Chapter 3: Tutorial Zone: No Respawns

The warning symbols around Mason’s class selection pulsed like infected wounds.

CLASS ASSIGNED: Patchborn
ARCHETYPE: Support / Error / Unknown
STATUS: Deprecated
NOTICE: This class is not recommended for active combat scenarios.
NOTICE: This class is not recommended for survival.
NOTICE: This class is not recommended.

That last line hung there in the air, silver letters twitching as if even the System hated having to display them.

Mason stared at it with the stunned blankness of a man watching a flatline monitor after three rounds of epinephrine. Around him, the dead city breathed beneath a crimson sky. The ruins of the suburban street stretched in both directions, lawns turned to ash-gray weeds, minivans half-swallowed by black vines, houses split open like dollhouses for giants. The cul-de-sac had been torn from Earth and dropped into a nightmare, complete with mailboxes and basketball hoops and front doors hanging loose from hinges.

The people clustered in the road stared at their own floating screens, some sobbing, some shouting, some laughing too loudly because panic had found a new mask.

“I got Swordsman!” a teenage boy yelled, voice cracking between terror and triumph. He was maybe sixteen, wearing a school hoodie and one shoe. A bronze icon of crossed blades shimmered above his head. “I got a weapon! Look, I—”

A rusty short sword appeared in his hand with a flash of motes.

Someone screamed.

Not because of the sword.

The corpse-wolves at the edge of the street had stopped circling.

They were listening.

Mason felt his paramedic instincts shove through the fog of unreality. Count heads. Identify exits. Triage threats. He spotted thirty, maybe thirty-five newcomers. Office workers, students, a man in surgical scrubs, an elderly woman clutching a purse like a shield, a delivery driver still wearing his insulated backpack. No organization. No plan. The System had thrown them into a kill box and called it onboarding.

A woman in a bloodstained wedding dress had chosen Pyromancer. Tiny embers crawled between her fingers as she whispered, “No, no, no, no,” over and over. A broad-shouldered man in a torn police uniform flexed gauntleted fists beneath the icon Iron Brawler. A young mother with a baby carrier strapped to her chest had no weapon at all, only a floating symbol of a green leaf.

“Everyone move,” Mason said.

His voice came out rough, smoke-scraped from the blackout and the bus crash and his own death. Too quiet at first. Nobody listened.

One of the corpse-wolves lowered its skull-shaped head. Its body was a starved greyhound stretched over exposed ribs, fur missing in patches, eyes burning the wet yellow of old pus. The thing’s jaw split wider than anatomy allowed, revealing rows of teeth hooked backward like fish gaffs.

“Everyone move!” Mason shouted.

The wolf lunged.

The teenage Swordsman screamed and swung the rusty blade with both hands. It clipped the creature’s shoulder, biting deep enough to spray dark sludge. The wolf crashed into him anyway. Boy and beast hit the pavement in a tangle of snapping teeth and flailing legs.

The street detonated into chaos.

People ran in every direction. Notifications chimed like cheerful bells over the screams. The Pyromancer bride flung a stream of fire that scorched the asphalt and set a mailbox ablaze. The police officer tackled one wolf hard enough to crack its spine against a parked sedan, then howled as another sank teeth into his calf. The mother with the baby sprinted toward Mason, eyes huge and glassy.

Mason grabbed her elbow and hauled her toward an overturned garbage truck blocking the far end of the cul-de-sac. “There! Behind the truck!”

“I don’t know what my class does,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what it does!”

“Doesn’t matter. Move.”

His own class icon flickered above the edge of his vision, a crooked silver needle threaded through a broken square. No weapon manifested. No armor hugged his body. No burst of strength filled his muscles. His inventory contained exactly nothing except the clothes he’d died in: torn paramedic jacket, dark cargo pants, boots sticky with blood that wasn’t entirely his.

Support / Error / Unknown.

Great. Fantastic. Cosmic malpractice.

The garbage truck smelled like rot and diesel. Mason shoved the mother behind it with six others: the elderly woman, a skinny accountant with cracked glasses, the delivery driver, two college girls, and the man in surgical scrubs whose hands shook so badly he couldn’t close his character screen.

“Stay low,” Mason ordered. “Don’t bunch up. If one gets over, kick it back.”

