"Hidden classes exist, but the ecosystem won’t produce them the same way."

Lily’s expression had been shifting for the last several seconds, and it arrived at its destination with some force.

"Brother Lane," she said, with the controlled precision of someone who had decided to be direct, "balance is a lovely concept. Would you like to look at my stat sheet and explain it to me? Because from where I’m standing, balance is not a word I would use."

Lane looked at Don with the expression of a man recognizing a situation he cannot win.

"The young lady makes fair points," Don offered, without sympathy.

"I cannot afford to make enemies of sharp-tongued women at this stage of my life," Lane said carefully.

"Hmph."

"Alright, in fairness, Boss Ye was genuinely upset about it. He already had words with Nolly. The handling was poor and he said so." Lane’s tone was careful but honest. "And Don came through it fine. No permanent damage."

Lily turned to Don with an expression that contained several feelings at once. "You’re too proud to even be properly upset, aren’t you."

"I’m missing nothing important," Don said. "All limbs accounted for."

"Fight the monster," she said, pointing at the nearest ratman with something between irritation and affection, and raised her crossbow.

Don noted, without comment, that she was already smiling by the time she fired.

---

With four, the rhythm changed completely.

Lane’s ice arrows were the kind of output that reorganized a fight around themselves, each one landing for over four thousand damage on the ratmen without a critical hit, the elemental damage cutting through the magic defense with the authority of someone who had been allocating Intelligence points with serious intent. His equipment was understated to the point of invisibility: display colors off, name obscured, the appearance of a player who had decided that other people’s awareness of his strength was a liability. But the numbers didn’t lie, and the numbers were very good.

Efficiency in the thirty minutes before Lane had joined them: seven rat tails.

Efficiency in the twenty minutes after: eleven.

The math was not subtle.

They fell into a natural configuration, Kira pulling and holding, Don working backstabs from behind, Lily controlling the pace of each fight with wind arrows and precise neck shots, Lane providing sustained elemental damage from range. The ratmen came down faster, the respawn cycle kept them moving, and the conversation filled the gaps between fights with the comfortable texture of people who had decided they liked each other.

The eighteenth tail dropped with a heavier sound than the others, a resonant thud that made everyone’s attention snap to the ground simultaneously.

Lily stepped forward first, crouching down, her expression bright with anticipation.

It was a breastplate. Level twenty-five. White iron. The stats were the kind that existed to fill inventory slots and disappoint people.

She stared at it for a long moment, then stood up and dropped it on the ground with the deliberate care of someone exercising genuine restraint.

Don picked it up before anyone could say anything. "I’ll sell it to a new player. Someone will find this exciting."

"How generous," Lily said flatly.

"You’re not wrong to be annoyed," Lane said, "but in fairness, the drops in this zone are historically stingy. The experience rate is the actual value here."

"Brother Lane," Lily said, "Don and I are just friends. We’re good friends, actually. So you don’t need to manage me on his behalf. And I only lose my temper at people who deserve it."

Lane’s expression shifted into something that was doing its best to be neutral and not quite managing. He looked at Don. "Is that the official position?"

"Old man," Don said, "you really should find a hobby."

Lane laughed.

---

The experience moved. Don watched his bar tick upward with the patient attention of someone who has been close to a threshold for long enough that every percentage point feels personal. Fifty rat tails. Seventy-five. The number climbed with the steady momentum of good teamwork, and somewhere around the hundred mark, Don felt the familiar pressure of a level accumulating to its breaking point.

It broke cleanly, without drama, at a hundred and twelve tails.

Level twenty-five.

He had the Elder’s Breastplate and Huron’s Dagger out of his inventory before the level-up animation had finished playing. The swap took seconds. He turned and held out the Queen Bee Sting toward Lily without ceremony.

"Secondary weapon," he said. "For when things get close."

She took it and turned it over in her hands with the focused consideration she gave most things, then clipped it to her belt with a satisfied nod. "I need to practice the quick-swap. It always takes me too long."

"Just repetition. You’ll get there."

