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.
This is the realy city of neo kyoto 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 stripped-down Kusanagi frame floated inches above the cracked asphalt, chassis panels removed to expose the internal wiring like a body mid-surgery — fiber optic nerves, a custom overclock core pulsing steady blue beneath a mesh of heat-dissipation coils. Someone had painted the fuel housing matte black and then scratched their tag into it anyway. The blue glow from the stabilizers bled onto the pavement below, pooling in the cracks like something alive.
And leaning against the saddle —
,stood the loudest mistake in a five-block radius. Jet Corvane of the lowline.
One of his arms around a girl in liquid silver mesh, the kind that caught and scattered light with every breath she took. The other hand was tossing a small data-chip between his fingers without looking at it — a habit, an idle trick, the same way other people cracked their knuckles. A second girl leaned into his shoulder, lips close to his ear, internal feed flickering faint gold behind her eyes. Jet was mid-laugh at whatever she was saying, head tilted back, completely unbothered by the fact that he was standing in one of the least safe districts in the lower city looking like he owned the lease.
There were tech-scars on his forearm. Faint, silvery lines tracing the paths of old chrome-runs — subdermal wiring that had been put in and taken out and put in again, leaving the skin slightly raised along each track. One of the girls was tracing them absently with one finger, following the lines like a map.
"Yo, Zach!"
Heads turned.
"Where the hell were you? I've been waiting so long, these fine ladies almost convinced me to bail on tonight's fight."
Zach didn't break stride.
Didn't look impressed.
Zach didn't break stride. Didn't adjust his expression. His eyes moved once across the bike — the overclock core, the scratched tag, the stabilizers — then to Jet, then away.
"This dude," he muttered, mostly to himself.
He stepped through the glow of the stabilizers without slowing
"You were never gonna bail."
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.
The club swallowed them whole.
Bass hit first — not heard but felt, a pressure against the sternum, the kind of low frequency that loosened something in the joints. Strobes carved the dark into stuttering frames: a face mid-laugh, a raised fist, chrome glinting on someone's jaw implant, gone before the eye could settle. The air was thick with synth-smoke and sweat and whatever chemical signature the Virex users were venting through their armor — sharp, medicinal, slightly sweet in the way that things are sweet when they're also dangerous.
Zach pulled his mask down around his neck. Took a breath of the unfiltered air.
Honest, at least.
They pushed deeper. The crowd thinned as the music did — less dancers, more fighters, people standing with the particular stillness of someone calculating odds. Ashware scraped and clanked with every movement, patched plates catching the strobe. A guy in Glint rig leaned against a pillar running diagnostics, neon traces pulsing pink along his arms in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Two women in matching Luxe sets stood back to back near the bar, not talking, just watching the room with the kind of calm that came from being the most prepared people in it.
One guy's Virex vents pulsed an unstable red along his forearms.
Zach watched him for a second longer than the others.
That was going to be him tonight. That had been him, fight after fight, riding illegal hardware because it was what he could afford and the alternative was showing up to a knife fight with his hands. It worked. Mostly. Until it didn't.
Jet fell into step beside him, closer now, voice dropping under the music.
"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.
"Used up my allowance," Zach said, tone flat and final, the way he said things he didn't want to explain further. "Mom's chrome bills came in."
The number behind that sentence was large enough that he didn't say it out loud. He never did. Jet knew anyway — had known since the first time Zach showed up to a fight in borrowed Ashware three years ago and didn't offer an explanation for why.
Jet was quiet for exactly two seconds.
Then his hand came down hard between Zach's shoulder blades — not a comfort pat, a full slap, the kind that rattled teeth.
"Heyyy, what's with the negative energyyy?" he said, voice light, playful, hippie-like.
"Jet—"
"We're literally about to go get paid—"
"Jet."
"—in a coliseum—"
Zach stopped walking.
He'd been about to say something sharp, something that would've landed and stuck, but the words dissolved before they formed because of what was in front of him.
Zach stopped walking because Jet had stepped directly into his path.
He was holding something out — a cylindrical activation cell, both hands underneath it like it had weight worth respecting. The containment field hummed faintly against Zach's knuckles as he almost walked into it. Inside the cell, suspended in slow rotation behind the magnetic seal, edges traced in clean neon-blue light — a suit of armor that had no business being in a club in the lower city.
The panels didn't sit still. They shifted, rearranged, like the thing was already thinking. Chest plate, gauntlets, greaves, a half-mask — all of it floating in precise equilibrium, each component holding its relation to the others with the kind of effortless balance that cost an extraordinary amount of money to achieve.
ApexWear.
Not a knockoff. Not a partial set. The full X5 configuration — and Jet was holding the activation cell out to him with both hands like it weighed more than it did.
"Happy birthday, dumbass."