TORTURED ME, TO AWAKEN AS AN SSS DRAGON

"Moretti. Dante Moretti."

The examiner called his name without looking up. Dante walked to the front of the hall, past rows of students who didn't bother turning their heads. The Awakening Stone sat on the altar, pale and smooth, glowing faint blue from the last student who'd touched it. That student, a girl named Chiara, had scored a B-rank affinity. The whole room had clapped for her.

Dante placed his palm flat against the stone.

Nothing happened.

The glow didn't change. Didn't flicker. The stone sat under his hand like a dead thing, cold and ordinary, and the silence that followed was the kind that crawled under your skin and stayed there.

"Unranked," the examiner read from the display. He finally looked up. "No measurable affinity. No latent core. You may step down."

Laughter started somewhere near the back. Not loud. Not yet.

"Move it, Moretti. You're holding up the line."

That was Renzo Cavalli, leaning back in his seat with his arms crossed and a grin splitting his face like he'd been waiting for this all morning. The boys around him were already shaking with it, biting their lips, elbowing each other.

"Unranked," Renzo repeated, loud enough for the entire hall. "They should make a new category for you. Z-rank. Below the insects. Below the worms that eat the insects."

Dante pulled his hand off the stone. His fingers were steady. That surprised him.

"At least worms serve a purpose," another voice called out. Matteo Ferraro, Renzo's shadow, never far behind. "They break down dead things. What do you break down, Moretti? Air?"

More laughter. Louder now.

"Enough," the examiner cut in, but his voice carried no real force behind it. He was already writing Dante's result into the ledger, already moving on.

Dante walked back to his seat. He didn't look at anyone. His jaw was tight and his chest burned like someone had poured something hot into the space between his lungs, but his face gave away nothing. He had learned that much. You give them your face and they eat it. You keep it blank and they get bored. Eventually.

The rest of the ceremony blurred past him. Names he didn't care about. Ranks he would never hold. B. C. One more B. An A-rank that made the whole room gasp. He sat through all of it with his hands flat on his knees and his eyes on the floor.

Talentless.

The word had a taste. Flat and metallic, like biting down on something that shouldn't be in your mouth.

After the ceremony, the hallway was worse. Renzo found him again near the east corridor, this time with four others. They blocked the path like it was something they'd practiced.

"Hey, Moretti." Renzo tilted his head, smiling that same loose smile. "I've been thinking about it. You know what you remind me of? A snake with no fangs. Just a belly dragging through the dirt, hoping nobody steps on it."

"A snake's still too generous," Matteo added. "Snakes can at least squeeze something to death. This one can't even squeeze a passing grade."

"You done?" Dante's voice came out flat.

Renzo stepped closer. "No, actually. I want to understand something. Why do you come here every day? What do you think is going to happen? You think one morning you'll wake up and the stone will light up for you?" He leaned in, dropping his voice to something almost gentle, which made it worse. "It won't. You know that, right? You're nothing. You were born nothing and you'll die nothing, and every day you walk through these doors, you're just reminding everyone what failure looks like."

Dante stared at him. The burn in his chest had spread up into his throat, pressing against the back of his teeth. He swallowed it down.

"My sister's waiting," he said, and pushed past Renzo's shoulder.

Nobody stopped him. They just laughed.

Lucia was standing by the car when he got outside, and the sight of her loosened something inside his ribs that had been clenched all day. She was leaning against the passenger door, her school bag slung over one shoulder, and her whole body was practically vibrating.

"Dante!" She grabbed his arm before he could even reach for his keys. "You won't believe it. Fallen Sun sent a recruiter. To the academy. For me."

"Fallen Sun?" He stopped walking. "That's top five."

"Top three, actually. They moved up after the Valterra campaign." She was grinning so wide it almost looked painful. "They want to meet with me next week. A formal sit down. The recruiter told Professoressa Rinaldi that my combat aptitude scores are the highest they've seen in six years."

Something warm spread through his chest, and for a second it pushed out everything else. The ceremony. Renzo. The dead stone under his palm.

