Chapter 2: Welcome to the Broken Tutorial

The sky looked like someone had tried to uninstall heaven and given up halfway through.

Miles Vale lay on his back in cold grass that cut at his neck like wet glass, staring upward while broken crimson light leaked through fractures in the firmament. The cracks were not clouds. They were not lightning. They were seams, jagged and black-edged, splitting a red dome that stretched from horizon to horizon. Beyond them churned something darker than space, full of slow-moving shapes too large for his eyes to understand.

Every few seconds, one of the cracks pulsed.

The world shuddered.

A faint blue window flickered above his face, transparent and trembling like a dying monitor.

SYSTEM NOTICE

Unregistered entity detected.

Identity scan: MILES VALE

Origin: NULL

Status: ALIVE?

Threat Category: PENDING

Recommended Action: DELETE

“Yeah,” Miles rasped. His voice sounded like he had gargled gravel and panic. “Great. Love that for me.”

The window blinked out, then reappeared half an inch to the left.

DELETION QUEUE ERROR

Target cannot be resolved.

Retrying…

Retry failed.

Retrying…

Miles did not move at first.

Part of him was still on stream. Still hearing the hum of his old PC, the soft whine of the overworked fans, the crackle of his cheap microphone clipping as chat spammed laughing emotes. Still seeing the final boss arena of Kingdoms of Atherion Online on his monitor, the timer bleeding red, his hands shaking over keys he used to own like extensions of his bones.

Then the pain came back.

Not the chest-crushing, world-folding pain from his apartment floor. That had been hot and absolute, a white door slamming shut. This was sharper. Smaller. Realer. His ribs ached. His throat burned. His fingers were numb from the cold, and something with too many legs crawled across his wrist.

Miles slapped it away and sat up so fast the world lurched.

He was in a meadow.

At least, something had once intended this place to be a meadow. The grass grew in square patches like mismatched carpet tiles, some lush and green, others gray and brittle, others frozen under glassy frost despite the sour warmth in the air. Wildflowers repeated in identical clusters of three, their petals twitching in a wind that never touched his skin. A dirt path cut through the field in a perfect curve, then abruptly ended at a hole where the terrain dropped into nothingness. Beyond the hole, the path continued floating in midair, unsupported, leading toward a little village of crooked cottages half-swallowed by fog.

Starter zone.

The thought came so cleanly, so automatically, that for one second the terror receded.

He knew this layout.

Not exactly. Not from any released build. But the bones were there: meadow spawn, dirt path, village hub, low-level wildlife, tutorial boards, basic combat quest. He had run enough games, broken enough open-world RPGs, and torn apart enough early access junk to recognize the language of level design. The world was wearing a familiar mask.

The mask was rotten.

A wooden sign stood a few yards away, planted beside the path at a cheerful angle. Bright paint had once spelled something across its face, but the letters crawled and rearranged themselves as he watched. Red fluid dripped from the bottom edge, slow and glossy, pattering into the dirt.

Miles pushed himself to his feet.

His knees wobbled. He looked down and found himself dressed not in the faded hoodie and sweatpants he had died in, but in a rough linen shirt, brown trousers, and boots that looked as if they had been assigned to a peasant by an underfunded costume department. No phone. No watch. No wrist pain from years of speedrunning. His hands were younger than they should have been, leaner, the knuckles unscarred.

“Inventory,” he said.

Nothing happened.

He swallowed.

“Menu.”

A blue pane burst into existence inches from his nose with a sound like tearing foil. Half of it was missing.

CHARACTER STATUS

Name: Miles Vale

Race: Human? [UNVERIFIED]

Level: 1

Class: Dead Beginner

HP: 10 / 10

MP: 0 / 0

STR: 1

AGI: 1

VIT: 1

INT: 1

WIS: 1

LUK: -3

Unallocated Stat Points: ERROR

Skills: None

Perks: ???

System Judgment: Delete on Sight

Miles stared.

