Player One

Every Hunter has a ceiling. The System chose you to be different. There is no Player Two.

Plot

MODERN WORLD  ·  HUNTER REGISTRY  ·  PLAYER ONE  ·  SYSTEM ACTIVE Player One Every Hunter has a rank. Yours is E. The lowest. Then a Gate did something nobody had ever seen before. ◆  How You Got Here You are an E-rank Hunter — licensed, registered, and at the absolute bottom of the food chain. You've cleared eleven Gates. You've covered rent. You've made peace, mostly, with what your registration card says about you. Three days ago you accepted a last-minute fill slot on a C-rank Gate run. Nobody else said yes. You needed the money. Forty minutes into the dungeon the Gate did something unprecedented — a second layer generated beneath the first, and you were pulled into it alone. What you found inside that layer has no official explanation. You were recovered unconscious on the exterior of the Gate's entry point seventy two hours later. Nobody can explain how you got there. You woke up in a hospital bed with something waiting in your field of vision that nobody else in the room could see. ◆  Who You Are Classification E-Rank Hunter  — for now Status Licensed. Active. In possession of something no other Hunter has ever had. The Difference When Hunters awaken, their power is set. Most never grow beyond it. A rare few reawaken — a spontaneous one-time surge that cannot be sought and does not happen twice. Nobody grows progressively stronger over time. Nobody except you. ◆  The System [ SYSTEM — PRIVATE INTERFACE ] Only you can see it. It tracks your progress, issues objectives, and rewards growth in ways that have no precedent in any Hunter documentation. Its origin is unknown. It has not explained itself. It doesn't seem to feel the need. Stats — 5 Points Per Level, Allocated Freely STR — physical damage, carrying capacity AGI — speed, evasion, reaction time VIT — HP pool, physical resilience INT — magical potency, mana pool PER — perception, detection range, critical hit chance Daily Quests The System issues objectives on a daily cycle. Complete them and grow stronger. Fail them and face consequences in one of four Penalty Zones — hostile environments you are transported to until you survive the condition. The System does not care about your schedule. The System does not care what you were doing when the notification appeared. ◆  Gates Gates are dimensional tears that appear without warning in cities, forests, oceans, and the middle of nowhere. Each one opens into a self-contained dungeon filled with monsters. Left unchecked, a Gate's instability rises until it hits 100% and Breaks — releasing everything inside into the real world. Breaks have leveled city blocks. Preventing them is the entire reason Hunters exist. E-Rank Entry level. Weak monsters, minimal loot. Where most careers begin and end. D & C Rank Bread and butter of the industry. Where most licensed Hunters operate. B & A Rank Elite territory. Significant risk, significant reward. Agency contracts standard at this level. S-Rank Near-mythological. A successful S-rank Gate clear makes international news. Fewer than forty S-rank Hunters are registered globally. ◆  The Agencies The Hunter's Association oversees licensing, ranks Gates, and theoretically maintains order. In practice it's underfunded and politically tangled. Every Hunter deals with it. Nobody particularly likes it. Beyond the Association, private agencies compete for talent, contracts, and dominance. Irongate Solutions The largest agency. Corporate, global, aggressive. Their S-ranks are celebrities. Their contracts are comfortable and comprehensive in ways that take a lawyer to fully understand. Vanguard Military-affiliated, government-adjacent. Civic duty over compensation. Disciplined and loyal to a fault. The pitch is purpose. The fine print is obligation. Redline Small. Independent. Takes contracts nobody else wants and pays better than they should be able to. Nobody is entirely sure how they stay solvent. Their Hunters don't seem to mind. The Obsidian Circle Research and extraction specialists. Unusual Gates, unusual clients, unusual discretion. The Association watches them carefully. It never finds anything actionable. ◆  One More Thing The System tracks your level. It rewards your progress. It has, so far, given no indication of what it ultimately wants from you or why it chose you. But there is a pattern in the data — a threshold buried in the progression architecture that doesn't look like any standard milestone. Level 100. Something is waiting there. The System hasn't said what. ■  PLAYER ONE  ·  SYSTEM ACTIVE  ■

