The central library towered six stories high, its sweeping marble pillars catching the sharp afternoon sun. Rain pushed through the heavy bronze revolving doors and walked straight past the front desk toward the grand mahogany bulletin board mounted against the east wall. A small crowd of upperclassmen stood around it, pointing at pinned parchment notices and paper printouts.
Rain found a small gap, squeezed in, and scanned the board from top to bottom.
[Rift Patrol – Western Outskirts]
[Requirements: C-Rank Minimum, Guild Affiliation Required.]
[Payout: 450 Credits/Shift]
Rain’s eyes moved down to the next one.
[Escort Detail – Commercial Re-supply]
[Requirements: B-Rank Minimum. Minimum two years documented active raid experience.]
[Payout: 800 Credits]
He scanned three more in rapid succession. A lab assistant post required a specialized mana-manipulation rank. A gym spotter post required D-rank strength output minimum. A night security sweep required an active contract with an official security guild. Every single paper pinned to the corkboard had a hard wall built around it.
’How is anyone at F-rank supposed to live?’ Rain thought, his teeth pressing hard against his lip as he backed away from the board. ’They give you a grant that puts you in debt, and then lock every job behind the rank you need money to reach.’
He turned away from the crowd and walked into the quiet computer lab tucked behind the main stacks. A row of black terminals sat on long wooden counters, their monitors glowing soft blue in the dim light. Rain pulled out a swivel chair, sat down, and tapped the cracked keyboard.
He bypassed the official academy portal and pulled up a public civilian job network used by local businesses and independent contractors across the lower sector.
He typed in his search criteria: First-Year / Entry-Level / Immediate Pay.
Thirty listings popped up. He clicked the first one.
[Warehouse Loading – Night Shift]
[Requirement: D-Rank Physical Augmentation or higher.]
He clicked back and tried the second.
[Rift Salvage Hauler]
[Requirement: Must possess personal baseline utility disk. Guild registration verified.]
He tried a third, then a fourth, then a fifth. Every page was a variation of the exact same answer. Either he wasn’t strong enough, didn’t have the right certification, or lacked the guild stamp required to legally step foot onto a commercial job site.
Rain rested his forehead against the cool edge of the plastic monitor, letting out a long, quiet breath. "Just one," he said. "Just give me one thing that pays enough to buy soap and bread,"
He refreshed the search queue one last time, filtering by No Rank Minimum.
A single new posting flashed at the top of the list, uploaded less than two minutes ago.
[White Tiger Guild – Emergency Support Slot]
[Location: Sector 4 Low-Tier Rift]
[Requirement: Open to all ranks, including F-Rank baseline arrivals. Immediate cash payout upon exit.]
[Payout: 300 Credits]
Rain sat up straight, his eyes scanning the text.
The web page looked surprisingly crude. The White Tiger emblem at the top was slightly pixelated around the edges, the font was an unformatted standard block type, and the color scheme looked like it had been put together in ten minutes by someone using a basic free template.
Rain let out a short, quiet chuckle, rubbing the back of his neck. "Guess even top-tier guilds don’t bother paying their IT department properly when they need cheap labor in a hurry,"
He didn’t care if the website looked bad. Three hundred credits was real money. It would cover his basic food for a month, buy him two fresh shirts, and leave enough on his card to cover any sudden school related fees.
He clicked Apply, typed his black student ID number into the box, and hit submit.
He prepared himself to wait, expecting the system to take a few hours to process his file or send it to a queue. Before he could even pull his student card out of the keyboard slot, the screen flashed bright green.
[Application Approved.]
[Roster Position Confirmed: Slot 6 – Carrier.]
[Rendezvous Point: Sector 4 Gate Three. Time: 20:00 Sharp.]
Rain stared at the green text, a huge, unobstructed wave of relief washing through his chest. He grinned, his shoulders relaxing for the first time all day. Eight o’clock tonight. A simple carrier run in a low-tier rift. Three hundred credits in his pocket before midnight.
He pulled his card free from the keyboard slot and sat there for a second longer than he needed to, just looking at the screen.
"Holy crap," Rain muttered under his breath, a short laugh escaping him. "I just got hired for a rift raid."
He said it out loud like saying it might make it feel less insane. It didn’t. If anything, hearing it out loud made the whole thing land harder.
’I’ve never actually been inside one,’ he thought, pushing his chair back from the desk. ’Not once. Not even close to one, if you don’t count staring at that tear in the sky from campus.’
