Centuria Books · I Ate the Tutorial Boss
I Ate the Tutorial Boss — Read the First Chapter
Morrow is a monster. Amelia thinks he’s big-brother material.
Chapter 1 — Please Kill the Registered Adult
Morrow grew a middle finger before the rest of his hand. He answered the door’s request to wait by forcing it through the keyhole, hooking the latch and pulling until the mechanism snapped inside. Warm air escaped into the dead universe, carrying cooked fat, rusty iron, and the unmistakable stink of a badly washed man.
Six hours without people had quite spoiled the pleasure of being alive. Morrow inhaled again, searching for the delicious stink beneath the cooking.
His other hand assembled from a fan of loose bones against the doorframe. Skin stretched over the knuckles; he tested each joint against his palm before accepting the arrangement. The five fingers came with one thumb too many, so he ate the spare before starting on his face.
“Occupied,” a man called as the door shuddered against Morrow’s grip.
“Temporarily,” Morrow replied through a fold in his collar, since his face remained unfinished.
Gold print burned across the wood and hung flat in the air before him.
NEW VESSEL REGISTERED
MORROW VEYLE — EMBODIED LEVEL 1
CLASS: UNASSIGNED
HP: 106/106 | MP: 132/132 | STAMINA: 100/100
Embodied Level measures this vessel.
Prior inheritance remains separately held.
He hauled the door open another inch and received a knife beneath his ribs. The intrusion spoiled a piece of himself on which he had worked rather hard. The blade penetrated deeper, sending a sharp sting up his chest. He had included pain—what a fucking indulgence.
The man tried to twist the knife, but Morrow hardened around it and held the blade fast.
“Keep that still. I am using it.”
“Get back!” the man shouted, shoving against him and making an excellent handle of his own arm.
Morrow dragged his torso toward the anchored knife until the last of him escaped the darkness. Legs assembled beneath him, followed by boots and the sweeping black length of his coat. Violet stars drifted across the fabric while the door hammered against his unfinished shoulder. Whatever awaited him beyond this room would meet somebody properly dressed.
He finished his mouth, added teeth, and smiled at the knife hand.
“You’re doing it wrong,” said a small voice from below it.
A child occupied a wooden stool beneath the man’s thick arm, purple curls brushing her plum cardigan. An iron hook pinned the back of her shirt to the wall. She struggled with the buckle of a loose brown shoe. Between attempts, she stared at the knife protruding from his ribs.
“You have to pull it out before you go through.”
The man shoved her stool into the wall with his boot, jolting her fingers away from the buckle. Morrow’s smile lost its teeth.
He clenched his fist, drawing twelve mana into the forearm until his palm split. Two wet rows of mouths opened along it. His wrist stretched past the knife hand and curled around the elbow, where the first bite crunched through bone. Morrow closed every mouth together, enjoying the resistance as he pulled toward the opening.
The scream was excellent: clear, full, delivered without the embarrassment of asking him to speak up. The man’s arm separated below the shoulder in a scalding sheet of blood. His remaining fist hammered the other side of the door, scrabbling across the wood before disappearing.
The knife came free with the arm, allowing Morrow to strip meat from its hilt and spit the blade into the dead dark. He could get a better knife; this one had already offended him.
“Maw Limb is a valid choice for a new encounter,” said a bright voice from the gold print. “Please target the registered adult.”
“I had gathered,” he told it, glancing at the child.
“Your cooperation has been noted.”
“Take that back,” Morrow demanded, tugging at the door to discover what else came off its occupant.
The man lurched into view with a hooked leash in his good hand. Blood soaked his greasy tan apron, and a broken upper tooth showed against his lower lip. He looped the leash around a lever beside the child and yanked it, dropping bars across the far doorway.
Beyond his bulk, white tiles sloped past a table with leather straps toward a drain, and chains hung above six empty bowls. Morrow could have found uses for most of the room, once its current owner had finished dying.
