The gate shimmered wrong.
Kael noticed it first, which made sense since nobody else was paying attention to him. The real hunters were busy checking their equipment and joking about how easy this C-rank dungeon would be. He was just the porter, the E-rank nobody who carried their spare supplies and stayed out of the way.
He'd been doing this job for fifteen years. At thirty-four, Kael River had long accepted what he was: the weakest kind of hunter, barely stronger than a normal human, earning minimum wage to haul backpacks through dimensional gates while actual hunters did the real work.
The gate was supposed to be stable. C-rank gates were routine. The government classified them as "moderate threat," which meant experienced hunters cleared them twice a week without breaking a sweat. Kael had been through maybe two hundred of these support missions. Show up, carry stuff, collect paycheck, go home to his shoebox apartment in the bad part of Seoul.
Today should have been the same.
The shimmer intensified. Kael squinted at the purple tear in reality, watching the way it rippled like water. His mana sense was garbage, barely functional, but something felt off. The gate looked... unstable. Flickering at the edges.
"Hey," he said. "Does that look right to you guys?"
Nobody heard him. Or if they did, they ignored him. The E-rank porter's opinion didn't matter.
Team Leader Han was laughing at something Hunter Kim said. The other four hunters were comparing their new gear, showing off expensive weapons they'd bought with their last dungeon haul. They were all C-rank or higher. Competent. Professional. They'd cleared hundreds of gates between them.
Kael shifted the supply pack on his shoulders and kept his mouth shut. He was probably wrong anyway. He was always wrong about this stuff.
The gate destabilized in an instant.
One second it was a controlled dimensional rift, a doorway between worlds. The next second it exploded outward, the tear ripping wider like fabric coming apart. Purple energy crackled through the air and the stable entry point they'd been preparing to walk through became a gaping wound in space.
Monsters poured out.
Not the C-rank beasts they'd expected. These were different. Larger. Faster. Kael recognized them from training videos: B-rank shadow wolves, at least a dozen of them, and behind them something worse. An ogre variant, maybe A-rank, its skin covered in stone-like armor.
Team Leader Han shouted orders. The hunters scattered, falling into combat formation. They were good at their jobs. Even surprised, they knew what to do.
Kael ran.
Not because he was a coward, though plenty of people had called him that over the years. He ran because he was E-rank and completely useless in a real fight. His job in a destabilized gate was simple: get clear, call for backup, don't die stupidly.
He sprinted toward the evacuation zone, fumbling for his radio. Around him, reality cracked further. The gate wasn't just destabilizing, it was expanding. Chunks of the containment wall crumbled as dimensional energy tore through concrete and steel.
Then he saw the children.
Three of them, maybe eight or nine years old, huddled behind a broken section of wall. A school group that had been touring the hunter facility when the gate went wrong. Their teacher was down, unconscious or worse. The kids were frozen in terror, directly in the path of a collapsing support structure.
Kael's mind went blank for half a second. Then training kicked in, the kind of training they drilled into even E-rank failures: protect civilians first.
The support beam was already falling. Three tons of reinforced steel and concrete, collapsing at an angle that would crush all three children in the next two seconds.
Kael didn't think. He just moved.
His legs pumped harder than they ever had. His E-rank body, pathetic and weak and useless in every way that mattered, carried him across thirty feet of broken ground in less time than he would have thought possible. He hit the kids at full speed, wrapping his arms around all three and throwing himself over them, covering their small bodies with his own.
The support beam came down.
The impact was immense, beyond anything Kael had experienced. His back shattered. He felt ribs crack, then collapse entirely. His spine gave way and something inside him ruptured. Pain flooded every nerve, white-hot and absolute.
But the kids beneath him were alive. He could feel them breathing, could feel them trembling against his chest.
Blood filled Kael's mouth. His vision blurred at the edges, darkness creeping in from all sides. The sounds of battle became distant, muffled, like he was hearing them underwater.
He tried to speak but only managed a broken whisper. "At least... I saved someone this time."
The words came out wet and wrong. Somewhere above him, one of the children was crying. Good. That meant they were alive. That meant this mattered.
His vision dimmed further. In the growing darkness, memories surfaced unbidden.
Fifteen years ago, he'd been nineteen and full of hope. His mana core had awakened during the First Gate Break, the disaster that killed tens of thousands and changed the world forever. Like millions of others, Kael had gained the ability to absorb mana, to become something more than human.
