The rain doesn't care who you are.
It falls the same on kings and corpses, on the S-rank Hunters who grace the covers of magazines and the forgotten E-rank nobodies who scrub dungeon entrances for spare coin. Liu Yun had learned that lesson young. He stood at the bus stop on Hallow Street, soaking through his second-hand hunter's jacket, and watched the city lights of Veramore blur in the downpour like smeared ink. Somewhere overhead, a billboard glowed with the face of Director Harlan Voss, the head of the National Hunter Association, arms crossed, jaw set, the words VERAMORE IS SAFE printed beneath him in bold gold letters.
Liu Yun spat on the pavement and looked away.
He was twenty-two years old and had been a registered Hunter for three years. In that time he had completed forty-one E-rank dungeon runs, earned the approximate income of a part-time sandwich shop employee, and received the nickname 'Null Yun' from the broader hunter community. The null referred to his mana signature, which registered at a consistent and humiliating zero-point-three on standard testing equipment. Every other active Hunter in Veramore had a higher output. Even the trainee assigned to filing paperwork at the front desk of the Association building had a higher output.
Liu Yun had checked.
He boarded the number nine bus with dripping boots and found a seat near the back. A Hunter in gleaming B-rank gear was already seated across from him, watching something on his phone with the volume up. The audio was a news segment, a reporter standing before the smoldering remains of what had been a residential block in the Eastgate district, where a Gate had fractured two nights ago and unleashed a flood of underworld creatures onto three city streets before the response teams arrived.
'The Mythological Underworld continues to press against the borders of our reality,' the reporter said over roaring wind and flashing emergency lights. 'Experts at the Association estimate that Gate activity has increased by thirty-one percent over the last six months alone. Citizens are advised to...'
The B-rank Hunter switched to a comedy stream and laughed at something. Liu Yun stared at the window.
The Gates had existed for fifteen years. Before them, the world had been simple, or at least it had been simple in the way that ignorance makes things simple. Then the sky tore open. Not everywhere at once, but in cities, in fields, in the basements of shopping malls and the floors of subway stations, reality cracked open and revealed what lay beneath it: the Mythological Underworld. A vast, layered realm of ancient power, populated by creatures that humanity had filed away as legend, minotaurs and hydras, Norse einherjar and Egyptian shades, Mesopotamian demons with names carved into clay tablets four thousand years old.
Some of the creatures crossed through. Many of them were hungry.
And in response, as if reality were attempting to balance the scales, certain human beings began to Awaken. A surge of mana would flood their bodies seemingly at random, on the street, in their sleep, in the middle of a meal, and when it faded they were something more than they had been before. Hunters. People capable of entering the Gates, fighting what lived inside them, and emerging with monster cores that powered half the city's energy grid.
Liu Yun had Awakened too.
He just hadn't Awakened well.
The bus shuddered to a stop three blocks from his apartment. He walked the rest of the way with his head down, hands in his pockets, passing the glow of late-night convenience stores and the locked gates of the Association's local branch office. A notice was pinned to the gate: GATE FORMATION DETECTED, SECTOR 7, CLASS D, PARTY RECRUITMENT OPEN, MINIMUM RANK: E.
He paused and read it twice. Class D. That meant dangerous for a solo E-ranker, manageable for a party. His rent was two weeks overdue. His mother's medication refill was due Thursday. He pulled out his phone and submitted a party application before he could talk himself out of it.
His apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that smelled permanently of mildew and takeout grease. He climbed the stairs because the elevator had been broken for six months, and the landlord, a C-rank Hunter who had retired rich and bitter, had no intention of fixing it. Liu Yun unlocked his door, kicked off his wet boots, and stood for a moment in the dark.
One room. A bed, a desk, a hot plate, a stack of monster-core processing manuals he'd been studying in the hope of pivoting careers. On the wall above the desk was a framed photograph: his father in full Hunter gear, grinning wide, one arm slung around a much younger Liu Yun. His father had been a B-rank Hunter. He had died in a D-rank dungeon when Liu Yun was twelve, killed not by a monster but by the structural collapse triggered by a reckless A-ranker pushing too deep too fast.
Liu Yun changed into dry clothes. He heated a can of bean soup and ate it standing over the sink. He checked his phone, the party application had generated an auto-response: SLOT FILLED, TRY AGAIN TOMORROW.
He set an alarm for five-thirty and lay down on the bed without pulling back the covers.
Tomorrow. He would try again tomorrow.
He didn't sleep for a long time. He lay in the dark and listened to the city breathe outside his window, and he thought about the billboard face of Director Voss and the words printed beneath it, and he wondered, not for the first time, who exactly those words were meant to reassure.
Because from where Liu Yun was lying, Veramore didn't feel safe at all.