The field went quiet in the way expensive places did right before they charged you for breathing.
The vast doorway still lay projected across the grass, a cathedral of light flattened over the earth. Gold-edged runes burned within its shape. The painted sky above it held steady. The hum from the crystal had faded, yet the note stayed in Kage’s teeth.
Then the system panel hovered over the threshold.
[The Curator Demands a Signature.]
[0% / 100%]
Nobody moved for a second.
Finn swallowed first. “A signature as in... write our names?”
Jax squinted at the glowing frame. “On what. The lawn?”
Zara folded her arms and frowned at the percentage. “It’s a meter. The dungeon wants a quota.”
Kage kept his eyes on the panel.
Signature. Gallery. Curator. Meter.
The place smelled wrong through Synesthesia. Old varnish. Damp paper. A stack of canvases sealed in a room with no windows. The percentage told him what the wording didn’t. The door wanted contribution, not penmanship.
He just didn’t know what currency it took.
Stats. Health. Mana. Levels. Some hidden raid somewhere in the city absolutely would ask for something obscene. Morpheus loved cute presentation on top of extortion.
Zherdev hit his patience cap first.
“Brother, with all due respect, I paid for the key,” he declared. “If the door wants a signature, it gets executive access.”
Before anyone could stop him, he stomped forward and slapped his right hand onto the center of the glowing threshold.
The field cracked with a wet hiss.
Zherdev shrieked, “OW. Kage, HELP!”, then looked around and snatched his hand back.
A mark spread across the back of his dominant hand.
The paint there was luminous. Shifting amber and deep blue moving over each other in slow, pressureless currents, the way oil crosses water when stirred once and left. It climbed to his wrist and stopped at one clean boundary. A single suspended drop formed at his fingertip, hung for half a second, then dissolved into light before the grass received it.The system chimed.
[15% / 100%]
The doorway reacted at once.
Its outline inhaled.
Light peeled off the field in visible strands and rushed into the frame. The painted grass around the threshold dulled. Green fled the blades. Wildflowers lost their color in a ripple that ran outward from the center. A ring of the field turned gray and lifeless, as if someone had washed the pigment out with a single brutal stroke.
Finn took a step back. “It’s eating the painting.”
Zherdev stared at his hand in awe and pain. “I hate how cool this is.”
Julie leaned over to inspect the mark. “You slapped haunted art. What did you expect?”
“Loot,” Zherdev said immediately.
Zara walked past him before the joke even landed. Her eyes stayed on the meter.
She pressed two fingers against the threshold.
A dry whisper rasped over the light. She pulled her hand back almost immediately.
[20% / 100%]
Only five percent. Zara’s expression sharpened.
The mark that formed on the back of her hand was chalk-dry. A smear of pale gray-white across the knuckles, pressed hard, slightly blurred at the edges. It held still and dried immediately.
Kage saw the pattern click a heartbeat before he spoke. But Vami moved first. Of course he did.
He stepped up with that infuriating little smile he wore every time the world proved him right. He touched the threshold with one finger.
The door flashed.
When he withdrew his hand, the paint rose immediately, the same shifting amber and blue as Zherdev's, climbing to the same wrist-height, producing the same suspended drop that dissolved before it fell.
[35% / 100%]
Fifteen again.
Vami turned his hand, admired the mark for half a second, then looked straight at Kage. His eyes gleamed.
He knew what this implied for Kage.
Rare bracket, Kage thought.
The numbers lined up too cleanly. Zara got five. Zherdev and Vami got fifteen. The mark types matched the rarity.
Zara caught up a breath later, and once she did, she started issuing orders like a woman who had seen the answer key and wanted the test over with.
“Lily. Finn. Quick.”
Lily blinked, then moved without argument. Finn jumped a little, then hurried after her because leaving Zara hanging felt more dangerous than the cursed door.
Lily pressed her palm to the frame. The chalk-gray smudge appeared on her palm, dry and still.
[40% / 100%]
Finn touched the frame and withdrew with the practiced speed of someone who had developed a technique for touching uncertain surfaces. Chalk mark. Five percent.
[45% / 100%]
Ren had remained silent through the trial-and-error phase. Now he stepped closer, eyes moving from hand to hand, mark to meter, the whole set of variables settling into place.
“It’s based on class rarity,” he said.
He spoke in the calm, clean tone of someone placing a piece on a board.
“Five percent for Common classes. Finn, Valdrias, Jax, Zara, and Lily chose base classes from the city trainers.”
Jax straightened at once. “Common my ass.”
Ren inclined his head a fraction. “Rarity, not effort.”
Jax opened his mouth, considered the wording, then shut it again with visible reluctance. He had already spent one apology on Kage. He clearly had no budget left for Ren.
Zara pointed at Julie. “Uncommon should be ten. Confirm it.”
Julie sighed with theatrical patience. “You analysts really know how to flirt.”
