The midnight air was cool against Mori's face.
He held his grip tightly onto the balcony railing, pulling the collar of his reinforced jacket up against the wind. Down below, the street was bathed in the dull, flickering orange glow dim street lamps. Every thirty minutes, a patrol cruiser from the Association swept through the streets.
Mori reached into his inner jacket pocket to make sure he still had the Spatial Shears.
He took a slow, silent breath, letting his senses expand into the cold air. With his new found powers, his mental clarity felt far sharper than before, even if his physical body still felt fragile. He called up his system interface to inspect his standing.
"System." Mori whispered.
____________INFO____________
[Name: Mori Relotto]
[Title: Slayer of Calamities]
[Class: God of Tailoring (EX)]
[Level: 2]
[Rank: F-Rank]
[HP: 240/240]
[MP: 370 / 370]
____________STATS____________
| Strength (STR): 5 [+10]
| Agility (AGL): 4 [+10]
| Vitality (VIT): 4 [+10]
| Intelligence (INT): 7 [+10]
| Perception (PER): 8 [+10]
| Unallocated Stat Points: 5
_______________________________
Mori stared at the 5 unallocated stat points hovering at the bottom of the panel. He wanted to dump them into Agility or Strength immediately to give himself a physical edge. However, years spent at a tailor's workbench had taught him patience.
You never cut fabric until you knew the exact dimensions of the pattern.
Holding onto those points meant he could adapt if an emergency called for a sudden burst of speed or endurance inside the gate.
His total Perception sat at 18ーa combination of his base 8 points and the flat +10 boost provided by his title. To a normal person, the darkness below was just a collection of shadows and alleyways. But through Mori's heightened perception and the trained eye of a craftsman who had spent hours examining grain lines, stitch densities, and cloth tension, the world revealed many hidden pathways. This was the power of a god-tier class.
The patrol cruiser's sweep cycle is precisely thirty minutes. Mori calculated the patrol route carefully as to not get caught, watching the white headlights fade down the avenue.
Mori moved with deliberate, practiced grace. He jumped over the balcony wall, holding tightly as to not fall off. His Agility was low, but what he lacked in raw speed he made up for in movement. Every fall was calculated, landing softly on the ledges of the balconies one by one to eliminate the scraping sound of rubber against concrete.
He ducked into the narrow service alley running behind the commercial strip. The smell of rotting garbage and stagnant rain filled the narrow corridor, but Mori barely noticed. His focus was locked entirely on the five-mile containment boundary surrounding his old residential neighborhood.
The perimeter line was a easy reminder of the Bureau's authority. To enforce the quarantine around the newly manifested portal, the Local Gate Management Bureau had erected a steel chain-link perimeter topped with barbed wire. But the real defense wasn't the steel gates, it was the array of Class-2 Motion Wards mounted along the fence line every twenty feet. Small yellow brass plates, etched with glowing runic arrays, projected an invisible web of localized detection fields across the alley.
Mori had seen these a lot in the past. Most of those times were when he was begging to the expedition teams to let him help. The Bureau was setting these up in the background to ensure that no monsters managed left the gate without being detected.
Mori stopped ten feet short of the detection zone, pressing his back against the brick wall of a dry cleaner's shop.
He didn't need special skills to analyze the ward. His elevated Intelligence and Perception allowed him to break down the mechanics through sheer observation and mana sensitivity.
'Yellow runic engraving... Class-2 Bureau standard issue.' Mori thought, studying the inner workings of energy emanating from the plates. They run on a closed-circuit grounding loop. The wards project a continuous field across the gap, and if a body mass exceeding fifteen kilograms interrupts the circuit, the grounding peg triggers an alert to the local command truck.
He knelt down, carefully observing the base of the fence where the concrete had cracked from age and weed growth. Because the Bureau technicians had installed the perimeter in a hurry, the grounding peg for the nearest ward plate had been hammered into loose mortar rather than solid bedrock.
The tension on the detection grid was uneven. Near the top of the fence, the threads were taut, but near the base, where the mortar was crumbling, the energy field sagged by a fraction of a millimeter.
