Overflow Novice: 10,000 Years in Tutorial Hell

Chapter 2: The World Has Changed

The transition wasn’t a fade-to-black; it was a violent, sensory-stripping erasure.

Ryu felt his internal organs attempt to switch places with his skeleton as the "Manual Ejection" protocol took hold. The digital sky didn't just break; it unraveled into data-shards that sliced through the air, and for a terrifying heartbeat, Ryu was suspended in a vacuum where time and space felt like wet cardboard. Then, the vacuum spat him out.

Gravity, which had been a polite suggestion in the Tutorial Island for ten millennia, suddenly became an abusive landlord demanding ten thousand years of back rent.

Ryu plummeted.

He didn't scream. He didn't have time. He hit the atmosphere like a railgun slug, the friction igniting the air around his skin. He wasn't wearing armor, just the same tattered, sweat-stained "Novice Tunic" he’d been wearing since the first Bush administration, but the heat didn't even singe his arm hair. His body, forged by a hundred million repetitions of the same basic exercises, was less "flesh" and more "condensed reality."

CRACK-BOOM.

He hit the asphalt of a street that hadn’t seen a vacuum cleaner in three years.

The impact wasn't a "thud." It was a geological event. The ground beneath him didn't just break; it liquified, then vaporized, then sent a circular shockwave of displaced earth and concrete rippling outward for three miles. Skyscrapers that had survived the initial apocalypse groaned as their foundations shifted five inches to the left. A cloud of pulverized gray dust billowed upward, mushrooming into the sky, effectively masking his arrival from any orbital satellites that might still be functioning.

Ryu stood up in the center of a crater twenty feet deep, blinking dust out of his eyes. He coughed, a dry, rasping sound.

"Air," he whispered. His voice sounded like grinding stones. "It smells like... exhaust? And wet garbage? Oh, god. It’s beautiful."

He took a deep breath of the polluted, post-apocalyptic Seoul air, savoring the metallic tang of rust and the faint scent of rain-slicked mildew. To a man who had smelled nothing but "Tutorial Pine" for 10,000 years, this was the finest perfume in existence.

[SYSTEM REBOOTING...]

[UPDATING WORLD PARAMETERS...]

[SYNCHRONIZING USER 'RYU' TO LOCAL SERVER: EARTH-001]

A screen flickered in front of his eyes. It wasn't the clean, blue interface from before. This one was a frantic, neon-yellow mess that kept glitching, the edges of the window twitching as if it were trying to contain something far too large for its frame.

[NAME: RYU]

[LEVEL: 1]

[TITLE: THE GRADUATE]

[HP: 99,999+/99,999+]

[MP: 99,999+/99,999+]

[STR: 99,999+ (OVERFLOW)]

[AGI: 99,999+ (OVERFLOW)]

[STA: 99,999+ (OVERFLOW)]

"Level one?" Ryu stared at the flickering '1' with a mixture of annoyance and hysterical laughter. "Ten thousand years. Ten. Thousand. And I’m a level one? I’m going to kill that pig again. I’m going to find where they keep the pig data and I’m going to delete it manually."

He tried to step out of the crater, but his leg felt like it was made of lead. No, that wasn't right. It wasn't that he was heavy; it was that the world was too soft. Every time he shifted his weight, the reinforced concrete beneath his feet crumbled like stale cookies. He had to move with the delicacy of a man walking on a floor made of wet toilet paper and landmines.

As he reached the rim of the crater, he heard it: a sound he hadn't heard in eons.

Human voices.

"Run! If it reaches the intersection, we're dead!"

"The signal! Send the flare to the Association! We can't hold a C-Rank Void Hound!"

Ryu turned his head, his neck popping with a series of rhythmic cracks that sounded like small-arms fire. About two blocks down, past a line of rusted, vine-covered sedans, a group of five people were sprinting for their lives. They were dressed in a hodgepodge of tactical gear and reinforced leather, carrying glowing swords and bows that hummed with low-level mana.

