Chapter 2: Welcome to the Tutorial

The first thing Jonah tasted after the world ended was gasoline.

It coated his tongue in a bitter film, sharp enough to cut through the blood in his mouth and the smoke gnawing down his throat. Somewhere close, a horn blared without pause, one long animal scream trapped under concrete. The sound drilled through the ringing in his ears until his eyes snapped open.

Darkness leaned over him.

Not night. Concrete darkness. Low ceiling. Fluorescent lights flickering in long rows, some dead, some buzzing, some strobing white over a field of wreckage. The ambulance lay canted on its side, wedged against a pillar painted with a blue B2. Its rear doors had burst open. Medical bags, IV tubing, a defibrillator case, rolls of gauze, shattered glass, and three bodies had spilled across the oil-slick floor.

Jonah’s body did not want to move.

Pain held him down with both hands. His ribs burned. His left shoulder felt packed with broken glass. Something hot crawled from his hairline into his eyebrow, then dripped onto the concrete beneath his cheek.

He inhaled and coughed so hard his vision burst white.

“Mara?” His voice came out shredded. “Mara, answer me.”

Only the horn answered.

Then a child sobbed.

The sound cut through everything. The smoke, the siren, the impossible memory of the sky splitting open over Denver like a wound with teeth. Jonah rolled to his stomach. His hands slipped in a smear of fluid. Not all of it blood. Coolant. Gas. Something black and viscous that had no business leaking from an ambulance.

He pushed himself up on one elbow and found Eli.

The boy was strapped to the gurney where it had jammed sideways against the wall of the parking garage. Eight years old. Maybe nine. Too pale beneath the oxygen mask. Dark curls stuck to his forehead. Before the crash, Jonah had been doing compressions while Mara drove like a demon toward Saint Brigid’s ER. Before the sky split. Before the dead stood up in the middle of Colfax and turned their faces toward the living.

Now the gurney’s metal frame was twisted, one wheel still spinning. The cardiac monitor lay cracked beside it, screen crawling with static. Eli’s mother, Mrs. Alvarez, was folded against the side wall, held upright by her seat belt. Her eyes were open. Her lips moved around a prayer Jonah couldn’t hear.

“Eli,” Jonah rasped.

He dragged himself toward the boy. Every foot cost him. His shoulder screamed. His knee caught on something soft and he looked down despite himself.

Mara was half under the ambulance’s front partition, pinned by the dash that had folded inward like wet cardboard. Blood soaked her uniform from sternum to hip. Her shaved head was turned toward him. One of her earrings—a tiny silver skull she insisted was “tasteful professional rebellion”—glinted in the stuttering light.

Her eyes found him.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

Jonah froze.

Mara’s mouth hitched into something that tried to be a grin and failed. “Kid first, Vale.”

The old guilt woke inside him so fast it felt like another injury. The suspended license. The disciplinary hearing. The hallway outside County General while a woman wailed because Jonah had chosen wrong and a man died anyway. Faces stacked behind his eyes like bodies in a morgue drawer.

Kid first.

He crawled.

The moment his hand touched Eli’s wrist, blue-white text unfolded in the air above the boy’s chest.

TUTORIAL INITIALIZATION IN PROGRESS

Subject: Human Juvenile

Status: Critical

Trauma: Internal hemorrhage, collapsed lung, systemic shock

Corruption Exposure: 3%

Estimated Survival: 00:02:11

Jonah jerked back, cracking his elbow on the concrete.

“No,” he breathed.

The text remained, steady as a monitor readout. Only he reacted. Mrs. Alvarez stared through it without blinking. Eli’s pulse fluttered beneath Jonah’s fingers, thin as thread.

A scream rose somewhere beyond the ambulance.

Jonah turned.

The parking garage sprawled in broken layers around them, a subterranean maze beneath Saint Brigid’s. Cars had slammed into pillars and one another. A delivery van burned near the ramp, smoke boiling along the ceiling. People stumbled through headlight beams and emergency strobes—patients in gowns, nurses in scrubs, a security guard with a baton, a man in a suit holding his own ear against the side of his head. The ramp leading up to street level was blocked by a city bus that had somehow nosed halfway down before jackknifing. Its windows were black with handprints.

Something hit the bus from the other side.