"Sloppy..." Mori whispered softly.
He draw some mana and channeled it into his right hand.
[MP: 347 / 370]
He drew the Spatial Shears from his coat. The pitch-black obsidian blades slowly drew in the dim light in the alley, vibrating with a subtle, low-frequency hum that vibrated through the bones of his fingers.
Mori didn't touch the fence. He didn't touch the ward.
Instead, he crouched low, extending the tip of the shears directly into the tiny gap between the grounding peg and the loose mortar. He felt the flow of mana anchoring the ward circuit to the earth. It was a delicate, artificial thread of energy keeping the alarm primed.
Positioning the blades around the energy thread, Mori squeezed the handles of the shears.
Snip..
There was no sound, no flash, and no alarm.
The spatial shears didn't cut the physical space. Instead, it severed the link connecting the ward's energy loop to its grounding anchor. Deprived of its ground connection, the invisible detection web spanning the alley instantly dissolved, collapsing inward like a net with its anchor rope cut.
[Notice: Spatial Seam Severed!]
[Target: Class-2 Ward Grounding Link]
[Result: Localized Detection Nullified (Duration: 180 Seconds)]
Mori was able to get the job done efficiently. However, his skills were still growing so it wasn't guaranteed whether the effect would last longer or even permanently.
A three-foot gap in the security grid opened before him. He slipped through the opening smoothly, stepping over the base of the fence without touching the metal frame. He dropped low into the shadow of a rusted dumpster on the other side just as a searchlight mounted on a distant light pole swept lazily across the upper perimeter.
Inside the quarantine zone, the silence was heavy and unnatural.
What had been a lively residential neighborhood only two days ago was now an empty landscape. Abandoned vehicles sat in the middle of the roads with their headlights still burning faintly or their hazard lights blinking in unison. Front doors of apartment complexes hung wide open, showing overturned tables and dropped groceries left behind during the panic.
He could feel the pressure of the gate even from afar.
Mori navigated through the deserted streets, using the shadows of parked cars and vans to conceal his approach. As he reached the two-block radius surrounding his building, the air grew thick with static electricity. The hairs on his arms stood up and every breath tasted like copper.
Here sat the final layer of defense: a heavy-duty Class-3 Mana Barrier surrounding the entire block.
A massive, semi-translucent dome of deep blue energy enclosed his four-story apartment complex. Fifty yards away, parked under the dead streetlights, sat an armored Bureau command vehicle. Through the tinted glass, Mori could see two operators in tactical gear staring at the monitoring screens.
Mori ducked behind a small sedan, resting his back against the rear tire to catch his breath.
Class-3 Barrier, he analyzed, eyeing the thick blue dome. Designed to contain monster outbreaks up to C-Rank. If anything solid touches that wall without an authorized frequency badge, it triggers a ten-thousand-volt shock and sends a direct signal to the command truck.
He looked down at his left arm. Underneath his jacket, the sleeve he had reinforced using his class ability sat snug against his forearm.
The sleeve absorbs kinetic energy up to C-Rank, Mori remembered. And its passive trait conceals its internal mana structure from standard detection sensors.
Mori pulled the Spatial Shears back out, gripping them firmly in his right hand while extending his left arm toward the glowing blue wall.
He didn't strike the barrier or try to force his way through. Instead, he focused his intent, channeling a thread of spatial mana from his shears into the reinforced seams of his sleeve.
Slowly, carefully, he brought the tip of the obsidian blade against the blue energy wall.
Where the blade met the barrier, the blue light didn't flare in resistance. Because the shears operated on spatial manipulation rather than physical force, the obsidian tip slid between the woven mana strands of the barrier like a needle slipping between the threads of a coarse linen weave.
Mori made a smooth, measured downward stroke with his hand.
Shhhhhhー
A narrow, vertical slit opened in the solid blue dome just wide enough for a person to squeeze through.
Mori pushed his left arm through the gap first. The barrier's automated countermeasure instantly reacted, discharging a crackling arc of blue electrical energy directly against his forearm.
