The Skill Thief of Manila

A LitRPG Apocalypse by Ramon Galvez

CHAPTER TWO: End Times

[You have received: Steal Skill.]

I was crouched on the floor reading the floating notification that had shown up like a text from someone I'd never given my number to while everyone was confused in the dark.

I focused on it. Waited for a description. Tried poking it. It didn't elaborate. It just sat there like it had fully delivered on its end of the deal.

[Steal Skill], not a sword, not a dagger. [Skill Thief], not the twin-blade assassin loadout I'd been mentally drafting since the timer hit fifteen seconds. Judging from the titles, which were literally the only information I had, I was a thief who stole skills, which meant I wasn't useful until I stole a skill that was useful. So I wasn't anything yet. Just regular old Joshua Dimagiba. Useless as an ashtray on a trike.

The dark lifted.

It wasn't that familiar generator sequence in a brownout, everyone exhaling together. This was all at once, as if someone bumped into the light switch of the sun, felt embarrassed and flicked it on hoping nobody noticed.

My eyes noticed. And filed complaints. Loud ones.

Around me, twenty-plus people were doing the thing people do when reality forces a mandatory update without an notice: processing it in public, badly. The floating screens were gone. The class cards were gone.

The crossbow wasn't gone, and I thought about stealing it. I was, after all, a thief.

Crossbow girl was cradling it with the careful bewilderment of someone who'd been handed a very expensive gift from a relative they don't remember meeting. Solid wood. Actual string. Bolts. A weapon in every sense, held by someone who looked like she'd never held a weapon in her life and was holding one anyway, which put her ahead of me.

I thought about the card I'd picked. The hooded figure, behind someone, holding a shard of light. I had seen that card and thought: that's me. Sixteen years of watching everyone around me know exactly what they were doing, and when the system asked me to pick a self, I picked someone else.

The rear hallway door hit the wall two feet from my face.

When I lunged for the card, I’d jumped to the door. I stepped back. The door banged forward. Now I was behind it.

The security guard came through sideways—one shoulder dragging on the doorframe, uniform torn at the collar—with something on his back doing the tearing.

It looked like a child.

That's the thing that hit first, before the details could accumulate into something my brain could file correctly. Child-sized. Gray-green skin with the texture of old rubber. Eyes the flat yellow of a lizard's. Ears like crumpled parchment. A smile containing too many teeth pointed in too many directions.

It had a shiv. Crude metal, triangular, handle wrapped in something I was specifically choosing not to identify. It was using it with the glee of someone who found this work fulfilling.

The guard was already past the point of return. I knew it the way you know a game's about to crash—the glitchiness before the silence. He went down on one knee. The thing rode him down without pausing.

The class was completely frozen.

I was two feet away. I looked at crossbow girl. She looked at the crossbow.

I threw my hands up in the air. Come on, lady!

"Shoot it!" From the cluster by the window wall.

"Shoot the thing!"

"May hawak kang crossbow, SHOOT NA!"

Everybody was now shouting.

She finally found the trigger and pulled.

The bolt went wide—over my left shoulder, four inches past my left ear—hit the far wall, ricocheted at an angle that could have opened my cheek, and clattered near the supply cabinet. I stood there for one full second not moving, heart mule-kicking my sternum.

The goblin didn't flinch. It had ridden the guard three feet into the classroom and was eyeing the cluster of screaming students by the window.

The girl with the crossbow was trying to reload, having decided that the correct response to almost taking off my ear was the exact same thing again, but faster, and with more feeling.

The monster crouched. My gamer brain recognized what was next. My body made a decision.

My desk-chair connected with its back-left side and the sound it made was one I was going to spend a considerable portion of my future processing in the background, like a Windows program you couldn't Control-Alt-Delete. The creature went sideways. Hit the floor. Stopped.

[You have slain: Goblin. Received: 10 gold.]

Goblin. I stood there with the desk-chair, shaking. Ten gold.

I didn't know how to fit that into anything. I just killed something for the first time, and I knew—logically knew—it was stabbing someone. It wasn't a child. It was going to stab someone else. I stood there knowing that and not feeling any better for what was probably two seconds which felt like a month.

I forced myself to inhale. Everyone was staring at me. I lowered the chair the way you put down a weapon in a cutscene where the director wants the viewer to know something has changed.

"Okay." I spoke slowly in order to not spook them. "The system gave us classes. Some people got weapons." I gestured at the crossbow. The girl cradled it closer. "We should figure out what everyone has. If these things run in groups, we need to know our damage spread before—"

The professor ran out the room without a word. Just bolted. The guy who'd been choking his Wyteboard marker and telling us to stay calm—gone, through the front door—and my classmates followed.

"Wait—"

They didn't. The hallway beats the room with a dead guy in it, even though that was where this goblin came from. The desk-chair barricade lasted three seconds. The guys who were trying to climb out the window reversed course.

"—because area-of-effect matters more than single-target at lower levels," I finished, to four empty rows of desk-chairs and one ceiling fan.

From the hallway: screaming, running, the clatter of more of the same. The sounds pulled away from Room 302 like the tide going out. People were drawing monsters out there, and they were doing it efficiently.

I sighed, feeling guilty about the safety that bought me.

Renato Maglalang, forty-three. That was his name. I went through his belt with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be: a radio that was dead, a retractable baton I took, a laminated ID card for Mr. Maglalang who had a wide smile, wearing his uniform like he was proud of it.

"Renato," I said. It seemed wrong to not say something. "I'm really sorry."

I did the Sign of the Cross and stayed there a moment. He had a callus on his right thumb from the baton. The pride in his photo wasn't an accident. It seemed like a choice he'd made that morning, before any of this.

That was when I noticed the icon.

It was floating just above his chest. A shard—small, translucent, glowing solid blue—drifting slightly. When I moved my hand near it, it tracked toward me, trying to close the distance. I pulled my hand back. It drifted back. Over his arm, it followed, chasing my fingers, staying about an inch from the surface of him.

A no-sign was stamped across the center of it. The kind that means function unavailable.

I looked at the icon. I looked at Renato.

Dead.

I looked at the goblin. Also dead.

I slammed my fist into my palm. That's right. The card had a living target. The hooded figure was fishing a skill shard out, not delivering a blade. I'm an idiot!

Something crashed down the hall. Things were suddenly tumbling, trilling and screaming in the distance. Brought me back to where I was, and I sat on the floor. My backpack went into my lap and my shoes came off. Squeaky sneakers seemed like a deadly oxymoron in the apocalypse, so I tucked them in beside my notebook, the one with Josh Giba / First Period / November 4th, 2025, the day everything turned to shit, in sleep-deprived handwriting.

The shiv was next. It had slid by the teacher's desk when the goblin went down. Rough, triangular, crude. A killer's weapon, unlike the baton. Taking out the goblin with a chair had been the body moving before the brain. Picking this up would be a decision. To make things bleed and die, close enough to smell.

I hesitated. This wasn't Shadowveil. Killing wasn't fun. Dying looked even worse. Maybe I didn't want to be an assassin, actually.

From somewhere down the hall, a voice rose into a scream with a name in it. I didn't catch the name. Didn't matter. The scream said: someone is here, someone is losing, someone needs someone to arrive five minutes ago.

I grabbed it. Stood. Zipped the backpack. Adjusted the strap. Baton in my left hand, shiv in my right.

Somewhere down this hall, someone was still alive.