[Resonance Wave (Basic) - lvl 1]

Cost: 7 mana

Harnessing the power of vibration, Resonance Wave allows the user to emit a focused pulse of energy that can match the natural frequency of structures and objects, causing them to oscillate violently for up to 15 seconds + 15 seconds per level of spell. Power and range increase with level.

It was easily the most expensive card he had in terms of mana cost, but he could see a number of uses for it. Even inside, he could use Resonance Wave to knock down ceilings and heavy objects like a vending machine, and once he left the office, there were plenty of buildings and trees and structures that he could destabilize with this.

Will wasn’t yet sure how much control the card would allow him to exert over the oscillation, but he’d taken just enough physics courses to know this would be a handy tool.

Not that he could use it yet. He was at a paltry 1 mana point right now, which meant he was going to have to wait almost ten minutes to reach the amount of power required to cast the spell.

And that was if he could even figure out how to get it into his deck. Will didn’t know if he could cast using a card that hadn’t been drawn from his deck, but he was fairly sure he couldn’t. The image was dimmer than the other cards had been, and the text was grayed out.

“Deck Box,” he declared, focusing on the passive skill.

Sure enough, a black container appeared in his left hand just as quickly as the cards did. It was metallic and cool to the touch, but it weighed almost nothing. The top of it was open, revealing the swirling black-and-white backs of the cards he’d earned so far. It fit snugly around them, and he couldn’t see the cards underneath the top one.

Will set the Resonance Wave card down, then drew the top card from the deck. It was a Chill, which was what he’d planned on swapping out anyway. He swapped the Chill for Resonance Wave, then tried to insert the latter back into the deck.

Your current maximum deck size is 3. You may not add cards until your deck size is less than 3.

The Chill card still counted as part of the deck even though he’d drawn it, he realized. After waiting a few more minutes, he tried casting it, targeting a half-finished bottle of water one of his newest coworkers had left behind the night before. It froze instantly, and the card faded to dust, entering the discard pile.

“So physically drawing a card counts the same as the Draw skill,” Will said, thinking out loud. “How do I swap a card in?”

At the word swap, a new menu appeared in front of his eyes. It looked essentially the same as the part of his status sheet that displayed his deck, but it held a few key differences—for instance, two new sections with the name Free Cards and Active Cards, which both currently displayed nothing.

Most notably, there was a blank section titled Hand. Will reached out, picking up the Resonance Wave card, and an image of the card popped into that section.

From there, a bit of fiddling was enough to find a way to swap cards. Will swapped Chill for Resonance Wave, wondering if the card in his hand would disappear.

It did not. Instead, when he looked at it again, he held the Chill card in his hand while the deck now had the Resonance Wave.

So while they weren’t in his deck, they stayed physically manifested? Will could see that getting very annoying, very fast.

“Inventory,” Will tried. “Store. Wait, no—exit store. Stash? Personal space?”

None of the commands worked, and there wasn’t exactly a handy guide to tell him more hidden commands. He really wished the tutorial being had given him more guidance than a hand-wavey “oh, you’ll figure it out.”

Well, it looked like he was going to have to carry his cards. Nothing wrong with that—he was used to it.

“Deck Box,” he said again, and the oddly light metallic cardholder disappeared.

Will backtracked to his cubicle, where he’d left both his existing deckboxes alongside his briefcase. He emptied the briefcase, then slipped Chill into one of the deckboxes, which he placed into his briefcase. Until he found a better solution, he was okay with carrying this around. He’d have preferred his backpack, but this made him feel like he was skipping work to play cards. Entirely satisfactory.

Also, it could hold his extra coffees.

With that sorted out, there was nothing else to do in his building. Will briefly weighed the idea of waiting in here until the 24 hours of Main Event 0 were up. There were about 22 and a half of those remaining, according to a slowly-decrementing time in the corner of his vision.

It would be safer, he reasoned. There were still monsters in here, but they were simple ones. He could spend the rest of his time safely grinding here now that he’d gotten the hang of things.

Just as he sat down at his desk, his decision made, the building rumbled.

Will tumbled out of his chair, catching himself with both hands before he could fall on his face. Sadly, using those two hands meant that he couldn’t catch the coffee, which spilled all over the floor.

