Dylan collapsed onto a white, faintly luminescent surface. It was smooth and cool to the touch. He closed his eyes and let it grace his cheek as he laid there, trying not to hyperventilate. He’d just escaped, but his panic was only now beginning to manifest.

The fight was bad.

He’d been out of his depth. Even though the monster had been relatively simple, for anyone without a class, it was a disaster.

Even still. Even knowing that facing the beast would have always been a desperate struggle, he also knew that he hadn’t made things any easier on himself.

He’d made so many mistakes. From his initial tactics to his first attack, from the way he’d let himself get hit to the way he’d let himself and the girl get separated. Every move was full of flaws.

Alyssa, he thought. Her name is Alyssa.

He’d be dead without her; he should at least start using her name again.

Dylan clenched his fist and began to push himself off the ground. He took a shuddering breath and clung to the words in front of him. Even behind his closed eyes, he could still make out the text.

[System Tutorial has begun. Please approach the Awakening Stone.]

Proof that he’d really made it out alive. Proof that she should have too.

He gently moved his injured shoulder, but was surprised to find it completely healed. Opening his eyes to inspect it, he saw fresh skin. If it weren’t for the strips of torn leather fraying from his bloodstained armor, it would be as if nothing had happened.

Dylan stared. For an indeterminate moment, he was lost in the phantom pain of his shoulder being ripped open, mind drifting back into the chaos of the fight.

His derailing thoughts were eventually interrupted by another flash of text.

[Please approach the Awakening Stone.]

He shook his head and looked around.

The room was as he expected.

White square tiles covered every surface. They were large, just over three feet to a side, and were emitting a gentle glow that was enough to comfortably light the space around them. The room looked to be about the size of his school classroom, but he knew that was an illusion. Based on what he’d heard from those who’d been initiated before him, the room could change to be whatever size the System wanted.

His father had once told him a story about his uncle. When he’d gone through the Tutorial, he’d tried to test the room and sprinted at one of the walls. Even after getting winded and needing to rest, the man didn’t give up. He began a steady jog that he could maintain for hours, but when he turned around to see how far he’d come, he found himself only a dozen steps away from the room’s center.

Dylan didn’t know how true the story was, but he wasn’t particularly interested in testing it to find out. Instead, he turned his gaze to focus on the room’s only distinguishing feature.

A pillar made of a solid white substance was erected in the center of room. It was hard to tell if it was rock or metal, seeming to shift between the two. At its peak was stone. It was black, but other colors seemed to flow in and out of it like water. The Awakening Stone.

The entity that would help shape his future.

Once he touched it, he would be initiated into the System and gain his class.

From then on, everything would change.

His father had become a Warrior. With intensive training, strict discipline, and a few lucky encounters he’d made himself strong enough to become a squad leader in the city guard.

His mother was an Herbalist. A noncombat class with skills that helped her cultivate special plants needed by Fairbasin’s largest apothecary.

His brother though…

When Eric touched the stone, he’d awakened as an Adaptive Bondsmith. A rare and highly sought-after class that eventually helped him enter the Asheford National Academy. He had the ability to create and enchant gear that could both bind itself to and modify its attributes for any user, regardless of class or unique abilities. A truly customized piece of equipment tailored specifically to the individual. The adaptation process even had the power interact with its user’s class mechanics, which was otherwise only possible through System rewards.

When it came to gear customization, Adaptive Bondsmiths were unmatched. Once bound, a Bondsmith’s work could even amplify unique class features the user kept hidden from all but the System itself.

No two people truly had the same abilities. Because of special rewards and growth opportunities, even people with the same initial class would become noticeably different as they began to advance through the tiers. Not to mention all the rare and unique class variations the Awakening Stone could produce.

Getting individually customized gear was already difficult and costly as it was for those who hired more traditional crafting classes; for those looking for a Bondsmith’s work, they needed to overcome the additional hurdle of extreme scarcity.

When Eric finished the Tutorial, Dylan knew that his brother’s abilities would be valuable, but knowing something is different from experiencing it.

