The tunnel smelled like rust and piss, same as every morning, but today Joss's mother had ironed his shirt.
He noticed because the creases were wrong. Mara Mercer owned one iron, a battered thing she'd traded three weeks of mending for, and she used it maybe twice a year. Funerals. The day Joss's father got his first surface repair contract. Now this. She'd pressed the collar flat and burned a faint brown line along the left cuff, and she was pretending she hadn't.
"You're not eating," she said.
Joss looked at his plate. Half a nutrient bar, split three ways. His piece was the largest. It was always the largest.
"Not hungry."
"You're nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
His father, Dol, sat across the narrow table with his piece already gone. He was reading a maintenance manual, the pages soft from years of thumbing. He didn't look up. Didn't need to. When Dol Mercer had something to say, he said it. When he didn't, silence was the statement.
Joss ate the nutrient bar. It tasted like cardboard soaked in vitamins, which was exactly what it was. He chewed, swallowed, and pushed back from the table.
"Let's go."
The walk to the surface took forty minutes. Up through maintenance tunnel C-7, past the water recyclers with their permanent drip, past Mrs. Ahn's laundry line strung between two pipe junctions, past the cluster of kids too young for assessment sitting on an electrical box and kicking their legs. One of them waved at Joss. He waved back.
The tunnels narrowed, then widened, then gave way to the freight elevator that connected the underground to street level. Mara pressed the button. The elevator groaned. It always groaned.
"When I got my assessment," Mara said, too casually, "the whole thing took ten minutes. In and out. Nothing to worry about."
"What'd they give you?" Joss asked, even though he knew.
Her mouth tightened. "Seamstress. F-Rank."
She said it the way she always said it. Fast, like ripping off a bandage.
The elevator opened to sunlight.
Joss stopped breathing.
He'd been to the surface before. A handful of times, for Dol's repair jobs, tagging along to carry tools. But those were quick trips, early morning or late afternoon, in and out before the crowds thickened. This was different. This was midday, the sky wide and blue and so open it made his stomach clench. Buildings stretched up around him like the walls of a canyon, but there was no ceiling. Just sky. Just nothing between him and the sun except air.
Not bad.
He kept walking. His parents flanked him, Mara on the left, Dol on the right, and for a moment they looked like any other family heading to Assessment Day. Except their clothes were tunnel-worn and Mara's shoes had been resoled twice and Dol's hands were scarred from twenty years of fixing things that weren't meant to be fixed.
The Assessment Center was a converted gymnasium three blocks from the freight elevator. A line of eighteen-year-olds snaked around the building. Most of them were surface kids -- clean clothes, good boots, parents with assessment prep guides and protein shakes. A few underground kids dotted the line, recognizable by their squinting. Too much sky.
Joss joined the line. Mara squeezed his arm. Dol nodded once.
"We'll wait here," Mara said.
"Could be hours."
"We'll wait."
He didn't argue. There was no point arguing with Mara Mercer when her voice went flat like that.
The line moved faster than expected. The assessors were processing kids in batches, five at a time, running them through the chamber and spitting out results. Most kids came out grinning or crying. A surface girl ahead of Joss got Mage, B-Rank, and her parents screamed like she'd won the lottery. An underground boy got Laborer, E-Rank, and walked past his mother without making eye contact.
Joss's turn.
The chamber was a white room with a raised platform in the center. Sensors lined the walls. A bored assessor sat behind a desk with three screens, drinking something that smelled like burnt coffee.
"Step on the platform. Hold still. Don't talk."
Joss stepped up. The sensors hummed. Light crawled over his skin, warm at first, then cold, then warm again. Something pressed against his mind -- not painful, but invasive. Like fingers sorting through a filing cabinet. The system was reading him. Measuring him. Deciding what he was worth.
The assessor's screen flickered.
"Warrior," the assessor said, already typing. "C-Rank combat aptitude."
Joss said nothing. Warrior was fine. C-Rank was average. For an underground kid, average was generous.
Then the talent assessment fired.
The sensors flared brighter. The assessor's screens glitched -- all three at once, the displays scrambling into static for one full second. Joss saw it from the platform. Three white screens, then a flash of text on the center monitor:
**SSS -- Infinite Harvest**
Then gone. All three screens back to normal. The assessor blinked, tapped the side of the center monitor, and frowned at it the way you frown at a vending machine that ate your coin.
"Huh." The assessor scrolled through the readout. "Assessment complete. No notable talent detected." He looked up at Joss with the tired eyes of a man who had processed three hundred kids today and wanted to go home. "You're done. Next."
Joss stepped off the platform.
His heart was doing something it had never done before. Not racing, exactly. Hammering. Slow, heavy, like someone was hitting his ribs with a mallet from the inside. He had seen the text. SSS. Three letters that did not belong on an underground kid's assessment screen. And a name.
Infinite Harvest.
He walked out of the chamber. Mara read his face and her shoulders dropped with relief. "Warrior?"
"Warrior. C-Rank."
"That's good." She looked at Dol. "Isn't that good?"
Dol studied Joss for a moment. Whatever he saw, he kept to himself. "It's a start."
