The Black Neil Lounge was a place that did not exist, not in official records, not in whispered addresses, not even in the memories of those who left its doors. It was a space between realities, tucked beneath the skeletal remains of an unfinished high-rise, where the city's forgotten shadows gathered to drink, deal, and disappear.
It sat like a bleeding heart at the edge of the world.
Buried beneath broken arches and soot-smeared towers, it throbbed with sound and vice, a hidden haunt of the wicked, the weary, and the wonderfully untrustworthy. Red lanterns hung from rusted hooks above its crooked awning, swinging like dying stars in the mist-choked wind. A low hum of magitech pipes bled through the cracked cobblestones, sending pulses through the ground, heartbeat rhythms to the doomed melody inside.
Smoke coiled lazily through the air, thick with the scent of spiced liqueur and slow-burning spell incense, clinging to skin and fabric like a ghost's touch. The walls, dark and damp with time, were lit only by the violet glow of magitech lanterns, pulsing in lazy sync with the jazz tune curling from a grand piano in the corner. The pianist, a man whose soul had been bartered away for talent, played with an effortless melancholy, his long fingers moving as if pulled by invisible strings.
Lucian Vance leaned back in a cracked synth-leather booth, one boot propped against the steel frame of the table, fingers wrapped around a lowball glass of Ashwine. Its surface shimmered violet—liquid like bruised starlight, harvested from spectral distilleries up north. He drank slowly. He didn't drink to forget.
He drank to remember only what he chose.
He wore a coat the color of midnight oil, heavy with reinforced ash-thread and scarred from too many jobs that should have killed him. Underneath, a shadow-hardened shirt clung to a frame that moved like a ghost, grace without effort, a blade always half-drawn.
His face was sharp, arresting rather than beautiful, cut by sleepless nights and too many secrets. His eyes were an impossible blue, not sky, not ocean, but something colder, something carved from distant starlight, glowing faintly when he was angry or curious or anything in between.
And his hair…it spilled messily across his brow in unruly layers, dark as the void between stars, with a sheen that caught the flickering magelights and shimmered like dusk on oil-slick stone. Some called it "night sky hair" behind his back, though never to his face.
People looked at Lucian Vance and forgot what they were saying. He had that effect, presence without force, gravity without weight. He didn't wear armor, didn't need to. The way he looked at people was enough to keep most knives sheathed.
But tonight, even he looked tired.
Tired… and waiting.
He looked across the bar one more time. In the back, behind the counter, framed by warped mirrors and flickering violet magitech lanterns, stood Juno.
He polished glasses like he meant it—slow, deliberate, one eye half-lidded as if he'd seen enough of this city to know not to blink. His right arm and left leg were both magitech replacements, sleek but disguised to look like worn metal and cracked leather. No Dominion seal. No visible gears. Just clean, quiet functionality.
A secret, well-kept.
Only Lucian knew who'd built them.
He remembered the look on Juno's face the night he had found him wounded, nearly dead—defiance even in collapse. The same look he wore now as Lucian approached the bar.
"Vance," Juno greeted, voice deep and slightly gritty, like broken radio static.
"Still alive," Lucian replied, sliding onto the bar stool, signaling another glass.
"Shame," Juno said, setting down the glass with a dull thunk. "And you're still pretty."
Lucian didn't smile. He just sipped from the glass, finishing it whole.
He was about to order another glass when someone sat beside him.
He didn't look right away. He had rules. But his awareness flared. No footsteps. No sound. Just a reflection on the chrome-glass table.
She had just... appeared.
He glanced up.
The woman across from him wore a long hood woven from stealth-fiber, darker than smoke, glimmering with embedded null-runes. Her face was hidden, but he could see part of her neck. There was a line of crimson ink etched in geometric execution sigils.
He knew what she was.
Umbral Blade.
Executioner of whispers. One of Campion's silken blades. Not meant for places like this unless the stakes were high.
Lucian stayed still. Didn't blink. His fingers barely flexed towards his weapon. He recognized the insignia carved subtly into the edge of her collar.
"You're a difficult man to track," the stranger murmured, her voice low and edged with amusement.
Lucian took a slow sip of whiskey, letting the burn settle in his throat before answering. "And you are late."
She didn't answer immediately. She reached into her cloak and drew something wrapped in waxed black parchment. She laid it on the table between them with precise, reverent care.
Lucian stared at the scroll for a long second. He didn't touch it.
"I thought I was done with Dominion favors," he murmured.
