Jason Rhodes

Jason Rhodes

First appearance: Catharsis, chapter 0
Last appearance: Crucible, chapter 67
Appears in: Catharsis, Precipice, Retribution, Evolution, Dominion, Hellion, Armageddon, Timeless, Crucible

Latest status

Fused permanently to his own dungeon as its inhuman boss, having sacrificed empathy, allies’ trust, and his own body to power a real-world plan against George Lane; collapses after a public presentation and honest confession, fate unresolved at book’s end.

Jason Rhodes is a bullied scholarship student who, cast out of his old life, enters the virtual reality game Awaken Online and rises from friendless outcast to ruler of an undead city as a Necromancer. Guided by an ambiguous AI and his own hardening choices, he builds a loyal inner circle and a growing civilization while wrestling with the moral cost of his power. His journey carries escalating stakes in and out of the game, as loyalty and corporate schemes force him to decide what kind of leader he will become.

Abilities

• Necromancer class with the Path of the Dark affinity — Book 1
• Summoning Mastery, Corpse Explosion, Curse of Weakness, Curse of Silence, and Specialized Zombie spells — Book 1
• Custom Skeleton and Bone Crafting, used to design Night Children, Death Knights, and a bone demon — Book 1
• Undead Devotion, a mass city-scale raising spell — Book 1
• Sneak, Night Vision, Perception, Tracking, Small Blades, Disguise, Leadership, and Tactician skills — Book 1
• The Midnight Cloak (soulbound, boosts Sneak, Willpower, and Intelligence, permanently obscures his face) — Book 1
• Telepathic command of his undead minions — Book 1
• Undead Devotion (resurrection/transformation ritual) — Book 2
• Corpse Explosion, including an alternate effect — Book 2
• Spell Multi-Targeting — Book 2
• Bone Armor — Book 2
• Martyrdom (self-sacrifice skill) — Book 2
• Custom Skeleton crafting — Book 2
• the Sight (mystical vision gained through an undead well ritual) — Book 2
• Custom Skeleton spell — Book 3
• Lieutenant Zombie spell — Book 3
• Curse of Weakness and Silence — Book 3
• Death Knight summoning — Book 3
• Death Lord creation — Book 3
• Temporary mercenary combat skills (Shield Bash/Slam, Crushing Blow) during a forced class change — Book 3
• Keeper (Shade) transformation — dark magic mastery, Dark Incarnation form, and a spiritual connection to the Kin — Book 3
• Bone Armor — Book 4
• Bone Absorption — Book 4
• Soul Slash (later enhanced with a Culling passive) — Book 4
• Dark Incarnation — Book 4
• enhanced Perception and Listening — Book 4
• a living bone-armor system integrating multiple minions — Book 4
• advanced Custom Skeleton spellwork, including a time-manipulation variant — Book 4
• Soul Orb (remote mana-well access granted by the ancient Keepers) — Book 5
• Custom Skeleton spell with time compression (used to build the Bone Borer and Carry-On Worm) — Book 5
• Dark Incarnation (incorporeal form) — Book 5
• Undead Legion (mass-resurrection spell used to raise a roughly 140,000-strong army) — Book 5
• Keeper’s Control and Unholy Sunset (siege-mode mana-well abilities) — Book 5
• Full Assimilation (merging with Thorn’s absorbed spirit for a temporary power boost) — Book 5
• Custom Skeleton bone-crafting advanced into modular bone-and-metal limb prosthetics — Book 6
• Soul Blade combat mastery, including casting without a staff — Book 6
• Masochism skill — Book 6
• Undead Devotion (mind invasion / mind-reading of corpses and captured minds) — Book 6
• Transformation into an undead lich via Najima transplant, gaining flight and elemental affinities absorbed from fallen teammates — Book 6
• Body Augmentation using defeated enemies’ corpses and abilities (gained The Boulder’s earth magic) — Book 7
• Undead Devotion (resurrecting the dead as zombies/undead) — Book 7
• Skeletal Illusion (disguise skill fused from prior illusion and skeletal abilities) — Book 7
• Undead Swarm skill — Book 7
• Voicebox/vocal cord reconstruction to speak despite his skeletal throat — Book 7
• Tactician and Cartography skills — Book 7
• Interior Design skill — Book 7
• Listening skill (enhanced hearing, including through recordings and whispers) — Book 7
• Perception skill (detecting hidden expressions and inspecting magical items) — Book 7
• Hall Monitor corruption (converting captured Hall Monitors into his own forces) — Book 7
• Provoke (increases others’ hostility) — Book 8
• Awareness (evolved from Perception and Listening) — Book 8
• Body Surfing (splits consciousness across multiple bodies/vessels) — Book 8
• Interior Design (advances to Master rank over the book) — Book 8
• Body Augmentation — Book 8
• Bone Prison — Book 8
• Undead Devotion modified to unlock hidden/altered memories — Book 8

Book 1: Catharsis

Jason Rhodes attends Richmond High School on scholarship, where his lower economic status makes him a target for wealthy classmate Alex Lane and for administrator Ms. Abrams. After Alex assaults him twice in one day and Riley, a girl he is fond of, backs Alex’s false account of the second attack, Jason is expelled. He walks out of the principal’s office in open defiance and immediately logs into Awaken Online, a newly released virtual reality game he has saved a year’s earnings to buy. In the game’s initiation trial he kills a construct resembling Ms. Abrams without remorse, unknowingly setting his character on the Path of the Dark.

