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**Arena of Ages**

**by S.H. Bastion**

Shane "Mac" MacAllister fixes bulldozers for a living and hunts wild boar with a knife he forged himself. He believes in leverage, sweat, and the fact that physics doesn't lie.

Then something reaches into a Georgia swamp and drags him off the planet.

Now he's a specimen in an alien testing ground where survival means climbing humanity's entire technology tree — flint and bone to bronze, steel, gunpowder, and beyond. The System hands your faction the recipes. The materials, you bleed for. And the rival factions are already ahead.

Good thing Mac knows exactly how things get built. And how they come apart.

What makes it different: two progression tracks running at once — you level up alone, but your faction climbs the tech tree together, and the gap between those two clocks is where things get ugly. Grounded, no magic: every stat and skill is alien tech, every weapon is real historical engineering. For fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl, Ark: Survival Evolved, and anyone who's ever lost a weekend to a Civilization tech tree.

Read it on Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/177907/arena-of-ages

Cover Artist: AI Generated

AI Usage: Generate Cover Art

Fun fact about me: before I was writing about a hog-hunting mechanic getting abducted, I served in the military — so the tactical stuff and the "dangerous people thrown together and forced to function" dynamic is written from some firsthand experience.

Arena of Ages — a LitRPG where the tech tree IS the progression system. Abducted humans climb from the Stone Age toward gunpowder and beyond, one contested resource at a time.