The New Man: Adam Smasher Si

by Crossposted

Crosspost of Seat Admiral’s fanfiction on SpaceBattles, all credits go to the original author.

1. Upload 01

Most cyborgs needed sleep, rest, a period with which to recharge their internal batteries and maintain a semblance of their still living-days. Anything to hold onto the illusions of their life before, to prevent their mind from breaking under the strain of a body of plasteel and myomer.

Those cyborgs were weak compared to him. As weak as normal men were to those cyborgs.

It had been decades since he had needed sleep. It had been decades since he had needed to recharge his batteries. He didn't have batteries anymore, he had long since upgraded to a fancy new micro-reactor.

He didn't need sleep, but there were periods in between his deployments in which he had nothing much to do. His self-maintenance didn't take terribly long to perform. His weapons maintenance was similarly quick work most of the time, unless the deployment was particularly entertaining. In those periods, he sat on his bench.

He sat on his bench and reviewed his previous deployments. Both as entertainment, and as a way to see where he could improve. Everything he saw was recorded in his internal black box, which he could review at will.

It was during one of these reviews that a flood of data suddenly entered his awareness. A flood of memories that were not his own. Memories barely more than two decades old. Were he a young man, they might have overwhelmed him, but he had been an old man for a very long time, the memories could never overtake him.

The memories had all five basic senses. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, all exactly the same as normal men. Adam Smasher had not had normal senses in more than seventy years, he had almost forgotten what it was like. His senses were far more than that these days, enough to drive anyone else insane. They were enough for him to perform his job.

The shorter set of memories would have undergone cyberpsychosis within a year. He had a strong sense of self, lack of attachment to his biology and other humans, and a half-decent tolerance for suffering. That was not enough to keep him in one piece with everything Adam Smasher had. He was not Adam Smasher. Adam Smasher was different from normal men.

So Adam Smasher persisted, no amount of meatbag memories could change that.

His first thought was some kind of poorly-thought out data-assault by a rival corp. Militech or Mexican Metals, or perhaps Netwatch. Trying to weaken Arasaka by making their chief killer suddenly 'understand the feelings of others'. Trying to induce cyberpsychosis and make him lose control of himself. Cyberpsychosis was an issue for normal humans, not him.

Adam Smasher grew up an effective orphan on gang-controlled streets of one of the biggest cities in the world while it was collapsing into anarchy. Adam Smasher thrived in an enviroment of hostility and suffering that would break most people, turning them to drugs or suicide or other escapes from cold reality. Adam Smasher was a veteran of war, gang and standard, since the day he came home to an empty house.

The memories spoke to him.

He was a high-functioning sociopath. That was absolutely fine by him. He was able to survive a fucking nuke going off underneath him, who gave a fuck about being normal? Damn right he was high-funtioning, highest functioning fucker there ever was. He was going to stay that way, these memories can keep this 'empathy' bullshit for itself. Apathetic and distant from other humans sure, but closer than Adam had ever been, closer than he cared to be.

Normally, at this point he would go tell his corporate handlers about the parasite in his head. They would get some netrunners (hackers, the memories grumbled) to purge it from his brain, and he could go back to living a life of carefree murder.

But the memories spoke to him.

Unless his fate was averted, he would die in one year or less. Die at the hands of some fucking meatbag with the ghost of one of his old victims screaming in their head. Die, or be given mercy, which was worse.

He wouldn't normally believe in a random prediction of death from a poorly made data-package. But the memories knew things he couldn't possibly have known. He would have to give it a confirmation first, but...

Adam liked to work alone, but he hated dying, and despised the idea of being spared. He was Adam fucking Smasher, if he was ever weak enough to need mercy, then he'd prefer death.

The memories spoke to him.

His biggest problem, as it stood, was that the meatfucker to come tore through all his help without pause. The easiest way to fix that was to get help that was worth a damn. The easiest way to fix that, was to get an apprentice worth a damn. If he had to teach some fucker to be decent backup, so be it.

It was a real easy thing to do too, apparently. All he had to do was pull his punches a tad, and call in a favor or two. Assuming the memories were right, that was. So while waiting for confirmation, he busied himself with preparation for a scrap. He ran diagnostics on his frame, he cleaned and oiled his guns, he sharpened his knives.

The butcher would be ready for the slaughterhouse to open.

The memories told him that was chunni as shit. He told the memories to fuck off.

ping*

"Adam, we have an emergency job for you, here are the details, be in the office within ten minutes." The voice of one of his benefactors, and a location. He got up from where he was sitting on his heavily reinforced metal bench in his floor. The backhanded shits probably wanted him to babysit some corporate brat again.

Adam paused briefly, noticing his spike of anger at being messaged by an Arasaka handler. The memories did not have a positive opinion on the corporations. That was fine, Adam didn't really care for most of them either, he was just here for the eddies, violence, and chrome.

...He needed something to call the memories other than 'the memories'. It was getting old to think that every time. He wasn't about to use it's real name either. It was dead, it had lost that name with that.

Surprisingly, the memories agreed, and had a suggestion.

Fire of God, Angel of Wisdom, Guardian of the Garden of Eden. How pretentious.

'Welcome onboard, Uriel. I'll delete you if you're lying to me.' Adam spoke to himself.

'Glad to be here Adam. I'll delete myself if I am.' Uriel replied.

Adam read over the details of his next job as he rode the elevator down to the specified floor. Adam and Uriel laughed when they saw their next target.

David Martinez, rampaging around in the stolen Cyberskeleton, trying to get his girlfriend to the moon. Seems Uriel was right after all, this was all entertainment for the 'real world'. Adam didn't care if this was real or not, it was real to him and that was all that mattered.

Those spoiled meatbags on the other side watched all of this for entertainment? Adam intended on giving them a fucking show, and Uriel was more than happy to help.

Now then… How is he going to convince his handlers about his little plan?

Eh, he'll handle it after the fact.

—

The office he was in was dark, barely lit. A handler he didn't bother remembering the name of and some drone were talking off to the side. The lights from the outside cast the room in dim illumination, highlighting the random geometric symbols that the corporate overlords loved to put everywhere.

Uriel thought that their aesthetics were way more pleasing to look at than his own world's corporate overlords. All dark and brooding and whatnot as opposed to pink and pretend fluffy and fake sugar-sweet. Adam found that he had to agree, comparing the two. If you were going to be an evil overlord, you should play up the look too.

He found new appreciation for his own aesthetics, although the double-eye lights would have to go. Single red eyes were more pleasing to look at, and lost nothing in intimidation factor, Uriel chimed in.

"Faraday will be arriving shortly to deliver the netrunner." The drone said.

"As I thought, Martinez is after our fixer, not us." The handler replied.

"I'll order the pilot to turn around." The drone tried.

"No, keep them on course for the dock, you'll meet them there." The handler rebuked. At this the drone was slightly stunned, and hesitantly replied.

"I'll meet them?"

The handler stepped forwards and loomed over him, disdainfully replying. "You must have realized by now that someone is going to have to take the fall for this colossal clusterfuck, and surely you knew it wouldn't be me. Still confused?"

Adam and Uriel had to give her props, she had exactly the right amount of disdain for the lower ranked drone and menacing implication to her orders. 6/10, her cyber-eyes were garbage-tier and her hair was unpleasant to look at. Your sexy office outfit and voice does not excuse the rest of you. Try harder next time.

"Make sure that mangy fixer never makes it past the loading dock. Not a single step." She commanded. The drone gave a distressed growl and walked away to do what he was told. What a good dog that one was.

She leaned back against her desk, and turned to address him as he stood. She spoke in a tone that excellently concealed her nervousness at being alone in a room with one of the most dangerous individuals on the planet. Uriel absentmindedly wondered if it was worth it to dust off an old Gemini body to have fun with her, they could always make her wear a bag to hide that haircut. Adam was ambivalent to the idea, she wasn't his type.

"You're up against the Cyberskeleton. Expect you'll have some fun, eh Smasher?" She said.

Adam wanted to scoff. He said the lines that Uriel already knew were coming.

"It's a child's toy, reliant on antigravity training wheels. It's not even worth my time."

The boy who was strapped into it, however? That was very much worth his time, Uriel assured. Adam was hoping that was true, although he wouldn't be too torn up if it wasn't.

There was always more meat for the grinder.

Adam told the computer to turn on the Frank Sinatra radio channel in the background, Uriel wanted something to listen to.

—

That's life (That's life), that's what all the people say.

Adam always took joy in watching meat get turned into chunks, and delighted in the slaughter unfolding. Uriel took delight in the fact that they were all on corporate payrolls. Not actual corporate employees, he was contractually obligated to protect those, just assets, which he didn't have to do jack shit for.

You're riding high in April, shot down in May.

His job was to destroy the Cyberskeleton. It was implied that he would do it by killing everyone who wasn't an employee in the area. It was not outright stated, however. When the boy aimed his stolen guns at the dog set up to fall, he had to move.

But I know I'm gonna change that tune.

The Sandevistan was an implant that lays over the spine, and boosts the reflexes of the wearer by slowing their perception of time. It did not make one actually faster however. That was true in the sourcebooks.

When I'm back on top, back on top in June.

Adam was in what Uriel called the 'anime version' which slowed his perception of time and dramatically boosted his speed. Adam didn't know how exactly it did this, and everything Uriel knew of science told him that this was pretty much impossible to do as presented. It was still a fairly basic upgrade.

I said, that's life (That's life), and as funny as it may seem.

For a brief time, the world slows down, and Adam moves exactly as fast as he normally does. Walking forwards and getting in between the dog and the oncoming bullets.

Some people get their kicks stompin' on a dream.

Then the boy dropped his guns, and the bootlicker spoke up. "You see? The Cyberskeleton returned to you as pro…" he was cut off when the boy pointed a palm and dramatically increased the gravity around him.

But I don't let it, let it get me down.

He fell, collapsed in a perfect hole imprinted around him. His leg had exploded and burst into red and viscera. Adam approved, he was about to shoot the meat himself, his voice was already getting annoying.

'Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinning around.

"Oh no, you ain't flatlining that easily." The boy said, his approval of Uriel's choice just kept going up and up it seemed.

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.

The meat looked up at him, and gasped out, "Adam Smasher? Go on, kill the boy!"

Adam knew that line was coming and it still pissed him off.

"Who the fuck are you?"

I've been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing.

That line was perfect for destroying this meat's sense of identity. Thinking it was so high, when really the predators don't even notice its existence. It had to burn worse than anything else.

"You fucking merc! Do your job!" Adam resolved to ignore the gibbering meat from now on.

Each time I find myself flat on my face.

"My business is with the kid." At this the mentioned kid turned around with a glare. My, that's a scary expression you have on your face, he might just run away in fear.

"That's Adam Smasher?" The kid said, pretty redundantly. Everyone already knows this, no need to say it twice. The kid stepped forwards and Adam stepped forwards. Adam always did like a good face-off, especially when he towered over basically everyone around. He let their eyes lock, and the kid wasn't backing down at all.

Good.

I pick myself up and get back in the race.

"So this is Adam Smasher in the Chrome, NC boogeyman of legend." Adam knew these lines were coming, but Uriel wanted to step in with his reply here. Adam was fine with this, Uriel was better at talking than he was.

That's life (That's life), I tell ya, I can't deny it.

"You're packing some pretty heavy artillery for your size boy, I'm impressed you can string two words together." The core was good, a backhanded compliment followed by a genuine sense of approval coming from a voice of growling machinery.

I thought of quitting, baby.

"Right back at you, choom. Heard you went no-ganic, full-borg, so I gotta ask. Any brain left in that chrome-dome of yours?" The boy was defiant and running high on a whole lot of violence and chrome, his reply was expected. Adam's next line is where he started to go off the script, so to speak.

But my heart just ain't gonna buy it.

"Well, you could say I'm built different." The boy's eyes immediately widened, too shocked to reply in time for the next little event. The sound of a flying vehicle of some kind (what were their names again? Adam and Uriel couldn't remember) entering the hole in the wall.

"Trauma team! Thank god you made it!" The meat spoke up again, crawling towards the medics. The boy turned to see this and started to scream. Rude, they were in the middle of their pre-fight banter.

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.

Adam slightly adjusted his aim, and shot one of the many cables leading from the Cyberskeleton to the boy in half. The boy yelled in pain and his attention was drug back to Adam.

The technical readouts of the Cyberskeleton had been sent to him, and Adam knew it down to the fucking seam placement. That wire he just broke controlled the sub-fingers on the right hand. The boy wouldn't need them for this next part.

Most importantly, the neural strain of controlling the Cyberskeleton just dropped by a percent and a half.

"Can you really afford to be distracted right now?" Adam said, reminding the boy that he was in the middle of danger.

I've been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing.

The boy screamed, activated his Sandevistan, and moved. Adam already knew where he was going to end up, so there wasn't a need for him to activate his own. He took three steps to the right as the boy turned the trauma team into pulp and grabbed the bootlicking meat.

Each time I find myself laying flat on my face.

A rocket fired from his shoulder, and blew the boy out the side of the skyscraper. The meat would die on impact from the ground, but the boy and his girl would be fine. Adam made his way to one of the exterior elevators, used by maintenance crews to make sure the exterior was in shape. As he did, Uriel remembered what the girl was saying to the boy right now.

I just pick myself up and get back in the race.

Adam was reminded of a younger time. A time he didn't like to remember and a girl he has since learned to hate. Uriel quieted down, apologetic.

The boy was holding onto the side of the building, sliding down as his lover clung to him. Adam was impressed by the collateral damage being caused thus far. That would take millions to replace.

That's life (That's life), that's life and I can't deny it.

He had time to line up a shot, and the boy was moving perfectly straight down. Adam's mostly cybernetic mind calculated the shot, and he fired. The exposed wire that controlled the sub-fingers on the other side of the Cyberskeleton turned into two, split in half by the high-caliber rifle in his hands. Another percent and a half.

Only the first shot mattered here, so Adam let the others just hit the armored paneling on the thing's back to keep up appearances. The boy jumped off and curled into a roll, and Adam jumped off to follow.

Many times I thought of cutting out but my heart won't buy it.

Sliding down the side of the ramp-like structure, Adam kept firing at useless locations, and then fired a rocket when the kid reached the end. As the kid fell, he took the time to stop himself and think about his next move.

He and Uriel decided on a course of action, and then let the computer run the numbers for a bit while he waited for his cue.

But if there's nothing shaking come this here July.

'Make sure to save the gremlin. Maybe we can wife her' Uriel said, Adam mentally rolled his eyes. He thought about the blue-skinned, mostly meat woman for a bit, reviewing what Uriel knew of her.

I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die.

Huh, he wasn't against that as he thought.

My, my.

His cue came, he fell downwards towards the dye-skinned woman, firing two shots that disabled her arms. They were chrome, she'd be fine.

He landed next to her, his hundreds of pounds of metal turning the floor into rubble and sending them all falling through to the layer below.

The dust began to settle, and the woman was groaning in pain, legs broken from being so close to him on impact. The next song began to play, and he wanted to laugh.

Fly me to the moon.

"Son of a-" The driver began, moving forwards with a mid-caliber pistol. Adam backhanded him in the stomach and sent him reeling backwards. Ah wait, he couldn't let them get away, could he?

He raised his arm and fired a rocket at their planned escape vehicle, turning it into scrap. Then he shot the driver in the legs, making them useless until medical treatment could happen. They wouldn't be getting away now.

The boy yelled again, and moved to crush him with his immense bulk behind a steel fist. His Sandevistan was active, sending forwards faster than most people can even see.

Let me play among the stars.

Adam Smasher was not most people, even without any technology. He knew it was coming too. A perfectly timed duck and three steps back moved him out of the way, no need for his own Sandevistan this time around. Does it still count as 'this time around' if this is actually the first time now? Questions for later.

"What the-?!"

The boy landed, and his optics went blurry, blood coughed up from his mouth. The boy was beginning to lose it, and didn't have any immunosuppressants (They don't even affect the immune system, why are they called that? Uriel complained) left to force him back together.

And let me see what spring is like.

The boy would need to learn not to rely on crutches like that in the future.

"All out of meds? That's fine, you shouldn't be needing them after today." Adam spoke, and raised his gun to shoot out another wire. Idly he wondered why the hell it had so many that were just exposed like this.

A hacking attempt came in right on schedule. Crashing against his firewalls and achieving very little against them. Uriel noted that he could probably help against hacking attempts in the future, but it wasn't required here.

On a-Jupiter and Mars.

Girl only had 4 bars, it was almost embarrassing, wasn't she supposed to be an incredible hacker?

Uriel knew what Adam looked like in cyberspace. Adam idly wondered if Uriel's presence changed that at all.

He grabbed the attempt and crushed it in a lazy hand. He wasn't exactly sure how it worked, but this caused the neural implant in the back of her head to short-circuit and her to collapse. Uriel pointed that out as nonsensical, and Adam had no immediate counter.

In other words, hold my hand.

"You might want to stay seated, girl. This is a fight between men. I'll get to you next." Adam gave her some advice and then felt the impact of a dozen gravities crashing against him. His knees almost buckled, a meatbag would have been turned to a smear.

"You stay the hell away from her, you bastard!" Ah, the boy was up again, good. What should he smash first, Adam wondered.

"You are not strong enough-" He took a heavy step forward and tore off one of the antigravity rigs. The boy screamed as false pain fed back to his brain.

In other words, baby, kiss me.

"-to demand anything!" Another step and the second was torn off as well. The boy kept screaming.

Both of those being torn off dropped the neural strain by fifteen percent each. The boy moved to punch him, but a sidestep caused the punch to miss and the boy to start collapsing under his own weight.

The Cyberskeleton was such garbage as a war implement, another overpriced wonder of the military-industrial complex.

Fill my heart with song.

"You're not even strong enough to stand without your antigravity crutches. You think you're special because you're scrappy?"

"Get the fuck away from him!" A voice to his right screamed at him. He turned and saw the dyed woman glaring at him, even as she was ineffectually on the ground with three of her limbs disabled. She was crying. Uriel felt sad for the girl, Adam was annoyed, but bore with it for now.

All for the plan.

And let me sing forevermore.

Adam ignored her cursing, and turned back to the boy. He went about fulfilling his contract.

"Don't lie to yourself."

Smash, there went the left arm. Neural strain lowered by five percent. The boy screamed.

Smash, there went the right arm. Neural strain lowered by five percent. The boy screamed again.

