The club missed my face by a hair. Hot wind slapped my nose, tasting like sweat and trash. A concrete pillar exploded behind me. Tile tried to give me a haircut. I ducked. I stabbed. My bargain-bin dagger snapped on the ogre's shin with a sad little click that sounded like, Congrats, loser.
Yeah. Hi. I'm Ethan. F-rank. The F stood for free funeral.
The thing in front of me was eight hundred pounds of gym-bro rock troll that smelled like onions in a gym bag. Gray skin like a driveway. Rebar jammed into a concrete bat. Eyes like wet pennies that wanted to watch something suffer. Preferably me.
I backpedaled over a broken bench. My ankle wobbled. The club dragged and shrieked. Sparks spat across the floor like the dungeon was coughing.
Arcadia City loved to pretend gates were glamorous. Guild posters. Hunters who were idols. Streamers doing "Top Ten Boss Kills" with thumbnails of people screaming. Nobody streamed the part where your weapon broke and you started bargaining with God about rent.
"Nice club," I told the ogre, because my brain thought jokes were armor. "Do they sell that at Murder Depot or…?"
It roared. The room shook. Blue fungus on the cracked subway walls pulsed like a slow migraine. My mouth tasted like pennies and panic.
Two minutes ago I'd had a team. "Fallback!" the tank had yelled. Hunter code for leave the F-rank behind. They were gone before my thoughts had even finished forming: Wait, guys—
Hunters were supposed to have your back. Tank up front. Healer top-offs. Mid-ranks swing big. F-rank stood behind them and tried not to breathe too loud. That was the plan. But plans broke faster than my dagger.
The ogre charged again. The floor hopped into my knees. I rolled right and bounced off a support beam hard enough to see stars I couldn't afford. The club turned the beam into gravel. Ceiling dust rained into my hair. I coughed concrete and instantly regretted having lungs.
Let me explain it a little. Ten years ago, the first gate had opened in Arcadia. Monsters poured out like the city had a hole punched into something's stomach. Some people awakened as hunters—fire hands, iron skin, holy healing. They got ranks and contracts and shiny posters. The rest of us got sirens, curfews, and "Shelter In Place" texts at 3 a.m.
I hadn't awakened. Not at seventeen when my lab partner blew a breaker with lightning and the school paper called him Thunder Prince. Not at nineteen when recruiters in glossy windbreakers promised "bright futures" outside community college. Not at twenty-one when I whispered to the ceiling of a dorm the size of a closet. Nothing. Just me. Ethan Cross. Human. Lowercase h.
So I took the exam. Barely scraped F-rank. Bought a used dagger that already wanted to retire. Signed a contract that said HAZARD PAY in bold and "accepts all risk" in smaller, meaner letters. I'd smiled for the guild photo and tried not to get a nosebleed on the carpet.
The ogre swept side to side. I dropped and chunks of tile shaved my ear. My hands shook. The dagger hilt was slick with sweat.
I sprinted behind a crushed vending machine. It had an ad of a model drinking cola like she'd never smelled a dungeon. The ogre's club punched the machine and the metal screamed like a kettle. It folded in half like a sad taco.
Inventory check: one broken knife, one backpack with a cracked phone (no signal), half a granola bar that tasted like birdseed and regret. I didn't have a plan; I just had a warning label.
I crawled toward a maintenance room. The backpack strap caught on a bolt. I yanked. It snapped with a pop my wallet felt. The ogre squeezed through the doorway, concrete grinding off its shoulders like dandruff. It sniffed, found me, and brightened. Great. I loved my life.
The room was all pipes and dust. A dead generator. A chain-link fence splitting the space. A poster said SAFETY IS A CHOICE, except someone had replaced the O with a dried brown smear. I backed into the fence. It rattled. So did I.
"Okay," I told the ogre, holding up my dead dagger like a priest with a spoon. "Hear me out."
It did not hear me out. The club rose slow, like it enjoyed the moment. The silence swelled—just breath, hum, and my brain juggling fifty stupid thoughts at once.
Like: my apartment bed squeaked if you breathed near it. Like: the hallway light buzzed all night and the landlord called that "ambience." Like: Guild Row's glass towers were so shiny you forgot there was rot under the polish. Like: I'd watched an S-rank cut a stone giant in half at the arena and walked home wired and heartsick and hungry for a life I didn't have.
Like: I should've learned plumbing. People always need plumbing. Monsters don't spawn in pipes, right? Don't answer that.
Like: if I saved hard, I could get out of the slums before I was thirty. If I survived. And that was a big if.
Like: sex. Or, you know, the theory of it. On paper. Not in my actual life. I was twenty-two and my romantic résumé was "one awkward date, bad lighting." Do not laugh please. Okay, you can laugh a little. My life sucked.
The club dropped. I jumped left because left felt faster. The floor broke into teeth. The shockwave slammed me into the fence. Static nibbled my spine. My legs did a Windows error and stopped cooperating.
I slid down to my knees. Everything narrowed. Ogre. Club. Blood finding the cracks in the tile like it was trying to leave me first.
"You're not special," I told myself. Out loud. "You're not chosen. You picked a job that eats people and it's lunchtime." Humor circled panic like vultures. I threw it scraps. It kept circling.
Boots hammered tile somewhere behind the ogre. Shouting. The words smeared in my ears. The ogre glanced back, annoyed, then returned to the insult in front of it: me.
I checked the dagger hilt again, like it had grown a blade while I wasn't looking. It hadn't. My hand shook so hard it looked like I was auditioning to be a blender.
People loved origin stories where the universe patted you on the cheek and said, Hey champ, your turn. My version: the universe shrugged and asked, You done? while it swung.
I thought about my mom telling me to be careful, which was like telling rain not to be wet. I thought about that guild receptionist smile—pity inside customer service. I thought about being background in other people's hero arcs. The guy who held the door. The guy who ran for potions. The guy whose name got mispronounced in the memorial video.
I also, because my brain was a traitor and I was dying, thought about boobs. Just a cheap slideshow. Not even HD. I hated me.
"Hold on," I said again, because my last line couldn't be silence. I held up the broken hilt like a traffic wand. "Time out, let's talk about it."
The ogre obliged me by not obliging me at all. The club rose. The fungus pulsed. The room waited like it wanted a show.
Regrets stacked like receipts. Should've trained more. Saved more. Kept my mouth shut when that B-rank called me "dead weight" like it was my legal name. Learned how to fix elevators. Learned to be someone else.
There's a version where I roared something brave and discovered hidden power and punched through stone like an inspirational montage. This wasn't that version. This was the honest one.
I inhaled dust, blood, metal, bad decisions. I felt very small. Very me.
And a thought clicked into place, stupid and clear and truer than anything I'd said out loud in a year: I really, really did not want my last memory to be an ogre's nose hair.
Also—yeah. That.
"Great," I said, a little laugh hitching because I couldn't help myself, because if I didn't laugh I'd cry. "I'm gonna die a virgin in a D-rank dungeon."
The ogre's shadow ate the light. Someone screamed, or I dreamed it. The club came down like a door slamming on the last room in my head.
Then everything went out.