The wind scouring the wilderness grew sharper, cutting right through thin layers of clothing.
Pedro strode at the head of the party, his green-quality longsword hanging loose in his grip, a permanent sneer plastered across his face. He’d already written off Jack’s claim of “heading to the level-four zone to farm mobs” as total empty posturing. That tiny little “2” next to Jack’s avatar? As far as Pedro was concerned, it wasn’t even worth a second look.
Leveling got exponentially harder the higher you climbed. The jump from level one to two was actually an extremely low threshold.
Pedro sneered to himself. Jack, that broke loser who could barely scrape together enough coin for his next meal, had obviously borrowed shark-level high-interest cash and blown it all on a single Basic Experience Scroll. This whole stupid, chest-puffing stunt was nothing but a desperate grab for five seconds of attention in the class group chat. Trying to flex on people with that garbage act? You picked the wrong mark. Pedro muttered under his breath, a sharp, venomous glint flashing in his eyes.
He couldn’t wait to reach the level-four spawn zone and watch Jack humiliate himself in real time. He’d even already pulled up his wrist communicator and typed out a message in the class group, primed to send.
> Our crew just swept the whole level-four zone. Didn’t catch a single trace of Jack anywhere. Hey Jack, you wouldn’t happen to be hiding behind the city gates typing up fake flex posts, would you?
The text sat in the input field. Pedro held off on hitting send for now. He planned to confirm with his own two eyes that Jack was nowhere near the area first—then he’d post it. He wanted the entire class to know this F-rank talent blank-slate Archer wasn’t just useless, he was a lying, sad little clown.
By Pedro’s math, Jack would never be dumb enough to set foot in a level-four zone. One single swipe from any mob there would delete a level-two newbie’s health bar instantly. Going there was straight-up suicide—the system’s emergency teleport protection wouldn’t even have time to trigger before he got turned to paste.
Fifteen minutes later, the four-person party pushed through a thick patch of scrub brush and officially crossed into level-four monster territory.
The terrain shifted hard under their boots. Flat grassland gave way to jagged, jutted rock outcroppings, and the air carried a faint, coppery tang of old blood.
Pedro opened his mouth to crack a mocking joke—and froze solid, his gaze locked dead on the open ground ahead.
Behind him, Ginny, Chuck, and Peri all sucked in a sharp breath at the exact same time.
Scattered across the rocky ground in front of them lay more than a dozen level-four monster corpses. These were the zone’s signature mobs—Ironhide Giant Lizards. The things were covered in thick, overlapping scales, had a base health pool of 70 points, and physical defense high enough to make any newbie weep.
Right now, every single one of those Ironhide Giant Lizard corpses was glowing with faint white light.
All dozen-plus bodies started dissolving into system particles at almost the exact same instant. That meant their times of death were barely seconds apart.
And that pointed to one bone-chilling fact: someone had systematically wiped out all these level-four mobs in an absurdly small window, with absolutely overwhelming efficiency.
“What… what the hell is this?” Chuck’s hand trembled around the hilt of his white-tier iron sword. “Who can kill stuff this fast?”
Sure, it was possible a high-level Pro had passed through and cleared the spawns on a whim. But high-level Pros never wasted time roaming around a newbie zone like this—they had way better grinds to hit.
Then, out of nowhere, a completely insane thought popped into Pedro’s head.
Jack. Jack had killed all of them.
The second that thought surfaced, it spread like wildfire through his brain, so intense it sent a sharp jolt of panic lancing through his chest. He shook his head violently and hurled the ridiculous idea out. What a joke. An F-rank Archer with no starter skill? Forget massacring level-four mobs—if Jack shot a hundred arrows at an Ironhide Giant Lizard, he’d be lucky to land a single forced “−1” scratch.
“Had to be a high-level City Guard patrol sweeping through. They cleared out a wave of mobs on their route.” Pedro forced his voice to stay steady as he offered up the obvious explanation.
Ginny and Peri both nodded immediately. That tracked perfectly. No other option made sense.
The party slowed their pace, picking their way carefully across the rocks. The level-four zone was no joke. Even with level-five Pedro leading the charge, they didn’t dare drop their guard for a single second.
They’d followed a gentle slope forward for roughly a hundred meters when Chuck suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, eyes glued to a massive boulder up ahead.
