Chapter 3: The Broken Class

The Class menu hovered in front of Callum like a stained-glass window made by a madman.

Red moonlight seeped through the shattered ceiling of Grand Central’s main concourse, painting the marble floor in bloody panes. Dust drifted through the air in slow, glittering curtains. Around him, hundreds of survivors stood beneath the broken constellations of dangling lights and exposed steel ribs, faces tilted toward invisible choices only they could see.

Some cried as they picked. Some laughed like lottery winners. Some stared too long and shook apart under the weight of it.

Every few seconds, the station flashed with new power.

A man in a bloodstained suit selected something and vanished beneath a pillar of bronze light. When the glow faded, a heavy mace hung from his hands and plates of rusted armor locked across his chest with a series of iron clanks. A teenage girl with a torn backpack gasped as frost spiraled around her fingers, her eyes shining ice-blue. Nearby, a construction worker’s shadow stretched up the wall behind him, grew horns, and folded itself into a black cloak over his shoulders.

People cheered for the impressive ones.

They edged away from the strange ones.

Callum barely heard them.

His eyes tracked the choices hanging in front of him, each framed in gold, silver, or black iron. The System had offered him miracles dressed as career paths.

CLASS SELECTION AVAILABLE

Recommended Options Based on Soul Imprint, Combat History, Cognitive Patterning, and Death Event:

1. Apex Duelist — Legendary Growth Potential

2. Railbreaker Vanguard — Epic Defensive Progression

3. Wraithline Tactician — Epic Strategic Support

4. Last-Breath Berserker — Rare Death-Triggered Scaling

5. Glitchbound — ERROR

The first four pulsed with seductive clarity. Clean descriptions. Defined stat growth. Skill trees like polished weapons laid on velvet.

The fifth option jittered at the bottom of the list, half-visible, its letters crawling over one another as if trying to escape. It did not shine. It leaked. Thin horizontal tears split the air around it, showing fragments of something beneath the menu—black code, white fire, the afterimage of a thousand broken screens.

Callum’s pulse beat slowly in his ears.

In the old world, people had called him reckless for the plays he made under pressure. They saw the snap decisions, the impossible flanks, the baited collapses, the final-second rotations. They never saw the work underneath—the hours of frame data, map timings, patch note autopsies, broken mechanics tested until they became weapons.

A clean system was predictable.

A broken system had edges.

And edges cut both ways.

He lifted his hand toward the corrupted option.

“Don’t.”

The voice came from his right.

Mara stood three steps away, one hand wrapped around a bent length of metal pipe and the other pressed to the blood-soaked sleeve at her shoulder. She had been a paramedic before the world cracked open; Callum had known that within five minutes of meeting her, not because she said it, but because she moved through panic the way other people moved through rain. Calmly. Efficiently. Angry at the weather, but not surprised by it.

The System had already changed her. A round shield of white enamel and dull steel hung from her forearm, stamped with a red sigil that looked almost like a medical cross if someone had designed it during a siege. A short spear rested in her grip, its edge clean despite the gore on the floor.

“I can see your menu?” Callum asked.

“No,” Mara said. “But I can see your face. That’s the same face idiots make right before they say, ‘Hold my beer.’”

Callum’s mouth twitched.

“This one’s broken,” he said.

“Great. Pick anything else.”

“The other ones have hidden flags.”

Mara stared at him. “This is not the time to be picky about fine print.”

Behind her, a stocky man in a Knicks hoodie puffed out his chest as golden light hardened across his skin. “Hell yeah!” he shouted. “Ironhide Bruiser, baby!” He punched a marble column. The impact cracked stone. His friends roared.

Across the concourse, someone else screamed as their selected Class wrapped them in black chains and dragged them to their knees. A woman nearby whispered prayers while blue fire consumed her hair and left her unharmed, crowned in flame.

The world was becoming an armory and no one had read the warranty.

Callum focused on the Glitchbound option. The more he looked, the more the System seemed to resent being observed. Text flickered in thin slashes beneath the name.

Glitchbound

Classification: [NULL]

Role: UNSUPPORTED

Growth Path: CORRUPTED

Primary Attribute: INVALID

Warning: Selection may result in unstable skill behavior, stat desynchronization, persistent death-memory retention, experience leakage, soul indexing errors, inventory duplication penalties, hostile System attention—

Warning suppressed.

There.

Callum’s fingers paused inches from the prompt.

“Hostile System attention,” he murmured.

Mara’s expression sharpened. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Callum.”

