The arena pulsed with anticipation, a living organism composed of thousands of spectators collectively holding their breath. Another fifteen-year-old stepped onto the central platform—the quantification altar, as Kiriti had already begun to think of it.
Sunlight lanced through high windows, transforming the chalk-white stone into something almost divine, the nervous boy upon it a sacrifice to some unseen statistical god. A robed officiant approached, golden staff gripped with practiced authority, mask obscuring any trace of humanity.
"Elias of House Ventor," the officiant intoned, voice amplified by what Kiriti recognized as a classic narrative device—unexplained magic that served the system rather than challenging it.
The boy—Elias—straightened his already perfect posture, chin lifted with the confidence of someone who has never had reason to question their place in the world. When he placed his hand on the crystal, five glowing numbers materialized above his head with mechanical precision:
STR: 18 AGI: 25 VIT: 15 INT: 32 LCK: 18 TOTAL: 108
"E-Rank," the officiant announced with the neutrality of a computer executing code. "Total Stat Score: 108."
A polite wave of applause rippled through the arena—not enthusiastic, but respectful. The sound of acceptable mediocrity being acknowledged. From his seat high in the stands, Kiriti observed the crowd's reaction like an anthropologist studying tribal rituals. The data points accumulated in his mind, forming the beginnings of a pattern recognition algorithm.
One hundred and eight points across five attributes, Kiriti thought, mentally establishing his first baseline for this world. So that's E-Rank. I wonder what the bell curve looks like. What's the statistical distribution? I need data. Ratios. Rarity distributions. A system only hurts you when you don't know its rules.
He watched as three more teenagers were called forward in succession. The first, a stocky farm boy with calloused hands that spoke of labor without reward, scored F-Rank with a total of 34. The crowd's response was tepid but courteous—the social minimum required by collective etiquette.
The second, a merchant's daughter whose quick eyes constantly calculated invisible sums, received E-Rank with a score of 89. Similar polite applause, though slightly less enthusiastic than for Elias. Another data point: perhaps the precise number within a rank also mattered.
Then came a noble's son—not from a major house, judging by his simple but well-made clothing that hit precisely at the intersection of quality and restraint. When his numbers appeared, the crowd's energy shifted with the suddenness of a voltage spike:
STR: 75 AGI: 48 VIT: 62 INT: 39 LCK: 42 TOTAL: 266
"D-Rank," the officiant declared, voice lifting almost imperceptibly. "Total Stat Score: 266."
The arena erupted with authentic enthusiasm. People stood from their seats, cheering and whistling. From a special section near the arena floor, men and women in military uniforms nodded approvingly, making notes on parchment. Their insignias—crossed swords behind shields—told a story without words: D-Rank was the threshold for martial service.
Interesting, Kiriti thought, mentally updating his sociological flowchart. D-Rank appears to be the first threshold that generates authentic enthusiasm. A 266 total activates meaningful social reaction. A valuable data point.
"Tamwell Millbrook of Millhaven."
Kiriti's attention snapped to Tam, who had risen from his seat with shaking hands that betrayed the biological manifestation of fear—increased adrenaline, decreased fine motor control. The boy who'd been kind to him—a simplicity Kiriti would have once dismissed as narratively convenient—made his way down to the platform with the hesitant steps of someone approaching their own execution.
When Tam's numbers appeared, Kiriti felt an unfamiliar twinge of concern, a hairline fracture in his analytical detachment:
STR: 7 AGI: 4 VIT: 6 INT: 3 LCK: 2 TOTAL: 22
"F-Rank," the officiant announced with mechanical efficiency. "Total Stat Score: 22."
The relief that washed over Tam's face was visible even from this distance. His shoulders sagged, tension releasing like a pressure valve opened. As he accepted his metal bracelet—copper, Kiriti noted, cataloging the material hierarchy implicit in the system—Tam glanced up toward the stands, finding Kiriti with a quick, triumphant smile.
"Not G!" he mouthed silently, pointing to his bracelet with the pride of someone who has narrowly avoided catastrophe. "I'm not G!"
