Chapter 1: Killed by the Tutorial
by inkadminMilo Voss knew the tutorial was broken when the slime hit him for nine thousand damage.
There was a wet little plap, like someone had dropped a raw egg from a second-story window, and then the entire left side of his body stopped belonging to him.
He flew backward through violet dust, boots furrowing twin trenches in the crater floor. Pain arrived a heartbeat late, huge and white and absolute, bursting behind his eyes with the confidence of a feature nobody had bothered to test. His ribs shrieked. His shoulder folded around itself. Something inside him made a noise like a snapping pencil.
Milo hit a chunk of black stone hard enough to crack it.
For one impossible second, he saw nothing but sky.
Not Earth’s sky. Not any sky a sane planet would have signed off on. This one had three moons, all bleeding silver light through bruised storm clouds, and above them rose a tower so tall it punched through the heavens and kept going. It was a black needle threaded with rivers of gold, vanishing into a whirlpool of stars. Floating islands circled it like debris around a drain. Some were forested. Some burned. One had what looked like an upside-down city dangling from chains as thick as highways.
Then the slime bounced into view.
It was the size of a delivery van.
“Nope,” Milo croaked.
The slime jiggled happily.
It was translucent blue, cheerful in the way only mindless tutorial enemies could be cheerful. A cube-shaped gelatinous nightmare with two black pebble eyes, a little smiling mouth, and a glowing crown-shaped icon floating above its head. Inside its wobbling body drifted bones, swords, half-digested shields, and what looked distressingly like the top half of a man in golden armor.
A blue window slammed open in front of Milo’s face.
TUTORIAL SLIME has attacked you!
Damage Received: 9,004
Critical Hit!
Crushing Damage! Acid Damage! Emotional Damage!
Milo blinked blood out of one eye.
“Emotional damage?”
Current HP: 1 / 38
Status: Near Death
Status: Internal Bleeding
Status: Questioning Life Choices
“That last one’s fair.”
He tried to sit up. His body voted against the motion with unanimous, screaming enthusiasm. He collapsed back against the stone, breath sawing through his teeth. The crater stank of ozone, sour blood, and hot metal. Violet ash drifted in slow spirals. Beneath him, the ground wasn’t dirt but shattered glassy material, black and blue and veined with pale light, as if a piece of night had been dropped from orbit and broken open.
The slime bounced closer.
Each hop shook the crater. Plorp. Plorp. Plorp.
Milo looked past it and finally noticed the corpse.
At first, his mind refused to understand scale. There was a wall of pale flesh at the crater’s edge, rising higher than a mountain range. Its surface was cratered with impact scars and threaded with dead constellations. Great silver feathers, each one longer than a city block, lay snapped and burning in the distance. A hand the size of a stadium had crushed a ridge flat. Its fingers ended in moon-white talons, and around one wrist hung a broken ring of planets, still turning slowly though their owner was dead.
A face lay half-buried in the horizon.
Beautiful. Terrible. Dead.
The corpse’s single visible eye was larger than a lake, glassy and dark, with a galaxy spiraling motionless in the pupil.
Milo swallowed. It tasted like pennies.
“Okay,” he said. His voice came out thin and hoarse. “That’s new.”
Another window appeared.
WELCOME, PLAYER!
You have been drafted into the Patchwork System.
World Fragment: Unknown Impact Zone
Scenario: Beginner Tutorial
Objective: Defeat 3 Tutorial Slimes.
Reward: Class Assignment, Starter Kit, 10 Copper.
Failure: Death.
Have fun!
Milo stared at the message. The slime gave a happy wiggle and absorbed a chunk of celestial feather with a sound like soup going down a drain.
“Defeat three,” he said. “Three of those.”
The window chimed.
Tutorial Tip: Use basic attacks to reduce enemy HP to 0!
Milo laughed once. It hurt enough that he nearly blacked out.
He had built tutorials. Bad ones, mostly. He had worked at Glass Hydra Interactive for six years, first as a systems designer, then as “temporary live operations support,” then as one of three exhausted people duct-taping a doomed fantasy MMO through publisher deadlines and executive pivots. He had written tooltips at three in the morning with cold coffee in his veins and despair in his soul. He had once been forced to add a smiling mascot who explained dodging while the game’s dodge button was disabled due to a network bug.
He knew broken onboarding when he saw it.
