Chapter 2: The Tutorial That Was Deleted

The subway entrance had become a throat.

People shoved into it in wet, panicked waves, their shoes slipping on the stairs, hands scraping tile and steel as if they could claw their way below the city and hide under enough concrete to make the end of the world miss them. Above, Michigan Avenue flashed blue-white through the station mouth. Every few seconds the new sky strobed with transparent windows and falling text. Somewhere out in the street, something bellowed with a metallic, animal sound that did not belong to anything born on Earth.

Elias Voss hit the landing hard enough that his shoulder clipped a pillar. Pain burst hot down his arm. He barely noticed.

He was breathing too fast, lungs full of dust, perfume, brake grease, and that sharp electrical smell that had flooded the air the instant reality cracked open. His work badge still slapped against his chest on its cheap lanyard. The absurdity of that almost made him laugh. End of civilization, and he was still wearing an IT support badge from a company whose servers had probably just been eaten by goblins.

Behind his eyes, the hidden menu flickered like an afterimage burned into his retinas.

CLASS SELECTED: BETA TESTER

STATUS: UNLISTED

WARNING: PUBLIC SUPPORT UNAVAILABLE

No one else had seen it. He knew that because while people screamed and grabbed at the glowing windows hanging in midair, their reactions had all been the same—shock, confusion, greed. Standard class prompts. Standard apocalypse script.

Elias had gotten something else.

He shoved deeper into the station, half carried by the crowd. Fluorescent lights overhead flickered in uneven strips. The digital ad board over the platform had turned into a blue pane filled with static symbols, as if the station itself had been caught halfway between software versions. A CTA train sat dead on the tracks with its doors open, interior lights blinking in a slow, dying rhythm. Somebody was yelling for their kid. Somebody else was sobbing loud and wet into their sleeve.

Then a man near the fare gates screamed, and the sound cut through everything.

Elias looked back.

The creature climbing down the station stairs had too many joints.

It moved like a spider trying to imitate a greyhound, all wrong angles and bursts of impossible speed. Its skin gleamed like oil on wet pavement. Where a face should have been, there was only a vertical split lined with small white teeth that clattered together as it sniffed the air. A blue marker hovered over it, shaking with the same faint instability he had seen in his hidden menu.

Skitter Hound Lv. 3

It launched itself into the crowd.

People scattered. One man got his arm up in time to keep the monster’s teeth off his throat, and the thing shredded through his coat sleeve and meat in a shower of blood. A woman in heels fell. The Skitter Hound twisted in midair toward her with obscene, joyful precision.

Elias moved before he thought.

There was a trash can by the pillar. Metal, half bolted down. He grabbed it with both hands and ripped. The bolt screamed out of crumbling concrete. He swung the can like a drunk baseball bat and caught the hound across the ribs in a crash that dented the cylinder in around the creature’s body.

The impact shivered through his wrists. The monster hit the wall, landed upside down, then sprang back to its feet as if bones were optional.

Its eyeless face turned toward him.

Bad choice, Elias thought. Great. First five minutes of the apocalypse and I’m already pulling aggro.

The hound came at him low.

He stumbled backward over a dropped backpack, nearly went down, and something in his vision snapped open like a command prompt.

BETA TESTER PASSIVE DETECTED: Fault Sight

Unstable entities, hidden seams, and exploit conditions become visible under stress.

The world lurched.

For one impossible instant, the monster wasn’t a monster. It was a model. A wet, half-finished shape stitched together with translucent lines and blinking nodes. Its movement path flashed in a red arc. Three of its legs blazed orange where the geometry clipped wrong through the floor.

Weak points.

No. Not weak points. Errors.

Elias ducked, the hound’s claws ripping through the air above his scalp, and brought the crushed trash can down not where it was but where the red path said it would land. Steel rang. Two of the creature’s legs folded with a noise like snapping PVC. The hound skidded, suddenly off-balance, and Elias kicked the twisted lid edge straight into the seam where its front limb met its torso.

The thing shuddered.

Then it split apart in a burst of blue fragments that smelled like ozone and rotten meat.

You defeated Skitter Hound Lv. 3.

Experience gained: 18

The block of text floated in front of him for half a heartbeat before dissolving into sparks.

Elias stared at the space where the monster had been. Around him, the station had become a riot. More creatures paced at the top of the stairs. Someone in a business suit was screaming at a floating menu, “I don’t know what Vanguard means!” A teenage girl with a glowing spear icon over her head dragged her little brother toward the tracks, because the tracks looked safer than the concourse and everybody had lost the ability to tell bad options from worse ones.

Another blue message snapped into existence.

BETA EVENT DETECTED.

Nearby geometry instability: 87%

Hidden layer breach imminent.

“What?” Elias said aloud.

The floor answered.

It gave way beneath him with the soft, final sensation of stepping through rotten ice.

He had time for one startled curse before the platform vanished and the world turned inside out.

