Tutorial Skip

# Chapter 2: Tutorial Skip

The air in the conference room had gone sour.

Kevin noticed it first—that metallic tang that comes before a thunderstorm, mixed with something organic and wrong. Like someone had hotwired a hospital into a server rack and let both catch fire.

He'd been staring at his status screen for the past three minutes, trying to make sense of floating blue text that only he seemed to fully understand.

> **KEVIN PARK** > **LEVEL: 0** > **CLASS: UNASSIGNED** > **HP: 100/100** > **MP: 50/50**

Below that, a cheerful message in font that felt aggressively passive-aggressive:

> *Congratulations, user! The System has been activated. Your world will never be the same.*

"No shit," he muttered.

His screen still showed the ghost of last night's error—*unregistered observer*—flickering at the edge of his vision like a watermark on pirated software. He tried to open a debug panel. Got a loading spinner. Typical.

Around him, the office had devolved into controlled chaos—the kind where everyone pretends there's a protocol but nobody trained for "reality.exe stopped responding."

Susan from accounting was crying at her desk, mascara running in streaks that looked like corrupted UI elements. Dave from IT had already tried to throw his monitor through a window. The window hadn't broken—reinforced glass, because of course—but the monitor had shattered into a cascade of digital fragments that dissolved before hitting the carpet, leaving behind a faint smell of ozone and regret.

Jenna from marketing was hyperventilating into a paper bag that probably wasn't helping. Mark—different Mark, Henderson's Mark, not team lead Mark—was on the phone screaming at someone who wasn't answering because the cell towers had apparently also received the patch.

Kevin's phone showed the same error as the yoga-pants woman would later:

> *No cellular signal detected. System integration in progress.*

Great. They'd nationalized telecommunications and skipped the changelog.

Emergency alarms blared. Nobody knew what to do because the fire department probably didn't have a protocol for "reality just got patched."

"Everyone stay calm!" shouted Mr. Henderson, their regional manager, voice cracking on the last word like a teenager hitting puberty mid-sentence. "We just need to—"

The lights went out.

Not the emergency lights. Those stayed on, casting everything in harsh red—the universal color of "you are now in a horror game." But the fluorescents died with a wet *sputter* that sounded less like electrical failure and more like something being *extinguished*.

Kevin's desk was near the window—corner office-adjacent, which in startup terms meant "you can see the apocalypse but you don't get a door." He looked down at Market Street and immediately wished he hadn't.

The city was *breaking*.

Not buildings collapsing. Not roads splitting open like a cheap disaster movie. The *rules* were breaking.

Cars had stopped mid-intersection, drivers frozen or fled. A bus had somehow ended up on the sidewalk, front end wrapped around a lamppost that stood completely undamaged—physics taking a coffee break. And in the middle of the street, something was moving.

It looked like a rat.

A rat the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

Patchy wet fur. Eyes the color of old blood. Gnawing on something Kevin really hoped wasn't a person. Its tail—thick as a fire hose—whipped back and forth as it turned its head, sniffing the air like it was reading packet headers.

> *New quest available: SURVIVE THE AWAKENING* > > *Objective: Reach a designated safe zone (0/1)* > > *Reward: 100 XP, Basic Equipment Pack* > > *Time remaining: 23:59:47*

A quest. A literal quest.

Kevin's programmer brain latched onto that detail with almost desperate relief. This was a system. Systems had rules. Rules could be understood, exploited, and occasionally patched by overworked devs at 3 AM.

If he could understand the rules, he might not die on the tutorial map.

"Kevin! Kevin, what are you looking at?"

Maya Santos.

Temp worker. Reception fill-in. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, nails bitten down to practicality. She'd grabbed his arm hard enough to leave marks. She wasn't crying. She was looking at him like he might have answers—which was hilarious, because he absolutely did not.

"Giant rat," he said. "Down on Market Street."

"Giant—"

She pushed past him to look, then made a sound that was half gasp, half curse in two languages.

"Oh, *Dios mío*."

"It's not the only one."