“Are you military?” the delivery driver asked.

“Paramedic.”

“That’s not military.”

“No,” Mason said, glancing over the truck’s dented side at the wolves tearing through the street. “It’s usually worse pay.”

A chime cut across the carnage, bright and merciless.

TUTORIAL EVENT INITIATED
Welcome, Newcomers, to the Eternal Patch.
Objective: Survive the Tutorial Zone.
Time Remaining: 02:59:59
Primary Threat: Goblin Scavenger Pack
Secondary Threats: Carrion Wolves, Environmental Hazards, Other Participants
Respawns: Disabled
Reward: Class Stabilization, Starter Cache, Tower Eligibility
Failure: Permanent Soul Deletion

For one impossible second, even the wolves seemed to pause beneath the weight of those words.

Then the screaming grew worse.

“Goblin?” the accountant breathed. “It said goblin. It said goblin scavengers.”

A sound answered him from the ruined houses.

Not a howl. Not a growl.

A laugh.

It came from everywhere at once: behind broken windows, inside gutted garages, under the collapsed porch across the street. High-pitched, wet, delighted. Like children giggling over a dying insect.

The corpse-wolves backed away from the center of the street, hackles rising. One dragged the teenage Swordsman by the shoulder, but dropped him when something whistled through the air and buried itself in its eye.

A jagged spear.

The wolf shrieked. Small figures poured from the houses.

They were the size of malnourished ten-year-olds, green-grey skin stretched tight over whipcord muscle, ears long and pierced with bones. They wore scavenged clothing: football pads, saucepan helmets, strips of carpet as cloaks, shin guards strapped to forearms. Their weapons were worse than crude. Rusty knives taped to broom handles. Garden shears. Rebar hooks. Kitchen blades hammered into spearheads. Every edge looked filthy enough to kill twice.

There were dozens.

The goblins hit the wounded first.

Mason watched one leap onto the downed police officer’s back and drive a screwdriver into the gap beneath his skull icon. Another dragged the teenage Swordsman away by his ankle while three more stabbed at his hands until he dropped the short sword. Their laughter had rhythm. They worked like hyenas with thumbs.

“We can’t stay here,” Mason said.

“Where do we go?” asked one of the college girls. Mascara streaked black down her face. Her class icon read Chanter, but no song came from her trembling mouth.

Mason scanned the street. North: open road, goblins swarming. East: a row of houses, many broken, possible cover. West: a drainage ditch lined with concrete, choked with red grass and black water. South: the garbage truck blockade and beyond it a split in the neighborhood where the asphalt had buckled upward into a jagged ridge.

There would be boundaries. Tutorial zones always had boundaries in games. But this wasn’t a game—not in the way screens made it feel. Blood steamed on cold asphalt. The stink of ruptured intestines cut through the garbage truck rot. A woman was begging for her mother while goblins stripped rings off her fingers.

No respawns.

The words clenched around Mason’s ribs.

“Drainage ditch,” he said. “Low profile. It might connect to somewhere.”

“Might?” the delivery driver demanded.

“You got a map?”

The driver’s mouth snapped shut.

Mason grabbed a length of broken metal from the garbage truck’s side—part of a mirror bracket, one end sharpened where it had torn free. It was too light, awkward in his hand, but better than empty fingers.

A goblin clambered onto the hood of a nearby car and spotted them.

Its grin widened. “Softs! Softs behind stinker cart!”

The words were mangled but understandable. Others turned.

“Run,” Mason said.

They ran.

The group spilled from behind the truck and sprinted toward the ditch. Mason took the rear because of course he did, because somewhere in the machinery of him a broken gear still insisted his body belonged between danger and strangers. His lungs burned. His boots slipped on ash. The mother stumbled, baby carrier bouncing empty against her chest.

Empty.

Mason’s heart kicked.

“Where’s your baby?” he shouted.

She looked down as if noticing for the first time. Her face collapsed. “He wasn’t with me when I woke up.”

There was no time to answer that. No safe answer existed.

A goblin burst from a hedge to their left, swinging a rake with knives tied to its tines. The accountant went down with a shriek as blades raked across his thigh. Mason pivoted and slammed the metal bracket into the goblin’s temple. The impact juddered up his arm. The goblin staggered, more offended than hurt, and snapped yellow teeth at him.

