Petty Nuisance

Theodore Calamity has spent twenty-one years preparing to become a supervillain. His only problem: he keeps accidentally fixing the city. He's got the name. The lair. The homemade doomsday devices. Fourteen carefully rehearsed minutes of opening remarks. What Ted doesn't have is Infamy — and without it, the League will never take him seriously. Level 2. Classification: Petty Nuisance. To even qualify for a probationary review, he has to clear ten benchmarks built for villains with money, followers, and an actual body count. So Ted commits. He seizes the Kessler Street Water Authority, takes nine registered civilians hostage, and fires up a machine aimed straight at the city's crumbling pipes. It works flawlessly. The machine strips out forty-one years of lead. Hundreds of homes get clean water for the first time in decades. His hostages rate him five stars. Ted levels up— —and loses Infamy. Then Vantage, the city's beloved hero, sweeps in to collect the cameras, the credit, and the official version of events. Because the record was never built to measure what Ted did. Only whether anyone was watching. Ted refuses to fail that way twice. His next scheme will be bigger, louder, and mathematically incapable of helping a single soul. But in a city that rewards heroic branding over outcomes, flawless engineering just becomes more evidence against him — and every benchmark the League dangles pulls him one step closer to doing real harm. Eventually Ted has to decide what he actually wants: recognition from the institution that dismissed him, or proof that its definitions of hero and villain were rigged from the start. Dryly funny, sharply observed, and powered by stats, skills, quests, and spectacularly misclassified competence, Petty Nuisance launches the Calamity series. How far will Ted go to make the world look directly at him — and who will he become when it finally does? — Description from novelcodex.org