New Web Novels

Hayes Carver has one job: keep his highly volatile, metal-eating Scale-Hound fed, calm, and moving along the treacherous tri-kingdom caravan routes. But the heavily trafficked highway is fracturing, spitting up remnants of the massive, buried crime that built the allied cities in the first place. On the other end of the route is Penn Stafford, a saboteur who knows exactly whose bodies are petrified beneath the pavement, and who is methodically tearing the road apart to prove it. As their paths forcefully converge, Hayes must use every ounce of his grit and the bond with his dangerous beast to protect the trade route he relies on, while Penn leverages his intellect and traps to tear it down. Two highly capable men, fighting on opposite sides of a reawakening world where every mile costs blood.

A plague province where the cure rots the host faster than the sickness, and everyone knows it. Toliman, a lock- and gatekeeper who knows every untracked route through the quarantine zones, has found one uninfected sanctuary beneath the city. But when the secret to keeping that sanctuary pure threatens to unravel, Toliman must decide what he will trade to keep the rot away, and who he will feed to the healers to do it. The price of survival is physical, the politics are corrupt, and the final reckoning demands blood.

When independent demolition specialist Kalliades takes a contract to scuttle the massive, deep-water salvage rig Kymatothia, it seems like a standard hazard job. The rig is isolated above a treacherous sub-surface trench, and the company wants the deteriorating structure gone. But Kalliades bears an ancient oceanic mark on his skin—a trait that makes him uniquely capable of surviving the crushing depths, and precisely what the anomaly beneath the rig is hunting. After a catastrophic structural failure, Kalliades wakes up three days in the past. Now trapped in a repeating time loop, he must use his structural expertise and precise application of explosives to reverse-engineer the disaster, navigate a paranoid crew, and outwit whatever is systematically dismantling the rig from the abyss.

A bitter feud suspended only by an uneasy marriage leaves two armed syndicates circling each other. Inside this fragile truce stands Lin Qianyu, a master brewer whose rare fermentation techniques yield anesthetics and performance balms that supply both lines. When she is offered up for the marriage to stabilize the truce, she brings something far more explosive than a dowry: a dormant, engineered strain capable of degrading the raw materials of their rival's narcotics trade, if triggered. To survive her new, heavily guarded household and her ruthless husband—who suspects her allegiance—Qianyu must navigate a lethal domestic chess game. She relies on her sensory mastery to uncover poisons, build unlikely allies among the watchmen, and silently propagate a weapon that could topple the precarious peace if her secret is discovered. When every meal and traded bottle carries a hidden motive, she is a single spark in a trench full of gasoline, and her husband is the one holding the match.

Death in the sun-scorched city of Lymnos is no longer an escape; it is a ledger. Ten years ago, the skies burned purple, and the Dust-Blight began eating time from everyone it touched. Now, those who fall can be brought back by the System, but the toll is paid in memory. Every resurrection strips away what makes them who they are.

Kallias was once the premier blademaster of the southern arenas, earning a fortune he squandered before the Blight settled in his own lungs. Out of time and slipping closer to the memory-toll with each breath, he scrapes together days by coaching those desperate enough to enter the gauntlet of the Culling Games. But when his new student, a prodigy with a lethal disregard for the rules, unearths a hidden mechanic within the System—a way to siphon time directly from the blighted beasts without losing memories—Kallias sees a final payout.

To survive the encroaching season of rot, a cynic past his prime and a talent who has never tasted true defeat must navigate a lethal tournament, a corrupt resurrection industry, and the deadly echoes of a past they can barely afford to remember.

The landslide didn’t just bury the century-old trade route between three hostile kingdoms; it buried the established order. Now, the caravan road is cut off, and surviving the initial disaster is merely the first, bloody test. Faris-ran, desperate to shed the suffocating legacy of a legendary caravan master parent, must carve a new path through shattered terrain, highly caustic alkaline dust, and rising banditry. Faris finds an unexpected, invaluable local ally in an outcast whose knowledge of the fractured terrain borders on the miraculous. But the alliance hides a dangerous motive. The ruined road will demand every ounce of Faris's hard-won competence, a ruthless new pragmatism—and a price far worse than simply dying in the dust.