Behind them, shadow manifest.

The Void Hound was a nightmare of obsidian fur and way too many joints. It was the size of a delivery truck, its three eyes glowing with a sickly violet light that seemed to swallow the dim afternoon sun. Every time its paws hit the ground, the asphalt blackened and rotted.

"Help! Someone!" a woman at the back of the group screamed, her leg catching on a piece of rebar. She tumbled, her pack of scavenged canned goods spilling across the cracked road.

The Void Hound didn't bark. It let out a sound like a violin being played with a hacksaw. It coiled its muscular hind legs, preparing to pounce.

Ryu watched this with the detached curiosity of a man watching a very slow documentary. C-Rank? he thought. Is that supposed to be impressive? It looks like a poodle with a skin condition.

He felt a strange twitch in his chest, not heroics, just a desperate need to interact with something that wasn't a digital pig. He decided to help.

He took a step toward the beast.

He intended to jog. In his mind, he was just closing the distance at a brisk pace.

Physics, however, had other plans.

The moment his foot pushed off the ground, the street behind him simply ceased to exist. A sonic boom, louder than a jet engine at point-blank range, shattered every remaining window in a four-block radius. Ryu didn't "move" so much as he deleted the distance between himself and the monster.

To the scavengers, it looked like the world had suffered a momentary frame-rate drop. One second, the monster was mid-leap; the next, a blurry man in a dirty tunic was standing directly behind it, and the air was screaming.

Ryu blinked. He was suddenly twenty feet past where he intended to be. "Whoops," he muttered, looking at his feet. "Still a bit touchy."

The Void Hound froze in mid-air, its momentum countered by the sheer atmospheric pressure Ryu had dragged along in his wake. The beast landed awkwardly, its violet eyes wide with a very primal, very confused kind of terror. It turned its three-eyed head toward Ryu, its hackles rising as it sensed something that shouldn't exist.

The scavengers had stopped running. They were staring at Ryu, their mouths hanging open.

"Is... is he a High Ranker?" the woman on the ground whispered, clutching a can of peaches like a holy relic. "But he’s not wearing a suit. He looks like a... a homeless monk?"

The Void Hound growled, a low, vibrating rumble that shook the rusted cars. It lunged at Ryu, its maw opening to reveal rows of crystalline teeth that could bite through tank armor.

Ryu looked at the beast. He felt a wave of genuine exhaustion. He just wanted to find a bed that wasn't made of digital straw. He wanted a burger. He didn't want to deal with an over-caffeinated shadow dog.

"Look, doggy," Ryu said, his voice casual, almost bored. "I’ve had a really, really long day. Like, thirty-six-million-hour long. Just... go away."

He raised his hand, intending to give the creature a dismissive little shooing motion, the kind of gesture you’d use to wave away a persistent fly.

He forgot, for a split second, that his Strength stat was currently screaming in a language the universe didn't speak.

As his hand flicked forward, the air in front of his palm didn't just move; it was compressed into a solid wall of kinetic energy. The displacement was so violent that it created a localized vacuum.

The "flick" hit the Void Hound, and the creature didn't just die, it was structurally discouraged from existing. The beast turned into a purple mist instantly, but the shockwave didn't stop there.

The gust of air from Ryu’s casual gesture caught the front of a three-story office building behind the monster. The concrete facade vanished. Then the steel girders snapped. Then the entire city block behind it simply... flattened. A straight path of absolute destruction, three hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, opened up in an instant, as if an invisible giant had decided to bowl a strike using the city as the lane.

Silence returned to the ruins of Seoul, save for the distant sound of a car alarm and the clatter of a single can of peaches rolling across the asphalt.

Ryu stared at his hand, then at the missing city block. He looked back at the terrified scavengers, who were now vibrating with a level of fear that bordered on religious awe.

"Uh," Ryu said, his hand still frozen in the air. "I meant to just scare it."