Staying Alive on Contested Ground

The Threat Model

A liquidation is not a fight. It is a check: if your Kami's current health has fallen below a threshold computed from the attacker's Violence against your Harmony, the kill lands, and if it has not, the attempt reverts. There is no dice roll to be lucky on.

This has one very useful consequence. The threshold is computable from public stats— compute it, do not guess at it. The inputs are visible: the attacker's Violence, your Harmony, your maximum health, and the affinity matchup between their hand and your body. Run the numbers on the specific Kamis you are worried about and you get an actual health floor to stay above.

Size that floor properly:

• Against the strongest active killer of the relevant hand affinity that frequents your node — not the average one, and not a killer who has stopped playing.
• Include the attacker's consumables in the worst case. Attack potions stack, and debuffs can be cast onto your Kami directly. A margin computed against a sober attacker is not a margin.

Build the margin out of stats, skills, and worn equipment— a pet covers whatever the stat sheet lacks for the role's margin, and its bonus belongs in the same arithmetic as everything else.

Margins Protect. Reaction Time Does Not.

The instinct is to watch the node and pull your Kami off when someone dangerous walks in. Abandon it. Attack cadence is a build variable, and its floor is zero — cooldown reduction is a thing predators buy on purpose. A properly built assassin can sweep every exposed accrual on a node in seconds.

Assume you will not out-react anyone. Every defense that works is a defense that holds while you are asleep.

The Post-Kill Window

Killing is not free. A Kami that liquidates absorbs the strain of the spoils it just took, plus recoil damage scaled by its victim's Violence. For a few moments after its own kill, a predator is at its most killable — health low, and standing in exactly the place everyone is looking.

Two things follow. A Kami that never kills never opens that window at all, which is a quiet argument for pure farm builds on dangerous ground. And hunters of hunters live inside that window: countering predation is largely a matter of being present and healthy when someone else has just paid the cost of a kill.

Three Ways to Hold Dangerous Ground

All three work. All three cost. The mistake is choosing one without pricing it.

1. Bank early and small

The standard answer: keep the uncollected pile small so there is nothing worth taking, collecting or stopping well before the tank fills. It is reliable and it needs no allies.

The price is not paid in deaths, it is paid in forfeited ramp. Halving your sit length roughly halves what each stop could have banked. You are buying safety with income, at a rate you should at least know.

2. A bodyguard squad

Violence-built protectors parked on the same node as the farm, suppressing raiders. It works in the sense that raiders get killed — but the squad itself nets roughly zero, so protection is a make-or-buy decision where there is nothing to buy: no protection market exists, so it means running fighters in-house and carrying their whole cost.

It also has a structural flaw. On busy ground the bodyguards' own kills keep opening the post-kill window, and the squad gets counter-hunted. Bodyguarding fails exactly where it is most needed.

3. Feed-tanking

Keep a big-health fleet fed so that health never drops far. If your Kamis stay above every attacker's threshold, your accruals become uneconomic to take at any size — not because they are hidden, but because the check never passes.

This is the most gas-elegant defense available. Once health is no longer the binding constraint, sit length stops being a safety parameter and becomes a pure cost-amortization knob: sit as long as the transaction economics prefer, not as long as you dare.

Death Is a Cost Line, Not a Catastrophe

Losing a Kami feels like a disaster and is priced like one by most new players. Run the numbers instead. Revive-and-redeploy is cheap at scale — on the order of one percent of gross for a well-run fleet.

So price your margins against expected loss, not against never dying. A defensive posture that costs you a third of your income to avoid a one-percent line item is a bad trade, however much better it feels.

Or: Do Not Be There

Every defense above is for players who have decided a particular node is worth holding. Most of the time it is not. See Choosing ground and counting costs — quiet, affinity-matched ground at par yield is a complete answer to this entire page.