If you’d asked me five years ago where I thought I’d be today, slumming in the Vents, hunched over an old summer school journal, and sleeping back-to-back with my ex’s contract-killer sister would not have been the answer. But it’s what I have to work with.

Obviously, things aren’t so hot these days. A lot has changed since I wrote this journal in the first place. I’m older, for one. Way taller. Still got the freckles, still got the arm thing. Oh, and I’m trapped a world away from home currently nursing a hole in my shoulder, two broken ribs, and an arm nearly cut to the bone. My window view is smoggy undercity and the concrete wall of the alley next door. I haven’t seen the sun in, oh, a few weeks. Currently running on four hours of sleep per night, if I can even manage that. And to top it all off, my only ally- my only anyone- is a girl with orders to bring me to the throne of the Champion, dead or alive. Her brother, the boy who I thought I was going to grow old with, who betrayed me and left me to die, is that tyrant’s premier apprentice. His name is Thane. And he is the best fighter I know. 

Thane left me with these wounds last time we fought, left Cal with worse for her rebellion, and sent us both fleeing into the lawless undercity of the capital. He’s hunting me as I write this. 

You could say I’m desperate.

There was a time in the past where I could beat Thane in a fight, and it was about a decade ago in my father’s garden back home in the outskirts of the Section. Akena, out near the beaches, better place than the Vents by leagues. You can thank said father’s golden, heroic heart for why that’s no longer the case. Dad had a talent for raising monsters of combat. I am one of them. Thane was his best. There is no path to escaping my current situation that doesn’t go through him. And seeing as going out and practicing in the underground arenas isn’t an option in my condition, I have to sharpen myself in other ways.

So it’s back to the books. Just like when I was little. All those years in the big house by the sea, all by myself, I didn’t have much to do but read when Thane or Dad weren’t around. I read anything I could get my hand on.. Writing isn’t exactly my forte- arm thing, remember?- but I dictated dozens of hours of notes and bits that I gleaned from old combat manuals, technical textbooks on the eighteen classes, and the history of the JOYs into this journal. 

Destiny really does have a sense of humor. I made this book to help my younger self beat Thane. So it’s… funny, in a kinda morbid way, that if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the rollercoaster of my teenage years, it’s my reason for coming back to it.

There’s no better place to start than where everything in my world starts: the JOYs. I don’t think there’s a person on the planet who doesn’t use one every minute of every day. Who’d turn down free access to superhuman powers that you get to pick yourself? Exactly. Even though the powers given by JOYs were originally geared towards combat, as the saying goes, a campfire’s just as warm if you use a lighter or a human hand. Though the translation doesn’t hit quite as hard as the original.

Combat is the natural order of things. Our social and political hierarchy is predicated on it. Which is why ever since the Creators disappeared and our history began seven hundred years ago, my world has been ordered into a gladiocracy: a society ruled by its strongest warriors.

The specific organization of those strongest warriors changes depending on the Section you’re in- they’re like our territories, each ruled by a different Champion. My Section, Section G, is one of the few that can trace some of its culture to the old era before the Creators. Here in the capital, pro fighters are celebrities who set trends in fashion, class metas, and dominate the news. We have two professional leagues with twenty fighters each, the minor and major leagues, and progress up and down those ranks is determined by simple combat record. The twentieth and last-place rank of the minor league is a position anyone in the Section can walk into the Metro Blockhouse and make a challenge for. Believe me when I say there’s a depressingly high percentage of anyone who thinks they have the skills to last more than a few seconds against a pro who’s devoted their entire life to the art of one-on-one combat.

Spoiler alert: they do not.

At the top of the leagues is our Champion, the strongest fighter in the entire Section. Anything he says is law. Not for political reasons, but because there’s a certain amount of practicality in not dissenting against a fighter who can wipe entire cities off the map. People who do, end up like me. Beat to shit and couch surfing in the Vents.

All the power the Champion wields comes from his JOY, just as all the power I do comes from mine. JOYs are palm-sized metal spheres packed with holoprojectors, a universal interface with the digital world. Phone, wallet, mobile projector, et cetera et cetera- makes sense why everyone carries one. Their real appeal though, is the FRAY system. Couple taps on the screen twines the neural link to your brain and turns a human into a walking weapon with their own customized suite of abilities. Here’s what mine looks like:

TETSUKA TAYLOR MONS (pref: 'TAY') MARTIAL ARTIST KI FIGHTER MYTHO

There’s no inherent power to the abilities JOYs give. There’s not like a… I dunno, Level 2 Martial Artist and a Level 1, and the two is just flat-out better. The power a JOY gives just is. It doesn’t pilot things for you. In a way, it’s better to just think of it as giving you access to things you can do. It’s like if ‘Human’ were a class: all Humans have the capability to do a standing backflip, but it takes a decent amount of training and focus to actually pull one off. 

In that way, everyone who uses a JOY is equal. Even the Champion. Even me. It’s the underpinning idea of a gladiocracy: if everyone is armed with the same potential, then anyone could be the strongest. It’s what you do with your abilities, and how you combine them, that sets apart the best from the not-best.

Sure, it’s easy enough to make yourself a Metal Elemental. But it’s not easy to be Gami.

The powers that a JOY can give are separated into eighteen distinct classes, which apply combinations of natural enhancements and general capabilities to your body via the neural link. Each of the eighteen classes represents a different facet of combat. Some grant arms and armaments, others give abilities that extend beyond the supernatural. Elementals control the primal forces of nature. Duelists are walking armories of melee weaponry. Psis tamper with the mind. Martial artists… well, we punch things. The twist is that you can only ever use three classes at a time. It’s the one built-in limit to the JOYs that everyone has to play by.

