[B-rank Dungeon clearance window closing.]

  [Expedited clearance recommended.]

  [Time remaining: 00:00:10]

  The white text popped into view for every Awakened in Manhattan that morning.

  The sun had barely risen, leaving the city washed in the cold, pale gray of early dawn. The streets had been empty compared to the usual rush, except for a few delivery trucks idling at curbs and an early morning jogger whose breath misted in the chill air.

  Shane stopped mid-yawn on the sidewalk.

  [Clearance failed: Time limit exceeded.]

  Some of the faces on the street turned ghost-white.

  [Warning: Dungeon breach imminent!]

  A failed dungeon just meant a bigger mess one rank higher. And just as he expected…

  [Alert: B-rank Dungeon is escalating to an A-rank Breach!]

  [Time until Breach: 01:00:00]

  The government’s precognition department had posted on their website that no A-rank or higher dungeons would appear in the US for the next week, so everyone’s been relaxed.

  Technically, they weren’t wrong.

  They hadn’t said a damn thing about a breach.

  [Please prepare a raid team for the A-rank Breach.]

  The morning silence was immediately shattered as every phone in a ten-block radius shrieked with the jarring tone of a Wireless Emergency Alert. The sound bounced off the skyscrapers, echoing loudly without the noise of traffic to drown it out.

  Shane fished his phone from his pocket. The screen was lit up with a gray notification box.

  [Emergency Alert: Extreme]

  [A-RANK DUNGEON BREACH DETECTED IN BROWNSVILLE. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.]

  It was a warning about an imminent dungeon breach, telling all non-Awakened in the area to get to a nearby shelter immediately.

  “A-rank…?” a guy mumbled, stumbling out of a 24-hour deli while speaking through a mouthful of half-chewed bagel.

  The civilians—a drowsy store owner who’d been rolling up a metal gate, drivers leaning out of their idling trucks, and a jogger pausing at the crosswalk—looked confused, until one driver leapt from his truck and ran for the nearest subway entrance. The others followed, abandoning vehicles and a bagel to run for the underground shelter.

  Shane spotted two others near the subway entrance who were half-pacing around, as if they wanted to go inside, but wasn’t sure if they could.

  A quick status scan showed that they were probably hunters.

  They exchanged a terrified glance in the dim light. Both of them E-ranks, likely never even gotten near a B-rank dungeon.

  They had probably registered for the tax breaks and the specialized health insurance—perks that made life in the city affordable—but this was the catch.

  In a breach emergency, all registered hunters were drafted to defend civilians.

  Shane tore his eyes away from them. They weren’t his problem.

  The problem was that this had never happened in the game.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Shane wondered who he could get to help him handle this mess. The heavy hitters, the S-rankers, were all out of the country.

  America’s small handful of S-rank hunters had all flown to Tokyo to deal with an SS-rank dungeon on the verge of its own breach. A breach was always a rank higher than its dungeon counterpart.

  An SSS-rank catastrophe was something no one wanted.

  But how the hell did a B-rank dungeon get to this point in the first place?

  If a dungeon was this close to its deadline, the Hunter’s Association would have been blowing up every guild’s phone lines. And there were always hunters patrolling the area to make sure there weren’t stray dungeons.

  The only variable… was Shane himself.

  But what could he possibly have done to cause a butterfly effect this bad?

  Damn it.

  If this had just been a B-rank Dungeon that got re-classified as an A-rank, like what happened with that monster wave dungeon, the timer would’ve had hours left on it. Plenty of time for the S-rankers to portal back from Japan since it took at least two hours to get an intercontinental portal running.

  [A hunter has arrived at the location of the dungeon breach.]

  [One hunter has been registered.]

  [Affiliation: Renegades Guild]

  Shane ran across the rooftops, following the system’s directions to the dungeon.

  The holographic arrow kept his [Bad Navigator] quirk from kicking in, leading him deep into Brooklyn, toward the sprawling maze of the Brownsville projects.

  From his perch on the gravel-strewn roof of a fourteen-story housing tower, Shane looked down at the complex.

  The rising sun hit the identical red-brick buildings, turning them the color of dried blood, but the service yard in the center of the block was nowhere to be seen.

  It had turned into a crater.

  The asphalt courtyard had completely collapsed, plunging into the hollow coal bunkers below—an intake meant for coal trucks that hadn’t run in forty years.

