He stared at the words "Very Low" for a long time.
"This is stupid," he told the air. "I am not… this useless."
The status, unsurprisingly, did not respond.
He closed the class window. The main status remained.
For a heartbeat, as he did, something flickered near the bottom. That stray symbol again. A ghost of a line.
He froze.
"…What was that?"
He dismissed the status entirely, then called it again.
"Status."
The window appeared.
He watched every part of it: name, age, class, level, stats.
At the very bottom, new text flickered into existence and then, this time, stayed.
One extra line that hadn't been there in the hall. One extra line that shouldn't have been there at all.
[Hidden Class: Adept of Null – SSS (Sealed)]
Lio forgot how to breathe.
He blinked, once, slowly, as if his eyes were playing tricks on him.
The words did not vanish.
Hidden Class.
Adept of Null.
SSS.
He had never even seen SSS written in an official document. S was myth-level as it was. SSS belonged in tavern tales, the kind people called lies and then retold anyway.
His pulse pounded in his ears.
"Details," he whispered.
Nothing happened.
He tried to tap the line with his finger. His fingertip passed through the projected window, as always, sending ripples of light through it. The text remained stubbornly there.
A faint question mark icon appeared next to the Hidden Class.
He focused on that.
A new window opened.
[Hidden Class: Adept of Null – SSS (Sealed)]Status: Inactive.Seal Integrity: 100%.Unsealing Condition:– Survive seven (7) consecutive days with 0 effective combat capability.
Warning: Premature access denied.Warning: Deviation risk: High.
Unsealing Progress: 0%
The room suddenly felt too small.
"Zero effective combat capability?" he repeated under his breath. "What does that even mean?"
No weapons? No offensive skills? No parties? No… nothing?
Seven days.
In a world where stepping outside the city walls without proper gear and party members was a good way to get eaten or stabbed by something with too many teeth.
Lio shot to his feet, the status window swaying in front of him like a floating sheet.
"A hidden class," he said. The words tasted unreal. "An SSS hidden class. And it's sealed because… I am not useless enough?"
That wasn't quite right. The condition wasn't about being useless. It was about surviving while useless.
The difference mattered.
The System voice from earlier echoed faintly in his memory.
Calculating optimal class assignment...
Had this always been there, buried under the Carrier? Had it been a mistake? A glitch?
"Why me?" he whispered.
No answer.
He paced once, twice, across the narrow floorboards. His thoughts spun, chasing themselves in circles.
If he could unseal it… If this was real and not some cruel hallucination…
An SSS hidden class would obliterate every disadvantage he had. He'd gone from worst-case outcome straight into something so far beyond best-case that he hadn't even considered it as a possibility. Most people didn't.
But the condition.
Seven days with zero effective combat capability.
He tried to think like the System.
"Zero effective combat capability" probably meant no usable offensive skills, no stat-buffing equipment, no party members that basically carried him. Just him, his bare numbers, and his wits.
And survival…
"Seven days where?" he asked the empty room. "In my bed? In the market?"
That would be too easy.
The System didn't give SSS hidden classes for staying inside and drinking tea.
A cold thought slid into his mind.
What if the System decides where?
His status window flickered.
Lines of text shimmered, rearranged. For a heartbeat, the whole thing scrambled into nonsense symbols, like someone shaking a glass full of letters.
Then everything froze.
A new message overlaid the rest.
[Hidden Condition Acknowledged.][Unsealing Trial Initializing…][Warning: Trial environment will be lethal.][Warning: User consent… overridden.][Transferring user to designated survival zone.]
"Wait," Lio said.
The world tilted.
His room, his bed, his books, the familiar shelves—all of it lurched sideways like a painting knocked from a wall. The floor dropped out from under his feet. His stomach flipped as if he'd been hurled off a cliff.
Cold flooded his veins, not the chill of the crystal this time but something vast and impersonal.
He tried to grab onto something, anything. His fingers closed on empty air.
Light swallowed him.
For a heartbeat—or a year—there was nothing but that pale, featureless brightness and the echo of his own racing thoughts.
Then he hit something hard.
He crashed onto rough ground, the impact knocking the breath from his lungs. Dirt scraped his palms through the thin fabric of his sleeves. The smell of earth and green things and something sharp and wild flooded his nose.
Lio coughed, wincing, and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
The light faded.
He was no longer in his room.
Tall trees loomed overhead, their trunks thick and bark rough, branches woven into a dense canopy that filtered the sunlight into shifting patches on the forest floor. The air was cooler than in the city, damp with the scent of moss and leaves.
Birds called somewhere in the distance. Something chittered. Something else snarled, far enough away that he couldn't see it but close enough that his skin prickled.
