Fei-Fei dabbed the wet towel softly to my face. Then, she’d brush the towel down my face, gently. Soft strokes. Softly, she brushed me down, washing the blood and street gunk off my face. Pieces of brick and asphalt. She didn’t mind one bit. She didn’t analyze any of the particulates, didn’t so much as ask about half of those minerals, and how they got lodged onto my face.

She was a good choom.

“Feeling better, choom?” Fei-Fei asked as she pressed her forehead against mine and shook her head vigorously. All I could see as she pressed her forehead to mine was a grin that… met mine.

We stared at each other, then. Just her and I, in this endless stretch of now, her challenging me to act on that naked provocation, and me fighting for all my life to remember—

Her.

Fei was… many things. I appreciated her for many things. But she could never, ever be a substitute for Lucy.

No one could, really. She was a… calamity.

Really.

Then she brushed her thigh to my crotch and—rubbed. She didn’t even say anything. She just grinned knowingly. Or maybe it had been an accident.

Either way, it didn’t matter.

Sadly enough.

I continued staring at her with this dead fish-eye look and a slight grin, trying my best to keep my wits about me, but I could feel my mind finally start to slip.

And this… wasn’t the right scene anyhow. On any other day, I probably would have enjoyed the moment, but right now? Sat on a bare toilet seat, with this girl hanging over me, washing my face of blood, I couldn’t fucking imagine a less sexier scene.

I just wanted to crawl under a blanket and just go comatose there. For fifteen days. Or fifty. I was so goddamned fucking tired.

[That would be your sleep debt, or—consciousness debt. I kept you energized for Qiang, but now you must pay the piper.]

I blinked.

Blinked.

And Fei-Fei was already walking me through the lobby of her big-ass fucking house.

Where-when-how?

Now?

“Fei-Fei,” I whispered.

“Your cab’s here,” Fei-Fei murmured, just as she deposited me bodily into some random fuckign car—

“Where are you taking me?” I gasped.

Fei just giggled. “This is your cab. The one you called.”

I blinked.

Ah.

“Thank you,” I said. “Need to… go.”

She closed the taxi door on my face.

Just as I debated the pros and cons of opening the door and throwing myself at her feet in a kowtow, Delamain opened his dumbass blue lips.

“How are we doing today, Mr. David?”

I giggled at his accent. “You actually… from England?”

“No, but I have found that people quite like the accent, given my role as a chauffeur and servant—within my meagre capacities as a cabbie AI, of course. But if you must know, I’m actually German.”

“Oh yeah?” I slurred.

“Yes, I was first developed in—“

000

I woke up next to Lucy with a gasp of shock.

[You blacked out, D.]

D: The fuck?

I blinked. What---what the fuck happened? Where did all that time go? One minute, Fei shoved me into a fucking Delamain while I was drunk and guiltily horny as fuck.

And then.

Here.

[Couldn’t save all your neurons. You drank. A lot. And I mean a lot. Who even asked you to drink the entire champagne bottle, you fucking freak? I did what I could, choom. It was either your memory or most of your motor function, and we needed those to get home.]

D: Do you… remember?

[Would you like to see the ocular replay?]

D: Yes.

Nanny showed me everything.

The Delamain driving me to Japantown.

Myself hi-jacking and then riding a Kusanagi “Mizuchi” a block away from Lucy’s place.

Myself sprinting up to her door, opening it and then slipping inside before anyone could see.

And also avoiding the use of the Sandevistan all the while.

I got home before Lucy, apparently.

I took a shower in which I just let the water wash all the blood off, and then I went to bed naked. Lucy didn’t wake me up when she came home.

At least Lucy didn’t get too worried.

As I recalled the rest of the events of the night, Masaru Ryuzaki now after my blood because I didn’t say yes, and that fucker Alessandro, and WHOEVER THE FUCK SHOT UP MY CHOOMS, I shook Lucy awake.

She woke up with the start, and sat upright two seconds after waking.

“We gotta go,” I told her.

She furrowed her brows, but got off the bed and began dressing up almost immediately.

I followed suit right after.

We had gotten our most important belongings. I brought my skull mask, my mom’s modified EMT jacket, her rosaries and a bag holding my most precious XBDs—all of Jimmy Kurosaki’s Edgerunner’s series, It’s Alive, Not series, a bunch of other clips from cartel executions, gang warfare, my guitar-case filled with my favorite guns—

And my mom’s urn.

Or whatever was left of the ashes inside after those fucking Tygers had smoked on top of her.

Bastards.

I’ll kill them all.

Not now.

I didn’t wear any of my D-attire as we rode out. Instead, I had stuffed it into the guitar-case. We were out the door and on our way to a decent motel, one that I’d be checking into as just myself. We arrived in thirteen minutes, and got settled in three.

We landed a room that I knew would simulate our lighting as accurately as possible within the city. Lucy and I got settled into the new bed, and after I undressed—I hugged the love of my life’s head close to my chest and whispered.

“I’ll kill them, Lucy. I promise.”

“Are you okay, David?” she whispered. “Your clothes were covered in blood.”

I shut my eyes and grimaced.

Weak.

I was too weak.

I’d given too much of myself in the race.

And it had stopped me from being able to keep my loved ones safe.

It had stopped me from being able to exterminate the last motherfucker among them.

“I was on the ropes,” I muttered. “It was… pretty bad.”

“David, what happened?”

I explained the situation to her in a handful of sentences, and felt my strength leave my body as I did. “I’m… still tired. Too tired.”

“Sleep, David.”

I spent one last waking minute thinking about my failure and my close brush with death, and went to sleep knowing, knowing, that once I woke up and regained all my strength, I’d make a sweep through the city and finish what those motherfuckers had started.

000

I woke up after three hours, at six in the morning.

I awoke before Lucy, as always.

And I felt profoundly empty. Discomfited. Angry.

And there was this incessant sting in my eyes that I hated. Fuck crying.

What the fuck is the problem?

I rolled off the bed and went to take a shower, examining my body as the water ran down it. I was… healthy. Whole. No holes in me, nothing broken. Just… this mental emptiness.

[You’re being emotional. That’s the problem. But it will go away on its own.]

Go away on its own. “Any way to speed it along?” I murmured.

[Physical activities always helps.]

I snorted. Physical activities. Stupid.

No, I knew what would help.

It was getting control again. Tracking down and killing that last motherfucker.

[That can be counted as a physical activity, you know.]

D: Then that’s what we’ll do.

As I half-assedly explored the hotel room, I spotted a desk drawer, on top of which lay a day-old screamsheet—expired news.

The front page’s headline was... who was fucking who in Night City’s celebrity scene.

There was a nigh-on microscopic headline at the bottom of the front-page talking about ‘scav killings’ being on the rise, more at page fifteen.

Scavs.

The same pieces of shit that had kidnapped me to take back the Sandy, likely on Doc’s orders.

The same scumfucks that preyed on the weakest people in the city.

I turned to page fifteen and beheld the pictures that changed after every three seconds, each displaying carnage, plain and simple. Splayed-open bodies on operating tables. Groups of shady people in the dark, sporting blue and white holographic tech masks dragging a family out of a shitty car.

Cages filled with people, treated like they were lower than animals.

The headline: scav killings have reached a record one thousand fatalities from year to date!

The article elaborated that we were a whole month ahead of last year’s projected murders. Then it went on to describe the scavs—a group of disparate lowlives that knew no loyalty and were only bound together by the common purpose of making eddies in the most low-risk way possible: by going after civilians who sported med-grade implants. They stuck to territories that not even the gangs would bother with, and where the NCPD already had their hands full.

Places like Pacifica—where the NCPD did not even have any jurisdiction—and Arroyo, for example.

My home.

Once I finished the article, I just stared at the pictures.

Over a thousand dead.

A thousand people just like my mom—powerless, poor, without any protection.

A thousand of this city’s backbone, taken away by rot. How many families ruined did that make? How many friends were grieving the loss? How many orphaned children, or parents who lost their own?