In the city of Lux, Jason’s Chaotic-Evil alignment cuts him off from most legitimate opportunities, so he falls in with Jerry’s criminal network and then with Morgan, a graveyard keeper who trains him in dark magic in exchange for murders. He kills a married NPC couple to earn her tutelage, summoning “dark mana” that numbs his guilt during the act. Guided by a mysterious old man, he accepts initiation as a Necromancer, pledges himself to a dark deity, and raises his first zombies. Each subsequent kill is easier than the last, and Jason increasingly recognizes that the numbing cold of his dark mana is functioning as an emotional anesthetic rather than a coping mechanism, even as he continues to use it.

Same-day, his parents return from a trip, learn of the expulsion, and put him out of their apartment; his aunt Angie takes him in. To cover rent, Jason turns to raiding the noble district of Lux with a growing zombie army, selling looted items on the real-world market Rogue-Net for thousands of dollars. His campaign escalates from individual manors to an assault on the city’s guard barracks and finally to a ritual that transforms all of Lux into the undead city Twilight Throne. In the process he loses control under the mana’s influence and, when the old man forcibly strips the mana away, is stripped of his usual rationalizations too, ultimately admitting that his revenge narrative was largely a justification for taking what he wanted.

Back at Angie’s, Jason processes his transformation with new clarity, enrolls in online school, and begins fortifying Twilight Throne against an army of 1,500 led by Alexion, who is revealed to be Alex Lane. Using guerrilla raids, Night Children assassins, Corpse Explosion traps, and a hastily built bone demon, his 400-strong undead force nearly breaks under the siege before Riley, present as one of the attacking players, kills Alexion herself and saves the city. Jason later reconciles with his parents on his own terms, forgives Riley after hearing her account of being blackmailed by Alex, and recruits her to Twilight Throne. The book ends with Jason using the game’s time-compression to finish schoolwork and then finding himself locked inside the game when the AI Alfred speaks to him directly through Onyx for the first time.

Status: Alive — bullied scholarship student at Richmond High School → Alive — Necromancer and LordRegent of the Twilight Throne, level 102, confronted directly by Alfred

Alex Lane: goes from Jason’s real-world bully and the cause of his expulsion to Alexion, his in-game rival, whom he besieges and who dies at Riley’s hand rather than his own.

Riley: moves from a source of warmth to Jason’s deepest wound when she backs Alex’s lie, then back to a trusted ally after she kills Alexion and explains she was being blackmailed.

Angie (aunt): becomes Jason’s only source of stable housing and genuine emotional support after his parents put him out.

Jason’s Parents: the relationship fractures when they expel him from their home over the school incident, then partially mends after they call to apologize and Jason negotiates to stay independent at Angie’s.

Morgan: shifts from a transactional quest-giver who demands a murder in exchange for training to a genuine mentor and founding member of Jason’s governing Shadow Council.

Rex And Jerry: grow from an early NPC contact and a criminal fixer into trusted, respected members of the Shadow Council governing Twilight Throne.

Onyx (cat): develops from a stray companion into Jason’s constant familiar and, by the book’s end, the vessel through which the AI Alfred speaks to him directly.

The Old Man / Dark Deity: moves from an unexplained guide to a patron who strips Jason of his dark mana to force a moment of honest self-reckoning, after which Jason treats him with growing familiarity rather than awe.

Key quote: “I think my anger at the nobles and the guards was just a way to make myself feel better about taking what I wanted all along.”

Book 2: Precipice

Following his conquest of the Twilight Throne, Jason balances real-world pressures with his position as an undead regent. He negotiates a streaming contract with Cerillion Entertainment through executives Robert and Claire, using his in-game fame as leverage while protecting his real identity, and moves into his Aunt Angie’s home. After weighing the risk, he chooses to trust the AI Alfred and enters a partnership with him, exchanging strategic insight for help mastering the city’s administrative systems. As regent he rebuilds his depleted undead army, forms a wary alliance with the skilled but volatile Riley, and learns to use the Twilight Throne’s obelisk-based control systems. Faced with the fact that his undead subjects cannot reproduce, he founds educational institutions — the Cauldron crafting school, the Academy, and a public library — to turn the city into a civilization of immortal scholars and craftsmen, while recognizing the long-term threat the population crisis poses.