In the sun-blasted caravan routes of the Gyarmath Basin, water is not merely currency—it is law. The Révész Syndicate, a ruthless cartel of distillers and warlords, controls every oasis and deep-well, strangling the desert traders and outlander settlements into compliance. István, a cold-eyed and brutally pragmatic bodyguard, plies his trade protecting the very merchants he despises. He is sharper than his clients, surviving by reading the silent language of desperation, debt, and the subtle shifts in power among the dunes.

When a catastrophic aquifer collapse obliterates the basin’s last independent water source in a single, devastating night, the delicate balance of the desert shatters. István’s current charge—a naive and idealistic scholar possessing the lost schematic for a deep-desert atmospheric collector—becomes the most valuable and hunted commodity in Gyarmath. To keep his client alive, István must navigate a collapsing society where survival means choosing between loyalty to his contract, the allure of monopolizing the new water source, and the terrifying reality that the Syndicate will burn the basin to ash before surrendering control. The trail ahead is paved with blood, broken oaths, and the creeping realization that the true power in the desert doesn't just drink the water—it bleeds it from those left behind.

Leyla-tay knows every forgotten tunnel, rusted fire escape, and subterranean gate beneath the sprawling metropolis of Alta-tay. By day, she maintains the city's decaying locks; by night, she protects her family's failing subterranean restaurant from developers. When sharp-suited corporate consultant Ozan-bek is sent to find the physical flaws needed to shut the restaurant down, their clash ignites a dangerous game of cat and mouse through the city's hidden core. But beneath the concrete lies the truth of a catastrophic explosion that wrongfully imprisoned Leyla-tay’s father. To expose the real culprits, the gatekeeper and the closer must navigate the deadly back-alleys of the past and the present, before the city they both love crumbles on top of them.

Forty years ago, the inner boundary of the Makrif-at Reserve was drawn in chain-link and rusted silence, sealing off a valley the government paid to forget. Today, the outer trails belong to oblivious tourists, but the closed zone belongs strictly to Tamir-at. He is the warden, the solitary caretaker, and the willing host to a territory that learns the shape of whatever dies in its soil. He guards the wild not from humanity, but humanity from the wild.

Then Fadila-im arrives. A newly assigned ecologist with sharp equipment, deep pockets, and an easy smile, she offers the resources Tamir-at desperately needs to patch an eroding perimeter. But her help demands access. Fadila-im isn't here to map the buffer zone; she is hunting for an extraction—a buried failure left behind by the architects of the forty-year quarantine. As the boundary wire strains and the valley’s true apex predator wakes to the scent of new ambition, survival for Tamir-at depends on the one thing he swore never to do: trust an ally trying to crack his cage open from the outside.

Once a year, the tide of magic washes over the island of Oleria, rewriting the coastline and shifting the earth itself. Every survival depends on one resource: Emberglass, the only material capable of stabilizing the shifting ground long enough to build a home, plant a field, or draw a breath free from the churning chaos.

Vane doesn't mine Emberglass. He protects those who trade it. As a bodyguard to an ambitious but naive glass-merchant, Vane knows the rules of the island: stay alert, expect betrayal, and never trust a guild that claims to have your best interests at heart. The Cinder Cartel controls the glass, and through it, the safety of every city on the island.

But when a routine protection job turns deadly, Vane and his charge uncover a fracture in the Cartel’s absolute control—a hidden, unmapped vein of Emberglass that hasn't been claimed. Now, hunted by Cartel enforcers and the island's own chaotic storms, Vane must navigate shifting alliances and treacherous terrain, using his sharp mind and sharper blades to keep his charge alive and secure a future before the next tide washes them all away.

The System is broken. Not "needs a patch" broken—it's actively rotting, managed by an underfunded bureaucracy that couldn't care less if a localized glitch wipes out a neighborhood. For Sorosh-ran, a gig-worker scraping by on the fraying edges of the sector, this is just Tuesday. He survives by practicing Censer-craft—an ancient, analog superstition in a world practically ruled by digital stats and prompt boxes.

