Chapter 3: Class Selection Error

The class window hovered over the graveyard like a confession written in fire.

FORBIDDEN CLASS DETECTED
Patch Witch
Origin: NULL_BRANCH / ADMIN-RESTRICTED
Role: Support / Exploit / Hexcraft
Compatibility: 98.7%

Warning: This class is not approved for mortal use.
Warning: Skill acquisition may permanently alter soul architecture.
Warning: Soul architecture currently unstable.

Accept class?
YES / NO

Mara stared at the word soul until the letters blurred.

Cold rain needled the back of her neck. Mud sucked at her boots. The graveyard around her breathed in a way graveyards were not supposed to breathe, the earth swelling and settling beneath crooked headstones as if something enormous slept just under the roots. The blood-red sky flickered between clouds, and every flicker made the floating interface stutter, its edges breaking into jagged squares of black static.

Permanent soul alteration.

In the office, warnings had been disposable. Legal wanted them. Design hid them in corners. QA clicked through them six hundred times a week, flagged typos, reproduced crashes, and complained when the button placement failed accessibility guidelines. A red warning box meant someone, somewhere, had needed plausible deniability.

Here, the warning pulsed against her vision with a sick little rhythm, and the corpse she had killed ten minutes ago was still leaking into the grass beside her.

Its blood smelled metallic. Not like pixels. Not like rendered fluid decals. Like pennies and butcher paper.

Mara swallowed bile.

“No approved for mortal use,” she said, because if she did not talk she was going to scream. Her voice came out hoarse and bitter. “That’s comforting. Really love the specificity.”

The grave under her left foot twitched.

Mara froze.

At first she thought it was another aftershock from whatever impossible system crash had dumped her into Eidolon. Then the soil bulged. Wet clods rolled off a sunken patch of earth. A finger emerged, yellow-white and black-nailed, clawing at the rain.

Another grave answered with a crack of stone. Then another.

All through the cemetery, hands punched through the earth.

Mara took one step back and nearly slipped on the moss-slick base of a headstone. Her dagger—the rusty starter blade she had looted from the broken skeleton—felt ridiculous in her fist. She had survived one monster because its lunge animation had glitched and locked its spine for half a second longer than intended. She had exploited timing. A single bug. Once.

The graveyard did not look interested in offering a repeatable test case.

A skull pushed free of the mud six paces away. One empty socket glowed with a cold blue coal. The other housed a wriggling centipede that spilled over its cheekbone like black thread. Its jaw opened, and a wet rattle crawled out.

AREA EVENT TRIGGERED
Graveyard of First Rest: Night Cycle Commencing
Undead Aggression: +300%
Respawn Grace: Disabled

Recommended Level: 3-5
Your Level: 1

“Oh, go to hell.”

The skeleton tore itself halfway from the earth. Beside it, a corpse in a rotted funeral coat sat upright with a gasp that sounded almost human. Its skin had shrunk tight over its teeth. Faint bronze letters crawled above its head.

Gravetouched Villager — Level 3

More names bloomed in the rain.

Restless Militiaman — Level 4

Bone Beggar — Level 2

Hollow Choirling — Level 5

They were all turning toward her.

Mara’s heartbeat became a frantic cursor blinking in the dark. Her health bar still sat in the corner of her vision, a miserable sliver missing from the skeleton’s earlier strike. Her stamina had recovered, but not her hands. They shook, slick with rain and blood. A rational portion of her brain began producing a list of facts with the dead calm of a bug report.

Expected result: Player chooses starter class in safe tutorial zone.

Actual result: Player offered forbidden class during escalating undead event in hostile graveyard.

Severity: Catastrophic.

Repro steps: Die in real world, wake up in nightmare.

The class prompt blinked again.

Accept class?
YES / NO

“What happens if I hit no?” Mara whispered.

The System answered with the merciless helpfulness of software that believed itself innocent.

Declining class selection will preserve current soul architecture.
You will remain Unclassed.
Survival probability in current encounter: 2.4%

“And if I hit yes?”

A pause. Not long. Less than a second. But Mara felt it. Somewhere behind the interface, something considered how much truth to give her.

Survival probability in current encounter: 41.9%

Long-term survival probability: ERROR
Long-term self-continuity probability: ERROR

Self-continuity.

Mara laughed once. It came out ragged enough to scare a crow from the dead branches above her. “That’s a fun phrase. That is an extremely normal phrase to use with a person.”

The first skeleton got its second arm free.

It moved wrong. Not like the previous enemy, whose glitched animation had created a pattern she could read. This one unfolded in pieces, ribs dragging from mud, shoulders snapping into alignment with hollow clicks. A broken saber hung in its hand, rusted edge notched but still sharp enough to split wet leaves as it scraped forward.

