Dr. Amanda Chen was a well-respected computer science professor, teaching at MIT. During the evening of March 7th, she was on her third cup of coffee, grading papers in her cramped office, when her teaching assistant, Marcus, knocked on her door frame.

  "Dr. Chen? You might want to check your mail."

  She glanced up at Marcus, pushing her glasses up her nose, "Marcus, if this is another student asking for an extension, I swear to god-"

  "It's not. Someone sent the department something interesting. It's from a company I've never heard of before."

  Amanda frowned. Unsolicited software wasn't uncommon, but most of it was academic projects or hobbyists' attempts that barely booted. Still, Marcus looked genuinely intrigued, and he was usually the first to dismiss the half-baked projects. "So, what is it?"

  "It's an Operating System. It's sent by a company called Quantum Innovation. They're offering it as a demo for educational purposes, and it's downloadable for free via FTP." He handed her a printout of the email, "The message is professional, but they are very vague about themselves. Still, their feature list is quite... extensive."

  She complained in her head, If you already have the printout, why did you ask me to check my mail? Still, she didn't say it out loud. She scanned the printout quite quickly. It gave a brief introduction of their company name, and then it went directly to explaining their features. It said that their OS included a preemptive, protected memory 32-bit kernel, virtual memory, a very modular driver architecture, security features like user separation and file permissions.

  And that was just the tip of it, apparently. The email mentioned that there was a surprise for them in the OS, which they were sure to love. Amanda wasn't sure how to feel about that, but she sure was curious.

  "Have you downloaded it?"

  "Started about five minutes ago. So, it should be finished by now."

  Amanda set down her pen and stood up, "Let's go take a look."

  They walked to the computer lab, where Marcus had already set up a test machine. It was a 386 with 32MB of RAM, nothing fancy but solid enough for testing. The download was completed, and Marcus was already extracting the compressed archive.

  "Huh? It's 34MB uncompressed?" He muttered under his breath, "That's quite substantial."

  Amanda pulled up a chair as Marcus began the installation process. The installer itself was surprisingly polished and minimalistic. It provided clear instructions and very minimal prompts. Within ten minutes, they were looking at a boot screen.

  Quantum OS v0.5

  The GUI loaded. Amanda was shocked. The interface was nothing like she had ever seen. There were no obtrusively bright colors, no clunky windows overlapping each other. It was very clean, smooth, with a dark grey background, with even crisper readable fonts. The desktop loaded instantly.

  "Boots very smoothly," Marcus observed as his mouse moved. "Let me check the system resources." He opened the Task Manager. "This looks quite good. Kernel's only using 8MB of RAM."

  Instructions on the applications that came with the OS were given in the installation notes, so Marcus knew what to expect. Amanda pulled up next to him and opened the file manager. She copied a file into the computer. "Why is this so fast?" She frowned. She tried moving a file from one drive to another. It was still just as fast. "Marcus, what file system is this thing using?"

  He looks through the file manager, "Uhh... it's called... NTFS? What's that?"

  Amanda paused, "Is this a new file management system?"

  He shook his head, "I don't know. I've never heard of this one before, so it could be a custom one. It's far more responsive and more efficient than the old FAT system."

  She felt a chill go down her spine. She hadn't expected this much innovation from an unknown company. She knew what cutting-edge looked like, and this was it. Everything about the OS was so absurdly well designed that it dwarved any of the existing OS on the market. Even the GUI was minimalistic and looked... modern.

  "Run some tests on this. I want you to stress test this. See how much their OS can handle before it collapses. I also want to know more about their new file system." She paused before continuing, "And don't tell anyone about this, Marcus. I want to understand it before word gets out."

  "Probably too late for that. They've probably sent this to multiple universities like Stanford, Berkeley..."

  Of course, they would. These guys were professionals. They've also probably spread this across the Usenet groups and BBSes. Her eyes narrowed. These guys are the real deal. Who are they? I want to meet them.

  Time passed quickly, and two years passed. There was quite a storm around Quantum Innovation for a while. The users were quite impressed with the features, especially the new NTFS file system. And when Windows came out with their own Windows NT 3.1 one year later, it was assumed that they had implemented the file system from Quantum OS. Another wave of publicity was generated, and the name was imprinted on their mind.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  William had continued to work on it all this time. As for Eve, she was continuously fanning the publicity of Quantum Innovation. He had also learned two more languages. Greek (both modern and ancient) and Russian. His Language skill also advanced to LV5.

  He had also been watching a lot of movies lately with Sarah and Eve. Since most of them were action movies, William got interested in learning a martial art. So, he chose to learn HEMA. He knew HEMA was a broad term for Historical European Martial Arts. Still, he wanted to learn swords. His repertoire of action movies included a lot of Japanese movies so there were a lot of Kenjutsu there but Kenjutsu was hard to find in Florida. So he settled for HEMA. He also wanted to learn a hand-to-hand martial art, and he wanted it to be in the same vein of HEMA, so he chose Bartitsu, which was an English, Victoria-era martial art that involved boxing, cane fighting, jujutsu, and savate. He liked the idea of fighting using canes.

  But after searching for it, he couldn't find any in Florida, which was quite disheartening for William. So, he settled for Jujutsu, swearing in his heart that he would one day learn Bartitsu, on his own if he had to.

