Chương 4: Rule One: Don't Die

He took one step. That was all the trees gave him. They came out of the treeline low and fast, three of them, throwing the brush aside. His head said wolves. Then he got a real look and knew they weren't, not all the way. They had the shape of wolves, the lope and the long jaw. But parts of them didn't hold. There were stretches along each animal where the fur and the muscle just stopped being there, and then a heartbeat later were back, like the thing kept forgetting to finish being solid.

The thin pale text flickered at the edge of his sight, the read he hadn't asked for, and it couldn't finish the job. Where a normal animal should have come back with weight and reach and a number for its life, this came back in pieces. Gaps. Whole sections of each wolf that the read just skipped, like there was nothing there to measure even with teeth plainly in the spot.

'They're not all here,' he thought.

"No, they're not," Sable said, and the easy thing had gone out of her voice completely.

"Void-touched. Half of each of them has already fallen out of the System. Do not let the other half put its teeth in you. Run. The gap, the treeline, go." He was already turning for the gap in the trees, the one the spearman had walked into, his exit, his one way out of the open. The wolves got there first.

They split as they came, two of them swinging wide to his left to cut the angle, and his stomach dropped, because he'd done this math once already today and it came out the same way it had with the man and the spear. They were faster. His legs were a level-one joke that barely cleared a branch. He was not going to reach the trees. There was one hard thing in the whole clearing, and it was at his back, and it was the tower.

'Tower,' he thought, and turned for it.

"No." Sable, sharp as a slap.

"Not the tower. I told you, the System has its eye nailed to that ground. You cannot be standing on it —""The wolves aren't watching me, Sable. They're eating me." He said it out loud, snapping it at the empty air, because a man could mutter all he wanted with three half-real wolves closing on him. He ran for the arch. He hit the tower wall beside the door and spun, his back to cold stone, the toy sword up in both hands like it would do a single thing. The first wolf came in after him and crossed the line.

He felt it more than saw it. It was the same edge Observation had laid out for him in the doorway not long ago, one side claimed and one side not, the strip of ground where the System stopped owning the dirt. The wolf put its front paws over that line onto the tower's ground, and it came apart at the edges. Not dead. It screamed, a wet wrong sound with too many notes stacked in it, and the half-gone parts of it tore worse, smoking off into nothing where the owned ground touched them.

It scrambled back off the line, shaking, whole again the second it was clear of it.

'It can't stand on the tower's ground,' he thought, fast.

'The owned ground. It hates the owned ground.'

"Because it's barely in the System at all anymore, and that dirt is all System, every grain of it, all the way down," Sable said.

"Good. You found the one safe patch in the valley. Now the bad news, and there's always bad news. It's a line, not a wall. They can cross it. It just costs them. And they're about to decide the cost is worth paying." The three wolves spread along the line and paced it, three sets of eyes that didn't all point the same direction. They weren't panicking. They were working out the problem, and he could watch them do it. He looked at the toy sword in his hands. Blunt. Light. A prop.

It had popped a tutorial slime because the slime had a core and the core was a free kill, and these things didn't have a core. They had gaps where their insides should be. The sword was going to do nothing, and he knew it the way he knew his own name.

'Right. The sword's useless. What isn't.' He had the answer before he finished asking, because Observation kept running and it kept laying the same dull fact over everything in front of him. The ground was claimed. The wall at his back was claimed. The tower was the most owned thing for a mile in any direction, and the wolves couldn't touch it without losing pieces of themselves. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. He dropped the toy sword.

He turned and got his fingers into a gap at the base of the arch, where the stone facing had cracked and lifted in eight hundred years of weather, and he pulled. A chunk came loose in his hand. Heavy, rough, the size of two fists. A piece of the tower. A piece of the owned ground. A box opened. [Skill gained: Improvised Solution.] The border was grey. The dullest grey there was, the bottom of every rarity scale he'd ever drawn.

