[F-Rank Dungeon – The Weeping Caverns] [Present Day – 5 Years Later]
"Hey, Wasted Potential! Move your ass! The bags aren't going to carry themselves!"
The shout echoed off the damp, limestone walls, accompanied by a chorus of cruel laughter.
I adjusted the straps of the eighty-pound supply pack digging into my shoulders and kept my head down, staring at the muddy boots of the man in front of me.
"I'm coming," I grunted, my voice rough from disuse.
"I swear, he gets slower every raid," sneered the party's Healer, a woman named Min-ji. She was checking her reflection in the polished gem of her staff, completely ignoring the gloom of the dungeon. "Why did we even hire him, Kang? If he tries to use a simple Wind Breeze to cool us off, he'll probably have a seizure."
"He's cheap," Kang grunted from the front.
Kang was the leader of this scrappy pickup party, a D-Rank Warrior with an ego the size of an S-Rank Gate and a shiny steel breastplate he clearly couldn't afford. He swung his broadsword lazily, cutting through the thick cobwebs.
"Plus," Kang added, glancing back at me with a grin that showed too many teeth, "if things go south, monsters usually go for the weakest mana signature first. He's distinct... bait."
The rest of the party—a mage in robes that were two sizes too big and a thief playing with a rusty dagger—snickered.
I didn't react. I just walked.
Five years, I thought, the bitterness tasting like copper in my mouth. Five years of this.
I wasn't a Hunter. I was a Porter. A glorified mule.
After the "Incident," my S-Rank contract was shredded. The government benefits vanished. But the bills didn't. My mother's condition—Mana Poisoning—required expensive suppressants that cost three million won a month. Without me, she would die in agony.
So, I carried the bags. I took the insults. I let D-Rank trash like Kang treat me like a dog because I had no choice.
"We're here," the Thief whispered, pointing forward.
We stood before the Boss Room. Massive stone doors, carved with weeping faces, blocked the path.
"Alright, listen up," Kang barked, rolling his shoulders. "It's just a Goblin Shaman in there. Easy money. Min-ji, keep the heals on me. Mage, blast the minions. And Ash?"
He pointed his sword at my nose.
"Stay in the corner and try not to die. If you drop the loot bag, I'm docking your pay."
"Understood," I said quietly.
Kang kicked the doors open.
We expected the musk of goblins—feces, rot, and unwashed bodies. We expected the shrieking of small, green monsters.
Instead, as the heavy stone doors slammed shut behind us with a sound like a tomb sealing, the air temperature plummeted. My breath misted in front of me. The orange torches on the walls didn't flicker; they flared a sickly, deep blue.
My instincts, honed by years of surviving as a coward, screamed. Every hair on my neck stood up.
The air pressure is wrong, I realized. The mana density... it's suffocating.
"Uh, Kang?" Min-ji's voice trembled. "Why is it cold? Goblins like heat."
"Shut up, I'm thinking," Kang snapped, though his sword hand was shaking.
From the shadows at the far end of the cavern, a sound emerged. Clop. Clop. Clop.
It was the sound of heavy hooves on stone.
A figure emerged from the darkness, towering over us. It was at least three meters tall. It had the lower body of a massive warhorse, clad in jagged obsidian armor, and the upper body of a demon knight. Smoke hissed from the vents of its full-plate helm. In its hands, it held a halberd that dripped with a viscous black liquid.
[System Warning: Abnormal Gate Detected.] [Boss Entity: Doom Knight Centaurion] [Rank: C+]
The holographic text hovered in the air, red and pulsing.
"C... C-Rank?" Kang's voice cracked, high and pathetic. "No way! The scanner said F! This is an F-Rank zone!"
"The scanner was wrong," I whispered, backing up until my spine hit the cold stone wall. "It's a Dungeon Break."
The Centaurion didn't care about our confusion. It didn't roar. It didn't monologue. It just moved.
For a creature that size, it blurred.