The delivery driver hit it with a recycling bin.

Plastic cracked. The goblin crumpled.

“Holy—” the driver gasped.

“Help him!” Mason barked.

Together they hauled the accountant up. Blood poured down his leg, bright arterial spurts. Mason’s training measured the wound before his fear could. Deep laceration. Femoral maybe nicked but not fully severed. Pressure needed now.

“Belt,” he said.

“What?”

“Your belt, now!”

The delivery driver fumbled his belt off. Mason looped it high on the accountant’s thigh and twisted with the metal bracket. The man screamed, nearly collapsing.

“Good,” Mason said through his teeth. “Screaming means you’re breathing.”

Something flashed at the corner of his vision.

PATCHBORN CLASS RESPONSE DETECTED
Condition observed: Structural compromise / organic vessel / acute fracture potential
Skill seed available.
Accept Skill? Y/N

“Are you kidding me?” Mason snarled.

“I’m sorry!” the accountant sobbed.

“Not you.”

The goblins were closing. Six of them bounded across lawns, cackling, knives out. One wore a child’s bicycle helmet with pink unicorn stickers.

Mason jabbed at the air. “Yes!”

SKILL ACQUIRED: Mend Minor Break [Rank I]
Repair a minor fracture, crack, split, tear, or integrity failure in a target object, body, or simple construct.
Limitations: Cannot restore missing mass. Cannot cure poison, disease, curse, or death. Excessive corruption may cause unpredictable output.
Cost: 10 Mana
Cooldown: 30 seconds
Note: This skill should not exist in current tutorial build.

Cold flooded Mason’s veins, then heat. He became aware of something inside him he hadn’t possessed a second before—a thin reservoir of pressure behind his sternum, like a second lung filled with blue light. Mana. It responded to his attention with a nauseating lurch.

“Can you walk?” Mason asked the accountant.

“No, no, it hurts, I can’t—”

Mason slapped a hand over the torn meat of the man’s thigh, not knowing what else to target. “Mend.”

The skill activated.

It did not feel like casting a spell. It felt like finding the exact seam where reality had torn and pinching it closed with bare fingers. Mason saw—not with his eyes, but with some new brutal sense—the parted muscle fibers, the nicked vessel wall, the ragged split in skin. Blue-white threads crawled from his palm into the wound. The flesh shuddered.

The accountant screamed again, louder.

The arterial spurting stopped.

The wound knitted—not healed perfectly, not erased, but pulled together into an angry red seam as if hours of emergency suturing had happened in a heartbeat.

Mend Minor Break successful.
Target integrity restored: 31% → 58%
Proficiency gained.

Mason stared.

“You fixed it,” the delivery driver whispered.

“I patched it,” Mason said, because the distinction felt important and horrifying.

The accountant took one shaky step. Then another.

A goblin spear hissed past Mason’s ear and clanged off the garbage truck.

“Move!”

They plunged into the drainage ditch as the first goblins reached them. The concrete slope was slick with moss the color of bruises. Everyone slid more than climbed, hitting the bottom in a splash of foul black water that soaked Mason’s boots. The ditch ran behind the houses, half-covered by creeping vines and collapsed fences. Above them, goblins gathered at the edge, yipping.

“Down!” Mason shouted.

A volley of objects rained into the ditch: stones, broken glass, a lawn dart, something that looked like a sharpened femur. One of the college girls cried out as glass sliced her cheek. The Chanter finally found her voice—not a song, but a raw, terrified note that vibrated in Mason’s teeth.

The air shimmered.

For three seconds, the projectiles veered aside as if hitting an invisible curve.

She stared at herself. “I did that?”

“Do it again when they throw,” Mason said.

“I don’t know how!”

“Figure it out fast.”

They ran crouched through the ditch, black water sucking at their ankles. Behind them, goblins scrambled down the slopes, claws scraping concrete. The elderly woman moved surprisingly fast, purse tucked under one arm, jaw set with grim fury. The man in surgical scrubs tripped twice before Mason grabbed the back of his shirt and shoved him onward.

“What’s your class?” Mason asked him.

“Anatomist,” the man panted. “I was a podiatrist. I don’t—I don’t do trauma.”

“Congratulations, you got promoted.”

