The rain never stopped. It shimmered against the glass towers like static crawling over skin, humming in every nerve of the city. When I stepped out of the alley, the light hit me so hard I forgot to breathe. Neon Haven. The city of light—and rot.
Every sign screamed a different color, every shadow whispered a deal. Drones drifted overhead like lazy predators, their lenses blinking red through the downpour. Somewhere above, trains slithered along magnet lines, sighing like restless ghosts.
I didn't know where I was going. My legs just moved, guided by some echo inside the blade hanging at my side. Its name—my name—glowed faintly against the dark: KAEL. Every time it pulsed, I felt… memories trying to surface, like faces behind fogged glass. But the harder I reached, the more they slipped away.
A vendor called after me, his voice warping through the rain.
> "Hey, drifter! Need a charge? Fresh circuits, cheap!"
I ignored him. The people here looked wired to the core—eyes flickering with implants, nerves buzzing with low-grade code. Even the children had data-ports glittering behind their ears.
Neon Haven wasn't built for humans. It was built for whatever came after.
I passed a screen wall showing a broadcast—some corporate god preaching salvation through upgrades. Voss Kyran Industries: Light Beyond Flesh. The same emblem that was etched into the back of my blade's sheath. My pulse spiked. Coincidence, or something carved into my past?
The rain thickened. I ducked under a canopy where a woman sat hunched over a console, selling black-market memories—silver capsules swirling with trapped light. She looked up as I approached, her eyes blank white from too many neural dives.
> "You lost, ghost?" she asked.
"Maybe," I said. My voice sounded strange, like I'd borrowed it from someone else.
She chuckled, static in her laugh.
> "Then Neon Haven's the right place. Everyone here's lost—some just sold their way out of remembering."
I was about to walk away when the city glitched. Just for a second. The lights flickered, sound bent, and every screen turned blue. A symbol flashed across them—a circle divided by a single blade of light. My blade.
Then it was gone.
People went back to their noise, but my heart wouldn't slow. The sword at my hip vibrated, humming like it recognized a voice.
> Nova.
The word wasn't mine, but it slid into my mind like a whisper from somewhere deep inside the circuitry of the city.
I moved again, faster now. Down streets that reeked of ozone and oil, through corridors of glass and steam, until I reached the city's heart—the Data Spire. It rose into the clouds like a needle stitching heaven to hell.
Every instinct screamed that I'd been there before.
My hand tightened on the hilt. For a heartbeat, the world around me bled into fragments—memories, flashes: a lab, white light, screams through a commlink, someone saying "Project Requiem is unstable."
Then reality snapped back. I was standing alone at the base of the Spire, rain falling harder, thunder rolling like applause.
Somewhere up there, my past was waiting. Somewhere beneath the noise, a voice was calling my name.
I tilted the blade, watching the blue letters shimmer through the storm.
> "If the city built gods from code," I whispered, "maybe it buried its devils too."
And then I walked toward the light.