Kael had already concluded that Dace was a liability.
What annoyed him was that the conclusion had turned out to be incomplete.
Incomplete conclusions were dangerous. Not because they were wrong in the broad sense. Dace remained a liability in enough categories to justify the title's continued use. Route risk. visibility bleed. shelter compromise. combat instability. Every one of those still held. But the northern seam had spent too many chapters teaching Kael that bad maps killed more efficiently than open hostility, and his current map of Dace was beginning to show empty sectors.
That needed correcting.
So the chapter became an assessment.
Not of whether Dace was useful. That question was too early and too emotionally contaminated to answer cleanly. The real issue was structural.
What kind of system had made this orange disaster survivable at all?
Kael brought him to the upper shelf above C2 just after first light, where the continuity route widened into a narrow mineral fold with enough privacy to ask direct questions and enough discomfort to keep the conversation from becoming sentimental by accident. Void Carapace fit the shelf line cleanly. Dace folded himself into the darker side like a guilty ribbon.
The drone remained south.
Good.
Mira's broad false pattern was still holding. The viewers, hunters, and forum scavengers got their old coastline and wrong map. The northern seam stayed mostly private.
Kael opened the memo field and created a new tab.
DACE'S SYSTEM
Dace saw the title and winced.
"That sounds medical."
"It is."
"I liked it better when you were just threatening rocks."
Kael ignored him.
"You said you rolled Monster."
"Yes."
"What race."
Dace straightened slightly.
"Worm-type."
Kael waited.
Dace kept waiting too.
Of course.
Kael said, "That is not enough detail to be useful."
"Oh. Right."
Dace thought for a second with his whole body, like the answer needed to travel farther than usual before arriving.
"Officially it says MudWorm."
Kael wrote it down.
Race: MudWorm
Not impressive.
Not even narratively ambitious.
The kind of race assignment the public game probably filed under "background ecosystem with upgrade potential too minor to matter." Which meant either Dace had been catastrophically unlucky, or MudWorm came with some system logic nobody important had found reason to publicize.
Kael looked up.
"Class."
Dace blinked.
Then his expression did something awkward between embarrassment and uncertainty.
"I don't think mine works the way yours does."
"That was not the question."
"Right. Sorry."
He focused for a second, probably opening his own status pane.
Then read:
"Class says... Gathered Thread."
Kael wrote that too.
Class: Gathered Thread
Useless name.
Potentially dangerous because of that.
The game liked hiding serious mechanics behind language soft enough to be dismissed.
"What does it do?"
Dace hesitated long enough for Kael to know the answer was going to be structurally offensive.
"It kind of..." He looked for a better phrase and failed honestly. "Gets stronger around people."
Kael held still.
Dace noticed the stillness and kept going faster, which rarely improved anything.
"Not everybody, I think. Not just like crowd density or whatever. More like... presence? Attention? Emotional spillover? I don't know the exact wording."
Kael's shell did not move.
The shelf around them felt suddenly more informative than before.
"Show me the description."
Dace looked surprised.
"Can I do that?"
"You managed direct messaging."
"That seemed easier than asking politely."
Kael stared at him until the point made itself.
Dace opened something in the interface and, after too much fumbling, pushed a small share window across.
Kael read.
Gathered Thread
Class Type: Resonant Support Growth
Primary progression source: ambient emotional density, social proximity, and attachment-linked persistence
Growth condition: remains active in the presence of bonded or repeatedly encountered entities
Caution: isolation severely limits progression
Kael read it again.
Then a third time.
Ambient emotional density.
Social proximity.
Attachment-linked persistence.
Bonded or repeatedly encountered entities.
Isolation severely limits progression.
He almost closed the pane immediately on the basis of professional offense.
Instead he scrolled lower.
There was more.
MudWorm racial adaptation:
High survivability in low-status environments
Low individual combat scaling
Improved cohesion function under co-dependent survival conditions
Kael let the interface close on its own and looked at Dace.
