Chapter 2: Worst Class Available

The goblin’s knife came down like a shard of moonless night.

Cassian moved before thought could catch up.

Not well. Not gracefully. His body was too cold, too new, too full of someone else’s blood and his own panic. But reaction had always been his one clean talent. Before sponsorships, before scandals, before the clip channels carved his career into memes, there had been a boy with twitch reflexes sharp enough to make older pros swear into hot mics.

He jerked sideways.

The knife missed his throat and punched into the cavern floor with a wet chok, biting through a slick red film. The goblin hissed. Its breath smelled like spoiled meat and rusted coins. It was knee-high, green-gray, all elbows and tendon, with a mouth too wide for its skull and eyes like black beads set in yellow slime.

Cassian slammed his forehead into its face.

Pain detonated behind his eyes.

The goblin yelped and reeled backward, clutching its nose. Cassian scrambled away on hands and heels, slipping in blood, lungs sawing at air that tasted of damp stone and copper. Around him, the cavern screamed.

People were waking everywhere.

Dozens of them lay scattered across the floor beneath a ceiling lost in darkness, each marked by the same translucent blue panes flickering in front of their faces. Some were still wearing street clothes. Some wore gaming rigs melted into their skin. Some were naked except for bands of gray cloth wrapped around them like burial strips. A man in a business suit shrieked as a goblin bit into his calf. A teenager with pink hair hurled a loose stone and hit nothing. Someone else cried in a language Cassian didn’t know.

The cavern itself was obscene.

Its walls were not stone exactly. They pulsed under mats of black fungus, threaded with veins of pale light that beat in a slow rhythm. Bone-white pillars jutted from the floor at angles, riblike and huge. Far overhead, a black sky yawned where a ceiling should have been, scattered with cold stars that did not twinkle. Every star looked like an eye that had forgotten mercy.

The goblin recovered and lunged again.

Cassian grabbed the first thing his fingers found: a broken femur, slick and heavy, almost as long as his forearm. He swung upward with both hands.

The bone cracked against the goblin’s jaw.

Its head snapped sideways. Teeth sprayed. It hit the ground, rolled, and came up screeching with half its face caved in. Above its head, red text shimmered into view.

Tutorial Goblin Scavenger
Level 1
HP: 7/18

“HP bars,” Cassian rasped.

The goblin answered by leaping at his chest.

He didn’t have time to laugh.

They crashed together. The goblin’s nails raked lines of fire across his cheek. Cassian jammed the femur between its jaws as it snapped at his eye. Its teeth ground against bone with a sound that turned his stomach. He bucked, twisted, and drove one knee up into its ribs. Something gave. The goblin choked.

Cassian shoved.

The creature fell backward.

Before it could rise, a boot came down on its skull.

Once.

Twice.

The third stomp burst it like a rotten fruit.

Cassian froze, panting, bone club raised.

The boot belonged to a woman in a blood-smeared white hoodie, early twenties maybe, with close-cropped black hair, warm brown skin, and eyes that looked far too awake for this nightmare. Her right hand clutched a jagged length of metal torn from somewhere. Her left trembled so badly her fingers blurred.

She looked at the dead goblin, then at Cassian.

“You real?” she asked.

“Working theory.”

“Great.” Her laugh came out thin and cracked. “That helps.”

A scream cut across the cavern as another goblin dragged a man by the throat. The blue panes in front of the survivors flared brighter all at once.

WELCOME, UNBOUND SOULS.
You have entered the Everdeep Tutorial.
Remain alive until class allocation is complete.
Current survivors: 63/80

Cassian’s mouth went dry.

Sixty-three.

There had been eighty less than a minute ago.

“Class allocation?” the woman said. “What, like a game?”

Cassian’s eyes flicked to the floating prompt, to the goblins spilling from cracks along the far wall, to the people dying because they were waiting for the rules to make sense.

“Don’t think game,” he said. “Think casino with teeth.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before.”

I died in a chair wearing a headset while half the internet watched me choke.

“Something like that.”

The goblins had numbers, crude knives, and the advantage of not waking up mid-trauma. The survivors had panic. Panic was a terrible resource unless someone shaped it.

Cassian surged to his feet. His legs nearly folded. He ignored them.

“Hey!” he shouted.

No one listened.

A goblin sprang onto a bald man’s back and stabbed him in the kidney. The man’s scream curdled into a wet gargle.

Cassian grabbed a loose rock and hurled it at the nearest blue prompt hovering above a cowering survivor. It passed through harmlessly, but the motion snapped a few heads toward him.

