Tsuyomei: The Last City

Tsuyomei is the last standing city on Earth. Everything beyond its perimeter is allowed to burn.

Built across Tokyo Bay and layered over the remains of an older world, Tsuyomei is one of the great contradictions of ChromaSpyke. It glows with neon. And it survived.

Much of Earth bears the scars of bombardment, reconstruction, collapse, and abandonment. Tsuyomei instead grew upward and outward, becoming a dense arcology of platforms, towers, transit systems, corporate districts, lower streets, and infrastructure stacked across the bay.

The city is protected by the Ikari Line, a radial demarcation extending from the city’s edge.

Outside it, the ruins surrounding Tsuyomei remain subject to containment and bombardment. Suborbital cruisers and corporate analysts watch the Mat, striking target concentrations and anything deemed dangerous enough to warrant removal. Level upon level of collapsed concrete buries the deeper zones, while bombardments slowly shatter the foundations and subfactories. Billions of people used to live and work here. People still live, scavenge, fight, and move through these areas, but doing so means accepting that the distinction between inhabited ruin and military target can disappear without warning. Nonetheless, there’s money to be made in the cold, dark shadows. And the only way to slip uninvited into the last city on Earth is the cross the Ikari Line.

This is not as simple as trekking through ganglands and hoping not to get hit from above. The Ikari Line, named after one of Tsuyomei’s Gumi clans, is tasked with guarding the perimeter. Soldiers hold the boundary between the city and anyone trying to get in. Food, tech, safety, opportunity… and havoc entice outsiders to organize and clash with the Gumi’s soldiers every day.

The line is not an elegant defensive wall. Fortifications are often little more than trenches, and supplies are meager. Global reconstruction efforts and resources are spent elsewhere. The Line holds through sheer weight of bodies, bullets, and grit. It’s a battered perimeter of trenches, checkpoints, damaged equipment, patrol routes, temporary ramparts, and soldiers expected to maintain control with whatever resources remain available. Entry into Tsuyomei passes through that system, making the Ikari Line both protection and filter.

Inside, the city becomes increasingly stratified.

Corporate workers, officials, and those with enough access can move through elevated transit systems and interconnected structures without ever descending to the lowest streets. Beneath them are districts where infrastructure becomes older, denser, and harder to control. And then there are the sublevels, the spaces between the streets and the black water bay below.

Tsuyomei’s lower levels are where many of its Keiratsu-Gumi operate. These organizations manage everything from logistics and medicine to entertainment, smuggling, communications, security, debt, and violence. Some work directly alongside megacorporate interests. Others fill spaces corporations would rather influence without open control. Their presence gives Tsuyomei an order that is rarely the same thing as law. Bribes and blackmail are rampant. Corporations influence every aspect of the city through gang sponsorship. Automated security systems draw a line even most street bosses refuse to cross.

The city itself is also unnervingly quiet. Sound-dampening infrastructure suppresses the bustle that would normally accompany a metropolis of its scale. Communication instead blooms across visual overlays, polyslates, glyph boards, private wireless networks, and short-range transmissions. Information moves constantly even when the streets do not sound alive. Only the entertainment center is exempt from the noise cancellation, and it’s filled with night clubs that never close and some of the most decadent excesses humanity has ever conceived.

For those born inside Tsuyomei, none of this is unusual. It’s an old game. Business as usual. The corporations and Gumi clans siphon most of the wealth and extort those willing to chase the scraps they leave behind.

The city is home to anyone wanting influence. It’s the only safe port for someone wanting to get off-world. For everyone else, it offers the guise of protection and a front row reminder of what awaits anyone stepping outside it’s limits.

If you’d like to experience Tsuyomei in ChromaSpyke fiction, A Star in Shadow provides one of the clearest introductions to the city, while Default State moves through the Ikari Line and the hostile zones surrounding its protected perimeter.

Now that you’ve been introduced to Tsuyomei, continue exploring ChromaSpyke by learning about the Keiratsu-Gumi that shape life within the city. Or return to the ChromaSpyke universe page and explore other lore articles.