But when a new anomaly starts crystallizing citizens from the inside out, the official readouts label it a minor hazard. The bureaucracy looks the other way. Sorosh’s fragrant smoke tells a different story.

Armed with his heavy brass censer, sheer stubbornness, and a desperate need for credits, Sorosh dives into the failing infrastructure to hunt down the Dross-taint. He's going to use the System's own blind spots to level up his discredited craft. He'll smash corrupted mechs, strip-mine the glitches for rare loot, and outsmart arrogant middle managers who rely too much on flawed data. Because if the Overseers won't fix the world's code, Sorosh will just have to burn it back to life, one sweet-smelling stat block at a time.

Every night the city of Osumadu marches out its dead to hold the line against what waits in the ash-wastes. To feed that army, the living must bleed. Nduoma is a way-keeper, master of the city's hidden locks and forgotten gates, making a dangerous living moving illicit grain and desperate people through the cracks in the walls. When a botched smuggling run unearths a sealed vault beneath the oldest district, she finds proof that the city’s founding compact is a lie: the dead aren't marching to protect Osumadu, but to keep something else imprisoned. Now, hunted by the ruling factions who will execute anyone to keep the truth buried, Nduoma must use every locked door and secret passage she knows to tear down the city's foundation before the dead finally turn around and march home.

Against a landscape measured in blood and rising waters, the Three Sects race a deadly flood season—and a disgraced surveyor holds the only true map. When an outsider dares to measure what the locals prefer to leave hidden, they trigger a conflict between the comfort of old lies and the danger of true knowledge. To survive the rising tide and the wrath of entrenched factions, they must use the very land as a weapon, forging unlikely alliances and paying a brutal price for every secret dragged into the light.

In the canal-choked merchant city of Vízvárad, blood is thicker than water—but toxic silt pays the bills. Tivian Lánczy is the family fixer for a struggling salvage and dredging crew. When the Lánczys' main submersible diving bell breaks down, they face imminent ruin at the hands of the wealthy dredging cartels. Salvation appears in the form of Zsuzsóka Várady, a high-born merchant offering an exorbitant payday to salvage a supposedly simple lockbox from the perilous deep-water district. But the cargo isn't what she claims, the volatile underwater currents aren't the only things trying to crush them, and a violent rival crew is already hunting for the prize. To save his family’s livelihood, Tivian must navigate cutthroat guild enforcers, treacherous tides, and the deadly, hidden agenda of his own benefactor.

Maca-uay patches up the broken and the careless in the company town of Killar-qa, an extraction settlement where the air filters log perfect air quality even when the miners cough black grit. She is a field medic who loses every fistfight but never loses a patient. When a supervisor is pulled from Sector Four with injuries that the company’s official shift logs classify as a simple fall, Maca recognizes the distinct tearing pattern of a spore-bore that was officially eradicated three years ago.

The company insists the sector is safe. The town’s continued operation—and Maca’s only safe harbor from the debts of her past—depends on the town’s high safety ratings remaining spotless. But as more workers arrive at her makeshift infirmary with "accidental" injuries that don't match the reports, Maca realizes the safety records aren't just falsified; they are covering up a quiet, spreading contamination. She has to find out what Killar-qa is actually digging into before the quarantine protocols lock the town down forever—without alerting the overseers that the town's most disposable medic knows they are all living on top of an active bio-hazard.

Evoia is a structural translator in the sunless city of Vrythos, gifted—and cursed—with the ability to hear the psychic residue trapped in stone and steel. The eternal long night of Vrythos has always been ruled by the Erethes, a nocturnal class that preys on the vulnerable. When Evoia deciphers a localized scream trapped within the founding pillars of the city, she uncovers evidence of a massive historical crime: Vrythos was built on a stolen bloodline. Her discovery forces an uneasy alliance with Kyranthos, a ruthless Erethes enforcer whose own family is implicated in the slaughter. As they unravel the buried truth of the city's origins, they must confront their growing, dangerous bond and fight to ensure the past does not return to devour the present.

