SSS-Class Profession: The Path to Mastery

Darkness swallowed me whole, and I found myself floating in a void that felt both familiar and alien. But I wasn't experiencing it...It was more like I was watching it, observing myself from somewhere outside my own body as the world around me shifted and reformed.

The first scene materialized with startling clarity. I was at that fateful night once more, ready to end my own life. Just moments before I jump I receive the notification informing me of my new job title...Jobmaster (SSS-Rank). But my reaction was different from what had actually happened in the past.

"What's the point?" the other me whispered, his voice hollow with despair. "Mom's dead, Dad's gone, and I'm worthless. Just another F-Rank piece of garbage that nobody will ever care about. And this? This isn't going to change anything...I hate my life."

I watched with detached horror as my younger self leapt off the bridge, tears streaming down his face. I lean over to see my own corpse. It was still alive... For now at least. Blood flowed freely onto the ground with his life draining out of him with each weakening heartbeat.

"At least this way, the pain stops," he breathed, eyes growing dim. "At least this way, I don't have to be a burden anymore."

The scene faded to black, and I felt nothing. No sadness, no relief, just... emptiness.

The void shifted, reforming into another familiar setting. I was back in a burning building wearing my Mr. Fox mask. Chief Ryan was trapped under the collapsed beam. But this time, when the ceiling started to give way, I didn't move fast enough. The flaming debris crashed down on top of me instead of him, pinning me beneath tons of burning rubble.

I watched myself scream as the fire consumed my flesh, my body lacking the anything that could have saved me at the time. Chief Ryan called out my name, trying to reach me, but the flames were too intense, the smoke too thick.

"I'm sorry," I gasped through the pain, my voice barely audible over the roar of the fire. "I couldn't... I wasn't strong enough..."

My body went still as the flames finished their work, leaving nothing but charred remains in a hero's grave that should have belonged to someone else.

The dream shifted again. Now I was bound to that chair in Cipher's cabin, Logan standing over me with that same sadistic smile. But this time, He began torturing me, before asking any questions, my body gave out much earlier than I had expected. The pain overwhelmed my nervous system completely, sending me into cardiac arrest before I could reveal any useful information.

"DON'T YOU DARE DIE ON ME," Logan sneered, checking my pulse and finding nothing. "TELL ME! HOW DO I JUMP RANKS?!"

Mars was next. The crash landing that shouldn't have been survivable accomplished as debris from the ship pierced my chest, puncturing both lungs and my heart. I watched Mr. Angel struggle for breath in the thin Martian atmosphere, blood frothing from my mouth as I slowly suffocated on my own fluids.

"Should have... stayed on Earth," I wheezed, my vision darkening as hypoxia set in. "I knew this could go wrong...Sienna....Camille..."

My body went limp in the wreckage of the transport, just another failed colonist whose ambitions had exceeded his capabilities.

The courtroom materialized around me, but this time the jury's verdict was different. "Guilty on all charges," the foreman announced, his voice echoing with finality. "The defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole."

I watched myself age rapidly in a prison cell, my body withering as decades passed in moments. The Masked Syndicate became nothing more than a historical footnote, a failed terrorist organization whose leader died forgotten and alone behind bars. No revolution, no change, no impact on the world's injustices.

"Forty-five years," an old guard said to his partner as they walked past my cell. "Forty-five years, and he still thinks he was some kind of hero. Delusional to the end."

My elderly self didn't respond, too far gone into madness to engage with reality anymore.

The mafia tournament appeared next, but Ragnar's fists found its mark this time. I watched the massive man's hand go through my chest, the point emerging from my back in a spray of blood and viscera.

"You fought well," Ragnar rumbled, almost respectfully. "But you were never in my league."

Mr. Beetle collapsed to the arena floor, my blood mixing with the metal as the crowd cheered for my death. Just another contender who'd overestimated his abilities and paid the ultimate price for his arrogance. My allies looked so broken and disheartened at the sight.

I was then in Europe, running through a hallway as Mr. Jester with Mark. The government agents' bullets found their target, multiple rounds tearing through my body as I tried to flee through the narrow hallway. I watched myself stumble and fall, leaving a trail of blood on the floor.

"Target neutralized," one of the agents reported into his radio. "Mr. Jester is down."

They left my body where it fell, just another problem solved by bureaucratic efficiency.

Director Connor's ambush formed around me, but this time Mark and I lost our fight against the Cain Protocol subjects. I watched myself get overwhelmed by their coordinated assault, their enhanced abilities too much for my still-developing skills to handle.

"Such potential," Director Connor mused as he stood over my broken body. "Such a waste. He could have been magnificent if he'd just accepted his place in the natural order."

My corpse was probably dissected for research, just another data point in their pursuit of human enhancement.

The plane crash was more brutal this time. Instead of jumping out with the girls and surviving the impact. I watched myself get crushed in the wreckage, my body pulverized by tons of twisted metal and debris. The island remained uninhabited, its secrets buried along with my crushed remains.

Next I saw how the laboratory in Northern Europe became my permanent prison in this version. I watched years pass as scientists ran experiment after experiment on my captive body, my mind slowly fragmenting under the constant torture until I was little more than a vegetative test subject.

"Subject has ceased all higher brain functions," one researcher noted clinically. "Recommend termination and organ harvest."

Even my death served their purposes, my body parts distributed to other facilities for further study.

And finally, today's assassination attempt played out as it should have. The bullet that shattered the window found its intended target, punching through my skull and the alleyway walls with my brains.

