As Zypher retired into Neo-ilka's pushing streets, the pressure of his wake weighed heavy on his shoulders. There was a charged air; it was chaotic and new; yet it has all been here all along. He could feel this city, now see its tangled tapestry of electric life pulsating round him in waves of churning steel, circuitry, and desperation.
Neo-ilka was alive, but hurt, maimed by the rot in the subatomic structure of the glittering, artificial veneer that coated it. As Zypher pushed through the crowds, he saw wear in every aspect of life about him: smashed vidscreens flickering with perpetual commercials, graffiti sprayed upon the walls of dark backstreets where hangings of furtive dissidence floated in the air, and exhausted factory workers stumbling out of factories under which aerial corporate drones hummed by overhead. Neo-ilka was more than a city-it was a monster, fed by the blood and lives of its people; something close to a defeated entity.
The temples had revealed something inside him-a heightened sense of awareness, a vision into what lay beneath the city. He could sense the desperation bubbling beneath the narrow alleys and neon-lit streets-the faint threads of hope interwoven in the darkness of despair. He felt the anger of the people, the frustration of the endless toil for crumbs, of the elites towering over, cut off behind the walls of metal and power.
He walks through the dismal lower districts, the underbelly of Neo-ilka, where even the faintest glow of neon hardly ever manages to penetrate. Barely noticed by the corporations, it's one of those forgotten districts where broken and discarded tech slowly finds its final resting home. People huddle here, finding whatever fragments of hope they can in the maze of crumbling buildings and abandoned machines.
He had just turned through a narrow crowded street, when at the corner of an alley he caught a commotion. He pushed forward into the throng, took a standing-room place near the front, and there saw a man standing on sort of a platform, his voice raised above the general murmurs of the crowd.
They feed us lies! Every promise of progress is just another chain chaining us into their system! he exclaimed, his voice raw with conviction. We are not gears in their machines; we are people with dreams and lives they have taken away!
The crowd murmured its answer. It was a face that spoke to a mix of anger and desperation. Zypher saw the emotion in the eyes—a hunger for freedom, a life unchained from the grip of the city. These were the abandoned, the lost souls among the gears of Neo-ilka's mechanical heart. And in this moment, he felt their faces his.
It was a man, however, whom Zypher's attention turned to as he beckoned him forward. "You-what do you see when you look at Neo-ilka?" he asked, his voice penetrating the taut silence. "Tell me, stranger, what does this city mean to you?
Zypher stepped back, letting the pulsing light of their gazes fall upon him. "Neo-ilka… It's like a machine running on borrowed time," he says slowly, still not sure of his words. "It chews up everything in its path in order to keep itself alive. But the machine is breaking. and it can't last much longer."
The man's eyes gleamed. A spark of recognition flickered across his face. "Exactly! The city lives on our backs, but it's failing, bleeding out piece by piece. And if we let it, it'll drag us down with it." He pointed to the skyscrapers looming in the distance, and his voice rose over each word. "They build walls to keep us out, to keep us weak. But we have something they don't understand. We have the will to break free."
People cheered, a fierce, defiant roar that seemed to shake the very walls surrounding them. Zypher could feel his energy speeding up inside of him; he felt a resonance between himself and these people. In their defiance, he saw the same spirit which the gods once wielded—a refusal to bow, to be silenced by powers greater than themselves. This place, this forgotten corner of Neo-ilka, was a spark waiting to ignite into something unstoppable.
As the crowd thinned, a woman came out of the shadows toward him, her face covered by a hood. She moved noiselessly, as if she were used to not being seen, but an intelligence gleamed in her eyes that cut through the night.
"You spoke well in there," she said in a low, strong voice. "Few people ever see Neo-ilka for what it is.".
Zypher watched her as he caught sight of the fine light of an implant on her wrist, just large enough to be noticeable. It was a small sign that she somehow was connected to the outdated technologies-onces that corporations forbade so they could control people and their devices.
"Who are you?" he asked curiously with caution threaded into his voice.
"They call me Kiera," she said, casting a quick glance about before answering to make sure no one overheard. "I work with a small network of people who are trying to undermine the corporations, those who want Neo-ilka to fall completely under their control."
Her words caught his attention. "A resistance?"
She nodded. "We're small, but we've got allies all over the city. In the factories, in the data hubs, even a few of the corporate towers. They're tired of the lies, of the system that's bleeding this city dry. We don't have the resources to take them on directly… but if the people could see the truth, if they knew the power they held…
Her voice faded away, but the blaze burning in her eyes was bright. The pull grew more intense; a desire to help, to utilize this newfound strength for something bigger. The gods had unveiled this strength, and maybe it had to be channeled in this way-to bring hope to a city that teetered on the very edge of falling.
"What can you use from me?" he asked, the choice having already been made before he spoke.
Kiera's eyes flashed with hope. "There is a place, hidden in the heart of the city-a data vault where the corporations store their most sensitive files. If we can access those files and reveal their secrets, we could expose them, show the people what they're up against."
The plan was dangerous; it would set him head-to-head with the most powerful individuals in the city. But the view that had been witnessed by him in the evening-their hunger for change, for freedom-gave him the strength to agree.
"Then let's do it," he said, feeling a thrill of purpose.
Kiera smiled, an expression almost alien to the stern face. "Good," she said. "I will introduce you to our network. You will have to make overtures to them if we are going to pull this off.".
As Kiera walked on the darkened streets, she described the fragile state of the city more. Everything hangs together under Neo-ilka's smelly facade by shoddy deals and short alliances. The corporations fight for the keep of their grip, but even they feel the cracks in that hold. Blackouts, sabotage, mysterious disappearances-all signs that the city was on the edge, just one push away from chaos.
Zypher heard it all, pouring into his mind the desperation of a city and the weight of gods that sat inside of him. And as he listened to everything, he knew he was supposed to have listened; that it was, in itself, an element of being supposed to stand there in Neo-ilka's darkest hour when pending doom was to spill into the city.