Juno Sparks
Level 1. Assassin. Starting gear: one rusty revolver and a really bad attitude.
Aria was an insurance adjuster with a gaming habit and a Charisma score she's still offended by. Then she wakes up in a crumbling high-rise in a ruined city, with a health bar floating in her vision and a terminal telling her she's a Level 1 Assassin. Her loadout is a single Colt, a knife, and four boxes of ammo. No respawn button. No manual. No one to tell her whether she can quit.
The city is full of zombies, and she's a terrible shot. But she's a quick study. With a secondhand baseball bat, a scruffy little dog named Midnight, and a talent for turning panic into XP, Aria starts to climb. She unlocks Victorian-flavored shops, scrounges for blueprints, and hunts quests for a shotgun she can't afford. She also catches the eye of a cocky guild recruiter, a flirty healer, and a secretive sisterhood of assassins whose mechanical librarian is a little too thorough with its security scan.
Everyone in this world seems to want something from her. Then a stranger on a passing bus holds up a message, and Aria loses an hour in the back room of a crafting shop. Now she's wondering whether the game was built for her, and who else is watching her play.
She can't log out, so she's going to have to grind.
Snarky, gritty, and packed with gear porn, zombie-bashing, and slow-burn romance, this is a steampunk LitRPG for readers who've ever muttered "fuck this game" and then played for six more hours.
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