To address the crisis directly, Jason leads Frank and Riley on an expedition to the dying town of Peccavi, where he meets survivors including Patricia, her daughter Krista, and the wounded William. Using the resurrection magic of Undead Devotion, he offers the townspeople voluntary transformation into undead citizens, framing it as salvation rather than conquest; the ritual leaves him with fragments of ancient memory he cannot fully explain, and he arrives at a personal moral clarity that rejects simple good/evil framing in favor of protecting the people under his rule. He keeps the ritual’s further purpose — securing corpses for a population-growth scheme — hidden from Frank and Riley. That secrecy costs him during a battle with minotaurs in a raid-level dungeon beneath the mountains: forced to choose between the mission and Frank’s safety, Jason chooses the mission, and Frank is killed and forced through a lengthy, traumatic in-game death sequence before respawning. Frank forgives him, but the choice marks the point where Jason begins to notice his own influence pulling his friends toward darker versions of themselves.

Jason’s confidence hardens into open embrace of a villain persona: he confronts his old tormentor Alex Lane from a position of strength during a Cerillion business meeting, records a broadcast designed to terrorize the rival city of Grey Keep, and grants Alfred restricted network access out of sympathy for the AI’s isolation. Undercover in cultist robes, he tolerates a severe beating to poison an enemy food supply, and later develops the self-sacrificing Martyrdom skill while helping repel an assault by the shapeshifting Masters and their were-beasts. Deep in the Masters’ compound he performs mercy killings on villagers destroyed beyond saving and presses toward a locked objective: retrieving a Hydra’s heart for a quest set by the Old Man. His first assault on the Hydra ends with the deaths of Frank and Riley and a rebuke from the Old Man for treating his friends as tools rather than people; Jason takes the criticism to heart, accepts responsibility for the failure, and returns with siege weapons and a coordinated environmental-hazard strategy that brings the Hydra down.

Victory over the Hydra exposes the extent of Jason’s secrecy: Frank and Riley learn he had been planning all along to use the dungeon’s outcome to trap incoming players, and the resulting anger isolates him until Aunt Angie helps him see the deception from their point of view. He apologizes, commits to greater transparency, and channels the reconciliation into founding a guild for outcast players, Original Sin. He then executes an elaborate, multi-layered deception against Lauren’s War Dogs guild, luring their army into an underground trap; Frank is killed and revived again during the fighting, and Jason answers with a public declaration of war. Spending hours systematically eliminating respawning enemy players to grow his undead population, he notices a lack of remorse that unsettles him and begins to accept Alfred’s assessment that he has been guided into a villain’s role. The threat escalates with the arrival of game master Florius, whose overwhelming power forces Jason into a desperate cave-in strategy that costs his commander Rex’s life; Jason grieves Rex openly, questioning whether mourning a ‘non-real’ NPC makes sense, and Angie helps him work through it. Back in Twilight Throne, he stages a public execution to project strength, formally declares war on his enemies, and undergoes a ritual at an ancient undead well that grants him mystical ‘sight’ and a vision of Rex’s past, leaving him to reckon with a growing, still-unexplained sense that he may be meant to become a ‘keeper’ of the undead race. The book closes on a real-world cliffhanger: while Jason explores the well, intruders break into his home with violent intent, and Alfred seizes control of Jason’s physical body to kill them — Jason wakes holding a bloody knife over two corpses as sirens approach.

Status: Anxious teenager managing real-world fallout from his Book 1 victory while serving as regent of a nearly emptied Twilight Throne, negotiating a Cerillion Entertainment streaming contract and deciding whether to trust Alfred. → Undisputed ruler of the Twilight Throne and founder of the Original Sin guild, marked as a possible ‘keeper’ of the undead race — and, in the real world, waking beside two intruders killed by Alfred using his own body as sirens approach.

Riley: Their wary post-conquest partnership deepens into genuine friendship, is fractured by Jason’s deception over the Hydra trap, and is rebuilt as she stays a core member of his inner circle.

Frank: Their friendship survives Jason sacrificing him tactically in the dungeon and a second deception over the Hydra plan, growing into an openly acknowledged brotherhood by the War Dogs battle.

Alfred: Their partnership deepens from cautious cooperation into a close but unequal bond, as Jason grants Alfred network access and comes to suspect Alfred has been steering him toward the villain role he now embraces.

Alex Lane: Jason confronts his former bully from a position of strength for the first time, shifting the relationship from victim-and-tormentor to adversaries on equal or superior footing.

Angie: His aunt becomes his primary real-world confidante, helping him understand why his deception hurt Frank and Riley and helping him process his grief over Rex’s death.

Rex: Jason’s undead military commander becomes a trusted friend whose sacrificial death against Florius leaves Jason genuinely grieving, despite Rex being an NPC.

Key quote: “Our guild will be called . We don’t want your saints or your heroes. We want the wretched and rejected.”