His first real skill, the thing he used to design whole questlines around handing out, and the System had watched him pry a rock off a wall and given him the cheapest one it owned.

'Of course it's grey,' he thought.

'Of course it is.' There was no time to be insulted. The biggest wolf committed. It came across the line low and fast, eating the cost as it came, its whole left side already shredding where the owned ground bit into it, and it didn't slow down, because it didn't need to live through this. It only needed to reach him. It reached him. Kaito swung the rock and the wolf came on into the swing, and they hit each other in the same half second. The chunk of claimed tower came around into the side of its head.

Its jaws closed on his left forearm. Teeth went into him, real teeth, and a bright line of pain shot from his wrist to his elbow. A box flared red at the corner of his eye, his health falling, a number he had no time to read. But the rock did not behave like a rock. Where it landed, the wolf came apart. Not the way a struck animal breaks. The way a thing that's half gone tears the rest of the way when you press the owned world straight into it.

The whole left side of it smoked off into nothing under the stone, the jaws went loose on his arm, and what was left folded onto the line and stayed down. He tore his arm free. Four red lines, a torn sleeve, blood already running down to his wrist. It hurt, a real bright hurt, nothing like the clean bloodless damage he used to build for other people. The other two flinched back. He didn't wait for them to think about it.

He grabbed a second loose stone with his off hand, a rock in each fist now, and he stepped up onto the very last inch of owned ground, right to the edge of the line, and he dared them.

"Come on, then," he said. His voice shook less than he'd expected.

"It's all owned ground from here. Go ask the first one how that worked out." They didn't rush him together, which was the only reason he lived through it. The second one tried him alone, a lunge across the line, and he met it with the stone in his right hand. It came apart the same way the first had, smoking off the owned ground, dead before the jump finished. The third one stopped.

It stood just off the line with its head low, and the gaps in it pulsed, the not-there parts going thin and then thinner, and it looked at him. Then it looked at the two dead things on the tower's ground. Then it backed away. Slow. Steady. Not scared, and he'd seen scared animals before, this was nothing like that.

It backed off the way you walk away from something when you've already got what you came for, and then it turned and went into the trees without hurrying, and the brush closed up behind it, and the clearing went quiet. Kaito stood on the line with a rock in each hand and his chest going like a hammer. A box slid up. [Level 3.] His strength ticked up a point. His health read higher than it had a minute ago. He barely looked at it.

'Sable.' He worked to get the breath behind the thought.

'It didn't run. It left. There's a difference. Why is there a difference.' A pause.

"Yes. There's a difference." She'd gone quiet, and the quiet was worse than the sharpness had been.

"And I don't like the answer, so I'll give it to you straight. Those three were not lost. Void-touched things drift, they wander, they wash up wherever the System's worn thin. But they do not come this deep into owned country. Not within a mile of that tower. Not unless something walked them here. They were pointed at this spot. And the one that just strolled off into the trees confirmed for whatever pointed it that you are the thing standing on this ground." He opened his mouth to ask the next part. Who. What.

What points a wolf. He didn't get the chance. A box opened in the air over the two dead wolves. Blue border. His font. No sound at all, the same dead-silent way the worst ones came. He knew the words before he finished them, because he'd seen most of them once already — three words that had flickered up in the tower and blinked out before he could hold onto them. [Anomaly. Source un—] It had cut itself off, that time. The System had started to say it, then taken it back, decided he wasn't meant to see.

It wasn't taking it back now. The line redrew itself, steady, in no hurry at all, finishing the thought it had swallowed back in the tower. [Anomaly. Source: Architect.] Kaito stood very still on the owned ground with a rock in each hand.

"... Sable," he said, out loud, to the empty clearing.

"I know." Her voice was flat.

"I told you to get off this ground." The box held. It didn't blink out and it didn't go quiet. It just sat there in his own font, bright and patient and certain, and for the first time since a server rack had cracked his skull open, the thing that ran the world was looking right at him.