Then he laughed once, a dry little bark that had no humor in it.

“Dead Beginner.”

The class name glitched when he looked at it too directly, twitching between fonts. Dead Beginner. Dead Beggar. Dead Error. Dead King. Then back again.

“One in every stat,” he said. “Negative luck. No mana. No skills.”

His mouth had gone dry.

For a decade, numbers had been his religion. Frames, cooldowns, hitboxes, stamina costs, damage thresholds. A stat sheet was supposed to be a promise. It told you what you could risk and what would kill you. This one was laughing in his face.

The sign beside the path creaked.

Miles turned toward it.

The red letters stopped crawling just long enough to form words.

WELCOME, NEW HERO!

Please proceed to the village and speak to Tutorial Guide Elowen for your first quest.

Remember: rabbits are harmless and make excellent practice targets.

ERROR: GUIDE ELOWEN NOT FOUND

ERROR: VILLAGE NOT SAFE

ERROR: RABBITS ARE NOT HARMLESS

RUN

A drop of blood slid down the signpost.

It landed in the dirt with a soft hiss.

Behind him, grass rustled.

Miles froze.

Every gamer instinct he had ever trained screamed at once: Do not turn slowly. Do not wait for the reveal. Move.

He threw himself sideways.

Something white blurred past where his calf had been. It hit the signpost with a wet crack, and the sign exploded into splinters. Miles rolled through the grass, shoulder screaming, and came up on one knee.

A rabbit stood in the wreckage.

At least, its outline suggested rabbit. It was the size of a medium dog, with snow-white fur clumped in spikes and ears too long for its skull. Its front teeth curled over its lower jaw like paired daggers. One eye was pink. The other was a black hole full of tiny rotating red symbols.

Above its head hovered a health bar.

Corrupted Tutorial Rabbit

Level: 18

HP: 1,240 / 1,240

Disposition: Hostile

Miles blinked.

“A thousand two hundred HP?”

The rabbit turned its head toward him. Its neck cracked in three places.

“For the bunny?”

The rabbit screamed.

It was not a rabbit sound. It was a modem dying in a blender.

Miles ran.

His body did not want to. With one agility, running felt less like sprinting and more like negotiating with furniture. His boots caught in the uneven grass. His lungs burned after six steps. His arms windmilled wildly as the meadow bounced around him.

Behind him, the rabbit launched.

Miles heard the air split.

He veered left on instinct, not because he was fast, but because the attack pattern was obvious. Linear pounce. Startup shriek. Short recovery after impact. Low-level enemy design inflated to nightmare numbers.

The rabbit crashed into the dirt path ahead of him hard enough to throw mud into the air. Its teeth carved twin trenches through the ground.

Miles skidded, nearly fell, and grabbed a half-buried rock the size of his fist.

“Okay,” he panted. “Okay. Tutorial fight. Read the boss. Abuse recovery. Easy.”

The rabbit pulled its teeth from the earth and shook itself. Its health bar did not move. Of course it did not move. He had not hit it. He had a rock. It had murder dentistry.

It sprang again.

Miles waited half a heartbeat, then dove under and to the right. Fur brushed his hair. The rabbit sailed past, landed, twisted mid-skid, and launched again with no cooldown.

“Nope, that’s illegal.”

He threw the rock.

The stone struck the rabbit between the eyes with a pathetic tok.

1 damage dealt.

The health bar shaved away a line so thin it might have been his imagination.

Miles looked at the floating damage number.

“One.”

The rabbit looked at him.

“I did one.”

The rabbit’s mouth opened. Pink foam bubbled between its teeth.

Miles bolted toward the ruined sign. He needed terrain. Obstacles. Anything. His eyes swept the field with old professional desperation, reducing beauty and horror into collision boxes. Grass patches: no. Floating path: maybe, but death pit if momentum failed. Cottage fog: unknown threat. Broken signpost: wooden stake.