He pointed. More shapes moved in the distance—some rat-shaped, some not. One looked disturbingly like a twelve-foot-tall pigeon, head bobbing with the unsettling confidence of a city bird that had finally leveled up. Another was a dark, amorphous blob swallowing light around it like a mobile void zone.

"Okay," Kevin said, pulling up his status screen again. "This is fine. This is a system. Systems have tutorials."

He found it immediately.

> *TUTORIAL: BASIC COMBAT* > > *Step 1: Equip a weapon* > > *Step 2: Target an enemy* > > *Step 3: Attack!* > > *Reward: 50 XP, Skill: [Basic Melee]*

Simple. Almost condescendingly so.

But Kevin had spent years debugging other people's code, and he knew tutorials were the most vulnerable part of any system. Written for the average user. Cut corners. Made assumptions. Treated edge cases like they were someone else's problem.

Usually his problem.

He read the quest text again, carefully.

*Equip a weapon.*

What counted as a weapon? No specification. No item class requirement. Just "equip." In most games, equipping meant dragging something into a slot. Kevin didn't have slots yet. He had vibes and panic.

*Target an enemy.*

Straightforward-ish. Didn't say *how* to target. Look at it? Point? Say its name out loud like a bad voice command?

*Attack!*

The exclamation mark was telling. The tutorial *wanted* him to attack. Cheering him on. Hand-holding him toward violence.

Something about that made him suspicious.

"Kevin, we need to move," Maya said, pulling at his sleeve. "The building's evacuating."

She was right. People flooded toward the stairwells, pushing and shoving. Someone screamed. A man in a suit had fallen and was being trampled—classic mob AI, zero collision avoidance.

The emergency lights flickered, strobe-light horror.

"Wait," Kevin said. "Look at this."

He pulled up his quest log and highlighted the tutorial.

> *TUTORIAL: BASIC COMBAT* > > *Difficulty: TRIVIAL* > > *Recommended Level: 0* > > *Note: This quest is designed to introduce users to combat mechanics. Failure is not possible.*

"Failure is not possible," Kevin read aloud. "That's not error handling. That's a promise."

"What?"

"It's guaranteeing outcome. Look at recommended level—zero. That's us. Everyone in this building. But that rat down there?" He jabbed a finger at the street. "It's not level zero."

"How do you know?"

"I don't. But I'm guessing. And I want to test something before we join the stairwell mosh pit."

Maya stared at him. "You want to *break* the tutorial?"

"I want to *understand* it."

His eyes landed on Susan's desk. Letter opener. Cheap plastic. Barely sharp enough to cut paper, let alone eldritch rodent flesh.

He picked it up anyway.

> *New item detected: LETTER OPENER* > > *Classification: IMPROVISED WEAPON* > > *Damage: 1-3* > > *Durability: 5/5* > > *Note: Really? This is what you're going with?*

"Ha," Kevin said, without humor. "The System sasses me. That's great. Love a hostile UX."

He equipped the letter opener—or rather, he held it and mentally confirmed he wanted to use it as a weapon. A small icon appeared in the corner of his vision: crude blade sketch, damage range laughably low.

> *Step 1 complete!* > > *Reward: 5 XP* > > *Proceed to Step 2.*

"Five XP," he muttered. "For equipping a letter opener. That's not much. That's tutorial breadcrumb energy."

"Kevin, the rat—"

The giant rat had stopped eating.

It was looking up at their building.

At *them*.

Kevin felt it like a target lock—soft ping in the back of his skull.

"Okay," he said, heart hammering. "Step 2. Target an enemy."

He looked at the rat. Pointed at it. Said, out loud, "I target that rat."

Nothing.

> *Step 2: Target an enemy* > > *Hint: Try focusing your intent.*

"Focus my intent." Kevin closed his eyes. "I'm a programmer. I can focus. I can intent harder than anyone in this office."

He opened his eyes and *looked* at the rat—not just looked. He *targeted* it. Imagined a cursor hovering over its head, selection box around its body, debug overlay showing hitboxes. The same intensity he used tracking down a race condition in production at 2 AM with three energy drinks and pure spite.

