Rank Z

The Awakening Hall smelled like floor polish and other people's futures.

I knew the smell because I'd mopped it. For two years I'd pushed a bucket around the National Hunter Association's marble lobby while teenagers half my age strode past with C-ranks and A-ranks glowing on their registration cards, off to fight monsters and date each other and die famous.

Today it was my turn at the Pillar. Late awakener. Twenty-six. The technician didn't even look up.

"Hand on the crystal. It'll tell you your rank and your skill. Don't get excited, most late ones come back F."

I put my hand on the crystal.

The system had a voice like a polite elevator. Everyone heard it differently. Mine sounded faintly disappointed in me, which felt about right.

[Measuring affinity…]

[…]

[…error]

[Recalibrating.]

The crystal, which was supposed to glow one of seven friendly colours, went the colour of a bruise. The technician finally looked up.

[Affinity does not match existing classifications.]

[Assigning provisional rank: Z.]

"That's not a rank," the technician said.

[Granting class skill: [Custodial Work].]

A card slid out of the dispenser. I picked it up. Under my photo, where other people had A-RANK PYROMANCER or B-RANK BLADE, mine said, in cheerful gold letters:

RANK Z, CUSTODIAN. Skill: [Custodial Work]. "Leave it cleaner than you found it."

The technician laughed first. Then the kids in line behind me. By the time I walked out, the clip of "the janitor who awakened janitor powers" was already climbing the trending feeds, and three different streamers had used the word cope.

I should have been crushed. I'd waited two years for a future and the system had handed me a mop with extra steps.

Instead I was thinking about the error message. Does not match existing classifications. In two years of mopping I had read every leaked Association report I could find, and I had never, not once, seen the system say it didn't recognise something.

The first Gate I cleared answered the question.

It was a D-rank break in a parking garage, the kind they let unranked volunteers wander into for "exposure," which mostly meant cleanup duty for the bodies. A Mire Hound came out of the dark, all wet teeth and dripping rot, and the volunteer beside me screamed and ran.

I didn't have a sword. I didn't have a fireball. I had a skill the whole internet was laughing at. So I did the only thing the skill let me do. I looked at the Mire Hound (at the filth it was, the wrongness leaking out of it onto the clean concrete) and I activated [Custodial Work] the way you'd wipe a stain off a counter.

[Custodial Work activated.]

[Target classified as: foreign contaminant.]

[Removing.]

The Mire Hound did not die. Dying leaves a body. Dying leaves blood to mop, a smell, a stain.

The Mire Hound was removed. One moment it was lunging. The next there was simply a clean patch of concrete where it had been, cleaner than the rest of the garage, cleaner than it had been the day it was poured.

The system pinged, softly, almost smug.

[Area is now 4% cleaner. Custodian satisfaction: nominal.]

I stood there in the dark with my heart going like a drum, and I started, very quietly, to laugh.

Let them call it a janitor's power. They had no idea what a janitor could do once you let him decide what counted as dirt.