Rank:Zero
Sera Vane is a sixteen-year-old "Rank Zero," openly labeled the worst rank in a culture that ranks everything in its pursuit of power. In the city of Velatrix, rankings dictate all aspects of life—school placement, social status, even access to clean water or decent housing. For Sera, it's a daily life of invisibility and humiliation at high-status Lunaris High, where walls themselves respond to student rank. She's the one in the gray jacket. The system failure. The punchline. But Sera is not who she seems.
She's been suppressing random outbursts of energy since she was a kid—episodes she can't explain, filled with static interference, hot-hot equipment, or machinery that inexplicably turns off when she's around. Her sister Jin has begged her to keep quiet, stay hidden, and stay alive. The last time anyone saw her power manifest, someone died.
As Sera drifts through school on a wave of taunts and exclusion, she discovers quiet friendship in Lio Dane—a friendly but seemingly low-ranking student who never once treats her like a ghost. Lio is actually a committed agent of an underground resistance, tasked with protecting her. For Sera isn't merely a statistical anomaly. She's a Sovereign-class Conduit—an ancient, feared source of power who can speed and shape energies flowing around her, including other people's abilities.
When a synthetic foe attacks Lunaris High in what should've been a routine drill, the best students die. Spies are mobilized. The defense net crashes. But Sera, unranked and unarmed, steps forward—and reality is remade. Her power explodes to life, driving the foe away and bending reality's laws. For the very first time ever, the system recognizes her. And the system goes nuts.
Headmistress Calaine Voss, the architect of the academy's ranking system, sees Sera as a threat and initiates the Strata Protocol—a black-budget program designed to put down renegade powers. But she's too late. Word of worldwide transformation seeded by Sera spreads, and a hidden network of retired Conduits and loyalists is reactivated. Lunch ladies, janitors, medics—those the system has all but forgotten are in line to join her. Through flashbacks, sabotage, and slow-cultivated allegiances, Sera learns the truth of her origins—and its terrible price. The regime murdered the last monarch she is now being asked to kill. The power that rests within her could liberate thousands—or enslave them.
As Sera is born into the world, her grip on self slips. Everyone wants her to be something: a prophecy, a weapon, or a queen. But Sera doesn't want to be anyone's fate. She wants a life. A voice. A choice. In the confrontation, she battles Calaine with not vengeance but clarity. Sera addresses the ranking system deception and releases a power flash that disables the scanning infrastructure throughout the city. She refuses to insert another hierarchy there. Instead, she disappears—blending again into the populace, refusing power in an addicted society.
But she is not lost. And she is not alone.
We observe that at the end of the novel, Sera walks backstreets with her sister and Lio, her glyphs pale but not dead. Power hums in her flesh but no longer governs her. Because her rank is gone. But her legacy has only just begun.
