Chapter 1: Error: No Class Found

The blue screen asked Evan Mercer to choose a class just as the first screaming started downstairs.

ARCHIVE SYSTEM INITIALIZATION IN PROGRESS

Regional Integration: Earth / Sol-3

Please remain calm during calibration.

Selecting a Class is mandatory for all registered sapients.

Evan stared at the translucent rectangle hanging in the air over his kitchen table and, for one stupid heartbeat, his first thought was that somebody had finally found a way to weaponize pop-up ads.

Then the screaming rose again from the floor below—raw, ragged, not the shrill surprise of somebody dropping a pan or finding a rat, but the torn-open sound of a person looking directly at something impossible.

The mug in Evan’s hand slipped, hit the linoleum, and burst into white ceramic shards. Cold coffee splashed over his work boots.

Outside his apartment window, the city had gone blue.

Not metaphorically. Actual blue light sheeted over brick walls, traffic, the laundromat sign across the street, every hard edge of the old Newark block painted in a glassy electric glow. It came from the sky in vertical bands like northern lights dragged down into straight lines. The clouds above the tenements were gone, replaced by vast geometric rings rotating inside one another, each line etched with symbols that hurt if he tried to focus on them.

His phone buzzed so hard it skittered across the counter. Then the screen flashed white and died.

Downstairs, somebody yelled, “What the hell is that?”

A crash followed. Then another scream, shorter this time.

Evan backed away from the window. “Nope,” he muttered to the empty apartment. “Absolutely not. I did my shift. I bought my ramen. I am off the clock for any apocalypse.”

The blue panel remained in front of him, patient and bright.

Available Base Classes:

Striker

Bulwark

Runner

Weaver

Mender

Scout

Controller

More options may unlock through lineage, environment, or aptitude.

Please choose.

His apartment door shook on its hinges as someone slammed into it from the hallway.

“Evan!”

It was Mrs. Alvarez from 3B. Seventy if she was a day, compact and iron-backed, with a voice that could cut through concrete. “Open the damn door!”

He yanked it open.

Mrs. Alvarez stood there in a flowered robe and house slippers, clutching her little white dog against her chest. Beside her was Luis from 3D, shirtless except for a grease-stained undershirt, carrying a baseball bat in one hand and his six-year-old daughter Sofia in the other. Sofia was crying silently, all wide eyes and quivering mouth.

A blue window hovered in front of each of them.

“You seeing this?” Luis demanded.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Below them came a wet impact, then the skittering scrape of something moving much too fast over tile.

Everyone in the hall froze.

Another scream cut off mid-breath.

Mrs. Alvarez’s mouth went hard. “Roof,” she said. “Now. Everybody’s heading up.”

As if to confirm it, doors banged open farther down the hall. Feet pounded on old carpet. Someone was sobbing. Someone else was shouting prayers in English and Spanish in the same breath.

“What about the stairs down?” Luis asked.

Mrs. Alvarez gave him a look that made him seem fifteen instead of thirty. “Use your ears, mijo.”

Evan glanced back at the floating menu. “I think we’re supposed to pick one of these first.”

“Supposed by who?” Luis snapped, but his eyes kept darting to the glowing screen in front of him.

The answer came from the building itself.

A deep tone rolled through the air, resonant and inhuman, like a bell struck inside his skull. Every blue panel in the hall pulsed once.

Warning: Unclassed entities will receive no protective designation, no progression rights, and no compatibility guarantees.

Please choose immediately.

“Protective designation?” Evan said.

“Pick one!” Mrs. Alvarez barked.

Luis swore under his breath and jabbed at his screen with the bat tip. The panel rippled.

Luis Ortega has selected Bulwark.

Primary attributes adjusted.

Starter skill granted: Brace I.

Blue light poured over Luis’s body in threads and sank into his skin. He staggered, nearly dropping Sofia. The bat in his hand warped for an instant, metal veins of light threading through the wood before fading. Luis looked at his free hand like he expected to see it turned into stone.

“Dad?” Sofia whispered.

“I’m okay.” He sounded like he wasn’t sure.

Mrs. Alvarez slapped her own screen with no hesitation.

Marisol Alvarez has selected Mender.

Primary attributes adjusted.

Starter skill granted: Knit I.

She inhaled sharply. The wrinkles around her hands smoothed for a second, not erased but tightened with sudden strength. The dog in her arms barked once, then squirmed free and landed lightly on the carpet. A tiny panel appeared over its head too. Evan almost laughed from shock.

“Move,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “Choose while walking.”

The corridor lights flickered out. Blue became the only color.

They ran.

The building was old enough that everything echoed—the thunder of feet overhead, the slam of apartment doors, the hiss of ancient pipes. Evan followed Luis and Mrs. Alvarez toward the stairwell, his screen sliding alongside him as smoothly as if it were nailed to his vision. Neighbors spilled from rooms up and down the hall, all of them with the same impossible windows hovering before their faces.