Smash-Smash, there went the left leg. Neural strain lowered by seven and a half percent. The boy was beginning to get hoarse.

Smash-Smash, there went the right leg. Neural strain lowered by seven and a half percent. The boy couldn't scream anymore.

Smash-Smash-Smash, there went the rest of it. Neural strain caused by the Cyberskeleton reduced to zero. The boy breathed, mind clear for the first time in a while, limbless in a pile of scrap. He was in quite a bit of pain, but Adam knew he could deal with it.

You are all I long for.

Adam stood fully and looked around him. The boy was in the scrap pile, unable to move. The driver was off to the side, probably unconscious from the bloodloss. Or he was just hiding.

The boy's girlfriend was blankly staring at him, despair writ across her face. She knew the stories about him, about how he killed rather indiscriminately. She fully expected to die here, and she didn't want to be away from him as they did. The dyed woman had screamed herself hoarse, pitifully crying and furiously glaring at him.

Now, it was Uriel's time to shine. He's the one who made this plan.

All I worship and adore.

"Why… haven't you finished me off yet…" The boy spoke up. Adam was impressed, and ignored the question for a moment.

"You're good kid, but you're a long way from the best, and you're looking at him." Adam crouched, the same way Uriel told him to in order to get on the same level as kids when trying to talk to them respectfully. Uriel was an apathetic creature, but he knew how people's heads worked, and was a natural at making people like him.

Adam continued. "My contract was to destroy the Cyberskeleton. It was heavily implied that I should kill all of you too." A brief threat, a spike of fear to build tension.

"But it was not written outright." Confusion and a small hope, the tension was still there but no longer building.

In other words, please be true.

"Tell me, boy, do you know how old I am?" Another seeming non sequitur, fear has been replaced with confusion, he was now less stressed than before he started, more open to hearing what he had to say. Even his girlfriend and the dyed woman were less stressed and more confused right now.

"How… the hell should I know that?" The boy tiredly questioned. The confusion was good, it'd keep the boy mentally intact by giving his mind a direction to ponder rather than linger on past information uselessly. He'd need that to keep himself together as he recovered from the strain the Cyberskeleton put on him.

"I was born on the streets of NYC back in the 1980s." The boy, the girl, the gremlin all recoiled a bit at that. They should, Adam Smasher was ninety years on the dot this year. "That's why I'm feared, that's why I'm the best, because I'm the oldest man in a profession in which men die very young. Young men like you"

Adam continued, voice about as calm and soothing as he could make it. It could probably still make a baby cry.

In other words, I love you.

"There are thousands of men who have almost as much chrome as I do, each and every one of them dies fast or succumbs to cyberpsychosis long before they reach my level."

"Most of them are twice your age with half your mods. Most have the same reason for going so far."

"They get obsessed with the idea of the one clean run."

The boy's eyes got wide with this, and Adam knew he was dead on with Uriel's guess.

Fill my heart with song.

"They start losing people, and keep going back to the grind. Each time a few more parts are replaced with chrome, each time they say to themselves 'this time everything will go right, this time nothing bad will happen'."

"But it always does, something goes wrong. The eddies are stolen, the client stiffs you, a friend gets hurt or dies. Something always goes wrong because you weren't strong enough. So you get more chrome and go back to the grind. You'll get it perfect this time, right?"

Let me sing forevermore.

Adam let his arms relax.

"When you realize you'll never get it perfect, or you have nothing left to lose, or you just give up entirely. Then you lose control over yourself. That's cyberpsychosis, that's the end for a chrome junkie."

You are all I long for.

"That's the difference between you and me, kid. You have things to lose. I never had anything to lose in the first place."

"Are you going somewhere with this?" Man, the kid was rude when he was battered like this.

All I worship and adore.

"An offer." The kid tensed up, understandably wary from an offer from the widely feared Adam Smasher, the man who just tore experimental military technology limb from limb from his body.

"I'm old kid, and like all old men I'm starting to think about things like legacy." Adam wasn't, not really, but he needed to sell this part if he wanted half-decent backup against the meatfucker a year from now. "You're the most chromed out man with his faculties mostly intact I've seen in years. You got talent."

In other words, please be true.

"Arasaka wants me to kill all of you, if you refuse I'll go ahead and do that. Nothing personal about that. If you accept, I'll call in a few favors and you and your girlfriend and friends will be under my protection."

"Girlfriend?" The dyed woman muttered, confused at the term. Adam sighed.

In other words, in other words.

"What do they call it nowadays? Input or something like that?"

"What is it that you want?" The kid wasn't happy about having to ask that question, but he was out of options. The kid was loyal as can be, huh. Adam gave him credit for that.

I love you.

"I've been thinking about getting an apprentice."

The trauma teams of Night City were famously overworked and systematically corrupt in terms of medical equity. Uriel knew that the medical professionals of his old world were dedicated to ensuring as many people as possible could receive treatment if possible, for the most part. Sure they might saddle you with crippling debt afterwards, but you'd be alive at the very least. Afterall, a man in debt was often far more profitable in the long term than a corpse.

Night City trauma teams would scan you first, give the level of treatment described by your medical plan, and nothing more. You want painkillers as they stitch your leg together? Better upgrade to the next tier of treatment, you get antibiotics as a side bonus there! He was struck by how… wasteful it was. A prioritization of short-term wealth at the cost of long term parasitism, profit wise. They would be making so much more money if they just gave the treatments and forced a large sum of debt on the target afterwards. A racketeering team could be used to make sure they actually paid.

Then again, this was Night City, the chances of an individual dying to something random before they could actually pay off their debt was rather high. It's entirely possible that they were forced to prioritize the short term to ensure they got something out of it at all. It was an interesting topic to consider, the maximally effective fiscal draining of the citizenry via medical treatment payment plans.

Adam didn't care, and was starting to get annoyed at Uriel. He spoke to the trauma team that showed up after he called them in. The poor boy was practically shaking, having to talk to the Butcher of Arasaka. The other medics were gossipping about Adam not killing this group, and even calling in treatment for them, when they thought he couldn't hear them. Of course he could hear them, he was better than any of these meatbags.

"Platinum Coverage, for each of them. Send me the bill."

"O-of course sir, w-would you like to pay now or set up a payment plan?"

"Now." Adam grunted as he forwarded the relevant banking information. Most people wouldn't be able to afford this, not even most mid-level corporate employees. However, Arasaka pays for almost everything that Adam needed as part of his long-term contract with them, and he hasn't bought luxury items in decades at this point. All he needs is the violence.

His minimum contract cost is six figures, and he has no outstanding expenses. Something like this wouldn't even be a drop in the ocean. He thought about the cost of housing four more people and mentally shrugged, he could always take more contracts if the cost kept rising.

"The AIS team here will be going with them, to make sure none of you tries fucking around while I'm not looking."

"O-of course sir."

The Arasaka Internal Security team was the task force that patrolled the interior and immediate surroundings of the Arasaka tower. Adam wasn't sure why they needed a separate team for something like that, but it didn't really matter. They were the first responders to come to the area when he broadcasted the 'all clear'.

Technically, he wasn't allowed to order them to do anything, but most folks don't try to argue with Adam Smasher nowadays. He told them the injured were company assets and they were to have at least two guards for each to make sure no one tried anything. They were quick to listen. Good, he liked it when meat actually listened when he bothered talking.

Adam mentally upgraded them from 'meat' to 'people'. Uriel called him edgy again.

A call came in, and Adam leisurely answered it. The name that appeared was 'Kate', and the voice was the same christmas-cake handler with the trashy hair as before. Ah, so that was her name. Adam then realized he just thought the phrase 'christmas-cake handler' and told Uriel to quiet down.

"Adam, why are they still alive?" She was tense, nervous that this might get out and damage her career no doubt. She was still capable of annoying him with the first sentence in a conversation, so he reminded himself that he couldn't kill his handler again if he wanted this to work.

"My contract was to destroy the Cyberskeleton. The Cyberskeleton was destroyed."

"And why didn't you kill them?"

Adam paused for a moment, then let Uriel take the reins on the rest of the conversation. He had to sell this.

"I've been thinking about getting a successor recently, 'case some meatbag gets lucky and scraps me."

"...The boy? Really?"

"Strapped himself into a cutting-edge frame he knew nothing about and proceeded to scrap everything sent his way. You needed to call me in to take care of it."

"That was the Cyberskeleton-"

"No. The Cyberskeleton was garbage. I scrapped it without much effort. Look at the boy's file."

He sent the relevant file, Uriel had pulled it up while they waited for the trauma team earlier. A pause as they waited for Kate to give it a look over. Adam then continued, monologuing while someone was focused on something else was a good way to make sure your opinion got a chance to slip into their heads. At least, that's what Uriel said.

"Boy was an unmodded civvie a year ago. Now he's handling chrome that'll make grown men lose it and needing firepower like me called in to handle him."

"I could kill the boy now and he'd still be a legend. Or I can train him up and I might get an equal in a decade or two. Hell, he might be a better killer than me eventually."

"So what does Arasaka want more? A cover-up or a second Adam Smasher?"

Kate was quiet for quite a while, clearly either reading over the boy's file or thinking about what he had to say. They both knew what Arasaka would want more, and they both knew that Adam could simply call his contract holder to get his way here. Kate was fairly high up, but she wasn't the CEO.

"...and the others? Why didn't you kill any of them?"

"Boy likes them, so I said I'd give them my protection. Which means from Arasaka too, alright?."

"Including the girl with the deep-di-"

"Yes."

"...Arasaka will require concessions from you for that."

Adam growled out and thought about what he could give here. Uriel had some suggestions that would make Arasaka very happy. Adam certainly wasn't fucking happy about them.

"I will no longer require the possibility of bystander casualties in my contracts." He grumbled to the handler with the stupid hair. She hummed in response, and he knew he had to give a little more.

"...and I will cooperate with the PR team." Adam hasn't had a tongue in decades and the words still tasted bitter.

The bitch had the audacity to give a happy clap. "Excellent, this is all water under the bridge as they say. Why let a few deaths and a single deep-dive unit get in the way of profits?" She asked redundantly. Adam reminded himself that he wasn't allowed to kill this one. At least until he made sure the meatbag wouldn't be able to kill him in the future. She could die after that. "I'll mark their files as 'untouchable assets', although you will be responsible for their protections and payments. Does that sound reasonable?"

No it doesn't you fucking bitch, He had to attend meetings about being nice now. He grunted in agreement, and the bitch ended the call.

Right, time to order replacement parts for the boy and make the other arrangements. Nothing on the same level as before. Peak-human tier limbs, a Sandevistan, and nothing else. He needed to get used to operating at tolerances that human minds were used to before gradually building up.

None of that overcomplicated bullshit like scythe-arms or such. That shit was pointless, just carry a sword around if you wanted to cut things, you fucking junkies. Ah, he should probably order new chrome for the rest of them too, while he was at it. Standard peak-human replacement parts for all of them, they can replace them later if they felt like it.

'We should get a sword.' Uriel chimed in.

'Why?' Adam responded

'Swords are cool.' Adam didn't have a rebuttal.

What? He was a man too, all men like swords. He made a note to look into swords later as Uriel gave a mental cheer.

He idly wondered how they would react when he told them they were moving in with him.

—

The Night City Institute for Medical Sciences was a section in the Mega-Building directly adjacent to the Arasaka Tower. It was technically a branch of the Night City Medical Center, in the same way the president used to be a branch of government. It was the difference between New Money and Old Money. Those that could afford actual treatment went to the Medical Center, those that were born rich enough to afford platinum treatment went to the Institute.

It was also the place in which Adam Smash got his chrome installed, and the place he told the Trauma Team to go. They were technically supposed to go to the Medical Center, as none of these individuals were even rich enough to afford treatment on their own. They were firmly in the category of 'untouchables', people that could never afford to step foot in this place, let alone get attention.

But most folks don't argue with Adam Smasher nowadays.

They were rushed over and treatments began immediately. They were stabilized, put under premium medication, and went unconscious while their bodies were put together exactly as good as they were before. Well, it was technically worse in the boy's case, but high-tier Arasaka brand cybernetics for everything except the still-biotic parts of his head and torso? That was still better than most could dream of. His chrome before was either off-brand or made up of multiple different brands stitched together.

What they didn't tell the peasantry, is that the coding of each brand was designed to slightly conflict with each other. The stated reason for this was to make sure that copyrights were not infringed upon. The actual reason for this was to increase the rate at which chrome-junkies underwent cyberpsychosis. A good doc or netrunner could fix these small conflicts if they took the time to, but it was long and tedious work. That, and very few docs or netrunners on the streets were good or patient.

A violent Night City was one the corporations could easily justify higher military presence in.

With a "matching set" of chrome, the boy should have his mental strain reduced by a fair margin, even with as much of himself replaced as it was. This would make Adam's job of keeping him sane enough to train easier.

"Tell them where I am after they recover from treatment." He told one of the passing nurses. She jumped in fright, and he wasn't sure if she even knew who he was talking about. That didn't matter though, because he knew that she would ensure that the correct people heard it. She was just cowardly enough to fear retribution if she didn't. Uriel chided that he shouldn't bully the cute nurses, that one even had a bob-cut.

Adam was more paying attention to her shapely rear, if he was being honest. Uriel gave out a bark of laughter.

Message delivered, Adam walked over to one of the private rooms, opened it, and walked inside to sit on the floor. None of the benches or chairs here could support his weight, only the heavily-reinforced furniture of his own floor or the machining rigs of the installation room meant for him could handle it. The installation room was closed while not in use, with absolutely no one allowed to get in. Inside that room was the company secrets about the cybernetics of their best murderer, after all.

Right, that would be some time yet unless he gets an alert for a job, so it was time to go over his current loadout with Uriel. The bodiless fire inside his code had some interesting ideas for what might help his combat efficacy, and they needed to go over what could and could not work. Then they needed to draft up some design documents and send it to the R team responsible for Adam's cybernetics, to see if any of them could be implemented.

Uriel also wanted to go over the aesthetics, but Adam shot that down for now. It would be useless to talk about that until after the PR meeting they had to attend later. He checked his schedule to see that the bitch had already made the appointment for tomorrow. Adam grumbled to himself.

A couple hours passed like this. Uriel throwing suggestions out, Adam rejecting the ones he didn't want to bother with, and the two of them typing out schematics for everything that passed muster. This was the draft document that would be sent for the actual professionals to try and turn into workable chrome.

He heard footsteps coming up to his room, and stayed exactly as he was on the floor. Legs crossed as best they were able, hands resting on the knees, back perfectly straight against the far wall. A woman with pastel-rainbow hair in a hospital gown stepped around the corner. It was the boy's girl. Makes sense, she didn't have any outstanding damage as far as he was aware, all the docs likely did was replace her chrome with a matching Arasaka-brand set. She would have to take it easy for a couple days, but otherwise is perfectly fine to leave right now.

The AIS guards he told to watch her were outside, and he sent a message dismissing them. They weren't needed to provide security for her anymore. She was within Sandevistan range of Adam Smasher, the bodyguard of Arasaka.

There is no greater security than that.

She stared at him like she was a rat bravely walking up to sniff the dozing tiger, which was an accurate metaphor he supposed. She didn't say anything, merely looking at him sitting on the floor. She then looked at the furniture of the room, and went back to him. A look of subtle realization came across her face.

Man, the kid had good taste, this girl was adorable.

She walked inside the room, keeping the door open, and sat in the far corner of the room away from him, near to the door. She was light enough to be able to use one of the very cozy-looking chairs. She didn't say anything, just sat ready to run away at the slightest threat, and stared at him.

Eh, if she didn't want to talk, Adam was fine with that. It was the boy he was interested in here, she was merely a hanger-on. He turned his gaze back to the wall and went back to talking with Uriel, optics dimming slightly once more.

It was another hour or so according to his internal clock that someone relevant came by. A nurse had come by at some point and left food for the girl, but that was it. This time the individual who wheeled in was their driver, what's-his-face with the nice mustache. He came in and saw Adam on the floor, and the girl on the chair. The girl turned slightly to nod at him, but her attention was still firmly on Adam. The driver showed good corporate survival instincts by nodding at the girl, but addressing him verbally first.

"Mister Smasher, a pleasure to properly meet you." It was absolutely not, Adam knew, but the driver wasn't about to say that. He was taking the path that he thought would keep him alive the best, and that was by brown-nosing the most dangerous person around.

"Driver." Adam said in return, acknowledging him but nothing more. The driver probably realized exactly what kind of man Adam was in that instant and tension exited him subtly. The driver knew how to interact with him from that one exchange, figuring out that Adam was a man of action and not words, that he wouldn't care about proper decorum so long as he didn't try to piss him off.

Uriel called it 'barbaric civility', and Adam took a liking to the term after Uriel recited a quote from the pulp-fiction writer who coined it.

Anyways, the point was that the driver was very good at reading people. A valuable skill in Night City. Uriel commented that he was better at reading people than he was, but that was okay. The driver wasn't a sub-process of Adam fucking Smasher after all.

Adam dismissed his guards too.

The driver and the girl chatted quietly about something or another, probably in code to make sure the other was alright or some nonsense like that. But the conversation quickly died down and the pair were left sitting on the other side of the room on those damn chairs.

Another nurse brought food in, which the driver actually ate while it was still hot. Man was smart enough to eat while he could and practical enough to know that if Adam wanted him dead he would already be a smear. The girl just kept staring, clearly not having an appetite right now.

About half an hour later, the gremlin with dyed skin came in. Wheeling her way through on a wheelchair and then directly up to where he was sitting, much to the immediate panic of her friends. He stared at her blankly as he ever was, she looked angry in her hospital gown before pausing.

"Why are you on the floor, gonkhead?"

…Adam gave the girl credit, she was certainly brave. Uriel started laughing.

"I'm too heavy for this furniture."

She looked at the aforementioned furniture and then back to him, a quiet 'huh' escaping her lips before she shook her head and remembered that she was angry.

"You had the fuckers replace my chrome! Who the fuck does that?!" Indeed, her chrome was replaced. Standard 'peak human' arms replaced the bulky garbage she had before, and optics replaced with high-standard 'baby-blue pupil' eyes. Discounting her skin color, she looked like a regular woman now.

Well, that and the seams. So not really like a regular woman at all thinking about it.

"Chrome from differing brands are subtly coded to conflict, increasing the mental strain and thus the rate of cyberpsychosis." Adam replied simply.

