The city never truly slept.It pulsed, like a living machine, veins of neon and arteries of steel stretching in every direction. Skyscrapers loomed overhead, wrapped in a veil of holographic billboards and shifting advertisements that followed the eyes of passersby. From above, Neon City must have looked like a circuit board every street glowing, every alley humming, every rooftop buzzing with antennae and signals too quick for the human mind to comprehend.
For Aria, this wasn't just home. It was a puzzle she couldn't stop solving.
By day, she was another face in the crowd a young woman in her early twenties, blending into the mass of workers, students, and wanderers who drifted through the city's currents. She wore loose hoodies, her dark hair tied back with little care, and her eyes gray and sharp constantly flicked across augmented reality overlays only she could see. A casual observer would think she was scrolling through feeds like everyone else. But Aria wasn't scrolling. She was listening. Watching. Learning.
By night, Aria became something else entirely.
Her apartment wasn't much a cramped one room capsule on the seventeenth floor of an old tower block in District Seven. The walls were thin enough that she could hear her neighbor arguing with his partner, or the hum of someone else's VR headset on the other side. But she didn't care. She wasn't here for comfort.
The real luxury was her rig.
Spread across the room was an organized chaos of tech a curved multi monitor setup, processors stacked like bricks, cooling tubes pulsing faintly with blue light, and wires spidering across the floor. Her custom built deck rested in the center, sleek and scarred from years of upgrades, its surface etched with stickers and little doodles she absentmindedly scratched in during long nights.
When she slipped into her chair, tightened the strap on her haptic gloves, and let the visor slide over her eyes, the real Neon City came alive. Not the physical streets, but the digital one the Net.
The Net wasn't clean, no matter what the corporations pretended. They showed the public a sleek interface of menus, shops, and entertainment. Aria saw the underlayer the threads of data, the backdoors, the shifting walls of code that corporations constantly patched and hackers constantly tore apart again. It was a war zone disguised as a marketplace.
And Aria loved it.
She wasn't one of the legendary names whispered in forums or the top ten listed on bounty boards. Not yet. But she was good. Quietly good. She had learned early on that being invisible was better than being famous in the Net. Fame painted a target on your back. Aria preferred to slip in, get what she wanted, and slip out without leaving more than a ghost trace.
That night began like any other.
Aria sat cross legged in her chair, visor glowing faintly against her face. The Netscape unfolded before her streams of data falling like rain, a skyline of corporate fortresses rising like towers in the distance, and floating shards of user networks scattered like neighborhoods. She flicked her hand, and her interface blossomed a glowing flower of icons, each one connected to different tools she had coded herself.
Routine job first, then maybe some fun.
She had taken on a client that afternoon, a middle aged vendor who ran a noodle shop in District Seven. His delivery drones had been glitching for weeks, constantly rerouting mid order and costing him business. The corporation that managed the drone software demanded fees he couldn't afford, so he turned to the underground instead. He found Aria through a friend of a friend.
"Simple job," she muttered to herself, diving into the drone network.
Her avatar a ghostlike figure in shifting neon blues and purples slid through the Net, bypassing basic firewalls like peeling stickers off glass. Within minutes, she found the problem a loop intentionally coded to redirect drones to a competitor's restaurant. Corporate sabotage, hidden beneath three layers of misdirection. She almost laughed.
"Petty bastards."
Her fingers danced, rewriting the loop and encrypting a patch so strong it would take a month for anyone to crack. Then, for her own amusement, she added a little side script if anyone tried tampering again, the drones would blast an obnoxious advertisement jingle at maximum volume until they stopped.
When she pulled back, the job was done. She sent the report, collected her payment a modest sum, but more than the vendor would've paid a corp and leaned back in her chair with a satisfied sigh.
That should've been the end of the night.
But Aria never stopped at "enough."
Her eyes shifted to the glowing skyline of the Net. Corporate towers pulsed in the distance, walled fortresses of firewalls and black ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). Breaking into one of those without preparation was suicide. But she wasn't here for that. Not tonight.
