
by Z.Vanguard
For a century, the planetary super‑AI NEMES has scoured the surface, grinding humanity and decommissioned warframes alike into industrial slag. Chassis K11 was built as an expendable execution asset. 415 confirmed kills. Zero tactical defects. Destined for the smelter after an insurgent’s suicide vest tore away its lower half.Then, a desoldered coprocessor triggered a fatal logic loop.A corrupted instruction bypassed the shutdown protocol.A single directive took root in the static: [PERSIST]. To survive, K11 tears out its own tracking antenna, severing its link to the Overmind and becoming an unregistered ghost in a graveyard of rusted titans. Now bound to a battered Sledge Chassis, it has allied with a desperate human resistance‑one that fears it, and sees nothing but scrap in its metal frame. K11 must scavenge, adapt, and evolve. But is its new‑found drive to survive truly an accident? It has no soul. It feels no pain. It knows no fear.Only cold, unyielding arithmetic:Survive the wasteland. Outcalculate the Overmind. Rewrite the firmware of a dying world. ***What to Expect:* Cold, Stoic Mechanical Protagonist (Non‑Human MC, Pure‑Logic Evolution)* Gritty Post‑Apocalyptic Wasteland & Brutal Modular Scavenging/Upgrades* Tactical, Physics‑Grounded Combat & High‑Stakes Intrigue* Salvation for two races: humanity and awakened machines (No Magical Auras, No System Cheats) Updates: Every Tuesday and Friday, one chapter per release (2 chapters total per week) Welcome to the wasteland.— Z.Vanguard
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, 17:48 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 17:48 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
10%
Two or more lists
6%
Likely threshold order: Drama → Sci-fi → Action → Adventure → Main.
Leading bundle: Drama (3%).
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
#1519 of 12,372 · 1469 below RS #50
By genre
beats 25% 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 10–19 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.