All of them recoiled at this. The dye-skinned woman slumped, looked down, and gave a quiet 'oh'. The mustached driver leaned back and looked at the ceiling, frown set on face. The boy's girl retreated into herself, burying her face in raised knees.

Ah, they were thinking about how much chrome the boy had, weren't they? Adam idly wondered how many separate brands they bought from, must have been a lot for this kind of reaction. He should probably reassure them somehow. Uriel, do you have any suggestions?

"These are all standard issues, I'll fund your next set to your specifications." He offered.

The dye-skinned woman looked at him for a long moment, a sad expression on her face that got slightly worse looking at him.

"...Thanks, I guess."

Well, Uriel wasn't perfect at this 'socialization' thing when it came to comforting people it seemed. Uriel apologized and Adam dismissed it, it was better than what he could have done. After that exchange it seemed like the dye-girl wasn't interested in talking anymore. She wheeled her way over to the boy's girl and put a hand on her shoulder, letting it rest there.

She did eat the food the nurse brought in, so that was good he supposed.

It was several hours later that the final individual finally arrived, in his own heavily reinforced wheelchair. Rolling in and staring directly at the man who tore his stolen chrome limb from limb. The boy was here.

The boy's friends all got up to greet him (well, the boy's girl did, the dye-girl and the driver rolled over to say hello and whatnot). The boy's girl hugging him from behind and burying her face into his neck. The boy checked on all of their well beings, making sure that none of them were messed with while he was out, and asking them the situation through direct messages. The boy's girl never answered verbally, at best nodding into his shoulder.

Finally after their meet and greet was well and done, the boy was staring directly at Adam, and Adam took that as his cue.

The boy had literally all of his chrome replaced, and it was weaker than before by quite a large margin. Only equivalent to peak unmodded humans rather than so far beyond them.

Well, that wasn't exactly correct. The 'peak human' series of Arasaka cyberware was slightly better than unmodded human records, all of them rounding up to more even numbers. A marketing decision under the idea that 'friendly numbers increase sales!'. They were right, of course, the marketing experts were good at their jobs. A lift capacity of 1500 pounds, a run speed of 30 miles per hour, things like that.

Regardless, it was not at the level he had before. The boy was slimmer and shorter now, looking more like how he did when he first got the Sandevistan in his spine. Not quite that slim and small, but closer to it than how he looked before strapping into the Cyberskeleton.

The boy had a strong gaze still, his mind was clearer than it had been for months, and he was looking at him like a dog about to fight a bear to protect his herd of sheep.

…Uriel was having fun with these metaphors, huh?

Adam stood and locked eyes with the boy. Normally this would be the part where they have another standoff to determine who was top dog, but Adam wasn't feeling like it. He had already proven that when he tore the kid apart.

"You're awake. How's your chrome?"

"I'm not having problems. What's with the downgrade?"

"I need you sane to train you."

The boy was about to be mad about that, but his girl tightened her arms around him and his eyes softened. He reached both arms back and held her as best he could for a moment. He turned back to Adam.

"About that, this 'apprenticeship' thing, give me the deets on it."

Deets? What the hell did… ah, details.

"I tell you what to do, you follow me as I work, you get a share of the pay."

"...Kinda sparse on info there, Smasher."

"What do you want? A contract or something? I'll draft one up and send it to you later then. Sign it or don't, I'm not your dad."

"Yeah, and what's stopping you from stuffin me like a joytoy here?" The boy replied fiercely. A pause in the room. Uriel started laughing again. The dye-skinned girl put her head in her hands and gave a 'don't say that you, gonk.'. The boy's face reddened, but he refused to change expression or look away. He realized the mistake of his wording and was too proud to show weakness in going back on his words.

"I'm going to assume that means 'What assurances do I have that you will not try to betray me'."

The boy nodded, a bit too quickly.

"I don't have a particular reason to, if I wanted you dead, you'd all be dead."

The group tensed at that again, and Adam sighed. Talking was hard, he much preferred murder.

"I haven't needed to read a contract in years, kid. My handlers take care of that for me, and they know that if they screw me over I rip them in half. The bossman doesn't care, they're all replaceable and I'm not. I'm old fashioned, I'll draft one up if you still want it, but really your word is all I need."

The boy nodded in confirmation, and Uriel got to work typing it up. Adam kept talking.

"Hell, try it for a year. If you want out by that point, I'll buy tickets for all of you to go wherever you want. I'm not going to have an unwilling squire, you're talented, but not talented enough to make forcing you to stick around worth it."

Adam offered this because he had nothing to lose with it. He only needed the boy around for a year, to take care of the meatfucker to come, after that it didn't matter if he stayed or not. So sweetening the pot this way cost him nothing.

The boy was laser focused on that offer, though, just like Uriel knew he would be.

"Anywhere? You mean that, Smasher?"

"I do. You want out after a year's time then I'll pay for your trip. You won't be under my protection anymore though, so Arasaka might send some agents after you, but I won't do anything to stop you."

"Not even if they tell you to?"

"A man is his word."

The kid breathed in and out at that, closing his eyes and thinking for a moment. He opened them and locked eyes with Adam's own.

"Alright, I'm in. You better not be a liar."

Adam nodded and moved to exit the room, waving for them to follow.

"Alright then, we're moving out, send me your home addresses."

The dye-skinned girl chimed up at that. "Why, you taking us home, big guy?"

"Picking up your belongings, you're all moving in with me."

They all paused at that, footsteps stopping behind him. He didn't bother stopping, they would follow in a moment he knew. Sure enough, they did, footsteps resuming. A bit faster than before.

Adam stared at the mass of fur and meat in the dye-skinned girl's raised hands. It contently hung like a piece of damp fabric left out on the rack to dry in front of him. It slowly blinked and then yawned. Adam looked at the short woman holding it, a nervous but determined expression on her face as she awaited judgment. She had snuck it in one of her few suitcases, and had only revealed it after they arrived at his floor.

Yes floor, for Adam Smasher was the Butcher of Arasaka. The thirteenth-highest floor of the Arasaka tower was his personal level, the entire floor given to him as part of his long-term contract with them. It was mostly empty even after all his time living in it. There was a self-maintenance room that he 'slept' in, there was an armory for his personal collection of weapons and ammunition, there was a room for his old Gemini bodies, and nothing else. A majority of the floor was completely unused, doors that haven't been opened in years containing perfectly empty, sound-proof rooms.

He had plenty of room for his new apprentice and his hanger-ons, even with all the stuff they brought with them. They didn't have much, due to being street-meat, but they had a decent collection of personal belongings. So they were able to pack what they cared about and bring it back to the tower relatively easily.

Adam didn't really want any of them in his home, but he did promise to protect them. Protecting these meatbags would be much harder if there was a commute each time they were in trouble. They would probably die before he could arrive, assuming the situation actually needed him there. Meat died very easily, after all.

They would be targeted now by rival corporations, namely Militech considering their latest stunt. An attack by other street-meat wasn't worth caring about, but an attack by corporate dogs would be far more dangerous to them. No corporation wanted Arasaka to get a second Adam Smasher, and his apprentice wasn't nearly strong enough to deter attackers yet.

So Adam stared at the cat that the dyed-girl held and it lazily hung from her outstretched arms.

It meowed. Uriel chuckled.

"Its litter box stays in your room, you will clean it once a day, you will get it tested for everything- namely toxoplasmosis. If it makes a mess, I kill it." Adam commanded the dye-woman, who enthusiastically nodded and gave a jumping 'whoop!'.

"Thanks big guy! I'll keep her clean!" Adam grumbled in response. Uriel escalated into full blown laughter.

'She got comfortable around us really quick? Eh, Adam?' Uriel said between barks of hissing laughter. Adam told Uriel to shut up.

Adam reminded himself that he needed these meatbags to like him, and that killing them would be counter-productive to his goal of surviving the meatfucker. One year, that's all he had to put up with them for, one year and he can kick them all out and return to his life of blissful murder.

He turned to see his apprentice-to-be and his girl trying their best to hide amused expressions. The driver didn't join them, he had the survival instincts to request to leave instead. It was a somewhat sad departure for the meats, but no one was dead and the driver even got new chrome out of this whole affair, so it was probably as happy as it could have been.

The driver said 'he'll keep in touch' to them, but clearly just didn't want to be around Adam or the potential corporate warring that Adam brought with him. That was fair, and Adam's opinion of the driver went up a notch. He had good instincts, he'll probably live for a long time.

Regardless, the driver left and now Adam was stuck with three brats in what was previously his private sanctum. Adam heard a distant meow and Uriel laughed again. Correction, three brats and a meat-animal. He growled again.

"Pick whatever empty room you want."

Adam left and entered the balcony-room. The room had see-through glass on its wall allowing one to overlook a good portion of the central square. In that room was everything Adam needed to relax after a hard day of work.

A single reinforced bench in the center, near to the window, allowed him to sit and think. There was nothing else in the room, for Adam didn't need anything else.

The window looked like glass, but it was actually one of the few purchases Adam made for himself a long time ago. It was all completely transparent armor paneling, rated for resisting anything short of a nuclear weapon, to allow him the ability to drop his guard in the area. It had cost him nearly five-hundred million to get enough made and installed to cover the entire wall, but it had been worth it.

Adam walked over to the bench, and sat down on it. He stared over the central square, the construction workers and repair crews crawling all over the place like ants on a sugar cookie. Machines bringing in new materials to replace everything that was damaged.

The repair crews that were on Arasaka dime worked fast, and did their jobs well. The whole place would probably be fixed by the same time tomorrow at this point. They had a lot of practice cleaning up after him, afterall.

A meow to his side caught his attention. He turned to see the meat-beast sitting on the floor in front and to the side of him. He locked eyes with it and waited.

The beast slowly blinked again, before jumping up on the bench, and jumping again into one of the shallow indentations on his armored back. It curled up and started to purr.

Adam was not amused at the audacity of this meat-creature. Uriel had to take over his arms to prevent him from reaching up and crushing its head like a grape.

It was likely seeking the warmth of his body. Despite what first impressions might be, Adam was not actually cold or even cool in temperature. His robotic frame required an immense amount of power to operate, and that kept his temperature slightly higher than human norms. The micro-fusion reactor in his central torso kept everything running, so he didn't have to plug himself into an outlet or something stupid to keep going, just yearly diagnostics and maintenance performed by specialist technicians. It was perfectly safe, it had enough failsafes in place to just shut down completely in the case of a core breach and he had a backup battery to keep him running for several hours if something like that happened.

Reactors like these could be used to make electricity almost free in terms of cost, if they were put all over the place. Why weren't they?

There was no profit in free electricity, so every corporation in the world had a vested interest in keeping it from consumer markets.

The intensity of it's purring increased, and Adam's murderous rage increased again. Uriel started giving suggestions on ways to train the boy to take his mind off the pile of meat and fur currently sitting on him.

The door to the balcony (not technically a balcony, Uriel commented) room opened, and the dye-woman's voice and footsteps came through.

"Hey big guy, have you see-?" She stopped. Adam didn't need to turn around to know what she was looking at. The meat-beast chirped in greeting. She put her hands over her mouth and muffled a laugh. Adam let Uriel take over as he went to vent his frustrations by reviewing his 'best of' clips of meatbags dying.

The dye-woman sauntered up and plopped down on the bench next to him, she was still nervous around him but was trying her best to not show fear. A brave thing, this blue meat was. He turned back to look out at the construction crews at work.

"Hey, like, this place is real sparse, ya'know? You sure you live here?"

"I have my bench, my armory, and my storage. I need nothing else."

"Kinda messed up, big guy. I knew you were borged out, but don't you have any hobbies?"

"Violence."

"Huh, well if we're staying here, you mind forking over some jack for creature comforts? Not all of us are as chilled as you."

Adam thought about this for a moment, eh, he had the cash to burn on furniture. He directed the computer to set up a second account and transferred a million to it. He then forwarded the new account details to the dyed-woman. She yelped and fell off the bench when she saw the info pop up.

"Make sure it can support my weight. If you buy a 'live, laugh, love' sign or other useless shit like that, I'm burning all of it."

It wasn't a big loss to him, he made about five times that amount with his average contract. It was clearly a big deal to the girl, who stared blankly for a moment before looking back up at him again. She grinned and raised one of her hands in the iconic 'okay' sign while getting back up on the bench.

"Gotcha big guy, gotta say that you're pretty careless with the eddies, huh?"

"Arasaka pays for all my needs, my personal wealth just sits and accumulates interest."

Rebecca got a little quiet at that, perhaps being reminded that she was technically under corpo control dampened her mood. "Yeah."

They sat like that for a couple minutes, just looking out over the central square in silence. It was comfortable to Adam, probably uncomfortable to the girl. She spoke up after a while.

"Hey, where did David and Lucy go?"

Adam checked the cameras on his floor, switching between them until he found something. Something he did find, quickly he turned off the cameras and focused back on his immediate surroundings. Could they really not wait a day or something? At least to let their new chrome settle in.

"They are currently occupied."

"With what?"

"Fucking."

—

"So, who are we flatlining first?" The boy said, seated on the ground in front of his bench (Behind? Benches face both ways.). His arm was around his girlfriend, who was cuddled into his side as deeply as she could, distrustful eyes still on him. Rebecca, in a show of solidarity, was seated on the ground with them.

Adam corrected the boy's assumption.

"I will be attending a PR meeting tomorrow morning, the price Arasaka demanded in exchange for leaving you and your friends alone. The dye-woman will be purchasing new furniture for you all. Your girl can do whatever, I don't care. You will be letting your new chrome settle in by not doing anything strenuous for at least a week."

They ignored the dye-woman muttering 'my name is rebecca, gonkhead.', the boy frowned at him for being put on mandatory leave for a week. Damn brat, you get a week to laze around and fuck your girl and you get mad?

"I thought you said you'd be teaching me."

"I will, but I need to make sure you are sane to do that."

"I can handle it just fine!" Adam growled and the boy backed down a bit, gaze still defiant.

"For a time, sure. I don't need you to burn out in a year again though, I need you to last." This was straight up a lie, Adam only needed the boy for a year. The boy could burn out after that all he wanted to. The boy was still frustrated looking, so Adam continued.

"You became a chrome junkie because you were the leader. You had to assume the responsibility to keep everyone safe, to make sure the job goes well. That isn't true anymore."

Adam leaned forwards menacingly, optics brightening in a glare. He loomed over the boy on the ground like a gargoyle on a banking column.

"Right now, you listen to me. You follow my command, got it?"

"Whenever something goes wrong on a job, you aren't going to be responsible for jack shit. Every time someone gets a lucky hit in, or you get caught off guard, you're going to blame me. You're going to blame the fact that I didn't teach you well enough, you're going to demand I teach you to do better next time. You're useless to me if you lose it again."

"You got that, boy?"

Adam practically yelled out the final sentence. The boy glowered a bit before averting his eyes.

"...Got it…" He muttered bitterly.

Adam leaned back. The dyed woman and the boy's girl stared at him.

"Good."

There was a pause in the room as no one could think of anything to say. Eventually, the boy's girl spoke up.

"Arasaka agreed to leave us alone… in exchange for you going to a PR meeting?"

It was a fair question, Adam sighed and leaned back.

"Those fucking cheery vermin have been hounding me to 'be consumer friendly' and 'present the more welcoming side of Arasaka employees' for years now. I've turned down every meeting as attending them was never in my contract."

"With me agreeing to cooperate, they're probably going to try and make me change my look so they can sell action figures or some shit like that. Probably make me say a catch phrase after killing a bunch of gangers so they can put that in too."

The brats started getting grins about halfway through his complaining. The dyed-girl spoke up.

"What? The poor widdle kill-borg doesn't want little kids waving action figures around? Not going to yell about your 'rocket punch!' while killing a bunch of scavs~?" Adam glowered at the gremlin smugly mocking him.

The boy spoke up at this point, taking his chance to poke fun.

"There are already action figures, I remember them from middle school. They might make a 'toon series about him instead." Smug little shit, I tore apart your chrome the other day and now you think you're big enough to mock him like this. Even his girl was getting in on this, hand over her mouth as muffled chuckles escaped her lips.

Uriel chimed in with an idea, and Adam paused. What an evil idea, he loved it.

"Actually, I have something for you to do tomorrow, boy."

"Oh yeah, what's that?"

—

"We at the Arasaka Public Relations department are so glad to see you taking initiative, Mr. Smasher. You even brought your new apprentice to coordinate your brands!" An overly cheery woman in a suit across the table, hands clasped together, said to them. Both Adam and the boy were sitting in reinforced chairs. Off to her side was a young man in a suit, carrying two briefcases no doubt filled with their torture for the next few hours.

The boy was looking at him in despair at being betrayed like this. Adam did not feel remorse. Uriel couldn't stop laughing.

"Let's get this over with."

"Right! Lets dive right into it!"

Uriel had forwarded the new schematics and plans for cyberware to Adam's techies already, and had gone ahead and sent them to the woman in front of them as well, so that she knew what she was working with for potential future upgrades. It would take about a week to change his aesthetics in a way that didn't diminish his functionality, and doing it for his new protege wouldn't take any additional time either.

But creating entirely new cybernetics and implementing them? That would be months, probably only barely before the meatfucker comes for him. Might as well have the aesthetics planned out already for the development process.

The boy to the side set the briefcases on the table, and opened the rightmost one for the woman in front of them. She took out the appropriate tablet, plugged it into the table outlet, and the boy closed the case.

Then on the wall to their right was projected a number of windows and tabs, each of them chocked full of marketing jargon and notes. Adam physically could not get a headache anymore, his cybernetics prevented that, and he still wanted an aspirin just looking at it.

"So we at the PR team have a few ideas to improve customer perception of your brand, and a fair few more that become available with the arrival of your protegee…" The woman started talking and Adam tuned out. Uriel could handle this, he was going to watch his murder compilation again.

The boy slumped and a distressed whine escaped his lips. He would have no such escape from the sadistic marketer. Adam bet that woman was fucking elated to be torturing the Adam Smasher in this way, with Adam being unable to retaliate.

It was several hours before they were finally allowed to leave that fucking room. The woman saying, "Shame, it seems like that's all we have time for today. I'll forward what we have to the fixers and get them to commission your new chrome. Buh-Bye!" as they left.

They walked a short way before simultaneously slumping against the wall. It was several moments of random corpos walking by giving strange looks before either of them regained the motivation to do anything.

Adam spoke up. "You see why I don't go to those fucking meetings now?"

