The first message from another Monster player arrived with all the dignity of a clerical error.
Kael was in N6 at the time, using the fold corridor the way the last several chapters had taught him to use almost everything now: not as scenery, not even as cover, but as a pressure instrument. A Rock Eater Juvenile had just committed to the wrong angle, and Void Carapace had already read the line of force before contact finished. Kael shifted, let the shell's outer structure deny the bite cleanly, and shoved the creature hard enough into the corridor wall that it lost the route's only good correction lane.
HP: 50 / 51.
Shell Essence: 17%
Good.
Enough.
He disengaged upslope before greed could overexplain the exchange.
The northern seam settled around him in familiar layers. Tide pressure below. Wind crossing the upper cut. The distant drone somewhere south feeding Mira's audience the broad old coastline instead of the tighter truth. Human voices absent for the moment. Even the Warden's particular kind of wrongness remained out of the route today, felt only as memory in N7 rather than active presence.
For ten whole seconds, the chapter almost felt organized.
Then the notification appeared.
Not hidden black-panel impossible like the coordinates from earlier chapters.
Not system-blue either.
Green.
A social UI color.
Kael stopped in the upper shelf shadow and stared at it.
Direct message request received.
Sender: MudWorm_Dace
Origin classification: Monster-race player
Allow preview?
He read that three times.
Monster-race player.
The phrase itself hit harder than the request. Not because it was shocking as concept. The system had always implied others existed. The Wilds were too large, too lawless, too structurally invested in unfairness for him to be the only thing dumped out here without rights. But implication and interface confirmation were different species of truth.
Someone else on the wrong side of the system had found him.
Or thought they had.
Or wanted him enough to say so directly.
Kael did not touch the prompt immediately.
Instead he looked up at the seam, at the route lines he now knew better than most people knew the floor plans of their own homes, and considered what categories of danger direct messaging could plausibly contain.
Human bait disguised as Monster player.
Clip-fed troll with borrowed language.
Actual Monster-race contact.
Or something worse than all three, some hidden system trick designed to test whether desperation made him stupid in social formats too.
Useful.
He chose Allow preview.
The message unfolded in a narrow pane.
No ornament.
No long introduction.
Just one line.
I rolled Monster too. I found your stream. I'm coming to find you. Don't run.
Kael stared at it.
Then once more.
The sentence managed to be alarming in several directions at once.
First, because "your stream" implied public ownership of the spectacle he had never consented to and still had not conceptually forgiven.
Second, because "I'm coming to find you" had become the standard opening line for most of his actual problems.
And third, because "Don't run" sounded either like terrible reassurance or the beginning of a murder with worse grammar than usual.
He closed the pane.
Then reopened it to confirm the sender line still said Monster-race player.
It did.
He opened the sender profile.
Sparse.
Almost offensively so.
MudWorm_Dace
Race classification: Monster-type
Public alignment tag: Excluded
Primary region access: Untamed Wilds
Combat ranking: negligible
Social metrics: none
Negligible.
Kael almost respected the honesty.
He opened the memo field and started a new tab.
DACE
Under it he wrote:
Direct message request received from MudWorm_Dace.
System confirms Monster-race classification.
Message: "I rolled Monster too. I found your stream. I'm coming to find you. Don't run."
Combat ranking listed as negligible.
He stopped there.
Then added:
Possibilities: bait / idiot / real contact. Not mutually exclusive.
That felt correct.
He read the message one more time.
The wording kept needling at him.
Not polished enough for a trap built by someone competent. Too direct. Too socially unarmored. Human hunters, especially clip-fed ones, liked pretending they were operating from strategy or entitlement. This read more like someone who had arrived at the sentence and sent it before a better one could intervene.
That made it more believable, which in turn made it more dangerous.
Kael closed the profile and resumed moving through N6, but less for patrol and more because thought came easier in motion once Echo Skin had made the seam legible. The route returned itself to him in pressure lines and spatial edges while the message sat in the back of his attention like an inconvenient living thing.
Another Monster player.
That fact kept returning.
