Chapter 1: When the Sky Rolled a Status Screen

The first time Eli saw his own death, it was framed in blue light and politely labeled CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

At that point, he was still stupid enough to think it was a prank.

Chicago had gone dark thirteen seconds earlier.

Not blackout dark. Not storm dark. The kind of dark that made every lit window in the Loop look suddenly frail, like candles in a church after someone had blown the roof off. The afternoon sky over the river had split into panes of glowing cobalt, enormous geometric fractures hanging above the city as if reality itself had turned into a shattered phone screen. Blue light spilled across glass towers, over the rusted tracks, down into the streets packed with horns and brakes and people pointing upward with their mouths open.

Eli Mercer stood outside the Jackson station entrance with a cardboard tray of coffees in one hand and his phone in the other, staring up with everyone else.

“Okay,” he said to no one. “That’s new.”

A CTA bus had stopped diagonally across two lanes, trapping three cars behind it. A bicyclist had laid his bike down in the street and was filming vertically with the reverent awe of a man chosen by history to upload something awful. Somewhere farther up the block, a woman started screaming and didn’t stop.

Eli’s phone lost signal. Then the screen went black. Then every billboard around the intersection went black too, one after another, until the huge curved ad display on the corner—ten stories of smiling athletes and impossible sneakers a second ago—fizzed into static and shone the same impossible blue as the cracks in the sky.

The coffee tray trembled in Eli’s grip. Hot caramel latte sloshed over his knuckles. He barely felt it.

People weren’t just looking up anymore. They were looking through things.

Blue rectangles unfolded in the air before them, translucent and crisp, hovering at eye level. Thousands of them. They bloomed over sidewalks, over hoods of cars, above the riverwalk and train stairs and newspaper boxes. Every face around him lit ghost-blue.

One opened in front of Eli with a soft chime, as neat and clean as a software prompt.

WELCOME, CANDIDATE.

INTEGRATION OF LOCAL REALITY COMPLETE.

EARTH: ACCEPTED.

COMMENCING INITIALIZATION.

PLEASE SELECT A CLASS.

Eli blinked at it. The window remained. Thin silver borders. Four luminous icons turned slowly in place beneath the text, each rendered with absurd, almost religious detail: a shield, a staff, a cross within a circle, a drawn bow.

AVAILABLE BASE CLASSES:

TANK

MAGE

HEALER

RANGER

“No,” Eli said.

A businessman in a navy suit beside him jabbed at his own screen with both hands and shouted, “Mage, mage, mage, what the hell do you mean hold to confirm?”

A college kid in a Bears hoodie grinned with the fragile hysteria of someone at the lip of a panic attack. “Dude. Dude, is this real?”

“If you have to ask—” Eli started, and then the air changed.

A pressure hit the street. Not wind. Something denser. He felt it inside his teeth, a deep descending weight that made everyone hunch instinctively. The blue fractures in the sky pulsed once, like a heartbeat visible from orbit.

Then the screaming near the station entrance sharpened from confusion into terror.

People surged away from the stairwell in a wave so sudden it tore a woman’s shoe off. Eli turned in time to see the first thing climb out of the subway.

It looked like a person only from far away and only for the first half second. Pale gray skin stretched too tight over a long frame. Arms that reached past its knees. Fingers jointed like knives. Its face had the layout of a human face and none of the mercy: mouth split too wide, black wet eyes without lids, no nose, just slits breathing steam into the summer heat. Filthy station light gleamed on strings of saliva swinging from its jaw.

It hauled itself over the last step, looked at the packed street, and grinned.

Then four more came behind it.

“Jesus Christ,” Eli whispered.

The first creature dropped onto all fours and launched.

The crowd broke.

Coffee flew from Eli’s hand. The tray spun away. Somebody smashed into his shoulder hard enough to turn him around. Car alarms erupted. A woman went down near the curb and vanished beneath a stampede of office shoes and shopping bags. The thing from the stairs landed on the hood of a taxi with a metallic boom that buckled the frame inward, then sprang again, claws carving sparks across yellow paint.

It hit a man in a Cubs cap chest-first.

Eli saw the impact. Saw the body jackknife backward. Saw blood spray across the side window of a parked SUV in a bright red fan. For one blank second the world slowed until every detail stood still: the impossible blue light, the wet sound, the creature’s shoulders flexing as it tore.

Then Eli was moving because everyone else was moving and standing still was how you died.

He bolted toward the station entrance.

It was the stupidest possible direction. He knew that even while he ran. But the street had become a grinder of fleeing bodies and locked traffic, and the station awning to his left promised only one thing: walls. Cover. A place where the monsters couldn’t leap from three directions at once.

“Move!” someone yelled.

“My kid! My kid!” someone else screamed.

Eli shoved through the knot at the stairs. A teenager nearly toppled over the railing; Eli caught his backpack, yanked him upright, and got an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. Fine. Great. Humanity was alive and well for its last five minutes.

The station swallowed them.

The cooler underground air hit him with old smells—ozone, concrete dust, brake grease, stale rainwater trapped in cracks. Fluorescent lights strobed overhead. More people were coming up from the platform, climbing into the chaos blindly, while others fought down against them.

Somewhere above, glass exploded.

Eli shoved to the side wall and forced himself to breathe. There were maybe forty people jammed into the mezzanine level already: commuters, tourists, a delivery driver still wearing an insulated food bag, an elderly man gripping the rail so hard his fingers had gone white. Everyone had a blue screen hanging in front of them. Some were tapping frantically. Some were frozen.

The college kid in the Bears hoodie stumbled down after him, face chalk white. “Did you see that? Did you—”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “Hard to miss.”

From above came a horrible skittering impact. Something had landed on the stairs.

