The morning began without hurry.
Sailor opened his eyes and lay still for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling. White, smooth, without a single crack. Through the panoramic window, soft morning light poured into the bedroom, falling in long strips across the wooden floor and the edge of the bed. Somewhere below, behind the double glass, the waking city hummed faintly.
Their home was a good one. Not enormous, but spacious: three rooms, high ceilings, a small balcony overlooking the park. His father worked as an engineer at a company that handled perimeter reinforcement around the towers. His mother ran a private medical practice. They lived quietly, without excess, but without hardship.
Sailor got up, stretched, and walked to the window.
Outside, everything looked ordinary. People were heading to work. Children dragged backpacks behind them. At the intersection stood a patrol of hunters in light armor, two of them, ranks C and B judging by their patches. An ordinary morning in a city that had long since grown accustomed to living alongside the towers.
The towers had appeared seven years ago. No one still knew why. One day, across the entire world, enormous structures of black stone and unknown metal had risen from the earth. Different heights, different shapes. Some were the size of ordinary buildings. Others rose above the clouds. Inside each of them, something lived, moved, waited.
The first expeditions never returned. Governments cut off access, declared states of emergency, began constructing theories. And then the awakened appeared, and everything changed. People who, for unknown reasons, had received power began entering the towers and returning alive. With resources. With experience. With levels.
The System became part of the world just as naturally as money and power had been before it.
Sailor looked at the tower visible from their balcony. Lowest tier, class C, long since cleared halfway through by the local guild. It stood there every day, black and silent, and he had grown as accustomed to it as one grows accustomed to a mountain on the horizon.
"Twenty-two years," he thought. "And still nothing."
He was not awakened. That was a simple fact he had long since accepted. Most people never awakened at all. The System chose on its own, by what criteria no one knew precisely. Some awakened at twelve, others at thirty-five. Some never awakened at all.
Sailor belonged to the second group. Or so he had believed.
The day was free. He had graduated from university six months ago, from the faculty of protective systems engineering, and was currently doing an internship at a small company that handled barrier maintenance around residential districts. The work was calm, technical, without risk. Not hunting in towers, but respectable.
He ate breakfast, drank his coffee, and went outside. Not for any particular reason, just to walk. Sometimes he liked to wander through the city without purpose, watching people, listening to the life that moved all around him.
He passed through the park, bought water from a vending machine near the eastern gates, and stopped at a low fence beyond which the neutral perimeter began. It was quieter here. Almost no one came here just to walk, only patrols and technicians.
This was exactly where everything began.
♢ ♢ ♢ ♢
At first he simply felt something strange.
Not pain. Not dizziness. Something else, difficult to put into words. A pressure from within, as though someone were carefully pressing against the inside walls of his chest, slowly, methodically. As though something that had long been sleeping somewhere deep inside had suddenly begun to wake.
Sailor stopped.
The pressure intensified. Not unpleasant, but noticeable. He stepped back and leaned against a concrete fence post. His legs held steady. His head was clear. Only this growing sensation inside, hot, pulsing, like a second heartbeat somewhere behind his ribs.
And then light flashed before his eyes.
Not bright, not sharp. Bluish, soft. Semi-transparent letters arranged themselves in the air before him, even rows that he saw clearly despite the sun shining directly into his face.
[ Anomaly detected ]
[ Initializing system… ]
[ Analyzing… ]
[ Error ]
[ Unable to determine type ]
[ Re-analyzing… ]
Sailor blinked.
He raised his hand and tried to touch the letters. His fingers passed through them, but the light shivered slightly, as though reacting to the movement.
"The System," he realized. "This is the awakening system."
He had seen this happen to others. Watched videos, read articles, heard stories. When someone awakened, the system appeared cleanly and immediately. Rank. Type. Characteristics. No errors. No red text about anomalies and inability to determine type.
The pressure inside reached its peak. Sailor clenched his teeth. Still not painful, but the sensation was now so strong that he exhaled involuntarily. Heat rolled through his chest, down his arms, reached his fingertips and then receded.
The light before his eyes flickered once more.
And the System restarted.
[ Analysis complete ]
[ Awakening confirmed ]
[ Name: Sailor ]
[ Race: Human ]
[ Type: Anomaly ]
[ Class: None ]
[ Level: 1 ][ 0% ]
[ Strength: 12 ]
[ Agility: 10 ]
[ Constitution: 11 ]
[ Mana: 15 ]
[ Stat Points: 0 ]
[ Skills: — ]
[ Talent: — ]
[ Trait: — ]
Sailor stared at the screen for a long time.
No skills. No talent. No trait. Only base characteristics and a type the System had labeled as anomaly.
Anomaly. He knew what that meant. A rare type, extremely rare. The System could not classify it within standard parameters. Anomalies did not fit into any conventional class. Mages, enhanced, contractors, all of these had clear parameters, clear paths of development. An anomaly had none of that.
Or it had something so non-standard that the System could not describe it in ordinary terms.
"So what now?" he thought, staring at the empty talent and skill fields. "Just like that? Awakened and nothing?"
The System was silent.
He stood there for several more minutes. The pressure inside had almost completely faded, leaving only a faint warmth somewhere in the center of his chest. Weak, barely perceptible.
Sailor straightened and looked around. No one nearby. The patrol had moved further along the perimeter. No technicians in sight. No one had seen anything.
He slowly started back toward the park.
♢ ♢ ♢ ♢
He reached a bench near the fountain and sat down.
