[Can’t Opt Out]

Sometimes, the world isn’t nearly as safe as everyone thinks. The universe is far more alive, more intelligent, more calculating than anyone actually knows, and its battle isn’t over yet. A decade since the war ended—mere blinks from conflict exploding once more—the continent’s heroes are about to realize they were always destined to be the universe’s saviours, or perhaps, the universe’s destroyers.

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For almost a decade, Emilia has been running—from her past, from the person she once was, from the war and destruction that ripped her country, her soul, her very core apart.

She has a good life. She has friends and school and the normalcy that she always craved. She doesn’t miss her old life—not often, anyways. She’s locked her ability to miss away, along with so many of the skills that made her a so-called war hero.

Emilia always knew the normal, relaxing life she carved out for herself wouldn’t last. So, when a series of events bring old friends and scars back into her life, when the government sponsored raids—ostensibly meant to keep Baalphorian citizens prepared for another war—start to spin even more out of control than they already were, when secrets about the real reason behind the war and the universe itself start to echo out into the world, Emilia knows it's just a matter of time before she has to stop running.

A winding, slow-burn horror with LitRPG elements and romantic subplots, [Can’t Opt Out] features a diverse cast of characters, all scarred and altered by the war that ravaged their continent for two decades. They are heroes, and they are broken. They love and hate and mourn for all the friends they lost during the war, for all the people they couldn’t save. After a decade of near peace—of a new world being forged around them and under their own influence—they think the war is done.

It isn’t—the universe and its enemies aren’t nearly finished fighting.

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Updates Sun-Thur.

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What to Expect:

✮ A lengthy slow burn with immersive world building, highly introspective characters, and a growing sense of existential/cosmic dread

✮ A winding story told through the eyes of numerous characters—but mostly through Emilia’s—spread throughout time and the continent itself, through the real and virtual world, which may be more insidious than its millions of users know

✮ Several Systems, including a technology-assisted version, a core/body-based version, a real-world raid/war-simulation version, several VR systems

✮ All the diversity~

✮ Bad governments and good friends from the continent and all its myriad of cultures

✮ A go-with-the-flow MC who has all the brain cells but constantly only uses two

✮ People dealing badly with trauma through (legal) drugs, sex, and (both legal and illegal) body modifications

✮ No harem for the MC, but she is in a quickly crumbling open relationship (don’t jump on that ship), and there is an eventual, polyamorous endgame

✮ Occasional, (mostly) optional smut for the MC and side characters

✮ An author who cries when they kill their characters but will kill them anyways