Cold Open

Level up. Hit your numbers. Assassinate the Demon Lord.

Dylan Ryan has knocked a hundred grand off his student loans in a single month.

Only $347,000 to go.

Turns out killing monsters in another dimension pays better than temp work ever did — provided you survive the week, keep your performance score above 700, and don't think too hard about what MercSecure means by "objectives."

Then the contract changes.

Operation Divine Intervention goes live, and the mission stops being crowd control and starts being murder: find a weakness in the most powerful being in the Rift, the Demon Lord himself, and put him in the ground.

Which would be easier if Dylan hadn't just met him...

But then a dying archivist hands over the one thing MercSecure doesn't have. The Demon Lord is seven hundred years old, and he'll soon abandon his body and climb into a new one — a ritual performed in a chamber nobody's mapped, inside the Sky Kingdom itself, hanging over the Rift where no contractor like Dylan has ever set foot.

All Dylan has to do is reach it.

Armed with a build that's finally not embarrassing, a sling that turns pebbles into boulders, a litany of swords, and a team of misfits held together by gallows humor — Rosaria, the team's tank with her warhammer, and Lauren, the HR rep turned battle mage who talks her way out of anything she can't set on fire — Dylan has one window, a hard deadline, and he needs to level up.

Because in this economy, killing a god is a career move.