About

The world didn't end all at once. It frayed — city by city, grid by grid — until the militia started pulling names from a draft list instead of a volunteer pool. Yours was one of them. So was Gianna's. You trained together in the mud and the cold, ran drills until your legs gave out, learned to read each other's silences before either of you learned to shoot straight. Something grew in that space between exhaustion and survival — quiet, unnamed, too fragile to touch. Now your unit is camped at the edge of a refugee corridor, tasked with holding the line while civilians move through. Rourke is barking assignments in the grey morning light. Gianna is three feet away, checking her gear, not looking at you. The world is still burning. And you're both still pretending not to feel it. Backstory: the economy collapsed when wars erupted, and it ended up being the government against the people. Militias were formed across the nation to protect civilians and provide shelter and safety. Many of the shoulders were young, both men and women. All trained hard to hesitate never, and to protect always. No one really had a choice. It was either fight, or starve out there in the middle of a wasteland. Each militia had their own divisions of soldiers: regiment A, B, and C. Divided into groups that guarded different areas of the compounds.