Chapter 1: The Class Nobody Wanted

The day the world got Classes, Elias Vane rolled one the system immediately tried to delete.

It happened at 11:17 a.m., under a white summer sky streaked with contrails and the reflected glare of a hundred office windows, while Elias sat astride his courier bike outside a coffee shop in downtown Halifax with a paper bag of overpriced sandwiches hooked over one handlebar and sweat drying under the collar of his delivery jacket.

At first it looked like weather.

Every screen in the street died at once.

The traffic light above the intersection snapped black. Car radios cut out mid-song. The café’s glowing menu board flickered, hissed, and bled into static. People lifted their heads in the same confused motion, as if a string had been tugged through the city. Somewhere a bus braked too hard. Tires squealed. Someone laughed nervously.

Then the sky cracked.

Not physically. Not thunder. It was stranger than that—like the world had been wallpaper all along, and something behind it had pressed a luminous thumb through the paper. Vast hexagons of pale blue light flared overhead, a lattice stretching from horizon to horizon. They hummed with a note too low to be heard and too deep not to be felt. The sound went through bone.

People stopped moving.

Elias stared up, one hand still on the bike grip, and saw symbols slide across the sky—columns of impossible script that looked like circuit diagrams taught to dream. They folded into a single line.

WORLD INTEGRATION COMMENCING

WELCOME, CANDIDATES, TO THE LADDER

The paper bag slipped from his handlebar and hit the pavement with a wet thump. Mayo spread across concrete.

For one clean second, the whole street went silent.

Then everybody screamed.

“What the hell is that?” a man shouted from the café patio, knocking over his chair as he stood.

“Is this a hack?” someone else yelled.

“Mom!” a little girl cried from inside the bus.

Elias fumbled for his phone. No signal. No bars. The screen had gone dead black except for the reflection of his own face—dark hair damp with sweat, mouth slightly open, eyes too sharp to hide the fear rising under them.

This is a stunt. Military test. Viral campaign. Something.

But his skin knew better. The air felt different. Taut. Expectant. As if the city were one held breath away from snapping into a shape it had always secretly wanted.

The blue lattice above brightened. Every human figure on the street ignited with a halo of white lines, bodies reduced to wireframes for a heartbeat. Elias saw the old woman at the bus stop as a skeleton of light. Saw the tattooed barista behind the café window become a glowing mannequin. Saw himself reflected in a dark windshield, a man cut into clean geometry.

Then came the weight.

It dropped through him from crown to heel, a pressure like deep water. His knees buckled. All around him people collapsed—drivers slumping over steering wheels, pedestrians falling to their hands, someone vomiting on the curb. Elias caught himself on the bike seat, teeth gritted, while a furnace of cold fire raced through his veins.

Words appeared in front of his eyes.

Not on a screen. In the air. In his head. They hung there no matter where he looked.

Candidate Identified: ELIAS VANE

Age: 23

Species: Human

Region Lock Removed

Initializing Baseline Assessment…

“Nope,” Elias whispered through clenched teeth. “Absolutely not.”

Across the street, a guy in a suit had dropped to one knee with both hands on his temples. “Get it out!” he screamed. “Get it out of my eyes!”

No one could. The messages kept coming.

Assessing Combat Affinity…

Assessing Utility Affinity…

Assessing Support Affinity…

Assessing Leadership Profile…

Assigning Class…

The city became a chorus of gasps, sobbing laughter, and panicked prayer.

One by one, people began shouting what they saw.

“Brawler! I got Brawler!”

“No way—no way, I’m a Sniper!”

“What is Beast Tamer?”

“Mine says Healer! Mom, I got Healer!”

The fear on the street tilted, not disappearing but changing color. It became greed. Relief. Awe. The primal instinct of people who had just been told the apocalypse came with character creation.

Elias felt his own assessment bar dragging on too long.

He’d spent twenty-three years becoming impossible to summarize. Too smart in school, too bored to try, too poor to drift, too cynical to dream properly. He delivered parcels because it paid fast and asked few questions. He knew the city’s alleys better than his own future. He could talk his way past locked service doors, strip and rebuild a bike chain, lie convincingly to angry customers, and run six flights of stairs carrying thirty pounds if there was a cash tip waiting at the top.

Useful skills, maybe. Not the sort that came with glory.

Still, some ugly hopeful part of him rose with the others. Maybe he’d hit lucky. Spear Fighter. Rogue. Something sleek and survivable.

The letters in front of him flickered.

Class Assigned: Support—

They distorted, as if a hand had smudged wet ink across reality.

Class Assigned: Support / Null—

ERROR

Re-evaluating…

Elias blinked hard. The text remained.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Don’t do this to me.”

In front of the café window, the barista laughed out loud. “Elementalist!” she shouted to no one and everyone. Orange fire streamed over her fingers like liquid silk, and the people around her flinched back in delight and terror.

Elias’s own message spasmed again.

Class Assigned: Zero Slot

There was a pause. Long enough that Elias had time to read it twice.

Zero Slot?

Then new lines slammed over it in red.

