The Hall of Heroes was magnificent. It was a grand pantheon designed to fill new players with a sense of wonder and epic destiny.
Ommmm...
Ethereal choirs sang in the background beneath a sky filled with nebulae. Towering marble statues of the Twelve Classes loomed over the spawn platform, bathed in an ethereal golden light.
To Sebastian's left stood the Guardian. The statue was clad in impenetrable plate armor and held a shield the size of a blast door.
To his right was the Archmage. Its robes billowed in an unseen wind, and its staff crackled with simulated lightning. Further down were the Assassins, the Rangers, and the Clerics.
They stood like titans, radiating power. But to Sebastian's bored, veteran eyes, they were entirely useless!
He walked past the shining armor of the Paladin and the arcane robes without a second glance. He completely ignored the majestic, swelling orchestral music that urged him to choose a rigid path of glory.
In his past life, he had seen what happened to the meta-classes. The Guardians, with all their armor and damage mitigation, were crushed into paste by the Void Titans. Those monsters ignored physical defense!
The Archmages relied on long cast times and structured spell formations. They had their throats slit by Phase Spiders before they could even finish their incantations.
The established classes were rigid. They had strict progression trees.
If you were a Warrior, you couldn't learn high-tier teleportation magic. If you were a Mage, you couldn't wield a greatsword without severe stat penalties. The system was designed to force players into parties and dependencies.
Sebastian didn't want to depend on anyone. People died. People mutated. People betrayed you!
He needed to be a one-man apocalypse.
He walked to the very edge of the selection circle, where the golden light didn't quite reach. There, sitting in the shadows, was a small, unassuming gray statue.
It held no weapon. It wore a ragged, tattered cloak draped over a wooden dummy.
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[Class: The Drifter]
↳ Base Stats: 10 Strength, 10 Agility, 10 Intelligence, 10 Vitality.
↳ Class Perks: None.
↳ Description: A wanderer without a home. Jack of all trades, master of none. The Drifter may learn any skill and equip any item but receives zero innate bonuses.
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On the forums of his past life, the Drifter was universally mocked as the "Trash Class." It was designed for roleplayers or masochists.
Without the innate damage boosts of the specialized classes, a Drifter would quickly fall behind in damage output by level 10. They were mathematical suicide.
But Sebastian wasn't going to be a master of none. With his Nexus Glitch, he was going to own the system!
He reached out and placed his hand on the wooden dummy.
"I select the Drifter." He stated clearly.
[SYSTEM WARNING: The Drifter class is considered a Hard Mode start. You will receive no starting skills and no passive bonuses. Are you sure you wish to proceed?]
"Yeah. Confirm."
Whoosh!
The ragged cloak dissolved into motes of gray light and wrapped around his digital avatar. His starting clothes shifted into a set of plain, durable leather and cloth that looked like a potato sack. There was no flashy armor or glowing weapons. Just the bare minimum.
[Ding! Class Selected: Drifter.]
[Initiating Talent Awakening...]
Because he had no class perks, the system was programmed to offer a random universal talent to compensate. A massive holographic roulette wheel materialized in front of him.
It was sectioned into thousands of tiny slivers of color. Most were white for Common, and a few were green for Uncommon. A tiny fraction were gold for S-Rank.
But there was one microscopic sliver of shifting, corrupted black-and-green!
Chaos tier.
Sebastian watched with cold detachment as the wheel began to spin with a blur of colors. Normally, this was the moment players prayed to whatever digital god listened.
Sebastian just stared. His eyes tracked the blur. He had survived the end of the world. A roulette wheel didn't intimidate him.
The wheel slowed. Click... Click... Click...
The ticker clacked against the pins. It bypassed a Golden Dragon Blood sliver and slid over a dozen Whites. Slowly and miraculously, it ticked to a stop directly on the rune of shifting, corrupted black!
[Ding! Talent Awakened!]
A jolt of dark energy shot through his avatar's veins. He opened his character menu to read the description.
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[Forbidden Alchemy] (Chaos Rank)
↳ Effect: Your body is an endless crucible. You no longer suffer from Potion Sickness or Digestion Cooldowns. You may consume any alchemical item to instantly regain Health or Mana, bypassing all consumption limits.
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Sebastian let out a real, breathy laugh. "Holy shit."
Usually, this talent was dangerous and kinda stupid. A guy in his past life blew himself up using this. Plus, nobody had money to buy endless potions.
But for Sebastian? It was an infinite resource generator!