Another pull strained the hinge and exposed the puncture beneath his ribs to the air. The sting reminded him how much skin he had wasted on that cheap knife. Rather than surrender any more, he compressed eight mana through his skeleton. His bones softened under the pressure.
His skull folded first, followed by a collapse of cartilage that made the child lift both feet off the floor. For three seconds his entire body could squeeze through an opening scarcely wide enough for one hand. He flowed down the inside of the door like a severed ribbon, drawing his boots beneath him as his ribs recovered their shape.
The iron leash struck him across the face before he finished rising.
His head turned with the blow, and he touched the warm line down his cheek to taste what the leash had done to him. His blood carried too much iron; he would fix that when he had a moment to improve the recipe.
“You can’t kill me. I’m registered,” the man insisted as he retreated toward the table, dripping blood on every tile between them.
Gold print spread beside his head.
REGISTERED ADULT
ON DEATH: ACCESS PASSES TO THE KILLER.
Morrow read the line. The man’s eyes crept sideways toward it.
“That part is for staff,” the man said.
“I enjoy promotion,” Morrow replied, catching the leash in his ordinary hand before pinning its loose end beneath his boot.
He yanked the man close enough for his shaped arm to climb the apron, open beneath the jaw, and bite through the throat from both sides. The head struck the table while the body stayed upright, pumping between the mouths that held it. Morrow bit again, taking the neck apart in strips before a deep swallow carried it down.
He savored the warm meat sliding through his throats while the man’s feet knocked against his boots, kicking slower with each little gush. Eventually the body folded, and Morrow let it settle at his feet. He liked the new world so far.
A brass disc rang against the tiles as he nudged the corpse away from the drain. Behind him, the child pointed down from her stool with her cardigan drawn over her nose. “My shoe. It’s in there.”
The brown shoe lay abandoned in the blood, its buckle hanging open. Beyond the barred exit waited an entire world he had scarcely begun to threaten. There would be unfamiliar rooms, interesting people, somewhere suitably elevated from which to announce his name. She pointed at the shoe again.
Morrow retrieved the shoe by its buckle while the mouths closed along his shrinking forearm. A rag dangled beside the drain, stiff with old blood and crusted grease.
“One moment,” he told her, abandoning it in favor of the shelves.
He searched past jars of gray paste and dried creatures with legs packed around their flattened bodies. A tin jug beside the basin held clear water without the sour stink of the drain. After testing it over his fingers, he washed the shoe under the supervision of the child above his shoulder.
“You have blood on your face,” she said, peering over the cardigan while he scrubbed the little shoe.
“I was there when it happened,” he replied, tilting the shoe to rinse beneath the buckle.
“There’s some in your hair too.” She indicated the end of a black lock.
He froze, then removed the clot with painstaking care. She inspected it before nodding. He had begun the day with considerably greater ambitions.
He placed the shoe beside her foot, but her hand intercepted his wrist before he could reach the hook behind her shirt. Through that contact, something impossibly familiar brushed the inside of his coat.
The ruined key lay beneath that cloth. Thirty-one percent of its old shape remained, carried through the loss of his war-body and into a place without light, roads, or anybody worth killing. Beside it, he had kept a stolen pattern from the seam around one particular child.
Every turn of the girl’s seam matched the stolen pattern, down to the small wrong angles where two heavens had once tried to keep her apart. His new heart missed a beat.
“Don’t open that,” she warned, dragging his hand away from the hook as she braced her heels against the stool.
Fine wires ran from the iron into the plaster above a little door traced in blue, framing a flat white rectangle just above the floor.
“It looks like home when you shut your eyes,” she whispered.
He kept his eyes open while the key gave a faint pull beneath his coat. “What happens if I take the hook out?”
“It gets to eat,” she whispered, tightening her fingers to keep him beyond its reach.
Release the captive, feed the door: an arrangement he might have admired under different circumstances. The girl was already lifting her feet higher, however, so Morrow examined the fabric around the hook instead. “Can you hold still while I tear this?”
