Three days in the Deepwend with no gear, no map, and no idea what world I'd walked into. I lived on hollow-country instinct and creek water until a Warden patrol dragged me to the academy and put my hand on the Assay, the stone that reads every soul alive and stamps it with a rank.
It printed ERROR. RANK 0. NO CAP DATA.
They filed me as a defective Awakening and dumped me in the Smith track, where the academy's rejects hammer out gear for students too highly ranked to make their own.
Here's what none of them know. An F-rank hits F's wall and stops. So does an S. Every rank in this world is a ceiling with a letter on it.
Rank 0 isn't a broken reading. It's no ceiling at all.
I start below the bottom of the ladder, weaker than the worst student in Grathmoor. But I grew up broke and hungry in the back hollows and I know exactly one thing nobody here does: how to go where nobody else will go. The near Deepwend is full of ore and beast-cores the ranked students can't survive to harvest. I can. And what I forge out of it makes the people wearing it strike above their rank.
Which, I'm finding out, is the kind of thing people kill you for.
18+ Explicit Content
Genre: Fantasy
It printed ERROR. RANK 0. NO CAP DATA.
They filed me as a defective Awakening and dumped me in the Smith track, where the academy's rejects hammer out gear for students too highly ranked to make their own.
Here's what none of them know. An F-rank hits F's wall and stops. So does an S. Every rank in this world is a ceiling with a letter on it.
Rank 0 isn't a broken reading. It's no ceiling at all.
I start below the bottom of the ladder, weaker than the worst student in Grathmoor. But I grew up broke and hungry in the back hollows and I know exactly one thing nobody here does: how to go where nobody else will go. The near Deepwend is full of ore and beast-cores the ranked students can't survive to harvest. I can. And what I forge out of it makes the people wearing it strike above their rank.
Which, I'm finding out, is the kind of thing people kill you for.
18+ Explicit Content
Genre: Fantasy
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Used availability for Nyles Roth's Rankless