BIFROST: Drop Zone

Reincarnation progression LitRPG: a combat engineer dies under a white dragon's teeth and wakes two weeks old on a frontier world that kills the unprepared. Everyone on BIFROST begins training when they are old enough to understand why. Cal begins before he can speak. Major Callan Bishop spent twenty years and two combat tours learning where structures fail. Welds, bridges, men. But finding the failure point always took time. A hand on the weld. A minute to think. The teeth came down faster than that. He emptied his magazine into the dark behind the wyrm's mouth, and it ate him anyway. On the other side of the dark, THE ADMINISTRATOR was waiting with the terms already written. His old body does not cross over. The strength, the endurance, twenty years of hard use that taught it to obey. He will wake in a body rated at nothing and earn back every last thing the old one could do. He wakes in a leatherworker's cottage beside the Okatcha swamp: an adult mind that can model a bridge and name the exact point where a crafted thing will break, trapped in a newborn that cannot lift its own head. Every mage on this world spends mana. Cal engineers it. He studies it by watching, tests it whenever his infant body allows, and opens gates no child his age should be able to find. His father works mana into leather without knowing he does it. The weapons passing through the shop are badly designed, dangerously made, and completely fixable. For the first time since he died, Cal sees more than a way to survive. He sees a world he could improve. That ambition may be the more dangerous discovery. An adult mind inside a child is a secret, and holding the Mask costs him every time. His mother has started noticing what does not add up. And Blue, the Irish wolfhound who claimed Cal without asking permission, may pay for one of his choices with a leg. The Administrator revealed one more thing it never had to. His rebirth came early. Early means there is a schedule. Cal still does not know whose. He knows only that the swamp already holds something that has taken his measure, and the frontier does not wait for a boy to be ready. ✦ BIFROST is a progression LitRPG about earned competence, magical engineering, and frontier survival. An experienced soldier rebuilds himself from a body rated one, solving problems instead of racing toward power. A family that must never learn the truth. A dog that never asked permission. And a System that keeps better records than it admits.