The coffee was cold.
Ethan Cross stared at the mug on his desk, watching the oily film on its surface catch the glow of his three monitors. The timestamp on his streaming software read 3:47 AM. His viewer count had dwindled to 23 die-hard insomniacs watching him break a seventeen-year-old game for the forty-third time.
"Okay, chat," he muttered, fingers hovering over his keyboard. "Frame-perfect jump in three, two—"
The world ended.
No dramatic buildup. No warning sirens. One moment Ethan was executing a pixel-perfect input, the next every screen in his apartment flashed blue—not the blue of a crashed computer, but something deeper, like staring into an LED sun.
He threw himself backward, chair toppling, as the light seared through his eyelids. A sound like reality tearing filled his skull. Not loud. Wrong. The kind of sound that shouldn't exist, like hearing colors or tasting mathematics.
Then came the voice.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMMENCING]
The words didn't come through his ears. They bypassed sound entirely, appearing directly in his consciousness like thoughts that weren't his own.
[EARTH SERVER: ONLINE]
[UPLOADING PARAMETERS...]
[SYNCHRONIZING...]
Ethan's hands found the edge of his desk. He pulled himself up, blinking away afterimages. The blue light was fading, but something had replaced it—something that made his stomach lurch.
Floating in the center of his room, visible through the scattered takeout containers and unwashed laundry, was a translucent blue window.
[WELCOME, PARTICIPANT]
[The Tutorial Phase will begin in: 00:59:42]
[Please select your CLASS to proceed]
"What the hell," Ethan breathed.
He reached out. His fingers passed through the window, feeling nothing—no resistance, no sensation. But the window remained, tracking his vision like a HUD element in a video game.
His phone buzzed. Then again. Then erupted into a continuous vibration as notifications cascaded faster than his lockscreen could display.
BREAKING: Unexplained phenomenon reported worldwide— Everyone seeing strange lights— Is this a hack? Mass hallucination? THE RAPTURE IS HERE
Ethan ignored them. He was studying the window.
The font was clean, modern. Sans-serif. The border had subtle gradients that smoothed at the corners. The countdown timer updated in real-time, perfectly synchronized. Professional work. Someone—or something—had put serious development resources into this interface.
And there, in the bottom-left corner, almost invisible:
A single red pixel, flickering.
Ethan's eyes locked onto it. Twenty years of hunting for exploits, thirteen years of professional speedrunning, six years of QA testing at Nexus Interactive—all of it had trained him to see what didn't belong. That pixel wasn't a design choice. It was a rendering error.
The blue box around the pixel shimmered, and suddenly Ethan saw more.
Lines of red code, ghostly and half-transparent, cascading around the window's edges:
//TODO: fix display overflow on edge case resolution //WARN: class selection timeout not properly bounded //ERR: participant_id=7,921,445,891 displaying anomalous perception
The code vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving Ethan's heart hammering against his ribs.
Anomalous perception.
He looked around his apartment with new eyes. The walls were... thin. That was the only way to describe it. Beneath the peeling wallpaper and water stains, he could glimpse wireframes—geometric shapes defining collision boundaries that didn't quite match the physical reality.
"This is insane," he whispered. Then, because he was Ethan Cross and his brain worked the way it did: "This is incredible."
The class selection window pulsed, reminding him of the countdown. 00:54:23.
Five options appeared:
[SELECT YOUR CLASS]
[WARRIOR] - Strength-based melee
[ROGUE] - Agility-based stealth
[MAGE] - Intelligence-based
[RANGER] - Balanced ranged
[HEALER] - Support and recovery
Ethan stared at them. Standard RPG fare. The kind of cookie-cutter class system you'd find in any generic fantasy MMO. Warrior for people who wanted to hit things. Rogue for edgelords. Mage for those who loved micromanagement. Ranger for the indecisive. Healer for masochists.
His finger hovered over Mage—Intelligence meant more skill options, usually—but then he noticed something else.
There was a sixth option.
No, not an option. A glitch.
At the very bottom of the selection window, half-clipped through the border, was a single word rendered in corrupted text:
[Ȃ̵̰N̷̨̿Ö̵́ͅM̷̱̊A̴̲̎L̷̬̓Y̸̳͝]
It wasn't supposed to be there. The UI clearly wasn't designed to show it—the text was partially out of bounds, overlapping with the window's decorative elements. A junior dev had probably forgotten to sanitize an input somewhere.
Ethan reached for it.
[WARNING: Selection cannot be undone. Please confirm.]
His thumb hesitated over the corrupted text.
The smart thing would be to pick Warrior or Mage. Go with something tried and true. Whatever this System was—alien invasion, government experiment, actual divine intervention—the conventional path was conventional for a reason.
But Ethan had never been smart in that way. He'd been smart in the other way—the way that saw a closed door and thought "but what if I clip through the wall instead?"
He pressed [ANOMALY].
The window shattered.
Not physically—the glass didn't break—but the System interface fragmented into a thousand spinning polygons before collapsing into a single point of searing white light.
[ERROR: Class data corrupted]
[LOADING DEFAULT PARAMETERS...]
[WARNING: Participant flagged for observation]
[ASSIGNING CLASS: ???]