Red outline appeared around the rat.

> *Target acquired: GIANT SEWER RAT (JUVENILE)* > > *Level: 3* > > *HP: 150/150* > > *Status: HUNGRY*

"Oh, it's just a juvenile," Kevin said. "That's fine. Totally fine. Baby eldritch vermin. Adorable."

"Kevin, it's coming toward the building."

Correct.

The rat started moving, massive body squeezing between parked cars, claws scraping asphalt like nails on a chalkboard scaled up to industrial horror. Screams rose from the street below.

> *Step 3: Attack!* > > *Hint: The system will handle the execution. Just commit to the action.*

Kevin read that line twice.

"The system handles the execution."

Interesting.

In most games, you press a button. Backend calculates hit chance, damage, crits. Player sees numbers go brr.

But this wasn't a game. This was reality with a UI slapped on top. So what happened when you "committed to the action"?

Did the System move your body? Override motor functions? Script your victory so the tutorial could pat itself on the back?

He raised the letter opener.

Maya grabbed his arm. "You're not seriously going to fight that thing with a *letter opener*."

"I'm not going to fight it. I'm going to test something."

"You're going to *die*."

"Maybe." He looked at her. "But the tutorial says failure isn't possible. And I want to know if that's true—or if it's just true if you follow the script."

He turned back to the window.

The rat was close now. Close enough to see individual whiskers, yellowed teeth, ribs showing through patchy fur like a bad texture map.

Kevin took a breath.

He thought about every bug he'd fixed. Null pointer exceptions. Race conditions. Off-by-one errors that ruined weekends. Every system had cracks. Finding them was just a matter of looking in the right places and having poor enough work-life balance to enjoy it.

He thought about the tutorial text again.

*The system will handle the execution.*

What if he didn't want the System to handle it?

What if he wanted to handle it himself?

He pulled up the tutorial quest and, instead of following Step 3, he *declined* it.

> *Warning: Declining a tutorial quest may result in incomplete onboarding.* > > *Are you sure? [Y/N]*

Y.

> *Tutorial quest declined.* > > *Skill [Basic Melee] will not be awarded.* > > *Do you wish to proceed with an unassisted attack? [Y/N]*

There it was. The crack.

The System assumed he'd follow the tutorial. Prepared for that path. But it had also prepared for the alternative—"unassisted attack"—and in preparing for that, it gave him an option the tutorial never mentioned.

Classic branching logic. Forgot to hide the dev path.

He selected Y.

> *Unassisted attack initiated.* > > *Calculating...* > > *Error: No skill found for combat resolution.* > > *Fallback protocol engaged.* > > *Damage calculation: Base weapon damage × user intent modifier.* > > *User intent modifier: 1.0 (default)* > > *Adjust modifier? [Y/N]*

Kevin's heart stopped.

He could *adjust* the modifier.

He selected Y.

> *Enter modifier value (0.1 - 10.0):*

He typed 10.0.

For a half-second, he considered typing something stupid—999999 or negative one or the kind of input that crashed old PHP forms. But he wasn't trying to break the System yet. He was trying to understand its boundaries.

Boundaries first. Chaos later.

> *Modifier accepted.* > > *Executing attack...*

The letter opener flew from his hand.

No—that wasn't right. He *threw* it. But he hadn't consciously thrown it. His arm moved on its own, powered by something that felt like muscle memory but wasn't—System-assisted animation, maybe, or his body deciding it trusted the math more than his survival instinct.

Time did something weird. Slowed. Frame skip. He saw the trajectory overlay—a dotted line from his hand to the rat's eye, probability estimate flashing 12% before the modifier applied and the number jumped to 98%.

Cheating. He was absolutely cheating.

The cheap plastic blade spun through the air, catching red emergency light, and—

Hit the rat in the eye.

The creature *screamed*. High-pitched. Wet. Cut through the chaos like a boss phase transition sound effect.

It reared back, clawing at its face. Kevin watched its health bar plummet.

150.

120.

80.

40.

0.

