
by Xtreme
#The_Cycle_Zero Files loading… Retrieval complete. Two thousand years ago, a meteorite called the Injector slammed into Gaia and tore the world open. From the wreckage crawled the Malwares — mindless, merciless things that spread like a plague across everything humanity had left. In the ashes, a military coalition called Xert rose to fight back. Some of them still believed the planet was worth saving. Others just saw the apocalypse as a chance to climb higher. Report complete. … Error: unauthorized leak detected. Upper-class classified file. File name: #Proto_Variable_X He has died more times than he can count. Every time he wakes up in the wreckage, he remembers a little less of who he was… and a little more of a girl and people he’s never actually met. Her face always ends the same way — in blood. He doesn’t know her name. He doesn’t really know his own either. All he has is a designation stitched into the recalibration that keeps dragging him back: C-R-O-S-S. He doesn’t know why they keep sending him back. He only knows that if he stops trying, he’ll never find her and the people he left behind. And some buried part of him is sure the promises he made are the only reasons any of this is still worth surviving. Somewhere in all of it, one variable was sent to tip the scales. C-R-O-S-S was never meant to be human. He was built for a single mission — reach [REDACTED] Type-3 and stop [REDACTED] Type-2 from ever happening — and he was built without the luxury of mercy. Without him, the system runs its course to one fixed ending: Destruction. But no one planned for what happens when a weapon starts remembering the people it was supposed to forget. Composed by: #Variable_Y
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, 04:18 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 04:18 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
17%
Two or more lists
9%
Likely threshold order: Sci-fi → Action → Adventure → Fantasy → Main.
Leading bundle: Sci-fi (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
#4519 of 12,416 · 4469 below RS #50
By genre
beats 84% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 31% 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 5–9 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.
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