
by Footslogger
Marcus and Tansy know something terrible is happening. They know they may be the only people capable of stopping it. Vermifuge has handed them frightening power. The power to save themselves and the people they care about. The power to fight back. What are they prepared to do, and what will it cost them? --- Marcus is a pizza cook. Tansy works in cybersecurity. Neither of them is qualified to start a revolution. It starts with a QR code on a light pole in Denver. Scan it. Play a strange little text game. Jump off a virtual cliff. Then the app installs itself. VERMIFUGE knows who Marcus and Tansy are and it knows what they're good at. It gives them classes, skills, quests, equipment—and rewards that arrive in the real world. At first, the game is almost fun. Then the quests start asking more of them. Break into places they shouldn't be. Steal things people don't want stolen. Sabotage systems designed to be untouchable. Decide who deserves to be a target. And somewhere behind it all is a question Vermifuge never quite asks outright: If the people hurting everyone else have made themselves impossible to stop legally, what exactly are ordinary people supposed to do about them? Marcus and Tansy are going to have to figure out what their answer is to that question as Vermifuge opens the door and dares them to walk through it. Vermifuge: Zero Day is a darkly funny real-world LitRPG technothriller about hacking, infiltration, friendship, violence, and an alternate-reality game with increasingly real consequences. It will be published each weekday until September 25th. The book is complete and edited, and the sequel will begin publishing in October. Keep an eye out then for Vermifuge: Man In The Middle!
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, 04:49 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 04:49 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
5%
Two or more lists
3%
Likely threshold order: Contemporary → Psychological → Romance → Action → Main.
Leading bundle: Contemporary + Psychological + Romance + Action (1%).
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
#9871 of 12,127 · 9821 below RS #50
By genre
beats 75% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 59% of similar stories
Mid-pack, room on both levers
Traffic and conversion both sit mid-field for a story this size. Growth here compounds from consistency: steady cadence feeds traffic, and a sharper hook lifts what each view is worth.
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.
Promoted by
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