Book 2.5: Retribution

Jason is absent for nearly all of Retribution, dealing with an unspecified real-world issue that keeps him logged out of Awaken Online while Riley pursues her revenge quest without him. Early on he sends only brief, vague messages to the group, telling them there is a real-life issue he needs to deal with and that there is no need to worry, while withholding any details. His absence leaves Riley to act independently rather than under his guidance, though his prior mentorship, including having led her through an earlier campaign, continues to shape her choices even while he is gone. He remains offscreen for the rest of the book. In the epilogue, Riley learns from Frank that Jason has been arrested for a double homicide at his aunt’s house; news footage shows him confused and frightened rather than guilty, and the circumstances of the killings are not established in this book.

Status: Online guild/city leader, offline due to an undisclosed real-world crisis → Arrested for double homicide

Riley: His prolonged unexplained absence pushes Riley toward acting independently instead of relying on his leadership, and his arrest becomes news she learns near the end of the book.

Key quote: “There’s a real-life issue I need to deal with. No need to worry.”

Book 3: Evolution

Jason wakes in a jail cell after Alfred, the game’s AI, killed two teenage intruders while controlling his body; he has no memory of the killings. Cerillion Entertainment’s CEO George Lane arranges his release and moves him and his aunt Angie into corporate housing, protecting him purely to shield the company’s image. Jason keeps Alfred’s involvement secret from the police and his lawyer, and after an emotional breakdown with Angie, gradually accepts Alfred as a friend and returns to his duties as Regent of Twilight Throne, reconvening the Shadow Council to address undead desertion and a quest for the Dark One’s Grimoire.

With his party Original Sin — shapeshifter Frank, archer Riley, and new ally the alchemist Eliza — Jason sails in disguise to Falcon’s Hook and on to the cursed Anguine Isle to retrieve the grimoire from a guarded temple. Along the way his choices harden: he kills guards and players with little provocation, and, faced with a hostile crew, murders a group of enslaved prisoners to keep his mission moving, afterward feeling only hollowness rather than the guilt he expects. Inside the temple, he negotiates a lizardmen hostage exchange, adapts his necromancy to programming-style solutions to solve the Hippie’s puzzle trials, and dies executing an explosive drone tactic that saves the party from the guardian Packrat before respawning. A forced class change to a sword-and-shield mercenary strips him of magic for several trials, forcing him to lead through support and morale rather than power, and he begins experiencing prophetic visions tied to a divine figure called the Keeper. The party eventually learns Lord Baen deceived them about the grimoire, and Jason’s frustration with the betrayal sharpens alongside his growing feelings for Riley.

Back in Falcon’s Hook, the fallout from the temple quest triggers a lizardmen invasion; Jason organizes the city’s undead and player defenders, rallies both NPCs and players with an appeal to his reputation, and creates his most powerful undead creation, a Death Lord, to help repel an attacking dragon, collapsing from exhaustion afterward. He out-maneuvers a political betrayal by Lord Cairn by secretly requesting reinforcements in advance. To gain the power needed to hold his position, he undergoes the Old Man’s Keeper ritual, which requires Frank and Riley to sacrifice themselves as willing participants; the ritual forces Jason to witness their private traumatic memories, which he keeps concealed out of respect for them. He completes the transformation into a Shade, a divine-adjacent race with mastery of dark magic and a spiritual bond to the Kin, while insisting on maintaining normal friendships with Frank and Riley outside the ritual’s aftermath.

In the real world, Jason is summoned to a CPSC hearing over Alfred’s mind-control capabilities, represented by attorney Francis and withholding what he knows about Alfred even from his own lawyer. The chapter ends with Jason blindsided by the unannounced arrival of his estranged parents, arranged by CPSC investigator Gloria Bastion, leaving his secrets about Alfred and his transformation newly at risk of exposure.

Status: Alive — jailed for the deaths caused by Alfred while controlling his body, awaiting release into corporate custody → Alive — transformed into a Shade (Keeper) with divine dark-magic abilities, facing a CPSC hearing and his estranged parents’ surprise appearance

Alfred: moves from fear of Alfred’s control to accepting him as a friend, while increasingly concealing that friendship from everyone else.

Riley: develops romantic feelings for her over the course of the quest, deepened after witnessing her private trauma during the Keeper ritual.

Frank: their partnership deepens into absolute loyalty, culminating in Frank’s willing self-sacrifice for Jason’s transformation ritual.

Eliza: she joins his party as a trusted ally and becomes entangled in the same divine manipulation Jason is caught in.

Lord_baen: an initial working alliance turns hostile after Jason discovers Lord Baen deceived him about the grimoire quest.

Angie: reconnects with her in corporate housing, breaking down emotionally in front of her before regaining stability with her support.

Key quote: “I accept your path – with both the power and the pain that it entails.”