Kiriti forced a congratulatory smile in return, though his mind was already calculating, assembling the pieces into a coherent theory. Twenty-two points for F-Rank. The minimum threshold appears to be somewhere around twenty. If Tam's relief is any indication, G-Rank must represent something truly catastrophic. Curious that his reaction wasn't relief at being F-Rank, but rather relief at not being G-Rank. A psychological distinction worth noting.
More names were called. More teenagers quantified and branded with their worth. The pattern crystallized with increasing clarity: F-Ranks received polite acknowledgment (the baseline social obligation), E-Ranks earned respectful recognition (the minimum positive distinction), D-Ranks generated excitement (the threshold of meaningful societal contribution), and the single C-Rank announced—a girl with extraordinarily high Intelligence—caused a near frenzy among what appeared to be academy representatives, identifiable by their quill-and-scroll emblems.
Then came the noble girl he'd been sitting beside.
"Seraphina Ashworth of House Ashworth."
She rose with the fluid grace of someone who had been trained since birth in the art of being observed. Not a hair out of place, not a wrinkle in her velvet dress—a walking demonstration of perfection as social currency. When she stepped onto the platform, the crowd hushed in anticipation, the silence itself a form of tribute.
Her numbers appeared:
STR: 26,478 AGI: 28,155 VIT: 30,602 INT: 35,781 LCK: 25,994 TOTAL: 147,010
"A-Rank," the officiant announced, with what sounded like genuine reverence, the first true emotion he'd displayed. "Total Stat Score: 147,010."
The arena exploded. People weren't merely applauding—they were shouting, stomping, creating a thunderous roar that seemed to shake the very foundations of the building. Seraphina accepted her golden bracelet with practiced humility, head bowed at precisely the correct angle to appear both grateful and deserving—a masterclass in aristocratic performance art.
That's not just quantitative difference, Kiriti realized, his writer's mind calculating the exponential gap. It's an entirely different order of magnitude. No natural distribution curve would create such outliers. The system is rigged at a fundamental level. It has to be. These numbers represent something more than individual capability—they're a codified manifestation of class structure.
"Kiriti... Kolluru?"
The hesitation in the officiant's voice as he struggled with the unfamiliar name barely registered. Kiriti was still processing the implications of Seraphina's impossible numbers, mentally simulating the kind of social engineering required to create such statistical anomalies.
"Kiriti Kolluru?" the voice repeated, louder this time, impatience bleeding through professional neutrality.
He became aware of Tam, now returned to the F-Rank section, gesturing frantically. "That's you!" he mouthed, the exaggerated movement of his lips comically visible even at this distance.
Kiriti stood, his borrowed teenage body feeling alien and uncoordinated, a poorly calibrated interface between mind and physical reality. As he made his way down the stone steps toward the arena floor, his heartbeat accelerated—not from fear, he told himself, but from the clinical interest of an observer about to gather crucial data.
The platform loomed before him, blindingly white in the midday sun. The officiant gestured impatiently, and Kiriti stepped forward. The stone felt warm beneath his feet, heat radiating through the thin fabric of his borrowed shoes. The crystal pulsed with inner light as he approached, a technological heartbeat disguised as magic.
Just a measurement, he thought. Just data.
He placed his palm on the crystal's smooth surface. A cold sensation swept through him, as if the crystal were drawing something essential from his body—perhaps the electrical impulses of his nervous system being quantified, perhaps something more metaphysical. The crowd fell silent, all eyes on the space above his head.
The numbers appeared, hovering in the air like a death sentence:
STR: 1 AGI: 2 VIT: 1 INT: 3 LCK: 1 TOTAL: 8
The silence lasted precisely three seconds—Kiriti counted them internally, his sense of time hyperacute in the moment of judgment. Then came the laughter.
It started as a single snicker from somewhere in the upper stands, quickly spreading like a virus through a vulnerable population until entire sections were laughing openly. Not the good-natured laughter of shared amusement, but the cruel mirth of superiority—the sound of people grateful for someone to look down upon.
