Chapter 1: Character Creation Failed

Nullblade Ascending chapter 1

When the blue screen asked Evan Mercer to choose a class, the only option he got was ERROR.

It hung in the air in front of him, a rectangle of cold light sharp enough to make the ruined station behind it look unreal. Around him, people gasped, cried, laughed, prayed. Gold and crimson and emerald windows unfolded before them like stained-glass invitations from a god with a gamer’s imagination.

Evan’s screen flickered once, spat static across the letters, and stayed blue.

He stared at it with blood drying on his knuckles, a box cutter clenched so hard in one hand that the cheap plastic handle bit into his palm, and had the absurd thought that if someone had uploaded Nullblade Ascending chapter 1 onto his life, the writer was laying it on a little thick.

Then the station roof groaned overhead, far too loudly, and somewhere out in the city something screamed with three voices at once.

The screen blinked.

CLASS SELECTION INITIALIZING…

ERROR

“No,” Evan said aloud.

Nobody heard him. Nobody would have cared if they had.

Ten minutes earlier, Chicago had still been Chicago.

Gray clouds over the Loop. Wind funneling between high-rises with the particular knife-edged meanness only this city seemed to perfect. A half-drunk coffee cooling on the guard desk in shipping receiving. A pallet jack with a busted wheel waiting for him to deal with it because the day supervisor had, once again, written someone should look at this on a sticky note as though problems in the warehouse solved themselves if you acknowledged them in handwriting.

Evan had been at the loading bay of a wholesale supply building just south of the river, wearing steel-toed boots, a reflective vest, and the expression of a man who had accepted disappointment as a weather pattern. Thirty-two years old. Night manager in a warehouse that sold paper products, cleaning chemicals, and bulk snacks to institutions too large and joyless to buy them in normal stores. Not dead. Not thriving. Not surprised by very much anymore.

The forklift battery station smelled like acid and hot dust. The overhead lights buzzed. His phone, propped beside the clipboard, had been playing a streamer VOD he wasn’t really watching—some speedrunner screaming over split times in a game Evan used to be good at before life had become an inventory of things he was too tired to fail at properly.

Then the entire building had shuddered.

Not a truck backing too hard into dock three. Not the elevated tracks rattling a block over. This had come from above.

Every light in the warehouse dimmed to twilight. Every screen went black.

Someone on the floor shouted, “Transformer blew?” and another voice answered, “It’s the whole damn block.”

Evan stepped out toward the loading bay door and looked up through the slit of reinforced glass.

The sky was cracking.

There was no better word for it. Noon-blue atmosphere split by glowing fractures that spread from horizon to horizon, each line shining a hard electric sapphire. The clouds around them pulled inward, spiraling, as if the whole city had become a drain.

Cars skidded in the street. Horns leaned into a single animal panic. Pedestrians froze, faces tipped upward. One woman dropped two shopping bags and oranges burst across wet pavement, bright as flares.

Then a voice rolled through the world.

It did not come from speakers. It did not come from the sky. It arrived directly inside bone.

INTEGRATION COMMENCING.

LOCALITY IDENTIFIED: EARTH / CHICAGO URBAN CLUSTER.

SHELTER, ADAPT, OR BE CULLED.

The words punched the breath out of everyone who heard them.

“What the hell was that?” Carlos from receiving whispered.

Evan didn’t answer. The loading bay door’s metal tracks rattled. The concrete under his boots hummed. Out in the street, the white lane markers lit up in blue gridlines that spread spiderweb-fast over asphalt, up walls, around traffic lights and bus shelters and building facades. Like an invisible architecture had always been there, and someone had finally switched it on.

His phone screen lit by itself.

WELCOME, CANDIDATE.

PRELIMINARY SURVIVAL EVENT INBOUND.

REMAIN WITHIN ACTIVE ZONE.

“Candidate for what?” Carlos said, voice cracking.

The answer came screaming around the corner.

They looked like dogs if someone had built dogs from wire, gristle, and broken black antlers. Too many joints in the legs. Hairless hides slick as wet leather. Their mouths split vertically instead of horizontally, opening into flower-like rings of teeth. There were six of them, loping through stalled traffic, hitting hoods and windshields and roofs without slowing, each impact denting steel.

A man in a suit stumbled between two taxis. One of the creatures changed direction with hideous smoothness and leaped.

The scream ended quickly.

Panic detonated.

