God of Zero Cost

The oak gates of the Hazor Military Academy rose six metres high, braced by vertical bands of black Iron Age ore. Inside the courtyard, the air smelled of wet horse hair, crushed straw, and the sharp, chemical tang of rendered animal fat used to grease chariot axles. To Ethan, the hyper-realistic odours were a toxic cocktail, making his throat constrict with another violent wave of nausea.

He marched past the training rings, though "marched" was a lie his mind told his legs. Every step was a battle against his own equilibrium. His leather pouch hanging from his belt drag-weighted his hip, pulling his center of gravity dangerously to the side. Inside sat fifty Silver Shekels of uncoined Hacksilber scrap—pristine, heavy, and completely separate from the weekly residential buffer he had already cleared to his Chinatown grid node.

He was exactly at the finish line. His vision was tunnelling, dark spots eating at the periphery of his sight, but he was there.

Dozens of premium-tier players from the Marina Bay syndicates crowded the inner portico. The sharp, rhythmic clink of their polished bronze greaves sounded like hammers drilling directly into Ethan’s neural migraine. He ignored them, pressing a hand against the cool, damp stone of the wall to steady himself as he stepped into the dim, cool shade of the administrative barracks where the enlistment ledgers were kept.

Behind the stone registry desk sat the same scarred NPC sergeant who had dismissed him on his first hour of server runtime. The man was unrolling a fresh sheet of dried sheepskin parchment, his thick fingers tracing the official palace muster seals.

Ethan stepped up to the stone threshold. He lacked the energy to lift his arm gracefully; his hand simply dropped like a stone onto the leather pouch, letting the silver metal clink loudly against the counter.

"I have the fifty shekels for the enlistment bond," Ethan said. He forced the words past his dry, swollen tongue. His voice was flat, steady, and entirely clinical—the voice of a man operating on the absolute limits of human endurance. "Register my character name under the vanguard track for the Chariot Commander class."

The sergeant paused. His grey, bloodshot eyes raked over Ethan’s thin, trembling wrists and soil-stained tunic, then dropped to the raw silver pieces spilling slightly from the pouch. A slow, incredulous scowl creased his leathered face.

"The mud-scratcher returns," the sergeant grunted, his hand reaching out to touch the silver weight to verify its purity against the desk scale. "Level 3. No metal weapons on your ledger, yet you crawl out of the ditches with a palace official’s wealth. Fine. The King’s stables don't care where the silver is from. Sign your mark upon—"

"A moment, Sergeant of the Gate," a dry, papery whisper cut through the room.

Ethan’s joints locked. The sudden spike of adrenaline was a physical agonising jolt to his central nervous system, making his heart hammer violently against his ribs.

From the dark, unlit corner behind the weapon racks, an ancient NPC shuffled into the torchlight. He wore tattered, coarse woolen robes that had turned the dark colour of unwashed soil. His long, silver beard was matted with dried clay, and his milk-white eyes locked directly onto Ethan’s face with a terrifying, algorithmic focus.

It was the old temple-servant from his first day. Elder Malachi.

The sergeant’s gruff posture vanished instantly, replaced by a sudden, nervous look of religious dread as he stepped back from the desk, crossing his forearms over his chest. "Elder Malachi. The palace registry is for the combat levies. The temple accounts are handled in the Upper Citadel."

"The Citadel tracks the bronze, but the deep earth tracks the lineage," Malachi whispered. The voice carried a low, gravelly vibration that rattled the air-pressure simulation in Ethan’s headset, sending a sickening throb of vertigo through his brain. He leaned over the stone desk, his breath smelling of old olives and dry dust as his boney hand clapped down firmly on top of Ethan's silver pouch. "Young man... I have watched your shadow move through the lower wards. You are the one who does not waste. You are the one who turns the waste crust of the furnaces into silver. Am I correct?"

Ethan’s internal scam-shield alarm began to scream at maximum volume, the flashing red warning light blinding his already strained eyes. Panic, sharp and cold, cut through his exhaustion. He yanked at the pouch, but his Level 3 Strength metric—severely debuffed by his own real-world fatigue—was useless. The old man’s fingers held the leather with an unnatural, iron-like structural force.

"The contract is with the garrison, old man," Ethan hissed, his voice dropping into a low, defensive whisper as he desperately tried to blink away the gray haze clouding his eyes. "My silver matches the bond minimum. Clear your hand off my assets."

"The garrison sells you the wind," Malachi cackled, his milk-white eyes flashing with a sudden, deep crimson light from the torch reflection. "They rent you a horse that starves and a wooden chariot that shatters when the wheels hit the limestone ravines. They take your fifty silver pieces, and they leave you with a debt covenant to the palace granary. But I... I offer you the true vanguard. The primordial force that requires no iron to forge. No silver to polish."

A sudden, blinding blue system notification exploded across Ethan’s field of vision, its high-density text yanking his visual interface away from the barracks room and forcing his burning, sleep-deprived eyes to read:

Ethan’s stomach plummeted, a cold sensation of pure dread washing over him. A potter? His exhausted brain scrambled, his thoughts sluggish and heavy as he tried to find a way to escape this trash artisan-class.

"No," Ethan shouted aloud. The effort tore at his raw throat. His finger lunged forward, trembling violently, trying to slam the red Decline button floating in his interface. "Cancel query! Revert to Chariot Commander track!"

Malachi’s face twisted into a wild, triumphant grin. He didn't wait for the digital confirmation. He snatched a small, flat, damp square of unbaked red clay from his sleeve and slammed it down directly onto Ethan’s fifty pieces of silver scrap.

CRACK.

The clay piece shattered, but instead of falling, the shards dissolved into a thick, wet slurry of dark ochre mud. The red mire surged upward, wrapping itself violently around Ethan's forearms. A horrific, burning heat seared through his virtual skin like liquid iron, triggering the haptic vest to pinch painfully against his real-world chest.

The silver pieces inside his pouch liquefied instantly, their metallic white glare swallowed entirely by the dark, heavy crimson mud.

Ethan stood frozen in the center of the registry floor. He couldn't breathe. His default linen tunic had completely vanished, replaced by a coarse, heavy, filthy burlap apron smeared with wet, rancid river silt that smelled of rot. In his right hand, his fingers automatically coiled around a blunt bronze trowel. Its durability metric read Infinite.

He looked up, his vision shaking violently.

The ancient NPC elder, Malachi, was already sprinting toward the barracks exit with impossible agility, his tattered robes flying behind his heels as his cackling laugh echoed down the stone corridor.

"Thank the Heavens! The ancestral deficit of the Hazor brick-kilns has been legally transferred! Have fun digging mud for the next forty levels, artisan!"

The silence of the barracks rushed back in. Ethan stared down at his bare, mud-covered feet. His jaw was clenched so hard that the haptic rig vibrated violently against his teeth, the metal taste of stress pooling in his mouth.

Thirty-one hours. Zero sleep. Blistered hands, a broken back, and a mind pushed to the brink of insanity. All for nothing. The fifty shekels were gone. The Chariot class was locked out forever. He had been completely, ruthlessly out-scammed by a piece of AI code in a tattered woollen kilt.

The heavy weight of his real-world exhaustion crashed over him all at once, no longer held back by adrenaline. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the cold stone floor, staring blankly at the mud on his hands.

He was right back in the dirt.