The club missed my head by an inch. Hot wind slapped my nose, smelling like sweat and dumpster stew. A concrete pillar exploded behind me, showering me in tile dust like the dungeon was trying to bury me early. I ducked, jabbed, and my bargain-bin dagger snapped on the ogre's shin with a click so pathetic it sounded like, Congrats, loser. You lose at stabbing.
Yeah. Hi. I'm Ethan. F-rank. The F stood for free funeral.
The thing in front of me was eight hundred pounds of gym-bro rock troll, stinking like onions rotting in a gym bag. Skin the color of a cracked driveway. A concrete bat with rebar jammed through it like DIY murder décor. And those eyes—wet copper pennies that didn't want money, they wanted to watch me die slow.
I stumbled backward over a splintered bench, ankle wobbling like a drunk flamingo. Behind me, the ogre's club dragged and screamed on tile, throwing sparks like the dungeon had a smoker's cough.
Arcadia City loved to dress gates up like they were glamorous. Posters with smiling hunters, idol commercials, streamers doing "Top Ten Boss Kills" with clickbait thumbnails of guys mid-scream. Nobody streamed the part where your knife snapped in half and you started bargaining with God about rent money.
"Nice club," I told the ogre, because apparently my brain thought sarcasm was armor. "What's that, Murder Depot's spring collection?"
It roared back. The room rattled like loose teeth. Blue fungus on the cracked subway walls pulsed like it was nursing a migraine. My mouth tasted like copper and panic
Two minutes ago, I had a team. A real, breathing team. Then the tank yelled "Fallback!"—hunter code for ditch the trash rank—and suddenly I was a one-man funeral. They were gone before my brain even finished forming the thought: Wait, guys—
Hunters are supposed to cover each other. Tank up front. Healer keeps you patched up. DPS swings wild. F-rank hangs back, pretends to matter, tries not to breathe too loud. That's the script. But plans? Plans break faster than my bargain-bin dagger.
The ogre came at me like rent was due. The floor bucked my knees up into my chest. I rolled sideways, slammed into a support beam hard enough to see discount fireworks behind my eyes. The club whooshed past my ear, missed me by inches, and turned the beam into gravel and my spine into tuning forks. Dust rained in my hair like the ceiling was shedding dandruff.
Let me explain a little. Ten years ago, the first gate tore open in Arcadia. Monsters crawled out like the city had a hole punched in its guts. A handful of people awakened—throwing fire, glowing, healing. They got shiny ranks, guild contracts, their faces on billboards. The rest of us? Sirens, curfews, and those 3 a.m. "Shelter In Place" texts. Which is government code for lie still and hope you taste bad.
I hadn't awakened. Not at seventeen when my lab partner blew a breaker with lightning and the school paper crowned him Thunder Prince. Not at nineteen when recruiters in glossy jackets promised "bright futures" that didn't include community college. Not at twenty-one when I whispered at the ceiling of a dorm closet and prayed for anything. Nothing. Just me. Ethan Cross. Human. Lowercase h.
So I took the exam. Scraped F-rank by the skin of my teeth. Bought a used dagger that rattled like it already wanted to retire. Signed a contract that screamed HAZARD PAY in bold and whispered "accepts all risk" in fine print that looked smug about it. I smiled for the guild photo and tried not to bleed on their carpet.
That was the résumé. This was the reality.
The ogre swept side to side. I dropped, and chunks of tile shaved my ear. My hands shook. The dagger hilt was slick with sweat.
I sprinted behind a crushed vending machine. Its ad still showed a model sipping cola like she'd never smelled a dungeon in her life. The ogre's club hit, and the machine shrieked like a kettle before folding in half like a sad metal taco.
Inventory check: one snapped dagger, one backpack with a dead phone, and half a granola bar that tasted like birdseed and bad decisions. No plan. Just a warning label that read: Congratulations, you're screwed.
I crawled toward a maintenance room. The backpack strap snagged on a bolt. I yanked, it popped, and my wallet cried out in the distance.
