The first thing Emily noticed upon awakening wasn’t the usual triumphant cheer or the surge of power that followed a manifesting Gift. It was the silence. A weighty, thick silence that filled the air with a strange, suffocating presence. There were no words of awe or congratulations. No whispers of encouragement or congratulatory pats on the back. Just the sterile hum of machinery and a soft, emotionless voice emanating from the speaker.

  > “Awakening confirmed. Tier: D. Classification: Support Type. Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Emily Ellis.”

  Her heart sank. It wasn’t a failure. But in that moment, it felt like one.

  She could see the technician’s eyes flicker when he read the results, a momentary hesitation before the mask of professionalism settled back in. She could hear the muffled shuffle of feet outside, the dull murmur of conversation stopping as the room seemed to shrink. Not because D-tier was a curse—no, D-tier was fine. But because Emily Ellis wasn’t just any girl. She was the daughter of John Ellis, the man who had forced a wyvern into submission mid-air, breaking its spine with chains forged from fury itself. She was the daughter of Rose Ellis, the woman whose barriers were as impenetrable as the very earth beneath them, who had faced down a drake as large as a cathedral and stopped it in its tracks.

  The world expected more. The world needed more.

  And yet, here she was. D-tier. The bare minimum. The lowest rung on a ladder that, to her parents, reached into the heavens.

  She told the press it didn’t matter. That power wasn’t everything. That she was proud to have awakened at all, even if she wasn’t strong like them. Even if she wasn’t like Eve, who had burned brighter than all of them, her light snuffed out far too soon.

  She said everything she was supposed to say. The right things. The diplomatic things.

  But in the quiet moments, when she stood alone in front of a mirror, she could see the truth.

  It wasn’t the Gift that haunted her. It was the absence of it.

  The truth was in the way her reflection didn’t show the strength she so desperately wanted to feel. It showed Eve’s shadow, her absence, her loss. A broken dream still echoing in the hollow spaces of Emily’s chest.

  ---

  In a world where the sky had cracked open, tearing its ancient stitches, humanity had learned the painful lesson that power was the currency of survival.

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  The Guilds were kings, their power measured by their capacity to destroy, to conquer, to keep the terrifying creatures of the Rift at bay. Nations? They were reduced to landlords, scrambling to secure their borders, offering whatever scraps they could to the Guilds in exchange for protection.

  The moment a child manifested a Gift, their value was determined by their Tier. There were no exceptions, no allowances for family legacy or promises of greatness. If you were born with the ability to wield magic, you were immediately assessed, categorized, and molded into a weapon, whether you liked it or not.

  S-ranks were celebrated, their births a national holiday. A-borns were revered, sought after, treated like royalty. B-tier was respectable, useful. C-tier was tolerated. And then… there was D-tier.

  D-tier was the forgotten. The useless. The ones who couldn’t even make a difference in a low-risk dungeon.

  And Emily? Emily was a D-tier who should have been an A. A D-tier with a legacy of blood and fire behind her. A D-tier with a name that echoed through the Guilds, whose parents had carved their marks into the bones of monsters.

  Her name—Ellis—was supposed to mean something.

  But in a world where power determined everything, she was nothing.

  Whispers followed her wherever she went.

  “How could she ever fill the void Evelyn left behind?”

  “It’s tragic, isn’t it? Poor Rose, poor John. They lost a daughter, and now they have a reminder that can never live up to her.”

  "She'll never replace Evelyn"

  She didn’t want to replace Eve.

  She never had.

  She just wanted to protect what was left of her shattered family. But it seemed like even that was too much to ask.

  ---

  The team that had recruited her, calling themselves "Iron Dawn," were a joke. A mockery of the legacy her parents had left behind. Emily didn’t care. She wasn’t there for pride, or for honor. She was there for the dungeon. For the chance to prove she could do something, anything, to earn a place in this broken world.

  Officially, the Rift they were entering was ranked C-tier—a half-collapsed mine, ancient and filled with the kind of danger that would make most hunters think twice. But the readings were off. The permits had been forged. And the team? Only two of them were even above D-tier. And Lucas, the C-tier, was barely scraping by with his weak, unpredictable magic. He was young, maybe fifteen, with fire streaks that barely lit up the darkness. He clung to his cracked staff like it was his lifeline. She hadn’t asked about his past, but she could see the anger in the way he held it, the desperation in the way he fumbled with the map as though it were a lie.

  They were the last to enter the Rift.

  Emily’s heartbeat thudded in her chest, loud enough to drown out the sounds of the others. The air in the dungeon felt wrong. It wasn’t the usual stale, pressurized air she’d grown used to. This air was heavy—dense, like it was pressing down on her chest. It had teeth. It tasted like metal and rust, and something else… something darker.