Chapter 3: Class Selection Error

The blue box hung in the air where the slime had died, its edges stuttering like bad video compression.

IMPOSSIBLE EVENT DETECTED
Unregistered exploit chain executed.
Environmental kill credited to: ROWAN VALE
Source: Collision Desync / Aggro Priority Inversion / Terrain Seam Abuse
Result: Level Threshold Reached

Initiating emergency class selection…

Rowan stared at it from where he lay sprawled on the damp grass, panting like a dog and bleeding into the dirt.

The slime’s remains hissed behind him, dissolving into a puddle of glowing green snot where it had torn itself apart against an invisible crease in the starter-zone hill. It had tried to lunge through the seam. The physics had disagreed. For one beautiful, horrifying second, the creature had stretched in three directions at once, its gelatin body snapping between collision states until the game—or the world, or whatever this nightmare was—had decided it was easier to kill the slime than resolve the bug.

Just like old times, except old times came with air-conditioning, vending machine coffee, and the option to log a ticket instead of getting your arm nearly melted off.

Rowan lifted his left hand. The sleeve of his cheap linen starter tunic had been burned away from wrist to elbow. Angry red blisters mottled the skin beneath. It hurt in a way no haptic rig had ever simulated. Each pulse of blood pushed fire under his skin.

“Okay,” he rasped. “Pain sliders definitely shipped at one hundred percent. Good call, team. Very accessible.”

The class selection box flickered.

ERROR
Standard novice classes unavailable.
Reason: Character origin invalid.
Reason: Soul hash mismatch.
Reason: Developer flag detected.
Reason: Developer flag corrupted.

Searching archived builds…

The meadow around him did not wait politely while the System had a stroke. Wind combed through fields of silver grass, carrying the smell of wet earth, monster acid, and distant woodsmoke from the village he had seen earlier. Past the rolling hills, the sky arched in impossible shades of dawn-gold and bruised violet, clouds layered like painted glass. Elysium had always been pretty on a monitor. Inside it, beauty had weight. It pressed on his lungs. It made the back of his neck prickle.

Because every polished stone, every blade of grass, every bird-shaped shadow circling above looked real enough to kill him.

Rowan pushed himself upright and immediately regretted it. His ribs stabbed. His knees shook. The starter zone’s friendly ambient music was absent, replaced by rustling grass and the liquid pop of slime residue eating through pebbles.

“Archived builds,” he muttered. “Great. Perfect. Let’s give the man with a concussion access to the cursed basement.”

The box expanded.

CLASS SELECTION: CORRUPTED BRANCH
No valid tutorial mentor detected.
No divine patron detected.
No race template detected.
No resurrection covenant detected.

Available classes have been reconstructed from deprecated, hidden, quarantined, or experimental data.
Proceed?

Below the question, two options appeared.

[YES]     [NO]

Rowan laughed once. It came out thin and ugly.

“No, obviously.”

He jabbed the air above [NO].

The button flashed gray.

INVALID INPUT
Class selection cannot be canceled.

“Then why offer?”

Legacy user experience requirement.

Rowan closed his eyes.

For three years, he had written bugs like this. Button present but disabled. Cancel path unreachable. User trapped in unskippable flow. Severity: High if progression-blocking. Priority: Low until someone important complained.

He had complained. Constantly. No one had listened.

Now the ticket was his life.

Something chirped in the grass to his right.

Rowan’s eyes snapped open. A fist-sized beetle with a jeweled shell crawled onto a stone, antennae twitching. Its carapace split, showing membrane wings and a pair of needle mandibles.

The creature’s nameplate shimmered above it.

Meadow Pincer Lv. 2

It turned toward him.

“Nope.” Rowan scooped up the rusted starter dagger he had dropped during the slime panic and lurched backward. “I am in a menu. There should be menu invulnerability. This is basic.”

The beetle opened its wings and shrieked like a boiling kettle.

The class selection window politely slid aside to keep itself visible.

Proceed?

“Yes, yes, whatever, proceed!”

The world hiccuped.

