Chapter 4 Chapter 4: The Strongest Class: Battle Mage
Ethan absorbed the SSS-rank confirmation without so much as a change in expression.
He had expected it.
The Genesis Code he'd entered was one of three rewards from the rarest quest in the Shadow Realm's hundred-and-ten-year history, a hidden Legendary-tier quest that had appeared exactly once, in all the game's recorded existence, and which Ethan had been the only player ever to complete.
He had finished it roughly a week before Ryan put a sword through his heart.
The timing had been close. Dangerously close.
In those final days before his death, Ethan had already sensed something shifting in Ryan, small things, barely visible, the kind of tells that only someone who had known a person for twenty years would catch. A flatness behind the eyes. A too-careful casualness. Questions about Ethan's plans that went one layer deeper than curiosity.
He hadn't confronted it. Hadn't wanted to believe it.
But he had been careful.
The quest had rewarded him with three Genesis Codes, each one carrying a different function, each one powerful enough to reshape a player's trajectory entirely. On instinct, for the first time in two decades, Ethan had kept something from Ryan. He'd memorized all three codes and told him nothing.
Ryan had never known they existed.
Looking back, that single moment of caution had preserved everything.
Ethan glanced down at his bracelet one more time, then closed the interface.
He had two codes left.
But not yet. Not until he was inside.
He sat on the rooftop and waited.
At exactly 10:00 PM
The sky broke open.
Across River City, across the country, across the entire world, the atmosphere split along invisible seams, and purple spatial rifts tore themselves into existence above every city, every town, every slum district and gleaming capital alike. Lightning crackled along their edges, casting stuttering violet light across rooftops and upturned faces.
Every ten years. The same sky. The same doorway.
The Shadow Realm Bracelet on Ethan's wrist pulsed with a slow purple glow.
A translucent panel materialized in front of him.
"DING~ Beginner dungeon [Cataclysmic Front] Zone 12, is now open. Enter the Shadow Realm?"
Ethan glanced at Lily, still asleep, his jacket rising and falling gently over her shoulders.
She'd be safe enough here for now. The dungeon would return him before morning.
He turned back to the panel.
Tapped Confirm.
"Server 12, River City Node, initializing..."
His body dissolved.
Not painfully, not like death. More like becoming light. Like being taken apart at the atomic level and reassembled somewhere else entirely. He broke into fragments of starlight and drifted upward into the violet crack in the sky, joining the vast river of glittering human figures streaming silently into the Shadow Realm across the globe.
---
And then he was somewhere else.
An enclosed space. No sky, no ceiling he could identify. Just a neutral gray void with a faint hum of system energy running through it like a pulse.
The familiar sound of the Shadow Realm's interface filled the air
"DING~ Welcome to the Shadow Realm. Please select your player ID and class."
An ID input panel shimmered into existence before him.
Ethan stared at the blank field.
His fingers moved automatically toward the letters of his old callsign, G-H-O-S-T, the name he had carried through a hundred domains, through twenty years of war, through every triumph and every loss.
He stopped.
Ghost was dead.
The whole world had decided that. They had carved his name into textbooks as a warning. They had made him a symbol of everything a player should never be. Generations of children had grown up learning to despise the name.
Let them keep it.
He deleted the letters and typed a single character instead.
Zero.
The existence beyond all others wasn't one. It was zero — the number that preceded everything, that contained nothing and therefore could become anything.
He confirmed it and moved on.
Class selection.
The Shadow Realm offered four foundational classes, each with two advanced paths unlocked upon first promotion.
Warrior, built for the front line. High health, strong melee control, durable under sustained punishment. Upon promotion: Sword Warrior (balanced offense and defense) or Shield Warrior (extreme tank, low damage, low speed, a wall in human form).
Ranger, speed and unpredictability above all else. Fast, elusive, lethal at picking apart scattered enemies. Upon promotion: Assassin (highest burst damage in the game, catastrophically fragile) or Marksman (ranged physical damage, high attack speed, demanding to play well).
Priest, healing and support. Upon promotion: Light Priest (maximum healing output, essential for dungeon teams, prime target in PvP) or Dark Priest (reduced healing, offset by debuffs and curses that cripple enemy combat power).
