Ren turned the page and found himself staring at another chart. This one was titled "Monster Classification and Threat Assessment." He rubbed his temples, already feeling the onset of information fatigue. This section was going to be particularly tricky to wrap his head around, but he needed to understand it if he wanted to survive what was coming.
The thing about monsters, the book explained, was that they didn't care about ranks. They didn't sit around thinking, "I'm Shatter-class, better not overdo it." That was all human invention. A desperate attempt to make sense of the chaos. A way to look at nightmare fuel and say, "If we put it in a chart, maybe it won't kill us as easily."
The truth was, monsters were ranked by humans. By hunters, governments, and the world system that had decided to slap labels on things that wanted humanity dead. The world system loved its categories because nothing said "comfort" like turning your possible cause of death into a neat, numbered list.
It started small, thankfully.
Mortal Rank monsters were the weakest of the weak. Mana-touched animals, oversized pests, creatures that looked more ridiculous than terrifying—until they clawed your face off. Think rats the size of house cats, wolves with glowing eyes that bite harder than physics should allow, or birds that could tear through leather armor with their beaks. Individually, they were nothing more than annoyances to anyone with basic combat training. Civilians could get seriously injured, but an F-rank hunter could deal with them easily enough.
Common Rank represented the classic dungeon fodder. Goblins with rusty weapons, imps that threw fireballs, mutated hounds with too many teeth—whatever flavor of nightmare your particular Gate decided to spawn that day. Small packs of these creatures could tear through an undefended village if no one responded quickly enough. They were dangerous enough to require professional attention but predictable enough that E-rank hunters treated encounters with them as training exercises. Most came back with cuts and bruises, but they came back.
Elite Rank was where things started getting interesting, and by interesting, Ren meant terrifying. These monsters were smarter, tougher, often sporting mutations or elemental abilities that made them genuinely dangerous. The kind of creatures that didn't just charge blindly into battle—they thought, they planned, they adapted. A nest of Elite-rank monsters could overwhelm an entire town if the local authorities weren't prepared. D-rank hunters usually got sent to deal with them, though most still returned bleeding and traumatized.
Then there was Shatter Rank.
These were the traditional Gate bosses, the monsters strong enough to break trained squads of hunters apart like twigs. A single Shatter-class beast could tear through dozens of unprepared hunters without breaking stride. The kind of threat that could put half a city in ruins if it managed to escape containment. This was solidly C-rank hunter territory, and even then, success wasn't guaranteed. The name "Shatter" came from what these things did to both bones and confidence.
Above that were the Ruin Rank monsters.
Regional threats that didn't just kill people—they destabilized entire areas. These creatures warped mana fields just by existing, caused nearby dungeons to go haywire, and put entire cities at risk through their mere presence. This was where you started seeing true horrors, the kind of beings that nightmares were made of. B-rank hunters were usually the ones deployed against Ruin-class threats, and the casualty reports made for grim reading. Many hunters who went after these monsters simply didn't come back.
Then you hit Destruction Rank.
Living disasters. Walking catastrophes. One of these monsters could level multiple cities without breaking stride, could grind an entire province into rubble, and turn the survivors into refugee camp statistics. The economic and social damage from a single Destruction-rank incident could destabilize entire regions for decades. A-rank hunters were the only ones with even a fighting chance against these threats, and even then, "chance" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that equation.
But the real nightmares started at Calamity Rank.
These monsters were roughly equal to S-rank hunters in terms of raw threat level. Their very presence meant a province-level crisis was underway. Entire armies would mobilize, governments would declare states of emergency, and maps would quite literally get redrawn in blood before the situation was resolved. The thing Ren had fought in his "FAKE" trial—the Dream Devourer—had supposedly been one of these. Imagine a spider the size of a cathedral that didn't just eat your body but feasted on your mind, your memories, your very sense of self until nothing remained but an empty shell. Yeah. Welcome to Calamity rank.
Ren shuddered, remembering that encounter. Even knowing it had been an illusion, the memory still made his skin crawl.
Above Calamity was Cataclysm Rank.
