The city never slept. It twitched.
Neon veins pulsed through skyscrapers like arteries, pouring light into the rain-soaked streets. Holo-ads screamed from every corner, promising new implants, new drugs, new lives. Drones buzzed overhead, their red eyes scanning for curfew breakers. Below, the streets were alive with gangs on hover-bikes, desperate vendors peddling counterfeit cyberware, and hollow-eyed workers trudging home from twelve-hour shifts.
To most, this was Erevos City—the jewel of the megacorps, a concrete coffin for everyone else.
Kai Veyl was just another coffin dweller.
He sat at his cubicle in the dim-lit sprawl of NexCorps Sector 5, fingers tapping over outdated holo-keys. His reflection blinked at him from the smudged glass divider: dull black hair hanging low over his eyes, cheap glasses that glitched when the neon hit them wrong, a corporate uniform a size too big. The kind of face people forgot before they even finished looking at it.
"Veyl," his supervisor barked from the aisle, a heavyset man with gold-plated cybernetic eyes. "File the resource reports before cycle change. Don't screw it up this time."
"Yes, sir," Kai muttered, shrinking into his seat.
The supervisor didn't even wait for an answer.
No one ever did.
Around him, coworkers joked, flirted, planned after-shift drinks. They shared inside jokes about managers, memes flickering across desk holo-screens, whispered rumors about promotions. Nobody invited Kai. They never did. He was the ghost in the office, the seat you never noticed was filled until someone pointed it out.
Kai played the part well—clumsy, quiet, almost apologetic for existing. His datapad slipped from his grip once, clattering across the cubicle floor. Nobody looked up. He bent down, collected it, and smiled faintly as if he were embarrassed, though inside he was amused. People really did see what they wanted to see.
By the time the final shift alarm rang—a shrill note echoing across the office floor—Kai had already slipped half his reports under another employee's pile. Nobody noticed. Nobody ever noticed. He packed up his cracked datapad and slipped into the tide of bodies spilling into the streets.
The night air smelled of fried soy, wet steel, and cheap fuel. Rain hissed against neon signs advertising memory implants, dream-chips, and "certified" muscle augments that would probably kill you within a year. Street vendors shoved glowing bowls of noodles under passing noses. A gang of half-metal punks revved their hover-bikes, sparks spitting from modified engines. A drone swiveled its camera eye toward a homeless man and zapped him with a stun burst for loitering too close to a megacorp tower.
Erevos was alive. Hungry.
Kai moved through it unnoticed. He liked it that way.
He ducked into an alley lined with peeling posters and humming transformers. At its end, stacked like cargo crates, stood his coffin apartment block. Hundreds of steel boxes pressed together, each barely wide enough for a bed, stacked twenty stories high like a hive of forgotten drones. His was on the seventh level. He climbed the rusted stairs, passed the flickering communal lights, and keyed open the door to Unit 7-34.
Inside was a box. Three steps from wall to wall. Bed shoved against the far end, a counter with a cracked water dispenser, a single light flickering overhead. But against the wall sat something that didn't belong in this coffin: a nest of wires, screens, and processors stitched together from scavenged tech. At the center: a battered neural rig, its chrome helmet scarred with years of use, cables spilling like veins across the floor.
Kai sat down and exhaled. The invisibility cloak of his day-life fell away like shed skin.
His eyes sharpened. His posture straightened. A smile tugged at his lips—not the shy, apologetic curl his coworkers saw, but the cold, knowing grin of a predator.
He lowered the rig over his head.
> Connection Established.
Welcome to the Shadow Net.
The room flooded with electric blue as the monitors lit. Code cascaded down, glyphs rearranging into strings of encrypted messages. Across the secure channels, avatars appeared—masked, distorted, hidden. Gangs. Mercenaries. Smugglers. Black-market brokers. A chorus of voices crackled to life, each filtered through audio scramblers.
And all of them were waiting for him.
To them, he was a whisper. A ghost. The Shadow Net—the faceless conductor of chaos who could turn riots into revolutions and gang wars into massacres with a few carefully placed messages. None of them knew who he was. None of them knew if Shadow Net was even human.
That was the point.
Kai's smile sharpened as the voices clashed for attention:
"The Chrome Fangs are moving on the south docks tonight—"
"We've got intel the Steel Vultures are working with CorpSec—"
"Orders, boss. Just say the word and the streets burn."
Kai leaned back in his chair, listening, parsing every desperate voice. Each of them thought they served Shadow Net directly. Each believed they were his most trusted ally. None suspected they were just pawns on a board only he could see.
He flicked a finger across the rig's holo-keys. Windows rearranged. Street maps glowed. Gang territories lit up in bloody red and burning orange. Corporate patrol routes shimmered in pale blue. It was a city of data, pulsing, alive—and it belonged to him.
His modulated voice rolled through the channel, low and resonant.
"Tonight, the docks," he said. "Chrome Fangs push south. Steel Vultures will intercept, but not before drawing CorpSec's eye. Keep the bodies loud. Make it look like turf war."
"Yes, boss," a dozen voices chorused, eager and loyal.
Kai's grin widened. If done right, the fight would cripple two gangs, bleed the megacorps' security, and leave a vacuum only his hidden allies could fill. A single move, three outcomes.
"Let the city twitch," he whispered.
The call ended. The screens dimmed. Outside, Erevos roared with its endless hunger.
And in a coffin-sized room no one cared about, an invisible office drone leaned back in his chair and savored the silence.
No one at NexCorps would remember Kai Veyl's name tomorrow.
But in the shadows of the city, his legend was already writing itself.