The Last Loyal Thing

IT manager David Mercer has spent fifteen years being "a rock" — reliable, invisible, filed under someone else's name. At home, his wife Sarah keeps the story and keeps the pen, editing his life one small correction at a time. The only place David is unquestionably real is the backyard at dusk, with a brindle greyhound's chin on his foot. When the floor of his bedroom tears open at 3:47 AM and swallows Duke, a System announces the dungeon is open and the only way out is through. David wakes on the pavement of a wrong version of his own street — and descends. Each floor is built from his life. Floor 1: the suburbs of denial, where neighbors insist the dog never existed, and Sarah's perfect smile hides a crack. Floor 2: the cubicle labyrinth of fifteen years of stolen credit. Floor 3: the ward of bargaining, with clean rooms and moving goalposts. Floor 4: the homestead trap — a warm house, real food, honest work, and no place anywhere for a dog. Floor 5: the courtroom, where Sarah prosecutes his entire marriage exhibit by exhibit. Floor 6: the shelter, and the smallest door in the dungeon. Floor 7: the System Core, which offers David the one thing every floor has really been asking him to take: a chair. Along the way he is joined by Lena, a trauma surgeon with a scalpel, a canvas bag, and a contract: Survive as ourselves. Triage, no punishment. Together they discover the dungeon's cruelest trick — it doesn't attack with monsters. It attacks with comfort, paperwork, and reasonable voices. At the center, David refuses the seat of the Architect and does the only thing the System cannot process: he orders its dissolution — and carries his starving dog up into an ordinary, ruined, beautiful morning. A LitRPG descent story about the last loyal thing a man can be. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The Last Loyal Thing — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