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A decent chunk of the population just uses their JOYs to augment their day to day lives, and they don’t care about fighting at all. They’re typically single-classers. Only choosing one and getting the hang of some of its abilities, like someone who only weightlifts. If you do weightlifting and gymnastics, to continue the example, that’s what it’s like to be a double-classer. It’s a significantly higher investment of time and effort to train both to functional levels, versus someone who only uses a single class. The biggest demographic of casual fighters dip into two classes with some sort of synergy. But if you’re set on making a profession out of it, either through the combat colleges or just to make money by fighting for something other than the leagues, you’re going to be triple classing. It’s real rare that you’ll see anyone even in the Sectional minor league running only two classes. Even if your third class is just relegated to giving defensive buffs, that extra coverage can mean the difference between getting mind-slaved by a Psi or shaking off their control long enough to land the winning shot. If someone ever made it to the pro scene with only a single class, they’d be the best fighter in the Section by a long shot. It’s like winning with a hand tied behind your back.

Some people think that the three-class limit was imposed by the Creators because anything more was frying people’s brains. Others that it just made for a fun challenge. There’s even some people who say it was a programming mistake. I never gave it much thought. Three’s enough for me.

Outside of the classroom, any fighter worth their salt treats each class as an individual unit with its own counterplay and nuance. But when you’re introducing them at school and helping kids pick their first classes, they’re not all that great at understanding high-level synergistic potential. They want to be like that guy they saw on the stream the other night. Or they just want something that will let them hard-counter someone on the playground. Or they just want to copy Dad’s classes. Heh.

For that purpose, it’s handy to arrange some of the classes into different organizational buckets due to the similarities they share. If you pick out of the same bucket more than once, typically you’re not getting nearly as much potential as if you picked out of a different bucket- and in some cases it can even be a detriment. Ki Fighter and Elemental, for example. I’ve heard they use the same neural cues of willpower to help guide their abilities. If you take both, you might start crossing wires in the middle of a fight. Same with Duelist and Gunslinger; you only have so many hands. Still, there’s ways to make anything work.

The go-to starter classes are called the Cores. They’re the three mundane combat affinities: Martial Artist for hand-to-hand combat styles, Duelist can summon any melee weaponry from a virtual armory using their JOY, and Gunslinger can do the same with anything ranged. It’s a good bet that if you don’t know someone’s classes, they’re bringing at least one of these. Especially in my Section. Martial Artists are- well, were- our bread-and-butter warriors.

Next up is the big three of iconic powersets, the Shapes. Shape-type classes use non-physical resource like ki or mana and convert it into new shapes, attacks, and more. Most popular in the meta of the past couple years is Elemental, which gives you free control over a single element each time you pick the class. Beyond the usual four suspects, it also includes thinks like Metal, Gravity, and Shadow. Ki Fighters like me use our stamina and the life energy present in the world as fuel for showstopping moves, and we can fly. Magus has an internal reservoir of mana that they use to cast spells in a variety of ways, both spellbook and non. They can also make their own spells. Not really my type of class. It’s for thinkers, not cannonballs.

Influence classes have the power in the name. Biohancers influence the body, typically for healing. They’ve got a built-in heartbeat radar and triage sense, and they can also amp up the body in ways that mimic some functions of other classes. Mytho is for influence of the spirit. They’re force multipliers who imbue the nearby areas with auras of everything from bloodlust to alertness to happiness, and they typically have some angelic or demonic outward sign; like my glowing skin. For influence of the mind, you’ve got the class with the worst reputation of all: Psi. While Psi can technically just be used for telekinetics, the amount of invisible and sinister powers it has- mind control, emotional influence to name a few- make it one of the most dangerous classes. 

Back inthe physical, Augment classes are for people who want to point-build their way to a custom body or machine. Mecha is for anything on the robotic side- anything from a fully robotic body to a Titan you can hop in and drive- and Modd is for the physical side. People call it the Catears class as slang, and if you browse the Net later in the night, you’d get why pretty quick. But Modd is also one of the most flexible classes. Gami, our Champion, uses it to have a body that’s just a blob of metal. It can also give you natural weapons or transform you into an entirely nonhuman form.

Adjacent to that are the Build classes: Innovator, Tamer, and Saboteur. Innovators create and modify technology, whether preexisting or from scratch. Being Innovator-classed is practically a requirement for anyone looking to enter a tech-related field. Pretty much everything we use in modern society was made by Innovators. Saboteurs, on the other hand, are incredible at destroying things. Like Gunslingers, they get to choose from a special armory of equipment that includes all the handheld and launchable explosives mankind has ever thought up, and a few they didn’t. The cutest of the bunch are definitely Tamers. It’s the pet class. You get your own creature (or creatures), get to trick them out however you like, and they even learn with you through their heuristics. It might be the only class that has any kind of scaling feature, because those animals can get smart.

Last on the list are the Enhancers. They’re grab-bag classes that have much higher natural enhancements, in exchange for less access to new abilities. Guardians are extremely durable and specialize in barrier-type abilities, which tend to synergize with Duelist and the more grounded Elemental classes. Assassins have a natural weakpoint sense, hit the ground with a fraction of their weight when they fall, and have really cranked-up noise suppression on many things they do. They also get to select from a limited version of the Duelist armory that includes small thrown weapons. And poisons. Can’t forget those. Hunter brings up the rear as the natural-combat and tracking class. It’s great for using extra natural weapons from the Modd class, or just for finding people who don’t want to be found.

By now, I imagine you’re counting all of those up and realizing that we’re still one short. It’s for a reason.

That class is called Shifter. It doesn’t fit into any bucket. And it is the only one Thane uses.