Kade Ashveil blinked.
In one instant, he was hunched over his cluttered desk, fluorescent lights buzzing, the cheap vinyl of the university research building seeping cold into his forearms. In the next, the world tore itself open around him. Too bright. The air tasted wrong—metallic, sharp, like ozone before a storm.
Then the ceiling, clutter, and synthetic normalcy evaporated.
He was standing—shivering and confused—at the edge of a forest that was too real to be a simulation, too wrong to be real.
Above him, the sky churned in silent, alien shades. Deep reds bled into sullen purples, shot through with fleeting white cracks—like reality itself was held together by spite. The trees were aggressive things: bark slick with something viscous, branches twisted in anxious knots. The air, if it could be called that, was thin, each breath catching at the base of his throat.
For three seconds, Kade grappled with disbelief.
He pressed his palms together, waiting for the pain of waking—a muscle memory from a thousand insomniac nights. No pain arrived. No reprieve, either. Just an impossible quiet, broken by the slow, deliberate clicking of settling undergrowth.
Others peppered the clearing. People. A haphazard scatter of humanity, all ages and cultures, some appearing in pajamas, some mid-uniform. Most trembled, eyes frantic, a handful hyperventilating. A few retched openly, curve of spine and shallow breath marking them as medical emergencies—or just lost lambs, waiting for a shepherd.
A digital chime rang in the air, so clear and close it might have been inside his skull:
[SYSTEM INTERFACE INITIALIZING... LOADING CORE PROTOCOLS.]
[TUTORIAL TRIAL 1: "THE AWAKENING" COMMENCING.]
Panic churned through the crowd. Someone screamed. A pair of teenage boys shoved each other toward the trees. A woman in a business suit fell to her knees, clutching a child who might not have even belonged to her.
Kade did not move.
The screen blinked, invasive and glaring right within his vision—not his field of view, not AR, but a sense somehow overlaying both mind and sight:
[TUTORIAL TRIAL 1 — THE AWAKENING]
Survive until dawn.
You have no skills.
You have no class.
Death is not permanent.
Failure means ejection.
System rewards await survivors.
A timer appeared, counting down from twelve hours.
None of this is real. Hallucination? Dream?
Yet the biting cold chewing through his jeans reminded him—reality did not care for comfort.
A branch snapped. Kade flinched. He forced his thoughts into order, cataloguing surroundings, cataloguing threats. Training from years in the foster system—the kind with weekly "adapting to risk" drills rather than fairy tales. Look for shelter. Scan for danger. Your odds are never zero.
The crowd remained, a flock caught between hysteria and freeze. Someone wailed, echoing off roots and uncertain dawn. A burly man tried to rally a group, his shouts muted by terror's strangling grip.
Kade calculated: Too exposed. Too unpredictable.
He edged towards the treeline.
Let others draw attention, he reasoned. Observe, assess, survive. This was not courage, just calculus; he had never cared for heroics or glory, only the cold simplicity of persistent existence.
Something writhed through the undergrowth to his left—a flash of pale limbs, a slither too long and too fast to be human. Whatever passed for wildlife here was not meant for children's stories.
As Kade reached the first tree, a man bulled past him, face wild. "Get out of the way!" The man disappeared into the gloom, snapping twigs in panicked succession. Two people followed, desperate to escape a fear with no name.
Kade exhaled, slow. He knelt, running stiff fingers along the base of a nearby trunk. It was sticky, yes, but not corrosive. His mind gamed out scenarios. Wood for a club or spear. Bark as cover. No sign of edible flora, but perhaps something to start a fire—
A rising shriek. Kade spun. The man who'd run in first shot back into view, trailing red, a gash torn along his thigh. Eyes wide, mouth shaping pleas that no sound could satisfy.
Behind him, the forest pulsed. Roots curled upward, twitching, as something amorphous lurched after him—limbs flowing into new shapes, obsidian eyes flashing with hunger.
"KILL IT!" the man screamed at everyone and no one.
Most people froze, shock warring with self-preservation. Kade hunkered low, watching the thing—its attention swiftly diverted by fresher, closer targets.
It carved through the clearing in a burst of brutality. Two lives winked out, blood slicking the ground. The cries became a messy, senseless chorus: some ran, some fell, a handful barricaded themselves with stones and shaking arms.
Kade fought the urge to run after them. Survive until dawn, the rule had said. That was achievable—if you were invisible.
He skirted the treeline, desperate not to catch the monster's eye, and ducked beneath a low-hanging branch. The rough bark scraped his cheek, grounding him in the urgency of now.