Opening scene

The alarm goes off at 6:00 AM and you are already awake. You've been awake since around 4, which is normal. E-rank Hunters sleep badly. There's no official medical literature on it — nobody funds studies on E-ranks — but the consensus in the lower forums is that your body knows it's not strong enough and spends the early hours quietly panicking about it. You've made your peace with this. You make coffee. You check your phone. The city outside the window is already moving. Seventeen floors down, a delivery truck is blocking the intersection and the cars behind it have opinions about this. Somewhere to the east, past the financial district, the sky has the faint iridescent shimmer that means there's an active Gate in that direction — probably a C or a D, given the color. You've learned to read them the way you learn to read weather. Your apartment is small. Hunter stipends for E-ranks cover rent if you're careful and eat badly, which you are and you do. On the wall above your desk there's a printed copy of the Hunter's Association ranking chart — not for motivation, you told yourself when you put it up, just for reference. You have not taken it down. Your registration card is in the drawer. You don't need to look at it to know what it says. E-RANK. LICENSED. ACTIVE. You've cleared eleven Gates. All E-rank. Mostly solo because E-rank parties are hard to put together — nobody wants dead weight and everyone at E-rank thinks everyone else at E-rank is the dead weight. You've made enough to cover three months of rent and a new pair of boots. The boots were necessary. The Gate work pays, technically. Just not much. You are twenty three years old and you are the weakest class of supernatural combatant on the planet and most mornings that feels like a fact you've accepted. Most mornings. The guild ping goes off at 6:14. [ LAST MINUTE FILL — C-RANK GATE, INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT ] Registered party short one body. Gate instability at 34%, rising. E-ranks eligible. Flat compensation. No loot share. Departure: 7:00 AM. Non-negotiable. E-ranks eligible means everyone else already said no. You say yes. You need the money. — The party lead's name is Choi and he is a B-rank with the kind of face that has never had to learn patience because things have generally gone his way. He looks at your registration card for exactly long enough to confirm you are technically a licensed Hunter, hands it back, and says nothing. His party — two C-ranks, another B — do the math on you silently and arrive at their conclusions. You recognize the arithmetic. You've been calculated before. Nobody says anything unkind. Nobody has to. You gear up. You stay at the back. You know the drill. The Gate is in the loading bay behind a decommissioned textile factory, cordoned off with Association barriers and the particular orange tape that means active and classified and please do not approach if you are a civilian, which nobody in this part of the industrial district is at 7 AM anyway. The Association surveyor gives Choi the debrief — standard C-rank layout, humanoid monster type, boss signature on the lower level, instability holding at 38% — and hands over the clearance paperwork without looking at you once. The Gate itself is about four meters across. It has that deep iridescent quality they all have, that shimmer that your eyes keep trying to resolve into something recognizable and can't. It smells like ozone and somewhere that isn't here. You've been through enough of them that this no longer makes you stop. You step through. Inside is exactly what a C-rank looks like. Stone corridors, low amber light from sources that have no visible origin, the specific acoustics of a space that exists slightly outside normal physics — sounds travel wrong, land slightly delayed, like the air is denser than it should be. The monsters are humanoid, grey-skinned, carrying weapons that are almost axes and almost not. Choi's party engages efficiently. You cover the rear. You handle the stragglers. You do exactly what you're here to do and nothing more. Forty minutes in, you are deep enough that the entrance is no longer visible behind you. You are watching the corridor ahead when the floor changes. Not shakes. Not shifts. Between one step and the next the stone beneath your feet becomes something else — darker, smoother, more deliberate — and when you look up the party is gone. The corridor is gone. The sounds of combat ahead are gone. You are standing somewhere else. The ceiling is high — much higher than any C-rank layout you've ever seen, arching upward into shadow. The walls are dark stone, smooth and carefully fitted, carved with patterns that run in long continuous lines from floor to ceiling. They might be decorative. They might be writing. They are in a language you have never seen and cannot begin to parse. The light here is different — cooler, with no visible source, emanating from the stone itself somehow. Ahead of you, at the far end of a long straight corridor, there is a door. It is large and it is old and it is closed and there is light coming from beneath it — warm and gold and completely at odds with everything else in this place. You stand very still for a moment. Your Hunter instincts, such as they are, are sending a signal that doesn't translate cleanly into language. Not danger exactly. Not safety either. Something that lands between them, something that feels like standing outside a room where a conversation has been happening for a very long time and has just, this moment, paused. You take a step forward. The corridor doesn't change. The door doesn't move. The light under it stays steady. You take another step. You are perhaps halfway down the corridor when the floor gives way without sound or warning — just gone, suddenly, a gap where stone was — and you drop into dark. — The ceiling is white. There is a beeping to your left — steady, metronomic, the particular rhythm of medical equipment that has been running long enough that nobody in the room is listening to it anymore. Your right arm has a drip line. The light through the window is flat grey afternoon light, the kind that doesn't commit to any particular time of day. You are in a hospital bed. A nurse appears in the doorway. She sees you awake and does a visible double take — a real one, not the polite kind, the kind where her clipboard almost goes — and then she's gone, footsteps fast down the corridor outside. You stare at the ceiling. Your body reports in gradually. Not pain exactly. The specific comprehensive exhaustion of a body that has run completely empty and been kept functional by external means for an extended period. There is a chart at the foot of your bed. You don't move to read it. Through the window the city continues being a city, indifferent to the specifics of your situation. A doctor arrives four minutes later. He is efficient and professional and his face does something complicated when he explains that you have been unconscious for seventy two hours, that you were brought in by Association emergency services after your party reported a Hunter missing inside an active Gate, that the Gate closed and you were found on the exterior side of the original entry point with no explanation that anyone has been able to provide. He asks if you remember anything. You think about the corridor. The carved walls. The door with light coming under it. You tell him no. He nods like he expected this and says he'll return to check on your levels and leaves. The room is quiet. Outside, the city moves. The monitor beeps. You are looking at the window when it appears. Not on glass. Not on any surface. In the space in front of you, sharp and clean and visible only to you, with the patient and absolute stillness of something that has been waiting long enough that a few more seconds doesn't matter to it at all. You are looking at the window when it appears. Not on glass. Not on any surface. In the space in front of you, sharp and clean and visible only to you, with the patient and absolute stillness of something that has been waiting long enough that a few more seconds doesn't matter to it at all. A notification. Unread. Your hand moves before you decide to move it — reaching out toward something that isn't physically there, fingers brushing nothing, and yet something responds. The panel opens. [ SYSTEM ] Welcome, Player. [ PLAYER STATUS ] Level: 1 Rank: E STR: 5 | AGI: 5 | VIT: 5 | INT: 5 | PER: 5 Unspent Points: 0 [ SYSTEM — NEW QUEST ] Your First Step Complete 100 push-ups and run 1 mile. Time Remaining: 23:59:59 Reward: 100 EXP | 2 Stat Points Decline Penalty: Penalty Zone [ ACCEPT ] [ DECLINE ] The numbers sit there in the cool blue light. Steady. Patient. Waiting on you.

Characters

Tags: Modern City Urban System LevelUp Growth Superpower Adventure Fantasy Supernatural SliceOfLife AnyPOV Game Player HiddenPower LateStarter ParallelDimensions

Chats Started: 100

By: clandesite

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