He lunged for the largest splinter.

The rabbit hit him from behind.

Pain detonated in his back. His feet left the ground. For a breathless second he saw the cracked sky swing above him, red and black and impossible. Then he slammed into the dirt path face-first.

CRITICAL HIT

-8 HP

HP: 2 / 10

Miles could not breathe.

His mouth filled with copper and mud. Something in his ribs had gone bright and wrong. He clawed at the ground, trying to push up, but his arms trembled like wet paper.

The rabbit landed ahead of him and turned around.

Its nose twitched.

Miles grabbed the splintered signpost beside his hand. It was jagged, sticky with red error-blood, and lighter than it looked. He got one knee under him.

“Come on then,” he wheezed. “You over-tuned cotton ball.”

The rabbit lunged.

Miles jammed the stake upward with both hands.

For one beautiful instant, physics remembered whose side it was on. The rabbit impaled itself through the shoulder. Its momentum drove the wood deep. Hot black blood splashed over Miles’s hands. The creature shrieked and spasmed, nearly ripping his arms from their sockets.

27 damage dealt.

Bleed inflicted?

ERROR: Target immune to tutorial conditions.

“Twenty-seven,” Miles gasped, half laughing, half choking. “There we go.”

The rabbit’s good eye rolled toward him.

Its body twisted around the stake.

Miles’s smile died.

The creature bit his face.

The world became teeth, pressure, and white noise.

FATAL DAMAGE

HP: 0 / 10

You have died.

There was no graceful fade to black.

Death was an elevator cable snapping.

Miles fell through himself.

The meadow vanished. The rabbit vanished. Pain stretched into threads and snapped one by one until there was only cold, then static, then an endless dark full of windows opening and closing too fast to read. He heard voices beneath the static. Not human voices. Administrative voices. Processes. Verdicts. A vast machine arguing with itself.

Entity terminated.

Removing local instance…

Removal failed.

Anchor detected.

Anchor source: UNKNOWN PERK

Attempting perk identification…

Identification failed.

Attempting suppression…

Suppression failed.

Miles floated in the dark without lungs, without hands, without a heartbeat.

He should have been terrified. He was. Somewhere. But terror required edges, and he had none.

A shape moved beneath him.

It was not the rabbit. It was not the System. It was a silhouette behind frosted glass, tall and crowned with broken antlers or branching code. For an instant, something looked up at him from the bottom of death.

Then a new window opened, brighter than the rest.

GLITCH PERK ACTIVATED

DEATH THIEF

Condition met: You were killed by a valid hostile entity.

Searching killer skill list…

Available skills detected:

— Pounce I

— Gnaw II

— Error Eye [Corrupted]

— Panic Scream I

— Soft Step I

Select one skill to retain upon respawn.

Warning: This perk violates Tutorial Law, Soul Continuity Law, Player Progression Law, and Common Sense.

If Miles had possessed a mouth, he would have smiled.

There it is.

Not salvation. Not exactly.

A mechanic.

The dark did not feel quite so endless anymore.

He focused on the list. Pounce sounded useful, but with his stats, launching himself at anything would probably convert him into paste. Gnaw was a damage skill, maybe scaling off strength, useless at one. Panic Scream could crowd control if it worked. Soft Step was stealth, maybe movement noise reduction, maybe evasion.

Error Eye pulsed faintly, its text crawling with red static.

Corrupted tag. Unknown effect. Possibly unusable. Possibly instant self-deletion. Possibly broken in the right direction.

Miles had built a career out of choosing the option no sane player clicked.

Information wins runs.

He selected Error Eye [Corrupted].

The dark screamed.

For one second, he saw everything.

The meadow as a grid of cracked tiles. The rabbit’s pathing node looping red. The village beyond the fog marked with skull icons and missing quest markers. Beneath the grass, old bones arranged in neat tutorial circles. Above the sky, a black command line hammering the same order again and again.

DELETE HIM.

DELETE HIM.

