Neon City Reckoning
Approved Angles Only
The production tunnel smells like warm plastic and stale coffee. It is brighter than the corridors, but not kinder. Light pooled here is not for safety. It is for clarity. It is for capture.
A strip of gaffer tape clings to the floor, half peeled back, its adhesive furred with dust. Someone has tried to remove it and failed. The edge curls up like a question no one wants answered.
Blitz Vector steps around it as if it might snap shut on his ankle. He hates how his body does that now - anticipating restraint in every harmless object.
Story Beat - The Test That Isn’t a Test
There are cameras everywhere. Not the ones for fans, not the ones that love spectacle. These are smaller, quieter, mounted low and high and at angles that make a person feel like a shape.
The lenses do not blink. They wait.
Synth Knight reads the space like a map. His shoulders settle as if he has found familiar rules. He tells himself it is relief. It might be surrender.
A monitor wall glows at the end of the tunnel. Twelve feeds. Same hallway, same light, same scene. Except one feed is half a heartbeat behind the others.
In that delayed frame, Wildbyte catches something the rest of them miss - a shadow that moves against the light.
They do not point at it. They watch it, the way you watch a crack in glass, waiting to see where it will run.
Thunder Jack stands close enough to feel the heat coming off the equipment racks. The cables are bundled tight. Too tight. Zip ties everywhere - fresh, clear, identical.
His fingers flex unconsciously, like he wants to tear every one of them apart and hear the relief of something breaking.
They Show You What They Want You to Be
The speaker above them clicks on. The voice returns - calm, measured, unhurried. It sounds like it belongs to the building itself.
“Tonight,” it says, “the city requires cohesion.”
The monitors shift. The feeds tighten into a single view. The tunnel looks cleaner. The tape on the floor is gone. The dust is gone. The reality is improved.
Blitz feels a strange panic. Not fear of being hurt. Fear of being erased.
Synth watches the edited feed and tells himself it is harmless. A broadcast choice. A production polish. He thinks of Neon Smash Rally and the way the lights hesitated, and how quickly the story afterwards became smooth.
He thinks: if the truth is messy, maybe the clean version is mercy. Then the thought lands heavy. Mercy for who.
Wildbyte steps closer to the monitors, close enough to see the seams. Their reflection splits across the screens, a dozen Wildbytes made of glare and static.
“If they can choose the angle,” they say, voice low, almost amused, “they can choose the person.”
Thunder Jack answers without looking away. “Then we stop being angles.”
Aftermath - The Crowd Learns the Cue
When they finally move on, the tunnel lights follow them. Not with brightness, but with attention. As if illumination is a hand on the back, guiding them toward a mark.
Blitz looks once over his shoulder. The half peeled tape is still there in real life. But on the monitor wall, it remains gone.
He wonders - briefly, sharply - which version will be remembered. The one that happened, or the one that will be played back forever.
Part of the BillingtonPix Wrestling Universe - Rise of the Neon City Renegades.
Written by
Neon City Reckoning is an original short-story arc set within the Neon Wrestling Universe, blending wrestling mythology, spectacle control, and resistance through style.