The drive home took eleven minutes.
Jacob knew because he counted. Counted the traffic lights that turned green as he approached—seven out of seven. Counted the pedestrians who stepped off curbs and then stepped back before he reached them—four out of four. Counted the parking spots available directly in front of his aunt's building—one.
The right one. The closest one. The one he never got.
Zero percent failure rate.
It wasn't subtle.
Jacob sat in his car for three minutes after he parked, hands still on the steering wheel, engine running perfectly for the first time in the two years he'd owned it.
The status screen floated in his peripheral vision. He'd tried closing it twice on the drive home. Both times it had disappeared for approximately four seconds before reappearing without his permission.
[JACOB HAYES]
[LEVEL: 1]
[RANK: SSS]
[CAREER: PERFECT HUNTER]
[TALENT: 0% FAILURE RATE]
[SKILLS: NONE]
[NEXT GATE: D-RANK | INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT | 71 HOURS 43 MINUTES]
Seventy-one hours.
He turned the engine off.
His phone had forty-seven notifications. He knew without checking that most of them were from the group chat. The rest were probably from classmates who'd heard about his message to Derek.
I'll join. And I'll clear a B-Rank Gate solo before your team even enters their first C-Rank.
In retrospect, the message was reckless. Provocative. Exactly the kind of thing that would follow him around school for weeks if his power turned out to have limitations he hadn't accounted for.
In retrospect, he didn't care.
Jacob opened his phone.
GROUP CHAT: VANGUARD PROSPECTS
Derek: Is this a joke?
Emma: Jacob, what are you doing?
Michael: LMFAO dude failed awakening and now he's talking shit
Adrian: This is sad, man. Just stop.
Sophia: Jacob, are you okay?
Derek: @Jacob Hayes I'm going to be generous and assume you had some kind of breakdown today. Given the circumstances, that's understandable. But if you show up to the D-Rank Gate rotation claiming to be a Hunter, I'll have you removed. Don't embarrass yourself more than you already have.
Emma: Derek's right. Please don't do this.
Michael: wait is he actually serious lmaooo
Adrian: Someone should call his aunt
Sophia: Can everyone stop? He's going through something. Jacob, ignore these guys. Message me if you need to talk.
Jacob read every message twice.
Sophia Chen. B-Rank Elementalist. The girl who'd cried when her stone lit up gold. She'd been in his AP Chemistry class for two years and always saved him a lab partner slot when everyone else had already grouped up.
He typed back to her privately:
Jacob: I'm fine. Thanks for being the only decent person in that chat.
Sophia: What happened? After you left, Emma looked... I don't know. Not happy.
Jacob: She made the right call for herself.
Sophia: That's not what I asked.
Jacob stared at his phone for a long moment.
Jacob: I'll explain later. Are you joining Derek's team?
Sophia: They asked. I haven't decided. Derek rubs me the wrong way.
Jacob: Smart.
Sophia: Jacob, what did you mean? About clearing a B-Rank Gate solo?
Jacob: Exactly what I said.
Sophia: You failed your awakening.
Jacob: Did I?
Three dots appeared, then disappeared. Appeared again. Then:
Sophia: ...what does that mean?
Jacob pocketed his phone without answering.
***
Aunt Marie's apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that smelled permanently of Mrs. Henderson's cooking from 4B and the laundry room on the second floor.
Jacob had lived here since he was fifteen. Since the phone call. Since the plastic bag with his parents' wedding rings.
He took the stairs. All four flights. Counted them the way he always did—not out of habit, but because counting was the only thing that kept his brain from going to places he didn't want it to go.
Sixty-two steps.
The same as always.
The apartment door was unlocked, which meant Aunt Marie was home. She worked nights at the hospital—intake coordinator, twelve-hour shifts—so catching her awake before 6 PM was rare enough that Jacob paused in the doorway.
She was at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and her laptop, still wearing her scrubs from the overnight shift she'd apparently decided not to sleep after.
"You're home early." She looked up. Her eyes—the same shape as his father's—did the thing they always did when she looked at him. The quick scan. Checking for damage.
"Ceremony ended at four."
"How'd it go?"
Jacob set his keys on the counter. "Fine."
Aunt Marie's scan intensified. She'd been doing it since the funeral, and she was good at it—better than most people gave her credit for. She'd been the one to notice when he stopped eating for a week after the sixth-month anniversary of the accident. She'd been the one to sit outside his bedroom door at 2 AM and just talk at him through the wood until he opened it.
"Jacob."
"F-Rank." The lie came out smoothly. "Barely anything. Some kind of support classification."
She was quiet for a moment. "That's okay."
"I know."
"Your dad was E-Rank for two years before—"
"I know, Aunt Marie."
She nodded. Looked back at her coffee. "Emma called."
Jacob's hand stopped halfway to the refrigerator. "When?"
"About twenty minutes ago. She wanted to make sure you got home okay." A pause. "She didn't sound okay herself."