Every second here is a test. A filter. They want to see who adapts—and who dies.
He listened. The screeches receded deeper into the woods. He waited an extra minute—hard-won patience keeping him safe while impulse claimed others.
System notifications pulsed in the corner of his mind.
[You have avoided direct threat. Passive bounty: +5 XP]
Rewarding cowardice? Or prudence? He couldn't decide, but he'd take it.
Time blurred. He crept alongside the shifting edge of camp, avoiding group clusters and the occasional bickering over "teams" and "leadership." A pretty way to get killed first, he reckoned.
Evening shadows began to swallow color. The temperature dropped further, breath fogging in irregular puffs. Hunger pricked his gut, but thirst pressed worse—a dry, sticky tongue against the roof of his mouth.
He spied a dip in the terrain, a shallow pit rimmed with vine and fallen needles. Shelter, if an imperfect one. He ducked inside, stacking sticks at the opening, mind already spinning through past biology lectures about exposure, hypothermia, and how little civilization really mattered.
There was movement again—deliberate, measured. Not running. He pressed himself lower.
A figure edged around the pit. Medium height, athletic, grim determination etched deeply into her jawline. Short black hair, caked with dried blood at the temple. Her clothes—stained hospital scrubs—were torn at the knee, spatters of something unidentifiable smeared along her sleeves.
She spotted him in the gloom. For an instant, both froze—fight or flight between exiles. Then her gaze flicked downward, noting his lack of weapons, the way his hands shook, fingers pressed white against bark.
"Anyone else back there?" she asked, voice tight but steady.
Kade hesitated. The wrong answer could mean anything. "No," he said at last, keeping his tone non-confrontational.
She looked him over, as though weighing threat versus utility. A faint smile twitched at her lips—bitter, weary, but real.
"Good. Makes it less likely we'll get picked off together. Unless you're dangerous."
"I... highly doubt it."
She actually laughed, if only for a heartbeat. It was not entirely unkind.
"Selene," she offered, extending a hand but not her trust.
"Kade." He took her grip, brief, firm, nothing extra.
She crouched beside him in the pit, attention darting up to the forest gloom. "People are panicking. That thing—it's hunting noise, movement. We need to stay quiet. Wait them out."
"Agreed." He was relieved, though he wouldn't show it. She exuded the kind of confidence forged under gunfire and triage rather than debate club dramatics.
Selene cast another glance at his hands. "Any injuries?"
He flexed his fingers. "Just scrapes. You?"
She rolled her shoulder, revealing a neat tear in her sleeve. "Grazed by… something. Didn't bleed much. Didn't see fangs, just pressure." She shrugged. "No swelling. I'll live."
Kade offered half a smile back. "If you start growing extra limbs, I'll help tie them off."
She snorted, then ducked even lower as the monster's shriek sounded again, distant but searching.
For a time, they sat in stillness.
Kade's mind whirred. This was no accident. Someone—something—was watching, measuring. The system notifications, the threats, the pointed cruelty of nature itself. If you wanted to optimize survival, you had to treat people like statistics. He hated that fact—but he understood it.
Selene, by contrast, peered back out toward the clearing, a determined fire behind her eyes. "If we can get to dawn, they said we'd make it."
"They didn't say what happens after," he murmured.
She met his gaze, unflinching. "Then we live through the next trial. And the next. Until we find a way out. Or everyone else is gone."
It was so simple—almost laughable in its clarity. But to Kade, the logic was sound.
The remainder of their night became a rhythm of quiet listening, terse whispers, and sharing the absolute minimum of humanity. Selene shared a ragged protein bar, Kade traded knowledge: don't attract attention, trust only what your own senses confirm, don't sleep.
He almost believed he could survive. Not because he was strong, or chosen, or even special—but because beside him sat someone who understood that survival sometimes meant sitting still and waiting out the end of the world.
Above them, the system timer ticked closer to dawn, each second measuring not just hours, but the kind of people who might see the sun rise again.
When the timer finally flickered toward its final stretch and the monstrous screams quieted, Kade exhaled the air he'd been holding since arrival. Selene squeezed his forearm—a wordless acknowledgement, not of victory, but of persistence.
Neither spoke of faith, hope, or destiny.
But as that first splinter of dawn broke over the nightmare forest and the system's voice echoed once more, Kade realized—without even knowing it—that his survival was the anomaly the universe had never prepared for.
[Trial 1: Cleared.]
Rewards Pending. Participants: 31% remaining.
Next Trial Initiating in: 4 hours.
He looked to Selene—and for the first time since arriving, felt something like resolve ignite in his chest.
We just have to keep going.