The first thing Erevan Arclight noticed wasn't light or smell.
It was sound.
Not the chirping of birds. Not the whisper of wind. Not even the faint buzz of electricity.
It was deeper, stranger. A low vibration that thrummed inside his bones, like a tuning fork jammed into his marrow. Every nerve seemed to shiver with it, as if the world itself was running on a frequency only he could hear.
Erevan's eyes snapped open. His body lurched upright before his brain had time to catch up.
He sat in the middle of a field—or at least something trying very hard to pretend it was a field. Half of it looked too real, almost hyper-detailed, each blade of grass sharp enough to cut if he stared too long. The other half looked ripped from an ancient video game demo, flat polygons smeared with green paint.
He blinked. Rubbed his eyes. Opened them again.
Nope. Still broken.
"Okay," Erevan muttered, his voice hoarse and shaky. "This is… new."
The sky flickered. One moment, a perfect blue dome stretched overhead. The next, it collapsed into a black grid of code, lines of text scrolling too fast for his eyes to track. Words. Symbols. Errors. His stomach turned, like he had fallen into a loading screen that forgot how to end.
Erevan cursed under his breath.
And then the voice arrived.
[System Notice: Welcome, User #00001]
The words weren't just in his head. They rang in the air around him, booming yet artificial, like a cheap text-to-speech program trying too hard to sound like a god.
A glowing message appeared before his eyes, translucent but solid enough to block out the glitching horizon.
Erevan blinked. "User number what now?"
He waved a hand through it. The hologram sputtered, jittered, then fractured into six overlapping copies.
[Error: Duplicate Notification]
[Error: Duplicate Notification]
[Error: Duplicate Notification]
The screens stacked on top of each other until they formed a blinding wall of glowing nonsense.
"Yeah, fantastic start," Erevan muttered. He scrambled to his feet, though the ground beneath him betrayed him instantly.
The field wobbled. His legs obeyed, but the earth felt like a trampoline that occasionally forgot it was supposed to be solid. Every step sent a ripple of distortion through the grass, as though reality itself lagged behind.
His gaze drifted toward the horizon. A forest loomed in the distance, but even that looked wrong. The trees pulsed like they were breathing, their trunks bending in and out of shape, pixels tearing and repairing. Some branches seemed half-erased, their existence flickering like bad video compression.
Erevan's chest tightened. For a terrifying second, he thought he might be sick. Then the gamer instincts, the part of him that had spent countless hours dying in VRMMOs, finally caught up.
This… this had a pattern.
Tutorial zone.
Glitched or not, it felt like the opening area.
His lips twitched into a grin despite the chaos. "Alright. Let's see what this bastard game throws at me."
The system pulsed again.
[System Notice: Initializing Character Sheet]
New lines appeared in front of him, neat and orderly, like the game was finally remembering its job.
Name: Erevan Arclight
Class: ???
Level: 1
HP: 100/100
MP: 50/50
Strength: 10
Agility: 10
Intelligence: 10
Luck: ??? (Error: Value Not Found)
Erevan squinted. "Not bad stats for a tutorial… except what's with the question marks? And Luck? Seriously? 'Value not found'? Did the devs just rage-quit coding halfway through?"
The system, as if offended, immediately spat back another line.
[Error: System Database Corrupted]
[Temporary Class Assigned: Anomaly]
Erevan stared. Then a bark of laughter burst out of him, sharp and disbelieving.
"Anomaly? My class is literally a bug. Fantastic. Just what every kid dreams of—forget knight, wizard, or rogue. Nope, I get to be a glitch."
He shook his head, a grin tugging at his lips despite the unease crawling up his spine.
And then the ground rippled again.
The ground beneath Erevan rippled like corrupted water. Grass dissolved into floating pixels, scattering upward as if gravity had stopped caring.
From the distortion, something rose.
At first, it almost resembled a wolf—if a wolf had been designed by someone who had only read the word in a dictionary and then winged the rest. Its snout stretched too long, twitching like broken clay. Its fur flickered between hyper-realistic detail and flat cartoon shading. Joints cracked in and out of place, making its movements look jerky, like a marionette tugged by invisible wires.
