Eloy’s fingers closed on empty water. The trout flicked past his shin, a silver blur already three feet downstream by the time his hand broke the surface.

The HUD timer read 13 days, 21 hours, 17 minutes. The cold had stopped being cold an hour ago. Now it was just a dull spreading numbness from the ankle up, with sharp stabs whenever he shifted his weight wrong on the slick creek bed.

FORAGE: 2/20.

Two fish. One hour. Seventeen more to go.

A third trout drifted past. Close. Tauntingly close. Its fins barely stirred the current.

Eloy lunged.

His bad ankle hit a slick rock. The joint folded sideways. His arms windmilled once, twice, and then the creek swallowed him whole. Freezing water filled his ears, his nose, the back of his throat. He came up gasping, hair plastered to his face, the bandage on his head dripping brownish water onto his shoulders.

[IsoldeSimp47]: LMAOOO HE FACEPLANTED

[GlitchWitch]: BRO IS NOW AQUATIC

[Slayer_007]: frame-perfect belly flop

[FragJump]: the speedrunner becomes the sea bass

"That was." He spat creek water. His teeth slammed together on the last word. "That was a water temperature calibration check. For science."

He shoved himself upright. Water cascaded off the soaked bandage. The wound beneath throbbed in time with his pulse, a wet, hot ache the cold couldn’t touch. His hands were marble-white. The kind of white that came before the shaking started.

The joke sat between them like a wall. Good. Walls were useful. Admitting he couldn’t catch a fish was the same as admitting the game had him pinned.

"You’ve caught two fish in an hour." Maya’s voice came from the bank. "The stream is visibly thick with trout. Even random grasping should yield a higher catch rate. Statistically, you are underperforming chance."

She sat cross-legged on a flat rock, the stolen map folded into a precise square on her lap. Her eyes hadn’t left him since he’d waded in.

Her lip twitched. Died before it became anything.

"Yeah, well." Eloy rubbed his arms. The friction did nothing. "The fish didn’t read the statistics manual. They’re cheating."

His fingers were going numb. The kind that meant his hands would stop obeying him in about twenty minutes.

"The fish are not sentient enough to cheat." Isolde’s voice cut through from the tree line. No inflection. Just the fact, delivered like a patrol report. "Your hands are shaking. You will miss more."

She stood against a pine five meters up the bank, spine straight, shoulders braced. Her eyes tracked the water the way they’d tracked the sewer channels: mapping exit routes, measuring current speed. She’d spotted the shaking before he’d felt it. That was the only tell she gave.

An hour bled past. The sun climbed. The creek stayed glacial.

Eloy’s third fish came from sheer desperation. He scooped it with both hands, a graceless, splashing lunge that sent him stumbling two steps downstream before he could fling the thrashing trout onto the grass.

FORAGE: 3/20.

His hands hung at his sides like dead weights. Numb from the wrist down. Seventeen fish remained. The smuggler trails started three kilometers south and they hadn’t moved a step.

At this rate we starve before the foothills...

He forced himself still. The water bit at his waist. He shut his eyes.

Deviation Sense. The passive tracked movement patterns, anticipation, intent. It was designed for ambush warnings. For patrol routes. But the underlying mechanic was the same: read the trajectory, predict the lunge, see the attack before the attack landed.

A trout flicked its tail three meters to his left. The passive caught it. A ghost-outline in his mind’s eye, a red trajectory arc, a half-second prediction of where the fish would be when it struck at the water bug drifting on the surface.

Same model. Different target.

[GlitchWitch]: bro is about to do something incredibly stupid

[SpeedLore]: deviation sense is for narrative threats not fish

[FragJump]: let him cook, worst case he falls in again

[Slayer_007]: ELOY FISH WHISPERER ARC

He just listened.

The world dimmed. The creek’s roar faded to a hum. The passive’s ambient feedback sharpened, and suddenly every fish within ten meters blazed into existence. Ghost-outlines. Red trajectories. Half-second predictions of lunges and strikes and the tiny, violent ambushes that played out beneath the surface.

He could see the attack before the attacker moved.

"Oh, you absolute legend." The words came out muttered, half to himself, half to the chat window he couldn’t look at. "It’s an exploit. They ambush bugs. Same predictive model. I can buffer my grab before they move. Frame-perfect fishing."

His teeth chattered around the grin. The speedrunner brain seized control. All consequences were irrelevant.

There was a skip.

He struck.

A trout. Clean. Another, scooped before it could dodge. A carp that broke the surface and he snatched it out of the air, water streaming between his fingers.

FORAGE: 4/20. 5/20. 7/20.

