My Hermes System

Van Evans has two talents: he runs faster than anything alive, and he survives things that should have killed him.

Born in the Relic Graveyard, the junkyard slums of a world still scarred by the Portal Calamity, he arrives at the Newer York System Academy barefoot, illiterate, and chasing the floating words only he can see: [The Hermes System - Locked]. His welcome is a scam — a golden-haired senior promises to take him to the Headmaster and instead leaves him on a practice stage as a living training dummy. Van crawls out of that beating with his System unlocked, a deep hatred for bullies, and three people who become his first real family: a bookish mage who teaches him to read, a loudmouthed fist-fighter who adopts him, and a slum sister who refuses to stop looking for him.

Every student carries a System — Mages, Enhancers, Evolution-types, and the wildly unpredictable Unique — and every student learns the same first rule: never reveal your skills. Van shatters that rule the moment he opens his mouth, because his System is the inheritance of the messenger god himself. The Gift of Hermes lends him the speed and durability of the Messenger of the Gods and lets him speak any tongue ever spoken, monster or man. The Conductor of Souls lets him do something far darker: harvest the souls of the dead and deliver them to the afterlife — the Fields of Punishment, the Asphodel Meadows, or Elysium — every delivery paid in EXP.

Judging where the wicked burn turns out to be the one job Van is great at.

He hides his system type, walks out of a Rank D portal crawling with arachnes, and nearly believes the academy will lift him out of poverty. Then the immortal Chairman of the Explorer Association, Clark Hearst, has him framed for his own father's murder and thrown, still in chains, into the Pit — a White Portal prison where the world's worst criminals are sent to disappear.

They chose the wrong boy.

Inside, Van climbs from nameless prisoner to President of the Pit, farming levels from every monster and murderer in his path, until even Hercules — a god trapped at the edge of the world — begs the Messenger for one final delivery: send me home. Granting that wish puts the rage of Olympus in his hands and a heavier truth in his head: he is the living embodiment of Hermes, and Hermes has family left among the living, starting with a silver-haired mother who watched him from the shadows his whole life.

Now the Circle wants its stolen god back, the old world wants its Messenger on a leash, and the only road forward cuts through the Darkzone — alongside a grandmother who bends steel with her bare hands, a princess who races him for fun, and friends who never stopped searching for him. Van wanted three simple things: money, a mansion, and a family. His System intends to pay in full — one delivered soul, one broken wall, one impossible message at a time.

Fast, funny, and merciless, My Hermes System is a progression epic about the strangest power in the realm: a courier's inheritance that turns its holder into judge, courier, and storm all at once.