The More I Invest in My Wives, the Stronger I Become

Chapter 2: The Nameless

Life as an E-Rank Hunter was not easy.

It was barely a life at all.

Daemon Miles woke up every morning to the same routine.

Check the job board.

Get rejected.

Check it again the next day.

E-Rank Hunters were the bottom of the food chain. Guilds didn’t want them. Parties didn’t want them. Even low-tier dungeons barely wanted them.

His bloodline didn’t help either.

Nameless.

No guild wanted to gamble a contract slot on a Hunter with an ability nobody could even identify. No stats sheet. No known skill tree.

Just a blank space where a bloodline name should have been.

To most people, "Nameless" didn’t mean mysterious.

It meant useless.

Daemon had lost count of how many interviews had ended the same way. A recruiter would glance at his file, pause at the bloodline section, and give him the same polite, tired smile.

We’ll contact you if a position opens up.

They never did.

But there was one person who never looked at him that way.

Kassia.

Kassia was a B-Rank Healer.

Kind. Steady. The kind of person who noticed when someone was having a bad day before they said a word.

She had a habit of healing people even when she wasn’t asked to. Scraped knees. Bruised knuckles. Exhausted party members who pushed themselves too hard.

She healed with her hands.

But somehow, she also healed with her presence.

Daemon still remembered the day they met. He had been sitting outside a guild hall, staring at another rejection notice, when she sat down beside him without asking and handed him a bottle of water.

You look like you need this more than me.

That was three years ago.

Since then, she had been the one constant in his life. On the days the world reminded him he was nothing but an E-Rank nobody, Kassia reminded him that he wasn’t.

You just haven’t found the right place yet, she used to tell him.

You will.

They had a plan.

Simple. Practical.

Once either of them landed a stable guild contract, they would get married.

It wasn’t the kind of love story people wrote songs about. No grand declarations. No dramatic proposals.

Just two people trying to build something real in a world that didn’t make it easy for people like them.

Kassia had already found her place.

She belonged to a party — five Hunters, mid-tier dungeons, steady contracts. Her team liked her. Relied on her. Especially her team captain, a C-Rank Hunter named Reiner.

Daemon had met him exactly twice.

Both times, Reiner had looked at him the way people looked at something they were trying to politely ignore.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

Reiner had a crush on Kassia. Everyone in the party knew it. Everyone except, somehow, Kassia herself.

Daemon was never invited to her party gatherings.

Her teammates were courteous to his face and dismissive behind his back. He wasn’t part of their world. He was just the E-Rank boyfriend nobody quite understood what she saw in.

Daemon didn’t complain.

He went his own way — cycling through random, disposable parties, doing the E-Rank grind alone.

As long as Kassia came home to him at the end of the day, none of that mattered.

Today was different.

Today was their third anniversary.

Daemon had spent the entire afternoon in his small apartment kitchen, sleeves rolled up, flour on his hands, sweat on his forehead.

He wasn’t naturally talented at much.

But cooking, somehow, was one thing he was actually good at.

He made all of Kassia’s favorites. Her comfort dishes. The ones she always ordered when she was too tired to think straight after a long dungeon run.

He set the table carefully.

Lit a single candle.

Checked the clock every few minutes like it might somehow move faster.

She’s going to love this.

He had been planning it for weeks. Saving what little money he had. Rehearsing what he wanted to say.

Three years.

It felt like the beginning of something, not the end.

She arrived at eight.

Daemon heard the door and practically jumped to his feet.

Kassia stepped inside.

She looked exhausted — more than usual. Her shoulders were slumped. Her eyes were dull, staring somewhere past him instead of at him.

Daemon didn’t notice it yet.

He was too excited.

He walked over, gently lifted the bag off her shoulder, helped her out of her coat.

"Close your eyes," he said, smiling. "I have a surprise."

She didn’t move.

"Kassia?"

Slowly, she looked up at him.

And that was when Daemon finally saw it.

Not fatigue.

Something else.

Her eyes were unreadable. Distant. Like she had already left the room, and her body just hadn’t caught up yet.

A cold, quiet feeling settled in his chest.

Something was wrong.

"Daemon," she said quietly. "I’m sorry."

He forced a small laugh, still holding onto the last thread of the moment he had built for weeks.

"Sorry for what? You’re not that late—"

"We’re breaking up."

The words landed like something dropped from a great height.

Daemon’s smile didn’t fade immediately.

For a second, his mind refused to process it.

She’s joking.

This is a bad joke.

"...Kassia, if this is some kind of prank—"

"I don’t love you anymore."

No hesitation.

No shake in her voice.

She meant it.

Daemon felt something inside him go very, very still.

The candle flickered on the table behind him. The food he had spent all day preparing sat there, untouched, suddenly meaningless.

