I sat in the worst shithole I’d ever been in, in my office.

  Well, not mine, but shared with twenty other poor bastards. Metal desks, frantic eyes, and too-bright screens stretched to infinity. Filing cabinets, which contained stuff that should have been digitized like three decades ago, loomed around the office like rotten trees in a swamp.

  Lucielle Legal’s open-plan office sprawled like a cost-cutting nightmare made manifest.

  Why have a dedicated storage when you could store stuff among cubicles, right?

  Everyone seemed to be busy as hell, and they probably were.

  Except for me, because I’d had shit piss to do and I didn’t even have a person who cared. Literally no one cared enough to notice that I scrolled through YouTube as I leaned back in my creaky chair, closing my eyes against the light and noise.

  Nothing about this life was working.

  Then again, nothing about me was working either.

  Conspiracy videos mashed together on the flickering monitor, a lizard man flipping to a government cover-up, flipping to Godzilla spitting poison over Tokyo. I jumped from monster clips to action trailers to cute kittens and a toddler biting some other kid’s finger, the minutes dragging like a reluctant child.

  A loud voice cursed at me from the corner, but it was only my own window reflection, a thin, dirty blond man muttering from behind an anemic beard, looking more lost than tired.

  This was not the future I imagined, sitting in a suit that didn’t quite fit, being ignored by a group of people who didn't even know my name. This couldn’t be the grand scheme that I went to school for, for which I entered the Secret Societies.

  The worst part was that I couldn’t blame anyone other than myself. I didn’t do well at school, I fled from my own caring mother, and I lucked out into this job.

  It sounded great at the time, to become a field agent of the Philadelphia interventions division of Lucielle Legal, a worldwide corporation connected to the Secret Societies.

  Except that the department had precisely one person working in it, me.

  They interviewed me by having me talk to an AI chatbot over the phone. I got my access card and onboarding information in the mail, and my main instructions were to not talk to anyone about what I do.

  My only source of assignments was a single email address, , which wrote me once a week, at best, and never replied to my emails.

  I didn’t even know if that was an AI bot either.

  “Yo, Peter,” called the only other guy who knew my name here, Arjun, the IT support guy who sat on the floor once upon a time. He threw a crumpled ball of paper in my direction, and it bounced off my monitor.

  “Save it,” I grunted, giving the general direction, from which the ball came, the finger.

  The drone of clicking keyboards and distant laughter filled the room, but nobody came my way, not for assignments, not to say hello. With my arm over my eyes, I considered bolting, maybe just picking up and leaving and finding Arjun, wherever he sat. Hell, if I walked out now, it would take months for anyone to notice.

  Then my inbox pinged, and I almost fell over myself trying to click it. A message from , still the only address that ever wrote me, and I opened it like a drowning man popped a life raft.

  The email read: “Inspect and report on damages at designated depot.” Attached were the coordinates to some distant industrial graveyard. Another grunt job. I slumped back in my chair, the fake leather groaning beneath me, and I sighed into my hands.

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  Arjun noticed me perk up and yelled over, “Date night?”

  “Damn right,” I shot back, dragging my sarcasm behind it like a ball and chain.

  I killed the browser and shut the email, ignoring the coffee rings on my desk and the way the chair protested when I finally stood up. My gun was already waiting, a standard-issue Glock that looked as out of place on me. I slid it into the shoulder holster under my suit jacket, which I then grabbed from the coat rack.

  No one batted an eye or waved or gave a shit as I walked out, but I mentally flipped them all off for good measure.

  Out of the gray jungle, the elevator hummed its mechanical song, a rickety thing with its own brand of claustrophobia. I leaned against the wall, closed my eyes, and felt the lurching rhythm as it carried me away from this soulless floor.

  Something smelled like bad takeout, or maybe that was just me after a week in the same button-down. I chuckled at my own pathetic mess of a life, at the way I was running toward grunt work as if I had won a lottery.

  Incredible, how shitty it felt to have nothing meaningful to do.

