The Choir Vessel

His fitness app started rewarding him for killing people. It's very good at its job.

Dez Calloway bought a fitness tracker to survive a bad diagnosis, not to survive himself.

The Band was supposed to gamify his workouts: streaks, levels, leaderboards to compete against his coworkers. Harmless. When a mugging goes wrong on the walk home from a double shift leaves Dez feeling stronger, faster, and lit up with a euphoria he can't explain, his app quietly unlocks a class that was never in the patch notes.

Somewhere out there, something old has been listening for exactly this signature for a very long time. It doesn't care if Dez calls himself a hero. It only cares that he keeps feeding it.

Three miles away, a data analyst named Priya Nair opens a routine bug ticket and finds a biometric trace that shouldn't be physiologically possible. She might be the only person alive in a position to see what Dez is becoming before he does.

If anyone cares to listen to her.

The Choir Vessel is a LitRPG horror about a system that rewards you for exactly the wrong reasons and how fast a sense of justice can curdle into appetite when something is quietly grading every decision.

What to Expect:

 - A grounded, contemporary setting. No portal fantasy, no isekai. Everything happens in and around one ordinary Midwest city. 

 - Light LitRPG, not a running HUD. Stat screens are rare and deliberate, not a constant overlay. This is a story about a system quietly working on someone, not a stat-optimization power fantasy.

 - Dual alternating POV. One lead whose judgment you can't fully trust as the story goes on, and one who's trying to piece together what's happening to him before it's too late.

 - Deliberate corruption, no redemption. The protagonist's choices get harder to defend as the story goes on, not easier.

 - Escalating horror. Supernatural elements are introduced gradually and earn their place rather than arriving all at once.

 - No focus on romance. No one is falling in love in this one.

 - Dark content, on-page. Violence, murder, and morally difficult choices throughout.

Reader discretion advised.

A note on the AI-assisted tag, since I know that phrase makes people (reasonably) wary after seeing a lot of AI garbage: I use it sparsely as a tool and definitely not as a writing replacement or generator. The story, the characters, and every line is written and edited by me. It happens to be very good at keeping track of continuity details and I'm a bit of a Forgetful Francis most of the time. I'm not trying to bury the tag, I just didn't want it to be the reason someone skipped the first chapter. Judge it on the pages.