Chapter 1: Error at the Tutorial Gate

by inkadmin

Ash died between one heartbeat and the next, with a child’s blood on his hands and a blue window asking if he wanted to continue.

For one absurd instant, that was what offended him most.

Not the pain—though there had been plenty of that, a white-hot spear punching through his ribs and out his back. Not the subway station collapsing into screaming chaos. Not even the fact that the thing that killed him had looked like a centipede designed by a sadist with a god complex, all plated black chitin and too many jointed legs clattering over tile slick with blood.

No. It was the pop-up.

It hung in front of his eyes as he fell, translucent and electric blue, neat serif font floating over catastrophe.

YOU HAVE DIED.

Would you like to continue?

YES / NO

He hit the floor hard enough that his teeth clicked together. The child beneath him made a wet, terrified sound. Somewhere above, fluorescent lights burst in a strobing chain, glass raining down like cold sleet. The station smelled of ozone, scorched plastic, brake dust, and opened bodies. The old familiar stink of disaster—except disaster had never before come with user interface.

Ash tried to breathe and got liquid in his throat. Blood, probably his. He tasted copper and something chemical, bitter as batteries.

“Hey,” he rasped to the kid, because the kid was still alive and that was what mattered. His own voice sounded far away, bubbled through fluid. “Hey. Look at me.”

The child was maybe eight, maybe ten. Little girl. Yellow raincoat with cartoon ducks on the hood. One sneaker missing. Her eyes had gone huge and glassy with shock, fixed not on Ash but on the monster bearing down through the panicked crowd.

People were trampling each other at the escalators. Some had frozen in place, staring up through the station’s shattered skylight where the evening sky had split into layered panes of blue light. The city beyond was all sirens and reflected neon and impossible geometry. Windows had appeared in the air over commuters’ heads like software hallucinations. Names. Numbers. Health bars.

Ash had seen a man in a business suit get launched into a ticket machine by a horned dog the size of a motorcycle. He had watched three teenagers beat one of those dogs to death with a metal trash can while golden text spilled around them like confetti. He’d had exactly six minutes to process the end of the world before a screaming mother lost her grip on her daughter and the giant centipede dropped from the tunnel ceiling.

Six minutes, and apparently all his training still won.

Former EMT. Current disaster magnet. Ash Vey had looked at the falling child and moved before his brain caught up.

Now he was dying over her, one arm braced around her shoulders, the other locked uselessly around the thing protruding from his chest. The centipede’s forelimb had pinned him like a butterfly specimen. Above him, its segmented head lowered, ringed mandibles opening with a click-click-click that made every primal alarm in his body scream.

The blue window waited patiently.

Seriously? Ash thought, and blood frothed at his lips.

The little girl found her voice. “M-Mister—”

“When I move,” Ash said, because there was only one chance now and it was bad, “you crawl. Under the bench. Don’t look back.”

She shook her head wildly, tears cutting tracks through soot on her face.

“Listen.” His vision tunneled. He forced a grin because kids read faces before words. “I’m a professional, okay?”

He had not been a professional for fourteen months. Fired after freezing on a call that smelled too much like the one that had killed his partner. Burned out, washed out, surviving on gig work and caffeine and the steady itch under his skin that told him he was meant for emergencies and was too broken to be trusted with them.

But the lie worked. The girl swallowed and nodded once.

Good enough.

Ash looked at the hovering options.

YES. NO.

“Little early for that,” he muttered.

The centipede lunged.

Ash shoved the child with everything left in him and hit YES.

The world turned inside out.

Darkness swallowed the station whole. Sound sheared away. Pain vanished so suddenly that the absence of it felt like another wound, deep and blinding. Ash floated in nothing, bodiless and cold, while blue code streamed past in vertical rivers.

It was not peaceful.

There was too much movement in the dark, too many layers under the light. As if behind the friendly game-like windows and reward chimes lurked machinery older and hungrier than any software had a right to be. He felt attention brush him—vast, impersonal, and irritated, like an office worker discovering gum stuck under a desk.

New text tore across the void. This one flickered, unstable, letters stuttering in and out.

FATAL EXCEPTION—SOUL ANCHOR NOT FOUND

PLAYER RECORD STATUS: INCOMPLETE

ATTEMPTING DEFAULT AFTERLIFE ROUTING…

ERROR

ERROR

ERROR

Ash did not have a body, but panic still found a way to tighten around him.

HIDDEN CONDITION MET.

FIRST-DEATH TUTORIAL FAILURE VARIANT DETECTED.

RESPAWN OVERRIDE AVAILABLE.

ACCEPT?

There was only one answer he had ever given to a bad idea dressed as his only option.

Yes.

Blue light struck like lightning.

He woke on cold concrete, gagging.

