Chapter 1: The Fallout
The streets of Seattle are a warzone: abandoned quarantine camps, rogue National Guard factions, and violent riots.
The city is controlled by gangs, mercenary groups, and survivalists who enforce their own rules.
Introduction to the lingering effects of C-23—a disease more deadly than its predecessor, leaving survivors physically and psychologically scarred.
Chapter 1: The Fallout
Seattle never truly fell, it just rotted. The collapse wasn’t an explosion, not a single moment where the world tipped off its axis. It was a slow decay, a disease that infected the city long before the first symptoms showed.
C-23 did the groundwork. The virus was deadlier than its predecessors, spreading faster, hitting harder. Unlike Covid-19, there was no time for vaccines, no months of warning. When it hit, it hit like a bomb. Bodies piling up faster than they could be buried. Hospitals overflowed, and soon, they weren’t places for healing, they were waiting rooms for the dead.
The government promised containment. They built quarantine zones, shut down entire districts, locked people inside their homes, saying it was for their own good. But what started as isolation quickly became abandonment. Resources ran out. The soldiers enforcing order lost their patience. People starved.
Then the assassination happened.
The President, shot down in a moment that should have sent the country into mourning, but instead sent it into chaos. No one even knew who was really behind it—conspiracies flooded the streets faster than the National Guard could keep up.
Some blamed the government itself, others pointed to foreign agents. A few whispered that it was one of the many militias that had been rising in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to strike.
What followed was something worse than war.
The protests started small—outrage, grief, voices crying out for justice. In a world already drowning in anger and fear, it didn’t take much for the spark to ignite. Police stations burned. Martial law failed. The government crumbled under its own weight, leaving cities like Seattle to fend for themselves.
The quarantine zones were the first to go. The military tried to decommission them, but by then, people weren’t listening to orders anymore. They tore down the fences, released the infected, believing they were freeing prisoners instead of unleashing death. Some say it was an act of rebellion. Others say it was madness. They tested humans inhumanely with experiments, trying to fix what could not be repaired.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Seattle became a battlefield. Not one of armies or politics but of survival. The rich fled first, retreating into private strongholds, while the rest of the city splintered into factions. Gangs took control of entire districts. Former law enforcement turned into hired guns. The military, those who hadn’t deserted, operated like a shadow government, deciding who lived and who didn’t based on their own shifting allegiances.
And in the ruins of what once was a city, the ones left behind had to make a choice.
Some hid, waiting for a savior that would never come. Some burned, giving in to the chaos.
And some?
Some decided that if the world was falling apart, that they would be the ones to decide what rose from the ashes. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t saints. They weren’t heroes. They would become something else.
And the world would remember their name.
The Vvaywards.