The rat collapsed. Body hit pavement with a wet *thump*, then dissolved into motes of blue light, leaving behind a small pile of coins and a glowing orb.

People on the street below stopped running for half a second, staring at the light show like they'd wandered into a cutscene.

One guy pulled out his phone—habit—and Kevin's HUD helpfully noted:

> *Device function: Recording disabled. Copyright protection active.*

Even the apocalypse had DRM.

> *Congratulations! You have defeated: GIANT SEWER RAT (JUVENILE)* > > *XP gained: 150* > > *Items dropped: 5 copper coins, [Skill Shard: Basic Melee]* > > *Level up! You are now Level 1.* > > *Stat points available: 5*

Kevin stared at the notification, breath ragged. Hand shaking. Whole body shaking.

He'd just one-shot a level-three monster with office supplies and a slider labeled *user intent modifier*.

If that wasn't the most on-brand superpower for a software engineer, nothing was.

"Holy shit," Maya whispered beside him. "You... you killed it."

"I exploited a bug," Kevin said, voice hollow. "Found a hole in the System and pushed a number through it."

"That's amazing."

"That's dangerous." He turned to look at her. She flinched at whatever she saw in his eyes. "If I can do that, other people can too. And if other people can do that, the System is going to patch it."

He pulled up his stat screen while he talked—old habit, check the build after every fight.

> *STR: 8 | DEX: 11 | INT: 16* > *Stat points available: 5*

He dumped four into INT and one into WIS without thinking. Glass cannon build. If the System wanted a debugger, he'd lean in.

Below, the glowing orb pulsed once, then vanished as someone on the street scooped it up without knowing what it was. Free loot for whoever had fastest feet. Classic MMO behavior.

Mr. Henderson chose that moment to climb back up the stairs, face red, tie crooked. "What was that? What just happened?"

Kevin didn't have a corporate-safe answer. "Rat died."

"In a flash of light?"

"Welcome to the new economy."

Henderson opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked like he wanted to write Kevin up for unauthorized monster slaying.

Kevin pulled up his quest log again, scanning for anything else he'd missed.

A new notification blinked in the corner.

> *EXPLOIT DETECTED* > > *Type: Damage modifier manipulation* > > *User: KEVIN PARK* > > *Incident logged.* > > *Administrator notified.* > > *Action pending.*

"Shit," Kevin said.

"What? What is it?"

"The System noticed." He stared at the cold clinical language. "It logged what I did. And it told someone."

"Told who?"

Kevin didn't answer.

Because at the bottom of the notification, a new line appeared.

> *Response received.* > > *Patching exploit...* > > *Patch failed.* > > *Re-evaluating...* > > *New directive: User KEVIN PARK designated as [PERSON OF INTEREST].* > > *Observation initiated.*

The patch failed.

Kevin filed that away under *extremely important* and *probably fatal later*. If the System couldn't close the hole immediately, either it was badly designed—which, fair, so was most software—or Kevin had stumbled into something the admin layer didn't know how to fix yet.

Both options were terrifying.

"Great," Kevin said, voice flat. "I'm on a watchlist. The *universe* has me on a watchlist."

Maya was still staring at him, expression mixing fear and awe like she'd watched someone speedrun the apocalypse with office supplies.

"What do we do now?"

Kevin looked out the window at the burning city, monsters roaming streets, people running and dying and screaming. The pigeon-thing pecked at a car roof. The blob oozed toward a Starbucks—probably the highest emotional resonance point on the block.

"We figure out how to survive," he said. "And we hope the admin doesn't decide to ban us before we do."

His screen flickered with a secondary message only he could see:

> *Observer note: User demonstrates anomalous interaction with fallback protocols. Recommend continued monitoring. Do not engage directly.* > > *Signed: [REDACTED]*

Someone was taking notes on him. Like he was a bug report with legs.

Above them, in the red-tinted sky, something flickered. Pattern of light that might have been a face, or might have been Kevin's imagination running an anxiety subroutine.

He didn't think it was his imagination.

> *Observation confirmed.* > > *User KEVIN PARK: Located.* > > *Awaiting further instructions.*

The System was watching.

