Low-Rank, High Mess

I went home and did three things, in this order.

I ate a cold pork bun standing over the sink. I read the Association's public FAQ on rank reassignment and learned that there was, technically, a form for it. And then I sat on the edge of my mattress with the laminated card balanced on my knee and tried to figure out what [Custodial Work] actually was.

The card said what the card said. Leave it cleaner than you found it. Cute.

The system had said something more interesting.

[Target classified as: foreign contaminant.]

A Mire Hound had crawled out of a Gate, snarling, breathing, weighing maybe ninety kilos of wet muscle, and the system had decided it was, in the end, a stain. Not a creature. Not a threat. A mess.

That meant the skill was deciding things. It had a category called foreign contaminant, and presumably a category called everything else. And whatever the limits were, I needed to know them before someone else found them for me.

So I went looking for a low-rank Gate.

There was a board outside the Association lobby where the unclaimed breaches got listed for volunteer cleanup. Most of the time it just meant body retrieval, which was why they let unranked civilians sign up. You weren't expected to fight. You were expected to carry.

The board that morning had three F-rank breaks and one E-rank, all of them small, all of them in the kind of neighbourhoods no licensed party would bother with for the payout. The E-rank was in a half-collapsed warehouse off the old shipyard road.

I signed my name.

The clerk glanced at my card, snorted, and signed his initials next to mine without comment. He thought he was sending a janitor to mop up other people's leftovers. I thought so too, technically. We were both going to be wrong.

The warehouse was forty minutes by tram. By the time I got there the Gate had been open for nine hours, which was the upper edge of what the Association considered safe to leave for volunteers. The breach shimmered against the back wall like heat off a road, the size of a garage door, smelling faintly of iron and wet leaves.

There was already a party there.

Four of them, in matching grey-and-orange jackets with a wolf-head patch stitched on the shoulder. I'd seen the patch on the rankings boards. The Greylight Pack. Mid-tier C-rank party, the kind that ran small commercial Gates for steady money and a fanbase of about eight thousand viewers. Their leader was a woman in her early thirties with a long braid and a sword strapped diagonally across her back. Jin Haru. I'd mopped her boot prints off the Association lobby twice.

She looked at me the way you look at a pigeon that has wandered onto your lunch table.

"Volunteer?" she said.

I showed her the card.

The second-tallest member of the party, a thin man with a healer's pin on his collar, made a noise that wasn't quite a laugh. The other two, a stocky tank type and a kid who couldn't have been older than nineteen, both stared.

"Rank Z," Haru read, slowly. "Is that a typo."

"It's what the crystal printed."

"Custodian."

"That's what the card says."

The healer leaned over her shoulder, read the skill name, and laughed properly this time. He had a nice laugh, which somehow made it worse.

"You're the guy from the clip," the kid said, brightening. "The janitor one. My sister sent it to me yesterday."

"Probably."

Haru handed the card back. She wasn't laughing. She had the tired, kind look of a class president who had pulled juniors out of trouble before, and she did not enjoy the others laughing in front of her.

"Look," she said. "This is an E-rank, but it's been ripe for nine hours. The boss is probably already maxed out. We'll handle the inside. You wait here, and if anything gets past us, you run. Don't try to be useful. Understand?"

"Understood."

"Good man."

They went in.

I counted to thirty. Then I followed them.

The inside of the Gate was the inside of a forest that had eaten a warehouse. Concrete pillars rose up through black pines. Moss covered the rebar. Somewhere ahead I could hear Haru's voice, calm and clipped, calling out positions.

I moved sideways instead of after them, sticking to the wall, the way two years of mopping had taught me to move around people who didn't want to see me.

The first one came out of the moss at me from the left.

It was a Splinter Imp. Bony, the size of a large cat, with a face like a knot of wet wood. F-rank textbook. It opened a mouth full of needle teeth, and I activated the skill before it finished the lunge.

[Custodial Work activated.]

[Target classified as: foreign contaminant.]

[Removing.]

The imp came apart into nothing the way a bad thought leaves your head when you finally say it out loud. The moss where it had been was suddenly greener.

[Area is now 1% cleaner.]

I didn't laugh this time. I was watching the system text.

Foreign contaminant. The same words as the Mire Hound. The system wasn't picking by species or rank. It was picking by something else. Something to do with belonging.

I took the long way around, deeper into the trees, and tested it.

A Bramble Stalker came at me from a ditch. I cleaned it. The system said foreign contaminant. I scrubbed it.

A Rotwing detached from a pillar and tried to drop on my shoulders. Foreign contaminant. Removed. The rust on the pillar went with it.

I walked past a low patch of glassroot, which was a real plant, native to this whole forest biome, the kind of thing the Association's botanists wrote actual papers about. I tried to activate the skill on a sprig of it, just to see.

The system didn't answer. The skill didn't fire. The glassroot stayed where it was.

Not dirt.

That was the first rule I figured out, standing in a warehouse-forest with a head full of cold static. The skill knew the difference between what belonged in a place and what did not. The Gate's own plants were natives. The monsters that had crawled out of it were not.

Which was strange, because the monsters had come out of the Gate. They had been born here. By any sensible definition this was their home.

The system disagreed.

I walked twelve more minutes through cleaner and cleaner forest. By the time I caught up with the Greylight Pack at the central clearing I had cleaned, conservatively, sixteen monsters out of a Gate that was supposed to contain about thirty.

The clearing was wrong.

Haru and her party were standing in a loose half-circle at the edge of it, weapons up, not attacking. In the centre of the clearing, on a low mound of black earth, sat the boss.

It was not E-rank.

I had read enough Association files to know it on sight. Antlers like fused bone. Three rows of eyes. A coat of something between fur and damp ash. It was a Hollow Stag, and Hollow Stags were B-rank, minimum, and the only reason a B-rank boss was sitting in an E-rank Gate was that the Gate had been miscategorised, which the Association did not do, or the Gate was changing, which the Association said could not happen.

The kid in the orange jacket was crying without making a sound. The healer's pin was shaking. Haru, to her credit, had her sword up.

The Hollow Stag opened its mouth. The clearing got darker.

[Warning.]

[Foreign contaminant of significant mass detected.]

[Custodian, please confirm.]

The system had never asked me to confirm anything before.

The Hollow Stag took a step forward. Haru saw me out of the corner of her eye and her face did something complicated that started in anger and ended in something a lot closer to please.

I looked at the boss. I looked at the system prompt blinking softly in front of my eyes, polite and disappointed.

"Confirm," I said.

[Custodial Work activated.]

[Removing.]

[…]

The Hollow Stag did not vanish.

The clearing went very, very quiet, the way a room goes quiet right before the lights blow.

[Hidden skill unlock condition met.]

[Granting class skill: [Deep Clean].]

[Warning: extended exposure recommended for first use.]

The Hollow Stag lowered its antlers. Haru shouted something I didn't hear.

I rolled my sleeves up.