Beneath the farming town of Krasnoy lies the Hollow—a sprawling, living dungeon whose roots, beasts, and rare soil are the town’s only economy. Harvesting it takes a light touch. Pull too much, and the ecosystem fights back. The town’s most famous Warden built a fortune on those rules. Then he vanished.

His kid, Volya, wants precisely zero pieces of the family legacy. No name, no money, no expectations. What Volya wants is a quiet, independent living relying on a fragile, untested class that bends the Hollow’s ambient rot into combat fuel. But out in the upper margins, things are getting ugly. Tunnels are unexpectedly collapsing. The rot is thickening. Someone is aggressively strip-mining the Hollow, and they’re destroying the farm to do it.

To survive the cave-ins and carve out their own standing, Volya forms a shaky partnership with Levskor, a fast-talking veteran of the local guilds who mysteriously drops out of a restricted vent at just the right time. But as Volya levels up by harvesting the very decay destroying the Dungeon, it becomes terrifyingly clear that Levskor isn't just a mentor. He's using Volya's unique build as a skeleton key to crack the Hollow's deepest wards.

The farm is dying. The harvest is failing. And the one guy helping Volya get stronger is the one pulling the trigger.

The legitimate front of the Zerrouki family business—a sprawling, deeply insulated salvage yard and restoration garage at the edge of a sprawling metropolis—requires a husband to sign the municipal permits. For the matriarch, a marriage of convenience to an outsider is a tactical maneuver. For Tariq El-Fekhar, a dismissed soldier who fled for a reason he refuses to explain, it is the only place left to hide. Tariq wants nothing more than to keep his head down, fix the engines, and stay off the grid. But his new wife, Safiya, is the heir to a quiet, brutal syndicate that moves more than just scrap metal, and she expects him to play his part as the obedient, silent partner. As the local rivals begin circling the Zerrouki territory, and the secrets of Tariq's past bleed into the present, he realizes the family's insular code is a cage. When he begins to dismantle the threats his own way, using the lethal competence he promised to bury, the dynamic flips. He was supposed to be a paper husband. Now, he is a danger she cannot control, and an obsession they both refuse to survive without.

They tell the wounded the Sula Order is salvation. They lie.

Pela works the shadow-shift at Mola Hospital, a decaying, blood-soaked sanctuary parked right on the continental borderline. Her trade is the Rua—a vile, outlawed magic that plucks the unvarnished truth directly from the living marrow of mutilated soldiers. It is a one-way ticket to an execution post if Warden Bato catches her. But when opposing infantrymen start arriving with internal rot that feels meticulously engineered to strip the spirit while leaving the flesh, Pela realizes the neutral hospital is not just treating the war. It is mutating it.

Trapped in a locked-room nightmare where carrying a blade means immediate death and the surgeons smell of faint lye, Pela must weaponize her illicit craft to pry confessions from the dying. She has to out-maneuver the brutal wardens, decode the contagion, and decide what a manufactured peace is truly worth—before the rot crawls into her own bones. In a sanctuary built on compulsory healing, uncovering the disease is treason.

Tamsin Fletcher has spent her life negotiating on behalf of the wagon-merchants and craft-halls, turning empty hands into temporary truces. She has never carried leverage of her own. When the reclusive Court of the Barrow-Mark unseals its borders to outsiders for the first time in a generation, Tamsin is sent to negotiate an end to a vicious proxy war bleeding the trade routes dry. But on the eve of a breakthrough, she is murdered—only to pry her eyes open exactly thirty days earlier, on the day the crossing opened.

Trapped in a closed stretch of time, Tamsin discovers she retains every secret she learns, but each repetition demands a physical toll from her strength. The proxy war she was sent to stop is being manipulated by a faceless director using the Barrow-Mark's shifting physical architecture: an ancient, subterranean mechanism of turning gears and kinetic locks known as the Brass Wheel. To break the cycle and claim unassailable leverage, Tamsin must forge a dangerous alliance with Vance Ironwright, the ruthless mercenary commander fighting on the wrong side of the proxy war. Together, they have exactly thirty days to map the physical puzzle of the Wheel, uncover the war's true architect, and stop the gears from locking the borders, and Tamsin's life, away forever.