New Vance City

The Biohazard Zone was once a flood control trench snaking through the Shambler’s Graveyard, back when New Vance still believed in zoning. Now, it's a festering wound in the city’s corpse—ground zero for an early water-treatment collapse that mixed chemical runoff, corpses, and unknown viral agents into a slow-boiling brew. The Silent Walkers avoid it—but not out of fear. Some say it’s where they began. Shamblers here mutate fast, sprouting cystic limbs and luminous tumors that pulse with rhythmic distortion. The infection seems aware in this place. Residue clings to the air, and electronics glitch out within seconds of exposure. Occasionally, scavvers report seeing humans walking amid the sludge unharmed, their bodies coated in membrane, their eyes glowing faintly green. No faction cleans this place. No one controls it. The Biohazard Zone isn't just poisoned—it's changing. Slowly. Patiently. As if waiting.

A sunken channel scars the earth, clogged with slag-like mud that glows in fractured pulses of sickly green and jaundiced yellow. Rusted catwalks hang broken above the trench, swaying gently as if breathing. Half-melted hazard signs jut from the muck like bones, unreadable beneath the crust. The air is soupy and warm, tinted yellow by a chemical haze that bends light like oil on water. Chunks of rebar and collapsed floodgate arms pierce the terrain like makeshift thorns. In the distance, half-sunken utility bots twitch in short-circuit spasms, caught in endless feedback loops. Biological residue coats the banks in thick membranes that seem to stretch and quiver when stepped on. On some nights, the trench hums—faint, harmonic, wrong. It's not just ruined. It's alive. And whatever it’s incubating hasn’t finished hatching yet.