The tram crossed the first security checkpoint - Boroughs Gate - and the automated wards swept the car in a wave of cold blue light. Jace felt it pass through him, a brief pins-and-needles ripple across his skin, and then they were through and the landscape began to change. The hab-blocks gave way to mid-rise commercial buildings with actual glass windows instead of mana-film. Shops with proper signage. A clinic with a glowing green cross above the door - a real Healer on staff, not just the med-kits and prayer that passed for healthcare in the Boroughs. People on the sidewalks walked faster here, dressed better, carried equipment that gleamed with the telltale shimmer of active enchantment.

  The disparity wasn't subtle. It never had been. But today it pressed against Jace's awareness with a new weight, because today he was being measured against these people's children, and the measuring stick had nothing to do with how hard you worked or how badly you wanted it. The System didn't care about want. It read something deeper - aptitude, affinity, the shape of your soul or your mana channels or whatever it was the Conclave researchers couldn't agree on. You stepped up to the Stone and it told you what you were.

  Most people got Normal-tier. That was fine. Normal was the baseline - honest work, respectable classes, a career in the Adventurers Guild or the Legion or a trade. [Skirmisher], [Enforcer], [Evoker], [Sentinel] - bread-and-butter classes that kept civilization running. Jace would take any of them. He'd take any of them and be grateful and grind his way forward because that was what Boroughs kids did. You got what you got and you made it work.

  But some people - the ones with the right bloodlines, the right training, the right ineffable *something* - got Rare. And Rare was a different life. Rare meant advanced classes, faster progression, abilities that made Normal-tier users look like they were moving underwater. Rare meant scholarships and sponsorships and doors that opened before you knocked. The gap between Normal and Rare wasn't just statistical. It was gravitational. A Rare-tier student at Ironhold operated in a different social orbit, and everyone arranged themselves accordingly.

  *Don't think about it. You can't control it. Just step up, take what the Stone gives you, and work.*

  His father's voice. Or what he imagined his father's voice would have said. He'd been nine when the dungeon breach took him - a minor incursion in the Boroughs' maintenance tunnels, the kind that happened three or four times a year. A crack in reality no wider than a doorway. Two Sewer Lurkers. The response team had put them down in minutes, but his father had been in the tunnel doing pipe repair when the gate opened, and minutes was too many.

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  Jace remembered calloused hands. A voice that was always calm, even when it shouldn't have been. The smell of pipe solder and cheap soap. His mother had a photograph - actual printed photograph, pre-Unveiling tech recovered from a dead data cache - but Jace couldn't look at it without the memories going slippery and strange, like trying to hold water in a fist. He'd been nine. Nine-year-olds don't build reliable archives.

  What he remembered with perfect clarity was the after. His mother sitting at the kitchen table, spine straight, hands flat on the surface, not crying. The recycling plant shift supervisor at the door with a box of his father's things. The way the apartment had sounded different that night - same walls, same furniture, same humming mana-conduit in the ceiling, but the silence was shaped differently. Like a room that had lost a load-bearing wall.

  *You come home tonight.*

  The tram crossed the second checkpoint. The wards were stronger here - he felt them like a hand pressing briefly against his chest, reading him, cataloguing him, and then letting go. The Midway District passed in a blur of commerce: gear shops with dungeon salvage in the windows, a potion brewery with green smoke curling from its chimney, a recruiting office for the Iron Legion with a hardlight projection of a soldier standing twenty feet tall above the entrance, jaw set, rifle gleaming. The projection's eyes tracked the tram as it passed. Jace had always found that unsettling.

  Two seats ahead, a woman in full combat gear was dozing with her head against the window. Heavy plate armor, mana-scored and dented, the kind you didn't buy off a rack - it had been shaped to her frame by a Smithing-class artisan. An axe leaned against the seat beside her, its edge humming faintly with a fire enchantment that made the air above it shimmer. She was probably mid-tier - Rare or low Epic - coming off a dungeon run, riding the public tram because the private transits didn't run this early.

  Jace studied her without staring. Adventurers fascinated him the way they fascinated every kid in the Boroughs - they were the proof that the System could lift you. That woman had probably started somewhere not unlike where he had. Stepped up to a Stone. Received a class. Leveled. Fought. Survived. And now she carried equipment worth more than his mother's apartment building and she dozed on the tram like the weight of all that power was just another kind of tired.

  As if sensing his attention, the woman opened one eye. It was the flat, assessing gaze of someone who evaluated threats the way most people evaluated weather - constantly, automatically, without particular interest. Her eye swept over him. Dismissed him. Closed again.

  And in that instant, Jace felt it.

  Not hostility. Not contempt. Something worse - the sheer biological reality of the gap between them. His body recognized it before his mind could articulate it: a heaviness in the air around her, a density, as if gravity itself acknowledged her differently. His hindbrain, the ancient lizard part that still governed fight-or-flight, sent a single clear signal: *that is not your weight class.* It wasn't fear exactly. It was the same thing a house cat felt in the presence of a tiger - the bone-deep certainty that some differences couldn't be closed by wanting.

  The feeling faded as she settled back into sleep. Jace exhaled slowly and turned back to the window.

  *That's what tier feels like. That's what I'm trying to become.*