Highway Survival: Start with a Cleaning Robot

Every person alive is pulled into a survival game played on a road that never ends. Each player gets one empty stretch of highway to themselves and one vehicle, drawn at random. Food and parts have to be scavenged from whatever the road offers, and after dark, monsters come for the players. Ethan Chance draws a cleaning robot with zero combat power. While he is still working out what to do with it, he wakes the Creator System, which lets him evolve, strengthen and fuse objects together. He starts on the robot. He adds a scanner so it can find supplies before he reaches them, then defensive plating, then a function that pulls monsters in toward it, then steel arms. Other players are still nursing wrecked cars along the asphalt while he is driving something that fights for him. The game ranks everyone daily by distance covered. Natural disasters sit across the route, and so do dungeons, which are the most dangerous places on the map and also the best paying. Ethan keeps taking them, stripping the surroundings for materials and feeding everything back into the robot, one upgrade after another, climbing the boards.