Esther burst into the safe room before slamming the door behind her. She collapsed onto her knees, gasping for air, “I– I’m completely out of breath.”

  “No kidding,” William groaned, “I shouldn’t have taken Chinese classes instead of Phys. Ed.”

  “It’s a little late to be lamenting your poor past choices,” Esther glanced out the window of the safe room at the massive tidal wave of monsters. There had to be hundreds– no, thousands of monsters, “how many people do you think died?”

  “Surprisingly, only 32 people have died. I guess a lot of people managed to escape,” William started to rummage through one of the cupboards, “are you hungry?”

  “Food would be good,” Esther nodded. It hadn’t even occurred to her until now, but she was starving, having been running on pure fear and adrenaline for the past couple of hours.

  William started to take stuff out of the cabinet, “Okay so in here there’s noodles, like cup ramen, pasta, udon… And other types of noodles. And just… more noodles. What kind of noodles do you want?”

  “Ramen I guess?”

  “Great,” William tossed two cups of ramen at Esther, “can you set those on the table and find the utensils while I find something we can boil water in?”

  Esther nodded, getting to work to dig through the cabinets. That’s bowls, that’s plates, that’s extra clothes, there’s–

  BANG!

  The door slammed open before quickly being shut again. A girl, a high schooler like Esther and William, stood in the safe room, panting and out of breath.

  It’s a person! Finally, another person in this crazy place! Esther walked up to the girl and held out her hand, “Hey, it’s nice to meet you. What’s your name? I’m Esther.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” the girl took Esther’s hand and shook it, “I’m Ariadne.”

  “You didn’t secretly fall in love with a hero, then get dumped by him and go marry a god, right?” William raised an eyebrow, “because with how crazy everything is right now, that could totally be true, and I frankly don’t want to deal with a minotaur right now.”

  Ariadne gave William an amused look, “No, I definitely am not married at 17.”

  “So we probably aren’t going to have to deal with a minotaur then. Good,” William introduced himself, “I’m William.”

  “William?” a flash of recognition crossed Ariadne’s face, “like the kid who got a four-point GPA and the highest scorer for the SAT at our school? You’re that William?”

  “Yes?” William raised a brow, “so you go to the same school as me and Esther?”

  Ariadne nodded, “Yeah. Scarlett mentioned you two a while back.”

  Esther immediately perked up, “Scarlett? Have you seen her in the tutorials by chance?”

  Ariadne shook her head, “Unfortunately not.”

  “Oh…” Esther deflated.

  “I’m sure she’s alright,” William gently touched Esther’s shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Esther took a deep breath in. She would be fine. She, Dietrich, Noah, and Yuno always came through.

  [You have a message from the system moderators!]

  You guys lived! It honestly would’ve been quite sad if you hadn’t, considering how OP the attributes you guys got are. I’m seriously considering how you even get that lucky, those attributes had less than a .1% chance of you getting them. Did you save all of your luck for that exact moment or something? Did the Calamity, the Lucky Cat herself somehow break the rules of the system and give you a ton of luck? The [Wheel of Attributes (???)] is literally rigged to almost never give out completely OP skills. Well anyways, ignoring the fact that I’m pretty sure that you, Esther and your friend, William, broke the system rules or got help from some being beyond the system, the 2nd scenario is here!

  [Scenario 2 Panel]

  Time Remaining: 6 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds

  Scenario Objective: Find out why the Quintet is capturing humans

  Scenario Information: you survived! But that’s not the end. From the monster horde, five monsters have risen to become the rulers of the other monsters and they call themselves the Quintet. (Don’t blame them for the uncreative name, they were literally just born three days ago in preparation for the tutorial so it’s not their fault) The Quintet has also captured the majority of your fellow humans for unknown reasons and you need to find out why! Well, okay. We can’t actually force you to find out why, but trust me when I say; you definitely want to find out.

  “Great. And how are we supposed to do all that?” Ariadne glared daggers at her own system window, “we literally just got thrown into this whole shit show!”

