Battle plan complete.

Grey might have been normal once. Before the Tutorial. Before the Game. No, there had been no life before the Game. Whatever that experience had been, it could not be called living.

He’d had friends. He’d had family. He’d had a decent enough job, one that paid for what he happened to want. It was not that the world had no place for him. No, he was not so dramatic anymore. He simply enjoyed this life more.

He sat on a tall outcropping of red rock, his feet dangling off its edges. Below him spanned dunes of shimmering, near-white sand, scattered like the ashes of a fallen god. Ruining the vista, however, were corpses. Corpses of giant scorpions with thick carapace that seemed more obsidian than anything. Corpses of titanic worms, their mouths filled with spiralling rows of razor teeth. Corpses of pale-skinned humanoids, whose glazed eyes pierced the sky and gazed upon the afterlife.

Grey drew his eyes from the bleeding horizon and looked down at the corpses. His enemies, if the dead could still be considered so. The stinger of one scorpion protruded from the head of another. One of the humanoids, a beast he called a ghoul, stared up at him, though the rest of its body lay on its stomach. A worm looked as though it were split down the middle, its insides spilled outside in a mess of orange fluid and pink, ribbon-like organs.

When had it come to this? Six months ago, maybe? No, that wasn’t right. It had been a year. The Tutorial had ripped him from Earth a full year ago, a normal man thrust into the heart of a world that wanted him dead.

Yeah, that sounded about right.

---

A Year Ago, Earth

Grey stared vacantly at the brick house over the leather wheel of his car. It looked nice enough, sporting a garage and a tidy lawn. A passerby might even think it a pleasant place to live. Grey knew the truth, however. The house was empty in all of the ways that mattered. No wife waited there. No pets. Not even a single houseplant.

After college, he had craved the solitude. The space. A home without roommates, annoying messes, and loud noises. What a fool he had been. What were minor annoyances compared to this?

He had tried to cure it. He had deleted social media, contacted his friends and family more often, and even went out of his way to try new things. The thing about loneliness, true loneliness that is, was that it had nothing to do with a lack of people. Grey had never felt the hollow, gnawing feeling ring more true than when he had stood in a crowd of his peers. No, true loneliness came from a lack of being understood, a lack of being loved for who you truly were. And though perhaps it sounded like the complaints of an overly neurotic teenager, Grey had yet to meet the person who cured the dreadful loneliness. Meeting girls, hanging out with friends, joining a martial arts gym, none of it had helped. And rightly so. Those things were not the problem. Grey was.

Now here he was, sitting in his car with no music or sound to comfort him besides that of his own shaky breaths. His hands shook, and he placed them on the wheel, his knuckles slowly growing white. He slammed his hand against the wheel. Again. A third time. On and on, until he was yelling at the top of his lungs. Tears filled his eyes. Pathetic. So pathetic.

Perhaps some people weren’t meant to be happy with normal. There was fulfillment to be found in a typical life, he knew that. Working, having a family, dying with people you love to mourn you. It was all humans were programmed to want. To need. Humans were nothing but a series of biological impulses designed to ensure the continuity of their species. That was all.

Then why was he so unhappy?

“Humanity, I am part of a race known as the Archons. We are what you might refer to as overseers and guardians. Guardians born to detect and prepare the planets of the universe for the arrival of Chi. Chi is a type of matter that will change your world greatly, speeding evolution and mutation in the many species of this world. Great dangers will appear, and your kind will develop gifts long thought to belong to fiction alone. To prepare Earth for this, your brightest will be taken to a series of worlds known as the Tutorial. It is a world of dense Chi, a place where your heroes can safely prepare for the danger ahead.”

Grey lifted his head, looking for the source of the voice. Tutorial, Chi, Archons. They were words from a game, a book. It was outlandish, impossible even, yet he wanted to believe. Anything but this, he thought.

A great shock ran through him, standing his hair on end, and the dark interior of his car became a white cubical room. Grey blinked at the circular fluorescent lights above, touching the smooth metal chair he found himself in. His mind seemed strangely cool and detached, as though he were drugged.

In theory, he should panic. Scream. Struggle. Look for a way out. He did none of those things, however. Instead Grey scanned the pane of glass that seemed to hang in the air in front of him, but before he could touch it, light flared through it, displaying a list of neatly typed words.

The flat voice came once more. “I speak now to those of you who have been picked for the Tutorial. You have each received a unique number of Points that comes from an analysis of your intelligence, physical fitness, personality, and experience. Chi is above all an evolutionary catalyst. It will provide humans with abilities and powers that seem almost unimaginable, the first of which we will use Chi to give you now. Choose a preferred Evolution from the list in front of you. You may filter the list as you see fit, but you may not purchase an Evolution that requires more points than you have available. Choose wisely.”

Grey had already started searching. Minor Telekinesis, Minor Chi Shaping, Minor Restoration… He was building a character, he realized. Like a game. He wracked his mind, discarding the absurdity of the situation. What was the most important part of any character, game or otherwise? Growth.

“Filter out all options but those with the most growth potential. Oh, and those that I can afford.” The list shrunk considerably. “Filter out all options not combat related.” It shrunk once more, though less so. An idea occurred to him. “Filter out all but the ones most suited to me.” Nothing. He sighed. “Show only the options that aid in the learning and development of other Evolutions.” Grey looked at his final list. A few stood out.

