Kirion stepped off the overcrowded tram into the heart of Sector Five, where smog swallowed sunlight and the air stank of synthetic meat, burned plastic, and oil. The buildings loomed like metal husks, stitched together with exposed wiring and desperation. Neon signs flickered, promising health scans, legal identities, and joy in injectable form.
He had grown up here. The streets hadn't changed—they had just decayed in new ways.
Down an alley, two children argued over a discarded comm-tablet. Across the street, a man with government-issue prosthetic limbs begged for spare credits, wearing a tag that read "Service Debt: 48 Years Remaining."
This was Neralis: a city on life support, hooked to the veins of the corrupt.
Kirion adjusted his mask, not to filter the pollution, but to blend in. Cameras watched every intersection, pretending to be traffic sensors. Drones buzzed overhead, scanning faces and flagging anomalies. He walked calmly past them all, projecting the posture of someone unremarkable.
But inside, he burned.
The regime had spent decades gutting the public systems—healthcare, education, housing. They replaced them with subscription models, loyalty-based access, and ruthless credit scoring. The powerful lived in vertical cities above the clouds. The rest clawed for scraps below.
Kirion had once believed he could change the system from within. He had earned top marks in med school, outperformed students from elite families. But when his application for residency reached review, it disappeared. Rejected. No appeal. No explanation.
Just a flagged note in his government profile: "Low loyalty index. Suspected ideological deviance."
They didn't even hide it.
He spent the next year underground, treating anyone who could pay—or barter. Gunshot wounds. Chemical burns. Malnutrition. Resistance fighters came to him between missions. Mothers came when their children couldn't breathe. And now, he was preparing to bring a child of his own into this fractured landscape.
He passed a towering mural of the Supreme Chancellor—a sleek, ageless face smiling down at the suffering like a god carved from holograms. A recent addition covered the lower wall in red graffiti: "Truth dies where comfort begins."
Kirion stopped and stared at it. The artist had been precise—almost surgical. He respected that. He pulled a marker from his pocket and added a symbol beneath the phrase: a small, simple circle split down the center.
His mark.
His quiet promise.
That night, back in his apartment, he lit a burner terminal and began copying resistance medical files onto encrypted drives. He updated illegal stockpiles, sorted clean syringes, and ran diagnostics on salvaged med-drones. The world wouldn't change overnight—but when it finally cracked, when the rot collapsed under its own weight—he would be ready.
Not just as a medic.
As a father.
And as a threat to the world that had tried to break him.