Chapter 1: Press Start to Die

Mason Vale knew the slime was going to kill him the moment its health bar unfolded into seven separate phases.

It hung above the creature like a bad joke rendered by a sadist.

Lv. 1 Verdant Slime
HP: 18,000 / 18,000
Phase 1: Gelatinous Innocence
Phase 2: Digestive Bloom
Phase 3: Core Exposure
Phase 4: Acidic Hymn
Phase 5: Mitosis Event
Phase 6: Royal Jelly Ascension
Phase 7: ???

Mason stared at it from the middle of a field the color of a butcher’s apron, beneath a sky so red it looked like sunset had been murdered and smeared across the heavens.

The slime jiggled.

It was waist-high, translucent green, and full of things beginner monsters were not supposed to be full of. Bones drifted in its body. Not little rabbit bones or bird bones, either. Human ribs. A jawbone with three teeth left in it. A rusted sword slowly dissolving in a pocket of fizzing yellow acid. Something that might have been a leather boot, except a set of toes still curled inside.

A cheerful blue window floated in front of Mason’s face, cracked diagonally from corner to corner as if someone had taken a crowbar to reality.

WELCOME TO THE TUTORIAL
Please defeat the Lv. 1 Verdant Slime to proceed.

Reward: Wooden Sword, 3 Copper, Basic Pants

TIP: Slimes are weak to blunt damage!

Mason looked at the slime. He looked down at his hands.

No weapon. No pants upgrade. No inventory. No shoes, unless his old socks counted, and given that one had a hole over the big toe, he suspected the System had opinions.

He was wearing the same black hoodie he had died in, the same coffee-stained shirt beneath it, and the same gray sweatpants he had worn for three straight days while testing build 0.9.13 of Kingdoms of Ash: Definitive Reforged Legacy Edition, a title so bloated it had once crashed the company Slack when a producer tried to type it in full with trademark symbols.

He had died.

That part should have been more difficult to accept.

Unfortunately, Mason Vale had spent the last eight years in game development quality assurance, which meant reality breaking around him felt less like a metaphysical crisis and more like Tuesday with worse lighting.

“Okay,” he said, voice hoarse. “Nope. Absolutely not. This is either a coma, a stress hallucination, or the most aggressive onboarding experience I’ve ever seen.”

The slime answered by producing a wet, bubbling groan.

Mason took one step backward through red grass that rasped against his calves like dry tongues. The field stretched in every direction, broken by crooked tutorial signposts, half-buried cobblestones, and skeletal trees whose branches held tutorial banners shredded to threads. The air smelled of iron, hot dust, and old rain. Somewhere far away, thunder rolled, though the sky held no clouds—only red light and a black sun with a bite taken out of it.

The blue window flickered.

QUEST ACCEPTED: First Steps!
Objective: Defeat the Lv. 1 Verdant Slime.
Progress: 0/1

WARNING: Leaving the tutorial combat area will result in corrective measures.

“Corrective measures,” Mason repeated. “Great. Love vague threats in the morning. Or after death. What time is it in hell?”

The slime bounced once.

The ground trembled.

Mason’s sarcasm dried up.

Because a waist-high slime should not have made the earth shake. A waist-high slime should have gone plip-plop and died after three hits from a rusty dagger. A waist-high slime should not have compressed itself like a hydraulic press, swelling with internal bubbles, then launched across twenty feet of grass at the speed of a thrown car.

Mason moved on instinct.

He had tested too many boss fights not to recognize a telegraph. The slime’s body flattened, its outer membrane darkened, the ground beneath it pulsed green—three-frame windup, maybe five if the engine choked. He threw himself sideways just as it smashed into the spot where he had been standing.

The impact detonated mud, grass, and acid in a circular splash.

Something hot kissed Mason’s cheek. Pain flared sharp and immediate. He hit the ground shoulder-first, rolled badly, and came up choking on the coppery stink of scorched vegetation.

Where the slime had landed, the field smoked. The red grass had melted into black curls. A shallow crater hissed with acid foam.

Mason touched his cheek. His fingers came away bloody, skin blistering where a single droplet had struck.

“That,” he said, breath shaking, “is not level one behavior.”

The System window politely chimed.

COMBAT TUTORIAL: Dodge enemy attacks by moving out of the way!

