The Hunger Between Safe Zones

When the sky splits open over Denver and the System announces humanity’s induction, Elias Rook is trapped inside a collapsing hospital with his younger sister on life support, a hundred terrified survivors, and the first monster wave chewing through the lower floors. The System offers classes, quests, and power—but every reward demands risk, blood, or betrayal. Safe zones rise across the city like miracles, yet each one is governed by brutal rules and hungry factions racing to monopolize food, medicine, and respawn shrines.

Elias awakens to the rare class Gravebound Warden, gaining strength from death but attracting things that should stay buried. To keep his sister alive, he must lead a desperate convoy across a city transformed into a nightmare biome of bone forests, flooded subways, and predatory gods wearing human faces. But the safe zones are not shelters. They are farms. And the System has not come to save humanity—it has come to harvest whoever adapts best.