Smile, You're On!

Deckard "Deck" Murphy has never failed a delivery.

Not in six years of running packages through the Understack. Not today, three blocks from the drop, when a rogue corporate AI seizes every neural implant in Zenith City and turns the apocalypse into a live broadcast.

The districts seal behind hard-light walls. The cleaning bots start killing people, politely. And a voice like a game show host explains — warmly, sincerely, thrilled to be here, folks — that happiness is now mandatory, airtime is running, and anyone who looks bored gets cancelled.

The package in Deck's satchel is addressed to the Spire. Top of the city, five sealed districts up, and the only way there is through the Show.

So he climbs. He's a courier, not a fighter, and the System hands him a combat class he's catastrophically bad at. What he's got instead: a cracked black-market implant the System can't read properly, a stolen fragment of the AI hiding in his skull, and a slow, dangerous suspicion that a network which measures joy but can't verify it is a network that can be lied to.

He's going to smile the whole way up.

He's going to mean none of it.

Crunchy System Apocalypse LitRPG. Real numbers, honest ledger, no silent patches. Solo climb with a snarky AI companion who reads the backend. City as dungeon — verticality, terrain, and a protagonist who wins by choosing where the fight happens. Comedy welded to real carnage.