NOVEL ONLINE FREE Chapter 4: 4 - Janitor
Ash stared at Kara, his mind racing, but his mouth too stunned to form coherent words.
He wasn't sure whether to laugh, scream, or just collapse under the weight of the situation.
"What the hell?!" Ash finally managed, his voice rising. "Why the hell am I getting executed for?"
"You really don't know?" she said, walking closer.
"You saved me, sure. But you also touched me while I was unconscious. That's a violation of royal—"
"What the hell?!" Ash cut her off.
"Are you seriously going to pull the 'you touched me when I was unconscious' crap?"
"Yes," Kara said, matter-of-factly, before her voice turned cold. "You could've done anything to me. You were alone with me. You could have—"
"WHAT?!" Ash nearly choked on his words, stepping back. "Are you out of your mind? I saved you! I dragged you out of a damn rift—"
"Enough!" Kara snapped. "You're going to die. Right here and right now."
She waved her hand toward her knights.
One of the armored figures stepped forward, his hand gripping the hilt tightly. The others followed.
Ash stood there for a moment, still trying to process everything. He was about to get killed over that? This girl had lost her mind.
"Three…"
"Two…"
Ash let out a long, exhausted sigh. This had to be a joke. Right? It had to be.
"One!" Kara finished.
"Die!" she screamed.
The knights moved forward with deadly precision, but just as they closed in, Kara's voice rang out again.
"It was a joke!"
Ash stood frozen for a beat, watching the knights halt in mid-step. He stared at her like she had grown an extra head.
"Your joke wasn't funny," Ash said flatly.
"It was though."
"No, it wasn't."
"Still, it was a joke."
Ash's patience was running thin. His hand twitched, wanting to punch something.
"Alright. I get it. It's a joke."
Kara stood taller, as if she were the one who had won some victory. Her knights had already stepped back, though their eyes still never left him.
A deep voice cut through the tension.
"It's a joke..." Kara repeated 'softly'.
Ash stood there, his thoughts spiraling in confusion.
What the hell is this girl about?
He glanced at Serafine, who was staring at Kara with an expression that could best be described as "pained disbelief."
"I'll never understand rich people…" Ash muttered under his breath, shaking his head.
"Tell me about it," Serafine said dryly.
---
After she left—just walked off like nothing had happened—Ash stood there for a solid five minutes trying to make sense of what he'd just lived through.
He just stared at the gates of their mansion with the kind of thousand-yard stare people usually saved for war stories or family reunions.
"Bruh," he muttered, rubbing his face. "What was that even about?"
No one had an answer.
So a few days later, after recovering from the emotional whiplash of nearly getting executed for saving someone, he decided to do something sane for once.
He went back to Rift Code 77-F.
The gates hadn't changed. Ash stepped inside without hesitation. His body was already adapting to the spatial pressure, and he knew the terrain well.
The first three floors were familiar territory.
Bloodstains were still dried into the metal walkways, the giant bonish monster Maris manipulated, and even Maris' corpse—half-slumped where he had last seen her scream—was still rotting in place.
Ash didn't say anything. He just kept moving.
Fourth floor was quiet.
Two skeletal crawler-types wandered in the open testing chamber, dragging chains behind them like they were trying to scare someone. Ash didn't humor them. One strike to the jaw, another to the spine, and they collapsed.
Fifth floor was slightly bigger. A few more boneheads showed up, this time dual-wielding blunt rods made of rusted alloy. But their attack patterns were slow, predictable. Ash weaved through them with a trash-tied pipe in hand and picked them off one by one.
Then, it happened.
A pulse of blue light flashed across his vision—
[DING!]
You have leveled up!
Current Level: 5
Ash blinked. The familiar layout greeted him with a soft chime.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Stats Updated:
Strength: 10
Agility: 9
Endurance: 12
Intelligence: 14
Willpower: 15
Luck: ???
"Nice," Ash muttered, closing the screen with a mental tap.
Fifth floor cleared. Nothing strange so far, just more of those half-dead hallway guards.
Ash sat down on a metal bench near an old stairwell leading down to the sixth floor. He pulled out a dented energy bar from his pocket, unwrapped it, and took a bite.
I'm really bored right now...
Ash ascended to the sixth floor.
Another skeleton came limping out from behind a shattered vending unit. It raised a corroded cleaver and lunged at him, but Ash was already moving.
He slid to the side, slammed the pipe into its knee joint, and followed up with a vertical strike that shattered the skull into pieces.
The skeleton collapsed without ceremony, leaving behind a few scattered fragments and items.
Ash knelt down and rummaged through the remains.
He stored everything into his vacuum.
