Mira was already awake.

I found her at the guild hall, not the Crown, which meant she’d been up long enough to want a different room. She had her notes spread across a corner table — not the Floor 7 geometry notes, something else, pages I didn’t recognize — and her crossbow leaning against the wall and a cup that was still warm.

She looked up when I sat down. Clocked my expression. "You got the flag."

I stopped. "You got it too."

"Two hours ago." She turned one of the pages toward me. It was dense — her handwriting, tight and precise, filling the margins. "I’ve been trying to place it since."

I looked at the page. She’d been working through the forum data, pulling threads she remembered from the supplementary datamine, cross-referencing against the flag’s language. The margin notes were in a shorthand I could mostly follow — question marks, bracketed phrases, lines connecting things that might be related.

"Anything," I said.

"Maybe." She pulled a specific page from the stack. "The forum data had a thread. Pre-release, one of the deeper theory boards, not the main wiki. It didn’t make sense when I read it the first time because it was describing a post-completion mechanic."

"Post-completion."

"For after the canonical story finished. After Vorn’s arc completed and the NTR ending resolved." She looked at me. "The theory was that the game had a secondary architecture built in — something that only activated if the primary story failed to complete. A failsafe."

I sat with that. "The game built a backup."

"The theory called it a Reinsertion Protocol." She tapped the page. "The thread didn’t have much. Two posts, both from the same user, both vague. But the language matches the flag. Correction mechanism. Canonical architecture. Reinsertion."

"What did the posts say about the vector."

Mira’s expression shifted slightly — the specific shift she used when she had information she hadn’t fully resolved yet. "That’s where it gets complicated. The posts said the protocol would identify an existing character in the city and use them as the insertion point. Not a new character — someone already present, already in relationship with the target."

"Daren."

"Daren," she confirmed. "The protocol finds someone in Daren’s established network and runs a corruption arc through them. Not Vorn’s approach — something slower, more organic, harder to clock."

I thought about Daren’s relationship network. Me at eight ninety-four. Lyra at nine oh seven. A handful of guild contacts I’d seeded over months of counter-operation. None of them flagged, all of them stable.

"Has the wiki generated anything on his network," I said.

Mira slid another page across. She’d already pulled the passive monitoring data.

DAREN — PASSIVE MONITORING

Relationship / Lyra: 912 — climbing

Relationship / Kai: 894 — stable

Corruption: 0/100

Active flags: 1

Mood: Stable / Present

Note: Flag 1 active — classification pending / source unknown

Flag 1. Active. Source unknown.

I looked at that for a moment. Daren had carried one active flag since before I’d arrived in Ashveil — it had been in his status block from the first time I’d clocked him, and I’d never been able to get a clean read on what it was. The wiki had filed it as pending classification for months.

"The flag," I said.

"I think Flag 1 was always the Reinsertion Protocol," Mira said. "Dormant while the primary story was running. It didn’t need to activate because Vorn’s arc was progressing. When I suspended Vorn’s flags —"

"When we suspended Vorn’s flags, the primary story failed to complete." I looked at the page. "And Flag 1 woke up."

"It would have been dormant for months. Long enough that I stopped flagging it as a priority." Mira’s jaw was tight in the specific way it got when she’d missed something she thought she should have caught. "The forum thread said the activation delay was built in. The protocol waits until the primary story has definitively failed before it starts moving."

"How long has it been active."

"Unknown. The wiki caught it two hours ago. That doesn’t mean it started two hours ago — it means the effects became observable two hours ago." She looked at me. "Below observable level, the flag said."

So it had been running for some unknown period before the wiki caught the effects. Could be days. Could be longer.

"The vector," I said. "The existing character in Daren’s network. Do you have a read on who."

Mira turned the last page. She’d pulled relationship data on Daren’s full contact list — guild clerks, market vendors, the handful of people he interacted with regularly. Most of them had flat relationship meters with him, the ambient numbers of people who existed in the same city.