The Gravetouched Villager began crawling on all fours, mouth stretched wide. It whispered in a voice full of grave dirt.

“Cold,” it said. “So cold. Give us… warmth.”

Mara’s skin prickled.

NPCs remembered. Monsters spoke. Pain was real. Death was maybe real and maybe worse than real.

The prompt floated between her and the rising dead.

Preserve herself and die as whatever Mara Venn currently was.

Or accept a thing the System was afraid to name properly.

Her old manager, Denis, had once said she had an unhealthy relationship with broken systems. They had been two hours from launch, the combat build was on fire, and Mara had found a progression blocker in the third faction questline that everyone else wanted to downgrade to “known issue.” Denis had pinched the bridge of his nose while she argued in the glass conference room under fluorescent lights.

“You don’t have to fix every edge case,” he had said.

Mara had looked at the spreadsheet full of red cells, the exhausted devs, the chat window where executives kept typing launch readiness questions with smiley faces, and felt something sharp and stubborn lock into place behind her ribs.

“If the edge case kills the player,” she had said, “it isn’t the edge. It’s the game.”

Now the edge case was wearing her skin.

The skeleton lunged.

Mara slammed her finger through YES.

The world stopped.

Rain hung in the air as silver needles. The undead froze mid-crawl, mud suspended from their claws. The red sky tore open along invisible seams, and light spilled through—not white, not gold, but a raw compiler-blue that burned without heat.

The class window shattered.

Its fragments did not fall. They reversed, slicing inward toward Mara. She tried to duck, but her body had become an object in a paused scene, every muscle locked. The first shard entered through her left eye.

Pain detonated.

Not the clean pain of a cut. Not even the bone-deep agony of the skeleton’s earlier strike. This was invasive, intimate, a thousand hooks sinking into memories and yanking them open. Code threaded through her veins like molten wire. Her spine arched. She would have screamed if time had allowed sound.

Images flashed across the inside of her skull.

A hospital room she had never seen, filled with black flowers and machines that displayed stats instead of heartbeats.

A woman made of moth wings stitching a glowing sigil into a child’s shadow.

A battlefield beneath a dead sun, where giants with deer skulls for faces fell into trenches of liquid starlight.

Her own apartment, noodles gone cold beside three monitors, launch countdown at 00:00:03, her reflection in the black glass looking older than thirty-two.

A voice behind the code said, Found you.

Mara’s frozen lungs seized.

The voice was not the System. The System spoke in polished prompts, rules arranged like prison bars. This voice was old static and broken lullaby. It slid between the shards as if it had been waiting behind them.

Little tester. Little knife. Oh, they should not have let you see the seams.

Then the blue light collapsed into her chest.

Time resumed.

Mara hit the ground on her knees and vomited black sparks into the mud.

CLASS ACCEPTED
You are now: Patch Witch
Level: 1

Primary Attribute unlocked: Insight
Secondary Attribute unlocked: Hex Tolerance
Class Resource unlocked: Glitch

Current Glitch: 3/3

Her vision swam. New symbols coiled at the edge of everything: faint tags clinging to objects like labels in a dev overlay. The headstones had collision values. The mud shimmered with traction modifiers. The skeleton’s saber carried a durability warning, red and almost gone. Above the crawling villager’s head, beneath its level marker, a line of broken text pulsed in sickly yellow.

Effect: Grave Chill
Status: Stacking aura
Integrity: 62%
Fault detected: Radius calculation overflow during Night Cycle

Mara blinked hard. The text remained.

“Oh,” she breathed. Her teeth were chattering. “Oh, that’s disgusting.”

The skeleton’s saber came down.

She rolled.

The blade struck where her neck had been, sinking into mud with a wet chop. Stamina burned from the movement. Her shoulder slammed into a headstone, and a collision warning flared in her peripheral vision.

-4 HP
Blunt Impact

“Yes, thank you, I noticed.”

The Gravetouched Villager skittered at her, too fast, fingers bending backward as it crawled over graves. Frost spread from its palms, silvering the wet grass. Mara felt the cold before it touched her, a numbing pressure that sank through her boots.

Grave Chill x1
Movement Speed reduced by 5%

The line under its status flickered.

Radius calculation overflow.

Not useful unless she had tools.

As if in answer, another window opened with a sound like a match striking.

NEW SKILL UNLOCKED
Hotfix — Level 1
Rewrite one broken effect for a limited duration.

