The fluorescent lights of Neo-Mall 12 buzzed like dying flies. Ethan Moore scrubbed dried puke off tile #7B, the stench of bleach and regret thick in his throat.
His father's rusted pocket watch a relic from a world that valued things that lasted ticked erratically in his chest pocket. Just two more hours, he thought. Then microwave noodles and another night staring at the ceiling.
Above him, a wall-mounted TV fizzed with static.
"—unexplained energy surges across the globe. Authorities advise—"
The screen glitched, pixels bleeding green.
Then the lights died.
Screams tore through the darkness. Not human something wet and hungry. Glass shattered. Metal shrieked. Ethan froze, mop handle slick in his grip.
A crack split the ceiling. Blue light poured through, searing his eyes. Words burned in his vision, cold and final:
[SYSTEM INITIALIZED]`
l[TERRAFORMING PLANET EARTH...]
[ADAPT OR PERISH]
The food court was a charnel house. Ethan crawled behind an overturned pretzel stand, lungs burning. Around him, chaos wore familiar faces.
A cashier from "Burger Nirvana" staggered past, eyes milky, jaw unhinged like a snake's.
[LVL 1 Retail Zombie] flickered above its head. A security guard,Dave, who'd nodded at Ethan yesterday,raised trembling hands. Golden light erupted from his palms.
[CLASS: C-TIER - SHIELD BEARER]
[SKILL: HOLY BULWARK]
A shimmering barrier vaporized two zombies. Dave grinned, wild-eyed with power. Then a lizard-thing with too many teeth dropped from the rafters. Its claws punched through Dave's light like paper. Blood sprayed the "50% OFF SMOOTHIES!" sign.
Ethan scrambled backward. His hip slammed into debris a shattered kiosk selling knock-off tech. The lizard-thing turned, nostrils flaring. Saliva dripped onto the tiles, hissing like acid.
Panic is a waste of calories. His dad's voice, from a lifetime ago. Useless then. Useless now.
Blue text flared
[CLASS ASSIGNED: F-TIER - WASTE DISPOSER]`
[SKILLS: TRASH SENSE (PASSIVE), MINOR DECAY TOUCH (ACTIVE)]
[DESCRIPTION: DISPOSE OF REFUSE. DO NOT EXPECT TO SURVIVE.]
F-Tier. Garbage. The words curdled in his gut. The lizard lunged.
Instinct took over. Ethan slapped a palm against its snout.
[MINOR DECAY TOUCH ACTIVATED]
The scales under his hand grayed… then stopped. The decay crawled an inch, no more. The creature shrieked, more insulted than hurt, and backhanded him.
Ethan flew. Ribs cracked. He skidded across the bloody tiles, coming to rest at polished black boots.
He looked up.
Golden light hauled the man. Impossibly clean, impossibly bright. Intricate plate armor glowed with inner fire. A floating greatsword, wreathed in solar flames, hovered at his shoulder. Above his head, burning letters declared: [ARIS THORNE - S-RANK SOLAR KNIGHT].
Hope, sharp and desperate, pierced Ethan's dread. "H-help—!"
Aris's gaze swept over him. Not with pity. With disgust. His eyes locked on the still-visible F-Tier status above Ethan's head.
"F-Tier?" His voice was polished steel. "Waste Disposer?" A sneer twisted his perfect features. "This sector is lost. We're retrieving valuable assets." He gestured, and three others in gleaming armor materialized from the smoke, grabbing a weeping woman with [B-Tier Hydromancer] above her head, hauling a trembling teen branded [A-Tier Golem Smith].
"Please," Ethan choked, blood on his lips. "The monsters!"
Aris's boot shoved him back toward the approaching lizard-thing. "Don't waste resources on garbage." His eyes held no malice. Only cold calculus. Disposal.
One of his squad, a woman with ice-blonde hair and glacial eyes [S-Rank Cryolancer], ripped the frayed backpack from Ethan's shoulders, the one holding his water, protein bars, dad's watch.
"Hey! That's—!"
"Caloric intake would be inefficient for your projected survival time," she stated, her voice devoid of inflection. She tossed the pack to the Golem Smith. "Carry this, asset."
The lizard-thing hissed, ten feet away.
Aris turned. "Priority extraction. Now." Golden light swallowed him and his chosen.
They vanished.
Leaving Ethan alone.
With the monster.
And a broken pocket watch spilling gears onto the floor.
Pain was a drumbeat in Ethan's ribs. He crawled, dragging himself behind the corpse of Dave the Shield Bearer. The lizard-thing snuffled near the pretzel stand, ripping chunks from a zombie.
Dad's watch.The thought cut through the fog. The last thing that mattered.
He spotted it. Crushed under a chunk of ceiling tile. The brass casing was bent, glass shattered, tiny gears spilled like metallic seeds. But as Ethan's fingers closed around it, he saw something else.
Faint purple mist coiled from the nearby corpse of a Retail Zombie. Thin tendrils snaked through the air… and were sucked into the watch's broken heart. A faint, almost imperceptible warmth pulsed in Ethan's palm.
His F-Tier status flickered erratically.
[??? ENERGY DETECTED]
[ABSORBING...]
[ENTROPY LEVEL: 0.01%]
Entropy? The word meant decay. Chaos. The universe winding down.
His eyes snapped to a shard of metal nearby a broken blade from a "Mall Ninja" display stand. [JUNK - LOW-GRADE STEEL]. Worthless.
Driven by something deeper than hope, deeper than fear, Ethan grabbed it. He focused, pouring every ounce of desperation into the skill the System mocked:
[MINOR DECAY TOUCH - ACTIVATED]
But this time, he pulled instead of pushed.
The blade shivered in his grip. Rust bloomed across its surface like a disease, but instead of crumbling, it fed him. Energy, cold and sharp as shattered glass, surged up his arm.
[ABSORBED 0.1 ENTROPY!]
[ENTROPY LEVEL: 0.11%]
[MINOR DECAY TOUCH → CORROSIVE GRASP (TEMPORARY)]
Power. Not much. But his. Stolen from what the world threw away.
A guttural growl echoed. The lizard-thing had found him. Six feet of scaled muscle, teeth bared, acid saliva dripping onto Dave's golden shield, making it sizzle. It lunged.
Ethan scrambled back. His hand slapped against something soft, greasy, a rotten pepperoni pizza, half-eaten, discarded before the world ended.
Trash.
Acting on pure, terrified instinct, Ethan didn't decay it. He decayed the potential energy trapped in its decomposition. He pulled.
[CORROSIVE GRASP: MAXIMUM OUTPUT!]
The pizza box imploded. Not into nothing into a fist-sized sphere of putrid green gas and superheated rot. It hit the lizard-thing square in its open maw.
SSSSKKKRRREEEEEEE—!
The sound was unholy. The creature reeled, clawing at its face. Flesh sizzled. Smoke poured from its nostrils. It stumbled, blinded, crashing into a fountain filled with murky water.
Silence fell, broken only by the creature's wet, agonized gurgles and the drip of leaking pipes.
Ethan stared at his hand. Grease stained his skin. Tiny flickers of sickly green energy danced around his fingertips before fading. The System message glowed, persistent, mocking, yet suddenly… malleable
[F-TIER: WASTE DISPOSER]`
He looked at the dying monster. At the ruined mall. At the shattered watch in his other hand, still faintly warm.
A slow, fierce smile cut through the grime and blood on his face.
They called him trash.
Fine.
He'd make this whole damn apocalypse choke on it.
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