Being an F-Rank was, for most students, the end of the world. It was a public declaration that you just didn't have what it takes.
For Alex, it was like winning the lottery. While the other students were marched off to shiny orientations in grand halls, Alex was given a crumpled piece of paper with a simple instruction: "Report to Custodial & IT Support. Basement Level 3."
He didn't even have to ask for directions. He just followed the signs that got progressively less fancy.
The polished marble floors gave way to simple tile, and then to bare concrete. The bright, inspiring posters of famous Strikers were replaced by yellowing safety notices and diagrams of the island's plumbing system.
The air, which smelled of success and expensive air freshener on the upper levels, now smelled of cleaning supplies and old machinery. It was perfect.
The door to his new department was plain metal with a small, smudged window. The sign, "Custodial & IT Support," was slightly crooked. Alex knocked once. A muffled grunt from inside told him to enter.
The office was a small, cluttered space filled with spare parts, rolls of network cable, and at least three half-disassembled cleaning robots.
Sitting behind a mountain of paperwork at a metal desk was a man who looked like he was powered by pure grumpiness and stale coffee.
He had thinning gray hair, a permanent frown etched into his face, and a uniform that was even more stained than his coffee mug.
"You the new F-Rank?" the man asked without looking up. His voice was gravelly, like he gargled with sand.
"Yes, sir. Alex Vance," Alex said cheerfully.
The man finally looked up, squinting at Alex as if the cheerfulness was physically painful to him. "Fitz. Just Fitz. Don't call me sir, I work for a living."
Fitz sighed, a long, tired sound, and pushed a bundle of gray fabric across the desk. "Here's your uniform. You get two. Don't lose them."
Alex picked it up. The fabric was thick, scratchy, and a shade of gray so boring it could put you to sleep just by looking at it.
It was the complete opposite of the sleek, colorful uniforms the Striker students wore. Alex held it up against himself.
It was a little too big in the shoulders and a little too short in the legs. Wonderful. It added to the whole "don't look at me" vibe.
Fitz then slid a plastic card across the desk. It was a simple ID card with Alex's picture, a terrible one, where he looked like he'd just woken up, and his name. Below it, in big, bold letters, it said: "Clearance Level: 0."
"That card will get you into janitor closets, storage rooms, and the service tunnels. It will not get you into the library, the training halls, or the good cafeteria.
Don't try," Fitz warned. "The alarms are loud and I'll have to fill out paperwork. I hate paperwork."
"Understood," Alex said, trying to contain his glee. Low-level clearance was a gift. No one would expect the guy with Level 0 access to be doing anything important.
"Your room is in the Utility Sector dorms. It's shared. Try not to annoy your roommate," Fitz grumbled, already looking back down at his papers, his attention span for new recruits clearly spent.
"Now get to work. Training Room 7B needs a scrub-down. Some B-Rank just made a mess practicing with a fire-based artifact. Take the big mop."
Armed with his new uniform, his useless ID card, and a cleaning cart that rattled like a box of angry skeletons, Alex made his way to Training Room 7B.
The walk was an adventure in itself. He passed the gleaming Striker dorms, towers of glass and white steel with balconies that overlooked the ocean.
He could hear music and laughter from inside. His dorm, in the opposite direction, was a simple, gray concrete block that looked more like a bunker than a place to live.
He found his room first, just to drop off his bag. It was small, with two simple beds, two metal lockers, and a single, tiny window that offered a stunning view of a brick wall.
His roommate wasn't there. It was quiet, peaceful, and gloriously average.
Arriving at Training Room 7B, Alex could smell the mess before he even opened the door.
It smelled like burnt plastic and ozone. The room, a large white space designed to withstand powerful attacks, looked like it had hosted a dragon with an upset stomach.
There were black scorch marks all over the walls, puddles of a strange, shimmering goo on the floor, and a few dents in the reinforced metal panels that looked suspiciously like a face had been slammed into them.
"Amateur," Alex muttered to himself, shaking his head.
He got his mop and bucket and started on the floor. To anyone else, it was just a dirty, thankless job. But for Alex, it was a chance to see something amazing. He focused his mind, and the world shifted. He activated [The Debugger].
Suddenly, the room was more than just a physical space. Overlaid on top of the scorch marks and goo, he could see faint, flickering lines of red code.
They looked like tiny digital scratches on the fabric of reality itself. They clung to the walls where the fire had hit, they shimmered in the air, and they were especially thick in the puddles of goo.
These were data-glitches. Tiny fragments of corrupted information, leftover energy from the clumsy use of an artifact. When a Striker used their power, especially if they were inefficient, their artifact would "leak" data.
It was like a car with a bad engine sputtering out dirty exhaust. To everyone else, this exhaust was invisible. To Alex, it was as clear as day.
He walked over to one of the scorch marks on the wall. Reaching out, he ran his hand over the physical soot.
But with his ability active, he could also feel the buzzing, chaotic energy of the glitch. It felt like static electricity, messy and wrong. It was wasted power, a sign of poor control.
The B-Rank student who did this was strong, no doubt, but they were also incredibly sloppy. They were forcing their power out instead of guiding it.
Alex chuckled softly. This whole academy was focused on raw power, on who could make the biggest explosion.
No one seemed to care about elegance or efficiency. It was like watching someone use a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame.
He spent the next hour cleaning the room. As he mopped up the physical puddles, he found that he could also interact with the digital ones.
With a bit of focus, he could gather the flickering red code into a little ball in his hand. It felt warm and fuzzy, like holding a tiny, angry kitten made of pure information.
He couldn't fix it or absorb it yet, but he could move it. He gathered all the little data-glitches from the room and "pushed" them into the drain along with the dirty mop water.
To a normal person, he would have just looked like a janitor doing a very thorough job.
When he was done, the room was spotless. Not just physically clean, but digitally clean too. The air felt lighter, calmer.
The background hum of wasted energy was gone. Alex leaned on his mop, looking around the pristine white room with a deep sense of satisfaction.
This was so much better than being a hero. He had a simple task, and he could perform it with a level of perfection no one else in the world could even see. He was a ghost in the machine, a janitor of reality itself.
A small smile touched his lips. His plan was working better than he could have ever imagined. Let the other students chase fame and glory. He had his mop, his rattling cart, and a whole world of invisible mess to clean up. And for Alex Vance, that was true power.