And its growl—half beast, half corrupted audio file. Low, garbled, layered with static that clawed at Erevan's eardrums.
[System Notice: Hostile Entity Detected – Glitch-Wolf Lv. 1]
Erevan's stomach sank.
"Oh, great. Tutorial boss fight already?"
The wolf lunged.
Instinct screamed at him to move, and somehow, he did. Erevan hurled himself sideways, rolling across a patch of grass that couldn't decide if it wanted to exist. His shoulder slammed into the ground, but at least his throat wasn't in the wolf's jaw.
The beast's teeth glitched halfway open, then snapped shut on empty air with a sound like tearing metal.
Erevan staggered to his feet. His legs wobbled, the fake-earth trampoline effect nearly sending him face-first into the dirt again.
"Okay, no sword, no spells, no tutorial fairy telling me which button does what… what the hell am I supposed to do here?"
The system beeped.
[Generating Starter Weapon]
Erevan's breath hitched. Finally. Something useful.
[Error: Asset Not Found]
[Error: Asset Not Found]
[Fallback Generated: Exploding Sheep Summon]
A woolly bleat split the air.
Erevan spun around and froze.
A sheep stood behind him. Fat. Fluffy. Its round eyes glowed an ominous, unnatural red.
Above its head, numbers ticked downward.
3… 2… 1…
Erevan's face went pale. "Oh, you've got to be—"
The sheep exploded.
The blast cracked like thunder. Pixels, fire, and white-hot static swallowed the air. The shockwave hurled Erevan backward. His ears rang, his clothes reeked of singed wool, and his vision filled with flashing red.
The wolf fared worse. The explosion caught it mid-leap, shredding its unstable body into jagged fragments of code. The beast twisted, limbs spasming, before collapsing into a storm of glitch-shards that fizzled into nothing.
[System Notice: Enemy Defeated]
EXP +120
Bronze Coins +5
New Item Acquired: Wolf Fang (Glitched)
Erevan just lay there, staring at the smoking crater.
His ears buzzed. His lungs burned. And every part of him smelled like roasted mutton.
Slowly, he lifted a trembling hand to his face. "What the actual hell."
The system chimed cheerfully, like nothing was wrong.
[New Skill Acquired: Exploding Sheep Summon Lv. 1]
Erevan sat up so fast his head spun. "No. Absolutely not. This is not a thing. Don't tell me this is my skill."
The glowing words floated smugly in the air, refusing to disappear.
He dragged both hands through his hair, groaning. "I wanted a sword. Or a spell. Something cool. Instead, I get… sheep. That explode. I can't even say that with a straight face."
He tried to calm his hammering pulse. The wolf was gone. He had experience points. He had coins. He had… apparently, a sheep bomb skill.
Somewhere in the distance, a roar echoed through the glitching forest.
It was deeper than the wolf's, heavier. The sound rumbled across the field, rattling Erevan's ribs and making the grass textures warp.
Erevan closed his eyes and groaned. "Of course. Because why stop at one cursed mutt when you can throw in a boss fight, too?"
He flicked his wrist. Nothing. He snapped his fingers, whispered "Menu," shouted "Status!" Still nothing.
Finally, the system beeped again.
[Error: Voice Command Recognition Malfunction]
[Tip: Try yelling louder]
Erevan pinched the bridge of his nose. His laugh was half hysterical. "Oh, I hate you already."
And then the forest line broke.
Another wolf emerged—but this one was bigger. Stronger. Wrong in new, terrifying ways.
Its body flickered between three textures with every step: raw polygons, photorealistic beast, and a nightmare sketch, unfinished and cruel. Its glowing red eyes locked onto him with the same countdown glow as the sheep.
The system pulsed one more time.
[System Notice: Elite Variant Detected – Laughing Beast Lv. 3]
The wolf opened its jaws.
Instead of a growl, it laughed.