  The dingy garage greeted me with flickering fluorescents and rows of neglected vehicles. The lights did a little dance before admitting they worked, and I made my way to the rusty old i30 at the far end, feeling the weight of my father’s ghost in every footstep.

  He once worked for Secret Societies.

  That was the only thing I knew about him.

  Okay, I didn’t know, but I inferred it from my mother’s drunken ramblings.

  In any case, rank in Secret Societies came with access to knowledge. And somewhere in that knowledge was everything there was to know about my father.

  To get up the ranks, I had to accomplish assignments.

  So now that I finally had one, I better do it with perfection.

  The i30 coughed and died, like it knew the building was nothing but a dead end. I really needed to get a car with an automatic clutch.

  I opened the door, got out of the car, and scanned the depot.

  The vines clinging to the rusted walls shivered with the breeze. No human in sight, no major road in range, and the guard post at the entrance to the depot area literally had a tree growing from inside of it.

  Perfect place for things to rot.

  I walked into the courtyard and spotted a tear in the building's side, gouged as if with massive claws from the inside.

  The hell was I doing here, again?

  I took a picture with my phone and prepared an email to IMDC.

  This was above my pay grade.

  The email never got sent, though, because I realized this might have been what I was waiting for.

  I wanted a way up through the ranks, and the fastest path there happened to be through assignments above my pay grade.

  I pocketed my phone and drew my pistol.

  With careful steps, I crept to the main door and swiped my access card. The main door shuddered open, just enough for me to slip inside.

  My shoes scraped through thick dust, weaving between toppled shelves and overturned boxes.

  What an absolute mess.

  Boxes lay everywhere, scattered all over the place, torn or trampled in places. With a quick look, I spotted closed, metallic cylinders inside the boxes, neatly stacked into a firm grid.

  The hell were those?

  I ducked by the nearest box to closer examine its contents.

  Claws scratched the ground, and I turned just in time to see a monster pouncing at me.

  I raised my arms to block, and realized it was the shape of a large, steel-covered dog with two tails, no eyes, and a lot of teeth that bit into my left forearm.

  The monster crashing into me knocked me to the ground, my gun leaving my hands and clattering on the floor.

  I desperately pulled on my power.

  Without a care for limits or precision, I drew all my strength into me and kicked the beast with both legs.

  Pain burst through my legs as I kicked the steel, but I launched the monster away from me.

  With shallow breath and cold sweat bursting all over my body, I jumped to my feet.

  The monster landed on all fours, turned, and launched itself at me again.

  I had to get my gun.

  I jumped towards the gun, timing the leap to dodge the pounce.

  The beast missed me, but its two tails whipped at me anyway. They lashed my arm and side, tearing apart the cloth and my skin like steel whips.

  I screamed in pain, but landed near my gun. I grabbed the weapon and turned to get up.

  The monster moved faster, spinning and pouncing at me before I straightened.

  Shit.

  I whirled on the floor, using my left arm to block.

  Steel fangs dug into my forearm, and the impact of its body smashing mine threw me back.

  The floor disappeared from under me. We fell down a flight of stairs. My back hit the stairs, knocking the breath from my lungs, and we rolled over. Next, I landed on the monster, but then we rolled again.

  My back hit the ground, the monster squeezing its jaws tighter as if trying to tear my arm off.

  I gritted my teeth, rammed the pistol into the side of its mouth, angled it upwards, and fired.

  In a frenzy, I squeezed the trigger as fast as I could. Gunshots deafened me, and I emptied the magazine into the monster.

  Its body went limp, and so did mine. I crashed on my back, the monster on me, rapid breathing, squeezing the air out of my lungs.

  The fuck was that?

  As if the world had decided to answer me, everything blackened. For a second, I saw only blackness.

  Then part of the darkness tore into white light, and from it walked out a man. Or well, a shape of one.

  I blinked and the darkness vanished, but the man remained, standing near me, an annoying smirk playing on his lips.

  “And thus, you’ve gained enough experience to level up. The System has sent me to guide you through the whole thing.”