Reese Reed was sitting alone in Mitchell High’s art studio when the system message arrived.

Officially, he was working on his final for art class.

In reality, he was playing the Ashes of Creation Alpha. He wasn’t going to miss out on this opportunity. He would pay someone else to finish the project. Probably Joey. Or maybe Emily would do it, she liked art. And him. But his heart was taken by another girl. Leah Rosebright.

These were the things on his mind before the message arrived, but when it did his eyes immediately fixated on two words, cultivate and immortal, and he instantly forgot all about Ashes of Creation, Leah, his art project—everything. It all was wiped away. The only thing that mattered to him in that moment, the only thing his brain was focused on, was the message.

It looked real, like a physical thing, so he tried touching it.

“Whoa,” he said in surprise when his fingers actually pressed into the text as though it were actually a physical thing.

Then the message disappeared, leaving his vision clear again, and he found himself staring at Leah’s self-portrait of herself as a monster—her own final project—on an easel at the far end of the studio.

“Well that’s inconvenient.” He hadn’t even read the message, and now it was gone. Had it said something about aliens? There was a smiley face, and something about trials and foes, but that was all he remembered from the brief glimpse.

He tapped random places in front of him, and felt… something. But nothing happened.

Had he just kicked himself out of the system?

A new message appeared before he could sink into despair.

Involuntary system activation.

You have been awarded a new title.

Welcome to the system, Reckless.

Reckless? What kind of title was reckless?

He reached out and touched the title.

The entire message disappeared.

He swore, then began making random gestures in the air.

One of these caused a panel to slide in from his left.

The alien invaders apparently took design cues from an iPad.

Reckless

Leaderboard Rank: 1

Score: 0

Level: None

Class: None

Attributes

∴ Agility (Novice 6)

∴ Endurance (Novice 3)

∴ Strength (Novice 4)

∴ Durability (Novice 5)

∴ Intelligence (Novice 10)

∴ Vision (Novice 4)

∴ Hearing (Novice 9)

∴ Smell (Novice 5)

∴ Taste (Novice 5)

∴ Touch (Novice 7)

Abilities

∴ None

Skills

∴ Control (Novice 1)

∴ Perception (Novice 9)

Titles

∴ Reckless

“A character sheet,” he mused. He quickly scanned the list, then immediately tapped on the Reckless title.

Reckless

Unity Drain: High

Description: In the face of the unknown, you acted without thought. It paid off. This time. Activate this title to temporarily become invisible. Perhaps it will help keep you alive in future endeavors.

Interesting. But how was he supposed to activate it? And what was Unity? Something like mana?

He tabbed out of Ashes of Creation—which he realized he’d died in—and brought up a camera app, the little light next to his webcam turning on. He slid away its cover then set the laptop on a table and adjusted it so he could see himself turn invisible.

This done, he tapped on the description of the title.

It disappeared and brought him back to his stat screen.

He grunted in frustration.

Okay, he thought, trying to stay calm. If this screen slid out like an iPad, maybe that really was what the interface was based on.

He swiped left, and the status screen slid away, disappearing. He swiped again in the same direction and a new screen appeared. It was a store. But he didn’t have any credits, so he only briefly glanced at the items available. They were certainly interesting, but not immediately relevant.

He swiped again, and though it somehow felt like another screen should appear, none did.

He tried swiping both up and down, and even diagonally, but nothing happened.

He went back to the main screen and tried swiping down on it.

This bore fruit.

Rank Name Level Score 1 Reckless None 0 2 Tim Wright None 0 3 Joshua Gibson None 0 4 Mateo Salazar None 0 5 Henry Paulson None 0

A scoreboard. And it appeared he really was number one.

Sweet.

He wasn’t sure why, though. Everyone on it had the same level and score.

Maybe it had something to do with his title? Or getting in so quickly?

It had called him reckless. Perhaps he was the first person to join. That seemed unlikely given the population of the world.

Although, many would be sleeping, and many more would be very young or very old. If touching the message was all it took to join, then many surely must have tried by now. The message practically begged to be touched. He hadn’t even considered trying to control it with thought because it looked so real.

Then again, maybe that came from growing up with touchscreens.

And hadn’t it said something about involuntary activation? So maybe it took more to activate the system for most people.

He quickly flicked down to the bottom of the scoreboard. There were already a few hundred people on it. Was everyone who joined the system on it? If so, he was surprised there were so few. How long had it been since the message appeared? Not long, he realized.

Not wasting any more time, he quickly scrolled through the list.

Reese recognized one of the names: Matt Bailey.

It figured that Matt would be on it. He was currently ranked nineteenth.

One interesting fact was that other than himself, all the names appeared to be real ones.

He wondered why that was, but decided it wasn’t important to dwell on at the moment.

He tried swiping down, but got nothing, so swiped up twice—once to go back to the main screen, and then once more. This brought up a row of icons: an eye with a diagonal line through it, a few icons he couldn’t decipher, what looked like two clouds with a line between them, and something like a group of squares.

He tapped on the eye, and the line going through it went away. Nothing else changed.

He tried tapping on the other icons. The second one next to the eye brought up a list with one item on it, his title. He tapped the icon again and the list vanished.

Nothing came of tapping the others save for the last one, which put a half-circle of rings in front of him that moved about. He couldn’t even focus on them.

He tried to follow them and was momentarily dizzy as the icons moved hectically.

“What the…”

He kept trying to lock on to them, but they wouldn’t stay in one place.

He swore several times and eventually punched the table in frustration.

He cursed again at the pain this caused, but as he rubbed his hand he noticed the icons were now motionless.

“Masochist system,” he muttered, and examined the icons, letting his hand drop.

