Chapter 2: Welcome to Elysium

The prompt blinked in the center of Rowan Vale’s vision like a cursor waiting for a command.

WELCOME, UNREGISTERED SOUL.

PLEASE SELECT YOUR PREFERRED METHOD OF TERMINATION.

▸ Claws
▸ Teeth
▸ Fire
▸ Drowning
▸ Falling
▸ Other

Rowan stared at it for a long moment while wind dragged red grass against his cheeks.

The sky above him was wrong.

Not wrong in the way a texture seam was wrong, not wrong like the ugly magenta checkerboard that appeared when some poor environment artist forgot to link an asset bundle. This was deeper. The sky was a wound stretched from horizon to horizon, a bruised crimson dome veined with black clouds that moved against the wind. Two moons hung in it, one pale and one cracked like porcelain, both too large, both glaring down with the judgmental certainty of unpaid overtime.

Rowan lay flat on his back in a field of knee-high scarlet grass, tasting iron and rain. Each blade had serrated edges fine as sawteeth. Where they brushed the side of his neck, they left cold scratches.

He did not move.

His brain had decided, quite reasonably, that movement was a privilege to be earned after a full diagnostic pass.

Okay.

The thought sounded thin, far away, like someone speaking through a closed door.

Okay, Rowan. You were at your desk. Lab Seven. Midnight build. You found the crash. Or the crash found you. There was white light. Burning plastic. Maybe a seizure. Maybe a lawsuit. Probably both.

He inhaled.

The air went into his lungs cold and wet and carrying the thick loamy stink of soil. Beneath that: crushed herbs, animal musk, distant smoke, and something sweetly rotten.

His lungs hurt.

That detail ruined several comforting theories.

“Nope,” he said aloud.

His voice came out hoarse, human, unmistakably his own. Not streamed through headphones. Not spatial audio. No subtle reverb pass. His tongue felt too large in his mouth. His throat had the dry scrape of someone who had fallen asleep under office vents for six hours and woken up with corporate regrets.

The prompt continued blinking.

PLEASE SELECT YOUR PREFERRED METHOD OF TERMINATION.

Idle selection detected.

Defaulting in: 59…

“Cancel,” Rowan said.

Nothing happened.

“Close.”

The prompt cheerfully ignored him.

“Esc.”

The countdown ticked to fifty-eight.

Rowan pushed himself up on his elbows. The world lurched, not with camera sway but with the nauseating rebellion of an actual inner ear. He swallowed hard. His palms sank into damp black soil. Grit slid under his fingernails. He felt every grain.

That made him laugh once, very softly.

It was not a good laugh.

“Immersion pass gets a thumbs-up,” he muttered. “Somebody tell Haptics they’ve overachieved.”

He sat up fully and looked down at himself.

He wore a rough-spun gray tunic belted with cord, brown trousers tucked into soft boots, and a canvas satchel slung across his chest. His office hoodie was gone. His badge was gone. His phone, wallet, caffeine tremor, and twenty-nine years of accumulated bad posture had apparently been replaced by Starter Peasant Chic.

His hands were his hands, though. Long fingers, scar across the left thumb from a box cutter incident during college, bitten nails. Not an avatar’s polished approximation. The scar was exactly where it should have been.

He flexed his fingers. They trembled.

“Menu.”

A translucent interface snapped open before him with a sound like glass chimes.

ROWAN VALE
Race: Human?
Level: 1
Class: [REDACTED]
Title: None
HP: 30/30
MP: 10/10
SP: 25/25

Strength: 5
Agility: 6
Vitality: 5
Intellect: 9
Will: 7
Luck: ERROR

Rowan’s mouth went dry for reasons unrelated to the wind.

Race: Human with a question mark was not standard. Luck throwing an error was not standard. Class redacted was absolutely not standard. Starter characters in Elysium Online got assigned one of six base classes after the tutorial threat response sequence. Warrior, Scout, Acolyte, Arcanist, Binder, or Wildheart. QA had made spreadsheets. QA had argued with design. QA had opened two hundred and thirteen tickets about the tutorial threat response sequence because Design Director Halden believed “death as onboarding metaphor” sounded poetic if you said it with enough beard oil.

