Chương 12: People suck. Not as much as the murder forest, but still.

Not as much as the murder forest, but still.

Level 4 arrived between the second and third snare check. He was crouching at the southern spur trap — one rabbit, clean catch, the improved trigger mechanism doing its job with the reliability of a system that had been correctly designed — when the XP counter crossed 750 and the cascade hit. He stayed crouched.

He'd learned early that the notification flood was easier to process from a stable physical position, and the southern spur was far enough from the wolf's established range that crouching in it did not carry immediate tactical liability. Five points. He read them sitting back on his heels with the dead rabbit in one hand and the bark-sheet in his cargo pocket and the morning light doing its usual inadequate job of illuminating the forest floor.

The allocation took him less than thirty seconds because he'd been thinking about it since Level 3 — had been running the analysis in the background the way he used to run long-form data processing jobs while doing other things, not actively attending to it but letting the problem state persist until the answer clarified. Willpower first. Two points, because Willpower at 9.

1 had been the highest stat he'd arrived with and the one the Nexus had never explained and the one he'd been treating as a vague advantage without fully crediting. He credited it now. Eleven days in the Crimson Wilds, two deaths, a depleted food cache, six confirmed player-kills in his chat logs, and he was still running his morning routine with the methodical steadiness of a man who had decided to survive and had not revisited that decision under pressure. That was Willpower. He wanted more of it.

Perception next. Two points, because the forest rewarded attention in ways that compounded — the Foraging Apprentice passive had proven it, the wolf-stalking approach had proven it, the chat pattern recognition was proving it in a different domain entirely. Attention was multiplicative here in a way it had never been in the open-plan office in Sacramento.

The last point into Intellect, for the crafting pipeline and the analysis work and the general sense that his brain was the tool he was most consistently reaching for and it was the one he'd been under-investing. 【 LEVEL UP! 】 You have reached Level 4. 5 Free Attribute Points allocated: Willpower: 9. 1 → 11. 1 (+2) Perception: 7. 5 → 9. 5 (+2) Intellect: 5. 4 → 6. 4 (+1) HP: 200 → 230 Mental resilience: Improved The Watchers note your allocation philosophy. They are adjusting their approach to you.

This is not a reassuring statement. The Willpower gain landed differently than the physical stat upgrades had. Strength and Agility had been immediately felt — the body's feedback updating in real time, the weight of the hatchet redistributing, the movement quality changing. This was subtler.

He sat with it for a moment and tried to describe it accurately: the background frequency of low-level dread that had been running since Day 1 — not louder or quieter, but lower, like someone had adjusted the bass on a sound system he hadn't known was always on. Still there. Manageable in a way that felt like his management rather than his endurance.

"Good," he said, to the southern spur and the dead rabbit and the morning. Then he finished the trap check and went back to camp. He had something else to do today. Something he'd been building toward for six days and had been deferring because the immediacy of the physical survival problems had always had a legitimate claim on his time. Today the traps were running, the food cache was rebuilt, the perimeter was solid, and the wolf's patrol had held its established range for four consecutive days. He had time.

This was, historically, where things went wrong. Last time he'd had time and space to think, he'd made a series of decisions that had resulted in his death — actual death, the kind with a loading screen — so he was approaching the concept of leisure with the same careful methodology he'd applied to everything else out here. Time was a resource. Resources got managed. He was not going to stand in the woods having feelings about things.

He was going to deploy the time correctly, like a man who had learned, at significant personal cost, that the wrong kind of thinking in the wrong direction got you a respawn screen and a one-Echo deduction. He knew what he was doing with it. He'd known for six days. He was ready. He settled on the flat-topped root cluster outside his shelter that had become his default thinking position, pulled out the bark-sheet, and opened the Ring Channel in passive view. Then he started writing.

The bark-sheet had been running field notes for ten days — plant candidates, snare geometry, resource locations, the wolf territory boundary estimate. He turned it over to the side with the least existing notation and started a new section at the top. Active Threats — Player Origin. He wrote down what he knew and then he wrote down what it implied, in the same structured format he'd used for quarterly data summaries: observation, pattern, conclusion, confidence level. Accounts observed: GoodSamaritanX.

SafeHarbour77. PathfinderX. He pulled up the Ring Channel and checked — a fourth name had appeared in the last twelve hours, active since approximately 0300, posting in a thread about players near the northern forest boundary. [CrimsonGuide]: anyone in the northern sector? we found a defended camp, happy to escort newcomers to safety He added [CrimsonGuide] to the list. Pattern observed: All four accounts made unsolicited offers of assistance. All four requested location information from distressed players.

Response times ranged from sixty to a hundred and forty seconds — fast enough to indicate active monitoring of the channel, variable enough to indicate multiple operators rather than one. Posting style varied by account in ways that pointed to different authors: [GoodSamaritanX] had used contractions consistently; [PathfinderX] had not; [CrimsonGuide] was using a slightly more formal register that the others hadn't. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Players who engaged and subsequently went silent: He listed them. MarcoB. NewPlayer_44. Three unnamed from the early GoodSamaritanX period. SunrisePlayer. Six total, accounting only for confirmed silences with clear engagement-to-silence chains. The real number was likely higher — he'd been monitoring for ten days but the chat had been active before he'd had access to it. Average time from engagement to silence: thirty-four minutes.

He'd calculated that on the bark-sheet with the same arithmetic he'd once used on campaign conversion rates, and it landed the same way — as a number that told you something concrete about the mechanism. Zero posts from any engaged player after the fact. Zero. In any thread, under any name.

