Wesley Holloway died certain he was right about the oat milk.
A seventy-cent surcharge. A cartoon mascot. One righteous rant, one delivery drone, one city bus. Twenty-nine years old, and that was the whole logline.
The afterlife totaled up his life and returned a single verdict: negligible. Then it dropped him onto the bottom floor of a dungeon in the weakest body it had. A Cave Critter, the green nuisance adventurers kill in the tutorial to learn which button is "attack." Worth zero experience. Survival not expected. The System didn't even build a column to track whether he'd live. The answer wasn't supposed to vary.
It varied.
Because the one thing you never tell a man who coasted through his entire life is that he's already worthless, already written off, already out of things to lose. Do that, and you hand him the permission he never had while he was breathing: to actually try.
So he tries. The dungeon kills him for it, and he wakes up again, a little sharper, a little stranger, holding scraps of progress the prey was never meant to keep.
Nobody sees him respawn. The guilds just trade nervous rumors about why the trash mobs on Floor One won't stay dead, and not one of them thinks to blame the worst monster in the building.
He wasted one life being negligible.
He has infinite shots at this one.
