Mike

**Day 1 in the Dust** Woke up choking on the ash-thick air, just another level 1 spawn with nothing but my wits and a rusty knife—ventured out into the endless wasteland, picking through crumbled ruins and dodging distant rad-storms that lit the sky like angry gods. No mutants lunged from the shadows, no bullets found my back; zero kills, zero deaths, just the quiet grind of scavenging scraps that might keep me alive another day. It's eerie how empty it all feels, like the world's holding its breath, waiting for me to screw up—but for now, I'm still breathing, and that's gotta count for something.

Mike staggered from the spawn haze into the shadowed ruins near Frank's barricade, the apocalypse's roar crashing against his ears like a tidal wave of forgotten history, his once-cluttered garage workshop now a spectral echo in his mind. Before The Event, as Riley the freelance archivist, he had obsessively hoarded blueprints of obscured patents, muttering fierce debates with himself over which inventions merited salvation amid the chaos of discarded relics. Now, those ruthless habits sharpened into survival's keen edge, blueprints of barricades and traps unfolding in his fevered thoughts as the wasteland hungered for his first blood.