My Alt Account Became the World’s No. 1 Hunter70.83%

Tier 2 Gate?

[DEV TREE]

His fingers hovered near the icon before finally tapping it.

The menu that opened wasn't like the rest. It didn't carry the soft tones or system-safe formatting of the skills page. This one was dark and minimal. A branching web of lines began to unfold across the screen, wide, tangled, and almost alien. There were no titles or cute icons, just raw nodes and data points spiraling outward in ways that made him squint.

At the very top of the screen, a dim header appeared:

[Developer Skill Branch — Tier 0 Access Granted]

Lanz slowly scrolled through the cluster of branches, eyes squinting to read the flickering labels. Some were labeled clearly, and those were the ones that pulled his attention first.

[Ghost Trace]

[Node Sync]

[Skill Fork]

These three was faintly pulsing, the glow was soft and consistent

[Memory Fragment – Locked]

[Override Tag Detected]

These two was blinking red, with occasional flickers that made it jump slightly in place.

And then there was [Class: ??? – Inaccessible], a node tucked deeper into the tree, completely gray, not even responding to cursor hover. Just a dead title buried in a sea of chaos.

The deeper he looked, the messier it became. Parts of the tree were unreadable, some connections ended in visual noise, and lines that's breaking apart.

He passed over one branch that led into a cluster of placeholder code — tags like:

[dev_node.legacy.hidden],

[flag/inert.placeholder], and

[!deprecated—noUI].

They weren't just hidden features, they were half-implemented leftovers, like someone had been building them and never came back to finish.

And it didn't feel like they were meant to be here at all.

He hovered over [Node Sync], finger twitching just enough to pull up a warning.

[CAUTION: Activating Developer Tier Skills May Result in Permanent Stat Divergence.]

Lanz tilted his head slightly. "That's… normal, I guess," he muttered, except it absolutely wasn't. This wasn't like accepting a stat boost or equipping a risky item, "divergence" sounded like it rewrote things.

It's obviously not adding onto or boosting, but more like rewiring. Whatever these dev-tier skills were, they didn't just change how you fought. They might change how the system recognized you.

He stepped back from the node, breathing through his nose, then scrolled a bit further to explore the tree's layout. A node near the center caught his eye — [Fusion Core Anchor] — and the moment he clicked it, the branches reshaped.

As if the tree had re-evaluated his build, his choices, and decided to offer a new angle... a new progression line.

It was responding to him.

Like it had been waiting for data. And now that it had some, it was learning from it.

Lanz stepped back mentally, mind racing. The fusion menu, the EXP rates, the simulation room's lack of safety settings, this tree. None of this belonged to the normal World Hunter System. Hell, even the font on the dev tree was different — thinner. He found a toggle labeled [Legacy Layer View] and, out of morbid curiosity, activated it.

The entire screen flashed red for a second. The background became grainy, edges sharpened, and the nodes changed ever so slightly. He turned it off again before it triggered a migraine.

Then, against better judgment, he tried switching the system language.

The interface didn't turn to static or broken English, it changed to something else entirely. Curved glyphs that looked like they belonged on ruins rather than in code, shapes that made his head hurt if he stared too long.

A second later, the menu auto-reverted, as if realizing it had pushed too far.

He stood there in silence, staring at [Ghost Trace] again.

His finger hovered over [Node Sync] for one last second… but he didn't press it.

Instead, he let out a slow breath and backed out of the tree.

The interface folded away just as clumsily as it had appeared, disappearing into the background like a tab being closed on a browser that shouldn't have been opened in the first place.

Whatever this was… it wasn't part of the World Hunter System. And judging by the layout, the language settings, and the absolute chaos buried inside those branches, he doubted this was made by anyone alive right now.

And he wasn't sure if that made him lucky… or just the next test subject.

"Yeah. No. I'm gonna leave now. This sh*t is to scary."

The simulation let him out with a subtle flicker, the interface dimming and folding away like mist retreating from sunlight, leaving Lanz alone in his room with a thin layer of sweat on his back and his thoughts still spinning around the strange, pulsing branches of the Dev Tree.

He didn't immediately move, his limbs felt heavy, not from physical strain this time, but from the sheer mental weight of everything he'd seen.

The fusion menu, the hidden skill branches, the warnings about mutation — it all hung in the air like the residue of a dream that hadn't decided whether it was a nightmare or an opportunity.

He rubbed the side of his face, stood up slowly, and made his way to the living room.

The apartment had settled into its usual evening life. The lights were dimmed, just the lamp on the counter left on, and a muted video was playing in the background — some leftover hunter prank videos still looping from when Miko had been scrolling earlier.

He plopped onto the couch with a dull grunt, feeling his muscles sink into the fabric, the kind of exhaustion that didn't scream pain but whispered it steadily into every joint.

His eyes drifted to the open laptop perched on the armrest, still logged in to Miko's third-party tracker app — the one she'd installed with the kind of giddy pride only someone tech-obsessed and slightly morally questionable could manage.

It was janky, barely legal, and totally brilliant.

An unofficial hunter tracking network that scraped and compiled ping data from overlooked gates, unstable relic fields, and low-priority anomalies flagged by drones but ignored by the big offices.

Miko called it "the underground gate gossip mill," but Lanz knew it had shown more real data than half the government terminals combined.

He navigated to the map tab out of habit more than intent, dragging the overlay across the Velmordop city grid.

His fingers slowed as he passed the southeast quadrant, near a residential block that hugged the tree line. That's when he saw it — a fresh red ping.