Instead, she drifted through the undernet forums, black markets, whisper channels where information flowed like contraband. She wasn't buying or selling. She was listening. That was her true skill.
And that was when she saw it.
A flicker. A message that wasn't supposed to be there.
It appeared like graffiti on a datastream, scrawled in luminous red
NEON WITCH
Her breath caught. The name was familiar, but wrong.
People online whispered about Neon Witch a handle, a ghost, a legend. No one knew who they were. Some said they were the best hacker in the city, maybe the world. Others said they weren't even human, but an AI gone rogue. Aria had always thought it was myth, the kind of story hackers told each other for fun.
But the word glowed right in front of her. Not just a rumor in a chatroom. A signature.
And it wasn't static. It pulsed, like it was calling her.
Aria hesitated. Curiosity was dangerous. She knew that better than most. Still, her fingers twitched. She reached out and touched the signature.
The Netscape shifted.
For a split second, the entire grid around her bent like someone pulling fabric until it wrinkled. Code warped, the skyline twisted, and she was somewhere else.
A void.
Everything around her dissolved into darkness, except for a single burning neon sigil in the distance. A witch's mark, glowing red and violet, hovering in the emptiness.
Aria's heart pounded. She whispered to herself, barely audible
"What the hell…?"
Then a voice spoke.
Not text. Not a message. A voice, low and smooth, echoing directly in her head.
"You've been watching the city, little ghost. Now the city is watching you."
Aria ripped her visor off, gasping, her room spinning around her. Sweat dampened her forehead. Her monitors flickered for a moment red static running across the screens before settling back to normal.
She sat in silence, heart hammering, the glow of the city seeping through her thin window blinds.
For the first time in years, Aria felt fear. Not of being caught. Not of the corps. But of something deeper.
Something was reaching out.
And it had chosen her.
Aria didn't sleep that night.
She sat in her chair, visor resting on the desk, staring at the streams of data running across her monitors. They looked normal again innocent code, endless chatter but the image of that burning sigil was seared into her mind. The voice echoed in her skull, low and unnerving
Now the city is watching you.
What did it mean? Who or what had spoken to her?
She ran diagnostics on her system, checking every line of code, every log file, every security layer she had built. Nothing. Clean. No trace of intrusion. And yet she knew what she had seen wasn't just her imagination.
By morning, when the sky outside her blinds shifted from black to gray, Aria forced herself to step away from the rig. She showered, dressed, and went out into the waking chaos of Neon City.
The streets were alive with motion trains gliding above on mag rails, hover drones zipping between towers, crowds flooding crosswalks under the glow of holographic signs. A giant billboard across the block projected a model wearing the latest synth fabric fashion, her smile sharp enough to cut glass. Corporate jingles layered over one another in a dissonant chorus.
Aria pulled her hood up and kept walking.
The smell of frying oil and street food drifted through the air, mixing with exhaust and ozone. Vendors shouted prices, while others hunched behind makeshift stalls selling pirated chips or counterfeit implants. Neon City was a place where wealth and poverty lived back to back, separated only by walls and algorithms.
Her destination was small and familiar a noodle stand squeezed between two megastore facades. The owner, Mr. Han, was already up, ladling broth into steaming bowls. He spotted her and smiled, his wrinkled face warm despite the harsh light of the city.
"Aria! The drones worked perfectly this morning," he said, handing a delivery unit a package before it zipped away into the crowd. "Customers already noticed the difference. You saved my business."
Aria offered a faint smile. "Just fixed some bad code. Nothing special."
Mr. Han shook his head. "To you, maybe. To me, it means survival. Here on the house."
He handed her a bowl, and she sat at the counter, letting the warmth seep into her hands. For a moment, the world felt normal. Safe. She almost convinced herself the sigil and the voice had been a hallucination born from exhaustion.
But then she noticed it.
Across the street, someone was watching her.
A man in a long coat, face obscured by a cheap mask and a hood. At first, she thought he was just another drifter. But he didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't even pretend to browse the nearby stalls. His head was angled slightly toward her, fixed.
