Vexat woke on something harder than stone and smoother than any floor made by mortal tools.

  For a moment he thought the white room had simply found a way to grow edges, because the light was everywhere again, flat and merciless and absolute. Then his vision settled and the brightness broke into forms. A forest rose around him in frozen splendor, every trunk a column of translucent crystal thick as a tower’s base, every branch a faceted sweep of glass-hard growth, every leaf a thin prism that caught the light and cut it into shifting bands across the ground. Above the canopy hung three suns.

  They were not arranged as any sane sky would arrange them. One burned high and gold-white. Another sat lower, tinged faintly blue. The third carried a harder brilliance with a pale red halo that set the edges of the crystal leaves glowing like heated metal. Their combined light poured through the forest from three directions at once, leaving no true shadows anywhere, only layers of reduced brightness and reflected glare.

  The air chimed.

  Not birdsong. Not insects. Wind moved through the crystal canopy in long measured currents, and every current drew out a different note from the branches overhead. Some tones were high and delicate, like a hundred small glasses touched by wet fingers. Others came deep and resonant from farther off, a sustained humming that made his sternum vibrate. The entire forest sang without life in the way forests were meant to sing, and the beauty of it was so precise it felt indecent.

  Vexat pushed himself upright and discovered that he was standing on a broad shelf of clear crystal veined with silver inclusions. The surface beneath his boots reflected him imperfectly, the way still water did when it wanted to be stone. Around him, the ground rolled away in ridges and roots of solid glass, some milky white, some smoke-dark, some bright enough to act as mirrors when the suns struck at the right angle. There was no soil. No moss. No soft decay. No sign that anything in this place had ever rotted.

  His last memory of the white room came back in fragments rather than sequence. A Sphere. Panels of light. A list of paths. Warrior, Scout, Warden, Healer, Builder, Mage, more besides. The sense that the System had not been asking what he admired, or what his family would approve, but what he could most honestly become first. He remembered rejecting anything that depended on strength he did not possess, or bravado he would have had to counterfeit. He remembered choosing the one path that looked weak enough to be honest and useful enough to survive.

  Then the window returned, crisp and immediate.

  [Class Selected]

  Class: Common Mage

  Rarity: Common

  Stat Gain per Level: +2

  Skills:

  Spark Bolt (Level 1)

  Mana Thread (Level 1)

  Vexat stared at the words until they vanished. Common. The System, apparently, had opinions. He almost resented the clean accuracy of it. He was not a battle-trained noble heir, not a frontier rider, not a siege engineer or oath-sworn shieldman. He was an archivist with disciplined hands and a mind inclined toward patterns. If the universe had dragged him into an impossible tutorial and concluded that “basic mage” was the best he had to offer, then at least it was being insulting with method.

  Voices reached him from beyond a screen of crystal brush, sharp with strain and newly translated into sense as they crossed the distance. Vexat moved toward them with caution, stepping between root-ridges that shone like polished blades. Even walking demanded attention; the forest floor was all slick facets, narrow ledges, and clear projections that looked decorative until one’s foot slid half a finger-width on their surface. His sensory cilia prickled continuously. The place had wind and resonance, but no scent worth naming, only a dry mineral sharpness that vanished before the mind could file it properly.

  He found the others in a shallow clearing ringed by pillar-like trunks. Nearly two dozen candidates had gathered there by accident or design, all in the first stages of panic being forced through reason. They were a mixed collection of species and silhouettes, enough to drive home what the white room had implied: this had not happened to Zatris alone. A squat broad-chested figure with plated cheeks argued with a narrow-limbed woman whose skin gleamed like wet bark. Two beings Vexat would have taken for human if not for the eyes stood close together in defensive confusion. Three Tzaryn were present besides him, each holding themselves with the brittle composure of people who knew exactly how much dignity they were losing and could do nothing about it.

  One male candidate stood a little forward of the rest and was already making himself useful.