The whole crowd recoiled deeper into the station.

Blue windows chimed again.

EMERGENCY EVENT DETECTED.

DUNGEON GATE STABILIZED: JACKSON STATION

THREAT RANK: E

SURVIVAL PROBABILITY WITHOUT CLASS: 2.3%

PLEASE COMPLETE CLASS SELECTION.

“Without class?” the delivery driver said. He was in his thirties, heavyset, sweating through a red polo. “What does that mean without class?”

“Pick one!” yelled a woman in scrubs. “Just pick one!”

People started slamming their palms into the screens like game-show contestants. One by one, windows flashed brighter as selections registered.

CLASS CONFIRMED: MAGE

A man in a suit gasped and staggered as violet sparks crackled over his hands.

CLASS CONFIRMED: TANK

A broad-shouldered woman in construction boots let out a strangled bark as a translucent shield icon burned over her chest, then sank into her.

CLASS CONFIRMED: HEALER

The nurse in scrubs doubled over, green-gold light spilling from her fingers.

All around the mezzanine, panic twisted into manic hope. People were changing. Not in monstrous ways. In game ways. Like the world had pulled a costume over their bones and called it truth.

The Bears-hoodie kid jabbed his own screen and whooped when a shortbow of blue light formed in his hand before solidifying into something that looked made of polished black wood.

“Ranger,” he breathed. “Holy shit.”

Another scream came from the top of the stairs, cut off fast.

Everybody flinched.

Eli looked at his screen.

The icons rotated patiently, waiting for him to make one of the four choices that apparently separated useful people from the kind who became scenery in the first ten minutes of an apocalypse.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Tank? No. I’m not built like a refrigerator. Healer? I got a C-minus in biology. Ranger?”

He’d played enough games to know he wasn’t a front-liner. He wasn’t a support personality either. He could probably do Ranger. Stay back. Shoot things. Avoid immediate disembowelment.

He reached up and pressed the bow icon.

The icon flickered.

Then the entire window rippled like water struck by a pebble.

Eli frowned. “What?”

He pressed it again. Nothing happened. The icon blurred. For a split second, a line of static slashed across the middle of the screen.

Nearby, the new Tank woman was already bracing at the foot of the stairs with a steel riot-shield-looking slab that absolutely had not existed thirty seconds ago. “Anybody else done? We need to hold this choke point!” she shouted.

A few people looked at her with desperate gratitude. Most just looked stunned.

Eli tapped Ranger harder.

PROCESSING…

“Good,” he said. “Great. Process faster.”

Footsteps clattered overhead. Then claws. Something rushed down the stairs on all fours, hit the Tank’s shield with a sound like a baseball bat swung into a car door, and sent her skidding back half a step.

The creature shrieked in her face.

Everyone screamed with it.

The Mage in the suit jerked both hands up and accidentally fired a bolt of violet light into the ceiling. Concrete rained down. The nurse-Healer cried out, “Aim lower! Lower!” as if that was the main issue.

The Tank roared and shoved. The monster staggered. A second one appeared above it, then a third.

“Pick your class!” the delivery driver shouted at Eli, as if volume would help the software.

“I’m trying!”

His window flashed brilliant blue.

CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

He stared at it.

For one weirdly calm second, the sounds around him went distant. The claws on the shield. The screaming. The electric crackle of bad spell aim. All of it muffled under the blood pounding in his ears.

“No,” Eli said.

He hit the screen again.

CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

“No.”

Again.

CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

The Bears-hoodie kid looked over mid-panic. “Dude?”

“Shut up.” Eli pressed Mage.

CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

Tank.

CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

Healer.

CLASS SELECTION FAILED.

The screen pulsed gently, serenely, like it had all the time in the world to ruin him.

“What does that mean?” Eli said. “How do you fail a multiple-choice question?”

A creature vaulted over the first one and landed behind the Tank.

Pandemonium broke loose.

People scattered deeper into the station. The Healer screamed and threw a burst of green light that somehow sealed a gash on the delivery driver’s forearm even as he was dragging her backward by the wrist. The suited Mage finally managed to hit something, and the monster’s shoulder detonated in a splash of purple fire and gray flesh. Its shriek scraped the concrete walls raw.

Eli stumbled back with the crowd, his eyes still glued to his own screen.

It had changed.

The four class icons were gone. In their place was a blank field filled with static, lines of text trying to resolve and failing, characters tearing themselves apart and reforming.

UNABLE TO ASSIGN STANDARD FRAMEWORK.

CAUSE: [NULL]

CAUSE: [REDACTED]

CAUSE: INCOMPATIBLE ATTRIBUTE VECTOR

ATTEMPT ALTERNATE ROUTING? Y/N

Eli laughed once, sharp and breathless. “Of course,” he said. “Of course the apocalypse gives me tech support.”

A monster hit the tiled floor two yards away, skidding on all fours, its broken shoulder smoking where the spell had blown through it. It lifted its head and those black lidless eyes fixed directly on Eli.

Its mouth opened wider.

“Y,” Eli said, and slapped the prompt.

The screen went dark.

The creature sprang.

Something hammered into its side before it reached him—a thrown metal trash can, dented flat on impact. The monster rolled, hissing. The Tank woman, bleeding from one temple, bellowed, “Run, idiot!”

Eli ran.

He vaulted the turnstile line with three other people at his heels and pounded down toward the platform. The station below yawned broad and dim, rails glinting in strips of emergency light. A train sat dead on one side, doors half-open, its windows black mirrors. More commuters clustered at the far end in a panicked knot. Above them, another blue window had appeared in the air, much larger than the individual class screens.

LOCAL TUTORIAL ZONE INITIALIZING.

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