The red light faded, leaving the bright text stamped into the back of Rain’s eyelids every time he blinked.
[Synthesis Result]
[Skill Name: Flash Step: Zero Drag]
[Rank: SSS]
Rain didn’t move. He sat pinned to the edge of the narrow clinic gurney, his fingers hooked so tightly into the thin fabric of the mattress that his knuckles were stark white. His chest hitched as he tried to take a full breath, and a brutal, familiar spike of pain shot through his left side where his ribs were cracked, reminding him instantly of the alley and the beating he’d taken.
SSS.
The letter hovered in front of him, sharp and glowing against the dim, gray walls of the room. It didn’t make any sense. Skills with three S’s attached to them belonged to the people who owned entire city blocks, the ones who rode through the main thoroughfares in sealed transport vehicles, whose families bought real estate with cash and never once looked at a price tag.
Rain had taken a severe beating in a dead-end pathway for two basic, bottom-tier skill disks. He had gambled his life, his health, and whatever meager savings he hoped to scrape together over the next months of hard labor just to acquire one trash disk that still cost the equivalent of twenty five thousand credits on the open market, a crushing debt that would have taken him years to pay back if he failed.
And now, right here in this cramped, foul-smelling basement ward, those two pieces of junk had fused into an anomaly.
A fresh line of text drifted up through the floating glare, taking its time to resolve at the center of his vision.
[Skill synthesis complete. Would you like to initialize Flash Step: Zero Drag now?]
Rain swallowed hard, his tongue dragging over the roof of his mouth like dry paper. His heart was hammering against his ribs, fast and erratic, sending a warm rush of adrenaline straight to his fingertips.
’Yes,’ he thought, the command crisp and immediate in his mind.
[Initialization protocol ready. Mental command required for execution.]
[Host must be on his feet to use this skill. Proceed to say "ACTIVATE FLASH STEP"]
He looked across the floor. The far wall was maybe ten feet away. An old plastic chair sat in the corner next to a rusted metal stand, and the paint on the concrete was flaking off in long, yellowed strips near the baseboard. Give or take, maybe ten feet. It was a joke of a distance.
He stood up anyways.
’Activate Flash Step.’
Something deep in his chest uncoiled. It wasn’t a slow warm-up or a gentle pool of energy like the synthesis process. This felt like a cold needle driving straight into his gut, siphon-draining a thick, heavy chunk of his internal weight down through his hips, down his legs, and locking right into the soles of his feet.
[Flash Step: Zero Drag activated.]
[Mana cost: -3]
[Mana: 7/10]
....
WHOOOSH~
The room didn’t blur. He didn’t even see the floor move.
One millisecond his knees were bent over the side of the mattress, and the very next, his shoulder slammed straight into the hard plaster of the far wall before his brain could register his feet leaving the linoleum.
The impact was loud, a flat, heavy thud that rattled his teeth. Rain hit the wall sideways, his frame folding up against the baseboard as his weight dropped him into a heap on the floor. His forehead bounced off the wall, and the sudden jar sent a blinding shock of white heat directly through his broken ribs.
"Nngh—!"
Rain slammed his palm over his mouth, pinning his tongue hard against his teeth to choke back the scream rising in his throat. He stayed completely still on his side, his knees pulled up toward his chest, breathing in short, shallow gasps while listening past the heavy pounding of his own pulse in his ears.
Down the corridor, rubber soles squeaked against vinyl. They slowed down, paused right outside the wooden door, and then slowly began to drift away as the nurse kept moving down the hall.
Rain pulled his hand back from his face, letting out a long, ragged exhale through his nose.
He started shaking. It began as a small tremor in his stomach, but as he dragged himself up into a sitting position against the wall, a quiet, wheezing sound came out of his chest. He pressed both hands over his face, trying to stop the ridiculous, breathless laugh that was bubbling up in his throat.
"Hehehehe~"
Ten feet in a fraction of a second. He hadn’t felt his feet touch the tile. He hadn’t felt the air push against his skin. The space between the bed and the wall had simply ceased to exist for him.
