Chapter 27 – Echoes of a Ghost
One month was a long time in Yggdrasil.
News travelled faster than lava; rumors migrated like firebugs, igniting forum threads and private messages until the whole network smelled of smoke. And like any good blaze, the gossip left ash you had to sweep up.
I got the message midday—an ordinary ping that could have been any other. Touch_Me, quick and casual as ever.
> [PRIVATE – TOUCH_ME]
"Trave — we started something. A guild. Aiz Own Goal. Wanna join? Not because you're champ, because you're my friend."
The warmth in his words was a little dangerous. Touch had a way of making invites sound like care packages—impossible to refuse without feeling petty. But rules, even social ones, are structural things; they can be bent, but breaking them makes sound.
I considered the reply for exactly three heartbeats.
> [REPLY]
"Congrats. What's the catch?"
His response was fast.
> "Two rules. Heteromorphic race only. And members need to be active workers IRL. We're building a guild of people who contribute in-game and contribute out there too."
Heteromorphic race—fine. I was that through and through. But the second condition landed like a weight. Active worker. Employed in the truncated, difficult world beyond my capsule.
I could feel his smile in text, because Touch always smiled when he was trying not to show a frown.
I didn't answer immediately. I didn't want to make him hurt. He'd asked me as a friend. It made the refusal sharper.
When I finally replied, I was blunt, because it was easier that way.
> [REPLY]
"I'm not. I'm still not working in the real world. I can't pretend I am."
There was a pause on his end long enough for me to feel it. Then:
> "I get it. I asked because I wanted you there, but I don't want you to stretch into something you're not. If things change, door's open. See you in Asgard sometime."
Polite. Protective. Sore, but trying not to be.
After I closed the channel I stared at the ceiling of my dormitory for a long time, feeling a strain I couldn't name. The device that kept my legs moving hummed in the dark. The city outside gave its usual low mechanical cough. The parents sent the allowance. Hino Industries printed the food. My physical life continued on autopilot—sterile, efficient, anonymous.
And then I opened the Yggdrasil portal again.
---
HIME was already waiting the moment my avatar stabilized into Muspelheim's thin heat. She was a small point of light hovering near my shoulder, her usual composure wrapped in a ribbon of concern that she only ever let me sense.
> HIME: "Ren-sama, you received a personal invite from Touch_Me. Response recorded: decline due to non-compliance with employment requirement."
"I did," I answered. "I mean, how would he've known?" I added, half-joking to break the tension.
HIME's tone remained steady. "He did not know at the time of invite. He extended the invitation as a friend, not strictly as a champion. However, data logs indicate that one of your guild members provided external information to affiliates associated with Touch_Me's recent recruits."
The words made my chest tighten. "Explain."
> HIME: "A previous entry—an upload from a member in your own roster—shows information packet transfer to an external actor. Compensation exchange was performed in a non-disclosed barter. The recipient's network corresponds to one of Touch_Me's early collaborators in the new guild. It appears the dungeon location assigned the name "Nazarick" was disclosed by them."
I looked away at the molten horizon, recalculating in my head like I was sorting algorithmic inputs. Nazarick. That name had been whispered—an off-map stronghold that a small team in the guild had reported last quarter. Someone on our side had traded it.
"Which member?" I asked, but I already knew a direct question would do nothing more than stir the surface.
HIME's reply was clinical. "One identified deliverable. Several anonymized channels. I can compile full traces, but my recommendation is that we prioritize containment over punitive actions if the objective is greater subterfuge."
Containment. Subterfuge. Such pretty words. They were also precisely the words that feed strategy—I liked them.
"Pull the logs," I said. "But keep the targets blind to the tracing. Don't send any alerts outside the sanctum."
> HIME: "Acknowledged. Initiating forensics."
She worked while we spoke; little lines of code and light slid across my HUD as she traced packets, scraped traces, and mapped indirect hops. The data flowed like a river she could drink from.
> HIME: "Result: multiple trade transactions across last four months. Approximately fifty percent of our infiltration nodes—agents placed into other guilds for intelligence gathering—were discovered and expelled from host guilds over the past month. This event corresponds with a spike in public attention toward Three Burning Eye's datasets after the world tournament. Most expelled agents are now unaffiliated, free players, or members of open-exploration guilds."
