"Huh, what did you just say?" said the goblin with a concerned yet surpised look at me.

"You probably heard what I said with those big green ears of yours, you green gnomme." I said while grinning at him.

"You little insolent-"

"You are the one little here, now go on with the explanation, you have no authority over players, you are just a money-grabbing geezer. Please proceed."

"Ok, I'll consider I didn't hear that. As your very smart friend said, I'm the tutorial guide, my role being to help you get acquainted with the system and help you in the early stages of the game. Our role is also to stream what you are doing to the people on the other side."

'Other side' huh, I guess you are not so important to say Cellyk, the kingdom of Orion himself, and the others who have gone through the same things as you. The only downside is that guys will be prepared when we get there, so beating them will prove difficult. It's not streaming; it's more like broadcasting; this is like a more deadly version of 'Survivor', so strategy will be the play here.

As I stood there, I saw that people were looking at me very anxiously, like I did something bad in moking that guy. Well, whatever, let's see what this guy has to say; maybe he will direct the attention towards him.

"Hey, what do you mean by streaming, and what is this other side? Is this just a show for you or what?"

It seems someone heated up; it was an upperclassman. I don't remember his name, but he stands out with that blonde hair and that phisique. I expected more people to start complaining, but I guess the complainers died.

"Please, you don't have to worry; you may not know, but you are not the first ones who got through this; different civilizations existed before you played this game, and some survived and made it to the other side."

Oh my god, this guy is applying the tactic that the best lie is the truth. Man, he left out the most important bits, but I will still toy with him through the scenarios. Why? Because it's fun and because I almost broke my PC when he gave me those riddles in the beta.

"Now, as you know, you passed the first scenario, and with that, you were designated as one of the main places, meaning that as long as you are here, passing the scenarios is your only concern."

Not really if the next scenarios are the ones I know,but okay. If he talks about a dome, shield, or barrier, we are done.

"So as a reward and because you are in a safe place, you will get a barrier around the school to keep the bad guys away."

Fuck,I knew it, preparing countermeasures. This guy is leaving the best bits out, but we will find them anyway when we start the scenario. The worst part of all of this is that we have to communicate to pass this shit, and not just us, the whole school needs to come together to make a plan, and I absolutely want nothing to do with this.

"The next scenario will start after an hour, more or less, so I will leave you with your thoughts. Bye."

Now that the green nugget is gone, let the show begin.

"Andrew, what should we do?"

"Please tell us what to do."

"Man, say something."

When I become the boss of the class, I'm not the hint button, you know, for god's sake. This is what you get when you save weaklings. But no, they are your classmates, you should save them, me and my stupid head. Arhhhhh, ok, stay calm and don't look angry.

"I say we should wait and see what happenes, if the school comes together, I'm sure we can do this."

"Are you sure? You look a bit angry, and you have a vein bulging."

Of course I have when you are so goddamn annoying.

"I'm fine, but this whole situation is very strange."

"He didn't give us a lot of hints, but the reward is nice, right?"

"The reward is strange, if we get a barrier, we will have to use it, so maybe that is what the scenario is all about."

Kate was about to say something, but she got a message posted on the school website saying that everyone should come to the auditorium. So the thing was already put in motion.

When we got there, we saw the student council president standing on the stage, getting ready to speak.

"I believe everyone is here. We all know that what we are living isn't easy, but if we work together, maybe we can end these hellish 'scenarios, as they call them. So I want every class to choose a responsible person and those persons to come to the student council in order to devise a plan to pass this. I will give you ten minutes to decide."

So we are doing some sort of round table to decide the fate of the school. But who is going to be responsible? I guess Kate is our class president but in the last 30 minutes I become very popular, so I don't know the play here. I will come out and ask to put myself out of danger, because the one who asks isn't the one chosen.

"So, who should we choose as responsible?"

"You!!!" Everyone said it immediately.

"Why me? I'm not so good with people, you know?"

"From our perspective, you are pretty good, plus you seem to be the most knowledgeable about this whole thing, so you are the best option."

They came up with pretty good arguments; I can't deny that. Man, I don't want to be the one chosen, but I guess I don't have a choice.

"Fine,but if I'm doing this, it will be my way; no objections,okay?"

"Of course, if you are the leader, the decisions you take have the same effect on you as they have on us, so you won't do anything to harm yourself."

That was kind of creepy accurate, not gonna lie, she mentioned in a phrase the nature of humans.

(What this girl said is very true; maybe I should keep an eye on her.)