He knew the basics, everybody did, the same way everybody knew not to touch a live wire even if they’d never been shocked. Rifts got ranked the same way people did, F through S, except the letter wasn’t measuring how strong a person’s Core was, it was measuring how much raw mana a given tear was bleeding into the world. An F-tier rift was barely a nuisance, shallow, low pressure, the kind of thing a maintenance crew could clear out with basic utility disks and a truck full of scrap containers. An S-tier rift was the kind of thing that got a continent’s worth of military attention and still sometimes won.
Somewhere in between the two, specialists called Rift Chasers made their entire living just watching the sky. The moment a new tear opened anywhere, a Rift Chaser was the first real response, government-contracted, independently certified, showing up to read the mana signature, log the tier, and file a report before anyone else got close enough to get hurt. After that, the actual rights to the rift got auctioned off behind closed doors, guilds bidding against each other, money changing hands long before a single monster ever got harvested. That was the whole economy in miniature, danger first, then paperwork, then profit.
’And tonight I get to see one up close,’ Rain thought, walking out through the lab’s narrow doorway into the main stacks. ’Not from a classroom slide. The real thing.’
He turned the thought over a few more times as he crossed the library floor, and underneath the nerves, there was something that felt almost like pride. White Tiger wasn’t some backwater outfit. He knew the name the same way he knew a dozen other guild names, from the endless promotional banners that used to hang along the transit routes back in the lower sector, guilds fighting for attention the same way soda companies fought for shelf space. White Tiger was one of the newer names in that fight, hungry, aggressive about expansion, the kind of guild that spent money on flashy recruitment banners and academy sponsorship deals to build a reputation fast.
’Guess they just don’t spend as much on their actual website,’ Rain thought, huffing out another quiet laugh as he pushed through the library’s heavy bronze doors into the afternoon light.
Underneath the joke, though, there was something harder to laugh off. Joining any guild for anything, even a single temporary raid slot, even just for one night, wasn’t a small thing. People spent years trying to get a guild’s attention and never managed it. He’d landed a spot in an afternoon, out of pure desperation, clicking Apply on a job board because nothing else would take him.
He was actually going to see a rift.
Not a photograph. Not a diagram on Miss Ebony’s projection screen. The real thing, the thing that had swallowed his ordinary, boring world eighty years ago and never given it back.
Rain picked up his pace across the courtyard, his paper envelope tucked under one arm, and found he couldn’t quite stop smiling.
By five in the afternoon, Rain was sitting in a corner booth at the main campus cafeteria, a plate of lukewarm rice and boiled meat sitting in front of him. He chewed slowly, watching the clock on the wall, mentally counting down the hours until eight o’clock.
The heavy glass doors at the cafeteria entrance swung open.
Three guys walked in. They wore matching dark navy leather jackets with black iron studs along the shoulders, the emblem of a jagged iron chain stitched over their left lapels.
Rain’s fork froze two inches above his plate.
It was the same three guys from the resonance ceremony day.
The ones who had pinned him against the brick wall outside the alley entrance to Dorm Block C, the ones who had kicked his ribs in while searching his pockets for disks.
Rain immediately dropped his eyes, leaning his head down over his plate, taking small, silent bites.
The three guys grabbed trays from the counter, laughing loudly among themselves as they argued over a card game. They carried their food across the room and sat down at a high table directly across the central aisle, less than twenty feet from where Rain was sitting. None of them looked at him directly. They set their drinks down, unzipped their heavy leather jackets, and started eating.
Rain didn’t wait to finish his rice. He slid his black student card into his hoodie pocket, picked up his tray, carried it to the disposal rack, and walked toward the exit doors without turning his head.
He pushed through the glass doors into the cool evening air, stepping out onto the wide stone walkway.
He didn’t run, but he kept his pace fast, heading down the main pedestrian strip toward the central gates. After twenty yards, he turned his head slightly, using the reflection of a dark shop window to check behind him.
All three of the navy jackets had stepped out of the cafeteria. They weren’t sprinting, but they were walking in a loose diagonal line, keeping their eyes locked on the back of his gray hoodie.
Rain’s mouth went dry. He picked up his speed, veering sharply into the thickest part of the evening crowd, weaving between groups of third-years carrying heavy weapon cases.
Every time he checked over his shoulder, at least one of the three was still there, cutting through the gaps in the crowd, keeping the distance between them locked at thirty yards.
The crowd began to thin as the path sloped downward toward the outer transit ring. The wide stone walkways gave way to narrow paved sidewalks, and the groups of students dispersed toward their respective dorm blocks.