They walked home together. Joss answered his mother's questions on autopilot. Yes, the chamber was fine. No, it didn't hurt. Yes, he'd start leveling tomorrow. No, he wasn't disappointed with C-Rank. The whole time, his mind was running numbers the way it always ran numbers, the way an underground kid's mind worked -- calculating cost, calculating risk, calculating what the information was worth and who would pay for it.
SSS. The highest talent rank. He'd never heard of anyone getting it. The system used letter grades: F, E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, SSS. Most people got nothing. No notable talent detected. A lucky few got a C or B-rank talent -- a minor bonus to their class. S-rank talents were one in ten thousand. SS-rank was mythical.
SSS didn't have a category.
And the screen had glitched. The assessor hadn't logged it. Which meant the system had recorded Joss's talent internally, but the display couldn't parse it. An SSS rank on an underground kid. A bug. Or something else.
He needed to test it.
---
The field zone started two hundred meters past the eastern city wall. Starter territory. Rabbits, mostly, with the occasional fox for players who wanted a challenge. Safe during daylight hours. At 6:30 PM, the Night Fog would roll in and everything in the field would become lethal, but it was 2 PM. He had time.
Joss stood at the edge of the grass with a common iron sword in his left hand and leather armor that smelled like the bargain bin, because it was. Total gear cost: 400 gold. Three months of his father's savings.
A rabbit sat in the grass twenty meters away. Brown, fat, twitching its nose. Level 2. The most pathetic monster in the game. Players killed hundreds of them for scraps of meat and hide and a prayer of something better. The drop rates were public knowledge. Rabbit Meat: 40%. Rabbit Hide: 30%. Rabbit Bone: 15%. Everything else was fractions of a percent. A recipe might drop once per three hundred kills. A skill fragment, once per thousand.
Joss gripped the sword. Crossed the distance. The rabbit noticed him at five meters and bolted. He was faster. Basic Slash. The system guided his arm, correcting his form mid-swing, and the blade cut clean. The rabbit dissolved into light.
The loot window opened.
He stopped.
The window was supposed to show one item. Maybe two, on a good day. Three if the gods loved you. That was how it worked. Everyone knew how it worked.
Joss's loot window had seven items.
**[Rabbit Meat x2] — Common**
**[Rabbit Hide x1] — Common**
**[Rabbit Bone x1] — Common**
**[Field Herb x1] — Common**
**[Basic Recipe: Rabbit Stew] — Uncommon**
**[Rare Herb: Moonpetal] — Rare**
**[Skill Fragment: Quick Step] — Rare**
Seven items. Every single thing on the rabbit's loot table. The meat, the hide, the bone, the herb that dropped one time in ten, the recipe that dropped one time in thirty-three, the rare herb that dropped one in two hundred, and the skill fragment that dropped one in a thousand.
All of it. From one rabbit.
Joss's hands were shaking. He dismissed the window and the items went into his inventory. He looked around. The field was mostly empty -- a few players grinding rabbits in the distance, too far to see his screen. Nobody had noticed.
He found another rabbit. Killed it. Same thing. Full table. Every item.
A third rabbit. Full table.
He walked to a quiet spot behind a rock formation, sat down on the grass, and put his head between his knees.
Rabbit Stew was worth 50,000 gold on the open market. Moonpetal, 15,000 gold each. The Quick Step skill fragment -- he ran the number twice to make sure he wasn't losing his mind -- was worth 200,000 gold.
Three rabbits. Maybe four minutes of work. And he was sitting on a quarter million gold in drops.
His family made 14,400 gold a year.
Joss lifted his head. The sun was on his face. Still strange, that. Still new. Underground, the only light came from fluorescents and the orange glow of welding torches. Here the light had weight. It pressed on his skin like something alive.
He thought about the nutrient bar his mother had split three ways this morning. The biggest piece for him. Always the biggest piece for him. He thought about his father's scarred hands and the maintenance manual with its soft pages and the way Dol never complained, not once, not ever, about a life spent fixing other people's broken things in the dark.
He thought about the assessor's screen. SSS -- Infinite Harvest. And then, nothing. No notable talent detected.
Nobody knew.
Joss stood up, brushed the grass off his pants, and started doing math. Not the kind of math they taught in underground schools, where the answer was always "not enough." A different kind. The kind where you looked at a broken system and calculated exactly how much it would cost to buy your way through every wall it had built.
He did not go home. He did not tell his parents. He did not tell his friends. He found more rabbits, and he killed them, one by one, and every single time the loot window opened like a door that had never been locked, and every single time he took everything.
The sun moved. The shadows lengthened. At 5:45 PM, forty-five minutes before the Night Fog, Joss walked back through the city gate with an inventory full of items that no level-one player should possess and a number in his head that kept growing.
He stopped at the gate and looked back at the field. The last of the daylight was turning the grass gold. In forty-five minutes, the fog would come, and the rabbits would become something else, and the field would belong to nightmares.
But right now, in this moment, Joss Mercer was eighteen years old and he had a secret worth more than the city above him.
He turned and walked into the city. He had work to do.
