The System gave them until dawn.
[ATTENTION: ALL PARTICIPANTS]
[Tutorial Phase: Mandatory Attendance Required]
[Teleportation to Tutorial Zone in: 02:47:33]
[Non-attendance will result in: TERMINATION]
The notification appeared in everyone's vision simultaneously, judging by the sudden chorus of gasps and curses from the survivors huddled in the convenience store. Ethan studied the message while the others panicked, looking for what didn't belong.
There.
In the timestamp, barely visible, a counter anomaly. The 02:47:33 wasn't just counting down—it was occasionally stuttering, repeating frames like a video playing at inconsistent speeds. The System's timer wasn't perfectly synced.
He filed that information away. Timing exploits were advanced-level—the kind of thing that required frame-perfect execution. He wasn't ready for that yet.
"What does 'termination' mean?" Linda Torres, the Healer, was clutching her status window like a lifeline. Her HP had recovered to 78/100 after what must have been some rest-based regeneration. "They can't just... kill us for not going, right?"
"I'm pretty sure they can do whatever they want," Kevin Price, the Warrior, said grimly. He'd taken charge of the survivor group in the way that natural leaders did—standing at the front, making eye contact, projecting confidence he probably didn't feel. "Whatever they are."
"The System," Ethan said. Everyone looked at him. "It's not a 'they.' It's more like... an operating system. Running on reality."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Neither do blue boxes or monsters." Ethan grabbed a bag of chips from a shelf—he'd been running on empty for hours. "But here we are."
Maya had been quiet since they'd arrived, her phone still recording even though there was no internet to upload to. Now she spoke up. "You said you're a QA tester. You test video games for bugs?"
"Tested. Past tense." He didn't elaborate on why.
"Then tell us: what kind of 'bugs' can you find in this tutorial?"
It was a smart question. The kind of question someone who understood his value would ask. Ethan felt a grudging respect for her.
"I won't know until I see it," he admitted. "Every system has different vulnerabilities. But tutorials are almost always rushed. They're designed to teach players the basics, not to be challenging. Developers cut corners." He opened the chips. "If there's anywhere the System is going to have sloppy code, it's the tutorial."
The teleportation hit without warning.
One moment Ethan was mid-bite into salt-and-vinegar chips. The next, reality dissolved around him like a watercolor painting in the rain. Colors bled together, sounds stretched into meaningless noise, and the sensation of existing briefly became theoretical.
Then he was somewhere else.
[WELCOME TO THE TUTORIAL ZONE]
[Participants: 247]
[Objective: Complete all training modules]
[Time Limit: 24:00:00]
[Survival Rate: ???]
The Tutorial Zone was a nightmare designed by a committee.
Ethan stood in what looked like a massive coliseum, its walls made of the same translucent blue material as the System windows. The floor was divided into sections like a game board, each section glowing with different colors. Red for combat. Blue for skills. Green for crafting. Yellow for navigation.
And surrounding him, nearly 250 people in various states of terror.
Some were crying. Others were praying. A few had the hardened look of survivors who'd already killed their first monsters. Most, though, just looked lost—ordinary people ripped from ordinary lives and dumped into a nightmare.
His own group had been scattered by the teleportation. Maya was visible about thirty meters away, already scanning the crowd. Kevin and Linda were nowhere in sight.
[TUTORIAL PHASE: MODULE 1]
[Basic Combat Orientation]
[Please proceed to the RED ZONE to begin]
The message appeared universally, but the red zone was already crowded with people fumbling through basic attacks against training dummies. Ethan's Glitch Vision flickered, analyzing the space.
The coliseum was wrong.
Not just in the obvious ways—the impossible architecture, the glowing surfaces, the complete absence of any sky. Wrong in ways that only he could see. The walls had hairline fractures in their wireframes, tiny gaps where the System's geometry didn't quite connect. The floor sections had overlapping collision boxes that created sliver-thin dead zones between them.
And in the very center of the coliseum, beneath the apparently solid floor, something massive was sleeping.
[???]
[Level: ???]
[Status: Dormant]
[Trigger Condition: ???]
A boss. There was a boss underneath the tutorial zone, waiting to be awakened. Ethan's heart rate spiked. What kind of sadistic designer put a hidden boss in a tutorial?
The kind that wants to thin the herd, some cold part of his brain answered.
