Mutarotation

Iron Litany An Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint Fan Novel For six years, Alex Whitlock survived on two things: a Korean web novel he read in fan translation about a man trapped reliving the same apocalypse, and old paperbacks from back home in Leeds about soldiers who never expected to win a war and fought anyway. He never told anyone. He never needed to — until the night Ways of Survival stopped being fiction and started being the only law left in the world he'd tried, for five years, to make his own. Kim Dokja isn't the only reader who made it to the end. When the Scenarios begin, Alex finds himself locked out of the one power he always assumed he'd earn — Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint isn't his to take. What the world gives him instead is stranger: a bronze gauntlet that argues with him in a dead machine's voice, a battered echo of requisition and faith bent sideways into something the Star Stream has never catalogued, and a memory of the story's ending that's real, but incomplete — and getting less reliable with every choice he makes that the original text never accounted for. He's not the protagonist. He's not the sole reader. He's a foreigner on the wrong train, an ocean and a language away from anyone who might vouch for him. But somewhere below him, in a subway car he hasn't reached yet, Yoo Joonghyuk is regressing through his fourth loop, and a boy the world will later call Kim Dokja is about to become someone the constellations can't look away from. Alex knows how that story ends. He doesn't know what happens to a man who was never supposed to be in it at all.