"They’re talking about you."

Mina said it from the doorway as he left, not like a warning. More like she was reporting something she had already processed and decided he should know.

Kai didn’t stop walking.

He had known since last night that it would spread. But knowing it and walking through it were different things.

Two blocks from the gate, a group of teenagers had the footage on someone’s phone, watching it loop. Kai saw the screen from across the street. The waist-height shot, gate collapsing in the background, him walking out clean.

One of them looked up and paused when she saw Kai. Her eyes widened, then she looked down at the screen quickly, then back up in shock. She nudged the person beside her without looking away, like she needed to share it before she was even sure. "...That’s him."

The girl beside her flinched, then quickly looked up. Her eyes met Kai’s blue eyes across the street. She opened her mouth, but Kai already looked away before she decided what to do with that.

He turned the corner.

A man on the phone mid-sentence went quiet when his gaze landed on Kai. Two women outside a café stopped talking at the same time as they stared at him. Even the delivery worker leaning against his cart looked up from his screen, looked at Kai’s face, then at the screen in surprise.

Fragments reached him from different directions.

"That’s him."

"Cleared it solo while Daniel’s whole group—"

"He shouldn’t have a class, how is he—"

"Someone like that doesn’t stay unaffiliated for long."

"No class, no guild, no record. Where did he even come from?"

There was nothing useful he could do about any of it. The image was already moving faster than he could affect it, and trying to manage it from the street would only produce more footage. Two versions of him now existed simultaneously.

The system flickered.

[External Attention Detected.]

[Scaling Condition: Active.]

Kai slowed his pace slightly and read it twice. No numbers had appeared alongside it, no output adjustment or amplification figure. Just the condition registering as active, the system acknowledging that something was happening and responding to it.

He looked at the view count and saw it had jumped.

Faster than before with more comments. Every view and comment passed through the system. Even though he hadn’t made the footage and hadn’t chosen to circulate it. The attention scaling didn’t require his participation.

It just required attention.

In a world built on rankings, broadcasts, and dungeon footage... Kai suddenly understood what kind of monster the system was trying to create.

...

The trading hub was fully packed this time.

Kai headed to the counter with the familiar clerk and set his materials down.

The clerk looked up when Kai walked in. "You again." Something in his voice had changed since last time — the suspicion was gone, replaced by something harder to read.

Kai set the materials on the counter and waited.

[Credits Earned: 9,200.]

Less than the first dungeon, but still way above what people were getting. The clerk ran it through once this time without the second check, which told Kai the number had stopped being strange to him.

That was something.

"It was you on that video, wasn’t it?" the clerk said, still looking at the receipt. "Clearing gates by yourself while the named classes wait outside."

Kai said nothing.

The clerk nodded at him. "People are going to start watching where you run." He met Kai’s eyes for the first time. "You should be careful... Not all of them will be friendly."

Kai already knew.

Attention created opportunity but it also created targets.

"Thanks," Kai said and walked out.

...

Dinner was quieter than the night before, which meant Leo was thinking about something. Most likely about him, considering he kept sending him glances when he thought he wasn’t looking.

"People are already competing," Mina spoke up after a bit.

"They have to," Kai said. "Standing still means falling behind."

Mina set her glass down. "Is that what you’re pushing yourself for?" She looked at him. "And the reason you got hurt?"

"I got hurt because something unexpected happened, but I dealt with it." Mina waited. "But yes, you’re right. On the first day when the system appeared, it made it obvious those who fall behind won’t have a good end."

"I get that... But the people doing the higher-level gates have teams," Mina said. "People watching their backs. You’re doing this alone."

"I know."

"I’m not saying stop." She met his eyes. "I’m saying I want you to come back from it."

Kai looked at her. She was watching him the way she did when she’d made up her mind to trust something and knew it. After a moment, she returned to eating while Leo glanced over at Kai.

"That guy at rank three," Leo said. "Raze. His clear times are getting faster every run."

Kai looked at him.

"Just saying," Leo said. "In case it matters."

Kai figured Leo must have looked through the fan-made rankings with his friends at school. Yet he would admit he was a bit curious about how others had cleared their own dungeons compared to him. He looked at the tablet and brought up some videos to look through while finishing his dinner.

...

It was late in the night, and Kai was looking at the notifications that had recently appeared.

[External Attention: Increasing.]

[Scaling Effect: Active.]

[Output Adjustment: Pending.]

The shift was faster than it had been this morning.

Kai could almost feel it.

Thousands of eyes.

People he had never met were thinking about him at the exact same time. He picked up the Fractured Blade and turned it slowly. He could feel it anticipating him, leaning toward each motion before he’d fully decided on it.

He hadn’t run a gate today, but tens of thousands of people had watched thirty seconds of footage on a loop throughout the day. And the system was reading every single one of those views the same way it read everything else

"Is it really that simple?" he said quietly.

He sat with that for a moment.

He was given abilities that scaled with attention, in a world that had just announced it was about to make every player publicly visible.

None of that was accidental.

The system had built him for a world that watched everything.

He almost laughed.

Then every screen in the city changed.

Not a flicker and not a gradual brightening. Every screen at once, in windows and on buildings across the street, and on every phone visible from where he was sitting. The specific quality of something switched by a single source rather than building from multiple points.

A voice came through that was system-generated.

[System Announcement.] [Ranking System: Initializing.]

[City-Based Rankings: Enabled.]

[Performance Metrics: Calculated from Day One.]

Kai went completely still.

Calculated from Day One, which meant the system kept track of everything from the moment the gates opened.

All waiting to be visible to everyone.

[Public Visibility: Active.]

[First Ranking Release: 24 Hours.]

The screens went dark. The city did not.

From his window, he could hear it — voices from open windows, someone in the street below saying did you see that to someone who had clearly also seen it, phones lighting up everywhere visible from where he was sitting.

A city of people all receiving the same information at the same moment, the reaction spreading not from a single point outward but everywhere simultaneously, as the sky had changed again.

The Fractured Blade shifted in his grip. The edges were moving faster than before, spinning up in response to something, though he had not asked them to.

He watched them for a moment. Then he stopped.

There was something different about the way the blade sat in his hand. Not the weight but more like a pressure against his palm that had not been there an hour ago, subtle enough that he almost missed it, like the blade had found something new to pay attention to.

He turned it over slowly. No notification came up or condition met.

Nothing to explain it.

[External Attention: Surge Detected.]

The scaling system was probably reacting to the city-wide surge. But the pressure in the blade was more than that explained, and nothing in the system accounted for it.

He set the question aside and looked back at the window.

He saw the screens still glowing on the buildings across the street and then at the footage still circulating on every phone visible from the window. Twenty-four hours were sitting between him and a public list that was going to show his name next to the word NULL.

For every player in the city. Every guild. Every person with a reason to recruit him or remove him.

He almost laughed at the timing.

"Then I decide what they see," he said. "And I make sure what they see is worth watching."

He set the blade down, looked at the window, and thought about twenty-four hours and what they needed to contain. The ranking was going to show whatever it showed. He couldn’t change six days of data.

Twenty-four hours.

Then the city would see him.

Not the footage someone else made. Not the gap where his class should be. He was doing something that answered all of it at once.