By the third week, my fake ranks had become urban legends.
Some people swore I could become any rank at all. Wrong. I could only display lower than S, which was unfortunately almost everything. Some said I was three people sharing one coat. Wrong, but Riley offered to sell fake coats anyway. Some said if a player killer attacked an F-rank at midnight, I would crawl out of their shadow and ask for a receipt. That one was also wrong. Usually.
Fear helped, but fear had a shelf life. Player killers adapted. They began forcing monsters to attack first. They used traps that triggered without touching anyone. They used fake safe zones with crystals painted on walls. They learned to test F-ranks from a distance with thrown bottles, insults, and staged accidents.
So I adapted faster. I learned to weaponize patience.
At a flooded parking garage, a crew had rigged cars to roll downhill into low rank shelters. They never touched the victims. They just cut the brakes and watched gravity commit the crime.
I arrived as a G-rank.
That was not even a real rank. Rank concealment let me display lower, but apparently the system allowed joke variants if I made them weak enough. The letter above my head looked embarrassed to exist.
The crew laughed so hard they forgot to be careful. One said the apocalypse had invented a rank below useless.
I bowed.
Then I stood in front of the next rolling car. It came screaming down the ramp, headlights flickering like angry eyes. The crew watched, waiting for me to dodge and expose whatever I was.
I did not dodge. I let the bumper touch my palm. No red mark. The car was not a player.
So I lowered my rank to blank.
For one second, I displayed nothing. Not because my power let me erase my rank completely. It did not. I had learned to stack the gray F under layers of shadow until the letter became unreadable. It felt like holding my breath with my soul.
The crew leaned forward. That was all I needed.
I revealed S and pushed. The car stopped so suddenly the rear lifted off the ground. Water exploded around my feet. I twisted, grabbed the bumper, and swung the entire car like a hammer into the ramp wall. Concrete cracked. The shockwave launched every hidden player from their hiding places.
One landed beside me and panicked. He stabbed my arm. Aggressor confirmed.
The rest saw the red mark and tried to run, but fear made them sloppy. One shoved a teammate aside. Another threw a shock trap at my feet. A third yelled that they should have tested me with two cars. I respected the commitment to bad ideas.
The garage became a pinball machine. I bounced between shadows under vehicles, slapped traps back at their owners, and used the guilt tokens Riley made to ring against foreheads whenever someone tried to pretend they were innocent. Each coin hit with a bright little chime. By the end, the parking garage sounded like a holiday song for criminals.
The shelter people helped me drag the red marked crew to the street crystal. One woman asked what my real rank was.
I showed her F. She laughed, because she understood the joke.
That felt better than applause.