Party System

People paid me to make their characters legendary. Then the game turned real — and trapped them inside. I’m a booster — a carry. You pay me, I grind your character to the cap while you live your ordinary life. Launch night of the expansion, I deliver one last rush order. At zero, my rig goes dark. Fine. I needed cigarettes anyway. Except the hallway is gone. My one-room apartment is a concrete cube in black grass under two moons. No logout. No support. Just a welcome panel for a classification no player has ever had: [Service Provider] The System rebuilt my account into a unique class...

Three stats. Four party members. Every evolution is permanent. Ethan Cole awakened as a Tactician yesterday. The city's only Tactician died three days ago. The nearest dungeon breaks in five. Without a Tactician, nobody can enter the Rift, nobody gets their stats allocated, and nobody evolves. He has to recruit a party from whoever's left, clear three floors, and learn his class in real time. A post-apocalyptic party-management LitRPG with permanent evolution choices and tactical combat you can follow. The recruitment board has nine cards. What remains: a construction worker with a daughter...

Rank 39 out of 39. Dead last. The scoreboard doesn’t lie. I’m an artificer—the wrench, not the sword. I keep the people who fight alive. Nobody writes songs about the wrench. Then I punched a broken breastplate in the armory annex at two in the morning, and the crack closed. The plate belonged to Reni. Knight. Level 14. The kind they paint on recruiting banners. When she put it on the next morning, the System told her defense was up forty percent… and asked if she wanted to attach to the forge lord who crafted it anew. Only thing? Nobody’s had a forge lord in three hundred years. ...

A home worth building. A family worth protecting. And powerful people who should know better than to threaten either. Finn has done his part to save Huntington. He’s ready to collect his reward and head home. Unfortunately, he’s also acquired Edmund’s Light—a legendary mirror capable of glimpsing the past and future. Abyssal corruption has rendered it unusable, and one of the capital’s most powerful noble families wants it badly enough to come knocking. Back at his manor, life finally offers something worth smiling about. New houses stand ready. The children he took in are ...

I rode into dense fog on call in an ambulance. I woke up enrolled in a magic academy… and I’m ranked near the bottom. On Earth, I was a paramedic. At the academy, I’m a rank F field healer with a locked specialization, no spellbook, and a system that thinks “abnormally high bond compatibility” is a medical warning. When a combat duelist named Mara starts crashing from wounds magic says are already fixed, I do what I know: stabilize, assess, hold pressure. Then her buried memories start coming back. Now my “wrong” healing methods are improving her class, throwing forbidden ...

Finn has finally returned to Cinderhold, stronger, wealthier, and ready to build a future for the children depending on him. But home is no longer safe. A mysterious plague is spreading through the region. Its victims turn black, crumble into ash, and cannot be saved by healing magic. When the disease reaches Cinderhold, Finn is sent into the quarantined slums to uncover its source. What begins as a simple investigation soon leads him toward dangerous forests, forgotten ruins, and enemies that refuse to stay dead. Meanwhile, House Alder continues to grow. Finn wants to give the children ...

Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivalled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone - it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping.

Today’s raucous revolt against Washington and Wall Street is a classic populist uprising. Now two respected political pollsters show what it means for the future of American politics. The riotous tea parties and town hall meetings of last summer seemingly took everyone by surprise. They shouldn’t have. Populist movements have always arisen in times of economic hardship. Here, Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen explore the heart of the uprising that has thrown American politics into turmoil.

The party has overcome every obstacle on the Way to the mythical O-Nex. They've bled for each other, fought for each other, trusted each other. But trust is fragile in the deep dark. The B-Nex is revealing its true scale—and its true horrors. Madness seeps through the walls. Secrets long buried are clawing their way to the surface. And [Aura], the cursed power that has kept them alive, is slipping from their grasp just when they need it most.

House Alder is finally becoming more than a name. The ruined estate outside Cinderhold has been transformed into Alder Manor. The children now have space to live, study alchemy, and build a future together. Finn finally has land, a home, and the beginnings of lasting strength. But before he can enjoy any of it, a desperate message arrives from the royal capital. Help. Winnie is trapped inside Huntington, a city sealing its gates as a mysterious plague spreads across the kingdom. Reaching her means crossing a land consumed by fear, slipping into a capital under lockdown, and confronting ...