Dace looked back with the expression of someone waiting to hear whether their test results had made the situation terminal or merely strange.
"That is a terrible system."
Dace brightened.
"Okay, good, I thought so too."
No defensive pride. No attachment to the class fantasy. Just relief that someone else had also looked at the wording and found it structurally insulting.
Useful.
Kael opened the memo field and began writing fast enough that he almost forgot Dace could see the title.
Gathered Thread = proximity-based growth model
Progression source tied to emotional density, repeated contact, and bonded persistence
Isolation cripples advancement
Race/class design appears built for co-dependent survival rather than solo scaling
He stopped.
Then added, because the line mattered too much not to state cleanly:
Dace does not merely prefer being near others. His system requires it.
That changed the map.
Not morally. Not in some cheap "therefore you should care" way. Kael distrusted stories that jumped from information to obligation without paying the cost of the distance in between.
But structurally, yes. The map changed.
It meant Dace was not simply socially reckless out of personality. The class and race had been designed to reward exactly the kind of presence-seeking behavior that Kael found tactically exhausting. Warmth, contact, continued pursuit, attachment logic, the refusal to leave people alone once the category "ours" had been even half-sketched.
Shell Breaker and Gathered Thread had been built to offend one another's instincts.
Interesting.
Bad.
Potentially useful.
Kael asked the next question carefully.
"How much stronger?"
Dace looked down at his own pane again.
"Depends."
"I know."
That won a small wince and, to his credit, a better answer.
"When I'm alone, almost nothing changes. Tiny stat creep. Really bad. When I stay near somebody long enough, I get... not combat-good exactly, but more stable? Better recovery, better route hold, less panic drain maybe? Hard to explain."
"Numbers."
"Right."
He focused again.
"Near you, right now, my durability and response stats are both higher than they were yesterday morning."
Kael stared at him.
"You checked."
Dace blinked.
"Well, yes. You are very measurable."
That nearly deserved to be held against him forever.
Kael exhaled once through the nose and motioned.
"Show me."
Dace shared the pane.
Sparse, but enough.
Level 3 still.
Combat scaling still poor.
But the modifiers were there, tiny green percentage lifts on recovery, stability, and route compliance. Not enormous. Just enough to change survival odds in the sorts of bad places where one more correction window meant not becoming crack debris.
Kael closed the pane.
Then stayed quiet long enough that Dace, against all known probability, did not interrupt.
What the chapter had produced was simple in the worst possible way.
Dace's system treated repeated proximity as fuel.
Not abstract companionship. Not dialogue. Not even kindness necessarily. Persistence. Shared survival space. The wrong-side-of-the-system version of architecture. If Kael remained near him, Dace got more viable. If Kael abandoned him, Dace's growth model collapsed back into low-stat irrelevance.
Which meant the liability assessment's emotional contamination section had just gained mechanical backing.
Excellent.
The world had apparently decided that even relationships now needed to be system-legible enough to become tactical burdens.
Kael wrote again.
New problem: proximity itself alters Dace's survivability curve.
Keeping him near me is not neutral. It actively feeds his system.
Abandoning him later becomes more expensive because continued contact makes him more viable in the short term and less viable in isolation.
He stopped there.
Dace finally risked a question.
"Is that as bad as it sounds?"
Kael looked at him.
"Yes."
Dace nodded slowly.
"Okay."
Another pause.
Then, with uncomfortable honesty:
"I did sort of wonder why being around you made it easier to not feel like everything was trying to kill me in the same exact way."
Kael held still.
Dace noticed and added, "I know that sounds emotional."
"It sounds diagnostic."
"That's fair."
Kael turned his attention outward for a moment, letting Echo Skin widen through the shelf line, over C2, across the upper seam. No hunters nearby. Drone still broad and south. Good. The conversation could continue without immediately becoming search bait.
He looked back at Dace.
"What happens if you stay near humans?"
Dace thought.
"Less."
"Less what."