“Thank you,” Mason snapped. “Incredibly useful. Ten out of ten. Ship it.”

The slime turned toward him.

It did not have eyes, but Mason felt it seeing him. Somewhere within its green depths, a fist-sized core glowed faintly, pulsing with rotten gold light. The bones inside shifted, forming and reforming around it like worshippers circling an altar.

A sound came from inside the slime. Not a growl. Not a roar.

A laugh.

Low. Bubbling. Hungry.

Mason’s stomach clenched.

He scanned the field the way he scanned broken levels: exits, interactables, exploitable geometry, anything the designers had forgotten to nail down. Tutorial signpost to the left. Broken fence to the right. A boulder behind him. A dead tree with one fallen branch. No UI minimap. No hotbar. No health bar that he could see, which was either reassuring or the System assuming he did not need to watch himself die in numbers.

The signpost read:

HIT THE SLIME TO LEARN BASIC ATTACKS!

Below the cheerful painted letters, older text had been scratched into the wood by something desperate.

DO NOT HIT IT.

Mason swallowed.

The slime compressed again.

“Right,” Mason said, and sprinted for the fallen branch.

The slime launched.

This time he expected the speed. He dove behind the dead tree just as the creature slammed into it. The trunk exploded in a spray of rotten wood and acid mist. Splinters sliced Mason’s hoodie. A wave of heat rolled over his back.

He grabbed the fallen branch with both hands, came up coughing, and swung at the slime as it reconstituted itself.

The branch struck with a wet thwack.

For one glorious second, the creature rippled.

A tiny white number popped above it.

-1

Mason stared.

The slime paused too, as if personally offended.

Its health bar changed.

HP: 17,999 / 18,000

“Oh, go to hell,” Mason said.

The branch began to smoke.

He threw it away just before it dissolved down to black sludge in his hands. Acid ate through the bark with cheerful efficiency, dripping onto the ground and hissing holes in the dirt.

The slime’s surface bulged. The glow around its core brightened.

Verdant Slime begins casting: DIGESTIVE SPRAY

“Casting?” Mason said. “You’re a slime.”

A cone of acid vomit blasted from the creature.

Mason ran.

The spray tore across the field behind him in a sizzling fan, chewing through grass, stones, signposts, and one unlucky tutorial dummy that had been hidden behind a hillock. The dummy raised a wooden sword in a frozen heroic pose for approximately half a second before melting into a faceless brown candle.

Mason cut hard right, lungs burning. Acid droplets pattered behind him like rain on a tin roof, except every drop carved smoking pits into the soil. His heart hammered with a frantic, animal rhythm that did not care whether this was a hallucination, afterlife, or unfinished DLC.

He needed a weapon.

He needed a plan.

He needed the person who designed this encounter to be dragged before a tribunal.

The broken fence ahead was made of old timber stakes tied with frayed rope. One stake had snapped, leaving a jagged end. Mason skidded beside it, seized the post, and hauled. It resisted. He planted a foot on the lower rail and pulled harder.

Behind him, the slime made that bubbling laugh again.

“Not now,” Mason grunted.

The post tore free with a wet crack of rotten wood and clinging red roots.

He turned just as the slime rolled toward him.

Not bounced. Rolled. Its body flattened and spun, gathering speed, bones inside it becoming blades pressed against the membrane. The rusted sword in its gut slid outward until the dissolved stump of its edge stuck through like a shark fin.

Verdant Slime uses: GELATINOUS CHARGE

Mason thrust the stake down and braced it against the ground.

The slime hit.

The impact traveled up Mason’s arms like a lightning strike. His wrists screamed. The stake punched through the slime’s outer membrane, sank deep, and struck something hard with a crystalline ting.

The golden core.

The slime shuddered.

A real damage number appeared.

-127 CRITICAL HIT!

Mason laughed once, wild and breathless. “There we go.”

Then the slime’s body flowed up the stake.

It climbed the wood like living oil, acid hissing, membrane peeling open around the embedded weapon. Mason tried to let go, but his fingers had cramped around the stake. Burning slime licked his knuckles.

Pain swallowed the world.

He screamed and stumbled backward. Skin bubbled across his fingers. The smell hit him a heartbeat later—cooked meat and chemical rot—and some detached, stupid part of him thought, At least it’s not my keyboard this time.

