Neon pooled across the street as if the light had weight, settling into the seams of spotless pavement. The buildings above rose in smooth columns of glass and steel, surfaces so clean they looked manufactured yesterday. Trees lined the boulevard in flawless symmetry, leaves a vivid, artificial green that never yellowed, never fell. Even the air felt curated—cool, filtered, almost sweet.
For a second, the world looked fixed.
He moved through it without matching it.
Baggy cargos brushed against his sneakers, worn Jordans scuffed at the edges, paint chipped along the soles. His reflection stretched thin beneath him as he walked, shoes interrupting the mirrored perfection with every step. He didn't adjust his pace for it. Didn't look down.
A pair of wired earphones hung against his neck. The cable caught the light as it swayed. People passed in silence, their interfaces buried beneath skin and bone, eyes flickering faintly with whatever they were watching inside their own heads. A few glanced at the wires. One woman's gaze lingered a beat too long — not rude, just confused, the way someone looks at a payphone.
He didn't care.
The news found him without being asked. A translucent screen bloomed at eye level, responsive to thought, and headlines scrolled in silence.
The clip ran automatically. A spray-painted mech, battered and defiant, trading blows with a sterile white corporate frame. Sparks. Smoke. A skyline swallowed whole. Then the feed cut to static like someone had pulled a plug.
He watched it twice.
A notification blinked over the static.
Anime girl profile picture. Neon hair.
yo wya u coming tonight?
The corner of his mouth lifted. He killed the screen with a thought and kept walking.
Ahead, the dome's curvature caught the light — its surface faintly shimmering, a soap bubble the size of a city block. The exit looked like a transit terminal: transparent panels arching overhead, security drones tracing slow, bored loops through the filtered air.
He passed beneath the threshold without slowing.
The change wasn't immediate. It crept in.
The trees thinned first. Leaves dulled. The air lost its sterilized softness. Concrete began to show beneath peeling surface layers. The polished symmetry gave way to patched repairs and exposed piping.
By the time he reached the outer ledge, the illusion had completely worn off.
Below stretched the real city.
Buildings leaned into one another. Neon signs flickered inconsistently over graffiti-tagged walls. Market stalls crowded the streets, tarps sagging under the weight of dust. Steam hissed from fractured vents. Smoke layered the skyline in uneven bands.
He smiled.
This part didn't pretend.
From his pocket, he pulled a compact mask and fitted it over his mouth and nose. The filter activated with a soft hiss.
Then he stepped forward.
The ground vanished.
Wind tore upward as he fell. Above him, the floating district drifted in quiet perfection, suspended within its artificial ozone shell—a pristine bubble in a choking atmosphere.
Halfway down, he shrugged off his backpack and swung it forward. The pack unfolded midair, hinges snapping into place as panels split apart revealing a compact board grav fins wiring into life as it extended. He tossed it beneath his feet.
Too hard.
"Oh—shit!—"
The board dipped beyond reach. His stomach lurched as gravity claimed him harder, faster. For a second, the space between the island and ground stretched impossibly wide.
He lunged, fingertips grazing the edge, dragging the hoverboard back beneath him. Both feet slammed down just as the anti-grav field flared on.
The board bucked violently, tilting sideways toward open air.
He corrected, knees bending, balance snapping into place.
Below, floating buses threaded between suspended rail-lines, engines humming as they drifted through polluted sky. He angled the board and dove between them, wind roaring past as the cleaner world above disappeared entirely behind smoke and steel.
Now he was grinning.
Because down there—
that was home.
The wind sharpened as he dipped lower, the hoverboard stabilizing beneath his boots. The city unfolded around him in layers.
Sunset burned between rows of red brick buildings, light catching on old fire escapes and shattered windows patched with sheet metal. Rust glowed amber in the dying sun. Laundry lines swayed three stories up, fabric snapping lazily in the crosswind.
A block over, the warmth vanished beneath electric blue. Entire streets pulsed with neon signage—kanji characters flickering unevenly, holo-ads glitching above doorways, wires tangled like nests between rooftops. A bassline thudded from somewhere unseen, vibrating through the metal skeleton of the street.