And this—this moon-corpse crater, this van-sized slime with raid-boss damage, this objective written by a sadist with access to a randomizer—was not merely broken. It was broken in the way a plane was broken after meeting a mountain.
The slime crouched.
Every inch of it compressed like a spring.
“Don’t,” Milo said.
It launched.
Milo rolled on instinct, and by rolled he meant flopped sideways while making a sound no adult man should make. The slime smashed into the stone where his torso had been. The impact burst a crater inside the crater. Acid splashed across his coat sleeve, hissing through fabric and skin.
Damage Received: 12
Current HP: 1 / 38
Passive Effect Activated: Tutorial Mercy
Fatal damage prevented while onboarding is incomplete.
Remaining Mercy Charges: 2
“Oh, thank God,” Milo wheezed.
Tutorial Tip: Mercy Charges help new players learn from mistakes!
“Getting hit by a meteor pudding for nine thousand damage was not a mistake. It was a lawsuit.”
His hand closed around something sharp. A shard of black stone, long as a kitchen knife and jagged along one edge. It pulsed faintly in his grip, cold despite the steaming crater around him.
A label flickered over it.
Improvised Weapon: Crater Glass Shard
Quality: Trash
Damage: 1-2
Durability: 3 / 3
Description: Technically a weapon if you are desperate, delusional, or in a tutorial.
“Finally,” Milo said. “Representation.”
He forced himself to his feet. The world lurched. His left leg dragged. His shirt was soaked with blood. He wore the same clothes he remembered wearing when he fell asleep at his desk: black jeans, gray hoodie, one sneaker with a loose sole, and a lanyard still hanging from his neck. The plastic badge at the end read MILO VOSS – SYSTEMS DESIGNER in faded letters, as if the universe wanted to rub it in.
His last memory came in fragments. Rain against his apartment window. A frozen microwave burrito. An email beginning with Unfortunately, due to restructuring. His old prototype build open on one monitor, the one nobody had funded, the one with the ridiculous working title Patchwork Paragon. He remembered laughing bitterly at the empty apartment. He remembered typing a note into the bug tracker: If reality had patch notes, who gets admin access?
Then a sound like a thousand servers screaming.
Then blue light.
Then impact.
The slime turned, unharmed. Its smiling mouth widened.
Above it, numbers appeared.
Tutorial Slime – Level 1
HP: 2,500,000 / 2,500,000
Affixes: Mythic Scaling, Raid-Tuned, Beginner Friendly
Milo lowered the glass shard.
“Beginner friendly,” he said softly. “Sure. Of course. Why wouldn’t it have two and a half million HP?”
A second slime oozed over a ridge of broken star-bone behind the first. Then a third. Smaller than the first, maybe only the size of a compact car. Their crown icons bobbed in the air. Their smiling faces were identical. The three of them jiggled with synchronized innocence.
Objective: defeat three tutorial slimes.
Milo’s grip tightened until the shard cut his palm.
“This is how I die,” he said. “Not heroically. Not dramatically. I get isekai’d into a cosmic landfill and murdered by onboarding content.”
The first slime hopped.
Milo ran.
It was less of a run than an argument with gravity. Every step sent knives up his side. His vision tunneled. The crater floor dipped and buckled beneath him, littered with chunks of impossible anatomy: silver feathers, broken armor, scales like fallen rooftiles, a chain link wider than his shoulders. Behind him, the slimes bounced with merry patience.
Plorp. Plorp. Plorp.
A blue arrow appeared in the air ahead.
Tutorial Tip: Kiting enemies allows you to avoid damage while attacking at range!
“I don’t have a ranged attack!”
Tutorial Tip: Try using your class skills!
“I don’t have a class!”
A pause.
Assigning class…
Please wait…
Milo stumbled behind a rib bone as large as an overpass. He pressed his back against it and gasped. The bone hummed with leftover divinity. The sound made his teeth ache. In the distance, beyond the corpse’s mountainous shoulder, a red jungle crawled up the side of a floating island. Farther still, impossible lights moved along bridges suspended between worlds.
The System window flickered.
Class Assignment Failed.
Error: Candidate record does not match available archetype.
Retrying…
“What does that mean?” Milo demanded.
Retrying…
Retrying…
Retrying…
Class Assignment Failed.
Error: NULL SOUL TEMPLATE
The words went red for half a second. The air around him chilled.
One of the slimes hit the rib bone.
The divine overpass cracked.