He was laughing about the absurdity of it all when he felt something in his legs.
A pain started deep behind his kneecaps and flooded down toward his ankles like boiling liquid poured straight over raw nerve endings. His calf muscles twitched violently under his skin, locking up into hard, agonizing knots that made his toes curl inward. The tendons at the back of his heels throbbed with a heavy, sharp ache, feeling as though they had been stretched past their breaking point and snapped back into place.
"Dammit," he hissed through his teeth, grabbing his right knee and squeezing until his forearm shook.
He sat there on the cold floor, letting the pain wash over him, but he couldn’t pull the grin off his face if he tried. It hurt like hell, but it was real. His own trash disk, a bottom-tier kinetic push that could barely knock over an empty tin can, had fused with Sen’s basic friction reducer. Combined and multiplied by the system, they had completely stripped away surface drag, turning an almost useless burst of physical force into absolute, near-invisible speed or at least it looked that way from his perspective.
He forced himself back to his feet, using the metal doorframe for balance while his legs wobbled under him like wet cardboard. Every step back to the gurney sent a sharp, biting needle straight up his heels into his lower back, but he didn’t care. He practically threw himself back onto the mattress, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his chin buried in his hands as he stared down at the floorboards.
He was eighteen years old, stuck in a dump of an academy clinic, bruised, broke, and battered, and he was sitting on an SSS-rank ability.
For the first time since he had been dumped in this lower tier, the suffocating ceiling above his head felt like something he could actually smash through. He didn’t just have a skill; he had an anomaly.
’If someone tried to corner me again,’ Rain thought, ’if those same guys came back to throw more punches while their friends held me down, they wouldn’t even see me move. I could dodge a blow, close the gap, or clear an entire street before anyone could react or pull a weapon.’
The thoughts in his head were running wild with possibilities. But he knew he was getting ahead of himself.
’System,’ Rain thought, his pulse still racing as he wiped a line of cold sweat from his eyebrow. ’Show profile.’
The interface expanded, locking into a clean block of pale blue light floating two feet in front of his nose.
[Host Profile]
[Name: Rain]
[Level: 1]
[Status: Awakened]
[HP: 34/100]
[Mana: 7/10]
[Physical Attributes]
[Strength: 8]
[Agility: 9]
[Endurance: 7]
[Intelligence: 16]
[Skill Slots: 1/1 (FUSED)]
[Slot 1: Flash Step: Zero Drag — Rank SSS]
[Mana Cost: 3 per activation]
[Range: ~12 feet per activation, scales with agility]
[Warning: Output exceeds current physical vigor. Structural risk to legs and joints upon use.]
Rain leaned in close, reading every single number line by line.
Thirty-four health points left. The beating had taken more than half his vitality, and slamming shoulder-first into the wall just now had shaved off another slice. Then his eyes drifted to the Mana bar. Seven out of ten.
It appeared the base level was ten units. Ten units was the absolute bottom of what an unawakened core held before taking a proper skill disk. A single activation of Flash Step had eaten three whole units in a millisecond.
Rain rested his knuckles against his lips, working through the math in his head. Three activations meant nine units of Mana total. That left him with a single unit lingering at the bottom of his core, which wasn’t enough to trigger the skill a fourth time. If he got into a real fight out on the streets, he had exactly three bursts of speed. Three steps to end it, three steps to run away, or three steps to tear his own leg muscles apart before he was running on dead air.
’Not to mention, I can only travel at most, twelve feet with it,’ he thought, glancing back up at the range line on the profile. Not a whole street. Not even close.
He stared down at his thin calves sticking out from beneath the hem of his hospital gown.
The warning line at the bottom of the profile wasn’t exaggerating or trying to scare him either.
Fusing those two disks hadn’t magically upgraded his bones or built up his muscle tissue. The system had handed an SSS-rank engine to a completely unconditioned frame. It was like putting a massive, high-grade power turbine inside a cheap wooden frame, the turbine would turn, the power would generate, but the frame was going to shake itself to pieces every single time he flipped the switch.
