Caleb had been running repair diagnostics on the southwest crater frame, going through each structure anchor point while the morning rain came in horizontally and cold across the plaza surface. Everything he had rebuilt the previous day was holding. He was working through the third anchor check when the revenue transfer pinged in the corner of his overlay.
He scrolled back through the overnight message thread to find where it started.
[ta1lorath: heads up. A player with a big platform found the clip. 4k watching him prep a recreation run. want me to build a package in case he eats it]
[yeah]
[ta1lorath: the patrol ate him in 4 minutes lmfao. guided death reaction bundle is live. affiliate clip rights sold. premium zone data licensed to 3 competing services. standard commission structure, you get your 70%]
[REVENUE TRANSFER: $800.00 / SOURCE: CLIP MONETIZATION + AFFILIATE BUNDLE / PARTNER: TA1LORATH]
[ta1lorath: ur welcome]
Eight hundred dollars. No forge, no patrol, no fight. Someone had tried to copy what he built and died doing it, and ta1lorath had packaged the death before the body finished falling. It felt different from the toll revenue, different from the patrol farming. He wasn't sure yet if different meant better.
He opened a fresh browser tab.
The same visibility that had just put $800 in his account was the same visibility that had put his real bank account number in a stranger's file. Ta1lorath's surveillance warning was still sitting open in a pinned tab from the night before. Three queries across six days, same source.
Someone had been looking, and they had been patient about it. He could not pull the scavenger clip back, could not scrub the forum posts where players had already started discussing what they had seen. What he could do was make sure anyone who followed those posts ended up somewhere wrong.
He created three accounts using handles pulled from the zone's inactive player registry and spent two hours backdating their posting histories to look like dormant accounts that had just come back with something to share.
The first went up under [VaultRunner_D7]:
[DISTRICT 13 / PLAYER REPORTS BOARD: VaultRunner_D7, 1 post]
[TITLE: Reached the plaza. Here's the actual route (learned from 3 deaths)]
Don't come in from the north. Warden sightlines go all the way to the entry point and you're dead before the render loads. Come in from the southeast, past the collapsed transit hub at the old Kellwyn Street marker. The hub gives you cover for the first 200 meters. After the hub, cut left into the drainage corridor. You'll know it by the burnt rubber smell. Follow it until the plaza ferrocrete comes into view.
What I saw from there: player-built structures. Not ambient generation. Someone actually lives here. Don't come stupid.
Good luck.
---
Two blocks east of the real entry. Not dramatically wrong. Just wrong enough that anyone following it would hit the outer patrol corridor and never understand why.
He didn't post the second guide until the first had three upvotes and one share.
The second went to a different subforum under a different handle:
[TITLE: District 13 IS passable. There is a safe entry window is 4-6 AM when Wardens cycle. West transit corridor, not the southeast]
The west transit corridor had no safe window. The patrol cycle there ran every forty minutes, around the clock.
The third he wrote was angrier, shorter, from the perspective of a player that hadn't made it as far:
[TITLE: Everyone keeps getting the fork wrong. Southeast drainage, LEFT branch. Not right. Left.]
The left branch opened into a deadfall.
He read each one back before posting. They sounded like players who had almost made it.
He was not sure what it said about him that they sounded right.
Curious players followed the routes across the morning. He could track their essence signatures in the passive monitoring overlay, small points of light moving through the outer zone and going dark one by one before they reached the perimeter. Each signature that disappeared bled a small passive trace into the Revenue Vein. Other people's failed attempts were the resource.
His phone rang from the pod's charging port.
He pulled the visor off and picked it up. A photo of his mother loaded on the screen. He answered.
"Cal." She said it like she had been waiting. "How's the internship? You've barely texted."
"It's going well actually," Caleb said. He was looking at the charging cable coiled on the floor while he said it. "Company's smaller than I expected, but the work is actually interesting."
"Are you eating? Real food, I mean. Not just whatever's in the machine at the end of the hall."
"There's a decent place a couple blocks over," he said. "I go there most nights."
There wasn't. He'd been running on protein bars from the pod suite's 24-hour kiosk and hadn't left the campus grounds since he started playing The World.
"We worry," she said. Not an accusation. Just something she needed him to have.
His father took the phone. "So, any cute girls at the office?"
Caleb could hear the slap his mother gave him, making him change subject.
"We're proud of you. You know that, right? Going out and doing something real this summer instead of just sitting on campus. That's exactly what we hoped you'd do."
"Thanks," Caleb said. "I appreciate it."
"We still care about you," his father said. He said it more quietly, like he wasn't sure it would land. "I know you want to handle everything yourself. That's good. That's what we raised you for. But you can call. Doesn't have to be anything big."
"I will," Caleb said.
"Okay. Take care of yourself."
He set the phone face-down on the console and sat there for a moment.
His parents were proud of him for a summer job that did not exist.
He put the visor back on.
The crystal market operation he and ta1lorath had been running closed out that afternoon. They had been buying low-grade essence crystals through her proxy accounts in small lots spread across several days, purchasing gradually enough that the buy pressure did not show up as a coordinated action in the market depth data.
The crystals had a thin supply and no real demand, which was the reason they had picked them. When they had pulled enough volume off the market, they withdrew the remaining buy orders and let the supply dry up.
The demand was noticed about four hours later. By then the price had moved 40% above their average entry cost. They sold it off over six hours, in small enough batches that the price held long enough to get all the way away. Ta1lorath sent the final numbers in a single message.
[ta1lorath: done. $212 net your side. first money you ever made without hitting something with a stick]
Caleb was back in the forge overlay, running evening checks, when a new private message arrived.
The sender handle was [VEXX]. No guild tag above it. No visible level indicator. The account had the bare, recently created look of something made for a single purpose.
[VEXX: 648245162, 36757684. [email protected] Account opened 3 weeks ago]
[VEXX: Nice first week. Enjoy It.]
Nothing after that. No explicit demand. No language that stated a threat. Just the information, arranged precisely enough to confirm that whoever had sent it had spent time looking and found everything they went looking for and was not in a hurry about what they intended to do next.
His heart forgot how to beat after that.
"Did I just get fucking doxxed in a video game?"
He did not reply. He forwarded the message to ta1lorath with no text attached or reaction attached.
41 seconds later ta1lorath finally responded, which was an unusually long time.
[ta1lorath: don't respond. Don't touch your cashout routing either. changing it now reads as rattled and they'll know they landed it. i'll run a trace on the vexx account. give me 24 hours]
Then, 17 seconds after that.
[ta1lorath: also. harlan's perimeter logs have 3 unfamiliar player signatures in the outer zone today. different entry points, different times, no visible coordination. could be nothing]
Caleb opened a plain spreadsheet and worked backward through the numbers. What did he have that was worth someone's time to move on? The Revenue Vein. The forge structures. The toll access, which would only grow more valuable as the territory became more established.
What would it cost someone to act on that? The people they'd need, the time it would take, whatever they had to say to whoever was paying for it. Where did that math stop closing? He ran the numbers from the past nine days forward to see where the gap closed.
He landed on thirty days, give or take, depending on how fast his earnings grew between now and then. He wrote it in the log under the date. He might be wrong. The VEXX message could be a freelancer running a scare tactic with purchased data, the kind of thing cartels paid out to unsettle smaller operations without committing real resources.
The three signatures in the outer zone could be exactly what ta1lorath had labeled them: curious players who would be dead before morning.
[80 DAYS]