by pfgoodwin01
Pendragon Protocol — Royal Road Synopsis An Army intelligence analyst gets yanked out of a VA waiting room and dropped into Arthur's seat. The system running the story renders his PTSD as a stat-sheet. He works the problem. Paul Reyes was waiting for a 14:23 consult at the Phoenix VA when the floor went out from under him. He came up in a pine clearing in fifth-century Britain, in 5.11 pants he hadn't worn since 2010, holding the cane he'd walked in with. The thing that catches him calls itself the Protocol. It speaks in two voices. The System voice is cold and terse. It renders class-tiers, skill trees, stress meters, and cost-lines for every choice he doesn't read carefully. The Operator voice is warm and tells him, in plain English, that he can refuse the walk. If he does, he'll be returned to the Phoenix VA at 14:23 and will not remember any of it. He walks. What the Protocol is running is the Pendragon arc. There's a holding called Brennvar that needs a king. There's a council of knights whose class-tiers read like wargame entries and whose voices read like men Paul served with at Fort Hood. The Round Table seats fourteen, binds thirteen, holds one chair empty for a man who hasn't arrived yet, and ends at Camlann. A wife is waiting at the long hall. Malory committed the ending to print fifteen hundred years ago. Paul Reyes is a trained All-Source analyst with twenty years of pattern-reading behind him. He has read Malory. He knows where the story goes. He intends to read the Protocol back. Forty chapters across Books I through IV: the complete Malory arc walked once, by an analyst, inside a system that watches the unit's pain in real time and indexes the ending. This is Skein V of the Skein canon. Genre: LitRPG · Progression Fantasy · Military · Isekai · Slow Burn · Psychological Style: Literary first-person past. System and Operator blocks render as in-line diegetic UI. Stat-sheets are a real surface, not a gimmick. Word count target three thousand per chapter; the alpha cut runs ninety-five thousand across forty chapters complete. Content warnings: Combat PTSD on the page · suicidal ideation as a named historical beat · custody loss · graphic combat · system-occluded violation event off-page in chapter fifteen · ends at Camlann · adult readers. One-line: Malory walked once, by an analyst, inside a Protocol that watches the unit's pain in real time.