He looked for the trigger condition. His [Exploit Detection] was already working, highlighting elements of the environment in subtle colors. Most of the highlights were small—minor bugs, inconsequential glitches. But one area pulsed brighter than the others.
The completion monument.
In the center of the arena, surrounded by the training zones, stood a marble pillar inscribed with climbing names and numbers:
[TUTORIAL COMPLETION LEADERBOARD]
[1. (UNCLAIMED)]
[2. (UNCLAIMED)]
[3. (UNCLAIMED)]
[...]
The first person to complete all tutorial modules would have their name inscribed at the top. Server First. Glory and rewards.
But Ethan's Glitch Vision saw the hidden code beneath the monument:
if (modules_completed == TOTAL && time_elapsed < THRESHOLD) { ** trigger_boss_spawn();** ** //dev note: too harsh for tutorial? revisit later** }
Someone had programmed a punishment mechanic for speedrunners. Complete the tutorial too fast, and you'd trigger the hidden boss. A trap for exactly the kind of player Ethan was.
"Clever," he muttered. "But not clever enough."
Because the code had a flaw. The trigger checked for completed modules, not skipped modules. If someone could reach the completion state without actually finishing the training sections...
His eyes tracked the geometry of the arena. The dead zones between floor sections. The gaps in the wall wireframes. The timing of the teleportation stutter he'd noticed earlier.
There was a path.
Maya found him twenty minutes later, standing at the edge of the navigation training zone while other participants stumbled through basic movement exercises.
"You're not training," she observed.
"Neither are you."
"I'm observing." She held up her phone. Still recording. "Someone should document what's happening here. For... later."
For the story, Ethan translated. Assuming either of us survives long enough to write it.
"I found something," he said quietly. He pulled up his mental map of the arena, translating his Glitch Vision observations into words. "There's a hidden boss under the floor. It triggers if anyone completes the tutorial too fast."
Maya's face went pale. "A boss? Like that Hollow Hound?"
"Bigger. Much bigger. I can't see its level, which means it's either glitched or massively over-leveled." He pointed at the completion monument. "But the trigger has a bug. It checks for completion, not for actually doing the work. If I can clip through the wall geometry and access the completion flag directly..."
"You can skip the tutorial entirely."
"Without triggering the boss."
Maya was quiet for a moment, processing. Around them, the sounds of combat training filled the air—the thwack of practice swords against dummies, the grunts of effort, the occasional cheer of success.
"What's the catch?" she asked.
Ethan appreciated that she knew there would be one. "The geometry is tight. Really tight. I've spent the last twenty minutes calculating the angles, and there's maybe a six-inch window where the wall collision fails. I need to hit it at exactly the right angle, at exactly the right speed, or I bounce off and alert the System to an exploit attempt."
"And if the System notices?"
He thought about the geometric eye. The observation protocol. "Bad things, probably."
"But you're going to try anyway."
It wasn't a question. Somehow, in the hour since they'd met, Maya Chen had already figured out who he was. The kind of person who saw a closed door and looked for the wall-clip.
"I'm going to try," he confirmed. "But I need a distraction. The System's attention seems to be distributed—it monitors anomalies, but it can't watch everything at once. If something big happens while I make my attempt..."
Maya's eyes went to the combat training zone, where a crowd had gathered around a particularly aggressive participant. A big man—not Kevin, someone else—was demolishing training dummies with brutal efficiency, his Warrior skills on full display.
"I can work with that," she said.
The distraction was beautiful.
Maya had somehow convinced three Mages, two Rangers, and the aggressive Warrior to stage a mock tournament in the combat zone. What started as "friendly competition" quickly escalated into a full spectacle, with participants gathering to watch and cheer. Even the System seemed interested, deploying additional training dummies and generating real-time scoreboards.
Under the cover of the chaos, Ethan moved.
The wall gap was in the northwest corner of the arena, hidden behind a stack of decorative crates that served no functional purpose. His Glitch Vision outlined the exact angle he needed—32 degrees relative to the floor, with a running start of exactly eight steps.
He'd done tighter clips in speedruns. In games that mattered less. Games where death was just a reset button.
No pressure.
He took his position. Measured his steps. Focused his perception until the wireframes became more real than the physical world.
And ran.
The wall rushed toward him. His shoulder hit the collision boundary at exactly the right angle—not the visual wall, which was six inches further back, but the invisible mathematical plane that defined where "wall" became "not wall."