None of those tickets had mentioned being actually asked how you wanted to die.

The countdown reached fifty-two.

Rowan jabbed a finger at the X in the corner of the prompt. His finger passed through light and struck nothing. The prompt did not close.

“Oh, come on.”

He tried again. Still nothing.

“Options. Settings. System. Logout.”

The menu changed.

SYSTEM FUNCTIONS

Inventory
Skills
Map
Quest Log
Social
Logout: Unavailable

For several seconds, Rowan stopped hearing the wind.

The word sat there in flat gray letters. Unavailable. Not disabled for combat, not blocked by story instance, not maintenance locked. Unavailable.

He selected it anyway.

LOGOUT FUNCTION UNAVAILABLE.

Reason: You are not connected to a client.

His heart did something unpleasant behind his ribs.

“Not connected to a client,” he repeated.

A laugh scraped out of him again, sharper this time. “Great. Great wording. Very reassuring. Ten out of ten. No notes.”

The countdown hit forty-five.

He needed information. Panic was for people who did not have test plans. Rowan had survived six years in game QA by turning disasters into reproducible steps. The universe could explode, the build could catch fire, a producer could hover behind him asking if the bug was “really a blocker,” and Rowan would still ask: what did you do, what did you expect, what actually happened?

Current actual: He was inside Elysium’s starter zone, or something wearing its skin. No logout. Physical pain. Blood-red sky, which belonged not to the starter zone but to the pre-release world corruption event that players were not supposed to see until patch three. A death selection prompt had appeared before class assignment. Class field redacted. Luck broken.

Expected: He should be dead at his desk.

He preferred the bug.

Rowan stood.

The moment his weight settled onto his feet, the grass shifted around him with a dry whisper. The field sloped down toward a valley he knew intimately despite never having felt its wind on his face. Silverbrook Basin. Starter Zone One. Gentle hills, rabbit mobs, tutorial slimes, NPC village with five quest givers, one locked cellar, and a blacksmith named Orlan whose anvil animation clipped through his wrist every seven strikes.

Except Silverbrook Basin was supposed to be gold-green beneath a blue morning sky. It was supposed to have sunlit wildflowers and a cheerful flute loop designed to test the limits of human patience. Now the brook winding through the valley looked like a vein of dark glass. The trees beyond it bent inward, their leaves black on one side and silver on the other. The village in the distance threw up threads of chimney smoke, but its rooftops were crooked, some patched with red banners Rowan did not recognize.

Near his boots, a round blue creature no bigger than a melon quivered in the grass.

Rowan froze.

The slime froze too, if a wobbling gelatinous lump could be said to freeze. It had two dot eyes suspended in its translucent body and a little crescent mouth that was not in the shipping build because the art director had insisted “slimes should be cute but not sentient.”

It blinked at him.

Rowan blinked back.

Lesser Meadow Slime
Level 1
Disposition: Curious

“Hey,” Rowan said cautiously.

The slime tilted, as if considering the greeting.

The termination prompt ticked to thirty-nine.

Rowan pointed at it. “Do you see this?”

The slime jiggled.

“Right. Stupid question.”

He took one careful step away.

The slime bounced after him.

It made a wet plop when it landed. The sound was so absurdly faithful that Rowan’s mind supplied three bug IDs related to slime locomotion audio desync. He had spent an entire Thursday making these things fall off ledges. Their hitbox extended three centimeters below their visible body. Their aggro radius could be broken by crouching near fern clusters. Their jump attack had eleven startup frames and a recovery window wide enough to park a wagon in. They were tutorial enemies, weaponized pudding.

They were also, apparently, real.

“I’m not selecting teeth,” Rowan told the prompt. “Just for the record.”

The slime opened its crescent mouth.

It made a soft chirping noise.

From somewhere deeper in the grass, five more chirps answered.

Rowan’s stomach dropped.

The grass around him began to move.

