Kiss the Dead, Survive the Game

He opens his eyes in a corridor that bends out of shape, and the smell in it is rot with roses underneath. He has crossed into another world, and the world is a game with a death rate of 99 percent. The system bound to him gives him a list of people to court, and none of them are human. There is a monster sewn together out of parts, which cries, a puppeteer who controls time, and the lord of the abyss, who eats fear. The others caught in the game run for their lives and work at the rules that kill them. His own assignments are to read love poems to a ghost with a grudge and to dance in a circle with a skeleton. The system is clear about the terms. A failed courtship gets him wiped out on the spot, and a successful one pays him in skills that keep him alive. After a while he cannot always tell which of his own lines are meant and which are the task.