Rain’s pulse hammered in his ears. His palms went wet inside his hoodie pockets.
Up ahead, a bright yellow shuttle bus was idling at a concrete stop, its pneumatic doors making a loud, hissing sound as they began to fold shut.
Rain didn’t think. He sprinted.
His boots pounded against the asphalt, his bruised ribs screaming as he drove his knees upward, throwing himself across the final ten yards. He shoved his shoulder through the closing rubber doors just as they locked together, tumbling onto the hard metal floor of the bus aisle.
The driver grunted, hit a switch on the console, and the bus pulled smoothly away from the curb, accelerating into the main street traffic.
Rain scrambled up onto a vinyl seat near the back window, pressing his forehead against the glass.
Out on the sidewalk, thirty yards behind the moving bus, the three navy jackets stopped. The leader pulled his hands out of his pockets, staring straight through the glass at Rain, a cold, knowing smirk spreading across his face.
Rain slumped back into the vinyl seat, dragging both hands down his face, his breathing coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
"They think I still have them," Rain said, his teeth grinding together until his jaw ached.
It was so obvious now. From their perspective, a couple of days ago, they had found two fresh baseline disks sitting in the alley. Then a bunch of guard whistles had blown, running boots had echoed down the lane, and everyone had scattered in the dark before anyone could confirm who grabbed the loot. They didn’t know about the system. They didn’t know the physical disks had been dissolved into raw code and swallowed by his core. All they knew was that two disks had vanished, and the scrawny F-rank kid who had been lying on the pavement was still walking around campus alive.
’They’re never going to stop looking,’ Rain realized, staring down at his knees. ’They think I’m sitting on fifty thousand credits worth of stolen skill’
The bus chimed, slowing down at a stop five miles away from the main campus gates.
The automated ticket scanner by the door beeped softly. Rain tapped his student card against the sensor.
[Fare Deducted: 7 Credits]
[Remaining Balance: 32 Credits]
Rain flinched as the screen flashed, hating every single credit coming off that balance. He had boarded blind in a total panic, and now he was sitting in an unfamiliar commercial sector miles away from both his dorm.
He stepped off the bus onto the cracked asphalt sidewalk, pulling his dark gray hood tight over his black hair as the sun began to dip below the horizon.
"Great," he muttered, looking around at the unfamiliar concrete warehouses and low-end retail stalls lining the street. "Just great."
He turned around, pulling his campus map out to orient himself for the long walk back toward Gate Three.
He had been walking for five minutes along a wide, four-lane commercial avenue when the air around him suddenly went hot.
BOOM!!!
A deafening, violent explosion shattered the glass windows of a three-story electronics store fifty yards ahead. The shockwave hit Rain’s chest like a physical wall, knocking him back half a step as a massive cloud of black smoke and orange fire erupted into the middle of the street.
Asphalt tore apart with a sickening crunch.
A massive, hulking figure wreathed in roaring red flames crashed down out of the upper atmosphere, slamming directly into the center of the road. The impact smashed a two-foot crater into the concrete, sending chunks of stone and burning tire rubber flying into the air. The figure was a young guy, barely twenty, wearing a bright yellow basketball jersey with the number four printed across the front, a thick red headband wrapped around his forehead.
Before the dust could clear, a second guy dropped out of the sky, landing lightly on his feet near the edge of the crater.
This one wore a matching red basketball jersey, a yellow headband tied around his damp hair, and white lightning arced visibly across his knuckles, crackling with a sharp, high-pitched snapping sound.
"You idiot!" the lightning guy roared, stepping over a burning piece of a commercial sign, his fist glowing blindingly bright. "What did you say about my mother?!"
"I said you couldn’t make a free throw if it was the size of your fat mother!!" the fire guy bellowed, hauling himself up out of the crater, his entire right arm expanding into a pillar of roaring flame.
Civilians on the sidewalk screamed, scattering in every direction, diving behind parked cars and ducking into doorway alcoves.
Rain scrambled backward, pressing his spine flat against the stone wall of a closed bakery, his eyes wide as he watched the two guys throw punches that blew holes through the surrounding storefronts.
A hundred yards down the street, behind a high metal chain-link fence surrounding an outdoor basketball court, a crowd of fifty teenagers was standing on bleachers, holding up paper cups and shouting wildly, cheering every time a fireball blasted across the street.
Rain stood frozen in the doorway, holding his breath, staring at the burning street in total, stunned silence.