Bloodied Letter

Lore & Background

In the grim economy of the Bank, contracts are not merely objectives—they are stories. The Bloodied Letter, more than any other artifact, whispers of a personal tragedy. Scholars of the Hunt's archives speculate that the letter was written by a civilian, a fellow hunter, or perhaps a Bank employee who was struck down while composing it. The blood is not a splatter; it is a smear, as though the writer's own hand slipped across the page while a wound bled freely. The words themselves are never legible to the hunter who picks it up, which only deepens the unease of cradling it in your pack.

The Bank, for its part, treats the Letter with the same cold procedural indifference it shows the skulls or the black box. It is a contract. It has a value. It must be delivered. The irony is not lost on the community of hunters: the Bank will pay a fortune for a dead person's final, incoherent scrawl, and will execute the hunter who fails to bring it. The letter does not care about the writer's name, their plea, or their fear. It is paper, blood, and a price tag.

Among the veteran hunters who have delivered it more than once, a quiet superstition has grown. They say the Letter is heavier than it should be, that the blood seems to glisten faintly in torchlight, and that the words shift if you look too long. None of this is provable. But in a world where the Hunt itself feels less like a job and more like a curse, a little superstition is cheaper than a bullet.

In Their Own Story

The rain had stopped, but the bayou still wept. Mara crouched in the overgrown hallway of the abandoned plantation house, her fingers brushing the damp wood of the desk where the Letter lay. She could hear them—two guns, maybe three—pacing the veranda outside. They'd been waiting since the Hunt began, she knew. Everyone waited for the Letter. It was the one contract that made you a target the instant your fingers closed around it, because there was no hiding a single sheet of paper in a pack.

She lifted it. The blood was dry, flaking at the edges, but the smear across the lower half was thick, almost three-dimensional. She did not read the words. Reading was a luxury for people who expected to live long enough to regret it. She slid it into her satchel, felt the faint, impossible weight of it, and ran.

Behind her, a door splintered. A rifle cracked. The night swallowed the sound, and the Letter rode close against her hip as she sprinted toward the Bank, toward the light, toward the only thing that mattered: being the first one through the door.

Reader's Guide

The Bloodied Letter is a contract artifact, not a weapon. Its entire combat function is to make you a target and to create a race to the Bank.

In every hunt where it is selected, the Letter spawns at a fixed, publicly announced location—typically inside a building or a defined area of the map. All hunters see the same marker on the compass. There is no stealth in finding it; the contest is entirely about who arrives first, who survives the crossfire, and who can hold the path to the Bank long enough to deliver it.

Because the spawn is known, the area around it is almost always contested. Expect ambushes, pre-positioned hunters, and crossfire the moment you enter the building. Grab the Letter quickly, drop to a crouch, and move. The moment it is in your pack, your position becomes the most valuable piece of information in the arena.

Delivery requires you to reach the Bank and complete the handoff. You do not need to kill every other hunter—only to be the first through the door. A fast, disciplined route with cover breaks is far more valuable than a firefight. Hunters with strong mobility and healing (Vigil, Grace, or a well-built LeMoyne) benefit most, as the Letter run is a sprint-and-survive objective rather than a damage contest.

Is it worth the risk? Yes, because it is the only way to win that hunt. The risk is not optional; the reward is the entire pot. The only question is whether you are the one who walks in first, or the one who bleeds out in the hallway.

Did You Know?

• The Bloodied Letter is one of several possible contracts; a given Hunt will feature only one contract type, and all hunters see which one it is before the match begins.
• Because the Letter's spawn location is publicly known to every player, the contest is less about discovery and more about who can survive the approach and the race to the Bank.
• Carrying the Letter does not add any mechanical buff or debuff beyond making you the target of every other hunter's attention; its power is purely economic and narrative.
• The Letter is a single sheet of paper, making it physically trivial to carry, yet in the lore of the Hunt it is treated with the same gravity as a skull or a sealed black box.