The building's parking garage was empty at 5:30 PM.
Three floors underground. No windows. Concrete walls. One flickering fluorescent light in the corner that maintenance had been "getting around to fixing" for eight months.
It was also forty feet long and twenty feet wide with a floor smooth enough to run on.
Jacob stood in the center of the garage in his school clothes and looked at the space.
"I want to complete a training session at double the standard D-Rank program without my body failing permanently."
The power activated.
He felt it—not a sensation exactly, more like a shift in the quality of reality around him. Like the universe had just subtly reoriented itself around his intention.
The way forward clarified.
Not instruction. Not a guide. Just certainty—bone-deep and absolute—that if he started, he'd finish.
Jacob dropped into position and did his first push-up.
Then his second.
By the fiftieth, his arms were burning.
By the hundredth, his muscles were screaming.
By the two hundredth, something had changed. The burn was still there, but beneath it—underneath the pain—he could feel his body adapting. Compensating. His cells working at a pace that wasn't quite normal.
The power didn't eliminate pain.
It just meant pain wouldn't stop him.
He kept going.
Push-ups. Sit-ups. Squats. Each set worse than the last. Each set completed anyway.
By the time he started his run—forty laps of the parking garage, thirty feet per lap, not quite a full kilometer but close enough—the fluorescent light in the corner had stopped flickering.
Jacob hadn't touched it.
He ran anyway and filed that detail away for later.
At lap twenty-three, his vision started going gray at the edges. Dehydration probably. Or blood sugar. Or his body simply hitting the wall that human physiology built at a certain threshold of exertion.
He kept running.
At lap thirty-one, his right ankle rolled on a crack in the concrete.
He felt the tendons stretch—felt the wrongness of the angle—and then felt the universe make a tiny, invisible correction. His foot landed true. The ankle held.
Zero percent failure rate.
He kept running.
He finished at 7:43 PM, two hours and thirteen minutes after he'd started. He sat on the concrete floor of the parking garage, back against the wall, lungs working like bellows, sweat soaking through his school clothes.
Every muscle in his body felt like it had been taken apart and reassembled slightly wrong.
He pulled up his status screen with shaking hands.
[JACOB HAYES]
[LEVEL: 1]
[RANK: SSS]
[CAREER: PERFECT HUNTER]
[TALENT: 0% FAILURE RATE]
[STRENGTH: 14 (+3)]
[AGILITY: 12 (+3)]
[ENDURANCE: 16 (+4)]
[INTELLIGENCE: 16]
[LUCK: 1]
Ten points total. In one session.
The standard D-Rank training program produced roughly two to three stat points per week.
Jacob had gained ten in two hours.
His power didn't make training easier. It made his body's adaptation certain—guaranteed the maximum possible growth from every session rather than letting chance determine how much stuck.
He leaned his head back against the concrete wall and stared at the ceiling.
Efficiency must be earned.
At this rate—three sessions per day, ten points per session—he'd hit D-Rank baseline stats by tomorrow night.
And then he could start pushing toward C-Rank numbers before the Gate opened.
Jacob closed his eyes.
His phone buzzed. He ignored it.
It buzzed again. Then again. Then three times in rapid succession.
He sighed and looked at the screen.
Not the group chat. A news notification:
BREAKING: CATEGORY JUMP DETECTED - B-RANK GATE UPGRADED TO A-RANK, INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT, PORTLAND OREGON. IHA EMERGENCY RESPONSE ACTIVATED. CIVILIAN EVACUATION IN PROGRESS. ALL HUNTERS WITHIN 50-MILE RADIUS REQUESTED TO REPORT.
Jacob sat up straight.
The D-Rank Gate.
The one in the Industrial District.
The one opening in seventy-one hours.
Had just upgraded to A-Rank.
He read the notification three more times, making sure he understood it correctly.
Category jumps were rare—the IHA documented them at roughly 0.3% of all Gate events. They occurred when a Gate's interior dimension destabilized and connected to a deeper, more dangerous layer of whatever was on the other side.
An A-Rank Gate in Portland.
Jacob thought about what that meant.
