The Lore

The Raiders were the first to organize after the Fracture — not out of ideology, but out of hunger. They started as loose bands of survivors picking over military wreckage and abandoned warehouses. Within months they had supply lines, camp hierarchies, and a crude economy based on salvage weight.

Today the Scav Raiders are the most numerous faction in the warzone. They hold no fixed ideology beyond territorial pragmatism: what's theirs is theirs, and anything you carry through their zone is subject to a toll — paid in goods or blood.

They're not well-equipped. Their weapons are scavenged, their armor is improvised, and their flight rigs — when they have them — are Gen 1 relics held together with welding wire. But they know the terrain better than anyone. They set ambushes in drainage tunnels, mine approach corridors, and use convoy escorts to bait overconfident solo operators.

Before the Fracture, they were private military contractors — the kind that guarded research facilities, server farms, and biotech campuses for corporations that didn't want government eyes on their work. When the governments collapsed, the paychecks stopped. But the installations didn't disappear.

Blacksite Security made a calculated decision: instead of disbanding, they seized the facilities they were hired to protect. The labs, the data vaults, the weapons research archives — all of it became their sovereign territory.

They are the best-equipped faction in the warzone. Their weapons are pre-Fracture military grade. Their body armor is actual body armor, not welded scrap. Their comms networks still function. And they guard their holdings with the cold professionalism of people who were trained for exactly this kind of work.

The problem is what they're sitting on. Every serious crafter needs blacksite schematics, advanced materials, and prototype components that only exist behind their walls. Getting in requires exceptional violence or exceptional stealth. Getting out with anything is the hard part.

The atmospheric detonations during the Fracture weren't just electromagnetic. Some carried payloads that were never officially acknowledged — experimental mutagenic agents designed to deny terrain to enemy forces by making the ecosystem itself hostile.

It worked better than anyone intended. In the blast zones, biology went wrong. Insects grew armored. Plants became aggressive. Animals adapted in directions that no evolutionary model predicted. Within two years, entire districts were overrun by organisms that had no business existing — fused, warped, and relentlessly territorial.

The warzone calls them Bioforms. They nest in contaminated zones, infested subway systems, overgrown industrial parks, and anywhere the mutagenic residue pooled. They don't negotiate. They don't retreat. They protect their territory with chemical sprays, venomous strikes, and swarm tactics that overwhelm even armored targets.

But their tissue is invaluable. Bioform glands produce compounds essential for advanced crafting — bio-reactive catalysts, living tissue substrates, and neural imprint gel can only be harvested from their remains. Every serious weapon smith eventually has to go into a nest.

Three weeks before the Fracture, a continental defense network codenamed STORMWALL was activated — a swarm of autonomous combat drones designed to establish air superiority without human pilots. The system was never given a stand-down order. The people authorized to issue one are dead.

The drones are still up there. They patrol in formations, recharge at solar collection points on rooftops, and engage anything that doesn't broadcast a valid IFF signature. Since no one alive has valid military codes, that means everyone.

They're the reason flying is dangerous. Not just risky — mechanically dangerous. A Stormbound patrol can track a flight rig from two kilometers out and close the distance in seconds. They fire energy-burst weapons that overload rig power cells and send pilots tumbling. They don't loot. They simply enforce a dead government's airspace.

Pilots have learned to read the patterns, hug rooftops, fly through urban canyons, and use the city's geometry as cover. But every now and then a swarm shifts its route, and someone who thought they knew a safe corridor doesn't come home.