The Accord Series : Book 1

When five foreign pantheons collide with Earth, one in four humans die and the rest wake up with magical class assignments. Halo Lockwood gets Tier 8, Tinker — a craftsman's class in a world that needs fighters. His Ledger Companion Clippy logs his contribution to the first monster attack as BAIT.

Halo can't punch his way through the apocalypse. What he can do is build — alarm webs, mana-lamps, a town's worth of gear at a 2 AM workbench — and think faster than the things trying to kill him. Falling in with a combat-class couple and their four-year-old daughter, he turns a small North Carolina settlement into something that can survive.

But surviving isn't climbing. The class he unlocks after a solo trial against a glacier-serpent the size of a freight train changes everything: Tender, a summoner of warriors — Fighter, Paladin, Cleric, Ranger — and the only one of his kind in this reality. Classified Mythic. One per world. The Allfather of Asgard has already noticed, and four other pantheons can count to one.

Now Halo's managing a found family, a rescued stranger with a locked profile and a flanker's class, a slaving operation two days upriver that he barely dismantles in time, and a Norse reality overlay moving south at nineteen miles a day. The Valkyrie who shows up to deliver relocation orders demonstrates why compliance isn't optional.

Raleigh has a new name. The people Halo couldn't save still have theirs. And somewhere in the city, a dungeon door has been standing open since the solstice.

He's been invited in.