Ryan POV
The text holds still this time instead of vanishing.
Black letters on a pale background, no guild border, no quest icon. Just my name at the top, followed by a single line.
[Ryan. You are not supposed to see this yet.]
"What is it?" Emily asks, catching the change in my expression.
I don’t answer right away. I’m reading it again, trying to memorize every word before it disappears.
[Three fragments found. Threshold approaching. The system cannot hide you much longer.]
"Ryan." Daniel steps closer. "You’re freezing up. What’s going on?"
"A message," I say. "It just opened on its own."
"From who?" Emily asks.
"It doesn’t say."
I turn so they can both see, angling my head like that will somehow let them read a private window meant only for me. It doesn’t work. Emily squints at the empty air in front of me, seeing nothing.
"I can’t see anything," she says.
"Me neither," Daniel adds. "Is it still there?"
"Yeah." I look back at the text. The next line has already changed.
[Do not tell them. Not yet. They are not ready, and neither are you.]
My stomach tighten. I glance at Emily, then at Daniel, both watching me with concern and confusion.
"What does it say?" Emily asks again, quieter this time.
I hesitate. The message is telling me not to share it, even though I don’t understand why.
But Emily’s the one who’s been piecing this together with me since the boar fight. Keeping her out now feels wrong in a different way.
"It says I’m not supposed to see it yet," I say carefully. "Something about fragments. A threshold."
"Fragments of what?" Daniel asks.
Emily’s quiet for a moment, processing. "Does it say anything about the item? Or the gauntlet?"
"No. Just that the system can’t hide me much longer."
"Hide you from what?" Her voice sharpens on the question, more urgent than I’ve heard from her before.
"I don’t know, Emily. I’m reading this in real time, same as you’re hearing it."
She exhales slowly, forcing her shoulders to relax, though I can tell it’s deliberate. "Okay. Okay. Keep reading. Tell me if it changes."
I look back at the window. The text has shifted again, line by line.
[You were not meant to log in today. The world noticed anyway.]
A chill runs through me.
"It says I wasn’t meant to log in today," I say quietly. "That the world noticed anyway."
Daniel’s gone pale. "That’s not a normal system message. That’s not anything close to normal."
"No," Emily agrees. "It’s not."
The text pulses once, and for a moment I think it’s about to vanish the way the last one did, cutting off mid-thought before I could finish reading it. Instead, one final line appears, slower than the rest.
[Be careful who you trust. Not everyone who seems to help you is only helping.]
I read it twice, the words settling into a place in my chest I don’t have a name for.
"Ryan," Emily says. "What does it say now?"
I look at her. Really look at her, the way I haven’t let myself since the training grounds, when she first offered to teach me and I decided, almost without thinking, to trust her completely.
*Not everyone who seems to help you is only helping.*
"Nothing," I say. "It’s gone."
The lie comes out easier than I expect it to, and that bothers me more than the message itself.
Emily studies me for a long second, something flickering behind her eyes that might be suspicion or might just be worry. I can’t tell anymore. Maybe I never could.
"You sure?" she asks.
"Yeah. It just cut off."
"Okay. That was officially the creepiest thing that’s happened today, and we fought an unidentifiable monster earlier."
"It’s been a strange day," Emily says, though her eyes are still on me, lingering a beat longer than necessary before she finally looks away.
We start walking again, the plaza quiet around us, torchlight flickering against the stone walls of the guild in the distance. Daniel fills the silence with theories, each one wilder than the last, but I’m barely listening.
I’m thinking about the message. About the warning buried inside it. About the fact that I just lied to the one person who’s been helping me make sense of any of this since the moment I logged in.
[Not everyone who seems to help you is only helping.]
I don’t know if that means Emily. I don’t know if it means someone else entirely, someone I haven’t even met yet.
Emily falls into step beside me as Daniel drifts ahead, still talking, still unaware of how much weight just settled over the three of us.
"You know you can tell me things," she says quietly, just between us. "Whatever’s happening to you. I’m not going to think you’re crazy."
"I know," I say.
"But you’re not going to tell me."
It’s not a question, and I don’t try to make it sound like one when I answer.
"Not yet."
She nods slowly, accepting it without pushing, though I can tell it costs her something to let it go that easily.
~~~
We walk the rest of the way back to the guild in silence, the three of us wrapped in whatever this day has turned into, none of us saying the thing we’re all thinking.
That whatever’s happening to me isn’t finished.
That it’s only just started.
We reach the guild steps, torchlight catching the stone archway above us, and for a moment everything feels almost normal again—three new adventurers heading in after a long first day, nothing more complicated than that.
Then my status window flickers open on its own. The words appear across the top, stark and final.
[Hidden Quest Unlocked.]