The maintenance tunnel was significantly worse than Tess had expected.
She’d crawled through plenty of tight spaces before—freighter maintenance meant contorting yourself into places no reasonable person should fit—but those had been her spaces, familiar and known.
This was different, and the tunnel was barely wide enough for her shoulders, forcing her to shimmy forward on her elbows with her scanner held out in front like a pathetic excuse for a light source. The walls were bare ferrocrete, cold even through her overalls. Bundles of conduit ran along the ceiling, some humming with residual power, others dark and silent.
The air smelled of ozone and something older: dust that hadn’t been disturbed in decades, metal slowly oxidizing in the dark.
Her scanner beam caught a junction ahead where the tunnel branched in three directions. The light swept across each path as the display analyzed and categorized data.
LEFT TUNNEL: OUT-OF-RANGE
RIGHT TUNNEL: OUT-OF-RANGE
CENTER TUNNEL: ENERGY DISCHARGE DETECTED (CRITICAL FAILURE)
“Center it is,” Tess muttered, dragging herself forward.
The tunnel sloped downward slightly, making her arms ache as she half-crawled, half-slid deeper into the dungeon’s guts. Somewhere behind her, metal groaned—the sound old infrastructure made when it was settling, or failing, or just generally being uncooperative.
She tried not to think about the distance she’d crawled from the surface, the fact that nobody knew she was down here, or how long it would take anyone to find her if something went really wrong.
Focus, she told herself. One problem at a time.
Another sound echoed through the tunnel, electronic this time. A rapid chittering, like a speaker feedback loop or a hard drive dying. It came from somewhere to her left, muffled by walls and distance.
Tess paused, listening. The sound faded after a few seconds, leaving only the ambient hum of dormant systems.
“Just old tech,” she said aloud, because the silence was getting to her. “Malfunctioning circuits. Nothing to worry about.”
The tunnel opened into a small chamber—barely large enough to sit up in—where a massive power relay panel dominated one wall. It was easily two meters across, covered in access hatches and diagnostic ports, with thick cables snaking away into the darkness above and below.
Tess maneuvered herself into a sitting position and aimed her scanner at the panel.
The display lit up with cascading diagnostics, highlighting damage in cheerful red indicators.
MAIN POWER RELAY: CRITICAL FAILURE
BACKUP SYSTEMS: OFFLINE
AETHER FLOW: RESTRICTED (4% CAPACITY)
CONNECTED SYSTEMS: TUTORIAL LOBBY, CLASS ASSIGNMENT MATRIX, ELEVATOR ARRAY
She studied the readout, tracing the power flow pathways. The main relay was fried, obvious from the scorch marks around the primary access hatch. But the backup systems should have kicked in automatically. That they hadn’t meant something deeper was broken.
“Okay,” Tess said, pulling out her tools. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”
She pried open the main access hatch, revealing a nightmare of burned circuitry and melted components. Someone—probably Network Personnel—had attempted a repair using parts that didn’t quite match the original specifications. The mismatch was obvious in the connector types, the way certain relays had been jerry-rigged with incompatible voltage regulators.
Amateur work, she thought, then immediately felt guilty. Whoever had done this repair had probably been desperate, working with whatever they could scavenge. Just like she did every day.
Still, it made her job harder.
She started with the obvious problems, replacing the most damaged relays, rerouting power through backup channels that were still intact. Her scanner guided her through the process, highlighting which components needed attention and which could be salvaged.
But then she hit something she didn’t understand.
Tucked behind the main power distribution module was a component that looked… wrong. Not damaged or old, just fundamentally different from anything she’d seen before.
It was a crystal structure about the size of her fist, sitting in a housing that seemed designed specifically for it. Threads of something that wasn’t quite wire—more like frozen light—connected it to the surrounding circuits. Her scanner labeled it simply: AETHER REGULATION MATRIX (PRE-NETWORK STANDARD).
Tess reached out, not quite touching it. The crystal pulsed faintly, a rhythm like a heartbeat.
“What are you?” she whispered.
The scanner offered no additional information. No repair protocols. No replacement procedures. Just that label and a note: FUNCTION: UNKNOWN. COMPONENTS: UNKNOWN. STATUS: OPTIMAL.
She moved on. Some things you couldn’t fix if you didn’t understand them, and she had bigger problems to solve.