A chain-link fence blocked the ditch ahead, bent but still anchored across the concrete channel. Beyond it, the ditch continued toward a storm culvert large enough to crawl through. Safety, or at least a narrower place to die.

The delivery driver reached the fence first and rattled it. “It’s locked!”

Of course it was.

Mason looked back. Goblins closed through the ditch, five of them in front, more behind. Their eyes gleamed in the red light. They knew the fence was there. They had herded the newcomers to it.

“Climb!” Mason said.

The mother scrambled up first, then the college girls. The accountant struggled with his patched leg, face white with pain. The elderly woman shoved her purse into the delivery driver’s chest.

“Hold this, dear.”

Then she climbed like a spider.

Mason almost laughed. Almost.

The goblins hit before the accountant made it halfway.

The lead one lunged with a hook made from rebar. Mason met it with his metal bracket. The weapons clanged. The goblin was stronger than its size suggested, all rope muscle and murderous glee. Its breath smelled like spoiled meat.

“Patchy soft,” it hissed, eyes narrowing at Mason’s flickering class icon. “Bad soft. Boss wants bad soft.”

Mason’s blood chilled. “What boss?”

The goblin grinned.

The delivery driver smashed it from the side with the elderly woman’s purse.

Something inside the purse made a solid, metallic thunk. The goblin’s jaw dislocated sideways and it collapsed into the water.

The driver stared at the purse. “Ma’am, what do you have in this?”

From atop the fence, the elderly woman called, “Pennies.”

More goblins surged.

Mason stabbed one in the throat with the bracket. It died kicking, black blood gushing over his hand. Another slashed his forearm, opening a hot line of pain. He punched it in the face, slipped in the water, nearly went down. A spear jabbed toward his stomach.

The accountant, still clinging to the fence, kicked backward. His heel caught the spear shaft and knocked it aside.

“Go!” Mason yelled.

“I can’t!”

“You can!”

The Chanter screamed that vibrating note again. The air buckled. A goblin leaping at Mason struck the distortion and spun away, smacking headfirst into the concrete wall. Mason used the opening to grab the accountant’s waistband and shove him upward with everything he had.

The man went over. Mason followed, fingers scraping chain link, boots finding purchase. A hooked blade sliced across the back of his calf. Pain flared white. He hauled himself up anyway and dropped over the far side, landing badly on one knee.

They didn’t stop.

The storm culvert yawned ahead, round and dark, its mouth rimmed with rusted bars. One bar had been bent outward. The gap was narrow.

“Through,” Mason said.

“We’ll get trapped,” the delivery driver said.

“We’re already trapped. This makes them come one at a time.”

That argument worked because it sounded tactical and because nobody had a better one. They squeezed through the bent bars into darkness that smelled of mold, cold stone, and something sweetly rotten deeper within. Mason went last again, because some habits were terminal.

The goblins reached the fence behind them and began climbing, shrieking insults.

Inside the culvert, water dripped in steady echoes. Silver UI light from class icons painted frightened faces. The baby carrier mother had no tears left; she moved like a sleepwalker. The Chanter pressed both hands to her mouth. The accountant kept touching his thigh as if expecting it to split open again.

Mason crouched by the bent bar. The gap was their only door.

He looked at the rusted metal. A long crack ran through the base of the bent bar where some previous impact had weakened it. His new sense prickled. Structural compromise. Split. Break.

Can mend it closed?

His mana reservoir had partially refilled, a thin pressure returning beneath his sternum. He didn’t know the numbers until he focused.

Mana: 17 / 30

Enough.

Mason pressed his palm to the cracked base of the bent bar. “Mend.”

Blue-white threads sank into rusted iron. The metal groaned. The bent bar shivered, then dragged itself inward by inches, not fully straight, but enough to narrow the gap. Rust sealed over the crack like scabbed skin.

Mend Minor Break successful.
Target integrity restored: 12% → 46%
Proficiency gained.

A goblin slammed face-first into the narrowed gap and got stuck at the shoulders.

It snarled, snapping teeth inches from Mason’s hand.

The delivery driver yelped and kicked it in the forehead until it fell back into its friends. The culvert erupted with goblin fury.

“You fixed the bars,” the elderly woman said. She had her purse back and held it like a holy relic. “Handy.”

“Temporarily,” Mason said.