Warehouse workers surged backward from the bay. Someone knocked over a tower of shrink-wrapped paper towels. Carlos began praying in Spanish. A driver sprinted for the side exit. Evan didn’t move for one second too long, because the first thing his brain always did in a crisis was reject the shape of it.

No. There’s a trick. A projection. A gas leak. A mass hallucination. A viral marketing campaign with a budget from hell.

Then one of the creatures landed against the loading bay door hard enough to leave a dent the size of a car tire, and his denial stopped being useful.

“Close it!” someone yelled.

Evan lunged for the chain control. The motor whined. The bay door began to descend in clattering increments just as another antler-hound slammed into it from outside. Teeth punched through one aluminum slat in a rain of curled metal strips. People shrieked and scattered.

“Office!” Evan shouted. “Get behind the office doors, now!”

He didn’t know if he was in charge. He just had the loudest voice still functioning.

Some listened. Some didn’t. That was normal too.

A second creature sprang onto the hood of a delivery van parked at the dock, then onto the side rail, claws scraping sparks. It was trying to find a better angle. Evan saw it hesitate as the descending door reached chest height. Its head twitched left, right, left again.

Pattern.

That was what his brain did best when everything else failed. Not heroics. Not brilliance. Not courage. Pattern recognition. In the warehouse, it meant spotting the bad pallet in a stack before it collapsed, the employee about to quit before they said it, the machinery vibration that meant a bearing would shear in twelve hours. It was the world confessing its flaws to him in tiny repetitive tells.

The creatures weren’t random.

They attacked movement first. The nearest living thing first. But before committing to a line, each did the same stutter-step scan, head twitching through three positions.

Acquisition. Confirmation. Leap.

One beat. Maybe less.

The bay door hit the concrete. The impact shivered through the dock. The monster outside screeched, scraping teeth against metal.

“Evan!” Carlos yelled from the office corridor. “Move, man, move!”

He backed away from the door, breathing shallow and fast. Around him, the warehouse had become a cavern of stacked goods and fluorescent half-light. Somewhere in the front offices glass shattered. The side exit, then. Someone had opened it.

Bad idea.

The scream that followed made the point for everyone.

Evan ran toward the corridor anyway because there were people there and because the monsters had a way in now whether anyone wanted to admit it or not. Halfway to the office, his boot slid on spilled packing straps. He caught himself on a pallet of bottled detergent and saw, hanging from a nail on a support post, the yellow fire door release map for the back emergency corridor.

One of the side fire doors there had a broken hydraulic hinge. It never latched cleanly. He’d filed three maintenance tickets. Nothing. If shoved open and let go, it slammed shut too fast and hard enough to break fingers.

His gaze snapped to the wall cabinet beneath the map. Fire axe behind glass. Beside it on the shelf: replacement utility blades, zip ties, emergency flashlight.

Something crashed through the office window.

The first antler-hound hit the linoleum in a spray of broken safety glass and blood. It had taken somebody with it. Its legs unfolded insect-quick. Carlos was nearest, frozen so completely that even his prayer had stopped.

The creature’s head twitched. Left. Right. Left.

Acquisition. Confirmation. Leap.

Evan grabbed the red fire extinguisher off the wall and hurled it.

It wasn’t a good throw. It didn’t need to be. The cylinder hit a filing cabinet beside the creature with a metallic cannon crack. Its head snapped toward the sound. It launched.

At empty space.

“Run!” Evan bellowed, already moving.

Carlos ran.

So did everyone else who still could. They bolted down the rear corridor between cinder-block walls washed in flickering emergency lights. Evan yanked the fire axe cabinet open on instinct as he passed, then rejected the axe immediately. Too heavy. Too slow in a hallway.

He snatched a pack of utility blades instead and kept the box cutter clipped to his belt. Behind them, claws skittered over tile. More than one set.

The corridor kinked left to the emergency exit, a steel fire door painted industrial red, with the busted hinge that maintenance had never fixed.

Evan got there first and slapped the push bar. Cold air punched in from the alley. A sheet of paper plastered to the outside fence whipped loose and vanished into the wind.

“Out?” Carlos cried.

“No. Past me.”

Carlos stared at him like he’d gone insane.

“Past me!” Evan shouted.

People squeezed by him into the threshold and past into the narrow concrete alley beyond. He stayed planted just inside, one hand on the push bar, watching the corridor. The first antler-hound rounded the corner at a dead run. Its black hide shone with office blood. Behind it came another, and another, shoulder-checking one another in their rush toward movement and open space.