[Slayer_007]: HE’S COOKING AND HE’LL COOK

[FragJump]: FISH CLIP ANY% WORLD RECORD

[IsoldeSimp47]: the anomaly is a fishing mini-game i’m crying

[xX_leafwhisperer_Xx]: APLUS FISHING STRATS

[Dr4ftK1ng]: chat we are witnessing history

The water around his legs churned.

Every fish in a fifty-meter radius. The same passive ping that showed him their patterns was pulling them in, and they were converging on his position like a living tide. Carp slammed into his thighs. A catfish the size of his forearm drove into his shin. Scales scraped his calves. Fins cut at his wrists.

"THAT IS NOT A FEATURE!"

A trout whipped around and slapped his shoulder. He staggered. The bad ankle buckled on the slick rocks, arms full of thrashing silver bodies, water churning around his waist. His free hand caught a rock. The fish kept coming.

On the bank, Maya De Alne’s composure shattered.

A full, helpless, ugly-cry laugh that doubled her over the blue ledgers, one hand pressed to her ribs, the other pointing at Eloy with a fish still wrapped around his forearm. The sound came out in jagged bursts. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to stop and couldn’t.

"The." She gasped. "The ’terrifying anomaly.’" Another wheeze. "He’s—" Her eyes were wet. "He’s being mugged by carp."

[ Maya De Alne — Affinity: 10 / 100 → 12 / 100 ]

[ +2: genuine, unguarded laughter at a comrade’s absurdity, a moment with no strategic value, breaking her calculated emotional containment ]

Isolde’s head turned.

Her eyes tracked Maya. The shaking shoulders. The crinkles at the corners of her eyes. The sound, that specific sound, that had no place in a fugitive camp.

The hand braced on the tree trunk relaxed. Her jaw loosened. Her spine eased a fraction, the rigidity that had held since the tunnel letting out one small breath of air.

She didn’t smile, but she stopped watching the tree line.

[ ISolde Reichenbach — Affinity: 17.5 / 100 → 18.5 / 100 ]

[ +1: mundane situation makes her feel at ease ]

Eloy dragged himself onto the bank. He dumped the fish onto the grass in a pile of thrashing, gasping silver. He was dripping. He smelled like a swamp. The bandage was a lost cause, saturated brown and peeling at the edges.

The HUD chimed.

[ FORAGE: 20/20 EDIBLE ITEMS — COMPLETE ]

[ +1 CONSTITUTION ]

[ SURVIVAL SKILLS — RANK F UNLOCKED ]

The new skill slotted into the back of his mind like a downloaded manual. How to start a fire from wet bark. How to read potable water by the mineral deposits on the stones. How to dress a kill efficiently, which cuts to make first, how to preserve what you couldn’t carry. He’d skipped every survival tutorial, optimized past every foraging node, and now here he was, standing in a creek with a Rank F skill he’d earned one fish at a time.

The +1 Constitution settled into his bones. A faint warmth.

He was slightly less useless.

Deviation Sense screamed.

A violent, skull-splitting spike that painted his minimap crimson and sent his threat assessment spiraling into emergency thresholds.

Eight signatures. No. Ten. High-level mana readings, moving at speeds that made the Inquisitor’s closing time look like a walking pace. Vectoring directly on the creek, on him.

The passive...

The restructured pathways. The network-linked channels. He’d turned on a beacon at full blast, and something had seen the light. He’d caused this.

"Your posture changed." Isolde’s voice came from the tree line. "What’s wrong."

She was already off the trunk. Weight shifted forward. Hand near her hip where a focus rod would hang if she still had one. Recognizing incoming contact before the alarm sounded. The question was a courtesy, his body had told her everything.

"We have company." Eloy scooped up a handful of the fish. There wasn’t time. "Fast company. Faster. A lot faster."

The guilt pressed across his shoulders. He kept his mouth shut.

Maya was already on her feet. The ledgers were secured, the map rolled, nothing loose. Three seconds from laughter to operational.

The HUD’s red signatures closed. Faster than anything the Inquisition fielded. Faster than Caldwell’s response teams. Faster than the data said was possible for any patrol in this sector.

Eloy grabbed another fistful of fish and shoved them into his pack.

[Slayer_007]: what’s happening

[coldfront44]: thats a LOT of them wth

[IsoldeSimp47]: eloy what did you do

[GlitchWitch]: the exploit pinged something bigger than fish oh no

[nachtfalter]: MOVE MOVE MOVE

The creek rippled.

A low hum built under the water’s surface, a vibration Eloy felt through the soles of his boots before his ears registered the sound.

In the treeline, fifty meters downstream, a shape moved. Too big for a man, wrong for an animal, and moving at a speed that did not belong in a forest.