The System's words were still turning over in his mind. Anomaly. Error. Unable to determine type. This did not look like a normal awakening. He had been given no skills, no talent. Just bare stat numbers and an unclear type.
He looked at the water in the fountain and thought.
Registering with the Hunters Association with a result like this was pointless. Without skills, without talent, with the type anomaly, they would either deny him placement or send him in for study. The second option held no appeal at all.
Time passed. People walked by. Someone was feeding pigeons. A child chased a ball around the fountain.
Sailor was already thinking of standing up and going home when the System came alive again.
Without warning. It simply flashed before his eyes, as though it had been waiting for exactly this moment.
[ Incoming signal detected ]
[ Source: unknown ]
[ Contract request ]
Sailor straightened on the bench.
"A contract?" he thought. "Right now?"
He knew about contractors. That was one of the human awakened types, those who formed an agreement with some entity and received power through that bond. Different entities granted different abilities. Contractors were rare and, as a rule, dangerous.
But a contract usually came immediately upon awakening. Not several minutes afterward. And the entity always introduced itself, gave a name, stated its terms. That was a mandatory part of the process. Without a name the contract could not be concluded, the System simply would not accept it.
Sailor looked at the lines before him.
Source unknown. That was also wrong. All known entities that entered contracts with humans had names. Spirits, demons, creatures from rifts, lesser-order gods. All of them were identifiable.
The System updated again.
[ Entity refuses to disclose name ]
[ Entity type: unknown ]
[ Entity level: unknown ]
[ Contract terms: none ]
[ Accept? ]
[ Yes / No ]
Sailor stared at those two words for a long time.
Logic said to refuse. An unknown entity, no terms, no name. This was exactly what every textbook on the awakening system warned against. Never enter a contract blindly. Never agree to what you do not understand.
But something else pulled him forward.
Not curiosity. Something deeper. That same warm sensation in his chest that had appeared along with the awakening. It did not press, did not compel. It simply was. Quiet, steady, like a fire burning evenly with no intention of going out.
"Who are you, exactly?" he thought, addressing that feeling inside.
There was no answer. Only warmth.
Sailor closed his eyes for a moment. Then opened them.
And chose, in his mind: yes.
[ Contract accepted ]
[ Processing… ]
[ Error ]
[ Contract name undefined ]
[ System designation assigned: Nameless Contract ]
[ Talent acquired: Nameless Contract ]
[ Trait acquired: Dragon's Will ]
Sailor went still.
Nameless Contract. He had never heard of such a thing. A contract always received its name from the entity that concluded it. That was a fundamental rule. The entity named itself, and that name became the name of the contract. That was how the System worked. Always.
But this entity had not named itself. And the System, not knowing what to do, had simply written: nameless.
And then there was Dragon's Will.
"A dragon," he repeated inwardly. "What does a dragon have to do with this?"
He knew about dragons. In the world after the towers appeared, dragons had become reality, like so much else. They existed in the highest towers, in catastrophic zones, on the most dangerous levels. Ordinary people never encountered them. Rank S hunters and above sometimes met them and almost never returned.
And he, a twenty-two-year-old with not a single skill, had just received a trait called Dragon's Will.
The System updated the screen again.
[ Name: Sailor ]
[ Race: Human ]
[ Type: Anomaly ]
[ Class: None ]
[ Level: 1 ][ 0% ]
[ Strength: 12 ]
[ Agility: 10 ]
[ Constitution: 11 ]
[ Mana: 15 ]
[ Stat Points: 0 ]
[ Skills: — ]
[ Talent: Nameless Contract ]
[ Trait: Dragon's Will ]
Sailor exhaled slowly.
There were still no skills. But the talent and trait had appeared. And both were connected to something the System could not fully explain.
He looked at the fountain in front of him. The water flowed evenly. Pigeons walked across the paving stones. The child was still chasing the ball. None of those around him had noticed anything unusual.
And he sat there with a nameless contract with an unknown entity, with a dragon's trait, and a type the System had failed to classify.
"All right," he thought quietly. "Let it be so."
♢ ♢ ♢ ♢
At home he shut himself in his room and carefully read through everything the System had shown him once more.
Talent: Nameless Contract. This meant that the foundation of his power came through this entity. Contractors received their power from their entity, using it as a source. However powerful the entity was, that was how powerful the contractor could become. But his entity had no name. The System could not identify it. That was either very bad, or very unusual.
He thought it was more likely the latter.
Trait: Dragon's Will. He tried searching for information online. Nothing similar came up. There were several articles about hunters with draconic abilities, about dragonkin, about rare classes connected to dragon magic. But Dragon's Will as a trait was not mentioned anywhere.
He closed the laptop and lay down on his back.
The warmth in his chest had not gone anywhere. It had grown slightly weaker, but it was there, constant, steady.
"Who are you?" he thought again, for the third time that day.
This time it seemed as though something responded. Not with words. Not with images. Simply a sense of presence, distant, immense, like something looking at you from a very great depth.
And then it was gone.
And he was left alone in the silence of his room.
Outside, darkness was already falling. The lights of the tower on the horizon glowed dimly and evenly, as they did every evening. The city continued living its life.
Sailor lay there thinking about the nameless entity that had chosen him. About a contract without conditions. About a dragon's will that no one could explain.
He did not know what would come next. Did not know where any of this would lead.
But for the first time in a very long time, he felt that something had finally begun.