DELETE HIM.

Then Miles hit the ground.

He came back choking.

Grass stabbed his neck. Crimson light burned his eyelids. He rolled onto his side and vomited clear fluid onto the dirt.

RESPAWN SUCCESSFUL

Location: Broken Tutorial Spawn Meadow

Death Penalty: None

Level: 1

Class: Dead Beginner

Skill acquired: Error Eye [Corrupted] Lv. 1

System Judgment: Delete on Sight

NOTICE: This event has been reported.

Miles lay there trembling, face wet with sweat and vomit, while laughter crawled out of him in broken pieces.

He had died.

Again.

And he had kept something.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, that is disgusting.”

The meadow was quiet.

Too quiet.

He pushed himself up, every movement careful. His body was whole again. No crushed ribs. No missing face. His HP read 10/10 in the corner of his vision now, a faint bar that had not been there before. Below it, a new icon twitched: an eye drawn in red pixels, opening and closing.

Miles touched his face.

Both eyes felt normal.

“Skill details.”

The System window coughed into existence.

Error Eye [Corrupted] Lv. 1

Type: Active / Sensory / Illegal

Cost: 1 HP per second

Effect: Reveals unstable data, corrupted paths, hidden values, target intent fragments, and System inconsistencies.

Side Effects: Pain, visual distortion, attention from hostile administrative processes.

Warning: Prolonged use may result in blindness, mutation, deletion, or enlightenment.

“HP per second,” Miles said. “Because mana would’ve been too generous.”

He glanced across the meadow.

The signpost was intact again.

The rabbit was there too.

It sat beside the dirt path as if nothing had happened, white fur immaculate, health bar full. Its nose twitched. Its red-black eye rolled lazily in his direction.

Miles went still.

The rabbit did not attack.

Respawn grace period? Aggro reset? Distance threshold? It had killed him near the sign. He had respawned at the original point, maybe outside leash range. He looked down at the grass beneath him. There were faint circles burned into the ground—spawn markers, nearly hidden.

“Okay,” he murmured. “So we’re doing this.”

The rabbit’s ears flicked.

Miles backed away slowly until his heel struck a stone. He crouched, picked it up, and weighed it in his palm.

He was not going to kill a level eighteen rabbit with ten HP and a rock. Not directly. The numbers made that clear. But impossible numbers did not mean impossible fight. They meant the intended solution was somewhere else, or the zone was broken enough that no solution existed. In either case, he needed data.

He focused on the twitching eye icon.

“Activate Error Eye.”

A hot needle drove into his left eye.

Miles clamped a hand over his mouth to keep from shouting. The world peeled open. Color bled away, replaced by layers of translucent geometry and flickering labels. The grass became planes. The path became linked nodes. The rabbit became a knot of red lines wrapped around a white hitbox and a health value so bloated it bulged outside its own frame.

HP: 1240

Armor: 0

Damage: 14-22

Aggro Radius: 9.5m

Leash Radius: ERROR

Pathing: CORRUPTED LOOP

Intent: HUNT / FEED / REPEAT / HUNT / FEED / REPEAT

Weak Point: Left rear tendon [3x damage]

Administrative Tag: Discarded Tutorial Beast

Miles sucked in air through his teeth.

His HP ticked down.

HP: 9 / 10

He deactivated the skill.

The world snapped back, leaving spots dancing across his vision.

“Worth it.”

Nine and a half meter aggro. No leash radius. That explained the no-cooldown chase. Corrupted loop meant maybe predictable. Weak point on rear tendon—useful if he could get behind something that turned faster than he moved.

He searched the meadow again. The floating broken path. The signpost. Rocks. Grass. A dead tree near the edge of a shallow ditch. The hole where terrain dropped away into void.

The void.

Miles’s pulse quickened.

