The Assassin: Reaper's Ascending
Synopsis
In a future built atop the buried ruins of a continent, society survives by sacrificing its weakest. The Higher Heights district is governed by the Eternal Games, a state sanctioned survival system disguised as opportunity and choice. On Choosing Day, citizens vanish without protest, fed into arenas where survival is not earned through virtue or strength, but through compliance with a system that punishes mercy and rewards moral collapse. Children, parents, and strangers alike are stripped of protection, reduced to resources in a city that values efficiency over humanity.
Duke enters this world carrying memories that do not belong to it. Reincarnated into a younger body after dying as an elite assassin in another life, he awakens inside the Games with his instincts intact and his conscience dangerously intact as well. Unlike the others, Duke understands violence as a craft, not a panic response, and quickly realizes that the system is not testing survival alone. It is testing obedience, adaptability, and the willingness to abandon empathy when it becomes inconvenient.
the Games force players into escalating acts of cruelty, engineering situations where hesitation kills and kindness is punished. Alliances rot into betrayal, children become tools and targets, and the arena itself responds to emotional weakness. As the game progresses and the survivors harden, Duke is pushed to confront an uncomfortable truth. To reach the Final Tier and escape reclamation, he must decide whether survival requires becoming exactly what the system wants him to be.
This story is not about winning a game. It is about what remains of a person when every moral boundary is turned into a liability, and whether identity can survive in a world designed to erase it.