A-Rank Gates required A-Rank Hunters minimum. The IHA would be mobilizing Guild response teams within hours. The evacuation radius for an A-Rank breach was three kilometers.
The Industrial District was two kilometers from the high school.
Two kilometers from the parking lot where Emma had returned his promise ring.
Two kilometers from where the Administrator had pulled him into a white void and changed everything.
Jacob's hands had stopped shaking.
He looked at his status screen. At his stats—14 strength, 12 agility, 16 endurance. Numbers that still put him below the D-Rank baseline.
Then he looked at the talent:
[0% FAILURE RATE]
An A-Rank Gate.
The probability of a Level 1 Hunter with below-average stats surviving an A-Rank Gate was—Jacob didn't even bother calculating it. The number would be so small it would be functionally zero.
But zero was different from impossible.
*If success is theoretically possible under any circumstances...*
Jacob stood up.
Every muscle protested. He ignored them.
He pulled up the IHA emergency channel on his phone. The mobilization request was real—they were calling every available Hunter in the Pacific Northwest. The Guild response estimate put the first A-Rank teams arriving in approximately four hours.
Four hours where the Gate was unsupervised.
Where evacuation was ongoing.
Where anything that came through the breach before the Guilds arrived would hit civilian infrastructure.
Jacob thought about his parents.
About Gate breach Alpha-7.
About the neighborhood they'd died protecting.
He thought about the Administrator's words: You are now an anomaly beyond my authority to contain.
He thought about the eleven people who'd survived the trial before him. About what they'd done with what they'd been given.
Then he stopped thinking and started moving.
He had a Gate to get to.
***
The Industrial District looked wrong even from three blocks away.
Purple light leaked from somewhere between two warehouse buildings on the north side of the district, pulsing in a rhythm that didn't match any natural light source Jacob had ever seen. The evacuation had cleared most of the area—he could hear sirens in the distance, the mechanical voice of an IHA announcement drone cycling through emergency instructions.
ATTENTION CIVILIANS. AN UNSTABLE GATE EVENT HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THIS AREA. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE NEAREST DESIGNATED EVACUATION ZONE. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Jacob moved through back streets, cutting between buildings, watching for IHA field agents. They'd have a perimeter up within the hour—probably already had a basic one—but the category jump had been sudden and the Industrial District was a maze of loading docks and shipping containers that took time to properly cordon.
He found the Gate at 8:31 PM.
It hung in the air between two warehouses like a wound in reality—twelve feet tall, eight feet wide, edges writhing with that same purple-black energy he'd seen in the parking lot when his world had first fractured.
Bigger than he'd expected. Angrier.
The ground around it was cracked in a ten-foot radius, concrete buckled like something heavy had been pressing against the boundary from the other side.
Jacob stood forty feet back and looked at it.
His status screen populated new information automatically:
[GATE DETECTED]
[CLASSIFICATION: A-RANK]
[STATUS: UNSTABLE - CATEGORY JUMP IN PROGRESS]
[INTERIOR DIMENSION: PARTIALLY MAPPED]
[KNOWN THREATS: UNCONFIRMED]
[IHA ESTIMATED RESPONSE TIME: 3 HOURS 41 MINUTES]
[CIVILIAN RISK ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL IF BREACH OCCURS BEFORE RESPONSE]
[RECOMMENDATION: WITHDRAW AND WAIT FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL]
Jacob looked at the recommendation for a long moment.
Then he looked at the Gate.
Then he looked at the cracked concrete around it—the way the damage extended outward, like whatever was pressing against the boundary had been doing it for hours. Building pressure. Building toward something.
He thought about probability.
The IHA estimate was 3 hours 41 minutes. Category jump gates had a 23% chance of breaching within the first four hours of the jump event. If it breached before Guild response arrived—
Civilian casualties.
Same math as three years ago, different variables.
Same answer.
Jacob checked his stats one more time. Fourteen strength. Twelve agility. Sixteen endurance. No skills. Level 1.
Against an A-Rank Gate.
He almost laughed.
"I want to enter the Gate, assess the threat, and contain it until IHA response arrives," Jacob said quietly. "Or eliminate it if that's possible."
He felt the power shift.
