Highlights
- Hunter rankings in the world of Solo Leveling are fixed and cannot be improved, meaning once a Hunter awakens to their abilities, their potential doesn’t change.
- Hunters are assessed for their magical power and given a rank, with S-Class Hunters being the strongest and E-Class Hunters being the weakest.
- Dungeons in Solo Leveling are also ranked on the same scale as Hunters, with higher-ranked dungeons posing a greater danger. Jin-Woo, the protagonist, is an E-Rank Hunter but still faces significant threats in a D-Rank dungeon due to his lack of physical ability.
The following contains spoilers for Solo Leveling, currently streaming on Crunchyroll, or available to read on Tapas.
Solo Leveling is finally here and the first episode got right down to it when it came to setting up the world and letting viewers understand a lot about what’s going on in the Solo Leveling world. One of the major pieces of exposition that was dropped in the first episode is a brief discussion about the mechanics of the world and how Hunters are classed in terms of their overall ability.
Alongside Hunters, the Gates that they enter to conquer the dungeons within are also ranked on the same scale used for classing Hunters. So, how do the Hunter rankings work in Solo Leveling?
There’s No Chance of Improvement With Hunters
Just to recap, Hunters are individuals who have awakened to magical power that are capable of entering and actually standing a chance against the various monstrous forces that await anybody brave enough to enter one of the Gates that appeared across the world over ten years prior to the events of the series. When the Gates appeared initially, people came to realize the threat they posed as military forces entered the strange portals but couldn’t put a single scratch on the hostiles they found inside. Each Gate supposedly lasts a maximum of seven days after opening before it begins leaking malignant, otherworldly forces with which the average person would have no means of dealing.
Enter the Hunter, whose magical composition is possibly an aftereffect of the opening of the aforementioned inter-dimensional Gates. Once awakened, a Hunter effectively maxes out their potential – meaning that once someone has awakened to their Hunter abilities, no amount of effort or self-improvement can lead to them changing their rank and therefore, potential ceases to be a valid concept.
How Ranks Are Calculated
While the manhwa takes a bit more time to show this part of the world, the first episode of Solo Leveling shows us just how Hunters are assessed for their magical power and given the appropriate rank. Hunters are found on a descending scale, where S-Class Hunters are the most powerful, and E-Class Hunters are the weakest. During Solo Leveling episode 1, “I’m Used to It”, while Sung Jin-Woo and his party are in the middle of exploring a dungeon, the episode cuts to the Hunter Association where a character we’ll soon learn is D-Ranked Hunter Yoo Jin-Ho, who will become a significant ally to Jin-Woo in the later stages of the season, is assessed for his magical power through the use of technology.
The process itself isn’t explained much, but Jin-Ho is made to place his hand on a giant black sphere reminiscent of something out of Gantz, while the technician reads the resulting value on a screen nearby. The sphere is actually a black crystal, and in the same episode we learn of the major uses of the magic crystals and essence stones that Hunters collect from the monsters they defeat. While the exposition dump might have been a bit much for the first episode, Chairman Go Gun-Hee’s foray into what kind of world the emergence of Gates and Hunters has created when it comes to development, trade, foreign relations and the race to develop or find a clean source of energy at least helps us understand some of the motivations for dungeon exploration.
Dungeons and Hunters Are Ranked on the Same Scale
Like Hunters, dungeons are also assessed and given a ranking that communicates the level of danger posed by the magic beasts found therein. On the same scale seen with Hunters, dungeons are rated from S-Rank to E-Rank, again with E reflecting the lowest amount of danger. Normally, Hunters of equal rank can enter a dungeon and come out relatively unscathed; however, protagonist Sung Jin-Woo’s fame arises from the fact that even as an E-Rank Hunter, his strength is still comparable to that of a regular person, and a dungeon of corresponding rank still poses a significant threat to his life. In the first episode, Jin-Woo and his party enter a D-Rank dungeon, which is very dangerous for Jin-Woo but very doable for the average D-Ranked Hunter. To drive home just how weak Jin-Woo is at the beginning of his journey, he recounts just how many times he has found himself on the brink of death during a dungeon exploration, even in E-Rank raids, showing a unique lack of physical ability that he makes up for with willpower.
Sometimes a high-ranked Hunter will only ever feature in low-level raids, as seen with Jin-Woo’s friend Joo-Hee, who is a B-Rank Healer but lacks the required mental fortitude to engage in more dangerous dungeon raids. Another aspect that raises the possibility of threat posed by any open Gate is the fact that it remains open for seven days for a group of Hunters to defeat the boss found inside. However, if that doesn’t happen, then a dungeon break occurs. The magic beasts and monsters start to invade the human world, which is a big problem because the average person has no way to protect themselves against such a threat because conventional weaponry have long since been discovered to be useless against them.
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