When Ethan's vision cleared, a new window floated before him:
[STATUS: ETHAN CROSS]
Level: 1
Class: [ANOMALY]
HP: 100/100
MP: 50/50
STR: 10 | AGI: 10 | VIT: 10
INT: 10 | WIS: 10 | LUK: 10
PER: 10
SKILLS:
[Glitch Vision] (Passive/Unique)
[Exploit Detection] (Passive)
[Debug Sense] (Active)
Unspent Stat Points: 0
Unspent Skill Points: 0
[Glitch Vision]. The name alone made his pulse spike.
Before he could examine his skills further, a thunderous crash shook the building. Car alarms screamed to life outside. Through his window—his actual window, the one made of glass—Ethan saw lights flickering across the city. Some buildings were dark. Others blazed with unnatural luminescence.
And something was moving in the parking lot below.
He pressed himself against the wall, peering down through the blinds.
The creature looked like a dog crossed with a nightmare. Six legs, each ending in curved claws. Skin like wet leather, glistening under the streetlights. Its head was wrong—no eyes, just a massive jaw that split its skull horizontally, revealing rows of needle teeth.
[E-Rank Monster: Hollow Hound]
[Level: 3]
[HP: 150/150]
The identification window popped up automatically, but that wasn't what made Ethan's breath catch.
He could see it.
The other layer.
Red wireframes outlined the creature's body, but they didn't match its physical form. The hitbox—because that's what it was, he realized with giddy horror—extended about six inches beyond the creature's actual head in every direction. Its legs, by contrast, had almost no collision detection below the knee joints.
And there, at the base of its spine, where a tail might have been: a tiny golden highlight. Pulsing. Waiting.
Ethan's new passive skill whispered knowledge directly into his brain:
[Exploit Detected: Hollow Hound pathfinding error]
[Target zone: Spinal joint—minimal collision resistance]
[Suggested action: Strike from below/behind to bypass natural armor]
The Hollow Hound raised its eyeless head, jaw unhinging as it released a sound like tearing metal. Then it lunged at the apartment building's front door, claws scrabbling against the reinforced glass.
Below, someone screamed.
Ethan looked at his status window. Level 1. No weapon. No armor. Base stats across the board.
He looked at the creature's highlighted weakness, pulsing gold like a target in a tutorial.
He looked at the door to his apartment.
"This is stupid," he said aloud. "This is so, so stupid."
He grabbed the aluminum baseball bat he kept by his bed—a relic from a brief, failed attempt at a normal hobby—and headed for the stairs.
The screaming was getting worse.
The stairwell was chaos.
Ethan's neighbors—people he'd never bothered to learn the names of—were scrambling upward, their faces caught between terror and disbelief. A woman in a bathrobe clutched a toddler to her chest. An old man leaned against the railing, wheezing. A guy who looked like a college student was filming everything on his phone, hands shaking so badly the footage would be useless.
None of them could see what Ethan saw.
The walls of the stairwell were overlaid with glowing green lines—pathfinding routes, he realized. The System's AI was calculating the most efficient routes through the building, and those routes were now visible to him like neon-lit highways.
One route led down.
To the Hollow Hound.
Two people were still in the lobby. A man in a security guard uniform was sprawled against the wall, blood pooling beneath him. A woman—young, athletic, holding a fire extinguisher like a weapon—was backing away from the creature as it forced itself through the shattered entrance.
The guard's status window was gray:
[Marcus Williams]
[Status: DECEASED]
But the woman's was bright and active:
[Maya Chen]
[Level: 1]
[Class: Ranger]
[HP: 85/100]
The Hollow Hound's jaw opened wider than should be anatomically possible. It lunged.
Ethan didn't think. Six years of frame-perfect inputs had trained his reflexes beyond conscious thought. He vaulted the last railing, dropping into the lobby, and swung the bat in an upward arc that connected with the golden highlight at the base of the creature's spine.
The resistance was nothing. Like swinging through empty air.
[CRITICAL HIT!]
[Hollow Hound HP: 150 → 42]
The monster shrieked, its charge aborted as its back legs spasmed uncontrollably. It collapsed, twitching, exposing its malformed skull.
"The head!" Ethan shouted at Maya. "Its hitbox is extended—aim in front of its face, not at it!"
She didn't question him. The fire extinguisher swung in a clean arc, connecting with apparently empty air six inches before the creature's jaw.
[Hollow Hound HP: 42 → 0]
[MONSTER SLAIN!]
[XP Gained: 75]
The Hollow Hound dissolved into motes of light, leaving behind a small pile of items: three bronze coins and what looked like a fang the size of Ethan's palm.
A new window appeared:
[LEVEL UP!]
[Ethan Cross: Level 1 → Level 2]
[+5 Stat Points]
[+1 Skill Point]
Ethan stared at the notification, chest heaving. His hands were shaking. Adrenaline or terror—probably both—made it hard to think.
Maya lowered the fire extinguisher, her expression cycling through shock, confusion, and something that looked uncomfortably like fascination. She was looking directly at him.
"How," she said slowly, "did you know to do that?"
Before Ethan could answer, his [Glitch Vision] flickered.
Across the lobby, the wall shimmered. For just a moment, the concrete surface became transparent, revealing what lay behind it—or rather, what the System hadn't finished loading yet.
A void. Pure and absolute. And within that void, distant but watching:
An eye. Geometric. Fractal. Wrong.
It blinked.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
[Anomaly detected in Sector 447-A]
[Initiating observation protocol...]
The wall solidified again. The eye vanished.
But Ethan knew, with the bone-deep certainty of someone who'd spent his entire life looking for glitches, that something had just noticed him back.
Outside, more howls echoed through the city.
The Tutorial Phase had begun.