In this exciting first installment of Stewart Hotston’s brand-new LitRPG series, two mismatched corporate nobodies stumble through a forbidden door and into a world where humanity is outlawed and their only shot at survival is each other.

Welcome to the Ring of the World. Try not to die.

They were nobody’s idea of heroes.

Shaun is a twenty-three-year-old ex-jock with a mountain of debt, his late mother’s clapped-out car, and a talent for making bad decisions. Ava is a middle-aged lab tech who gave up her dreams to raise her brother and has been quietly furious about it ever since. They work for the same faceless mega-corporation, they can barely stand each other, and on any normal day their paths would never cross.

But this is not a normal day…

When a mysterious alarm pulls them into a secret sub-basement and face-to-face with a door floating three feet off the ground, Shaun does what Shaun always does—acts first and thinks never. One opened door later, they’re stranded in a world of ancient magic, mythical creatures, and legends made flesh. Oh, and humanity has been outlawed on pain of death.

Armed with a talking sword, a forbidden mathematics that can rewrite reality, one deeply reluctant octopus, and a Fae prince with serious family issues, two people who have absolutely nothing in common are going to have to learn—fast—that survival is a team sport.