by MiltonLane
Set in an alternate 1985 this series of short stories chronicles the life of Ex-Special forces soldier turned band roadie Johnny 'Viper' Malone. Here the world has been split in between two great empires. The Mesozoic Combine is a group of lizard men who fled deep under the earth to escape disaster millions of years ago. The other is the Syndar Empire a group of interdimensional aliens who came to earth through a portal in the 1960's. A different kind of cold war is simmering across the world, and one thing is clear whoever wins Mankind is sure to lose. Told in a format similar to Lester Dent's the Gadget Man, what you'll find here is a series of loosely interconnected short stories chronicling the life and times of Viper Malone as he tours this dystopian hellscape as a roadie for the band Devil's Due and putting his skills to to good use helping Humanity wherever he can.
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, 07:38 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 07:38 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.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
24%
Two or more lists
15%
Likely threshold order: Short Story → Sci-fi → Action → Adventure → Main.
Leading bundle: Sci-fi + Short Story (8%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#1079 of 12,170 · 1029 below RS #50
By genre
beats 21% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 19% of similar stories
Both levers trail the field
Traffic and conversion are both below comparable stories. Cadence is the first lever — stories posting near-daily reached 25 followers 17% of the time; stories posting every few days almost never did. Get the flow going, then re-check conversion.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 5–9 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.