He pulled up his attribute panel out of habit.

[Human | Apprentice Thief | Level 25 | HP: 3,880 | Physical Attack: 2,324–2,449 | Physical Defense: 544 | Magic Defense: 469 | Critical Hit Rate: 1% | Reputation: 3,900 | Luck: 0]

The attack numbers were good, meaningfully better than before the equipment swap, the Huron’s Dagger adding both base damage and the backstab modifier in a way that changed his effective output substantially. The defenses remained a problem he was choosing to manage rather than solve. Getting breached by elite monsters at level twenty-five was a structural issue with the build, not a situational one. He noted it, filed it, and decided that positioning was cheaper than rebuilding his stat allocation from scratch.

The reputation number was the one that genuinely puzzled him. Nearly four thousand reputation points sitting in his sheet with no clear mechanical purpose. Realms Online hadn’t published anything that explained the conversion, and no one in any forum had cracked it yet. Something to watch.

He tested the new dagger properly on the next pull.

Killing intent triggered, the red light coating the blade doing what it always did. He moved behind the ratman Kira had just anchored and drove the strike home with everything the skill offered.

[Critical hit, 8,594!]

The ratman’s aggro snapped toward him with the speed of an automated response.

Don triggered evasion immediately and stepped sideways, letting the claws pass through empty space, then came in from the flank with a series of basic attacks at the neck.

[1,985!]

[2,195!]

Kira stunned it back into compliance with her shield and recaptured the aggro through sheer provocation, but her voice carried a particular quality. "Could you possibly hit it slightly less hard? I’m working with taunting mechanics that have physical limits."

"I’ve used all my skills," Don said. "Everything from here is basic attacks."

"Your basic attacks are someone else’s skills."

Lane watched this exchange and pulled up Don’s stat sheet, which Don shared without thinking twice. The reaction was the slow, slightly stunned silence of a person revising several assumptions at once.

"Strength eleven, Agility seven." Lane read it twice. "That’s three full tiers of Strength above a standard Apprentice Thief baseline." He looked up. "You’re running a pure Strength build on a stealth class."

"The Agility comes from equipment," Don said. "The Strength is all allocation."

"I have never," Lane said carefully, "seen an attribute file like this in my entire time playing games."

"Brother Lane," Lily said cheerfully, from the other side of a dying ratman, "doesn’t that just mean he’s special?"

"What it means," Lane said, rallying, "is that his positioning needs to be immaculate, because if anything gets through his defense, it gets through."

"We manage," Don said.

"Clearly."

By midnight, the tail count had reached two hundred.

Don sat at twenty-five and seventy-one percent. Kira had crossed into twenty-five. Lane had pushed to twenty-seven with the quiet consistency of someone who had been playing efficiently for hours before they arrived. Lily, who had started the session further behind than anyone, had climbed two full levels in a single night, a number that reflected both the difficulty of the content and the quality of the team around her.

They were beginning the process of turning back toward the village when the ground made a sound.

Not an impact. Not a footstep. A deeper register than either of those, a rumble that started below the grass and worked its way upward, followed by the crack and heave of earth splitting open under pressure.

The thing that came out of the ground was categorically different from the ratmen they’d been fighting all night.

Two heads taller. Moving on all fours with the muscular efficiency of something that had never needed to be anything other than dangerous. Gray fur plated over with a thin carapace layer that caught the moonlight in irregular patches. Eyes red and completely attentive. The incisors were the part that took a moment to process, long, slightly curved, the color of old bone.

Don’s level was just sufficient to read the attribute window.

[Sabertooth Rat King, Hashu

Enhanced Boss | Level 30 | HP: 1,000,000

Physical Attack: 1,600–2,000 | Physical Defense: 1,300 | Magic Defense: 1,200

Skills: Sharp Tooth Strike, Backstab, Rapid Combo]

One million HP. Physical attack starting at sixteen hundred. An enhanced boss, spawning in the open world at midnight, with a party that was missing a healer.

Don was already pulling up the team channel to call for backup when Hashu moved.

It went directly for Lily.