The stockade gate stood like a period at the end of a sentence written in dirt and fear. Ali's journey had a destination now, and it was a closed door.
"System," he whispered, the word heavy with a fatigue that went deeper than muscle. "Besides walking up there... do we have any other option? Any at all?"
He already knew the answer. He felt it in the cold earth under his tattered bark wraps, in the hollow ache that the berries had only papered over, in the tremor that never quite left his hands. But he needed to hear the logic one last time, to have the final exit sealed off by cold data, not just his own crumbling will.
[Survival Option Analysis - Immediate Term.]
Option 1 - Approach Homestead: As previously modeled. High social risk, high probability of securing basic subsistence (food, water, shelter) if successful.
Option 2 - Return to Wilderness: Attempt to forage/hunt/shelter independently.
Feasibility Assessment: Caloric reserves critically low. [Foraging] skill nonexistent. [Hunting] skill nonexistent. [Shelter Construction] skill minimal. Ambient temperature dropping. No secure location identified.
Probability of Surviving Another Night: <22%. Primary cause of failure: hypothermia compounded by energy depletion.
Option 3 - Locate Alternative Settlement: Attempt to circumvent homestead and find another. No data on other settlements exists. Search pattern would be random walk in hostile territory, increasing exposure time exponentially.
Probability of Success Before Collapse: ~3%.
Conclusion: Option 1 possesses the only viable probability of continued survival beyond the next 12-18 hours. There is no hidden path. The map ends here.
<22%. The number was a cold fist around his heart. The best he could do on his own was a four-in-five chance of dying in the dark.
The dam holding back everything else—the fear, the confusion, the sheer, overwhelming wrongness of it all—cracked.
"Fuck," he breathed, the sound shuddering out of him. He sank lower behind the tree, his forehead pressing against the rough bark. "I'm tired, System. I'm so tired. I just want to rest. I want to go home."
The word home unleashed it. A torrent of images: the blue glow of his monitor, the feel of his chair, the sound of his sister moving in her room down the hall. His mom calling him for dinner. His dad's quiet presence.
"My family," he choked out, the reality hitting him like a physical blow. "It's been a whole day and a night. More. Do they even know I'm gone? Am I just... a missing person poster now? What if time is different here? What if it's been weeks for them? Years?" The horror was existential, a yawning void beneath the immediate horror of survival. He had been so focused on the next minute, he hadn't let himself think about the people for whom his next minute had already become a permanent, aching absence.
[Temporal Analysis: Speculative.] No data on relative timeflow. Stress-induced temporal distortion is a high factor in your perception. Regardless of differential, your absence in your home dimension is a near-certainty. Fixating on unactionable variables consumes cognitive resources needed for immediate survival.
The System's cold pragmatism was a slap. Unactionable variables. His family, his home, his entire life—reduced to a distraction. It was brutally correct, and it made him want to scream.
He dug his fingers into the dirt, the cool soil a weak anchor. "I don't have time to think about that," he muttered, echoing the System, hating it. "I need to focus on survival. And I don't... I don't know if I can survive another night."
He wasn't asking the System anymore. He was admitting it to himself. The bravery was gone, scraped away by hours of terror and cold. What remained was a simple, animal calculation: approach the fire, or freeze in the dark.
He looked at the homestead. The smoke from the chimney was a pale gray ribbon against the darkening sky. It meant warmth. It meant people. It meant all the dangers the System had coldly outlined.
He was a 16-year-old boy with 16 years of life on a PC. He was physically weak, mentally frayed, and utterly out of his depth.
But he had followed the rules. He had drunk the water, avoided the monster, eaten the strange berries, and followed the path. The path had led here.
There were no more game guides. No more wikis. This was the final boss of the tutorial: knocking on the door.
With a shuddering breath that felt like his first and last, Ali pushed himself to his feet. He brushed the dirt from his stained, black hoodie. He adjusted the crumbling bark on his feet. He touched the flint shard in his pocket, not for courage, but for the reminder of its sharp, pointless reality.
"Okay," he said to the empty air, to the System, to the part of himself that still wanted to run and hide. "Okay."
He didn't walk with purpose. He walked with the slow, defeated steps of someone out of choices. He stepped out of the tree line and onto the cleared ground, a stark, visible figure against the green.
He was done being a shadow. He was a problem walking toward a gate. He just had to hope their solution involved a bowl of soup and not a spear.
Each step toward the silent, palisaded walls was a march into the unknown, not of monsters, but of men. And somehow, that was more terrifying.