Name: Grey

Points: 7

Higher Processing (⅓ Remaining)

5

Single Player (1/1 Remaining)

7

Sage’s Eyes (1/1 Remaining)

7

He tapped on Single Player. Higher Processing seemed only to be a mental aid, and Sage’s Eyes lacked the power he sought.

Single Player

Your mind develops a presence almost like that of an Artificial Intelligence. It allows one to change and classify Evolutions into that of game-like skills, changing the world into something that resembles a game.

Warning: This Evolution has potential side effects on the mind.

He selected it immediately, feeling a strange call from the ability. Perhaps he could find better, but the other members of the Tutorial were snapping up Evolutions left and right. Besides, he loved games, the more challenging the better. Hell, he had become a programmer in the hopes to one day design games. That hadn’t worked out, but now? Chi had given Grey the chance to play his own game.

A feeling like dozens of needles pressed into his skin started from his spine and crept up his body until he stiffened in his seat, his flesh pressed against cool metal. He tried to move. Nothing. He opened his mouth. Nothing.

He felt as though he were at the center of a frozen lake after winter’s first freeze. The soft crack of the ice below sent a tingle that started in the balls of his feet and spread throughout his whole body, and before he knew it, the crack was spiderwebbing madly, creating an elaborate blossom of snapping ice with him at its center. Then the ice shattered. The cold water ripped the breath from his chest, thrusting him into the blissful void that lay between awake and sleep.

His eyes cracked open what felt like a few moments later, and he immediately shut them again with a wince. Bright. He explored his surroundings with his other senses. It was hot. He laid on sand. He heard… nothing.

He sat up. A great blanket of white sands surrounded him. He saw no water, no life, nothing. It seemed to be a sea of sand dunes and little else. No, that was not true. At his feet rested pieces of gear, the basic type given at the beginning of any game, and there, in the distance, he spotted an outcropping of reddish brown rock that pointed boldly at the sky like the finger of a god. A Tutorial indeed.

He buckled on the leather armor and picked up the spear, standing to his feet with a heavy sigh. His soft hands hardly seemed made for war, but he suspected that was true of all men and women. When he left this world- if he left this world- he imagined it would be a new pair of hands he looked down upon, ones tanned by the great star above and calloused by battle.

A part of him whispered this was a dream. Perhaps it was madness. Perhaps his mind had cracked. Or maybe he had been given the chance he had just cried for. Grey had wished for a life he could love, and here he stood, experiencing a world he had only imagined as an escape.

The Tutorial soon taught him the danger in wishing.

——

“The Tutorial will soon end. To those of you who have survived, welcome to the Genesis. Your people will need your aid. As Archons, our aid will be limited past this point. Good luck. You have ten minutes to do as you wish.”

The Archons. Grey was unable to tell if they were friend or foe, but he supposed they had helped him earn the Game. That was enough in his book.

If Chi had flipped the world on its head, the Game turned Grey’s perspective to match. It helped him plot and measure his growth, and as the Player, he could choose his Evolutions as he wished. More than anything, however, the Game had given him a purpose.

Quest- Ongoing

Become the Ultimate Player.

He craved it like nothing he’d ever known in his life. School had never stimulated him. Books and games were only distractions. Even programming was not what it had been made out to be. Problem solving? The only problem Grey had solved was figuring out what to search to find code that would do as he wanted.

No, there was nothing as stimulating as the Game. He pulled up his status screen with a flick of a finger. No expression crossed his face, but he felt a warmness in his stomach.

Grey Shor

Evolution Points: 9

Rank: E

Evolutions (3/7)

Single Player: E (10/200)- Diamond

Chi Breathing: E (20/165)- Gold

Minor Telekinesis: F (19/21)- Bronze

His time in the desert had taught him many things, some of which were about Evolutions. Namely, all Evolutions started at Rank F, but not all Rank F’s were created equal. Some had greater potential than others, so Single Player divided them into groups. Starting from Bronze, Evolutions ascended to Silver, Gold, and then Diamond, though there was a hard cap for how many of each rarity he could have that depended on his total Rank. He was, for example, capped at one Gold and one Diamond at Rank E.

Beyond that, Grey had divided his Evolutions into two groups: Primaries and Secondaries. A Primary determined a person’s build. It was the ability that formed the base of the person’s skills. A Secondary was an Evolution that supported the Primary. This made things much simpler for him. If an Evolution didn’t support his Primary, it was useless.

As for Rank, all Evolutions grew in strength the more they were exposed to condensed Chi. His Evolution called them Evolution Points, and the easiest way he had found to gather them so far came from killing living beings. To break through the wall between Ranks, however, Evolutions could either be forced through with condensed Chi or combined with another Evolution of the same Rank to form something new.

Despite these restrictions, his progress seemed almost disappointing now that this was over. A year of hell, of bloodshed, of torturous living, and this was all he had to show? The Ultimate Player… It was far away yet. Single Player was the brightest beacon of his progress. Taking the Evolution up a Rank had provided him with something called a dimensional storage. He had only to think about it, and whatever item he had stored there appeared.

With his thoughts gathered, Grey stood from his place on the rock outcropping, looking at the bloodshed below him. Was this what Earth would be like? He waited for a reaction at the thought. None came.

Grey shrugged to himself. There would be stronger prey, if nothing else. His plans, too, promised to make things… interesting.

The Tutorial had been a hell, and from it emerged a devil unlike any the world had seen before. From it emerged the Player, a man who wanted to make the world his own Game.