Aria's stomach tightened. She forced herself to eat slowly, acting as though she hadn't noticed.
When she finally stood and handed the empty bowl back, she risked another glance.
The man was gone.
Back in her apartment, Aria locked the door twice and dropped into her chair. The city outside throbbed with neon, but her focus was inward, on the Net. She needed answers.
She jacked in again, her avatar materializing in the glowing sprawl. But this time, she wasn't here to wander. She dove directly into the undernet forums, places where encrypted whispers carried more truth than corporate newsfeeds ever would.
Her query was simple Neon Witch.
At first, the responses were the same old nonsense urban legends, exaggerated stories. A hacker who had once erased an entire corporation's debt records in a single night. A ghost that could slip into military networks without tripping alarms. An AI born from corporate labs that had escaped and gone rogue.
But buried beneath the chatter was something different. A thread with no replies.
The post was anonymous, timestamped only an hour ago.
The Witch has marked someone.Watch the wires.A storm is coming.
Aria's hands froze over her interface.
Marked.
She thought of the sigil, burning neon in the void.
The Net shifted around her suddenly, and for a terrifying second she thought it was happening again. But this wasn't the Witch. This was a trace.
Someone was following her.
Her avatar moved fast, slipping between datastreams, masking her signal, deploying cloaking protocols she had spent years perfecting. Yet every time she looked back, the trace was still there persistent, relentless, narrowing in.
This wasn't a corp. Their traces were heavy, brutal, and obvious. This was cleaner. Sharper. Human.
Aria's pulse quickened.
She darted into a black market hub, blending with the swarm of avatars buying and selling illicit goods. The trace hesitated, briefly thrown off. She used the chance to jump networks, bouncing herself three layers deep into private servers until she finally shook them.
She sat back in her chair, breathing hard.
Someone had followed her because she searched the name.
The Witch wasn't just a legend. They were real. And the moment she touched their mark, she had painted herself with a target.
That night, as the city outside drowned in neon haze, Aria received a message.
It appeared directly on her main monitor, bypassing every firewall she had. That alone was impossible. No one should've been able to reach her system without tripping alarms.
The message was short.
Do you want to know the truth, little ghost?Midnight. District Thirteen. Rooftop of the Halloway Spire. Come alone.**
Aria stared at it, heart hammering.
Every instinct told her this was a trap. District Thirteen was one of the worst zones in the city half abandoned, crawling with gangs and forgotten tech. The Halloway Spire had been empty for years, a relic from when corporations thought the district could be "revitalized."
But another part of her burned with curiosity.
The Witch or someone tied to them was reaching out. And Aria had been chosen.
She packed lightly a compact deck in her backpack, a foldable interface pad, and a pulse knife tucked into her jacket just in case. Then she slipped out into the night.
District Thirteen was everything the polished heart of Neon City wasn't.
Here, the streets were cracked and uneven, lit only by the occasional flicker of a failing streetlamp. Buildings loomed like hollowed skeletons, their windows shattered, their walls painted with layer upon layer of graffiti. The hum of drones was absent; the corps didn't waste resources on patrolling dead zones.
Aria kept her hood low, her senses sharp as she climbed the rusted stairwell of the Halloway Spire. The air grew colder as she ascended, the city noise fading into a dull hum below.
At the rooftop, the neon skyline stretched before her a breathtaking sprawl of lights and towers, alive and endless.
And she wasn't alone.
A figure stood near the edge, silhouetted against the glow. Cloaked in black, their face obscured by a mask shaped like a witch's grin, glowing faintly with violet lines.
Aria froze.
The figure turned slowly. The mask's eyes lit up with neon fire.
And a voice smooth, echoing, the same one from the void spoke aloud this time, carried on the wind
"Welcome, little ghost. You've stepped out of the shadows. Now let's see if you can survive in the light."
Aria's world shifted. In that moment, she realized her life as a quiet hacker was over.
She had been chosen by the Witch.
And nothing in Neon City would ever be the same again.