Incorporated with DeepSeek
# Neon Vows
*A Shadowrun Noir Cyberpunk Story*
The rain over Seadistrict smelled of ozone and dead fish, a cocktail that clung to my trenchcoat like a guilty memory. Neon signs flickered in Cantonese, Japanese, and Sperethiel, painting the puddles with the garish colours of corporate promises. Somewhere above the smog layer, the arcology called Magehaven stabbed the sky like a glass syringe, the seat of the sorcerer families who owned this city’s soul. I was down here in the gutter, where I belonged—a freak with cat-slit yellow eyes and twin swords strapped across my back, one steel, one silver.
The Witcher they called me. The Monster. The last mistake of House Malveil.
A woman stepped out of the alley, her body flawless and her mana aura crackling with enough power to make my medallion hum against my chest. Sorceress. The innate kind, born with the genetic lottery ticket that turned raw magic into a plaything. Her skin was alabaster, too smooth, like a porcelain doll that had never seen hardship. They all looked like that—wealthy, immortal-beautiful, sterile. A dead-end branch of evolution that refused to stop lording over the rest of us.
“Kael,” she purred, “you’ve killed three of my brothers this month. The council is willing to let you walk away. Just name your price.”
My hand drifted to the hilt of the steel sword—the one for humans and their mundane sins. “I already have a price. All your heads on pikes outside the slave pens. The Templar family walks free. Magehaven burns.”
Her laughter was silver bells in a morgue. “You’re still that little boy we snatched from the floating markets, aren’t you? Still clinging to pirate fairytales.”
“No,” I said, and my voice was the rumble of a distant earthquake. “I’m the man who’s going to end you.”
---
I was born on the *Crimson Current*, a rust-bucket trawler that my father, Captain Darian Vance, refitted into a smuggling rig to run bioware past Lone Star blockades. My mother, Lyra, was a healer—not a street doc with chrome tools, but a woman who knew every herb, every pressure point, every whisper of the body’s own magic. They called her a witch, but she had no sorcerous blood. Just knowledge, calloused hands, and a heart too big for the Sixth World.
Pirates. Gentlemen of Fortune, my father would say, tapping my chest with a salt-crusted finger. “You’re a Spartan among these sheep, boy. Never surrender. Never let them see you kneel. And whatever you do, follow this—” he tapped my heart again, “—even if it leads you into a storm.”
I was seven when the sorcerer flotilla found us. Sleek catamarans warded with illusion spells, crewed by men whose eyes glowed the colour of cheap narcotics. My mother hid me in a smuggler’s compartment. Through the cracks I saw her burn, a silent scream as a blast of raw arcane fire reduced her to ash because she refused to give me up. My father took three of them down with a monofilament cutlass before they butchered him. I was dragged out, screaming, and a sorcerer in emerald robes grabbed my chin.
“Perfect. A blank-slate child. The Templar slaves can raise him into obedience.”
They took me to Magehaven, a vertical city carved into a converted oil rig arcology, shielded by corporate law and magical wards. The sorcerers ruled there, five families who traced their innate “gift” back to some long-forgotten metaplane. They were flawless and cold, wielding power like it was their birthright—which it was, in their minds. But their bloodlines were sterile. Every generation, they needed new servants to tend their floating palace, and they took them by force from the waters below.
The Templar family had been their slaves for four decades. A knightly order from before the Awakening, they once held oaths to protect the innocent. Now they wore shock-collars and cleaned sorcerer baths. But when they were thrown a feral pirate brat, the old man—Sir Aldric—looked into my eyes and saw something worth salvaging.
“This one has fire,” he told his daughter, a woman named Elara who walked with a limp from a sorcerer’s casual cruelty. “Let me teach him.”
And so, in the bowels of a sorcerer’s paradise, a Templar slave and a pirate orphan forged a weapon.
---
Aldric trained me in the old ways—longsword forms, meditation, the ethical codes of a knight. But I already had a code, hammered into my bones by the sea. I was a Spartan. I would never surrender. I would follow my loving heart, and my heart had only one beat: *Kill them all.*
At fourteen, I started augmenting myself. Not with the chrome you buy in a street clinic. I raided sorcerer alchemical labs and studied the mutagenic formulas they used to create their monstrous guard-beasts. The Witcher lore was ancient, half-forgotten—whispers of a golden age when professional monster hunters were forged through the Trial of the Grasses. I found scraps of that knowledge on the Matrix, buried in elven archives. I mixed a cocktail of fungal toxins, hormonal boosters, and raw mana-infused retrovirals that would have melted a normal man’s nervous system. I injected it in a sewer, while Elara held my hand and wept.
My body broke. My eyes bled yellow and my pupils stretched vertical. My heart stopped twice. When I woke, the world was sharper, faster, deadlier. I could see in the dark. My reflexes outpaced any street samurai’s wired nerves. And I could cast the Signs—simple, brutish magic gestures that the sorcerers considered beneath them. Aard, a telekinetic shove. Igni, a burst of flame. Quen, a shimmering shield. No incantations, no innate talent, just will and mutated biology.
I was a Witcher. The first in six centuries.
The sorcerers didn’t notice at first. I was just another scarred slave, cleaning the galley. But then one of House Malveil’s younger sons tried to beat Elara for spilling wine. I grabbed his arm and snapped it. He screamed, unleashing a bolt of chaos energy. I cast Quen, absorbed it, and then drove my forehead into his nose. Before the guards arrived, I vanished into the service corridors.
That night, the Templars were lashed for my rebellion. Aldric took forty strikes and died smiling. I watched from a ventilation shaft, my heart a frozen furnace. *Follow your loving heart.* My heart loved them. My heart hated the sorcerers. There was no contradiction.
