Chapter 1: Nothing

The skill evaluation machine hummed, beeped, and displayed a single word:

**[NULL]**

Jin Takeda stared at the screen. Around him, the other students who'd just awakened were showing off skills like [Fire Control] and [Super Speed] and [Enhanced Strength]. Normal skills. Useful skills. Skills that would get them recruited by guilds, earning money and futures worth living.

Jin had gotten [Null].

"What does that mean?" he asked the proctor.

The woman's expression was carefully neutral—the look of someone delivering bad news. "It means your skill does nothing, Mr. Takeda. No effect has been detected. You've awakened, but your ability is... empty."

"That can't be right. Everyone gets something."

"Not everyone." She pulled up a database on her terminal. "Approximately 0.01% of awakeners manifest null skills—abilities with no detectable function. It's rare, but not unprecedented. I'm sorry."

She didn't sound sorry. She sounded like someone checking a box, already moving on to the next evaluation, already forgetting his name.

Jin walked out of the awakening center with a card that declared him a failure before he'd even begun.

---

Two years later, Jin had proven the proctors right.

Every guild rejected him. Every job requiring awakened abilities turned him away. He worked at a convenience store now, scanning groceries for customers who used skills to float their purchases to their cars, wondering what cosmic joke had given him power that amounted to absolutely nothing.

Then the robbery happened.

A C-rank awakener burst into the store one evening, skill blazing with visible fire, demanding cash. Jin was alone behind the counter, staring at a man whose flames could reduce him to ash in seconds.

"Give me the money, or I burn this place down."

Jin should have complied. Should have handed over the register, let the awakener go, filed an insurance claim and moved on.

Instead, he felt something stir.

Deep in his chest, where his useless skill supposedly lived, something *woke up*.

"No," Jin said.

The awakener laughed. "No? Do you know what my skill is? [Flame Soul]. I can generate fire hot enough to melt steel. What's your skill, convenience store clerk?"

"Null."

"Null?" More laughter. "A nothing skill? You're going to fight me with—"

The man tried to create fire.

Nothing happened.

His eyes went wide. He tried again, straining, reaching for the power that had defined his entire existence. Still nothing. The flames that should have erupted from his hands simply... didn't.

"What did you do?" His voice cracked. "WHAT DID YOU DO?"

Jin looked at his hands. At the faint shimmer surrounding them that hadn't been there before. At the awakener who was suddenly, impossibly, just an ordinary man.

"I don't know," he admitted.

Then he punched the robber in the face.

---

The Association arrived within the hour.

Not the local response team—the big players from headquarters, the ones who handled threats too significant for normal channels. Three S-rank hunters, a research team, and enough equipment to analyze Jin down to his DNA.

"You're telling me," the lead researcher said, "that his skill completely negated a C-rank [Flame Soul]?"

"I didn't negate anything," Jin protested. "My skill does nothing."

"Your skill apparently does everything." The researcher pulled up scans of Jin's ability signature. "What you have isn't 'nothing'—it's the absence of something. Specifically, the absence of any other skill. When that absence interacts with an existing skill, the result is cancellation."

"Cancellation?"

"You turn skills off, Mr. Takeda. Any skill, any rank, any power." The researcher's eyes gleamed with fascination. "In your presence, S-rank awakeners become ordinary humans."

Jin felt the world shift around him. His useless skill. His nothing power. All this time, it hadn't been empty—it had been *waiting*.

"Why didn't it work before?"

"Probably because you never activated it. Null skills are notoriously difficult to trigger—most awakeners never figure out how. You're lucky that robbery pushed you into it."

Lucky. Jin thought about two years of rejection, two years of being treated as worthless, two years of believing he was broken.

**[SKILL: NULL]**

**[DESCRIPTION: NEGATES ALL SKILLS, ABILITIES, AND SUPERNATURAL EFFECTS WITHIN RANGE]**

**[RANGE: PHYSICAL CONTACT]**

**[COST: CONTINUOUS MENTAL EFFORT]**

**[WARNING: THIS SKILL IS CLASSIFIED AS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS]**

**[YOU HAVE BEEN FLAGGED FOR IMMEDIATE REGISTRATION]**

"What happens now?" Jin asked.

The researcher smiled—the hungry smile of someone who'd found a very valuable specimen.

"Now, Mr. Takeda, you become useful."

Jin looked at the S-rank hunters surrounding him, at the researchers with their equipment, at the cards they were holding that would reshape his entire future.

For two years, he'd been nothing.

Now he was something that made everyone else nothing.

He almost laughed.