Prologue
The girl's tightly shut eyes snapped open before the alarm she'd set even had a chance to ring. The room's interior was so far removed from the typical squalor of Neo Haven's lower-class residential districts that calling them worlds apart wouldn't be an exaggeration. Truth be told, it wasn't a lower-class district at all—it was Engineer Plaza, the kind of place reserved for Mega Corp affiliates with legit jobs. But setting that aside, the space brimmed with disgustingly expensive, disgustingly rare relics from the old century. A genuine wooden bed crafted from real timber instead of a capsule pod. A shower cascading actual clean water instead of an air purifier. Landscape paintings and an analog clock hanging on the walls, even though she wasn't short on visual cyberware implants. It was enough to make one question whether this was really 2196, with the 22nd century gasping its last breaths, let alone the 21st.
"……ha. Fuck."
At odds with her delicate features, coarse words slipped through her small lips. It was the toxic cocktail of relief at surviving to greet another morning and despair at staring up at that same damn ceiling without having kicked the bucket yet—and deep down, she hoped the asshole who'd hurled her into this world was tuning in.
Shhhhaaaa…… Crunch…!
After indulging in the luxury of a warm shower the moment she rolled out of bed. While chomping down a pill packed with every nutrient a proper breakfast demanded, she padded over to the window in nothing but her underwear and tweaked the full-wall glass's transparency.
"Fuck off."
Forcing the poor home AI to double as her emotional dumpster like that, she—the one once known as 'he'—glared out the window at Neo Haven, aka Emerald City.
Whether she'd devour it whole and claim her prize to escape, or end up as its lunch, boiled down to raw skill alone. Bracing for the protagonist's inevitable arrival, Anastasia hurled herself into the city's verdant glow once more, chasing credits and resources.