The Neon Gut. That's what people called this stretch — nobody official, nobody with a permit, just everyone who lived inside it and knew better than to be here after the second shift bell. Three blocks wide, six deep, and lit like an open wound. SYNTH-FLESH PARLOR strobed hot pink above a doorway reinforced with blast-plate. A Kogashi-7 holobillboard forty feet tall cycled through its ad loop above a gutted pachinko den — a model with chrome-plated cheekbones smiling with teeth that were definitely not standard-issue, selling a neural-lace subscription that cost more per month than most people earned in three. Below it, hanging off a rusted beam like a defiant afterthought, someone had spray-stenciled: YOUR THOUGHTS AREN'T YOURS ANYMORE.
The street-level moved different here. Vendors ran off military-surplus fold-tables, selling gray-market tech under rain tarps — cracked visors, bootleg wetware still in surgical packaging, stim-patches that probably worked and definitely weren't regulated. A pair of Virex users stood outside a noodle bar with their vents cycling open, bleeding heat and the faint chemical smell of whatever cocktail they were running.
Bass moved through the pavement like a second heartbeat. Not music from any single place — layered frequencies bleeding out of basements, out of speaker arrays bolted to scaffolding, out of the bones of the buildings themselves. A DJ rig floated on a secondhand grav-platform above an intersection, the operator in a full Kurai blackout visor, scratching between frequencies with fingers wrapped in conductor tape. The crowd below didn't so much dance as absorb it, bodies moving in that half-unconscious way that meant the sub-bass was hitting the nervous system directly.
Further down, the colors shifted again.
Pink.
Purple.
Low doorways framed by soft red light. Silhouettes in windows. Laughter that sounded rehearsed. Perfume thick enough to taste even through his mask as he carved past.
He didn't slow.
He weaved through floating bus lanes, dipped under a suspended cargo rail, then let the board coast into a district where the light thinned out entirely.
The glow here wasn't vibrant.
It was dull.The third district didn't have a name anyone said out loud. On UrbanMesh — the open-source city map that the corps hadn't managed to kill yet — it showed up as a gray polygon with the label ZONE 9 / UNINCORPORATED. Locals called it the Drip. As in: everything here was in the process of slowly dripping away.
Streetlamps hummed weakly, casting sickly halos on cracked pavement. Buildings leaned inward like conspirators. Mold crept along brickwork. Water pooled in uneven pockets that reflected a muted, almost radioactive green.
The streetlamps ran off a degraded municipal grid — the kind of infrastructure that hadn't been serviced since before the Partition, running at maybe forty percent capacity on a good night. The light they produced wasn't light so much as the suggestion of light. Pale halos on cracked pavement. Enough to see the damage but not enough to feel safe about it.
Buildings leaned into each other like they were too tired to stand alone, facades stained dark with moisture and decades of particulate fallout from the industrial belt upwind. BioSeal patches — the cheap kind, the kind that crumbled after one wet season — covered stress fractures in load-bearing walls. Someone had tried to maintain a mural on the side of one building; the original image was lost under layers of mold and weather, just a ghost of color bleeding through black-green decay.
Water collected in the uneven pavement in long shallow pools that didn't reflect light so much as swallow it. The surface shimmered faintly — that particular radioactive green that meant runoff from the corp processing plants upriver was finding its way here through cracked drainage infrastructure that nobody with a budget was ever going to fix. Something moved in the largest pool. Slow. Deliberate. Big enough that the water displaced in a long, smooth wave before going still.
Zach's board slowed to a drift.
The smell reached him even through the filter — layered and wrong. Metal and rot and something underneath both of those, organic and dense, like something large had been alive here recently and wasn't anymore.
He exhaled slowly.
"Yeah," he muttered to himself. "This is the creepy part."
He kicked the tail of the board upward.
It snapped into a clean tre flip, rotating smoothly beneath him—but instead of landing it, he caught it mid-spin with one hand. The grav fins folded instantly. Panels retracted. Hinges locked.
