Chapter 2: The Tutorial Wants Me Dead

The System window hovered over Miles Renner’s body like a surgeon deciding which organ to steal first.

ERROR RESOLVED.

SOUL ANCHOR ESTABLISHED.

CLASS ASSIGNMENT: Graveborn

STATUS: Forbidden Hybrid / Deprecated Asset / Unlicensed Resurrection Vector

WELCOME TO VEYR.

Miles lay half-buried in a pit of corpses beneath a blood-red sky and tried to decide whether the afterlife had a sense of humor or if God had outsourced onboarding to the worst live-service developer in history.

The bodies around him were not all human. That was the first thing his brain latched onto because it was easier than thinking about the subway platform, the screaming metal, the stranger’s fingers slipping from his coat as concrete swallowed the world. Easier than remembering the last wet crunch of his own ribs.

There were bodies with horns, bodies with scales, bodies wrapped in priest robes, bodies wearing plate armor dented inward like crushed cans. A man with translucent wings stared sightlessly at the sky, his face locked in an expression of offended surprise. A blue-skinned woman with tusks had one hand clenched around a broken spear. Something shaped like a dog but wearing a crown lay tangled beneath a dozen pale limbs.

And Miles was among them.

He pushed himself upright. The motion dragged something cold and thick across his back. Blood, maybe. Grave mud. The pit sloped down toward a drain cut from black stone, and every inch of it reeked of rust, rot, and damp ash. His borrowed—or resurrected, or whatever the hell this was—body shuddered as air scraped into lungs that had no business working.

“Okay,” he rasped.

His voice sounded wrong. Not monstrous. Worse. Familiar, but hollowed out. Like someone had recorded him through a wall and played it back from inside a coffin.

The red sky pulsed. It was not sunset. There was no sun. Just a ceiling of crimson cloud stitched with black lightning and pale runes that crawled like maggots across the horizon. Far above, impossible towers stabbed upward from floating continents. Chains thick as highways connected them to distant mountains. Somewhere beyond the corpse pit, horns blared. Thousands of voices roared in answer.

Miles had played enough MMOs to recognize a starting zone when one was trying to kill him.

A second window snapped open in front of him, hard enough that he flinched.

TUTORIAL QUEUE CONFIRMED.

LOCATION: The Bone Orchard

OBJECTIVE: Survive Initial Calibration

REWARD: Starter Gear, Faction Eligibility, Soul Ledger Access

FAILURE: Memory Forfeit / Reassignment / Compost

NOTE: The Tutorial is mandatory. Refusal is treason against Progress.

“Compost,” Miles said.

The corpse underneath him twitched.

He scrambled back, slipping on gore. A skeletal hand burst from beneath a tangle of robes and clamped around his ankle. The fingers were bone wrapped in wire-thin tendons, cold and impossibly strong. A skull rose after it, dragging a spine and rib cage from the heap like a puppet yanked upright.

Its empty sockets flared with pale green fire.

SKELETAL TRAINEE – LEVEL 1

Disposition: Motivated

“Motivated for what?” Miles kicked on instinct.

His heel struck the skull. Pain flashed up his leg, but the bone cracked. The skeleton’s jaw clacked open, and it made a sound like dice shaken in a cup. Not laughter. Not exactly.

More corpses shifted.

A dozen green lights bloomed in the pit.

Miles’ stomach sank. “Of course. Trash mobs.”

The first skeleton lunged, both hands reaching for his throat. Miles twisted aside. He had no weapon, no armor, no raid frames, no keyboard, no headset full of idiots asking if they should stand in the glowing circle. He had only a dead body, a lifetime of panic management, and the miserable reflexes of a man who had spent too many years surviving digital emergencies on caffeine and spite.

The skeleton hit the corpse heap behind him and skidded. Miles grabbed the closest thing that looked usable: a femur slick with black blood. It came free with a wet pop. The absurdity of it nearly made him laugh.

Improvised blunt weapon. Durability: probably awful.

Two more skeletal trainees clawed their way upright. One wore a cracked bronze helm too large for its skull. Another had an arrow lodged through its sternum. Their movements were jerky at first, then smoother, as if something was teaching them from above.