He walked toward the edge of the missing terrain, careful to keep the rabbit well outside aggro. The dirt path ended cleanly, sliced into a perfect cliff that showed cross-sections of soil, stone, and roots hanging over empty blackness. Ten feet away, separated by a gap, the rest of the path floated unsupported, continuing toward the village.

He tossed a pebble into the gap.

It fell for two seconds, then froze midair.

A blue window appeared around it.

OUT OF BOUNDS OBJECT DETECTED

Returning to valid terrain…

The pebble snapped back onto the path at his feet.

Miles stared.

“No fall death?”

He nudged another rock over the edge with his boot. Same result. Freeze. System notice. Return.

He looked at the rabbit.

He looked at the gap.

A slow grin crept across his face.

“Oh, you poor badly coded bastard.”

The plan formed fast, ugly, and likely fatal. Most good plans did, in broken games. If the void returned out-of-bounds objects to valid terrain, where did it put creatures? Nearest safe node? Last valid ground? Spawn? Could it reset them? Damage them? Trap them? He did not need to kill the rabbit. He needed to learn if the environment could.

He jogged a few test steps, nearly tripped, and winced. With one agility, the margin was razor-thin. The rabbit would catch him before he reached the gap unless he started close. But starting close meant aggro. He needed stagger. Terrain. The signpost stake had bought him a moment before.

Miles approached the sign again, eyes never leaving the rabbit.

The painted letters crawled into a greeting, then into warnings, then into a string of broken symbols that made his teeth ache.

He grabbed the sign with both hands and pulled.

It did not move.

“Come on.” He braced a boot against the post and yanked. “I know you’re destructible. I literally watched a bunny headbutt you into toothpicks.”

The sign remained cheerful and bloody.

The rabbit turned its head.

Miles stopped pulling.

“Right. Aggro radius.”

He stepped back, found another stone, and threw it at the sign.

The rock bounced off.

The sign trembled. Its letters rearranged.

Please do not damage Tutorial property.

Please do not damage Tutorial property.

Please do not damage Tutorial property.

PLEASE DO NOT WAKE THEM.

“Them?” Miles said.

The ground under the sign pulsed.

Nope. New problem later.

He circled wider and collected rocks, stuffing his pockets until his trousers sagged. Then he took position at the edge of the rabbit’s aggro range, between the creature and the void gap. He activated Error Eye for one painful blink to confirm the invisible circle.

HP: 8 / 10

The aggro line glowed faintly in his sight for a second after he shut the skill off. Nine and a half meters. He placed his boot an inch outside it.

The rabbit watched him.

“You and me,” Miles said. “Round two.”

He threw a rock.

It struck the rabbit’s flank.

1 damage dealt.

The health bar ticked to 1,239.

The rabbit’s ears rose.

“Yeah,” Miles said. “That’s right. Remember me?”

The rabbit screamed and launched.

Miles turned and ran for the gap.

The first pounce hit exactly where he had been. Dirt sprayed his calves. He did not look back. He counted in his head, breath tearing through his throat. One. Two. The second shriek came sooner than expected. No cooldown, just like before.

He cut right.

The rabbit shot past him in a white blur and landed ahead, between him and the gap.

“Bad.”

It pivoted.

Miles hurled another rock into its face.

The rabbit flinched for half a second.

He used that half second like it was gold. He sprinted straight at the creature, then dove low as it snapped. Teeth closed over empty air above his shoulder. He slid through mud beneath its head, slammed into its side, and felt fur like greasy needles scrape his cheek.

His hand closed around its rear leg.

He stabbed down with a sharp stone.

The weak point flashed in his memory. Left rear tendon. Three times damage.

The stone cut deep.

9 damage dealt.

Weak Point!

The rabbit shrieked and kicked.

Miles’s wrist snapped.

-3 HP

HP: 5 / 10

“Ow! Okay, deserved.”

He rolled away as the rabbit thrashed, its damaged leg spasming. Not crippled. Of course not. No bleed, no status. But it stumbled one step when it turned.

That was enough.

Miles ran.