His heart hammered.
"This is not happening," he whispered.
He stood up slowly, legs shaking.
The forest stretched in every direction. No houses, no streets, no walls, no smoke from chimneys. Just trees and undergrowth and, in one direction, the distant glimmer of water between trunks.
He turned in a full circle, hoping against reason to see a piece of Stonebridge peeking between the trees.
Nothing.
His status window hung in front of him again, as if it had followed along.
[Location: Designated Survival Zone – Outer Ring][Trial: Hidden Class Unsealing][Objective: Survive seven (7) consecutive days with 0 effective combat capability.][Time Elapsed: 00:00:07]
Seven seconds.
That was how long he had been here.
Below that, new lines appeared.
[Restrictions Applied:]– No party formation allowed.– No offensive skills available.– No equipment beyond current inventory.– Return to city: disabled.
Lio swallowed.
"Current inventory," he muttered. "Show."
A small icon blinked into existence. He opened it.
[Inventory]– Plain shirt (equipped)– Plain trousers (equipped)– Worn boots (equipped)– Simple belt– Small knife (utility; non-combat rated)– 3 copper coins– 1 piece of stale bread (half)
That was it.
He patted himself down as if the list might be wrong. His fingers found the small knife in his belt—a short, dull thing meant for cutting rope and bread, not fighting monsters. He pulled it out anyway.
The blade was no longer than his hand and badly in need of sharpening.
"Non-combat rated," he repeated. "That is a joke."
Something rustled in the underbrush to his left.
Lio froze, knife held in front of him, though he wasn't sure what he thought he could do with it beyond wave it menacingly.
The rustling grew louder, closer. Leaves shook. A low growl rumbled through the green.
His mind supplied a dozen entries from monster guides. Forest zones often began with low-threat creatures: horned rabbits, thorn boars, small wolves. All capable of killing an unarmed, unarmored human if they were careless.
He was very, very unarmed and unarmored.
A shape pushed through the bushes.
It was a boar, more or less. Boar-shaped, at least, though larger than any farm animal he'd seen. Bristling dark fur covered its thick body, and two curved tusks jutted from its lower jaw, each the length of his forearm. Its eyes gleamed a muddy red.
The boar sniffed the air, snorted, and turned its head toward him.
A small tag of text appeared briefly over its head in his vision.
[Thornback Boar – Level 4]
Lio's mouth went dry.
He was Level 1.
Bare stats. No skills. A dull knife the System itself had mocked.
The boar huffed, pawed the ground, and lowered its head.
"Do not charge," Lio whispered. "Do not charge. Do not—"
The boar charged.
It thundered toward him, surprisingly fast for something so heavy. The ground shook under its hooves. Leaves and bits of dirt flew in its wake.
Lio did the only thing he could think of.
He ran.
He threw himself sideways as the boar barreled forward, its tusks slicing the air where his torso had been a second earlier. Pain lanced up his arm as one tusk grazed him, tearing fabric and skin.
He tumbled through the undergrowth, branches slapping his face, roots grabbing at his boots. He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up scrambling.
Behind him, the boar skidded, snorting and squealing, then pivoted with surprising agility and came again.
"Status!" Lio gasped, stupidly, because what good would numbers do him right now?
The window flickered into existence at the edge of his vision anyway.
[HP]: 14 / 20
The graze had taken six points.
One more solid hit and he'd be very, very dead.
He dodged behind a tree as the boar lunged. The impact shook the trunk, bark splintering where the tusks struck. The boar squealed in outrage, backing up, shaking its head.
"Think," Lio panted. "Think, think…"
He couldn't fight it. Not directly. He had no skill, no strength. But the boar was fast and heavy and not particularly careful.
He looked around rapidly. Trees. Roots. Underbrush. A slight slope leading down toward the glimmer of water.
He shoved the knife back into its sheath. It was more likely to get him killed if he tried to play hero with it.
The boar pawed the ground again, lining up for another charge.
"Come on," he muttered, backing away down the slope. "Come on, you oversized ham."
He let the boar see him move. Its eyes tracked him. Its muscles bunched.
When it charged this time, Lio ran not sideways, but down the slope, letting gravity pull him faster. The boar thundered after him, snorting furiously.
The ground grew more uneven. Rocks jutted from the dirt. Roots twisted like grasping fingers. Lio stumbled twice, nearly falling, but kept moving, heart pounding so hard he could hear little else.
He saw the water then—a stream, narrow but fast, cutting through a rocky bed at the bottom of the slope. The far bank rose sharp and high.
If he misjudged this, he was going to break his neck.