Kai checked the time when he woke up.

Only ten more hours until the official ranking is released.

He lay there for a moment with that number sitting in the quiet of the room. Whatever position six days of solo runs had produced was already locked into the system and waiting. He could already imagine what would happen. If he made the top 100, thousands of people would notice him without fail.

He picked up his phone and opened the forums.

The clip had grown even more overnight. The video had already been reposted dozens of times with different edits, slowed clips, and cropped angles. Someone had put together a side-by-side comparison of his exit and Daniel’s group standing outside the gate, looking burned.

Someone else had looped the moment the gate collapsed behind him and added text asking if it was real. Another had shown Daniel’s group walking out before it switched to him. One looking damaged and frustrated, the other clean and unbothered. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The view counter refreshed while he was looking at it. The number jumped by thousands in a single refresh, not hundreds. It was reaching close to five hundred thousand and was still climbing, making him put down the phone.

Then picked it up again to find it had already moved.

He scrolled through the comment section. Most of the conversation had collapsed into one thread at the top, pinned there by sheer volume.

The top comment read simply: "He doesn’t have a class."

The replies were still coming in. Someone said it wasn’t possible. Someone pointed at the NULL tag in the footage. Someone asked what he was actually using. Someone said it broke the system.

Two lines near the top of the thread stood out from the rest.

"Guilds will start looking for him."

"I heard they already are."

He kept reading, and then one comment stopped him.

"Okay, the null class output is weird, but let’s not pretend it’s Victor Hale territory. That’s an actual epic class. This is probably a one-time thing."

Eleven thousand likes came right after.

All of them agreed with the comment, and there were hundreds of replies under it that also restated the same thing.

Bro moves like he already cleared the dungeon once.

Nah, there’s no way that null class weirdo could.

The system literally bugged around him!

I thought we would get another Epic, but it was just another disappointment. Victor still clears him!

Of course.

All of those had hundreds to a thousand likes as well.

Kai looked at the number for a moment.

Eleven thousand people had watched thirty seconds of footage and decided it was worth a shrug. Eleven thousand people had looked at the name Victor Hale and then Kai and drawn a line between them in public, and the line said everything about where they thought he stood.

He thought about the barricade outside the awakening ceremony. Victor was leaning against it with his arms crossed. The sympathy was delivered loud enough for the crowd to hear, along with the comment about his siblings.

His grip on the phone tightened slightly. Not anger exactly, but irritation at being dismissed. The irritation faded almost immediately.

It wasn’t useful yet.

What was useful was that he knew where the bar was now. Kai stared at the comment for a moment longer than the others. Then locked the phone as this was good, he would let them compare him to Victor.

It would make what came later even worse for them.

Now he had two options.

He could stay hidden, keep running gates, and let the scaling build quietly without anyone understanding what was driving his numbers. The risk was that the footage was already out there, and people would keep looking for him. He couldn’t pull it back.

The second option was to stop treating the visibility as background noise and use it. The attention scaling responded to what people watched. He couldn’t control what people chose to watch. He could control what there was to see.

He stayed with both options for about thirty seconds.

The first one was safer, which meant less chance of dealing with unsavory people. The second one was faster, which helped deal with the debt notice on the kitchen table.

He already knew which one he was choosing. He’d already decided the moment he saw the eleven thousand likes.

[External Attention: Sharply Increasing.]

[Distortion Output: Increasing.]

[Adaptive Response: Accelerating.]

And then he left his room.

Mina was already up and had made breakfast for them. She nodded to him before continuing to eat her toast. He thanked her and began eating while being lost in thought. After ten minutes, Leo appeared from the doorway. "Did you see the changes in the fan-made rankings?" he asked while rubbing his eyes.

"I did," Kai said.

"You’re not on it." He said as he sat down. "I kept on checking and typing in different things, but you weren’t coming up."

"I know," Kai said.

"But you cleared a gate yesterday! Two of them." Leo frowned before dropping the tablet. "I don’t get it!? Why aren’t you on the list yet!?"

"The people don’t know it’s me. So they aren’t sure who cleared them," Kai said.

Leo blinked. "Isn’t that bad? Wait, can’t you do something to make them–"

Kai placed Leo’s breakfast in front of him. "No, it isn’t. Because the system will display the official ranking, and it will be useless."

Leo looked at the plate and started eating. A moment passed. "I told my friend Hana you cleared two gates yesterday," he said without looking up.

"Something happened, didn’t it?" Kai raised a brow. "Did she not believe you?"

"She didn’t even after I showed her the video." Leo frowned. "She kept saying it had to be fake... because her older sister told her to.."

"It’s to be expected," Mina said without softening it. "No one would easily believe a person with no class could clear a dungeon." She looked at Kai. "But that doesn’t matter, right?"

Leo grinned. "It doesn’t! Don’t worry, I will make sure she believes it."

Mina laughed quietly.

Kai looked at Leo for a moment without saying anything. Eleven thousand people in a forum thread had decided he wasn’t good enough. One twelve-year-old at the table had told his friend she was wrong and gone back to eating his breakfast like it was nothing.

That was enough.

Number one in the city. He would get there.

Leo was happily eating his breakfast while scrolling through his phone. Kai watched him for a moment, then let his eyes drift to the school bag by the door. The left strap was frayed through at the buckle, wound over with a strip of black electrical tape. It had been fixed carefully, the tape lay flat and even. He had no idea when Leo had done it.

He looked away before Leo could catch him looking.

He would find a new bag before the week was out. Something Leo would just come downstairs one morning and find there, and neither of them would say anything about it.

After breakfast, Kai went back to his room and saw the clip had gained more views in the last hour. The comment thread was still growing with new replies appearing faster than they could settle.

Someone had started a separate post asking anyone with combat class knowledge to analyze the footage and explain how the outputs were possible for an unclassed player.

No one had a satisfying answer yet.

The best attempt was three careful paragraphs from someone with a real combat background, concluding it had to be a hidden passive like some rare variant the system wasn’t displaying.

They were confident but wrong.

It was a reasonable mistake.

If that was the ceiling of what thirty seconds of footage could produce, he had more room than he’d thought. He scrolled further. The rest were guesses but one comment stopped him.

"It adapts, look at it."

No explanation or follow-up when people asked what they meant. Just those three words, posted four hours ago, six replies deep in unanswered questions. Kai looked at it longer than he’d looked at anything else in the thread.

Whoever wrote it had seen something in thirty seconds of footage that three paragraphs of careful analysis had missed entirely.

He closed the phone and looked at the ceiling.

The ranking was going to show whatever it showed in a matter of hours. He had already decided what came after it. The only real question was how much ground he could cover before the people who had drawn the line at Victor Hale started paying closer attention.

He intended to make that a very short window, by the end of the day, the city would finally see him.

And Kai intended to make sure they never forgot it.