"Move along, loser."
"Get out of here, you smell like a weakling."
"You're useless, we don't need you."
Mori heard and understood those words. Almost every day it would be the same thing back to back. He knew deep down he was useless, but he just need a reason to keep moving forward so he can earn his keep and provide for his only family left. There was an expedition team right next to a gate and this was one of his chances to try and earn some money. All Awakened have the right to enter a gate as long as they're working with the proper procedures, but even so if you're deemed weak you'll be denied entry by the association or the team exploring the gate.
"Please, I.. I really need this job. I can be a porter, a miner, anything just to earn some money. This is really important to me and I'll do anything."
He was practically begging on his knees at that point. The expedition squad for this gate had seen enough.
"Last time I'm asking you, kid. Get out of here or else we'll have to get our hands dirty before entering the gate."
A big, armored man cracked his knuckles while glaring at Mori on the ground. Bouncer, a C-Rank Vanguard. He was famous for being ruthless to weakling Awakened and rookies, but as long as you put in the effort and work he would be "nice" to you. Mori was also famous in a senseーfor being one of the weakest Awakened in the city. He gained the powers of a tailor, a job that even a normal human can do. With no fighting abilities other than being able to sew up clothes just a bit faster, he was branded as a nobody and every expedition team denied his help.
Gates range from 1-Star to 10-Star. 1-Star being the easiest, beginner friendly gates to the only known 10-Star gate that was the start of the Great Outbreak. There have been a few 7-Star and 8-Star gates that appeared in the world that required multiple nations to join hands to destroy it. They were National Disasters and not one nation could afford the consequences of leaving it be. Many lives were lost, but that's to be expected if the world were to take on even stronger gates and anomalies.
The concrete dug into Mori's knees, but the pain was nothing compared to the weight resting on his shoulders. His fingers twitched, instinctively feeling for the invisible, threads of his magic. In a world where people could throw fireballs or shatter steel with their bare fists, he was essentially a walking sewing machine.
"P-please.. my mother is sick and-"
The man picks up Mori and grabs him by the collar, lifting him up 3-feet in the air.
"I told you to move it while I gave you the chance!"
Bouncer was fuming at this point. He had enough of Mori's behavior and wanted to beat him to a pulp. Mori choked out his words, forcing his eyes up to meet Bouncer's iron gaze. His voice trembled, but he held his ground.
"The infected mana virus... the serum from the Association costs fifty thousand credits a dose. Just.. let me haul the mana crystals. I.. I won't ask for a cut of the boss loot. Just standard porter wages!"
"Then what happens when a goblin scout circles back to the rear?" Bouncer spat his words into Mori's face.
"You drop the pack and die! Then my team loses thirty thousand credits worth of raw mana crystals and cores because we had to babysit a weakling! The Association gave you a license because the law requires it, kid. Reality doesn't care about your license. An F-Rank like you can die somewhere an no one would care."
Bouncer throws Mori down onto the ground so hard that his body bounces once and tumbles before coming to a halt.
"A 3-Star gate is not a place where you can come and go whenever you want. We don't want to worry about someone else other than the team that does the heavy lifting."
A woman mage with big glasses from the expedition team steps up to console Mori. She kneels down right next to him and heals him before moving away.
"Please understand our situation. Your life is too precious to throw away in a gate like this."
Mori knows his weakness, his capabilities. There isn't anything he can say to argue against Bouncer or the others.
A couple of other Awakened in the background laughed. A sound that cut deeper than any physical blow.
"Look at him, begging like that. Hey, Mori! Why don't you offer to patch Bouncer's underwear after the raid? Maybe he'll throw you a few crystals!"
"A Tailor in an 3-Star gate expedition... what a joke. Go open a dry cleaner's, kid!"
Mori clenched his fists so hard his nails tore into his palms. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tell them that he had tried. He had spent eighteen hours a day applying to every clothing factory in the lower district, only to be rejected because non-Awakened tailors worked for half the pay and didn't trigger 'mana spikes' in industrial machinery. He was stuck in a nightmare. Too weak to hunt, too "Awakened" to work normal labor, and too broke to keep his mother alive for another month.
"Listen to me, Relotto..."
Bouncer growled.
"You step within ten feet of this perimeter again before we clear the Gate, and I won't wait for a monster to kill you. I'll break both your legs and leave you in the alleyway. Got it?"
Mori laid there on the cold concrete, watching the team assemble, check their weapons, and step through the swirling, blue vortex of the 3-Star Gate.