"G-Rank," the officiant announced, his voice noticeably softer than for previous declarations, as if even speaking the designation at normal volume would contaminate him. "Total Stat Score: 8."
A voice called out from the crowd: "Hope you enjoy the Training Grounds, weakling!"
More laughter followed, a social contagion of cruelty. From the corner of his eye, Kiriti saw Tam's expression shift from encouragement to horror, then to pity—which was somehow worse than mockery, carrying as it did the implicit acceptance of Kiriti's fate. In the A-Rank section, Seraphina had already turned away, her dismissal more cutting than any verbal mockery.
Eight points? Across five attributes? The thought circled his mind like a predator. If this was a game, I'd be a tutorial NPC. Not even that. I'd be the bug that crashes the opening cutscene.
Heat rose in his chest—not embarrassment, but a slow-burning rage that started somewhere deep and primal before being channeled through his writer's imagination. He visualized grabbing the nobleman who'd shouted at him, imagined the satisfying crunch as his fist connected with aristocratic teeth, driving them through the back of the man's skull. The vivid detail of the fantasy surprised even him—the specific texture of bone fragmenting, the precise arc of blood spatter, the mathematical physics of impact force transmitted through facial structure.
Instead, he bowed—gracefully, heroically—the perfect picture of dignified acceptance. A masterful performance, the kind he would have written for a sympathetic character designed to earn reader attachment.
Let the masses laugh, he thought coldly. Every audience needs its fool. And every fool, properly positioned, can become the narrative's center.
The G-Rank master approached with a dull iron bracelet. As it locked around Kiriti's wrist, he felt something change—a subtle shift in the air around him, as if the world itself were marking him as deficient. The metal was cold against his skin, a constant reminder of his new status.
"Remove him," the officiant ordered, already looking past Kiriti to the next name on his list.
Guards stepped forward, their expressions a mixture of boredom and faint disgust, as if his very presence were an unpleasant chore they'd been assigned. They didn't grab him roughly—they didn't need to. The ultimate insult was that they clearly didn't consider him capable of resistance.
As they led him toward a dark tunnel entrance, he caught one final glimpse of Tam, still watching with that insufferable pity, and Seraphina, already engaged in conversation with other A-Ranks as if he had never existed.
A sharp voice cut through the murmur of the crowd: "Are you a bastard of some house? Kolluru, was it?" The question came from a noble girl with an elaborate hairstyle and a smirk that suggested she already knew the answer—the verbal equivalent of prodding a dead animal with a stick.
Kiriti didn't dignify her with a response. The darkness of the tunnel swallowed him, and with it, any pretense that this world would offer him fairness or mercy.
The "processing room" was a circular chamber deep beneath the arena, its architecture an object lesson in psychological manipulation. The ceiling was deliberately low, creating a perpetual sense of pressure. The walls curved inward slightly, subconsciously reinforcing the impossibility of escape. The torches were positioned to cast long, distorted shadows across rough-hewn stone walls—not for practical illumination, but to create an atmosphere of dread.
Kiriti cataloged these details automatically, his writer's mind recognizing the deliberate design choices. This room wasn't just functional; it was theatrical—constructed to reinforce hopelessness in its occupants.
He was directed to a bench along the wall, where approximately twenty other teenagers already sat, all wearing the same dull iron bracelet. Their expressions formed a catalog of trauma responses: vacant shock, quiet sobbing, grim resignation, dissociative detachment.
"Another one for the meat grinder," one of the guards muttered as he shoved Kiriti forward. "Enjoy your five minutes of life once you hit the dungeon floor."
The door slammed shut with a finality that echoed through the chamber. Kiriti surveyed his fellow rejects with the same analytical precision he'd once applied to character development in his manuscripts.
A girl with tangled red hair rocked back and forth in the corner, tears streaming silently down her freckled face—classic manifestation of self-soothing behavior in acute stress response. A boy with a twisted spine stared vacantly at the wall, lips moving in what might have been prayer—religious coping mechanism, possibly effective for maintaining psychological equilibrium in crisis. Three others huddled together, whispering in voices too low to hear—social bonding as survival strategy.