One slime emerged from beneath a blood-red clump. Then another. Then three more rolled down the slope like living raindrops, bodies shimmering blue and green and milky white. Dot eyes fixed on Rowan. Crescent mouths stretched wider than any version of the model he remembered.

Their dispositions flickered.

Lesser Meadow Slime — Level 1 — Disposition: Curious

Lesser Meadow Slime — Level 1 — Disposition: Hungry

Lesser Meadow Slime — Level 1 — Disposition: Hungry

Lesser Meadow Slime — Level 2 — Disposition: Remembering

“Nope,” Rowan said.

The level two slime had a scar.

That was impossible for several reasons, the first being that slimes did not have scars because they did not have persistent surface geometry. But a jagged pale line cut across its front like a crack in jelly, and the creature’s eyes narrowed when they found him.

Rowan knew that look. He had seen it in leads during triage meetings.

“We haven’t met,” he said, backing away. “I have a very forgettable face, so you may be confusing me with another doomed idiot.”

The scarred slime lunged.

Eleven startup frames were very short when viewed from inside the meat.

Rowan threw himself sideways. The slime shot past his shoulder and smashed into the dirt with a wet slap. Something stung across his upper arm. Not a tap. Not controller vibration. A slicing, chemical burn that made his vision flash.

-4 HP

HP: 26/30

“Ow!” Rowan shouted. “Absolutely not! That is not what a slime does!”

The pain kept burning. It radiated from the shallow welt on his arm where acidic mucus smoked against his skin. He slapped at it with his sleeve and hissed through his teeth.

The termination prompt reached thirty.

DEFAULTING IN: 30…

The slimes spread out.

That was also wrong. Tutorial slimes did not flank. They hopped in mildly threatening straight lines until a player learned that left-click made consequences. These slimes formed a loose crescent, cutting him off from the downhill path toward the brook. Their bodies compressed and swelled. Droplets of acid sizzled where they struck grass.

Rowan’s pulse hammered in his ears.

He opened his inventory with a thought so desperate it felt like a prayer.

INVENTORY

Starter Bread x1
Cracked Canteen x1
Dull Knife x1
Traveler’s Note x1

“Knife.”

The weight appeared in his right hand.

It was less a knife than an insult with a handle. Six inches of pitted iron, blunt along one side, nicked along the other. He had logged a ticket about the starter knife dealing rounding-error damage to enemies with natural armor. The ticket had been closed as “working as intended.”

“If I get killed by onboarding jelly because Halden wanted a gritty survival feel,” Rowan said, “I’m haunting the monetization team first.”

A green slime bounced toward his left ankle.

Rowan kicked it on instinct. His boot sank halfway into the creature’s body. Cold slime swallowed his foot, then heat bit through leather.

-2 HP

HP: 24/30

“Bad idea!”

He yanked free and stabbed downward. The knife punched into gelatin with almost no resistance. The slime squealed, body rippling around the blade. A tiny damage number floated up.

3

The slime’s health bar barely moved.

“Come on, that was center mass.”

It wrapped around the knife.

The iron smoked.

Rowan let go just before the acid reached his fingers and stumbled back. Another slime slammed into his calf. Pain burst up his leg.

-5 HP

HP: 19/30

The field tilted. Rowan gasped and nearly fell. The grass hissed around him, alive with movement. More slimes were coming. He could see their rounded bodies gleaming between blades like bubbles in blood.

Think.

The scarred slime watched him from three paces away, not attacking. Waiting.

They remember.

The phrase crawled up his spine.

Every time Rowan died, the world rolled back twelve hours… but the monsters remember. He did not know how he knew that. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the premise had been seeded into him by the last thing he saw in Lab Seven, all redacted patch notes and forbidden raid build warnings. Maybe death had come with a trailer.

The termination prompt ticked down to twenty-two.

If it defaulted, did the world choose a death? Did the slimes? Did the System just assign him to claws, teeth, fire, drowning, falling, other, like a customer support category?

He needed to break the sequence.

Rowan scanned the hillside. Grass, slimes, brook downslope, a broken cart half-buried near a cluster of white stones to the east, and beyond it a stand of starter-zone ferns with broad yellow leaves.

