You´re Not Alone

They ran.

Neon’s breath came in sharp gasps, each inhale scraping his lungs raw as his legs pounded against the fractured streets. The weight of exhaustion threatened to drag him under, but Aria’s grip on his wrist was unrelenting, the pulse of gunfire sounding through the city’s streets behind them.

Somewhere behind them, Vey held the line.

He fought not for victory, not for survival—but to buy them seconds. Precious, irreplaceable seconds.

“Faster!” called Aria´s voice, edged with urgency as she yanked Neon forward, her strength defying the fragility of her frame. 

His lungs screamed. His body rebelled. But they could not stop.

A plasma bolt ripped through the air, a streak of burning energy that obliterated a truck to their left. The explosion sent a shockwave through the street, the impact hurling shards of metal and concrete into the air. 

Without thinking, Neon lunged, tackling Aria behind the rusted body of an old freight hauler just as another blast sent fire licking up the crumbling facades around them. He hit the ground hard, the breath knocked from his chest, the sting of debris slicing against his skin.

For a moment, there was only the deafening ring of his heartbeat in his ears.

Then, the world sharpened again.

He pressed his back against the corroded metal, chest rising and falling like a drowning man grasping for air. Sweat and grime clung to his skin, mixing with the sting of shallow cuts.

“I can’t believe that lunatic,” he muttered, voice hoarse.

Aria didn’t look at him, her violet eyes scanning the battlefield through the gap in their cover. The flickering light of distant fires painted her face in sharp contrast, her expression unreadable. 

“He’s bought us time,” she said, barely above a whisper. “We have to make it count.”

Neon exhaled sharply, staring down at the dirt-encrusted lines of his palms. “Do you think…” he started, voice thick, “if we ever find the people who built this world—who created all of this—do you think we’ll get to kill them?”

Silence stretched between them, a fragile thing amid the ruins.

Aria turned to him, the firelight catching the glint of unspoken thoughts in her gaze. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, steady. “Would it change anything?”

Neon let out a breath, half a laugh, half something bitter and broken. “I... don´t know."

Aria didn’t press him further. Instead, she reached for his hand again, her fingers warm despite the cold steel of war closing in around them. “Come on. We need to reach the outskirts.”

The megacity stretched endlessly before them, its towering structures groaning under the weight of battle, their facades scorched and crumbling. Drones zipped through the smog-filled sky, their glowing red eyes scanning for movement, while sirens howled in the distance, a mechanical wail mourning the city’s slow collapse.

The farther they fled from the central battle zone, the thinner the enemy’s grasp became. Patrols grew sparser, the ruins swallowing them in an eerie silence, broken only by the distant echoes of destruction. The neon glow of Nyxia’s skyline pulsed against the dark horizon, an artificial heartbeat slowly fading as they neared the city’s edge. 

Beyond the shattered remains of its walls lay the expanse of the Frontier.

They stopped beneath the remains of a collapsed bridge, gasping for breath. Aria crouched beside him, her gaze drifting upward, where the sky, despite everything, still existed beyond the smog. The stars fought to pierce through the artificial haze.

Neon followed her gaze, his chest still heaving, the ache in his body refusing to fade. He thought of Vey. He thought of a future that had been stolen before he had ever grasped what it could have been.

And he wondered, not for the first time, if revenge would ever be enough to fill the hollow space inside him.

“Back there,” Neon said quietly. “You asked me once why I fight.”

Aria tilted her head slightly. She didn’t speak, didn’t press him. She just waited, the way she always did.

Neon exhaled through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck. “I never had anyone.” His voice was hollow. “No family. No friends for most of my life. Just me. Always me.”

He let his head fall back against the cold stone, eyes unfocused. The memory clawed its way to the surface—the past he had tried to bury beneath layers of rage and defiance.

A boy, younger than he could remember, huddled beneath a shattered transport, his hands raw from clawing through rubble. The city burned around him, screams tearing through the smog. He had cried out for help, for someone, anyone—but no one came.

No one ever came.

“I was left to fend for myself,” Neon said, voice barely above a whisper. “This world… it doesn’t care if you live or die. It just keeps moving forward, leaving you behind like trash.”

Aria reached for his hand, her touch impossibly gentle, grounding him in the present. “Neon… Neo… look at me.”

He hesitated, resisting for a moment, then turned to her.

Her eyes held his—not pitying, not apologizing, not pretending to understand a pain she had never lived through. No, what burned in her gaze was something fiercer. Defiant. A quiet promise that she saw him, truly saw him, and would not turn away.

“You’re not alone,” she whispered.

His throat tightened, the words catching somewhere deep inside him, tangled in the knots of old wounds and older fears. He looked away. “It’s not that simple.”

“It can be.”

He huffed out a breath, a bitter half-laugh. “Yeah? How?”

Aria smiled, a small, knowing thing, like she had already seen the answer and was just waiting for him to find it. “Come with me.”

He frowned. “Where?”

“Just out,” she said, her fingers still wrapped around his. “A day. A night. Just us. Away from all of this.”

Neon studied her, searching for the catch, the unspoken condition. But there was none. Just Aria, looking at him like he was something worth saving. Something more than a weapon, more than the shattered pieces of his past.

She continued. “Just… let us go out together. Do something for once.”

Aria’s eyes lit up, and for a second, she looked like something untouchable, something bright against the endless dark.

“You said you wondered about the people who created this world.” She squeezed his hand, her warmth seeping into his skin. “But before we find them, why don’t we find something beautiful first?”

“And where exactly would we go?”

Neon exhaled slowly, closing his eyes. The world felt different in that moment—softer, quieter. And in that quiet, something fragile stirred inside him, something he had long thought dead.

“You talked about those little insects once,” he murmured, as if answering an old question. “The ones that glow.”

Aria smiled, like he had given her the right answer. “The fireflies in Militia. Great, we´ll go there.”

Before he could say anything else, she stood and took a step forward, her fingers slipping from his. The air shifted as she approached the boundary—a thin, barely visible shimmer in the darkness. 

The divide between Arnem’s war-torn reality and the untouched ruins of Militia.

She reached out, her fingertips grazing the unseen wall of energy.

A ripple. A pull.

And then the familiar light burst around them, swallowing them whole.