He searched her face for something — anything — that resembled the woman who used to hand him water bottles and tell him you’ll find your place.

He couldn’t find her.

"...Why?" he finally managed.

"I just don’t feel the same way anymore," she said. "That’s all."

"That’s not a reason, Kassia. Three years, and that’s all you’re going to tell me?"

She didn’t answer.

She didn’t explain.

She simply repeated the only line she seemed willing to give him.

"We can’t be together anymore."

Then she turned, picked her bag back up off the floor where he had gently set it down minutes ago, and walked out the door.

No goodbye.

No explanation.

Just the sound of the door closing.

Daemon stood alone in his apartment.

The candle kept burning.

The food kept getting cold.

And for a long time, he didn’t move at all.

Moving on wasn’t a quick process.

It took six months.

Six months of walking past guild halls that reminded him of her. Six months of catching himself cooking her favorite dish out of habit before remembering there was no one to eat it with. Six months of turning off the void where a plan for his entire future used to sit.

But life didn’t wait for anyone to heal.

E-Rank rejections kept coming. Rent kept coming. Mornings kept coming, whether he was ready for them or not.

Slowly — quietly — Daemon put himself back together.

Not because the pain disappeared.

Because it had to be enough just to keep moving.

He told himself he was done.

Done chasing love. Done planning a future with someone else in it. Done hoping some guild would finally see him as more than a Nameless E-Rank with nothing to offer.

Some people just aren’t meant for that kind of life.

He had almost convinced himself of it.

Then the invitation came.

It arrived without warning — a formal letter, sealed with a crest Daemon didn’t immediately recognize.

The Hale family crest.

He stared at it for a long moment before opening it, half-convinced it was some kind of mistake.

It wasn’t.

He was being summoned to the Hale estate.

Daemon Miles, E-Rank Hunter, ordinary in every way that mattered — invited to the estate of the most famous Hunter family on Earth.

He almost didn’t go.

But curiosity, and the fact he had nothing left to lose, won out.

The estate was more massive than anything he had ever seen in person. Marble floors.

Towering ceilings. Portraits of legendary Hunters stretching back generations, watching him like he didn’t belong there.

He probably didn’t.

Evelyn Hale met him in a private study.

She was elegant, composed, and carried herself with the kind of quiet authority that came from decades of leading one of the most powerful bloodlines in the world.

But when she spoke, Daemon heard something underneath the composure.

Desperation, carefully hidden.

She explained everything.

The corrupted Hale bloodline. The generations of Hunters who had died from it. Victoria’s diagnosis. Three years, if nothing changed.

She explained the ancient records. The Nameless Bloodline. The theory — unconfirmed, uncertain, their last remaining option — that his bloodline might be able to stabilize hers.

"We are not asking you for charity," Evelyn said carefully. "We are asking you to marry my daughter. In exchange, the Hale family will provide you with resources, status, and support no E-Rank Hunter could ever access on his own."

Daemon sat in silence for a long moment.

A marriage. To save someone’s life.

Not love.

Not the kind of future he had once imagined with someone else.

But maybe that didn’t matter anymore.

If this can actually help her, he thought, if it means she gets to live... then it’s worth doing.

He thought of Kassia, briefly. Of the future he had once planned. Of how certain he’d been, once, that he was done with all of it — marriage, partnership, any of it.

And yet here he was.

Agreeing to marry a woman he had never met.

Funny, he thought. Life doesn’t care what you swore off.

"I’ll do it," Daemon said quietly.

Evelyn closed her eyes, relief breaking through her composure for just a moment.

"Thank you," she whispered.

The wedding hall was quiet.

No reporters. No cameras. No crowd.

Just a handful of trusted Hale family members, and two strangers standing across from each other, about to be bound together for reasons that had nothing to do with love.

Daemon barely remembered the ceremony itself.

The vows.

The rings.

Victoria’s calm, unreadable expression.

His own quiet, awkward smile — an instinct, not a plan, the moment their eyes met.

And then, it was over.

Married.

To a woman he had known for less than an hour.

For a few seconds, Daemon just stood there, processing the strangeness of it all.

So this is my life now.

Then he felt it.

A strange pulse, deep inside his chest. A warmth that didn’t belong to him spreading through his blood, faster than his heartbeat, faster than thought.

His vision blurred.

And there, hovering in the empty air in front of him — invisible to everyone else in the room — a faint, translucent screen flickered into existence.

Daemon froze.

What... is that?

The screen pulsed once.

Then words began to form, letter by letter, glowing faintly against the empty air.

[Host detected.]

[Bloodline resonance confirmed.]

[Initiating—]

The screen flickered violently.

And then, without warning, it went completely black.