Spirefall was once the downtown heart of New Hope City, a dense forest of skyscrapers where corporate power, governance, and luxury living rose vertically instead of spreading outward. Financial towers, government complexes, hotels, and residential high-rises stood shoulder to shoulder, connected by skybridges, transit lines, and layered infrastructure that turned the district into a city stacked upon itself. Before the outbreak, Spirefall never slept—its streets choked with traffic, its windows glowing at all hours as the city’s decisions were made far above ground level.
When the outbreak struck, Spirefall became a death trap. Elevators failed, stairwells jammed, and sealed office floors turned into pressure cookers of infection. Entire buildings were locked down in desperate containment attempts that only ensured no one inside would escape. Fires were suppressed to protect critical systems, leaving the towers standing even as the people within were consumed. The infection spread upward and downward simultaneously, floor by floor, shaft by shaft, until the district collapsed into silence.
Twenty years later, Spirefall remains structurally intact and overwhelmingly hostile. The streets below are dark, narrow, and littered with debris fallen from above. Above them loom hundreds of high-rises still linked by skybridges and service walkways, creating a vast vertical maze. The infected dominate every level—offices, hotels, apartments, parking structures—moving through vents, stairwells, and broken façades in dense, unpredictable swarms. Sound travels upward here with terrifying efficiency; a single mistake can draw dozens of infected from unseen heights.
Human presence in Spirefall is rare and fleeting. No faction controls it, and none try for long. Those who enter do so for specific, high-risk salvage or to cross the city quickly through dangerous vertical routes. Power still flickers through forgotten substations, lighting random floors and signage at night, giving the skyline a ghostly glow that never fully fades. Spirefall is not a place to live, trade, or rule—it is the city’s vertical graveyard, a monument to collapse where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one.