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

Chapter 5: A Wilderness That Bites Back

He kept going. He had five years of not freezing when things went wrong, and the one rule was: if the Aberrations were feeding, they weren't hunting. You walked wide, you walked quiet, and you didn't be the thing that made them look up.

The ground around the Walled Cities had once held towns and villages. The rifts had burned them flat, but the ruins were still there—foundations, cracked walls, the occasional metal thing nobody had bothered to haul away.

Ethan walked for an hour.

He ran into three more pockets of Aberrations. Two more wiped-out scout teams, lying in the open where they'd gone down.

His mouth got tighter the farther he went.

This close to the city? The scouts normally worked a kilometer out without running into half this much trouble. Whatever was spooking the Aberrations inland, it had pushed the swarm toward the wall. The question that kept circling back was whether they were massing. If they decided to test the fence, the Outer District was where they'd come through.

He kept moving anyway. Finding the abandoned village was a stroke of luck. Teams had been through it before—they took the good stuff, the salvageable weapons and tech, and left the junk. The junk paid Ethan's rent.

He filled his pack with bent pipe and twisted rebar, then turned up a cache of old books on a collapsed shelf. Paper yellowed, ink long since faded to ghosts, but the bindings had held. Whatever they'd been printed on, a hundred and twenty years hadn't finished it off. He stuffed two under his arm.

He was halfway back when he almost got made.

A four-armed Aberration—the same design as the ones in the clearing—rounded a wrecked cart thirty feet away and stopped, head swinging. Ethan pressed himself flat against the wall of a burned-out house and didn't breathe for what felt like a full minute. The thing took two snuffing steps closer, then lost interest and shambled off.

He waited until it was gone before he let his lungs fill.

The Outer District gate was a relief. He came through on shaking legs, and the first thing he saw was a knot of people clustered by the turnstile—four survivors, all of them cut up. One of the men was missing an arm from the shoulder down. He was leaning on a friend's shoulder, white as paste, the stump wrapped in a tourniquet that was already bleeding through.

"God," he was saying, "what's with the swarm out there? Usually we push a klick before we see anything. We walked two hundred meters and hit a dozen groups. They flushed us twice."

"Two teams together. Six dead. Four of us made it back."

"Old Chen's done. Look at him. He's got a kid at home—"

The man with the missing arm just stared at the ground.

Ethan stood with his scrap pack and listened. His own close call of an hour ago didn't feel so close anymore.

No more going out for a while, he told himself. Today I came back because I got lucky. I'm not betting my life on daily luck.

He took his salvage home. It wasn't enough to bother Leo with, and the wilderness could wait until the Aberration pressure died down.

It was just past two when he walked through his yard. He checked the plot first—green and healthy, a few hours from ripe—then went inside, drank a bottle of paste, and lay down on his bed to stare at the ceiling. Rested his eyes. Got up. Pulled on his workout clothes and went through his calisthenics routine.

You didn't skip the workouts. That was the one thing the five years out there had taught him that nobody could take away.

At five o'clock, his wrist comms buzzed.

The device was a hand-me-down, secondhand off someone's upgrade list, eight hundred bucks when a new one ran over five grand. It worked, which was the whole point. He glanced at the caller and almost smiled.

Felix Chen's face filled the screen, grinning.

"Boss. Brandon White's throwing a class thing tomorrow night. Rose Ballroom. You in?"

Ethan didn't answer right away. A party organized by Brandon White was, by definition, a party Brandon intended to stand at the center of. Ethan had no particular interest in standing at the edge of that.

"You going?"

"Me?" Felix's grin didn't waver. "You go, I go. You don't, I don't. It'd suck without you anyway." His expression sobered. "But you should know. Michelle Liu's gonna be there. She awakened Holy Cleric, A-rank. Already got accepted to the Capital military academy. Somebody's coming to collect her in two months."

Ethan's eyes narrowed.

Michelle Liu. The girl the original Ethan had a hopeless crush on. The girl Brandon White had chased for a year straight, the one who'd looked right through him—and then publicly announced that the person she actually had her eye on was Ethan. That announcement had bought him a year of Brandon's best side-eyes and made his scholarship a month away from disappearing before Mr. Guo had stepped in.

Ethan had never believed it. He and Michelle had exchanged maybe ten words in three years. Ten. An orphan from the Outer District with no name and no money didn't catch the eye of a Liu. She'd used him as a shield to dodge Brandon. Simple as that.

"So why would she show up to a party like this?" he said.

"Beats me." Felix shrugged. "But it's not just her. A handful of A-ranks from our year all got into the Capital academies. Maybe she's scouting teammates early?"

Ethan rubbed his jaw. "I don't really feel like it. But if you want to go, I'll come keep you company."

Felix hesitated, then came clean. "I want to go. I got into Longhu Combat Academy. I want to see if anybody else from our school got in there—lock in a teammate early. Same hometown. Less chance of waking up knifed in my sleep."

"Fair enough. Tomorrow." Ethan checked the time. "I'll see you at my place."

He hung up and walked back outside.

The vegetables had ten minutes left.

He stood over the plastic sheeting and realized his hands were actually a little shaky.