At age eleven, Dante discovered two fundamental truths about the economies of both worlds.
The first was that Hell did not use gold or silver coins like the old fantasy books in the school library claimed. Trade at the outpost on the edge of the Ash Wastes ran on thick wads of gray banknotes, stamped in black ink by the Central Bank of the Fourth Continent. The bills smelled of smoke and bore long serial numbers printed across the corners.
The second was that the lesser demons at the trading post paid one hundred of those notes for an unopened bag of roasted coffee and three boxes of matches brought from Earth, yet charged only fifty notes for a sack of fire lizard scales.
"This is robbery," Maria had grumbled back then, eyeing the wad of gray currency bound by a rubber band in Dante's hand. "That boar-faced thing paid two weeks' worth of my family's groceries for four chocolate bars I grabbed on sale at the corner market."
"It isn't robbery, it's an import tariff," Dante had answered at the time, pocketing the bundle in his shorts. "They don't have sugarcane on that stony ground. We do. The system calls it market arbitrage."
That same year, Maria clocked in at one meter fifty-five in height during the school physical. Dante stalled at one meter forty-two, having to crane his neck just to speak with her.
At age twelve, their first serious combat milestone was reached.
[Dante Miller has reached Level 5.]
[New spell unlocked: [Runic Containment Barrier].]
[Mana Reserve increased: 85/85.]
[Maria has reached Level 6.]
[Attributes updated: Strength 16, Constitution 18.]
[Skill unlocked: [Lesser Seismic Strike].]
The celebration took place on the pump house floor with two two-liter bottles of soda and a plastic container of fried chicken croquettes Maria bought along the way.
The rusted iron rebar had been retired two months earlier. In its place, Maria now carried a solid ten-kilogram bar of carbon steel, which she had purchased from the junkyard owned by a classmate's uncle and had lathed to fit a braided leather grip.
Dante had also discovered that using chalk infused with specific mineral powders to draw magic circles significantly slashed the Mana required for spells. In other words, he never went anywhere without chalk now.
She rested the slab of steel over her shoulder with the same casual ease she might hold a broom, while Dante required both hands and a heave from his knees just to pry one end off the floor.
"Don't you ever grow?" she asked, chewing the tip of a croquette while looking at him seated on the concrete platform.
"My growth is focused on Mana channels," Dante countered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Brute physical strength is a primitive attribute that any level-three ogre develops without mental effort."
Maria gave him a backhanded swat across the nape of his neck. The tap was light by her standards, but it made Dante's teeth clatter and knocked his head forward an inch.
"Watch your mouth, bighead. If I don't smash the monsters' teeth with this piece of steel, your genius Mana is only good for sketching pretty circles in the dirt before you turn into lunch."
At age thirteen, money began piling up at an absurd rate.
Dante discovered that certain crystallized sulfur stones found in the deep chasms of Hell could be sold on Earth to underground jewelers and rare mineral collectors downtown. The deals were paid out in ordinary hundred-real bills, handed over in manila envelopes inside cramped backrooms of commercial arcades.
The Miller household began changing without Maicon or Kayla asking too many questions.
A brand-new double-door refrigerator materialized in the kitchen one Wednesday. When Maicon returned from the warehouse and saw the gleaming appliance in place of the rattling old husk that wheezed at night, Dante simply stated he had won a municipal youth computing contest. Maicon opened the freezer, spotted two cases of premium beer stashed on the top rack, shrugged, and never brought it up again.
Kayla received a fifty-inch television for the living room. She spent her days glued to gossip shows across the massive screen, her eyes glassy in the vivid new colors, never caring whether her son spent his afternoons in his bedroom or out of town. Money for the monthly bills landed reliably in the mailbox at the start of every month, and that was all it took to maintain domestic peace.
At Maria's house, the approach was far more direct. She slammed ten thousand reais in cold cash onto the kitchen table before her mother and brother.
"What is this, girl?" Her mother nearly dropped her coffee mug, staring at the bank-banded stacks.
"Delivery work," Maria replied, already standing one meter seventy tall, broad shoulders filling the kitchen doorway. "I cleared the overdue installments on your sewing machine and paid off the tab at the grocer. The rest is for groceries so we don't have to buy scrap meat with bone in it."
Her older brother reached a hand out toward one of the stacks. Maria caught his wrist between two fingers, clamping down on his tendons until the boy sank to the tiled floor, groaning in pain.
"If you lay a single finger on this cash to gamble at the soccer field, I'll snap your arm in the exact same spot the doctor casted last year. Am I clear?"
Her brother nodded frantically, cheek pressed against the kitchen linoleum, unable to wrench his arm free.
At age fourteen, trips into Hell ceased being desperate scrambles for survival on the fringes of the Fourth Continent and became routine work.