For a sickening moment, he was inside the geometry. A void space that wasn't meant to exist, filled with nothing but error codes and unrendered textures.
Then he was through.
[GEOMETRY BREACH DETECTED]
[Participant 7,921,445,891 has accessed restricted zone]
[Flagging for review...]
[Review delayed: System resources allocated to combat zone event]
The distraction was working. The System couldn't process his violation fast enough.
Ethan found himself in a developer's corridor—a debug space that existed between the rendered zones of the tutorial. The walls here were flat gray, untextured. Floating text boxes displayed variable names and memory addresses. It was like stepping behind a movie set and seeing the scaffolding.
And there, at the end of the corridor, was a simple terminal:
[TUTORIAL COMPLETION FLAG]
[Status: INCOMPLETE]
[Modify?]
His finger hovered over the confirmation button.
This was it. Skip the entire tutorial. Claim a completion without doing the work. The kind of exploit that would make his old speedrunning community proud.
But something made him hesitate.
The code beneath the terminal was visible to his Glitch Vision. And buried in that code, almost hidden, was a secondary trigger:
if (completion_flag == TRUE && modules_completed < 1) { ** //emergency failsafe - remove in production** ** trigger_boss_spawn(force=TRUE, target=exploiter);** }
A failsafe. Someone—a developer, a god, whatever the Architects were—had anticipated exactly this kind of exploit. Complete the tutorial without doing any modules, and the boss would spawn anyway. And it would specifically target him.
"Son of a bitch," Ethan muttered.
He couldn't skip everything. He had to complete at least one module. But which one would be fastest? Combat would take hours. Crafting required materials he didn't have. Skills needed extensive practice.
Navigation.
The navigation module was just movement. Running, jumping, climbing. And unlike the others, it had no combat component. Just... traversal challenges.
Which meant it probably had geometry challenges.
Ethan's smile was sharp. Geometry was his specialty.
He exited the debug corridor through a gap in the ceiling, emerging into the navigation training zone. A few participants glanced at him curiously—he'd appeared from a direction with no visible entrance—but most were too focused on the obstacle course in front of them to care.
[NAVIGATION TRAINING MODULE]
[Objective: Complete the obstacle course]
[Current Best Time: 4:23]
[Participants Completed: 12/247]
The course was a nightmare of platforms, balance beams, and climbing walls. The "intended" path wound back and forth across the zone, requiring careful jumps and precise timing.
Ethan ignored it entirely.
His Glitch Vision mapped the shortcuts. A collision gap in the first wall that led directly to the second platform. A ceiling clip near the climbing section that dropped you past four obstacles. A simple out-of-bounds path that circumvented the final maze entirely.
He ran.
The course that took others four minutes took him forty-three seconds.
[NAVIGATION MODULE: COMPLETE]
[Time: 00:43]
[NEW RECORD!]
[Server First Achievement: Tutorial Speedrunner]
[Reward: +500 XP, Title [Pathfinder], Skill Point ×2]
[LEVEL UP!]
[Ethan Cross: Level 3 → Level 5]
[+10 Stat Points]
[+2 Skill Points (Level) + 2 (Achievement)]
The notifications exploded across his vision. Four skill points at once. Massive XP bonus. And a title that would mark him as exceptional.
But underneath the celebration, his Glitch Vision caught something else.
The dormant boss was waking up.
Not because of his completion—the single module meant the failsafe didn't trigger. Something else had activated it. Something in the combat zone.
He spun, looking through the arena's geometry, and saw the problem.
The aggressive Warrior had gotten too aggressive. His practice sword had broken a training dummy in exactly the wrong way, sending shrapnel into a hidden trigger plate in the floor. The plate that controlled the boss's spawn condition.
[EMERGENCY ALERT]
[Tutorial Boss: AWAKENED]
[All participants: SURVIVE]
The floor of the coliseum cracked open, and something ancient and terrible began to rise.
Ethan had forty seconds, maybe less, before the monster finished spawning. Forty seconds to warn 247 people. Forty seconds to figure out how to kill something that wasn't supposed to be beatable.
His Glitch Vision was already working, scanning the emerging creature for weaknesses, for exploits, for anything.
And finding nothing.
For the first time since the apocalypse began, Ethan Cross faced a system he couldn't immediately break.