“I am holding still,” she protested, distinctly aggrieved that he had failed to appreciate her effort.
“Continue, then. You have a talent.” He tore a small square from the back of her shirt, leaving it on the hook. The blue line flickered as he lifted her free and set her on the clean end of the table. Behind the empty stool, the blue outline held steady. Morrow left the hook buried in its socket. “Outplayed,” he told it.
“Damaging an approved restraint may reduce your access standing,” said the bright voice.
Morrow held up the dead man’s brass disc. “You appear to have given me his job.”
“You have his access,” the bright voice corrected him. “You are not employed here.”
“Then I won’t need to give notice.” He slipped the disc into his palm and turned away from the print.
DISTRICT ACCESS DISC
Effect: Carries the dead holder’s local access.
Limitation: Damaging approved restraints can reduce access standing.
The girl had put her shoe on, but her trembling fingers missed the buckle twice. Morrow crouched to fasten the strap, concentrating on the leather until she abandoned her attempts to help. He straightened and inspected the first door. He wiped the blood from two counters shining on its blackened edge and read what the gold letters had to say.
SEAM TIME SINCE LAST COMMON EVENT
ORIGIN WORLD: 6 YEARS, 43 DAYS, 9 HOURS
VESSEL SIDE: 6 HOURS, 14 MINUTES
Six years had passed in the universe where they had beaten him. Morrow reread the counters, digging his fingers into the wood beneath them. Of course they had grown a child while he was busy growing knees.
“How old are you?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Six,” she answered, seated with one fist closed around her small cloth pocket.
Her pale face and purple curls framed eyes whose darkness extended beyond the wall behind her. He searched her seam for a remnant of its old split, but she sat before him in one piece: one body, one soul, and the complete confidence of a child waiting for her shoe to be fixed.
He pressed his hand against the door, waiting for some answering movement from the dead universe beyond it, but the wood remained still beneath his palm.
“The crossing is complete,” the voice informed him. “Your inbound aperture is exhausted.”
Morrow drove his hand through the panel and struck cold stone close behind the frame, where there should have been a world of darkness. He pulled his hand out slowly, scraping splinters across the floor.
“You might have mentioned that before I came through.”
“You were occupied.” The print shone placidly over the hole he had made.
The child slid off the table and joined him, holding her pocket with both hands. Dust marked one knee where it had brushed the stool.
“Is that my door?” she asked, peering into the broken panel.
“No, this one was mine,” he said, resisting the temptation to demolish what remained.
“Can you make my door?” She leaned closer while she waited for his answer.
Most of the things he could do would have made a six-year-old move away from him, yet here she stood with her shoulder almost against his leg.
“Where is it? I shall need somewhere more precise than home.”
“By the lake. There’s a pear tree, but the pears aren’t ready.”
He regarded the exhausted gate while she waited to see whether an unripe pear tree would do for directions. “What is your name?” he asked her instead.
“Amelia Vorelia,” she answered clearly, as though somebody might have come to collect her.
He kept his face still. Trevor’s daughter had been delivered into his hands and was introducing herself as though he might be helpful.
“Morrow Veyle,” he replied, and she tried the first part quietly to herself.
She looked up at him, her fingers still pressed around the little pocket. “I want my Mommas.”
Both inquisitors had survived, then. He pressed his thumbnail into the brass disc while she waited. “If there is a road to them, we shall find it.”
“Both of them,” she insisted, the corners of her mouth trembling.
“That is a reasonable opening demand.” Morrow stood beside the ruined gate, still holding a stolen disc he could do nothing useful with.
She pressed her lips together. The effort tightened her face while her fist closed harder around the pocket. Amelia looked toward the far door, then at the corpse beside the table. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said.
The brass disc warmed against his palm, raising the bars three inches across the room. Air gusted through the opening and stirred his coat, bringing distant shouting beneath the clangor of a bell. Stone houses crowded beneath a low red sky; somewhere beyond their rooftops, a much larger structure creaked.