Valid targets: Glitched skills, corrupted statuses, unstable environmental rules, damaged item properties.
Cost: 1 Glitch + variable backlash
Duration: 10 seconds or until patch collapse

Warning: Hotfix does not create from nothing. It edits what is already broken.
Warning: Poorly written fixes may cause unintended consequences.

Mara stared at it for half a heartbeat.

Then the Hollow Choirling screamed.

It had pulled itself from a child-sized grave near the iron fence, a small corpse in the shredded remains of a white robe. Its jaw unhinged, and sound poured out in visible rings. Every headstone the rings passed over began to vibrate. Names carved in stone bled blue light.

Hollow Choirling begins casting: Lament of Waking
Effect: Summon additional undead from all marked graves
Cast Time: 8 seconds
Interrupt Difficulty: High

“Nope.”

Mara staggered to her feet. Her legs felt filled with ice water. The skeleton wrenched its saber free and turned toward her with patient malice. The villager circled left, grave frost blooming under its hands. Three more shapes were dragging themselves upright beyond them, their nameplates shivering in the rain.

She had one skill. Three Glitch. A rusty dagger. Ten seconds per fix. And a graveyard full of bad math.

Think like QA.

Not like a hero. Heroes charged. Heroes believed tooltips. Testers looked for what the game assumed would never happen.

Radius overflow on Grave Chill. Summon from marked graves. Environmental rules. Headstones. Night Cycle aggression. Broken saber durability.

The Choirling’s scream climbed higher. Cracks ran through the nearest grave markers. Skeletal fingers punched through one split slab, then another.

Mara focused on the villager’s aura line until the yellow text sharpened. It felt like squinting with a muscle behind her eyes. A new prompt unfolded.

Hotfix available: Grave Chill
Broken Effect: Radius calculation overflow
Current behavior: Aura expands beyond intended boundary during Night Cycle

Enter rewrite parameter:

A blank field blinked.

Mara almost laughed again. The System had given her a command line in the middle of a zombie attack.

The villager pounced.

She threw herself behind the headstone. Its claws raked stone instead of skin, spraying chips across her cheek. Grave Chill pulsed through the marker and bit into her arms.

Grave Chill x2
Movement Speed reduced by 10%

Her fingers were going numb. The blank field waited.

She did not know the syntax. Of course she did not know the syntax. There was no documentation. There was never documentation. Someone in systems had probably named variables after their cat and left for another studio three years ago.

“Fine,” Mara hissed. “We’re doing live service trash.”

She jammed intent into the field, not words exactly, but a shape of meaning sharpened by panic.

Rewrite Parameter:
Invert aura target filter. Apply Grave Chill to undead only.

The System hesitated.

Patch validation…
Validation failed: Target filter protected.
Suggested alternative: Adjust radius.

“Protected my ass.”

The skeleton rounded the headstone. Its saber rose.

Mara shoved more will into the prompt.

Rewrite Parameter:
If radius overflow detected, set origin target as hostile source. Clamp expansion inward.

The blue cursor blinked once.

Validation partial.
Cost: 1 Glitch
Backlash: Minor frostbite / soul static
Apply Hotfix?

“Apply.”

Something tore out of Mara’s chest.

Not blood. Not air. A bright, buzzing thread of herself unspooled through her ribs and snapped into the Gravetouched Villager. For one awful instant she felt what it felt: cold without end, hunger without stomach, a memory of a hearth it could no longer picture. Then the Hotfix took.

The frost aura imploded.

Silver rime raced backward across the grass, surged up the villager’s arms, and swallowed it from fingers to shoulder. The corpse shrieked, its jaw splitting wider than bone should allow. Its own cold turned inward, locking joints, freezing rotted muscle into rigid black ice.

Hotfix successful.
Grave Chill radius clamped to source.
Duration: 10 seconds
Glitch: 2/3

“That’s right,” Mara gasped. “Eat your own debuff.”

The skeleton swung.

She brought up her dagger on instinct. Rust met rust with a clang that jarred her arm to the elbow. The saber slid down, nicked her wrist, and hot blood cut through the rain.

-7 HP
Bleeding: Minor

The skeleton pressed forward. It was stronger than her. Of course it was. It had no muscles, no leverage that made sense, just system-approved force. Mara’s boots sank in mud as she shoved back with both hands.

The saber’s durability warning pulsed brighter.

Item: Rusted Militia Saber
Durability: 1/20
Fault detected: Break threshold not resolving due to owner death state

Owner death state. The saber should have broken already, but the undead’s status was preventing the item break. A broken effect.

The Choirling’s cast timer flashed.

Lament of Waking: 4.2 seconds

Beyond the skeleton, graves were opening like rotten mouths.

Mara could not win a strength contest. She did not need to.