Jake Turner crossed a city to reach his sister and the System changed his class for it.
Survivor is Rare. Nobody in the Zone has ever seen another one. It does not make him strong and it does not let him fight, and what it does instead is pay him, in a ledger the System keeps and will not show him, every single time somebody else lives because of something he did.
Adrienne Coll works that out before he does.
She has three hundred people, a borehole, four hundred thousand litres of fuel and the only functioning institution left in Zone 114, and she is not a villain and she is not wrong. Concentration is the only arithmetic that works. Scattering the strong among the weak kills everyone. She will ask Jake four times, politely, in writing, and she will be right every time.
He wants to build somewhere ordinary people can live. A derelict mill on a river bend with a stone wall built in 1894 to keep water out, moving water that will not run out, eleven hectares of ground, and four hundred people who would rather keep themselves than be kept.
One of those is negotiable. It is not the one she thinks.
Book two of the Day Zero System trilogy. Full stat progression, fixed published arithmetic, a settlement built from the water up, and a System that has never once lied and has never once explained itself.