Except his core was E-rank. The lowest grade. Barely functional.
The testing center had been blunt. "You'll never be a real hunter. Consider a normal career."
But Kael had been stubborn. Stupid and stubborn. He'd enrolled in hunter academy anyway, spending his parents' life savings on tuition. For three years he'd trained alongside people with actual talent, watching them grow stronger while he stayed weak.
His parents had died in a gate break during his second year. Not killed by monsters, just caught in the evacuation zone when a B-rank gate collapsed wrong. Trampled in the chaos. Their insurance payout had barely covered the funeral.
Kael could still see his mother's face from the last time they'd spoken. She'd been worried about him, wanted him to quit the academy and find safer work. He'd told her he was fine, that everything would work out. Three days later she was dead.
After graduation, Kael had taken the only hunter job he could get: porter work. Minimum wage, no benefits, no respect. He'd spent fifteen years carrying other people's gear, watching them succeed while he scraped by in an apartment so small he could touch opposite walls with his arms spread.
His neighbors had called it a closet. His landlord called it "cozy." Kael called it home because he couldn't afford anything better.
People had mocked him. Friends from the academy who'd become real hunters avoided him at gatherings, embarrassed by his failure. His own relatives stopped inviting him to family events. The few times he showed up anyway, they'd ask about his job in pitying tones that made it clear they thought he was pathetic.
Even children could become C-rank hunters these days. The latest generation awakened stronger than ever, their cores adapting to the mana-saturated world. At thirty-four, Kael was still E-rank. Still weak. Still useless.
He'd thought about quitting a thousand times. But what else could he do? Being a hunter, even a failed one, at least meant he was trying. At least he was part of the world that mattered, even if only at the very edge.
His apartment had one window that looked out over a busy street. Sometimes Kael would sit there in the evenings and watch real hunters walk by. You could always tell them apart from normal people. They moved differently, confident and strong. They wore expensive clothes and carried expensive weapons. They mattered.
Kael had never mattered. Not really. Just another E-rank failure in a world that had no use for the weak.
Except now. Right now, in this moment, with his back broken and his life bleeding out onto concrete, he'd actually done something. These three children would live. He'd managed to save someone.
In fifteen years of failure, of being useless and weak and pathetic, he'd finally done something that counted.
The darkness grew deeper. Kael's breathing stopped. His broken body went still.
Then came the light.
It started as a pinpoint, white and pure, growing in the center of his fading vision. At first he thought it was just death, the brain's final hallucination before shutdown. But the light was wrong. Too bright. Too real. Too present.
It expanded rapidly, swallowing the darkness, swallowing the pain, swallowing everything. The broken body beneath the support beam faded away. The sounds of battle disappeared. Even the memory of the children's trembling faded into nothing.
There was only light.
And falling.
Kael felt himself pulled backward, not through space but through something else entirely. Through time itself, through memories, through moments he'd already lived. His life rewound.
He saw himself that morning, waking up in his tiny apartment. Saw yesterday, last week, last month. The years peeled away like pages turning backward in a book. Fifteen years of porter work vanished. Hunter academy rushed by in reverse. His parents' funeral undid itself. The First Gate Break that had killed them played backward, monsters retreating into dimensional rifts, buildings rising from rubble.
The sensation was impossible. Wrong. Reality didn't work like this.
But it kept happening. Kael fell backward through fifteen years of failure, through three years of hunter academy, through the First Gate Break, through his childhood. He saw his parents alive again, young, their faces clear in his mind. Saw his old school, his old friends, moments he'd forgotten he'd even experienced.
The white light surrounded everything. It wasn't warm or cold, wasn't comforting or frightening. It simply existed, absolute and infinite, pulling him backward through time with irresistible force.
Kael tried to scream but had no voice. Tried to resist but had no body. He was consciousness alone, awareness without form, being dragged through the current of his own history like a leaf in a river.
The falling sensation intensified. The light grew brighter, so bright it should have been painful but wasn't. It was just light, just falling, just the impossible feeling of time running in reverse.
His life continued to rewind. Faster now. Years blurring together. Moments compressing. Everything he'd ever experienced racing backward toward some unknown destination.
Kael fell through the white light, through time, through impossibility itself.
And kept falling.