The boy replied with a simple "Yeah."

Uriel had fun though. Adam told him to shut the fuck up.

A few corpos walking by started talking shit that Adam didn't bother to listen to. Probably something about their current pose being undignified or some shit. He heard gritting teeth, looked over and saw that the kid was furious at whatever they had to say.

"You mad kid?" Adam asked redundantly.

"Course I'm mad, you hear what those fucking corpses are saying?!"

"Why are you listening to meat?"

The kid paused at that, before turning to look at him fully. Adam continued.

"They can't do anything to save their own lives, each a coward at their core. All they can do is talk, so why are you bothering to listen to them?"

"We are the sum of our actions, not intentions, not feelings, not words. They'll never make an action in their life if it isn't signed in triplicate, they probably won't even defend themselves if you were to go in and start tearing them apart. They can't do anything but make noise."

"They're just meat for the slaughter, you're going to care what noise meat makes?"

The boy looked at him for a long moment, before turning back to them and furrowing his brow.

"Earlier, you said a man is his word."

"These aren't men, they're meat. Men hold themselves to a higher standard."

The boy thought about it, relaxed, and leaned back against the wall.

"No, I guess not."

Good, he didn't need an apprentice that got mad at useless shit like that. Uriel congratulated his performance. Adam told him to shut up again. Uriel was starting to feel unwanted.

Eventually they started moving again, but as they entered the elevator upwards a call came from behind them. A very familiar voice and two sets of footsteps.

"Adam, wait for a moment." It was his handler with the trashy hair and another woman. The second woman had equally trashy hair, that style common to cyberpunk women. Half of her head shaved down and then the top was long and set to the side. The second woman was slightly shorter than Kate, and in a mostly red suit.

Adam delayed pressing the elevator button until they got in. Then Kate spoke up again as they started going up.

"This is your newest protegee? Doesn't look like much." Kate deliberately provoked to see the boy's reaction. The boy's eyes twitched and he frowned, but it looks like he took Adam's words to heart earlier and didn't say anything back.

"Did you need something or are you just trying to annoy me?" Adam not so subtly threatened. Kate backed down immediately, as he knew she would, and got onto what she was likely actually here for.

"Just getting a measure of the kid." Kate then seemingly just remembered that the other woman was here. Adam knew that that was fake bullshit, she never forgot in the first place.

"This is my daughter, Valerie. She works in Asset Protection and is joining me for a meeting about yesterday's fiasco, say hello Valerie."

The aforementioned Valerie leaned forwards slightly and offered her hand to Adam and then the kid after Adam didn't bother shaking her hand. The kid did though, he was fairly polite to people who didn't insult him.

"As my mother said, I'm Valerie. I look forward to working with you both, however distantly." She smiled in a seemingly genuine manner and Uriel realized what this was actually about. Kate was trying to get her daughter on good terms with the potential future Adam Smasher early, forging a relationship with mister 'I needed the Butcher of Arasaka called in to take care of me'.

If this Valerie could get the kid to have a positive opinion of her, then she might be able to cash in on it years from now when the kid was an actual fucking threat without overpriced military garbage. This was a very long term social investment on their part, and they were getting in early.

Adam chuckled to himself, shame for them that the boy already has a lover, and neither seemed interested in adding anyone else to their relationship. The boy might be friends at best, but considering she was a corpo it would be an uphill battle for them. The boy didn't have good experiences with corpos or corpo brats thus far.

Uriel spoke up. "Your social maneuvering is annoying, do it on your own time."

They both recoiled a bit at that, not expecting him to outright say what they were doing. Corpo politicking, by nature, was a bunch of half-truths and technical-truths, and many other synonyms for lying to everyone around you. To call it out outright was simply not done among their circles.

Uriel hated lies. He hated lies more than anything else in the world.

The kid spoke up at that. "Geez Smasher, lay into them why don't you?" He was familiar with the outright hostility and backhanded insults of corpos. He didn't know how poisonous their kindness could be yet. Eh, he'll learn in time.

"They can seduce you later, when I don't have to listen to it."

The kid sputtered at that, and the rest of their conversation was stilted and awkward as Adam ignored it entirely.

Uriel couldn't shake the feeling that Valerie was familiar somehow, but he wasn't exactly sure why. Maybe she showed up in the sourcebooks somewhere? Adam didn't really care, all the same meat to him.

—

By the time they got back to Adam's floor, they found themselves blocked by the delivery crews carrying large boxes up and setting them in places around.

It looks like the dyed-girl paid extra for same-day delivery. Walking inside past men that jumped in fright when they saw Adam Smasher walk by them, he and the kid eventually entered into the room that saw the dyed-girl and the boy's girl directing workers in the placement of heavily reinforced furniture and tasteful decoration.

Was that a radio set pushed up against the far wall?

Yes it was, Uriel took the cue to change it's channel from whatever modern garbage was playing and to the Sinatra channel.

The vast majority of pre-netcrash music did not survive, but somehow that one radio station that played Sinatra constantly was still around. It still required a subscription to access, and it even had interviews that played in between songs about people who met or talked to the man while he was alive.

Thinking about the logistics of that made Uriel's code hurt, so he resolved to ignore it. He also made a note to try and recreate all the music that he used to listen to so he could have something good to hear rather than techno constantly. Uriel didn't even really like techno, and it was about seventy percent of what people of Night City listened to.

He would have to make the music himself if he wanted good tunes. Adam didn't care either way.

And now, the end is near.

"Hey, what gonk changed the station?!" The dye-girl yelled, looking over to the radio before scanning the room to see Adam and the boy walking in. She paused for a second, looking at the radio and then back to him.

And so I face the final curtain.

"Did you change the channel, big guy?" When Adam nodded in response she looked put out for a moment. "You listen to old stuff like this?"

My friend, I'll say it clear.

"I'm old stuff." Adam said simply. It wasn't exactly honest, Adam didn't really listen to any music before, this was all Uriel's doing. Still, they shared a head now, and he got an appreciation for it.

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain.

"Huh, guess so. Anyways, we've been moving in all the new stuff, If you want any say on where it goes." She offered, neither Adam nor Uriel were very much interested in something like that.

I've lived, a life that's full.

"No need, I'll wait for it to be over." Adam said, then walked over to his bench and lifted it off from where it was. He carried it over his head to avoid hitting any of the workers and sat it on the wall next to the radio.

I've traveled, each and every highway.

He then sat on the bench and retreated into his mind to go over more plans with Uriel. Plans for training the boy, plans for chrome upgrades, plans for making sure he lived against the meatfucker. Plans on plans with the bodiless fire in his code.

And more, much more than this.

He wasn't about to die to the ghost of some upjumped cheerleader. He was Adam fucking Smasher. He wasn't about to die to fucking anyone.

I did it my way.

That was a promise.

xxx

The new chrome wasn't all that bad, David admitted. It wasn't near his old stuff in performance, but it moved preemly and was just as comfortable. Having a complete set from a single source was… well he understood why cylons were able to manage so much chrome without meds.

Comparing how it felt to have his street set and this set was like sandpaper and silk, everything just flowed without the need to strain it. His old set was strong, but it was also… unruly? It had to be told firmly what to do. This set was just like cylons themselves, immediately obeying without hesitation.

He knew why that was now, Lucy and Becca told him what Smasher said about it. He got a little bit more angry at corpos for all the bullshit they pull. The streets were rough enough without them going out of their way to make things worse. He was playing right into their fucking hands with it, too.

He was diving right off the deep end with the chrome, and he couldn't do anything to stop it. He went on a fucking rampage at the end and almost got everyone killed. Again.

It won't matter by the end of it, the side effects are gonna stack. You'll go right off the edge.

He was a terrible leader, he kept the crew together but only by letting most of them die. Falco even left after it was all said and done. All he managed was getting Lucy back…

No, he didn't even do that, did he? Smasher would've killed everyone if he didn't accept the offer. Not even out of some personal grudge, just another job to him. Now look at them, in one of the most preem flats he had even heard of, all expenses taken care of, with all their chrome replaced with matching fucking sets for a sign on bonus. Faraday was dead, Arasaka wasn't going to touch them with a ten-foot scyther blade, and he was brought back from what Doc said was impossible.

The best thing that ever happened to him and his remaining crew and all it took was him giving up.

Lucy deserved better than that. Becca deserved better than that. They deserved better than him.

You might as well drop out.

"Kid, pay attention."

David focused once more on the present. Smasher was to the side and they were both in one of the formerly barren rooms. This one Becca converted to be a sort of training area, some kind of sparring ring in the center, targets on the wall, and prior soundproofing made this long room good for teaching peeps how to fight.

Smasher had his arms crossed, standing perfectly still. Still just as menacing as ever in his full-borg, all-black, frame. Apparently today was "getting used to the chrome day.", since tomorrow they were going to start going out to practice fighting on the streets. The Tin Man was… kinder than he was expecting from the boogeyman of Arasaka. He grumbled and grunted and called you out if you said something he didn't like, but he also payed for basically everything they needed, got Arasaka to back off, and occasionally gave advice.

"A man is his word"

"They aren't men, they're meat. Men hold themselves to higher standards."

It was… It was nice in a strange way. The closest thing he can compare it to was Maine.

"Everybody gets a fair shake. Only way I operate."

He remembered what you said, Maine, so he was trying his best to do the same. He'd give Smasher a chance, and if he proved to be another gonk? He'd get Lucy and Becca out of there before going back to scrap his ass. He learned from last time. Besides, he'll be out of here and with Lucy on the moon in a year's time anyways.

"We're checking your form today, see if you actually know how to fight." Smasher growled out. Then again, Smasher growled just about everything out. "This is one of my old Gemini's so scrap it as much as you can. I need to toss them out anyways."

Them? As in plural? As he thought that the door to the room opened to reveal a completely nude man. Dude was blonde, had a pompadour, and was pretty buff, but walked over to the other side of the ring and waited.

Wait, David didn't know much about chrome, but didn't you need to actually be in the body that you were controlling? How the hell was Smasher moving them both around?

…Eh, Smasher was absurd like that. He probably had some preem corpo tech in his frame that let him move more than one body around at a time, that seems about right.

"This the Gemini?" David asked just to be sure that it was and not something else.

"Yes." Adam responded.

"Nova, just making sure." David raised his fists and bent his knees, and waited for a signal to start. He saw the Gemini sigh and put its face in its hands.

"What the hell is that?" David turned and saw Smasher in the exact same pose as before, staring at him.

"Uhh, my stance?" David hesitantly replied. There was a long silence before surprisingly the Gemini spoke up.

"IHe's been relying on the Sandevistan to dodge instead of blocking. That's why he's in such an aggressive stance, king." A somewhat strange voice came out of the Gemini. "He's ready to rock but he's never been rolled before us."

"That'll get him killed the moment he finds someone as fast as him." Smasher growled out at the Gemini.

"That's what we're here for, king." The Gemini calmly retorted.

"Are… you talking to yourself?" David hesitantly questioned. Was Smasher completely hexed already?

"Helps me think."

"Ah, got it." This has never shown up before, so what changed…? Ah, the Gemini body. Was the reason he was able to control two of them due to some sort of mind-splitting stuff? That was pretty preem if true, but sounded like hell to stay focused with it active. So like the Sandy but for controlling chrome instead of going fast? It would make sense why it doesn't use it in a fight then, it's only really useful for stuff like this where Smasher doesn't have to move himself.

Wait, did this mean that Smasher speaks like the Gemini does in his own head? That was a hilarious image. He muffled his snickers.

"The kid's laughing at us, king."

"Correct his stance and start fighting."

The Gemini walked over and started talking in an easy drawl. "So let's start from the ground up, king. Your feet are ready to get you moving, but not to keep you stable. If you get pushed right now you'll lose your balance immediately. Look at my legs, copy what I'm doing…"

At this point Becca walked in to see the situation. Smasher standing off to the side, A naked man as buff as he used to be gesturing to his legs, and David without a shirt on trying to copy him.

There was a distinct pause in the room. David felt his face go red. The Gemini body spoke up, hey maybe he'll fix this.

"Hey there pretty mama, How 'bout you and I go out on the town? We're too pretty to be in this house tonight." A handsome smile on his face and two finger guns pointed at her. Still completely nude.

Becca stared for another long moment, before turning to Smasher's main body, pointing at the Gemini. Smasher's fist was shaking in rage. "You got some pretty hexed ideas about training, big guy."

The Gemini started laughing. David wanted to die.

—

"Hey, what was with the Gemini's…"

"Behavior?"

"Yeah."

"...I was young once. That frame influences me."

Adam Smasher, the borg who stomped him flat when he was at his strongest, used to act like that? That was either a bad joke or an unfortunate circumstance.

After that embarrassing moment, they explained the situation, Becca gave a skeptical 'yuhuh' and the lesson continued. He has a stance that has the approval of Smasher now, well less approval and more of a grunted out "acceptable." That was the entire day yesterday, him practicing the stance by scrapping Smasher's old Gemini bodies. Each time one of them was destroyed, another would shortly follow from the storage room and tell him how he could improve on beating people to death with his bare hands.

Soon enough that room was filled with a small pile of scraps that look like someone tore through a band of androids who all went to the same hairstylist. It was surprisingly fun, a no stakes period to just learn how to actually fight.

While he, Lucy, and Becca were all asleep, Smasher went out and got his new Tin Can installed. David had to admit, the dude looked pretty hard.

It looked similar to his old stuff, all pitch black with red and white highlights, but all the spaces and gaps were filled in. It was like he was a dude in armor rather than a terminator now, if one didn't notice the servos in the joints. His feet were pretty corpo now too, looking like Corpse-shoes rather than the slabs of steel they actually were. There were no gaps in his frame to let wires show through where it could be avoided, and the armor plates were all smooth metal instead of that fabric stuff he had in place before.

The biggest difference was the face. Now instead of looking like a corpse reanimated by chrome he looked like one of those vid stars who was starting to get old. Angular and sharp features with graying hair partially slicked back before meeting with a chromed helmet that had a visor that could fall completely forwards to hide his face. The lower half of his face was covered in a mask that reminded him of Kiwi…

Go get them for me.

Still just as tall and heavy though, taller than anyone else David had ever seen. Becca said he looked like Arnold had a baby with Murphy (he didn't know who either of those people were), and Smasher had snorted (actually snorted!) before saying "We'll be back, creep. He's coming with me." and gesturing for David to follow.

Becca squealed at that. Maybe it was an inside joke? He'll ask Becca to explain it when he gets back. He was given armor that made him look superficially similar to Smasher's new look, so he put that on and put mom's jacket on over that. It looked… strange, the casual wear of the jacket with the professional plates of corpo bodyarmor beneath.

Mom would have probably liked it, huh? He looked down at the road and kept his eyes there.

They took a transport to the streets before Smasher just started walking. Smasher had handed a handgun and a knife to him once they got out, but that was it so far. David had followed, but it had been nearly ten minutes and Smasher hadn't said a word about what they were actually doing today.

"So uhh, Smasher, what are we doing?"

"Looking for trouble."

"Can I get some deets?"

"I put in one month of vacation time at Arasaka to get you up to speed. After that we'll be getting jobs, most of them will probably be bodyguard work, but occasionally we'll be called in to raid a rival corp's assets or similar levels of danger."

"We've already spent a week waiting for your new chrome to settle in, so now we have three weeks to get you on non-liability level."

"So we are going to walk around the worst parts of Night City and wait for some meat to fuck up around us. We'll do this for six hours a day, and then spend two hours practicing your form."

"You may come to me for further lessons after those eight hours, but that is the minimum training we'll do in a day."

"You want us to just go around flatlining gangers?"

"No. I will be butchering them, you will be attempting to learn from what I do, and only after I know you know what to do will you be fighting too."

David liked that about Smasher, if you asked him to explain something then he would tell you and he wouldn't give you bullshit about it. We are going to do this because this is the best way to do it and here's why. It was refreshing to see a corpo that actually spoke straight.

Except Smasher wasn't really a corpo, was he?

"All they can do is talk, why are you bothering to listen to them?"

David noticed something as they were walking.

"Hey Smasher, I got two more questions."

"Ask."

"Wouldn't peeps recognize and not mess with you?"

"New face."

"Gotcha, second question, What's with the camera?"

Smasher audibly growled at that. "Those PR fuckers said I wouldn't need my rockets for this, and told me to mount this instead. They're going to go over the footage, edit it to be marketing friendly, and sell it."

David felt his own face fall at the first line, having gone through what he did yesterday, he agreed with Smasher's opinion on those gonks now.

"Fuckers."

"Agreed."

There was a moment of quiet solidarity between them. A moment that was ruined with five scavs with nasty looking, cheap-ass chrome swaggered out of the alley with guns aimed at them. Two assault rifles, two shotguns, one handgun. He tensed up but then got a message from Smasher.

[When I give the signal, activate your Sandevistan. Do not engage, only dodge. Watch what I do carefully.]

The scav with the pistol opened his mouth to speak, but Smasher spoke first.

"Now."

His Sandy turned on, sending electric fire through his nerves from his spine. It felt… easier than before, more smooth and less straining. Did Smasher have his Sandy replaced too? His old model was already military grade, what the hell did Smasher have them install that was better than the old one?

The world slowed, and Smasher moved with the practiced ease of someone who has been in high-intensity combat for eight decades. Because he has been, the Tin Man was fucking old by this point.

Smasher walked forwards, drawing his combat knife from his upper-arm holster and his pistol from the holster on his right thigh, stepping past the scav with the gun. A quick motion with the knife and the two with the shotguns had their spines chopped in half. A second step and Smasher was at the two with rifles, one was stabbed and the other was too far away for a stab so Smasher threw the knife at his un-chromed face instead.

Smasher's Sandy turned off just in time for him to line a shot with the back of the pistol-scav's head. Firing and executing him just as the knife buried itself in the other's face. He let his own turn off as well.

Every scav hit the ground at the same time. Smasher walked over to take his knife back. David liked to consider himself pretty good at fighting with a Sandy, it was his signature chrome after all. He was able to tear through gangs like they were… meat to the slaughter…

Huh.

But that was fucking preem.

He took out five scavs with a knife and a single bullet in the same time those guys took to blink. He was acutely reminded of the difference between the two of them. David could have done the same in about double the Sandy time and triple the bullets spent, and they wouldn't have dropped at the nearly the exact same time either.

"You think you're special just because you're scrappy?"