He glanced at her then, really glanced. Her dark hair was plastered to her cheek with sweat. Dust had settled in the fine lines around her eyes. She was exhausted, wounded, surrounded by strangers, and still looking at him like he was another patient trying to leave the ambulance with a punctured lung.

He owed her something honest.

“The good Classes are too clean,” he said. “They want us to take them fast. Big numbers, flashy descriptions. But the errors under them don’t match. The Duelist has a ‘duel enforcement’ clause buried under the interface. Vanguard has threat-binding. Berserker has death conditioning. They’re not just powers. They’re leashes.”

“And this one?”

The Glitchbound option jittered hard enough to blur his vision.

Callum smiled without humor. “This one’s the leash they failed to delete.”

Mara cursed under her breath.

A bell tolled somewhere above them.

It was not one of the station clocks. Those had all stopped at 11:17, the minute the subway ceiling caved in and Earth fell through itself. This sound rolled through the bones of the building, deep and vast, vibrating in teeth and blood.

Every interface in the concourse flashed at once.

FIRST NIGHT APPROACHING

Time until Hollowing begins for unclassed humans: 00:47:59

Select a Class.

Survive.

Climb.

The crowd erupted.

People who had hesitated began stabbing at the air, accepting whatever promise hovered in front of them. Light detonated across the concourse. Steel, leather, robes, antlers, masks, blades, chains, feathers, shields. The frightened became armed. The desperate became dangerous.

Callum had spent his whole life making decisions while timers bled down.

He selected Glitchbound.

The world skipped.

Not shook. Not spun. Skipped.

For a fraction of a second, Callum saw the concourse without people, then filled with corpses, then rebuilt in white stone beneath three suns, then underwater with fish swimming between ticket machines. His body forgot gravity and remembered it badly. Something cold threaded through his veins like wires pulled beneath skin.

A sound like a corrupted audio file shrieked inside his skull.

CLASS SELECTED: G̶l̵i̷t̸c̸h̶b̷o̶u̵n̷d̴

Validating soul index…

Validation failed.

Assigning baseline attributes…

Attribute table not found.

Generating starter skills…

Skill package damaged.

Registering level…

LEVEL: NaN

Congratulations, Player.

Callum hit the floor on one knee.

Pain sparked through every joint. His hands flashed transparent, bones visible as thin white wireframes before flesh snapped back into place. His breath stuttered in his lungs. For a moment, his heartbeat played half a beat out of sync with itself.

“Callum!” Mara crouched beside him.

He tried to answer. The first attempt came out as static.

Several people nearby turned.

The Knicks hoodie man laughed first.

“Yo,” he said, loud enough for his friends to hear. “What the hell did you pick? Dial-up modem?”

His group cracked up, the kind of laughter that came from terror looking for a target.

Callum pushed himself upright. The interface trembled at the edges of his sight, reluctant but present. He opened his status.

PLAYER STATUS

Name: Callum Vale

Class: G̷l̵i̶t̴c̶h̷b̸o̸u̵n̶d̶

Level: NaN

HP: 38 / 38

MP: 0 / -7

Stamina: 42 / 41

Strength: 6

Agility: ERR

Endurance: 7

Perception: 9

Will: 11

Luck: DIV/0

Unassigned Attribute Points: ???

For two seconds, Callum simply stared.

Then he started laughing.

It came out ragged and breathless, more disbelief than amusement. Mara looked at him as if deciding whether head trauma had finally tipped him over.

“That bad?” she asked.

“My mana is negative.”

“Is that possible?”

“Apparently I owe the universe seven magic.”

“Can you still stand?”

He flexed his fingers. Thin red squares crawled under his skin and vanished. “Mostly.”

“Can you fight?”

Callum opened his skill list.

SKILLS

[Lag Step] Lv. ? — Move after you move. Cooldown: Yesterday

[Packet Loss] Lv. ? — Lose something incoming. Target validity: Uncertain

[Debug Strike] Lv. ? — Attack an error. Damage: Contextual

[Respawn Cache] Lv. LOCKED — Death stores data. Data stores debt. Debt stores teeth.

“That,” he said, “is a philosophical question.”

The Knicks hoodie man swaggered over, boots grinding glass. His new bronze knuckles glowed faintly. Ironhide Bruiser had thickened his neck and shoulders, swelling him into the shape of someone who had never needed to ask twice.

“Hey, Error Boy,” he said. “What level are you?”

Callum dismissed his interface. “Busy.”

“Nah, nah, I wanna know. Mine says level one. Tank build. Strength twelve, Endurance fourteen.” He grinned at the small crowd gathering around them. “What you got?”

