The Gate in Sector 7 was a bad one.
Liu Yun could feel it the moment he stepped off the transit van and looked at it. The fracture hung in the air above an abandoned rail yard like a wound that couldn't close, a vertical tear roughly four meters tall, its edges crackling with dark violet energy that smelled of sulfur and old stone. The ground around it was scorched in a perfect radius, the rail ties warped upward like fingers reaching for something they couldn't grasp.
The party he had finally been assigned to stood a short distance away, gearing up in the thin grey light of early morning. There were five of them, not counting Liu Yun. Their leader was a D-rank Hunter named Bracken, broad-shouldered, irritable, with a greatsword that had definitely seen better decades. Behind him were two C-rank support types whose names Liu Yun hadn't caught, a D-rank archer named Pell who kept snapping her bowstring nervously, and a young man barely out of registration who introduced himself as Fynn and then immediately asked Liu Yun what his rank was.
'E,' Liu Yun said.
Fynn blinked. 'They let E-ranks into D-class Gates?'
'It's legal,' Liu Yun said.
'Is it... safe?'
Bracken answered before Liu Yun could. 'Nothing about this is safe, kid. That's why they pay us.' He looked at Liu Yun with the particular expression of a man who has seen cannon fodder before and accepted it as a necessary feature of the profession. 'You stay at the rear. Don't engage unless something gets past the line. If something gets past the line and reaches you, run toward the Gate exit and scream.'
'Understood,' Liu Yun said.
Bracken didn't look convinced that understanding would be enough.
They went through.
The inside of the Gate was a cavern the size of a sports stadium, its ceiling lost in amber darkness, its walls slick with moisture that smelled of iron and decay. The floor was uneven black stone, split by cracks that glowed faint orange deep below, like looking down at something sleeping. The air was thick enough to taste.
The first wave came within three minutes. Goblin variants, two meters tall, built more like bears than the small creatures of mythology, their hides a deep arterial red and their eyes burning coal-hot. They poured from a tunnel mouth on the far side of the cavern in a tight, fast mass, and Bracken's party met them with practiced efficiency.
Liu Yun stood at the rear and watched.
His mana output was too low for offensive casting. He carried a short blade, standard E-rank issue, bought used from the Association surplus shop, and he held it because protocol required it, not because he expected to use it. The battle ahead of him was a controlled chaos of fire bursts and impact waves, the sounds of metal on hide and the guttural screaming of dying goblins echoing off the stone ceiling.
He was scanning the edges of the cavern when he saw it.
A shadow moving against the wall, separate from the battle. Not a goblin. Something larger, slower, moving with the careful precision of a predator that has been hunting far longer than it has been hunted. Liu Yun tracked it with his eyes without pointing or calling out, he needed to be certain before he alarmed the others and risked breaking their formation.
It wasn't a goblin. It was a Shadow Stalker. A C-rank equivalent creature from the Underworld's second layer, it looked like a human made of compressed darkness, its face a smooth blank, its limbs slightly too long, its movement utterly silent. They were ambush predators. They waited for the moment when a hunter's attention was fully committed to one threat before striking from a blind angle at the one target least able to defend.
It was looking directly at Liu Yun.
He had about four seconds.
He screamed, not for help, though that would have been the sensible option, but a raw involuntary sound of pure adrenaline as the thing crossed the distance between them in a single flowing movement and hit him like a wall. He went down hard, stone grinding against his shoulders, the creature's weight pinning him, its hand, if it could be called that, closing around his throat.
He stabbed it. Twice, three times with the short blade. The blade went in but the creature barely reacted, like stabbing smoke that had learned to be solid. Its grip tightened. The amber-dark ceiling above him started to go grey at the edges.
Someone shouted. Bracken's boot connected with the Stalker's midsection and it released, staggering, and Pell put two arrows through its chest in rapid succession. It dissolved into a puddle of darkness that evaporated like water on a hot stone, leaving nothing behind.
Bracken looked down at Liu Yun. 'I said stay at the rear.'
'It came to the rear,' Liu Yun managed.
The look on Bracken's face said he considered this a personal failing on Liu Yun's part regardless.
They cleared the dungeon. It took four hours, two additional waves, and a mini-boss, a Gargoyle Knight that cracked one of the support mage's ribs with a single shield bash before Bracken brought it down. Liu Yun contributed minimally, he picked off two injured goblins that were crawling away from the main battle and he redirected a rolling boulder with his body, which technically protected the archer but also resulted in a bruised shoulder and a cracked rib of his own.
The core harvest was modest. Bracken divided the shares on a rank-weighted formula that left Liu Yun with a sum roughly equivalent to two hours of minimum wage work.
'Try the F-rank gates next time,' one of the C-rankers suggested, not unkindly. 'You'd do better somewhere your output isn't working against you.'
There were no F-rank Gates. F-rank was a classification reserved for training environments used by Association recruits. Real Gates didn't come that tame.
Liu Yun took his share, thanked the party, and walked back toward the transit stop alone.
His ribs ached. His neck bore finger-shaped bruises. His share wouldn't cover both the rent and the medication, he'd have to choose one and beg Mrs. Dalton on the third floor for another extension on the other.
He was halfway to the stop when his phone buzzed. A new Gate notification, Class D again, different sector, different formation type. Party recruitment open.
He submitted an application.
He didn't know what else to do.