She stepped up, set her palm against the threshold, and drew it away. The mark that formed was precise. Ink-black lines wrapped around both her wrists in angular geometric patterns, clean strokes and exact angles, the mark of a drafter working in miniature. It held sharp. It dried instantly without a single blurred edge.
[55% / 100%]
Julie lifted her arm and looked at the mark. “Okay. This one’s actually pretty.”
“Confirmed, then,” Zara said.
The entrance reacted harder this time.
The bright projection thickened. Light condensed. The flat glowing outline rose into mass.
Obsidian pushed up from the earth in slow, grinding slabs. Gold leaf ran across it in branching seams. The doorframe emerged piece by piece, immense and heavy, as if the threshold had been sketching itself and had finally secured enough funding to enter construction.
The field around them suffered for it.
Color fled in another wave.
Grass turned into pencil strokes. Flowers became loose smears of gray. The distant hills flattened into a monochrome study. Even the painted clouds above lost depth and settled into layered charcoal and white, the whole vestibule draining toward stark draftwork as the frame grew more real.
Kage watched the change and felt the logic underneath it.
The door is paying for its own body by stripping the painting.
Art was becoming architecture. Pigment was becoming stone. This place already made too much sense for his comfort.
Jax strode up next with the expression of a man determined to win an argument against a percentage meter.
“Fine,” he muttered. He slapped the threshold, and gray chalk spread across his hand.
[60% / 100%]
Valdrias followed immediately, as if refusing to let Jax monopolize the concept of touching glowing surfaces. He pressed his palm to the frame. A charcoal brand pressed itself flat across the back of his gauntlet hand, broad and dry, the edges blurring where the chalk met the metal.
[65% / 100%]
Ren stepped last among the obvious variables.
He placed his hand on the threshold with measured control, feet set at precise balance, body aligned as though even a door deserved proper ma-ai. Wet paint rose over his hand immediately, the same shifting amber and blue as Zherdev's and Vami's, climbing to the wrist in slow pressureless currents, a single suspended drop forming at the edge of his palm before it dissolved without falling.
[80% / 100%]
The number hovered there.
The party stared at it.
Silence fell again, heavier this time.
Ten-man raid. Nine signatures counted. Eighty percent.
Finn glanced between the panel and the party list. “Wait.”
He did the math out loud because the horror clearly demanded witnesses.
“If ten Common classes only give five each...” He swallowed. “That would be fifty.”
Zara’s mouth flattened. “Correct.”
Jax looked at the meter. “Then a normal group gets locked out.”
“Or taxed,” Kage said.
Everyone looked at him.
He kept staring at the threshold.
“Hidden raid. City access. Expensive key. If the roster undershoots, the system bleeds the difference out of the party.”
Finn’s face went pale. “Bleeds what?”
“Whatever hurts most,” Vami said lightly. “Something like raw stats. Max HP. Levels. Permanent durability loss. Something educational.”
Julie shot him a look. “Why do you say that like it’s charming?”
“Because sadism with strong internal logic is charming.”
Zara nodded once, grim and approving. “He’s right. A straight lockout wastes the key. A penalty like this preserves the design.”
Zherdev clutched his glowing hand to his chest. “This game keeps inventing new ways to mug me.”
“You paid for the mugging,” Kage said.
“That does sound like me.”
Lily glanced at the still-hovering [80% / 100%], then at Kage.
Everyone else followed her eyes.
The shift happened all at once. The analysis phase ended. The waiting phase began.
Kage stood there with Mumyo at his hip and the entire raid quietly measuring him.
They all saw “Poet” in the UI. Nobody sane thought “Poet” was his actual class. Not here. Not after everything he’d done.
Zara voiced the room’s math first.
“Common is five. Uncommon is ten. Rare is fifteen.” Her gaze stayed fixed on him. “Unique should be twenty.”
“That fills the bar exactly,” Finn said.
Julie folded her arms. “Nice and clean.”
Vami’s smile widened a fraction. “Assuming he’s only Unique.”
Zherdev perked up immediately. “Brother, Kage is premium content. The premium content.”
Jax crossed his arms. “Whatever it is, just touch the thing.”
Ren said nothing. He just watched Kage with quiet, disciplined attention.
Kage felt the weight of their stare settle across his shoulders.
Twenty would be convenient.
It would also be a lie.
He knew what his class was. He had known since the system handed it to him with all the subtlety of a car crash. The panel in his own interface had never hidden the word from him.
Legendary.
A class tier the game should have locked behind months of progression, several international incidents, or divine intervention.
He stepped forward.
The half-built frame loomed over him now, obsidian and gold and hungry light. At eighty percent, it had enough substance to cast a real shadow across the grayscale field. The threshold itself shimmered like varnish laid too thick over a painting.
The air around it pressed against his skin, the hum from the frame moving through the soles of his boots and up through his bones, a string wound one full turn past the point the instrument was built to hold.
“Stand clear,” he said.
