The plaza was still loud when Kai left it.

He found a quieter street two blocks over and stopped there, back against the wall of a convenience store with the plaza reduced to a low hum in the distance.

He opened his status screen.

[Player: Kai Rosefield.]

[Rank: F.]

[Class: Null.]

[Level: 1]

[Exp Requirement: 0/100]

He looked at the empty class slot for a moment. Then scrolled down.

[Attributes]

[Strength: 14.]

[Vitality: 17.]

[Agility: 13.]

[Magic: 14.]

"These are F-rank?" he muttered.

That didn’t line up.

He heard from the others that they all started out with ten in every stat. Even the Epic Class Elena was the same. Which meant the more dangerous players would start appearing soon.

Before he fought or even leveled up.

Kai exhaled once. "...Good."

He scrolled further and found the two lines that hadn’t appeared on the public display during the ceremony.

[Passive: Distortion.]

[Effect: Gives the best possible outcome for the situation]

[Passive: Reward Distortion.]

[Effect: Alters calculated reward output.]

He read the second one twice. Then a third time, and on the third pass, he stopped at one word specifically.

He needed to see it work, not later but now. He pushed off the wall, picked up a loose stone, and threw it at the wall across the alley.

The stone hit at an angle he had not aimed for. Not the center of the wall, but a specific point near the base where a crack had already started. The section came apart from that single point outward, stone dropping in pieces.

He looked at where it had been.

That was not his throw. That was the distortion of finding the one contact point that produced the maximum result from the minimum input.

Kai trailed off as he glanced at the passive. "The optimal outcome..."

He quickly glanced back at the second passive and locked onto the keyword.

Alter.

The system would run its standard calculation, and then the distortion would rewrite the outcome to be better. In fact, there is likely no ceiling to how high it could be. Something shifted behind his eyes, a blue glow that went unnoticed.

Then his screen flickered.

[Host Condition: Stable.]

The blue screen distorted for a moment like something behind it had moved. Kai suddenly realized the alley had gone completely silent. Even the wind had stopped.

He froze. "Host?"

Not player or user but Host.

The word hadn’t come up once during the ceremony. The system hadn’t used it on anyone else. Just him. The screen disappeared. Player meant you were in the game. User meant you had access. Host meant something was using you. He stood there longer than he meant to.

It was still quiet in the area.

"...So it’s not just the results." Something else had been given to him when he picked this.

It wasn’t visible but active.

He closed the screen as testing here was useless and started walking again. If the system ran on conditions, then he would find the right ones. And break them.

...

The city felt different from the way it had three hours ago.

Two men were arguing outside a pharmacy with grins on their faces about the gates. A girl sat on the apartment steps with light swirling around in her hand.

He passed a darkened storefront and caught his reflection in the glass — except it held still for half a second after he’d already moved on.

He didn’t slow down.

The world was adjusting too quickly and dangerous people would appear soon. He stepped off the main road and walked through the neighborhood before finding his apartment.

Kai heard Leo through the door before he knocked; he was talking very fast. Mina was close to the entrance when he opened the door. Her black hair was pulled back, and her crimson eyes went over him quickly in concern.

"You’re back," she said. "I kept texting."

"Phone was off."

"Why."

"Crowds," he said, stepping inside.

Leo came out of the kitchen mid-sentence, bread still in hand. "Did you get something good? Daniel from the news got a fire sword thing. Did you see it? It was on every stream."

"I saw it."

"What did you get?"

Kai rubbed Leo’s hair with a faint smile. "Still figuring it out."

Leo squinted at him with a grin. "That means weird, right? My friend Hana said some people got weird ones."

"Go finish eating," Mina said.

Leo went, though he looked back twice before disappearing into the kitchen.

Mina turned back to Kai and raised a brow when she saw him moving towards the kitchen. He opened the cabinet before blinking when he saw it was the wrong one.

He closed it and opened the right cabinet.

He had opened the wrong one because his mind had already moved past the kitchen. But he had seen what was in it. Two cans and the rice bag were pushed to the back with almost nothing left.

Their part-time pay wasn’t until next week.

He said nothing about the cabinet.

’So little?’

"Wrong cabinet," Mina said from behind him.

"Simple mistake."

"A weird one, considering how long we’ve lived here."

He filled a glass with water and drank, mind already somewhere past the kitchen.

"You’re acting differently," she said. "Did something happen with the class?" 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

There were things he could tell her. The passives, the overflow counter, the word the system had used for him that wasn’t player or user.

"Long day," he said.

She held his eyes for a moment and didn’t push. That was also something she had always done.

"Dinner in twenty," she said.

They ate together with the window open, the three of them at the small table with the evening air moving the curtain slowly. The bulb above the table dimmed for a breath when Kai sat down, then steadied.

No one noticed.

Leo talked through most of it. About streams and rankings and the gate near the university, where no monsters had come out yet, but everyone was watching. He pulled out his phone and slid it across the table toward Kai without breaking his explanation to Mina.

"Someone already made a ranking list. Forty thousand votes."

Kai picked up the phone.

The list was rough, community-built, cobbled together from ceremony footage and eyewitness posts across the city. Incomplete and probably wrong in places, but spreading fast enough that wrong didn’t entirely matter yet.

He scrolled down through it.

Near the top, sitting in third place, was a name he recognized.

[Victor Hale.]

[Epic Class: Sovereign Blade.]

A short clip was attached. Twelve seconds of phone footage from the ceremony, the crowd reaction is audible even through the small speaker. The comments below it were still loading faster than they could settle.

"He’s definitely in the top 5 city-wide at minimum."

"Sovereign Blade is an S-tier class! It has to be considered an Epic!"

"This guy is going to be untouchable!"

Leo leaned over. "Don’t you know him? I recall seeing him at your school. Victor something?" He pointed at the vote count. "He is a big deal now, look how many comments that one has." He read one aloud without thinking. "He was always going to be something."

Leo said it the way he said most things he read online, without attaching his own opinion to it yet, just reporting what was there. He was still deciding what he thought.

Kai took the phone before glancing at the comments and then scrolling down the list.

Top ten.

Top twenty.

Top fifty, but he still couldn’t even find his own name. He pushed the phone back to Leo while he was talking to Mina. Kai picked up his fork and kept eating, and thought about what it meant that the system had decided to use a word like that for him specifically.

Something was being hosted.

Whether that was a good thing was a different question.

After Leo went to sleep, the dishes were done. Kai headed to his room, but then Mina appeared in the hallway with her arms crossed.

"What’s the plan for tomorrow?" she asked. "Are you going to try–"

"I will. And don’t worry, I will be careful. I just need to understand my class if I want to plan for the future."

Mina’s eyes narrowed for a couple of seconds before nodding. "Leo came home today with a school notice that his fee is due Friday." She said, "The extension we asked for is done. I’ve already got the money ready, so you don’t need to worry if he mentions it."

"Thank you, Mina."

She nodded once before moving past him towards her room.

Kai stood in the hallway alone in the quiet of the apartment and thought about the word host. He thought about the two cans and the empty rice bag and the school fee due Friday and the system rewriting its own rules to accommodate what was inside him.

Then the numbers.

10x

100x

1,000x

10,000x

The crowd had laughed. The officials had moved on. Mina did not know. Leo did not know.

Nobody in the city knew what had happened on that stage except him. He was going to find out what it meant before anyone else did. Somewhere else, something in the system had started watching back.