Save File: Tactician Run
He woke up in the wrong character.
Marcus Vale, thirty-four, dead at his desk after six full playthroughs of the cult tactics-RPG Banner of the Eighth. The personality test that opens the game hung on his screen the moment his heart gave out. The answers stayed in the system.
He woke up inside the game. Not as the heroic prince. As Marek Vance, twenty-one, son of the framed general the kingdom calls a traitor, and foster brother to a girl who turns out to be the last surviving Caen, the priest-line whose blood, in willing acceptance at a crown, completes the cabal's six-hundred-year-old curse against the kingdom's army.
The cabal has been preparing for nineteen years. He has, by his read of the game's ending he never finished, somewhere between three and twelve months to stop them.
The personality test bound him. Eight squad leaders, one for each Aspect of the world's oldest oath, are in the back of his skull now as cosmic threads he can feel. Five are within reach. Three are still ahead.
Sir Halberd Ostrey. The lance-captain who hates the Vance name on principle, who took his father's lance on a field nine years before this story began and has been carrying it since.
Mira Caen. His foster sister, the queen the cabal wants, who has been dreaming the ritual every night of her life since she was nine and never told anyone.
Wyn the Quiet. The smuggler who has lived alone for seven years and broke the silence to slide half her bread across a table to a man she did not know.
Aselin Ferre. The witch with a snake tattooed at her left wrist, whose grandmother was burned by the church for a working that has kept Aselin alive ever since.
Brace Holcomb. The cleric who refused the Court's third rite and walked south for seven years carrying his dead husband's mace.
Three more are coming.
He has a kitchen knife and a body that hasn't sparred in seven years. He has the analytical reflexes of a man who broke into bank vaults for a living. He has a foster sister who has known what she was for nineteen years and never been allowed to say it out loud. He has, somewhere in the wilderness, a father everyone but his mother thinks is dead, sending one-line letters in soot from a cave he won't name.
He has, by every reading he has of the field, no chance.
He has, by his own count, eight.
Save File: Tactician Run is transmigration tactics-RPG progression fantasy with a polyamorous harem of eight squad leaders, hard-magic class evolution gated on named promotion artifacts, kingdom-scale strategic warfare, and a coronation pivot at the end of arc one that breaks the world Marek is fighting to save.
Eight chapters a week. Spicy canon under the Mature tag. Clean fork available for readers who want the romance with fade-to-black.