It came out flat and quiet. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Everyone moved anyway.
Vami stayed closest. Of course.
Kage lifted his hand.
For half a heartbeat he saw his reflection in the threshold. Gray eyes. Black hair. The face he had built to be forgettable.
Then his fingers touched the light.
The world seized.
A shock ran up his arm, sharp and deep, like plunging his hand into freezing ink.
Black text bloomed under his skin.
No. It rose off his skin.
Archaic letters spiraled across the back of his hand and up his wrist, thin and precise as quill strokes. Each character hovered a hair’s breadth above him, detached from gravity, drifting in slow orbit as if his body had become the page and the script refused to stay flat.
The meter leaped.
It blew straight through expectation, straight through clean design, straight through every polite assumption in the room.
[130% / 100%]
The panel stuttered.
The numbers glitched, doubled, tore, then held.
Every sound in the field cut off.
Wind died.
The doorway’s radiant gold snapped into a glaring, contaminated red.
The obsidian frame screamed.
It happened in silence first, a full-body shudder of impossible stress, then sound caught up in a shrill fracture that made Finn clap both hands over his ears. The grayscale field froze in place. The sketched grass stopped swaying. The painted clouds above them locked flat.
Vami stared at the meter.
For the first time since Kage had met him, the arrogant composure—the specific expensive composure of someone who maintained it as a deliberate ongoing project—cracked entirely. All at once.
“Knew it,” he breathed.
He looked from the numbers to the floating text around Kage’s hand.
“Legendary, right? How the fuck do you have a legendary class already?”
Jax swore under his breath.
Zara’s eyes widened once, sharply. Then calculation came roaring back in, harder than before.
Zherdev lit up with vindication. “BRO, I SAID HE WAS BUILT ILLEGAL.”
Julie grabbed his shoulder before he could try to high-five the haunted architecture.
Kage opened his mouth.
The sky tore apart before he said a word.
The flawless painted blue above the field split open with the sound of giant canvas ripping from corner to corner. A jagged white wound spread across the heavens. Behind the clouds waited a blinding void of wire-frame geometry. Lines and nodes burned in weird perspective, a skeletal construction layer hidden behind the painting of the world.
The whole vestibule lurched. Then a voice arrived.
It came from everywhere. From the frame. From the field. From inside the torn sky. Cultured, elegant, and breaking as it spoke, each sentence catching on obsession like silk dragged over broken glass.
“The lines cross. The ink bleeds. An unauthorized edit... no. No. The signature...”
The obsidian frame convulsed.
A rhythm started under their feet.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
The ground pulsed with the massive, deliberate impact of a printing press stamping page after page. Each beat ran up Kage’s legs and into his ribs. The letters around his hand spun faster. Synesthesia flooded his senses with wet ink, old vellum, hot metal type, lampblack, dust from forgotten shelves.
Finn’s hawk took off from his shoulder in a panic, wheeled once, and slammed against invisible air above the group as though the whole field had become a sealed box.
“Uh,” Finn said, voice climbing fast. “I have concerns.”
“Everyone ready weapons,” Zara snapped.
The voice fell lower.
It slipped past the ears and sank into bone.
“A draft revised. A stanza reclaimed.”
The pause that followed hit harder than the words.
Kage felt it in the marrow of his arms. In the joints of his fingers. In the place where the black script floated above his skin and answered some call older.
Then the whisper came.
“Master... have you finally returned to the desk?”
Every eye turned to Kage again.
He hated that.
He hated how the world kept finding new ways to pin a spotlight on him and call it destiny.
Fantastic, he thought. The dungeon is a fan.
The field gave way. No explosion. No polite transition.
The ground folded. The painted grass crumpled inward from every direction in one smooth, decisive motion, the geometry of the space pressing toward the door and compressing, a piece of failed parchment crushed in a large fist. The texture of the grass vanished. The sky vanished. The crimson door and the torn wire-frame void collapsed into a single point and expanded outward into a darkness with no color, no texture, nothing except the sensation of ten people accelerating in the same direction at speed.
Gravity changed its mind.
The ground vanished under all ten of them. Finn screamed first. Zherdev screamed louder. Jax cursed with great commitment.
Julie caught Vami’s sleeve for a heartbeat before both of them dropped through the collapsing field. Ren twisted in the air on instinct, already trying to find footing on a world that had stopped offering any. Lily reached for whoever was closest. Valdrias held onto his shield like it was a moral principle. Zara’s face stayed hard and focused right until the moment the crumpled earth folded under her boots.
Kage fell with the rest.
The torn sky rushed up around them. Or down. Direction had left the chat.
Mumyo slammed against his palm as he drew on reflex, the blade flashing free in a dead-black line. The little pulse in its steel beat fast now. Readiness. Devotion.
Above them, the painted field shrank into a crumpled scrap of light.
Below them waited a dark void full of shifting frames.
The dark took all of them.