And Kevin had the distinct feeling he'd just painted a target on his own back the size of a raid boss aggro radius.

Behind him, Mr. Henderson finally stopped shouting "stay calm" and started actually moving people toward the stairs.

Kevin grabbed Maya's wrist—not romantic, just efficient.

"Come on," he said. "Tutorial's over. We're skipping to the part where we don't die."

---

They made it three floors down the stairwell before the crowd bottlenecked.

Somebody had tripped. Somebody else had shoved. Classic human stack overflow. Kevin pulled Maya against the wall, letting the surge pass like he was standing in a mob spawn zone and didn't want aggro.

His screen pinged again.

> *Tutorial skipped. Bonus objective unavailable.* > > *Alternate progression path unlocked: [Self-Directed Learning]* > > *Warning: Increased difficulty. Reduced hand-holding. Have fun!*

"Oh good," Kevin muttered. "Hard mode. My favorite."

"What?" Maya asked.

"Nothing. Just confirming the System has the same sense of humor as every game designer who's never been punched."

They hit the lobby minutes later. The automatic doors were stuck half-open, grinding like they couldn't decide whether to obey physics or the new patch. Outside, Market Street looked like someone had dropped a mod pack on downtown San Francisco without reading compatibility notes.

The rat corpse was gone. The coins too. But the glowing Skill Shard still hovered above the pavement, pulsing faintly—loot only visible to System users, probably.

Kevin walked toward it before his brain could call him an idiot.

The shard dissolved into his palm with a warm pulse.

> *Skill acquired: [Basic Melee] (Level 1)* > > *Note: Skill obtained outside recommended tutorial path. Proficiency growth may vary.*

"Look at that," he said. "I speedran the tutorial and still got the reward. Sloppy design."

"You're enjoying this," Maya said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm enjoying not being dead." He flexed his fingers. They still shook. "Enjoyment is a strong word."

A scream cut him off—close, left side, alley between a vape shop and a closed Wells Fargo. Kevin's Pattern Recognition pinged before he consciously decided to care.

Red outline. Small. Wobbling.

Slime-shaped.

"We should keep moving," Maya said.

"We should," Kevin agreed.

He was already walking toward the scream.

Maya swore in Spanish and followed.

Because apparently patch day came with side quests whether you wanted them or not.

And Kevin had never been good at ignoring push notifications.

Before they reached the alley, Kevin's screen showed one more line—small, easy to miss:

> *Side quest detected: [First Responder]* > *Reward: Unknown* > *Failure penalty: None (this time)*

"No penalty," he muttered. "Suspicious."

"What?" Maya asked.

"Nothing." He picked up the pace. "Let's go save someone before the System changes its mind about failure states."

On the way down the stairwell, Kevin tried the damage modifier trick again on a cockroach-sized monster that scuttled across a landing—just to see if it had been patched.

The menu appeared. He typed 10.0.

> *Error: Modifier cap reduced for user KEVIN PARK. Maximum value: 2.5.*

"There it is," he said. "Hotfix deployed."

"English?"

"They nerfed me." He kicked the dissolved bug remains. "Admin's watching. Can't one-shot everything anymore."

"Maybe that's good?"

"Maybe." He didn't sound convinced. "But it means the System learns. Which means we need to learn faster."

They hit the lobby minutes later. Automatic doors stuck half-open, grinding. Outside, Market Street looked like someone had dropped a mod pack without reading compatibility notes.

The rat corpse was gone. The coins too. But a glowing Skill Shard still hovered above the pavement.

Kevin walked toward it.

The shard dissolved into his palm.

> *Skill acquired: [Basic Melee] (Level 1)*

"I speedran the tutorial and still got the reward," he said. "Sloppy design."

A scream cut him off—alley between a vape shop and a closed Wells Fargo.

Slime-shaped red outline on his HUD.

Maya swore in Spanish and followed him toward it.

Because patch day came with side quests whether you wanted them or not.

And Kevin had never been good at ignoring push notifications.

That couldn't be good.