It wasn’t long before the people around him began to change. Even before Eric was accepted by ANA, people in Fairbasin would treat him differently. Those who used to be indifferent would suddenly flatter. Those who used to be hostile would try to make amends.

Eric dealt with everything with a calm smile, but Dylan had more trouble.

He’d always been a little isolated from his peers. There was no animosity on either side, but there was no real comradery either. When his classmates began to get closer to him, Dylan was excited. He’d had trouble taking the initiative in making friends in the past, often missing the best times to get close to those around him, and now those same people were taking the initiative to get close to him. He was happy.

But it wasn’t long before he realized that most of their conversations would somehow gravitate toward Eric. When Dylan saw how the rest of the town was acting around his brother, he figured out what was going on. He was upset, but he decided to not immediately do anything. He wanted to wait until after Eric had left to further his studies to see how they’d behave. He wanted to know if, without his brother there to act as the object of everyone’s greed, they could see him for him. For Dylan. He wanted to know if they saw him as anything more than a conduit to the future promise of adaptive gear.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

They didn’t.

While it happened less often, many conversations would still subtly revolve around Eric. Dylan was tired. He didn’t want to continue being used, but he also didn’t want to break the peace. So, he began to mentally distance himself. In his mind, he would no longer call them by their names. To them, he wasn’t really Dylan; he was simply the Bondsmith’s brother. Why should he view them any differently?

He felt silly now. He realized that, despite thinking himself grown, he’d still been a child playing childish games.

They had impure motives when trying to get close to him and were in the wrong for trying to use him to take advantage of his brother. But he was wrong too. He’d dehumanized them, shunting their names away from his active mind, simply referring to them as the boy or the girl. He’d tried not to let his attitude toward them show, but he doubted he’d truly succeeded.

After all, all actions stem from the mind, and he’d made a conscious choice to view them as lesser. He vowed to never do that again.

Recognize their dubious intentions. Recognize his own dubious thoughts.

Face everyone and everything directly.

Whoever’s left…

[Approach the Awakening Stone.]

The System’s prompt once again ferried Dylan back from his drifting mind.

He walked forward.

As he approached, Dylan noticed that the stone’s height was positioned exactly at his heart. One of the System’s peculiarities. No matter who entered the Tutorial, the Awakening Stone would always meet their heart.

Everyone he knew talked about their experience in the same way. As they approached the stone, they would feel a warm breath caress their bodies, calming their minds and relaxing their muscles.

For Dylan, it was different.

The air around him was still warm, but it was neither calming nor relaxing. It felt sharp, setting his nerves on fire. Maybe he was still on edge from the fight with the welf. Maybe he was too worried about the aftermath of the dungeon break. But he couldn’t find the feeling everyone else had described.

He felt power. He felt danger.

It wasn’t malice; it was simply the breath of something that was so far beyond him that his mind couldn’t comprehend it in any way other than a primal sense of fear.

It was the breath of the System.

His head remained still, but his eyes darted around the room. Nothing.

Dylan continued forward.

Prickling heat roiled across his skin as Dylan arrived at the pillar.

He looked down on the Awakening Stone before quickly shutting his eyes.

Where the rest of his family had simply described a shining black stone radiating a calming heat, Dylan saw chaos. What seemed like flowing colors at distance were now complex streams of mana performing a frenzied dance.

The front of his head began to hurt. He somehow knew that the mess he saw was actually precise and ordered. It was all governed by a series of rules. Very important rules. But because he couldn’t grasp the outermost edge of even a single one of those rules, the mere act of looking at that mana could cripple him.

It reminded him of the patterns he’d seen in the sky just before the dungeon break, only infinitely more complex.

He didn’t know why he was seeing these things, but he felt they were simultaneously the most important part of his life and the one thing he would give everything to avoid.

He wanted…

He didn’t…

[Place your hands on either side of the Awakening Stone.]

Dylan jolted awake, blood rushing down his nose.

Controlling the instinct to open his eyes, he shook his head and blindly reached forward.