“A headache.”

One of Hoodie’s friends snorted. Another, a woman with fresh green tattoos moving like vines over her arms, leaned in and squinted. “His aura’s messed up. Looks like a bad signal.”

“Maybe he picked NPC,” someone said.

More laughter.

Mara stood, shield shifting into place with a soft scrape. “Back off.”

Hoodie looked her up and down. “Relax, nurse knight. Just checking the leaderboard.”

“There is no leaderboard,” she said.

“There’s always a leaderboard.” His gaze snapped back to Callum. “Ain’t that right, pro gamer?”

The words landed with an old bruise’s precision.

Callum’s face went still.

He had not told Hoodie who he was. He had not told anyone here. But the old world had loved watching prodigies fall almost as much as watching them win. His face had been on streams, highlight reels, apology videos, think pieces. Callum Vale, the kid who saw every angle. Callum Vale, the washed-up genius who choked when it mattered. Callum Vale, retired at twenty-four after one scandal, two bad seasons, and a thousand strangers deciding his story for him.

Hoodie’s grin widened when he saw recognition flicker.

“Yeah, I knew it. My little brother used to watch you. What was your tag? ValeVex? Man, you fell off hard.” He tapped the side of his own head. “Guess the System knows trash mechanics when it sees ’em.”

Callum felt Mara shift beside him, ready to intervene.

He breathed in dust, iron, ozone, old coffee from a cracked kiosk bleeding across tile. He let the insult pass through him and found the useful thing inside it.

People were watching. The frightened ones, the newly powerful ones, the predators beginning to realize there were no cops coming. Social physics had changed, but it had not disappeared. First impressions mattered. Weakness attracted teeth.

Callum smiled.

“You picked Ironhide Bruiser?” he asked.

Hoodie puffed. “Damn right.”

“Good defensive scaling. High Endurance. Probably damage reduction after standing still or taking repeated hits.”

The grin faltered. “How’d you—”

“Your feet keep planting. Shoulders square before you talk. You want someone to swing so your passive triggers.” Callum nodded toward his bronze knuckles. “But your Agility is garbage. And if the Class name is literal, your joints aren’t as protected as your torso.”

Hoodie’s face darkened.

Mara muttered, “Callum.”

He ignored her. “So no, I’m not going to punch you. That would be stupid.”

Hoodie stepped closer. “You calling me slow?”

“I’m calling you obvious.”

The crowd made a sound that was half laugh, half inhale.

For a heartbeat, Callum thought Hoodie would swing anyway. The man’s right fist tightened. Bronze light crawled over his knuckles.

Then the station screamed.

Not metaphorically.

Every speaker in Grand Central crackled at once, shrieking with feedback. The old arrival boards above the concourse flickered to life, not with train times, but with rows of jagged symbols that rearranged themselves into words.

LOCAL EVENT TRIGGERED

Starter Region: New York Terminus

Threat: Goblin Scavenger Pack

Objective: Survive the Ambush

Bonus Objective: Prevent Shrine Desecration

Reward: EXP, Copper Marks, Starter Cache Access

Failure: Respawn Shrine Corruption, increased Hollowing pressure

The floor trembled.

At the far end of the concourse, beyond the shattered archways leading to the lower platforms, something metal clanged. Once. Twice. Then a chorus of high, eager yelps rose from the dark.

The crowd froze.

Callum’s interface painted red brackets over the tunnel mouths.

ENEMY DETECTED: Goblin Scavenger Lv. 1

ENEMY DETECTED: Goblin Scavenger Lv. 2

ENEMY DETECTED: Goblin Cutter Lv. 3

ENEMY DETECTED: Goblin Hex-Sniffer Lv. 2

Shapes poured out of the tunnels.

They were smaller than humans but not childlike. Their bodies were all wire muscle and sharp angles, skin the color of bruised olives and wet clay. Long ears twitched beneath helmets made of bottle caps, broken phone cases, and rat skulls. They wore patchwork armor stitched from subway maps and leather stripped from seats. Their eyes shone yellow in the red moonlight.

They carried weapons made from the ruins of the city.

Kitchen knives lashed to broom handles. Shivs carved from turnstile metal. A stop sign hammered into an axe blade. One dragged a chain strung with human teeth and MetroCards.

The smell hit next: rot, wet fur, old pennies, and sewer gas.

Then they charged.

Panic detonated harder than any spell.

People screamed and scattered. A fire mage threw a wild bolt that exploded against a pillar, showering everyone nearby in marble chips. Someone with a bow made of green light fired into the ceiling. Hoodie bellowed and ran forward with three other newly-Classed fighters, leaving unarmed survivors exposed behind him.

