Turn 6 of 13

Ask why Ordwin cares so much about catching R.

The question hangs between you like a blade suspended by a thread. Ordwin's weathered face goes still, the guarded neutrality of someone who has practiced hiding his wounds longer than you've been alive. The glowing mushrooms pulse faintly in the silence, their sick light catching the creases around his eyes, the white scar that bisects his left eyebrow.

"I don't care about catching them," he says finally, and his voice has gone flat, stripped of the rough warmth that colored it before. "I care about understanding. Forty-seven deaths I watched from this border, Cassie. Forty-seven people with broken numbers who walked past that marker because their stats drove them to it, or their pride, or their desperation. I wrote their names in a book. I buried what I could find."

He turns away from you, toward the dark throat of the path ahead, and his shoulders settle into a familiar weight.

"The first sabotaged Allocation came through seven years ago. A boy with Guilt ninety-nine and nothing else above four. He wept himself to dehydration because he couldn't stop apologizing for breathing. I found his body three days later, curled around a tree root like he was trying to hold it together."

Your Spite stat thrums, but quietly now, reading the grief beneath his words rather than feeding on it.

"You knew him," you say, and it isn't quite a question.

"I trained him." Ordwin's hand closes on empty air where his sword hilt would be, an old habit.

"In the life before. Different world, different war, same face. He remembered enough to find me when he woke here, red numbers and all. Asked me to fix it." The laugh that follows is broken glass.

"I couldn't fix a broken sword, let alone a divine spreadsheet. He walked past this marker because I told him stats weren't everything. Because I believed it, once."

He faces you again, and his eyes have changed—no longer pity and unease, but something harder. Hungrier.

"R. didn't just sabotage his Allocation. R. chose that stat specifically. Guilt. They knew him, Cassie. Knew what would unravel him. And I've been standing at this border ever since, waiting to learn if they know you too."