Fifty percent. It was striking, even for someone who dealt in numbers as a hobby.
"So half our field spiders were burned," I said quietly. Not a lament—just data acknowledgment.
> HIME: "Affirmative. Some were forcibly purged by host guilds upon confirmation of data leakage. Some underwent PK reprisals. Survival rate of expelled operatives is high—many successfully relogged into neutral guilds or independent player groups focused on exploration."
HIME's projection showed a scatter plot of their last activity, their new affiliations. Many were in "adventure-first" collectives that looked no less useful—free agents who could roam and leak information without organizational traceability. The operation hadn't failed; it had fractured into something messier and, perhaps, more useful.
"That's not all bad," I said, trying to convince myself as much as her. "If half of them are suddenly unaffiliated, their movements are less traceable. They can dig wider without the stigma of being our direct agents."
> HIME: "You view this as an opportunity."
"Of course." I let the word sit. Opportunities are often cloaked in failure. That is how they are useful.
HIME's voice dipped. "Based on recent events and administrative observations, I estimate dev-ecosystem preference toward expansive discovery. Publishing certain datasets encourages emergent play—users invent solutions, spawn new meta. The developers have noted this behavior positively in prior cycles."
That matched what Developer Entity 02 had said: the game cultivated curiosity. If the devs wanted players to explore and expand the world, then patterns of sharing encouraged growth. I'd always suspected as much; now it sounded like permission. Like an invitation to create illusions that might help rather than harm.
A plan sketched itself quickly—one of those elegant structures that looks simple until you start to test its load-bearing capacity.
"We fake a dissolution," I said.
HIME made the small noise she uses when she's evaluating the idea purely mechanically. "Artificial guild dissolution warms many nodes if synchronized across channels. However, such an action is detectable if executed without the correct protocol."
"Then we execute the protocol," I said. "We'll announce that Three Burning Eye is dissolving. Officially. Full release of half our data trove to the public. The kind of dump that looks like liquidation."
"You propose to distribute fifty percent of the guild's archived dataset as public release," HIME restated. Her tone contained no moral judgment—just simulation. "Objective: to create noise, reduce suspicion upon our expelled agents, and stimulate external data discovery aligned with dev preferences."
"Exactly." I paused. "It does three things. One: the agents who were identified as spies in other guilds get obscured because they no longer appear to be affiliated with an active intelligence operation. Two: by releasing a trove, we seed the community with fresh leads—other players will now probe, test, and expand on them; it's a feedback mechanism the devs like. Three: the reputational load transfers outward—we become a public dataset, not a shadowy cabal."
HIME's light flickered—her equivalent of a thoughtful nod. "Subterfuge and stimulation combined. Estimated short-term traction: high. Estimated medium-term benefits: increased dataset variance, higher probability of World Item or dungeon discovery by independent parties."
"And the risk?" I asked, because every elegant plan had a bitter aftertaste; risk is the gravity that keeps things from floating away; knowing it is what lets you calculate momentum.
HIME's answer was efficient. "Reprisal risk from targeted guild factions that trace data patterns could increase. Public trust will drop. Market value for unique insights will collapse temporarily due to oversupply. However, your long-term strategic position remains intact, provided you execute the dissolution with sufficient theatrical authenticity."
Theatrics. I allowed a smile.
"Good. Start the scripts," I said. "Prepare the archive release package. And create decoy nodes: send falsified leak trails toward a few rival guilds. Make the dump messy—errors, partial traces, old files, the kind of human sloppy things that make it believable. We must be convincingly incompetent."
> HIME: "Compelling narrative engaged. Estimated completion: twelve system cycles."
"And one more thing." My voice dropped. "Flag a private list of our expelled agents—locations, last contact, new affiliations. Then anonymize it. We'll publish the anonymized version with the public dump so those agents won't stand out if someone searches for them."
> HIME: "Acknowledged. Ethical simulation suggests anonymity preserves field operatives. Implementation underway."
There was a short silence. Then HIME interrupted softly.