One entry was moving.

GUILD CONTACT — PASSIVE MONITORING

Name: SERA

Classification: Civilian

UI overlay: NONE

Corruption meter: NONE

Organic relationship / Daren: 31 — climbing

Note: Contact initiated 14 days ago / organic progression / source of initial contact unknown

I looked at that for a long time.

Sera.

Cloth merchant, north end cloth district. Six years operating. The woman Vorn had built forty-one organic relationship points with through genuine interaction, the woman who’d told him to come back when he knew what he actually wanted, the woman I’d done counter-establishment work with for months.

Sera had no corruption meter. No UI overlay. No game protection. Civilian classification — the same classification that had made her vulnerable to Vorn’s Flag 3 in the first place.

She was now in organic relationship with Daren. Thirty-one points. Fourteen days of contact with unknown initiation source.

The Reinsertion Protocol had picked Sera.

Not because she was weak or compromised. Because she was already established as a genuine presence in Ashveil, already trusted, already in contact with the people who mattered — and because she had no game protection. No corruption meter meant the protocol couldn’t corrupt her. But it didn’t need to corrupt her. It just needed to use the organic relationship she built with Daren to create the conditions the canonical story required.

A civilian with genuine connection to the protagonist. No mechanic needed. Just proximity and time and the slow erosion of trust that happened when someone you cared about developed an attachment to someone else.

The game had found a way to run the NTR arc without a corruption mechanic.

It was going to use real feelings.

I put the pages down.

"Vorn," I said.

Mira nodded. "He built forty-one points with her through genuine interaction. If anyone understands the architecture of what’s running on her right now —"

"He won’t want to hear it."

"No," Mira agreed. "He won’t."

I thought about Vorn on the canal bench in his self-determining state, working out what he actually wanted. Vorn at Sera’s stall making himself smaller. Vorn meeting the condition she’d given him, cautiously forward according to Calenne, better than expected according to Esta.

The protocol had picked Sera because she was the most genuine presence in Ashveil. The person nobody had run mechanics on, the person who’d responded to Vorn’s honesty with her own honest condition, the person I’d done counter-establishment work with because she was worth protecting.

And now she was thirty-one points into an organic relationship with Daren with an unknown initiation source and the Reinsertion Protocol active in the background.

The wiki was documenting from effect rather than cause.

I needed to find the cause.

I looked at Mira. "The forum thread. Did it say anything about a stop condition."

She was quiet for a moment. "That’s the part that didn’t resolve," she said. "The thread cut off. Second post, mid-sentence. Whoever wrote it stopped."

"Why."

"The forum board went dark the same day. Pre-release. Before the game launched." She looked at me with grey eyes. "My foreknowledge advantage runs to the edge of that thread and then it stops."

First time her advantage had a hard edge.

"So we’re equal," I said.

"We’re equal," she confirmed. "From here I know what you know."

I looked at the passive monitoring data. Daren at nine twelve and climbing. Sera at thirty-one with him and moving. Flag 1 active with no stop condition identified and no source traceable and a Reinsertion Protocol that had been dormant for months and was now running below observable level.

The canal bench was going to need to happen again.

I wasn’t looking forward to it.

"Don’t tell Vorn about Sera yet," I said. "Not until I know more about what’s actually running. If I tell him now and I’m wrong about the vector —"

"You’re not wrong," Mira said.

"If I tell him now and the information is incomplete, he acts on incomplete information. Give me two days."

Mira looked at me for a moment. Then she gathered her pages and stacked them with the precise economy she brought to everything. "Two days," she said. "Then we tell him together."

I looked at the guild hall’s main floor — clerks at the counter, adventurers coming and going, the ordinary machinery of a city running its morning operations with no idea that the game it was built inside had started running a backup script.

The wiki sat in the corner of my vision. Structural entry active. Generating from effect rather than cause. Documenting a thing it couldn’t fully see.

Two days.