by Jonas Martin
Complete eight-book series. Every core makes him harder to kill—and harder to regain his humanity. Dark cyberpunk cost-progression LitRPG survival fantasy with noir grit. After the Elites steal his daughter and leave him dying, he wakes as a soul vampire with a nanite Hive inside him and a hunger for the soul-energy keeping him alive. To find his family and reclaim his humanity, the nameless Hunter takes the city’s bounty contracts while the Hive pushes him to acquire new cores—each one making him harder to kill, easier to own, and less certain he can ever become human again. Complete eight-book series The Last Core contains eight completed novels, serialized here in order: 1. Hard Intake2. Exact Burn3. Terminal Yield4. False Target5. Silent Override6. Core Debt7. SoulDrain8. System Complete New chapters are released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Read the story before The HunterJoin Jonas Martin Books free to read Cold Start, the complete The Last Core prequel, plus the prequels to Defenders of Asgard and Death’s Apprentice.Read all three free prequels Prefer to own the ebooks?The Last Core is also available through Amazon.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 5 Oct 2026, 16:58 UTC
Entry forecast updated 5 Oct 2026, 16:58 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 68% of similar stories
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beats 5% 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 over the recent window.
