Introduced: The Pest Control Officer Has Been Classified As A Pest.

By Earworm Jim

Vic Holloway has spent eleven years in council pest control. He knows that an infestation is never really about the animals - it is a building telling you, in the only language it has, that something upstream has been ignored for a very long time by somebody who could have afforded not to ignore it.

Then a drain chamber under a condemned block opens onto somewhere else.

The Ward is a real world with a game System installed over the top of it four hundred years ago, and it is still receiving patches. Everyone who arrives gets assessed. Everyone gets a class. Vic gets a category:

SPECIES: INTRODUCED
CLASS: -
FUNCTION: SANITATION (VERMIN)

He cannot fight. He will never be able to fight. What he can do is file things for removal, and wait, in range, while the Ordinance does the killing slowly and loudly and without protecting the officer who filed.

It is not a power. It is a job nobody has wanted for four hundred years, in a district whose last twenty-one sanitation officers are a row of empty pegs and one coat.

But Vic has read forms for a living his whole adult life. And somewhere in the disposition field, under REMOVAL and RELOCATION, there is a third box nobody has ticked since before the install had a fourth century.

PEST CONTROL: BOOK ONE. A LitRPG about competence, paperwork, and a man who was classified as vermin by a system that has never once been audited.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDWRNNHS
• ISBN13: 9798192191262
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"