The city went quiet when the number changed.

Not fully.

Cars still moved and streams were still playing. But for several seconds after the update, conversations stopped.

[Remaining Active C-Rank Dungeons in Mythal City: 20.]

People had known this was coming, but knowing it and seeing it on every screen at once were different things.

Near a food stand, a small boy tugged his mother’s sleeve. "What happens when they’re all gone?"

Nobody nearby pretended not to hear the question, and that was the worst part. She opened her mouth and then closed it.

...

By the time Kai reached the guild district, it was already active.

Armored convoys pushed through streets too narrow for them.

Elite teams moved between gates in tight formation. Outside one of the remaining C-rank entrances, two guild representatives were in each other’s faces over something that had stopped being a professional dispute a while ago.

"That slot belonged to us!"

"You missed the timing window!"

"By three minutes!"

"Move faster next time."

The hunters standing behind both representatives had a look of despair. Bandaged arms. Armor patched in places that had already taken new hits. Three of them had sat down against the outer dungeon wall, weapons still on the ground beside them, one of them asleep with his chin on his chest.

Nearby, a healer had her eyes shut and a recovery potion open in her hand, not drinking it yet. Saving it for later. Kai walked on. The further into the lower district he got, the more the mood changed. It wasn’t panic yet.

But the city had started bracing for something. He caught pieces of the same conversation on three different streets, different voices, same words.

"If the B-ranks appear before we level enough—"

"Then what?"

Nobody answered immediately enough.

"We fall behind."

A group of younger hunters sat outside a closed supply shop with their gear on the ground, eyes on the ranking board across the street. One of them said, "I think I’m already too weak for this."

Nobody argued. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

...

The dungeon they had cleared that morning had gone the way they all went.

Another gate collapsed.

Another blue light climbed into the skyline.

Another number disappeared.

He and Sera came through the exit, and the crowd outside was larger than the previous crowd, which had been larger than the one before that.

The gate shattered.

The light rose.

The crowd reacted.

"KAI! SERA!"

Sera stretched beside him, her armor dimmed to resting state, a bruise visible along her jaw from a hit that had gotten through early in the run. Kai had a cut along his forearm that had mostly closed.

"That dungeon was rough," Sera said.

"Yeah," Kai said.

The crowd pressed closer against the barriers, louder than the last clear. A man near the front gripped the barrier with both hands. A teenage girl stood a few rows back, not filming, just watching.

One voice rose above the rest. "Don’t leave us behind!"

Kai slowed.

"Keep climbing! We’re counting on you!"

He looked at the crowd. Not the phones or the noise, but the faces behind them. He thought about the younger hunters outside the closed supply shop. The one who had said I think I’m already too weak for this without anyone arguing.

Sera stepped beside him. "Kai."

He looked away from the crowd. "Let’s go," he said.

She fell into step without asking further.

...

Sora had been live since the morning update, and her stream had not dropped below eight hundred thousand viewers since the number hit twenty. She pulled up the dungeon tracker on her second monitor and turned it toward the camera without saying anything for a moment.

"Look at them," she said. "They haven’t stopped. Some of them probably can’t remember the last time they slept." She watched gate positions being contested in real time. "The hunters running these are exhausted... There even people sleeping against walls! While the Healers are collapsing from mana exhaustion. Teams running second clear on the same day because they’re afraid someone else will take the gate if they rest."

Her chat ran slower than usual.

It feels like we’re running out of time...

Everyone’s too desperate now!

What happens when they’re all gone?

She did not have an answer for the last one.

"I don’t know," she said. "I don’t think anyone does." She looked back at the tracker. "But I’ll tell you what I keep thinking about. Nobody’s going to remember the clear times. They’re going to remember how this felt. Watching the number go down. Wondering if it was supposed to feel like winning." She paused. "Because right now it doesn’t feel that way to me."

She reached for her drink and realized it had gone warm an hour ago. Her chat went quiet for almost ten seconds. Then it came back slowly, people processing rather than reacting.

Sora had started recognizing the difference instinctively, and she let it run.

...

Victor watched the twenty announcements from his office window. Below the window, the city was moving faster than it had that morning.

Victor turned back to his desk.

The screen was still paused on the same frame it had been paused on for three days. Kai, above the Air Duke, mid-sequence, three air-steps caught in the footage at an angle that should not have been possible. He had brought in two class mechanics analysts.

One of them had trailed off mid-sentence and gone quiet, staring at it. Victor had watched it sixteen times and arrived at the same place every time: he did not know what he was looking at.

That bothered Victor more than the footage itself. He had tried to contain it, but that had made things worse.

He knew that now.

The problem was that every option he would normally reach for made the same thing happen. A direct move against Kai put him in the public eye faster. Victor looked at the tracker. Twenty dungeons left.

He had spent weeks thinking of Kai as a problem to be managed. He was starting to think that was the wrong way to look at it entirely.

He walked back to the window.

The twenty blue lights were still out there in the skyline, each one a little closer to going dark for good.

...

Mythal barely slept that night.

Apartment windows stayed lit past midnight. The ranking boards kept updating, names shuffling up and down, the remaining count holding at twenty in a way that made it feel like it was already nineteen.

Kai sat at his desk with the notebook open. Three days of numbers filled the page, air-step durations mapped against fan counts across every run since Sky Grave Dominion. The pattern held every time he checked it. He was not finished, but he was getting there.

He closed the notebook and looked out the window. His goal for rank one was getting closer, soon he will reach top ten.

Then every screen in the city flickered.

Once.

Then twice.

On the street below, people stopped mid-step and looked up.

[Emergency Ranking Update: Initializing.]

He set the notebook aside and looked at the skyline. Whatever came next, the direction was the same.

The city waited for the next number to change.