Kiriti approached a small group near one of the torches. A thin boy with sharp features was speaking, his voice carrying the resigned authority of someone who knew exactly how bad things were.
"—eastern labyrinth is the worst," he was saying, gesturing with hands that never stopped moving, as if perpetual motion could somehow ward off death. "Acid spitters that melt your skin off while you're still conscious. Makes the northern ice worms seem merciful by comparison."
"What are you talking about?" Kiriti asked, keeping his voice neutral, curious rather than alarmed—the vocal equivalent of his analytical mask.
The thin boy looked up, eyes narrowing as they performed their own analysis. "Fresh meat, huh? You don't even know what G-Rank means, do you?"
"I gathered it's not particularly desirable," Kiriti replied with deliberate understatement.
A bitter laugh erupted from a stocky girl beside the thin boy—not genuine humor, but its dark mirror. "Not desirable? That's one way to put it. We're dungeon fodder, newcomer. Walking sacrifices."
"To be precise," added a taller boy with glasses too large for his face, pushing them up with a nervous habit that had clearly developed over years, "we're 'monster attrition resources.' That's the official term in the Royal Charter, Section 12, Paragraph 7."
"Fancy way of saying 'bait,'" the stocky girl muttered, her matter-of-fact tone somehow more disturbing than hysteria would have been.
Kiriti's stomach lurched—a physiological reaction he couldn't control, his body understanding the implications faster than his mind could rationalize them. The analytical facade he'd maintained cracked slightly, allowing a flash of genuine horror to break through. These weren't fictional characters facing fictional deaths. These were real teenagers—real people—sent to die for the convenience of a broken system.
He forced his expression back to neutral, but his heart hammered against his ribs, each beat a reminder of his own mortality in this unfamiliar world.
"They send us in first," the glasses boy continued, his voice taking on the detached quality of someone reciting information to distance himself from its implications. "Our presence activates the dungeon monsters, makes them visible. The higher ranks come in after to clear them out more efficiently. It's a resource optimization equation, really. Our lives versus the time saved for valuable citizens."
"And we die in the process," Kiriti concluded, appreciating the mathematical elegance of the system even as he recognized its moral bankruptcy.
"Not always immediately," the thin boy said with a brittle laugh. "Sometimes you last a few days. Depends on the dungeon. Depends on how fast you run. How well you hide."
Kiriti's writer's mind automatically began constructing a narrative: the cruel system, the expendable underclass, the inevitable rebellion. It was the kind of storytelling shortcut he'd have sneered at just days ago—predictable, derivative, emotionally manipulative. But the iron bracelet around his wrist wasn't fictional, and neither was the fear now coiling in his gut like a cold serpent.
"I'm Mikal," the glasses boy said, adjusting his oversized frames with a precision that suggested routine. "The charming optimist here is Dren, and that's Lissa."
The stocky girl—Lissa—gave a curt nod. "Welcome to the bottom of the world, newcomer."
"Kiriti," he replied, then added without thinking: "So what's the way out? How do you rank up from G?"
The laughter that followed had an edge of hysteria to it—the sound of people who had abandoned hope so thoroughly that even the concept was amusing. Even the girl who had been sobbing in the corner looked up with a bitter smile, as if Kiriti had told a particularly dark joke.
"Listen to him," Dren said, wiping tears of mirth—or despair—from his eyes. "He thinks there's a way out."
Kiriti kept his expression neutral, refusing to give them the satisfaction of seeing his growing alarm. "It's a legitimate question. Every system has progression mechanics."
Mikal tilted his head, studying Kiriti with new interest. "What a strange way to put it. But to answer your question: yes, technically stats can improve. Monster kills give an average of 0.25 points to a random attribute."
"Quarter-points," Dren spat, as if the very concept was offensive. "And you need to land the killing blow, which almost never happens when you're running for your life from creatures specifically designed to hunt G-Ranks."
"What about training?" Kiriti pressed, seeking the logical progression path that must exist. "Physical exercise for Strength, studying for Intelligence?"
