Acid Rain

The city doesn't have a name worth remembering. Eighty-seven percent unemployment. Coffin apartments stacked into the underside of the world. No sky, just neon and the acid rain that falls on everyone equally and eats through everything slowly. Nicola Vale is eighteen, sleeping on a friend's couch, and good with his hands. That's all he's got. He fixes what other people can't, keeps his head down, and survives on a refurb wetware connection so degraded that everyone can tell exactly how broke he is just by looking at him. Then his best friend gets an idea for a livestream. Boost a car, film it, farm some clout. Simple. Except they steal the wrong vehicle from the wrong gang, and what's in the trunk is worth killing for. No crew. No backup. Just a street kid, a gun he barely knows how to use, and a city that already decided people like him don't matter. Acid Rain is a gritty cyberpunk progression story about favors owed, chrome that costs more than it fixes, and what it actually takes to refuse to disappear into a system built to erase you. Cyberpunk is about saving yourself. Not the city. Not the system. Yourself.   ***What to Expect*** Narrative-driven progression — rep, chrome, and favors that shape the story, not a stat sheet. No system windows or numbered stat increases — this is a Progression tag, not a full LitRPG. Street-level grit — violence has real cost, and survival is never clean. Updates Mon/Wed/Fri — consistent schedule, no surprise hiatuses.   ***What This Isn't***Not a sheet-based LitRPG — no character sheets, no skill trees, no menu screens. Not a power fantasy — Nicola earns everything the hard way, and it costs him. Not for readers who want a clean, tidy world — this city doesn't forgive mistakes.                                                                                                                                                                           Welcome to the lowside.