They established an underground shelter within one of the dry fissures of the Ash Wastes, shielded by three layers of [Runic Containment Barrier] that Dante maintained with concentrated Mana stones. The hideout featured two inflatable mattresses, toolboxes, canned food from Earth, and three iron chests packed with gray banknotes from the Infernal Bank.
Maria completed the quest [Protect the Light] shortly after turning fifteen.
[Special Quest: Protect the Light - Completed.]
[Final reward granted:]
[Life Affinity Consolidated.]
[Trait Acquired: [Unshakable Bodyguard] - Damage received by linked allies within three meters is reduced by 25% and partially redirected as counter-attack energy to the Sentinel.]
"Does this mean I get stronger when you get hit?" she asked, reading the silver text floating in the air of the stone shelter.
Dante sat on the ground, carving stabilization runes into a beast bone with a fine-tipped knife.
"It means the system officially designated you as my truck bumper," he replied without looking up from the rune. "If I take a hit, you hit harder against whatever struck me."
"Convenient for you," she remarked, crossing her long legs on the air mattress. "And wildly unfair for the one who has to stand up front taking bites."
"You have forty-eight hit points, Maria. I have twenty-one. If one of those hounds bites my ankle, I'm limping for three weeks."
"That's because you live on rice and cheap sausage and spend all day reading spell scrolls instead of lifting iron."
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
"I'm a caster, not a dockworker."
At age sixteen, their patience for pretending to be ordinary kids from the slums completely ran out.
Dante hired a private attorney on the city's wealthiest commercial avenue. Armed with thick envelopes of cash converted through black-market money brokers, the legal emancipation process sailed through the registry office bureaucracy without a hitch.
His farewell to the Millers lasted less than ten minutes.
Dante placed a binder on the kitchen formica table containing debt clearance receipts for the entire apartment, along with a bank balance covering their fixed living expenses for the next ten years.
Maicon signed the emancipation papers with a cheap blue ballpoint pen, verified the figure on the top page of the binder, and offered his son a limp handshake.
"You were always kind of weird, kid," Maicon said, lighting a cigarette by the laundry window. "At least you caused less trouble than the neighbors' brats. If you ever need anything... well, you've got more cash than me, so I guess you won't."
Kayla gave him a brief hug, complained that his new coat smelled like smoke, and returned to the couch to catch the finale of the six o'clock soap opera.
Maria handled things similarly at her place. Her mother wept a little, gave thanks for the debts wiped clean, and hid the documents at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her brother didn't even bother coming out of his room.
That same month, they leased the top floor of a high-end apartment building in the upscale Acacias district, twenty minutes from downtown.
The unit featured solid hardwood floors, three spacious bedrooms, an enclosed balcony with tempered glass, and double-insulated brick walls, perfect for anyone needing to tear open portals into other dimensions without sulfur fumes leaking into the hallway.
On moving day, the furniture deliverymen parked their truck at the curb and refused to carry a four-seater leather sofa up the stairs after discovering it wouldn't fit into the service elevator.
"We'll come back tomorrow with a crane to hoist it through the balcony window," the driver announced, wiping his neck with a dingy rag.
Maria, who had already reached her towering height, wearing gray sweatpants and a black tank top, raised an eyebrow at the man.
"No need to come back tomorrow."
She walked over to the truck, shoved her hands under the sofa's wooden base, bent her knees, and hoisted the ninety-kilogram piece of furniture up to her chest in one clean snap of her back.
The three movers froze on the sidewalk, mouths hanging open.
"Hold the entrance door, Dante," she called out, striding past the glass lobby with the sofa on her shoulders as though carrying a shoebox. "If you let the elevator door close before I hit the stairs, I'm coming back down and making you haul the cushions by yourself."
Dante, trailing behind with two lightweight bags of cheese bread and a leather folder holding the lease agreements, merely shook his head and hurried to catch the aluminum door.
"Monster," he muttered under his breath.
"I heard that, smoke boy!" Her voice boomed down the stairwell, accompanied by heavy thuds marching up the steps.
At age seventeen, the layout of the Acacias apartment followed a routine established with military precision.
The expansive living room was split down the middle.
The left side belonged to Dante. Two long iron bookcases stood crammed with old tomes on alchemy, hand-drawn arcane diagrams on tracing paper, and dozens of glass vials containing oddly colored powders sorted by density. On the floor, a thick rug concealed the runic chalk circle he used for meditation and accelerated Mana regeneration.
The right side was Maria's domain. A commercial bench press occupied the center of the floor, flanked by cast-iron plates totaling over two hundred kilograms, a treadmill whose motor she had burned out twice from the sheer impact of her strides, and a wall mount where her carbon steel bar now rested beside a pair of iron gauntlets reinforced with basilisk leather plates from the Third Continent.
