A bullet to the head did a lot of damage. Dermal armour or no dermal armour.
A hot-loaded custom-printed 'Shredder ©' round fired from Dexter Deshawn's heavily modified CA Liberty did a fuck ton of damage. It punched through bone and splintered into an expanding cloud of razor shards that ricocheted back and forth inside the skull, transforming precious neural tissue from a delicate web of life and connection into so much bloody soup.
This was, invariably, a fatal wound. But that only meant that death was assured, and death was not necessarily the end.
Not for stars, or worlds, or even mortals. Especially not a mortal who had chipped a certain stolen prototype.
It was the product of countless brilliant minds, shackled by the iron will of an Emperor to build him the future he sought above all else. A world -His world- of immortals, reigning eternal over those who could not hope to reach them.
Perhaps it was some echo of what once was, and what might have been, that planted the thought in his head so long ago. Or perhaps Saburo Arasaka was nothing more than a greedy old man, grasping for eternity.
Whatever the case, as cutting edge munitions obliterated a cyberpunk's brain, the fruits of stolen labour were activated. Saving her life, and dooming it. For a brief moment at least. Then, in that paradoxical instant of life and death, something infinitely greater was a̶̡͍̟͈̔̄̃͘Ẉ̸̨̮͎̋ą̷̨̛̲̈́̋k̷̹̿͂̅́Ē̴̛̩͊͝ǹ̴̳̝̇ę̶́́͜D̵̟͓̑͠.
And thus, the first link in a cursed chain was broken.
Dumped in a junkyard, with her dreams dripping out a hole in her skull, V stirred.
Diagnostics flashed across the darkness of her semi-conscious mind. Her cyberware rebooted itself with the persistence of metal, while mere flesh struggled to hold onto consciousness. Then something changed.
She had dreamt. While she had been dead. Dreamt of…she wasn't sure. Silver. There had been silver.
Now there was shit. Biostink and hot metal, enveloping her and crushing her. When her optics finally came back online V realised exactly where the stink was coming from.
She'd been thrown in the trash.
It was so perfect that she almost laughed.
Instead, she swore that she would put her heel through Dex's fat fucking face, then do it twice more for T Bug and…and Jackie.
First things first, she let herself feel a little grateful for the lack of glitches in her vision, and heaved her arms up to throw off the junk that had been piled atop her not-quite-a-corpse.
When that didn't work, she started wriggling instead. Pride flatlined and left behind as she squirmed and writhed her way out of the crush of what had to be a dozen old screens and an entire junked MaiMai.
When she finally managed to get free, it was to discover that her weakened arms were matched by every other part of her. V tried, rolling around in oily mud and worse to get her legs under her, but she could not stand up.
"So what." She bit out. "So fucking what."
This wasn't the first time she'd been laid low. If she had to crawl then she'd fucking crawl. Anything but dying in a junkyard. Again.
Her bug's eye view transformed the junkyard's piles into mountains looming over her. So she set her path along the valleys between them. She ignored the trickle of filth that soaked her clothes, where blood hadn't already dried thick enough to make them waterproof.
Slowly, painfully, valleys gave way to a great plain of muck. Dotted with the debris of Night City. She pushed herself through the lesser detritus, digging a furrow in the wrappers and needles and shredded materials of a thousand MegaCorp products. Occasionally trying and failing to hawl herself up with a hand on something larger.
Until she glanced up to check her destination and saw something moving. Someone moving.
Getting closer.
V reached for a gun that wasn't there with a hand that went limp halfway through the act. Helpless on the ground, she felt the bizarre urge to make a joke about it. Her hand was meant to be the one lover that wouldn't do that after all. Then she wondered where the thought had even come from. It wasn't like her to get distracted when she was in danger.
Lucky her, as the figure got closer it resolved into some poor gonk in the uniform of one of the waste processing corps. Some subsidiary that she'd never heard of but had probably seen in the fineprint of ten thousand trash cans.
Of course, when he got close enough for her to see that he was making a call, and staring right at her, and telling someone that he had "-found her!", V wondered why she had ever thought chance would do anything but screw her over.
There wasn't much she could do but glare at the fucker as he pulled a gun and drew a bead on her. Only, before he could fire, he cocked his head and asked, "What do you mean, make sure?"
Then he started screaming. And melting. Black fire flaring up like he'd been soaked in CHOOH2 and someone just sparked his deck.
The gun went off, once and again -both shots winging far over her head- and then he got smart enough to turn it on himself. Halfway there his hand split in two and ate the gun. His head followed suit, the top splitting from the bottom and yawning wide enough for a crystal eye to flicker back and forth, and fix on her.
The fire died down and left a nightmare behind it. Like nothing she'd ever seen. Like she'd dreamed of, when she was a kid and every night came with her wild imagination drowning her in images of what lay beyond the Blackwall.
It took a step towards her, leg shuddering and screaming then suddenly stretching out to crash down in front of her. The rest of the thing flowed into place above the limb, hesitating like a stuttering vid.
It reached down, its 'hands' opening up to reveal twisted copies of the gun it ate. It should have killed her then, and V knew in her gut that it could have, but it wanted to see her suffer. She knew, somehow, that it liked to see her on the ground.
Which was proof that even pitch black body devouring monsters could be stupid as hell.
Her quickhack found purchase in a cyberdeck that she couldn't see, and that her feeds told her was somehow in three places at once, but which crackled with caged lightning all the same.
The monster screamed, and she rolled away as best she could, then flew as its flailing limbs caught her with a kick like a runaway truck.
She slammed into a pile of trash, something speared deep into her back, and just like that the fight was over.
But she'd gone down swinging at least. As the hack wore off and the nightmare thing turned to face her -the smoking remains of the junker's cyberdeck ejecting from its back- V grinned her defiance at it. Finally able to look down on the fucker from her throne of trash.
It spoke, with the voice of a void yawning in the darkness, and said. "Your Final Words, Oh Ruined Star?"
She couldn't quite manage to give it the finger.
It reared back, dark energy gathering for what could only be her end, and V found her thoughts were elsewhere. With the people she had lost. With the people who were about to lose her. With the people she had, maybe, sort of, hoped to have someday.
"This…would make a hell of a Braindance."
Then darkness burst forth and a torrent rushed towards her-
Light rose to meet it.
A pure and brilliant light. Like nothing she could remember seeing, and yet, it was like meeting an old friend. Tears welled in her eyes but she didn't need to close them against the radiance that turned shadows solid, and burned them to nothing.
The thing couldn't even make a sound. It was gone in a moment, then all that remained was the memory of light. Lingering in a patch of junkyard that felt cleaner, for having beheld it.
She slumped back in her seat and winced at the sharp metal that was still stabbing through her kidney. Then winced again as something prodded her in the forehead. Something, furry?
V blinked up at a silhouette that seemed to tower above her. Then kept blinking until it resolved into, a cat?
It was white, white as the snow she'd seen in old stills. With a crescent of darker fur on its head.
'Some corp's logo stamped on a biosculpt pet?'
She was still staring dumbly up at it when it poked her in the face again and, before she could voice her opinion about that, it spoke.
"Wake up Senshi."
V's breath caught and she wondered if this was all some fucked up dream as her brain shut down due to a massive bullet overdose. Like it could read her wandering thoughts, the cat poked her a third time and leant in close enough for her to see its mouth, impossibly, form the words.
"We have a world to save."