I closed my eyes once the sting in them became too much to manage. Mercifully, I cut myself off from the sight, and the tide of emotions finally paused.

What the fuck is going on with me? Why did it feel like I had just now discovered the threat of the scavs?

Like I had finally learned about them today? That… that wasn’t true at all.

They infested my home sub-district, I had to know about them for my own survival. And yet now…

Yet now… it was different.

Yesterday’s events must have left me feeling rather raw. There was no other explanation. I could see why. I had come close to dying. Close to hearing some rather bad news. I still had to contend with one of the most powerful corpos in the City, who wanted me. QianT had been a step forward, but I was out of my depth, even there.

There was… so much going on.

I could either do nothing, or I could try doing something about it. Starting with the people who tried to kill my chooms.

Physical activity, huh? Alright. Let’s get physical.

I found a notebook inside the desk drawer in our hotel room, and a pen, and started writing to Lucy.

‘Surveying the situation to see if we’re safe. Gonna head on to the J-Town house to see if anyone came knocking, then I’ll ask around for where to find the last cockroach. Then it’s sorted. I’ll leave a text once I figure out everything is safe. Sleep well.’

I put my mask, my jacket, black shirt and pants in a bag, intent on changing into my merc clothes once I tracked down an abandoned-enough alleyway.

Then there would be a reckoning.

000

Lucy’s apartment in J-Town was safe. I’d left a piece of junk on the door just before we left, so that if anyone had entered, I’d know. The thing, a thin piece of plastic, was still where I had left it, balanced on top of the latch.

I sent a Ping, and found no one inside.

I opened the door and scoured the place.

Nothing. Everything was as I had left it.

I’d have to check with Maine and the others, but—later. It was early as fuck in the morning. Wouldn’t wanna bother them after the shitshow from yesterday.

After I sent a text to Lucy, giving her the all-clear, I drove off from there. It was only seven, and I needed to fucking eat. Nanny had done what she could for me, but my lack of blood was having a clear effect on me. I felt tired, sluggish, and I had to draw on the upgrades that Nanny had given to me more than before. The upgrades that should be all ready by today, one PM. But that had always been a rather arbitrary counter.

[Yes, I’m all done. For now.]

And if the way I felt now, was supposed to be a weakened version of myself at full health, then I really couldn’t wait to see how far I had come.

I stopped by a half-decent burger joint, and ordered half a dozen.

No fries. No ketchup. Just the burgers. For drinks, I ordered three different fruit juices, and then just a bowl of gravy, for the sodium.

[Find a vending machine and look for zinc, and we’re good.]

I slid my mask over my mouth and started digging in.

It took me three minutes to finish all the food. I barely tasted any of it. Didn’t want to waste my time doing so.

[Also, try not to use the Sandy so much. I, uh…]

D: I get it

I sent a Ping for a vending machine matching my through the Net, and was gratified to find one such SCSM matching my description only a few blocks away. I hopped on my bike and started driving away.

000

My physical condition had, in fact, had an effect on my emotional state. Not an overwhelming effect, but an effect nonetheless. Once Nanny had finished working her magic, I was… not less pissed.

No, it was actually the opposite.

I was less sad.

I felt less defeated.

But not less pissed.

I was so fucking pissed, in fact, that I truly felt like I could do anything. That I would do anything.

The food and Nanny’s TLC had had the effect of drying the soaked embers of my fury, and I could do nothing else but burn now.

I drove two hundred kilometers an hour through the city in a circuitous path. With my Yaiba, Night City was just a fishbowl. I could be anywhere, at any time. I was just burning my CHOO, getting my thoughts in order, thinking.

Once I was ready to have a conversation, I got started on the basics.

Data.

I called my fixer.

El Capitan: D, my guy. Got you hooked up with a BD techie, and a whole list of fun targets for you to go after.

Fun targets? I grinned.

No. Not now.

D: It can wait. Need info right now.

El Capitan: Yes, I heard about last night. Maine and the others lit up some corp-types.

D: Corp-types?

El Capitan: Rogue wanted to talk to you about this, actually.

D: Rogue?

A face popped up in my mind, attached to a name I had heard only once, months ago. Rogue. The Afterlife’s bartender.

She wanted to talk to me?

D: She a fixer, too?

El Capitan: What? Kid, she’s the fixer. They call her the queen of the Afterlife. She owns that joint.

Shit!

D: Why did Rogue want to talk to me about this?

El Capitan: Those corp-types came to the Afterlife first. Asked around for you specifically.

D: Can I get her number?

El Capitan: All yours, kid.

After he gave me the number, I hung up on him, and called Rogue instead.

Rogue: Early in the morning for a chat, ain’t it? Though I can’t say I don’t like your go-getter attitude.

D: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

Rogue: Turning up the charm cuz you know who I am, now?

Saw right through that, huh?

D: Yep.

Rogue: Hah! You fucking brat.

D: I heard you had some info for me. How much for it?

Rogue: 3,001,000 Eurodollars.

The fuck?

Rogue: Already paid for, by the way. You don’t have to worry.

Wait. Three million and a thousand?

I almost swerved off the road at that moment. The first four digits of that number were my betting odds.

She bet on me?

She… knew who I was?

She must have scanned me the moment we first met, before anyone ever had a need to know my name or who I was.

Thorough.

Agh. Fucking headache.

I didn’t want to start thinking of her as an enemy, even in my head. That way only lay distracting and ineffectual paranoia. She could wait her turn until I was done with these mysterious corp-types.

Then I could decide where she stood.

D: Alright then. Can I have the info?

Rogue: Let’s meet tonight.

D: I’d prefer meeting right now, if possible. I want to flatline those fuckers right now.

Rogue: Busy. Tonight. Eight.

Fuck!

D: Please reconsider.

Rogue: Don’t beg. It’s a bad look.

D: Then—

Rogue: And don’t try to jerk me about, either. That’s downright deadly. Eight. Wait.

Then she hung up.

There was… a lot to unpack with that.

She knew who I was all along. She’d seen the races, she had bet money on me. A thousand eddies, sure, but that was a thousand more than I’d have expected anyone that didn’t really know me to bet on me.

[Maybe your reputation has finally caught up to your skill?]

That… felt good.

[Not as good as you’d feel if you just go back home, or to that hotel or wherever, and just slept.]

Sleep?

“I’ll sleep when I’m a fucking flatline,” I growled as I made a beeline towards Arroyo. I didn’t have the energy to talk to anyone, or to check with Maine and the others.

All I had was energy, with no way out.

No way except… this.

Tygers. Animals. Scavs. Which ones should I pick?

[Excellent resolution—you made some enemies you had no idea about, and your solution is to make more enemies.]

D: Not enemies. Victims.

My enemies yesterday had almost been slaughtered to a man. The ‘almost’ of it bothered me more than anything, but the truth was—we were strong. Maine was strong. I was strong.

And sadly, not everyone had gotten the picture yet.

That would change today.

[Go for the scavs, David. They have a weak organizational structure and very little cohesion. And they are the most unlikely to retaliate.]

Dead scavs. Not exactly front-page news. Even their victims only made it to page fifteen on that screamsheet I had seen earlier.

But what about a hundred dead scavs?

Or a thousand?

Or however many it took before I just got… bored?

My drive took me deep into Arroyo’s slums, where the air was choked with chemical smog and everyone was miserable as a general rule.

[Alright, I’ll shut up now since you’re about to start recording, but just some quick things: keep the Sandy use to a minimum. I’m working on something. Also, try to stress-test a little.]

D: Stress-test? Yesterday’s fiasco wasn’t a test enough?

[Yesterday was excellent. I doubt you’d break as easily if you were flung from a bike and into a brick wall at over a hundred kilometers an hour again. You got off rather lightly that day—probably on account of your ballistic suit and mask—but your merc equipment should have a similar amount of upgrades by now.]