That familiar reorientation. The universe making room.
Theoretically possible.
The certainty settled in his chest—not comfortable, not reassuring, just absolute. The way math was absolute. The way probability became certainty at 0%.
Jacob walked toward the Gate.
At twenty feet, the air pressure changed—the same crushing weight from the parking lot, but stronger. More intentional. Like something on the other side could feel him approaching and was deciding what to do about it.
At ten feet, he could hear sound leaking through the Gate. Not language. Not anything he could name. Just a low, continuous vibration that his ears interpreted as sound and his brain interpreted as wrong.
At five feet, something hit the Gate from the other side.
Hard.
The entire boundary shuddered. Purple light flared. The crack in the concrete extended another two feet toward Jacob's left foot.
He stopped.
The Gate stabilized.
Then something hit it again. And again. And again—rhythmic now, methodical. Like something testing the boundary's weak points. Looking for the spot that would give.
Three hours forty-one minutes.
Jacob made the calculation in under a second.
He stepped through the Gate.
The cold hit first—immediate and absolute, twenty degrees below Portland's November evening.
Jacob materialized on the other side and immediately moved left, putting something solid against his back. His eyes adjusted faster than they should have—another effect of the power, maybe, or just adrenaline doing what adrenaline did.
He was inside a massive cavern.
The ceiling was forty feet above him, studded with crystals that emitted a faint blue light—enough to see by, not enough to see well. The ground was smooth stone, dark and slightly reflective. The air tasted like copper and ozone.
The Gate shimmered behind him, still open.
Twenty feet ahead, something had noticed he was there.
It was big. That was the first thing Jacob processed. The second was that there were more than one—he counted four before he stopped counting, because four was already a number that should have made him run.
They looked like bears if bears had been redesigned by something that had never seen a bear but had been given an inaccurate verbal description. Six feet at the shoulder. Eight hundred pounds, maybe more. Heads too large for the body. Eyes that reflected the crystal light in ways eyes weren't supposed to reflect light.
Four of them.
And they'd noticed him.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT UPDATED]
[OBSIDIAN BEARS - RANK A CREATURES]
[COUNT: 4]
[STATUS: AGGRESSIVE]
[ESTIMATED COMBAT POWER PER UNIT: FAR EXCEEDS HOST CURRENT STATS]
Jacob read the assessment.
Looked at the bears.
Looked at his hands.
Fourteen strength.
Success is guaranteed. The path to success is not.
The nearest Obsidian Bear took a step toward him.
Jacob's brain ran the numbers in the half-second he had before everything became very loud and very fast.
He couldn't fight four A-Rank creatures with D-Rank-baseline stats and no skills.
He couldn't win through direct combat.
But he didn't need to win. He needed to contain. Needed to keep them from breaching the Gate until IHA response arrived.
Three hours forty minutes.
The lead bear charged.
Jacob ran.
Not toward the Gate—away from it. Deeper into the cavern, away from the exit he needed to keep clear, drawing the creatures' attention with him.
Zero percent failure rate.
He didn't fail to stay ahead of the bear—by inches, by fractions of inches, legs moving faster than his agility stats should have allowed, the universe making microscopic corrections to his footing, his balance, the angles of his turns.
His lungs burned. His legs screamed. The parking garage training two hours ago had already pushed his body to its limit.
He kept running.
The bears were fast. Faster than something their size had any right to be.
But Jacob was faster at turning.
He used the cavern—its pillars of stone, its uneven terrain—to cut angles the bears couldn't follow without losing speed. Not fighting. Surviving. Buying time.
Two hours fifty-eight minutes remaining.
He could feel his body fraying at the edges. The cost was accumulating—every near-miss, every desperate turn, every second of running on a body that had already been pushed past its limits once today.
His power guaranteed he wouldn't fail.
It didn't say anything about how much it would hurt.
Jacob laughed—a short, gasping, slightly unhinged sound—as he vaulted over a boulder that one of the bears shattered three seconds later.
Somewhere behind him, through the Gate, he could hear IHA announcement drones getting closer.
He just needed to keep them busy long enough.
Mom. Dad.
His foot found solid ground.
I'm not done yet.