My Wife Rules The World

The footsteps slowed before anyone appeared.

Then a figure came through the trees, hands slightly out from his sides in the universal gesture of not wanting to startle anyone. A boy, around their age, with a D3 band on his wrist that caught the faint light.

Leon and Emma both saw it at the same moment.

"Hey," the boy said, stopping a few meters away. "Sorry. I heard people talking."

"It's fine," Leon said.

"I'm Fred. I was with two others from my building but they got separated in the rebalancing. I've been on my own since yesterday afternoon."

"Emma." She gestured at Leon. "Leon."

Fred looked between them. "Are you heading to the depot?"

"Planning to leave now, yeah."

"Could I come with you?"

Leon and Emma didn't look at each other, but the same thing was running through both their heads. Fred was D3. In a tournament where higher-ranked participants came with documented assistance advantages — better briefings, priority contract access, more detailed rule explanations — a D3 student asking to tag along with two D4s instead of the other way around was unusual enough to notice. Most D4s in their position would have been the ones asking.

"Your companions," Emma said. "They're the only ones you were with?"

"Yeah. We arrived together and then the rebalancing split things up." He said it without defensiveness. "I've been moving solo since the drop. It's not ideal."

It was a straightforward enough answer. And regardless of the reasoning, being unnecessarily difficult with a higher-ranked student in the first two days wasn't a position either of them needed to be in.

"Yeah, that's fine," Leon said.

Fred visibly relaxed. "Thanks."

They started walking.

The zone map showed the depot at roughly forty minutes northeast. Leon gave Fred the short version of how they were approaching it — moving along the base of the ridge rather than going directly up, which added distance but kept the footing more predictable in the dark. Fred listened without interrupting and said it made sense.

The forest was still dim, the sky barely beginning to lighten above the canopy. They moved at a steady pace, single file where the ground required it, side by side where it opened up.

After a while Fred said, "Did you both read the full rules document?"

"Most of it," Emma said.

"The Witness clause. Article 14." He stepped over a root. "There's a supplementary conditions document linked at the bottom flagged. “

"It didn't flag anything for us," Leon said.

"There's a location requirement that isn't in the main Article 14 text. To give valid testimony as a Witness, you have to have been within forty meters of where and when the incident occurred."

"That's specific," Emma said.

"It gets more specific. You don't actually have to have seen it happen. No direct line of sight required. You don't even have to have been aware something was occurring at the time. You just have to have been physically within forty meters of the location at the relevant moment." He paused to check his footing on a patch of loose stone. "So you could theoretically be asleep forty meters away and still qualify."

Leon thought about that for a moment. "Which makes the term witness fairly loose."

"Extremely. Though the claim still has to be plausible — you can't report something that couldn't have physically happened at that location at that time. But as long as one detail points toward it being possible, and you meet the radius requirement, the testimony qualifies for the arbitration panel."

"So the content of what you witnessed matters less than where you were standing," Emma said.

"Essentially. Which is a strange design for a rule built around firsthand testimony."

"Why isn’t this highlighted on ours" Emma asked. Not suspiciously, just curious.

"D3 & above gets a detailed rule briefing as part of the standard assistance package, including highlighting important parts. It goes through edge cases and supplementary conditions that the main document doesn't cover." He said it without particular emphasis. "My family doesn't have a lot of buffer on the CPP side either. I wanted to understand every mechanism regardless."

Leon nodded. Emma glanced at her band briefly and said nothing.

The sky above was getting lighter properly now, the flat grey shifting toward something with actual colour in it. The temperature hadn't improved but it hadn't dropped further either. Leon could see his breath.

Then all three of their bands pulsed at exactly the same moment.

They stopped walking.

The screen showed a notification header with a small animated icon — a child's cartoon face, grinning, eyes too wide.

Phase 1 — Game 1: The Laughing Kid

Notice: In 20 seconds, all participants within a 10-meter radius of your current position will form a team. This team will remain active until The Laughing Kid concludes. Do not move if you wish to be grouped with your current companions.

The three of them looked at each other.

Nobody moved.

The counter ran down. At zero, a new notification replaced it.

Team registered: Fred, Emma, Leon.

Team command authority is assigned by individual CPP count. Highest CPP holder acts as team leader for the duration of this game.

Fred's band flashed briefly. Leon's didn't. Emma's didn't either.

"That's you then," Leon said to Fred.

"Seems like it." Fred was already reading the game rules loading on his screen.

Leon pulled his own up.

Out of all the teams created per group of 100, one would be designated the Escapers. The rest of the teams in the group would be Seekers. The Escaper team would have a Laughing Kid card image displayed on their band screens, visible to anyone who looked closely enough. Their goal was to reach the depot before being found. Seekers had to locate and photograph Escaper team members through the band camera and submit a report. Each team had three report attempts total, allocated by the team leader to whichever members they chose. A correct report transferred 15 CPP from the caught Escaper, split equally across the reporting team.

A caught Escaper could refuse the transfer and request a lucky draw instead. The draw assigned an action — ranging from minor actions to physically harmful ones. Completing the assigned action meant the reporting team received the reward from the system without it coming from the Escaper's CPP at all.

If even a single member of the Escaper team reached the depot uncaught, every member of that team received 30 CPP each.

Rank modifier and Obligation Token rules were suspended for this game.

Leon finished reading and lowered his wrist.

"Thirty CPP," Emma said quietly.

"It's a significant reward," Fred said.

"If we're Escapers and we make it — that would push me to D3. Combined with what's locked." She said it almost to herself. "That would be one of the fastest rank changes from the initial stage of any tournament."

"This whole tournament has higher stakes than anything before it," Fred said. "The rewards scale with that."

Leon checked the time on his band. 4:48 AM. Depot opened at 6:00.

"Realistically, how many teams do you think have formed across the group," he said.

Fred thought about it. "Hundred students. Teams of varying sizes depending on who was near who when the notification came. Could be twenty teams, could be more."

"So one Escaper team out of twenty or more," Emma said. "Low odds."

"Very low. We're almost certainly Seekers." Leon looked at the depot marker on the map. Just over an hour until it opened, maybe twenty minutes of walking left. "If we push to the depot now and get there early, we're already in position. Seekers need to find Escapers — the depot is the one place every Escaper has to reach eventually. We send one person to wait there and the other two move back toward the main zone and join whatever search is forming."

"Split up once we arrive," Fred said. "One holds the depot, two sweep back."

"It's the most efficient use of the position we're already in."

Emma was nodding slowly. "We should still move fast. If other Seeker teams have the same idea the depot will get crowded quickly and—"

All three bands pulsed at exactly the same moment.

They stopped walking.

A single line appeared on the screen.

Congratulations for being selected.

The screen background shifted. Where there had been plain interface, there was now a grinning cartoon face staring back at all three of them.