SPLAT.
The sound was wet and heavy, like a watermelon being dropped from a ten-story building.
I blinked, and Kang was gone. Or rather, his head was.
The leader's headless body stood there for a second, blood fountaining from the stump of his neck, painting the ceiling red. Then, the body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. His head rolled across the floor, the expression of arrogance still frozen on his face.
"KANG!" Min-ji screamed, a sound that shredded her vocal cords.
Chaos erupted.
"Fireball! Fireball!" the Mage shrieked, panic overriding his training. He threw a clumsy sphere of flame at the monster.
The Centaurion didn't even dodge. It simply stomped its front right hoof.
BOOM.
A shockwave of pure kinetic energy rippled through the floor. The stones shattered. The Mage was launched backward, slamming into the wall with a sickening crunch of breaking ribs. He slid down, leaving a smear of red, and didn't move again.
The Thief tried to run. He turned tail and sprinted for the sealed doors, activating his Haste skill.
"Open it! Open the damn door!" he wailed, clawing at the stone.
The Centaurion spun, its long, armored tail whipping out like a scorpion's stinger.
Thwack.
The tail tip impaled the Thief through the chest, pinning him to the door. He gasped, blood bubbling from his mouth, his legs kicking uselessly in the air before going still.
Ten seconds.
It took exactly ten seconds for the "Dawn Chasers" party to be erased from existence.
Min-ji was on her knees, sobbing, her staff clattering to the floor. "Please... please don't..."
The Centaurion walked over to her. It raised a massive hoof.
I closed my eyes.
Crunch.
Silence returned to the cavern. The only sound was the heavy breathing of the monster and the drip, drip, drip of blood.
And then, there was only me. The Wasted Potential.
I was pressed into the corner, sliding down the wall until I hit the floor. My legs were jelly. My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
The Centaurion turned its burning red eyes toward me.
It snorted, a jet of steam hissing from its helmet. It clearly didn't view me as a threat. I was a bug. A stain. It trotted over slowly, savouring the terror.
So this is it, I thought, a bitter, twisted smile forming on my face.
Five years of eating shit. Five years of carrying bags for arrogant pricks who didn't know how to tie their own boots. Five years of watching my mother wither away in a hospital bed while I scraped by on copper coins.
And I die here? In a nameless cave? Like trash?
I never even got to use it.
I looked at my trembling hands. The hands that broke a pencil and almost killed me.
The Centaurion raised that massive halberd high into the air. The black blade caught the blue torchlight. It was beautiful, in a way. The geometry of death.
I don't want to die, I realized. The fear was there, yes, but beneath it, something hotter was bubbling. Something ugly and ancient. I don't want to die helpless. I don't want to be at the mercy of gravity, or monsters, or guilds, or fate.
I looked up at the monster's glowing eyes.
I just want... to be in control. Just once.
The blade descended.
[Condition Met: The Desire for Absolute Control in the Face of Inevitable Death.] [Condition Met: Sole Survivor of an Abnormal Anomaly.] [System Error... Rebooting...] [Legacy Protocol: 'PLAYER' System Activated.]
DING!
The sound was crisp, clear, and utterly out of place.
Time seemed to freeze. The halberd hung inches from my nose, the air pressure pushing my hair back.
A blue screen—brighter, sharper, and more arrogant than any status window I'd ever seen—erupted in my vision.
[Congratulations! You have awakened the Hidden Class.] [Achievement Reward: 'Gift of the Beginning' unlocked.] [You have received 50 Unallocated Stat Points.]
[Current Status] Name: Ash Class: None -> The Ruler (Locked) Strength: F Agility: F Stamina: F Mana: F- (Cursed) Control: EX (Sealed)
[Available Points: 50]
Fifty points?
My mind raced. The average F-Rank Hunter had 10 points total. A C-Rank had maybe 40. Fifty points was an instant jump across three ranks.
