The SSS Talent That Wasn't Supposed to Exist

CLASSIFICATION ERROR

The damp smell from the underground concrete walls still hung heavy in Arka’s nose as the intruder from The Archive dissolved slowly into the shadows of the corridor. The porcelain-masked man didn’t leave using teleportation magic or jump through a window. He simply took a single step backward, his body unraveling into thousands of golden pixels that shattered and evaporated into thin air—as if his very existence had been forcibly purged from the room’s spatial map.

"He... vanished?" Elena whispered, stepping toward the spot where the man had been standing seconds ago.

The silver-haired girl extended a trembling hand, trying to detect any lingering mana traces with Truth Seeker. However, her golden pupils suddenly dimmed into a rigid stillness. No aura remained. No power fluctuations. It was as though the masked man had never set foot on the marble floor of the Aegis containment facility.

"There's no trace at all," Elena muttered, her voice catching in her throat. She turned a deathly pale face toward Arka. "Who are those people, really, Arka? And what did he mean... that the person from 1909 wasn't the first?"

Arka didn't answer.

He stood frozen beside the completely dead liquid-server console. The surrounding air felt suffocatingly thick, pressing against his lungs with an invisible weight. The man's words echoed continuously inside his mind, shattering the entire framework of logic and mana theory he had spent years studying at the university.

Not the first.

If the Storyteller was a recurring entity that appeared and was repeatedly erased by the world order, then what was the actual purpose of the Awakening system humanity so revered? Was this system designed to measure human strength... or was it created as a massive cage to restrict and seal existences like his?

"Arka?" Elena called out again, taking a step toward the tall youth. "We need to get out of here before the unconscious Aegis soldiers outside wake up."

Arka exhaled a long breath, wiping his weary face. "You're right. Let's move."

He turned around, intending to step toward the wide-open steel door. Yet, the moment his right foot hit the threshold, an intensely sharp, throbbing pain gripped the inside of his left chest.

THUMP.

It wasn't a physical impact. It was an eruption of scorching ancient energy—like liquid lava injected directly into his veins. Arka stumbled, clutching his chest as he dropped to one knee on the cold concrete floor. His glasses slipped from the bridge of his nose, clattering onto the marble.

"Arka!" Elena cried out in panic, kneeling beside him by reflex and grabbing his shoulder. "What's wrong?!"

Arka couldn't speak. His vision blurred instantly. The air inside the room vibrated violently, accompanied by an ultra-high-frequency hum that deafened his eardrums from within his head.

BZZZZT!

Before Arka's eyes—without him summoning it—his private interface screen exploded into a bright glow in the open air.

The dull blue radiance that usually accompanied his F-Class status burned away completely. A dense, blood-gold light bloomed from behind the cracking system pixels. Translucent lines of code spun wildly like a digital storm in a void.

The status line that had mocked him since his Awakening day split into two, forcibly peeling away from its core structure.

[Talent: Storyteller] [Rank: F-Class]

Both lines of text were abruptly struck through by a burning red line that stung the eyes.

CRACK!

A massive warning window, many times larger than a standard human interface, expanded fully before Arka and Elena.

[Classification: Failed]

The rigid, mechanical voice that normally sounded cold within the system distorted completely, turning into a reverberating echo of thousands of ancient whispers overlapping inside Arka's consciousness.

[WARNING.] [This Talent cannot be measured by the current system.]

Elena, witnessing the screen directly from the side, stared in sheer horror. Her grip on Arka's shoulder lost all its strength. As an S-Class holder, she knew the absolute rule of this world: the system was natural law. There was no Talent that could not be measured by the system. Even the S-Rank Talents of the world's strongest figures had clear limits, descriptions, and numeric calculations.

Yet the text before their eyes did not say 'Too Strong' or 'Level Unknown'.

The system openly admitted its own incompetence. It had failed to process Arka's existence.

"The system..." Elena's voice trembled violently, cold tears brimming at the corners of her eyes from the immensely dense mana pressure radiating from the display. "...the system can't read you..."

Arka held his burning chest, slowly raising his head. He ignored his glasses lying on the floor. His sharp pupils reflected the dark-gold glow emanating from the system window.

The swirling vortex of error codes on the screen dimmed, leaving a solid black field.

Above that dark void, the dull gray F-Class text disappeared without a trace. In its place, rows of ancient golden letters typed out one by one, each keystroke echoing directly in the depths of his soul:

[Unknown Talent Detected.]

Arka held his breath. Every joint in his body locked up.

One second. Two seconds.

The screen blinked slowly, revealing a final line of text that changed the trajectory of Arka Pratama's life forever:

[Would you like to know why you were given an F?]