Air tore into his lungs so hard it felt like drowning in reverse. His body convulsed. He rolled onto his side and coughed up nothing but breath, hands scrabbling over his chest, his ribs, his stomach. No hole. No blood. No chitin spike through the sternum.

Alive.

His heart hammered as if trying to make up for lost time.

Ash pushed himself upright too fast and nearly blacked out. The world swung around him in a nauseating blur of shadow and sodium-orange light. He was in a maintenance alcove off the subway platform, half-hidden behind a wall of vending machines and a locked service gate. The station beyond was quieter here, distant screams and impacts echoing through tile corridors like sound underwater.

In front of him stood a waist-high pillar of tarnished steel capped by a cracked glass orb. The orb pulsed weakly blue, each flicker accompanied by a mosquito-whine of unstable electricity. Graffiti crawled up the pillar—old tags, fresh scorch marks, and one line of glowing text that seemed burned directly into the air above it.

CHECKPOINT CLAIMED: VERNON SOUTH STATION — PLATFORM B

LOCAL CONTROL: UNASSIGNED

Ash stared at the words. Then at his hands. Then back at the words.

“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no.”

Because impossible had rules. Hallucinations had patterns. Adrenaline spikes, blunt-force trauma, oxygen deprivation—Ash knew all the tricks a dying brain could play. He’d talked enough patients through the edges of them. But those tricks did not usually include being stabbed to death by subway arthropods and waking up at a magical save point.

A second block of text appeared, smaller than the first and much dimmer, like it didn’t want to be seen.

FATAL EXCEPTION—RESPAWN OVERRIDE ACCEPTED

Notice: Repeated restoration may result in data degradation.

Notice: Administrative review pending.

His skin went cold all over.

“Data degradation,” he read aloud, because hearing it made it less real. It did not help. “Sure. Why not. Completely normal sentence to see after dying.”

A soft crying noise came from the other side of the vending machines.

Ash froze, all the leftover static in his nerves snapping into focus. He rose into a crouch and edged around the machines.

A man in a transit security uniform sat on the floor with his back against the wall, clutching his left forearm. Blood soaked the sleeve dark. He was in his fifties, thick-necked and broad through the chest, with a gray mustache matted by sweat. A collapsible baton lay by one boot. When he saw Ash, he flinched so hard his injured arm knocked the wall and he swore.

“Easy,” Ash said automatically, hands opening. “I’m not with the bugs.”

The guard blinked at him. “The what?”

“Fair.” Ash glanced at the wound. Deep bite. Ragged edges. Not arterial, but ugly. “Can I look?”

“You a medic?” Suspicion warred with pain in the man’s face.

“Used to be.”

That should not have felt like a confession. It did anyway.

The guard hesitated, then extended the arm. “Name’s Ortega,” he grunted. “Something came outta tunnel three and took a piece out of me before those college idiots dragged it off.”

Ash knelt and did a quick assessment. No proper kit, no gloves, no gauze. Just a dead world, a bleeding stranger, and his own hands. Some things never changed.

“You dizzy?” he asked.

“Only when I’m awake.”

Ash almost laughed. Good sign. “Can you move your fingers?”

Ortega did, wincing. “What the hell is happening out there?”

“If you find out, let me know.” Ash tore off his own overshirt, twisted it tight, and improvised a pressure wrap. “For now, pressure, elevation, and not dying in a filthy subway alcove. That’s our care plan.”

Ortega watched him work, then eyed him more narrowly. “You look like you seen this before.”

Ash tied the knot one-handed and sat back on his heels. “I’ve seen panic before.”

He had. The station wore it like a weather system. Every shout and crash out on the platform carried the same charge as mass-cas incidents, pileups, apartment fires—the moment society’s script tore and everyone started improvising with whatever version of themselves surfaced first.

Some ran. Some froze. Some helped.

Some got stronger.

A burst of excited yelling echoed from the platform, followed by a chiming fanfare so bright and cheerful it sounded criminal.

LEVEL UP!

Ortega stared at the empty air where the message had appeared. “Did you—”

“Yep.”

“You seeing the blue crap too.”

“Also yep.”

“Well.” The older man swallowed. “That’s bad.”

“Massive understatement. Hold still.”

Ash leaned back against the wall and finally looked at the cluster of windows hovering at the edge of his vision. He’d been ignoring them on principle, which was childish but emotionally satisfying. Now he focused, and they snapped into clarity.

WELCOME TO THE INTEGRATION, PLAYER.

Tutorial Zone: Eclipsed Haven District 9

Survive. Adapt. Ascend.

Name: Ash Vey

Level: 1

Class: None

Health: 18/18

Stamina: 15/15

Status: Disoriented

Another pane sat partially hidden behind the others, its border fractured like cracked glass. When Ash tried to focus on it, text crawled across so fast he only caught fragments.