With one fluid motion, he slung it over his shoulder as it compressed back into backpack form, straps sliding into place against his jacket.
His boots hit pavement.
The sound echoed more than it should have.
He pulled up his holographic interface again. The translucent screen blinked to life, casting pale light across the front of his mask. With a mental command he pulled up the anime girl profile picture onto his holograph and initiated the call.
The name expanded in the corner.
JET.
The connection pulsed.
"Yo, I'm here," he said, scanning the street. "Where's the place at? I don't like this part of town, bruh. Shit's creepy…"
His eyes drifted left.
There was a pond where there shouldn't have been a pond. Just a stagnant pool collecting runoff between collapsed concrete barriers. The water wasn't reflecting light properly. It swallowed it.
Something shifted beneath the surface.
He stilled.
A massive shape broke through with a wet, dragging sound. Skin slick and uneven. Eyes too large. It was a mutated frog with its patterns glowing with a radiant red. The frog's mouth split wider than it should have—unnaturally wide—before snapping shut around something small and struggling.
A yelp cut off mid-sound.
Gone.
The water rippled once. Then stilled.
"…dark," he finished quietly, throat tightening behind the mask. "And weirdly green."
His fingers flexed unconsciously at his side.
That wasn't normal wildlife. That was runoff. Radiation. Corp dumping.
His stomach twisted, disgust crawling under his skin. The smell hit a second later—thick, metallic, rotting.
He took a half step back from the pond, eyes still locked on the surface.
"Jet," he muttered, voice lower now. "Tell me I'm close."
Static.
Then—
"You are. Two blocks north. Try not to adopt the mutant frog."
The connection cut.
Zach exhaled sharply, before turning away from the water. Steam curled off the surface behind him like something breathing.
Two blocks later, the air changed.
Rot became perfume. Metallic decay became bass-heavy vibration under neon lights.
A low magnetic hum rippled through the street ahead.
Not parked.
Hovering.
A sleek grav-bike floated inches above the pavement, blue stabilizers glowing beneath the chassis, engine core spinning lazily like it didn't believe in gravity.
And leaning against it—of course—
One arm slung around a girl in liquid silver mesh, the other draped over someone laughing into his shoulder, stood the loudest mistake in a five-block radius. Jet Corvane od the lowline.
"Yo, Zach!"
Heads turned.
"Where the hell were you? I've been waiting so long, these fine ladies almost convinced me to skip tonight's fight."
Zach didn't break stride.
Didn't look impressed.
He adjusted his hair, eyes sweeping once over the hovering machine, the girls, the chaos.
"This dude…"
He muttered under his breath.
He stepped past the grav-core's soft glow.
"You were never skipping it."
Jet grinned wider like that was the exact answer he wanted.
Zach didn't slow down. He walked straight past the hoverbike, past the perfume cloud, past the laughter — heading for the club entrance where black glass doors pulsed with bass from inside.
"Heyyy," Jet called after him, disentangling himself from the girls without much effort. "We haven't seen each other all day and not even a kiss hello?"
A few bystanders snickered.
Zach stopped.
Very slowly.
He turned his head just enough for the neon lights to glint of his eye.
"Shut up with the gay shit!" He scowls face flustered and embarrassed
Jet clasped his chest dramatically. "Wow. Cold. After I skipped class and everything."
"That's not new," Zach muttered.
Jet jogged up beside him, falling into step like he'd never been dismissed in his life. "I was busy networking."
"You mean sleeping."
"Strategic energy conservation."
They reached the entrance scanner. The bass thudded through the ground now — heavier, sharper. The fight crowd was inside.
Jet leaned closer, dropping his voice. "So what's the real reason you bailed earlier? You sounded weird on comms."
Zach pushed the doors open.
Light swallowed them.
He didn't look at him.
"Are you even going in," Zach said, tone flattening, a quiet edge under it, "or are you high on chrome again?"
A sigh followed it. Not angry.
Disappointed.
Jet scoffed lightly, but there was a flicker in his eyes — quick, defensive.