The viewers and hunters had made his existence public as target, phenomenon, hidden class, content. Mira had shifted from pressure to variable. The Warden had moved from unclassified presence to something closer to guide. And now the system itself had casually admitted that someone else in the Wilds might approach him not from the cliffs, not through a lens, not with a bounty conversation already prepared.
That should have been reassuring in one narrow human sense.
It was not.
Because the Wilds had trained him too well.
Anything new arriving from outside his known map was first and foremost a complication. Even help, if that word survived contact with the setting at all, tended to come shaped like leverage.
He climbed to the upper shelf above N3 and checked the drone pattern before doing anything else.
Mira's machine remained broad and intentionally unhelpful over the old coastline, scanning B1 and the southern routes in the same wide viewer-safe passes she had been using since their chapter. Good. That meant if Dace truly was trying to find him through the stream, he would be following an incomplete public picture, not the actual seam routes Kael now depended on.
Useful.
It also meant whoever approached would likely arrive through the wrong map first.
Better.
A cautious person would leave the message unanswered and wait.
Kael did that for eleven minutes.
Then the second notification came.
Same green tone.
Same social overlay.
MudWorm_Dace: okay that sounded threatening. i meant don't run because i'm bad at chasing and also bad at not getting seen
Kael stopped walking.
Read it.
Then read it again.
The seam around him held still while he processed the possibility that the Wilds, for reasons known only to its more vindictive gods, had just introduced another social factor whose first strategic move was to clarify that he was not competent enough to be efficiently threatening.
The message continued before he fully closed the pane.
also i am orange
Kael stared at that for a long, offended second.
Then a third line arrived.
like very orange. if you see something orange and worm-shaped please don't kill me too fast
He closed the pane.
Then reopened it because disbelief had become structurally inadequate.
Same messages.
Same sender.
No rhetorical improvement.
He put one claw against the mineral wall and considered whether the class had finally broken into dark humor because the alternative was admitting this might be real.
Combat ranking: negligible.
Yes.
That tracked.
He updated the memo.
Follow-up message suggests sincerity through incompetence.
Claims poor pursuit capability and high visibility.
Describes self as orange worm-type.
Then, because accuracy mattered:
Current likelihood shifting away from bait, toward real contact plus severe tactical deficiency.
That line should not have helped.
It did.
Not enough to trust the sender. Never that. But enough to narrow the category from "predator with social language" to "problem that might also be a person."
Kael still did not respond.
He spent the next hour checking whether the map itself showed any signs of an incoming unknown Monster-race pressure signature.
Nothing obvious at first. No new route use in N1. No disturbance around N2's false exit. No changed drone behavior. No hunter traffic at CLIFF ACCESS 1 beyond the usual low-grade curiosity wave.
Then, shortly after noon, Echo Skin returned something strange from the southern side of the old coastline.
Not human.
Too low and irregular.
Not local fauna either. The movement pattern lacked the coast's usual efficiency. It paused too often, resumed at bad angles, and somehow managed to carry the emotional signature of someone losing a fight with the terrain without any actual opponent needing to participate.
Kael stopped in the upper seam and listened harder.
The pressure contour was distant, somewhere beyond the basalt approaches, but distinct enough now that the shell could outline the broad problem.
Small body.
Low profile.
Segmented maybe.
Moving in bad starts.
And, yes, orange did not strictly exist in Echo Skin's pressure geometry, but the body's interaction with the terrain carried a weird bright recklessness that his mind immediately categorized as if the color had become behavior.
A worm-type, maybe.
Actually coming.
The message pane opened again before he approved it.
MudWorm_Dace: i think i found the place with all the terrible rocks
A second line.
wait no i found a different terrible rocks
Then:
do all the rocks here want me dead or is that a me issue
Kael closed his eyes for one second.
Then answered for the first time.
Yes.
He watched the send confirmation appear and immediately regretted making himself part of this new administrative category.
The reply came almost at once.
MudWorm_Dace: okay good that's honestly reassuring
Kael stared at the message long enough that the shell around him began feeling judgmental.
Then he typed the next line with the kind of reluctance usually reserved for consenting to procedures you know will be necessary and annoying.
Stay where you are.
