A civilized man required three things upon entering a new city: a decent drink, an accurate lay of the land, and currency that didn't look like scrap metal.
Lucifer stood on the rain-swept corner of 4th and Shinjuku-South, watching the river of drenched mortals flow around him. Nobody stopped. Nobody made eye contact. In a metropolis held together by cheap fiber-optic cables and paranoia, a tall blonde man in a wet three-piece suit was merely another eccentric hoping not to get mugged before daybreak.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarette case. Empty.
"Inconvenient," he murmured.
Across the street, tucked beneath the shadow of a colossal magnetic rail track that rattled every two minutes with deafening screeching, sat a low-roofed dive bar. A flickering neon sign buzzed through the fog in harsh amber letters: The Broken Valve. Below it, a scuffed hand-lettered board read: NO CYBERWARE OVERLOADS. CASH OR UNLOCKED CRED-CHIPS ONLY.
Lucifer smoothed the front of his coat, stepped off the curb, and crossed the asphalt.
Inside, the air was warm, thick with the smell of cheap synthetic tobacco, stale hops, and wet wool. A low synthesized bassline thumped from a cracked ceiling speaker, vibrating against the back of Lucifer's teeth. At the counter, an older bartender with a cybernetic eye that whirred every time it refocused was wiping down a laminate surface with a gray rag.
Lucifer slid onto a vacant vinyl stool at the far end of the counter. It creaked under his weight.
"Raining hard out there," the bartender said without looking up, his voice gravelly from decades of cheap smog. "What's your poison?"
"Bourbon, if you have it," Lucifer said. "Failing that, whatever you pour when you want to forget you live under an elevated train."
The bartender paused, his mechanical lens zooming with a faint click-whirr as it assessed Lucifer's tailored shoulders, clean cuffs, and utter lack of visible augmentations.
"Old synthesis grain alcohol. Brown color added," the man said, setting a heavy glass on the counter and filling it with two fingers of amber liquid. "Five credits. Chip or retinal scan?"
Lucifer didn't reach for a pocket. He had no chip, no plastic ID card, and certainly no desire to submit his retinas to a machine manufactured in a sweatshop.
Instead, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a single, heavy silver coin—an ancient Athenian owl tetradrachm he'd picked up from a dead general during the Peloponnesian War, forgotten in the lining of his coat. He set it gently on the laminate bar between them.
The bartender squinted down at it. He picked it up with thick, grease-stained fingers, weighed it, bit the edge with a gold-plated molar, and raised an eyebrow.
"Real silver. Solid. Don't see metal like this down here."
"Then consider the difference an advance on your hospitality," Lucifer replied, picking up his glass.
He took a sip. It burned—raw, harsh, and utterly lacking in craftsmanship. It tasted faintly of kerosene and sugar cane. Under normal circumstances, he would have vaporized the distillery that produced it. Tonight, the crude heat in his throat was almost novel.
"You're not from the lower sectors," the bartender said, sliding the silver coin into a locked drawer beneath the counter. He pulled out a worn glass and poured himself a finger of the same amber rotgut. "Exec down on his luck? Or did your ship miss the docking spire?"
"Something like that," Lucifer said softly, setting the glass down. "Tell me about the building in the center of your skyline. The one piercing the cloud deck."
The bartender stopped mid-swallow. He set his glass down a little too heavily, his good eye flicking toward the front door before settling back on Lucifer.
"You mean the Spire. Takamura-Saito Heavy Industries." The bartender shook his head, leaning forward so his voice stayed under the hum of the music. "Mister, if you got beef with them, take that fancy coin collection of yours, buy a ticket to the outer agricultural colonies, and don't look back."
"I rarely look back," Lucifer said, his tone mild, almost soothing. "It's a dreadful habit. What are they manufacturing up there?"
"Manufacturing?" The man laughed, a dry, rattling cough. "They don't make toasters, friend. Three months ago, their seismic drills cracked something deep beneath the old tectonic fault. Rumor is they pulled up a relic—some chunk of black stone that radiates enough juice to power the whole grid. Except ever since they dragged it to the eighty-fifth floor, the city's been... wrong."
Lucifer tilted his head, his golden eyes sharpening. "Wrong how?"
"Nightmares. Half the district wakes up screaming at three in the morning about eyes in the sky. Power flickers in geometric patterns. The brass brought in corporate security squads with locked-down helmets—guys who don't talk, don't eat, and don't bleed right when local gangs try their luck. They call it Project Morning-Glow." The bartender snorted bitterly. "Corporate poets. They're playing with fire they don't understand, and when that spire pops, the whole valley goes with it."
Morning-Glow. Lucifer's lip twitched in genuine, quiet amusement. Mortals could never resist the vanity of light.
Before Lucifer could speak, the bar's heavy front door was kicked off its magnetic latch, slamming against the interior wall with a violent clang.
A blast of cold, wet wind swept through the room, cutting through the cigarette smoke.
Three men walked in. Unlike the scavengers in the alley, these men wore sleek, matte-black ballistic armor stamped with a crimson triangle. Their faces were obscured behind opaque, polarized visors that glowed with faint HUD telemetry. Heavy submachine guns were strapped across their chests, held at low-ready.
The entire bar went dead silent. A patron in the corner booth frantically shoved his hands into his pockets and ducked his head.
"Takamura Enforcers," the bartender hissed under his breath, his face going gray. He slid Lucifer's empty glass out of sight. "Don't move. Don't look at them."
The lead enforcer scanned the room, his helmet tilting with deliberate, mechanical precision. The red HUD band across his visor flared as it swept over the patrons, pausing abruptly when it landed on Lucifer.
