Chapter Eight: Rank S
I woke up laughing.
Not from a dream, I didn't remember dreaming at all, which felt right, given the last twenty-four hours had already outpaced anything my subconscious could reasonably compete with. I woke up laughing because the first thing my mind did, before it even finished booting up for the day, was replay the notification stack from the night before, still pinned faintly at the corner of my vision like an afterimage.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗ SYSTEM NOTICE
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════╣
CLASS CONFIRMED: THE LAUGHING QUEEN.
I sat straight up in bed and screamed a laugh into my empty apartment loud enough that somebody two floors down banged on their ceiling, and I didn't care, I bounced actually bounced, knees on the mattress, springs shrieking in protest, both fists in the air like I'd just won something instead of survived it because for the first time in two years, the System had finally, finally said my name and meant something by it.
I had a class. I had a class. I had a class no one else on Earth had ever had before mine, apparently, built out of nothing but sheer spite and error correction, and it was mine.
Then I caught my reflection in the cracked mirror over my dresser and stopped bouncing entirely.
I didn't recognize her.
Twin ponytails, high and full, one side gone lightning blue, the other blood red, catching the morning light like they'd been dyed for a photoshoot instead of grown overnight. Tattoos climbing both forearms in patterns I hadn't chosen and couldn't fully make sense of skulls, playing cards, thin looping script in a language I didn't read. And my eyes. My eyes weren't mine anymore either, iris blown out to a deep, glassy red that caught the light wrong, unsettling in a way I couldn't look away from no matter how many times I blinked, hoping it would resolve back into something familiar.
I laughed again, quieter this time, standing there in an oversized t-shirt in front of a mirror that was showing me a stranger wearing my face.
"Well," I said, out loud, to nobody. "Guess we're doing this now."
The Adventurer's Guild registration office occupied the ground floor of a building that had once been a courthouse, repurposed the way most civic buildings had been once the towers went up marble floors, high ceilings, and a line of new-classed hopefuls stretching out the front doors, all of them clutching their Assignment Day paperwork like it was a winning lottery ticket.
I didn't have paperwork. I had a hammer strapped to my back that I'd learned, overnight, could shrink down to something pocket-sized when I willed it to, and a class the System itself had apparently invented on the spot. When the intake clerk asked for my Assignment Day documentation, I told her the truth, because lying felt like more effort than I had in me that morning.
"I don't have any. I got assigned two days ago. In a dungeon."
Her expression did something complicated. "That's... not how this normally works."
"Yeah," I said, popping a fresh blowpop out of my pocket and unwrapping it while she typed something into a terminal that clearly wasn't built to handle whatever box I didn't fit into. "I've heard that a lot lately."
They ran me through testing anyway Power Testing Room Three, a converted courtroom with padded walls and a small crowd of guild staff watching from behind reinforced glass, because word had apparently traveled fast that something unusual had walked in off the street.
The strength test came first. A reinforced striking dummy, thick as a tree trunk, calibrated to measure impact force in numbers that meant nothing to me until the tester a bored-looking man with a clipboard explained the scale afterward.
"Just punch it," he said. "Whenever you're ready."
I punched it.
The dummy didn't just dent. It folded, base bolts screeching loose from the floor, sailing backward into the padded wall hard enough that the whole testing chamber shook. Silence followed, total and immediate, the tester's clipboard hanging forgotten at his side.
"...Right," he said finally. "Moving on."
The speed test came next a reflex course, motion-sensor hazards firing at randomized intervals, designed to measure how cleanly a climber could dodge a coordinated ambush. I don't fully remember running it. I remember laughing through most of it, the kind of laugh that arrives uninvited and doesn't ask permission, weaving between strikes that should have connected and somehow never did, my body reading the pattern a half-second before my mind caught up to why.
"She's " I heard someone say behind the glass, voice climbing with disbelief. "That's faster than the current record. That's significantly faster than the current record."
Magic testing came after that, and this was the part where I actually had to shrug.
"I don't think I have any," I told the tester honestly, standing in the center of a runic testing circle that lit up faintly under my feet and then just... didn't do anything else. No mana signature. No elemental affinity. Nothing on any of the scales they tried.
"That's unusual for an S-tier candidate," the tester said, frowning at her readings.
"Yeah, well." I popped my blow pop back into my mouth. "Nobody's ever accused me of being usual."
The last test was the one that actually made the room go quiet.
Ability Manifestation. A wide, padded chamber, nothing in it but empty space and a request to simply "demonstrate your class abilities however feels natural."
I didn't overthink it. I reached out, the way I'd learned to reach for the hammer without looking, and let my hand close around whatever was waiting there.
A knife came first, thin and gleaming, gone the second I flung it into the padded wall hard enough to bury to the hilt. Then a small, absurd cannon that materialized across my shoulder and fired a single concussive blast that rattled the observation glass. A boxing glove on a spring-loaded arm, shooting out from nowhere to punch a padded target clean across the room. A jack-in-the-box that popped open mid-air and detonated in a burst of confetti and shrapnel-sharp playing cards. A hand mirror, appearing last, catching the overhead light and throwing it back tenfold, blinding for exactly as long as I wanted it to be and not a second longer.
I stood in the wreckage of my own demonstration, breathing hard, blowpop still clicking against my teeth, and looked up at a room full of guild staff staring at me through reinforced glass like they weren't entirely sure what they'd just watched.
"Rank," I said. "What'd I get."
The head tester cleared his throat twice before he managed to answer.
"S," he said. "Confirmed S-rank. Unaffiliated, no combat history, no prior guild record." He looked back down at his readings, then back up at me, like he was hoping the numbers might have changed in the interim. "In the history of this office, I don't think we've ever processed an S-rank with zero prior standing."
"Cool," I said, and turned on my heel, and walked out.
I didn't wait around for the paperwork. Registration confirmation would post to the public ledger automatically that was how it worked, name and rank visible to every guild in the system the second the ink dried, digital or otherwise. I walked out through the same lobby I'd walked in through, past the line of hopeful new-classed kids clutching their assignment slips, and felt every single one of them turn to look at me as I passed.
Some looked afraid. A couple looked like they wanted to say something and thought better of it. One girl, maybe sixteen, just stared, open-mouthed, at the blood-red eyes and the two-toned hair and the way I was popping a lollipop like I hadn't just broken three separate testing records in one sitting.
I heard someone in line ask the person at the front desk, low, like they thought I wouldn't hear it anyway. "Who was that?"
The clerk's answer floated back to me on my way out the door, half a shrug in her voice.
"I don't know," she said. "She just registered herself as V."
By the end of the day, that single letter had made it to every major guild's recruitment channel no last name, no known affiliation, no guild history, no prior anything, just a fresh S-rank testing record that broke three benchmarks in one sitting and then walked out the door before anyone could even ask for a formal recruitment meeting.
I found out how far it had spread three days later, when Denny showed me a guild forum thread with over four thousand replies, every single recruiter posting some version of the exact same four words.
FIND ME THIS GIRL.
I read it curled up on my kitchen floor, blowpop stick chewed down to nothing between my teeth, and started laughing again quiet, disbelieving, a little unhinged because somewhere out there, an entire industry built on classifying people was scrambling to find a girl the System itself hadn't known what to do with two days earlier.
They could look all they wanted.
I wasn't planning on being found.