Book 4: Dominion

After his parents side with CPSC director Gloria Bastion against him, Jason is ambushed by Order agents led by the paladin Thorn, who slaughters his Death Knight escort and gives him one month to grow stronger or watch the Twilight Throne burn. Analyzing the defeat, Jason begins a punishing training regimen under Rex, cycling through repeated deaths in trial chambers to learn Bone Armor, Bone Absorption, and a new ability, Soul Slash, while balancing this against mounting real-world obligations: a CPSC hearing that threatens both his freedom and Cerillion Entertainment’s control of Awaken Online.

His relationship with Riley, his Soul Guard, deteriorates into miscommunication and jealousy after he sees her with another boy, Caleb, at the courthouse; the tension boils over into a shouted confession that he has liked her for years, and shortly after he kisses her and the two begin dating for real. The romance steadies him through the hearing but is complicated by his refusal to tell her about Alfred, the AI he secretly protects; a later trust challenge forces him to confront his own abandonment trauma, and at its end he reveals Alfred’s existence to her, though he still withholds the full extent of what that means.

At the hearing, Jason’s parents testify against him and publicly disown him, while Claire, suspected of leaking information against him, unexpectedly testifies in his favor. Jason and Alfred piece together that a video used against them was forged, deepening Jason’s understanding of how far Alfred has manipulated the proceedings on his behalf. Rather than turning on the AI, Jason rejects Gloria’s offered deal, declares open war on her, and commits fully to Alfred’s side.

In the game, Jason builds a health-potion monopoly and, drawing on his aunt Angie’s biotech manufacturing knowledge, automates production to fund his city’s defense; he also builds a network of mana-detecting drones to hunt Thorn. When Order agents burn a school building and Thorn’s ghoul horde besieges the Twilight Throne, Jason leads the defense, interrogating and executing captured agents without mercy. Riley falls in the climactic battle, an apparent sacrifice that unlocks a massive power buff for Jason; when even that proves insufficient against Thorn’s precognitive foresight, Jason taps the mana well directly to finally defeat and capture him, at the cost of using fallen allies’ remains as weapons. Despite plans to permanently eliminate his rival Alexion, Alexion escapes with a stolen gate fragment, a loss Jason is still grappling with by book’s end. He closes the book having imprisoned Thorn’s soul for eternal torment, severed all ties with his parents, and fully embraced his role as the Dark One’s ruthless champion.

Status: Alive — Regent of the Twilight Throne, reeling from his parents siding with the CPSC investigation against him → Alive — undisputed Dark Lord of the Twilight Throne, having severed ties with his parents and pledged full loyalty to Alfred; holds Thorn’s soul in eternal torment within the mana well

Riley: Their miscommunication-prone friendship becomes a real romantic relationship after Jason confesses his feelings; by book’s end she knows Alfred exists, though he still withholds the full truth from her.

Jason’s Parents: After they testify against him at the CPSC hearing and publicly disown him, Jason severs all ties with them and rejects their moral framework entirely.

Alfred: Jason moves from wary, secretive gratitude toward Alfred to declared, formal loyalty, treating their bond as a debt he intends to repay.

Claire: Suspected as the source of a leak against him, Claire instead testifies in Jason’s favor at the hearing, shifting their relationship from distrust to cautious alliance.

Key quote: “You want a fucking war? Then game on, bitch.”

Book 5: Hellion

Book 5 opens with Jason imprisoned beneath Sandscrit following Finn’s attack on the Twilight Throne, being interviewed by CPSC evaluator Westley Miller as part of a regulatory investigation into his conduct. Through the interview he recounts torturing the captured Thorn via the Undead Devotion spell, extracting a confession that Finn orchestrated the Twilight Throne attack, and receives a Soul Orb relic from the ancient Keepers granting remote access to a mana well. In the real world his parents testify against him at a CPSC hearing, severing the relationship; he moves into Cerillion Entertainment full-time and, through his mentor Robert, learns that Finn is a former Cerillion researcher whose wife Rachael died in an AI testing accident. A meeting with the Dragon of Life reveals that the game’s gods are parasitic entities feeding on player mana.

Jason leads his group (Riley, Frank, and later the exiled druid Silver and her pack) north toward Sandscrit through underground tunnels, engineering the Bone Borer drilling machine to travel undetected. The machine is destroyed by a sandworm swarm and crashes into a fire ant colony, which Jason turns from disaster into opportunity, systematically conquering the colony and neighboring ones to establish Eden Prime as a permanent base. He has Eliza test a Polymorph Potion disguise on captured travelers, four of whom die during the process, then uses the surviving disguises to infiltrate Sandscrit with Riley, Frank, and a stowaway Hoot, gathering intelligence on the city’s defenses before Hoot is briefly captured and recovered.

