Tide Hunters: The Saltblood Chronicles

Synopsis

Two centuries after the Great Inundation — when rising seas, industrial toxins, and collapsed ecosystems drowned ninety percent of Earth's landmass — humanity clings to existence on floating platform cities called Arks and the jagged mountain ridges that now serve as islands. The surviving wildlife didn't simply die; it adapted. Accelerated mutation cycles, driven by decades of biotoxin saturation, produced creatures of terrifying new configurations: blind echolocating reef sharks that navigate city corridors, fungal-networked hive-minds that wear animal corpses as puppets, bioluminescent predators that mimic human distress signals to lure prey. Enter Karev, a Tidehunter — one of a dying caste of genetically augmented specialists, engineered at secret facilities called Forges to perceive, track, and eliminate these evolved threats. Karev carries modified biochemistry, sharpened reflexes, and a reputation for cold professionalism in a world that both needs and despises him. His fees are paid in water rations and protein credits. His company is kept by a reckless acoustic journalist named Pip who broadcasts stories across the surviving network, and a brilliant but volatile biotech engineer named Ysolde who works for the governing Compact but answers to her own conscience. As Karev moves between drowning settlements, fulfilling contracts against creatures the desperate survivors call monsters, a pattern emerges that he cannot ignore: many of the so-called monsters are reacting defensively to human encroachment, while the humans commissioning his hunts are concealing catastrophic corporate crimes. The deeper Karev digs, the more the fundamental question corrodes him — when the species that engineered its own apocalypse points a finger at something wild and calls it a monster, what does that word actually mean?