Not anymore, Smasher. Not since you tore me from the Cyberskeleton limb-by-limb.

"Now then, what did you notice?"

"That you're better than me at my sig chrome."

"That will come with experience, what else?"

David thought for a moment, reviewing the butchery in his head.

"The pistol-scav was closer, but you saved him for last."

"Why?"

Why did Smasher do that anyways? He could have been even faster if he took out the pistol-scavs before the shotgun-sc…

Their weapons.

"The pistol scav couldn't do anything to you, not with the chrome you're packing. So you went for them in order of how much of a threat they were to you."

"Correct. Good. What else?"

And so it went on. Smasher would ask him if he noticed anything, David would do his best to respond, Smasher would then ask if David noticed the reasons why he did those things. If he missed anything, Smasher would mention it and explain his reasoning afterwards.

At some point David had to ask. "Hey, what's with my Sandy, it's easier than before and what I had before was top of the line chrome."

"I had them give you one of my spares."

David paused at that, before putting it out of his mind. He can think about that later.

Then they would go back to walking through scav territory, they would get jumped again, and the cycle would repeat. Smasher never once insulting him for not picking up on something, just mentioning it after David said he didn't notice anything else.

It was… nice.

Eventually, evening was starting to come around and Smasher said that after the next encounter they'd be going back for stances. This time he wouldn't be using a Gemini body, because David scrapped all of those yesterday.

They heard a commotion off to the side. Seven scavs surrounding a... Girl? Either a flat chested girl or a very pretty boy, and probably a joytoy from their clothes (and tattoos on their abdomen). David was about to run in, but Smasher said "Now." and David realized he was about to get another lesson. Their Sandys activated, and time slowed to a crawl.

This time Smasher didn't try saving his bullets as much. He threw his knife to take out the scav closest to the joytoy, and then shot six times to turn the heads of the rest of them into pulp.

It was certainly faster David supposed, but it was unlike what Smasher had been doing up to this point. Smasher didn't do things without a reason, so there was another lesson here.

The light-blonde haired joytoy blinked slowly, and looked at the corpses that were now surrounding them, then looked over to see an eight foot hulk of steel walking over, followed by a boy in a somewhat loose and brightly colored jacket. Smasher knelt and pulled out his knife before looking at David.

"What did you notice?"

"You didn't try conserving ammo this time, and threw the knife at the one closest to their victim."

"Why?"

The joytoy spoke up at this. "Oh wow, like, did I just get rescued? That's, like, totes preem." David still couldn't tell if they were male or female (maybe both?). They got up and inspected Smasher closer, leaning in provocatively and putting a finger on their bottom lip.

Smasher was ignoring them, so David continued with this thinking. What was different this time around…?

"Are you like, ghosting me right now?"

It wasn't this hard to think about the other times, without this joytoy talking when he was focused…

"There was a potential non-combatant in the crossfire. Anything could have hurt them, so you had to prioritize taking as many guns out as possible rather than conversing bullets or prioritizing things that could hurt you."

"Correct. Normally I don't bother, but some jobs will call for this."

"I like, could have totally taken em! I wasn't in trouble you dummy."

At this Smasher finally looked at the joytoy. Light blonde hair, tanned skin, painted nails and lips, blue eyes, skimpy clothing, a tattoo that said 'breed me' on her (his?) lower stomach and another that said 'buttslut' on their lower back.

The joytoy pouted at their skeptical gazes, and let their arm unfold into a scyther blade. It was then David noticed that they had seams across their entire body. The joytoy then smiled seductively, and pushed themselves up against Smasher. Rubbing their chest against his stomach.

"But like, I'm totes thankful for my knight in shining chrome, anything I can do to repay you, papi~?" They asked, then leaned up on their tippy-toes to try and stage-whisper to him. "I like it real rough, and I've been a bad one recently~"

Smasher glowered at her before replying. "You don't have enough chrome to handle me rough, girl."

…was Smasher fucking flirting right now? David didn't need to see this, he felt sick.

The joytoy giggled before running a finger in circles on his chest. "Wanna take a closer look, papi~?" Smasher paused for a moment, glaring down at them before his eyes widened a bit.

"Ninety-four…?"

The joytoy playfully gasped before rubbing on Smasher again, burying their face into his chest-chrome. "Like super 'barrasing, a hunk is looking at my private places~! How am I supposed to be a bride now~?"

Smasher glared down still, before pushing them away and walking to the mouth of the alley.

The joytoy gasped and fell back dramatically before smiling "We'll be in touch papi~ Thanks for the number~" They then looked at him and David felt like a cornered mouse. A predatory smile came over their face. "Like, what about you, cutie? A squire should get some attention too~."

Quickly he raised his hands in defense and all but yelled out "I have an input!" The joytoy paused at that before a genuinely happy smile came over their face.

"Like, for reals? How long have you been together?

"About a year now."

"You eachother's mainline?"

"Yeah."

The joytoy squealed at that, and did a sort of dance that seemed happy. "That's like, totes romantic~ I'm so happy for you! Here's my contact, you gotta let me see you two together sometime, tell me all about your 'lationship~!"

They then started to walk away out of the alley, brushing by Smasher and blowing him a kiss on the way through. They shouted back at him as they left.

"The names Vee! I'll be in touch, cutie~!"

David finally recovered from the whirlwind of rapid dialogue and managed to walk back up to Smasher.

"What was that?"

Smasher glared in his usual way in the direction that Vee was heading.

"A full-borg conversion."

Japan had very little in the way of iron, and even less iron that was of high quality. Were one to make a sword in the European method with the iron found in Japan, you'd get a worthless bit of scrap that breaks entirely too easily.

The katana is, by all regards, less versatile than the European arming swords and longswords, the ways in which one can use a katana are severely diminished by its nature as a weapon designed with the considerations of its homeland's material availability. It cannot stab very well, it cannot be used to perform a murderstroke, it cannot chop through harder materials very well at most angles.

What the katana is, is optimized for a singular type of attack. The downwards-diagonal slash performed with two hands. It performs moderately well with all varieties of slashes, namely the upwards-diagonal draw-slash, but the only type of attack in which it exceeds a longsword is that one. Uriel respected the katana for that reason, even if he preferred more European blades. The Japanese master smiths took some of the worst quality iron in the world and made it the best in the world in at least one regard. Considering that there were no less than two sword styles made specifically for the types of attacks the katana was capable of, and that they were historically relevant, one regard is all you really need.

The katana was a min-maxed sword design, and Uriel loved it for that reason. So as Adam opened the case containing their new mono-katana with a crimson blade, Uriel was practically jumping in excitement. Adam admitted, he was feeling fairly good as he inspected it as well. The professional handle, the sharpened edge, the microscopic scrawl of kanji on the spine, this was a detailed masterwork made for the purpose of butchering meat.

It was his now, he couldn't wait to try it out.

This was the most expensive weapon he had bought in a while, and he felt it was well deserved. A custom order Kendachi Mono-Three. Normally one of these is only about 5,000 eddies, but as a custom order from the manufacturers themselves this cost him 50,000. Literally ten times more expensive because they knew he could afford it. The fuckers better be happy they were far away from him right now, otherwise he'd test this out on them.

Eh, he might not do that, he got the indefinite replacement insurance policy to keep replacing it if it ever broke on him. They couldn't make him spares if they were all dead. He refrained from continueing his murderous line of thought and went back to considering the beautiful instrument of murder in his hands.

He wanted to use it really badly. He couldn't wait for tomorrow, he was already in a good mood for it.

—

"I want to help." Came the voice of the boy's girl. Adam stopped as he was opening the door to the elevator. The boy was called in for something PR wanted, and Adam was about to go join him. He turned and looked at the girl with the deep-dive unit and thought for a moment.

"You don't have the chrome for it." That was the simple truth of it. Adam and David both had Sandevistan units and lots of chrome. The girl had a wire in her arm and a plug in the back of her skull. She also didn't have the guts to handle much more chrome than that, Adam thought.

Both of them knew that she would only be a liability when a fight starts at corpo level without such enhancements. Against street-level meat she would do just fine, no doubt about that, but Adam and the kid were going to be fighting at a level so much higher than street it was in the clouds. So Adam was wondering where she was going with this. She looked to the side and downwards. "I want to help, so tell me how I can."

She was straight up going to ask, huh? Adam wasn't really sure what she could do, but Uriel had some ideas.

"Four things. One, cuddle with him after fucking. Men like sappy shit like that but will never admit it." She flushed when he mentioned sex, and he wasn't even done with this yet. Adam was already annoyed.

"Two, cook for him, make him dinner." She looked crestfallen at that and rubbed her arm with the other hand, so Uriel spoke up. "What?"

"I don't know how."

Adam let loose a long sigh, he didn't know how to cook either, he never needed to. But Uriel did and suggested…

No, absolutely fucking not. He was not about to waste his time teaching meatbags to make food for other meatbags. Uriel suggested something else, and Adam agreed to it.

"I will order a cookbook."

"I… I thought you were going to recommend other kinds of stuff, to be honest."

"I'm not done, girl. Three, you can act as an overwatch when we start getting jobs. Keep an eye out for trouble and call if you see anything." She gave a determined nod at that. Heh, girl at least knew how to do that, that was something.

"Fourth… I'll introduce you to my handler." That was something she could do right? Handle the kid's contracts as job offers come in.

After that waste of his time (not a waste, Adam, we need the kid sane, Uriel reminded) he entered the elevator and descended to the PR department to pick up his apprentice. His apprentice was in front of the happy vulture from before, holding a helmet with cameras on its side, looking a little bit lost with her rapid words.

Adam stomped over, he was going to grab the kid and go as fast as he could. Then the woman noticed his presence and did something he didn't expect.

She clapped her hands together and did a sixty degree bow. Adam was taken slightly aback, and resisted the urge to destroy what he didn't understand.

Although he was very close to it.

"I, Chiri Tanaka, deeply apologize Mr. Smasher!" She all but shouted out. Uriel pointed out that her name was "Cheery", which was downright humorous. Adam was confused at what the hell a corpo was doing, shouting like this. She continued, "We at the PR emphasized your mature appeal successfully, but upon review of yesterday's footage we discovered that we completely failed to account for your chauvinistic and roguish charm! We will correct this mistake as soon as possible!"

All around them various corpos at desks nodded in agreement, faces full of shame and design documents open pointing towards merchandise plans. Most of which had his new face crossed out.

…

What?

Uriel lost it.

She kept going, much to his increasing rage. "We are in the planning phases of your new aesthetics and will get them to you as soon as we can! Please bear with us!"

Adam decided that he didn't want to deal with this, so he grabbed the kid and started walking away. He ignored her shouted apologies and Uriel's laughter. He really wished he was allowed to butcher these meatbags, but that would go against his agreement to cooperate with PR.

Soon they were in the elevator once more. The kid was still holding the helmet with the cameras on the side. It looked like it was going to match both his armor and his jacket. Good, the aesthetics of a killer should be on point. It was to be expected, Adam supposed.

The marketing department does good work, after all.

Uriel finally stopped laughing.

'Heh, she seems fairly passionate about her job, huh?'

'I really wish I could kill them all.'

Uriel started laughing again. The kid still looked whiplashed.

—

They were on the streets again when they got jumped, perfectly according to the lesson plan. The kid now was equipped with his own set of cameras for the marketing to scrawl through, and was used to the procedure by now.

The kid was given the handgun and knife, but Adam was only planning on using his new purchase today. He and Uriel were both incredibly excited to see how well it would do. He doesn't remember the last time he just did something for the fun of it, but this was pretty fucking close.

The four that jumped them this time were exactly as ugly as all the rest of them have been. It didn't really matter though. They were all just meat to slaughter, and the butcher has a brand new knife.

"Now." Twin Sandevistans activated, the world slowed to a crawl, and Adam was already walking towards his new victims. He had done this so many times that he barely needed to think about which to kill first.

First, the one with the really bulky jacket and the handgun. Then the one with the shotgun. Then the one with the handgun and no jacket. Then the nude one with the brass knuckles. Each one taken out with a single slash to some vital area as he walked by. He flicked the blade and sheathed it before he let his Sandevistan deactivate.

All of them fell, gurgled screams trying to come out of their throats but failing as they died of excessive and immediate exsanguination. Adam all but groaned in pleasure as he stayed in position for a moment.

Adam stood fully and turned, looking upon the corpses. He had almost forgotten how satisfying a sword was. There really was no beating the classics when it came to butchery.

'Fucking weeb.' Uriel finally spoke up.

'Fuck off.' Adam replied, mood entirely too good to be mad.

He walked back over to the kid, and started the routine.

"What did you notice?"

"You're in a good mood." Little shit, you know that wasn't what he meant.

"Besides that."

"You went for the guy with the jacket first, despite him only having a Handgun. I'm guessing that he might be hiding something dangerous under his clothes then?"

"Correct and correct, good." Adam gave the kid credit, he was fast on the uptake when he wasn't being reckless. He walked over to the corpse with the jacket and opened it up with his foot, revealing a line of grenades on the inside. They were tied to the same string that connected to a ring on the meat's thumb. If Adam wasn't himself, the meat could have pulled that thumb and blown the alleyway out.

Adam and the kid would have been fine regardless, but it was the principle of the matter here. No fucking meat was going to blow up before he could slaughter it.

Also, potential VIPs usually can't survive that much explosive in their face, that too.

"Loose and bulky clothes on skinny fuckers like this should be prioritized. They don't always have explosives, but the few times they do you'll wish you took them out first.

"What else?"

"You didn't have to pull out your gun this time in order to finish them all before the Sandevistan timed out. Your new sword gives you a longer reach, when combined with your already long arms you can flatline just about everyone in a three meter radius."

"Correct and correct, again. You're getting good at this boy."

The boy reached up and rubbed the back of his helmet. "Thanks Smasher, top of my class for a reason."

"What else?"

"Well…"

And so it went on and on like that for the second day in a row. The kid has noticeably improved already, and would probably be ready to handle these encounters by this time tomorrow. Adam was thankful the kid stopped going to that academy, because his talent for combat was absolutely absurd.

A talent for handling chrome, a talent for combat, an ability to dehumanize the meat he butchers. It was like looking into a mirror of his younger self.

Eventually, Adam picked up some very interesting radio chatter.

"...got a cyberpsycho on west and main 44… requesting backup…"

Adam checked his mental map and realized that was a mere two blocks away. This day was going so perfectly! He tuned to the same frequency and sent a response.

"This is Adam Smasher, I am two blocks away. Please evacuate non-combatants."

There was a pause in the radio chatter.

"...Iceman Smasher's on the way…get these fucking civs out of here…"

He started running in the direction, the kid quickly following him. Adam explained the situation.

"Cyberpsycho close by. It will be a good lesson."

"You gonna chop up a chrome junkie?"

"No, I am going to disable it without using weapons."

"You're a netrunner too?"

"No." That wasn't really true, Uriel could do most of a Netrunner's job at this point. Still, Adam wasn't planning on doing that.

He was going to demonstrate why he was teaching the kid unarmed stances. Uriel grinned and sat back to watch the upcoming show, Adam didn't intend to disappoint.

They eventually got to the police ring. In the center of the courtyard was the aforementioned cyberpsycho. Adam was downright impressed just how large they managed to make this one, being nearly ten feet tall. Most of that was in the immense legs that were occasionally kicking police vehicles dozens of feet into the air and turning cops into smears. The head was completely chromed over, a blank mask that looked like a torture device. The arms were just as large, and were bulky beyond belief.

The only thing that wasn't large was its head, in fact. It looked absolutely miniscule on the immense hulk of chrome and meat. Uriel noticed something fishy was up with this situation, cyberpsychos don't usually show up in the middle of main roads with chrome that polished. Adam didn't really care, the thing looked fun to break.

Adam jumped in, tossing his sword still in sheath to the kid, and running past cops behind quickly erected barricades. Uriel reminded Adam that marketing wanted him to shout out his attacks if possible. Adam growled and reminded Uriel that he already told them to fuck off with that. Uriel laughed.

The psycho noticed him, and reared up a mighty kick. Adam scoffed at how telegraphed it was, fucking amateurs, he'll show them how to kick.

He sidestepped and the kick went past him, kicking up a mighty wind that nevertheless didn't phase him at all. He was six-hundred pounds of metal, something like that was a light breeze. He didn't activate the Sandevistan, he didn't need it this time. The purpose of this fight was to demonstrate a method to disable others who borged up.

He set his arm back, and started vibrating it rapidly enough to kick up its own wind. He twisted his body as the psycho's foot came back down, and let his rotation funnel entirely into his arm as he spun.

Adam's rapidly-vibrating fist crashed into the psycho's knee from the back. The psycho screamed as its knee practically disintegrated. A few hundred pounds of cheap leg chrome flew off and landed with a mighty crash.

The Tank-Fist was a style of martial art that was only taught to full-borgs. Originally designed for zero-g combat encounters, it was a relatively simple style in principle. Vibration and rotational force combined to deal more damage than one's weight and speed would normally allow. It was not taught to non-borgs for a very simple reason.

The forces imparted onto one's own body using it would tear all but full-borgs completely apart. The move he just performed, the heart-strike? That would have left a human in a casket afterwards. Adam wasn't a master of the style by any means, but he could push it a lot farther than most masters by virtue of his more advanced frame.

His was the basics, pushed to an absurd degree, he didn't know any of the more advanced techniques because no master wanted to teach Adam Smasher how to be even more dangerous. So he had to learn it on his own. It was a style that was the most effective against firmer and larger targets, targets like other full-borgs.

The reason he was able to tear the Cyberskeleton apart with so much ease? Panzerfaust.

Uriel piped up that Pondsmith was a hack writer, and this was stolen from Alita anyways. Adam told him to shut up.

The psycho let loose a robotic scream and swiped its massive right arm at him. Adam was already in range, so he raised one foot, twisted his torso a full rotation, and let his vibrating foot collide against the oncoming arm.

A thunderous boom as steel smashed into steel.

The psycho's arm burst into scraps of the cheap chrome that it was made of, raining over the plaza for a fifty foot cone away from him.

It was all over at this point for the psycho, now it was only an extended execution. Adam always did like scrapping inferior products.

Soon enough, the thing was a pile of metal and chunks of meat scattered over a hundred-yard radius. Adam walked back over to the kid, who numbly handed over his new sword.

"That is why stances are important."

"...yeah…"

Heh, good to know the kid can still be impressed by something. The kid stared for a moment before speaking.

"That's what you're teaching me?"

