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Trash Tier
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 11 2026
Pages: 404
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Dying doesn't cost anything. It's everything that happens after that goes on your tab.
Kai Vance flatlined on a subway platform trying to save his little sister. Then he woke up - no white light, no chosen-one fanfare, no cosmic committee explaining his destiny. Just four dry words blinking in the corner of his vision: UNDERSTUDY (UNRANKED), followed by a bottom-rung assignment clearing debris nobody else wants, for pay that loses to stocking shelves.
Understudy doesn't come with a power of his own. It comes with four seconds to copy someone else's, badly, a beat behind, while an entity called the Ledger tracks every borrowed breath down to the Recovery Credit and never once rounds in his favor. Kai's entire plan is to stay small, stay unranked, and let his file keep being wrong about him - because the file being wrong about him is the only thing keeping him alive.
Then a routine clearance job in a dead shopping mall goes sideways, and Kai does something that isn't in Understudy's job description. Not a copy. Not a guess. A claim the world itself has to honor.
The Ledger doesn't have a category for what just happened. Neither, unfortunately, does Kai - and something with a much bigger budget than his has already started asking questions.
TRASH TIER is Entry 1 of THE LAST RESPAWN - a grounded, bureaucratic survival story about debt, disguise, and what happens when the system's biggest processing error learns to read the fine print.
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