Chapter 2: The Class That Shouldn’t Exist

The road out of Ashwick had been designed by someone who loved first impressions.

Milo could see it under the ash.

White stone pavers curved gently between fields of starter wheat, each tile engraved with curling vines and tiny arrows that would have looked whimsical if they weren’t half-buried beneath soot and goblin footprints. A wooden signpost leaned at the fork ahead, its cheery painted letters blistered black by heat.

TUTORIAL SHRINE — 0.3 MI

RABBIT MEADOWS — 0.5 MI

PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE SLIMES

Beyond it, the village burned in a low, hungry murmur. Roof beams cracked. Something collapsed with a sigh of sparks. Smoke dragged itself across the ground in gray ribbons, stinging Milo’s eyes and coating his tongue with the taste of pennies and charcoal.

He kept walking.

The pitchfork rested over his shoulder, though calling it a pitchfork was starting to feel insulting. The three tines had been warped into a jagged hook-blade lattice after his accidental miracle back in the square, the metal veined with faint blue lines like trapped lightning beneath glass. It hummed against his palm. Not loudly. Just enough to remind him that physics had lost an argument and hadn’t gotten over it.

A cracked blue rectangle flickered at the edge of his vision with every step.

STATUS: UNRESOLVED
Entity classification failed.
Player flag: NULL
NPC flag: NULL
Hostile flag: PENDING
Please proceed to nearest Tutorial Shrine for emergency identity reconciliation.

“Emergency identity reconciliation,” Milo muttered. His voice came out rougher than he expected. Smoke, screaming, death, reincarnation into the world’s most anticipated full-dive MMO—apparently those things were hard on the throat. “Because ‘figure out what the hell I am’ didn’t test well with focus groups.”

The system window shivered, as if offended.

Behind him, something yipped.

Milo stopped.

The sound came again—small, wet, desperate.

He turned with the pitchfork already sliding down into both hands.

At the edge of the road, half under a broken cart, a rabbit the size of a loaf of bread struggled in a snare of glitched shadow. Its fur should have been white. Instead it flashed between textures: snowy pelt, bare pink polygons, a brief and horrifying checkerboard grid. One eye was round and black. The other was a spinning loading icon.

Three goblins crouched around it.

Not the green, cackling tutorial kind he remembered from old design docs and trailers. These were wrong. Their limbs bent with puppet stiffness, jaws too wide, teeth repeating in nested rows like a bad asset duplication. One held a rusted knife. Another gnawed on a chunk of something that might once have been a boot.

The third turned its head all the way around without moving its shoulders.

Its red nameplate snapped into view.

Corrupted Goblin Forager — Level 2
Status: Tutorial Override / Hunger Loop / Error: Aggression Boundary Missing

“Oh good,” Milo said. “The rabbits have bugs and the goblins have patch notes.”

The goblin shrieked and ran at him.

Milo had never been in a real fight before today. He had played a thousand of them. Balanced them. Broken them. Sat in meetings where men with three watches said things like combat feel needs more juice while Milo secretly prayed for a meteor. None of that should have helped when a malformed goblin came sprinting at his kneecaps with a knife.

But games had rules.

Even broken ones.

The goblin lowered its shoulder too early. Its attack animation had no cancel window. Milo saw the commitment in the twitch of its hips and stepped left before thinking. The knife scraped his jacket. He swung the pitchfork down.

The weapon bit into the goblin’s spine with a sound like splitting bamboo and wet cabbage. Blue veins along the tines flared.

Improvised Weapon Proficiency increased: 1 → 2
Damage dealt: 18
Weak Point: Spine Knot
Corruption bleed detected.

The goblin folded. Not died—folded. Its model crumpled inward until for one nauseating second Milo could see a black lattice inside it, crawling with symbols that were not letters. Then it burst into gray motes and a strip of leather that landed on the road.

The other two goblins stared.

Milo stared back, heart slamming hard enough to bruise.

“Yeah,” he said, lifting the pitchfork again. “I’m having a weird day too.”

They came together.

The first leapt high, its jaws unhinging. The second darted low, knife flashing for his calf. Milo backpedaled, heel skidding on ash-slick stone. He jabbed at the low one and missed, the hook-blade scraping sparks off a paver. The high goblin landed on his chest.

Claws punched through his shirt and into skin.

Pain detonated white behind his eyes.

HP: 22/34
Bleed: Minor

“Get—off!”

He slammed his shoulder into the signpost. Once. Twice. The goblin clung to him, teeth snapping inches from his cheek, breath rank with rot and sweet spoiled fruit. On the third impact, the signpost snapped.

Milo hit the ground with the goblin under him.

Something cracked that wasn’t wood.