  He was tall even by Tzaryn standards, broad across the shoulders without moving like a brute, with matte dark-bronze skin and silver-gray eyes that tracked the clearing in quick measured sweeps. His clothing had been altered by the tutorial into a fitted set of dark leather and reinforced cloth that still somehow suggested military order rather than costume. He did not radiate calm so much as impose it by behaving as if panic had not yet been authorized.

  “Keep your voices at a level where words remain distinguishable,” he said, and the translation laid a neutral clarity over an unmistakably commanding cadence. “If anyone has information, speak one at a time. If anyone attacks first, everyone else learns something unpleasant about them immediately.”

  It was a practical line. Better, it acknowledged the obvious without pretending this was a council session in a civilized hall. Several candidates glared at being directed. None ignored him.

  Vexat filed the male away as competent and therefore immediately relevant.

  A woman with pale green skin and a crest of flexible quills along her scalp lifted a trembling hand. “My screen said tutorial. Candidate. Class selection. Then I was here.”

  A heavyset figure in scale armor added, “Mine too. I took Spear Fighter. It gave me a skill to thrust harder.” He paused, frowned at his own summary, then muttered, “The universe is mocking me.”

  That earned a few thin laughs, not because it was especially funny, but because people would reach for any stable surface when the ground changed under them. More candidates spoke in turn. A human-looking man had taken Healer. One of the other Tzaryn had chosen Archer. A four-armed candidate from some world of wider joints and denser bone had become a Shield Bearer. Several, like Vexat, had gone for paths that sounded simple and survivable rather than glorious.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The commanding Tzaryn noticed him then, not with surprise but with the quick acknowledgement of someone updating an internal roster.

  “You arrived from the west edge?” he asked.

  Vexat glanced back the way he had come. In a place with three suns and mirrored ground, west felt like optimism dressed as measurement. “From that direction,” he said. “I don’t recommend assuming the reflections mean anything.”

  The male’s eyes flicked briefly to the crystal floor, then back. “Noted. Teral.”

  He offered no house, rank, or title. Sensible. Those things might already be dead.

  “Vexat.”

  Teral’s gaze sharpened for half a beat on the name, perhaps placing the accent as Tzaryn, perhaps judging whether Vexat looked likely to be useful or difficult. “Do you have anything besides confirmation that this place is absurd?”

  “The terrain is hostile to inattentive movement,” Vexat said. “No soil. No ordinary plant life. Sound carries badly because everything reflects it. And there are no shadows strong enough to conceal much at ground level.”

  Teral considered, then nodded once. “Good. That is more than most people have contributed.”

  A rustle went through the clearing. Not from leaves—those sang in the wind but did not rustle—but from bodies shifting, heads turning, nerves looking for a new threat. Vexat followed their gaze upward.

  Small creatures clung to one of the nearer trunks, half-hidden among blade-like crystal fronds. At first he mistook them for decorative growths. Then one moved with an insect’s abrupt economy, and the illusion broke. The things were the size of housecats, six-legged, made of translucent plates around a darker core that pulsed faintly with inner light. Their heads were all angles. Their feet ended in fine hooked points that clicked against the trunk. As one climbed over another, the contact made a sound like cut gems struck together.

  The human healer inhaled sharply. “Are those alive?”

  One of them detached from the trunk and dropped. It did not fall so much as redirect itself, landing on the crystal shelf with a hard musical crack. Then it scuttled forward with alarming speed.

  Several candidates reacted at once and badly. The Spear Fighter lunged too early. The bark-skinned woman cried out and stumbled backward. Someone to Vexat’s left produced a shield of faint blue light that flickered as soon as it formed. Teral stepped into the thing’s path with a short blade in one hand, but Vexat was closer by angle if not by courage.

  He did not think. He opened the new internal handle the System had left within reach and found mana waiting like cold water behind a gate.

  The sensation was alien but clean. A reservoir. A shape that wanted direction. He raised one hand instinctively, fingers spread, and pushed along the path the skill suggested rather than explained. White-blue light snapped between his fingertips and leapt outward.

  The Spark Bolt crossed the clearing as a jagged line of contained brightness and struck the creature square in its faceted head. The crack of impact was sharp enough to sting the ear. Light burst through the translucent shell. The thing spasmed once and shattered into glittering fragments and a dimming inner core that rolled across the ground like a bead of smoky amber.

