The skyline used to glow. Now it bleeds.

Two centuries after the Collapse, Earth was nothing but rusted steel, shattered satellites, and sprawling mega-cities carved into wastelands. Neonhaven — once a corporate utopia — had become a fortress city surrounded by desert storms and warring scavenger clans. The rich hid behind ion shields and chrome walls, while the poor fought for battery cells and clean water in the ruins below.

Out there, in the Wastes, survival wasn’t about skill — it was about nerve.

Vex Kael crouched behind the burnt husk of a hoverbike, pulse rifle in hand, scanning the horizon through his cracked visor. The HUD flickered—low energy, 3%. His armor, a patched-together relic from the Corporate Wars, hummed weakly, the neural interface glitching as a static voice buzzed through his comms.

“Kael, status?”

“Running dry. Two hostiles down. One drone still active.”

He gritted his teeth. The drone’s plasma core hummed in the distance, its blue glow cutting through the crimson dust storm. One shot left. One. He scavenged the ruined corpse beside him—an ex-Corp enforcer, his face half-metal, half-burned. In his belt pouch, Kael found it: a fusion cell, still warm.

He jammed it into his rifle, aimed high, and squeezed.

The drone burst into flames, spiraling down in a storm of sparks and neon shrapnel. Silence fell over the wasteland.

Then came the footsteps.

She emerged from the haze — a tall, slender figure clad in scavenger armor made of scrap metal and carbon weave. Her visor glowed crimson.

“Didn’t think anyone was crazy enough to take on a Corp drone solo,” she said, her voice muffled behind her rebreather.

“Didn’t have much choice,” Kael replied. “They hit my outpost.”

Her head tilted. “You from Outpost 9?”

He nodded.

Her expression hardened. “Then you’re the last one.”

Something inside him sank. The Corps had wiped them all out. Again.

“You’ve got nowhere left to run, soldier,” she said. “Join me. The Rust Syndicate’s rebuilding something—something that can tear down the Corps from the inside.”

Kael stared at her. Behind her, the horizon flickered with plasma storms and the faint blue glow of orbital stations — the remnants of the old UNSC-like forces that once governed humanity before the megacorps took control.

He holstered his weapon. “If you’re lying, I’ll kill you.”

She chuckled. “Wouldn’t blame you.”

They moved out together, the storm at their backs, heading toward the black spires of Neonhaven — where cybernetic gods and rust-blooded rebels were about to clash.

---

As night fell, Kael looked up at the burning fragments of the orbital ring still circling Earth.
He whispered under his breath:

“We built heaven. And sold it to hell.”

Then, deep in the neon night, the rebellion began to hum again.

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