Chapter 3: The Class That Shouldn’t Exist
by inkadminThe first thing Kael Venn did after accepting the forbidden class was fall to his knees and vomit light.
It poured from him in thin silver strands, hissing against the black stone floor of the tutorial chamber. The glow tasted like copper and winter air. It dragged memories with it—mud-slick boots in the lower tunnels, the stink of ogre blood, Captain Varrow shouting for the porters to move faster, stone screaming as the ceiling came down.
Then the memory snapped.
Kael clawed at the floor, dragging breath through clenched teeth. His ribs felt like they had been broken, put back together by a drunk mason, and filled with molten glass. Symbols crawled beneath his skin. Not tattoos. Not scars. They moved too purposefully, little splinters of blue-white radiance swimming through the veins on the back of his hands.
The tutorial chamber watched him in silence.
It was a round room of polished obsidian and pale floating lanterns, too clean to belong to any dungeon Kael had ever crawled through. Four sealed doors stood at the cardinal points, each marked with a different icon: sword, staff, shield, and bow. Above them, carved into the wall in glowing script, was the old promise every child in the kingdoms learned before they could read a tax notice.
THE SYSTEM GUIDES. THE SYSTEM REWARDS. THE SYSTEM PROTECTS.
Kael spat a string of silver onto the stone.
“Protects,” he rasped. His voice came out raw, like someone had dragged it over gravel. “Right.”
A pane of translucent blue light unfolded in front of him with a soft chime. It flickered three times before stabilizing, though the corners looked gnawed, as if something had taken bites from the interface.
CLASS ACCEPTED
Shardbound
Classification: ERROR
Origin: REDACTED
Progression Path: Unstable
Warning: This class is not recognized by current System law.
Kael stared at the last line until the words blurred.
“That seems bad,” he said.
The pane answered by distorting into static. A second window snapped open over it.
INITIALIZATION COMPLETE
Level: 1
Vitality: 8
Strength: 7
Agility: 9
Mind: 11
Will: 14
Luck: -3
Unassigned Attribute Points: 0
Primary Skill Acquired: Shard Sense I
Primary Skill Acquired: Fracture Touch I
Passive Trait Acquired: Core Hunger
“Luck minus three?” Kael pushed himself upright, wincing as the glowing lines beneath his skin pulsed. “I die in a cave-in, wake up in a forbidden tutorial, and you decide I’m unlucky now?”
The System did not dignify that with a response.
Kael’s laugh cracked halfway through. He had heard adventurers complain about bad starting stats for years—over wine, over campfires, over the bodies of porters who had absorbed the trap meant for someone richer. They talked about the System like a stern parent. Fair, if demanding. Cruel, if challenged. Generous, if obeyed.
Kael had carried their packs, cleaned their blades, counted their arrows, patched their socks, and watched them level while he stayed nothing. No class. No skills. No glowing destiny. Just strong enough to haul loot, too weak to claim any.
Now he had a class.
Apparently an illegal one.
The northern door, the one marked with the sword, sighed open.
Cold air rolled out, smelling of wet fur and moss. Beyond the doorway waited a corridor lit by strips of soft gold light. It was narrow, just wide enough for two armed men to walk shoulder to shoulder, and its walls were etched with smiling reliefs of heroic figures slaying beasts. The carvings had no blood. No broken fingers. No porters crushed under dropped treasure chests.
Kael wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked around for a weapon.
There was a rack by the door that had not been there a moment ago. On it hung a selection of tutorial equipment: a wooden sword, a cracked buckler, a shortbow with three blunted arrows, and a novice’s wand capped with cloudy quartz.
He took the sword. Then the buckler. Then, after a second’s thought, the wand too.
Warning: Improper equipment for selected class.
“I’ll try to be embarrassed after I survive.”
He tucked the wand into his belt. The wooden sword felt light and pathetic in his hand, but familiar enough. He had trained himself with discarded practice blades behind taverns, copying mercenaries when they were too drunk to notice. A porter who could not defend himself became a casualty line item.
He stepped into the corridor.
The door sealed behind him.
The sound was quiet, almost polite.
Kael did not like polite doors.
The corridor stretched ahead and opened into a grassy arena under an impossible sky. He stopped at the threshold despite himself. The ceiling was gone. In its place, clouds drifted across blue morning light. Wind stirred knee-high grass. Dew glittered on every blade. Somewhere, a bird called.
He knew enough dungeon work to hate it immediately.
“Fake sky,” he muttered. “Fake field. Real teeth.”
A chime rang.
TUTORIAL COMBAT TRIAL I
Objective: Defeat 3 Lesser Fangrats
Reward: 10 Experience, Basic Ration, Minor Healing Draught
Guidance: Use your class skills to achieve victory!
The grass rippled.
Three shapes broke from it at once.