Pattern.

The lead monster’s head twitched. Left. Right. Left.

Evan jerked the door wide, stepping into the alley. The creature launched.

He let go.

The broken hinge did what maintenance never had. The heavy steel fire door whipped shut like a guillotine. It caught the monster at the neck with a wet, explosive crunch. Bone cracked. Teeth sprayed across the concrete threshold like shattered porcelain.

The body convulsed, hind legs hammering the floor.

The second creature barreled straight into it and tangled. Evan drove his boot into the push bar again, forcing the door inward against the trapped neck, pinning both monsters in the choke point. Their vertical jaws snapped inches from his leg.

He dropped to one knee, ripped the box cutter free, thumbed the blade out, and slashed at the first thing that looked soft.

The eye gave way with a hot burst of black fluid.

The scream hit him physically. It was ultrasonic, needled through his skull. He stabbed again, lower, where jaw met throat. The blade was laughably small for this. Office-supply murder. But blood poured, slick and smoking where it hit the steel threshold.

“Evan!” Carlos shouted from farther down the alley. “Jesus Christ!”

“Find something to lock!” Evan barked back, then threw his weight against the door as the second creature clawed through the gap. One talon raked his forearm, slicing vest and skin in a white-hot line. Pain flashed, immediate and bright. He hissed and stabbed downward, found tendon, twisted.

The damaged beast thrashed. The hinge screamed. For one awful second Evan thought the whole plan would fail because of course it would, because every workaround in his life held exactly until the moment he needed it.

Then the top hinge tore free of the frame.

The steel door dropped half an inch and sheared sideways under the stress, crushing both monsters harder into the jamb. The pinned neck gave with a pulpy snap.

Something changed in the air.

SURVIVAL ACTION REGISTERED.

HOSTILE ELIMINATION: 1

ASSISTED ELIMINATION: 1

The words appeared translucent over the alley, visible and impossible. Evan stared at them for the fraction of a second that nearly got him killed.

The third antler-hound hit the ruined door from inside the corridor with enough force to blast it outward.

Evan dove. Claws ripped the back of his vest. He hit wet concrete shoulder-first, rolled under a rusted ladder bolted to the brick wall, and came up with his box cutter still in hand. The creature landed where he’d been, skidding on the blood of its packmates. Its head twitched.

Left. Right. Left.

He snatched a broken length of chain from the alley fence and whipped it at a dented dumpster lid three feet to the side.

Clang.

The monster lunged for the sound.

Evan was already moving. He came in low, slammed the box cutter blade into the soft seam behind its foreleg, and rode its momentum as it whipped around. The blade snapped off inside it. The creature shrieked and bit at him, but the angle was bad. It smashed into the brick instead, stunned for just half a heartbeat.

Enough.

Evan seized the rusted ladder rung overhead, planted both boots against the creature’s shoulder, and kicked off hard. The rung screeched. The beast toppled backward into the open dumpster behind it.

The lid crashed shut.

Without thinking, he ripped one of the spare utility blades from the plastic pack, sliced through the thin wrap with his teeth, and jammed the blade through the dumpster handle loop and the hasp bent into the metal frame. Crude. Fragile. Better than nothing.

The dumpster convulsed. The blade bowed, whining under stress.

“Move!” a woman shouted.

Evan looked up. At the mouth of the alley, maybe twenty yards out toward the street, a woman in navy scrubs was waving him over with one hand while using the other to hold a pressure bandage against the thigh of a teenage boy slumped behind a sedan. Dark hair yanked back. Face streaked with grime. Eyes furious, alert, alive.

Beyond her, the city was coming apart by system notification.

Blue translucent lines climbed buildings like digital ivy. Traffic lights had become glowing pylons. Far above, one of the mirrored towers near the river had split down its glass face and revealed, impossibly, a stone structure inside, spiral stairs wrapped around a shaft of green fire.

A CTA bus lay on its side in the intersection while things moved around it that did not belong in any natural taxonomy.

Evan ran.

He reached the sedan breathing hard enough to taste metal. The woman took one look at the slash on his arm and said, “You’re bleeding.”

“You’re observant.”

“And you’re shocky. Sit down before I make you.”

She had a trauma kit already open on the pavement, supplies arranged in clean lines with the automatic ruthlessness of competence. That more than anything cut through his panic. Competence was real. Competence meant the world still had pieces that fit together.

“Name?” she asked.