"I'm clean."
"Mm."
"You don't believe me."
Zach stepped fully inside, neon strobes sliding across his long hair, his sharp features tightening for just half a second.
"You said that last time."
Jet walked beside him now, grin softer, less performative.
"I'm good tonight," he said, quieter. "Promise."
Zach didn't respond.
But he didn't tell him to leave either.
"Yo…" Jet's voice dropped low, cautious—an unusual restraint for the loud, boisterous gangster he usually was.
"You running on the Virex kit again?"
Zach's eyes flicked up, and for a second, the usual smirk didn't appear.
Virex. Street slang for experimental, borderline unstable fight armor. All offensive, minimal defense, overclocked neural boosters that made your reflexes feel like time slowed—but it chewed through your body if you pushed too hard. Cheap for anyone who wanted it illegal, deadly for anyone who didn't know what they were doing.
"Yeah." Zach's tone was somber, flat. "Used up all my allowance… gotta help Mom pay her medb."
Jet's grin faltered for the briefest second, but he recovered instantly. Slap. Hard. Right on Zach's back.
"Heyyy, what's with the negative energyyy?" he said, voice light, playful, hippie-like.
Zach turned to protest, to snap something sharp, but froze mid-word.A soft hum filled the club corner.
Inside a cylindrical activation cell, the ApexWear X5 shimmered—not solid, but a floating web of glowing panels, edges traced in neon-blue light. Grav-fields and magnetic stabilizers held it in place like liquid glass.
Jet leaned back, hands in pockets, grinning that rare, soft smile."Here," Jet said, smiling warmly, uncharacteristically gentle. "Happy birthday, dumbass."
Jet was standing a step ahead, holding out the X5's cell.
Zach's eyes widened slightly. Jaw tensed. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Words stuck somewhere between disbelief and something heavier—gratitude he didn't know how to speak.
"W-where did you get this" he stutters
"Thats a trade secret gang" jet chuckles
tapping the side of the activation cell. "Don't ask questions you don't wanna owe answers for."
The cell hummed louder as they started walking.
The club swallowed them in bass and strobes. Bodies moved in flashes of neon and smoke, sweat and chrome. The deeper they went, the darker it got. The music thinned. The crowd changed.
Less dancers.
More fighters.
Some in Ashwear—scratched and dented.
Some glowing faint in Neon rigs.
One guy's Virex vents pulsed unstable red along his arms.
Jet leaned closer as they moved toward a guarded stairwell hidden behind a flickering holo-ad.
"Tonight's a full-grid match," he said casually. "Fifteen v fifteen. Arena drop."
Zach blinked. "Fifteen?"
Jet grinned. "Big money night."
Zach hesitated.
For a second.
The word fifteen lingered heavier than it should have. Fifteen bodies. Fifteen weapons. No rules.
His shoulders stiffened. A flicker of doubt passed through him — quick, almost invisible.
But then—
Money.
That one word hit different.
Rent. Repairs. Upgrades. Freedom.
If anything in this city could cut through fear, it was credit.
Zach's posture shifted. Subtle. Controlled. His jaw stopped tightening. His breathing steadied. The uncertainty didn't vanish — it folded inward, sharpened.
He rolled his shoulders back.
"Alright," he said quietly.
Jet noticed. Smirked.
They descended the stairs.
Each step down dulled the music above until only a distant thud remained.
"No rules," Jet continued. "Last team standing wins the pot. No ring-outs. No mercy pauses. If you can move, you fight. If you can't, you get dragged."
"Dragged where?" Zach asked.
"You don't wanna know."
At the bottom, a massive circular chamber waited. Fighters gathered around a glowing platform in the center — a rippling vertical field of distorted light.
A portal.
It shimmered like heat over asphalt, but colder.
"Transport drops us into an old-world coliseum sim," Jet said. "Stone arena. Open sky projection. Real impact physics. Corp sponsors love the aesthetic."
The field pulsed.
One by one, fighters stepped through and vanished.
Jet nudged him. "You good?"
Zach nodded.
The they stepped through.