Dead City Ascension

When the System descends, every screen in Philadelphia goes black for thirteen seconds. When they come back, the city is sealed beneath a crimson dome, the dead are rising as resource-bearing horrors, and every survivor is forced to choose a class before the first monster wave reaches their street. Eli Mercer, a burned-out paramedic with a talent for staying calm while everything falls apart, chooses a class no one wants: Mortalist, a scavenger-support path built around harvesting essence from the freshly dead. It is ugly, stigmatized, and terrifyingly effective.

As food runs out, neighborhoods become kingdoms, churches turn into safe zones, and gangs, cops, militias, and desperate civilians clash over cores, skills, and shelter. Eli only wants to keep his younger sister alive, but the class in his veins keeps pushing him toward the center of the city’s nightmare, where the strongest monsters gather around something buried beneath the old subway tunnels. To survive, he will have to turn corpses into power, bargain with enemies who wear human faces, and decide what kind of man can still exist when the world rewards brutality. Because the System did not come to save humanity. It came to sort the living from the useful.