Two young women, dormitory mates, embark on their education at a big state university. Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiance. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it", Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education.  

Two months ago I was the academy’s problem. Now I’m everyone’s. I’m Wade Corrin. Artificer. Still F-rank on paper, still dead last on a ranking board I don’t even live under anymore. Also the first of my kind in three hundred years—the man whose work can push your gear past its rating… if you trust me. That part’s non-negotiable. Which is why nobody powerful believes it. The forge I rented has bunks now. A scrap line. More people every week. Reni runs breach floors with me. Cora’s hunting whoever capped her. Petra’s S-rank—and every day she stays, the academy looks ...

Lorin, the knight who once fought at Finn’s side, is running out of time. Abyssal Corruption is eating away at him, and the only way to keep him alive is to forge a special suit of soft armor. The materials Finn needs can only be found in two places: the Crimson Drakehawk Roost and the frozen depths of the Frostrift Chasm. One means facing a flock of deadly monsters. The other means entering a place where the cold never fades. And Finn has less than two weeks. While searching for a way to save Lorin, Finn finally gains legal status in Molten Iron and earns his promotion to Adept Mage. ...

I set keystones for a living. That was the job. Four years under Dren. A room above the mortar shed. A pint of ale every night at the tavern, poured before I asked by a barmaid named Daisy who noticed when I skipped meals. A small life. Solid, the way a good arch is solid. Then I walked the forest path home one night and a goddess stepped out of the air. Priala of the Tenth, bound into a barmaid’s body when her Temple was sealed shut. Waiting for me to be named. She named me her Devotant. That means: Ten temples. Ten Trials. Ten Blessings to absorb. A mortal champion to lift a seal ...

One goblin's wit may prove just as sharp—and dangerous—as his teeth in this rollicking LitRPG tale of mud, blood, and battles galore. Aside from regenerating teeth and enhanced night vision, newborn runt-of-the-goblin-litter Daggat didn't have much going for him. Until, that is, the spin of...

Nar was born to pay for a sin he never committed. Locked in a cubeplant in the depths of the Between-Nexus, he's spent his entire life feeding the machine—cursed to die in darkness without ever seeing the sky. When he gets his one chance at freedom, he takes it. Now Nar must Climb. With a hybrid class he can barely control, a weapon that doesn't suit him, and a secret that would get him killed if his party discovered it, he'll brave the ageless depths of the B-Nex in search of the fabled surface.

My whole craft is fixing what’s broken. The woman at my gate isn’t broken. That’s the problem. I’m Wade Corrin. Still expelled — which didn’t stop my squad from walking into a collapsed training breach and carrying out two trapped cadets while the academy’s instructors argued jurisdiction at the barricade. Reni’s plate took a hit down there hauling one of them out. It went on my bench before anything else. Priorities. The rescue bought me a frozen account and a writ nailed to my gate. The foundry town grows anyway: bunks, walls, five bonded women, a repair queue down the ...

The system owes me a fortune. This morning, somebody started skimming from it. I’m Dane. The booster the game migrated as staff. My apartment came with me. So did four of my former clients: Simone, Jessa, Cora, Vivian. One concrete cube, four women, zero drama. Nineteen days in, we’ve earned a lazy morning. We get exactly one. Then my scheduled settlement lands nineteen percent short. Docked. The deduction is authorized — filed by another service provider. Another one. Like me. Worse: my payment windows are watched. Trackers on the roads. Ambush crews at the bridges. Professionals who...

A startling account of how the underrated Dwight Eisenhower saved the world from nuclear holocaust, by the bestselling author of The War Lovers. Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower set about to make good on his campaign promise to end the Korean War. Yet while Eisenhower was...

My healing is still flagged as contamination. Now the people who wrote that rule are at the gate. On Earth, I was a paramedic. At the academy, I’m a Rank E field healer with a forbidden specialization, four bonded partners, and patient outcomes the doctrine can’t explain. So the Board sent an adjudicator with authority to override the academy and remove “anomalous candidates.” Meaning… me. She wants a controlled demonstration of what my hands can do. Fine. One condition. Her Board sealed the file on my ambulance partner—the woman in the wreck beside me when this world took us. ...