All right, I forgot about you. Who the fuck you are, man? Having a voice in my head who can also possess my body means that you are either a superpower that I got from the system, which is a pretty messed-up power, if you ask me, either I have some sort of personality disorder, so tell me which is it.

It's none of those options. I have always been with you, but you suppresed me when you entered high school.

W-what? Don't tell me, but you weren't a voice back then; you were just a thought.

So what? You really believed that the twisted nature that you left behind wouldn't come back. You thought that secluding yourself and being a faceless streamer would make you a better person. Having fans that don't know who you are behind your mask aren't true fans. Now that you have a girlfriend and people who follow you, it is because of you. No, wrong. Apart from Kate, who seems to understand a part of you, the rest is just a facade. You are now respected because of your power, not because of yourself.

Shut up.

Why don't you want to remember all you went through before high school? All that bullying welled up inside you until you wanted to kill all of them, didn't you?

I said, Shut up.

You even made a plan about it, and from what I know, you didn't destroy it. Now you can do it; you can kill them all; you can destroy everything. Don't try to suppress your instinct; your mission is to destroy everything in your path,destroy those who broke you apart along with those who would want to do the same thing.

"Shut the fuck up!!"

"Andrew, are you okay?"

"What, were am, what happened?"

"You were about to leave to the student council room to concieve a plan."

"Oh,right, sorry, I'm fine. While I'm gone, can you do something for me?"

"What?"

"I would like you to find out the class or the skills everyone in the class has, especially if there is someone with a communication skill; if you can classify them in your mind, that would be very helpful in the next scenario."

"You know what the next scenario will be; you said something about the barrier being given with a purpose."

"I have a hunch, and I hope I'm wrong, but if that scenario is going to happen, I wish we were prepared, just in case."

"Sure, I will talk to then, can I assume that Albert is part of our class now?"

"He is, but I know what he is capable of, so you can leave him alone, he has fighting skills, so he has no immediate interest for me."

"What did you just said, do you think I showed you my full power.Come back here."

I left him talking and went inside the school. As I was going down those green stairs, every step I took felt heavier than the previous. If that voice is true, then this is bad. That question mark class can be something like murderous intent or something like that, something like corruption that is trying to get to the surface from the depths of my soul.

(Bingo, that's right, I am the corruption; that question mark class is corruption, and all those skills are about that, and if you can control that power, you will be stronger than anyone.)

Telling you to shut up is meaningless, so you can keep bragging. As long as you are a class, you can be controlled, so you can come in handy, but I don't want to rely on something that I refuted with all my soul all my life, so for now, just let me be if you can do that.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

(Sure, but you will need my help sooner or later, so I'll be waiting in the depths of your soul.)

I finally arrived at the student council room, passing all those hallways full of players who lost, so to speak. The sight is too bad to be put into words. And they called this a safe place; this will be even worse once the scenario starts. But there is only one good thing about safe palces, and that is side quests with good loot.

If I make those guys execute a plan to protect the school, I can search for quests to gain loot and improve my mastery of my skills.

It isn't good to be greedy, but in this situation, nobody cares about good or bad.

I opened the door and entered inside. There was the president, along with other representatives like me. It seemed that some of them hadn't arrived yet, so I took a seat and waited.

"It seems that no one from 11th grade class D is here," said the president.

The council president was a guy from the 12th grade; obviously, I don't know for sure if he was in class A or B. He was taller than me; he had 1,90 meters. He had brown hair, glasses, and a piercing gaze. Maybe he was squinting behind the glasses, but who am I to judge. Anyways, I felt responsible to let him know that no one from the D class would come, leaving aside the fact that Albert killed them all.

"No one from the 11th grade D class will come; there is only one guy alive, and he came to our class, so I will talk on his behalf if I may."

"You are from the 11th grade A class, right?"

"Yes, my name is Andrew Shade, but you probably don't know me, and the one alive from D class is Albert Reiss."

"It is true that I don't know you personally, but I heard about you being A class like me."

Oh, so he's A class. Makes sense.

"I say we should begin this meeting to be able to make a plan in time for the scenario, whatever that may be."

When we officially started the meeting, I put my hands in my pockets and put my legs on the table.

"What are you doing?" said the president with a puzzling look on his face.

"I put my legs on the table; isn't that obvious?"

"Why?"

"Well, I always wanted to do that in public, and since it's the end of the world, I thought why not?"

"We don't know it's the end of the world."

"Come on, you don't believe that yourself. Everyone saw what happened, and since this is like a reality show, we won't get out too soon."

"That may be true, but those are just assumptions; we need concrete evidence."

"If we are doing things based only on evidence, then this meeting is useless. We don't know the scenario, but we want to create a plan,or do you know more than us?"