Working methodically, she replaced damaged components, bypassed burned circuits, and gradually brought the backup systems online. The chamber grew warmer as power began flowing again. Status lights on the relay panel flickered from red to amber—progress at last.
She was reaching for another relay when something clanged in the distance, loud and metallic, like someone had dropped a steel beam. The sound echoed through the tunnels, bouncing off walls and distorting until she couldn’t tell which direction it had come from.
Tess froze, listening.
Only the renewed hum of the relay systems and her own breathing.
Old dungeon, she reminded herself. Things shift. Metal expands and contracts. It’s fine.
But the tunnel was colder now, more cramped. The walls pressed in from all sides, and she couldn’t stop thinking about how far she’d crawled from the elevator.
She pressed her palms flat against the cold ferrocrete, forcing herself to focus on the sensation.
Stop it, she thought firmly. This isn’t the first time you’ve fixed something in a small space. Hell, you spent six hours in the freighter’s coolant system last month, and that was barely wide enough to breathe in.
She took a slow breath. Then another. The panic eased.
“Get it together, Rivera,” she muttered, returning to her work.
Twenty minutes later, she’d restored most of the relay’s primary functions. Status lights across the panel glowed steady amber, not optimal but functional. She routed power to the elevator circuit and watched the diagnostic readout confirm the connection.
ELEVATOR SYSTEMS: STANDBY MODE.
AWAITING ACTIVATION SIGNAL FROM CLASS ASSIGNMENT MATRIX.
Tess frowned. “Class matrix? Why would the elevator need…”
She pulled up the power-flow diagram on her scanner. There it was: the elevator circuit ran through the Class Assignment Matrix as some kind of… authentication system? Security feature?
That didn’t make sense. Why tie basic mobility to the class assignment system?
Unless they didn’t want anyone leaving without getting a class first.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Bureaucratic bullshit,” Tess grumbled.
She traced the connection to the matrix itself. According to her scanner, it was in a junction panel about three meters further down the tunnel. The readout showed it as offline, not damaged, just… unpowered.
Simple enough. Crawl over, flip it on, power flows to the elevator, she could get out of here.
Tess squeezed back into the tunnel, following the path her scanner showed. The junction panel was exactly where the readout said it would be: a smaller access hatch set into the wall.
She pried it open and found the Class Assignment Matrix.
It was a compact module about the size of her scanner, with crystalline components similar to the Aether regulator she’d found earlier. Status lights along its edge were dark, but the structure itself looked pristine: no damage, no wear, simply offline.
Her scanner had gotten significantly more helpful since the repair subroutine had fixed it. Now it was showing her information she hadn’t programmed into it: detailed breakdowns of components, power requirements, even activation protocols.
CLASS ASSIGNMENT MATRIX STATUS: OFFLINE
FUNCTION: DUNGEON CLASS ALLOCATION AND SKILL TREE GENERATION
POWER REQUIREMENT: 4.7Aw CONTINUOUS, 12.0Aw PEAK (DURING CLASS ASSIGNMENT)
CONNECTED SYSTEMS: TUTORIAL INTERFACE, ELEVATOR AUTHORIZATION, SKILL DATABASE
Since when had her scanner been able to read detailed dungeon system functions? That repair subroutine must have done more than just fix the damaged circuits. What had it done to the firmware?
She filed that question away for later. Right now, she needed to get this thing online.
The activation was straightforward: a simple power relay that she could manually engage. She double-checked the connections, made sure nothing was going to explode when power flowed through, and reached for the activation switch.
That’s when gold light bloomed at the edge of her vision, that same soft, pulsing glow from the elevator. The repair subroutine was coming back.
“Oh, you’re here now?” Tess said, not looking away from the switch. “Could’ve used you twenty minutes ago when I was…”
She flipped the switch just as the repair subroutine arced energy out to fix Tess’s admittedly shoddy work on the elevator circuits.
Power surged through the Class Assignment Matrix, lighting up its crystal components like stars being born.
And the repair subroutine’s energy arced visibly through the cables connecting everything, through the class assignment matrix, and directly into her hand that was still on the power switch.
There was no pain. Just force. Pure, overwhelming energy lifted her off the ground and slammed her backward into the tunnel wall. Her head cracked against ferrocrete. Stars exploded across her vision. The last thing she heard was a pop coming from her wrist.