The moment the voltage struck his sleeve, the hidden spatial threads woven into the fabric activated. The kinetic energy was instantly redistributed across the millions of microscopic seams in the cloth, neutralizing the force completely before it could reach his skin. He still felt the pressure and strength of the barrier as it crossed through the sleeve. After all, Mori was still F-Rank, incomparable to anything at the level of C-Rank.
[Item Effect Active: Kinetic & Energy Redistribution]
[Class-4 Barrier Shock Absorbed!]
Mori squeezed his torso through the narrow slit, slipping inside the courtyard of his building. As soon as he pulled his trailing leg through, he released his mana grip on the shears. The barrier's blue energy snapped back into place, stitching itself closed without leaving a single ripple on the surface.
In the command vehicle fifty yards away, neither operator looked up from their screens. The diagnostic monitors registered zero fluctuation in the barrier's integrity.
The interior of his old apartment building was completely unrecognizable.
The familiar scent of the flower garden near the entrance and old floor wax had been replaced by the dry, metallic dust of pulverized obsidian. The walls of the stairwell were cracked, line after line of spatial fractures running up the plaster like spiderwebs.
Mori climbed the stairs silently, placing his weight close to the wall where the steps were least likely to creak. The stairs were fragile and could crumble at any given moment of extreme stress.
When he reached the third floor landing, he stopped. Apartment 304, his home, no longer had a doorway. The entire wall had been torn open, replaced by a jagged, hovering void of absolute blackness.
The 8-Star Gate.
It didn't resemble the neat, stabilized portals managed by the Gate Bureau. Standard portals were smooth, oval tears that looked almost watery. This gate was a violent, tearing wound in reality, eight feet wide and ten feet high, framed by floating chunks of shattered concrete and twisted rebar held frozen in mid-air by a gravitational distortion.
It wasn't normal for a gate to affect the surrounding environment, but an 8-Star gate is far from anything normal anyways. It would have been relieving for his own home to remain intact, but what he was facing was similar to the end of the world. There would be no home left to go back to if things got worse.
The swirling black gate at its core was completely opaque, blocking any view of what lay beyond. Mori stared into the void unable to see what lies ahead, but he didn't need to. He could still vividly recall the crimson wasteland, the blood red sky, and the hound that had nearly killed him.
He paused for a second to steady his breath.
Set up near the entrance of the gate was a Bureau survey unit, a three-legged automated sensor with a rotating crimson lens recording the gate's energy fluctuations.
Mori stepped around the sensor, timing it perfectly with the motion of the sensor. His shoes crunched softly on the powdered drywall scattered across the floorboards.
He paused at the edge of the event horizon, turning his head back to look down the dark hallway one last time. He thought of his mother lying in a sterile hospital room under Bureau guard, her life support conditional on whether he signed over the deed to this anomaly.
"Three days.." Mori whispered to the empty hallway, his jaw tightening as his fingers gripped the handle of his shears. "I'm not giving you any chance to take away my only home and family."
He turned back to the void, took a deep, steadying breath, and stepped forward off the ledge of his living room floor directly into the swirling black tear.
The light of the city vanished, and reality collapsed into darkness.
Mori's boots slammed into jagged stone. The sudden impact traveled up his ankles to his knees, making his joints ache.
He dropped into a low crouch, his left hand touching the ground to stabilize himself while his right hand held the shears in an inverted guard.
"Hhh... hh..." He exhaled slowly, watching his breath form a thick cloud of white mist in the freezing air.
The heat of the city was completely gone. In its place was a barren, oppressive wasteland under a violent red sky. Jagged spires of black basalt shot out of the earth like broken bones, extending as far as his eyes could see. Floating islands of shattered rock hovered silently in the upper atmosphere, locked in place by chains and some type of gravitational force.
This was the calamity realm, the interior of the 8-Star Gate.
[Notice: You have entered an 8-Star Gate.]
[Environmental Penalty Active: Spatial Instability.]
[Effect: Non-spatial skills suffer a 20% efficiency reduction. Standard physical durability reduced by 10%.]
Mori read the system notifications hovering before his eyes with a cold, focused expression.
