Tutorial (1)

A translucent hologram window bobbed in the air before my eyes, packed with an endless scroll of shitposts perfectly matched to the caliber of the users. I rubbed my eyes and pinched my cheek. It stayed exactly where it was. Not a dream, then. Reality, apparently.

I dragged my gaze off the hologram and looked around. Dim gray-brown masonry, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠an underground labyrinth—no matter the angle, this was unmistakably the Labyrinth of Beginning, the tutorial backdrop of Chronicles of Archea. And the spot I occupied was the safe zone: the place where a player opens their eyes.

"Haaah.... Well, shit."

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What the hell kind of situation was this? I felt thoroughly bewitched by something uncanny. A wise chancellor who could lay the whole mess out in one clean stroke would've been nice. Unfortunately, Chronicles of Archea is a trash game, so of course no such person exists.

"Wait. Or do they?"

Right. I didn't have a brilliant minister, but I did have the freaks of the Transmigrator Gallery, who amounted to the same thing.

"First I want to write a post. How do you even do that?"

When you don't know, the law is simple: shut up, lurk, three days. I fixed my eyes on the hologram with that in mind, and somehow the gallery's controls began pouring into my head. I wrote at once.

A notice. I'd have to read it, wouldn't I. I pulled it up.

Hmm. Skimming the notice, I got the shape of it well enough.

The ones who'd transmigrated early were monsters who'd survived on raw physicality alone, with no hidden pieces to their names. And a newbie like me, barely arrived, was the perfect meal.

"I'm a survivor of nineties Korea, the era when only the strong made it through. I won't go down that easy."

Even back then, stuck in nothing but the body of a frail little kid, I'd managed to keep myself alive.

"What matters right now is which class I change into."

In this game—no, in this world—class is everything. Choose the right one and you can slash the difficulty of staying alive from here on out. A lurk through the Transmigrator Gallery made it obvious I needed something strong from the opening. So long as other transmigrators existed as competition, a late-bloom class would only leave me stuck as a Golden Goblin, prime meat for the slaughter.

The problem is, even if the class I want is out there, I don't get to pick it.

Like I said, this game is trash. It's also a roguelike, and randomness is a mandatory ingredient of trash roguelikes. On top of that, this one makes you roll your class at random too.

Having thought that far, I rummaged through the area, looking for anything worth using.

"Aagh... busted. Completely busted."

Nothing I could use as a weapon. At this rate I might have to class-change into the worst garbage class of all, the Unarmed Fighter—the trash class that can't even wield a weapon.

...If I were a newbie, that is.

I bit down hard on my index finger and broke the skin. Blood soon beaded at the tip, and with it I drew a circle, then began writing runes across the floor. A makeshift magic circle.

The moment I inscribed the runes and read them aloud, I felt something drain out of my body, and light began to frost over the crude circle.

"Oh."

When the light died, what remained was a handsomely made skull staff.

"Lucky."

Not a bad result. What I'd just performed was Weapon Creation, magic paid for by offering up one's life force. This trash-god of a game will let you do things that, in any normal game, would be impossible without the skill—so long as you follow the proper procedure. Someone like me, who's dug into the setting until most of its knowledge is stuck in his head, can theoretically cast any magic at all, provided the catalyst is there.

The catch is that obtaining it as a skill makes the procedure far cleaner and far stronger, so you're usually better off getting the skill and then casting. Used that way, this same magic is the sort that pops the instant you say Weapon Creation.

Anything beyond this needs more magic power and more catalysts. Out of reach.

Still, the absurd freedom unique to a trash-god game had patched my garbage start. And the more you use a given class's magic, the higher your odds of actually obtaining that class. So the right play, as far as possible, is to cast a lot during the tutorial.

Which leaves the real problem. How do I perform in an actual fight...

I'd never exercised, let alone been in a fight once in my life. I'd never even gone to the army. Don't ask why. There's a painful story there.

...Maybe I should look at the status window first.

According to the gallery, the iron rule is to turn it on by shouting status window at the top of your lungs.

"Status wiiiiindooooow!!!!!!!"

Looking it over, this body sat a little under average in everything except magic power. Low stats can be jacked up later—brew elixirs with alchemy and choke them down, or replace the body outright with machinery, or with the flesh of a magical beast.

I couldn't do any of that yet. I'd just have to solve it fast.

Next was Familiar Summoning, magic that would fight in my place. This one stakes the soul as its catalyst instead of blood, and it can be used only once. In the original game, binding a contract with your soul was nothing but flavor text. Now that the game had become real, I had no idea what risk I was actually taking. But if I walked outside without summoning a familiar, the skeletons and zombies would grind me into minced meat in seconds.

I began to recite the Familiar Summoning incantation.

When that long passage finally ended, a crack split the empty air, and I felt a quantity of MP being sucked away that Weapon Creation couldn't even compare to.

...Am I about to die doing this?

Genuinely spooked, I checked the status window. My MP was already at zero, and my HP was dropping too.

I'm fucked. Can I cancel this?

Right about then, a beautiful woman with crimson hair and crimson eyes stepped softly out of the rift and came to stand before me.

...! Five stars. Not a 6-Star, but still—a familiar sitting near the very peak of power, and I could command her from the very start.

And yet the moment I saw the name Claudia von Rosenberg, all I could do was choke on a silent gasp.

Of all the familiars in the world, she's the one built exclusively for netorase!