Leo Vance was having a shit day.
Not the kind where you stub your toe and your coffee's cold. A real one. The kind that starts at 6 AM when your alarm doesn't go off, continues with a freezing shower because your landlord's "fixing the boiler" (translation: too cheap to actually fix it), and peaks when you show up to work and find out some psycho scheduled you for a double shift.
Sixteen hours. Stacking cans. Aisle seven. Thirteen-fifty an hour, before taxes.
His student loan payment was due in six days, and he was still two hundred and thirty-seven dollars short. The philosophy degree he'd worked so hard for now sat under his TV stand, doing a better job as a coaster than as a career path. And if the store played that same watered-down version of "Despacito" one more time, he was pretty sure he might lose what little patience he had left.
Still, he reminded himself, things could be worse. He had a job. He had his health. That had to count for something.
Leo straightened his name tag—the laminated badge that read "LEO – HERE TO HELP!" in bright, forced cheerfulness—and reached for another can of baked beans, doing his best to get through another shift.
Can number forty-seven. Only eight hundred and fifty-three to go.
The existential dread was really setting in.
It was 2:47 PM on a Tuesday. Leo thought it'd be a normal, soul-crushing, boring-as-hell day. The store was in its usual afternoon slump. Some old folks shuffled through produce, moving so slow they made glaciers look fast. A mom with eyes that screamed "I haven't slept in three years" was trying to stop her twin toddlers from turning the cereal aisle into a wrestling ring. And Old Man Henderson was arguing with the deli guy about the "ethics of factory-farmed pastrami."
Normal. Boring. Safe.
Leo should've known better.
The universe has great timing and a terrible sense of humor.
The sky didn't just tear. It shredded. Like someone took a cosmic knife to reality and went to fucking town on it.
The sound was impossible to describe. Leo's brain tried anyway: imagine if God suddenly remembered he left the oven on, and his "oh shit" was amplified through speakers made of pure dread and bass so deep human ears weren't meant to hear it.
Every window rattled. The floor bucked like something alive. Fluorescent lights flickered and exploded in sequence, raining sparks and glass. A car alarm went off outside. Then another. Then another. Until the whole parking lot sounded like it was having a breakdown.
Leo dropped the can. It bounced off his steel-toed boot—the only smart thing he'd bought since graduating—and rolled away with a sad metal clatter.
"What the actual—"
Then the light hit.
It wasn't sunlight. Wasn't lightning. It was other. Colors Leo didn't have names for, couldn't have names for, because human eyes were never supposed to see them. It poured through the windows like liquid metal, spreading across the floor in patterns that hurt to look at.
People screamed. Of course they did. That's what happens when reality stops making sense.
Then came the voice.
It didn't come from speakers. It came from everywhere. Inside Leo's head, vibrating through his teeth, shaking his chest, humming in his bones like someone installed a subwoofer in his skeleton.
It was loud enough to blur his vision. Cheerful enough to make his skin crawl. And so fundamentally wrong that every survival instinct from millions of years of evolution started screaming in terror.
"GREETINGS, INHABITANTS OF TERRA-SOL!"
The voice was... male? Maybe? It kept changing pitch like someone was fucking with the sliders mid-sentence. One second it sounded like a game show host on too much coke. The next, like a bored DMV worker reading a script. Then like something that learned English from corrupted audio files.
Leo's hands shook. The can kept rolling. Somewhere, a kid was crying. Old Man Henderson dropped his pastrami.
"CONGRATULATIONS!"
"Congratulations?" Leo whispered. His voice got lost in the screaming and shattering glass as an entire display of fancy olive oil spontaneously exploded.
"YOUR PLANET HAS BEEN SELECTED FOR INTEGRATION INTO THE MULTIVERSAL SYSTEM FRAMEWORK!"
Leo's panic-soaked brain grabbed the only explanation that made sense: This is a prank. Has to be. There are cameras. Some viral marketing for a shitty mobile game. Any second now someone's gonna jump out and—
"IN ACCORDANCE WITH MULTIVERSAL ACCORDS, SUBSECTION 7, PARAGRAPH 42, YOUR SPECIES HAS BEEN ASSESSED AND DEEMED 'SUITABLE FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES' AND WILL NOW UNDERGO MANDATORY RESTRUCTURING!"
Entertainment purposes.
Those two words cut through Leo's panic like ice water and the growing realization that he was fucked.
"YOUR URBAN CENTERS, SUBURBAN SPRAWL, AND FRANKLY RATHER TEDIOUS RURAL AREAS HAVE BEEN RECONSTRUCTED INTO A MORE ENGAGING FORMAT: THE SANCTUM-DUNGEON COMPLEX!"
The ground didn't shake. It buckled. Like the Earth's crust decided it was tired of being flat and wanted to try new shapes.
Leo grabbed the shelf. His knuckles went white. Around him, cans tumbled to the floor in what would've been funny if he wasn't pretty sure he was about to die.
