Chapter1: Cataclysm

It was a clear blue sky with large white mighty clouds hovering over the Land of Japan. Beneath the clouds, lived mortals with no ordinary powers, magic or skills. They never know about these things except form the comic and movie knowledge from random authors. Though, some of their derived theories were wrong. It was not entirely wrong. There were students of high school chit chatting with each other, salary workers running to catch the train on the time, boys playing baseball.

It was some time later, a sudden earthquake occurred and due to this, the utensils fell down in the house, the public panicked. There was no advance notice of this earthquake of having high magnitude enough to cause death of enormous amount of people. What was shocking that it happened all over the world. The whole world was witnessing this violent shake and trembling down in fear. At last, it stopped giving the people fear and gave time to take rest. But who knew that it was the time waiting for their death.

From out of nowhere, blue- and violet-coloured circles appeared in the sky, on the street. As usual, they were astonished by this quick appearance. From that circle came the beasts and the monsters with their eyes set on the flesh of people. The beasts were drooling over the taste of humans. After that was only massacre and bloodshed of humans. This event is called the famous cataclysm. The weapons, army and nuclear missiles could not affect the monsters very much.

It seemed the humanity had lost its hope. But the scenario was different, the trajectory of this killing equation made by the monsters went wrong. After two or three days, humanity received a gift which is skills. The people who manifested their skills and used this gift to kills monsters becoming people's saviour. Those gifted humans were Rankers. It was a matter of time there were guilds and training centre for the rankers to earn huge amount of money based on their quest. Eventually, they became celebrities and had fame and power.

The greed is a characteristic of human. Some rankers were misusing their skills to commit crimes but law could not do much about it until Safety Department came into the picture. There were various classes like Mages, Swordsman, Alchemist, Healer, Assassin etc and based on power and combat skills were ranks, F (the lowest), E, D, C, B, A and S (the strongest). The Rankers who broke through the limits of S class were called World Class, they were revered as the property of the whole Earth

This was all six years ago. Ryoma Tachibana was a student studying in high school aiming to be a ranker. Walking down the streets, he was lost in his own world of rankers. His friend Kuro Saki slapped him to wake him up to reality. Kuro was a very good friend who actually cared for Ryoma and even he was focussing on becoming a famous ranker.

Ryoma was focussed more on being assassin and his friend was trying to become alchemist.

Alchemist focusses more on potions and magical devices. The money came from selling artifacts found at dungeon were high causing rankers to be rich. This was another sole reason of becoming ranker for those two. Ryoma reached his home and called out to his mom, "I am home." putting the shoes aside. His mom replied "ok son." Ryoma's mom name is Sana Tachibana who was busy cleaning the house. Ryoma walked past the portrait of his father, Shouko Tachibana who was an A-rank hunter popularly known as 'Raging Lion of Fire'. His fire held high esteem even among S rank hunters. Unfortunately, He was killed by the Glucenberg monster, an ice type A-rank dragon. To survive, Sana had to work at supermarket to make a living.

Ryoma was fixed on becoming ranker despite his mother's warning and cries. But his stubbornness won over his mom. He had to go tomorrow at 1:45 p.m. to Osaka training centre which was just 5 km from his house. Training centre is where hunters or rankers get their ranks checked and the guilds try to make contracts and recruit newbie rankers. The famous guild till now in Japan is Kami Guild whose CEO is the daughter of a high profit-making company J-Arc, Akari Yuka. She is a well-known S rank mage popularly known for her ice powers.

Ryoma had a nice meal consisting of ramen, tuna cutlets and sushi rolls made by his mother. He then brushed his teeth, went straight to bed and ultimately dozed off, "zzz..zzz".

There are rankers who have unbelievable strength and power. Thomas Andre of America, Siddharth Bachchan of India, Lu Zhigang of China and Sun Jingwoo of Korea. Ryoma might be aiming to become one for Japan.