Mana-Fused Bone ×1 – 2 bronze
Rusted Lens Fragment ×1 – 1 silver
Tagged Guild Crest (Class D) ×1 – 0.5 gold
Total Estimated Value: 0 gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze
(Rounded: 0.5 gold = 5 silver) → Total: 5 silver, 2 bronze
Auto-Transfer: Success
At the end of the day, after clearing out the rest of the floor and looting everything he could carry, Ash returned home.
The teleport gate took him back to the lower ward of Seoul, and from there, he took a lift straight to their mansion in the middle sector.
He sold the day's haul through a private vendor system—automated drones picked up his loot, scanned it, and transferred coins to his account.
He didn't bother checking the amount. He stripped off his gear and headed straight for a shower.
Once clean, he stepped out, dried off, and walked barefoot to his room.
His sister, Serafine, was already seated in the main lounge, sipping some cheap berry wine while looking over a newspaper.
Ash walked past her without a word, sat on the couch opposite, and began opening up the digital analysis of Rift Code 77-F, also known as Shattered Realm.
The interface projected from the small disc on his wrist, showing diagrams, floor schematics, and previous reports.
"It's an eight-floor structure," he muttered. "Each floor has low-tier monsters—mostly F-rank husks, and one or two field-class entities."
Serafine glanced up. "What about the top?"
"There's a boss on the eighth floor," he continued, scrolling through floor breakdowns. "No known record of it being defeated yet. People don't usually care about F-Rank Rifts."
Ash zoomed in on the initial anomaly report.
Rifts weren't just buildings filled with monsters. They were fractures that appeared on different planets across the galaxy, each one linking to a corrupted replica of something that used to exist.
Entering a Rift wasn't the same as entering a dungeon. It was dimensional travel.
When someone stepped through a Rift's boundary, they were transported into a replica of a place. The terrain would match, down to the layout and materials, but everything inside was wrong. The world shifted just slightly, as if someone had taken reality and stretched it thin.
That was because the moment you entered, you were no longer in your world.
You were inside a dimensional mirror—an echo of the original structure—but altered by forces from outside known reality.
Then—
The doorbell echoed again through the wide halls of the mansion—another CLANG!
Outside, a familiar carriage was parked on the gravel path.
Ash sighed and stood. "No way. Again?"
He walked to the gate, pulling it open just enough to see the woman stepping down from the carriage.
It was Kara Whiteen again.
The moment their eyes met, she strode toward him with the full force of royalty. Her expression was unreadable—but her tone was anything but.
"You're coming with me!"
Ash blinked. "...What now?"
"We're entering a Rift Dimension together."
He stared at her for three seconds straight, then: "Huh?! What for!?"
"Don't think too hard, just come with me already," Kara replied, brushing past him with all the entitlement of someone who had never heard the word 'no.'
"I already cleared the 8th floor of the Shattered Realm."
Ash narrowed his eyes. "You cleared the Rift?"
"Yes, yes," she waved it off. "I defeated the F-rank boss, opened the Rift's inner portal. The real challenge's inside. The portal only appears after defeating the dungeon guardian. That's where the real dungeon begins. The 'Rift Dimension.'"
Ash's brain lagged. "Wait, you're saying… the Rift Portal is inside the building? On the 8th floor?"
Kara smiled over her shoulder like it was the most normal thing in the world.
"Exactly. Now, let's walk."
And just like that, two armed knights stepped out from the carriage They flanked Ash without a word.
"This better not be another prank," Ash muttered as he started walking beside Kara.
They walked for several minutes, into the ruins of the Shattered Realm.
It was quiet, unnervingly so.
When they reached the 8th floor, Ash looked around, half-expecting a normal floor of the building.
Instead, it was different.
A section of the floor had collapsed inward, revealing a swirl of energy where brick and steel should've been.
Floating gently in the center of the exposed chamber was a Rift Portal—a living distortion of space, like someone had stabbed reality with a needle and twisted it open.
It pulsed with colorless light.
Then, as it pulsed, a vacuum fell from it. It was a better vacuum than he had. It looked durable and could withstand hours of work unlike his current vacuum.
Ash stopped in his tracks.
"What the hell…?"
The system's words echoed faintly in his head.
SYSTEM INTERFACE – [CLASS ALERT]
[TRASH COLLECTOR CLASS – HIDDEN EVOLUTION PATH CONDITION DETECTED]
Requirement: Locate [Vacuum Ult. 0] inside
Status: 1/1
Ash narrowed his eyes.
[HIDDEN EVOLUTION CLASS REVEALED]
[NEW POSSIBLE CLASS: JANITOR]
Requirement: Kill The Heloxian Queen In Heloxian Planet
Status: 0/1
"Is this the thing… the system wanted me to find?"