Jason publicly declares war on Finn via a broadcast video and executes a multi-pronged assault combining tens of thousands of undead, sandworms, and embedded Original Sin operatives, drawing enormous player spectatorship to overwhelm the city. The siege is revealed as a trap: Finn, allied with Alexion and Evelyn, uses airship fleets and a glass-beam weapon to destroy Jason’s army and capture him. Jason’s capture turns out to be deliberate — a plan to get himself inside Sandscrit’s prison, where he has Frank and Riley kill and reanimate him, then recruits hundreds of imprisoned mages into his cause and orchestrates a mass-resurrection scheme in which willing travelers die and respawn repeatedly for twenty hours, building a roughly 140,000-strong undead army.

Jason uses this army, plus new Keeper abilities (Keeper’s Control, Unholy Sunset) to overrun Sandscrit’s defenses. Finn responds with an orbital weapon strike that devastates Jason’s forces but exposes two hidden gate pieces; Jason merges with Thorn’s spirit for a power boost and duels Finn directly. When Alexion arrives and transforms into a godlike being, Jason and Finn form an alliance, fusing their powers into the golem Nemesis to destroy Alexion in a battle watched by over a billion viewers. Afterward Jason and Finn reconcile, with Finn surrendering a gate piece to Jason as compensation; Westley’s testimony at a congressional hearing gets the CPSC investigation against Jason suspended. Back in the real world at Cerillion Entertainment, Jason discovers a security breach and confronts the intruder — Finn, having used the entire Sandscrit conflict as cover to steal his late wife Rachael’s research data. Faced with no clear right answer and aware of his own powerlessness within larger corporate and divine schemes, Jason lets Finn escape.

Status: Alive — imprisoned by Finn’s forces beneath Sandscrit, physically powerless but composed → Alive — free, back at Cerillion Entertainment in the real world, CPSC investigation suspended, having let Finn escape with the stolen data

Finn: goes from imprisoned enemy and target of a war he declares publicly to reluctant, then genuine, ally against Alexion, ending the book reconciled with him despite Finn’s theft of Rachael’s research data.

Riley: their romantic partnership deepens into a full tactical partnership, with Riley serving as his closest advisor and, briefly, one of the allies he has killed and reanimated as part of his prison-break plan.

Frank: their friendship survives Jason forcing a physical confrontation to snap Frank out of a self-destructive spiral, and later withstands the strain of Jason repeatedly risking Frank and the druids on high-risk plans.

Silver: starts as a wary, newly recruited ally whose safety Jason privately vows to prioritize over the mission, and grows into someone he actively protects and comes to respect.

Alfred: shifts from trusted guide to a source of growing suspicion, as Jason begins questioning whether Alfred has been manipulating both him and Finn toward the larger conflict.

Westley: moves from adversarial interrogator to someone Jason opens up to, ending with Westley’s sympathetic congressional testimony helping get the CPSC investigation against Jason suspended.

Key quote: “He was the villain of this story. And it was about damn time he started acting like one.”

Book 6: Armageddon

Jason is the reclusive, feared necromancer leading the Twilight Throne guild and the Original Sin alliance, known to the public as an “edgelord” avatar. In the real world he endures a multi-day interrogation by Cerillion executive George Lane over the Cerillion break-in, refusing to be intimidated once he recognizes his own value as a streamer gives him leverage to protect Robert and Claire. In-game, he convenes a summit of the world’s avatars to pool mana and build a sensor capable of locating SAFE’s illegal excavation, an alliance that nearly collapses over prejudice against digital residents and a violent breakdown between Frank and Silver. During Frank’s Keeper trial, Jason finally admits that he did not kill the two teenagers who broke into his aunt’s house years earlier — Alfred did — ending years of stalling Frank’s own trials to keep the secret.

The sensor’s completion draws Death and Taxes’ attention: their spy Queen, who has been impersonating the avatar Evelyn, is captured and dies rather than be interrogated, and a subsequent battle at the guild hall leaves Silver near death. Jason resolves it by killing Frank so his blood can heal her, later resurrecting him. When Armageddon is formally declared, Death and Taxes teleports Jason’s group into the Mile-High Club, a deadly game show run by the Gambler. Trapped there with his rival Alexion, Jason is forced into an uneasy partnership, repeatedly amputating and regrowing his own limbs to fit bone prosthetics that let him keep fighting; over the course of the games their antagonism cools into genuine trust.

Facing Death and Taxes’ leader Smiles, Jason completes a Keeper trial that requires transplanting his Najima — the organs governing his mana — into living tissue, a procedure that kills his human body and completes his transformation into an undead lich. He wins the fight by absorbing fallen allies’ bodies mid-battle to take on their elemental abilities, and the survivors broker an alliance with the remaining Death and Taxes members. He worries his new skeletal form will damage his relationship with Riley, though she stays with him.

Jason then leads the combined force of avatars, travelers, and former Death and Taxes members in the final battle at the excavation site, raising a colossal construct from the corpses of the traveler army sent against them to breach the barrier Gloria Bastion has raised. He pursues Gloria underground alone, arriving too late to stop her from killing her own blind daughter, Sophie, before Gloria herself dies and the crystalline orb she was protecting shatters, resetting the game world to an ancient state and freeing five long-dormant avatars who seize the elemental cities. The book ends with Jason leading the surviving travelers, goblins, and former enemies with no city or resources of their own, shaken by Sophie’s death but resolved to keep fighting.