The meadow dimmed. The beetle froze mid-launch, wings blurred in a silver smear. The grass stopped swaying. Even Rowan’s pain dulled, as if someone had wrapped reality in cotton and reduced the volume.

New windows unfolded around him in a jagged semicircle. They were not the clean blue panels of the live build. These were black, red, purple, colors bleeding at the edges, fonts overlapping as if several UI skins had been forced into the same space and left to cannibalize each other.

AVAILABLE CLASS: NULL SQUIRE
Role: Defensive / Anti-Existence
Description: A knight sworn to no lord, no land, and no continuity. Null Squires reduce incoming damage by partially failing to exist at the moment of impact.

Starting Skills:
• Missing Frame Guard
• Oath of Nobody
• Unperson’s Counter

Known Issues:
• May be forgotten by allies during combat.
• Inventory may not persist between scene transitions.
• Excessive nonexistence can become permanent.

Select?

Rowan blinked.

“That’s not a class. That’s a cry for help.”

The next window shivered forward.

AVAILABLE CLASS: BLOOD ACCOUNTANT
Role: Support / Resource Theft
Description: Converts wounds into debt and debt into power. Specializes in balancing ledgers across enemy health pools.

Starting Skills:
• Interest-Bearing Injury
• Hemorrhage Audit
• Foreclose Vitality

Known Issues:
• All healing is taxable.
• Party members may be repossessed.
• Class banned in four divine jurisdictions and one beta test.

“I remember you.” Rowan’s throat tightened with half a laugh, half nausea. “You crashed the economy test server in forty-six minutes.”

He could still see the spreadsheet: clerics healing each other recursively until their health debt overflowed into negative damage, causing an NPC banker in Valecrest to ascend into a world boss called Auditor of Suffering. The design lead had called it “emergent.” The producers had called security.

Another class panel dragged itself into focus like a corpse pulling free of mud.

AVAILABLE CLASS: PACIFIST NECROMANCER
Role: Summoner / Nonviolent Control
Description: Commands the dead while refusing to harm the living. Raises fallen entities for protection, labor, and emotionally complicated companionship.

Starting Skills:
• Gentle Reanimation
• Bone Wall, Please
• Apologetic Exorcism

Known Issues:
• Cannot deal direct damage to living targets.
• Undead may develop opinions.
• Excessive empathy may unlock forbidden questline.

Rowan stared at that one longer than the others.

It sounded ridiculous. It also sounded useful. Minions. Protection. Bodies between his soft human skin and the thing currently frozen in the air trying to bite him.

But “cannot deal direct damage” was a death sentence in a solo starter zone. He knew Elysium’s early-game spawn tables too well. Slimes. Pinchers. Thorn hares. Bandit scouts if a player wandered near the old mill. Wolves after dusk.

He needed violence. Preferably unfair violence.

The panels rearranged. One window remained at the edge of his vision, pulsing out of sync with the others. It was smaller. Darker. The text inside crawled for several seconds before stabilizing.

AVAILABLE CLASS: GLITCH TYRANT
Role: Control / Corruption / Exploit Sovereign
Description: A forbidden ruler of broken rules. Glitch Tyrants identify flaws in reality’s logic, impose false states upon enemies, corrupt skills, and seize unstable mechanics from defeated bosses.

Starting Skills:
• Bug Report
• Forced Error
• Phase Theft (Locked)
• Tyrant’s Cache (Damaged)

Class Trait:
• Respawn Anomaly

Known Issues:
• Illegal class. Do not deploy.
• Attracts Administrator scrutiny.
• May destabilize local quest logic.
• May cause monsters to retain memory across rollback events.
• Tyrant-class entities historically associated with world-ending incidents.

Select?

The meadow seemed to grow colder.

Rowan read the description twice. Then a third time, because the words “Respawn Anomaly” had hooked under his ribs and pulled.

“Rollbacks,” he whispered.