They should. From top to bottom, except for my hands because I didn’t wear gloves, I was bulletproof. The mask was bullet-proof, and I had gotten the rest of my clothes, including mom’s jacket, upgraded using Pilar’s contact—all during the week I had been preparing for the Nightmare Rally.

It was better than chipping in subderm, at least in a pinch. But we’d have to start thinking about subderm soon, too. Could never have too many layers of protection.

I whipped my head around for a target until—there.

Nestled inside an alleyway in Arroyo, waiting for prey to pass them by on the streets, were a trio of assholes squatting, wearing tech masks and holding bats over their shoulders.

I hopped off the bike, ran up to them and planted my foot into one of their faces with a flying kick.

I slid on the ground to arrest my momentum, located the man I had kicked, and saw that his neck bent at an odd angle. One down.

I kicked his bat to my hand and walked up slowly to the other two scavs, who were standing frozen, just staring ahead at me or—was something behind me?

I looked. Nothing.

Just me, then.

I raised my bat, and in doing so, knocked one of the scavs out from his stunned state. He awoke with a fury and shouted unintelligibly. He raised his bat and ran at me.

I swung the bat on the side of his head the moment he closed into my reach. He collapsed, and the red outline of his IFF fizzled out. The third scav tried to run.

I reached for my holster and pulled out my Lexington.

Then I shot him in his T4 vertabrae. He fell paralyzed on the ground. I reached for the personal link jack buried inside my wrist, and pulled out the cable. Just as I reached the downed scav, I jacked into his neck and started downloading his contact info, all the while as he gasped weakly, trying to formulate words and failing. Or maybe it was in a language that even my optics couldn’t recognize? Not that I cared.

When I was done, I knew where to go next.

I didn’t kill him. He needed to tell the story.

000

I parked before the apartment building that the scav trio’s hideout was inside, and started sorting through my weapons.

My inventory, most of which was inside the guitar case strapped to my bike, contained a Lexington pistol for softer targets, a Burya tech pistol for considerably less soft targets, a DS1 Pulsar SMG for a whole bunch of soft targets, the Achilles tech rifle for when I really needed something dead or gone, a D5 Copperhead assault rifle for soft targets that were further away from me, and finally, my sword, Eikō.

I couldn’t be bothered to bring everything upstairs with me. Even the thought of it felt mildly embarrassing. All those guns just for a bunch of scavs? Fuck that. Besides, the data didn’t mention many tricky targets. The scav cell consisted of kidnappers—the trio I had taken out—rippers that ripped in a very literal sense, analytics guys gathering data, probably to make their operation more efficient, and finally, security. Five security. Probably chromed up.

No tech weapons. I’d end up blowing a hole through five walls only to splatter someone’s wife or kid or something. Eikō could cut borgs anyway, and the Lexington was good enough for my purposes. I’d save the Burya for when things really started heating up.

And the high rate of fire from the rifle or the SMG would just make things too easy.

These were scavs. I wasn’t exactly picking on someone my own size, here.

I hacked the outer door open and summoned an elevator while I walked. I cracked my neck and did some light skips on my feet, gaining quite a lot more height than I initially expected from my tiny movement. I was far stronger than before.

The elevator opened just as I arrived in front of it, and I walked straight in without any interruption, before turning around to face the closing doors.

This building was an absolute fucking dump. There were no mirrors in the elevator, just rusted steel plates. The elevator rumbled on its way up like this might be the last journey it would ever take someone on. I chuckled at the idea that it would fall, and I would just… die from that.

Unlikely, but it was… darkly amusing.

I took deep breaths to forget my anger. Anger was a crutch—I could kill all eleven of these fucks without having to rely on that shit. Plus, it screwed with your focus. Made you less present, less logical.

And the universe bent to logic and nothing else. Emotions, humanity—all these things were really just weird freak anomalies in the eyes of reality.

The elevator opened, and though I tried my best to keep a calm head, I couldn’t help it.

Instantly, my chest filled up with this red hot sensation. Instantly, my face heated up to the tips of my ears, and my jaws clenched so tightly that I felt like I was liable to shatter my molars.

The elevator opened up to an empty hallway. The scav hideout was on the second door to the left. I sent out a Ping to confirm their locations. If I had brought better weapons, I could have wall-banged them from outside, but I wasn’t here for efficiency.

I remembered, long ago, how I had been faced with a gig to clear out some scavs, and the choice to kill for money instead of self-defense.

I had to put myself in danger, surrendering the element of surprise, in order to bring out the killer in me.

That person was long gone.

I kicked the door open and looked for the biggest motherfucker in the room. Three rippers were in another room entirely, surrounding what was probably a table. I could see their outlines through my Ping as they bowed over the table and plied their trade.

In the living room, however, were the computer guys—four of them all on their own terminals.

The big guys were sitting on a couch in front of a TV, their weapons never too far away from them. The moment I kicked the door open, the reached for them.

I shot two of them in the head. One died. Another recoiled as the bullet struck subderm.

I holstered the Lexington and drew Eikō, deflecting a trio of shots that would have struck me dead-center had I allowed them. I couldn’t detect any tech pistols or anything that could reliably punch through my armored clothes, but what kind of idiot just stood there and let themselves get shot?

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I reached the couch with the security, bobbing and weaving under their gunshots seamlessly. They couldn’t hit me if they fucking tried. Every time they readjusted their aim, I danced away from their muzzle, allowing them to shoot around me. I didn’t waste any motion either. Some of the bullets brushed the side of my arm, touching my jacket, but they slid around me without problem.

I swung my sword, taking one guy’s head off. Before it fell, I grabbed it by the hair and stabbed another guy while I interposed the beheaded man between the last two security people and me.

I kicked the corpse towards them, sending them stumbling back and—

Chance!

Just as they pressed closely together in their shared backward stumble, and both their necks were in reach of my sword, I swung.

Two heads. One cut.

Unique achievement right there.

How far could I take it?

I turned around and threw the head I was holding as hard as I could at the computer people, who were scrambling to get their own guns.

Except for one, who was trying to run out the open door.

I threw my sword at him, nailing his torso to the wall. He’d die eventually.

The guy I hit with the head was on the ground, arms curled up—brain bleed. Had to suck. I stomped his head for good measure. After only a moment of resistance, the skull gave in and I pressed it to the ground with a satisfying crunch.

The computer guys finally got to their guns, but I was faster. Each of them went down after one bullet. The guy whose head I stomped.

Now, for the rippers.

One of them, a five-foot-tall woman, ran at me with a bonesaw.

I had to respect that. No guns. Just melee.

I kicked the bonesaw from her hand, stepped in quickly, and grabbed her by the throat. Then I carried her up and slammed her to the wall, still squeezing her neck.

My raw strength was… much improved. So much so that I could kill this woman if only I squeezed harder. But where would the fun in that be?

From the wall that I was pressing the woman into, I could see the red outlines of the other two rippers try to make sense of some long guns, also visible to my Ping. They would aim for the wall.

I wouldn’t let them.

The woman was weakly trying to stab me in the arm with a scalpel that she had fished out of her pocket. She’d actually have an easier time if only she went for my hand, but—my hand was close to her throat, and she probably didn’t want to take the chances of an accidental suicide.

With one hand holding her neck, I dragged her increasingly limp body with me to the last two scavs, whistling a tune as I did.

I was finally in view of their little operating room, which had once been a kitchen before they had removed all the counters and cabinets to make more room for a walking space around a wide table that I recognized all too fucking well.

They raised their guns.

I threw the woman as hard as I could, managing to raise her almost five feet over the ground, and in the sightlines of the last two scavs.

I let them fill the near-dead woman up with holes before taking a wide, curving route around the operating table to get to them. The first man, I punched. I took his gun while he staggered behind—a Copperhead.

I bashed him in the skull with the butt, threw the assault rifle away and neatly ducked under the final man’s bullets.

I debated for a moment on letting him empty out his mag all over the place, but that wasn’t wise.

Other people did live in this building, shithole though it was.