The kind of monsters that didn't just destroy—they broke nations. Collapsed governments. Tore social order to pieces and left entire regions uninhabitable for generations. Some of them even looked humanoid, which somehow made them infinitely worse. How do you fight something that could walk into your capital city wearing a human face and a politician's smile? How do you prepare for a threat that could manipulate society from within while possessing the raw power to level mountains? Challenger and Master rank hunters were the ones who got deployed against these threats, assuming anyone was foolish enough to send them at all.
Then there were the Unique Rank monsters.
These abominations didn't just destroy nations—they unmade entire ecosystems, unraveled the very fabric of civilization itself. Some of them possessed intelligence that rivaled or exceeded human capability, and their humanoid appearances allowed them to blend seamlessly into society. They could spend years, even decades, slowly rotting civilizations from the inside until collapse was inevitable and unstoppable. When a Unique Rank monster appeared, it wasn't a battle or even a war. It was an apocalypse in slow motion, entropy given flesh and purpose. Only Grandmaster rank hunters had even a theoretical hope of stopping them, and the emphasis was heavily on "theoretical."
And finally, at the absolute apex of the nightmare hierarchy, came Extinction Rank.
The end of everything. These were the monsters that didn't just threaten cities, provinces, or nations. They threatened civilization itself. Entire species, entire empires—gone, wiped from existence as if they had never been. Humanity-scale extinction events given form and malevolent intelligence. To fight one of these horrors, you would need someone at the level of a Myth or Legend. And even then, with all that godlike power at your disposal, victory might not be achievable.
That was the monster ladder. Mortal to Extinction. A neat progression from "annoying" to "species-ending threat."
It looked orderly on paper, just like the hunter classification chart. Clean categories, clear progression, logical hierarchy. But the book made it clear that this appearance of order was deceptive. The reality was messy, bloody, and full of screaming. Every rank was just a label slapped onto a nightmare after it had killed enough people to warrant classification.
Hunters liked to believe the world system made sense of it all. That if you knew a monster's rank, you understood the risk, could prepare accordingly, could make informed decisions about engagement protocols. But the truth was much simpler and more terrifying.
Standing in front of an actual monster, rank didn't matter at all. You didn't see a number floating above its head like some twisted video game interface. You didn't think, "Ah, this is an Elite-class threat, I should use Strategy B." You saw death coming at you with claws, teeth, and corrupted mana, and your only thoughts were about survival.
The book included several case studies of encounters where hunters had misidentified threat levels, either underestimating or overestimating their opponents. The results were invariably catastrophic. Overconfident C-rank hunters getting shredded by what they thought was an Elite-rank target that turned out to be Shatter-class. Entire squads fleeing in terror from what looked like a Calamity-level threat but was actually just an unusually large Common-rank monster with good special effects.
Fear, the book noted, was both humanity's greatest weakness and its most reliable survival tool in monster encounters. Those who couldn't feel fear got themselves killed through reckless overconfidence. Those who felt too much fear froze up and got killed through inaction. The successful hunters were those who could feel the fear, acknowledge it, and still function despite it.
The book continued with tactical recommendations for different monster ranks, preferred team compositions, equipment suggestions, and statistical survival rates. The numbers made for sobering reading. Even with proper preparation and appropriate hunter ranks, mortality rates remained disturbingly high across all threat levels.
But what struck Ren most was the fundamental arrogance underlying the entire classification system. Humans had looked at forces of chaos and destruction that existed beyond their comprehension, and their response had been to make charts. To create the illusion of understanding and control where neither truly existed.
The monsters didn't care about human categories. They didn't follow human logic or human expectations. They simply existed, driven by alien impulses and operating according to rules that had nothing to do with the neat hierarchies civilization preferred.
Standing in front of one, ranks became meaningless. You didn't think about threat classifications or tactical protocols. You thought about the fact that this thing was going to kill you if you didn't run or fight right now, in this moment, with whatever tools and skills you possessed.
The world system might track hunters and their advancement. Humans might catalog and classify monsters with obsessive precision. But out there in the dark, beyond the safety of cities and the comfort of archives, monsters didn't care about charts. They just killed.
And Ren was starting to understand that maybe, just maybe, his own power operated by the same principles. Maybe the reason his abilities felt so alien and uncomfortable wasn't because they were weaker than the system's neat categories suggested.
Maybe it was because they were something else entirely.