The metal boomed.

Everyone in the garage went still.

Another impact. Harder. The bus shifted an inch, tires squealing.

A nurse near the stairwell began whispering, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

Jonah tasted gasoline again. The air was full of it. One spark and the whole level would turn into a crematorium.

“Vale!” Mara’s voice snapped him back. “Move your ass!”

He looked at Eli’s timer.

Estimated Survival: 00:01:37

Jonah’s training took over because panic was useless and grief could wait its turn. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. He tore the boy’s shirt open. Purple bruising bloomed across the ribs. One side of Eli’s chest barely rose.

“Need a decompression needle,” Jonah said.

“Bag,” Mara hissed. “Red pouch.”

His trauma bag had spilled ten feet away beneath a rain of shattered syringes. He lunged, fingers closing around the strap, and dragged it back. His hands knew where everything was even when the world didn’t. Gloves were gone. Sterility was a fantasy. He ripped open the pouch, found a fourteen-gauge catheter, swabbed more out of habit than hope, and jammed the needle into the second intercostal space.

Air hissed out.

Eli’s chest rose more evenly.

The timer did not vanish.

Estimated Survival: 00:01:09

“Come on,” Jonah said. “Come on, buddy. Stay with me.”

The boy’s eyelids fluttered. His lips had gone blue.

Jonah pressed two fingers to the carotid. Rapid. Weak. Fading.

A warmth stirred beneath Jonah’s palm.

Not the boy’s. His.

It began in the scar across Jonah’s right hand, the old jagged line from the night he’d punched through an ambulance window to pull a drunk driver out before the engine caught. The scar darkened. Black seeped beneath the skin like ink dropped in water, branching into the veins of his wrist.

Text flickered at the edge of his vision.

ERROR: SOUL CONTAMINATION DETECTED

Class assignment interrupted.

Unauthorized resonance identified.

Searching…

Searching…

Searching…

“Not now,” Jonah whispered.

The black veins pulsed.

Eli arched against the straps. A wet rattle broke from his throat. His mother screamed his name.

Jonah clamped a hand over the boy’s sternum, as if pressure alone could keep him from leaving. “No. You do not die in a parking garage. You hear me? You don’t get to do that.”

The warmth became heat. Then fire.

Jonah gasped.

Something opened inside him—not in flesh, not in bone, but in a place he had never had words for. A door in the cellar of his soul. Behind it, a vast dark pressure breathed in.

FORBIDDEN CLASS COMPATIBILITY CONFIRMED

Designation: Plague Warden

Status: Quarantined / Unregistered / Hostile Architecture

Primary Function: Absorb, contain, redirect corruption.

Warning: Class unavailable in standard tutorial lists.

Warning: Prolonged use may result in mutation, psychosis, death, or worse.

Accept?

Y/N

Jonah stared at the prompt while Eli died under his hand.

There were no angels. No choir. No time to ask what worse meant.

“Yes,” he said.

The world went black at the edges.

Not darkness. Rot. It poured from Eli’s body into Jonah’s palm in oily threads no one else could see. Cold followed it, deep and hungry, the cold of hospital morgues and winter ditches and the moment after a pulse disappeared beneath his fingers. Jonah tried to pull away, but the thing inside him latched on.

Black veins raced up his forearm.

His skin bulged as if worms moved under it. He tasted pennies and grave dirt. Eli’s pain came with the corruption—broken ribs, drowning lungs, terror so sharp Jonah nearly screamed. Beneath that was something else, a dark grit lodged in the boy’s blood from whatever had leaked into the world when the sky opened.

Jonah dragged it out.

Eli convulsed. His chest snapped up in a full breath.

The purple bruising faded from livid to yellow. The wound at his temple sealed like time reversing badly, skin knitting in rough ridges. His heart slammed beneath Jonah’s palm, too fast but strong.

Then the sickness hit Jonah.

He fell sideways and vomited black fluid onto the concrete.

It steamed.

Mrs. Alvarez sobbed. “What did you do? What did you do to him?”

Jonah couldn’t answer. He was staring at his own hand. The veins had retreated halfway down his wrist, but not gone. A branching stain remained beneath the skin, delicate and dark, like the roots of a dead tree.