Fangrats were larger than normal rats by the exact amount required to make them disgusting instead of merely annoying. Each was the size of a hound, with mangy gray fur, wet black eyes, and tusks that curved up from their lower jaws like bone hooks. Tutorial beasts, Kael knew. Baby heroes killed them by the dozen and boasted afterward as if they had survived a dragon siege.
These three came low and fast.
Kael moved before fear could stiffen him. He had spent his life surviving in the margins of other people’s battles, and the margins taught lessons no academy bothered with. Monsters targeted the brightest armor, the loudest spell, the smell of blood, the closest exposed ankle. Fangrats leapt for tendons.
He kicked the first in the snout.
Cartilage crunched under his boot. Pain shot up his leg as if he had struck a wall with fur. The fangrat tumbled aside shrieking. The second lunged for his left calf. Kael dropped the buckler, not to block but to smash downward. The rat’s teeth scraped wood; his knee drove into its skull. The third hit him from the side.
White pain burst along his hip.
Kael went down hard. Grass filled his mouth. The fangrat’s claws raked his ribs, tearing through the thin tutorial tunic. Its breath smelled like rot and old milk. Tusks snapped inches from his throat.
He jammed his forearm under its jaw, holding it back while its claws shredded his sleeve.
“Get—off!”
The symbols beneath his skin flared.
Something inside him reached.
Kael felt the fangrat differently then. Not as weight, heat, and stink, but as a cluster of trembling lights bound around a hard red speck in its chest. A core. Tiny. Crude. Beating like a second heart.
Shard Sense I activated.
The world sharpened to edges.
Every blade of grass became a line. Every drop of saliva hanging from the beast’s teeth shone with cold detail. The red speck inside the fangrat pulsed once, twice, and Kael understood without being taught that it was flawed.
All monsters had cores. Adventurers knew that. Boss cores powered cities, guild vaults, airships, noble wards. Lesser monster cores were barely worth the labor of cutting out, but they existed.
Kael had carried sacks of them until his shoulders bled.
He had never seen one through flesh.
His free hand clamped onto the fangrat’s chest.
“Break,” he snarled.
Fracture Touch I activated.
There was no flash. No heroic blast. Just a small, intimate crack.
The fangrat stiffened.
Its eyes bulged. Its claws spasmed against Kael’s ribs. Beneath his palm, the red speck shattered into three glowing splinters. Heat rushed into his hand, up his arm, and buried itself behind his sternum.
The fangrat collapsed on top of him, instantly dead.
Lesser Fangrat defeated.
Experience gained: 3
Fragment detected.
Core Hunger has consumed: Fangrat Shard x1
Available Trait Echo: Lesser Bite / Scavenger Scent / Nerve Twitch
Kael had no time to read the rest.
The first fangrat, bleeding from the nose, slammed into his shoulder. The second darted behind him. Kael rolled, dragging the dead beast with him as a shield. Teeth sank into the corpse instead of his arm.
He shoved the body forward and scrambled to his feet.
His side burned. Warm blood slid down his ribs. The pain was real enough to prove the tutorial had not been softened for him. Of course it had not. The System had given newborn heroes guided trials and safe injuries. Kael had received an illegal class and a luck score that looked like a personal insult.
The fangrats circled, hissing.
Kael tightened his grip on the wooden sword.
His hand shook. Not from fear. From the thing he had just swallowed. The shard inside him scraped at his bones, tiny and hungry. It left behind impressions: damp tunnels, edible rot, the twitch before prey moved.
The fangrat on the left tensed.
Kael felt the attack a heartbeat early.
He pivoted as it sprang. Its tusks passed through the space where his thigh had been. His wooden sword came down on the back of its neck with a dull crack. Not enough. Tutorial weapons were made for ceremony, not survival.
The beast twisted, but Kael was already dropping on it. He planted a knee into its spine, grabbed its matted fur, and slammed his palm against its ribcage.
This time, he felt resistance.
The core wriggled away from his touch, a red ember trying to hide in meat.
“No,” Kael said through his teeth.
He pushed.
The symbols in his arm blazed so bright they painted the grass blue.
Crack.
The fangrat died.
Lesser Fangrat defeated.
Experience gained: 3
Fragment detected.
Core Hunger has consumed: Fangrat Shard x1
Duplicate shard absorbed.
Trait Echo strengthened: Scavenger Scent
The last fangrat fled.
It bolted for the far side of the arena, tail lashing, tutorial instincts overwhelmed by whatever animal wisdom told it Kael was not playing the same game.
Kael chased it.
Not because he wanted to. His ribs screamed. His hip throbbed. His lungs felt like wet paper. But the shard inside him pulled, and beneath that pull was an older habit: never leave a threat behind you. Adventurers did that. Porters died for it.