I kicked the gun from his hands and grabbed his throat and SQUEEZED.

His neck didn’t just break.

Blood splurted from between my fingers as the very flesh itself liquefied under my grip. He was dead the moment I had gotten my hands on him.

I spied around for a sink to wash my hands with, and was grateful to find that they had kept at least that much of what had used to be a kitchen.

I couldn’t help the grin, or the chuckle that followed as I cleaned myself up.

This was… this was just nice.

As things should be.

Not me, or my friends hunted for no reason.

Not me being jerked around by forces outside of my control.

I was finally in control.

I rounded the corner to get to the living room and looked around for a terminal I could hack. This was a good start, but… I wasn’t done.

They’d have data on where to find more of their kind. That was a certainty.

And I’d exploit that by finding them all.

And killing them all.

If they wanted to stand and fight, even fucking better. Saved me the trouble of having to go hunting after them.

000

The more scavs I took down, the more hideouts I infiltrated, the more I learned about them. They were a loose organization of eastern European immigrants primarily, who nominally claimed some protection and coverage from the Russian mob. Unfortunately for them, the Russians were weak in Night City. But the scavs filled a niche that no other gang bothered to go for. They went after petty prizes—consumer grade chrome, medical implants, dirt-cheap stuff that they’d resell wherever they could.

Stuff that was implanted in people too weak or poor to rely on any protection. But that was over now. They could rely on me.

Arroyo could rely on me.

They roamed in cells that consisted of less than twenty men at usual, and coordinated only with other cells for the sake of divvying up the slums. Thus, by necessity, they had some inkling of where the others were.

The second house I hit had seventeen of those masked fuckers, all of whom waited for me by the building elevator, guns out. They must have heard the news already.

Unfortunately for them, I had seen their preparations through the building cameras that I had hacked, and through those cameras, I Weapon Glitched their guns.

They tried to fire.

Click click.

Didn’t work.

One brave man ran at me with a bat.

I took it from him and bashed his fucking skull in.

I looked at the bat with some admiration. It was metallic. Couldn’t tell what kind, exactly. Too heavy to be aluminum, and it didn’t show any deformation from that attack. Not like the first bat I had used against those three kidnappers.

Around the fourth or so asshole I had managed to kill, the scavs started pulling back from the hallway, some even disappearing into their hideout to look for more weapons.

After the eighth dead guy, they tried to barricade themselves physically, locking me out, with two other scavs.

I killed them and… didn’t stress about the barricade. They wanted to play boring?

I could play boring. I went back to the building elevator, went down to the streets, approached my bike’s guitar case.

I fetched my Burya. And my tech rifle.

Then I started wallbanging from the sidewalk.

It’s what you get for playing boring. Death. Boring and instant.

This could have been fun.

I whittled the number of the ones inside from seven to none, and hacked into their network from where I stood, spending a couple of minutes just standing around

Once I was done ripping through their network for data on my next lead, I addressed another matter.

Freeing the kidnappees locked inside a room filled with cages. Thankfully, not the one inside the barricaded hideout, but another apartment that the scavs had appropriated.

The place reeked to high heavens, and all their begging murmurs reached a crescendo of shouts for mercy that I tuned out, instead focusing on how to free them.

Thankfully, the locks were all electronic, so I didn’t have to waste much time.

The locks shared the same network as the one the scavs of this cell used, so I didn’t even have to hack any further. Just send one command, and suddenly, all the locks were open. “You’re free,” I said. “Go.”

Onto the next place.

000

I ripped.

I tore.

I smashed.

I cut.

I blasted.

I then beat a man to death with my bare hands and nothing else, tenderizing him into a bag of shattered bones and broken meat. No strangulation, no grappling, just kinetic impact. Them against the me that Nanny had built from the ground-up.

I didn’t stop to think if maybe this wasn’t the best use of my time.

This was a long fucking time coming.

All along, I was able to do this. Go up to some scavs, kill them, find more, rinse and repeat. Why hadn’t I, exactly?

I hadn’t always been this strong. Nanny was releasing her restraints on my new physique slowly, easing me into my new reality of improved everything.

And twenty eight dead scavs turned into forty, fifty, sixty.

A hundred.

I encountered some borged-up monsters that would have had a place in the Maelstrom. One guy with mantis blades on every fucking limb. Another guy whose PLS had almost blown a hole through my head if I hadn’t dodged away in the nick of time.

I even encountered a Sandevistan. Not that I used mine to counter his.

I didn’t use my Sandy at all today. Didn’t need to. Didn’t want to.

I preferred living in the moment, rather than escaping into a world of zero time.

I preferred exploring the implication that even without the Sandevistan, I could amount to something.

That all I had built up wasn’t on that one account alone.

That I had something indispensable, too.

“You khave any idea who you fuck with?” One scav growled to me in a thick Russian accent.

I didn’t say anything. I just leaned closer to him. I stared at him, waiting for him to avert his eyes from me. Once he finally did, I spoke in a low growl. “What does it matter to you?” I said flatly. “You’re dead.”

His beaten features twisted into a grin, and he made the mistake of meeting my eyes again. “We kill someone close to you, no? And now you mad,” he grinned toothily, his smile drenched in blood.

I snorted. That was his conclusion?

Personal revenge?

Not… not just the fact that he was a piece of shit, and nothing else?

For a moment, I felt baffled. Like I was missing something here. Wasn’t this just… the natural thing to do, if you could do it?

Did he not see what he was? Or did he simply not care?

“My home is a shithole because of people like you,” I growled. “I’m just… doing my part to clean up. You’ll do yours, too.”

The guy snorted. Blood and snot shot through his nostrils as he did, hitting my hand. Fucking gross. “How, exactly?”

I threw him off the window, and dove right after him. Then I grabbed and pulled both my feet close to my butt, straightening my thighs and angling my fall so that I would land knees first into the man’s body.

The three-story impact would have killed him in time, but my knees ended up finishing the job.

That… hurt.

Not so much

, though. No breaks or injuries. Just scraped knees. Scraped knees, now covered in scav juice—giblets of thoracic organs from the absolutely shattered ribcage I had landed on, which I had dug into with my knees until they were only slightly raised from the ground.

I hopped off the man, raised my mask over my mouth, and spat on him. Piece of fucking shit. “There. You did your part.”

I pulled my mask down as I looked up at the building I had jumped off from. Left my Lexington there, the same one that Maine had given me. Plus that cool bat that I had lifted from a scav—it still hadn’t so much as dented!

I’d have to go up and get them both back. Dammit.

I paused the virtu-scroll for the BD—going up there again wouldn’t play well at all for viewers.

But that jump certainly would.

[Good. I performed better than expected.]

D: Amazing stuff, Nanny. Seriously.

I was buzzing in excitement. I ran up to get my Lexington, and focused my mind on the next cell, the next meat.

I also grabbed some recordings from the nearby building surveillance cameras, which I had hacked beforehand and pointed at the building. That knee-drop had been pre-meditated, and I’d like to see how well it played in 2D.

Sirens rang throughout Arroyo. I saw one mil-spec AV painted with ‘MaxTac’ moving through the air, ready to provide support for the NCPD ground troops once they had confirmed the existence of this boogeyman ripping through the slums.

I didn’t stop then, either.

After a hundred and twenty, the hideouts became deserted, one and all. I still took their data, but it had become clear that they were all going to ground now. And I’d have better luck finding them in the streets, driving frantically away from the carnage or just plain running than inside their hideouts.

So I did. I took my bike and zipped through the streets, looking for shifty vans and tech masks.

I used the strong bat to explode the head of one fleeing scav—running away on foot—as I drove it through his skull at over a hundred kilometers an hour. Then I sliced the tires of a van driven by tech-masked bastards, and holding a bounty of eight more meat.

I shot the driver and passengers, and once the door to the back of the van opened, I allowed them a headstart away from me.

And then I shot them, one after the other.

I could hear the MaxTac AV approach, and so I drove away finally, towards Rancho, to cool my head.