He remembered the moment after death—or what he assumed was death. The office lights. The test build. The patch note spreadsheet open on his second monitor. Midnight turning into 3:17 a.m. with no one left in the QA pit but him and the hum of dying fluorescents. The bug title: Critical: respawn loop persists world-state exceptions after forced rollback.

Then the server warning. The smell of burning plastic. His hands refusing to leave the keyboard. The emergency lights painting everything red.

And after that, grass against his cheek.

“Every time I die,” Rowan said slowly, “the world rolls back.”

The box did not answer.

It didn’t need to.

His mouth went dry.

If that trait did what he thought it did, death was not an ending. It was a reset with consequences. A twelve-hour rollback, maybe. That was the bug he had been hunting. The reason he had stayed late. The one buried deep enough in the resurrection service that nobody believed his repro steps until he recorded twenty-seven gigabytes of footage and still got told to “validate again on the latest branch.”

Monsters retain memory across rollback events.

His gaze flicked to the frozen beetle.

“That part is less charming.”

The class panel pulsed. The letters in GLITCH TYRANT glowed like hot metal.

Everything about it screamed trap. Illegal. Forbidden. Administrator scrutiny. World-ending incidents. It was exactly the kind of content the studio buried behind dev commands, forgot to remove, and then pretended never existed when dataminers found strings in the client.

It was also the first thing since waking that looked like a weapon built for the shape of him.

Rowan was not a hero. He had never fenced, never shot a bow, never marched in armor beneath a holy banner. His combat training consisted of avoiding gym memberships and once breaking his thumb on a vending machine that ate his dinner.

But he knew broken systems.

He knew how to walk along the edge of a map until the collision thinned. He knew how to pull mobs out of leash range one pixel at a time. He knew how to stack buffs in the wrong order, open menus during animations, cancel recovery frames with emotes, drag bosses into doorways, dupe quest items, corrupt aggro tables, and make programmers sigh with the defeated awe of priests witnessing blasphemy.

In Elysium, everyone else would learn swords and spells.

Rowan could learn the seams.

The panel waited.

His burned arm throbbed. The beetle hung in the air, mandibles open, a tiny knife with wings. Somewhere far away, a bell rang from the starter village—soft, silver, and indifferent.

“All right,” Rowan said. “Let’s make terrible decisions.”

He reached for the Glitch Tyrant panel.

The moment his fingers touched [Select], the other classes screamed.

Not metaphorically. The windows tore sideways with shrieking audio distortion, their text stretching into long white wounds. The frozen meadow convulsed. Grass blades bent at impossible angles. The sky cracked into layered squares, each one showing a slightly different dawn. For half a second Rowan saw the world without its skin: wireframes beneath hills, strings of symbols hanging from trees, red bounding boxes around stones and insects and his own shaking hands.

Then the panel opened like an eye.

CLASS SELECTED
GLITCH TYRANT

Warning: Class signature matches quarantined antagonist framework.
Warning: Tyrant seat previously occupied.
Warning: Inheritance conflict detected.

Resolving…

“Previously occupied?” Rowan said. “What does that mean?”

Something answered from behind the System’s voice.

It was not sound. It was a pressure, vast and cold, pushing through the gap the class selection had opened. Rowan smelled ozone, dust, and old blood. For an instant, the meadow was gone, replaced by a throne room made of broken raid arenas: dragon bones for pillars, shattered UI panes for stained glass, rivers of static flowing through grooves in black stone.

On the throne sat a silhouette wearing a crown of error messages.

Its head turned.

Rowan felt its attention touch him.

A migraine exploded behind his eyes.

He hit the ground on his hands and knees as frozen time shattered. The beetle completed its leap with enthusiastic professionalism and buried both mandibles in his shoulder.

“Son of a—”

Pain punched the word out of him. The Meadow Pincer’s legs clawed at his tunic. Its wings buzzed against his cheek, hot and frantic. Rowan dropped the dagger, grabbed the beetle with his burned hand, and nearly blacked out from the agony. The thing’s shell was hard and warm, vibrating with insect strength.

Instinct screamed at him to tear it off.

Memory screamed louder: pincers injected a stacking bleed if pulled incorrectly.

