When the global banking grid fell silent, nobody believed it would last. Screens blinked error codes, governments issued calm statements, and the wealthy promised it was all “temporary liquidity disruption.” But days turned to weeks, and then to the kind of silence that meant the world had stopped believing in safety.

Civilization didn’t fall with fire—it unraveled in hunger.

Food vanished first. Stores were raided, then abandoned. Gardens became armed fortresses. Farmland turned into contested battlegrounds. Cities emptied like cracked shells as people fled in desperate waves, leaving behind towers of useless currency and empty promises.

Elias had never hunted a day in his life before the collapse. Now he crouched in the woods, bow taut, fingers raw. His clothes were torn, mud caked beneath his nails, stomach cramping in ways that no longer felt human. Across the clearing, a wild boar scurried through some bushes—thinner than it should have been, just like everything else alive.

He loosed the arrow.

It missed.

Branches snapped behind him. He turned in time to see three figures rise from the brush, gaunt faces smeared with ash, rusted blades in their hands. They weren’t hunters—they were raiders. People who had given up on farming or foraging and leaned into something ancient and brutal: take or die.

Elias bolted.

The forest tore at him, but fear sharpened his instincts. He dove over rotted roots, lungs burning, hearing their footfalls trampling close like the rumble of wolves. Ahead—smoke. A camp. Safety, maybe.

Or another trap.

He stumbled into the clearing. A family stood around a fire, spears raised at the sudden intrusion. The father’s jaw clenched; the mother pulled a child behind her, eyes fierce and hollowed with instinctive ferocity.

“Help,” Elias gasped. “Raiders.”

For a moment, nobody moved. And then the father saw the shadows approaching. His grip on his weapon tightened—but instead of striking Elias away, he shoved him behind the fire pit and readied his spear.

The raiders burst in. There was no negotiation. Only screams, swinging blades, the crack of bone and the hiss of boiling water spilled in the struggle. Elias grabbed burning wood and swung, instincts overriding terror. Primal. Desperate. Human.

When it was over, three bodies lay smoldering in the dirt.

The forest went quiet again.

The mother wept silently, the father staring into the flames like they held answers. The child clutched Elias’s sleeve, afraid to let go—afraid to be alone in a world where hunger made beasts of everyone.

Elias looked around at the fire, the pot simmering with scraps of meat and fresh vegetables—the closest thing to home he’d seen in months.

“You can stay,” the father said hoarsely. “If you work. If you fight.”

Elias nodded.

Because the world of banks and screens and promises was gone. And what remained wasn’t chaos—it was something primal. A place where survival wasn’t earned with money, but with blood, sweat, and teeth bared against the dark.

Civilization had been a dream.

This was reality: gather together, defend your fire, and pray your hunger never grew sharp enough to turn you into the thing you feared.