Miles backed up the slope, bare feet sliding between ribs and broken shields. The pit walls were fifteen feet high, ringed by black iron spikes. A gate waited at the top, barred and chained, with a sign hanging over it in cheerful gold letters.

WELCOME, NEW SOULS!

Below that, in smaller letters:

PLEASE DIE CONSTRUCTIVELY.

“Yeah,” Miles muttered. “That tracks.”

The skeleton with the helm charged first.

Miles let it come.

That was the thing about basic mobs. They committed. They didn’t feint unless the designers were sadists, and this one had all the grace of a shopping cart rolling downhill. Miles planted one foot on a dead orc’s shoulder, pivoted, and swung the femur into the side of the skeleton’s knee.

Crack.

The leg snapped sideways. The trainee collapsed, momentum carrying it face-first into the pile. Miles followed with a two-handed strike to the back of its skull. Bone splintered. Green fire sputtered.

Combat Registered.

Improvised Weapon Proficiency: 1%

Morale Adjustment: Irrelevant

The arrow-rib skeleton leapt at him from the left.

Miles ducked too late. Fingers raked his cheek. Cold fire lanced through the scratches, and his vision blurred at the edges. The skeleton’s jaw snapped inches from his ear. Its breath smelled like old pennies and cellar dust.

“Personal space!” Miles slammed his forehead into its face.

Bad idea.

Pain burst white across his skull. The skeleton reeled less than he did.

It grabbed his shoulder and drove him backward. Miles fell hard, bodies breaking his fall in ways that were both soft and crunchy. The femur slipped from his grip. The skeleton crawled over him, jaw working, green flames reflected in the slick black of its teeth.

He shoved a forearm under its chin. The thing was light, but relentless. Its fingers dug into his collarbone. He could feel the tips grinding against bone.

A red smear appeared across his vision.

HEALTH: 63%

Condition: Bleeding / Panicking / Unarmed

“Helpful,” he snarled.

His right hand groped blindly. Cloth. Hair. A shattered cup. Something jagged.

He seized it and rammed it upward.

The shard of broken spearhead punched through the skeleton’s eye socket and out the back of its skull. Green fire sprayed like sparks from a grinder. The trainee shuddered once, then collapsed across his chest in a clatter of bones.

SKELETAL TRAINEE defeated.

Experience gained: 3

Miles lay beneath it, panting.

Then he felt something move inside his hand.

Not the spearhead. Not the bones.

Something beneath his skin stirred, black and eager.

The broken skull in front of him exhaled a thread of pale smoke. It should have dissipated into the corpse pit stink. Instead, it curled toward Miles’ palm. The veins in his hand darkened, turning ink-black beneath the skin. A symbol bloomed across his wrist: a crooked crown made of bone, split down the middle by a vertical line of static.

The smoke touched him.

Cold pleasure knifed up his arm.

Not pleasure. Hunger rewarded.

Miles arched off the corpses as the fragment sank into him. For one heartbeat, he saw flashes that were not his own: a training yard beneath white banners, a wooden sword in bony hands, an instructor’s boot crushing ribs, an endless command hammered into a dead mind.

Stand. Fight. Fail. Repeat.

Then the vision snapped shut.

GRAVEBORN PASSIVE DISCOVERED: Grave Harvest

Effect: Fallen enemies may yield Fragments. Harvested Fragments can restore minor Health, reveal memories, unlock traits, or corrupt existing abilities.

Warning: Grave Harvest is not an approved Tutorial function.

The warning line flickered.

Then appeared again, this time sharper.

NOTICE: Unauthorized soul interaction detected.

The air in the pit went still.

Every skeletal trainee froze.

Miles slowly sat up, bones sliding off his chest. “That sounds bad.”

Above the pit, something moved.

A figure leaned over the iron railing at the top of the wall. Tall. Too tall. It wore a long red coat stitched from strips of leather and parchment, each strip covered in tiny moving text. Its head was a deer skull with gold spectacles perched on the nasal ridge. A black instructor’s cane tapped against the railing, tap, tap, tap.