SKILL ACQUIRED

Septic Mercy I

Draw corruption and lethal trauma from a target into yourself. Stabilization likely. Full recovery improbable.

Cost: Corruption burden increases.

Current Burden: 7%

Threshold Effects begin at 10%.

Mara laughed once, breathless and disbelieving. “That’s new.”

Jonah wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The black vomit clung to his skin, then sank into the concrete with a hiss. “Yeah,” he said. His voice sounded far away. “Not in the manual.”

The horn finally died.

For one impossible second, silence took its place.

Then every phone in the garage screamed at once.

The sound was not a ringtone. It was a metallic chime that vibrated in teeth and bone. People clapped hands over ears. Screens lit in pockets, on dashboards, under bodies. Jonah’s cracked radio flashed. Even the dead nurse slumped near the elevator had a phone glowing blue through the pocket of her scrub top.

Above them, the air thickened.

Letters burned into existence across the parking garage, huge and white, casting shadows from the wrecked cars.

WELCOME TO THE TUTORIAL

Region: Denver Metropolitan Cluster

Instance: Saint Brigid’s Substructure B2

Participants: 118

Objective: Survive until extraction.

Time Remaining: 03:59:59

Secondary Objective: Clear Incursion Nests 0/3

Reward: Safe Zone Access, Class Stabilization, Starter Boons

Failure: Assimilation

A hundred and eighteen people read their death sentence in the air.

Then the garage erupted.

“What the hell is this?”

“My daughter’s upstairs!”

“Open the doors!”

“Is this a terrorist thing?”

“Everybody calm down!”

The security guard tried to climb onto the hood of a sedan and slipped in oil. He was broad, gray-mustached, with a name tag that read REED. Blood ran down his temple, but his voice still had the practiced authority of someone used to being ignored in hospitals and obeyed in parking lots.

“Listen up!” Reed shouted. “We need to move away from the vehicles and—”

The stairwell door slammed open.

A doctor stumbled through backward, one hand pressed to his throat. His white coat was black from the chest down. He took three steps into the garage, mouth opening and closing around a wet clicking sound.

Behind him crawled a thing that had once been a person.

It came on all fours, joints bending wrong, head dragging sideways because the neck was too loose to hold it up. Its hospital gown flapped around a ribcage split like a cracked cage. Pale vines threaded through the exposed meat, pulsing with a sick green glow. Its face was still mostly human, but the mouth had torn wide at the corners, packed with little black teeth like broken glass.

A prompt appeared over it.

Infected Thrall – Level 1

Condition: Hunger-Driven

Corruption: 18%

The doctor fell.

The thrall pounced on him before anyone moved. Its teeth sank into his cheek and pulled. The sound was wet cloth ripping. The doctor’s scream snapped the garage back into motion.

People ran in every direction.

“No!” Jonah pushed up, swayed, and nearly went down again. His left leg trembled under him. “Get away from the stairwell!”

No one heard him except Mara.

She coughed blood and grinned at him from under the ambulance wreckage. “Always did hate hospital orientation.”

“I’m getting you out.”

“You are absolutely not.”

“Shut up.”

“That’s my line.”

The thrall lifted its head from the doctor and turned toward the fleeing crowd. Its eyes glowed the same green as the vines in its chest. It skittered forward, fast.

A man in a Broncos hoodie shoved a pregnant woman out of his way. The woman fell hard, screaming as the creature bounded toward her.

Jonah moved without thinking.

He snatched a fire extinguisher from the wall bracket, crossed the distance in a limping sprint, and swung as the thrall leapt. The extinguisher connected with its jaw. Bone cracked. The impact jarred Jonah’s injured shoulder so badly sparks burst behind his eyes.

The thrall hit the concrete, rolled, and came up hissing.

“Lady, crawl!” Jonah barked.

The pregnant woman did, sobbing.

Reed appeared on Jonah’s left, baton raised. “You see the label too?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Reed swallowed. “Thought I was having a stroke.”

The thrall lunged again. Reed cracked it across the skull with the baton. Jonah drove the extinguisher into its knee. The joint folded backward, but the thing did not care. It clawed at Jonah’s thigh, tearing through uniform fabric and skin.

Pain flashed hot.

Jonah rammed the extinguisher nozzle into its open mouth and squeezed.