He stood up, dusting the black grit from his trousers. Standard Awakened would be severely weakened here. Physical weapons would dull faster, and standard mana spells would lose coherence due to the unstable atmosphere. But for a class that works directly with spatial energy... this is a workshop.
He looked back toward the entry point. Floating just a few feet above the rocky ground was the inner side of the portal. A jagged, tear-shaped rift glowing with a faint blue outline. It hovered silently against the desolate landscape, the only connection back to his living room. It a surprise that nothing else came through the gate despite how loud and bright it is.
Mori didn't linger near the exit. He knew from the awakened handbooks that the area immediately surrounding an unranked portal entry was often a hunting ground for territorial monsters, let alone the 8-Star gate.
He took a few steps forward, his boots crunching on the brittle obsidian gravel.
He could sense the mana drifting through the air like invisible currents of wind. It felt different from the mana in the human world. It was raw, unrefined, and rough. Like coarse wool that hadn't been washed or carded.
This ambient energy was useless without a high-tier mana filter. But to Mori, raw mana was raw material.
I need to test my limits, Mori thought, raising his left arm to inspect the reinforced sleeve. The Bureau gave me three days to hand over the rights to this gate. To beat their deadline, I need more than just one reinforced sleeve and a pair of shears. I need a full set of equipment.
He closed his eyes and extended his hand toward a nearby basalt spire.
He focused on the air surrounding the rock formation. Through his heightened senses, he could see that the air wasn't empty; it was woven from invisible strands of spatial force, overlapping and crisscrossing in a dense, three-dimensional lattice.
"Thread." Mori muttered, drawing 10 MP from his pool.
[Activating Skill: Divine Threadmaster (F)]
[MP: 339 / 370]
His right hand glowed with a faint, silvery light. He extended his index finger and thumb, making a delicate pinching motion toward the space five feet in front of him.
Pinch.
A soft, musical chime sounded in his mind as his fingers caught hold of something invisible.
Mori pulled his hand back slowly, drawing a thin, gleaming strand of silver light out of thin air. It looked like a thread of spun glass, no thicker than a human hair, but as it stretched between his fingers, the surrounding air vibrated with intense pressure.
[Material Harvested: Raw Spatial Thread (Low Tier)]
[Quality: Fine]
[Purity: 82%]
Mori examined the silver thread floating between his fingers. It was weightless, yet possessed incredible tensile strength. When he brought a small piece of obsidian stone near it, the stone was sliced in half instantly by the thread's spatial tension, falling to the ground in two perfectly clean pieces.
Remarkable, Mori thought, his eyes lighting up with the passion of a craftsman. In the human world, a single inch of spatial-type monster silk costs millions of credits on the black market. Here, it's woven into the very air.
He carefully wrapped the silver thread around a small wooden bobbin he had brought in his tailor's kit, storing it safely in his belt pouch.
Before he could pull a second thread, a low, guttural rasp echoed from the basalt spires ahead.
Grrrrr...
Mori froze, dropping his weight into a low stance.
From behind a rocky pillar twenty meters away, three shapes emerged, slinking low against the dark gravel.
They looked like wolves, but their bodies were unnaturally elongated, their ribs protruding against skin that looked like worn black leather. Instead of eyes, their faces were dominated by vertical, glowing violet slits that pulsated with their breathing. Long, razor-sharp tufts of crystalline glass grew along their spines, clacking together like bone needles as they moved.
[Monster Identified: Stalker (Rank: D+)]
[Description: Scavenger beasts born from spatial fractures. Extremely fast, capable of short-distance spatial leaps.]
The three beasts spread out in a classic hunting formation, flanking Mori from the left, right, and center.
Mori's heart hammered against his ribs. His HP sat at just 240. A single solid bite from one of those beasts could easily snap his collarbone or sever an artery.
Don't panic, he told himself, tightening his grip on the Spatial Shears. My Strength is 15 and Agility is 14 with the class bonus. I'm not the frail F-Rank I was yesterday.
The lead wolf growled, its violet slit flaring bright.
CRACK!
The central beast vanished.