Mage, high spell damage, single-target and area-of-effect, strong crowd control. Upon promotion: Elemental Mage (the highest raw damage ceiling of any class in the game, offset by slow cast times) or Wizard (control-focused, capable of locking down entire battlefields).
Ethan had spent his previous life as a Sword Warrior.
He knew the class better than anyone alive. Its rhythms, its limits, its ceiling. He had taken sword mastery to a level that even the most celebrated players in the world had acknowledged, Cherry Blaze, the finest micro-control specialist to ever come out of Japan's server, had challenged him in Domain Ten and walked away with a loss and a compliment she'd never given anyone else before or since.
"The best swordsman I've ever fought," she'd said. And she'd meant it.
But Ethan wasn't choosing the sword again.
Because there was a fifth class. One that barely anyone in the Shadow Realm's history had taken seriously. One that was almost never discussed in the major guilds' strategy sessions, almost never represented in the high-level player rankings.
The Battle Mage.
The only melee class in the game that dealt spell damage. The only class that combined, truly combined, the durability of a Warrior, the speed of a Ranger, the devastating magical output of a Mage, and traces of a Priest's recovery ability. Its skills were visually spectacular, its growth potential theoretically uncapped, and its overall ceiling higher than any conventional class.
In theory.
In practice, the Battle Mage had one problem that kept it off every serious player's radar.
It was catastrophically expensive.
Every skill above the basic tier required Runes, physical components, products of the Shadow Realm itself, that had to be embedded into the casting process to unlock a Battle Mage's true power. The higher the skill level, the rarer and more costly the runes required. And the Battle Mage burned through runes at a pace that made even well-funded guilds hesitate.
Ethan remembered a player from his previous life, an 80-star War Emperor level Battle Mage who had been, by any objective measure, one of the most naturally gifted players to ever pick up the class. His mechanical skill was breathtaking. His strategic instincts were sharper than anyone Ethan had fought above Domain Seven.
And he had been completely stopped in his tracks. Stuck at War Emperor. Unable to advance because his family had poured every dollar they had into his rune costs and come up short.
Ethan still remembered watching that player, once, charge a single fireball skill for forty seconds with a stack of high-grade runes embedded and then release it. The sphere had expanded until it blotted out the horizon of the map. A BOSS that a team of over a hundred players had failed to crack for half a day had evaporated in under three seconds.
It had been the most overwhelming display of damage Ethan had ever seen in his life.
He had never forgotten it.
The Battle Mage's cast times were brutal, longer than any comparable skill from any other class, scaling worse at high levels, sometimes two to three times slower than equivalent mage skills. Every fight required patience and positioning that most players simply didn't have.
But Ethan had a hundred years of combat instinct and a Genesis Code that had been, as far as he could tell, designed specifically for what this class could become.
The class's growth potential wasn't just high.
It was limitless, in the right hands, with the right resources.
And Ethan intended to have both.
He confirmed his choice without hesitation.
"DING~ Battle Mage selected. Confirm?"
Confirm.
Light cascaded over him, a warm, downward wash that resolved into form and texture as it settled.
A long black battle robe, structured and clean, with faint silver edging along the cuffs and collar. And in his right hand, materializing from nothing, a magic sword, slender, double-edged, gleaming with a pale silver light that pulsed faintly like something alive just under the surface.
Starter gear. No bonus attributes. But the weight of it in his hand felt right in a way that was difficult to explain.
He had to admit, the other Ethan's body suited it.
5'10". Lean without being thin. The kind of build that wore a battle robe like it had been fitted for him.
Ethan pulled up his status panel.
[ID: Zero]
Rank: 1-Star Warrior
Class: Battle Mage
(Class Trait: Every 3 points of Intelligence grants +1 Spell Attack and +1 Speed)
Ability: Infinite Fusion (SSS-Rank)
Server: Zone 12
ATTRIBUTES:
Intelligence: 2 | Spirit: 2 | Stamina: 5 | Endurance: 2 | Agility: 2
COMBAT:
Attack: 2 | Armor: 2 | Magic Resistance: 2 | Speed: 2.2
HP: 50 | Mana: 16
EXP: 0 / 20
Currency: $0
System Note: Combat power, 258. Congratulations on being a first-class beginner.
Ethan read through it once, clo
sed the panel, and accepted the Zone 12 starter pack the system dropped into his inventory.
Then a beam of white light swallowed him whole, and he was gone from the selection space
