Rising of the Golem King, Sugar and Poison, Rise of the Bandit Queen

THE WORLD GAVE HER NO MAGIC, NO CLASS, AND NO WAY HOME. SO SHE OPENED A LEDGER. One minute Amy Wilson is stepping off a curb in Austin with her phone in her hand. The next she wakes chained to a stone floor under two setting suns, in a world where warriors are born to combat classes and the tag around her neck reads COMMON CLASS. At auction she brings eighty-two gold. Her freedom is priced at ninety-five. Her wages at the Mercenaries Guild front desk are one silver a week. By honest math, freedom is twenty years away. Amy has never once been limited to honest math. So she does what she has always done best. She smiles. She pours. She remembers. Three years of secrets go into a private ledger kept in an invented shorthand: which guild master skims which contract, which Berserker was quietly sold to die by the man who signs his pay, which favors, placed like investments, will one day come due. In a city that believes a collar makes a woman simple, her politeness is a knife no one thinks to check for. Then a kind man from her own world walks back through the guild doors, wealthy now, and counts one hundred fifty gold pieces into her hands. A gift, he says. One otherworlder to another. Ninety-five of it buys her throat back. Alone that night, Amy stacks the remaining fifty-five on a wool blanket and decides what it will buy: a place beside the shy engineer whose newest invention cracks the air like a god breaking a bone. He believes he is helping an old friend to her feet. He has no idea what he has funded. She will tell you exactly what she did, and exactly what it cost. She will not lie in this account. She will not apologize in it either. The empire does not yet know the name it will one day print on wanted notices from Azure Reach to the capital. She is on her way to teach it. A villainess origin told in her own unrepentant voice. For readers of morally gray heroines, isekai with no chosen one, and fortunes built with other people’s coin. A standalone entry in the world of Rising of the Golem King.