There was no falling in the normal sense. No rush of air, no clean drop. It felt like being pulled through a loading screen made of cold water and static. Chunks of the station flickered around him in broken frames—the yellow safety strip, a woman’s reaching hand, a suspended coffee cup, a train window full of wide white faces—then all of it smeared into bands of impossible blue.

Something chimed.

Unauthorized access.

Restoring deprecated environment…

Loading: Tutorial_Intro_01

Status: DELETED

Override accepted.

He hit ground.

The impact knocked the breath from him. Cold grass slapped his cheek. Grass.

For a few seconds he lay there coughing, fingers dug into damp soil, while his brain tried and failed to connect subway concrete to open air. The ground under him was springy, too even, every blade of grass trimmed to exactly the same height. When he lifted his head, the world ahead looked like someone had built “fantasy meadow” from memory and then quit halfway through.

Sunlight poured over a rolling field bright enough to hurt. Wildflowers grew in neat repeating clusters: red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue. A dirt path wound between cartoon-perfect boulders toward a timber fence and a little village in the distance. Smoke rose from chimneys in frozen, decorative curls that didn’t drift with the wind. Beyond the village, the horizon simply… ended.

Not in darkness. In white.

A blank wall of unfinished nothing stood where mountains or skyline should have been, stretching up and up until it swallowed the sky itself. Parts of it glitched with wireframe outlines and strips of scrolling code that vanished whenever he focused on them.

Elias pushed himself onto his elbows.

“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “Nope.”

A bird sang nearby. The note clipped halfway through and repeated from the beginning. Sang, clipped, repeated. Somewhere farther off, a sheep bleated in a perfect loop.

His whole body went tight.

This wasn’t just another dungeon. He knew unfinished assets when he saw them. He’d spent enough graveyard shifts crawling through broken backend tools and abandoned test servers to recognize the stink of a thing no one expected users to touch.

This is a dev room.

His hidden class menu pulsed once at the edge of his vision, almost smug.

Location discovered: ???

Provisional designation assigned: The Tutorial That Was Deleted

Danger Rating: Unknown

Recommended level: Not Applicable

“That seems bad,” Elias muttered.

He got to his feet and looked himself over. No obvious broken bones. His left shoulder ached from the pillar. His palms were scraped raw. His phone was gone, probably somewhere between reality layers. In his right hand he was still gripping the dented metal trash can lid by sheer stubborn accident.

Good. A shield. Sort of.

A soft chiming came from his left.

He turned and saw a translucent sign hanging in midair beside the path. It looked like a tutorial prompt from an early-2000s RPG, complete with gold trim and cheerful serif font.

Welcome, New Adventurer!

Walk forward to begin your heroic journey!

Tip: Use WASD to move.

Elias stared at it for three full seconds.

“I hate this place already.”

The sign flickered. For a moment the friendly text distorted into gibberish symbols and a red line of error code. Then it corrected itself and resumed smiling at him.

Grass rustled behind him.

He spun, lid up.

What emerged from behind a boulder looked at first glance like a wolf cub. Then it stepped fully into view, and the illusion died. The body had loaded in duplicate layers. One head occupied the proper position, all fangs and glowing blue eyes; a second, ghostly half-head protruded from its shoulder, opening and closing its mouth a second too late. Its hindquarters blurred every other frame, briefly becoming transparent. A label danced over it, numbers stuttering.

Tutorial Wolf Lv. 1

Tutorial Wolf Lv. 1

Tutorial Wolf Lv. ?

“Of course,” Elias said softly.

The wolf lowered itself with a growl that crackled like damaged speakers.

His heart thudded hard once. The station had been chaos. This was worse in a different way—too quiet, too bright, as if something dead had been propped up to imitate harmlessness. He shifted his grip on the lid and reached instinctively for that strange pressure behind his eyes.

Come on. Fault Sight.

The world sharpened.

The wolf’s body lit with tracer lines. Its duplicated head pulsed violet. One of its back legs was half a second out of sync with the rest of the model. Beneath its health bar—when had health bars started feeling normal?—a tiny line of unreadable text flickered in and out like a comment left by a tired developer.

OnSpawn: Aggro_Player // Disable after quest_accept

The wolf sprang.

Elias sidestepped. Claws tore his sleeve instead of his throat. He jammed the metal lid down on the creature’s back, and the ghost head bit uselessly through air. The real body twisted with shocking force, but it had overcommitted. Elias saw the desynced leg hit the ground a fraction late and slammed his heel into the joint.

The world made a sound like glass crunching under a boot.

The wolf froze mid-snap. Its duplicated head stretched sideways in a smear of pixels. Then the entire creature collapsed into blue shards.

You defeated Tutorial Wolf Lv. 1.

Experience gained: 640

Elias did not move.

The number hovered in front of him, bright and undeniable.

“No,” he said.

The message remained.

“No, that’s… no.”

He’d never played a game where the tutorial wolf gave enough experience to catapult a player straight into endgame taxes. Another window burst open before he could process it.

LEVEL UP!

Elias Voss — Level 1 → 4

+3 Attribute Points

+1 Skill Point

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