Mori's eyes widened as the space where the wolf had been standing folded inward like a pinched piece of paper. A fraction of a second later, a ripple appeared in the air just five feet to his left.
A spatial leap!
The wolf materialized mid-air, its jaw open wide, revealing rows of needle-like teeth coated in dripping black saliva. It leaped straight for Mori's neck, driven by predatory instinct.
Standard Awakened would have tried to dodge or raise a shield. But Mori didn't look at the monster's teeth, he looked at its movement trajectory as if it were a line of stitches being pulled through fabric.
Its weight is leaning forward. The angle of attack is twenty-five degrees.
Mori didn't retreat. He stepped forward into the wolf's guard, pivoting on his right heel.
He raised his left arm, the arm protected by his reinforced spatial sleeve, and shoved it directly into the beast's open maw.
SNAP!
The wolf's jaws clamped down hard on his forearm.
A sharp jolt of pain and pressure slammed into Mori's arm. He winced and screamed in pain, but the expected crunch of breaking bone never came. The moment the wolf's teeth struck the cotton fabric, the interlocking spatial seams inside the sleeve activated. The kinetic force of the bite was instantly caught in the internal spatial web, redistributed across the entire surface of his jacket, and safely discharged into the air as a soft wave of displaced air.
[Item Effect Active: Kinetic Redistribution]
[Damage Negated: 29 Physical Damage Absorbed!]
[Non-blunt trauma detected, unable to negate all damage]
[HP: 221/240]
The wolf's eyes widened in confusion as its bite failed to penetrate the flimsy-looking cloth. It tried to separate its jaws from Mori's arm, but some of the threads had dispersed inside its mouth and were able to snag into the wolf's teeth. Just like how chaps are used to protect the wearers from chainsaw accidents.
"My turn!" Mori said angrily.
With his left arm holding the wolf's jaw locked in place, Mori raised his right hand. He didn't stab the wolf with the shears. Instead he opened the blades wide, placing the pitch-black obsidian edges around the space where the wolf's neck joined its shoulder.
He focused his mana into the shears, drawing 30 MP.
[MP: 309 / 370]
"Cut it open!"
SNIP!
The obsidian blades closed smoothly. There was no resistance, no bone-crunching impact, and no spray of blood. The shears simply severed the spatial coordinates binding the wolf's head to its torso.
The beast's body instantly went limp. The head detached cleanly, dissolving into a shower of sparkling black mana dust before it even hit the ground, leaving behind a small, glowing purple crystal.
[You have slain a Stalker (D+)!]
[Experience Gained!]
[Some HP and MP have recovered]
[You have absorbed the enemy's stats]
[Loot Acquired: Low-Grade Void Core x1, Stalker Tendon x1]
Mori didn't have time to celebrate.
WHOOSH!
The remaining two wolves, enraged by the death of their pack mate, attacked simultaneously from both sides. One leaped toward his exposed right shoulder, while the other swept low, aiming to tear out his legs.
Mori's low Agility meant he couldn't dodge both attacks at once.
I can't outrun them, he realized in a split second. I have to control the space.
Reaching into his pouch, he pulled out the wooden bobbin containing the Raw Spatial Thread he had harvested moments earlier. He didn't throw it. He tossed the bobbin into the air above his head and snapped his shears against the empty air beneath it.
"Divine Threadmaster!"
Using his class ability to manipulate thread properties, he channeled 30 MP into the floating strand, causing it to instantly expand and split into a web of glowing silver tripwires across the four-foot gap between the two approaching beasts.
[MP: 288 / 370]
The wolf leaping for his shoulder crashed headfirst into the invisible silver web.
SLICE!
The beast's momentum worked against it. The ultra-dense spatial thread cut through its black hide like a hot wire through butter, cleanly severing its front legs and sending the howling monster tumbling head over heels into the gravel.
The third wolf, sweeping low, managed to duck beneath the silver web, its claw scraping against Mori's boot.
Mori felt a sharp sting as the claw tore through his leather boot, slicing into his ankle.