"Unregistered biometric profile," a synthesized voice crackled through the leader's helmet speaker, flat and devoid of humanity. "No neural handshake. No sectoral clearance."
The enforcer took two heavy, magnetized steps forward, his boots ringing on the steel floor plates. He raised a gloved hand, leveling a shock-taser directly at Lucifer's chest.
"Unregistered citizen. Stand up, place your hands behind your head, and submit to genetic tagging. Failure to comply authorizes immediate lethal suppression."
Lucifer didn't move. He rested his elbows against the laminate counter, swirled the dregs of the kerosene-tasting liquor in his glass, and looked back at the armored soldier.
The heavy cosmic locks inside Lucifer's chest pulsed, an iron weight squeezing against his spirit. His mind was still an ocean, but the pipe leading to his hands was narrow, hot, and straining against the pressure.
He didn't need the ocean. A cup of water would drown an ant just as easily.
"You have five seconds to lower that weapon," Lucifer said, his voice dropping into a register that wasn't loud, but somehow made the neon lights in the ceiling flicker and buzz in protest. "And apologize for interrupting my drink."
The bartender shut his eyes and backed toward the kitchen door.
"Target displaying hostile non-compliance," the soldier barked into his comms. "Suppressing."
The enforcer pulled the trigger.
Two barbed electrodes leaped from the barrel on copper wires, crackling with fifty thousand volts of incapacitating current.
Lucifer didn't duck.
With a movement too precise to track, his bare left hand snapped up and snatched both wires out of the air six inches from his face.
The high-voltage current surged directly into his skin. Blue electrical arcs danced across his fingers, crawling up the tailored fabric of his sleeve, crackling against his collarbone.
Lucifer didn't flinch. He didn't even drop his cigarette case.
Instead, he looked down at the blue electricity wrapping around his knuckles. For a being who had spun stellar lightning out of the void before the sun was formed, fifty thousand volts felt like a warm, slightly prickly bath.
He smiled—a cold, razor-thin expression that made the soldiers freeze in their tracks.
"Crude," Lucifer whispered.
He pulled his willpower tight, focusing on the current flowing through his hand. He didn't just absorb the voltage; he re-wrote its trajectory.
With a minute twist of his fingers, he reversed the polarity, feeding the electrical surge back along the copper wires at ten times its original frequency, supercharged by a pinpoint wisp of his own primordial flame.
The arc turned from blue to blinding, incandescent gold.
The current shot back into the enforcer's weapon in a fraction of a millisecond. The gun didn't merely short out—the internal lithium power cell ruptured, exploding inside the soldier's hands in a violent burst of sparks and melted polymer.
The blast blew the leader off his feet, sending him crashing through a laminate booth, groaning as smoke poured from his cracked breastplate.
The remaining two enforcers reacted instantly, leveling their submachine guns to open fire.
"Hostile—!"
Lucifer didn't give them the breath. He moved forward, crossing the ten feet of linoleum in a blur of motion that defied the room's damp, heavy physics.
He caught the second soldier by the barrel of his rifle, shoving it toward the ceiling just as a deafening burst of automatic fire ripped through the water pipes above, sending a shower of hot rust down upon them. With his other hand, Lucifer drove an open palm directly into the center of the man's chest.
He didn't use infinite strength. He simply used the concentrated mass of an immortal vessel anchored against the earth.
The shockwave caved the reinforced titanium breastplate inward with a wet, metallic crunch. The soldier was thrown backward through the bar's reinforced glass window, shattering it into thousands of glittering neon fragments that spilled out onto the rain-drenched sidewalk.
The third soldier backed up toward the doorway, his weapon shaking in his armored grip. His visor flickered erratically, the internal system failing to calculate how a baseline human in a wool suit was moving with the kinetic force of a high-speed freight transport.
"Back off!" the soldier yelled, his voice cracking through the digital modulator. "Back the hell off, you freak!"
Lucifer stepped forward, his leather shoes crunching over the broken glass. His coat was damp, his tie was slightly askew, and a faint golden warmth radiated from the hollow of his collarbones, drying the rainwater on his face.
He reached out, his fingers wrapping around the muzzle of the soldier's rifle. The steel began to groan, bending like warm wax under his grip until the barrel was bent at a ninety-degree angle toward the ceiling.
"Tell your masters at the Spire something for me," Lucifer said, his golden irises locking onto the black glass of the visor with terrifying clarity.
The soldier whimpered, paralyzed by the sheer, crushing weight of the will pressing against his nervous system. It felt like standing in the path of a collapsing star.
"Tell them," Lucifer murmured softly, leaning in close, "that they have built an altar in the clouds, but they have forgotten who owns the sky."
He shoved the soldier out the broken frame. The man stumbled into the street, scrambled to his feet in the rain, and sprinted into the dark without looking back, leaving his moaning comrades in the gutter.
Silence descended upon the bar, save for the hissing of the broken steam pipe above and the steady patter of rain outside.
Lucifer paused, feeling the heavy throb behind his temples again. His breath hitched slightly—a mortal sensation that annoyed him to no end. The seals had held, but they had creaked under the strain of that localized flame. Every time he forced his will through the needle's eye, the friction grew.
He looked down at his left hand. The skin was slightly red, tingling with residual heat.
Progress, he thought.
He walked back to the counter, tossed a second ancient silver coin onto the laminate surface next to the first, and reached over to pick up the half-empty bottle of brown grain alcohol by the neck.
"Thank you for the hospitality," Lucifer said to the pale, wide-eyed bartender frozen behind the counter. "I'll be taking the bottle."
He turned, tucked the liquor under his arm, and stepped out through the shattered window into the neon-lit rain, his eyes fixed on the towering black spire cutting through the clouds above.