He ripped his hands free, leaving strips of skin on the dissolving wood.

The slime recoiled, stake still lodged in its body. Its core flickered faster. The health bar trembled.

HP: 17,872 / 18,000

The first phase bar dipped by a fingernail.

Then a crack ran through the blue System window in front of Mason’s face. It widened with a sound like ice breaking.

PHASE TRANSITION ERROR
Threshold not reached.
Corruption detected.
Attempting correction…

“No,” Mason said. “No, no, no. Don’t you dare.”

The slime convulsed.

Its health bar refilled.

HP: 18,000 / 18,000

Then Phase 2 lit up anyway.

PHASE 2: DIGESTIVE BLOOM

The slime blossomed.

Its body split open in four directions, petals of transparent green flesh peeling back to reveal a furnace of acid and bone. The golden core rose from the center on a stalk of jelly, bright as a diseased sun. Around it, hundreds of tiny mouths opened in the membrane, each with teeth made of crystallized digestive fluid.

Mason backed away, hands shaking, breath ragged.

“That’s a bug,” he whispered. “That is absolutely a bug. Phase transition at full HP? Severity one. Blocker. Do not certify.”

The System window blinked.

COMBAT TUTORIAL: Some monsters become stronger when damaged!

“I damaged it once!”

The slime screamed.

The sound hit Mason in the chest. It was not loud in the way thunder was loud. It was intimate. It crawled into his ears, down his throat, behind his eyes. The red field shivered. Distant birds, if they were birds, took flight from the skeletal trees as black commas against the sky.

The mouths spat.

Acid bullets streaked toward him.

Mason ran in a zigzag, cursing with the creativity of a man who had worked under milestone deadlines. Droplets punched into the dirt around him. One hit his left calf. His leg nearly folded. Another sliced through his hoodie sleeve and burned a line across his forearm. He reached the boulder he had spotted earlier and dove behind it.

The acid barrage hammered the stone.

Smoke rose in green ribbons. The boulder hissed, shrinking by inches as the acid ate through it.

Mason pressed his back to the rock and cradled his burned hands. His fingers trembled uncontrollably. Red blisters climbed his skin. His pulse thudded in his wrists, each beat a hammer on raw nerves.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Think. Tutorial field. Enemy overtuned by… ten thousand percent. Quest requires kill. Boundary punishes leaving. Environment destructible. Core vulnerable. Acid body. Need range. Need—”

The boulder cracked.

Mason looked up.

A green tendril slid over the top of the stone, smoking where its acid touched rock. Then another. Then six more. The slime was climbing over the boulder, mouths opening along each limb.

“Need new boulder.”

He scrambled away as the tendrils stabbed down. One speared through the hem of his hoodie and pinned it to the ground. Mason twisted, yanked, and felt fabric tear. A second tendril lashed around his ankle.

The pain was immediate.

Acid burned through sock and skin, sealing around him in a grip like hot glue. Mason kicked with his other foot. His heel sank into the tendril with a wet pop, and the slime released him more from surprise than injury.

He rolled downhill, hit a patch of red mud, and slid into a shallow ditch.

For a moment, the world narrowed to breath, pain, and the taste of dirt.

Then his shoulder bumped against something metal.

Mason turned his head.

A sword lay half-buried in the ditch.

Not a heroic sword. Not even a decent sword. It was short, rust-chewed, and bent near the tip, its leather grip mostly gone. But it was metal, and it had an edge, and Mason had never felt love like this.

He grabbed it with ruined hands and nearly blacked out from the pain.

A window popped up.

ITEM ACQUIRED: Rusted Training Sword
Quality: Trash
Durability: 3/20
Damage: 2-4

This weapon has seen better centuries.

“Don’t care,” Mason hissed. “You’re beautiful.”

The slime crested the ditch.

It had changed again. Phase 2 had swollen it larger, stretching its body until it stood taller than Mason by a head. The mouths across its surface dripped acid threads. The stake remained inside it, dissolving slowly, an ugly dark line pointing toward the core.

Mason’s brain caught on that detail.

The stake pointed toward the core.

The slime had not removed it.

Because it could not.

“Oh,” Mason said, and smiled through bloodied teeth. “Object collision. You stupid blob.”

The slime lunged.

Mason did not run this time.