  “I think our first priority is to figure out where the humans captured are being held,” William said.

  “That seems like a good starting point,” Esther nodded, “uh, just one question. How do we figure that out?”

  William pointed outside at the massive trail of destruction left by the monster horde.

  “Oh,” was all that Esther said.

  ____________________________________________________

  “Esther,” William whispered so that none of the monsters would hear them speaking. They had finally found the location of the monsters after following the path of destruction for a few hours and were now hiding near the place where the people were being held captive.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think there’s some kind of [Identify] skill?”

  “Why would I know that?” Esther asked.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Because you’re the rpg lover,” William glanced at the people being held prisoner by the monsters. There were a lot of people, at least 70, all of them in cages that were more like messily mashed together planks of wood to form several large boxes. They were also surrounded by dozens of various monsters, each one some kind of demonic creature, “I want to know what types of monsters are guarding those cages.”

  “I would assume they’re demons, but if you really want the [Identify] skill…” Esther squinted at the monsters, trying to ‘will’ a skill into existence.

  [You have a message from the system moderators!]

  Damn, Esther. I can’t believe you did it again. Just how many litrpg novels have you read to know all the tips and tricks?!

  Gained Skill: [Identify (Common)] - this is a skill that no being in the multiverse can do without. Allows you to glean a basic overview of entities and items of the same rank or lower.

  Esther blinked in surprise, “I didn’t think that would work.”

  “You got the skill?”

  “Yeah. You just have to ‘will’ the skill into existence,” Esther explained, “I doubt it will work with other skills unless they’re a common skill that everyone needs though.”

  “I see,” William squinted at the monsters, “this is not working.”

  “You’re too grounded in the power of science and proof. The System makes the impossible possible. You have to believe it will work,” Esther paused, “or at least that’s how most rpgs would probably describe it.”

  “Now you sound like some kind of wise sage,” William chuckled wryly, before going back to squinting at the monsters.

  “Disconnect yourself with reality, or else it’s never going to work,” Esther said, giving William a little more sagely advice before turning to the monsters. So are they demons or not?

  [Infant Stolas Demon (F) - lvl 2]

  “They are demons!” Esther exclaimed, “I was right!”

  “No one ever said they doubted you,” William glanced back at the demons, “Stolas, huh?”

  “Who’s Stolas?” Ariadne asked.

  “A demon king from the Ars Goetia,” William explained, “he’s also a popular character from a tv show.”

  “I swear, you’re practically a living wikipedia. Or AI,” Esther stared at the demons, “so what do you think our chances of taking those guys out are?”

  “This is supposed to be a tutorial. Not some kind of impossible hellhole,” William raised one of the knives that they had brought from the safe room kitchen, “I think we can do it.”

  Esther brandished her own knife. She crouched down, creeping forwards towards the demon before– got you! Esther lunged forward, slicing her knife across the demon’s chest and leaving a long cut.

  [You have slain [Infant Stolas Demon - lvl 2] - experience has been earned. Bonus experience for defeating an enemy above your level.]

  [You have reached lvl 1! 1 SP (stat point) has been gained!]

  [You are now (F) rank!]

  Esther turned around to face William and Ariadne, who both had killed their own demon, “Did you guys also level up?”

  William nodded.

  “Nope,” Ariadne groaned, “that’s so unfair! Why did you two get to level up and I didn’t?”

  “Probably because the demon you took out was level 1,” Esther knelt down to poke one of the demon corpses with her finger, “William and I both killed demons at level 2 and presumably you get more experience or exp, as most people call it, for killing higher level enemies.”

  “That’s… actually a really good point,” Ariadne pointed at the wooden boxes, “should we try to get them out?”

  “I don’t think any of us are strong enough to break a wooden box, even if they are poorly constructed,” William peered inside the cracks between the wooden boards, “and I don’t think these people are going to be helping us any time soon. They’ve all been knocked out. We can come back and get them later, our primary objective right now is to find out why they’re being captured.”