Once the shaking stabilized, Will rose to his feet, casting a look of sorrow at his now-empty drink can. His balance felt slightly askew, like the entire building had tilted.

Had it? Had something crashed into the side of the office, knocking it off the foundations?

Whatever the case, Will concluded that it was no longer safe to just bunker down in the office. A minute passed without the building shaking again, and Will deemed it safe to start moving.

He took the stairs three at a time, keeping a hand and both eyes on the railing in case the entire office started shaking again.

Which was why he didn’t see the web until it was too late. Will was halfway between the second and first floors when a second, less intense tremor tore through the office, and though he was able to keep himself from tumbling head over feels, he didn’t catch the thin lines of the spiderweb until he hit it facefirst.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

With the amount of momentum he carried, Will couldn’t fully slow himself down before the entire front side of his body got caught up in the sticky string, which stretched but did not break under his weight. Only a quick reaction kept his arms free as he threw them behind his body, screwing his balance up even more. His feet were barely touching the stairs now.

Briefly, he wondered if his improved Dexterity stat helped with that. He sure as hell wouldn’t have thought that fast if he’d fallen down the stairs just three hours ago.

Then again, his Intelligence stat had gone up too, and Will didn’t feel that much smarter. Maybe it was because he hadn’t experienced any intellectual challenges so far?

He pushed the thought aside, focusing on his current situation. It was possible that he’d already killed the spider responsible for this, but he didn’t want to put any faith in that idea.

“Draw,” he tried to say, but his face was caught by the web. He couldn’t move his mouth enough to speak.

Draw, he thought, mentally forcing the skill to activate.

A card appeared in his left hand. Will couldn’t turn it around to see what it was, but he remembered how he’d been able to swap his cards earlier.

Deck Box. Swap.

The menu appeared in his mind again, and this time, Will focused on the section marked as Hand.

He held a Shield in his hand. With his mana back up to 6, he would be able to use it one time before he was out of power. Either that, or he could Discard and try for another. Would Resonance Wave work to get him out of this? Will didn’t want to use Magic Missile for fear of blowing his own face off if he targeted the web. Options, options…

The sound of the predator preceded the sight of it. This spider was smaller than most of the ones he’d faced so far, but its eyes glowed a soft, acidic green and its body glistened with fluid that could’ve been venom or blood.

[Hunter Spider [F] - lvl 4]

Level 4 was a pretty large jump up from everything else. Will was still level 0, even after beating the shit out of so many level 1 spiders, and he wasn’t sure if if this four-level disparity would matter a lot or a little.

Either way, he had to act. The spider was getting closer to its immobilized prey, green acid dripping off its mandibles. Will did not want anything to do with that.

Resonance Wave was too expensive to use right now. While Magic Missile might help, Will knew that Discard had a 10 second cooldown. Trying to draw Magic Missile here meant taking a fifty-fifty chance of getting an unusuable card.

And just activating Shield only delayed the inevitable

Time to try something new.

Will pushed magic power from his body into the card, activating the Shield.

At the last second before it projected itself, he used a skill.

Invert.

Instead of a simple forcefield, pale blue energy shoved, attacking instead of protecting. A burst of raw force the same size as the Shield spell replaced the spell that would’ve normally activated, exploding outwards from just in front of Will’s face.

It didn’t have a very long range, but it didn’t need one. The web trapping Will snapped under the force, and he stumbled, barely catching himself on the railing as the awkward position he’d been in threatened to tumble him forwards.

The spider hadn’t been hit by the inverted Shield, he saw, but he was free. Its biggest advantage was gone.

It hissed at him and spat. A green gob of acid flew forth from its mouth, forcing Will to jump back. The puddle sizzled on the concrete stairs.

Will considered the creature for half a second before concluding that he didn’t want to even try punching it.

He ran up the stairs, and the spider followed.

All according to plan. Whose plan it was, he had no idea.

The third floor had a fire extinguisher right next to the stairwell, which was one of the few things the company hadn’t cheaped out on. Will unhooked it from the wall, remembering the mandatory fire drills he’d been a part of too many times.