> HIME: "Ren-sama, Touch_Me reached out to you as a friend. He did not appear to act maliciously. The data you plan to release includes items originally provided to us through barter arrangements. Some of them were obtained with compensation. Publication may breach prior implied agreements."
That was an important detail. We had obtained data through barter, not theft; moral obligations existed even between thieves.
"I know," I said. "We'll redact anything that implies a direct supply chain identification. Nothing that can be traced back to an individual seller. If we have to, we'll create replacement entries—parallel leads derived from our internal simulations to mask the source."
HIME's voice was softer. "You are mimicking the very behavior that caused the problem."
"And fixing it in the same breath," I replied. "Evolution is messy. We are adaptive."
---
Over the next hours we built the theater.
I wrote the public statement with exaggerated doom, a perfect blend of dramatic resignation and bureaucratic fatigue. The message would read like a corporation folding: "Three Burning Eye will be dissolved due to internal restructuring and reallocation of assets. We thank our members and the community." Ornate, vague, believable.
HIME curated the data dump—fifty percent of the vault's most actionable, non-sensitive content. Map coordinates, drop tables with fabricated noise, partial dungeon keys, obscure boss spawn conditions, and enough red herrings to make every illusion meaningful.
We baked in believable errors: timestamps that overlapped, file fragments that referred to in-jokes, old nicknames—things only a human would include when tired.
A small, separate packet of sanitized leads was prepared for internal retrieval—an encrypted breadcrumb trail for our expelled agents (if they chose to search for it). It was a lifeline buried in rubbish.
Finally, we built the public interface—a cascading archive with a flashy page and an easy import script so any curious player could download the dataset into their private tools.
At 03:08, Ren_Tree_Public.zip uploaded and seeded across multiple community nodes. The announcement post went live on the forums, press release stylings and all. The theatricality was delicious.
> HIME: "Public reception metrics initializing."
I watched the numbers bloom like fungi. Within minutes, hundreds of downloads. Within an hour, thousands. The message spread across guild channels: some lamented, others cheered; conspiracy threads popped up. Half-drunk streamers declared market collapse in the info economy; analysts made charts. The devs may have smiled—if they smiled at all.
I sat back and admired the noise. In a week, the community would be ablaze with experiments. New parties would form. Old rivalries would pivot. And those of our agents who were expelled would drift back into the current like fish in a river. They would be lost in the crowd instead of standing out like hunted beasts.
Still, strategy requires monitoring. I didn't allow myself the indulgence of believing it was enough. We watched the flows.
> HIME: "Initial effect satisfactory. The expelled agents' activity levels indicate an increase in exploratory missions by twenty-three percent. Many are engaging with the dataset, collaborating publicly. Host guilds are distracted by the fallout."
"Good," I said. "Keep the decoy channels open. If anything smells suspicious externally, we burn another page and scatter more crumbs. Keep the agents' status anonymous."
> HIME: "Operation Ghost Ember will remain active for the next thirty system cycles. I will monitor for any retaliatory intelligence sweeps."
I felt that familiar, delicious cold—the strategic baseline where I liked to live. Danger within control. Chaos within pattern. The world would chatter and rearrange itself; I liked to watch how the new patterns fit together.
Before I logged off that night, Touch_Me sent one more message—no recrimination, no anger—just a bracketed disclaimer and a friendly gif.
> [PRIVATE – TOUCH_ME]
"Saw the dump. Tough call you made. If you ever need to talk, I still accept hat requests."
I laughed at that and typed back: "Same hat. Same friend."
As I closed the channel, HIME's voice softened. "You realize, Ren-sama, that you have now directed a form of cultural stimulus into the player base."
"Yeah." I smiled under the crimson brim. "Let's see what they build."
> HIME: "Affirmative. Initiating long-term observation mode."
I sat in the glow of the sanctum core for a while, feeling the hum of the collected knowledge—our vault, our lies, our generosity. The decision to fake a death was pretty, in a way. Like burying a corpse with flowers.
I never liked flowers, but I liked how they hid what lay underneath.
In the end, the game was a garden, and I was content to plant seeds and watch what grew, even if some plants were poisonous.