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A city bus full of ordinary people — plus one corgi — is yanked into the System's tutorial on the setting nobody survives: Hell Difficulty. Nathaniel treats the death trap as a puzzle with an exploit somewhere, because the alternative is dying like the statistics say.
Progression: brutal tutorial crunch where every unlocked edge compounds; group survival math included.
Reader fit: you want high-lethality system gauntlets and a protagonist who thrives on terrible odds.
Texture: tense, calculated, dog included.
Series