“Right,” he gasped. “Tutorial bug number thirteen. Detach animation can be interrupted.”

The beetle dug deeper.

A new UI element flickered at the edge of his sight, red-black and ugly.

NEW SKILL AVAILABLE
Bug Report Lv. 1
Focus on a target or phenomenon to identify exploitable inconsistencies.
Cost: Concentration / Pain tolerance / Sanity optional

“Would’ve loved a manual.”

Rowan forced himself to stare at the beetle. Not at the mandibles in his flesh. Not at the blood spreading down his chest. At the creature as if it were a test object under debug view.

The world sharpened.

Green shell. Six legs. Wing animation still looping even though it had latched on. Its abdomen twitched every 0.8 seconds before poison injection. Nameplate jittering because it was too close to the player camera. Mandible lock classified as both “grab” and “weapon hit,” a tag conflict from an old combat refactor.

Lines of red text crawled over the beetle.

BUG REPORT: Meadow Pincer
Detected Issues:
• Attachment state conflicts with airborne state.
• Poison injection requires valid grounded target confirmation.
• Mandible lock lacks failsafe if host changes collision layer.
• Wingbeat audio desync: cosmetic.

Recommended Exploit: Force state contradiction.

Rowan’s breath hitched.

“Force state contradiction,” he repeated. “With what, my charming personality?”

The second skill answered before he finished.

Forced Error Lv. 1
Impose a detected invalid state on a target.
Low success chance against stable entities.
High backlash chance if error rejected.

Available Error:
[Airborne + Attached]

The beetle’s abdomen swelled. Poison tick imminent.

Rowan grabbed the idea like a live wire.

“Forced Error!”

The words tore out of him in a voice that was his and not his, layered with a digital snarl. Black squares spilled from his fingers into the beetle’s shell. The insect spasmed. Its wings blurred faster, still beating, still latched, the System trying to decide whether it was flying or attached.

For one absurd second, the Meadow Pincer levitated sideways with Rowan’s shoulder still in its mouth.

Then the contradiction resolved violently.

The beetle shot backward as if yanked by an invisible hook, mandibles ripping free. It slammed into the air three feet away and stuck there, legs paddling at nothing. A red icon spun above it.

STATE ERROR
Target cannot path.
Target cannot detach.
Target cannot land.

Rowan clamped a hand over the bleeding holes in his shoulder and staggered upright.

“That,” he breathed, “is disgusting. I love it.”

The beetle shrieked. Its body twitched, trapped in a tiny invisible box. He picked up the dagger with his good hand and limped closer. The creature’s eyes were glossy black pinheads. It had no expression. It was a low-level mob, a starter bug designed to teach players that poison existed.

Still, it watched him.

Not like an animal. Like something taking notes.

Rowan hesitated.

“Don’t make that face,” he said, though the beetle had not changed at all. “You attacked me during character creation. That’s rude in every culture.”

He stabbed it.

The first strike bounced off its shell and jarred his wrist. The second found a seam beneath the wing casing. The third sank deep. The beetle spasmed, legs curling inward, and burst into motes of gold light that smelled faintly of copper and crushed leaves.

Meadow Pincer defeated.
+8 EXP
Loot acquired: Cracked Chitin x1
Loot acquired: Pincer Venom Sac x1

Glitch Tyrant proficiency increased.

Rowan stood over the fading sparkles, chest heaving.

His shoulder bled freely. His arm burned. His ribs hurt. His stomach growled with the offended timing of a body that had decided survival was not enough; it also wanted breakfast.

“I miss health bars,” he said.

As if reminded, the interface flickered.

STATUS UNLOCKED
Name: Rowan Vale
Level: 2
Class: Glitch Tyrant Lv. 1
Title: None

HP: 31/60
MP: 18/25
Stamina: 22/40

Strength: 6
Agility: 8
Endurance: 6
Intellect: 14
Will: 11
Luck: ERROR

Unassigned Attribute Points: 5
Skill Points: 1

Rowan squinted at Luck.