I
Nivlac opened his eyes to find himself lying flat on his back in the middle of a muddy country road, staring up at a sky so ordinary—pale blue, scattered with unremarkable clouds—that for one disoriented moment he genuinely wondered if the entire Temple of Fate had been some elaborate fever dream.
Then something warm and insistent began chewing on his pant leg.
He sat up fast enough to startle the goat currently treating his trousers as an afternoon snack, and the two of them regarded each other for a long, silent moment—Nivlac still catching his bearings, the goat entirely unbothered, already returning its attention to the fabric between its teeth.
“…Right,” Nivlac said aloud, mostly to hear his own voice and confirm it still worked.
“Welcome to the other world, I suppose.”
II
He tugged his pant leg free with more effort than the situation strictly warranted, the goat protesting with an indignant bleat.
He got slowly to his feet and brushed dirt from clothes that felt, on reflection, suspiciously plain for someone who’d just been dramatically judged by an ancient temple.
No armor.
No robes.
Just a simple, undyed tunic and trousers—the kind of starter outfit that suggested the universe had budgeted absolutely nothing for his arrival.
He reached, out of pure eight-years-deep muscle memory, for a phone that no longer existed.
His hand closed on empty air, and he stood there feeling faintly ridiculous, before a translucent blue interface flickered to life in front of him instead—eerily reminiscent of the customer service dashboard that used to greet him every night at the start of a shift, except cleaner, sharper, and, notably, not currently frozen on a loading screen. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
III
[Name: Nivlac]
[Class: Light Support (Initial)]
[Level: 1]
[HP: 32/32 | MP: 40/40]
[Skill: Glimmer’s Blessing (100% effect on the Undead, diminished to 30% on all other races)]
[Note: This class is ranked as the lowest-tier support class in the world.
Joining a party as soon as possible is strongly recommended to improve survival odds.]
He read the note twice, the second time slower than the first, absorbing the particular cruelty of seeing “lowest-tier” rendered in flat, unapologetic text—as though the system itself had no interest in softening the blow.
“Fair enough,” he said to the empty road, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he meant it without bitterness.
“At least you’re honest about it.”
There was something almost restful, he decided, in the bluntness of it.
Eight years of customer service had trained him to detect euphemism at fifty paces: “we’re exploring alternative solutions” meant we have no idea what’s wrong; “let me escalate this for you” usually meant nobody wants to deal with this.
A system that simply told you outright that you’d drawn the short straw—no hedging, no corporate softening—was almost refreshing by comparison.
He glanced around properly for the first time, taking stock of his surroundings.
Rolling green hills.
A dirt road winding off toward what looked, in the distance, like the beginnings of a town—smoke rising from chimneys, the faint outline of rooftops catching the afternoon light.
The goat, having apparently decided Nivlac’s trousers were no longer worth the effort, wandered off toward a patch of grass with the unbothered confidence of a creature that had never once in its life been handed a system notification about its own inadequacy.
V
Nivlac watched it go, and felt something settle in his chest—not quite confidence, not quite peace, but something adjacent to both.
Whatever this world turned out to be, whatever “lowest-tier” actually meant in practice once real stakes were involved, he was, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, standing somewhere with no ticket queue, no shift schedule, and no one waiting on the other end of a headset expecting him to fix something before his next scheduled break.
He allowed himself a slow breath, taking in the strange, low hum of a world he didn’t yet understand, and started walking toward the smoke on the horizon.
Whatever came next, he decided, he might as well go meet it on his own two feet.