Free Web NovelChapter 1: F-Minus
The system notification arrived at 7:43 AM on a Tuesday, which Dillan always thought was a deeply disrespectful time to end the world.
No warning. No countdown. Just a soft chime — the kind your phone makes when someone likes your photo — and then the sky cracked open above every major city on Earth simultaneously, and out of those cracks poured something that had no business existing in a world that still had parking tickets and overdue rent.
Gates. Dimensional rifts. Holes in reality wearing the color of bruised light.
Dillan was eating instant noodles when it happened.
He watched the broadcast on his phone with chopsticks halfway to his mouth, noodles dripping on his shirt, while a news anchor tried very hard not to cry on live television. Behind her, Seoul’s skyline had grown a new feature — a churning violet tear in the atmosphere roughly the size of a football stadium, leaking something dark and wrong into the morning air.
He set down his chopsticks.
Well, he thought. That’s new.
By noon, the system had reached everyone.
It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t knock. One moment Dillan was standing in the queue outside the Hunter Registration Center with four hundred other people, and the next moment a translucent blue panel materialized in front of his face like the universe had decided he needed a notification he couldn’t swipe away.
[WORLD GATE PROTOCOL — INITIATED]
[GLOBAL HUNTER REGISTRATION — ACTIVE]
[SCANNING... SCANNING... SCANNING...]
[RANK ASSESSMENT COMPLETE]
He stared at it.
It stared back.
Then it showed him his rank.
[HUNTER RANK: F—]
Dillan blinked.
He read it again.
Then he looked around at the people near him, watched their faces cycle through surprise, relief, excitement — a woman two spots ahead of him burst into tears when her panel showed B-rank, her friends immediately swarming her with congratulations. A teenage kid behind him pumped his fist at a C. Even the tired-looking salaryman beside Dillan got a D-rank and exhaled like a man who’d just learned he wasn’t dying today.
Dillan looked back at his panel.
F-minus.
The system made a new letter, he realized slowly. For me. Specifically.
He spent a long moment processing that. The algorithm that had assessed eight billion human beings, assigned ranks from F all the way to SSS, apparently encountered Dillan Ruren and decided the existing scale was insufficient. It needed a minus sign. It reached into its code, found a symbol that had never been used in Hunter classification before, and deployed it exclusively for him.
He was, statistically speaking, below the bottom.
He was the footnote beneath the last page.
Cool, he thought distantly. Cool, cool, cool.
His phone buzzed.
It was his guild. The Ironspire support staff — a low-tier Hunter guild he’d worked admin for over the past eight months, filing Gate reports, managing equipment logs, answering phones. Not glamorous. But stable. He’d been quietly hoping that when his rank came in, even a low one, they’d let him try field work.
The message was three lines.
Hey Dillan. Saw your rank notification — the system broadcasts to registered employers automatically, hope that’s okay. We’re going to have to let you go. Insurance won’t cover anyone below F-standard on the roster. Really sorry. You were great at the phones. Good luck out there.
He stared at the message.
Then his phone buzzed again.
It was Jiyeon. His girlfriend of fourteen months. Or, apparently, his girlfriend of fourteen months and approximately forty-five minutes ago.
Dillan, I saw your rank. I’m sorry. I can’t do this. My family is already freaking out about the Gates and I can’t be worrying about you too on top of everything. Please don’t make this harder than it has to be. Take care of yourself.
He read that one twice too.
Outside the registration center, someone had set up a livestream. A content creator with a ring light and too much energy was doing reaction coverage of the crowd’s rank results, calling out numbers, interviewing people, building exactly the kind of chaos-adjacent content that got millions of views on a day like today.
Dillan walked past him.
The streamer glanced at him, glanced at the F-minus still floating faintly visible on Dillan’s panel — the system kept it displayed publicly for the first hour — and the camera followed automatically, because content was content.
"Whoa, hey — wait, is that an F-minus?" The streamer’s voice pitched upward with the specific delight of someone who’d just found gold. "Dude, that’s — I’ve never seen that before, is that even real? Chat, are you seeing this? Chat says it’s real — bro, how does it feel to be literally the lowest ranked human on the planet right now?"
Dillan stopped walking.
He turned slowly toward the camera.
The streamer grinned, leaning in, ring light blazing.
Dillan looked directly into the lens with the expression of a man who had eaten bad noodles, lost his job, lost his girlfriend, and been personally insulted by an algorithm, all before 1 PM on a Tuesday.
"Ask me again," Dillan said quietly, "and I’ll make sure your channel gets reported for harassment."
He walked away.
Behind him, the chat exploded. The clip would hit two million views by midnight. The comments were split exactly down the middle between people calling him pathetic and people calling him their new favorite person on the internet.
He didn’t know that yet.
He was too busy sitting on a bench outside the registration center, rain starting to fall, staring at the F-minus on his panel while the world restructured itself around him.
Below the bottom, he thought.
His stomach growled. He’d left the noodles on the counter.
Far above the city, the Gate pulsed once — that deep, bruised violet, slow as a heartbeat — and something in Dillan’s chest pulsed back.
He felt it like a hook behind his sternum. A pull. A hunger he didn’t have a name for yet.
His panel flickered.
For exactly one second, beneath the F-minus, a second line appeared — scrambled, glitching, wrong — and then vanished before he could read it.
He frowned at the empty panel.
Weird.
His phone buzzed again. Spam, this time. An ad for a Hunter gear discount sale.
Dillan stood up, turned his collar against the rain, and started walking toward the Gate.
He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have a rank worth mentioning. He didn’t have a job or a girlfriend or a warm bowl of noodles waiting for him.
What he had was a pull in his chest that felt like hunger.
And hunger, he figured, had to start somewhere.
Three blocks away, a girl with dark eyes and a healer’s insignia on her jacket watched him walk toward the Gate alone.
She didn’t know his name yet.
She pulled out her phone and took a photo anyway.
Something about him, she thought, tucking the phone away with a small, private smile.
Something about him felt like mine.