“Stop running alone!” he shouted, voice ripping raw. “Back to the pillars! Make a line! They’re small—kick them off, pin them, stomp the head!”

“Who the hell are you?” someone yelled.

“Currently not dead! Copy the strategy!”

The woman in the hoodie barked a laugh despite herself, then lunged at a goblin trying to flank him. Her metal shard punched through its neck. Black blood sprayed her sleeve.

A huge man with a braided blond beard grabbed a goblin by both ankles and swung it into another with a roar. A teenage girl snatched up a knife from a corpse and backed toward the nearest bone pillar. Others followed, not because they trusted Cassian, but because terror loved instructions.

Cassian kept talking. His voice became a metronome.

“Left side, watch the crack! Don’t chase! If it drops, stomp! You, suit guy, behind her—no, behind her unless you want your tendons harvested!”

The cavern shifted from massacre to ugly brawl.

Goblins came in ones and twos, yipping with glee, expecting meat that cried nicely. Instead they met boots, rocks, bone clubs, and the sudden murderous coordination of desperate primates. Cassian slipped through the chaos, not fighting more than he had to. He watched angles. He called targets. He counted.

Sixty-three became sixty-one.

Then sixty.

Then the last goblin found itself surrounded by seven humans and died beneath a rain of stones.

Silence slammed down.

Not true silence. People sobbed. Someone vomited. The cavern walls pulsed. Blood dripped from the raised edge of a bone pillar with soft, steady ticks. But the screaming had stopped, and in its absence, every survivor seemed to hear their own breathing for the first time.

The woman in the hoodie bent over, hands on knees, and threw up beside the goblin she’d killed.

“Good work,” Cassian said.

She spat. “Never say that to me again after I puke.”

“Fair.”

Her eyes narrowed through sweat. “Name?”

He hesitated just long enough for her to notice.

“Cassian,” he said.

Recognition flickered. Not starstruck. Worse. The grim little spark people got when they realized they’d seen your failure before.

“Vale?”

“Unfortunately.”

“I watched your match tonight.”

“Then you’ve suffered enough.”

She stared at him for half a second, then laughed again, stronger this time. “Mira Chen. Nursing student. Part-time debt enthusiast.” She looked at the goblin corpses. “Full-time whatever this is now, I guess.”

Before Cassian could answer, the System spoke without sound.

The blue panes vanished from individual faces and reappeared in the air above the center of the cavern, huge and bright enough to paint every blood-slick stone in ghostlight.

CLASS ALLOCATION PHASE BEGINNING.
Performance during initial survival interval has been measured.
Temperament, aptitude, trauma imprint, kill contribution, and soul curvature have been assessed.
Please accept one available starting class.

A murmur passed through the survivors.

“Soul curvature?” the blond bearded man boomed. “What kind of nonsense is that?”

“The kind that gets a UI,” Cassian said quietly.

His own pane bloomed in front of him.

CASSIAN VALE
Soul Status: Unbound
Level: 0
Tutorial Contribution: Command Influence High / Direct Kills Low / Survival Instinct High / Death Proximity Extreme

Available Classes:
Gravebound Novice

Cassian waited.

The pane did not change.

One class.

A cold pressure settled behind his ribs.

Around him, other people began to gasp as their options appeared.

“Iron Vanguard,” the blond man said, grinning as golden light climbed his arms. “Ha! That sounds right.”

A shield of translucent metal flashed into being on his forearm. He flexed, and the air rang like struck steel.

Near the bone pillar, the pink-haired teenager squealed despite the blood on her cheek. “Ember Duelist! I got fire!” A spark danced between her fingers, then blossomed into a tiny blade of flame. She almost dropped it. “Oh my god, oh my god.”

“Shadow Skirmisher,” muttered a narrow-faced man in a torn dress shirt. The darkness under his feet rippled like ink.

“Acolyte of Mercy,” Mira said.

Soft green light pooled around her hands. The shaking in her fingers eased as the glow spread. The scratches on her wrist closed, leaving only pink lines. Her expression twisted—wonder, horror, hunger for usefulness. “I can heal.”

“That’s good,” Cassian said.

She looked at his pane.

“What did you get?”

Cassian didn’t answer.

Her gaze found the words anyway.

“Gravebound Novice,” she read.

The blond man heard and turned. His grin widened with the instant cruelty of a man grateful not to be the weakest person in the room.

“Gravebound?” he said. “What, you dig holes?”

