Combat mechanic — added v222 · pays nothing, on purpose

The Stand

A fight you finish — four or more hostiles at once, every single one of them killed, without dying, flying, or backing off

By this point the game already had fourteen quiet layers tracking the shape a player draws with their own feet — going up, going through, going round, going back, bringing something else along. Not one of them had ever looked at the thing the game actually spends most of its time on: a fight. Combat here has always been an appetite, never a task — you swing at whatever's in front of you and the only thing anything has ever counted is the running total. The Stand is the first system to ask you to finish one particular fight, and the first able to tell you that you didn't.

What forms a stand

Four or more live hostile creatures inside 50 metres of you at the same moment — and you kill every single one of that group, without dying, flying, or breaking off. The roster locks the instant it forms: a fifth creature arriving afterward doesn't join it and doesn't make the stand harder, because a stand is one specific fight, not a running body count.

This genuinely can't be farmed on demand. The world caps its living hostile population at 12 at any time, spawning them 70 to 220 metres away and quietly retiring an ordinary one that drifts past 340 — so four at once is not the normal state of the game. It happens when a camp goes off, when a war wave lands, when you've walked into more than you meant to. And the ordinary, sensible response to that situation — back off and pick them apart from a distance — is exactly what ends a stand before it counts.

What ends it before it counts

• Breaking off is the fail state, and the common one. Let any single member of the group get 130 metres from you while it's still alive and the stand is over. Nothing is taken — it just didn't happen.
• Dying fails it. You don't finish a fight by respawning into it.
• Flying fails it. Getting airborne over a fight is the opposite of standing in one.
• Letting one walk away fails it. If any member of the roster leaves the world without an actual kill of yours behind it, the group was never finished.

What it deliberately doesn't do

• No counter on screen. You're never shown how many are on you, which ones belong to the roster, how many are left, or how far the nearest one has drifted. Knowing what's around you by actually looking is the entire activity.
• It never announces itself when it forms. A muster you simply walk away from is dropped in total silence — travelling past ordinary wildlife never produces a line of chatter. It only speaks once you've committed by landing the first kill.
• No timer, ever. Take an hour over it, heal, eat, back into a doorway — however you like, as long as nobody gets 130 metres clear of you alive.
• Pays absolutely nothing. No coin, items, experience, stats, drops, or reputation, at any number of stands, and it declares no denominator of its own, so nothing about it can ever read as a fraction to chase.

Version history

• v222 — added. Ships exactly as described above — a single new save field, created lazily, so a character who saved before this version loads with no stands behind them and loses nothing.

Trivia

• It's the first of the game's whole family of unlisted, zero-reward ambient systems — alongside The Crossing and The Leading — to be about combat rather than the shape of a walk.