"GLUTTONY!"
A question that plagued every being who lived in this, world what were skills, truly? What was their purpose? How did they manifest? Why were they so intimately bound to one's soul?
How were their tiers decided? And more importantly… why did they exist at all? There were too many whys, Too many how's. Yet the answer was painfully simple, they didn't know. No one did, save perhaps a select few who had climbed to the very peak of this world's hierarchy of strength, beings so far removed from the ordinary that their existence itself bordered on myth.
Most people these days didn't even question it anymore.
Skills were simply their part of the system, ingrained so deeply into daily life that no one stopped to doubt them. The only common understanding was that skills were absurd by nature, things that could bypass talent, potential, and even affinities native to this world. And within that absurdity existed something even more unreasonable were S-Rank skills.
They stood in a league of their own. Few people truly understood them, but just like lower-tier skills, not all S-Rank skills were equal. Utility still mattered. The difference between skills never disappeared, no matter the rank. After all, if someone were given a choice between a D-rank Slash skill and a D-rank cooking skill, most would choose Slash without a second thought. That same logic applied even at the S-Rank level. Subtle differences existed there as well. Take Agawa's skill, for example, the one he had used before. It was purely attack-based. And because it was S-Rank, its destructive capability alone would likely carry Agawa far along his path to power, long before its limits ever became a concern.
However, Gluttony wasn't an attack skill, nor was it a defensive one. However, Judged purely on utility, on how much it could support someone on the path to power it was among the very best. In fact, Gluttony stood at the very top of the S-Rank hierarchy. It was one of those absurdly powerful skills that broke even the established rankings, a skill so dominant that many could argue it should be classified in an entirely different tier, one that existed above S-Rank itself.
After all, rankings were never absolute. There were rare cases where a high A-Rank skill, given the right user and circumstances, could rival or even outperform a mediocre S-Rank skills like Absolute Calculation, an A-Rank analysis skill capable of dismantling higher-tier abilities through perfect prediction, but such cases were exceptions and Gluttony was one such exception.
However, those were deliberations for the future. Right now, for Kelly, Gluttony was a boon unlike anything ever recorded, it is the singular piece, something that could actually allow him to survive the upcoming Trials… that however, if he survived the ordeal, he was currently trapped in. After all, to wield a skill in its truest form, the person had to be the one in control of the skill, not the other way around. And this concern was far greater when it came to S-Rank skills. They were never simple tools to be picked up and used at will, especially not for Kelly. He hadn't even realized what he had done. He didn't understand what he had awakened. And worse, he had no idea that his unintended actions had already set heavy consequences into motion, consequences that would one day demand a price far greater than he could imagine.
Gluttony, in a nutshell, absorbed the souls of the targets Kelly killed. Yet that alone was not what made it truly terrifying, not for its victims, and certainly not for its user. Its true horror lay in what came after. Gluttony did not merely devour a soul and discard it, it integrates that soul into the user's own, forcibly merging it with Kelly's existence and altering the most fundamental structure any being living could ever possess. Changes to the soul were never simple. If they were, everyone would attempt them. Even preparing for such an act required unimaginable rituals, resources, and safeguards. It was like performing surgery, not on flesh, but on the soul itself. Tearing it apart. Stitching it back together with something foreign. Tearing it again. Each alteration reshaped the individual at their core. And Gluttony did all of this without anaesthesia.
The pain was beyond imagination, far worse for someone like Kelly, who had activated the skill without even understanding what it did. Worse still, because of his unawareness related to his actions, Gluttony ended up absorbing the entire soul of its prey along with its lingering awareness, instincts, and will.
Now, what would happen next would decide Kelly Kamimura's fate. Even if he won the inevitable battle of wills, what would emerge afterward… would it truly still be Kelly? No one knew. Not even Kelly himself.
And yet, skills of such catastrophic consequence never existed without reason. Where the cost was overwhelming, the benefits were equally absurd. An individual's entire power structure, their strength, growth, potential, was rooted in the soul itself. By absorbing souls, Kelly's own soul could grow stronger, his stats increasing in proportion to what he consumed and in rare cases, when an entire soul was fully assimilated, there was even the possibility of inheriting something that belonged solely to that individual's being… their skills.
"GLUTTONY!"