Tess stood outside the dungeon entrance at dawn, staring at the industrial steel doors like they might bite her.

  They probably wouldn’t.

  The entrance sat at the edge of Tertius-Prime’s central district, built into the ground like a bunker. It was maintained, barely, with clean ferrocrete and functional lighting, which made it stand out in a city where “functional” was aspirational. A faded sign hung above the doors: DUNGEON ACCESS - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Below that, someone had spray-painted: Cleared 20 years ago. Nothing left.

  Tess adjusted her tool belt and took a breath.

  She’d spent half the night arguing with herself. The other half she’d spent watching Marcus cough himself awake three times, each one worse than the last. The freighter’s old medical scanner kept flashing warnings about respiratory damage and Aether exposure degradation.

  So here she was at the dungeon tutorial. About to get a class she didn’t want because she needed something, and she was out of better ideas.

  “Morning,” a voice called.

  Tess turned. A guard sat in a small booth beside the entrance, wearing House Tertian colors, faded blue and silver, and looking terminally bored. He was young, maybe in his mid-twenties, with a look that suggested he’d drawn the worst posting in the city and knew it.

  “Here for access?” he asked, not really looking at her.

  “Tutorial entrance,” Tess said.

  That got his attention. He looked up, blinking. “The tutorial? Seriously?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Huh.” He pulled up a datapad, tapping through screens. “Haven’t had anyone use that in… six months? Maybe longer.” He paused, reading something. “Name?”

  “Tess Rivera.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Rivera? Like Marcus Rivera? The Engineer?”

  Tess nodded.

  “Wow. Yeah, head on in.” He hit a button, and the steel doors groaned open, revealing a corridor that sloped downward into darkness. “Your dad’s a legend, you know. Fixed my sister’s hauler last year when nobody else would touch it.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember that one,” Tess said.

  “Tell him Dane says hi.” The guard waved her through. “Good luck with the tutorial. It’s, uh… dated.”

  Tess stepped inside.

  The corridor was lit by strips of dim emergency lighting, the kind that hadn’t been replaced in decades. The walls were bare ferrocrete, scuffed and worn, with old safety notices peeling at the edges. It smelled stale, like nobody had breathed the air for years.

  At the end of the corridor sat an elevator: industrial, utilitarian, with sliding doors that had seen better decades. A small screen beside the call button flickered weakly.

  Tess pressed the button.

  The doors slid open with a grinding screech that made her wince. Inside, the elevator was even worse: scratched metal walls, a flickering overhead light, and a control panel that looked like it had been installed sometime around the city’s founding.

  She stepped inside, the doors closed behind her, and the elevator lurched downward.

  And then, the screen on the wall flickered to life.

  Bright colors and cheerful music filled the small space as a woman’s voice, smooth and enthusiastic, began to speak.

  “Welcome to the Dungeon Tutorial System!” the voice said. On the screen, animated figures danced across a stylized dungeon backdrop: knights in shining armor, mages casting spells, rogues flipping through shadows. “Congratulations on taking the first step toward your future!”

  The woman continued, her voice relentlessly upbeat. “The Network is proud to offer you this opportunity to join galactic society as a productive, class-bearing citizen! Whether you dream of fortune, glory, or simply a better life, the dungeon awaits!”

  The animation shifted to show a smiling family standing in front of a pristine house, all of them wearing gleaming armor and holding weapons.

  “Get your class! Find your fortune! Become the hero you are meant to be!”

  Tess rubbed her temples. “This is insane.”

  The elevator continued its descent. The video looped back to the beginning, with the cheerful music starting over.

  Then the lights flickered, and the elevator shuddered.

  Tess grabbed the handrail as the entire car jerked to a halt, throwing her off balance. The screen went dark and the overhead light died, leaving her in silence for a long moment.

  Then, sparks exploded from the control panel.

  “Crap!” Tess stumbled back as the panel erupted in a shower of blue-white energy. An Aether surge—wild and uncontrolled, the kind that happened when the city’s power grid failed and backfed into the dungeon’s systems.

  The emergency lighting kicked in, bathing the elevator in dim red.

  Tess pulled out her scanner and aimed it at the control panel. The device beeped, displaying a cascade of errors and warnings.

  POWER REGULATION FAILURE.

  AETHER SURGE DETECTED.

  ELEVATOR SYSTEMS OFFLINE.

  “Of course,” she muttered.

  She pried open the access panel beside the doors, exposing a tangle of wiring and outdated circuitry. Her scanner highlighted the damage: fried relays, overloaded capacitors, a major power line that was sparking intermittently.