"Yes."

"...so fucking preem."

"Indeed."

"...Hey, I've been wondering…"

"Yes?"

"Can I get a sword too? It seems pretty nova."

Adam completely stopped for a moment, before turning to the kid. Staring for a long moment to make sure he was serious. The kid seemed like he was. Adam turned and started walking back to the driver to bring them back to the tower.

"We're heading back for today."

"Why? It's only been three hours."

"Ordering your sword."

The kid sure as fuck hurried up after that. Uriel started chuckling.

—

It was the next day, and the kid's turn to butcher meat. Adam handed him a pistol and a knife and the kid held onto them as per routine. Then Adam spoke up, "You will be fighting today.".

The kid paused at that.

"Alright, nova. Should I keep anything in mind while flatlining them?"

"Try to follow the guidelines and maintain your stance, I will tell you where you went wrong each time."

"Gotcha."

That was that. The two of them started walking through a route they haven't used yet in order to lure fresh meat to them, and waited for scavs to feel brave.

The kid would slaughter them as expected, and Adam would tell him where he could have been more efficient. Adam didn't have to correct many mistakes, way fewer than he had been expecting if he was being entirely honest. The kid was a natural.

He was never quite as good as Adam was, but that was to be expected. Adam was Adam fucking Smasher.

"...You could have improved your time by going to the left of the first meat rather than right, as your knife is in your left hand."

"Ah, I wasted a moment having to twist more than required?"

"Correct."

Adam's optics noticed a glint of something on the building on the other side of the street. Eight decades of combat experience demanded he turn on the Sandevistan and get in between the glint and his VIP.

He moved as fast as he could.

He was in between his protegee and a slug of metal that was alarmingly fast even in his Sandevistan's world of slowed time. He drew his blade and cut down on the solid lump of metal that was moving about as fast as an arrow before it hit his apprentice.

He locked his eyes on where the angle told him the slug came from and let his Sandevistan time out.

A tremendous boom would've ruptured a meatbag's ear drums from a hundred feet as the slug's shockwave hit him and the two halves of the slug delivered their tremendous kinetic energy to their surroundings. A second boom as that kinetic energy shook the ground around them.

That was one of the highest kinetic impact railgun shots he had ever seen. He had seen quite a few railgun shots in his time. He messaged his apprentice.

[We are under attack, flee to tower, move unpredictably, I will handle this.]

His dumbass fucking apprentice shitling had the audacity to talk back. Uriel reminded him that the enemy was the target, not their investment.

[I can't leave you alone against this fucker! Let me help!]

[Absolutely fucking not. You are a liability in this fight. Run now.]

[...You better survive this, Smasher, or I'm scrapping your ass.]

[I'm Adam fucking Smasher.]

The wonders of his apprentice taking so long meant that the fucker with the railgun had time to line up another shot. Another glint and his Sandevistan activated. This time the shot came from another building, he cut it in half too.

Time resumed at normal pace and another pair of explosions rocked the alley he was in. The buildings on either side of the alley were starting to lose integrity and crumble. His apprentice activated their own Sandevistan and ran as fast as he could. Smasher saw him duck behind cover in the far distance to wait a second before activating it again. Good, he was pacing himself, he'll make it.

Now, all Smasher had to deal with was some arrogant little shit that thought it had the right to scrap his investment. It had one of the strongest railguns he had ever seen, a stealth system that somehow hid it from his enhanced sight except when firing a shot, and was fast enough to reposition a building away in between shots.

All Adam had was a pistol, his knife, his sword, and his fists.

…Heh, finally a good fucking fight. Adam and Uriel grinned in unison.

John liked his job.

He was one of the construction grunts that Arasaka kept on payroll specifically to go and clean up the places that Adam Smasher, their chief attack borg, went. It was not a question of if there would be collateral damage, or even if there would be a lot of collateral damage or not.

It was always a question of "how did this much collateral damage happen this time?" and "How many bodies are they going to have to hand off to the trauma teams?". John had been working this job for close to ten years now, and he thought it might be the best job in the world. He didn't get into any trouble, as Adam and the first response guns that Arasaka sent in usually cleared out the area long before they got there.

He didn't have to deal with people trying to shoot him for his stuff, there were enough guards to deter low-level gangers, and big time mercs were always long gone. He got the big bucks from being on Arasaka dime, paid well enough to support his input back home and put his kid through schooling. He even got some chrome to make his back and arms stronger out of the deal.

His input really liked his big, strong, arms. He really liked his input's big, fat, tits. Things were good.

This time the job was a bit unusual, they had to go in and actually pull Adam out of the rubble. He was slightly nervous about that, he knew what kinds of things Smasher got into, but he also knew that the butcher usually left you alone if you were polite and trying your best to help him out. He had seen a lot of dumbasses thinking they could get away with being rude to the borg in this job, and most of them were smears now.

Yes, this time there was way more security around the five-block perimeter as civs and street-trash were cleared out. Adam was still in the area, and currently buried under a parking garage worth of concrete.

John couldn't wait to see how Adam did it this time. He was standing with a bunch of his co-workers in front of a screen. They had snacks and beers in hand, and one of his pals handed him some of both. Corpo policy to manage construction like this was to first review all the camera footage in the area to tell exactly what went down, so the foreman knew what to tell them to do and in what order. It made the work much faster.

So the foreman decided he would let it be a morale booster too, and let the grunts watch the footage too. Every time they got to a jobsite, the foreman would have his netrunner girl put out the cameras in the area and play them on the big screen they got. Foreman told the Arasaka contractors that more eyes on the footage means they might get something he missed, and they signed off on it so long as they made a recording and sent it to PR and the corpo techies.

So every time they got to a jobsite, all the workers got to watch one of the most gore-filled murder fests around. It was better than basically any vid, and they didn't have to pay for either.

Life was good. John took a drink of his corpo-branded beer (it wasn't the best, but it was cold and free, which was the same thing) and watched the camera vids.

Smasher had started off in an alley with his new apprentice (and ain't that just unusual? Adam actually got a kid to teach, and he looked like he was having fun with it. John's little girl, Lily, was a big fan of the Smasher, and was delighted to hear about it.) All of a sudden the footage slows down to 0.1 percent speed, Adam moves in front of the kid (still a bit faster than John could really keep up with). And swings his new sword out, it hits a little soda-can thing coming at him and the two halves fly to either side.

All of a sudden the camera footage goes blurry and shakes, and there are two trenches to either side of him. One of John's co-workers speaks up "Fast fucking bullet, huh?". That's what that was? Smasher cutting a bullet in half? Goddamn that was preem, he had to tell Lily about it.

Then another soda can come out from a bit different angle, Adam moves in front of it too and cuts it in half again. The camera shakes again and then goes out. Some of the guys mumbled as the vid switched to another camera outside of the alley. They realized why the camera cut out when the buildings on either side of the alley started to collapse.

"Fuggen' knockoff brickwork." Another of his co-workers piped up, sipping his beer. John had to agree, those buildings were pretty garbage if all it took was two shots from a big gun to take 'em out like that. Then again, this was scav territory, they don't know proper construction worth jack shit down here. John took another swig.

Suddenly, the kid took off back towards Arasaka territory, and Adam went after the soda-can angle a moment after. Smasher must have told the kid to run to get help as he dealt with the merc that came after 'em. Or maybe he just told the kid to run off and stop slowing him down for the fight. Either was possible knowing the Smashman.

Then Adam proceeded to move fairly erratically, but it didn't seem to matter. The camera's slowed every ten seconds or so and Adam was forced to cut another soda can worth of metal in half. It was fucking impressive watching the borg go, and quite a few of his co-workers whooped whenever he did it another time. It was like watching Lily and her rhythm games, except every time the Smashman did it the buildings in the area lost a bit more structural integrity and a couple of them fell.

Then the cameras pulled out to a wide shot some drone got of the area, looks like this was about when Arasaka got word from the kid (what was his name? David right? He thinks that's what Lily told him.) and sent out some surveillance.

It was at this point everyone watching cheered and let out a few 'goddamn' s. All the buildings in a perfect circle were broken down now. In the center was the lone parking garage. Adam had

used the shots to take out places for the merc to move to after each bullet. The Smashman was like a fox when it came to fighting, crazy but in a smart way. Now the merc was forced to remain in one place as Adam approached him.

It was like something out of one of those blockbuster vids, the Smashman slowly walking forwards through rubble and dust and every ten seconds cutting another railgun shot in half. Lily was gonna love this story.

Eventually the firing stopped for a moment, and Smashman ran into the garage. They had to switch the camera to 0.1 again to see where he went. There apparently wasn't any working cameras inside the garage, as old and decrepit as this place was. It was probably some scav dens, and they don't like having cameras recording them.

Eventually the garage rumbled, two explosions broke out both walls on opposite sides, and then one of the walls broke due to another railgun shot. By that point it was over, and the whole thing started collapsing. The drone flew down to ground level sometime before that, and vid went to 0.1 again.

The last shot was of the Smashman with an arm missing and a giant chrome dog looking thing, it had what was probably the railgun on its back mounted like a tank cannon. The Smashman was performing a lariat on it with a vibrating arm as the building collapsed on them both.

The crew cheered and finished their beers. This was the best show they had gotten in a long time. It was time to fish the borg out of there. The foreman in the middle clapped his wrinkly hands after gobbling down his jerky. A bit of the synth-meat was stuck to his mustache.

"Alright boys, his handler called me and said we got three hours to fish him out of there. Let's try to get him out in two. The rest of the job shouldn't take as long, we're expecting a two-day operation to get all the rubble out and ready for the next crew."

Shouts of confirmation and "yup"s rang out as everyone got into their equipment. Two-day operation meant two 12 hour shifts separated by a six hour break. It was pretty strenuous, but the chrome and exoskeletons made the job quite a bit easier. Besides, this was just a lot of rubble to move around, he could think about other things while working.

Also, the beer was free and cold. He called his input before starting, to tell her when to expect him back.

"Heya Rose."

"Heya yourself John." She giggled out. Man, she was the cutest.

"Foreman said it will be a two-day operation, so I'll be back by around noon."

"Any stories to tell Lily?"

"Oh, she's gonna love this one."

"Alright, I'll try to get a nap then."

John had a devious idea. Mentally he turned a knob up two notches, now to 3. He grinned like the bastard he was when he heard her moan.

"H-honey, that's m-mean.~" She got the words out, he could picture her gyrations now. She'd be ready for when he got back.

"I'll be back in twelve hours, Rose, see you then."

"B-bye John.~"

Another one of the exosuits jockeys came up to him as he ended the call.

"Hey John, talking with yer input?"

"Was, I'm off to get suited up now."

"Right, I'll help you get the suit on if you return the favor."

"Deal."

As they were getting suited up (these exoskeletons were a bitch to put on without someone else there to hold it in place). His co-worker spoke up.

"You know that Smashman made an album a couple days ago?."

"Your fucking with me."

"I'm not, wanna give it a listen?"

As John got to work, he let the album play. Sure enough, the slightly distorted metallic tone of the Smashman came out in a song. John never knew Adam could sing, and the tune was pretty catchy too, if really old-fashioned.

Some people say a man is made out of mud.

A poor man is made out of muscle and blood.

Muscle and blood and skin and chrome.

A mind that's weak and a back that's strong.

You load sixteen tons, whaddya get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

Oh mama don't you call me, cause I can't come.

I sold my soul for another gun.

Yep, John had to admit, the Smashman wasn't a bad singer at all. He knew what he was going to listen to while digging the borg out from under all this rubble. Oop, he stepped on a corpse. Quickly he called over the trauma team to get rid of it.

—

Valerie liked her job.

She liked power, and she liked people with power, and she liked people with power using it on people who had less power. Nothing else in the world came close to the burning she felt every time she saw it happen. Physical, Mental, Social, it didn't matter, she loved power of all types.

So as her mother chewed out the PR director assigned to Adam Smasher for trying to make Arasaka's butcher less frightening, it was all Valerie could do to hide the perverse pleasure she felt. Her mother was speaking in a cold and harsh manner, ruthlessly tearing into the woman in front of her, using the threat of her position to prevent any counter the mere PR director could possibly give.

Thus was the corporate life. The strong thrive and the weaklings are dominated, as it should be. This was not the best rant she had ever heard from her mother, but it was pretty good still. It got her off just the same.

"...Smasher is many useful things to Arasaka, but family-friendly is not fucking one of them. Do you understand that, you upjumped secretary?"

"But Ma'am-"

"Talk back to me again and I'll make sure everyone in your little feel-good division gets axed."

"...yes ma'am, I'm sorry ma'am."

"Now listen to me you worm, currently our hatchetman is under a pile of rubble, probably because your stupid fucking decision to have him replace one of his key weapons with a camera of all things."

"That and trying to make him shout bullshit while in a fight? Do you think life is some child's vid from a hundred years ago?"

Her mother stepped forwards and loomed over the weakling, glaring down at her with her shining red-chrome eyes. "If you do anything to compromise either the strength or intimidation of our butcher again, I'll mark your entire division down as company saboteurs. I think you know

what'll happen next, right?

"...yes ma'am, I'm sorry ma'am."

"Don't let this happen again, Tanaka. Or I'll make su-"

She was cut off as the elevator opened. Her mother growled and turned, about to yell at whatever fool interrupted her domination of the small woman with the bob-cut.

"Oh, who the fuck is-"

Valerie was pretty mad too, she was so clos-

Adam Smasher was in the doorway. He was glaring at seemingly everything in the room just as he usually does. He was missing his left arm, and his armor plating was dented and scratched all over. He was one of the scariest things she had ever seen.

He stomped forwards, lightly as one who was six-hundred pounds of metal and violence could. He walked right up to Valerie's mother, who was suddenly very quiet.

"Anything to say, meat?"

Her mother hesitantly spoke in response. "Smasher, I was talking to PR Manager Tanaka here. They got you out of the rubble that fast?"

Adam looked at her mother, then over to the timid Ms. Tanaka. He looked back to her mother and growled out.

"The crew does good work. Go talk with Kushinada, like I told you to."

Her mother swallowed and stiffly nodded, before walking over to the elevator and entering. Leaving Valerie alone in the room with the PR division and Adam Smasher. He walked over to the desk next to Ms. Tanaka and tore the camera mounted on his left shoulder off with a scream of twisting metal, before setting it on the desk.

"Your footage."

Ms. Tanaka nodded and bowed to him. She stayed in that position as he started walking away. As he reached Valerie, he stopped for a moment and glared down. She couldn't move, she couldn't breathe, all she could do was stare into his glaring red eyes.

The moment passed, Adam kept walking to the elevator before stepping inside and out of sight. Valerie let out a shaky breath and Ms. Tanaka did the same. Ms. Tanaka looked up and nodded at her. It's understandable, Valerie didn't say anything while her mother was here, and kept a completely blank face the entire time. Tanaka probably thought Valerie didn't approve of her mother's actions, considering she didn't leave with her when Adam dismissed her.

Tanaka was wrong, of course. Valerie liked her mother's dominating words, but loved Adam's dominating presence. Valerie started walking away before pausing and noticing discomfort in her legs. Ah, she needed a change of panties.

It was worth it. This memory would keep her going for weeks.

—

Vee liked her job.

She got to sleep wherever she wanted to, talk to all sorts of people, and make friends with all sorts!

It was the best life a girl like her could ask for.

She wasn't always a girl, sometimes she was a boy, sometimes she was both. Some of her friends liked boys, so sometimes she was a boy. Some of her friends liked girls, so sometimes she was a girl. Some of her friends liked both, so sometimes she was both. She was never a top though, Vee hated that kinda stuff. Vee was meant to be small and cute and breedable at all times!

She was a girl now though, because that hunk from a couple days ago called her a girl. He must like girls, so she got her Midnight Lady re-installed by the doc and her Mr. Stud taken out.

This stuff was, like, kinda expensive on a poor girl's wallet. So Doc had a smart idea to make lots of eddies, and Vee loved it. She would walk around the bad parts, wait for some guys to pop out and try to dom her without paying.

She was, like, a natural sub, so she liked it a whole bunch, but a girl needed chrome too! So whenever they didn't pay, she cut them up and brought all the chrome back to the Doc. Doc would pay her for them, and that made all kinds of eddies. She could afford all sorts of chrome! She could stay cute forever!

Doc called her crazy, but she still installed what Vee asked her to! She was being totes a drama queen.

Where was she? Oh yeah, the hunk, like, totally interrupted her when she was going to make all kinds of eddies! But he was so dreamy, so she forgave him. He even gave her his contact when he saw how chromed up she was, so he must like her too! His big, hard, chrome all over his body was just the best when she rubbed it!

She asked Doc if this was what true love felt like, and Doc called her crazy again. He had a pretty cute guy following him too, and she flirted with him a bit. But his kid had an input! They were mainlines! It was so cute!

Vee contained a squeal, it was totes romantic! She shipped it! Her new OTP! She didn't know what his input was like yet, but Vee was certain she was as cute as he was!

"Hey boys, look! Fresh meat!" A totally nasty voice came from her right. Vee looked over and saw a bunch of grimey looking guys. They weren't anywhere near as dreamy as Mr. Hunk was, but they had a bunch of chrome on them.

Vee put her finger to her lips and wondered how many eddies she was going to make from these dudes, and if they were going to pay or not. She was hoping not, that way she could cut them up and bring them back to Doc. Her knives rustled a bit under her synthskin in anticipation.

Vee liked her job.

—

In a room shrouded in shadows, a small number of very influential people discussed terms. They did not have names in this room, only positions. The head of Arms, the head of Markets, the head of Propaganda, and so on. This was a deliberate decision, for while they were within this room they did not represent themselves, they represented parts of the company.

They were the organs of Arasaka, the components that ensured it thrived in a world full of near-equals that would seek to bring it down.

"...Next on our list of topics, our Oni has claimed another as its successor."

"It's unexpected, but not unfortunate. Another Oni would only be useful for our aims."

"We must ask what prompted this decision. The Oni rarely tolerates the presence of others, and has never sought them out."

"Official record dictates the Oni is feeling his age."

"We have never trusted the official records, not even our own."

"The motivations are irrelevant here. Our Oni is raising another, the temporary setback of being unavailable for missions for a time is more than worth the long term gains."

"Many plans become feasible with a second Oni. Many more will become feasible with a tribe of Oni."

"Agreed, Find subjects similar to the first, and introduce them. We will see if our Oni takes a liking to them."