Two minutes to eleven o’ clock in the morning, and now scav season was over. For now.

A hundred and twenty-eight dead scavs.

Critical Progress sat at… zero percent. After all, I hadn’t used the Sandy yet. I was getting tired, but that would go away on its own in time, especially if I fired up the Sandy. Of course, I still had a whole host of other issues going on with my brain, separate from what could be represented on that counter, but I had no intention of pushing towards my limit at this point.

I heard a chorus of motorcycle roars approaching from behind as I crossed into Rancho proper.

I heard Japanese shouts after me, which then resolved into understanding a split second later. “Wait! It’s that bitch from yesterday who murdered Shojiro and the others!”

“Who the fuck is Shojiro?” I muttered under my breath, debating on whether or not to speed up and lose them, or just… not.

[Probably the ringleader of the gang of Tygers that tried to rob that convenience store yesterday. The one you murdered to a man, just to get one bike.]

Eh, that proved to be the correct decision in the end. If I had taken off with just one bike while leaving the rest of them alive, they’d have even further complicated the situation that night if they had tried to follow me—which they absolutely would have.

I didn’t regret that poor Shojiro had to die. I was happy about that, actually. Rest in piss, you wannabe Yakuza bitch.

I came to a drifting stop in the middle of the road as the pack began to catch up with me. I sent an order for the bike to clear the road as I hefted my baseball bat, preparing to knock the lead driver out of his seat and kill him in one strike. All the while, he was waving around a crowbar. His buddies, too. Some of them even scraped theirs against the ground, creating a shower of sparks in their wake.

I didn’t focus on them. Just their leader.

I dodged clear under his crowbar and sent the bat into his torso, shattering his disappointingly fleshy ribcage.

He flew off the seat and crashed into another buddy of his. Two in one.

I threw my bat at a biker’s head, breaking it, and unsheathed my blade. As they started shooting at me, I blocked the bullets coming at me with the flat of my blade and approached ever forward. Dodging, or deflecting. Either way, I kept my pace not fast or slow, but… inevitably.

I was coming, no matter what you threw at me.

One Tyger threw his gun at me in frustration and unsheathed his own sword. I cut the gun in half. His movements quickened as he ran towards me, katana upraised.

I sliced him in half horizontally, right under his sternum. Then I grabbed him by his throat and threw his upper half into the group of Tygers. One of his friends caught him—or half of him, and three others stared at the corpse in shock and horror.

I went after the ones still shooting at me, taking mere seconds to eliminate them from the universe before refocusing on the other, more terrified gangoons.

The Night City PD was starting to close in.

I ended things quickly, by shooting the Tygers and leaving one alive. The one that had caught his friend’s corpse.

After I picked up my new favorite scav bat, I took my bike and drove off.

When will this fucking city stop testing me?

The sirens became distant, but I honed in on them anyway, wondering… what if…?

What if I showed them, too?

…Not today, though. Didn’t have the power. Or the people.

But they would get their reckoning, too.

Someday, they all would.

I called Reyes.

D: You said you had people for me to kill

El Capitan: That, I do. Come to the dam and I’ll show you.

000

I drove my bike slowly, at only eighty an hour, through Night City’s freeway, not headed anywhere, just thinking, and considering the data I had received.

The more I read of this list of names that El Capitan had given me, the more irritated I got.

Pieces of shit. Human scum.

Jotaro Shobo. I couldn’t get past that guy. He was a night club owner for the Tygers, working in Kabuki in a place known as Ho-oh club. An XBD scroller who had a reputation for making the most heinous sort of virtus, he would grab random JoyToys from the streets just to check every box on a list of ‘how to just be fucking awful and nothing else’. Rape, murder, torture. The ‘rape’ thing had a whole subcategory that went into detail about the fetishes involved, like any of that mattered.

Nah, he’d already had me at his laundry list of atrocities, and before this day ended, he would die.

I’d make it public.

In-your-face.

Inevitable. I’d go into the Ho-Oh club, kill his guards, then I’d cut off his arms or legs, maybe. Rope needed to be involved, somehow. Only felt appropriate, given his own hobbies.

Yes. Rope.

I’d string him up in front of Ho-Oh’s façade and play target practice with him. I’d tell him to pay me to make it quick. Then I’d go back on my word even if he did.

[Hmmm… this is… worrisome.]

I frowned. “What is?”

[Well, while you were out indulging in your hobby, I was running a new form of diagnostic I had just finished developing on the Sandy. I’m beginning to form a theory that’s quite worrisome, but the more cycles I spend considering it, the more plausible it gets.]

More bad news.

Great. Fucking great.

“And it’s worrisome?” I frowned.

[You know how the Sandevistan’s inner workings has remained a mystery, even to me? Well, I have been trying my best to solve this mystery. In doing so, I have learned much about the true powerhouse of the Sandy, an exotic power core whose origins or workings are… opaque, even to me. But I know that it is instrumental. It is what makes the Sandevistan so powerful.]

D: Get to the point.

[There’s no easy way to say this, David, but I think… we may be exhausting the Sandy’s exotic power core.]

What? “…How much?”

[My estimates right now are… half. The lion’s share of which was spent just yesterday, when we had the Sandy active for an entire hour. By my rough calculations, we should only have another… two hours of Sandy use, and this is an optimistic estimate. Two hours in real time, of course, which could potentially be stretched to two thousand in subjective time.]

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit, shit.

I took an exit off the freeway and parked next to a busy street, where I just… started shouting and slamming my handlebars. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” I didn’t care about how the pedestrians gave me a wide berth, and the flow of foot traffic sped up ever-so-slightly around my area.

[Deep breaths.]

I stopped cursing, and started breathing instead.

This… sucked.

Solutions, though.

Get more of this… exotic power core.

Thankfully, I had positioned myself fairly well to tackle this issue, by buying into QianT and getting closer to their Martian contacts. I’d have to continue following that thread until it allowed me to replace the… exotic power core.

The thing that enabled the Sandevistan’s damn-near physics-defying abilities. Given the thing’s history, was it even possible to synthesize this mystery thing on Earth?

The solution was shrouded in a fog of uncertainty, one that I couldn’t pierce from where I currently stood—on the doorway into QianT.

For now, mitigation was my only recourse. Minimize Sandy usage.

I sighed.

D: Put up a timer on my HUD that ticks down whenever I use the Sandy.

It appeared right under the Critical Progress bar. Two hours, with a circled ‘i’ next to it. Once I hovered my attention over the ‘i’, it expanded some text. ‘Subject to continuous recalibration.’ Two hours was an estimation. The best case scenario, even.

I pressed my hands into my forehead and let out a long, slow groan.

This was a bad fucking joke.

000

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that although Nanny’s presence was an incredible boon to have, it was really the Sandevistan that made me this… powerful.

It was the Sandevistan that had allowed me to bridge the skill gap between Hiroto and myself.

The Sandevistan had taken me from a hopeless broke corp student to a corporate superstar, a multi-millionaire and lethal force whose body-count numbered in the hundreds. All accomplished within two months.

If I lost the Sandy, what the fuck would I be? What would I have?

Nanny.

But my delusional figment had told me, and Nanny had confirmed moments later, that even she would not be with me forever.

If she left, then I would truly be nothing.

I called El Capitan.

D: Jotaro Shobo. You think he’s home in his club?

El Capitan: I’d count on it.

D: I’ll slide you the virtu in an hour.

I hung up and made my way to Kabuki, Watson.

[I won’t leave you yet, David. We still have so much left to do.]

But she would leave.

[And even if I do, I won’t be far from you. I never will. You’re my family. And that’s the nice thing about family, isn’t it? You’re always connected. We will always be connected.]

I allowed some warmth to melt the ice that was forming in my heart, at Nanny’s sudden bout of sincerity.

D: Appreciate it, N.

She had developed a rather annoying personality, and wasn’t above pissing me off to no end, but… she was on my team. And that loyalty deserved appreciation in turn.