The low goblin lunged. Milo grabbed blindly and caught the broken signpost shaft. A prompt shimmered over it.

Damaged Object detected: Splintered Signpost
Structural integrity: 12%
Eligible for PATCH.

The word sparked through him like a dare.

He didn’t know how to use the ability. Not really. Back in the village, panic had pulled the trigger. This time he reached for the feeling on purpose: the itch behind his eyes, the sense that the world was a fabric snagged on a nail and his fingers could find the thread.

“Patch,” he hissed.

Blue light leaked from his palm into the signpost.

The wood twisted.

It did not repair. It reinterpreted.

The cheery plank with TUTORIAL SHRINE painted across it folded down the shaft, letters stretching into runes. Splinters braided into a sharpened edge. The arrowhead became a wedge of glowing white wood.

PATCH successful.
Splintered Signpost altered into Wayfinder Spear.
Effect: Points toward assigned objective. Deals bonus damage to entities obstructing tutorial path.

“Assigned objective,” Milo grunted, and rammed the spear into the low goblin’s open mouth.

The bonus damage was not subtle.

Light punched out of the back of the goblin’s skull in the shape of an arrow.

Damage dealt: 31
Objective Obstruction bonus applied.
Corrupted Goblin Forager defeated.

The last goblin, pinned under his weight, let out a choking squeal. Milo rolled off, coughing, and brought the pitchfork down with more desperation than technique. The hook caught its throat. The blue veins drank the shadow seeping from its body.

For half a heartbeat, Milo heard whispers.

Not words. Mechanics. Cooldowns ticking. Hunger routines looping. Aggression radius expanding forever because some line of control had been cut.

Then the goblin dissolved.

Corrupted Goblin defeated.
Experience gained: 12
Experience held in escrow pending class selection.
Loot generated: Frayed Leather Strip x2, Goblin Ear x1, Cracked Copper x4

“Escrow?” Milo wheezed from the road. “I get mauled by knife gremlins and you put my XP in escrow?”

The cracked interface did not answer.

The glitched rabbit gave one final yip from under the cart.

Milo considered walking away. He really did. His chest hurt, his shirt was sticking to him, and he had never once in his life looked at a rabbit and thought this is my responsibility. But the thing’s loading-icon eye spun faster, and the black snare around its hind leg pulsed like a vein.

He sighed so hard it turned into a cough.

“Fine. But if you turn out to be a secret raid boss, I’m going to be very disappointed in your foreshadowing.”

He crouched and inspected the shadow snare. Up close, it wasn’t rope. It was a broken status effect, a loop of black text biting into the rabbit’s leg.

Condition: ROOT
Duration: 00:03 / 00:03 / 00:03 / 00:03 / 00:03
Error: Duration expired but removal event not found.

Milo winced. “Oh, I know this one. Classic dangling effect reference. We shipped one of these in a prototype once. Turned all the archers into statues permanently. Players loved it until they didn’t.”

The rabbit trembled.

He touched the loop of black text.

The itch behind his eyes returned, subtler this time. There were edges to the ability, he realized. Little handles. Patch wasn’t a fireball. It didn’t simply hurl power into the world. It asked a question: what is broken, and what should it have been?

Milo swallowed.

“Patch.”

Blue light slid across the black loop. The repeated duration collapsed into a single exhausted timer. The snare popped like a soap bubble.

PATCH successful.
Broken Status Effect repaired: ROOT removed.
Skill familiarity increased.

The rabbit bolted three feet, stopped, turned, and stared at him with its normal eye and its loading icon.

“You’re welcome,” Milo said.

The rabbit sneezed.

A tiny window appeared.

Ashwick Glitch-Hare regards you with unstable gratitude.

“Great. Even the wildlife has emotional baggage.”

The hare vanished into a ditch, flickering between frames as it went.

Milo gathered the loot because apparently he was the sort of person who did that now. The copper coins were warm and stamped with the profile of a woman wearing a crown of stars. The goblin ear he very deliberately did not inspect. He tucked everything into the leather satchel he’d taken from the village well and stood on legs that felt borrowed.

The Wayfinder Spear, true to its description, tilted insistently toward the road ahead.

Milo followed it.

The world changed as he approached the shrine.

The smoke thinned first. Then the ash stopped falling, ending at an invisible boundary across the road as cleanly as if someone had dragged a line tool through the air. On one side, ruin. On the other, sunlight poured over green grass and wildflowers with suspiciously perfect color saturation.

Birdsong played in the trees.

It looped every eleven seconds.

Milo stood with one foot in the burned tutorial zone and one foot in the untouched meadow, listening to the same cheerful trill restart again and again.

“That’s not creepy at all.”