"She got A-Rank. Divine Healer."
Aunt Marie's eyebrows rose. "That's extraordinary."
"Yeah."
Another pause. The kind that Aunt Marie was good at—full of things she'd decided not to say yet.
"Are you two still—"
"No."
The word landed in the kitchen like a stone into still water.
Aunt Marie wrapped both hands around her coffee mug. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. She made the right call."
"Jacob—"
"I'm going to study." He pulled a water bottle from the refrigerator. "I'll make dinner at seven. Don't argue."
He walked to his bedroom before she could say anything else.
***
Jacob's room was small enough that he could touch both walls with his arms spread. Desk against the window. Bed against the opposite wall. Bookshelf crammed with his father's old Hunter manuals that he'd read so many times the spines had cracked.
His father's certification photo sat on the desk. Marcus Hayes, twenty-two years old, E-Rank Hunter, looking directly at the camera with the expression of someone who'd just figured something out and couldn't wait to test it.
Jacob had his father's eyes. His mother's stubbornness. Both of their worst qualities and none of their best ones.
He sat at his desk and opened his status screen.
[JACOB HAYES]
[LEVEL: 1]
[RANK: SSS]
[CAREER: PERFECT HUNTER]
[TALENT: 0% FAILURE RATE]
[SKILLS: NONE]
[STRENGTH: 11]
[AGILITY: 9]
[ENDURANCE: 12]
[INTELLIGENCE: 16]
[LUCK: 1]
He stared at the stats for a long time.
Eleven strength. Nine agility. Twelve endurance.
Regular human numbers.
He'd checked the Hunter Association's public database before—average stats for a newly awakened D-Rank Hunter were around 25 across the board. C-Rank started at 40. B-Rank at 60.
Jacob was sitting at roughly 11 average.
The power guaranteed he'd succeed at whatever he attempted. But the path to success wasn't guaranteed to be efficient.
Limitation 2.
Success is guaranteed. The path to success is not.
Meaning he could enter a D-Rank Gate and clear it. He just might need to spend six hours doing it because his stats were too low to do anything quickly.
Or he could spend the next seventy-one hours training.
Jacob pulled out a notebook—the one his father had given him the Christmas before he died, still mostly empty because Jacob had never figured out what was worth writing down.
He wrote at the top of the first page:
WHAT I KNOW:
1. 0% failure rate applies to anything theoretically possible.
2. I can't violate physics. I can't do things I have no knowledge of.
3. Success is guaranteed. EFFICIENCY must be earned.
4. I can only focus one primary objective at a time.
5. Success doesn't eliminate cost. Just failure.
He stared at point three.
Efficiency must be earned.
His power didn't make him stronger. It made him *certain*. There was a difference—a massive one—that he suspected most people would miss.
Someone with a 0% failure rate and strength of 11 fighting a D-Rank monster wasn't going to instantly win. They were going to *eventually* win. Slowly. Painfully. Expensively.
He needed base stats.
Jacob pulled up the Hunter Association's public guidelines on his laptop. Training regimens for newly awakened Hunters were standardized—the IHA released recommended programs based on rank and career type. For combat-focused careers, the standard starting program was:
- 200 push-ups daily
- 200 sit-ups daily
- 200 squats daily
- 20km run daily
- Weapon training: minimum 2 hours
- Gate simulation: 1 hour (required IHA membership card)
For a newly awakened D-Rank Hunter.
Jacob looked at his stats again. He was at roughly half the physical baseline for D-Rank.
He opened a new page in the notebook:
GOAL: D-RANK BASELINE STATS BEFORE THE GATE OPENS
Time available: 71 hours
Required stat increases:
- Strength: 11 → 25 (+14)
- Agility: 9 → 25 (+16)
- Endurance: 12 → 25 (+13)
He did the math.
Fourteen points of strength in seventy-one hours. Assuming linear stat growth from physical training—which the manuals said was roughly accurate for the first hundred points—he needed to train at approximately 200% of the standard D-Rank program.
He wrote the number down anyway.
400 push-ups. 400 sit-ups. 400 squats. 40km run. Every day for three days.
For a human with his current stats, that was physically impossible.
Jacob underlined the word *physically* in his notes.
Then he crossed it out.
For someone with a 0% failure rate, physically impossible had a different definition than it did for everyone else.
If surviving the training was theoretically possible—if a human body *could* adapt fast enough given the right conditions—then he'd succeed.
The question was what "success" would cost.
Power doesn't eliminate cost. Only failure.
Jacob looked at his father's photo.
His father had trained for eighteen months before his first Gate. Had worked his way up from E-Rank stats through sheer repetition and stubbornness. Had documented every session in notebooks that Jacob had read so many times he'd essentially memorized them.
"I've got seventy-one hours," Jacob said to the photo. "What would you do?"
His father stared back with that expression—figured-something-out, can't-wait-to-test-it.
Jacob stood up.