If I put it in Strength, I might be able to catch the blade, but my bones would shatter. If I put it in Agility, I could dodge, but I'd eventually tire out. If I put it in Mana, I could maybe cast a Tier 1 Fireball... but I didn't know any spells.
I looked at the cursed stat. The stat that governed my progression tree. The stat that I never had enough mana to use properly.
[Control].
The ability to command the laws of physics.
"Dump it all," I snarled, blood spraying from my lips. "Put everything into Control."
[System Warning: Extreme allocation detected. Are you s—]
"DO IT!"
[Allocating 50 Points to Control...] [Control Stat Updated: F- -> B+] [Mana Efficiency Protocol: Overridden.] [Notice: Tier 3 (Fundamental Forces) forcibly unlocked for 10 seconds.]
The world didn't change. I changed.
The air suddenly looked... thick. I didn't just see the monster; I saw the math. I saw the vectors of the halberd's descent. I saw the friction coefficient of the floor tiles. I saw the tensile strength of the leather straps on its armor.
I reached out my hand.
I didn't try to use Fire or Wind (Tier 1). I reached deeper, into the newly unlocked Tier 3.
Gravity. Friction.
I looked at the Centaurion's obsidian chest plate. Specifically, the molecular bond of the leather strap holding the heavy armor together.
Friction: Zero. Tension: Maximum.
"Unravel," I whispered.
SNAP.
The sound was like a whip crack. The strap burst.
The heavy obsidian chest plate, weighing easily four hundred pounds, instantly detached. Gravity took over. It fell straight down—directly onto the Centaurion's front hooves.
CRUNCH.
The sound of shattering bone was sickeningly loud.
The monster shrieked—a high-pitched, metallic squeal of confusion and pain. Its balance was instantly destroyed. It tripped forward over its own armor.
The heavy halberd, meant to split my skull, swung wildly off-course, sparking against the stone wall and burying itself in the ground next to my ear.
I stood up.
My nose was bleeding again. My head pounded like a drum, a migraine threatening to split my skull. But I wasn't in a coma. I wasn't fainting.
I was standing.
And for the first time in ten years... the world felt light.
I looked at the Centaurion. It was writhing on the ground, struggling to stand with shattered hooves, its unarmored neck exposed where the chest plate had fallen.
"Checkmate," I whispered.
I walked over to Kang's headless corpse. I reached down and grabbed the hilt of his broadsword. It was heavy—too heavy for my weak F-Rank arms to lift properly.
But that didn't matter. Weight is just the effect of gravity on mass.
I focused on the blade.
Tier 3: Gravity Manipulation.
"Lighten."
The sword became as light as a feather. I lifted it with one hand, spinning it lazily.
I walked up to the thrashing Doom Knight. It looked up at me, red eyes flickering with something new. Fear.
"You should have aimed for the neck," I said.
I raised the sword high.
"Heavy."
I swung the sword, increasing the gravity around the blade a hundredfold at the moment of impact. The blade accelerated, becoming a falling meteor.
SH-THUNK.
The blade cleaved through muscle, bone, and stone floor alike. The Centaurion's head was severed instantly, rolling away to join Kang's.
Black blood sprayed over me, warm and foul. I didn't wipe it off. I let it soak into my cheap porter clothes.
[You have defeated the Doom Knight Centaurion (Boss).] [Experience limit exceeded.] [Level Up!] [Level Up!] [Level Up!]
[System Notice: New Skill Unlocked - 'Copy Conditions'] [System Notice: The Administrator is watching you with interest.]
I stood over the corpse of the C-Rank boss, panting heavily. The blue window hovered before me, glowing with promise in the dark cavern.
A new text box appeared, the font slightly different. Sarcastic.
[System: Well, look at that. The trash didn't die. Color me impressed. Now, loot the body before the dungeon collapses, you moron.]
I grinned, a feral, bloody expression that felt foreign on my face.
"Finally," I rasped, staring at my trembling hands. "Tutorial over."