Edgar opened his eyes in an unfamiliar clearing. The flora was completely alien to him. Huge green trees, scrub and brush, all different, all wrong in the way only a foreign world could be. Then the screaming began.

  “Where am I?!”

  “Where’s my family!”

  “What happened to my baby!”

  He immediately began moving through the thousands of people in the clearing, towards a small light that had been shot into the air. He found Selene and his children even before everyone had finished warping in. Selene was already in full concentration, muttering under her breath, and Edgar didn’t interrupt her. He pulled his kids into a quick hug, hard enough to ground them, then stepped forward into a more visible location where he could be seen without needing to climb or shout.

  Selene shouted and lifted her hand, fingers spreading. The air around the clearing thickened into a smooth, mostly transparent wall. It formed a wide circle, high enough that the treeline beyond blurred and bent. A few people in the crowd screamed as they saw the wall developing around them. Sound from within the rainforest became distant, and sound within the barrier echoed, louder than usual, every voice thrown back into the clearing as if there was nowhere for it to go.

  Edgar stepped forward and started speaking. His voice carried cleanly to everyone throughout the crowd. “Everyone shut up and listen if you don’t want to die.”

  Heads snapped towards him. Fear sharpened into anger. A man pushed through the crowd and swore at him, calling him insane, demanding to know what Edgar had done. Edgar didn’t react. Then a gun was pointed at him. A man dressed in a blue uniform shouted, “You did this!” and fired a single shot. The bullet hit Edgar’s forehead and bounced right off.

  Edgar looked at the man as if he’d thrown a rock. “Now, if we’re done with the games, we need to get ready.” He gestured to the woman behind him without turning fully, keeping himself as the centre of attention. Selene’s face was tight with strain. “Selene is keeping this barrier stable for the time being. It won’t last forever. In the next minute or so, you’re all about to be integrated into the System. It will impose a tutorial on you. You can scream about it, or you can listen and maybe we’ll all live long enough to hate each other later.”

  Outcry poured out anyway. People weren’t used to taking rules. They were used to demanding explanations. That habit died fast when the crowd remembered the bullet. Edgar didn’t need to threaten them. He just stood there and let reality do the work.

  [Welcome to Earth Tutorial 532, The ten-thousand participants here will integrate under Scenario: Dungeon Apocalypse. Your mission is simple, survive for thirty days. How you do is up to you. Good luck.]

  The message hung in the air where everyone could see it. Some flinched away as if it might burn them. Others stared with slack mouths, eyes glassy, trying to understand why letters could exist without a surface. A woman began to sob. A teenager started to laugh, sharp and hysterical, then choked it off when another message flickered and vanished too fast to read. Edgar didn’t smile. He watched denial collapse, watched panic spread, and spoke straight through it.

  “This is my last warning,” he said, voice steady, carrying again. “If you want to live, you serve my group now. You follow instructions. You do not run into the forest. You do not test the barrier. You do not pick fights inside the clearing. You do not steal. You do not touch my children.” He let his gaze move across faces one by one, cold enough to make people look away. “You can hate me later. You can call me whatever you want later. Later exists only if we do this properly.”

  A blue light flooded over Edgar. He lifted his hands and a set of matching sabres appeared as if out of nowhere. He didn’t flourish them. He didn’t pose. He simply let the weight of them exist as proof. “Now, we have a dungeon apocalypse on our hands. The main goal is survival. What the System doesn’t tell you is that you’re about to be separated. Every one of you will experience a dungeon. Since we’re in this bubble you’ll be teleported directly. Some of you will get combat dungeons. Others will get crafting. It tailors itself to your best option.”

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

  He held one sabre slightly forward, not pointing at anyone, just reminding them he could. “If we do well here, we don’t come out as a crowd of terrified people begging for scraps. We come out as the elites of the new world. The ones with levels. The ones with gear. The ones with organisation. The ones who decide what happens next.” His eyes moved across the clearing again. “That only happens if you stop acting like individuals and start acting like assets.”

  He didn’t soften the next part. He laid out the process and made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion. Teams. Rotations. Salvage. Rules for claiming supplies. Rules for learning to fight without killing each other first. Rules for obeying orders the first time. He explained how they would return and where they would report. He explained what would happen to anyone who tried to break the structure. He didn’t promise comfort. He promised survival, and survival came with a price.

  When people began vanishing one by one in puffs of smoke, they finally listened with open ears. They stopped arguing and started memorising.

  The last few people vanished and Edgar turned back to Selene and his two children. Selene’s breathing was controlled, but her brow was slick with sweat. “Thanks, Selene. Release your magic on us once we’re gone. Don’t waste strength trying to hold it longer than you have to.”

  The strain on Selene’s brow lightened by a fraction. One by one, the rest of them vanished, entering their dungeons.

  ***

  Edgar opened his Tutorial window, smiling at the result.

  [Tutorial Phase 2: Wave 4/5. Participants Remaining: 10,000/10,000]

  He had done it. Ten thousand alive. Ten thousand integrated. Ten thousand people who had learned, in the first minutes, that survival had a chain of command, and he held it.

  The clearing had evened out into a settlement with edges. The barrier still stood, a silent circle that took the teeth out of every wave and turned chaos into a slow, controlled grind for essence. Edgar moved through the camp with full authority. People stepped aside without being told. Voices lowered when he passed. Eyes dropped. Workers hurried. Fighters straightened. Nobody forgot the bullet. Nobody forgot the sabres. Nobody forgot the order he had given them at the start.

  He had created a hierarchy, and it was clean.

  At the top was Edgar and his family. Selene stood at his right hand, not because she needed permission to be dangerous, but because Edgar made it clear that anyone who touched her, questioned her, or inconvenienced her was questioning him. Below them were the elites, fighters with decent gear, trained as a unit rather than a mob. Weapons maintained. Armour fitted. Squads drilled until their movements became natural. They weren’t friends. They were the blade he would use later, and they knew it. They served him because service kept them fed, armed, and alive.

  In the middle were merchants and organisers, the ones who tracked supplies, traded rations, managed storage, and kept the numbers steady so nobody woke up to find food missing. They weren’t free either. They were useful servants, rewarded when they performed, replaced when they didn’t. At the back were crafters, protected and valuable, building what the fighters needed and treated as irreplaceable because Edgar made it policy. Waste a skilled hand and you wasted the group’s future.

  It wasn’t subtle. Edgar sat at the top. The people beneath him were servants. Well-trained and well-presented servants, organised enough to look like civilisation instead of a mob, but servants all the same. They gave him their effort. They gave him their loot. They gave him their obedience. In return, they received structure and safety. Anyone who tried to take without giving was removed. Anyone who tried to pretend this was a democracy learned quickly that the barrier didn’t protect them from Edgar.

  Edgar wasn’t disillusioned though, and nor were the people. They knew Edgar and Selene gained the best rewards and items. They levelled the fastest and the hardest. They worked themselves to the bone, but this was never going to be equal. Edgar didn’t ask them to like it. He asked them to accept it.

  No one left. Safety often came at the expense of freedom, and most people chose safety with both hands when the forest beyond the barrier was full of teeth.

  Edgar, now level twenty-four, held equipment that, while nothing compared to his old gear, would serve him well for the early stages of the true integration. He believed there wouldn’t be a single person above him in the world. Sure, there would be masses, and there would be monsters, but he would come out on top and shape the survivors into something that could stand. If they did well here, they wouldn’t just survive. They would rule.

  Not a single person had died. And that fact, more than Edgar’s voice or Selene’s barrier, was what finally made everyone understand who truly held power in this tutorial.