by Pejot
Somewhere in a warlord-controlled part of Eastern Europe, 2013. Victor Jastrzebski, leader of a private military company called the Dragons, finds an unnamed eleven-year-old girl surrounded by the bodies of three grown men during a routine patrol. He takes her in and gives her a name, Lucy. There is only one problem. Nobody can explain how she killed them with her bare hands. What begins as another contract takes the Dragons into a hidden world of experimental technology, stolen prototypes, and people with their own reasons for keeping secrets. Did Victor find Lucy by accident, or was he meant to find her?
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, 06:19 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 06:19 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.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 72% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 2% of similar stories
Hidden gem — exposure is the bottleneck
Readers who find this story follow it at a high rate; there just aren't enough of them. In our cohort data, near-daily posting lifted the odds of reaching 25 followers from ~0% to 17% — more chapters, shoutout swaps and ads buy the eyeballs this conversion deserves.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 20–49 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.
