I
The commentary around him didn’t die down so much as it evolved, shifting from shock into the kind of casual, half-interested cruelty that people reserve for things that don’t actually affect them.
“Light Support,” a woman nearby repeated to her companion, shaking her head.
“My cousin got that in the beta run of a game like this once.
Quit within a week.”
“This isn’t a game, though,” her companion pointed out.
“Feels like one,” she said, and they both laughed, already moving on to speculate about someone else’s newly revealed class three pillars down.
Calvin listened to this exchange with a strange, detached curiosity.
Feels like one.
He filed that thought away too, alongside all the others, a small, useful data point about how the people of this world seemed to understand their own reality.
II
The Warrior who’d laughed hardest a few minutes earlier had already lost interest in Calvin entirely, absorbed instead in showing off his new golden aura to a small cluster of admirers.
The Mage who’d received her judgment before Calvin was still turning her hands over in wonder, occasionally sending out small experimental sparks that made the people near her flinch and laugh.
It struck Calvin, watching all this unfold, that nobody here seemed to actually understand what they’d been handed , least of all the people cheering loudest. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
They were celebrating potential, not competence; excitement at receiving a good hand of cards, long before anyone had actually had to play them.
III
He thought about the calls he used to get from brand-new SaaS clients, the ones who’d just signed a contract, still riding the high of a sales pitch, calling in not because anything was wrong but because they wanted someone to confirm, one more time, that they’d made a good decision.
Confidence, in his experience, was rarely correlated with actual mastery.
Some of his most disastrous tickets had come from clients who’d been utterly convinced of their own competence right up until the exact moment everything caught fire, usually somewhere around month three, once the honeymoon period wore off and the actual work of running a system responsibly finally began.
Maybe class judgments worked the same way.
Maybe the people celebrating hardest right now had simply been dealt a flashier opening hand, with no guarantee at all of what they’d do with it.
It was, he supposed, one of the few genuinely comforting thoughts he’d had since waking up in this place, the idea that a loud, golden start didn’t necessarily mean anything durable, and that a quiet, mocked one didn’t necessarily mean nothing did.
IV
The system official, still hovering nearby with the patient indifference of someone who’d processed ten thousand registrations before lunch, cleared its throat, or made a sound approximating one, given that Calvin still wasn’t entirely sure it had a throat.
“Sir.
Your name confirmation is still pending.”
That.
Calvin became aware, belatedly, that he’d been standing in silence for what was probably an uncomfortably long stretch of time, lost in his own private audit of the room’s collective ego.
A few nearby onlookers had started glancing his way again, curiosity flickering back to life now that the “Light Support” novelty had worn thin enough to make room for a new one: the guy who apparently couldn’t even confirm his own name.
“Sorry,” Calvin said, and found, to his mild surprise, that he meant it; not toward the official, but toward himself, for the small, uncharacteristic lapse in composure.
Eight years of never leaving a caller in dead air, and here he was, doing exactly that to himself, in front of an audience no less, on what was arguably the single most consequential phone call of his entire existence, if you squinted at it the right way.
V
“Take your time,” the official said, in a tone that suggested it did not, in fact, particularly care whether he took his time or not.
“Though I would note that pillar occupancy affects the queue’s overall throughput.”
Calvin almost laughed.
Even here: reborn, judged, freshly humiliated in front of a hall full of strangers, someone was still worried about throughput.
Some things, he thought, feeling something loosen slightly in his chest for the first time since waking in this place, really do carry over between worlds.
He straightened, the murmuring crowd fading back into a manageable hum, and turned his full attention, at last, to the question actually in front of him.