The Tutorial Shrine sat on a hill at the meadow’s center, surrounded by marble steps and floating crystals. It should have been beautiful. It almost was. White columns rose in a circle around a fountain of liquid light. Banners fluttered from no visible wind, each embroidered with a different class sigil: sword for Warrior, staff for Mage, leaf for Ranger, sunburst for Cleric, dagger for Rogue.

At the top of the shrine, a statue of a hooded woman held an open book in one hand and a blade in the other. Her face had never been carved. Or had been scraped away.

A dozen blue motes drifted around the altar, bobbing like helpful fireflies. As Milo climbed the steps, they snapped into formation and chimed.

Welcome, New Adventurer!
You have reached a Tutorial Shrine.
Please stand within the selection circle to finalize identity, choose class, allocate beginning attributes, receive starter equipment, and bind to resurrection protocol.

Milo stopped at the second-to-last line.

“Resurrection protocol.”

The motes chimed pleasantly.

“You had resurrection this whole time?” His laugh came out sharp. “That would have been nice before I got stabbed, burned, eaten by server smoke, and whatever happened to my actual body.”

No response.

Of course not.

He stepped into the circle.

The shrine awakened.

Light rose from the floor in rings, scanning him from boots to hair. The sensation was intimate and cold, like being measured by a tailor made of needles. Milo clenched his jaw as translucent panels unfolded in the air around him, dozens of them, crisp and whole in a way his cracked interface had never managed.

IDENTITY RECONCILIATION INITIATED
Searching account registry…
Searching soul signature ledger…
Searching NPC birth tables…
Searching monster spawn manifests…
Searching environmental object index…

“Environmental object?” Milo said. “If I come back as a chair, I’m uninstalling the afterlife.”

The panels flickered.

No match found.
Expanding search parameters…
Searching deprecated entities…
Searching legacy test users…
Searching crash artifacts…
Searching emergency payloads…

The fountain’s liquid light began to ripple. The class banners snapped taut. Milo felt pressure build in the air, a silent compression that made his ears pop.

One panel turned red.

ERROR.
Entity contains non-native design imprint.
Entity contains severed player authentication residue.
Entity contains unauthorized System-call compatibility.
Entity is not eligible for standard onboarding.

Milo’s mouth went dry.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “That sounds personal.”

The class sigils brightened one by one.

Available Classes:
Warrior
Mage
Ranger
Cleric
Rogue

The words hovered in comforting blue light.

Then each one cracked.

Warrior — unavailable. Reason: Body template unverified.
Mage — unavailable. Reason: Mana channels irregular.
Ranger — unavailable. Reason: Beast pact registry rejected.
Cleric — unavailable. Reason: Divine witness refused.
Rogue — unavailable. Reason: Shadow archive returned: absolutely not.

Milo blinked at the last line.

“Even the shadows are gatekeeping me?”

The shrine did not laugh. But something under the fountain did.

It was faint—a dry, electric chuckle that skittered across Milo’s teeth.

The sunlight dimmed.

All five class banners went blank.

No valid classes available.
Recommending termination and clean respawn.

The selection circle under Milo’s feet flashed red.

“Whoa.” He stepped back.

The circle moved with him.

“No. Bad shrine.”

Light hardened around his ankles.

Termination will begin in:
5

“We are not doing a countdown.”

4

Milo drove the Wayfinder Spear into the glowing ring. The shaft shook violently. Sparks climbed his arms.

3

His broken interface jittered at the edge of his vision, the old cracked blue screen fighting its way over the shrine’s clean panels.

PATCH available.
Target: Tutorial Selection Circle
Damage: Class resolution failure / Termination fallback
Warning: Patching active onboarding infrastructure may violate celestial warranty.

“Void the warranty,” Milo snapped.

2

He slammed his palm onto the circle.

“Patch!”

The world inverted.

For an instant, Milo was not standing in a shrine. He was falling through layers.

He saw Aetherion from underneath: not forests and kingdoms, but threads of rule and number, lattices of gold code stretched around mountains, rivers defined by flowing equations, dungeons pulsing like tumors with black-red roots. He saw cities like knots of permissions. He saw gods as vast silhouettes leaning over the world, their fingers made of command lines.

Then he saw cracks.

Everywhere.

Hairline fractures in monster behavior. Rusted loops in quest logic. Whole regions wrapped in deprecated flags. Doors leading to zones that had been deleted but not forgotten. Corpses with respawn anchors still attached. Children born with loot tables behind their eyes.

And behind it all, deeper than sky, a colossal blue presence turned its attention toward him.

Not a face.

An interface pretending not to be one.

Milo felt it recognize him.

He felt it flinch.

UNAUTHORIZED PATCH REQUEST DETECTED.
Source: Milo Vance
Classification: Error
Correction: Classification updated.

The shrine exploded outward in blue light.