The club missed my head by an inch. Hot wind slapped my nose, slling like sweat and dumpster stew. A concrete pillar exploded behind , showering in tile dust like the dungeon was trying to bury early. I ducked, jabbed, and my bargain-bin dagger snapped on the ogre’s shin with a click so pathetic it sounded like, Congrats, loser. You lose at stabbing.
Yeah. Hi. I’m Ethan. F-rank. The F stood for free funeral.
The thing in front of was eight hundred pounds of gym-bro rock troll, stinking like onions rotting in a gym bag. Skin the color of a cracked driveway. A concrete bat with rebar jamd through it like DIY murder décor. And those eyes—wet copper pennies that didn’t want money, they wanted to watch die slow.
I stumbled backward over a splintered bench, ankle wobbling like a drunk flamingo. Behind , the ogre’s club dragged and scread on tile, throwing sparks like the dungeon had a smoker’s cough.
Arcadia City loved to dress gates up like they were glamorous. Posters with smiling hunters, idol comrcials, strears doing "Top Ten Boss Kills" with clickbait thumbnails of guys mid-scream. Nobody stread the part where your knife snapped in half and you started bargaining with God about rent money.
"Nice club," I told the ogre, because apparently my brain thought sarcasm was armor. "What’s that, Murder Depot’s spring collection?"
It roared back. The room rattled like loose teeth. Blue fungus on the cracked subway walls pulsed like it was nursing a migraine. My mouth tasted like copper and panic
Two minutes ago, I had a team. A real, breathing team. Then the tank yelled "Fallback!"—hunter code for ditch the trash rank—and suddenly I was a one-man funeral. They were gone before my brain even finished forming the thought: Wait, guys—
Hunters are supposed to cover each other. Tank up front. Healer keeps you patched up. DPS swings wild. F-rank hangs back, pretends to matter, tries not to breathe too loud. That’s the script. But plans? Plans break faster than my bargain-bin dagger.
The ogre ca at like rent was due. The floor bucked my knees up into my chest. I rolled sideways, slamd into a support beam hard enough to see discount fireworks behind my eyes. The club whooshed past my ear, missed by inches, and turned the beam into gravel and my spine into tuning forks. Dust rained in my hair like the ceiling was shedding dandruff.
Let explain a little. Ten years ago, the first gate tore open in Arcadia. Monsters crawled out like the city had a hole punched in its guts. A handful of people awakened—throwing fire, glowing, healing. They got shiny ranks, guild contracts, their faces on billboards. The rest of us? Sirens, curfews, and those 3 a.m. "Shelter In Place" texts. Which is governnt code for lie still and hope you taste bad.
I hadn’t awakened. Not at seventeen when my lab partner blew a breaker with lightning and the school paper crowned him Thunder Prince. Not at nineteen when recruiters in glossy jackets promised "bright futures" that didn’t include community college. Not at twenty-one when I whispered at the ceiling of a dorm closet and prayed for anything. Nothing. Just . Ethan Cross. Human. Lowercase h.
So I took the exam. Scraped F-rank by the skin of my teeth. Bought a used dagger that rattled like it already wanted to retire. Signed a contract that scread HAZARD PAY in bold and whispered "accepts all risk" in fine print that looked smug about it. I smiled for the guild photo and tried not to bleed on their carpet.
That was the résumé. This was the reality.
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. Its ad still showed a model sipping cola like she’d never slled a dungeon in her life. The ogre’s club hit, and the machine shrieked like a kettle before folding in half like a sad tal taco.
Inventory check: one snapped dagger, one backpack with a dead phone, and half a granola bar that tasted like birdseed and bad decisions. No plan. Just a warning label that read: Congratulations, you’re screwed.
I crawled toward a maintenance room. The backpack strap snagged on a bolt. I yanked, it popped, and my wallet cried out in the distance.
The ogre squeezed through the doorway, concrete grinding off its shoulders like dungeon dandruff. It sniffed once, found , and brightened like I was dinner and dessert. Perfect. I love my life.
The room had pipes, dust, and nothing useful. A dead generator sat in the corner like a sulking fridge. A chain-link fence cut the space in half, like that would stop anything. A poster on the wall read SAFETY IS A CHOICE—except sobody had replaced the O with a dried brown sar. 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 out."
It did not hear out. The club rose slow, savoring it. Silence swelled—just breath, hum, and my brain juggling fifty stupid thoughts at once.
Like how my apartnt bed squeaked if you so much as looked at it. How the hallway light buzzed all night and the landlord called that ambience. How Guild Row’s towers glead like toothpaste ads while the whole city rotted underneath.
How I once watched an S-rank cut a stone giant in half at the arena and walked ho wired, hungry, heartsick for a life I’d never touch.
How I should’ve learned plumbing. People always need plumbing. Monsters don’t crawl out of pipes, right? ...Don’t answer that.
How if I sohow saved enough, maybe I’d crawl out of the slums before I turned thirty. Big maybe. Huge if.
And, yeah—sex. Or, you know, the theory of it. On paper. Not in practice. I was twenty-two with a romantic résumé that read: one awkward date, bad lighting. Do not laugh. Okay, laugh a little. My life sucked.
The club dropped. I jumped left because left felt faster. The floor broke into teeth. The shockwave slamd 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 first.
"You’re not special," I told myself. Out loud, because apparently I needed the mo in stereo. "You’re not chosen. You picked a job that eats people, and guess what—it’s lunchti."
Humor circled panic like vultures. I kept tossing scraps, hoping it stayed busy. It didn’t.
Boots hamred tile sowhere behind the ogre. Shouting, but my ears sared the words into static. The ogre glanced back, annoyed, then locked right back on the insult standing in front of it: .
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 to be careful, which was like telling rain not to be wet. I thought about that guild receptionist smile—pity inside custor 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 na got mispronounced in the morial 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 .
"Hold on," I said again, because my last line couldn’t be silence. I held up the broken hilt like a traffic wand. "Ti out, let’s talk about it."
The ogre obliged by not obliging 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 "dead weight" like it was my legal na. Learned how to fix elevators. Learned to be soone else.
There’s a version where I roared sothing 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, tal, bad decisions. I felt very small. Very .
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 mory 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. Soone scread, or I dread it. The club ca down like a door slamming on the last room in my head.
Then everything went out.
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