The first thing I noticed wasn't the monsters. It was the weight.
In a K-Rank gate, the air feels stagnant. In this dark red void, the air felt like it was made of lead. Every breath I took felt like inhaling fine metallic dust that coated the back of my throat. I stood frozen for a moment, my boots planted on a floor of rusted iron grating that groaned under my weight. Below the grating, there was only an endless, pitch-black pit that echoed with the rhythmic, wet thump-thump of massive, unseen machinery.
"Wha—!?"
I spun around, but the portal was a flat wall of dead air. It was gone. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, uneven beat that seemed to sync up with the distant machinery. The silence here was worse than the noise; it was the silence of a tomb that hadn't been opened in a thousand years.
"Calm down," I hissed to myself, my voice trembling. "Get a grip, Oliver. You're at 44.5%. You've been training. You're not the same kid who got kicked around in that alley."
But my body knew better. The rats beneath my clothes weren't just agitated—they were terrified. I could feel them huddled close to my skin, their tiny hearts racing. They could sense the scale of this place. This wasn't a sewer with a few overgrown lizards. This was a Dark Red Gate. N-Rank. A level of existence I wasn't supposed to see for months.
"Might as well try," I muttered, a bitter taste in my mouth. "Before I get ambushed by these damn fuckers."
I forced myself to walk. The "factory" was a labyrinth of towering, rusted silos, tangled nests of copper piping, and conveyor belts that moved with jerky, unnatural hitches. There were no lights, only the dim, sickly crimson glow that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.
I hadn't walked fifty yards when the first shadow moved.
It didn't come from a corner; it peeled itself off a rusted pillar. It was a Scrap-Stitched Husk. It stood seven feet tall, a humanoid frame made of grey, dead flesh held together by jagged iron staples and rusted wire. Instead of a face, it had a rusted metal plate bolted over its skull with three glowing red pinpricks for eyes.
It didn't hiss. It just lunged.
The speed was wrong. It was too fast for something that size. I barely had time to react.
"Rat Jump!"
I launched myself to the side, but the Husk's arm—a massive limb ending in a rusted meat-hook—caught the edge of my hoodie. The fabric tore like paper, and the force of the near-miss sent me spinning across the iron grating. I slammed into a steam pipe, the heat searing through my clothes.
"Ugh—Rat Blade!"
Ten rats surged to my hand, but I could feel their hesitation. They were resisting the formation, their bodies stiff with fear. The Rat Blade formed, but it was jagged, unstable. The Husk was already on top of me, raising its hook for a killing blow.
I didn't have time for a perfect strike. I rolled between its legs, the hook slamming into the floor where my head had been a millisecond before. The iron grating shattered like glass under the impact.
If that hits me once, I'm dead. Not injured. Dead.
"Focus!" I screamed in my head. Embody the skill!
I channeled every bit of that training from my apartment. I didn't just command the blade; I felt the teeth of every rat in that weapon. I lunged at the Husk's calf, slicing through the stitched muscle. It didn't scream—it just turned with mechanical precision.
I used Rat Jump to get behind its head, but the Husk swiped backward blindly. Its metal-plated elbow caught me in the chest. I felt a rib snap. The air left my lungs in a violent burst, and I hit the floor hard, coughing up a spray of red.
The Husk loomed over me, the red pinpricks of its "eyes" glowing brighter.
"Not... today..."
I released the Rat Blade and sent the ten rats directly at its face plate. "Rat Splat—Multi!"
The rats swarmed the metal plate, jamming their tiny bodies into the gaps of the bolts. For a split second, the monster was blinded, flailing at its own face. I didn't waste it. I grabbed a jagged piece of the shattered floor grating—real iron—and combined it with five rats to create a reinforced, heavy-duty spike.
I drove the spike into the back of the Husk's neck, where the spine met the metal skull. I twisted with everything I had.
The Husk shuddered. A foul, black liquid sprayed from the wound, drenching my arms. It collapsed forward, its massive weight nearly pinning me to the floor.
I lay there, gasping for air, clutching my cracked rib. My vision blurred for a second before a notification flickered in the corner of my eye.
[Monster Slain: Scrap-Stitched Husk] [Mastery: 44.5% -> 46.2%]
A 1.7% jump from a single common enemy. The realization hit me like a physical blow. The old man was right—the danger was the catalyst. But the cost... I looked down. Three of the rats I had sent to blind the monster hadn't come back. They were crushed under the creature's metal face-plate.
[Swarm Count: 45/48]
I didn't have time to mourn. The sound of my struggle had echoed through the hollow factory. From the darkness of the upper catwalks, I heard it—the screech of metal on metal.
I scrambled to my feet, my breath coming in ragged hitches. I was deep in the bowels of the facility now, surrounded by steam vents and giant, grinding gears. That was when I saw them.
Iron-Hide Hounds.
There were two of them. They looked like skinless wolves, but their ribcages were reinforced with rusted rebar, and their teeth were long, serrated steel nails. They didn't bark. They just circled, their claws sparking against the iron floor.
I was already exhausted. My chest burned with every breath. But I couldn't stop.
The first Hound leaped. I used Rat Jump to clear it, but the second one was already in the air, anticipating my landing. It was a level of coordination I hadn't seen in K-Rank.
"Rat Wall!"
I sent twenty rats forward to block the mid-air strike. The Hound slammed into the mass of fur and bone. But these weren't Sludge-Lurkers. The Hound's steel teeth tore through the wall like a hot knife through butter.
I heard the screams—not the squeaks of my rats, but the mental scream of my connection to them being severed. One, five, ten...
"NO!"
I landed and swung the Rat Blade in a wide, desperate arc. I caught the first Hound in the throat, nearly decapitating it, but the second one had already broken through the wall. It latched onto my shoulder, its steel-nail teeth sinking deep into my collarbone.
I roared in pain, the sound tearing from my throat as I felt my own bone grate against the metal. I grabbed the Hound by its head, ignoring the blood pouring down my arm, and commanded the rats still in the wall to swarm its belly.
"Eat it! EAT IT!"
The rats, fueled by my own agony and desperation, tore into the Hound's soft underbelly. It thrashed, ripping a chunk of my shoulder out as it fell, but the swarm didn't let go. They burrowed inside, destroying it from the inside out until the beast finally went limp.
I fell back against a rusted crate, my left arm hanging uselessly at my side. The silence returned, heavier than before.
I looked at the floor. It was covered in grey fur and red blood. My blood. Their blood.
[Monster Slain: Iron-Hide Hound x2] [Mastery: 46.2% -> 49.8%]
I should have been happy. I was nearly at 50%. But then I checked the count. The "Wall" had been decimated. The Hound's teeth had been too much.
[Swarm Count: 29/48]
Nineteen rats. I had lost nineteen of them in less than twenty minutes. The weight of it hit me harder than the Husk's hook. These weren't just "units." They were the reason I was alive. I could feel the holes in my mind where their heartbeats used to be.
I sat there in the dark of the N-Rank factory, clutching my shattered shoulder, surrounded by the corpses of monsters and my own swarm. I was becoming the King, but the crown was made of lead, and the price was being paid in blood.
"Is this what you meant?" I whispered to the empty alley in my mind, thinking of the blind man. "Is this the work?"
I looked deeper into the factory. The Boss was still out there. And I was down to twenty-nine rats.