’If I just use it blindly,’ Rain reasoned, staring at his trembling knees, ’I’ll blow out my own achilles tendons on the second step. I need a frame that can handle the shock. Strength to absorb the impact, endurance to keep the muscle from cramping, and agility so my brain can keep up with where my body lands.’
He leaned back against the thin pillow, his eyes scanning the blue light as ideas began to turn over in his mind. He didn’t just need to survive three uses; he needed to build his body up until three uses didn’t leave him limping like an old man. If he trained his legs, if he ran until his lungs burned and squatted until his thighs were hard as rock, he could turn that violent recoil into controlled momentum. He could chain the steps together. Imagine stepping past an opponent’s guard, hitting them before they even turned their head, and stepping back out of reach before their body even hit the pavement.
’System,’ Rain thought, focusing his mind on the floating screen. ’How fast does my Mana regenerate?’
Text resolved beneath his physical attributes.
[Base Mana regeneration is tied to Intelligence and current physical rest state.]
[Current rate: 1 Mana point per 60 minutes of complete rest.]
[Current rate: 1 Mana point per 180 minutes of active physical strain.]
Rain’s eyes narrowed as he read the numbers. One point an hour if he was sitting still doing absolutely nothing or sleeping. Three hours per point if he was walking, working, or fighting. That meant if he burned all three steps in a bad encounter, he was effectively powerless for the rest of the day. There was no quick refill, no instant potion in his pocket, and no shortcut. Once the reservoir went dry, he was relying entirely on his own weak muscle and bone.
’What about the skill slot?’ he asked mentally. ’Can I synthesize another skill right now if I buy or find another disk?’
The main profile window shifted, replaced by a diagram showing his single occupied skill slot.
[Synthesis requires two or more active skill slots.]
[Current Skill Slots: 1/1.]
[Slot 1 is currently occupied by [Flash Step: Zero Drag] (Fused state).]
[No available empty slots detected. Synthesis unavailable.]
’How do I unlock more slots?’
The system paused, a faint ring pulsing at the center of the screen before fresh lines appeared.
[Skill Slot Expansion conditions:]
[1. Host Level milestones.]
[2. Specific system achievement parameters.]
[3. Quest completion rewards.]
[Detailed threshold requirements are currently unavailable.]
Rain stared at the word locked. It didn’t give him specific numbers or target levels, leaving a clear gap in what the interface was willing to show him right now. It was a ceiling, but at least it confirmed that the single slot wasn’t a permanent limit. He could expand later once he leveled up or triggered whatever achievements the system tracked.
He shifted his weight on the bed, feeling another dull throbbing in his thighs, and thought of one more practical issue.
’What happens if I try to activate Flash Step when I only have one Mana left?’
[Skill activation will fail.]
[Partial Mana deductions will not trigger motion.]
[System Warning: Attempting to force skill execution during total Mana depletion may cause severe blacklash such as but not exclusively, Internal core instability.]
Rain closed his eyes and let the blue windows dissolve back into nothing.
He sat alone in the quiet clinic room, listening to the faint hum of the building’s ventilation system overhead. He lifted his hands, turning them over to look at his palms in the pale light filtering through the grimy window high on the wall. His knuckles were still scraped red, covered in dried blood and dirt from the alley, but his fingers were steady.
He had spent his whole life watching other people walk around with power, watching them take up space like they owned the ground beneath their feet just because they were born into the right families or had the cash to buy high-tier disks straight out of the box. He had been an unawakened nobody, an F-rank target for anyone who had a bad day and wanted something to kick.
Now he was sitting on a skill meant for the gods of this world, wrapped inside an eighteen-year-old body that could barely handle one full-speed jump without crashing into a wall.
Rain let out a long breath, a genuine, wild smile breaking across his face in the dim room.
He didn’t care about the pain in his legs, and he didn’t care that he only had three uses before running dry. The power was real, it was sitting right inside his core, and no one could take it away from him.
All he needed to do now was get out of this bed, leave this clinic, and start working until his body was strong enough to keep up with the skill he had just forged.
’What could go wrong?’