  Complicated, but not impossible. The elevator used a screw-drive system, which meant she wouldn’t plummet to her death, but she’d be stuck here until she fixed it or someone sent help.

  She was reaching for her tools when a new message appeared on the dark screen.

  CRITICAL FAILURE DETECTED.

  CORE REPAIR SUBROUTINE EN ROUTE.

  ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 3 MINUTES, 47 SECONDS.

  Tess blinked. A Repair Subroutine? She’d find out in three minutes what that meant.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She looked at the mess of wiring. Three minutes wouldn’t be enough time for her to even start, but maybe she could help and even learn something about the dungeon systems. She pulled out a replacement relay from her belt and started tracing the damaged circuits.

  The system was old. Really old. The sort of tech that predated half the standards she’d learned from her Dad. It was like trying to read a language she only half understood—familiar enough to recognize, foreign enough to slow her down.

  Her scanner highlighted another problem: the Aether surge had damaged something deeper in the elevator’s control matrix. It looked less like simple electronics and more like the stupid companion dog she couldn’t fix. Almost organic in its complexity.

  Tess frowned. Something deeper was damaged here, something beyond simple electronics.

  A glow appeared in the elevator’s corner near the ceiling—soft at first, then brighter, gold and white and something else that made her scanner beep frantically.

  The glow coalesced into a shape—present rather than solid, a sphere of pure energy about the size of her fist, pulsing with light.

  The Repair Subroutine?

  It hovered for a moment, as if assessing the situation, and then it moved.

  Tess had never seen anything move that fast. The sphere darted to the control panel, and where it touched, sparks flew—but these weren’t the chaotic, destructive sparks of the Aether surge. These were precise and controlled, the subroutine working through the damaged circuits like water flowing through cracks, finding every broken connection, every fried component, every place where the system had failed.

  And it fixed them.

  Tess’s scanner was going insane, trying to track the subroutine’s movements and failing completely. The readouts were gibberish: energy signatures that spiked off the scale, patterns that matched nothing in her database.

  “What the hell…” she whispered.

  The subroutine moved through the access panel she’d opened and swept through the exposed wiring. Burned relays regenerated and broken connections resealed themselves. The entire mess of half-functional tech became… functional.

  It was beautiful—and impossible.

  It found everything. It moved to the elevator doors and repaired whatever had screamed on the way in. Then it touched the overhead light, and the flicker stopped, the glow becoming steady and clean. Even the screen was fixed, which flickered back to life, showing a simple status display instead of the propaganda video.

  Tess stood frozen, tools forgotten in her hands.

  Her scanner. She lifted it, trying to capture what the subroutine was doing, trying to understand it.

  The scanner’s screen filled with data: incomprehensible, cascading, too fast to read. Energy patterns and code that looked almost alive, readings that suggested the subroutine was rewriting systems at a fundamental level.

  And then the scanner started smoking.

  “No no no…” Tess shook the device, but the screen was flashing red warnings now, the casing hot against her wrist.

  CENTRAL PROCESSOR OVERLOAD. SHUTTING DOWN.

  The screen went dark.

  “Great,” Tess muttered. “Just great. More things to fix.”

  The subroutine paused.

  It rotated, and Tess could have sworn it was looking at her. She shivered, then its focus shifted to her wrist.

  Tess barely had time to flinch before electricity arced from the control panel to her wrist in a streak of golden light. It touched the scanner for less than a second, a brief, brilliant flash, and then it was gone, retreating into the elevator’s systems.

  Tess stared at her wrist as the scanner’s screen flickered.

  REBOOTING.

  DERELICT FIRMWARE DETECTED.

  UPDATING…

  Came back online showing perfect diagnostics and a status she’d never seen before: FIRMWARE UPGRADED: ALL SYSTEMS OPTIMAL.

  Optimal? Tess thought. She didn’t even know it could be optimal.

  “You fixed my scanner,” she said aloud, to nobody. To the subroutine. To the universe. “Just like that. No, you upgraded it? Why?”

  The elevator hummed. All the damaged systems came back online at once: power, lighting, controls, everything. The car lurched and resumed its descent, smooth and steady, as if it had never been broken at all.

  The subroutine flickered once more, then disappeared into a seam in the wall, vanishing into circuitry Tess couldn’t see.

  She stood there, breathing hard, staring at the space where it had been.

  Now, that was what she wanted—that kind of precision and immediate understanding of how to repair defective systems. And the power to do something about it.

  Could she copy it? Learn how it worked? It had to use Aether, which she didn’t have access to, but maybe she could study the principles. Maybe there was a way to…

  The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open.

  Tess stepped out into the tutorial lobby as lights and displays turned on in a cascade in front of her.