"You are," the woman said. Her voice was smooth. Female. Educated. But it held something else—an edge, like a knife too often used. "This isn't a favor. It's a necessity."
Lucian glanced at the door. "You always deliver contracts with a personal touch?"
"No." She pushed the scroll towards him. "Only for people the Dominion can't kill themselves."
Lucian reached for the scroll. The moment he touched it, a jolt of heat buzzed through his fingertips—biometric recognition.
The seal blinked once and peeled away.
Inside: a strip of nano-treated vellum, embedded with shifting glyphs.A living contract.
It began to speak, not aloud, but inside his skull, humming just above thought.
Darius Vale.Location: Blackthorn Slums.Asset Status: Rogue.Conditions: Target may resist.
Objective: Terminate. Time: 2 days
Lucian's jaw tightened. Blackthorn. Of course.
The Dominion always picked the jobs that couldn't be done clean. The Shroud kept most enforcers out. You needed a special necromantic veil-guide or Remnant sensitivity to even find your way in, and fewer still came out sane.
The woman remained still, her presence a blade in shadow.
"We can't enter the Shroud directly," she said, as if reading his mind. "Our tech fails past the Fold. Only certain... talents can operate beyond the veil."
"You mean people like me," Lucian said flatly.
She nodded once.
"And the bounty?" he asked, tone even.
The stranger's smile gleamed in the dim light, too white, too sharp. "Fifty thousand. Double if you make it look clean."
Lucian exhaled slowly. Fifty thousand Ashcrisps. That was too much for a simple kill.
Something was off.
"We don't care how. Just end him. And anything he's guarding." She leaned in, "Or if you failed to end it all, just bring it to us."
Lucian's eyes narrowed. The phrasing was careful.
"Guarding?" He raised a brow, "like what?"
The woman stood as she said firmly, "Anything."
Lucian gave her a long look, of doubt and curiosity.
"The contract is binding. It expires in forty-eight hours." She gave him a smirk, leaning a little towards him,"and you are already burning time." Then she turned and walked away, feet silent on the vibrating floor. Within moments, she dissolved into the ambient shadows beneath the neon signage.
Lucian remained still, the megitech scroll sat on the table in front of him, now silent. He drained the last of his drink.
A voice interrupted him.
"You're gonna regret saying yes to whatever that was."
It was the bartender—Juno.
"They are offering an undeniable deal." Lucian whispered.
Juno leaned closer, lowering his voice beneath the lounge's murmuring jazz.
"Don't take their money, Lucian."
Lucian's fingers tapped the edge of the obsidian envelope that now sat before him, wax seal still unbroken.
"They're offering seventy-five thousand Ash-crisps."
Juno's jaw ticked. The magitech knuckles of his false hand sparked faintly. "I don't care if they're offering the crown of the Hollow King himself. The Dominion doesn't pay unless someone else already paid the real price."
Lucian raised an eyebrow.
Juno shook his head, running his hand down the scarred wood of the bar like it was a map. "You think you're ready. You're not. You think they'll let you walk away after this one? They won't."
"You don't know what the job is."
"I know who sent it. And I know what they do to people who say no."
Lucian glanced toward the far end of the lounge. The Umbral Blade woman still sat in her dark corner, silent as stone. He thought she has left.
"It's already been sent."
Juno exhaled slowly. For a moment, he looked tired. Older than the magitech made him seem.
His voice was quieter now.
"My sister was arrested for owning a book, Lucian. One book. A poem. She didn't even know what it was."
Lucian's gaze turned sharp.
"They took her to the Sanctum. I never saw her again."
He flexed his mechanical fingers. A faint click echoed beneath the hiss of smoke.
"They burned my real arm and leg when I tried to get her back. Left me to rot in the gutter while the Enforcers laughed."
Lucian looked down. "I remember."
"No," Juno said. "You saved me. Sierra gave me limbs. Raine gave me breath. But I'm the one who's still stuck behind this bar, serving drinks to the same bastards who ruined everything."
His eyes locked with Lucian's. "Don't become one of them."
A moment passed. A long, heavy pause soaked in old blood and worse memories.
Lucian's gloved hand hovered over the magitech scroll. Then he picked it up and slid it into his coat.
"I'm not doing this for them."
"Then make sure they don't mistake you for one of theirs."
Lucian stood.
The Umbral Blade's eyes tracked him as he moved through the haze.
Juno said nothing more, only watched. One hand on a rag. The other on the hidden revolver beneath the bar.
His own quiet rebellion.
And the ghost of a sister no one remembered.