Milo screamed and dove away as a chunk the size of a bus collapsed behind him. The slime burst through the debris, still smiling, its gelatinous body full of glittering bone fragments. Acid smoke rolled from it. It inflated again, preparing to leap.
Milo threw the crater glass shard.
It spun end over end and stuck in the slime’s face with a tiny tik.
You dealt 1 damage!
Tutorial Slime HP: 2,499,999 / 2,500,000
Weapon Durability: 2 / 3
The slime’s smile did not change.
“Progress,” Milo said faintly.
The second slime landed on him.
There was no elegance to it. No dramatic dodge. No clever counter. The slime came down like a hydraulic press made of jelly, and Milo vanished under translucent blue weight. Acid burned his skin. His lungs compressed. Darkness crowded in from the edges of his vision.
Damage Received: 14,778
Critical Hit!
Current HP: 1 / 38
Passive Effect Activated: Tutorial Mercy
Fatal damage prevented while onboarding is incomplete.
Remaining Mercy Charges: 1
Inside the slime, Milo saw things.
A sword with a golden hilt, its blade etched with runes. A severed gauntlet still clenching a prayer bead. Three copper coins. A human skull wearing spectacles. Bubbles clung to his eyelashes. Acid found the cuts on his hand and made them sing.
He flailed. His palm slapped against the embedded glass shard. It shifted, carving a longer line through the slime’s inner membrane.
You dealt 2 damage!
You applied Surface Scratch.
Surface Scratch has been resisted.
Milo’s mind, cornered and panicked, did what it had always done when faced with disaster.
It started looking for systems.
Level one mob. Raid tuning. Mythic scaling. Mercy until onboarding complete. Class assignment failed because soul template null. Objective gated by class reward. Enemy stats impossible. There has to be a flag. There’s always a flag.
The slime squeezed.
His bones creaked.
Not a game. This is not a game. It hurts. It smells. I’m dying.
But the windows were real. The labels were real. The tutorial tips were real and condescending. And if there were windows, there was data behind them. If there was data, there were variables. If there were variables, some exhausted idiot somewhere had named them badly.
Milo dug his fingers into the slime’s burning interior and shouted, “Open character sheet!”
A window appeared crookedly, half-clipped through the slime’s body.
PLAYER PROFILE
Name: Milo Voss
Level: 1
Class: UNASSIGNED
HP: 1 / 38
MP: 12 / 12
Stamina: 3 / 41
Strength: 4
Agility: 5
Endurance: 3
Intellect: 11
Will: 9
Luck: -2
Traits: Offworlder, Beta Scarred, Design Debt
“Luck negative two?” he rasped. “Yeah, I noticed.”
The window jittered.
Class Assignment Pending…
Searching…
Searching…
Searching…
Something else flickered behind the character sheet.
Not blue. Green.
Old terminal green, the color of late-night builds and crash logs and command prompts open on second monitors. It flashed for less than a breath, buried beneath layers of polished System interface.
Milo stared.
The slime compressed again. His last Mercy Charge glowed faintly in the corner of his vision like a candle in a hurricane.
“No,” Milo hissed. “Don’t you dare hide the useful part behind the user-friendly garbage.”
He grabbed the edge of the blue character window.
His fingers passed through it at first. He swore, concentrated, and tried again—not with his hand, but with the same mental muscle he had used to drag nodes around in debug tools, to select nested objects, to force a UI element to reveal its properties when the interface designer insisted users didn’t need that.
The edge caught.
The window peeled back.
Reality stuttered.
For an instant, the crater went wireframe. The slime around him became a stack of translucent hitboxes, collision spheres, damage volumes, AI states, loot tables, obsolete tutorial tags, and a chunk of crimson text that pulsed like a wound.
ACCESS VIOLATION
Unauthorized interface call detected.
Attempting to suppress…
Milo bared bloody teeth.
“Suppress faster.”
The green window unfolded.
DEBUGGER INTERFACE // FORBIDDEN BUILD
User: MILO VOSS
Credentials: ???
Permission Level: ILLEGAL
Warning: Debug actions may cause backlash, corruption, memory bleed, divine attention, soft death, hard death, or narrative instability.
Continue?
Y / N
Milo laughed into a mouthful of acid.
“I always knew reading warnings was optional.”
He slammed his fist through Y.
The world screamed in code.
Green text cascaded across his vision. The slime’s interior froze around him. Acid droplets hung in midair. His own blood floated in red beads. Somewhere far above, thunder rolled backward.
DEBUGGER ACTIVE
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