He pulled the pin, aimed the nozzle at the stairwell door, and squeezed the handle as soon as the venomous spider caught up, each of its eight legs leaving green marks behind on the concrete.

The thing hissed in rage as frigid, suffocating white gas blasted it, enveloping it in a thick white foam. Will laughed as he blasted it backward. The world was so much more fun when you could hit it.

Before it could recover, he dashed at it. With only a single mana point, he couldn’t use his cards, but he could smash its head in with the closest thing he had to a baseball bat.

The Hunter Spider didn’t just sit there and let itself die, though. As soon as he stopped the suffocating spray, it started moving, and it evaded his first attack. Rather than dodge again, it leaped for him, and Will instinctively brought his briefcase in front of him.

Just in time. Its legs scrabbled for purchase, trying to cling on, and that gave him enough time to awkwardly smack it with the fire extinguisher. It wasn’t a lethal blow, but it knocked it off of him.

Will sprayed it again, then smashed it while it was down.

It only took a single hit to break its body apart. Green gore exploded all over the stairs and the extinguisher as if the spider had been a piñata for the world’s most fucked-up birthday party.

[You have received 27 coins!]

Higher-leveled monsters offered more coins. He’d suspected that, but it was nice to see it confirmed.

[Level up!]

[1 skill point received. 500 coins received.]

[Due to Trial Runner, your stat point has been automatically assigned.]

Will tossed the bloodstained fire extinguisher aside, his mood better than ever. His first level-up was finally here! He’d struggled to kill the level 4 monster far more than he had with any of the others, so it was nice to see his efforts rewarded.

500 coins wasn’t actually that much in the grand scheme of things, but it was almost ten times as much as he’d received so far, so he would absolutely take that, thank you very much. That was enough to buy ten F-Tier cards, though he obviously wasn’t going to spend it all at once.

The skill and stat point, on the other hand, was incredibly important. The store set the price of a single skill point to 10,000 coins and a stat point to 5,000, so leveling up had earned him an effective 15,500 coins. Not that he could do anything about the stat point.

This had been fun—way more fun than anything else involving the office—and there was a lot to be gained out of going around killing stuff. Add that to the fact that the building was apparently in the process of crumbling, and Will’s decision was easy. He was going to have to leave.

Examining the skill point confirmed that it would raise a skill by one level. So far, he had the most trouble with a lack of options, and there were a couple ways to improve that.

Immediately, Will tried to increase Draw’s level.

Draw requires four skill points to advance in level.

He frowned. Seriously?

Shuffle, Invert, and Discard didn’t offer useful benefits for increasing in level until Draw leveled up, and Card Seal was already maxed out, so…

Deck Box advanced to level 2.

Your maximum deck size has increased to 5.

“Two extra cards per level, then?” Will guessed.

Nobody replied, obviously.

He reached into his briefcase—which was miraculously mostly clean—and retrieved the Chill card from the deck box within.

It was getting easier to mentally activate skills. Will only needed ten seconds or so to add the card to his deck.

As he pondered whether he should buy another card, he returned to the stairwell, taking his steps more carefully this time. No further webs turned up to hamper his progress, thankfully.

Will made it to the first floor without any further incident and opened the door. It should only be a few strides from the exit on the ground floor to the outdoors—

Destruction greeted him. Cubicles were overturned, desks flattened and torn apart. Broken electronics lay across the ground, sparks flying here and there. It looked as if a tornado had blown through the place.

But it wasn’t a tornado.

Will took a slow step back as he processed the sheer size of the thing he was looking at. Its spotted brown body was as wide as he was tall, and it stretched nearly the entire length of the floor—maybe even further.

Its head was serpentine, and even as Will watched, it smashed through a vending machine, forked tongue snaking forth and snatching the contents within.

This thing was a snake. A snake the size of a building.

[Earth Serpent [F] - lvl 24]

This, he realized, was what had been shaking the office.

He took another step back. Will felt a crunch, and he looked down to see that he’d stepped on a broken shard of glass.

The snake turned to look at him.

[Hidden Event — “Tutorial Boss”]

[Reward: 1,000 coins]

[You have encountered a boss during Main Event 0. Kill it before the event ends.]

[Penalty for failure: Death.]