A banner across the street showed a smiling man in red armor standing on a heap of small skulls.
Morrow turned the disc toward the exit. A man displaying children’s skulls ought to be easy to find.
“Neither do I,” he replied, carrying the disc to the slot beside the bars before sliding it home.
Once the bars rose high enough, he retrieved the disc and pocketed it before stepping through. Amelia hurried after him, only to hesitate where blood streaked across the floor. Her freshly washed shoes remained together at the edge of the mess.
Morrow returned to offer his hand, waiting while she examined it with commendable suspicion. Once satisfied, she wrapped her other hand around two more fingers, apparently determined that he should not leave without her.
“We’re going home?” she asked, clinging to his fingers while he helped her across the blood.
Morrow let the System announce his reward behind them, his attention occupied by the child he had acquired while stealing a door.
“First, we are going to find out who has been selling the roads.”
Amelia tightened her grip as they stepped into the street. He had killed the man between her and the world; now he needed a route between this world and her mothers.
The street offered him a hundred things he could eat. None of them was an address.
Chapter 2 — A Very Small Health Bar
A legendary sword floated above the first square of the street, and Morrow reached for it before Amelia caught his coat. “Look down,” she said, tugging at a handful of stars.
A crack beneath the sword revealed a pit bristling with broken blades. One skeleton lay impaled below the prize with its fingers stretched toward the hilt. The System brightened LEGENDARY, apparently concerned that the corpse might distract him from a bargain.
“This limited-time offer is suitable for ambitious new arrivals,” it announced in the voice that had welcomed him inside.
“I see the time limit.” Morrow studied the skeleton’s outstretched fingers. “Raise your standards. I intend to be a catastrophe.” He guided Amelia around the square and away from the blue seams crossing the red stone.
After following them for two steps, the sword snapped back on its chain of light, leaving Morrow with a wounded side and no weapon to show for his arrival. “Good catch,” he told her, and she brightened at once.
Then she pointed to his face. “You missed some blood.”
His coat concealed the puncture beneath his ribs, but every step disturbed the damaged flesh. Blood pasted the lining against his side. He settled beside the stone bench of an abandoned bread stall, sheltered from the drifting red grit.
A flat loaf waited above the cold oven, wrapped in waxed cloth beneath a brick. Morrow checked under the shelf before lifting it, willing to believe after that sword that the bread had teeth.
“Is that stealing?” Amelia asked as she climbed onto the bench.
“It certainly is,” he confirmed while inspecting the wrapping for complications.
“Momma says to ask first.” Amelia waited with her hands resting on her knees, leaving him to hold the stolen loaf.
Morrow peered into the oven, then under the counter. “Who do you suggest?”
She inspected the vacant stall. “You could leave a note.”
“Does the bread need a note?” Morrow lowered the loaf to the counter between them.
“Then they’ll know who took it,” she explained, looking up at him as though he had asked a perfectly sensible question.
Rather than prolong the argument, he pinned a scrap of paper beneath the brick and wrote TAKEN with one bloody fingertip.
“You need your name,” she said after reading his work aloud.
He added MORROW VEYLE in neat letters and showed her the finished warning. “Now they know whom to thank.”
Amelia nodded as though he had nearly learned something, leaving him free to examine breakfast. Grain and sweet oil scented the loaf, without a trace of recognizable poison. The corner he sampled was dry, bland, and free—three strong recommendations. He divided it between them, giving her a piece large enough to occupy both hands.
As she took her first bite, gold print spread across the oven door.
‘DING!’ [Morrow Veyle] Embodied Level 1 → 2 — registered adult killed. Processing Room 6 access transferred. The vacancy is your fault. HP: 92/106 | MP: 112/132 | 6 attribute points earned
Six points belonged entirely to him, an arrangement Morrow approved of immediately. The health bar demanded considerably more thought, considering he had once interposed a war-body between himself and a god. This vessel had spent fourteen points rediscovering the unpleasantness of knives and iron: eight beneath the ribs and six across the face.