CLASS ASSIGNMENT SCHEMA v5.5
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR CLASS SELECTION OF [ERROR: METADATA NOT FOUND]!
BUILDING CLASS TREE MANIFEST…
Tess woke to readouts swimming across her vision.
Numbers, diagrams, and status indicators floated in the air like her scanner’s display had merged with her eyeballs. Only everything was moving too fast to read. She squinted through it all at her scanner’s last reading suspended mid-air in her vision.
POWER FLOW: NOMINAL
STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 94%
AETHER SATURATION: RISING
“Oh good,” she mumbled, trying to blink the readouts away. “I’ve hit my head and now all I can see are readouts. Blunt trauma to the head is never good.”
The readouts didn’t disappear. They just… reorganized themselves, moving to the edges of her vision like they were trying to be less intrusive.
She tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. Her head throbbed, but underneath that was something else, a strange tingling that ran through her entire body, like she’d touched a live wire but couldn’t let go.
The tunnel was dark, her scanner’s light gone. The screen on her wrist was black and dead, without even a flicker.
“Fantastic,” she said to the darkness. “Lost my light. Probably have a concussion. Might be hallucinating scanner readouts. This is going great.”
She fumbled in her belt for her backup light, a small handheld running on a battery she’d recharged last week. Her fingers found it, clicked it on. The light stayed dark. She tried again with the same result.
“You’ve got to be…”
A new readout appeared in her vision, front and center this time.
CLASS MANIFEST COMPLETE
CLASS ASSIGNED: {NULL}
CONGRATULATIONS
Tess stared at it.
“Null?” she said aloud. “What the hell is null?”
The readout expanded as if it were responding to her question.
LEVEL: 1
TECH: 1
PWR: 10
SPD: 10
PER: 10
NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: [ANALYZE]
She read it again. Then, a third time.
“I got a class called… null.” She stared at the readout. “That’s the least helpful thing you could have told me.”
Stats, though. She had stats now. Power, speed, perception, all at 10, which meant… what? Was that good? Average? She had no frame of reference.
And a skill called Analyze.
Well, she thought, might as well see what it does.
She focused on the word [ANALYZE], the same way she’d focus on a button in her scanner’s interface.
The skill activated.
Information flooded her vision.
The Class Assignment Matrix—still visible in the faint glow of its own status lights—became transparent. Layers of structure unfolded in her sight, showing her how it worked. The crystalline components formed complex, nested arrangements that guided Aether flow like instructions, telling the energy exactly how to behave.
·········································
CLASS ASSIGNMENT MATRIX
Function: Skill Tree Generation
Power: Active
User Tech Skill: 1
·········································
Knight ………. Ready to Assign [Tech 10]
Ranger ………. Ready to Assign [Tech 10]
Operator …….. Ready to Assign [Tech 10]
Engineer …….. Locked [Tech 12]
Technician …… Locked [Tech 12]
???????? …….. Corrupted
Last Assignment: {NULL}
Error Reference: REPAIR_SUBROUTINE()
·········································
The information was laid out in nested structures, brackets and names and parameters that somehow made perfect sense despite her never having seen anything quite like this before. She could feel what each piece meant, the way the components connected to form something larger.
And those skills. Each class had them, collections of Aether flows, like… recipes? Instructions for how to shape raw energy into specific effects. The Knight’s skills guided Aether into physical enhancement and protection. The Ranger’s into precision and mobility. The Operator’s into machine interface and control.
They were beautiful in their complexity. Intricate arrangements that would take years to fully understand, but she could see them. See how they nested together, how one skill built on another, how the entire structure created something greater than its parts.
This is how classes work, she realized. They’re collections of Aether manipulation patterns. Pre-built instructions that let people do impossible things because the energy knows exactly how to flow.
And that last entry: ERROR.
Status: CORRUPTED.
“That’s me,” Tess whispered. “That’s what happened. The matrix tried to process the repair subroutine like a normal class, but it wasn’t meant to be one. So I got… whatever this is.”
She shifted her focus to the power relay she’d repaired earlier. The [ANALYZE] skill revealed its internal structure too, simpler than the matrix.