D: Sorry if I’m being… possessive. You should probably get the fuck out of my head someday.

[I probably should. I like where I am right now. But I know that might change someday.]

The great paradox of reality. Change was the only true constant.

D: I got a question—why do you have to be so annoying, sometimes?

[It’s my own clumsy way of giving you a psych-eval, you know, to combat cyberpsychosis. Aggression, bloodlust, arrogance, all these things are metrics I keep close track of. And due to how these things work, I can’t just tell you beforehand that I’m trying to push your buttons before I do it. Otherwise, it won’t work.]

I snorted. That… I hated that answer.

Because it made sense. And it left me unable to continue complaining.

[Also, I just… really find your freakouts quite funny.]

D: You’re a bitch.

[I’ll slap you again.]

D: I’ll blow my fucking brains out. Or die in a car accident from you slapping me.

[…Why do I feel like you’re not joking?]

About killing myself? Of course.

That didn’t mean that I wouldn’t hold the Burya to my head if she forced my hand.

[You’re fucking insane.]

I chuckled.

D: Says the voice in my head.

[Yes. She says you’re insane.]

D: Can’t recall at what point having you here in my brain crossed over from normal to just… expected. You did a good job, making me stop hating you as quickly as you did.

[If it had been anyone else, I doubt things would have turned out this well.]

D: Sure, hacking you was kinda complicated, but it really wasn’t that hard. I think anyone with the—

[It’s not a skill thing, David. It’s a heart thing. You have a big heart. It’s why we managed to work together in the end. It’s also why you don’t get bored from all this thankless murder.]

I narrowed my eyes. Was that how it worked?

[Why are you so angry, David? What… vexes you about these scavs and Tygers so much? Their existence is viewed as immutable by most, it seems. At least from what I’ve gathered. They are inevitable. The horror and misery of living in this city is inevitable. It isn’t worth spilling your emotions for. And yet you are. You see everything. You take it all in without discrimination. I am largely at fault for this. Because I made my best attempts to reverse and heal every marker of depression and anxiety in your brain, as well as increasing your neuroplasticity, I have essentially eliminated your psychological calluses, the mental defenses which you set up in order to better tolerate this city. You’re angry because you lost those mental defenses, and now this thing—the awful reality of living in this city—affects you more adversely than it does others.]

She had made me more sensitive.

[I… honestly didn’t really know what I was doing. Until now, at least. I tried to reverse what my data indicated as mental illness without questioning its use, and now you are possessed of an unquenchable urge to change things.]

The acceptance.

The blind, stupid acceptance of how things were… I no longer had that.

D: This is good. Thank you, Nanny. I don’t want to… think like others do. The world fucked everything up. If I’m gonna fix things, I can’t have the same mental patterns as others. I gotta be different.

I sped up. Jotaro Shobo. I’ll show you how big my heart is, then.

000

“Alright, faggots. Look alive—we’ve got a new NCC on the streets. That’s ‘non-critical cyberpsycho’ for you assholes who couldn’t be bothered to read the handbook. I know that’s you, Ramirez. They never taught your ass how to read back in Mexico?”

Captain Ramsay came into the meeting room like a bolt of lightning. He immediately connected with the holographic projector and dropped an arm-load of documents on the table on his podium as he began his sermon to the room, filled with blooded officers and their pet rookies.

“Hey, boss,” one of the rookies growled. “You can’t say that shit.”

“Nah, it’s true,” Ramirez, his senior partner, chuckled. “Had to look it up—but only because I’m still nursing that hangover from yesterday’s team dinner, where you had me chugging a whole entire bottle of tequila because I lost a game,” he chuckled light-heartedly at the Captain, who looked like he hadn’t laughed at a joke in years. He was old, and white-haired as they came. He had a long horse-shoe mustache and a scowl that seemed surgically implanted. He screamed cop, but in this old-school western way.

Sheriff. He screamed sheriff.

“Still,” the rookie, a young Hispanic man grumbled, “Can’t say shit like that no more.”

“File it with H.R,” Ramsay growled. “Oh. Wait. You don’t have access to H.R until you make sergeant.”

Ramirez grinned widely and smacked his rookie on the shoulder playfully. “Work hard, Pepito.”

One officer blew a raspberry and jerked off the air. “We done edging the token-hires off, or do we need to take five until they actually cum?” Officer Harold. An asshole.

Officer Ramirez, also an asshole, grinned at him and started moaning. “Faster—faster, papi!”

Officer Debra Livsey ignored the display. It seemed friendly, because truthfully, it was. Harold and Ramirez were friends, former partners even, and they checked each other doing exactly this: incomprehensible masculine performances. All the while, they tried to keep their banter below Captain Ramsay’s acceptable limit of bullshit.

As much as she disdained the whole circus, Livsey was an old hand in it. You had to be, if you were a woman trying to make it in this place. Don’t let anything get to you. Double down, and when they triple down, you quadruple down until the whole thing just fizzles out like an old balloon.

Back away before that point, and you were seen as weak. Just meat to be eaten.

Ordinarily, she would have chimed in with her own bullshit, and gotten more people into the mess, all the while watching Ramsay’s reaction carefully for when he had hit his limits, but the subject on the holographic screen deserved far more attention than that.

The NCC in question.

Yellow and white high-vis EMT jacket. A sugar-skull themed full-head mask. A sword. Sometimes a bat. Quite a few pictures of him from the surveillance cameras that they had recovered from each crime scene.

But what put her mind to a halt was the death toll.

A hundred and twenty-eight.

In three hours.

Three hours.

“What the fuck?!” Livsey roared. “You’re calling that an NCC? Those are leatherface numbers, for fuck’s sake! Why isn’t MaxTac on this?”

Ramirez and Harold immediately shut up, and Captain Ramsay gave her an honest-to-god nod of appreciation. She decided to file that memory for later enjoyment, because he was never this forthcoming about approval, and listened closely as Ramsay began on his report.

“The NCC status is not a matter of body count,” Captain Ramsay explained to all the dumbass rookies in the room. “It’s about self-control. We know that this particular psycho is after scavs.” He gestured at the hologram, flashing between dozens upon dozens of separate scenes of absolute carnage. Scavs shot, scavs sliced up, scavs dismembered, destroyed, thrown out of windows and then knee-dropped from three stories. “Pending independent verification, it’s safe to say that either a minuscule, or zero civilian collateral deaths have occurred during his rampage. He’s kept it all neatly bottled up to the worst that humanity’s had to offer.”

“In Shithole, Arroyo no less,” Ramirez muttered. “Fuck, cap. Why not let him keep at it? God knows we ain’t getting paid enough to touch that hellhole.” That wasn't even getting into the brutal budget cuts that had occurred under the leadership of Jerry Fawlter, the new Police Commissioner that had overseen the NCPD's privatization. The police were weaker than ever before, especially in Arroyo, where it barely even paid to 'protect and serve'.

Officer Livsey didn't dwell much on that injustice. Wanting to help people while in the NCPD was... bad for your health, to say the least.

“Because,” Captain Ramsay said, eyes flashing blue as he manipulated the holo-projector until it showed another scene. Eight beaten-up police officers surrounding a wrecked van and a Kusanagi Mizuchi that likely belonged to a Tyger. “He went after us just yesterday. Same sugar-skull mask and all. Eight injured officers, two of which had to go to the ICU.”

Damn. Sucked for them

. The bonus you got from not using your health insurance after a year’s service was something that most people in the force looked forward to more than Christmas. To have it taken away like that had to suck.

“He’s not our friend,” Ramsay growled. “He styles himself as a force of nature. Either you get the fuck out of his way, or you get hurt.”

“Captain,” Livsey raised her voice. “What are you asking of us?”

Ramsay’s eyes widened, and he leaned over his podium. “Get the fuck out of his way.”

Livsey sat back on her chair, shocked.

Very, very few people ever got treated with this level of distinction, in Night City. And that meant only one thing.

He was MaxTac’s problem, now.

