In the Adventurer’s Guild, monster difficulty ran from H-rank to A-rank.
H-ranks were trash mobs: goblins, slimes, things a well-armed farmer could put down solo. E-ranks marked the start of proper adventuring, the kind of beasts rookies cut their teeth on. By C-rank, you were fighting monsters like Ogre Generals, who were tougher, smarter, and stronger. Veterans operated at that level.
But A-rank?
That was where the world broke. A-rank monsters weren’t beasts; they were natural disasters. One of them could wipe out a regional knight order solo.
Ogre Kings belonged there. So did Amanta, the so-called evil dragon, one of the lowest among the pantheon of fallen gods. He tried to lay a hand on Cordelia last year.
Tried… and got erased.
And now? I was heading toward something even worse. But that was okay. It was about time the world remembered why my name never appeared in the reports.
Amanta had earned his classification as a Calamity not just for her destructive power, but because she was deified in the mortal world—immortal, in effect. Kill her once, and she’d just come back. Again and again. That alone made her a nightmare.
Anything above that fell into a different category altogether: S-rank.
At that level, we weren’t talking about tactical weapons anymore. We were talking about strategic threats. Beings whose power broke the scale, who could shape, end, or redefine the fate of nations.
For a human, it meant something terrifying: the kind of personal power that surpassed borders. Someone not bound by nations but capable of negotiating with them. A single individual with enough might to sit across from a government and speak as an equal.
For a monster, it meant something worse: a force capable of destroying nations entirely.
To put it simply, if tactical-class meant the strongest player on the board, then strategic-class flipped the whole table. Imagine playing shogi against a grandmaster. That was tactical. Now imagine your opponent moving three pieces for every one of yours or declaring the game over just because they felt like it. That was strategic.
That was what it meant to be S-rank.
And me, Ryuto Maclaine?
Yeah, I belonged there.
If the Adventurer’s Guild ever tried to formalize things, my power would clock in well beyond the threshold. I didn’t just match S-rank standards. I defined them.
So did the creature now looming in front of me.
The Ogre Emperor.
We were the same class of monster, both of us walking disasters in our own right.
“Come on, then,” I muttered, rolling my shoulders as I stared it down. “Let’s see what you’ve got, beast.”
“UOOOHHH!”
Its roar shattered the air like a pressure wave. It tore through the landscape, vibrating through bone and blood, echoing through my chest like a war drum in hell.
The sound was noise weaponized.
A fusion of intimidation skill and confusion magic, designed to overwhelm, to dominate. Any lesser creature within range would’ve collapsed instantly. Hell, even some mid-level monsters would’ve fainted on the spot.
It was more than a battle cry. It was the roar of an emperor.
I didn’t flinch.
“You think a scare tactic like that’ll work on me?” I scoffed. “You’re still just a beast, no matter how fancy your title.”
Step by step, I moved forward.
The distance closed—ten meters now. Close enough to feel the heat radiating off its massive frame. Close enough to smell blood and smoke clinging to its breath.
That was when it moved. The Ogre Emperor crouched low, muscles tensing, and then launched skyward in a thunderous leap.
A monstrous fist, so massive it could only be described as belonging to a kaiju, came crashing down from above.
Its upper arm was as thick as an ancient tree trunk. Three meters in diameter, easy. And the fist itself? A square meter of raw destruction, less a weapon and more like a runaway construction crane gone haywire. Honestly, this wasn’t a fantasy battle anymore. It was a damn monster movie.
I stared up at the incoming blow, eyes sharp, mind calm. It was sluggish, just as I’d suspected. Powerful, sure, but slow.
Exploiting my lighter frame, I kicked off the ground and shot fifteen meters to the left in a single bound. The instant I moved, a deafening explosion erupted to my right, followed a heartbeat later by a shower of dirt and debris.
“Damn. That power’s no joke.” The words slipped from my mouth in a breathless murmur as I turned to face the impact zone.
Where I’d been standing moments ago, a crater had bloomed five meters across, like the earth itself had caved in. The Ogre Emperor, clearly pleased with the devastation he’d wrought, gave a satisfied nod and flashed a toothy grin.
Then, with a deliberate arrogance, as if putting his overwhelming strength on full display, he began striding toward me again. I didn’t have long before he was back within striking distance.
And strike he did.
Raising his left arm high, the Ogre Emperor brought it down in a thunderous arc. Another explosion rocked the battlefield, but this time… the crater never formed.
Because I caught his fist.
With my right hand, I raised my palm skyward and stopped that titanic blow cold.
“Hey, Emperor. Mind if I cut in for a sec?” I asked, voice low and steady, eyes locked with his in quiet defiance.
Realistically, the impact should’ve driven me straight through the ground like a tent peg. But thanks to a little trick with barrier magic, I’d spread the force of the blow across a twenty-meter radius. A nice little hack for not getting flattened.
That was the problem with S-rank battles. By the time you hit this level, the environment itself couldn’t keep up with the damage output. It was a logistical nightmare.
“Erkkk?” he gurgled in confusion, his massive arm trembling in my grip.
The Ogre Emperor stared at me, slack-jawed and dumbfounded, his thick brow furrowed in blank confusion.
Not that I blamed him.
He’d just watched his most powerful strike, an attack that should’ve obliterated anything in its path, get stopped dead by something barely the size of a peanut. Of course, his brain was fried. If he’d been capable of articulate thought, it probably would’ve just been a wall of question marks.
“Excalibur, the God-Slaying Relic,” I murmured.
As the words left my lips, one of my sacred swords, slumbering in the folds between dimensions, manifested in a ripple of light and steel. With a flick of my wrist, the blade snapped into my grip.
I sprang upward in a fluid motion, landing lightly atop his massive fist. From there, I ran—boots pounding against the rugged terrain of his arm as I sprinted up toward his shoulder. The uneven ridges of muscle and sinew gave me plenty of footing; honestly, it was easier than scaling a cliff face.
“You and I, we’re both S-Rank. Technically, anyway,” I said as I ascended, my voice carrying with deliberate calm. “But that’s just a classification. A clumsy one.”
I reached his shoulder and pivoted, raising my greatsword high above my head. The blade was nearly a meter and a half long, easily capable of cleaving through steel, let alone flesh.
“Think about it. To a mite, there’s no real difference between a human and an elephant. Both are just massive, incomprehensible forces. So the mite lumps us into the same category.”
The sword came down in a clean arc.
“Which means there’s still a pecking order within S-Rank.”
I drove the blade into the side of his neck and leapt. As I fell, the sword tore through him like a hot knife through butter, slicing clean from the base of his jaw to his opposite flank in a brutal diagonal slash. Flesh parted. Bone gave way. Blood erupted behind me in a crimson geyser as gravity pulled me toward the ground.
“You? You just barely scraped past A-rank,” I said, landing with a sharp thud as my boots met solid earth. “Honestly, Cordelia and Lilith together could’ve handled you just fine.”
Even before the last syllable left my mouth, the Ogre Emperor collapsed with a sound like a building crumbling, his body crashing into the ground as a fountain of blood sprayed into the sky, accompanied by a deafening shockwave of sound.
From the direction of the gate, I heard the distinct thump of someone hitting the ground. The knight commander, who’d been watching the fight unfold, had gone completely limp, legs giving out as he crumpled into a crouch.
“O-O-Ogre… Ogre…” he stammered, eyes wide as saucers. “The Ogre Emperor… Taken down… In one strike?”