“Candidate Renner,” it said, voice bright as a school bell and twice as cruel. “How fascinating.”

The skeletal trainees resumed moving all at once.

Miles swore and rolled away as three sets of claws raked the place where his head had been.

The instructor watched from above. “Most candidates take between four and nine minutes to discover screaming. You, however, have accessed a prohibited mechanic in under two. Efficient! Deeply illegal, but efficient.”

Miles snatched up the femur again and swung at a skeleton’s ankle. “Are you the tutorial NPC?”

“Instructor,” the deer-skull creature corrected. “NPC is a slur used by the recently incarnated and the terminally unimaginative.”

“Great. Is there a feedback form?”

“Yes. It is your corpse.”

A skeleton buried both hands in Miles’ side.

He screamed despite himself. The pain was immediate and intimate, fingers punching through skin like ice picks. He hammered the femur into its elbow. Once. Twice. The joint shattered. He kicked the skeleton back and pressed a hand to his ribs. Blood seeped between his fingers, dark red, too warm, too real.

HEALTH: 41%

Bleeding worsened.

Tutorial Tip: Avoid damage to reduce dying.

“I missed this kind of design philosophy,” Miles gasped.

The pit had become motion. Bones crawling from beneath bodies. Green eye-fires blinking awake. There were not twelve trainees now. There were at least thirty, maybe more, dragging themselves out of the dead like a class arriving late.

Miles’ raid leader brain—the part of him that had once tracked cooldowns, boss timers, positioning, player egos, and the inevitable collapse of human discipline after midnight—finally shoved panic out of the chair.

Resources. Terrain. Aggro. Win condition.

He could not kill thirty skeletons in an open pit. Not with a bone club and a hole in his ribs. The gate was the objective. The wall was too high. But the corpse heap sloped toward the barred exit. The skeletons climbed badly. Their feet caught in ribs and armor straps. They were light. Brittle. Single-minded.

And there were bodies everywhere.

He backed toward the steepest part of the heap, drawing the front line after him. “Come on,” he said, breath ragged. “Stack up for cleave.”

“Oh, listen to that,” the Instructor called down. “Strategy. How quaint. Candidates usually rely on hope. Hope has excellent mouthfeel but very low survival value.”

Miles ignored it.

The first three skeletons scrambled up after him. He waited until the lead one reached for his knee, then shoved his femur through its rib cage and twisted. It snagged between the ribs like a lever. He yanked sideways, pulling the skeleton across the path of the one behind it. They tangled. The third crashed into both.

Miles kicked.

The cluster rolled down the corpse slope, gathering two more trainees on the way. Bones clattered, limbs snapping beneath the pile’s weight. One skull cracked open on a black stone outcrop.

SKELETAL TRAINEE defeated.

Experience gained: 3

Pale smoke rose from the broken skull.

Miles saw it. Felt it. The Graveborn mark on his wrist pulsed like a second heartbeat.

The smart move was to ignore it. The warning had already made the System notice him. The instructor was watching. Whatever celestial moderation existed in this afterlife MMO had probably just received a ticket marked urgent exploit behavior.

But his ribs were bleeding, his head rang, and the next wave was climbing.

“Fine,” he hissed.

He reached.

The fragment snapped into his palm.

Cold surged through him. Flesh tightened. The bleeding in his side slowed, then clotted into black scabs that crawled like beetles across the wound. His health ticked upward.

Grave Harvest successful.

Minor Health restored.

Memory Fragment absorbed: Formation Drill – Shield Line

HEALTH: 49%

For a breath, he knew how to lock shoulders with soldiers who no longer had shoulders. He knew the weight of a shield, the rhythm of bracing against impact. The knowledge was incomplete, cracked, but useful. Like downloading a tutorial video directly into his bones.

Above, the Instructor’s cane stopped tapping.

“Candidate Renner,” it said softly, “do that again.”

“Pass.”

“That was not a request.”

A new window slammed across Miles’ vision, red-bordered and shaking.

CALIBRATION ADJUSTMENT.

Instructor Override Accepted.

Spawning Advanced Lesson.

