Winston stood thirty meters from where he’d launched the spell.

He turned slowly and looked at what Grey Charge had done.

The trees were gone. In every direction within a hundred-meter radius, the forest had been flattened completely, trunks were snapped at the base, canopy stripped away and the ground carved into furrows from the shockwave alone.

A wide, open clearing now existed where dense forest had stood seconds ago. Winston hadn’t used the Level 6 Gladius. He hadn’t activated Energy Coating. Just the spell on its own, boosted by a single soul.

’The effects are this massive without any of that?’

He pulled up the spell’s current level and the number confirmed what he was seeing.

Soul Burn had pushed Grey Charge from Level 15 to Level 30.

Winston went still for a moment. Level 30 was Rank Two territory.

The absolute peak of a Rank One initiate, someone who had grinded all the way to a hundred Mastery points, topped out at a Level 20.

Winston had just blown past that ceiling with one boosted expendable spell. And he hadn’t even stacked his other upgrades on top of it.

’If I combine this with the Level 10 Energy Coating and the Level 6 Gladius—’

He stopped that thought before it finished. The implication was too large to sit with comfortably right now.

He pulled back, reined it in, and focused on what actually mattered in the short term.

Soul capacity.

He could currently use five lotus slots, four now, with one on a day cooldown after Life Tithe had triggered.

Increasing that number required reaching twenty Mastery points naturally. That was still a long way off. Gathering souls wasn’t the bottleneck. The usable capacity was.

Winston exhaled and accepted the limitation. It was still far better than anything he’d had this morning.

He deactivated Soul Burn.

The heat in his chest faded and his Mastery dropped back to its natural level. His energy returned to zero. Grey Charge reverted to Level 15. Everything went back to baseline after the temporary boosts were gone.

Then he noticed movement at the edge of the clearing.

Freya was walking toward him.

She stopped a few meters away and studied his face with the kind of focused attention that suggested she was cross-referencing him against every student she had ever memorized.

Whatever result she came to, it clearly didn’t match anyone in her records. She looked at the flattened forest. Then back at him. Then she stepped forward and extended her hand.

"My name is Freya. Can we be friends?"

Winston stared at the outstretched hand.

"..."

Freya’s hand stayed outstretched as Winston just stared at it.

"You might not know me, but—"

"I know who you are." Winston cut her off. "We went to the same academy, actually."

Freya’s composed expression cracked for just a moment.

"We did?"

Winston watched the confusion work its way across her face.

"Yeah we did...I’m surprised you don’t recognize me. Then again, you never attended any classes, so I suppose that tracks."

Freya studied him harder, clearly running through every name and face she had stored away. Coming up empty.

"Are you a prodigy raised by the Class Holder Association? Did you skip classes as well? How is someone this talented completely unknown to me?"

Winston blinked at the rapid-fire questions. Of everything he had expected to happen today, standing in a flattened forest being interrogated by Freya Valeria wasn’t on the list. He gave the only honest answer available.

"I didn’t miss any classes. I don’t work for the Association. I just attended Nightwing like everyone else."

"Then why don’t I remember you?"

Winston shrugged.

"Maybe if you’d shown up occasionally, you would have."

Freya went quiet. She lowered her hand slowly and looked at him with an expression that was harder to read than before.

"...Maybe you’re right." She paused as she thought over her next words carefully. "Can I get your name?"

"Yeah I don’t see an issue with that, it’s Winston Vance."

"I won’t forget it."

The lightness in the exchange evaporated immediately after that and Freya’s expression shifted from the casual curiosity to something sharper and more serious.

She glanced at the flattened treeline around them, then back at Winston.

"I think it’s fortunate we ran into each other. Because something is wrong with this region."

Winston had already been turning that thought over since the Grey Tusk had appeared so far from the beacon. He nodded slowly.

"I noticed."

"I believe we entered a false gate."

The words landed like a stone dropping into still water and Winston’s expression went flat as a result.

He knew exactly what a false gate was. It was a higher-tier gate disguising itself as a lower one, mimicking the readings, passing the checks and pulling in holders who had no idea what they were actually walking into.

The gate’s natural restriction still applied, meaning no holder above Rank One could cross a higher tier gate pretending to be a tier one gate.

But everything inside would be scaled for a far more dangerous tier. For fresh initiates who had just awakened their classes hours ago, a false gate wasn’t a difficult challenge.

It was a death sentence.

"The Association ran the one-hour test though," Winston said. That test existed specifically for this, send a monster through the gate, wait sixty minutes for the readings to spike and reveal the gate’s true rank.

It was standard procedure for every new blue gate. "There’s no way they missed it."

"They ran it," Freya said. "I don’t doubt that. But this has to be the answer. There is no other explanation for why a Level 15 monster would be roaming this far from the beacon in what’s supposed to be a Tier One gate.

In a real Tier One region, that creature should be sitting on top of the guardian’s territory or it should be the guardian.

Finding it out here in an open forest means the region’s power ceiling is far higher than what the test showed."

Winston’s grip on the gladius tightened without him meaning to.

In a real Tier One gate, he had been managing. He had a plan, a system and resources that stretched his reach well beyond his natural level.

In whatever this gate actually was, everything he had calculated about survival had just become unreliable.

Easy mode had just ended.