"YOUR NEW HOME FEATURES ONE HUNDRED FLOORS OF PROGRESSIVELY DIFFICULT CHALLENGES, HOSTILE ENTITIES, RESOURCE SCARCITY, AND APPROXIMATELY 73% FEWER OSHA VIOLATIONS THAN YOUR PREVIOUS INFRASTRUCTURE! PLEASE NOTE THAT CASUALTY RATES ARE EXPECTED TO BE HIGH, BUT VIEWER ENGAGEMENT METRICS SUGGEST THIS WILL BE EXTREMELY ENTERTAINING!"
"One hundred floors?!" someone shrieked. Maybe the cereal aisle mom. "WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!"
The voice didn't answer. Of course not. This wasn't a conversation. This was an announcement. The kind you make before doing something horrible while pretending people had a choice.
"TO FACILITATE YOUR INTEGRATION AND ENSURE MAXIMUM ENTERTAINMENT VALUE, EACH INDIVIDUAL WILL BE ASSIGNED A CLASS DESIGNATION BASED ON GENETIC COMPATIBILITY, LATENT POTENTIAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE, AND A SMALL RANDOMIZATION FACTOR TO KEEP THINGS INTERESTING! PLEASE REMAIN CALM DURING THE SCANNING PROCESS!"
"REMAIN CALM?!" the mom screamed. "REMAIN FUCKING CALM?! MY KIDS ARE—"
She stopped. They all stopped.
Because the screens appeared.
Not phone screens or monitors. These were rectangles of pure light, see-through, glowing that same sick blue that reminded Leo of every error message, every frozen computer, every "this program has stopped working" he'd ever seen.
They floated two feet in front of everyone's face, following your eyes with perfect, impossible accuracy.
Leo stared at his. His hands shook so bad he could barely read it, but text kept typing itself out, each letter appearing with a soft ping that felt like tiny nails in his skull.
// MULTIVERSAL SYSTEM - TERRA-SOL INTEGRATION PROTOCOL //
// INITIALIZATION IN PROGRESS... //
// PLEASE STANDBY... //
// SCANNING BIO-SIGNATURE... //
// ANALYZING GENETIC MARKERS... //
// CROSS-REFERENCING PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE... //
// ACCESSING ARCHETYPE DATABASE... //
// ASSIGNING CLASS DESIGNATION... //
Around him, other screens were finishing up.
A guy in a wrinkled business suit—the type who probably made six figures telling people how to do their jobs—stumbled back as a sword appeared in his hands with a flash of gold light.
Not a good sword. It looked like something a cosplayer bought off Wish—crude iron, badly balanced, with a handle that'd probably give him blisters in thirty seconds.
But it was real. Solid. Heavy. Sharp enough to kill.
Above his head, glowing text appeared:
[CLASS ASSIGNED: WARRIOR - COMMON]
[LEVEL 1]
[WELCOME TO THE CRAWL, WARRIOR! TRY NOT TO DIE IMMEDIATELY!]
The businessman stared at the sword like it insulted his mom. His face went from pale to red in three seconds.
"COMMON?!" he shouted, voice cracking. "I have an MBA from Stanford! I closed a three-million-dollar deal last month! I golf with senators! I'm not fucking COMMON!"
Nobody was listening. Nobody cared.
A teenage girl—sixteen, maybe seventeen, too much black eyeliner and a faded My Chemical Romance shirt—shrieked as fire burst to life in her palm. Real fire. Actual burning flames that should've been melting her skin but weren't.
[CLASS ASSIGNED: PYROMANCER - UNCOMMON]
[LEVEL 1]
[BURN, BABY, BURN! DISCO INFERNO NOT INCLUDED!]
She stared at the flames. Her face went through shock, terror, and then—in one heartbeat—pure manic glee.
"HOLY SHIT!" she screamed. "MOM! MOM! I'M A FUCKING MAGE! I'M A MAGE, MOM!"
Her mother, three aisles over with a cart of frozen dinners, was too busy having a mental breakdown to respond.
The air filled with voices, a chaos of confusion, terror, and the kind of hysteria that happens when your worldview gets bodyslammed:
"ROGUE?! What the hell is a Rogue?!"
"I'm a Healer! But I don't know any healing! WHERE'S THE TUTORIAL?!"
"Why is there a mana bar?! I don't want a mana bar!"
"Someone call 911!"
"911 isn't a thing anymore, Karen! READ THE ROOM!"
"THIS IS BULLSHIT! I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MANAGER!"
Leo's screen was still loading.
Still. Fucking. Loading.
The progress bar—because of course there was a progress bar—crawled along at maybe 2% per second. Everyone else got assigned in seconds. Leo had been standing here for almost a full minute, watching the little blue bar inch forward like a depressed sloth was operating it.
// ASSIGNING CLASS... //
// PLEASE WAIT... //
// THIS IS TAKING LONGER THAN EXPECTED... //
// PLEASE CONTINUE TO WAIT... //
"Come on," Leo muttered, heart hammering so hard it hurt. "Come on, come on, just give me something—"
The screen flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then it turned red.
Not blue. Red. The color of error messages and warnings and very, very bad news.
// ERROR. //