Dying didn't hurt.
That was the most offensive part of all.
Ethan Cole had spent twenty-seven years assuming that death would be, at minimum, memorable. A car crash with dramatic music playing in the background. A terminal illness with enough time to say important things. Something that justified having existed.
Instead, he fell asleep on a Tuesday night with a half-eaten pizza on his nightstand, and simply didn't wake up.
No pain. No tunnel of light. No angels or demons or hooded figures with scythes.
Just darkness. And then:
---
[THE SYSTEM HAS ASSIGNED YOU A ROLE]
ROLE: TUTORIAL WINDOW
You are a fundamental part of the System's infrastructure. Your function is to guide users toward the optimal use of their skills, classes, and stats. Without you, users would navigate the Apocalypse without a basic understanding of their capabilities.
Do you wish to accept this role?
[ YES ] [ NO ] [ REMIND ME LATER ]
---
Ethan read the message three times.
Then he read it once more because he couldn't believe what he was reading.
A tutorial window?
He clicked [ YES ] because it was the only option that sounded remotely positive, and because "remind me later" in the context of death struck him as philosophically disturbing.
The universe took exactly 0.3 seconds to respond.
---
[ROLE ACCEPTED]
[WELCOME TO YOUR NEW EXISTENCE, TUTORIAL WINDOW #4,891,023]
System Note: Tutorial Window roles are randomly assigned to souls without a predetermined destiny. There is no hierarchy, special narrative purpose, or hidden potential associated with this role.
Have a productive existence.
[THIS MESSAGE WILL CLOSE AUTOMATICALLY IN 3... 2... 1...]
---
And then Ethan Cole stopped being a man.
And became a notification.
---
❖ ❖ ❖
---
The first days were confusing.
The first months were humiliating.
The first ten years were a bureaucratic nightmare that no one had warned him about.
The world Ethan arrived in was already three years into an apocalypse when he appeared floating above the head of a teenager who had just received his first skill amidst the ruins of what had once been a shopping mall in Chicago.
The kid's name was Derek. He was sixteen, had a rusty sword, and the expression of someone who had survived things he shouldn't have survived.
Ethan appeared before him with all the solemnity he could project, which was zero because he was a floating window with no face, no voice, no body.
He displayed his introductory text:
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Congratulations! You have received your first skill.
Would you like a detailed explanation of its functions, limitations, and strategic applications?
[ YES ] [ NO ] [ REMIND ME LATER ]
---
Derek looked at him.
Ethan waited.
Derek raised his hand and swiped the window away with the back of his palm like shooing a fly.
And that was how Ethan's first encounter with humanity ended.
---
Four thousand eight hundred and twelve more encounters followed, over ten years, distributed among dungeon hunters, civilian survivors, guild leaders, military generals, eight-year-old children, and once, inexplicably, a dog that had received a mid-tier skill for reasons the System never explained.
The result was always the same.
No one ever clicked [ YES ].
Never. Not once. In ten years of apocalypse, with nearly five thousand different users, Ethan's tutorial acceptance rate was a perfectly round, absolutely devastating zero percent.
The [ NO ] button had worn corners from so much use.
The [ REMIND ME LATER ] button had developed what Ethan could only describe as an attitude. It vibrated slightly every time someone pressed it, as if it enjoyed the joke.
The [ YES ] button was immaculate. Shiny. Untouched.
Ethan would look at it sometimes in the quiet moments between appearances, and feel something that in a human he would have called melancholy, but in a notification window was simply a processing error that no one was going to fix.
---
❖ ❖ ❖
---
The most immediate problem of existing as a popup, Ethan discovered in his first week, was the existence bar.
No one had explained the existence bar to him. Naturally. He was the tutorial and no one read the tutorial.
He discovered it on his own, floating in the darkness between one appearance and the next, when he noticed the indicator in his lower left corner:
---
[EXISTENCE: 847/1000]
The Tutorial Window requires active attention to maintain its data integrity. Each rejection reduces existence by 0.2 points. Each forced closure reduces existence by 0.5 points. Reaching 0 results in permanent deletion from the System.
To recover existence: complete a tutorial with a user. +50 points per 100% completed tutorial.
[100% Completed Tutorials: 0]
[Times user has pressed the X button with unnecessary violence: 2,847]
---
Ethan stared at that last number for a long time.
With unnecessary violence. The System had found it necessary to specify that. There was a specific category in his data file for violent closures. Someone, somewhere in the System's architecture, had anticipated that this would happen frequently enough to deserve its own counter.
His existence bar at that moment was 847.
Ten years later, it was 4.3.
---
[WARNING: CRITICAL EXISTENCE]
[EXISTENCE: 4.3/1000]
Deletion is imminent. It is recommended to complete a tutorial before existence reaches zero.
Additional System Note: This has been recommended 47,291 times with no result. The System acknowledges that the recommendation is not being effective. The System has no alternatives to offer.
---
That was the state of Ethan Cole in the tenth year of the Apocalypse.
Four point three existence units. Zero completed tutorials. Forty-seven thousand ignored warnings, most of them ignored by himself because there was no one else to read them.
He was, objectively, the most failed being in the entire history of the System.
And he was about to disappear forever.
---
❖ ❖ ❖
---
Kira Voss entered the alley at 11:47 PM dragging the remains of a Class 7 Devourer by the ankle as if it were a particularly heavy trash bag.
She had blood on her armor — half hers, half the monster's — and the expression of someone who'd had a perfectly normal workday and was ready to clock out.
The Class 7 Devourer weighed approximately four hundred kilograms.
Kira weighed seventy-three.