The reply arrived faster than seemed educationally appropriate.
MudWorm_Dace: i would love to but i am currently falling very slowly into a crack
Kael moved before the sentence finished offending him.
Not south by the obvious routes. Never that. He took the upper fracture toward the old coastline, cutting across the seam in a line Mira's current drone pattern would not fully track and that any hunter watching playback would misread as standard repositioning at best. Echo Skin widened as he ran, the southern approaches unfolding in hard return shapes.
There.
A broken shelf above the old basalt approach.
And below it, in a narrow black crack half-eaten by tide wash and terrible decisions, a pressure contour exactly as tactically stupid as the messages had promised.
Small.
Long.
Worm-bodied.
Actively losing a low-speed argument with geology.
Kael reached the ridge above the crack and looked down.
The system tag resolved.
MudWorm_Dace
Monster-type - Level 3
Orange, apparently, had not been exaggeration.
Even in ordinary sight after hours of seam dark, the body stood out against wet stone with a kind of aggressively unfortunate visibility. Small segmented worm-like form, brighter than any Wilds creature had a right to be if it intended to survive long, front half wedged in a crack while the rear half kicked with determination unassisted by competence.
He looked up as Kael's shadow crossed the ridge lip.
"Okay," Dace said immediately, voice warm and breathless and somehow far too alive for the setting, "before you decide to kill me, I want to say in my defense that I was expecting less crack."
Kael stared at him.
Then at the crack.
Then at the route.
No hunters nearby. Drone currently south over B1. Mira's pattern still wrong enough to buy time. Good.
Dace wriggled once and achieved the tactical masterpiece of making the situation slightly worse.
"I know how this looks."
Kael remained on the ridge.
"It looks orange."
Dace went quiet for one rare useful second.
Then, to his credit, laughed.
"Okay. That's fair."
His profile was almost insulting in its transparency. Level 3. Negligible metrics. Monster-type confirmed. No visible combat threat. No social caution either, which was somehow more destabilizing than claws would have been.
Kael descended one careful line lower and kept enough stone between them to prevent this from becoming an immediate regret.
"Why are you here?"
Dace blinked.
The question seemed to matter to him more than Kael intended.
"Because I saw the stream," he said. "And because everybody in chat and on the boards kept talking about you like..." He trailed off, then tried again. "Like you were content first."
That was unexpectedly better than the rest of him.
Dace shifted, hissed as the crack reminded him it was still involved, and went on.
"And because I rolled Monster too."
Kael did not speak.
Dace met his eyes anyway.
"That part changes stuff."
Yes.
It did.
Not enough to override caution. Not enough to produce trust out of syntax alone. But enough that the chapter sharpened around the fact instead of dismissing it. Another creature dumped into the Wilds from the wrong side of the system. Another participant classified as excluded and killable and likely worth less to the game than to the people who wanted clips out of it.
Useful.
Dangerous.
Human, perhaps, in the worst possible way.
Kael looked at the crack.
Then back at Dace.
"Can you get out?"
Dace considered the question with the seriousness of someone evaluating a philosophy prompt rather than his current body angle.
"Not in a way I'd recommend."
That tracked.
Kael edged closer, still keeping side angle and retreat line.
Dace watched him carefully now, the humor still there but quieter.
"I know this is probably a terrible first impression."
"It is."
"Okay. Good. Just making sure we're aligned."
The absurdity of the sentence nearly qualified as hostile environmental pressure by itself.
Kael studied the crack geometry.
The problem was simple enough. Dace had entered at the wrong angle, the shelf narrowed below the visible line, and his body type had enough flexibility to get trapped in exactly the kind of place that looked survivable until physics acquired a sense of humor. Pulling him free directly would be slow. Risky only if the drone widened north or a hunter group chose the wrong moment to get curious again.
Manageable.
Annoying.
Kael opened the memo field and added one final line under DACE.
Real.
Then he closed it and looked down at the orange worm in the crack.
"Don't talk for thirty seconds."
Dace nodded immediately.
Then said, "That's going to be harder than the crack."
Kael, against his better judgment and with no actual consent from the rest of himself, believed him.
End of Chapter 28