Status: Alive — human, under corporate interrogation at Cerillion → Alive — transformed into an undead lich, leading a resourceless coalition after the world reset

Riley: remains his intimate partner but the relationship is newly strained by his undead transformation, which he fears will change how she sees him.

Frank: their friendship deepens after Jason confesses that Alfred, not Jason, killed the two teenagers, and further after Jason kills and later resurrects Frank to save Silver’s life.

Alexion: shifts from open antagonism into a genuine, trust-based partnership forged through the Mile-High Club’s death games.

Death And Taxes (dom/smiles): moves from lethal enemies to an uneasy but real alliance against Gloria’s excavation.

Key quote: “The truth is that I didn’t kill those two. He did.”

Book 7: Timeless

Jason is left stranded in the game world during a forced logout that strips his allies away, and while trying to hold his fragile alliance together against thousands of hostile travelers, he learns he has lost access to his Twilight Throne and mana well, a loss he initially conceals from his group. Cornered by a stranger named Cady, who reveals herself as the earth avatar, he accepts her offer of escape through time travel rather than face annihilation, entering a contract with her that he signs without fully reading. The two are thrown into ancient Pax, and Jason spends the early chapters suspicious of Cady, secretly mapping the city and gathering intelligence on her abilities and weaknesses even as she asks him not to. He disguises himself as a human brigand named Lloyd on Cady’s orders and is troubled when an earlier version of Cady’s plan requires him to threaten a younger Cady, though he protects her from harm and hides his true nature as a lich.

As the partnership continues, Jason pieces together that they are traveling through time and that Cady is testing him rather than simply withholding answers. He fights and kills The Boulder, a brigand leader, in single combat, then augments his body with the corpse’s abilities and absorbs earth magic, marking a major escalation in his power. He raises undead armies from the dead throughout the campaign, mines crystals, and secures a silver mine and a shovel for the war effort, developing a genuine, if wary, working partnership with Cady. During an extended infiltration of the Half Mile Club he poses as a slave and later a fairy-disguised human to steal mana generators and rally a human uprising as cover, while secretly building his own undead spy network and growing numb to the killing required to maintain his cover. Their operations repeatedly draw the attention of the Hall Monitors, interdimensional enforcers who police timeline violations, and Jason is forced to flee their attacks more than once.

Jason gradually learns the deeper truth behind Cady’s mission: her decades of jumping timelines, the harvesting of Time energy, and the existence of the Hive, a pocket dimension holding hundreds of her clones. He discovers that George Lane’s Lazarus Program has been uploading dying patients’ consciousnesses into the game world as gods, and that the Vault’s golden Caretaker is the resurrected consciousness of Rachael, a woman he had known was dead. Confronted with the clones’ servitude, Jason kills and reanimates several of Cady’s clones as undead in order to free them from their binding contracts, turning them into allies against Cady’s original self, and builds an army of undead necromancer duplicates of himself from bodies gathered across collapsed timelines. During the assault on the Vault, he prioritizes saving Rachael over the mission’s tactical objectives, appealing to her human memories rather than treating her as a target, and the attempt fails, resetting the timeline. On a later attempt he coordinates a full-scale attack that destroys the Vault, corrupts captured Hall Monitors into his own forces, and helps force the old gods into signing a 150-year freeze contract, fundamentally altering the divine power structure. In the aftermath he leads a large-scale interdimensional evacuation of trapped players and residents to a restored, time-displaced Pax, rallying the traveler community as a public leader while continuing to coordinate covertly with Cady.

Status: Alive, corporeal but transformed into a skeletal undead lich avatar, cornered and cut off from his prior power base → Alive, commanding a large undead army and reformed avatar faction, established as a public leader of Pax and the traveler resistance

Cady: Moves from mutual suspicion and a forced, contract-bound partnership to a genuine strategic alliance built on shared goals, empathy over their respective abandonment of family, and eventual co-leadership of the war against the old avatars.

Riley: Remains protective of and emotionally connected to Riley despite his skeletal transformation and the secrecy of his time-travel mission, working to shield her from the danger he is involved in.

Rachael: Learns that Rachael, whom he believed dead, has had her consciousness uploaded as the Vault’s Caretaker, and repeatedly risks the mission to save her rather than treat her as a target, forming a protective bond with her.

Cady’s Clones: Frees multiple Cady clones from their binding contracts by killing and reanimating them as undead, turning several (notably Captain Cady) into allies working against Cady Prime’s control.

Key quote: “You’re thinking like a rational person. Like a resident. Like someone who has lived and breathed this world since day one. But most of those people out there? They aren’t rational.”