"Target eliminated," the driver reported. "Not a clean kill, possibility of witnesses."

I watched my body slump over the floor, blood pooling around my head as the life drained out of my eyes. Some passersby found me minutes later, their screams of anguish echoing through the streets.

Each death felt equally real, equally possible. Each one represented a moment where luck, determination, or sheer stubbornness had been the only thing standing between me and oblivion. How many times had I come within inches of dying? How many narrow escapes had I managed through nothing more than chance and desperation?

The mathematical reality was inescapable: nobody cheats death forever. No one maintains their luck indefinitely. Every risk taken, every dangerous situation entered, every enemy faced—they all accumulated into a growing probability that eventually, inevitably, something would go wrong.

I wasn't immortal. I wasn't invincible. I wasn't some chosen protagonist with plot armor protecting me from consequences. I was just a man who'd gotten lucky more times than he deserved, and luck always ran out eventually.

The thought should have been terrifying, but instead I felt... oddly empty and curious. What would it actually be like? The moment when my luck finally failed, when the odds caught up with me, when whatever was hunting me finally closed the distance?

Would there be an afterlife? Some continuation of consciousness beyond the failure of biological systems? The concept seemed almost foreign. The idea that this collection of electrical impulses and chemical reactions that constituted my sense of self could somehow persist after my body ceased functioning.

Heaven seemed unlikely for someone who'd killed 2 people in their lifetimes, who'd caused as much destruction and chaos as me. If there was some cosmic justice system keeping score, my ledger was probably painted in red ink. Hell might be more appropriate, assuming such places existed at all.

But maybe there was nothing. Maybe death was just... stopping. Like turning off a computer or extinguishing a candle. The cessation of all experience, all thought, all sensation. Not peaceful or painful—just absent.

I couldn't picture it. The concept of non-existence was too detached for a mind that had never experienced anything except existing. It was like trying to imagine a color that didn't exist or a sound beyond the range of hearing.

As I drifted through these morbid contemplations, a figure began to materialize in the void before me. At first it was just a shadow, a suggestion of human form emerging from the darkness. But as it became clearer, I recognized the scarred and broken features with a mixture of guilt and recognition.

Mark.

His body bore the evidence of everything he'd endured—the torture, the experiments, the systematic destruction of his physical form and psychological well-being. Burns covered most of his skin, some old and silvered, others appearing fresh and angry. His left arm hung at an unnatural angle, clearly broken and never properly healed. One eye was completely white, blinded by some past trauma.

But it was his expression that struck me most. Not accusation or anger, but a kind of weary resignation. Like he'd expected to find me here, in this place between consciousness and death.

He didn't speak, but somehow I found myself talking anyway, the words emerging from my mouth without conscious thought.

"I know what you're thinking," I said, my voice echoing strangely in the void. "That I'm being reckless, that I'm going to get everyone killed, that I'm too stubborn and too naive to see the bigger picture."

Mark remained silent, but his scarred features seemed to shift slightly, as if acknowledging my words.

"But I can't change," I continued, the admission feeling like it was being torn from somewhere deep inside me. "I won't change. This optimism, this determination to keep fighting no matter what. It's all I have left. It's what's kept me alive through everything we've faced."

The scarred figure tilted his head slightly, and I could almost hear his unspoken question: At what cost?

"The feeling of death," I said, my voice growing stronger, more defiant. "The knowledge that everything could end at any moment. It doesn't make me want to hide or play it safe. It makes me want to push harder, fight more desperately, achieve something meaningful before the inevitable happens."

Mark's visible eye seemed to focus more intently on me, and I felt compelled to continue.

"You think I don't understand the risks? You think I don't know that people are going to die because of my choices? Of course I know. But I also know that people are dying right now, trapped in a situation I can only describe as hell, because of the system we're fighting against. People like my mother, people like the countless D-Ranks and low-level workers who get ground up in the machinery of 'natural order.'"

The silence stretched between us, heavy with unspoken arguments and conflicting philosophies. Mark had always been the pessimist to my optimist, the voice of realism to my reckless determination. Even broken and traumatized, even reduced to a figure in my own subconscious, he represented the part of me that questioned whether our choices truly mattered in the long term.

"I'd rather die trying to change things than live accepting them," I said finally, the words carrying the weight of absolute conviction. "And if that gets me killed, if that gets the people I care about killed, then at least we'll have died for something that mattered."

Mark's expression shifted again, and for the first time since he'd appeared, his lips moved. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper, but it carried clearly through the void:

"You'll come to regret your choices."

The words hit me like a physical blow, not because of their content but because of the absolute certainty with which he delivered them. It was like that time in the restaurant, but it felt much stronger this time. Like my consciousness itself was warning me. Like a prediction delivered with the confidence of someone who'd already seen how the story ended.

Before I could respond, before I could argue or defend or explain, the void began to collapse around me. Mark's scarred figure faded back into darkness, his final words echoing in the empty space as everything dissolved into unconsciousness.

I woke up on the gym floor, my body screaming with pain from dozens of injuries I'd deliberately inflicted on myself. My broken wrist was swollen to nearly twice its normal size, my torn bicep had formed a grotesque knot under the skin, and every movement sent fresh waves of agony through my damaged spine.

But the Pain Resistance skill was working. The sensations were there, every bit as intense as they should have been, but they felt distant, manageable. Like someone had installed a filter between my nervous system and my consciousness.

I lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Mark's final words. You'll come to regret your choices.

God damnit Mark....