
by Paul Fortunato
World peace was mankind's biggest mistake. United under one banner, humanity erased war, hunger, and disease. A utopia of peace, compassion, and cooperation. Then the stars took notice. The Intersol called us forward, claiming we’d earned a place amongst them. But their judgment was swift—our kindness was weakness, our mercy a joke. Too soft. Too fragile. Too naive to stand among real civilizations. Earth was declared a game reserve, a zoo where we could live out our little fantasy of peace. The price of safety? Biomass harvesting—our people taken as food for the cosmos. But there is an escape clause. Wargames. A brutal bloodsport where species prove their worth—or are eradicated. A hundred thousand humans thrown into a meat grinder against billions. A species that abandoned war, fighting civilizations that never stopped. The aliens think they’ve already won. But they never studied our history. They don’t know about our fallen blood-soaked empires, the instinct for cruelty, the hunger for dominance lurking beneath our progress. Humanity hasn’t forgotten war. We’ve just been waiting for an excuse.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 07:49 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 07:49 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
6%
Two or more lists
0%
Likely threshold order: Sci-fi → Action → Fantasy → Main.
Leading bundle: Sci-fi (6%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#9214 of 12,172 · 9164 below RS #50
By genre
beats 76% of similar stories
beats 77% of similar stories
beats 42% of similar stories
Mid-pack, room on both levers
Traffic and conversion both sit mid-field for a story this size. Growth here compounds from consistency: steady cadence feeds traffic, and a sharper hook lifts what each view is worth.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 50–149 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.