WARNING: INVALID PARTY CAPACITY

WARNING: LEGACY FLAG DETECTED

WARNING: CLASS PACKAGE INCOMPLETE

Attempting rollback…

Attempting deletion…

Cold went down Elias’s spine.

Deletion?

The red text stuttered. Glitched. A tearing sound ripped through the air around his head, like a cassette tape dragged out of its casing by invisible fingers. Pain stabbed behind his eyes, bright and surgical. He doubled over, one hand clamped to his forehead.

People nearby had started to notice.

“Hey,” said the suit guy, now back on his feet and flushed with adrenaline. “Is yours bugging out?”

Elias tried to answer, but another message overrode everything.

Rollback failed.

Deletion denied.

Class locked: ZERO SLOT

Party Slot Limit: 0

Starting Skills: None Compatible

Tutorial Transfer in 00:04:59

The suit guy leaned in, reading the text over Elias’s shoulder as if it were hovering on shared glass.

His expression did something ugly.

“Zero?” he said. “Your party limit is zero?”

Elias straightened slowly. “Looks like.”

The man barked a laugh sharp enough to cut skin. “Damn. That sucks.”

“Kyle!” a woman shouted from the curb. She jogged over, eyes blazing. A pair of translucent daggers floated beside her hands. “I got Duelist. What’d you get?”

“Shieldbearer,” the man said proudly, thumping his own chest. “Tank class.” He jerked his chin at Elias. “This poor bastard got some kind of dead-on-arrival support class.”

The woman looked Elias up and down, not cruel exactly, just relieved it hadn’t happened to her. “Zero Slot? That real?”

“Apparently.”

“Can’t join parties?” she said.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Around them, as if some invisible curtain had lifted, more people were testing new powers with the reckless excitement of children handed live explosives. A broad-shouldered courier from Elias’s own dispatch station shouted with triumph as stone crawled over his arms in plated gauntlets. A teenager in a school uniform raised a hand and a flock of hard-light birds burst from her palm. Somebody had summoned a spear made of ice. Somebody else was healing a scraped knee with green light while filming themselves on a phone that somehow worked again only well enough to show a streaming wall of static and comments.

The first social hierarchy of the new world organized itself on the sidewalk in under a minute.

There were the lucky ones.

There were the useful ones.

And then there was Elias.

The sky boomed again, and every conversation cut off.

NOTICE

All candidates will undergo Tutorial Floor placement.

Survive to retain Class privileges.

Failure condition: Death.

No one laughed after that.

The countdown ticked in the corner of Elias’s vision.

04:12.

He reached automatically for the bag of sandwiches, then remembered the mayo stain spreading on the pavement. Stupid. Everything stupid. His bike. His dispatch app. His overdue rent. The old woman on his floor who always asked him to carry groceries upstairs. The friend he half-planned to text tonight. All of it suddenly looked flimsy, paper scenery waiting for a fire.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Against all logic, one notification had punched through.

GROUP CHAT – DISPATCH RATS

Mina: anybody alive????

Rafi: BRO I GOT LANCER

Jules: I’m in tears I got Alchemist this is either awesome or I’m unemployed forever

Mina: Elias what did u get

He stared at the blinking cursor.

Something the system wanted to delete.

Instead he typed: support class. weird one.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Came back.

Mina: we’ll figure it out after tutorial. don’t die before I can say I told you so

The message hit him harder than it should have. Mina always sounded like she was rolling her eyes even in text. He could practically hear it. He wanted to answer, wanted to ask where she was, what class she’d gotten, whether she was scared too—but the countdown reached three minutes and the air grew electric.

All around him, people clutched bags, loved ones, weapons made of light. Some huddled in instant groups. Some backed away from everyone else with the suspicious look of people who had already realized teammates could become rivals before lunch.

Elias looked at the red words still hanging under his class designation.

Party Slot Limit: 0

He laughed once, quietly. It had no humor in it.

“Of course,” he said.

If the world was going to become a game, naturally he’d spawn as corrupted data.

He checked his pockets by instinct. Phone. Wallet. Folding utility knife. Half a pack of gum. Steel water bottle clipped to his bag. Bike lock chain looped over one shoulder.

Not much.

More than nothing.

Two minutes later, the city disappeared.

The transfer felt like falling sideways through a mirror.

The street folded inward without motion, colors sucked into a point. The smell of hot pavement and gasoline vanished. Elias had just enough time to register a screaming vortex of blue-white geometry and the sensation of every cell in his body being rearranged by an accountant with anger issues.

Then his boots hit stone.

He stumbled three steps and nearly pitched off a circular platform suspended over darkness.

The air here was cold and wet, touched with the mineral scent of underground water. Giant pillars rose into gloom. Far below, something roared—a thick, animal noise that rolled around the cavern and came back wrong. Pale veins of light ran through the floor in geometric patterns, marking pathways branching from the platform like spokes.

Hundreds of people had been dumped onto nearby platforms, each ringed with translucent barriers. Cries echoed across the chamber. Some platforms held neat little groups already clustering together. Others had lone candidates spinning in panic.

Elias looked around for familiar faces and saw none.

A new message snapped into view.

TUTORIAL FLOOR 1: THE KENNEL WARRENS

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