The Last Safe Hour

At 3:17 a.m., every screen on Earth goes black and a silver countdown appears in the sky. When it reaches zero, cities become hunting grounds, hospitals turn into spawning pits, and the dead begin leveling faster than the living. Former urban search-and-rescue medic Mara Voss survives the first wave beneath the collapsed subway tunnels of Chicago, awakening to a brutal System that rewards risk, sacrifice, and violence with power.

The only refuge is a shrinking network of Safe Hours—temporary sanctuaries where monsters cannot enter, bought with human lives and defended by factions already turning on each other. Mara’s class, Woundbinder, lets her heal by taking pain into herself, but the System marks her as an anomaly after she saves someone meant to die. Now monsters stalk her by name, a corporate warlord wants her ability, and the countdown to the next world event promises something worse than invasion: selection.