He could bleed to death from those two shallow wounds. He pinched the puncture closed through his coat before returning to the points.
He selected two points for Agility before the System could contribute advice. Quick fingers would make catching a throat considerably easier. Strength received one point, enough to improve his grip when its owner struggled. Another went into Vitality, leaving the final pair for Focus and Will. Sense could remain exactly where it was; the man with the knife had been conveniently close.
“You were hit twice,” the System observed while he considered his choices.
“He was hit permanently,” Morrow replied, keeping his attention on the six points he could spend.
“Perception is an important contributor to survival.”
Morrow pressed CONFIRM with the finger he had made for the door.
MORROW VEYLE — EMBODIED LEVEL 2
CLASS: UNASSIGNED
STRENGTH: 9 | AGILITY: 12 | VITALITY: 9
FOCUS: 13 | WILL: 11 | SENSE: 6
HP: 92/116
MP: 112/142
STAMINA: 85/111
VOID PRESSURE: 1
DEPTH: 16/16
UNSPENT POINTS: 0
His fingers slid across the brick with delicious precision. He lifted it between two fingertips, then caught a loose thread on Amelia’s cuff before it brushed the oven.
The wound in his side remained open. He held his coat aside another moment while the System placed an arrow beside his new maximum HP. “That is capacity,” it explained.
“I can read. Your little window has been perfectly clear.”
“Your prolonged interest suggested otherwise,” the voice replied, keeping the arrow beside his unfilled bar.
He dismissed the window before it could congratulate itself on the explanation. The expanded bars allowed several more unfortunate introductions. He flexed his improved fingers around the brick, testing how tightly he could squeeze.
Amelia offered him the rest of her bread, holding it out farther when he reminded her that he had eaten. Her glance toward the processing room suggested that she had remembered too.
“That wasn’t bread,” she said.
“A matter of taste,” he assured her, breaking off enough to let her resume breakfast.
With bread occupying her attention, he opened his coat and angled his wounded side away from the bench. Crumbs nestled in the cardigan beneath her chin as she leaned forward to investigate.
The key lay in a fold no tailor had sewn, its broken length like clear bone around three absent teeth and a gold thread caught inside the stem. As he drew it free, the remnant shifted toward Amelia and she shrank back against the wall.
He stopped with it still close to his chest. “It isn’t a door.”
“It wants one,” she said, watching the gold thread pull toward her.
“So do I. We have that in common.” He held the key flat on his palm instead of bringing it any closer.
Beside the empty fold, his stolen pattern remained hidden in a seam only he could interpret. Every turn recalled its own expense, making this disappointing return particularly aggravating. The pattern identified the child while the key strained toward her across his palm. Neither gave him an address.
The System placed a valuation over his palm, eager to help with something at last.
LEGACY OBJECT
FUNCTIONAL REMAINDER: 31%
Effect: Bar one known seam.
Limitation: Maximum hold 31 seconds.
EXCHANGE OFFER AVAILABLE
Morrow closed his fist before the offer could spread into a second window. “No. Find somebody else to rob.”
“The exchange includes full vessel restoration,” the voice offered, while blood crept between his shirt and skin.
Pain throbbed beneath his ribs. He kept his fist closed around the key.
“You offer a very small health bar for a thing you will not price.”
“Pricing depends on successful appraisal,” the voice informed him, leaving the offer blank where a value should have been.
“Then appraise these,” he suggested, displaying two fingers before returning the key to his coat.
One intact world root remained in the next fold, curled among remnants that had long since stopped living. He brought the pulsating knot into the light, considering the catastrophe compressed inside it. Despite being smaller than his fist, it could make this entire street an insignificant corner of the damage.
The prospect warmed him more than breakfast as he surveyed the stacked houses and red sky, imagining where he might put them once they were properly frightened. That smug voice could come too, assuming it survived the journey.