Despite the heat in the air, the stone was cool, like the tile beneath him. A comfortable tingling sensation ran through his body and a screen appeared in the darkness before him.

[Class Options]

[1. Warrior]

[2. Guardian]

[3. Random]

Shit, Dylan cursed.

The Awakening Stone always presented a few options to choose from, and one of them was always random. The rest, experts hypothesized, appeared based on a combination of an individual’s aptitudes, aspirations, and intentions. While there were often surprises on the list, most options followed the accepted pattern.

Once the class choices were presented, all a person had to do was mentally select one to get a more detailed summary of its features. Select the same one twice in a row, and the class was finalized.

A Warrior was a melee combatant. The class had a good balance of offensive and defensive features, and with some lucky System rewards, it could specialize in some interesting directions.

It was no surprise to Dylan that Warrior was one of his class options. His father was a Warrior, and he’d been training him and Eric since they were young. He’d taught them both about his Warrior skills and how to handle many of the common weapons of the class.

The problem was that Dylan wasn’t particularly good at any of it.

The training kept him fit, but the kind of fighting Warriors specialized in was something Dylan had struggled with time and again.

More importantly, it was something he didn’t enjoy.

Choosing a class was for life, and he’d seen the effect making the wrong choice could have on people.

He decided to pass on Warrior.

And as much as he didn’t want the be a Warrior, he wanted to be a Guardian less. It took his least favorite aspect of Warrior combat and made it into its core tenet. Getting hit.

The class specialized in attracting attention and taking damage in order to protect others.

Dylan guessed the option had appeared because of the remnants of his mindset from the battle with the welf. He’d been focused on blocking the thing and protecting Alyssa so that she could protect them both with the shield.

Though, for all that the fight might have made the option appear, it also made him decisively choose to give it up. Anything he could do to avoid that kind of experience again, he would do.

Even if that meant leaving things to fate.

There was nothing else to it.

Honestly, he would rather accept a noncombat class over the uncertainty brought by choosing random, but he didn’t have any of those available. He’d also learned a bit about herbalism from his mother, but he guessed that his state of mind after coming here had been too focused on fighting for the Awakening Stone to give him anything peaceful.

So, an uncertain future it was.

Taking a deep breath, Dylan chose.

The other lines of text flickered out and a single word remained.

[Random]

The air around him exploded. Though he couldn’t see it, he felt coils of mana erupt from the stone in his hands, flowing through all corners of the white room. They twined around him before rushing through the center of his forehead. His neck was pushed back, and streams of mana began to pour through him.

They felt alive.

Each one was distinct, carrying its own characteristics, its own flavor. Classes. Or the mechanisms that governed them. Dylan didn’t quite know. He simply let himself float at the center of the current.

Suddenly, something called to him, tugging at his mind. He instinctively tugged back.

Breath rushed from his body as he staggered forward against the Awakening Stone, leaning heavily against its pillar. He felt his mind bend. A fishing pole pulling against the might of a whale. He felt his connection to the thing deepen, and despite the struggle on both sides, they were already inextricably bound.

Either he claimed it as his own or lost himself in the attempt.

He began to focus. Calling his mind back from the countless streams. Concentrating on just the one he’d chosen.

Or had it chosen him?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was bringing it back. Making it his.

He gave the stream of mana a mental tug. It moved closer. He did it again.

Little by little, he pulled it back, and little by little, his body collapsed. Sweat pooled on the tile around him; blood ran freely from his nose, dripping down his chin to create new stains on the already messy leather armor.

Dylan slipped forward, practically hugging the pillar. His only support. His head swayed down, smashing into the Awakening Stone, and it was as if something had opened.

The painful tug-of-war became a rushing torrent. The stream of mana flew toward him and entered his mind.

Just as he succeeded, he finally saw it. The stream was composed of those same patterns. The ones that made his head hurt.

It rotated around his consciousness, and slowly began to dissolve. Bringing with it agony.

Dylan could no longer endure. He fainted.

Behind his unseeing eyes a new message from the System appeared.

[Congratulations on Random Class Selection: Deckmaster.]