Don stared.

Standing in front of him, without the black cloth and without the darkness, was Kira. Pod number sixteen. The short-haired girl from the Extraordinary Studio who had been logged off when they left, or who he’d assumed had been logged off.

His mouth opened. Closed.

"You’re Water-Colored Nebula," he said.

"Shh." She pressed one finger to her lips, quick and decisive. "Keep your voice down. I’d like to keep that information contained, if you don’t mind."

Don recovered enough to punch her lightly on the shoulder. "You absolute menace. Sitting there in pod sixteen looking completely ordinary while you’re sitting eighth on the server leaderboard with a hidden class." He shook his head. "Alright, report your stats. All of them. I need to feel better about my life choices."

Kira gave him a look, then relented with the air of someone making a minor concession. "Strength ten, Agility eight, Constitution twelve. And before you ask, Intelligence is five."

Don did the arithmetic quickly. Five tiers above baseline across the board, roughly. That kind of gap between a hidden class and a standard one didn’t sound dramatic until you watched it operate in actual combat, and then it was the difference between a fight and a demonstration.

"Don’t put any more points into Constitution," he said. "That’s the trap hidden class players fall into. The health looks good on paper but you’re wasting the class’s actual ceiling. Stack Strength. Fill the health deficit with gear later."

Kira was quiet for a moment. Then: "That’s what I was thinking. Good to hear it confirmed."

"Looks like you made the right call coming to find us tonight," Don said, then paused. "Well, coming to rescue us. Which I should probably thank you for more formally."

"You can thank me by not broadcasting my class to everyone on the East Coast server." She glanced down the residential street, which had returned to its normal nighttime quiet. "Also, I want to team up. I’ll take you and Lily somewhere good tomorrow."

Don smiled. "Deal."

Behind them, light footsteps announced Lily’s arrival, she’d caught up from wherever the sprint had deposited her, slightly flushed, boots clicking on the pavement. She looked between Don and Kira with the focused attention of someone filing information away.

Don opened the party interface and added them both.

The moment Kira’s stats populated in the team display, the numbers were hard to ignore. 5,200 HP. Constitution twelve, each point from equipment yielding sixty HP on the hidden class multiplier, the result was a health pool that put her in a different category from anyone Don had run with recently. It wasn’t just the raw number either. The architecture of the stats told a story about how she’d been building.

Lily looked at the numbers without comment. She pressed her lips together in a small, knowing smile and said absolutely nothing. Don appreciated that about her.

---

The next morning, after logging back in and finding his class mentor in a thoroughly unhelpful mood, not a single new skill offered, just a vague gesture toward the horizon and something about experience being the true teacher, Don met the other two at the teleport terminal.

Kira had already dropped coordinates into the team chat. East Coast. A region called the Howling Plain.

They arrived in Jerkudon Village with the quiet efficiency of players who had already decided what they were doing, repaired equipment, restocked ammunition, and set out west from the village entrance. The plain opened up after roughly ten minutes of running, a wide stretch of grass that couldn’t quite commit to being either green or yellow, the kind of terrain that existed to be functional rather than beautiful.

Realms Online disagreed with that assessment. The grass moved against Don’s ankles in a way that actually felt like grass, each blade catching the simulated wind at its own angle. The sky above the plain had the particular clarity of early morning in a game world that had clearly been built by people who cared. He noticed these things in the gaps between noticing more important things.

The smell reached them first.

Then the ratmen.

They were bigger than the name suggested, upright, roughly human height, bodies covered in dense gray fur with an underlying flush of red at the skin. The foreclaws were the main event: long, wide, layered like blades stacked on top of each other, catching the light in a way that made the damage numbers feel predictable before they even started.

Don pulled up the attribute window on the nearest one.

[Plains Ratman] Elite | Level 28 | HP: 200,000

Physical Attack: 800-1,000 | Physical Defense: 550 | Magic Defense: 400

Skills: Claw Pierce, Rapid Strike] 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

He switched to the Larsai Bow without discussion and picked out a lone ratman at the edge of the pack, isolated, its attention on something in the opposite direction. A single shot took a clean thousand HP off its bar and snapped its head around immediately.

It came at him fast and loud.

Kira stepped forward to meet it.

What she did next wasn’t defense in any conventional sense. She swung the shield in her left hand in a tight horizontal arc that caught the ratman across the forehead with enough force to stun it completely, a clean mechanical interruption that bought her exactly the window she needed. Then the longsword came up and across, trailing light that was almost aggressive in its brightness.

"Holy Strike."

[3,104!]

Don and Lily both stopped moving for a moment.

That number, from a single skill hit, without a critical, it wasn’t something a standard Knight build produced, even with full Strength investment. The Paladin’s hidden class multipliers were doing exactly what hidden class multipliers were supposed to do.

Kira didn’t retract the sword. She flowed directly from the slash into a sequence of three rapid thrusts, Consecutive Strike, each one landing before the ratman had processed the previous one.

[689!]

[689!]

875!]

The moment the stun cleared and the ratman’s eyes focused again, she raised her free hand and pressed a mark onto its forehead. Blood-red, pulsing once. Provocation. The ratman’s entire aggro architecture redirected onto her with an almost audible click.

The ratman swung both claws at her. She raised the shield.

[23.]

Don patted Lily on the shoulder. "Stop watching. Let’s go."