From publisher blurb:
The air tastes wrong. There is a sweetness to it, cloying and unnatural, like the breath of a corpse that died in ecstasy. All around you, the ruined husk of Virelock City sprawls across the planet’s black glass plains—its arcologies weep rivulets of melted steel, its towers bend in supplication to no god but the silence. This place, once a monument to galactic cooperation and industrial marvel, now sings only a lullaby for the dead. They said the outbreak began in the ventilation systems. Invisible particles, drifting like ghosts. A mutagen—alien, artificial, perhaps ancient—unleashed into the controlled air of a sealed paradise. Those who breathed it in did not simply die. They transformed. Sinew bulged. Minds unraveled. Bones unfurled into weapons. What rose from the flesh of those citizens was not human. It was not even alive in the way the word was once understood. You are a member of the Omega Lumen Division, a specialized arm of the Blast Rangers, trained not just for combat, but for containment, for catastrophe, for confrontation with the unspeakable. Where wars end and monsters begin, you are deployed. The briefing was terse. Enter the city. Locate survivors. Retrieve black-box data from central BioComms. Discover the source of the outbreak. Do not let it spread. Sigma Reclaimant Command waits in low orbit with a planetary warhead protocol. Should you fail, they will erase Virelock. Deep beneath the streets, something still breathes. There are transmissions that don’t exist on any spectrum. The infected chant without vocal cords. Memories flood the air as if the city itself mourns. The mutagen does not merely destroy—it rewrites. Every hour you remain here, you feel it crawling closer to your thoughts, trying doors that should never be opened. The people who once lived here are not gone. They are watching. And waiting. And dreaming in the dark. You walk not through ruins, but through the ribcage of a city that has become conscious. So steel yourself, Ranger. This mission is not just disaster recovery. It is descent—into memory, into madness, into the marrow of a nightmare engineered by hands unknown and intentions unreadable. What you find here may save lives. Or it may end the era of humankind altogether.