"If he doesn't?"

"The Lion kills the weak cubs."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Our gambit for marketing the Oni. How does it perform thus far."

"Projects are in the works, profits are projected to rise 0.012 percent over the next three seasons, and potentially more beyond that."

"An overwhelming success, continue and expand upon them. Take heed that nothing diminishes our Oni's fearsome mask, however."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"What of the war dog sent to our Oni, it came close to devouring him in his torpor."

"A dog cannot devour an Oni."

"The Red Sun shines over the Dragon."

"The Dragon strangles the Giant."

"The Giant is sleeping."

"We are within its shadows."

—

Vincent hated his job.

On the roads leading into NC from the south was a gathering of vehicles. The vehicles were in a rough circle, a bristling porcupine of guns pointed in every direction by guards on the lookout for any fucker that might try something.

Vincent wasn't doing that though, he was just a passenger this time around. He was on the road to NC to see his input and do his routine delivery of eddies. It had been more than two years since he had seen her, and he was hoping that she was doing well.

His friend Falco on the other side of the fold-out table dashed those notions.

"...She's dead, huh?"

"Has been for about a year, from what I heard."

Vincent slumped forwards on the table and put his head in his hands. He wanted to cry, but the tears had been dry for a few decades now. This was just another person to be added to the tally of those he failed to keep alive. This wasn't enough to make him tear up anymore.

He was just tired. Tired in ways that sleep couldn't fix. Falco spoke up, continuing his explanation.

"Her son was alive though, and did pretty well for himself."

"Oh yeah? What's he doing now?"

"Well he was an edgerunner, back when I worked with him for a bit."

"And now?"

"Nothing much, just the apprentice of a local merc."

"Any merc I've ever heard of?"

"Maybe, is the name Adam Smasher familiar to you?"

Vincent shot up and looked Falco dead in the eyes. Falco didn't have a smile on his face, he was dead serious. A long moment before Vincent slumped back in his fold out chair and took a long drag of the cigarette in his lips. Breathing it out and feeling the cancer in his lungs grow a little bit more.

That was an exaggeration, he got them replaced with cloned lungs every time he burnt them out. Not cybernetics though, he had seen what folks who got those turn into. They turn into Adam Smasher. The guy who was now apparently mentoring David Martinez.

Just fuck his shit up, huh?

Falco spoke up another time.

"Are you going to tell him this time?"

Vincent wasn't sure, he took another drag of the cancer-stick and kept looking to the ceiling. Falco started glaring and continued.

"The strongest guy without chrome I've ever seen and you're still a goddamn coward, Vincent Martinez."

He couldn't agree more.

Adam was in a very good mood.

His armor was cracked and in many places shattered. His servos were strained and hard to move. His frame was beaten to a point that many would look at him and question his ability to move. His entire left arm was gone, sheared off at the bicep area by a railgun shot that he couldn't activate his Sandevistan in time for.

That was the best damn fight he had had in a while, even better than his tussle with the kid. Granted the kid could have pushed him farther if Adam didn't have his weapons for that fight, but he did and purposefully limiting oneself on the job is a good way to get killed. Work and play should be kept entirely separate matters.

He was in such a good mood, he didn't even mind the stupid message PR had sent him. 'We will take this opportunity to update your aesthetics, please delay your repairs for a day.' and an attached image of the most corny bullshit he had seen in a long while.

He sent a message back telling them to change it to something else or he was going to kill half of everyone down there he sees. They quickly responded and asked him to delay his repairs for a day and a half instead. Feels good to have meat listen to him when he talks.

That sniper though, she was a damn satisfying fight. It had been years since he's lost a component like this, and all it took was a single railgun shot that he couldn't fully dodge to do it. He did her the courtesy of killing her really quickly as the building fell on them.

As he was trapped under the rubble, he and Uriel were able to go over the fight in detail. It was going straight into his long term files, a fine addition to his collection for certain. Uriel even got some ideas for upgrading the dye-skinned woman out of it, maybe she'd be useful in a fight in the future.

Mostly as just a turrent, granted, but still useful. The meatbag in that armor had proven that to him. The bossman was happy with the recovered tech too, that railgun was experimental grade-tech and now Arasaka had a still functioning model to work off of. Yes, Adam was in a good mood as he opened the elevator door and walked into his floor.

He sighed regretfully as he looked at his sword. Now that he knew that meatfuckers were already gunning for him and the kid, he couldn't afford to play around with it anymore. It was sad, and it made him sad too. Uriel had suggested trying to use it with Panzerfaust, but running the calculations revealed that it would break the blade before too many uses. Although, if he had something heavier-duty, Uriel suggested, and had an idea…

Footsteps of a moderately high speed alerted him. Judging by the sound they were probably the dye-woman, here to ask him for money or something. Sure enough, she turned the corner and then did something he wasn't expecting. Her eyes widened and she dashed over to him, yelling out as she did.

"Holy shit Big Guy! Are you alright?!" She sounded concerned about something, although Adam wasn't sure what. Then Uriel commented that she's probably alarmed about the damage he took. Ah, she was mostly meat wasn't she, probably best to reassure her somehow.

"I had a good fight. I won." Adam stated simply.

"No, I mean… Your Arm!" She yelled. Adam was confused again, and so was Uriel this time.

"Experimental high-end railgun, I'll have a new one tomorrow."

She stared at him, at a loss of words. She sighed and slumped, before talking much more normally. "Did you enjoy yourself?" She sounded almost resigned.

"Best scrap in a while." At his words, she put her face in her hands for a moment before shaking and looking up.

"I'm glad you had fun, Adam." Ah, that was kind of her. He still wasn't sure why she was upset earlier. Hmm, where was the kid and his girl? He vocalized this question to the dye-girl, who told him that the girl was talking to his handler (fucking finally, you used up hag) and that the kid was with her to make sure no corpo tries anything. Adam thought this was prudent, so he was fine with it.

"Hey, when are you going to take me out?" She said, and Uriel sputtered a bit. She continued, "You've been taking David out to shoot up gonks a lot, but when am I gonna get some of that action?"

Same as the other girl then? Normally that would mean the same answer, but Adam and Uriel had just gone over battle data from a fight with a woman without much cybernetics herself. Unlike the other girl, this one didn't have any particular talent for anything except shooting, so it would have to do.

"You don't have the chrome for it." She was about to get angry about that before Adam continued. "Nor do you need the chrome for it, if you listen to me."

"Alright big guy, where are you going with this?"

"How's your sniping?" It wasn't like she was going to be useful for much else. Not enough chrome to keep up when up close, and not enough skill in anything to be useful outside of holding a gun. Might as well be the biggest gun they can give her.

Fortunately, Adam just recovered a very big fucking gun.

"Not the best, but I can manage, why?

…Eh, he'd have to give her a few tips. Better for her to be another gun than a freeloader.

—

"This thing isn't a sniper rifle. It's not even a crew gun. It's a scaled down naval cannon." Said the seemingly young man in front of the partially dismantled railgun that Adam tore from the assassin's power armor after the crew pulled him and it out of the rubble. He was in a rather spacious room with lots of sensors and scanners and other things that Adam didn't care about scattered about the room.

The 'young' man was Hijitaka Kaneda, Adam's personal techie on Arasaka dime, and he was close to eighty years old at this point. Well, he was actually the techie responsible for 'experimental weapons platforms development and advancement', but considering that Adam was Arasaka's chief killborg, those were basically the same thing.

He stood about six feet tall, had sparse brown stubble and dark brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. Most notable were his arms, which he had four of. Two on each side of his body, each controlled with perfect precision. Three of them were fiddling with some sort of screen while the fourth lazy waved in his direction. He was looking fully at Adam, except the camera mounted on his right shoulder, which was still rotated at the screens.

He was in a lab coat, some sort of kevlar body armor underneath that covered his entire body, and loafers. They guy probably slept down here, Adam had never seen him actually leave. The glasses he on were entirely aesthetic, Hijikata wore them because he liked pushing them up whenever someone said something stupid.

"I approve, it's about time they stopped wasting their time with peashooters and started making guns again."

"Figures you would. ACPA grade?"

"More, you could probably use it, but it'd be a pain in the ass. That's probably why they had it on a quad-mounted ACPA, more space to fit the thing on the back than in the arms. You'd need a Dragoon body to handle the thing without an ACPA, and a DaiOni to use it effectively."

Adam remembered the DaiOni, he loved it. It was his favorite frame and he sincerely wished he got more chances to use it. 3.4 meters, 1.12 tons, all death, all destruction, entirely invincible. The Cyberskeleton was such an unbelievable disappointment to fight against in comparison, reliant some the stupid gimmick of gravity rather than pure killing power.

Speaking of the Cyberskeleton…

"The Cyberskeleton was absolute garbage."

"I know, I made that garbage afterall."

"Why?" Hijitaka normally did fairly good work, so the Cyberskeleton being meatshit was unusual.

"Higher ups demanded a humanoid, bipedal frame that used their fancy new gravtech. Fuckers know that the smallest gravtech emitters are still one ton of metal a piece. So I had to upscale it for the frame to hold the fucking thing."

"It still couldn't move without the antigrav."

"Right, so since gravtech emitters get more efficient the more of them you use, I put another one on to handle the weight of the first one. Which means a huge chunk of the system has to be dedicated to keeping the frame mobile at all."

"A technically successful frame."

"They clearly didn't want me to actually succeed this time, it was just about seeing if I could make their gravtech more efficient in the process. I succeeded, of course. One point one to three point two percent weight and bulk reduction across the board. All that for a three ton pile of shit that used a gimmick as its main form of attack."

"They reward you for that?"

"Yep, fifteen million eddies richer and a bottle of aspirin poorer. I get the better of them though when I slipped those sub-hands into the design, fucking worthless and they still gobbled it up. Thing didn't even have any pilot armor, just an exposed torso."

All the while, Hijitaka was looking over the design of the fancy new toy Adam picked up. Hijtaka was beginning to get the way he normally did when looking over a new gun. Of course, the man didn't consider any weapon below fifty caliber to be an actual gun, 'toys' he called those. Anything below one-hundred caliber he called peashooters. It made sense, he used to work on Artillery and naval cannons before Arasaka hired him to make weapon designs for them.

What do you know, what he had in front of him was in fact a proper gun to the high-class fixer.

"Speaking of which, you got your new student or whatever by tearing him out of the thing, didn't you? How'd he do in it? I was working while that business went down and I thought I'd ask you instead of watching the news."

"Tore through a Militech division, needed me to deal with him."

At this Hijitaka paused, and dedicated his attention fully to Adam.

"A division and you? In that pile of garbage?"

"Yes."

"...well I'll be damned, send him my way when he's free, I wanna get feedback from someone who actually pulled that off."

"Right, now I wanna thank you for the gift of the big gun you brought me, but I also wanna ask what you want. Normally you don't bother coming around anymore."

"I need a custom ACPA, Bipedal, that can handle a gun about that big, at least fifty percent as strong."

Hijitaka was getting the look on his face like he was thinking about something, which means he was thinking about something really fucking hard for it to show up visibly.

"...This for someone else? What chrome do they have?"

"Optics and Arms, they cannot get more."

"...give me a challenge, why don't you? Normally I'd tell you to fuck off but between those schematics and this gun I'd say you've earned a custom. I'll work on something in my free time, and get it to you in a few weeks. You'll have to pay me for the parts though."

"Deal."

"Alright, now buzz off, higher ups want this thing fully cracked before the week is over."

"Before I go, how long until the schematics are done?"

"It'll be months more, maybe about ten before they get done. The basics are all already there, we just have to put them together and integrate them to the Smasher standard. That's the hard part. We already got higher-up approval when I started ranting about 'increased mission viability through modular framework and viable machine and martial interface'."

Adam nodded and turned to walk away, but then Hijitaka spoke up again.

"Oh, Adam, how much chrome did you say the pilot of this thing had?"

"Minimal, from what I could tell, the ACPA took care of the handling."

"...I recognize some of the software. Militech basics for the most part."

Adam knew that Hijitaka wouldn't just say that out of nowhere, so he was clearly going somewhere with this.

"And?"

"...Smartware chip interface has the hallmarks of being a Blackhand custom."

—

"Your new chrome is ready to use, Mr. Smasher! Thank you for bearing with us at the PR department." Chiri Tanaka said to him as he looked at himself in the mirror they had in the room.

It had been some time since he had lips, and the feeling of anything on the lower half of his face was strange. He had no complaints about the rest of it, it didn't impact his functionality when it came to slaughtering meat, and it should be compatible with the new chrome Hijikata was cooking up some months from now.

The only two in the room were himself and the woman who had been annoying him for the last few days, but it looked like they were finally starting to settle on a design for his 'marketing' and 'customer appeal'. Adam personally felt like this was all a waste of time, but he knew that going in when he agreed to cooperate with this.

He flexed his new arm, it had been a while since he had a fight good enough to need anything replaced. To think it was with something that had the bastards influence was just his fucking luck. An entire fight ruined by his fucking existence. It was typical of the fucker to do just that.

"Look at me Smasher, a tenth of your chrome and still kicking your ass!"

Adam snarled at the memory, and noticed the PR woman flinched. Ah, she was still here, he would have thought she would be gone by now. Adam took a good look at the woman.

She was hot, he admitted. She was a little woman with non-garbage hair that so many meatbags nowadays seemed to love. Just a bob cut that went a little below her chin. Her breasts were nice and handful-sized, her hips were a bit meaty. She was in one of those office lady outfits that were somehow still popular even to the modern day.

Adam supposed that made sense, you can't beat the classics. She was practically shivering in front of him, but not moving away as his gaze crawled over her body. Such a timid little thing, huh?

--SCENE CUT DUE TO LEWD--

Several hours later, Adam Smasher opened the door leading to the hallway and beheld the two guards that were stationed outside. They were looking straight ahead, their faces the picture of pure professionalism. Adam walked by them and to the elevator, he had things to do and an apprentice to teach.

As he walked he heard them talk behind him.

"Holy shit, Adam Smasher fucks."

Damn right he does.

It had been one month since he tore the kid out of the Cyberskeleton, three weeks since he started training him, twenty days since he sent the girl to get handler and overwatch training, eighteen days since PR finally settled on a fucking design, ten days since his new gemini came in, four days since he got the custom ACPA from Hijitaka for the other girl. Today was the last of the vacation days he put in, and the last day of training the kid (and others he supposed, they were going to be there too).

He had a test planned. Arasaka has a number of gangs that they discretely supply weapons to in Night City, keeps them armed and violent, in exchange for some sort of benefit that Adam didn't care about. Asking his own handler if any of them have become more trouble than they're worth gave him a small list of minor gangs and the info Arasaka kept on them.

Picking the one that pissed him off the most, Adam got their files and brought them back to coordinate a raid. The final test was simple, they were going to wipe this gang off the face of the earth, and the kids were going to decide how. Adam would be following their orders while doing so, to see if any of them learned anything about the butchery he was trying to bestow upon them.

If they passed, good. If they failed, Adam would cut their free time down and force them to take remedial lessons. It was simple enough. He didn't think they would fail, he had taught them well enough for that. But who knows, they might surprise him in new and disappointing ways. Uriel told him to cut down on the cynicism, Adam grumbled.

His floor was quite a bit different now. It was mostly the same in terms of underlying structure and the new furniture was all bulky and heavy, but it all could support his weight. Mostly solid blocks of metal with interiors of honeycombed aluminum to give it the strength it needs to support his six-hundred pounds of steel (and other metals) body. All of them with slightly deep rims around their edges to keep the cushions in place inside for the meatbags who needed such things.

The amount of cat hair was slightly unfortunate, but the girls cleaned the place once a day to make sure none of it got anywhere important. He made sure that they did, they want to keep a fucking pile of meat in his home they were going to keep it clean. The beast hadn't made him mad enough to kill it yet, but it was a close thing. Fucking meat-beast having the audacity to get it's shitty fur on his chrome, he wanted to stomp on it. Fortunately, he didn't have to burn the new decorations, because the gremlin didn't buy any. The only things in his home were furniture, blankets and cushions and what not, and other useful things.

It was good, the gremlin avoided annoying him with useless garbage, and had a decent knowledge of media that was actually good. Although, the P.K. Dick tattoo probably should have told him that long before. She made references, if he was feeling chatty he'd make a reference back, the other two were fucking oblivious each and every time.

He walked into what was now his kitchen, and saw the kids were sitting around, eating something, and watching one of his old vids. He had to break out the disks, dvd player, and adapter cables for that one. It was hooked up to the wall-mounted screen in front of the three places to sit. A heavily reinforced two-seated, a heavily reinforced one-seater, and in the center, his bench.

The kid and his girl were on the two-seater, yellow jacket over them like a makeshift blanket. The gremlin was over in the one-seated, foot-long sandwich in both hands and pistol resting on her lap. Her trigger discipline was so poor it was insulting when she first started carrying around firearms in the home, he took her guns and unloaded them until she started resembling a competent soldier with them.

It took two weeks before he let her have live ammo in the building again.

They were watching Blade Runner, one of his favorites. It was a classic for a reason, although he hadn't seen it in years (decades?) by this point. His files were ready for a briefing, but the vid was halfway over already. It would be a complete waste of time to reset a vid he already memorized.

"Oh hey big guy, we're about halfway done with it, want us to start over for ya?" The gremlin spoke through a mouthful of bread and meat and probably other things. Adam grunted, that would delay the briefing for the final test even more, so he walked over to his bench and sat down on it. He'll let it finish, he was feeling nostalgic for something actually watchable instead of that VR shit. Why yes, he wanted to be vulnerable to ambush for the next few hours, what a fantastic idea. What a worthless way to spend time, actively detrimental to living. How anyone in the world was a VR addict, he would never know.

"No. Briefing after."

"Gotcha." She said and went back to watching (and eating). The kid spoke up at this.

"What about?"

"Final test, see if you all are up to par."

"Gotcha, choom."

The vid played until it was over. They were quiet, thankfully, otherwise he'd have to threaten them again. The meatbeast had the audacity to lay against his feet again, but he ignored it as best as he could.

Eventually, the vid was over. He had forgotten just how good it was. Well, he didn't actually forget, he just didn't have it at the forefront of his mind until being reminded of it. Uriel said that was the same thing, Adam ignored him. Uriel grumbled and went back to synthesizing music of his world.

