[Reset complete]
[Detected: Same skill in existence. Effect calculated.]
[New ruling required. Adjusting skill parameters.]
[Ruling added: Not affected.]
"Pa..."
"Papa, why did you make mama cry?"
"What?!"
Rowan jolted awake with a shout, his chest heaving as his breath came in ragged bursts.
The memories rushed through him all at once, so painful it felt like his skull was being cracked open from the inside.
The war, the deaths, the end of the world, all of it flashed through his mind not in sequence but simultaneously, every moment existing at once since time was no longer in sync with him.
"Ah, AH!!!"
He screamed, nearly retching, blood dripping from his nose as he crumpled to the floor. His vision swam, everything too bright and too blurred to make out, his balance gone completely.
And then it all stopped.
"Huff... Huff..."
He slowly regained his senses as the ringing in his ears faded and the voices around him filtered back in.
"Ro... Rowan!"
A man's voice cut through the noise as his consciousness snapped back. Someone was in front of him. A middle aged man in a black suit, two badges on his lapel, a USA insignia on one side and a sniper scope crossed with a knife on the other. Rowan recognized those badges.
'Hunter Association? But it got destroyed years ago!'
He shook his head and looked at the man properly.
He knew this face. A coworker. What was his name again?
The details of his past life had gone foggy, worn thin by years of new faces and new deaths layered on top of them.
"Mister Rowan! Mister Dan! What are you two making a scene for?! Get back to work!"
"Yes ma'am!" Dan bowed his head in apology and shot Rowan a sideways glance, signaling him to do the same.
Rowan didn't move. The last time he had bowed to anyone wasn't something he could even place anymore.
"Hmph! You dare look up at me like that? Just because you awakened doesn't mean you're better than the rest of us. In here, I'm your BOSS!!"
The floor manager walked up and jabbed her pen into his chest.
The sight of them jolted something awoke.
He knew this woman. The manager of his old workplace.
Ohio State Hunter Association Headquarters.
And the man standing beside him, still wincing from secondhand embarrassment, was Dan.
His old best coworker.
"That idiot's starting trouble again."
"Remember the last new year party? He acted so proud winning the game, and he's an awakened one."
"I heard the only reason he works here is because of his mama. Should be out serving his country instead. Coward."
Whispers rippled across the floor as people leaned toward each other with barely concealed grins, glad to have something to break up the day.
Being the only awakened person on the floor made him a convenient target, especially for people who spent all day drowning in paperwork about people like him.
"Are you out of your mind? Just apologize or she'll bury you in overnight work." Dan hissed at his side, trying to nudge him into reason.
Rowan ignored him and walked straight toward the floor manager, eyes forward.
"I quit. Here's my card. Call me when the documents are ready."
He pressed his Federal Employee ID card onto the desk and walked past her.
"Wait, you think you can just walk away like that?! I'll report you for abandonment of post!"
The floor manager grabbed his shoulder, furious.
"Go ahead. I dare you."
Rowan didn't flinch. Because even though most of his memories from this life had gone foggy, one thing he remembered clearly was that hunters were treated as first class citizens.
They were the ones keeping the peace, keeping the gates contained, keeping people like her alive to yell at office workers.
In a courtroom filled with jurors who lived near dungeon gates and had survived disasters firsthand, who did she think they would side with?
"You, you!!"
"Calm down. You don't want that blood pressure medication going to waste, do you?"
He brushed her hand off his shoulder and stopped at the office door, remembering one last thing.
"Dan. Does the hunter exam have any open slots right now?"
Since they both worked in what amounted to the HR office for registered hunters, Dan had access to the scheduling system.
"Wait, let me check." Dan pulled up the board. "There's a fast track slot opening in ten minutes."
"Thanks."
Rowan waved without looking back and walked out to the elevator.
But before the doors closed, a hand shot through the gap followed by a sharp sound.
"Ouch!"
The elevator bit Dan's hand before releasing. He shook it off and squeezed inside, slightly out of breath.
Rowan looked at him.
"What is going on with you?" Dan said, catching his breath. "First you suddenly scream like a dying pig, and now you just quit your job."
Dan had worked alongside Rowan for an entire year.
The last two survivors of their intake, everyone else from that batch had either transferred out or quit, leaving just the two of them.
"Now you're going to become a hunter and you couldn't even give me a heads up? I have to find a new work partner now, hell, maybe even a new job the way things are looking." He looked genuinely put out.
Going back into that office alone, without the one person who made the wolf den bearable, wasn't something he had prepared for this morning.
Rowan considered it. "Sorry. Something urgent came up."
Not entirely a lie.
"Is it money?." Dan sighed and leaned against the elevator wall as the floor numbers ticked down, staring up at the light above the doors. "Cancer, right? My mom has it too. That's why I'm here, pushing paper in a federal building instead of doing something else."
"Oh." Rowan never knew. "You never told me that before."
Whether he had forgotten or Dan had simply never said it, he couldn't be sure.
Because he remembered that around a year from now the intensity of the gates would spike hard enough that every awakened person got conscripted, and they never got to even say goodbye.
"Well, it's not exactly good small talk, is it?" Dan let out a short laugh. "And honestly I don't know much about your family either. Except about your father."
A year as partners and they had never talked about anything beyond work and sports scores.
"Yeah." Rowan sighed.
The elevator doors opened into a busy floor, people dressed in the casual warrior style that had become normal since the gates opened, street clothes layered with armor plating that looked pulled straight out of a fantasy novel.
'It's been so long since I saw this many people.'
Rowan couldn't contain a small smile.
Then he remembered that he didn't remember.
"Hey Dan, which way is the testing room?"
"Really?" Dan stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and led the way anyway.
