The iron gates of Aethelgard didn't just close; they snarled. The boom echoed through the desolate gray plains of the Outer Rim, vibrating in the mud beneath my face. I tasted copper and silt. "Get up, trash," a voice spat. I pushed myself up, my fingers sinking into the cold muck. My ribs screamed from Lucius’s earlier kick, but the physical pain was a dull roar compared to the silence in my soul. I was in the Rim. The graveyard of the kingdom. "Look at him," another voice chuckled. "The 0.01 percenter. I’ve seen better potential in a literal sack of dung." I wiped the sludge from my eyes and looked up. Three men stood there. They weren't soldiers. They were bottom-feeders—D-Rank thugs with jagged scars and the kind of cheap, rusted armor that smelled of stale ale and desperation. "Who sent you?" I wheezed, clutching my side. "Lucius?" The leader, a hulking brute with a broken nose and a club studded with blunt iron nails, grinned. "The young Master is a generous man. He doesn

The stench of the Outer Rim was thick—a mixture of ozone from the breaking Monolith and the rot of a thousand desperate lives. I moved through the shantytown, my marrow still humming with the toxic sludge I’d harvested from the waste. "I told you, please! The mana-wheat was blighted this season!" A girl’s scream cut through the low drone of the camp. I rounded a heap of rusted sheet metal and stopped. Two Aethelgard border guards, their silver-and-blue breastplates gleaming mockingly against the gray mud, were tossing a massive iron pot into the dirt. A girl—no older than seventeen, with flour-dusted hair and a [Cook] emblem glowing faintly on her collar—was scrambled in the muck, trying to save a spilled slurry of soup. "This isn't food, Miri," the taller guard sneered, kicking a splash of gray broth into her face. "It’s lukewarm water. My stats didn't budge a single point after eating this. You’re a [Cook], aren't you? Where’s the mana buff?" "The System... it’s not giving m

The dust from Governor Vane’s collapsing shack hadn't even settled before the air above us curdled. A streak of white light descended from the Imperial Skyship, slamming into the cobblestones with the force of a falling star. When the radiance cleared, a man in blinding platinum armor stood there. He looked like a god carved from ivory, his cape fluttering despite the lack of wind. This wasn't a border guard. This was Ser Alaric, Lucius’s lead squire—a B-Rank Knight whose name was synonymous with "unmatched." "I was told I’d find a corpse," Alaric said, his voice smooth and cold as a glacier. He looked at the rotting timber that used to be a mansion, then at me. "Instead, I find a Scrapper standing in the ruins of a Governor’s home. Explain yourself, Thorne, before I decide your tongue is scrap too." "Alaric! Kill him!" Vane screamed, crawling out from under a pile of moth-eaten rugs. "He stole the mana! He turned my palace into a hovel! Look at my robes! They’re burlap!" Alaric d

The Iron Graveyard was a place of ghosts, but as I moved deeper into the valley of rusted spires, the ghosts started to look familiar. The S-Rank Golem hissed beneath me, its vents cooling, but I jumped down from its shoulder before the steam even cleared. "Kaelen, wait! Where are you going?" Miri shouted, scrambling after me. "The shield is holding, but the sky is crawling with Inquisitors!" "I saw something," I said, my voice tight. "In the trench behind the slag heaps." I reached the edge of a deep, jagged fissure in the earth. It wasn't a natural formation. It was a mass grave. Thousands of bodies lay tangled in the gray silt, their skin turned to marble by the Rim’s cold. But these weren't warriors. Their collars glowed with the dull, flickering light of [Utility] classes. [Weavers]. [Plowmen]. [Tinkerers]. "Oh, gods," Miri whispered, covering her mouth. "Why? Why so many?" "System inefficiency," I growled, my eyes scanning the faces. I saw the Aethelgard stamp on their tuni

The sky over Aethelgard wasn't blue anymore. It was a shimmering, artificial gold, projected by the capital’s broadcast arrays. Every screen, every hovering mana-mirror, and every ocular implant in the kingdom was tuned to the same channel. "Look at the screen, Kaelen," Miri whispered, her hand trembling as she pointed toward the horizon. I looked. My father’s forge—the place where I learned to breathe soot and dream in brass—was being held in the grip of massive, hydraulic pincers. "Citizens of Aethelgard!" Lucius’s voice boomed from the sky, smooth and dripping with fabricated virtue. "Behold the final cleansing of the Thorne heresy. This workshop, a breeding ground for treason, will now serve a higher purpose. We melt this trash today to forge the 'Solarian Plate' for our newest Paladin division!" The pincers dropped the forge into a vat of white-hot liquid mana. I watched the anvil—the one my father used to lift me onto—dissolve into a shapeless sludge. "He's doing this t