Chương 5: fluffy bunnies.

The rabbit made a mistake. It broke from cover at the wrong angle — northeast instead of back into the root tangle where Finn couldn't follow — and the rock face that closed off that end of the clearing made the mistake permanent. He'd been tracking it for twenty minutes, which was nineteen minutes longer than anything he'd attempted to track before, moving slow and low through the underbrush the way he'd learned by failing at it twice yesterday.

His bare foot found the quieter ground now without him consciously deciding to look for it. He didn't know when that had happened. The rabbit hit the rock face, turned, and found him already repositioned. He stabbed it with the improved stick. The Nexus logged the kill with the brisk efficiency of a timesheet approval. 【Combat Result 】 Crimson Wilds Hare (Lv 1) — defeated. XP gained: 12 Total XP: 238/250 Item drop: Raw Hare Meat x2 (Edible — requires cooking) First successful hunt logged.

The Watchers note the improvement. Twenty minutes of tracking for a Level 1 rabbit. Progress is relative. He crouched over the kill and did the math without being asked. Two hundred and thirty-eight out of two-fifty. Twelve away. He'd been accumulating XP in small increments — foraging attempts, crafting repetitions, the fire technique — and apparently it had been adding up in the background while he wasn't watching the counter. He was twelve experience points from Level 2. He looked around the clearing.

There was a second rabbit at the far edge, frozen at the treeline in the way prey animals freeze when they're deciding whether they've been noticed. It had been noticed. Finn was very still. It bolted left. He was already moving right to cut the angle, because he knew this clearing now — knew the root configuration on the east side that would slow it down, knew the gap in the thorn-trees it would aim for. He got there first.

The second kill was faster and considerably less elegant than the first, and the Nexus counter tipped past 250 mid-swing. The blue boxes arrived like someone had thrown a handful of light at his face. 【LEVEL UP! 】 You have reached Level 2. 5 Free Attribute Points available. Total XP: 8/500 (excess XP carried forward) The Watchers observe with mild interest.

He stood in the clearing with two dead rabbits and five free points and let the cascade of notifications wash over him in the way he'd already learned to manage them — eyes unfocused, reading without reacting, processing before deciding. Five points. He ran the available options in the time it took to breathe twice. Vitality was the math that mattered.

He was running around a murder forest with eight Vitality and one Echo fewer than he'd started with, and the wolf that had killed him was Level 8, and somewhere between here and whatever passed for safety in this world there were certainly things considerably worse than Level 8 wolves. More HP was not exciting. It was structural. He put all five into Vitality. 【Attributes Updated 】 Vitality: 8 → 13 (+5 allocated) HP: 130 → 180 Hunger drain rate: −8% You no longer feel quite so fragile against the wilds.

The Watchers note the conservative allocation. They expected something more entertaining. The difference was subtle, like the difference between a car with good brakes and a car with shitty brakes, invisible until the moment it isn't. The forest looked the same. The cold was the same. His bare right foot had the same opinions about the ground.

But something in the back of his mind that had been running a constant low-level threat calculation since he'd arrived here recalibrated, slightly, and the result was a quiet that hadn't been there before. He noted it and did not trust it, because the wolf had been Level 8 and he was Level 2 and 50 additional HP was not a strategic position, it was a margin. Margins were useful. They were not safety. Then the new tab appeared in his Nexus HUD. It blinked once.

The label read 【RING CHANNEL 】 in the same crisp blue as everything else, patient and waiting, and Finn stared at it for four full seconds before opening it. 【RING CHANNEL — ACTIVE 】 You are now connected to all Ring 1 cohort survivors. Channel scope: Local (0–10 km) + Ring-wide broadcast. Gods may broadcast to all channels without restriction. Current active users: 847 // Recommend reading before posting. Spam will not be tolerated. Eight hundred and forty-seven.

He'd been alone in the Crimson Wilds for three days — two and a half, technically, with the death reset — and there were eight hundred and forty-seven other people somewhere in the same ring, most of them presumably having a version of the same terrible time. He didn't quite know what to make of that. Were any of them close? Did everyone also lose shoes? Did this mean there could be towns? Cities? How long had this been going on? A slew of questions flooded his brain with the new information that there were people.

He wasn't alone. Is this the "not alone" of my apartment building? Where technically I lived with about 200 other people, but we never spoke and all tried to stay quite in our own spaces? He wondered if everywhere was as harsh as this. Could someone show up at any moment? The channel opened into a flood of text, messages moving fast enough that he had to deliberately slow his reading to catch individual threads.

[NewPlayer_44]: WHERE AM I someone please help [GoodSamaritanX]: @NewPlayer_44 we're close, share your coords, we have food and shelter You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. [GoodSamaritanX]: just arrived from the eastern ridge, happy to guide you to our camp [KaiS]: don't share coordinates with strangers. basic survival tip [NewPlayer_44]: heading to the ridge now, thank you so much The timestamp on NewPlayer_44's last message sat at 23 minutes ago.

There were no subsequent posts from that account. Hopefully, the person had found some help. Hopefully. Finn read the thread again. Then he scrolled back and read the prior twelve hours of Ring Channel history from the beginning, which took a while, and he did it the way he used to read anomalous data sets — looking for patterns, not content, because content was what people wanted you to see and patterns were what was actually there.

After 40 minutes of speed reading, Finn felt the hope that had flickered to life start to die like his first fire. He wasn't sure what he had expected from a global chat, but it wasn't this.

"The system gave me a social media platform," he said quietly, to the dead rabbits and the clearing and no one.