He waited until the creature committed, until its whole body surged forward and its mouths opened for the bite. At the last second, he dropped flat. The slime sailed over him, its acidic underside close enough to singe his hair. Mason thrust the rusted sword upward with both hands.

The blade entered the slime’s body.

It dragged through jelly, hit the embedded stake, and scraped along it like a rail. Mason used the stake as a guide, forcing the bent tip toward the core.

The slime landed behind him, but momentum carried the sword deeper.

The tip struck gold.

A flash erupted inside the creature.

-302 CRITICAL HIT!
Corrupted Core Disruption!

The slime shrieked. Its tendrils whipped outward, slamming Mason into the ditch wall. His ribs cracked. The sword was torn from his hands. The creature recoiled, its body convulsing around the wounded core.

For one shining second, Mason thought he had found the exploit.

Then the health bar did something that made his soul leave early.

HP: 17,698 / 18,000
Adaptive Resistance Gained: Piercing Damage -90%

“You adaptive-resistance at level one?” Mason rasped. “Who hurt you?”

The slime’s core pulsed.

The golden light deepened to amber.

The red grass around the creature wilted, then liquefied, sinking into the earth as if the field itself were being digested. The mouths on the slime closed one by one. Its surface smoothed. Its body grew still.

A low note rolled across the field.

Mason had heard that kind of audio cue before.

Big attack.

Raid wipe.

“Oh, come on.”

Verdant Slime begins casting: ACIDIC HYMN
Cast Time: 10 seconds

The air vibrated.

Seven seconds.

The ditch walls sweated green.

Six.

Mason tried to push himself upright. His left leg buckled. The ankle the slime had grabbed was a ruin of blood, blackened skin, and white-hot agony. His burned hands could barely grip the mud.

Five.

He looked around. Ditch. Mud. Broken sword lying six feet away, already smoking. Half-dissolved stake inside the slime. No cover. No movement skill. No inventory potion. No UI health bar because apparently the System wanted his death to have mystery.

Four.

Mason laughed.

It came out cracked and a little hysterical.

“This is bad onboarding,” he told the sky.

Three.

The System window flickered in front of him, cheerful blue beneath its fractures.

TIP: If combat feels too difficult, try leveling up!

“Against what?” Mason shouted.

Two.

The slime’s body became transparent. The golden core opened like an eye.

One.

Mason raised both middle fingers.

“Patch notes,” he said, “or I riot.”

The world turned green.

Acidic Hymn did not hit like liquid. It hit like sound had become poison.

The slime released a ring of luminous acid vapor that expanded through the field in a perfect circle. The grass vanished. The ditch walls melted. Mason’s clothes dissolved off his body in smoking strips. His skin blistered, split, and sloughed beneath a wave of pain so immense it became white silence.

He tried to scream. His throat melted first.

For a few seconds—or hours, or corrupted frames—Mason Vale existed as a collection of errors.

Heat. Green light. The smell of himself cooking. The impossible sensation of bones aching as acid found them. His vision narrowed to the cracked System window floating inches from his face, untouched by the destruction around it.

It displayed one final message.

YOU DIED.

Then everything went black.

Before the red field, before the slime, before the health bar with seven phases, there had been the office.

Not that office was generous. Iron Lantern Games rented the third floor of an old insurance building wedged between a vape shop and a dentist whose neon molar sign flickered like a warning from God. The office had exposed brick because exposed brick was cheaper than drywall, beanbags nobody used, and a coffee machine that sounded like it was gargling screws.

At 12:43 a.m., Mason Vale had been the last one there.

Again.

The QA pit glowed with unattended monitors, their screensavers bouncing company logos around like tiny ghosts. Empty cans of energy drinks formed a defensive perimeter around Mason’s workstation. His bug database had one hundred and thirty-seven open tickets assigned to him, twenty-six marked “Need Repro,” nine marked “Won’t Fix,” and one marked “Unable to verify because tester tone was unprofessional.”

That last one had been about a dragon clipping through a cathedral, soft-locking the final boss fight, and then T-posing while the player burned alive.

Mason still stood by the tone.

He had been hunched over his keyboard, eyes gritty, hoodie sleeves pushed up, watching the latest internal build stutter through the main menu. Rain tapped against the dark windows. The city beyond looked smeared and distant, headlights bleeding through glass like wet neon.

His phone buzzed beside a cold slice of pizza.