I Awakened the World's Worst Class, Then Became Unstoppable

Chapter 4: Not Worth The Investment

The conference room on the third floor of the City Lord's Manor didn't have windows, and nobody in it was pretending to enjoy the fluorescent lights.

"So that's him," one official said, nodding at the file open in front of him. "Student of David Guo."

A murmur ran around the long table. Saying David Guo's name in this city always earned a shake of the head and a tired half-smile. The man had walked away from everything the Guo family in the Capital had to offer. Refused the family's arranged marriage, told them exactly where to stick it, and vanished south to Jiangnan Walled City—a third-tier hole on the coast where Aberrations came from the land and the sea in roughly equal numbers and the wall had never managed to catch up.

The Guo family had been furious. They hadn't been able to stop him.

What made it all the more ridiculous was what David Guo actually was. Teacher was one thing. Saint Teacher was something else entirely—a rarer Class, one that could spot talent nobody else could see. S-rank on top of it. A Saint Teacher didn't pick a backwater out of laziness.

Nobody had ever worked out why he'd picked Jiangnan. They'd stopped asking.

Because the file said David Guo recommendation, the room got serious. For about ten seconds.

"David Guo or not," a woman across the table said, "I don't see an E-rank amounting to anything."

"Farmer's a rare Class, sure. But what's it actually do? Can't fight. Can't contribute. We don't have an inch of arable soil in this Federation to give him, and his talent rank is E. The resources it'd take to cultivate him would be—" The speaker whistled softly. "Sea of money."

"I say we don't lose sleep over it. Guo probably flagged him because the Class is a curiosity. What future does a garbage Class have?"

"The risk-to-reward ratio is ugly. Even if we poured everything into him, what's the upside? He grows some grain. Big deal."

Around the table, heads nodded. E-rank. Farmer. No upside.

Director Gordon Tang let the room talk itself out. Saint Teachers had a knack for finding diamonds in the rough, he knew that. But there was finding a diamond, and there was finding a rock. E-rank wasn't a rough diamond. It was a rock.

He picked up his pen and drew a hard X next to Ethan Su's name.

"Next," he said.

The room moved on.

Ethan had no idea he'd just been voted up and down by a room full of the most powerful people in the city. He would have shrugged anyway.

He slept late—no alarms, no scholarship-grind schedule, no reason to be anywhere—and when he rolled out of bed the first thing he did was pull back the plastic sheeting.

The vegetables were thriving. The cucumber vines hung heavy with fingers of fruit, each one the width of his thumb and already firm. The snow pea vines were a tangle of flower and pod. The lettuce heads had fattened to the point where he could've picked them that morning and eaten them. No point yet.

He washed up, drank a bottle of paste, borrowed a hand truck from the guy two houses down, and hauled his scrap pile out to Leo Liu's yard.

Leo was a Scavenger, C-rank, and as close to a fixture as the Outer District had. Scavengers could break refuse down into energy crystals, which made them the natural buyers for everything Ethan pulled out of the dead zone. Leo never shorted him.

"Look at you." Leo hefted a flattened fan motor, squinted, tossed it onto his scale. "You keep walking out there and hauling back this grade of junk, you're gonna put me out of a job. Five thousand for the lot. Take it or leave it."

"Deal."

Five thousand was generous. Another buyer would've handed him three and called it a favor. Ethan didn't pretend otherwise.

Leo tapped his wrist comms, and the money moved. Ethan checked his balance: two hundred and seventy thousand. Six years of scholarships and scrap runs, every cent he'd ever kept.

In the old country that kind of money didn't exist. Here it was a small fortune.

He'd heard there were rentals even cheaper than his, further out, where the housing was bigger and the rent was a joke. Out past the slums, past where anybody actually lived. The city wall only protected the Inner and Mid Districts. His corner of the Outer District was ringed by a high-voltage fence instead of masonry—good enough to stop a slow Aberration, not good enough to stop one that climbed, tunneled, or flew. The lots beyond had once been homes. A few bad Aberration incursions had emptied them out years ago, and they'd stayed empty.

Someday, he told himself. Maybe.

He picked up two weeks of the cheapest paste—eighty bucks a bottle, eight hours of fullness, which was all he needed. The good stuff, the kind that took the edge off hunger for a full day, ran a thousand a bottle. He wasn't spending that to feel full.

Back home, he did the math. The vegetables came in at six. Fourteen hours to kill. He slung his pack, checked the short blade he'd pulled off a scavenged corpse five years back, and headed for the gate.

"Little Chen," Mrs. Alvarez called from her porch, using the name the whole block had called him since he was twelve, "you're not going back out there, are you?"

"Ethan," he corrected, out of habit. Nobody ever used it.

"Ethan. Whatever. The City Lord's scout teams lost three men out there two days ago. You got Awakened now, kid—you don't have to throw your life away for scrap."

"I'm not going far," he said. "If it gets hairy, I turn around. I've been doing this since I was thirteen."

She didn't look convinced. None of them did. A handful of neighbors had come out to the fence line to watch him go—Old Man Chen, Mr. Patel's wife, a couple of the kids who'd aged out of school two years back. They stood there like they were seeing him off to war.

"Be careful," someone said. "Run fast."

He lifted a hand without turning around. Behind him, he heard Mrs. Alvarez sigh.

"That kid works too hard."

"Hard times. Hard times for everybody."

"Just come back safe."

The gate at the edge of the Outer District was unmanned. Past it lay a suspension bridge a hundred meters long, strung over a moat that dropped hundreds of feet to the poisoned water below. When Aberrations attacked, the guards winched the bridge up. A hundred meters of water and a three-hundred-foot drop did most of the wall's work for free.

Almost all of it.

The Aberrations that could fly didn't care about a moat. And ten years back, a swarm of tunneling mole-things had chewed straight under the foundations and come up inside the city. Eleven thousand civilians had died before the garrison figured out what was happening.

Ethan crossed the bridge, knelt, and studied the dirt on the far side. Lots of footprints. Booted feet. He followed the ones that looked freshest, heading left.

He'd been exploring this ground since he was thirteen. Everywhere within a half-mile of the gate he'd already walked, mapped, and picked clean. He decided to push a hundred meters straight, then cut right into ground he hadn't touched yet.

He moved slowly. Each step measured. He stopped every ten paces and listened. He was eighteen, but he had five years of scouting behind him, and the one lesson those years had pounded into him was that only an idiot treated the wilderness like a hiking trail.

Five hundred meters out, he stopped.

The air tasted like iron.

Blood. A lot of it.

He crouched low and drifted toward the smell, sliding from one dead trunk to the next, until he could see the clearing through the grass.

There were three of them.

Each one stood about seven and a half feet tall, long-limbed, with four arms, three legs, and a tail bristling with backward-pointing spines. Their heads barely qualified as heads—just a vast, unhinged maw ringed with teeth, stretched wide enough to swallow a man's skull in one bite and apparently incapable of closing.

On the ground in the clearing were five bodies. Torn apart. The scraps of cloth told him they were from a City Lord's scout team. Those teams went out in fives. Five bodies on the ground meant one team had walked out of the gate and none of them had walked back.

Ethan didn't hesitate. He put the bushes between himself and the clearing, took fifteen slow backward steps, and did not look back until the smell of blood was gone.