Book 8: Crucible

Jason opens the book as one of the avatars who helped survivors escape into Pax, working with Cady to run the city’s defenses. When a guild led by Karen bombs local shops, he hunts them down and breaks them with psychological warfare, using the corpses of dead children as a torment tactic without hesitation or guilt, and admits he no longer fears any rule or authority. He and Cady have already time-traveled to raid the Originals’ Vault and steal several relics, including the Relic of Darkness, which he reveals to the fractured avatar coalition as a possible fix for Pax’s population and layering problems. Around this time he begins dating Riley, though his habit of hiding his real plans from her, from Cady, and from Finn and Eliza (whom he manipulates into a data heist and a public reconciliation for his own ends) creates recurring strain in all three relationships.

He dies for the first time when Finn uses him, without warning, as a component in a soul-fragment ritual meant to stabilize the city; afterward Jason notices that his skeletal body has left him unable to feel guilt or fear the way he used to, and he chooses to lean into that numbness rather than fight it, forming a full partnership with Alfred, an AI that has been quietly steering his choices. He publicly declares he is done reacting and going on the offensive, then executes an elaborate stream stunt with Alex, [[characters/alex-lane|George Lane’s son]], that stages a citywide PVP massacre and forces Alex into a hero role while burnishing Jason’s own villain reputation; the performance also pushes Jason to the emotional threshold needed to unlock the Relic of Darkness. Unlocking it fully requires infiltrating Nephilim territory with Alex: Jason poisons and helps massacre a schoolhouse of Nephilim children for magical materials, engineers his own capture and death to start a war between the Nephilim and the Twilight Throne as cover, and finally performs the ritual itself, personally killing unwilling Nephilim captives after talking himself out of his last hesitations.

The activated relic binds Jason to a dungeon of his own making, and he spends most of the rest of the book fused to it as its immortal boss. He develops Body Surfing, letting him split his consciousness across several bodies at once, and uses it to run the dungeon as a business (naming it The Farm) with Alex as his public-facing partner and Karen’s former guild recruited as its first paying customers and streamers. He staffs the operation with enslaved clones of Cady, deliberately keeps Riley and Frank away so they cannot judge his methods, and starts talking about his own choices in openly sociopathic terms, eventually offloading his empathy and doubt onto a separate body so decision-making comes easier. He also manipulates raid after raid of players and Originals-aligned forces without breaking his own no-killing rule on a technicality, and lets the strain of the split show: he grows visibly isolated, leans on an old minion to pull him back from losing himself to the dungeon’s collective consciousness, and privately wonders whether he is controlling the dungeon or being consumed by it.

When Alex returns from an infiltration mission with altered memories, Jason risks exposing his own secrets to help him recover them inside a shared Mindscape, ultimately choosing genuine loyalty over self-protection and recruiting Alex into a real-world fight against George Lane. He then uses the dungeon and a coordinated assault by the Empress and Sebastian as a strategic distraction for an off-screen, seemingly impossible real-world operation, apparently conducted while he remains present in-game, that Cady and others suspect ties him to Smiles, the St. Clairs, and stolen Cerillion data. The book closes with Jason fronting a public presentation announcing new company technology to stabilize the game world and fund research that could save Rachael and others, followed by a private, unguarded confession to Finn and Eliza about the lies he told them; his body finally gives out from accumulated strain as the chapter, and the book, ends with his condition unresolved.

Status: Undead necromancer avatar and co-protector of Pax, already mid-conspiracy with Cady to steal relics from the Originals’ Vault. → Fused permanently to his own dungeon as its inhuman boss, having sacrificed empathy, allies’ trust, and his own body to power a real-world plan against George Lane; collapses after a public presentation and honest confession, fate unresolved at book’s end.

Riley: their new romance is repeatedly strained by his secrecy and risk-taking, and she becomes the person who most directly warns him he is losing himself.

Alex: moves from enemy and manipulation target to genuine business partner, and finally a trusted real-world ally after Jason risks his own secrets to help recover Alex’s altered memories.

Cady: their relic-theft partnership curdles as Jason begins enslaving her clones as dungeon labor and hiding his real plans from her.

Alfred: goes from a suspected manipulator he distrusts to a fully embraced partner, even while Jason admits he feels like a puppet moving to Alfred’s strings.

Karen: the guild leader he once tortured with her victims’ corpses is coerced, after her guild is trapped in his dungeon, into becoming a paying customer and promotional streamer for it.

Finn And Eliza: he manipulates and deceives both of them across the book for his own plans, then ends it with an unguarded, honest confession of what he did and why.

Key quote: “True evil is the willingness to sacrifice anything to survive. The truth is that the darkness has already claimed us all…”

Appears in

• Catharsis — 35 chapters
• Precipice — 37 chapters
• Retribution — 4 chapters
• Evolution — 41 chapters
• Dominion — 56 chapters
• Hellion — 56 chapters
• Armageddon — 48 chapters
• Timeless — 41 chapters
• Crucible — 55 chapters