It meant that as long as he had items in his inventory, his mana pool was effectively limitless. He could spam skills that would normally drain a high-level Archmage dry in seconds!
"Perfect," he murmured as he closed the interface. "Send me in."
[Login Confirmed. Transporting to Novice Village #109.]
Flash!
The world shifted, and Sebastian materialized in the center of a chaotic, bustling cobblestone square.
The noise and the smell of wood smoke and unwashed bodies hit him instantly. Novice Village 109 was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of players who had spawned simultaneously.
They were running around like headless chickens. They shouted for groups, harassed the local guards, and marveled at the realistic physics of the game.
"Woah! Look at the graphics! I can feel the wind!"
"Anyone want to party up? Looking for a Level 1 Slime Farm tank!"
Sebastian stood perfectly still amidst the swirling tide of naive enthusiasm. To them, this was the ultimate playground. A vacation from the grim reality of 2077.
To Sebastian, looking at their smiling faces, he only saw walking corpses!
When the Great Merge happened, ninety percent of these people would die screaming because they treated the mechanics like a game instead of a survival manual.
He didn't waste time feeling pity. He pulled up his inventory. He had exactly 50 copper coins. The standard starter stipend.
He moved through the crowd with the fluid, pragmatic grace of a veteran assassin. He turned his shoulders to slip through tight gaps without breaking his stride, easily sidestepping a burly Warrior who tried to shove him.
He ignored the flashing "!" quest markers above the Village Chief and the Blacksmith offering rusty swords.
He headed down a narrow, dirty alleyway toward a dilapidated tent that smelled faintly of sulfur and cheap ink. This was the general magic vendor. It was a grumpy non-player character named Silas.
Silas looked up from his ledger. He sneered at Sebastian's plain Drifter clothes. "You don't look like you have the coin for the arcane arts, boy."
"Show me your trash tier," Sebastian demanded. His tone brokered no argument.
The vendor blinked. Huh? He was taken aback by the sheer authority in the Level 1 player's voice. Silas grumbled and pulled out a dusty, moth-eaten crate from beneath his counter.
Sebastian sorted through the garbage. Minor Heal. Basic Strike. Mud Ball.
His eyes landed on a crumbling, scorched tome. Basic Spark (Tier 0). It cost 45 copper.
It was the weakest offensive spell in the entire game. It dealt a pathetic 5 to 10 points of fire damage. It had a one-second cast time and a range of maybe one meter.
Most players would consider buying it a complete waste of starter funds.
Clink!
Sebastian slapped 45 of his 50 copper coins on the counter. He didn't bargain. He just took the book, shoved it into his inventory, and turned on his heel.
He had exactly 5 copper left to his name. He had no armor, no specialized weapons, and a spell that couldn't kill a chicken in one hit.
He walked out of the village gates, leaving the screaming crowds behind.
The outskirts of Novice Village 109 were a rolling expanse of idyllic green plains.
Hundreds of players were currently chasing after low-level slimes and horned rabbits. The fields looked like a disorganized, chaotic medieval warzone fought entirely by toddlers.
Sebastian walked right past the safe zone barrier. He didn't draw a weapon because he didn't need one! He just kept walking, his dark eyes fixed on the oppressive treeline in the distance.
He pulled the crumbling Basic Spark skill book from his inventory.
In The Ethereal Plane, you didn't need to read the books to learn the skills. You just had to crush them.
Crush!
He closed his fist, and the book dissolved into a cloud of red, glowing particles that flowed directly into his chest.
[Ding! Skill Learned: Basic Spark (Level 1).]
↳ Tier 0 Fire Magic
↳ Cost: 5 Mana
↳ Damage: 5 to 10
↳ Proficiency: 0 / 100
Sebastian pulled up his stat sheet. He had 100 maximum mana. That meant he could cast the spell twenty times before needing to sit down and rest.
Normally, reaching Level 2 of the skill required 100 successful casts. A normal player would spend hours just grinding this one pathetic spell on slimes to see a minor two percent increase in damage.
He reached the edge of the plains and stepped into the shadow of the Wailing Woods.
The atmosphere shifted immediately. The bright, cheerful sunlight was choked out by towering, twisted pines and mist curling around gnarled roots.
The ambient music faded into an eerie, unsettling silence. It was broken only by the snapping of twigs and the low, guttural growls of predators.
This was a Level 5 zone. New players were explicitly warned by the guards to avoid it until they had a full party.
Sebastian was Level 1. He was wearing starter cloth and was utterly alone!
He stopped in a small clearing. It was time to test the Nexus Glitch.