[-35 HP]
[HP: 201 / 240]
Pain shot up his leg, but Mori kept his composure. He turned on his good foot, drove his heel down onto the wolf's tail to pin it to the stone, and brought the Spatial Shears down in a swift, vertical arc.
SNIP!
The shears cut through the wolf's spine at the base of its skull. The beast gave one final, shuddering gasp before collapsing into black dust.
The immobilized wolf on the ground thrashing without its front legs was easily finished off with a quick, decisive snip to its neck.
[You have slain a Stalker (D+)!]
[You have slain a Stalker (D+)!]
[Some HP and MP have recovered]
[You have absorbed the enemy's stats]
[Experience Gained!]
[Level 2 -> Level 4!]
[Gained +10 unallocated stats points]
[Loot Acquired: Low-Grade Void Core x2, Stalker Hide x1]
Silence returned to the cliffside.
Mori stood amidst the fading mana dust, chest heaving as he wiped a bead of cold sweat from his forehead. He leaned against a nearby rock spire, inspecting his ankle. The cut was now smaller. The HP gained from killing the Stalker's helped him recover his body.
He looked down at the loot scattered on the ground.
Three small, violet crystals glowing with concentrated mana, along with a square patch of tough, jet-black leather from the stalker's hide and a bundle of fibrous gray sinew.
Mori knelt down, picking up the Void Stalker Hide.
He ran his fingertips over the texture. It was rough, covered in microscopic, overlapping scales that felt cool to the touch. When he squeezed it, the hide offered incredible resistance to pressure while remaining surprisingly flexible.
[Material: Stalker Hide]
[Rank: D+]
[Properties: High abrasion resistance, partial spatial camouflage, weak kinetic dampening.]
This material... Mori's eyes narrowed as an idea took shape in his mind. It's rough, but with the right treatment, it can be converted into leather lining. If I combine this with the spatial thread I harvested earlier, I can craft a proper pair of reinforced boots and a chest guard.
He sat down on a flat basalt stone, resting his injured ankle.
He pulled up his tailor skill menu, examining his active abilities:
[Class Skills Available:]
Divine Threadmaster (F) - Extract raw energy threads from the environment or defeated entities.
Divine Needlework (F) - Weave, stitch, and refine materials with conceptual spatial properties.
First, the injury, Mori thought.
He gathered a small strand of raw spatial thread and channeled his mana using Divine Needlework. Instead of using a metal needle, he shaped the tip of the thread into a microscopic point using his shears.
[MP: 301 / 370]
With steady hands, Mori brought the thread to his wounded ankle. He didn't stitch the skin directly; he stitched the spatial boundary of the wound, drawing the severed edges of his flesh back together by binding the space around them.
The pain faded just a little. The bleeding stopped as the wound was held securely in place by invisible, self-dissolving spatial sutures.
[HP Restored: +10]
[Current HP: 225 / 240]
"Convenient," Mori muttered with a faint smile. "A tailor who can mend his own flesh."
He stood up, testing his weight on his foot. The ankle felt stable, supported by the spatial sutures holding the tissue together.
Now that his immediate physical condition was stabilized, Mori turned his attention back to the desolate landscape stretching before him.
The three Stalkers had been mere D-Rank scavengers, but their presence proved that the ecosystem of the 8-Star Gate was active and dangerous. There were more than just D-Ranks, and Mori knew that. If it had been anything else other than D-Rank monsters in a group, he would have died. He needed to keep getting stronger.
Further ahead, where the crimson sky met the distant horizon, colossal mountain-like structures hovered in mid-air, surrounded by swirling storms of red and purple lightning.
That's where the real monsters are, Mori analyzed, his gaze locked on the distant horizon. And that's where the high-tier spatial materials are waiting.
He checked his pocket watch. Two hours had passed since he stepped into the gate. Outside, in the human world, it was roughly 2:00 AM. He had roughly sixty-eight hours left before the Bureau's deadline expired and Director Flores demanded his decision regarding the safe house and his mother's medical care.
Mori picked up his Spatial Shears, secured his bobbin of glowing thread, and began walking deeper into the basalt canyon.