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

"Kaelen! They’re coming from the flank!"Miri’s scream was cut short by the wet thud of a lead pipe hitting bone. I spun around, my boots kicking up clouds of toxic rust. The scavenger gang—a pack of 'C-Rank' Jackals who had been lurking in the shadows of the Iron Graveyard—had finally found the guts to move."Get your hands off her!" I roared.One of the thugs, a man with a cybernetic jaw and a jagged bone-saw, had Miri pinned against a pile of discarded boiler plates. A gash across her forehead was leaking blood, staining her white [Cook] apron."She’s a pretty little resource, Thorne!" the leader of the Jackals laughed, leveling a mana-blunderbuss at my chest. "We heard you purified a core. We heard you fixed a Titan. Imagine what you’ll do for us once we start taking this girl apart piece by piece.""Kaelen... don't..." Miri wheezed, her eyes fluttering. "There are too many..."I looked at her. I looked at the five men surrounding her. My marrow turned into liquid ice. I had the p