The killing began.
---
In the Shadowrun parlance, I became a serial killer with a very specific client base. One by one, I hunted the scions of the five families. I learned their routines, their vices, the flaws in the arcology’s security matrix. My dual swords—a steel blade coated in industrial diamond for the mundane guards, a silver alloy with colloidal anti-magic particles for the sorcerers themselves—became a rumour in the undercity. The gangs whispered about the “yellow-eyed ghost” who left no witnesses, only corpses with severed hands (you can’t cast spells without hands) and a blood-drawn crest: a wolf’s head.
I was still a child of pirates. My father taught me that a gentleman of fortune takes what he needs. I looted the sorcerers’ vaults, funding my potions—toxic decoctions that boosted my speed and pain threshold for short bursts, brewed from chemicals that would kill an unaugmented human. I’d down a vial of Liquid Hate (my own name for it), feel my veins burn with ice-fire, and then walk through a hail of gunfire and magic alike.
The sorcerers panicked. They tightened security, hired shadowrunners, tortured the Templar slaves for information. But the Templars knew nothing—I operated alone, a spectre that slipped through wards with a disruptor charm I’d carved into my medallion.
Then came the night I stormed the high spire.
---
House Malveil’s patriarch, Arcturus, waited for me in the penthouse solarium, rain drumming a funeral beat on the stained glass. His robes shimmered with reality-bending threads. Around him, the last of the council cowered—three sorcerers, their innate magic crackling in defensive patterns. At their feet, chained and beaten, knelt the remnants of the Templar family. Elara, her grey hair matted with blood, raised her eyes to me.
“Kael,” she whispered. “Don’t…”
“Don’t what?” Arcturus mocked. “Don’t fulfil his pathetic vendetta? This abomination thinks he’s a hero. A Spartan among men, was it? You’re just a failed experiment, Witcher. We are the true power—innate, destined, flawless.”
“Flawless,” I repeated, stepping into the light. My yellow eyes caught the reflection of a neon sign outside, painting my scarred face in green and purple. “Your flaw is that you’ve never had to fight for anything. You were born with a silver spoon of raw magic, and it made you soft. The Templars taught me discipline. The pirates taught me to never surrender. And my mother… she taught me what it means to love something so fiercely you’d burn down the world to protect it.”
I drew both swords. Steel in my right, silver in my left. “I am Kael Vance. Son of a healer and a captain. I am the Witcher. And tonight, your line ends.”
Arcturus sneered and threw a bolt of raw mana—a torrent of colourful death. I cast Quen, the shield flaring gold, and sidestepped. The bolt struck a pillar, turning it to molten slag. I rushed him, feet silent on the marble. His underlings opened fire with spells and sidearms. I danced through it, a blur of augmented reflexes. Igni burst from my left hand, setting one sorceress ablaze. Aard shoved the second into a wall with bone-snapping force. The third tried to teleport; my silver sword sang and his hand spun away, teleport spell sputtering out.
Then it was just Arcturus and me.
We circled. He was old, powerful, his mana reserve like a star. I was faster, meaner, and running on a cocktail of potions that would cause renal failure in an hour. My heart pounded a Spartan war-drum. “For the *Crimson Current*,” I breathed.
He summoned a storm of spectral blades. I didn’t dodge—I took them. Quen shattered, the blades sliced my coat and flesh, and I kept moving, pouring my last reserves into a single thrust. My steel sword punched through his chest, shattering his ribs, piercing the heart that had never loved anything.
He gasped, his perfect face contorting. “You… will never… win. The world… needs us.”
“The world needs no one who keeps slaves,” I said, and twisted the blade.
He fell.
The surviving sorcerers—the younger ones, the ones who hadn’t been at the council—fled into the night. The slave collars deactivated. Templar survivors staggered to their feet. I knelt beside Elara and cut her chains. She cupped my cheek with a trembling hand.
“You did it. We’re free.”
“Not all of you.” Aldric’s ghost stood between us. Her eyes, I realised, were already dimming. Internal injuries, maybe. I pulled a healing potion, but she pushed it away.
“You taught me to follow my heart,” I said, throat tight. “This is all I have left. Revenge. Ending their tyranny.”
“No, child,” she murmured. “Your father’s heart was love. Yours is still there, buried under the hate. Don’t let the sorcerers take that, too. Promise me… you’ll find something else to fight for.”
I made no promises. Couldn’t. The rain outside had stopped, and the neon was reflecting in the pool of her blood. I closed her eyes and stood. The arcology’s security systems were rebooting; Matrix alarms would bring corporate response within minutes. I gathered my swords.
The Templar survivors, maybe a dozen, gathered their wounded. A young man, barely older than I’d been when Aldric first trained me, stepped forward. “Sir… Witcher… what do we do now?”
“Leave Magehaven. There’s a smuggler’s boat in the under-docks, key code 7-7-Alpha-Crimson. Tell them Captain Vance’s son sent you.”
“And you?”
I looked out the shattered window, at the skyline of neon and steel. Somewhere out there, the remaining sorcerers had escaped. They’d regroup, rebuild, find new slaves. My father’s voice echoed in my skull: *Never surrender.*
“I’ve got a job to finish.”
I walked out into the rain-slick corridor, a mutated monster hunter with cat eyes and a heart full of loving fury. The Witcher wasn’t done. Magehaven was just the first sorcerer town to fall.
The night welcomed me back like an old lover, and I disappeared into its neon shadows, twin swords dripping, a ghost with a Spartan creed.
---
*End of Part One.*
