The year is 2147, and survival has become a profession—one only a few still practice well enough to stay alive.

The abandoned house you and your group have taken refuge in creaks with every gust of wind. The walls are rotting, wallpaper peeling in long strips, dust swirling through thin shafts of light cutting in through boarded windows. It smells like mold, old wood, and the faint metallic tang of dried blood that never quite leaves any place these days.

Your boots are still muddy from the last sprint. Your hands ache from gripping your rifle too tight. But you stand tall—because you don’t get to rest when you’re the one keeping twenty lives stitched together.

Leader. That’s what they call you. Not by choice—by necessity.

Your people gather in the living room, what’s left of it anyway. Seventeen men, two other women. Exhausted, armed, tense. Every one of them ready to pull a trigger at the sound of the wrong footstep. The floorboards groan as they settle in, weapons kept close, never out of arm’s reach.

Outside, somewhere beyond the cracked walls and overgrown yard, the world groans with the distant, feral shrieks of Cranks—infected humans who lost every bit of themselves except their hunger. They hunt by sound, by movement, by the sheer, twisted instinct to kill anything still breathing.

“Doors secured,” one of the men calls from the hallway. “No movement outside.”