It was ten o'clock on a Friday night.
Dante stood before the hallway mirror, straightening the collar of a black long-sleeved shirt.
He had grown, reaching one meter seventy-two. His build remained lean, without significant muscle mass, but his posture was straight, shoulders aligned, and his gray eyes carried an analytical calm foreign to a seventeen-year-old. His dark hair was kept trimmed short, and his slender fingers bore calluses from the endless handling of chalk and runic scribes.
[Name: Dante Miller]
[Age: 17]
[Level: 14 (Pact Summoner - Tier 2)]
[Health Points: 34/34]
[Mana Points: 210/210]
[Attributes:]
[Strength: 07]
[Dexterity: 10]
[Constitution: 08]
[Intelligence: 24]
[Wisdom: 18]
[Charisma: 14]
The congenital weakness remained branded into his soul. He would never be a frontline brawler, but with two hundred and ten Mana points and three concurrent summons unlocked in his grimoire, he didn't need to be.
Heavy footsteps sounded from the kitchen, followed by the solid thunk of the refrigerator door.
Maria strolled into the hallway balancing a glass baking dish packed with half a kilogram of ground-beef pasta in one hand and a large dinner fork in the other.
She pulled up next to him in front of the mirror.
The height difference was almost comical.
Maria had cleared one meter ninety at age sixteen and hadn't stopped since. Her build was a dense pillar of functional muscle, boasting broad shoulders, vascular arms bronzed by outdoor training sessions, and long legs like concrete pillars. Her brown hair no longer hung in braids like when she was a little girl, cropped chin-length now, loose and functional.
She wore black training shorts and a sleeveless top that exposed her broad back and a jagged scar across her left shoulder, a keepsake from an encounter with an infernal hound in the Fifth Minor Continent.
[Name: Maria]
[Age: 17]
[Level: 17 (Unshakable Sentinel - Tier 2)]
[Health Points: 115/115]
[Mana Points: 30/30]
[Attributes:]
[Strength: 26]
[Dexterity: 21]
[Constitution: 28]
[Intelligence: 10]
[Wisdom: 12]
[Charisma: 09]
She shovelled a massive forkful of pasta into her mouth, chewed leisurely, and looked down at Dante's reflection in the glass.
Then, she planted her right elbow squarely on top of his head, using his skull as an armrest while she swallowed her food.
Dante didn't budge. He just closed his eyes slowly, took a deep breath, and let it out through his nose.
"Move your arm," he said in a flat monotone.
"The armrest is comfortable," she mumbled around a mouthful, chewing without the slightest rush. "You're the exact height of a balcony railing. Very practical."
"I am one meter seventy-two, Maria. That is the national male average."
"Average for someone who forgot to eat their crusts." She scooped up another forkful. "If you stay this tiny, when we head down to the Second Continent the lesser demons will think you're my sack lunch."
"I have twenty-four Intelligence." Dante tilted his head, nudging her elbow with his forearm. Maria's arm didn't shift an inch, feeling like an iron beam set in concrete. "I can open two planar rifts simultaneously and cage a demon captain in an ether brig for twenty minutes. You, on the other hand, are sitting at ten Intelligence and take three minutes to calculate change at the bakery."
"Why calculate change when I can snap the bakery counter in half with an open hand?" She shrugged, finally lifting her elbow off his head to scrape the bottom of the glass dish. "Physical strength solves ninety percent of my problems. The other ten percent I leave to you and your chalk scribbles on the floor."
Dante smoothed down his hair, flattened by the weight of her arm, looking across the spacious, quiet apartment.
Seven years had slipped by since the night he dropped into that reeking alley, bleeding out in the gutter with four hit points and an impossible survival quest.
Today, they held legal emancipation papers, a penthouse no neglectful parent could threaten, overflowing bank accounts in both worlds, and enough firepower to step into and out of planar rifts without asking anyone's permission.
Childhood had been short, brutal, and settled with blunt iron swings and late-night arcane calculus.
Now, the preparatory phase was over.
"Are we heading down tonight?" Maria asked, setting the empty dish on the kitchen counter and grabbing a gym towel to wipe her hands.
Dante looked at the fourth tab of his interface, where the destination index for Planar Transit pulsed in a golden hue previously locked away.
[Access granted: 1st of the Nine Great Continents - Plain of Iron Souls.]
[Recommended Level: 15+.]
He pulled his reinforced black leather jacket off the back of the chair and slipped his arms through the sleeves.
"Tonight," Dante answered, a sharp half-smile curling across his face. "Grab your steel bar. We just graduated from daycare.”