The Sleeping Neon

Ren Takeda wakes up in an underground laboratory, his mind still foggy from artificial sleep. The air is cold, the light harsh, and the walls are covered with screens displaying images of the war, the ruins of Shiro City, and his own modified body. Painful memories flood back—unbearable pain, chemical transformations, muffled screams. Once, he was an orphan, living an ordinary life. But all that changed the day he was captured, modified, and turned into a living weapon.

In the opening scene, Ren manages to escape his confinement. The cables and machines that had forced him to become a weapon detach from him with a metallic crash. His muscles, once human, are now enhanced, amplified by Tonium energy flowing through his veins. With inhuman speed, he races through the lab, his neon powers activated. But he is far from fully controlling what he’s become.

His escape takes him through the underbelly of Shiro City, a sprawling metropolis where humanity survives in squalor, under the grip of megacorporations and Neons—beings altered by Tonium. It’s a broken world, ruled by the profits of the powerful, where social inequality and war rage on.

Ren encounters the Neon-Errants, a group of rebels fighting against the Neons and the megacorporations’ malicious use of Tonium. Their leader, Kai, a man scarred by past betrayal, sees Ren as a valuable asset in their fight against the oppressors. But Ren, who has himself become a Neon, remains wary of these rebels. He knows all too well how those who fight for freedom can sometimes lose themselves in violence and sacrifice.

A sabotage mission against a Tonium factory becomes a moral dilemma for Ren. Should he follow the Neon-Errants, with their radical methods and shattered vision of the future, or should he seek the truth about the Neons and their control over humanity? The Tonium coursing through his veins seems to be guiding him down a path he doesn’t yet fully understand. But he knows that the future of humanity—and his own—depends on the choices he makes in this battle for the truth.