Then the root would be spent, and anything able to hear it unfold would know where to find him.
He tightened his fingers around the living knot before returning it deeper inside his coat. Having escaped one creature that considered him useful, he refused to advertise his whereabouts to the next.
“Was that an egg?” Amelia pointed to the fold he had just closed.
“It was a great deal more expensive,” he explained, smoothing the coat over it.
“A special egg?” She caught the crumbs from her lap in one cupped hand.
He let that stand; there were limits to what he would defend before lunch.
His fingers explored the familiar bend where the Blank Edge had once rested. They curled around the empty fold, taking the old grip that had let him make an argument stop existing.
Instead he withdrew an empty hand before she could ask about another egg.
“Tell me what the door at your home does when you use it,” he said.
“The one by the lake?” She swallowed her last mouthful, taking the question seriously.
At his nod, she informed him that it opened, leaving Morrow to study her face for evidence that she was fucking with him. She waited with a crumb clinging to her lip.
“Does it mark the far side, or make a sound?” He touched the air before his chest. “Does it pull at you here?”
Amelia put her crumbs on the loaf wrapper and looked at the place he meant.
“You knew that hook would feed the room,” he continued. “What does your home door feel like?”
She took a long time finding an answer, with her fingers folded around the pocket. “It feels like going into the kitchen when Momma’s there, even if you can’t see her.”
Morrow glanced at the wall behind the oven while she worked through the rest.
“It knows the other Momma too. They’re different, but the door knows both of them.”
“Can you feel either of them here?” He waited as she closed her eyes.
The nearest channel whined. A blue line brightened beneath its water, then dimmed as Amelia opened her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t feel either of them.”
He would have preferred a lie he could dismantle, some reassuring explanation with a weakness he could attack. Instead he had a child desperate for her kitchen and a key whose remaining talent was keeping doors shut.
“How did you leave?” he asked, turning back from the channel.
“There was a puppy,” she answered, squeezing the cloth pocket between her fingers.
He waited while she worried a stubborn crumb from her thumb. The puppy had been crying beside the step, she explained, so she had approached to pick it up. It escaped through a doorway resembling the little one at home before she could catch it.
“I thought I could still see the lake.” She stared down at her hand. “Then I couldn’t.”
The wrapper crackled under his fingers, and he eased his grip before it tore. “Did the man have the puppy?”
Her answering nod supplied an extremely tempting reason to return for the rest of the man. Morrow savored the possibilities before dismissing them, since the kidnapper was already dead. Somewhere nearby, however, an animal might still be waiting where he had left it.
Amelia touched the torn back of her shirt. “I wasn’t supposed to go by myself.”
“Did he know that?” Morrow asked, and she nodded without looking up.
“Then he planned it.” He waited until her eyes rose to his face. “I planned to take a door today. You planned to pick up a puppy. His plan was the one that needed a hook in a wall.”
She rubbed the torn edge of her shirt between finger and thumb. “He was a bad man.”
“He also tasted of onions. There was very little to recommend him.”
An almost-laugh escaped before she pressed her lips together. Morrow leaned closer, waiting for the rest. He had worked harder for applause and enjoyed it less.
Another window opened between them, interrupting before he could make her do it again. Rows of red squares surrounded a large blank space, with a single green point pulsing at the bread stall.
NEW ACCESS HOLDER
DISTRICT MAP: LOCAL RANGE
RETURN TAGS DETECTED
REGISTERED PROPERTY REMAINS WITHIN DISTRICT.
He turned the map until its green point faced the way they had come. Behind them lay the processing room; ahead, six red points crowded against the wall of a long building on the next street.
A seventh sat almost on top of the green one, close enough to be on their bench.
Morrow turned toward Amelia. The System brightened REGISTERED PROPERTY on the map.
“You misspelled guest,” he told it, resting two fingers against the window.
“The existing designation is valid.”
“Temporarily,” he replied, memorizing the route before dismissing the map.