The world went to shit.
That was what most people said now in buses or transports back home. Which was exponentially worse than the complaints about inflation people randomly had on bus rides back home a couple of decades prior.
Rain dragged his shoes across the cracked concrete walkway leading toward the student housing sector, the weight of two plastic cases pulling at the seams of his jacket pockets. The morning sun was higher now, beating down on the back of his neck, but a cold sweat clung to his ribs. His jaw throbbed with every step, the sharp iron taste of blood still settling on his tongue where Sen’s fist had cut the inside of his lip.
He kept his thumb pressed against the sharp edge of Sen’s crumpled debt manifest. Twenty-five thousand credits. Four percent annual interest.
Rain had felt the exact same hollow drop in his stomach when the proctor handed him his own yellow slip. That brief, sickening moment where the air leaves your lungs and you realize the rest of your life just got mapped out in black ink on a cheap paper receipt.
He could still see Sen’s eyes right before he swung, not angry, not hateful, just completely hollowed out by panic. Sen was gone, vanished into the sea of commuters outside the gates, and Rain knew with a dark, sinking certainty that the guy wasn’t heading home to his dad. He wasn’t heading to the docks either.
Sen was going to LOG OFF.
It was a word everybody used because nobody wanted to say the real thing out loud. The news channels called it early departure statistics or voluntary census reduction.
They buried the numbers in the back pages of the daily gazettes, right below the weather reports and Guild market tickers, but everyone in the lower wards knew the truth. More eighteen-year-olds log off in the three days following the Resonance Ceremony than died from mana-poisoning in the slums or got chewed up by monsters in the low-tier rifts combined. The state even had cleanup crews on retainer near the elevated train lines and high-rise bridges every August, dressed in plain white coveralls, waiting with hoses and canvas stretchers before the morning rush hour even finished.
Rain understood it. That was the terrifying part. Sitting on that dry fountain step, watching the girls and boys walk off the dais with yellow slips in their hands, he had felt that same sudden, suffocating urge to just stop breathing. To just lie down on the cobblestones and refuse to move.
Because when the state hands you a bill for twenty-five grand before you’ve even had breakfast, and the only tool they give you to pay it back is an F-rank breeze or a friction pad, they aren’t giving you a future. They’re handing you a shovel and telling you to dig your own grave at four percent interest.
Rain lifted his eyes toward the towering concrete walls of the Vanguard inner campus. Beyond the dorms, far past the administrative spires, the sky above the city center looked normal at first glance. Bright blue, clear, dotted with a few pale morning clouds.
But if you looked closely at the horizon, right where the upper ward skyscrapers cut into the atmosphere, the light shimmered. It warped like heat rising off asphalt in mid-summer, a massive, jagged tear in reality that stretched three miles wide and never closed.
The Great Fracture.
Eighty years ago, there were no cores. There were no skill disks, no mana scanners, no guilds in silk coats handing out gold pens to teenagers. There were just ordinary cities, ordinary debts, and ordinary people living ordinary, quiet lives.
Then the sky split open over three major continents on the exact same afternoon.
It didn’t start with a war or an invasion. It started with a sound, a low, grinding vibration that vibrated through every human ribcage on earth for six straight hours. When the noise finally stopped, the rifts were just sitting there. Bleeding alien atmosphere into the clouds, leaking a thick, blue-grey gas that smell like burnt copper and ozone.
At first, humanity panicked. Armies mobilized. World governments poured trillions of credits into artillery, fighter jets, and nuclear warheads, aiming every weapon they owned at the spatial tears. They shelled the first rift for forty-eight hours straight.
It did nothing.
The bombs detonated against the rift thresholds, their shockwaves swallowed whole by the void. And then the monsters came out.
They weren’t animals. They were horrors forged from dense, high-frequency mana, beasts with hides like reinforced steel, chitin that absorbed kinetic impact, and eyes that burned with cold, predatory intelligence. Standard firearms barely scratched them. Lead bullets flattened against their scales; high-explosive rounds just knocked them back a few feet before they charged again. Within three months, entire coastlines were wiped clean. Millions of people flooded inland, crowding into hastily constructed fortress cities surrounded by fifty-foot concrete blast walls.
Humanity was losing. The old world order collapsed in less than a decade. Paper currencies vanished, global supply chains shattered, and the old laws of nation-states became meaningless overnight.
