The Battle Master

At seventeen, the scanner tells you what you are. It looked at Alex Renn and returned an error.


In Varnhelm, your Class is your future. It decides your work, your rank, and your worth, and it is handed to you in four seconds by a machine that has never been wrong.

The machine has no idea what Alex is.


Marked UNASSIGNED, he is dumped into the Gridlands with three points of Strength, a rusted knife, and a survival estimate of four days. No respawns. No training. No one coming.

Then he kills something that should have killed him — using eleven metres of wire and the only stat he has — and a buried protocol wakes up in his chest.

No ceiling. No fixed branches. No permission required.

They call it Steelborn, and every skill it gives him is paid for in blood, sweat, and a resource bar that greys out his vision when he pushes too hard.

Central wants it deleted. So they reopen an arena that has been sealed for ninety-one years, strip his core at the gate, put him in hundred-year-old plate with a sword he has never held, and send him out onto the sand in front of forty thousand people to find out what is actually underneath.


Inside this book:

A protagonist who is genuinely outmatched in every fight and wins with terrain, timing, and arithmetic — never brute force

A full progression system: stat blocks, quest prompts, skill unlocks, loot tiers, level-ups, and a Sync Load bar with real consequences

Three brutal arena bouts with every ability switched off, against a champion who has never lost

A found family of exiles worth caring about — and a cost when the system finally collects

A buried origin, a brother on the wrong side, and an AI that has been leaving notes since page one

A clean read throughout: no profanity or explicit content


PLUS: 3 EBOOKS INSIDE

A thank-you gift from the author for supporting the mission of clean, family-friendly books that parents never have to screen first.

Gift ebook 1 — Choose Your Quest: The Dwarven Jester Spy, a 400-choice interactive humorous fantasy gamebook

Gift ebook 2 — Paws and Pages, a cozy cat mystery

Gift ebook 3 — 444+ Fun Facts About Basketball for Kids



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Rabea Hadi is a board-certified family physician who writes for families. With over 2,000 positive reader reviews, thousands of copies in readers' hands and multiple bestselling titles, his books are trusted by parents who want stories that are funny, warm and completely clean.


PRAISE FOR DR. RABEA HADI'S BOOKS

"An interactive adventure story that is a quick, fun read, and ultimately a journey of self-discovery through the choices that you make." — Reedsy Discovery

"Just like the ones I used to read when I was a kid... I loved all the different images that went well with the story, and the number of different plot turns that it has. PLEASE MAKE MORE!" — 5-star reader review

"How come nobody thought of this before?! This is a great method of interactive reading. It reminded me of an old medieval video game. I can see this book taking off... love it!" — 5-star reader review


Maybe Perfect for fans of Ready Player One, Ender's Game, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Cradle, and Awaken Online — anyone who loves a system-driven underdog story where the numbers matter and the hero earns every single one of them.


The scanner said error. Start reading and find out what that actually meant.