The fangrat vanished into the tall grass.
Kael stopped, chest heaving.
The fake wind hissed across the field.
He closed his eyes.
For one trembling breath, he smelled everything. Dew. Blood. His own sweat, sour with panic. The musk of the dead fangrats behind him. And there—a hot, oily thread cutting through the grass to his right.
Scavenger Scent.
“That is foul,” he whispered, and turned.
The fangrat leapt at his face.
Kael threw up the buckler. The impact numbed his arm. Tusks punched through the wood, stopping a finger’s width from his eye. The fangrat shrieked and thrashed, stuck. Kael screamed back, more angry than brave, and drove the wooden sword into its open mouth.
The blade snapped.
The broken end punched through the soft palate and into the skull.
The fangrat convulsed, kicking against the shield, then went limp.
Lesser Fangrat defeated.
Experience gained: 4
Combat Trial I complete.
Reward issued: Basic Ration x1, Minor Healing Draught x1
Level Up!
You are now Level 2.
Attribute Points gained: 2
Skill Thread available.
A small cloth pouch appeared in the grass with a cheerful pop.
Kael stared at it, then at the corpse dangling from his ruined buckler.
“A pouch,” he said. “How generous. Nothing says divine guidance like making a man bleed for hard bread.”
He pried the dead fangrat off the shield and dropped it. Then he sat heavily in the grass, uncorked the healing draught with his teeth, and sniffed it.
Mint. Honey. A bright medicinal sting.
He drank.
Warmth flooded his throat and spread through his torn side. Flesh knitted with a sensation like ants marching under his skin. Kael bit down on a curse as the claw marks sealed. The bruising remained. So did the exhaustion. Minor draughts were meant to keep adventurers moving, not make them whole.
He opened his status with a thought.
The pane lurched into being.
Kael Venn
Class: Shardbound
Level: 2
Vitality: 8
Strength: 7
Agility: 9
Mind: 11
Will: 14
Luck: -3
Unassigned Attribute Points: 2
Skills: Shard Sense I, Fracture Touch I
Passive: Core Hunger
Absorbed Shards: Fangrat x3
Available Trait Echo: Scavenger Scent I
Skill Thread available: Bind Echo
Kael wiped blood from his chin with his thumb.
“Bind Echo,” he read aloud.
The words unfolded.
Bind Echo
Spend 1 Skill Thread to attach an absorbed Trait Echo to your Shard Tree.
Warning: Shard Tree structure unstable.
Warning: Unauthorized growth may trigger review.
“Review by who?” Kael asked.
The pane flickered.
For an instant, the blue light went black.
White text appeared, thin as a knife cut.
…observer ping failed…
…routing anomaly…
…class signature not found in approved index…
Then it vanished, replaced by the status pane as if nothing had happened.
Kael’s mouth went dry.
He had worked in dungeons long enough to know there were things adventurers did not talk about in front of priests. Loot irregularities. Quest failures that disappeared. Parties who entered restricted gates and returned missing one member none of them remembered. Once, in the city of Hallowmere, he had watched a golden-armored knight argue with empty air for three seconds before his body turned into motes of light and every witness calmly resumed breakfast.
Admins, people whispered after too much drink. The System’s immortal enforcers. Angels made of law. Or executioners wearing halos.
Kael looked up at the fake sky.
It was still blue.
That somehow made it worse.
He assigned one point to Vitality and one to Agility. If his class intended to make him touch monsters to death, he would need to reach them without becoming food. The numbers changed. No fanfare. Just a tightening in his muscles and a deeper steadiness in his breath.
Then he selected Bind Echo.
The moment his thought touched the command, pain speared through his chest.
Kael toppled sideways into the grass. His vision whited out. Something unfolded inside him: not a tree, despite the System’s name for it, but a jagged constellation of broken glass suspended in darkness. At the center burned a larger shard, blue-white and cracked down the middle. Around it drifted three red splinters, circling like hungry insects.
One red splinter shot toward the center.
It struck.
Kael gagged as alien instinct braided itself into him.
Rot meant food. Blood meant direction. Air carried stories. Fear had a smell like bitter roots.
Trait Echo bound.
Scavenger Scent I acquired.
Effect: Detect nearby blood, decay, and weakened life through scent within a limited range.
Shard Tree stability: 92%
Unauthorized modification logged.
Kael rolled onto his back, gasping.
“Logged where?” he wheezed.
The sky glitched.
Only for a heartbeat. Clouds froze. The birdcall cut off mid-note. A square of blue overhead turned black, revealing a depth full of cold white symbols streaming downward too fast to read.
Then the world resumed.
A new chime sounded, louder than the first.
TUTORIAL COMBAT TRIAL II
Objective: Defeat 2 Thornback Boars
Reward: 25 Experience, Novice Weapon Cache
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