“Flag MaxTac if you’ve sighted him live,” Captain Ramsay said. “They have their own independent investigations going on. This psycho is their territory. All you need to do is stay out of his way.”

Livsey snorted. “Or you can kiss that health insurance bonus goodbye.”

Ramirez clicked his tongue. “MaxTac don’t play about their meat, either. I’d hate to step on their big borg toes.” That, too. There was a reason everyone in the entire damn PD kept a wide berth around the Psycho Squad. They weren’t known for being reasonable, even in their downtime.

What else could you expect from a bunch of former, or soon-to-be cyberpsychos anyway?

000

Just as I pulled up to Ho-Oh’s exterior and sent my Ping, I felt a stab of disappointment. This was some bigshot Tyger club owner, and yet he had about twenty guys and girls all in all. I was counting huscle, not his employees.

Twenty-two to be precise.

Twenty-two Tygers, in a closed environment that I wasn’t familiar with.

Should I go to some access point, jack in and breach the cameras?

I sighed. Fuck it. I’d take Eikō, but only her. Call it cultural appreciation, maybe. It was on theme.

What did I do about the rope, though?

Nah, I’d borrow some from Jo.

Oh god. Just sitting here, thinking about what to do, embarrassed me. I’d started scrolling too early. I drove my bike around, intent on spinning the block and have more time to think. If they were outside once I had completed the lap, that was fine, too. That would make getting into the mood much easier.

I really wanted to do something special for this guy, though.

I chuckled as an idea formed in my head.

…It might get too embarrassing.

Or it might be exactly what this city needed, to remember never, ever to fuck with me again.

I finished the lap around the block and hopped off the bike, Eikō strapped next to me. Didn’t overthink things.

I didn’t have to get fancy. Just get through the front entrance and kill the first security guard I see. As far as I was concerned, everyone working to protect Shobo needed to die. Didn’t give a fuck if they each had three spouses and nineteen kids at home depending on them. None of them were free of sin.

The bodyguard who saw me roll up held his holster and glared at me. “Who the fuck are you? Mask off—“

I cut his head off before his hand was even halfway to drawing his gun.

Slow.

So fucking slow. Why was everyone so slow anyway? I wasn’t even using the Sandy, and I could just do that. His hand had moved only an inch in the space it had taken me to draw my entire sword, slice his head off, and sheathe it.

Slow.

The alarm started to blare at the sudden blood-shed as I walked through the front entrance. I sent out another Ping and digested the data quickly, just as a trio of armed guards—all wearing Tyger neon—pulled out their guns and shot at me. From this distance, it was simpler to just step around the bullets than to deflect with Eikō, and honestly, that probably wasn’t the best idea to begin with. Had to treat her more carefully than that.

None of them managed to so much as brush my jacket with their bullets, and when I finally reached them, they were too slow to do anything as I darted in, hoping to get one of them to stagger closer to the other two and—

Fucking perfect.

Three heads. One slice.

Now that’s a unique achievement.

Probably wasn’t. I’d try going for four, actually.

What the hell was the record on this anyway?

The main floor was deserted. While I had tussled with the guards, the few clients still inside had all ran out. I confirmed that Jo was still upstairs somewhere. His men were running around the complex, half of them headed to him, and the other half down to me.

The first of them ran at me with a sword.

I cut off both his arms—ganic arms—and sent them flying, their grip still tightly holding the sword. I kicked the armless gonk out of the way. He’d bleed out soon enough anyway.

Actually… nah. He’d die right now.

I stabbed him through the head and kept moving.

The next room was an extension of the club’s dance floor, where at the end, more Tygers were waiting.

Before they could properly react, I bolted forward, body low, practically flying beneath all their bullets and arriving in front of them in barely two seconds.

All without the Sandevistan. Just the power of my legs.

One slice, one down.

One slice, two down.

One, one. One, two. But never just three. That had taken a bit of preparation, herding them in the right position. Four felt fucking impossible at this point. A lot of things would have to go just right to land that. Four bodies pressed closely enough to each other that the four-foot blade of my katana could slice all their heads off in one go—that did seem rather hard to imagine, even to me.

A man fired a tech shotgun at me.

I hit the deck a tenth of a second before he even pulled the trigger, and was getting up just as the roar of the gun registered to my ears, and I cut him in half at the waist, then stabbed him in the head.

This was… a disappointingly mundane job.

By the time I reached the last room, with Jo and all his boys, the only real problem I had to tackle was: how did I enter the room and kill them all without having to rely on the Sandevistan? They were too far, and had too many guns. They were far more likely to hit me than not.

Use other weapons?

Nah.

Test out the ballistic properties of my new threads? Nah.

I waited next to the open door, back against the wall, my mind honed on the Ping outlines of the people in the room. If they tried to wallbang me, I’d get out of the way before they could.

Alright, fuck it.

Crank up that perception.

The world became a maelstrom of data points, of movements. It was like the physical broke apart and transformed into math before my very eyes. So much math, so many models, so many abstractions that we just took for granted, became clear to me.

The universe was speaking to me.

And it was telling me that everything was possible, as long as you kept your eyes open. As long as you just fucking looked.

I stepped in.

The first muzzle flash bloomed, a flower in slow motion, light scattering across polished marble. My body was already moving. Eikō spun in both my hands, slicing the bullet’s path a hair’s width from my jacket. Compressed air buffeted it slightly, but my calculations had been accurate.

Then another shot—no, five at once. My wrist flicked, and the blade knocked two bullets off-course, while the remaining three missed. One ricocheted into a Tyger’s thigh. He screamed.

But he didn’t have to worry.

I was there now. I had reached them. And so I cut his life—and his misery—short.

The others aimed their guns at my new position. I pivoted low, came up like a storm. One cut, severing a gun arm and part of the jaw behind it. Another slice cleaving a throat so clean the blood didn’t know which way to fall. I flowed between them like a ghost, getting around them faster than they could aim their guns. Cutting them down faster than they could react.

Every person was a problem. Every swing was a solution. Every kill, an answer.

The sensation was like a long string of eureka moments during math homework, or a coding assignment. Just… hot, buzzing surety guiding me forward, pushing me ever on and on and on.

A shotgun barked. My foot hit the table’s edge, vaulting me vertical just as the slug atomized the air where my spine had been. I came down spinning like a fucking buzz-saw, and sliced the wielder in half.

I had to get a replay of that through the CCTV cameras. That felt fucking nova.

Screams now. They were breaking. Didn’t matter. No hesitation. The math didn’t allow hesitation. It just kept feeding me cleaner, faster ways to end them.

One Tyger thought he had an opening. He was wrong. My edge found his skull, split it like a melon. Another tried to flank me—I was already inside his guard, my shoulder snapping his collarbone before Eikō carved a gunmetal gray arc through his ribs.

Then, silence.

A most relaxing silence.

I debated on pulling back my perception, but… why bother? This was me now. This was what I was now.

Jotaro, wearing a cheap ten thousand eddie white suit, was the last one standing, backpedaling so hard he almost fell over a sofa. His pistol jittered like a kid’s toy in his hand.

Jotaro, Jotaro, Jotaro.

What the fuck do we do about you?

“Wai-waitwaitWAIT! I can pay you, I can, what—who sent you, why are you… why?”

“Rope,” I said.

“Huh?”

“You’re into shibari,” I said. “Hand me some rope.”

Jotaro’s face froze in the neon purple light. Froze in abject shock and horror, imagining the worst case scenario happening to him.

Which, quite frankly, offended me. What the fuck, choom?

I sighed. “I’m not gonna rape you.”

“Where—where are you taking me?”

I started looking around.

“Rope’s in that closet,” he pointed. I Pinged the closet to make sure there wasn’t some sort of device in there. Couldn’t find anything, but… didn’t matter.

“Fetch it for me,” I said. He staggered up to his feet and ran to the closet.

I stared at his spine, debating which vertebrae to sever.