“What class is good?” a college kid from 2A shouted.

“How the hell should I know?” someone screamed back.

The stairwell door banged open. A river of tenants surged upward. Evan was carried into it shoulder-first, smelling sweat, detergent, fear, and the copper tang of fresh blood. A man in business clothes clutched his arm where three parallel cuts had shredded his sleeve. His blue panel flashed red over and over while he mashed at it with shaking fingers.

Evan looked down into the central stairwell shaft.

Something moved on the landing two floors below.

It was the size of a large dog and had too many joints. Its body was made of slick black plates that clicked over one another like beetle shell layered on wet meat. Six limbs gripped the wall, not the floor, and it skittered upward around the curve of the stairs with nauseating speed. Where a head should have been, there was only a split open ring lined with teeth. Blue symbols floated under its hide like code trapped in tar.

The man in business clothes saw it at the same time.

He made a sound Evan would hear in his dreams for the rest of his life.

The creature launched.

It crossed two flights in a blur and hit the man chest-first. They smashed into the railing. Teeth punched through shirt and rib with a crack like snapping sticks. Hot blood sprayed the wall and stairwell, bright red under the blue glow.

Sofia shrieked.

Chaos exploded.

People surged upward, trampling bags, shoes, somebody’s dropped laptop. The creature tore free carrying a mouthful of flesh, then hissed as a pulse of pale green light struck its side.

Mrs. Alvarez stood one step below Evan, one hand outstretched.

Knit I has minor restorative and stabilizing effects.

“That wasn’t for the bug,” she snapped when Evan looked at her. “It was for him. Move!”

Luis turned, planted his feet, and shoved his daughter into Evan’s arms. “Take her.”

“What are you doing?”

“Bulwark, right?” Luis raised the bat in both hands. His face had gone flat and hard, fear burned into something usable. “So let’s see if that means what I think it means.”

The creature bounded up the wall again, slick limbs scraping sparks from concrete.

Luis met it halfway down the flight.

He slammed the bat into the thing’s side with a crack that jolted through the stairwell. For an instant a translucent shield-shape flashed around his forearms. The impact actually threw the monster into the opposite railing. It hit, recovered instantly, and scythed a limb across Luis’s chest. Cloth and skin opened. Luis grunted but didn’t fall.

“Go!” he roared.

Evan didn’t argue. He grabbed Sofia tighter and ran with the crowd, Mrs. Alvarez on his heels, the dog somehow keeping pace between ankles and debris.

His own panel kept floating beside him, infuriatingly calm.

Please choose.

Fine.

Evan bounded up the next flight and swiped the menu open wider. Icons bloomed under the class names—fists, shields, bootprints, a stylized eye, a staff woven with light. His heart hammered so hard the words blurred.

He had no sword training. No magic training. No anything training except stocking canned soup at three in the morning without throwing out his back.

Pick something that keeps you alive. Fast. Think.

Scout? Runner? Striker?

The stairwell shook. Far below, a chorus of hissing answered one another.

He jabbed at Scout.

The panel froze.

For half a second nothing happened.

Then the whole screen glitched into static.

Blue symbols shredded sideways in jagged streaks. A black bar cut through the center. Text spilled down in fragments, disappearing before he could read them.

He nearly stumbled.

Class selection failed.

Attempting reassignment…

“That doesn’t sound great,” Evan said aloud.

Mrs. Alvarez shot him a look. “Did you pick?”

“Kind of?”

Static flared brighter. The crowd burst out through the roof access door into cold night air. Evan followed, skidding onto tar paper under a sky transformed into rotating blue machinery.

Other tenants had already gathered around the roof’s edges. Across the block, people stood on neighboring buildings, all of them lit by the same ghostly system glow. Sirens wailed somewhere distant, but they sounded small now, local and human beneath the immense humming lattice overhead.

A helicopter hammered past between towers—city police, low and fast. Every person on the roof turned toward it with wild hope.

The helicopter simply stopped.

Midair.

No explosion. No visible collision. It froze as if the sky had become glass. Then blue lines crawled over the fuselage in geometric patterns. The rotors slowed. The machine folded inward, crushed by invisible pressure into a compact cube of metal and sparks that dropped out of the air and vanished before it hit the street.

No one spoke after that.

Evan’s panel cleared.

Reassignment Complete

Class: Zero Slot

Compatibility Warning: irregular

Skill Capacity: 0

Level Cap: ???

Class Function: unavailable

He blinked.

Then blinked again.

“No,” he said softly. “No, that’s not a class. That’s a bug report.”

The panel remained serenely offensive.

He tapped at the text. More appeared.

Zero Slot

A nonstandard designation has been assigned.

You cannot equip active skills by conventional means.

You cannot allocate skill slots.

You are exempt from several standard limitations.

Further details locked.

“Exempt how?” he demanded.

The system did not answer.

Around him, other people were staring at their own windows and talking over one another in breathless, disbelieving bursts.

“I got Striker—what the hell is Might?”