White chemical foam blasted down the creature’s throat. It thrashed, gagging. Reed stomped its head once, twice, three times, his polished security shoe slipping in black blood. On the fourth stomp, the skull caved in like rotten fruit.

The thrall went still.

Text flickered.

Infected Thrall defeated.

Contribution: 62%

Experience gained.

Level: 1

Progress to Level 2: 18%

Corruption residue detected.

Absorb? Y/N

The dead creature leaked that same green-black filth across the concrete. Jonah felt it before he understood the prompt. The stain called to the door inside him. Not with words. With gravity.

His veins darkened in answer.

“No,” Jonah said, and meant it.

The prompt vanished.

For a second, he was proud of himself.

Then the doctor the thrall had mauled began convulsing.

Green light spread from the bite along his veins.

Reed backed up. “That’s not good.”

Jonah dropped beside the doctor. Middle-aged. Indian. Badge clipped to his coat: DR. SANJAY PATEL, CARDIOLOGY. His cheek was gone. Air bubbled pink from his throat wound.

Subject: Human Adult

Status: Critical

Corruption Exposure: 22% and rising

Estimated Turn: 00:00:48

“Hold him down,” Jonah said.

Reed stared. “Hold him—are you insane?”

“Probably. Hands on his shoulders.”

“He’s turning into one of those things!”

“Not yet.”

That was all Jonah had. Not yet. Two words that had ruined him before and still owned him.

Reed cursed but knelt, pinning Patel’s shoulders with both hands. “If he bites me, I’m haunting your ass.”

Jonah grabbed Patel’s wrist.

The corruption slammed into him harder this time.

It knew him now.

Black-green fire surged up his arm, so cold it burned. Patel’s ruined cheek knitted in jagged strips. The bubbling in his throat slowed. Jonah clenched his teeth until something cracked. Images flashed behind his eyes that were not his: a hallway carpeted in moss that pulsed like lungs; a city under a black sun; thousands of mouths whispering from beneath the floor.

Hungry.

The word did not come from Jonah.

He ripped his hand away with a shout.

Patel sagged, breathing. The green light under his skin faded to a faint sickly web.

Jonah’s arm was black to the elbow.

Septic Mercy I successful.

Target stabilized.

Residual corruption remains: 5%

Current Burden: 14%

Threshold Effect Triggered: Black Vein Bloom

Physical contamination visible. Social hostility likely. Additional effects pending.

Jonah stared at the word social hostility while a hundred trapped survivors screamed around him.

“Your arm,” Reed said.

Jonah pulled his sleeve down. It did not help. The darkness crawled past the cuff, branching toward his hand. “Later.”

“That’s a big later.”

Across the garage, more stairwell doors began to rattle.

The tutorial had not waited for anyone to breathe.

System prompts bloomed over people’s heads in quick bursts. Jonah saw them as flashes while he staggered back toward the ambulance—classes, levels, health bars, half-formed titles.

Class Selection Available

Choose one:

Militia Recruit

Field Medic

Scrapper

Acolyte

Runner

A nurse with mascara streaking down her face stared at her hands as golden light wrapped her fingers.

“I picked Acolyte,” she whispered. “It said I can mend minor wounds.”

A teenage boy in a cafeteria apron swung a length of rebar experimentally, laughing too loudly. “Scrapper gives me plus two strength. Plus two! Dude, I can see my stats.”

A man in the suit shouted, “Don’t pick anything! It’s a contract! You’re agreeing to something!”

A woman with a broken arm screamed back, “Then you can contract my bone back into place, Doug!”

The air filled with terror and decision. Light flared, faded, changed people in tiny ways. Postures shifted. Eyes sharpened. Wounds stopped bleeding. A frail old man stood straighter as muscle filled his arms. The rules of the world were rewriting bodies like bad code.

Jonah reached Mara and dropped to his knees.

Her skin had gone gray. Too much blood. The dash pinned her pelvis and lower abdomen. Even before the System, it was the kind of entrapment that killed while rescuers argued over tools.

Now text hovered over her.

Subject: Human Adult

Status: Critical

Crush trauma, arterial bleed, pelvic fracture, organ damage

Continue Reading

You are reading a free preview (50%). Log in to unlock the full chapter and join comments.

Log In to UnlockCreate Account