Either the accounts were abandoned after the encounter — which happened, new players sometimes just stopped posting — or the players were not in a position to post anymore, which was the conclusion the data supported and the one he'd been sitting with for days, building toward, not wanting to commit to prematurely. He committed to it now.

"It's a coordinated player-kill operation using the global chat as a lure," he said, writing the conclusion on the bark-sheet in the large, deliberate marks of someone who wanted to be able to read it back later without ambiguity." This is phishing with actual consequences and zero IT department to report it to." He underlined it.

Added the operator count estimate and the methodology note — distress monitoring, coordinate extraction, offline contact — and sat with the completed analysis in front of him on the bark-sheet. Confirmed threat. The conclusion's confidence level was high enough to act on. His operating rules updated themselves accordingly: no location posting, no responding to unsolicited help, no coordinate information in any form. Chat was intelligence. Not communication.

He wrote those rules at the bottom of the section and underlined them twice. 【 Environmental Scan — Passive 】 Foraging Apprentice: 14 safe specimens detected within 5-metre radius. Trapping circuit: On track for 2–3 catches this cycle. Shelter integrity: 40/40. Perimeter integrity: Fully operational. The Watchers note you have constructed a functional survival apparatus. They are not entirely sure how they feel about this.

He sat with the bark-sheet and did not immediately put it away, because there was a second conclusion sitting at the edge of the analysis that he hadn't written down yet and that he'd been aware of for the last twenty minutes in the way you're aware of something you're not quite ready to say. The people doing the dying were not stupid. He'd been treating the pattern as a data problem — inputs, outputs, response to threat, appropriate calibration. That framing was accurate as far as it went.

What it didn't account for was the Day 2 variable. He would have been [SunrisePlayer] on Day 2. Not because he was careless or incompetent — he'd been doing his best with what he had on Day 2, same as SunrisePlayer, same as MarcoB. The difference was not intelligence or caution. The difference was that he hadn't had the Ring Channel on Day 2.

By the time he'd gotten access to it he'd already learned enough to read the pattern, and he'd had a Perception stat that was trending upward and an analytics background and nine days of this world's specific education in the cost of trust. SunrisePlayer had none of that. Had had an injured ankle and a scared post and an offer of help from something that sounded like safety in a context where safety was the thing most desperately needed.

"I would have been SunrisePlayer on Day 2," he said. His voice was flat.

"I know this. The self-awareness doesn't make it easier." The Nexus did not offer a notification for this particular data point. Some categories of information, apparently, fell outside its accounting system. He looked at the Ring Channel. [KaiS] was active — two posts in the last hour, both in the wolf-encounter thread, both accurate and brief. The account had been consistent enough for long enough that Finn had stopped actively auditing it and filed it under reliable source, unknown identity.

[CrimsonGuide] was still running its rotation in the north sector thread, and another player — [NewStart99] — had posted asking about the offer. He watched the exchange unfold in the peripheral way he'd learned to monitor it. [NewStart99] hesitated — posted once, then didn't respond to [CrimsonGuide]'s follow-up for four minutes, which was atypical for someone actively seeking help. Then: [NewStart99]: actually I found somewhere to shelter, thank you though [CrimsonGuide]: oh good!

let me know if you need anything [NewStart99] posted three more times in the following hour. Still alive. Still posting. Finn noted this as its own data point, filed under threat response — player successfully avoided, and went back to the bark-sheet. He added the final line. Not for the analysis. For himself, because he'd decided somewhere in the last ten minutes that the bark-sheet was also a document of the things he was being honest about, and being honest required writing this one down.

Also the only voices I can hear. He looked at it for a moment. Then he put the bark-sheet away in the cargo pocket that had become its permanent home and got up to check the trap circuit for the afternoon run. The afternoon trap circuit produced two catches — eastern run and the southern spur again, the northern snare still running dry, which meant either the game trail there was less active than he'd estimated or the snare geometry needed adjustment. He'd check the ground sign tomorrow.

He cooked in the early evening. Herb-Wrapped Roast, the recipe running on autopilot now, the preparation time down to twenty minutes from the original thirty because his hands knew the sequence. His Hunger climbed to 91% and held there with the nutrition bonus running, and he sat by the fire in the entrance of his shelter and looked at the biome edge where the Foraging Apprentice passive was doing its permanent, quiet work. Fourteen confirmed safe specimens within five meters.

He counted them in the shimmer — the round-leafed ground cover, the Coolwort clusters, the broad-leaf understory in its three patches, the Palegrove mushrooms near the eastern root system. More food than he'd known existed in his immediate area. More than he could eat in a day. The cache was rebuilding faster than the rats had depleted it. He opened the chat one last time before sleep. [PathfinderX] had been quiet for six hours.

The rotation was coming — the next account would appear sometime overnight or by morning, fresh name, same structure, same patient predatory warmth. He'd stopped finding this surprising. He'd started finding it useful as a clock: when the new name appeared, it confirmed the cell was still operational. That was intelligence. [KaiS] had posted once more. A thread about water purification methods in the Crimson Wilds, brief and accurate, signing off with:"boiling works, don't trust the downstream."

Finn had already learned that one the expensive way. He appreciated the confirmation anyway. He closed the channel. The wolf skull on the exterior wall caught the last of his firelight as he banked the coals — pale, dry, turning slowly on its bark-fiber cord. The camp was quiet. The perimeter held. He had a bark-sheet with two sections now. Resource map on one side.

Threat analysis and operating rules on the other, with a line at the bottom he'd underlined twice and one honest addition below it that he hadn't underlined at all. He slept well for Day 11. This was, he thought, either a good sign or a sign that he was getting dangerously comfortable. He planned to assume good sign and stay alert for the other interpretation.