Chapter 3

The Administrator stared at the young man before him.

The human was only experiencing one moment—the conversation they were having—while The Administrator was experiencing variations of the same moment with the billions of others that had survived the initial transition to Class Selection.

A new presence emerged behind The Administrator. A similarly dressed man walked up beside him. The man had a grey pony-tail, grey goatee, and glasses. Only The Administrator would be able to perceive the man within the white space—no one else.

“You failed at your mission, Sevryn,” said The Administrator.

“One second more and the young man would have been dead,” said the older man.

“You should have simply killed him with your blade.”

“You and I both know the Penalty would have been too high for that,” Sevryn replied.

The Administrator sighed. The High Executor was correct in his statement.

The Administrator processed the noise of the billions of others on auto-pilot while staring at the young human known as Rob Fischer before him.

The Administrator would have to seek out alternative solutions to his problem.

As soon as Rob made his final class selection, choosing Warrior, he felt for a brief second a strange euphoria overtake him. At first he thought it was merely just his own excitement at living out a fantasy of being inside a role-playing game, but then he came to believe it was something else.

Some kind of deep powerful magic–the energy that must have governed the Grand Authority System–was coursing through him. He felt his body changing, improving, getting better, smarter, more powerful.

It was a great wondrous feeling before it completely evaporated and was replaced with overwhelming levels of pain.

He collapsed to the ground. His body gyrated spasmodically. His eyes twitched. He could feel his muscles growing and sharpening at a rapid clip. He could only presume that his body was reacting to the additional stat points that were flooding into him.

As the pain continued though, he started to doubt his initial stat-based theory. He couldn’t believe every time someone leveled up they would go through this amount of pain. This had to be more about the onboarding of his new Warrior class to his body and mind.

The agonizing sensations throughout him began to dissipate, leaving behind a throbbing debilitating headache. He laid on the floor of the vast white room.

For a second, Rob thought he could see The Administrator look at him with bemusement, but he couldn’t be certain. Still, the thought was there and it unnerved him. The entity before him was presented as a servant, a helper, an all-powerful cosmic version of Clippy, and yet there was more to him than that. He acted like he was a neutral party, and yet Rob could feel it, something seething and resentful beneath his elegant veneer.

The headache slowly began to soften. Rob took a deep breath, stretched, and pushed himself off the ground and back onto his feet.

He contemplated the weird moment–from euphoria to utter pain. The euphoria must have been the system magic entering his body and making him feel light-headed. The pain was then that same magic being twisted and put to use inside of his body and mind.

During his near-seizure, a whole bunch of new status updates had appeared in his retina.

Rob grinned. He had no idea what the Tutorial was going to be like, but he was getting a better and better understanding of this new world that was dawning before him. It was all reminiscent of a video game and it was making him more and more eager and excited.

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He could only imagine someone without as much video game knowledge being utterly lost, confused, and terrified. Actually, he was pretty sure even people with role-playing game knowledge were probably freaking out right now as well.

He wondered how many different conversations The Administrator was experiencing at that moment. He was sure the entity was watching people break down and cry, yell and attack him, and pretty much everything in between.

Rob was quite surprised by how level-headed he was being despite the circumstances. He couldn’t quite explain why. He also knew he had bigger things to deal with than questioning his emotional response to the apocalypse—namely, the apocalypse.

He continued onto the next prompts in his retina.

Rob nodded his head as he read the words.

Interesting.

He tried to intuitively speak Japanese and then French and found himself lacking in both attempts. He had a feeling the system would now auto-translate between two humans who did not share a common language. The fact that the skill was deemed “Common” suggested there were other languages out there, from different species and entities that existed across the multiverse.

He briefly contemplated having deep philosophical conversations with aliens, and then moved onto the next prompt in his retina.