A few nervous laughs broke out. Too loud. People wanted someone else’s bad luck to mean their own wasn’t fatal.

Cassian studied the pane.

Gravebound Novice
Rarity: Common (Degraded)
Role: Corpse Utility / Attrition / Unstable

Those who are not chosen by blade, flame, oath, or prayer may yet find employment beneath the soil.

Starting Attributes:
Strength +0
Agility +0
Endurance +1
Will +1
Perception +0
Ether +0

Starting Skills:
Grave Sense I
Last Rites I
Deathmark I

Warning: Class performance may be impaired in environments lacking corpses.

“Corpse Utility,” the blond man repeated, delighted. “That’s not even a role. That’s janitor with trauma.”

“What’s your name?” Cassian asked.

The man puffed up. “Brom. Iron Vanguard.”

“Brom,” Cassian said. “If you keep talking, I’m going to test whether Last Rites works on the socially dead.”

The laughs that followed were smaller, sharper. Brom’s grin thinned.

Mira leaned closer. “Is it bad?”

“It says degraded.”

“That seems bad.”

“In games, degraded usually means one of two things.”

“Trash or secret overpowered nonsense?”

“Trash,” Cassian said. “Secret overpowered nonsense is what people call trash right before it kills them.”

He lifted a hand toward the prompt and accepted before doubt could become paralysis.

The class entered him like a coffin nail.

Cold drove down through his skull, his spine, his hips, pinning him upright. The cavern tilted. Sound receded beneath the thunder of his heartbeat. Beneath that heartbeat came another rhythm—slower, deeper, wrong. It pulsed from the floor, from the walls, from every corpse cooling around him.

For one impossible instant, Cassian felt all the dead in the cavern.

Not as people. As vacancies.

Holes torn into the shape of the world. The goblin at his feet was a small jagged absence, still steaming with malice. The bald man by the wall was a larger one, edges frayed by confusion. The business suit, the teenager with the crushed throat, the woman he had never seen alive near the first crack—each body hummed with an aftertaste, a last note caught between flesh and whatever came after.

And under all of them, far below the cavern, something vast rolled in its sleep.

Cassian gasped.

His pane updated.

Class Accepted: Gravebound Novice
You have learned Grave Sense I.
You have learned Last Rites I.
You have learned Deathmark I.

Due to anomaly in soul imprint, additional passive detected.
Broken Respawn: Uncatalogued
Error: Source not found.
Error: Authority conflict.
Error: Something is watching.

The last line flickered red, then vanished.

Cassian went very still.

Something is watching.

“Cassian?” Mira’s voice sounded far away. “You okay?”

He swallowed. The cold remained in his bones, but his vision cleared.

“Define okay.”

“Not falling over. Not bleeding from the eyes. Not making that face.”

“What face?”

“Like you just read the terms and conditions.”

He almost smiled.

A new prompt appeared across the cavern.

TUTORIAL OBJECTIVE UPDATED.
Survive three monster waves.
Wave One begins in: 10 minutes.

Bonus rewards available for remaining survivors above threshold.
Penalty applied if survivor count falls below 25.

The cavern erupted.

“Three waves?”

“We barely survived the first attack!”

“That wasn’t a wave,” Cassian said.

The words cut harder than he meant them to. Several faces turned toward him, pale and furious.

He pointed at the timer burning above them.

“That was the lobby check. The System wanted to see who moved.”

Brom lifted his new shield. “Then we make a wall. I’m a Vanguard. They come, I smash.”

“Sure,” Cassian said. “And when they climb over you?”

“They won’t.”

Cassian looked at the cracks along the far wall. Too many entry points. Uneven floor. Bone pillars for cover. Corpses everywhere. People with new powers they didn’t understand. Ten minutes.

He felt the old match-brain click on.

Not comfort. Not confidence. Something colder. A map made of threats.

“We need lanes,” he said. “Three groups. Shields and tough classes front. Anyone ranged behind. Healers central. Nobody blows stamina showing off. We stack bodies in front of the cracks.”

“Bodies?” Mira said.

“They’re obstacles.”

Her face tightened. “They’re people.”

“They were people. Now they’re cover.”

For a heartbeat, she looked like she might slap him. Cassian let her. He knew the expression. He’d seen it on teammates when he told them to abandon a losing player to secure the map objective. He’d seen it on coaches when he made the right call too quickly.

Then a distant horn sounded from somewhere beyond the cracks, low and wet and hungry.

Mira’s jaw clenched.