"Lu, that's incredible."

"I know!" She bounced on her heels like she was twelve again, not sixteen. "Mamma is going to lose her mind. Can you imagine her face?"

He could. Gianna Moretti, who worked double shifts at the textile mill and came home smelling like chemical dye, who never once complained about it, whose only extravagance was the small glass of wine she poured herself on Friday nights. She would cry. She would try not to, and then she would.

"She'll say something about Papa," Lucia added, quieter now. She glanced at him sideways. "She always does when something big happens. That thing about how he was special."

"Special," Dante repeated. The word meant nothing. Their mother had given them that single word like a locked box with no key, and every time they tried to ask more, she sealed the conversation shut with a look that said the subject was not a door but a wall.

"Get in," he told Lucia. "Let's go tell her."

They pulled onto the main road, Lucia talking nonstop about Fallen Sun's training compound, their sponsorship contracts, the legendary S-rank awakener who founded the guild forty years ago. Dante let her voice fill the car. It was the only sound in the world he never wanted to turn down.

Then the sky broke.

It didn't darken. It split, like fabric pulled too tight across something massive underneath. Red bled through the cracks, not sunset red but wrong red, the color of old wounds reopened. The wind that had been pushing through the open windows just stopped, and the air turned thick and still.

"Dante." Lucia's voice changed completely.

He pulled the car to the shoulder. Through the windshield, the horizon was coming apart. Black shapes pushed through the red tears in the sky, pouring down like smoke given weight and hunger. Blightbearers. He'd seen them in textbooks, in grainy combat footage shown during safety drills. D-rank creatures. The kind that required trained squads with proper gear.

"Stay in the car," he told her.

"Are you insane?" She was already unbuckling her seatbelt. Silver light gathered around her right hand, bright and liquid, forming into the shape of a blade. Her awakened ability, raw and untrained but real. "There are people on the road, Dante. I can see them running."

"You don't have armor. You don't have backup."

"And they don't have time." She kicked the door open and ran toward the nearest cluster of shadows.

He went after her. Of course he did. What else was there? She was the only person in his life who looked at him and saw someone worth knowing, and she was sprinting toward a pack of creatures that could tear through soldiers.

He had nothing. No power. No weapon. Nothing but his legs and the stupid, burning refusal to stand still while she fought alone.

Lucia cut through the first Blightbearer with a sweep of her silver blade, and the thing shrieked and dissolved into black ash. Two more came from the left. She spun, caught one across its jaw, ducked under the claw of another. She was fast. Gifted. Everything the stone had promised she would be.

The largest one came from behind.

Dante saw it before she did. A shape twice the size of the others, low to the ground, moving with a speed that didn't match its bulk. Its mouth opened and black rot dripped from teeth that looked like they were made from the same darkness as the sky.

"Lucia, behind you!"

She turned, but too late. The thing was already lunging, claw extended, aimed at her chest.

Dante didn't think. His body moved on its own, covering the distance between them in three steps that felt like falling forward, and he threw himself into the space between his sister and the claw.

It went through his ribs like they weren't there.

Pain swallowed everything. White, then nothing, then white again. He felt his knees hit the ground. He felt Lucia screaming his name from somewhere far above him. He felt the warmth leaving his body in a rush, pouring out of the hole in his chest where something important used to be.

So this is what it's like.

His blood didn't fall.

It hung in the air around him, suspended, each drop catching light that wasn't coming from anywhere. Crimson glass, floating, spinning slowly, and the world went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with silence. Something was in that quiet. Not a voice. Something older than voices, bigger than language, pressing against the inside of his skull with a question he could feel but not hear.

[Mother System activated. Reawakening initiated.]

The red sky, the monsters, Lucia's screams, his own dying body. All of it folded inward, collapsing into a point of light so bright it burned through the back of his closed eyes.

The last thing Dante Moretti knew was the feeling of being unmade, and somewhere beneath the nothing, the faintest pulse of something waiting to begin.