"Less useful growth. I think." He frowned. "It's there sometimes if they're panicked enough or if I've been around them for a while, but it feels... thinner. Like my system doesn't know what to do with them unless there's already some kind of link."
Kael stored that.
So the class did not simply farm emotional noise. It weighted repeated meaningful proximity, maybe especially under shared exclusion or co-dependent survival. Which meant the system had categories deeper than crowd psychology. Better. Worse. Both.
He asked, "And near me?"
Dace met his eyes, surprisingly steady.
"It feels stable."
That word landed harder than he intended to let it.
Because Shell Breaker had never once offered stability as part of its own design language. Endure. Break. Rebuild. Exposure. Threshold. Path divergence. Continuity through destruction. Stability was something the setting let other people buy in cleaner districts with better air.
And yet Dace's class, absurd and soft-handed and probably considered low-value by every visible metric, was reporting stability from proximity to him.
Useful.
Terrible.
Kael wrote it down anyway.
Dace reports growth around me as "stable" rather than merely stronger.
Potential implication: his system values reliability of continued presence, not just emotional intensity.
That made sense.
It also made his life worse.
Because reliability was the one category Kael's instincts had been shaped to avoid offering to anything beyond systems already forced on him. Reliability created expectation. Expectation created dependency. Dependency created leverage or loss.
The Wilds, naturally, had decided to make that process mechanical.
Dace shifted on the shelf and said, carefully, "You don't have to keep me around because of any of that."
Kael looked at him.
Dace kept going before the sentence could be mistaken for nobility.
"I'm saying it because if my system makes this worse for you, I'd rather know that than accidentally pretend it's help."
That was... better than expected.
Not strategically sharp. Still him. Still orange. Still structurally prone to turning important conversations into awkward declarations that sounded like they had skipped several drafts.
But honest.
Kael distrusted honesty less than performance.
"Your system does make it worse."
Dace nodded.
"Okay."
"It also makes the math less clean."
Dace thought about that, then gave a small, rueful smile.
"I'll take that over impossible."
Kael almost asked why.
Then decided the answer was already present in the class pane. Gathered Thread. Co-dependent survival logic. Isolation crippled progression. Of course he would take less clean math over impossible solitude. His system had been built to.
The real problem was that Kael had not.
He opened the memo again and wrote the sentence he had been resisting since the start of the chapter.
Dace is not merely a liability. He is a relational variable.
He read it once and nearly deleted it for sounding like a person thinking too much about systems.
Then left it.
Because that was exactly what the setting required to survive it.
A narrow mechanical silence followed.
Then Dace, somehow sensing the conversation had reached its first usable end point, said, "So... am I allowed to ask a tactical question now?"
Kael looked at him.
"If it is tactical."
"I think it is."
"Then ask it."
Dace pointed, not south toward the watched coastline, but deeper north through the continuity routes.
"Are there more places up there like this?"
Kael followed the gesture.
Not a stupid question.
Better than that, it was the right category of question. Not "What are you?" Not "Can I stay?" Not "Are we allies now?" The seam had no patience for those. Just route, space, survivability.
"Yes," Kael said.
Dace nodded, absorbing that with visible relief.
"Okay."
A beat.
"That was the tactical question."
For once, Kael did not tell him to be quiet.
He closed the memo and looked north again.
Dace's system had changed the problem.
Not solved it.
Not softened it.
Changed it.
The Wilds were still what they had always been: hostile, layered, structurally rude, and increasingly public in all the wrong ways. Hunters still came from the cliff routes. The viewers still turned every clean frame into future pressure. Mira still mattered in ways he had not finished pricing. The Warden still left architecture in N7 that the shell could partially integrate and that he had not yet decided when to accept.
All of that remained.
But now there was also this:
Another excluded player whose class turned continued proximity into stability.
A system built not around solo escalation, but around surviving near someone long enough for that to become mechanically meaningful.
Kael hated how important that might become.
Which meant, by every rule the Wilds had taught him, it probably would.
End of Chapter 32