The card pulsed once in my palm, warm like a heartbeat, then went cold.

  Teleportation Anchor. Single use. Crimson Safehouse, Ashwood Street, Grimvale.

  I didn't have time to question why a Crimson family item was in my pendant or how Lena had slipped it in there without me noticing. The forest behind me cracked, branches snapping under weight. Multiple sets of footsteps. Professional-tier speed.

  "Go!" Lena grabbed my arm, her hood fallen back to reveal sharp features and eyes that burned like embers. "The anchor will take you to a safehouse in Grimvale. I'll lead them off."

  "That's suicide." The words came out hoarse. My ribs still ached from the dungeon collapse, every breath a reminder that I was barely holding myself together.

  "I've survived worse than Veil hounds." She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Your mother taught me that. Now GO!"

  She shoved me hard toward the forest edge just as three shadows burst from the tree line. I heard Lena's voice erupt into a battle cry, or what I assumed was a battle cry, because it sounded like a thousand cards shuffling at once.

  I activated the anchor.

  The world folded.

  The transition felt like being squeezed through a straw made of static electricity. One moment I stood on a forest road surrounded by dying screams and the crack of combat. The next, I was stumbling onto cobblestone, gasping for air, my vision swimming with stars.

  Ashwood Street. Grimvale.

  The safehouse was a nondescript building wedged between a tanner's shop and a collapsed awning. The door was unmarked, unremarkable, the kind of place you'd walk past a thousand times without noticing. I hammered my fist against the wood three times, then twice, then once.

  The door swung open.

  A man with no face.

  I stumbled backward, my hand flying to Void Slice, but the figure raised, hands?.in a calming gesture. As my eyes adjusted, I realized he did have a face. It was just... wrong. Like someone had taken a normal man's features and stretched them slightly too long, pulled them slightly too thin.

  "Classless," he said. Not a question. "Lena sent you. She said you might be stubborn about it."

  "What are you?"

  "Keep your blade," he said, stepping aside to reveal a small room lit by a single candle. "I'm a friend. Or at least, I'm not your enemy. The Crimson family has no love for Veil."

  I didn't sheathe Void Slice. "Crimson Safehouse. But Crimson and Veil are supposed to be,"

  "Allies? Rivals? Enemies?" The faceless man, I couldn't think of him as anything else, laughed. It was a dry sound, like rustling paper. "The suits war amongst themselves constantly. But there are things even they agree on. House Veil's obsession with the Classless card has made them dangerous. Unpredictable."

  "They want to kill me and take it."

  "They want to kill you and become it." He gestured to a worn chair. "Sit. You look like death warmed over."

  I didn't sit. "What do you mean, become it?"

  The faceless man stared at me for a long moment. Then he sighed, reaching into his coat and producing a deck of cards. He shuffled them with practiced ease, ace through king, four suits, plus two jokers.

  "Tell me, Classless. What do you know about the cards?"

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  "They give us powers. Skills. Everyone has them."

  "Everyone has them," he repeated. "And where do they come from?"

  I opened my mouth to answer, dungeons, obviously, everyone knew that, but stopped. The truth was, no one actually knew. The cards had simply... always been there. As long as anyone could remember, players had been diving into dungeons and emerging with strange tattoos and stranger abilities. The System, people called it. The Cardforge.

  But where did it come from?

  "You're thinking," the man said. "Good. Most people don't. They just accept the cards and move on. But you... you're the first Classless in three generations. The first person to prove that the card system can be bypassed entirely."

  "Bypassed?"

  "The tattoos, the slots, the tiers, all of it is just a cage. A filter. Most people can only use the cards that match their slot capacity, their tier, their rarity. They spend their whole lives climbing from Noob to Skilled to Professional, always chasing the next card, the next slot, the next upgrade." He fanned the cards out on the table. "But you. You don't need to climb. You can learn anything."

  I thought about Void Slice. Beyond Tier 0. The card that had let me kill a Core Spawn spider with a thought.