The icons moved again.

He swore, then realized what was happening and felt like an idiot. It was a good thing no one was around to see.

Except maybe the system.

He raised his hand in front of him, and like he suspected, the icons moved with it.

Interesting, so they were fixed to the position of his hand.

As he opened his hand, he realized there were exactly five of them, and they were in the perfect position to easily tap.

That was actually pretty cool. The squares icon made more sense now. It was like hotkeys.

They were just empty circles, but he assumed he could load them out however he wanted. It was a good thing they were empty, because he’d probably hit them a bunch without noticing in his thrashing.

He extended all his fingers to their limits and vaguely felt them press into the circles.

It was a little weird since they were above his fingers rather than below. Like typing with the tops of his fingernails. The sensation was incredibly faint, not at all like touching the message had been.

“Probably need to put something in them to feel more.”

That could wait. He’d need to get used to having them there so he didn’t accidentally activate anything, so he went back to exploring.

He swiped up and was somewhat surprised to get another screen, the icon bar now at the very bottom of his vision rather than the top.

This new screen contained a list of the messages he’d gotten previously.

“Chat log.” He sighed and swiped back to the main screen, then brought back his status screen and swiped again.

This new screen listed body parts. He frowned, rubbing the scruff on his chin, five little circles like faint blue rings dancing under his eyes.

Then he realized what the screen must be for.

He tapped head, then hair, then smiled at the options presented.

He was right. Body alterations.

A moment later, a massive gray beard suddenly appeared on his face.

He laughed. “Sweet.” The beard didn’t quite feel real when he stroked it, but when he looked at himself in his laptop’s camera, it looked real enough.

This made him remember why he had set the camera up in the first place. Invisibility.

He grinned in excitement. Now, how to activate it? Touching the description from his character sheet didn’t do anything, but what about that list?

He brought up his single-item ability list via the icon bar, and was about to tap his reckless title, when an alarm sounded.

Lockdown.

Well, this seemed like a safe place to lock down to him.

He looked around the room, considering. He assumed the lockdown was because of the message, but what if it wasn’t? He probably should lock the door, just in case.

Just as he finished doing this, an announcement came over the loudspeaker telling everyone to head to the auditorium.

He sighed. He wanted to stay and explore the system, but it wouldn’t look good if the mayor’s kid didn’t obey ‘all proper rules’. And Cal or the assistant principal would be logging each student on the digital attendance and lockdown tracker his dad had championed for. So they’d know that he’d come to school today and was missing from the count.

If he wasn’t found unconscious, bleeding, and on the verge of death, he’d be grounded until he turned eighteen (not very long) and written out of his father’s will (forever).

So he reluctantly packed up and headed out.

As Reese joined the other students in the hall on the way to the auditorium, he saw Leah and Zoe with that Dexter kid.

Idiot, he thought. Leah had been pining after him for years and Dexter was too inept to notice.

Reese felt a stab of guilt at the thought. The kid had lost both his parents, one right after the other. You couldn’t blame him.

Still, Reese wished he would either ask her out or put her out of her misery.

Then Reese could swoop in without feeling like a dick about it.

As his gaze settled on the students who had clearly altered themselves, information about them popped up.

Remembering something, he pulled down the bar with the icons on it and tapped the eye again. The information on the others went away.

He turned it back on. He didn’t see why anyone would ever want to have it off.

In the auditorium he tuned out what the principal was saying and got back to exploring the system.

He was disheartened to discover he was no longer ranked number one on the scoreboard.

Rank Name Level Score 1 Xīn Zhào None 0 2 Goro Sakurai None 0 3 Martin Hinsen None 0 4 Anatoly Novikov None 0 5 Gavin Spencer None 0

What the hell? It’d only been a few minutes, how had so many people beaten him? He’d already been knocked out of the top ten, and was currently ranked eleventh.

A few minutes meant a lot, apparently. He was willing to bet that unlike him, the ones who had surpassed him were free to explore at will, not stuck in a packed crowd. What time was it in China? One AM? Something like that.

Well, that was okay. It was still early days. He would catch up.

But he became further disheartened as he explored the interface, exhausting every screen he could access and not finding anything like he was looking for.

There had to be a way. How was he supposed to get stronger? To get abilities? What he really wanted was some kind of quest or an explanation of how he could level up.

He brought up his stat screen again. Maybe it was the kind of thing where you leveled by increasing your stats?

He studied them.

His highest stat was intelligence, at novice 10. If he assumed 10 was the cap, at least for novice, then that meant 5 was average? An endurance of 3 would seem about right in that case. And he did have excellent hearing. He was a bit near-sighted, so a vision of novice 4 would also make sense; slightly below average.

What was control? It was at novice 1, which was the lowest out of any stats or skills. He didn’t consider himself an impulsive person. He always tried to think through situations before reacting. So maybe it was something else? Like, control over magic or something of that nature.

He wondered if there was a way to increase his stats through other than conventional means. If he could get stronger and faster without working out… That opened up a lot of possibilities.

A sudden loud thud drew his attention away from his interface.

That was the door to the auditorium.

It had gone eerily silent except for what sounded like a news broadcast.

Reese noticed Leah, Matt, Dexter, and Emily all sitting next to each other.

And they were only a few feet from the door which something had just pounded against.

Before he could worry about this, another thud came and the silence broke as students began yelling and screaming and running for the door at the opposite side of the auditorium.

Reese got up, putting on his backpack as students swarmed around him. His eyes darted about, looking for another exit.

There came a final slam against the door and it flew open and was immediately followed by an honest-to-God monster.

“Oh sh—” Reese began, but was drowned out as a teacher who had been standing near the door fell to the monster and the real screaming began.