Callum’s mind snapped into lanes.

Entrances. Enemy count. Civilians. Chokepoints. Unknown skill behavior. Mara wounded but armored. Hoodie overextended. Goblins fast, low center of gravity, pack tactics.

“Mara,” he said, voice cutting clean through the noise. “Left side. Shield wall by the ticket kiosk. Don’t chase. Make them come through the gap.”

She looked at him for half a second.

Then she moved.

“You!” she barked at a cluster of survivors clutching improvised weapons. “Behind me unless you know how to use that thing! Spear guy, cover my right! Blue hoodie, get the kids under the counter!”

People obeyed her because she sounded like consequences.

Callum grabbed a fallen length of rebar from the floor. It was heavy, ridged, cold against his palm. His stats might have been garbage, imaginary, or both, but leverage still worked.

A goblin leapt over a broken bench toward a woman frozen beside a vending machine. Callum stepped into its path and swung the rebar like a bat.

The goblin twisted in midair with obscene flexibility. His strike clipped its shoulder instead of its skull. Bone cracked. The creature hit the floor, rolled, and came up snarling.

A damage number flickered above it.

4?

“That’s not encouraging,” Callum muttered.

The goblin lunged low, knife flashing for his thigh.

Callum tried to activate Lag Step.

He did not know how to use skills yet. No tutorial prompt appeared. No convenient muscle memory bloomed. He simply reached for the concept in his interface, the way he might click an ability bound to a key.

The world hiccuped.

Callum moved.

Then moved again.

Badly.

His body jerked two feet to the left, then snapped half a foot backward, then stumbled forward into the exact space he had tried to avoid. The goblin’s knife scraped across his calf, hot pain opening under torn denim.

[Lag Step] activated.

Cooldown remaining: -00:00:03

“Of course,” Callum hissed.

The goblin shrieked triumph and came in again.

Mara’s spear punched through its ribs from the side.

She kicked the body off the blade, face pale but eyes steady. “You call that dodging?”

“Beta feature.”

“Refund it.”

A crash rolled from the center of the concourse. Hoodie had met the first wave head-on and, to his credit, was hard to kill. Goblin blades skittered off his forearms and chest with sparks. He laughed as he backhanded one scavenger into a pillar hard enough to burst its skull.

Then three more goblins hit his legs.

Callum saw the formation too late to warn him. One goblin hooked a chain around Hoodie’s ankle. Another stabbed behind his knee. A third jumped onto his back and drove a bone spike into the side of his neck where no iron sheen protected him.

Hoodie’s laugh became a strangled roar.

“Help him?” Mara snapped.

Callum was already moving.

Not because Hoodie deserved it. Because Hoodie was a tank whether he understood the role or not, and if he fell in the open, the goblins would break into the civilians like water through glass.

Callum sprinted across the slick marble, calf burning. The concourse had become a storm of ugly little battles. A frost-wielding teenager froze a goblin’s foot to the ground and then vomited on herself from the effort. The fire mage accidentally set a newspaper stand ablaze. A priest-looking man in a luminous scarf held both hands over a bleeding stranger while golden numbers ticked upward.

Goblins darted through it all, laughing, cutting, retreating, dragging away dropped bags and weapons and, once, a screaming man by his hair.

Callum reached Hoodie as the big man dropped to one knee.

“Behind you!” Hoodie’s vine-tattoo friend shouted.

A Goblin Cutter came at Callum from the right, wielding two razors made from sharpened rail spikes. It was taller than the others, with red paint smeared across its face in a grinning skull.

Goblin Cutter Lv. 3

Trait: Opportunist

Status: Excited

Callum swung the rebar. The Cutter ducked under it and slashed his forearm.

Pain flared white.

HP: 31 / 38

Callum backed up, nearly slipping on blood. The goblin advanced with quick, twitchy feints. Too fast. His Agility stat still showed ERR at the edge of his vision, which apparently did not mean secretly amazing.

The Cutter snapped a slash toward his face.

Callum raised the rebar and tried Packet Loss.

The skill tore something out of the air.

The goblin’s incoming blade vanished.

For one glorious instant, Callum thought it had worked exactly as advertised.

Then the rebar vanished from his hands too.

[Packet Loss] activated.

Incoming object lost.

Held object lost.

Memory of object partially lost.

Callum stared at his empty palms.

What was I holding?

The Cutter looked at its own empty right hand, then at Callum. Its left-hand razor remained.