As he stepped outside of his small dorm room and turned the key to lock it, he came face to face with David. David was his dorm neighbor and a person he had known since they were in kindergarten, which meant that there were roughly 19 years of shared history between the two.
One might expect them to be good friends or at least supportive acquaintances.
That was far from the truth.
In kindergarten, David brought in his favorite toy to play with after lunch when they would have free activities and started boasting about how cool it was. Kaiden got jealous and decided to break it because he didn't have such a badass toy robot.
Naturally, David got mad and (after a lot of crying) snitched on him to their teacher, resulting in Kaiden having to apologize, his parents buying David a replica of the toy, and he also got a lot of flack for it at home from his father.
The young Kaiden knew that he was in the wrong but didn't care much, so despite his (forced) apology, their relationship never got any better. In elementary school, they were rivals on getting the best grades, in middle school, they competed to be better than the other at basketball, and in high school, they were crushing on the same girl (both got rejected).
Now that they were in college, all their rivalries reached new heights when Kaiden beat David's highest rank in a competitive game when he reached Gold 3.
Yes, they both were very average gamers.
David was also the guy who shouted at him to shut up while banging his walls when he was getting his penis torn to shreds and restructured by the system.
Kaiden raised an eyebrow when he examined David, who was smugly smirking at him. It wasn't hard to decipher why he was in such a jolly mood; a girl was endearingly latched onto his arm.
"Kaiden, my good friend. How have you been?" David inquired haughtily in a posh tone as if they were wealthy business partners seeing each other after returning from a holiday trip to Hawaii.
The pornstar wannabe, instead of entertaining him with an answer, decided to check the girl out.
She definitely wasn't a monumental victory.
Calling her chubby would be generous; she was just plain fat. Though going by modern standards, she wasn't close to being morbidly rotund, just 'plus-sized.' She had dark hair, freckles on her cheeks, and quite small breasts compared to the rest of her overwhelming curves. She wasn't a complete monster, though, Kaiden would honestly give her a score of 2.5 out of 10.
Just barely fuckable if one was truly desperate or had enough alcohol present in their system to remove all of their inhibitions.
"Are you done checking my girl out? Meet Becky. We ran into each other on campus, and it was love at first sight. Becky, meet Kaiden, a guy I have known since kindergarten."
Kaiden nodded to the girl before amicably offering his congratulations to the pair. "Hey, nice to meet you. Kudos to both of you."
He knew that showing any signs of care, be that jealousy or anger, would be playing right into what David wanted him to do. Yes, his girl wasn't hot, not at all, but she was still a girl. It didn't feel good to be the loser of the race to score a chick, but… Kaiden was never desperate enough to go for ugly gals like this one. He shot for the stars with each attempt of his, but like Icarus, his wings always melted before he could reach the sun.
"Hey. David told me some things about you," she greeted him back with a wry smile.
"All good things, I imagine…" he chuckled, to which she grimaced, letting Kaiden know that David had been trash-talking him. Well, not that he cared.
Sadly, David was a rather smart guy, or at least academically gifted, as he was one of the top students in their economics major. Kaiden got disillusioned with the degree and wasn't giving it his all to get good grades, so he was now the loser on both the personal and professional end of their nerdy rivalry.
"Well, enjoy yourselves, I'm off to train."
"Bye, Kaiden. It was nice meeting you."
"Sure, man. Have fun," David said lastly, but as they went past each other, he brushed his shoulder into Kaiden's and leaned in to whisper, "I'm going to be the one who loses his V card first, broski. It will happen today. You're making beating you in all aspects of life too easy nowadays… I'm honestly starting to get bored."
Kaiden paused for a moment and glanced back towards the retreating form of the pair as they went into David's dorm room together.
'I could've lost it ages ago if I lowered my standards to a hippo, you fuckface.'
Kaiden could've said this out loud and probably even come out victorious from their ensuing argument, but he was too classy of a guy to say this in front of Becky. She didn't deserve to be berated just because the two men had beef with each other.
Kaiden knew that ugly girls like her tended to be heavily insecure about their looks, so he could really hurt her heart if he were to speak back to David in that scenario.
The war between them didn't need to have innocent casualties.
In the next moment, he just shrugged his shoulders. Kaiden had much bigger things to worry about, and there was a chance that he could take a gorgeous girl's virginity by the end of the month if he succeeded in the tutorial mission of the system and get paid while doing so. 'Play the long game, Kaiden.' He reassured himself, then stepped out of the dorm and went for a walk.
…
He came back to his room after an hour.
There was still a lot of time left until his shift at Bruno's bar, so he slumped into his bed and then opened his systemic interface.
Ever since the apocalypse, all humans had access to this status window that displayed their relevant information.
However, for non-awakened people, meaning the commoners, this window didn't display much. In Kaiden's case, it used to be as such;
[Name: Kaiden Ashborn]
[Class: -]
[Level: -]
However, ever since he managed to slip on the banana peel like a certified boss, a few lines were added.
[Name: Kaiden Ashborn]
[Rank: 0 - Worm]
[Class: -]
[Level: -]
[Tutorial Mission: Stop Being Pathetic, Fuck Virgins For A Living!]
[Side Quest: Training Arc]
When a commoner awakened, they would receive a class, which meant that despite getting a system, he still wasn't an awakened—since he didn't have a class. Classes were categorized into tiers, going from F to S in most cases.
Awakened were soft-locked regarding their potential depending on the class they got. Someone with an F-ranked class would quickly fall behind one that got an S-ranked one if they put in the same amount of effort and had the same amount of innate talent and general luck.
Levels served as a measuring tool of progression. Awakeners had to kill dungeon monsters or other awakened in order to gain levels, which would make them stronger.