The corpse pit groaned.

At the bottom, near the drain, the bodies began to sink. Not collapse. Sink, as if the stone beneath them had turned to mud. A circle of runes burned through gore and bone, each symbol flaring white-hot before darkening to char. The skeletal trainees nearest the circle immediately dropped to their knees. Some pressed skulls to the ground. Others tried to crawl away and were dragged backward by invisible hooks.

Miles’ mouth went dry.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

A hand emerged from the rune circle.

It was made of bone plated in tarnished iron. Then came an arm, a shoulder, and a skull crowned with three broken swords. The creature hauled itself from the pit floor, twice the height of the other trainees and armored in pieces scavenged from a hundred dead soldiers. Rusted chainmail hung from its ribs. Shields were bolted across its spine. Its eyes burned blue instead of green.

It carried a training sword the size of a railroad tie.

ADVANCED SKELETAL TRAINEE – LEVEL 4

Role: Punishment Demonstrator

Disposition: Pedagogical

The Instructor spread its arms above. “Lesson two! Some mistakes generate additional content.”

The giant skeleton looked up at Miles.

Miles looked at the gate.

Still chained.

Beyond it, he could see a narrow corridor lit by ghost-blue lanterns. Freedom, or at least the next flavor of murder.

“Open the gate,” Miles shouted.

“Defeat the lesson.”

“This is a level one tutorial.”

“And you are a level one problem.”

The Punishment Demonstrator charged.

It did not move like the others. It moved like a miniboss. Heavy, deliberate, each step crushing bones to powder. Its sword dragged behind it, carving a trench through corpses. Miles could almost see the attack telegraph: shoulders twist, weapon angle low, sweeping strike designed to catch panic-rollers.

Don’t dodge back. Dodge through or go over.

He ran downhill toward it.

The Instructor made a delighted sound. “Oh, he has brain damage.”

The massive sword swept across the pit with a scream of displaced air. Miles threw himself forward and down, sliding on his hip through blood and grave slime. The blade passed over him close enough to shave hair from his head. He slammed into the Demonstrator’s shin, wrapped both arms around the iron-plated bone, and jammed the broken spearhead into the knee joint.

The weapon screeched against metal.

No break.

The giant skeleton lifted its leg.

Miles had half a second to regret every choice he had made since birth.

It kicked him.

The world became impact.

He flew backward, hit the corpse slope, and bounced. His shoulder dislocated with a wet pop. Health warnings screamed red across his vision. He tasted blood. Not metaphorical blood. Real blood, hot and coppery, flooding his mouth.

CRITICAL HIT RECEIVED.

HEALTH: 18%

Condition Added: Dislocated Shoulder

Tutorial Tip: Larger enemies often hit harder.

Miles laughed. It came out as a choking cough.

The skeletal trainees closed in, drawn by weakness. The Demonstrator turned, blue eyes steady, sword rising for the finishing blow.

He was going to die in the tutorial.

Not gloriously. Not saving a stranger. Not under tons of concrete with the last humane act of his life still warm in his chest. He was going to get beaten to death by a themed onboarding module while a deer-skull manager made comments.

Something ugly and familiar woke beneath the fear.

It was the same thing that had kept him raid leading long after the game stopped being fun. The same thing that made him study logs at three in the morning because twenty-four people swore they had not stood in fire and the data said otherwise. The same thing that made him refuse to quit a boss after two hundred wipes, not because victory mattered, but because failure had begun to feel personal.

Spite.

“No,” Miles said.

A trainee grabbed his bad arm. Pain detonated. He nearly blacked out. Instead, he leaned into the agony, used the skeleton’s grip as leverage, and slammed his shoulder against a jutting shield embedded in the corpse pile.

Pop.

His shoulder snapped back into place.

Miles screamed through clenched teeth, then drove his forehead into the skeleton’s skull. This time he angled it right, striking the already cracked temple. Bone gave. The trainee collapsed.

Smoke rose.

He harvested without hesitation.

Grave Harvest successful.

Minor Health restored.

Memory Fragment absorbed: Pain Is Instruction

HEALTH: 26%

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