The ogre squeezed through the doorway, concrete grinding off its shoulders like dungeon dandruff. It sniffed once, found me, and brightened like I was dinner and dessert. Perfect. I love my life.
The room had pipes, dust, and nothing useful. A dead generator sat in the corner like a sulking fridge. A chain-link fence cut the space in half, like that would stop anything. A poster on the wall read SAFETY IS A CHOICE—except somebody had replaced the O with a dried brown smear. I backed into the fence. It rattled. So did I.
"Okay," I told the ogre, holding up my dead dagger like a priest with a spoon. "Hear me out."
It did not hear me out. The club rose slow, savoring it. Silence swelled—just breath, hum, and my brain juggling fifty stupid thoughts at once.
Like how my apartment bed squeaked if you so much as looked at it. How the hallway light buzzed all night and the landlord called that ambience. How Guild Row's towers gleamed like toothpaste ads while the whole city rotted underneath.
How I once watched an S-rank cut a stone giant in half at the arena and walked home wired, hungry, heartsick for a life I'd never touch.
How I should've learned plumbing. People always need plumbing. Monsters don't crawl out of pipes, right? …Don't answer that.
How if I somehow saved enough, maybe I'd crawl out of the slums before I turned thirty. Big maybe. Huge if.
And, yeah—sex. Or, you know, the theory of it. On paper. Not in practice. I was twenty-two with a romantic résumé that read: one awkward date, bad lighting. Do not laugh. Okay, laugh a little. My life sucked.
The club dropped. I jumped left because left felt faster. The floor broke into teeth. The shockwave slammed me into the fence. Static nibbled my spine. My legs did a Windows error and stopped cooperating.
I slid down to my knees. Everything narrowed. Ogre. Club. Blood finding the cracks in the tile like it was trying to leave me first.
"You're not special," I told myself. Out loud, because apparently I needed the memo in stereo. "You're not chosen. You picked a job that eats people, and guess what—it's lunchtime."
Humor circled panic like vultures. I kept tossing scraps, hoping it stayed busy. It didn't.
Boots hammered tile somewhere behind the ogre. Shouting, but my ears smeared the words into static. The ogre glanced back, annoyed, then locked right back on the insult standing in front of it: me.
I checked the dagger hilt again, like it had grown a blade while I wasn't looking. It hadn't. My hand shook so hard it looked like I was auditioning to be a blender.
People loved origin stories where the universe patted you on the cheek and said, Hey champ, your turn. My version: the universe shrugged and asked, You done? while it swung.
I thought about my mom telling me to be careful, which was like telling rain not to be wet. I thought about that guild receptionist smile—pity inside customer service. I thought about being background in other people's hero arcs. The guy who held the door. The guy who ran for potions. The guy whose name got mispronounced in the memorial video.
I also, because my brain was a traitor and I was dying, thought about boobs. Just a cheap slideshow. Not even HD. I hated me.
"Hold on," I said again, because my last line couldn't be silence. I held up the broken hilt like a traffic wand. "Time out, let's talk about it."
The ogre obliged me by not obliging me at all. The club rose. The fungus pulsed. The room waited like it wanted a show.
Regrets stacked like receipts. Should've trained more. Saved more. Kept my mouth shut when that B-rank called me "dead weight" like it was my legal name. Learned how to fix elevators. Learned to be someone else.
There's a version where I roared something brave and discovered hidden power and punched through stone like an inspirational montage. This wasn't that version. This was the honest one.
I inhaled dust, blood, metal, bad decisions. I felt very small. Very me.
And a thought clicked into place, stupid and clear and truer than anything I'd said out loud in a year: I really, really did not want my last memory to be an ogre's nose hair.
Also—yeah. That.
"Great," I said, a little laugh hitching because I couldn't help myself, because if I didn't laugh I'd cry. "I'm gonna die a virgin in a D-rank dungeon."
The ogre's shadow ate the light. Someone screamed, or I dreamed it. The club came down like a door slamming on the last room in my head.
Then everything went out.