When The System Spoils You For No Reason-Chapter 51 - Fifty One

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."

— Groucho Marx

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"Are you human?" 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"It says that on my status sheet, doesn’t it?"

"Well, in my case, I wouldn’t trust appearances that much."

"Ya know." He rolled the phrase across his tongue like a scientist tasting a new compound, and filed the colloquialism away into his vast vocabulary.

His name was Michael.

...

A year had bled away since the trip to the Expanse—a year of strained air and political tension that clung to the skin like static.

After leaving that claustrophobic dungeon, the boys had been immediately accosted. The Aurelians descended with faces like aristocratic masks of fury. The head of the House, alongside other leading powers of the continent, had summoned them—a demand that crackled with unspoken threat.

At that critical moment, Michael appeared. He moved with a liquid, effortless grace that seemed to part the hostile atmosphere around him, placing the boys under the formidable protection of the Nova Ameriga Council, the leading power of the North American continent. His intervention carried weight because Michael was the son of the Council’s president.

What might have been a small guild’s private reckoning with an SSS-Rank Faction became a continental issue—well, small guild relative to an SSS-Rank Faction.

Three months of wire-taut diplomacy later, a resolution was forced into place. The White Fang Guild was permitted to keep the loot to train their members, bolstering the guild’s power. For the foreseeable future, they would be tasked with clearing dungeons—both impromptu incursions and permanent ones—with resources funneled to the Council at an 80% share, leaving a meager 20% for the guild itself.

More specifically, the boys would work for the Aethelgard Sovereignty—the premier SSS-Rank guild of North America—for a full year, without reward, to repay the damages the Council claimed to have endured.

The average continent, like North America, was governed by a Council led by a president who functioned like a head of state. The Council served as the legislative and judicial body, setting the rules that governed the continent. The SSS-Rank guilds, in turn, were the enforcers: police and army both. They protected the continent from threats beyond the capacity of lower-ranked guilds, served as cradles for geniuses, and explored lethal, uncharted danger zones.

In continents like the Expanse, Councils were replaced by the ancient, formidable Houses. The guilds’ duties, however, remained the same.

...

For nine grueling months, the trio had been forcefully trained. Courtesy of the Council, they were almost permanently attached to dungeon raiding teams—the damp chill of subterranean passages and the metallic tang of monster blood becoming a familiar misery. They also answered calls from SS-Rank guilds and, of course, the Aethelgard Sovereignty itself.

Zeke joined their raids on special occasions—most often when Avalon called. His spare time, which constituted most of his time, was spent in characteristic indolence, a picture of calm in contrast to their relentless schedule.

...

The haul from the final cave had been staggering, even after splitting it with Anton. Skill, Ability, and Trait runestones glittered in ranks from F to S. Stat potion vials shimmered across similar tiers. There were rare herbs—including the coveted S-Rank specimen they had liberated—and artifacts ripe with potential as alchemy and blacksmithing ingredients.

These were rewards they were ultimately forced to surrender to the guild, though they would have done so regardless—it had been one of their core drives when they embarked on the pillaging. The pillaging itself, however, had been the most significant fuel for the continent’s initial outrage.

In the end, humanity’s need for perseverance outranked personal squabbles between youths. That, combined with the fact that the Expanse opened every five years—and the pivotal detail that Zeke had soloed a demon completely unknown to House Aurelius—had cooled the fury. That demon appeared to have operated in secrecy for years, annihilating hunters without leaving witnesses, until Zeke ended it.

...

Though the boys surrendered the rewards, they received a share back from White Fang.

Aaron, unable to rank up, was graced with two Ability runestones. The first granted him Shadow Mirror—a D-Rank ability that let him conjure an intangible, distracting copy of himself. The second drew Kai’s palpable envy: Umbral Sovereign. This S-Rank skill allowed him to extract shadows from corpses and raise them as immortal minions, sustained by his mana. The rank and number of shadows he could maintain depended on his Magic Power.

Nerfed by his own talent limit, his B-Rank Magic Power meant he could only extract and sustain shadows up to B-Rank—nine at maximum, or double that if they were C-Rank.

Kai’s only consolation was knowing that runestones typically granted abilities aligned to one’s innate affinity. The odds of pulling something unrelated were slim.

Kai, at least, received two abilities that matched his thematic palette of light. Swords of Revealing Light—an A-Rank ability that let him conjure and control luminous blades whose impaling strikes could seal an opponent’s Magic Power, though with diminishing effect against stronger foes. And Divine Blessing—another A-Rank ability allowing him to bestow a potent blessing once per hour: Blessing of Recovery granted C-Rank regeneration and cleansed non-inborn ailments; Blessing of Might raised all attributes by one rank; Blessing of Warding dispelled curses and shored up all resistances.

He had also maxed out his stats, hitting his talent limit at pseudo-S-Rank—a term the boys were encountering for the first time. It described a phenomenon where a person’s total stats surpassed their current rank’s threshold but lacked the traditional three stats at the next rank required to advance.

His stats now read:

Strength: A(780)

Agility: S(885)

Endurance: A(770)

Perception: A(799)

Magic Power: S(1000)

One more stat at S-Rank—however low—and he would have officially ascended.

Jude had been the most unlucky of the three. His first runestone granted Fire Fist, a D-Rank ability that coated his fists in flames mimicking the properties of his strikes—enhancing their power, burning his target, and allowing him to release the fire as a projectile. His second was Shinsai, a C-Rank ability that, upon chanting Sentence, manifested a slow-winding but devastatingly powerful fire arrow of immense heat and destructive force.

He had barely touched the stat potions, relying instead on his level-up trait while hunting at a pace the boys sarcastically dubbed the unholy revenge—what the Council had politely called training.

His stats stood as an S-Rank testament to that relentless labor:

Strength: S(1100)

Agility: S(1110)

Endurance: S(1100)

Perception: S(1100)

Magic Power: SS(1330)

And finally, there was Zeke Vaughn—who had lazed through the past year without collecting a single piece of loot. He had SAGE, after all. Amid a sprawl of gifts he deemed too unremarkable to mention, Zeke walked away with only two semi-decent traits. The first was a D-Rank trait he abused at every opportunity: Free Flier. It made him a natural master of flight—someone who moved more comfortably through open air than solid ground—and he gloated incessantly about its complete absence of mana or stamina cost. The second was Master of Arms, a B-Rank trait that made him, as the name implied, an instant master of any weapon he laid hands on.

...

Which brought Zeke to the current situation. Michael regarded him with that same easy smile—a disarming expression that, to anyone unaware of the depths behind his cool gaze, would be taken entirely at face value.