  Silence held for exactly one heartbeat.

  Then three more dropped from the trunk.

  This time the group met them with something closer to coordination. Teral intercepted the first with a precise diagonal cut that split plates and sent shards spinning. The Spear Fighter skewered another after correcting his distance by a valuable fraction. Vexat caught the third in a second Spark Bolt, weaker than the first and sloppier in line, but enough. When it broke apart, the System chimed softly inside his mind.

  [Enemy Defeated]

  Crystal Vermin

  Experience Awarded

  The message vanished so quickly it barely felt real. He wanted it back immediately, not out of greed but because he needed categories. Numbers. Rules. If a thing could be quantified, it could be studied. If it could be studied, perhaps it could be survived.

  A larger series of panes unfolded before the entire group at nearly the same moment, judging by the way half the clearing went still and started reading empty air.

  [Passive Skill Granted]

  Beyond Basic Needs

  Effects:

  Removes hunger

  Removes thirst

  Removes sleep requirement

  Warning:

  Psychological strain is not removed

  Pain is not removed

  Stress accumulation is not removed

  That was when the true wrongness of the place reached him.

  Until then he had been busy enough that bodily signals had no room to rise. Now he checked automatically, the way any trained mind performed an inventory after shock. Mouth dry? No. Stomach tight with hunger? No. Throat burning for water? No. Fatigue in the muscles from tension and recent panic? Present, but isolated, divorced from the ordinary heaviness that should have accompanied it. His body had not become healthy. It had become interrupted.

  Vexat swallowed and found nothing to swallow. The motion worked. The need behind it did not exist.

  Around him, people were reacting with uneven delay. One candidate laughed in outright relief. Another began crying harder. The human healer touched his own throat, then his chest, then said, “I was thirsty,” in a tone that suggested he no longer trusted memory. The bark-skinned woman whispered, “No sleep?” as if she had been told the sky was permanent now and had not yet decided whether that was mercy or threat.

  Vexat kept his face controlled and filed the sensation where he stored facts too dangerous to interpret prematurely. No hunger. No thirst. No sleep. The System had removed the ordinary brackets around time. It had taken away the small negotiations by which a body insisted on being treated as real. He understood at once why some minds would call that a gift. He understood at once why they would be wrong.

  Teral spoke before the clearing could drift into speculation and fear. “Then we use the advantage without pretending it makes this kind.” His voice cut across the chiming air with steady force. “No one collapses from exhaustion. No one starves while we learn the ground. That improves our odds. It does not make us safe.”

  The fact that he said it so quickly improved Vexat’s opinion of him. A lesser organizer would have sold hope too hard and then paid for it later.

  A new panel appeared.

  [Tutorial Quest Issued]

  Tutorial: Cull 10 Crystal Vermin

  Objective: Kill 10 Crystal Vermin

  Rewards:

  Experience

  Basic Tutorial Loot

  Progress toward Tutorial Evaluation

  Time Limit: None

  There it was. Clean. Legible. Simple enough to be a first task in a training hall. Around the clearing, shoulders lowered by degrees. A few candidates even smiled, embarrassed by their own relief and too grateful to suppress it. A hunting quest. Low-level monsters. Clear reward structure. No walls closing in. No darkness. No starvation clock. The tutorial, for all its absurdity, might be survivable if it continued in this vein.

  Vexat looked up through the faceted canopy at the three suns burning without motion he could yet perceive. The forest answered itself in layered chimes. Far away, something cracked like a huge bell struck under stone.

  Manageable, he thought, watching the reflected light slide over crystal bark and mirrored ground. That was the word people used when they had seen the first page of a problem and mistaken it for the whole record.

  Still, when Teral began assigning candidates into provisional groups for the vermin hunt, no one argued very hard. And when Vexat stepped forward to join one of them, with a new spell in his hands and no hunger in his gut and no sleep waiting at the edge of the next hour, even he could admit that the task before them looked almost merciful.

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