“Look! Over there!” Chuck hissed, his finger trembling slightly as he pointed.
Pedro followed his gaze—and his entire body went rigid as if struck by lightning, his feet rooted to the ground like they’d been poured full of lead.
Roughly thirty meters ahead stood a painfully familiar figure.
The cheapest homespun cloth clothes. A beat-up training shortbow so ragged it looked ready to snap in half. It was the exact same guy they’d been mocking nonstop the whole walk over. Jack.
Right at that moment, a freshly spawned Ironhide Giant Lizard was charging straight at him with heavy, thundering strides. Drool dripped from its gaping jaws, venom glistening visibly on its sharp, ridged teeth.
Pedro’s eyes went wide. He leaned in slightly, fully ready to watch Jack get torn to shreds.
But Jack’s movements were terrifyingly calm.
He didn’t step back. His expression didn’t even flicker. With smooth, practiced ease, he reached into the quiver at his hip, pulled out one of the crudest wooden arrows from the very bottom, nocked it to the bowstring, drew, and aimed.
Thwip—
With the faint snap of the bowstring releasing, the wooden arrow became a gray blur and punched cleanly into a tiny gap between the Ironhide Giant Lizard’s dense, armored scales.
−72!
A massive, blood-red damage number exploded above the lizard’s head.
The level-four mob—with its 70-point health cap and absurdly high armor—had its entire health bar erased in one hit.
The Ironhide Giant Lizard didn’t even manage a dying shriek. It just crumpled straight to the ground into a corpse.
Pedro’s brain went completely, deafeningly blank, every shred of common sense and everything he thought he knew about this game world shattering into dust in that single second.
Seventy-two damage.
What did that number even mean? In the newbie phase of this datafied world, a level-five heavy knight kitted out in a full set of green-quality defense gear had a max health pool of maybe 200 points, tops.
Jack’s single arrow had dealt nearly 70 damage. And what did that add up to? It meant Jack could casually pull back that garbage wooden bow, fire three of the cheapest wooden arrows money could buy, and straight-up delete a fully geared level-five tank spec from existence.
Damage numbers like that had zero business showing up on a level-two Pro’s stat panel. It was impossible. Broken. Straight-up OP.
“Holy shit, what am I looking at…” Ginny clamped a hand over her mouth, the exclamation slipping out before she could stop it.
Pedro’s palm was slick with cold sweat around the grip of his green-quality longsword. He was screaming internally so loud he could barely hear himself think.
What kind of skill is this? How is the damage this insane?
How could a level-two Pro pull numbers like these? He— a level-five Warrior dumped full of gold coin buffs, popping his B-rank talent for critical hits—had a max burst record of 54 damage. Jack had just fired one completely ordinary-looking basic attack and ground that record into the dirt.
Pedro’s mind scrambled desperately for any rational explanation.
Could Jack’s bow and arrows be insanely high-grade enchanted gear?
Over at the Pro’s Guild trading hall, there were consumables newbie Pros could splurge on—Explosive Arrows etched with advanced mana circuits that dealt massive bonus damage on impact. But each of those arrows cost dozens of silver coins, sometimes even a full gold piece a pop. Using them was literally burning money.
No. That can’t be it. Pedro shot down his own theory immediately.
Jack couldn’t even pay his rent. He’d been crashing in a stairwell closet for months. Where the hell would he get the cash for luxury consumables like that? That wooden shortbow in his hand was clearly trash-grade—it didn’t even qualify for white-tier designation!
Pedro was still racking his brain, completely unable to make sense of what he’d just seen, when all four communicators in the party suddenly blared with the sharp alert tone reserved for priority notifications.
The class group chat had detonated.
One minute prior, Campbell—the lone-wolf A-rank Ice Mage who never talked to anyone—had posted a carefully aligned comparison image in the group.
The left half of the image was a screenshot of the post that had blown up on the Pro’s Guild forums the day before: the mysterious figure shot from behind, the so-called “Level-One God” who’d one-shot a level-three Gray Wolf in the level-three zone.
The right half was a photo Campbell had dug out of the school’s old archives: Jack, during archery drills on the academy training grounds, shot from the exact same angle.
Beneath the image, Campbell had added a single line of text, short and to the point, but it landed like a nuclear bomb.
> Body proportions match. The one-shot level-three mob god is Jack.