  “You’ve always been a pretty down to earth kind of person when it comes to stuff like this,” Esther noted, “so what should be our next plan of action?”

  “Infiltrate their ranks?” Ariadne suggested.

  “That’s not going to work unless they have humans doing some kind of work for them. We also can’t disguise ourselves as demons because their anatomy varies too much compared to ours, plus we have no way to make ourselves show up as demons if someone uses [Identify] on us.”

  “Then we can sneak in!”

  “That might actually–” William froze, then grabbed Esther and Ariadne and pulled them back to where they had been hiding earlier, “be quiet!”

  “What? Why?” Ariadne asked.

  As if right on cue, a demon strolled into the room. It was probably the most humanoid creature that they had all seen since coming here, aside from actual humans. Its whole body looked like a sculpture, with pale flawless skin, sculpted facial features, and sea-glass blue hair that flowed through the air like water despite there being no wind.

  [Lesser Abyzou Demon (E) - lvl 28]

  “Damn, she’s hot,” Ariadne muttered.

  “Shut up,” William hissed under his breath.

  Another demon soon came in, unlike the demon from before, this one looked far less human and almost like a red bipedal wolf, similar to a werewolf.

  [Lesser Beleth Demon (E) - lvl 30]

  “Abith,” the werewolf-looking demon started.

  “What is it, Lethy?” Abith, the blue haired demon asked.

  “Don’t call me that. My name is Leth,” Leth growled, “anyways, what happened to the infant demons we posted here?”

  “I don’t know,” Abith gestured towards the infant demons, “they were like that when I got here.”

  Leth crouched down and touched his two– fingertips? Paws tips? Is that even a thing? Esther wasn’t quite sure– to one of the dead infant demon’s forehead. A faint, purplish light started to surround them before slowly fading away, “There were three humans here. A boy and two girls. Their scent is still strong, so they were here pretty recently.”

  “Can you track them down?” Abith asked.

  “I think so,” Leth’s head swiveled around to look in the direction that Esther, William, and Ariadne were hiding, “they went that way.”

  Ariadne cursed, “We’ve got to go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Abith suddenly appeared in front of them right out of nowhere, “you three are scrawnier than I thought.”

  Esther tried to stab the demon, going for one of the arteries in the neck, but Abith effortlessly grabbed Esther’s arm and disarmed her.

  “Gutsy. All of the rest of the humans just ran away or begged for their life,” Abith noted as inspected Esther’s knife, “how cute. I bet Lethy would be interested in keeping you as a pet.”

  “I’m not going to be anyone’s damn pet,” Esther struggled against the Abith’s hold on her, but the grip was like iron.

  “I’m sure Lethy would disagree!”

  “My name isn’t Lethy,” Leth strolled over to inspect the newly captured Esther and her friends, “she’s too squishy to keep as a pet. All the non-high level humans are too squishy. Plus, I don’t want a pet that’s feisty, they’re a pain to keep in line.”

  “Awww,” Abith frowned, “I thought you would finally like one of my pet suggestions.”

  “Let. Me. Go!” Esther banged her fists against Abith’s hand.

  “You could just keep a squishy pet,” Abith ignored Esther, “I’m sure we have plenty of submissive humans you could keep as a pet. I’m sure that neither my lady, The Shattered Princess, or your master, the Mad Prince, would care if we kept one of the humans.”

  “I wouldn’t dare to guess what either of our gods could possibly be thinking,” Leth pointed at the door that he and Abith had entered the room through, “just take them to the other prison. This one is full.”

  “Don’t order me around. We’re of the same rank.”

  Leth rolled his eyes, “Can you please just cooperate for once?”

  “Fine,” Abith waved her hand over Esther, William, and Ariadne. A faint shower of sparkles rained down on them. “Nighty-night.”

  Spots filled Esther’s vision as she went limp in Abith’s hands. The last thing she remembered was getting thrown over Abith’s shoulder and thinking, we sure are in deep shit now. Then, everything went black.