Fern clusters.

His mind locked onto the memory with the clarity of terror.

During alpha, slimes tracked player line-of-sight using a cheap raycast from their center point. The ferns had been imported from a larger zone and accidentally flagged as stone walls for navigation. Crouching behind them broke aggro. It was stupid. It was on his list. Ticket SO-1187: Meadow Slime target loss near decorative foliage. Status: deferred.

Deferred meant holy scripture now.

Rowan sprinted east.

The slimes surged after him.

His injured calf screamed with every step. Wet impacts thudded behind him. Something splashed across his back; acid ate pinpricks through his tunic and kissed skin.

-3 HP

HP: 16/30

“I’m giving this build,” he panted, “a negative score.”

A blue slime bounced ahead to intercept. Rowan saw it compress, saw the wobble before the leap, saw the animation tell he had documented years ago. Eleven frames. Maybe twelve in real life. He dropped into a slide on wet grass, momentum ripping a shout from his throat. The slime sailed over him, close enough that cold slime brushed his hair.

He crashed into the fern cluster shoulder-first.

Leaves slapped his face. Soil filled his nose. He curled behind the thick yellow fronds and forced himself into a crouch, heart battering his ribs.

The slimes stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped.

Six gelatinous bodies landed in the grass beyond the ferns, bobbing uncertainly. Their eyes darted left and right. One bounced into another. The green slime with his knife still embedded in its body spun in confused circles.

Rowan stared through the leaves.

“No way,” he whispered.

The scarred slime did not move.

It sat directly beyond the fern cluster, eyes fixed on Rowan’s hiding place.

Its disposition flickered again.

Lesser Meadow Slime — Level 2 — Disposition: Suspicious

“No, no,” Rowan breathed. “You don’t get suspicion. You’re a blob. Blobs get pathing, not intuition.”

The scarred slime oozed sideways.

It did not have line-of-sight. It should not have had line-of-sight. The fern collision flag should have been a wall to its aggro raycast. But the creature edged along the perimeter, testing angles. Learning the exploit’s shape.

Rowan’s skin crawled.

The prompt reached fifteen.

DEFAULTING IN: 15…

He looked at the broken cart.

It lay only four strides beyond the ferns, one wheel missing, its axle jutting like a spear. Beside it sat a muddy barrel with a rusted iron hoop. Rowan knew that cart too. Decoration. Non-interactive. Except in build 0.8.3, its collision mesh had loaded before its visual mesh, creating a narrow wedge beneath the axle where small mobs could become stuck if lured from the northwest angle. He had made an entire video titled “Slime Prison Any%.” The devs had laughed. Then ignored it.

The scarred slime continued circling.

Fourteen.

Rowan gripped the fern stems and forced his breathing quiet.

He needed a weapon. The knife was lodged in green jelly. Inventory had bread, canteen, note. Bread might distract slimes? No, they ate biomatter, but bait logic had never been implemented. Canteen maybe water diluted acid, but cracked. Note maybe tutorial flavor text, unless this insane world had decided paper cuts counted as DPS.

He opened the note.

Traveler’s Note

If you can read this, keep your head down and follow the road to Silverbrook. Do not trust the chapel bells. Do not answer voices from wells. If the sky is red, you are early.

Rowan stared.

“That wasn’t in the build.”

Twelve.

The scarred slime found an angle. Its eyes met his through a gap in the leaves.

It smiled wider.

Rowan bolted.

The scarred slime launched at the same instant. It tore through the fern cluster behind him, body warping around leaves with a hiss. Rowan ran toward the broken cart, lungs burning, leg half-numb. The other slimes snapped back into awareness and bounced after him in a wet stampede.

Ten.

He reached the cart and grabbed the axle. Splinters drove into his palms. The wood was slick with moss. He vaulted over the broken side just as a slime slammed into the planks, shuddering the whole frame.

Nine.

The green slime bounced after him, knife hilt wobbling from its body.

“Thank you for returning my property.”