In the scramble to rebuild something that resembled order, the surviving governments and the first mega-guilds jointly issued a new digital ledger currency to replace the dead paper economy. They pegged it one-to-one against the old dollar’s value, one credit for every dollar a thing used to cost, mostly so people could still make sense of prices without relearning math in the middle of a war, but they gave it a new name to mark the clean break from everything that had collapsed.
They called it the credit.
Then came the discovery that changed everything.
A team of military researchers dissecting a dead rift-drake in the ruins of what used to be Chicago found a crystalline organ seated right behind the creature’s sternum. It was dense, glowing with stored mana, radiating an electromagnetic signature unlike anything known to science.
They called this Crystal a Core.
More importantly, they realized that human bodies had begun to react to the alien atmosphere leaking from the rifts. Within a generation, children were born with dormant, calcified core-structures sitting empty behind their own breastbones. Human bodies were evolving to survive the new atmosphere, building an internal organ designed specifically to hold and process atmospheric mana.
The breakthrough happened when a civilian researcher figured out how to extract a monster’s dead core, refine it through high-pressure ether-baths, and carve a single, repeatable magical construct onto its surface.
Yes, magic, because no other word could be used to describe the miracle that was about to be unleashed on the world.
The Skill Disk was born.
If a human pressed a refined disk against their chest during a moment of core-resonance, their body would absorb the etched construct. The ability became permanent. Suddenly, human soldiers weren’t just shooting rifles; they were launching fireballs, hardening their skin into living stone, and stepping through shadows. The tide of the war shifted. Humans built walls around the rifts, turned the rifts into a resource farm, and established the current order.
Power became the only currency that mattered.
If you had a high-tier core, you could absorb A-rank combat disks. You could fly, shatter buildings with a punch, or heal fatal wounds in seconds. You became a Guildmaster. You lived in the sky-spires of the Upper Ring, ate real meat, and owned land.
If you had a low-tier core, you absorbed an F-rank disk. You became an engine. A human tool meant to clear exhaust pipes, slide factory crates, or power city streetlights for sixteen hours a day.
And that was where the corporate guilds stepped in.
They realized early on that controlling the skill disks meant controlling the entire human species. The Dead Domain was dangerous, and harvesting raw monster cores required elite, high-tier combatants. The private guilds monopolized the rift gates, locked down the refining foundries, and artificially choked the supply of skill disks. They turned a basic biological necessity into the most expensive commodity on the planet.
To keep the lower classes from revolting, the government created the State Indenture Grant.
It sounded like charity. The news broadcasts called it The Great Equalizer. Every citizen got a free evaluation and a guaranteed disk on their eighteenth birthday! The state paid for it all up front!
Except the state didn’t pay for anything.
They bought low-grade utility disks from the guilds at inflated wholesale prices, slapped a twenty-five-thousand-credit price tag on them, and handed the bill to children who didn’t even have shoes without holes in the soles.
It was a perfect, inescapable trap.
If you tried to refuse the scan, you were classified as an unregistered core threat and tossed into a labor prison. If you took the scan and got an F-rank disk, you were handed a twenty-five-thousand-credit debt manifest at four percent annual interest.
You couldn’t even sell the disk back to pay off the debt, because the moment the booth dispenser dropped it into your hands, your registration number was stamped onto the metal. Selling an assigned disk on the black market was a federal felony that carried a twenty-year sentence in the deep-level scrap mines.
You lived in a world where a loaf of synthetic grain bread cost fifteen credits, a gallon of clean drinking water cost eight, and the state deducted fifty percent of your daily factory wages before you even saw your paycheck to cover the interest on your grant. Not the principal. Just the interest.
Rain gripped the two cases tighter in his jacket pockets.
He thought about Sen again. The way Sen’s shoulder had slammed into him, the desperate, wild look in his eyes when he yelled that he’d rather check out than walk home to his dad with a yellow slip. Sen had worked two years at the docks just to afford the late-awakening processing fee, hoping against hope that his core would yield something, anything, that could lift his family out of the lower ring. And the machine had handed him a crate-slider disk and a twenty-five-thousand-credit bill.
Rain’s feet dragged over a patch of weeds pushing up through the broken asphalt.
’The world is like two sides of a coin now more than ever,’ Rain thought, and he wasn’t just thinking about the bank accounts of the upper wards.