With his trust placed on Dan direction, Rowan used the time to open his status window to check his current situation.
--
[Status]
Level: 1
Class: Assassin (E) / Soul Reaper (Tier 2, SSS)
[Stats]
Strength: 1
Agility: 1
Vitality: 1
Dexterity: 1
Magic: 1
Status Points: 5
--
'Damn. I forgot how weak I was!'
His stats were nothing short of abysmal.
But it was to be expected. At level 1 everyone started with 1 across the board.
Stats worked as a multiplier rather than a fixed value. A physically strong man with 2 in Strength could hit harder than a scrawny one with 5.
There were three ways to increase power.
Training, skill upgrades, and leveling, slowest to fastest in that order.
Training pushed the body to its ceiling.
Skill upgrades stacked on top of that.
Leveling raised the multiplier.
All three had to run simultaneously for full growth.
Most people only focused on leveling because it gave the fastest visible return.
Ironically, he had done two of the three when he first started.
The floor manager might have looked like a joke, but the government wasn't.
Ten years of research had produced a standardized training program adopted widely across the military, and that foundation was a large part of why humanity hadn't collapsed after all the gates rapidly opened.
Still, locking himself into military structure was too rigid for what he needed now.
He needed room to move, room to grow on his own terms and his own schedule.
And the ticket to that freedom was a hunter permit!
If you wanted to hunt, then what you needed was a hunter permit.
A system the government created to keep track and observe the behavior of awakened individuals.
Many years ago there was an "awakening coup" attempt where a group of awakened ones decided to try and overthrow the government and seize control, but the attempt failed.
Since then the laws and rules of who and how you could clear gates had become stricter.
"Man, I only got rank E..."
"Same here. I guess it's back to work..."
A man and woman walked out of the testing room with disappointment written across their faces. Rank E meant your power was low enough that hunting became genuinely dangerous.
Even if leveling up was possible for everyone, the risk required to get there wasn't something average people could bear.
When the official system was first implemented and the data came in, rank E hunters had a casualty rate of over 20%, the highest of any profession in recorded history.
And if that didn't deter you, the cost of American healthcare would finish the job.
"I got rank D!!"
A teenager came bouncing out after them.
"I'm from Silver Claw guild, would you like an interview!"
"Wait, I'm from Red Pellet, we have a sign-on bonus for healer or warrior class!"
A group of vulture scouts who camped outside the testing room every day swarmed the boy before he even finished reading his results.
D rank was considered the baseline for becoming a real hunter, so a teenager walking out with one was exactly the kind of prospect the guilds circled.
If Rowan remembered correctly, every 10 points at one rank equated to 1 point at the rank above. 10 E for 1 D, 10 D for 1 C, and so on up the ladder.
The gap between ranks was exponential.
And the higher your base rank, the better your ceiling for improvement later.
Two people starting at level 1 with the same stats on paper were not equal if one held an S rank skill.
The higher ranked skill scaled faster, hit harder at every threshold, and compounded over time.
Most people who came to check their rank were teenagers in high school or early college.
People normally awakened around 18, a built in clockwork that appeared mostly in the young.
But if someone awakened later in life their rank tended to come in higher to compensate.
That was part of how humanity had fended off the first world raid.
A select few awakened at A and S rank and tore through the monster hordes, seizing back control. Many of them were still on active duty. Some had retired due to injury.
Rowan knew some of them personally. A few had even been his mentors.
'This sure does bring back memories.'
Back when the draft happened he had been lined up with another 10,000 Americans who had refused to register as hunters, tested for the first time, learning their rank alongside strangers.
Rank wasn't something the system assigned as a judgment of the individual, it was made by the government.
It was a measurement, a calculation run by AI based purely on stats, the same AI that monitored the city and detected gate appearances.
The real system, the one that gave people their status windows, given ranks to their skills and stats, where it came from and why, remained a mystery to the very end.
"Next is... Rowan?"
The girl knew who he was. Only a handful of awakened worked in the entire building, so his name circulated.
"Hi." Rowan waved.
Dan followed close behind, accompanying his best friend through his midlife crisis.
"You decided to join the hunter force, huh? Good for you." She looked mildly interested.
Rowan worked in the same building, so seeing his own status window should have already told him roughly what rank to expect.
Most people knew before they walked in, but some still hoped it would be different.
Not Rowan.
He had taken the test before in his last life. He already knew what the outcome would be.
People got two free rank checks.
Beyond that, it was 100 dollars each time, and that was the rate for fast checking.
"You know the drill. Place your hand on the orb and relax."
The room was built like a medical center, wires and cables running from the walls and hooking into a black orb sitting in the middle of the space.
A [Depleted Mana-stone].
Rowan placed his hand on it and settled.
[E]
No matter how much he wished otherwise, that was just how the system worked.
"Okay, here we go." The girl had a gambling addiction. Watching people spin their rank each time was like pulling a slot machine lever, and the lever never got old.
The energy flux moved from the orb into Rowan, a mild buzzing sensation that rushed through him before flowing back.
The black orb began glowing with a dim light. An early signal for E rank.
'As expected.' Rowan sighed and began to pull his hand away.
But the orb never stopped glowing, it kept shining brighter and brighter.
"Hm?"
The tester had worked this room for years, run countless people through the orb, seen B ranks come through that made the whole office buzz. But the light pouring out of that stone right now was something she had never seen before.
The reading on the screen in front of her began to glitch, numbers spinning wildly.
[E] [S] [D] [A] [D] [C] [S] [SS] [SSS]
The screen flickered as the energy being pulled into the orb grew stronger and stronger, until.
BANG!
A circuit breaker tripped and every light in the building went out.