  "That's not my doing," I said. "The Classless card gave me that."

  "The Classless card gave you the potential." The man's voice dropped. "But the System itself... it's not just giving out powers, Classless. It's harvesting. Every dungeon, every card, every skill, it all feeds into something. Something vast. Something that exists outside our world."

  The room felt colder.

  "What do you mean, outside our world?"

  The faceless man closed his eyes. When he opened them again, I saw something I'd never seen before in another human's gaze. Fear. Pure, undiluted fear.

  "The cards don't come from dungeons," he whispered. "Dungeons are just... distribution points. Hatcheries. The real source is something far beyond our reality. Beyond Phit, beyond Qora, beyond anything we can perceive with our limited senses." He leaned forward. "The outer gods, the ones who sent the cards, who gave us the System, they're not gifts. They're eggs. And we've been incubating them for millennia."

  My hand was shaking. I couldn't make it stop.

  "That's insane."

  "Is it?" He pulled a single card from his deck. It was black. Not black like shadow, but black like the void between stars. The symbol on it wasn't a spade, heart, diamond, or club. It was something else entirely. Something that hurt to look at.

  "This is a Joker," he said. "But not the kind you're thinking of. This is a Carfa. A wildcard. There are only five of them in existence, one for each suit, plus one that doesn't belong to any. And every single one was found in a dungeon that didn't exist before we entered it."

  "Carfa," I repeated. The word felt wrong in my mouth. "What does that have to do with anything?"

  "Everything." He slid the black card across the table toward me. "Veil has been searching for their Carfa for generations. The King and the Ace, their leaders, they don't just want your Classless power. They want to know how you became Classless. They think the answer will lead them to the Joker Veil. The one card that could give them control over the System itself."

  I stared at the black card. It pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because Lena asked me to. And because your mother was the last person to touch a Joker card before she disappeared." His voice was grave. "Your mother, Dere. She found something in a dungeon. Something that scared even the Crimson family enough to hide you in a backwater town like Grimvale. And now Veil knows you're alive."

  The pendant around my neck grew heavy. The letter inside, the one from my mother, the one I'd barely read, suddenly felt like it was burning through my shirt.

  "What did she find?"

  "I don't know. But I know this: the Classless card isn't just a cheat skill. It's a key. And Veil will do anything.kill anyone, to turn that key in the lock."

  The door burst open.

  I spun, Void Slice flaring to life in my hand, but it was only Lena. She stumbled into the room, her cloak torn, blood dripping from a gash on her forehead. Behind her, nothing but empty street and the distant sound of shouting.

  "They followed the anchor's signature," she gasped. "The Veil hunters, they have a tracker. Someone in the dungeon marked you."

  "Marked me?" My blood ran cold. "When?"

  "Doesn't matter." She grabbed my arm again, pulling me toward the back of the safehouse. "We need to move. Now. The safehouse is compromised."

  The faceless man was already moving, pulling a lever behind a bookshelf. A secret door groaned open in the floor, revealing a dark staircase leading down.

  "This goes to the old sewers," he said. "They'll lead you to the eastern gate. From there,"

  A scream from outside. Then another. Then the distinctive sound of cards being torn in half.

  Lena's face went pale. "They're here already. That's not possible."

  But it was possible. Because through the broken doorway, I saw them. Three figures in Veil black, their tattoos blazing with dark light. And at their head, a woman with silver hair and a smile like a blade.

  She was looking at me.

  "Hello, little Classless," she said. "Your mother was a hard woman to find. But you? You're exactly where we expected."

  Her hand rose. On her wrist, a tattoo I recognized, the spade. But not just any spade. This one had a crown above it.

  Ace.

  The highest rank in House Veil.

  And she was here.

  For me.

  [SYSTEM]

  New Quest Triggered: [Escape the Ace]

  Objective: Survive the encounter with House Veil's Ace

  Reward: Unknown

  Failure: Capture by House Veil