Rook set a timer.
Thirty minutes.
When it chimed, he stopped working.
Not because the System told him to. Not because he was exhausted. But because that's how he'd always done things—work until the task was done, then step back long enough to think.
He sat on the rough wooden steps of his cabin, back against unfinished planks, and pulled his phone from his pocket.
It still worked.
Signal was spotty, battery already bleeding fast, but enough remained to check what the rest of the world was doing.
The first video loaded slowly.
A group of armed survivors stood in the middle of a downtown intersection, shouting at another group across a barricade of burned-out cars. Both sides had banners now—actual symbols spray-painted on bedsheets and taped to poles.
"This is our territory!" someone yelled.
"Bullshit!" another voice screamed back. "We cleared this block first!"
The camera shook violently as a fight broke out. Steel pipes swung. Someone went down hard. A wolf burst from a nearby alley and tore into the chaos indiscriminately.
The feed cut.
Rook scrolled.
Another clip. Another city. Same pattern.
Groups calling themselves guilds. Leaders screaming orders. People flashing their levels proudly, as if numbers alone made ground belong to them.
No walls.
No claims.
No understanding.
Rook exhaled slowly through his nose.
They weren't stupid.
That was the thing.
They were reacting exactly how people always did—grabbing what they could see, fighting over what felt important, assuming presence equaled ownership.
He checked his own interface.
Territory Status: Stable
Threats Detected: None
The difference wasn't brilliance.
It was restraint.
Rook locked the phone and set it aside. He stood, stretched his shoulders, and returned to work—reinforcing the cabin walls, adjusting the watchtower supports, doing small things that wouldn't show up in highlight clips.
As he worked, the System chimed quietly.
[Resource Node Detected: Timber]
[Resource Node Detected: Fresh Water]
New tabs unlocked.
No announcements. No alerts sent to anyone else.
Rook noticed because he was looking.
By the time the timer chimed again, the sun had dipped lower in the sky. Shadows stretched across the valley. The stream reflected gold instead of blue.
He checked his phone one last time.
Another guild war. Another argument over ground that didn't belong to anyone.
Rook turned the screen off.
Break time was over.