The heavy metal butt of the spear tapped against the hardwood floor. It wasn’t loud but also not quiet either. The metallic click cut straight through the anxious murmur of the students like a gunshot.
Instantly, several nearby students snapped their heads around. Their eyes widened in a mixture of disbelief and instinctual alarm, their gazes darting rapidly from Michael’s unnervingly calm expression to the weapon he held. It was a spear, a solid two meters of polished ash-wood with a triangular iron tip. A spear just like the system had announced.
„Hey… dude, where the hell did you get that?“ a guy from the upper desks asked. His voice trembled as he pointed a shaky finger at the cold iron tip. „How did you do that? Was that… was that from the text broadcast? The text in our heads?“
„Is that a real weapon? Like, an actual, sharp weapon?“ the girl sitting directly next to him chimed in. The initial confusion in her voice was rapidly evaporating. „What did you press? My screen just says ‚Inventory,‘ but I’ve been trying to tap it for a minute and nothing is happening! Why isn’t it working?!“
Michael didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slowly surveyed the sea of pale, uncomprehending faces filling the tiered rows of the auditorium. It was a pathetic sight. These were top-tier university students, some of the brightest minds of their generation, yet they were utterly paralyzed by the sudden breakdown of reality.
His deeply ingrained gamer instincts, forged through thousands of hours of high-stakes survival games, urged at him to ignore them entirely. In any true survival scenario, dead weight wasn’t just a nuisance—it was a lethal liability. Any second spent playing the benevolent tutor, explaining mechanics, or holding the hands of terrified civilians was time actively stolen from his own progression. He had absolutely no desire to play the righteous hero, nor did he want a crowd of helpless dependents anchoring him down, dragging him into the mud when things inevitably went from bad to worse.
Yet, he could guess what would happen next. If the system and the weapon were real, the next thing to happen would be…
As he looked at the wide, terrified eyes of the students, a baseline shred of basic human responsibility checked his harsh pragmatism. He didn’t want to play the savior, but he also didn’t want the deaths of these clueless, ordinary people weighing on his conscience simply because he had chosen to remain completely silent when a few simple words might save them.
„Focus on the word ‚Inventory‘ in your mind,“ Michael said. „Don’t try to look at it with your physical eyes, and stop waving your hands around like idiots. Just command it mentally. Think about retrieving the item stored inside. Whatever is happening out there, it’s completely real. Stop staring at your useless phones, get your heads straight, and prepare yourselves for the worst.“
He didn’t wait to see if they actually understood or if they would just keep panicking. Gripping the sturdy ash-wood shaft with both hands, Michael turned away from his seat and faced the tiered steps. His eyes were locked on the heavy, reinforced double doors at the bottom of the lecture hall. His immediate goal was simple: get to those doors, open them, and scout the situation in the hallway outside to determine his next move.
But he didn’t even make it past his own row.
Without warning, a sudden, violent tear ripped through the fabric of the air itself, directly above the middle section of the lecture desks. Space seemed to fracture like brittle glass under a hammer, peeled back by an invisible, localized, and immensely powerful force. A swirling, chaotic vortex of pitch-black energy and unstable, purple light manifested out of thin air, hovering suspended a few meters above the wooden writing surfaces.
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The temperature in the massive room plummeted instantly, dropping so fast that Michael could see his own breath misting in the sudden, unnatural chill.
While the surrounding students screamed in terror, scrambling backward in a chaotic frenzy, tumbling over overturned chairs and dropping their expensive laptops in a desperate bid to escape the spatial anomaly, Michael’s eyes locked onto the rift. His heart started beating faster. It accelerated, pumping blood through his veins with a lot of adrenaline.
*A spawn portal.*
He knew exactly what was about to happen. He had seen this such mechanics a lot of times across a dozen different virtual worlds. In every game he had ever mastered, a spatial portal opening up directly inside a designated starting zone meant only one thing: the game was officially starting, and the first wave of active threats would be spawning in.
Instead of retreating or cowering like the rest of the three hundred students, Michael tightened his grip on the spear. He lowered his center of gravity, and lunged into a full sprint straight toward the pulsating purple tear. He didn’t want to wait for whatever was inside to find its bearings. He needed to choke the spawn point and eliminate the enemy before it could adapt to the environment and utilize its mobility.
A heavy, shifting shadow detached itself from the center of the purple vortex.
It dropped like a stone, landing with a dull thud onto the wooden desk below. The creature was roughly the size of a large timber wolf, but its anatomy was distinctly distorted, alien, and deeply unsettling. It was a four-legged, sleek entity that resembled a grotesque cross between a starved, skeletal hound and a predatory, long-eared fox. Its dense fur was entirely black, and its eyes burned with an unsettling, deeply predatory crimson light. Opening its elongated jaws to reveal multiple rows of jagged, translucent, needle-sharp teeth, it let out a low, guttural hiss that literally vibrated through the metal structure of the room and the bones of every person in the room.
The lecture hall erupted into absolute panic. Raw, throat-shredding shrieks echoed off the high ceiling as the students finally faced the physical reality of the materialized horror. The illusion of safety was shattered forever.
But Michael didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second.
The iron tip of the recruit’s spear tore through the air, driven forward by the full momentum of his sprint. It struck before the monster even registered the attack. It was obviously not expecting such an early attack. Michael possessed absolutely no information, or anatomical knowledge regarding this alien hound-fox hybrid, so he relied on the fundamental logic of anatomy facing an unknown being: he aimed directly for the undisputed spot—the center of the head.
The heavy iron spearhead pierced straight through the creature’s skull, shattering the bone before the beast could even fully shift its weight. A wet, sickening crunch echoed out above the screams of the crowd. The crimson light in the beast’s eyes snuffed out instantly. It slumped forward onto the desk, completely dead before its alien brain could even process the fact that the encounter had begun.
A sharp, chime-like digital ping resonated directly inside the confines of Michael’s mind, and a rapid barrage of glowing text flashed vividly onto his retinas:
[You have killed a Hound-Fox (Level 1)]
[You have received 10 Experience Points]
[WORLD FIRST ACHIEVEMENT: ‚First Blood‘ unlocked. ]
[Notice: You are the first human globally to eliminate an external threat entity.]
Michael didn’t have a single second to dissect the implications of those notifications, let alone marvel at the mind-boggling fact that he was currently sitting at the absolute top of a global leaderboard, if there was one. The purple rift above the desks pulsed violently once more, expanding outward as it discharged another wave of spatial energy.
The second monster was already crossing over.
Michael didn’t waste time waiting for it to hit the ground. As the second black hound-fox came tumbling down from the chaotic depths of the portal, Michael braced his back foot firmly against the metal frame of a lecture chair, stabilizing his core, and thrust the two-meter spear upward into the air.
The iron point caught the descending creature cleanly in the center of its throat mid-air. The brutal momentum of its own downward descent did the rest of the work, driving the sharp blade deep into its flesh, tearing through its body, and shattering its upper spine.
[You have killed a Hound-Fox (Level 1)]
[You have received 10 Experience Points]
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