  He dragged Eve along with him (although she didn't want to), and they had a lot of fun. While Jujutsu was quite ceremonial and more serious, the HEMA club was absolutely hysterical. Most of them were goofing around, sparring with each other.

  HEMA quickly became his favourite. Although he didn't like loud places, the club quickly became his one and only exception. He loved the variety of weapons available. He loved to try different weapons and see how different they were. He thought the longsword would be big and slow, but to his surprise, it was quite a quick weapon. Rapier required a lot of finesse and a lot of small steps. As for the rapier, he expected it to work the same as the longsword, but having only one curved edge really changed how it was used. Still, almost all weapons were the same. Hit others while not getting hit.

  One of his main reasons for joining HEMA and Jujutsu was to train up his Body stat. It was stuck at 4, which he didn't like. After just a month of training, he got two new skills, Hand-to-Hand Combat(LV1) and Swordsmanship(LV1). Just like with Language, Swordsmanship was connected to multiple weapons like the longsword, saber, rapier, and all kinds of swords. It didn't include any of the polearms he also sometimes trained with, but he suspected that it would be in another skill. After all, it was named Swordsmanship, not all-weaponsmanship.

  As for Hand-to-Hand Combat, it was currently only linked to Jujutsu, which made sense. Still, even with the skills, he couldn't match Eve in swordsmanship. While she was physically weaker, she could beat him quite handily while sparring with the sword. She just had a lot more reflex and probably better talent too. But in Jujutsu, she was no match for William. Here, physical strength and speed seemed to matter more.

  1994, December 31st

  It was New Year's Eve. Their mansion was decorated with Christmas decorations. They still haven't taken it down. William decided to turn an unused bedroom into a gym. It included a mat for sparring and other activities such as yoga or stretching, a treadmill, a bunch of dumbbells, an exercise bike, pull-up machines, and a lot more equipment he didn't know the name of.

  William and Eve were practicing their longsword in there. They wore protective gear and practiced using wooden swords. Though it was quite weird to use them after getting used to the weight of the dull steel weapons, it was still fine. Both of them were quite proficient in German longsword techniques. Both of them were in Langort stance. William moved first, changing his stance to Ochs as his arms moved upward, the longsword pointed straight at Eve's head. He thrust. Eve countered with the Zornhau, which displaced his thrust and immediately thrust back at him. He stepped back, niftily dodging her attack. He struck the 'weak' of her sword, displacing it, and then moved in quickly. Changing his grip to Mordhau, he grabbed the sword by the blade and swung down with the wooden hilt.

  She was surprised at his move and tried to move out of the way, but couldn't.

  They were both panting and gave each other a quick handshake.

  He grabbed a water bottle and started drinking. Eve coughed, "Where'd you learn how to do that?"

  He raised his eyebrows in a provocative manner, "You like it? Hehe, I saw one of the guys use it there, and it seemed quite effective."

  Eve scoffed, "This is now what? Your fourth win against my thirty?"

  "Don't mind the schematics. You're still better than me at swordplay. If you really want to count, let's include the Jujutsu matches, eh?"

  She changed the subject, "You're quite impatient. You shouldn't always make the first move. You should first wait and see how the other person fights."

  He nodded, "I know, I know. But I just can't help myself! I can't make myself wait for longer than half a minute."

  "What is it you always say? RIght, sounds like a skill issue to me."

  He gasped, "You dared use my own spells against me, Eve?"

  "I dare, bruh."

  "Damn, she's good."

  She got up and started heading towards her room, "Welp, I'm gonna go for a shower now. We should help Sarah take down the Christmas decoration, alright?"

  William gave a thumbs-up, "Of course, we should."

  He watched as she left the room.

  [Sir, would you like an in-depth analysis of what you did wrong in the spar?]

  He shook his head, "It's alright, Pennyworth. I don't need it. She isn't using any cheats, so I shouldn't either."

  [Quite admirable, Sir. Still, I must say, your last hailmary, Mordhau, seemed to be quite effective.]

  "It will no longer be. She'll be prepared against it now. Anyway, unblock the notifications and show me."

  [Affirmative.]

  [Your stat, Body, has risen by 1 from 4 to 5.]

  He nodded, satisfied. The effect didn't take place until he opened the notification, which was quite a strange system. He felt himself becoming stronger, faster, and more resilient. He felt that he had a lot more stamina now, and he saw his stamina bar reach back up to full.

  He opened up the full system.

  [Name: William Tudor

  Age: 14

  Race: Human

  Traits: ADHD, Chromesthesia, Teen, Genius, No Filter, Introvert, Gamer, Weeb, Caffeine Dependent, Night Owl, Amateur Martial Artist]

  Stats

  Body: 5

  Mind: 8

  Insight: 6

  Charisma: 4

  Willpower: 7

  Skills: Chromesthesia(LV4), Shut-In(LV7), Coding(LV9), Gaming(LV100), Languages(LV5){English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Russian}, Speaking(LV10), Crawling(LV10), Walking(LV10), Running(LV10), Hand-to-Hand Combat(LV1 -> 2), Swordsmanship(LV1)]

  He smiled. He planned to enjoy this New Year's fully and rest for a week or so.