He managed to push himself up onto his feet, his chest heaving with a mixture of suffocating rage and hopeless despair. He stared down at his trembling hands.
A tailor, he thought bitterly. What am I supposed to do? Sew a dragon to death?
He turned his back on the glowing 3-Star Gate and began the long, humiliating walk home. He didn't know it yet, but as he dragged his bruised body back toward the residential sector, the spatial air inside his tiny, crumbling apartment was already beginning to warp and crack open like dry glass.
Mori dragged his feet all the way back to his small, rundown apartment. Every step burned with the memory of Bouncer's words and the cold pavement against his knees.
He opened the creaky front door to the familiar smell of bitter medicine and damp wallpaper.
"Mori? Is that you, sweetheart?"
A quiet, raspy voice called out from the bedroom. Mori took a deep breath, forced a smile onto his face, and walked in. His mother lays under a thin blanket, her skin pale and stained with sweat. Black vein-like marks, the signature trace of the monster virus, spread slowly across her neck.
"Hey, Mom,"
Mori said softly, sitting on the edge of her mattress.
"Yeah, it's me."
"How did... how did the job hunt go today?"
She asked, coughing weakly into a towel.
Mori looked at his scraped hands. He wanted to tell her he got a job as a porter. He wanted to tell her he had enough money for her next serum dose. But the lie couldn't escape his throat.
"It was quiet today,"
He said gently, tucking the blanket around her shoulders.
"Not many teams needed extra hands. But I'll find something tomorrow. Don't worry."
"Don't push yourself too hard,"
She whispered, her eyes heavy with exhaustion.
"I'm just happy you're safe and doing well."
Within a few minutes, she drifted off to sleep. Mori sat in the dark room, watching her chest rise and fall. The serum was due in three days. If he couldn't pay, the hospital would stop delivering it, and the virus would claim her within a week.
Desperate and numb, Mori walked out to the tiny living room. He collapsed onto the floor, staring up at the cracked ceiling.
Why give me magic if it's completely useless? he thought bitterly. What good is being an Awakened if I can't even save my own mother?
Then, the air in the room went dead silent.
The temperature plummeted. The small lamp on the table flickered out.
A sharp CRACK echoed through the room, like glass snapping under extreme pressure. Mori scrambled backward as a line of crimson light split the space right above his coffee table.
The spacial tear widened. Spikes of black energy leaked out, suffocating the room in absolute pressure. The air grew so heavy Mori couldn't even stand. His lungs burned just trying to pull in oxygen.
It wasn't a standard blue portal. It was pitch black, pulsing with a terrifying, ancient power that made every instinct in Mori's body scream.
An unranked gate had opened right inside his home.
Mori stared at the swirling pitch black void. He knew what a normal person should do: run, call the Association, evacuate the area. However, the Association wouldn't arrive in time to save his apartment, and they certainly wouldn't pay for his mother's treatment.
If a high-rank gate appeared, rare treasures, high-grade mana cores, or even secret awakening artifacts were buried inside. One item could pay for his mother's medicine for life.
He looked back at his mother's bedroom door. Then he looked at the black vortex.
"If I stay here, we die anyway," Mori whispered.
He grabbed a large chef's knife from the kitchen counter, took a deep breath, and stepped straight into the darkness.
The world flipped upside down.
When Mori blinked, he wasn't in his living room anymore. He was standing on a jagged cliff under a sky the color of dried blood. He didn't understand where he was. Despite being one of the weakest Awakened, he studied hard to be knowledgeable of gates and dungeons. This wasn't anything he knew about.
Mori grabbed the edge of the cliff carefully and took a small glance.
Just one peak down the cliff sent a shock throughout his whole body, causing him to jolt back in fear.
Below him lays a flat wasteland of black stone. Thousands of colossal shadow beasts stood below the cliff, wandering around aimlessly.
Monsters larger than skyscrapers, winged abominations with hundreds of eyes, and armored behemoths roared in a unison that shook the ground beneath his feet.
This wasn't a 1-Star gate. It didn't feel or look like a 7-Star gate either.
A single monster from this horde could flatten a town, hundreds being able to destroy a city in a matter of seconds. Mori Relotto, a weak F-Rank tailor with a kitchen knife, was trapped right in the center of it.
The air inside the gate didn't just feel cold or humid. It felt thick, heavy, and poisonous, suffocating Mori's lungs with every dry breath he took.
He fell to his knees on the black rock, scraping the skin and releasing small amounts of blood. The kitchen knife slipped from his trembling, sweaty fingers, clattering against the stone before rolling off the edge of the cliff.
