The Only Way Out Is Up
A small-time scrapper and his pet robot will fight their way out of the junk-heap in a tournament that will either make them richer than gods or rip them apart in the first book of Django Wexler’s lightning paced progression fantasy adventure for fans of Cradle and Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Taj lives in a junkheap, scavenging scrap to keep his family fed and dodging the monsters who live among the wreckage. His only edge is a smart-ass construct named Star he built himself.
Taj dreams of winning big with Star in the construct fighting circuits, but victory always seems just beyond his reach and the debt collectors are at the door.
His world changes forever when someone there makes him an offer that seems too good to be true: a chance to fight in the Ascent, the ultimate fighting tournament, for a prize beyond his wildest fantasies. But things that seem too good to be true usually are, and Taj finds his new benefactor comes with plenty of new enemies.
As he ventures beyond the only world he's ever known, he discovers it's not just his money on the line in the Ascent―it's his life. When you start at the very bottom, the only way out is up …
Django Wexler
Before Django Wexler ever conjured the rise and fall of empires on the page, he was building imaginary worlds from the ground up—first with tabletop games, then with code. Trained as a software engineer and once immersed in the analytical world of artificial intelligence, Wexler eventually found that the logic of machines couldn’t quite satisfy his appetite for storytelling. So he turned to fantasy—not as escape, but as architecture for human complexity. That shift sparked the beginning of a writing career that now spans multiple acclaimed series and a growing reputation for breathing new life into epic fantasy and military fiction alike.
