I
The soft white light around Calvin held steady for a moment: no flames, no runes, no dramatic swell of sound.
Just a quiet, near-transparent glow, gentle enough that he almost mistook it for a pause rather than a result.
“Judgment complete,” the Great Sage said, and gave a single, economical wave of his whisk, as though closing a file he’d already lost interest in, his attention visibly moving on before the words had even finished settling in the air.
“Class: Light Support.”
II
The hall fell silent for exactly two seconds.
Then the laughter broke, impossible to contain, rippling outward from the nearest onlookers like a stone dropped in still water.
“Light Support?!
Oh, that’s brutal!”
“I heard that class is the worst one in the entire system, barely functions on anything except the Undead!”
“Condolences, man.
You just rolled the hardest difficulty setting there is.”
Calvin stood inside the pale light, expression carefully blank, letting the noise wash past him.
It wasn’t that he felt nothing, it was that eight years of customer service had trained a very specific kind of numbness into him, the ability to let a wave of noise crest and break without reacting to a single drop of it until he’d heard the whole thing through.
III
So this is what the Great Sage meant by “when the laughter starts,” he thought, with a detachment that surprised even him.
A system official drifted over to formalize the registration, reciting the details in the flat, practiced cadence of someone who’d said the same lines a thousand times before and expected to say them a thousand more.
“Confirming class: Light Support.
Core restriction: healing and buff effects apply at full strength solely against the Undead.
All other targets receive a diminished effect, with the exact reduction scaling by race and relational closeness.
Please confirm.”
“Wait, hold on,” a burly man nearby interrupted, freshly crowned Warrior, still practicing punches in the air with the enthusiasm of someone who hadn’t yet noticed anyone was watching.
“What’s a ‘diminished effect’ mean, exactly?
Like, if somebody drinks his potion, they get basically nothing?”
“Approximately,” the official said, without a flicker of inflection.
IV
The Warrior laughed so hard he had to slap his own knee.
Calvin remained expressionless, running a private calculation instead: full strength against the Undead.
If he ever actually crossed paths with something Undead, that would be…
what, exactly?
Home turf?
The thought was almost funny, in a bleak sort of way, given that he currently owned no weapon, no armor, and not even the faintest idea what a “party” was supposed to look like in this world.
He filed the thought away.
Speculation about future advantages felt premature when he hadn’t even worked out how to walk properly with a body that, as far as he could tell, still wasn’t quite casting a shadow.
For now, standing in a hall full of strangers who’d already decided what kind of story his life was about to become, all he really wanted was to get through the next five minutes without giving them the satisfaction of a visible reaction.
V
“One final item,” the official said, consulting a form that technically didn’t exist in any physical sense.
“Please confirm your name for the World of Threnmoor.
Original name on record: Calvin.
Will you be retaining it?”
Calvin didn’t answer right away.
Around him, the laughter had mostly settled into a low murmur of ongoing commentary…
someone was already explaining, with the confident inaccuracy of secondhand knowledge, exactly how “useless” Light Support was rumored to be in group content.
He let it blur into background noise, the same way he used to let a difficult call’s opening minute of venting wash past him before he actually started working the problem.
He thought instead about the Great Sage’s warning.
Diminishment, too, is foreshadowing.
An easy thing to say, from where that old man was standing.
A harder thing to actually believe, standing inside a spotlight built entirely out of other people’s pity.
But he found, turning the thought over, that some small, stubborn part of him wanted to believe it anyway, not because the evidence supported it yet, but because the alternative was simply accepting the joke at face value, and Calvin had spent eight years refusing to accept a customer’s first, angriest read of a situation as the final word on it.
He was not, it occurred to him, going to start now.