  It looked like a bomb had gone off, leaving a twenty-foot-wide sinkhole next to the playground. They were lucky it hadn’t been right underneath it.

  Shane leaned over the edge, peering into the dust from the roof.

  The hole was filled with tons of debris. Shattered concrete slabs, twisted rebar, and mounds of dirt. But the center was terrifyingly clean.

  Deep at the bottom of the rubble funnel, glowing in the darkness of what used to be the sub-basement, was the dungeon gate.

  But it wasn’t the stable oval he was used to.

  A violent mess of purple light swirled like a hungry mouth.

  It had already sucked in the debris that had fallen directly on top of it, clearing a perfect circle in the wreckage.

  The remaining rubble formed a steep, unstable funnel around the gate. Every few seconds, a loose brick or a chunk of asphalt would slide down the slope and vanish silently into the vortex of light.

  Rising from that central eye were the distortions.

  The fissures reached into the air, like cracks in a windshield, towering four stories high. They were pitch black and razor-thin, cutting through the morning light.

  Before today, there had been rusted chain-link fences and “RESTRICTED AREA” signs zip-tied around its perimeter, fenced off for a decade because the ground was unstable and prone to sinkholes.

  That very neglect was the reason no one had found the dungeon gate in time.

  Down below, the lone hunter looked impossibly small and fragile compared to the sinkhole.

  He didn’t dare step closer, knowing that one wrong move would send the rest of the debris—and him—sliding straight into the dungeon’s mouth.

  He took a few steps back and paced around the weeds, constantly glancing from the pulsating gate to his phone, then up at the towering apartment blocks as if expecting a miracle to drop out of the sky, knowing not all residents could evacuate in time.

  Not wanting to be seen, Shane took a step back from the ledge. The parapet wall cut off the line of sight, making him invisible to anyone down in the courtyard.

  A new system window popped up just for Shane.

  [Form a party with other registered hunters.]

  Raids usually weren’t a solo gig. The system window continued with a recommendation.

  [Recommended total number of hunters is a maximum of 32.]

  The system window expanded to show a table. Of the 32 slots, only one was filled. It showed the guild name of the hunter who had registered first.

  [Represent your guild and stop the A-rank dungeon breach!]

  [Cross-guild parties are authorized.]

  [NOTE: Max capacity per individual party is 16 in order to get the party buff.]

  The pop-ups kept coming.

  [If raid capacity is exceeded, higher-rank hunters may forcibly eject lower-rank hunters from the registry and take their slot.]

  “It’s tough being an F-rank,” Shane muttered to himself with a wry smirk.

  Honor mode blocked him from joining guilds, but not from raid parties. And he needed those party buffs.

  The numbers were straightforward.

  Two full parties of sixteen.

  The limit was clearly set with the expectation that S-rank and A-rank hunters would be the ones clearing it.

  No one else had shown up yet. But the first registered hunter must have contacted his guild, so more people should be showing up soon.

  The problem was, S-rankers ran with their own dedicated teams, crews of A and B-rankers they’d trained with for years. Which meant most of the country’s competent hunters were probably in Tokyo with them.

  With the one-hour time limit, not a lot of high-rank hunters would be able to join.

  There was one government-affiliated S-rank and a handful of A-ranks on the payroll, but they were the exceptions. Most high-ranking hunters chased the massive paychecks offered by the private guilds.

  But they wouldn’t be here.

  It was an open secret that those high-rankers were positioned to prioritize guarding politicians and the wealthy districts first.

  Even the lower-rank government response teams would get here slower than a pizza delivery because this was a poor neighborhood. Their strategy wouldn’t even be to save Brownsville; it would be to set up a perimeter around Brownsville to keep the monsters from reaching Manhattan.

  They would most likely try to hold the breach off inside this neighborhood until the S-ranks returned.

  This much he could glean from past experiences and the news media he’d been scouring to learn about this world.

  What a shitty world.

  But, he had to admit, he was starting to like it here better than his old one.

  After a short wait, a dozen or so hunters had gathered in the alleyways below, but the problem was, he didn’t recognize a single face.

  In other words, there were no named characters. Which also meant they couldn’t be strong.

  As an F-rank, Shane had to choose his party carefully.

  He wouldn’t be able to push anyone out to get in.

  Party composition was another huge problem. Finding party members who could cover his weaknesses could be the difference between success and failure.

  He [Blinked] into an alley behind the growing crowd.

  Time to register.