The quiet evening air inside his dormitory room was cold.
Oscar sat on the edge of his narrow bed, staring blankly at the bare white wall across from him.
The chaotic roar of the central plaza outbreak, the piercing shrieks of fleeing civilians, and the heavy metallic smell of pooling blood still echoed vividly in his mind.
Returning to his old dormitory room after the outbreak was over felt surreal. Due to the sudden dungeon outbreak in the central plaza, Greymoor Academy had officially suspended all entry and closed its gates for the day to clear the surrounding sectors.
He had no choice but to head back to his old quarters in the lower district instead.
Just hours ago, he had walked through the city center thinking that urban zones were completely secure. The spatial stabilizers under the main streets were supposed to make city outbreaks impossible.
Yet, within seconds, stone pavement had turned into a slaughterhouse.
He leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, and let out a long breath.
A sudden shiver ran down his spine as he recalled the gruesome sight of dead bodies littering the stone tiles.
Husbands standing over fallen wives, mothers crying over ruined market stalls, and off-duty guards torn apart in a single claw swipe.
’I was barely a few feet away from that chaos,’ Oscar thought, his hands clenching into tight fists.
He began running through alternate scenarios in his head, and the realization made his stomach turn.
What if he had not bought the Ironbite Crossbow from the local shop?
He would have been entirely weaponless, forced to scramble like the rest of the helpless crowd.
What if he did not possess his Aimbot trait? Shooting a moving beast’s eye socket from thirty meters away under sheer panic would have been impossible for an untrained, or even trained, human.
What if he did not have his Divine Hack System’s Ban function to strip the Feral Minotaur’s defenses?
His simple common-quality arrows would have simply shattered off its stone-hard hide, leaving him completely exposed to its lethal boulder attacks.
Most terrifying of all, what if the Feral Minotaur that stepped out of the portal had possessed vastly superior attributes than him?
On his walk back to his old dormitory, Oscar had pulled out his phone to research Feral-tier monsters on the official Host Association online database.
What he read during that walk completely shattered his previous assumptions.
According to government research papers, monsters from the Feral rank onward were further classified based on the number of cores they had.
They were categorized from Zero Core up to Ten Core.
A basic Zero Core Feral monster already possessed primary attributes on par with Two-Star Class Hosts who were well above Level 25.
Their attributes would be terrifying, and their health points routinely exceeded thousands of points.
Oscar frowned as he recalled the fight in the plaza. The Feral Minotaurs he fought had low-level attributes.
Their Intelligence was only 14, and their health pool was barely around 200 HP. They were far too weak compared to the official data recorded by the government.
Why were those Ferals so weak?
The research on the internet was published directly by the central government’s research division, who had confirmed these metrics over decades of dungeon exploration.
They had no reason to publish fake stat tables for basic Feral beasts.
’Was that portal suppressed by something?’ Oscar wondered, rubbing his chin. ’Or did someone manipulate a dungeon to open in the city?’
He remembered the malicious, cold gaze staring at him from inside the closing portal void. Whoever was behind that look was likely responsible for the unnatural outbreak.
"Whatever," Oscar muttered, shaking his head to clear his lingering anxiety. "Thinking about it now changes nothing. I need to get stronger."
He summoned his character interface with a simple mental thought, a translucent blue panel materializing directly in front of his eyes.
During the containment fight at the plaza, he had continued sniping Feral beasts alongside the student squads and guild Hosts, grinding through the remaining monster waves.
The massive influx of experience points had pushed his strength even further.
[Host Character Status]
Name: Oscar
System: Divine Hack System
Function(s): Ban
Traits: Aimbot | Invisibility (Locked - 10,000 EP to unlock) | Locked | Locked...
Class: One Shot King (1*)
Class Skill: Qua(Ntity((Lity)
Level: 20 (0 / 2,000)
Attributes:
STR: 2
CONST: 1
AGI: 55
INT: 52
Mana: 520
HP: 10
Unallocated Points: 28
Evolution Points: 2,500 EP
Class Stacks: 40
Quantity Stack: 78
Quality Stack: 18,000 Damage
Oscar stared at his updated status screen, a long sigh of satisfaction escaping his chest.
Reaching Level 20 brought him close to reaching the level requirement for a second class change, which was Level 25.
This kind of progress was crazy. No One-Star hosts could progress as fast as him. After all, none of them could kill a Feral like he could, Oscar thought proudly.
But deep in his mind, he knew that he was just lucky. Because if the Ferals that came out had stats like the research said, he could never kill one.
’Well, luck is also a skill...’ he shrugged.
He had gained six additional levels during the final phase of the plaza battle, accumulating forty unallocated stat points.
His Agility and Intelligence had both passed the fifty-point threshold thanks to the passive bonus of his Unique Class.
With fifty-two Intelligence, his Aimbot detection range had expanded dramatically, allowing him to auto-lock onto targets from over a hundred meters away.
His mental processing speed was sharper than ever, making chaotic battlefields look like slow-motion footage.
However, he noticed his Constitution was still sitting at a fragile point value of 1. His health remained at a precarious 10 HP.
Even an Ordinary monster, if they managed to land a hit on him, could one-shot him.
’I need to put points into Constitution soon,’ Oscar thought, eyeing his forty free points. He decided to do that after further research.
Closing his status panel, Oscar brought up his personal bank account interface on his phone.
The moment the screen lit up, his eyes widened, and a massive grin spread across his face.
[Account Balance: 10,000,000 Credits]
A whopping ten million credits sat cleanly in his bank balance.
This direct wire transfer was issued by the government’s official emergency assessor who had been dispatched to oversee the central plaza outbreak.
In urban outbreak scenarios, government assessors immediately distributed initial emergency credits to participating Hosts based on their direct contribution to ending the spatial rift.
Because Oscar had single-handedly wiped out dozens of Feral Minotaurs before they could slaughter the trapped crowd, his contribution rating for the battle was ranked at the absolute top.
These ten million credits were merely the initial emergency bounty.
The government representatives and Host Association cleanup crews were currently securing the central plaza, clearing the rubble, and harvesting the monster corpses.
Every Iron-Horned Bull and Feral Minotaur corpse left on that street would be processed for materials, hide, and cores.
None of his kills would ever go unreported or stolen. It was not because the field assessors were inherently honest or anti-corrupt.
Rather, it was because they could not hide the data even if they wanted to.
The entire central plaza district was covered by high-resolution security cameras and other recording devices.
Every single arrow Oscar fired, along with the exact time of death for every beast, was captured on official government surveillance footage.
He personally did not have to waste time digging through monster guts or carving out bloody cores on the street.
The government representatives would handle all the messy harvesting work, catalog his confirmed kills, and sell the materials on the official market.
All he had to do was wait for the Host Association to call him to pick up his secondary compensation check.
’How convenient,’ Oscar thought, leaning back against his pillow with a faint laugh.
Ten million credits in initial rewards, a massive stack of forty unallocated stat points, and a growing stack of Quality damage.
The fake bubble of safety in the city was dangerous, but as long as he stayed sharp, his progression speed would outpace whatever threats were lurking in the dark.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand, displaying an incoming text notification from the Host Association.