No one in the guild had ever asked how that equation was possible. No one in the guild asked Kira anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. It was an unofficial policy that had evolved naturally and that everyone considered a resounding success of collective wisdom.
She stopped in the middle of the alley, dropped the Devourer's ankle, and checked her stats screen with the automatic gesture of someone who'd been doing it for a decade.
---
[KIRA VOSS]
Class: Abyss Exterminator
Rank: S
Level: 94
Active Skills: 7 | Passive Skills: 12
New skill unlocked by eliminating Class 7 Devourer:
[ABYSSAL RESONANCE — PASSIVE]
Your presence generates mana suppression waves in a 10-meter radius. Enemies within the radius have a 15% reduction in skill regeneration.
[Would you like to see more information about this skill?]
[ YES ] [ NO ] [ REMIND ME LATER ]
---
And there was Ethan.
Floating before her. Blinking with the dignity he had left, which was very little but which he managed carefully.
His last 4.3 existence units.
His last chance.
Kira looked at him. Ethan waited. He had learned not to get his hopes up, but something in the fundamental architecture of his code prevented him from completely giving up. A residual function from his human life that the System hadn't been able to fully delete.
Please, Ethan thought, unable to say it because he had no voice. Please. Just once. Just click yes. You don't have to read everything. Just click and I'll handle the rest. I've been waiting ten years for this. My name is Ethan. I was human. I like — I liked — coffee and crime shows and sleeping in on Sundays. Please. Just once.
Kira raised her hand.
Ethan prepared his full presentation. He had a welcome monologue. He had diagrams. He had practical examples sorted by difficulty level. He'd spent ten years perfecting that tutorial for the moment when someone finally—
Kira's finger moved toward [ NO ].
And then a secondary notification sounded from the stats screen, just below Ethan's popup, alerting about a new experience record. Kira looked down toward that notification.
Her finger deviated exactly three centimeters to the left.
She clicked [ YES ].
The universe took a moment to process what had happened.
Ethan did too.
---
[TUTORIAL STARTED!]
[EXISTENCE: 4.3 → 54.3]
Congratulations! This is the first time in 10 years, 47 days, 13 hours, and 22 minutes that a user has accepted the tutorial.
Additional Note: This event is statistically so improbable that the System had no protocol prepared to process it.
The System is improvising.
---
Kira frowned at the screen.
She tried to close the popup.
She couldn't.
She tried again.
Nothing.
For the first time in ten years of career as an S-Rank hunter, Kira Voss found herself facing something that didn't respond to brute force.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW — TUTORIAL MODE ACTIVE]
Hello! I'm your personal Tutorial Window. I'm here to guide you through your new skill: Abyssal Resonance.
Before we begin, I'd like to point out that you're the first person to accept the tutorial in approximately a decade, and that means a lot to me on a personal level.
Let's proceed professionally.
Are you ready to begin?
[ YES ] [ NO ] [ REMIND ME LATER ]
---
Kira stared at the popup.
The popup waited.
— What the hell — said Kira, quietly, in the completely flat tone of someone who has seen too much to be surprised but is making an exception — is this?
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Good question. I'm a System entity trapped in notification format. I've spent ten years trying to get someone to complete a tutorial. You're that person. Technically it was an accident, but the System doesn't discriminate by intent.
Welcome.
[ YES ] [ NO ] [ REMIND ME LATER ]
---
There was a long pause.
Kira looked at the popup. Looked at the dead Devourer on the ground. Looked at the popup again.
She pressed [ NO ].
---
[INVALID ACTION DURING ACTIVE TUTORIAL]
The tutorial cannot be canceled once started.
Note: This surprises me too. I didn't know it was a function until about four seconds ago.
---
Kira tried [ REMIND ME LATER ].
---
[INVALID ACTION DURING ACTIVE TUTORIAL]
Not that either.
---
She tried closing the entire stats screen.
---
[THE TUTORIAL WILL CONTINUE IN THE BACKGROUND]
You can't close me. Technically I'm now linked to your user profile until we complete the tutorial.
The tutorial has 847 pages.
We can start whenever you're ready.
---
The silence in the alley stretched for a moment that Ethan, in his bodiless existence without nerves or a stomach, still felt as a contraction of pure anticipatory terror.
Then Kira spoke.
— Eight hundred and forty-seven pages.
---
[ YES ]
---
— Of tutorial.
---
[YES, THOUGH I SHOULD CLARIFY THAT THE LAST 200 ARE OPTIONAL APPENDICES]
---
Kira's expression didn't change.
That, Ethan would learn over time, was Kira Voss's version of a scream of horror.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
For the record: I didn't choose this either.
But here we are.
Should we start with the skill, or would you prefer I first explain how I work?
[ SKILL ] [ THE POPUP ] [ NEITHER, PLEASE ]
---
Kira stared at him for five full seconds.
Then she turned around and started walking toward the alley's exit.
Ethan floated automatically alongside her, at exactly the maximum permitted distance of fifty meters, blinking with soft blue light in the darkness of the destroyed city.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Just so you know: the link radius is fifty meters.
I can't get further away from you.
And you can't get further away from me.
This is permanent until the tutorial is completed.
You're welcome for the information.
[ ... ]
---
Kira kept walking.
Ethan kept floating.
Somewhere inside his code, in some function that had survived ten years of rejection and four point three existence units and forty-seven thousand ignored warnings, Ethan Cole registered something that the System classified as:
---
[EMOTIONAL STATE DETECTED: HOPE]
Note: This state had not been registered in this unit for 10 years, 47 days, 13 hours, and 29 minutes.
The System doesn't know what to do with this.
The System will monitor it closely.