"Kiriti Kolluru."
They say my name like it personally offended their ancestors.
The officiant squints at his scroll like he just saw a typo that might explode. One of the nobles laughs. Another one mutters, "Foreign name. G-Rank for sure."
I rise from my seat like I'm approaching an execution, not a crystal podium. The stone stairs echo under each step like they're counting down the seconds to humiliation.
Everyone's watching. Everyone. It's like walking into a courtroom where the jury already voted guilty and the judge is drunk on noble prejudice.
I step onto the platform.
The crystal pulses brighter, like it knows something weird is about to happen. Cool. So even the magic artifact is nervous.
I reach out. Palm to surface. Cold. Sharp. Buzzing like a caffeine-addicted hard drive. There's a flicker behind my eyes—a moment where something ancient and mechanical brushes against my soul like a bureaucratic spreadsheet demon doing its rounds.
Then the numbers appear:
**STR: 3** (G)
**AGI: 3** (G)
**VIT: 6** (G)
**INT: 30,003** (B)
**LCK: 9** (G)
**TOTAL: 30,024** (B)
Silence. Real silence.
The kind that hits like a slap. The kind that makes birds stop mid-flight and existential dread spike like a stock crash.
Then chaos.
Gasps. Screams. A noble in the VIP section drops their jeweled chalice. Somewhere, a scribe starts scribbling frantically. Even the crystal buzzes louder, like it wants to file a system bug report.
"Thirty thousand in INT?!"
"That has to be a glitch!"
"The rest of him looks like he was built by accident."
"What kind of build is that? Brain-only mode?!"
I stand there like the world's most overclocked librarian. Lightning rod? No. I'm the tower they strap lightning rods to. Nerd mode: weaponized.
The officiant clears his throat, voice less robotic now. More... disturbed.
"B-Rank. Total Score: 30,024."
And that's when the laughter starts. First one guy. Then a dozen. Then the whole stadium is wheezing.
One voice shouts, "Put all his points in brain and forgot to install survival!"
Another goes, "He got hacked by the god of useless encyclopedias!"
Even Seraphina reacts. Her eyebrows rise a whole two millimeters. That's practically a marriage proposal.
Tam looks at me like I just confessed to war crimes against mathematics.
I raise my arms, take a slow, dramatic bow. Theater kid levels of flair.
"Thank you," I declare, loud and proud. "I always dreamed of being statistically bullied in public."
More laughter. Louder now. But I don't flinch. I let the spotlight bake into me. Let their ridicule pour down like confetti. Because behind every joke they're making, I see it:
Fear.
Confusion.
And the tiniest sliver of doubt.
Because they don't know what to do with me. Because I broke the narrative.
Because to them, I'm not just a fluke. I'm a glitch.
And if this world runs on numbers?
Then I'm not just playing the system.
I'm about to rewrite the code.
The officiant stares at me like he wants to request a refund from the gods. The crowd is still laughing, but now it has a tinge of confusion. Unease. Like they're not sure if this is a joke or the beginning of a catastrophic glitch.
"INT is over thirty thousand?!"
"He has six in Vitality! I've seen toddlers with more durability!"
"Is he supposed to be standing? That much INT should collapse his spine from the weight of his own brain."
The crystal dims and flickers, sputtering like a dying torch. You can almost hear it wheeze in binary.
Officials gather like pigeons around a spilled noble lunch. One whispers to the officiant. Another pulls out a second scroll to double-check my readout, then a third to cross-reference that scroll. They look like they want to cast Detect Bullshit but forgot the incantation.
"Bracelet malfunction," one mutters.
"Must be a glitch in the system," says another, his eyes darting toward the VIP box like he wants permission to panic.
No one seems to know what to do with me. Not the officiants, not the guards, not the floating crystal that's supposed to be all-knowing. I'm a narrative hiccup. An unscheduled anomaly. A walking contradiction in a world that worships clean numbers.
And then—because this comedy writes itself—they slap the standard-issue iron bracelet on my wrist. Everyone has one. The design is identical for all ranks, the only difference being the glowing rank letter. Mine flickers with a big, shiny B. But judging by the way the guards look at me, I might as well be wearing an explosive collar labeled "debug me."
Seraphina watches like she's just spotted a rat performing algebra. Her gaze is colder than her dress is expensive.
"They think you're a bug," she says, tone clinically detached.
I raise an eyebrow. "They're not wrong. Just wait until I start reproducing."
She scoffs, like she's used to having the last word. Tam, poor Tam, looks like he wants to sink into the arena floor and pretend he never spoke to me. I get it. No one wants to be friends with the error message.
Two guards flank me, moving with the cautious rhythm of men escorting a bomb they don't understand. Not rough. Not gentle. Just carefully impersonal. I imagine they've been briefed: if I start glowing or speaking Latin backward, drop me.
The tunnel behind them yawns like a mouth that's swallowed too many failures. It's lined with flickering torches placed just right to be spooky but still OSHA compliant. The stone seems darker down there. Hungrier.
"Training Grounds," one announces. Loud. Purposeful. Performative.
The crowd ripples.
Gasps erupt like popcorn. A noble drops her monocle. Another leans forward like he can't believe the kingdom just tossed a B-Rank into the monster disposal bin.
"Did he say Training Grounds?"
"But he's a B!"
"That INT score alone could qualify him for Court Mage status!"
It doesn't matter. The system said glitch. And this kingdom? It doesn't tolerate statistical heresy.
Or maybe it does—just not in public. Because if he's really B-Rank, if that thirty-thousand-plus INT is legit and not some divine typo, then logically the Training Grounds shouldn't be hard for him. It's only designed to break G-Ranks. If he's truly that gifted, he should walk out just fine. And if he doesn't—well, maybe that's all the proof we need that he never belonged there in the first place.
Tam opens his mouth to say something—a goodbye, a last-ditch encouragement, maybe a prayer. But I cut him off with a raised hand.
"No speeches," I say, already moving forward. "Save it for my funeral montage. Preferably with sad violin and a black-and-white flashback."
The laughter's gone. Dead. What remains is quieter. Unsettled. The arena hums with whispers, unsure if it just witnessed a prophecy or a punchline.
My footsteps echo as I vanish into the dark.
Behind me, Seraphina mutters one final judgment, sharp enough to draw blood.
"Figures. High INT. Zero sense."
She's not wrong.
But she also doesn't know what happens when you hand a broken script to someone who used to write plot twists for a living.
They expect me to die in that dungeon.
But I've seen how these stories work.
I know what happens when the glitch refuses to crash.
Let's see what this dungeon does.