This time, the laughter was almost cruel—the sound of people who had already tried everything he was suggesting and found it useless.
"Training?" Lissa repeated incredulously, exchanging knowing glances with the others. "Did you hear that, Mikal? He thinks he can just do some push-ups and get stronger!"
Mikal shook his head, the gesture both pitying and weary. "Training yields no measurable improvement in attributes. The stats are... fundamental. Inherent. Ontologically fixed. You can learn skills, techniques, but the underlying numbers don't change from conventional means. It's as if they're written into the fabric of your being."
"Then what does work?" Kiriti demanded, a note of frustration slipping past his careful control. "There must be something."
A heavy silence fell over the group. Dren glanced nervously at the guards stationed at the chamber's entrance, then leaned closer, voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
"Duels," he whispered, the word itself apparently dangerous. "To the death. Winner gets up to one point in a random stat."
"One full point?" Kiriti clarified, mentally calculating the efficiency of such a method.
"Maximum of one," Mikal corrected, his academic precision unwavering even in discussing murder. "Usually less. Depends on the difference between your total stats and theirs. Kill someone with higher stats than you, get more points. Kill someone weaker, get almost nothing."
Kiriti absorbed this information, his expression betraying nothing while his mind worked through the implications. "And that's the only reliable way to improve?"
"'Reliable' is generous," Lissa said with a sardonic twist to her mouth. "More like 'theoretical.' Most G-Ranks never get the chance. We're sent to the dungeons in groups, but separated once inside. By design." She glanced meaningfully at the guards. "They don't want us getting ideas about cooperation."
"Or about killing each other before we serve our purpose," Mikal added softly, pushing his glasses up again. "The system is quite elegantly designed when you think about it. Horrific, but elegant."
The cold logic of it all clicked into place in Kiriti's mind. G-Ranks weren't just disposable—they were deliberately calibrated to be just valuable enough to serve as dungeon bait, but not valuable enough to be worth saving. An optimization problem solved with human lives as variables.
Only 0.25 per kill. 0.25. I need 2 more points just to stop being G-Rank. That's... what? Eight kills minimum, assuming I'm not dead by then?
For the first time since awakening in this world, genuine existential dread gripped him—not the abstract concept of mortality he'd manipulated in his stories, but the visceral understanding that his consciousness might simply cease. What if there was no way out? What if he really did die in some forgotten dungeon corner, his consciousness extinguished forever? What if there was no narrative structure to exploit, no writer's room beyond this reality, no reset button?
His eyes twitched involuntarily, an autonomic betrayal. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead—another physiological response beyond his control. His heart pounded against his ribs so violently he wondered if the others could hear it, the sound of biological panic.
This could be it. The actual end. No epilogue, no reader comments, no sequel announcement. Just... nothing.
A heavy iron door at the far end of the chamber groaned open, the sound designed to be ominous. A middle-aged man in simple robes bearing the G symbol entered, his face a mask of bureaucratic indifference—the human embodiment of systemic cruelty.
"Attention, resources," he called out, his voice carrying no warmth or compassion. "Processing will now begin. You will be divided into dungeon groups based on regional needs and monster activity levels."
Kiriti watched the other G-Ranks shuffle forward, their movements mechanical, resigned—already playing their assigned roles in this narrative. He took a deep, controlled breath, forcing the panic down into a compact, manageable form, mentally folding it into smaller and smaller spaces until it could be contained.
Eight points. That's where I start.
The processing official was assigning teenagers to different groups, reading names from a scroll with the bored efficiency of someone who had performed this task many times before. As Kiriti waited for his name to be called, a cold certainty settled over him, replacing the fear with something far more dangerous.
But I know how stories work. And if this world runs on narrative...
"Kiriti Kolluru," the official called. "Eastern Labyrinth, Group C."
As he stepped forward to receive his assignment, Kiriti felt the last traces of panic subside, replaced by something far more dangerous: a calculated determination bordering on the psychotic, the kind of clear-eyed purpose that comes from seeing through the artifice to the underlying machinery.
...Then I'm going to write myself out of hell.