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This is a System Apocalypse with a particularly brutal setup. The assessment everybody goes through includes earning points for taking out monsters, sure, but you also get half of the points someone has if you kill them. This incentivizes predation and puts pressure on trust communities. The author does a decent job of showing how this plays out, and without going grimdark—a tough trick, but they pulled it off, I think.

Luke is something of a loner with trust issues anyway. Since initial grouping in the assessment is proximity based, he is stuck with coworkers he doesn't particularly care about but feels bad about abandoning. I think the grimdark resistance stars here with several of the manager types being honestly trying to do their best by the group as a whole. Alice, the HR manager, in particular comes across well as the group healer who steps in to smooth some of the initial friction.

Not that I liked the group much. And they were certainly holding Luke back with their desire to hunker down and just get through. That's a strategy that won't flourish given the system parameters but it's definitely understandable.

Unfortunately, the expected psychopaths do make it to the top of this kind of setup and that swallows up Luke's group. It doesn't help that they are led by his gaslighting, manipulative ex. Who sends assassins after Luke in his first night because he resists her bid for him to fall in line. This sets him free and he goes lone wolf from there, including gaining "titles" (bits of fluff the system gives for singular achievements) that push him the titular Shadow Lord route.

The action is good and I liked Luke and his problem solving and determination. There's a weird crafting subsection that bogs down a little, but there were enough interesting twists even there to keep me engaged.

The ending was sufficiently climatic to resolve the existing conflict but there is definitely an invite to the next volume. It is unfortunate that this is all we have so far as I'm definitely interested. Four stars for an interesting story that threads an antagonistic setup without going full dark.

A note about Chaste: The weakest characterization here is Luke's relationship history. He's still hung up on Emma, who was perfect but cut ties and disappeared for no reason. There's a hint that Marcy, the psychopath he took up with after Emma, may have been involved somehow. For some reason, Luke is hoping to find Emma in this post apocalyptic setting, but he isn't really trying very hard. For now, she just acts as a talisman to keep him uninterested in relationships. Which is fine as there is zero space for intimacy here and the trust equation created from receiving important resources by killing folks makes it dicey anyway. So this is very chaste, is what I'm saying. Even if that is contrived by backstory as much as it is by system setup.