"In a murder forest. The only updates are 'I'm scared' and 'someone offered to help me and now they've gone quiet.' Very engaging content. I guess expecting tutorials might've been a bit too much to ask for." GoodSamaritanX appeared in seventeen separate threads in the last twelve hours. Always helpful. Always fast — responses under ninety seconds, which meant either this was someone who had nothing else to do or someone who was actively monitoring the channel for specific triggers. New player distress signals.

Coordinate requests. The language was consistent across all seventeen threads: warm, reassuring, mildly urgent, always steering toward an in-person meeting.

"[GoodSamaritanX] is definitely not a good samaritan," Finn said.

"I've been in analytics long enough to recognize when someone is being helpful at a suspicious velocity. I guess I won't be asking for help anytime soon." He flagged the account in his mental file under player-killer or affiliated, do not engage, do not share location.

Then he kept reading, because the channel also contained some useful information if you filtered for it: a confirmed safe water source three kilometers east from someone, a warning about something called a Thorned Boar that two players had apparently encountered and not enjoyed, and a thread from someone called [KaiS] who posted infrequently and precisely and whose advice was consistently the most tactically sound thing in any given conversation.

What he didn't see was anyone describing anything that looked like it could be from around him. Granted, he hadn't ranged out too far.

"No one wants to venture out too far in a murder forest thankyouverymuch" and he wasn't equip to fight off, well, really anything, so he hadn't ventured off too far. He quickly got the sense that he might be really far out there, from anything resembling something that might be considered civilization.

"Great. Of course, I'd be chosen to spawn away from literally anything. That really tracks with this place." He saw anything post from GoodSamatitin flash by again offering help.

"well, maybe it's not so bad, at least I can finding my footing without having to worry about some asshole stabbing me in the spleen." He did not post anything. He field-dressed the rabbits with his improved stick — this was not a skill he'd had before and the Nexus acknowledged the gap with characteristic diplomacy — and brought the meat back to where he'd left his fire banked under ash near the Anchor Stone.

He rebuilt it in ten minutes now, which was another thing he hadn't been able to do three days ago, and set the meat to cook while he gathered the herbs he'd identified yesterday near the root systems. Pale green, slightly sharp-smelling, the Nexus had tagged them Crimson Wilds Herb (Common — culinary use, minor Vitality restoration) on his second foraging pass. He wrapped the meat in the herb leaves the way he'd seen done in a YouTube video he couldn't quite fully remember, and put it at the fire's edge.

The result took forty minutes and smelled, genuinely, like food. Not roots. Not something he was eating out of mechanical necessity. Food, with texture and heat and the herb cutting through the gamey edge of the meat in a way that suggested someone, somewhere, had designed this ecosystem with actual flavor in mind. 【Cooking Success 】 Herb-Wrapped Hare Roast (Novice) Nutrition: Significant Hunger +34% │ Thirst +6% (moisture in meat) Vitality restored: +8 HP over 10 minutes Cooking skill threshold reached.

Novice Cooking — UNLOCKED The Watchers are mildly surprised. They expected you to eat it raw. He ate the first rabbit slowly, reading the Ring Channel while he did it. Not posting. Just reading, building a picture, the same way he used to read six months of sales data before drawing any conclusions, because conclusions drawn from insufficient data were worse than no conclusions at all. [KaiS] had posted again while he was cooking:"Stop sharing coordinates with anyone until you've verified their base exists.

Three players went to meet 'GoodSamaritanX' in the last hour. None of them are posting anymore." Three. Finn set the bone down and stared at that message for a long moment. Then he looked at the Ring Channel's active user count: 831. It had been 847 when he'd opened it. The math on that was not complicated.

He saved KaiS's post in his mental file under a different category than GoodSamaritanX, but adjacent to it — not threat, but person operating with accurate information and the willingness to share it without an obvious angle. That was rare enough to note. He ate the second rabbit. The meal was genuinely good by any measure he currently had available, which were admittedly limited but not irrelevant.

He ate alone in the blood-red forest, firelight holding the permanent dusk at bay in a two-meter radius of warmth, reading the voices of eight hundred people he'd never met who were all, in their various ways, as lost as he was. The chat was real. The people in it were real, including the ones who were actively using it to find people to kill. He had no way to verify anything said in it except by pattern analysis and inference, which were tools he had but which had margins of error he couldn't fully calculate.

The rabbit was real. The Level 2 was real. His fifty additional HP were real in the sense that they existed in the Nexus's accounting, and the Hunger drain reduction was already showing in the meter's slightly slower bleed. One of these things was uncomplicated. The other two required more data before they could be trusted, and trust was a resource he intended to manage carefully. He closed the chat. Cleaned the bones of the second rabbit with the same methodical attention he'd given the first.

Thought about water containers — he'd been drinking from the stream by crouching at the bank, which worked but was inefficient and meant every water run was a separate trip in a forest with at least one confirmed Level 8 predator. He needed something to carry water in. Bark could be shaped and folded. The hare's stomach lining was a possibility he noted without enthusiasm but without ruling out. Tomorrow's problem.

Tonight's problem was sleep, and the fire, and keeping the Exposure meter from deciding that 71% was a ceiling rather than a baseline. He banked the fire and settled against the Anchor Stone's base, where the blue pulse felt, irrationally, like company. Not good company. Not the kind you talked to. But something that was running on a regular schedule and would be doing so when he woke up, which was more continuity than anything else in his current life was offering.

Eight hundred and thirty-one people in the Ring Channel. He wondered how many of them had thought to not post their coordinates yet.