He couldn't bother reaching for it. Against the nightmare unfolding beneath him, a 12-inch steel blade was as useless as a toothpick against a tsunami.
Across the horizon, the sky burned with streaks of ash and blood-red thunder. It stretched to an impossible amount. The massive creatures dragged massive iron chains across cracked obsidian plains. Swarms of winged, multi-eyed monstrosities flew across the crimson sky, their screeching vibrating so hard inside Mori's chest that blood began to trickle from his nose.
An 8-Star Gate..
The reality hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. The historical texts from school hadn't understated a single detail. Forty years ago, a gate like this opened and nearly wiped humanity off the map. It took every S-Rank Awakened on the planet, millions of soldiers, and total global collapse just to push back the Great Outbreak.
And now, another one had opened. Right in his living room.
If this horde found the gate he stepped through, it wouldn't just destroy his apartment. It would swallow his city in minutes. It would tear his bedridden mother to pieces before she could even wake up. It would erase the entire country.
I'm going to die here, Mori thought. His heart pounded like a trapped bird inside his ribs. His vision blurred with hot, helpless tears. Bouncer was right. Everyone else was right. I'm just dead weight. I couldn't even protect my own home.
A low, gutted growl echoed from behind him.
Mori's breath hitched. He slowly turned his head.
Standing at the crest of the cliff, barely thirty feet away, was a monster. It looked like a hairless, skinless hound, but its body was four times the size of a bull. Black, tar-like miasma oozed from its exposed skin, and its face was a mass of snapping, needle-thin teeth with no eyes.
The hound lowered its head, sniffing the air. It caught the scent of human blood coming from Mori's scraped knees and bleeding nose.
Mori couldn't move an inch. Fear locked his joints. His legs felt like lead pipes filled with concrete. He couldn't run. He couldn't fight. He didn't have fire magic, or heavy armor, or superhuman strength.
He was just Mori Relotto. An F-Rank Tailor.
The hound let out a high-pitched, ear-splitting shriek and leaped.
It moved with terrifying speed, a blur of red muscle and snapping jaws lunging straight for Mori's throat. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. In that final fraction of a second, as death barreled down on him, Mori didn't see his life flash before his eyes. He saw his mother's pale face. He saw her black-veined neck, coughing on a thin mattress, waiting for a son who was never coming back.
No...
An overwhelming wave of pure, unadulterated rage exploded in Mori's chest. Not at the monster. Not at Bouncer. At himself. At his own uselessness. At the pathetic occupation he had been cursed with.
If I'm going to die, I'm not dying like a worm!
Instead of cowering, Mori threw his hands forward, screaming at the top of his lungs. He didn't have a sword or shield. He didn't have a fireball. He reached instinctively for the only thing he had ever known. The faint, invisible threads of mana he used to sew fabric together.
He didn't channel his mana to create a needle or a thread. In sheer desperation, Mori grabbed the very fabric of space in front of him, as if the air itself were a piece of torn, frayed cloth, and yanked it with everything he had.
THREAD!
A blinding white light erupted from his fingertips.
The invisible mana threads didn't sprout into weak cotton strings like they usually did. Amplified by the sheer concentration of ancient, atmospheric mana flooding the 8-Star Gate, Mori's threads expanded into razor-thin, glowing filaments of sheer spatial force.
SWOOSH
The spatial threads crossed through the air like a net, snapping tight like high-tension steel cables right in the path of the leaping hound.
The monster didn't even have time to react. Its momentum carried it directly into the web of glowing light.
There was no sound of impact. No bone-crunching crash.
The hound simply passed through the grid of mana threads. A split second later, as it landed on the rock behind Mori, the creature neatly separated into dozens of clean, perfectly diced cubes of flesh and bone, collapsing into a silent, steaming pile of black blood.
Mori collapsed onto his side, gasping for air, his lungs burning as if he had swallowed liquid fire. He stared at the mountain of diced monster meat, then down at his own trembling hands.
The glowing threads attached to his fingers didn't fade. Instead, they began to pulse, absorbing the black miasma rising from the dead hound's remains, reeling the raw mana back straight into Mori's body.
Inside his mind, a cold, mechanical chime sounded for the very first time in his life:
[Hidden Condition Cleared: An F-Rank Crafting Class has slain a Calamity-Class Entity alone.]
[System Unlocking...]
[Class: 'Tailor' is changed to 'God of Tailoring (EX)']
[Class Skill: 'Basic Tailoring (D) ' is evolving into 'Divine Threadmaster (F)'.]