"The guy is right, this plan was created on our assumptions, and I guess at this point, everything is possible." said a guy who was the representative of an upperclass, if I may guess.

"That's true, so does anyone have an idea of what the next scenario can be?"

Everyone gave their opinions on the scenario until it was my turn.

"What do you think about this?"

"I'm not sure, but I think the key stands in the barrier."

"The barrier—what about it?"

"Is someone here good at video games?"

"I am pretty good; I play games a lot," said the guy who stood up for me before.

"Well, you know in shooter games when you respawn and you are invincible for a few seconds?"

"Yes, it is some sort of barrier around you to not get caught in the crossfire."

"And you know those 'protect the castle' games, when you have waves of enemies and have to protect an objective, and that objective has a barrier before it can take damage?"

"There are a lot of those types of games. Wait, you are saying this barrier was given for a purpose in the next scenario."

"Precisely, this is a death game, broadcased to some godly creatures, so it won't be fun if we get an invincible shield and we just try to solve the aftermath of a disaster. This is no 'Big Brother' show where they want to see our emotions after we are put out of our comfort zone. They will hit us with an even worse scenario, we will be hit again and again until we adapt and conquer the scenario. This is what this is like, in my opinion."

"I can't deny that thought process, but you say we will be hit with waves of monsters?"

"I'm not sure if there will be waves, but we will be hit with something, and we will need that barrier. We need to find the barrier source, a crystal of something like that, and we need people who have the energy or battery-type skill to power energy into the source to make the barrier sturdy at times of impact, and we need people who can put up a network to be able to communicate with each other."

"It's good to create roles for everyone, to have an order of things, even if we don't get hit with what you said, it will make things easier."

"And don't forget what that badger or goblin said—that he will give us time to get used to how the system works."

"So the time before the scenario is for preparations for the scenario."

"Yes, that's what I believe, at least. Now I will go to see what everyone in my class has as skills and if they are useful for this scenario."

"We need to go to our classes and put in motion the plan, but how will we speak to each other?"

"If the signal is down on phones, we can just buy something from the shop."

"What shop? This game has a shop."

"Yes, just say open shop, and you can buy something from there, but I say we better see if someone has a communication skill to not waste coins, but you can do what you want."

I left the room and walked slowly to my classroom. We had little under half an hour to put the plan into motion. I need to give everyone work to be able to do some side quests for XP, coins, and loot.

I arrived at my class, and it seemed everyone was waiting for me to arrive.

"So how did it work?"

They started to assault me with questions. I told them that we created a plan according to the scenario and what they needed to do for it to work.

"I asked the other ones for their skills, and we have someone with a comms skill."

"That's incredible; who is it?"

"It's Alexia, but she doesn't know how to use the skill."

"Ok, gather everyone; I will give you a quick lesson on how to use your skills."

When everyone gathered, I showed them how I summoned my katana and began explaining how this works in five simple steps.

"So we have:

1. To activate a skill, you need to know its name and think about activating it. It's like when you want to do something. I guess you know how to see your skills; you just need to think about activating character information, and you'll see it.

2. A skill is an ability derived from your class, so the rarer the class, the stronger the skill.

3. A skill gets stronger, and you can use it longer based on mastery. Mastery can be increased when you use the skill. So don't worry if you can't do much or get tired at first; if you use the skill repeatedly, you will get better.

4. Skills become stronger when you do the same thing, so when you get coins from scenarios of other missions that might appear, try to use them to upgrade your stats.

5. And lastly, you can probably create or obtain skills along the way, and that may be good if you understand whether to keep or sell them, but this last one is just speculation on my part.

Now you can train your skills and divide yourself if you think you have skills that are the same, like fighters, healers, and things like that."

Now that we have finished this, I can go back to finding side quests. I left the class, but Albert was waiting outside.

"You can't fool me with that; what's your purpose in training them?"

"For now, pass the scenario; in the future, they might get useful. By the way, I have something only you can do at the moment."

"What?"

"I spoke with Kate, and she will take the emmiters to the crystal spot when that is found; meanwhile, I need your bomb skill with something."

"Sounds interesting; spit it out."

After I spoke to Albert, I went to the school basement, and a side quest appeared.

[Quest- info]

The underground is full of two-star monsters that want to get out. Defeat them in order to complete the quest.]

[Reward: 5000 coins and what you find there]

It seems quests don't have failure penalties.

[System message]

What is this?

[Because you played the beta, you got 20.000 coins and 2 chests with guaranteed epic rarity or higher items.]

Nice; this might get fun. Let's open this.