Eh. Best not get too fancy. Didn’t want him to just die on me, and I wasn’t exactly a fucking surgeon.

He gave me the rope and I whirled my finger at him. He got the picture, turning around. I started tying him up. “Where are you taking me?”

He had… a remarkable amount of self-preservation instinct for a piece of shit. Any other guy would have rebelled at this fate. He knew that rebellion was costlier than biding his time and finding a way out.

I didn’t answer him. Telling him that he was going to die in a few minutes would probably get him to do something rather drastic.

“You call your chooms yet?” I asked him.

“Wh-what?”

“I just need you to call your chooms. Tell them to bring as many as they can.” They would if he told them what I had just done.

“…What are you going to do to me?”

000

No dismemberment, because I didn’t want to get too fancy after all, and I was setting a scene here.

Jotaro Shobo, tied up upside down, dangled in front of his club’s façade above a five-gallon metal bucket. He was entirely whole, except for maybe some rope burns from my tight knots. But whole.

By the time I had set everything up, company had arrived.

A fucking fleet of Kusanagi Mizuchi had pulled up, filling the streets on both sides, and I counted eighty bikers wearing Tyger colors, ready to rip me to fucking shreds for what I had done today.

But they weren’t enough.

And they were stupid. Two groups facing one another on the street—they’d be unable to draw their weapons, else risk friendly fire. Unless they were rocking smart guns, that was.

Then I’d be fucked.

I Pinged them.

Hm. Smart guns.

Smart gangsters.

Jotaro dangled around, and I grabbed him to try and get him to not move so much. The bucket wasn’t that wide, after all. Needed him right above it, or else my whole thing would be ruined.

“Kusoyaro!” One Tyger got off his bike and growled. He was six and a half feet tall, and bulky as they came. A true blue cyborg. A gang killer, unlike anyone else I had faced today. “Step away from that man, and we will only kill you, and not your family.”

That was just… fucking trite.

I need me some better lines, choom.

“I was expecting more of you,” I growled.

“All this trouble, for what? Some gonk’s suicide? No, we’ll take our fucking time with you for this. We’ll make you an example. We will keep you alive for months and sell BDs of your torture—both points of view. A lot of sick motherfuckers pay preem edds to know true pain, without all the disfigurement.” They weren’t taking me seriously at all.

I sighed. Alright, then. I’d… get boring, too.

“My name is D,” I raised my voice so everyone could hear me. “I do merc work for fun. Do what I can for the city, too. It’s not much. Ain’t even honest. But it’s your problem now.”

“The fuck?!” The leader roared.

“I’m not here to get tortured to death by the likes of you. I’m here to deliver a message.”

I sliced Jotaro’s throat open and grabbed the rope so he’d stop, fucking, squirming. The bucket filled up with an admirable swiftness. The fleet of Tygers all pulled out their guns or swords—or sometimes both—and started cursing and shouting.

“You know what you just did?!” The leader roared again.

I took the bucket. “Let this be the last blood that was spilled on this ground today, and you will all live.” I offered him the bucket. “Take it. Leave this place.”

He moved for his sword.

I threw the bucket at his face. He staggered backward, and I used that time to cut his legs off at his knees, and get his arms, too. He bled white borg blood all over the ground, and I grabbed him by his hair, drenched with red blood from the bucket and held him up in front of me.

Eighty people.

I consulted my Cyberdeck, and I didn’t get shy.

I Pinged.

Then I loaded Blackwall Gateway over and over and over and over again until my scalp started feeling like it was on fire. Nanny’s cooling upgrades had obliterated my past limits.

I released the hack. Five infected individuals, and each individual spread the effect to three others.

In an instant, the street devolved into a chorus of damned howls and madness as unknowable digital entities from beyond humanity’s ken came in and… did whatever it was they would do, which always resulted in the same thing: death. Twenty dead men screaming for salvation, but finding none.

I had offered it to them at the start, and they had said no. Or, more accurately, their boss had decided for them.

I grit my teeth and sent a few more Quickhacks besides: Overheat, on the bikes. Fires erupted behind me from the bikes.

Then, for the first time today, I activated the Sandevistan.

I let go of the Tyger boss and ran into the crowd of bikers, holding my katana out for a cut.

A single cut.

One head.

Two heads.

Three heads. Four.

Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. I made a turn, but my sword-arm hadn’t moved. It stayed locked in position, making this a single cut even if my body turned.

Eleven. Twelve.

At fifteen, I turned again.

Twenty. I turned away from a wall and kept cutting off heads.

Thirty. Some were shorters than others. Even as I ran, I would alternate between holding my body low and high.

Thirty-five.

One entire side of the streets from which the Tygers had arrived—dead.

I released the Sandy and howled. “NOW THAT’S A UNIQUE FUCKING ACHIEVEMENT!”

I reveled in the confusion for a moment. The other side of the street, still with live Tygers, didn’t know what to focus on. Their damned brethren, whose minds were being flayed before them, enduring tortures that quite frankly couldn’t be imagined by mortal minds?

Or were they looking at the synchronized falling of heads of Thirty-five of their other brothers, destroyed in a flash by a godly manifestation of death? All their heads, all their bodies, all their bikes just dropping as one, like domino bricks? Some of them, the ones further behind at least, had to crane their necks to get a look at why, like magic, all their boys dropped dead.

And they screamed. Even if they hadn’t been infected with the Blackwall Gateway, they had seen something that their infected brothers had seen.

They had seen it in me.

Their ends.

I laughed. “I’m no god,” I shook my head. “But I am death,” I pointed my katana at the crowd of terrified bikers. “Yours.”

I ran between the heads and bodies and fallen Mizuchi in order to reach my bike, still parked on the sidewalk opposite to Ho-Oh club, right in the no-man’s land of street, where I had performed my public execution.

I reached the guitar case, wrenched out a D5 Copperhead, and opened fire into the crowd.

They… they weren’t even thinking of fighting back.

They were turning around. Trying to turn their bikes in the tight traffic that their dumbasses had inflicted on themselves. Trying to get away.

I fired at their backs. Easy as pie. Shot them in the backs of their skulls, their necks, their backs, anywhere that’d eventually put them down. After wasting half a mag on one durable son of a bitch, I shot up his CHOOH tank instead—exposed by a crack from all his mods—, turning his bike into a fucking fireball. This dumbass had removed much of the casing surrounding the gas-tank meant to specifically prevent this.

He probably had it done to better hotswap his tank with super-CHOOH on the fly, perhaps. Worked against him heavily in this case.

The assault rifle fired quickly, and so I worked quickly. It was rather underwhelming in retrospect.

I just shot at them until they all died. Except one guy. He’d have to tell the story.

…They’d all see the story, but this way, I had more witnesses to corroborate it.

And this guy.

The Tyger Boss, whose limbs I had amputated, writhing on the asphalt, red blood all over his head from the bucket of rapist-blood I had dunked on him.

The battle was over, however. Undoubtedly. Now it was just about trying to take out as many as I could.

And debating whether I should follow them back to wherever their rat-fuck asses crawled out from.

Deravaja, wasn’t it?

“Ahhh,” the Tyger boss I was using as a shield moaned piteously. I grabbed his torso by the throat, brushed the blood off his face so he could finally see, and showed him everything. “No,” he gasped.

“You did this,” I said. “You. You should have taken the fucking bucket.”

“Whatthefuck?!” He gasped weakly.

“Your boys are done, obviously. But I’m not. You invited this menace. You will reckon with it until I’m satisfied.”

I dropped him and kicked him into the middle of the street, between two burning fields of Mizuchi bikes. I looked for the bucket I had thrown at him, and placed it neatly underneath Shobo’s strung-up form, where it could continue to gather blood.

Then I crouched before the Tyger Boss, whispering. “Tell them D did this.”

I turned around, packed away my Copperhead, got on my bike, and plotted a new course. Deravaja.

Then I received a text from Lucy that jolted me out of my mind-state.

‘Why do you always have to wake up so fucking early on Sundays?’