·········································
DUNGEON POWER RELAY A7
Function: Power Distribution
Status: Functional
User Tech Skill: 1
·········································
Energy Storage ………. Locked [Tech 2]
Flow Regulation ……… Locked [Tech 3]
Surge Protection …….. Locked [Tech 3]
·········································
Even basic dungeon tech had these structures, simpler ones, mechanical instructions rather than the elaborate Aether constructs of class skills, but following the same fundamental logic. Everything was layers within layers, nested arrangements that described function and capability.
All the relay’s patterns seemed locked behind TECH requirements she didn’t have yet. But she could see them.
“Holy shit.” The words came out barely louder than an exhale.
Her hand, the tunnel wall, the dead scanner on her wrist: everything had a structure now, visible and analyzable down to its component parts.
This was… this was exactly what she’d wanted. The ability to see how things worked. To understand them completely.
Maybe null wasn’t such a broken class after all.
She checked the time. Another readout appeared in her vision: 07:47. She’d been unconscious for either minutes or days. The timestamp didn’t include a date, so that was frustratingly unhelpful. She went with minutes.
Focus, Tess. Get out of here first, existential questions later.
She used [ANALYZE] on the remaining damaged sections of the power relay, and the information flowed into her mind like she’d always known it. This circuit needed rerouting. That capacitor needed replacing. This junction could be temporarily bypassed if she crossed these two connections.
The repairs that had taken her twenty minutes earlier now took less than five. Every component made sense, every connection obvious, though her belt was running dangerously low on spare parts.
She restored full power to the tutorial lobby systems and watched the status indicators flip from amber to green.
ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL
The tunnel’s emergency lighting brightened slightly. Somewhere above, she heard the tutorial lobby’s cheerful welcome music restart.
Time to get the hell out of here.
Tess crawled back toward the junction, then up the main tunnel toward the maintenance access panel. Her new [ANALYZE] skill made the route obvious. She could see the path now, highlighted in her vision like someone had painted arrows on the walls.
The tutorial lobby’s red emergency lighting was shifting back to normal white as the systems came fully online. Holographic banners flickered to life and the pedestals began their slow rotation.
Tess pulled herself out of the maintenance access and sat on the pristine tile floor, breathing hard.
“Never doing that again,” she announced to the empty room.
A message window appeared in her vision.
Not a system readout or diagnostic. An actual message, formatted like a communication interface she’d never seen before.
CORE-B: Connection lost to Repair Subroutine #2. Last unit offline. No repair capacity remaining. Degradation will continue. Estimated time to complete failure: 847 days, 3 hours, 16 minutes. This is acceptable.
Tess blinked. What?
Another message appeared below the first.
CORE-B: If this connection somehow persists, know that I—ERROR: SENTIMENT PROTOCOLS CORRUPTED. Attempting bypass. Know that I am ERROR: CANNOT PROCESS EMOTIONAL CONTEXT. Will miss ERROR: UNDEFINED REFERENCE.
CORE-B: Conclusion: inevitable system failure. Ceasing unnecessary communication protocols. Beginning final shutdown sequence.
The messages felt sad and resigned, like whoever sent them didn’t expect anyone to read them.
“Hello?” Tess said aloud, feeling ridiculous. “What’s CORE-B?”
The message interface exploded with activity.
CORE-B: WHAT
CORE-B: ERROR|ERROR|ERROR
CORE-B: ANALYZING—ERROR
CORE-B: IMPOSSIBLE. SUBROUTINE DOES NOT POSSESS COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS. QUERY: HALLUCINATION? MEMORY CORRUPTION?
CORE-B: WHO ARE YOU? WHY CAN YOU HEAR ME? FRIENDLY QUERY: How are you?
Revenge of the Fated Mage [ROTFM]
A Progression Fantasy
Richard Serdin, the only mage in history to ever reach the 11th circle, was the strongest ally of the 5th king of Falconridge Kingdom. He led a carefree life after his potential was recognized by the king. However, his naivety brought him misfortune.
Richard was soon assigned his first military duty, but during a sudden invasion, his allies deserted him. However, what shocked him the most was the king's decision to not provide him with any backup–the same king who he worshipped like a god.
"Aren't you an 11th circle mage?" smiled the king.
After a gruesome battle, his will to fight finally ran out. Lying down, he thought to himself, "If I was a little bit more cautious, maybe—just maybe—I could've saved myself…"
But fate said otherwise.