  The space was vast and ridiculous. Easily fifty meters across, with a domed ceiling that glowed with soft, artificial light. The floor was polished tile, pristine despite decades of neglect. Holographic banners flickered to life in the air, cycling through slogans in cheerful fonts: “CHOOSE YOUR DESTINY!” “FORTUNE AWAITS!” “BE THE HERO YOU WERE BORN TO BE!”

  In the center of the room sat three pedestals, arranged in a triangle. Each one displayed a class option with the kind of over-the-top fanfare that made Tess’s eye twitch.

  KNIGHT - Heavy armor materialized above the first pedestal, rotating slowly alongside a massive sword and shield emblazoned with the Network’s logo.

  RANGER - The second pedestal showed twin pistols and light armor, all sleek lines and tactical webbing.

  OPERATOR - The third displayed a pilot’s helmet and a holographic interface showing ship controls.

  Tess walked up to the pedestals, frowning. She circled them once, then again, looking for… something. Anything else that would make more sense to select.

  “That’s it?” she said aloud. “Three classes?”

  No response. Just the ambient hum of the room’s systems and the cheerful music playing softly from hidden speakers.

  She knew there were more classes. Hundreds more. Marcus was an Engineer, Level 11, one of the best in the city. The lady who sold Tess parts, Vera Kain, was a Merchant. Her friend Kade was an Operator, sure, but there were Technicians, Medics, Artificers, Scrappers…

  She sighed and started looking around. The walls were lined with more holographic displays: testimonials from grinning adventurers, statistics about dungeon success rates (highly sanitized, she suspected), and promotional material for Network-approved gear.

  Then she spotted it: a small kiosk tucked in the corner, almost hidden behind one of the floating banners. It seemed older than the rest of the room, more utilitarian. A simple terminal with a cracked screen.

  Tess walked over and tapped the screen.

  It flickered to life, showing a basic text interface.

  TUTORIAL CLASS SELECTION SYSTEM v1.2

  AVAILABLE CLASSES: KNIGHT, RANGER, OPERATOR.

  FOR COMPLETE CLASS MANIFEST, PLEASE USE MAIN DUNGEON ENTRANCE.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  She read it again, hoping she’d misunderstood. Nope, still the same message.

  “Dammit!” She smacked the kiosk’s side, which accomplished nothing except making her hand sting. She kicked it instead. “Of course the tutorial entrance doesn’t have full access. Of course!”

  She turned back toward the elevator, already planning her route back to the surface. She’d have to go around to the main entrance, which meant dealing with actual delvers, probably paying some kind of entrance fee, definitely answering questions about why a classless nineteen-year-old wanted access to…

  The lights flickered, and Tess froze.

  “No,” she said. “No no no…”

  Another Aether surge, bigger than the last. Dane had said no one had used this entrance in six months; of course, the Tutorial was failing. The holographic banners sputtered and died while the pedestals went dark. The cheerful music cut off mid-note, and several lights above exploded in a shower of sparks.

  Every light in the tutorial lobby went out.

  For a moment, Tess stood in complete darkness, listening to systems dying around her: capacitors discharging, screens going dead, the ambient whirring of the room’s power grid fading to nothing.

  Then the emergency lighting kicked in, dim and red, barely enough to see by.

  Tess pulled out her scanner. The device’s screen showed what she already knew: total power failure. The surge had fried the entire tutorial system’s main power distribution network.

  “Oh come on!” she shouted at the ceiling, at the universe, at whatever cosmic force had decided today was the perfect day to make her life more difficult.

  The room didn’t answer, but her improved optimal scanner did.

  POWER RELAY DETECTED.

  LOCATION: MAINTENANCE ACCESS PANEL 3-B.

  DISTANCE: 12 METERS.

  Tess looked around for the white and gold repair subroutine, but it was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was off repairing something somewhere else? Or maybe it only responded to critical system failures, and a dead tutorial lobby didn’t qualify.

  Either way, she was on her own.

  Taking some tools from her belt, she walked to a panel that looked exactly like the access panels in the city, standard Network design, which meant standard Network security. She pulled out a slim rod from her toolkit, the kind she definitely wasn’t supposed to have, and inserted it into the lock mechanism.

  A twist, a click, and the panel slid open.

  She knelt down, examining the maintenance tunnel beyond. It was narrow, dark, and—she swept her scanner’s light across the opening—completely lacking emergency lighting.

  “Of course,” she muttered.

  Nothing for it, then. If the repair subroutine was going to show up, it would show up. Otherwise, if she wanted out, she had to do what she did best: fix things.

  Tess cranked up her scanner’s built-in light, took a breath, and crawled into the darkness.