Gacha for the End Times

Scott Leonard went to sleep as an ordinary thirty-year-old Florida dispatcher. He woke up four hundred years too late, inside an obsidian pod, wearing someone else’s body and someone else’s destiny. The locals call him the prophesied Champion, the man who will lead humanity back to the surface. But Scott only feels like a man who missed his alarm. Armed with nothing but a sarcastic android named Q-T and a mysterious gacha system that spits out nostalgic sci-fi gear sealed inside heavy plastic pods, he must fight for a dying underground city against swarms of blood-red giant ants while the ancient technology around him slowly stirs back to life. He is not the only one. Somewhere in the same colossal cavern, two other modern-day people have also awakened as Champions, and each is convinced their own Bastion-City is the last remnant of humanity. As the enigmatic System begins offering seductive quests and dangling powerful rewards, Scott starts to sense he is no longer just fighting for survival. He is playing a game. A game whose rules no one fully understands. A game that seems to delight in turning desperate people against each other. Every successful pull, every hard-won victory, every quiet moment of hope only deepens the feeling that something else is watching. In a buried world lit by glowing mushrooms and built for giants, Scott must decide how much he is willing to become the hero they need… before the game decides for him. A tense, slow-burn isekai about reluctant leadership, the seductive danger of power, and the creeping dread that every reward comes with invisible strings attached.