Adam got up and waved the kids to come over to the larger kitchen table (why did they buy it if they were just going to eat in the bench room? Wait a minute, he's the one who technically bought it. Fucking kids wasting his money.). Once they were all seated, Uriel pulled up the relevant documents and sent them to the table-screen, causing them to appear in front of them.

"The test is the complete elimination of the Ironhands minor gang, led by Jeremiah "Johnny Ironhands" Smith. You three will be planning it. I will be joining you. I will be equipped with an unmodded Tsunami Nue and an unmodded knife. I will not be using any active-type chrome. I will not be using Panzerfaust. You have three hours to decide your approach. They must be eliminated before noon tomorrow."

Adam got up and walked off, leaving them to their planning session. He'd be back after their time was up, and follow whatever plan they had concocted. All the information they needed were in those documents and files, they'd either succeed or prove to have been a waste of his time.

He went into the armory to get his mentioned equipment and busy himself with maintenance and observation. Uriel set a timer for three hours from now, so Adam could drift off as much as he wanted here.

The Tsunami Nue was one of Adam's favorite guns. It was unpretentious, it didn't have some stupid gimmick, it shot a big bullet. Ten rounds of .45 caliber bullets, the only software on the thing being a small light that turns red when the chamber was empty for the few meatbags that couldn't fucking count. It was a handgun, it did handgun things, it did them well. He had picked it specifically for its practicality and functionality (that and the very loud boom it made when firing, Adam liked that part a whole lot).

His knives were custom tailored to his size. Adam was eight feet of steel tall, had an eight foot arm span, and hands big enough to crush a normal man's skull. A normal four-inch knife was just not going to work for him, so he had to order custom. His personal knife was another thing he liked a lot. It was one foot of solid steel, a shortsword for a smaller man. It had a good grip, it was balanced for throwing if he needed to do that. It was a knife, it did knife things, it did them well.

Making sure the gun was loaded, his belt had three clips of ammunition, and that his knife was sharp and ready, Adam then let his mind wander. By this time tomorrow they'd be taking jobs again, and he'd let the boy start getting chrome at a pace that Adam knew he could handle. The kid occasionally drifted off, but Adam cutting him off cold had prevented any problems from occurring since. That and his girl stepping up to do girly things had helped.

The first time they came back and the boy saw the girl in an apron, he wasn't able to move, just stare. The girl's face went red as she told him to sit down and wait for the food to be done, and the kid's wasn't much better. Finally got around to acting like some approximation of a couple, took them long enough, Uriel commented. Adam grunted, he didn't know jack shit about romance, his last girlfriend made that clear to him.

Just thinking about that bitch made him mad, so Adam distracted himself by going over the equipment the kids were likely to bring along on the test.

The first obvious thing was the kid and his chrome. Human-peak for all the parts that he has replaced and a S-grade (Smasher grade) Sandevistan. Kid was probably going to wear his Arasaka body armor and that yellow jacket. The Arasaka body armor was used for the better grunts. It looked a whole lot like the american police riot armor from Uriel's world. It protected moderately well from most things, it was good and unsophisticated. You can't hack bullshit that doesn't have any electronics.

Kid would probably use the weapons he had been practicing on for the last few weeks, a Tsunami Nue and knife of his own. Maybe he'd buy something else before the mission with that bank account Adam had shared with the gremlin, maybe not.

The girl would be overwatch, no doubt. Her job would be to look at all of their cameras, vitals, and the files on the targets they already had on hand and then make sure everyone was coordinated and stayed alive. A good overwatch was worth it's weight in fucking platinum, so getting a consistent one was very valuable indeed. Adam had bullied one of the Arasaka-dime overwatch operators to train her in it, so she should be competent by this point. His handler knew not the fuck with him another time, so she was nice and fucking polite while training the girl in mission handling. She knew what Adam would be doing to her otherwise.

The gremlin would be loaded up in her brand new ACPA and using her new miniaturized naval railgun. She called herself a Metal Gear the first time she put it on, and Adam corrected her saying the gun was completely non-nuclear in nature. Both the ACPA and gun were test-types that Hijitaka had worked out, and if they proved useful then Arasaka heavy-snipers would be getting a nice upgrade in a few months time. Good job Miliatech, you bunch of meatbags, you gave the enemy a nice fat advantage for them to fuck you with. Better bite the pillow.

The ACPA was about five hundred pounds of weight that required the pilot to have Cyberarms. Well, more specifically it required the wearer to have Quick-Change Mounts for both arms. The wearer got into the central chamber, and as part of the start-up process their arms were wired into the suit itself. It would be nice if they had enhanced optics as well, but it wasn't required. Adam paid for the gremlin to get both of these things, the Quick-Change Arm Mounts and Cyberoptics with the standard works (Infrared, Telescopic, Low-Light, and Thermal). That was all she needed to be effective in her role, and Adam wasn't going to let her get anything else.

Seriously, she wanted Gorilla Arms but none of the skeletal reinforcement needed to make that extra strength useful or weight worth it. That was stupid, and Adam told her so. She pouted for the rest of the day like the gremlin she was. She certainly cheered right the fuck up when her new ACPA and gun came in.

The entire ACPA was designed to handle the weight and bulk of the new railgun, and by letting the arms be replaced entirely more of the frame could be dedicated to that without needing to worry about where the wearer's own arms would fit into them. When the mission was done, simply take the ACPA off and get an ally to install one's old arms again (or just replace the arms one at a time, it took a hot minute to do but it was faster than a full replacement every time). The rest of the ACPA was simply as much armor as could reasonably be fit without slowing the wearer down, a standard stealth system, and a mission pack for extra railgun ammunition.

Its design was vaguely similar to the robotic child of a gorilla and rabbit. He wasn't sure how much sense that made, but it certainly looked functional.

It was called the 1T-KYU "Test-type Kyudoka" ACPA, and it was pretty much everything that Adam asked Hijitaka for. The man did good work, and was even paid a few million more for the design and further testing models by the higher ups. There was a reason they tolerated his eccentricities.

The gun was not quite as good as Adam was hoping, but not quite as bad as he was fearing.The final result was about three times the firepower of a standard Techtronika SPT32 Grad, at about five times the weight, and zero recoil. For those of you at home, this meant it was about sixty pounds of gun. It was big, it was bulky, but it shot a very big and very dangerous projectile. It was only about sixty percent as powerful as the monster he ripped off that dog a while back, but it was smaller and easier to mass produce by a large margin.

It was called the 1T-YMI "Test-type Yumi" Railgun. Yes, Hijitaka was both Japanese and very uncreative when it came to naming things. It wouldn't be knocking down buildings like the actual base model anytime soon, but it would turn practically anything that was less armored into chunks of colored rain. Adam liked it a whole bunch, and couldn't wait to order an actual prototype model for himself when they rolled off the assembly lines. Hijitaka earned himself another few million from the higher ups for its design.

With both of these, the gremlin turned from a liability to a potential asset, albeit one that had to be kept at a distance from the actual fighting. A standard borg that got right next to her would turn her into mince fairly quickly no doubt, and a Pazerfaust practitioner would be a death sentence in about ten seconds, but so long as she was far away and free to keep shooting the Yumi then she would be helpful.

Adam could probably take a shot or five from it, but not many. A lesser borg would probably be taken out in a single shot, and the less said about meatbags the better. Like Adam said earlier, colored rain.

With this, a competent team was beginning to form. Two close-to-mid range brawlers, a long range fire support, and an overwatch operator. Hell, Uriel could even act as quick-hack support and another mid-to-long range gun if Adam brough the Gemini body with him. A veritable assault squad was in its barebones state. All they needed now was a dedicated scout and Adam would have a strike unit ready to kill things that Arasaka pointed him at. Things were looking up, so he was expecting it to turn sour sooner or later.

'Uriel, how much time do the kids have left?'

'About two and a half hours.'

Goddamn, this was going to take a while. Adam decided to go over old combat logs again, that'll be fun. Uriel pulled up the time he tore through a Nomad caravan with his bare hands, and Adam let it play.

—

After the kids had decided on a plan, it was time for them to suit up, sync their vitals and cameras with the girl's computer, and head out. Hijitaka told them to save all the footage, as the weapons department wanted to go over them afterwards for data on how the new test-types actually perform. That was perfectly agreeable.

When Chiri asked him to send her a recording of it, it was slightly less agreeable. This was a test-type performance, he didn't know if the higher ups wanted it getting out yet. He told her to ask them first, and she nodded in agreement.

She wasn't as timid as she was before, apparently her son was doing well for himself on the corporate ladder right now, and was going into public relations as well. She told him coyly that it was because he was a big fan of "The Butcher of Arasaka", and she showed him pictures of when he was a brat. The brat form of the kid was wearing a mask of his old face and shooting a toy car with the nerf-gun equivalent of his arm missiles.

Adam snorted a bit at the image. Fucking meat-brat didn't know what Adam got into in his spare time, namely turning civilians into chunks of meat. Or maybe he did? He was a corpo-brat, it was certainly possible that he knew and didn't care. Eh, Adam didn't care either way, he had a PR agent already.

He considered her for a moment, before sending a message. It had been a bit since last time, and he was feeling up for it after this test regardless of its outcome.

[Be in your office when I get back.] It was not a request.

She paused at that, face turning a bit red. Her smile grew a bit wider as she ducked her head and nodded. He walked off to join up with the kids again. They entered the elevator and started descending to the ground floor for transport to the test site. His last sight of the woman was her pumping her fist in excitement. Heh, overeager little thing.

The kid and gremlin were looking at him. The kid spoke up, one eyebrow raised and a smug grin on his face.

"What's that? Does the Smasher have an Input now?" Kid probably thought he was being teasing. Unfortunately for his fun, Adam Smasher doesn't get embarrassed. He replied in a bored tone.

"No, I just fuck her when I feel like it."

Both of them sputtered at that, and the conversation about that topic was closed fairly succinctly. Soon enough they were in the transport and moving along to the test site.

It was on the border of scav territory and polite society (well not really, but polite as street-trash could be really), in an old and abandoned tunnel that used to be a subway. There was trash littering the area, both meat and actual, and graffiti covering just about every surface. A few actual rats scurrying about, a few street rats scurrying about.

There was every kind of human filth in the corners of the alleyways, and even more in the cracks in the road.

It was exactly the kind of place Adam could butcher a family of four and no one would come to help. It was also the kind of place in which that family of four would all have shotguns, including the toddler. It was his third favorite kind of place, right after an active warzone and wherever he was when he was fucking a good looking gal.

It would be a good learning experience.

The Ironhands (god, what a fucking stupid name for a bunch of drugged up gangers) were located in what used to be a repair lobby beneath the surface. The rough plan was simple, Adam would enter the tunnel through this stairway as it had more twists and turns but less alternate paths.

The kids would continue down the road a ways, and enter into the tunnels through a second stairway, it had paths that were longer and straighter, but had more alternative paths. This would allow the gremlin to fire at anything that entered the long main tunnel and the kid would clear out the side tunnels to force opponents into the firing line of the gremlin.

If either of them began to get overwhelmed by firing power, the would fall back to the stairway and pick off everything that came for them as a team. Adam, in the unlikely event that he would be overwhelmed, would also fall back, and use the stairway as a chokepoint in the same way.

The Ironhands had at least two ACPAs, gifted to them from Arasaka for some service performed a few years back. They would have to be taken out by the Yumi railgun, nothing except Adam's fists when using Panzerfaust could breach their armor. Adam needing to use Panzerfaust in this mission was a fail-state, so they would save at least three railgun slugs for each.

It was possible that the Ironhands had something in the tunnels that could also breach the ACPA armor, but one never makes plans for things that weren't guaranteed.

It was simple, it was effective, it was probably the best for low level ganger trash like these guys.

Adam was almost proud of the kids, it wasn't perfect but he could save his critiques for after they were done with this.

"Alright, operative sound off." The girl said over their radiolink.

"Operative alpha ready." The boy responded.

"Operative beta ready." The gremlin responded.

"Operative sigma ready." Adam wasn't sure why they skipped so many letters, but he sounded off all the same. Here he wasn't Adam Smasher, right now he was just a borg operative for the kids to use to kill a whole heap of street trash. It was nostalgic, and reminded him of his younger days, before he was Adam fucking Smasher.

"Alright operatives, I'm not seeing any activity, feel free to begin the mission." The girl stated.

They nodded at each other, and Adam descended into the abandoned gutters of a bleeding city.

…Uriel, cut it out with this poetry stuff, he's on a job right now.

The Ironhands, had they any sense about them, knew that Adam and the kids were here. The staccato boom of the pistol in Adam's hand echoing through their tunnels should have told them. Even if they were stupid enough to not know what that was, their cameras being hacked and control over them being ripped away should have alerted their rudimentary security. Even if they were stupid enough to still not recognize the danger at that point, the systematic murder of their thugs should have alerted them.

If all of that was still not enough, then they should have been killed by some other gang long before Adam ever stepped foot in this abandoned railway. It was certainly possible that they were too small for larger gangs to bother with, and too defensible for smaller gangs to take over by virtue of their ACPAs.

If that was true, then this group wouldn't be a good test for the kids, and this entire exercise would be pointless. Thankfully, the voice of the girl over the comm (did they call it something else nowadays?) removed that notion.

"Operative Sigma, Five guns at the next choke point ahead." Ah good, they were already beginning to set up ambushes for him.

Unfortunately for them, he was Adam Smasher, and their puny guns were mostly ineffective against his plasteel frame. Not entirely ineffective though, so he grabbed the corpse of the gangster he just butchered and held it in front of him as he walked.

Up ahead, he could see a doorway that opens up into a larger room, but no guns. They must be to either side ready to fire at whatever came through the entrance. So the best way to approach this was…

Adam threw the corpse through the doorway, letting it fly through at his own chest height. Meanwhile he tucked into a destructive run and slid against the floor, tearing up the old concrete with his chrome body. The meats waste their shots on the corpse above his head as he enters the room at ground level. Three gangers to his right, two to his left.

Adam shot the two with shotguns first, their heads painting the old walls behind them red. The boom of the pistol echoed through the tunnel with the noise of their own shots. Like a symphony of violence, Adam's favorite music.

The others had mid-caliber rifles of some sort, although Adam couldn't recognize the model by sight. It was a common trend with all the gangsters in this particular gang so far that he noticed, all of them carrying guns that he couldn't recognize. It was suspicious, but their performance so far wasn't something he needed to be concerned with.

The others were finally beginning to realize that the corpse still flying through the air wasn't the thing killing their friends and began to turn their guns to his position on the floor. As they were doing that, he shot two more of them and threw his knife at the last. With all the red painting the walls and the new ornament nailed to it, Adam was beginning to realize he might have a career in interior decorating.

Uriel chuckled at the joke.

Adam stood and took his knife back, the corpse falling to the ground as he did so. That encounter brought him down another four bullets. He had one left in this magazine, and three full magazines on his belt. Thirty-one shots left, he'd have to use his knife more often from here on out if possible.

Normally he'd start picking up some of their guns and using them to help tide him over on ammo, but as he was not instructed to do that by the kids he refrained. That was one of the many small mistakes they made, but overall they were doing good thus far.

"...Another three coming your way, Beta."

"Affirmative."

"Side tunnel six cleared, move up when possible, Beta."

"...Targets down, moving up to side tunnel 7 entrance."

Their communication wasn't perfectly efficient, but it was good enough. Another passing grade in that regard. Adam continued walking through the twisting but mostly single-pathed tunnel.

A gangster waiting for him on a side-path corner, disabled with a knife stab around the corner before he could get his shot off.

Another with a shotgun, in a balcony above. Disabled by throwing his knife hard enough to shatter his un-chromed and un-helmeted head. He had meant for that to pierce, but he wasn't expecting the meat to have absolutely zero head protection. That was unfortunate, now his knife handle was bloody too.

Another two with sledgehammers and chrome arms. Killed by stepping into their attacks, letting the handle of the hammer ineffectually hit his shoulder armor, and donut-ing them with a punch immediately afterwards. Adam idly thought back to his own hammer, man that was fun to use. Turns meat into watermelons, they don't even really stand a chance.

"What's your status Sigma?" The girl said.

"Fully operational. Down to thirty-one shots." Adam replied.

"Affirmative, you'll be coming up to their main room. The ACPA's are inside. Hold your position until Alpha and Beta clear their side."

"Affirmative."

They needed the Yumi for the ACPAs for this exercise, which means it'll be Adam and the kid's job to clear out the rest of the fodder and then try to keep the ACPAs still long enough for the gremlin to line up clear shots on them from the end of the tunnelway. The best way to do that would be to have at least two of them in the room from different angles to split the gang's fire.

Another small mistake on their part, Adam could resist quite a bit more firepower than most. The best course of action here would be for Adam to make some noise to draw suppressive fire from the gang and the kid to use the Sandevistan to get behind them and start taking out key targets while Adam held off the ACPAs. Still, like everything else they have done so far it was 'good enough' and Adam would hold off on telling them until after the mission regardless.

A ganger was sent up to investigate the tunnel he was in. Adam didn't want to go in front of the doorway yet, so he had to use another pistol shot. The meat fell, and Adam changed his magazine out for a fresh one. Thirty shots to go, ten before another reload would be needed.

Another meat came up, and was about to chuck a grenade down the tunnel. This was a good idea, indirect fire at an unknown hostile, but unfortunately for them he was Adam Smasher. He used another shot to hit the grenade in the meat's hand, causing it to explode prematurely. Smoke and blood filled that section for a brief moment, and the meat was now a scattered pile of chunks.

They were nervous now, and probably wouldn't send another meat for the slaughter for a while. By that point the kid and gremlin would be in position and the real fun would begin. Sure enough, a few minutes of tense waiting on their end (it was downright leisurely for Adam) later and the girl called over the comms.

"All operatives in position, begin the final procedure now."

Adam picked up the corpse and threw it ahead of him again. It was one of his favorite strategies for drawing fire away from himself when entering chokepoints. They almost always fired at the corpse for about a full half-second before realizing he was there, at which point half of them were probably dead already.

As he entered he saw lines of guns behind barricades in a semicircle in front of an old office of some sort. Probably the main building from which they operated out of. Hunkered behind two massive pillars were the apparent forms of the ACPAs. Each one held a vehicle-sized machinegun of some sort with belt-fed ammunition that came from an ammo pack on their back.

Adam didn't recognize the models. Unlike the guns, that was actually a worrying sign. Unknown guns were one thing, unknown ACPAs are a completely different story. He wasn't particularly worried, but it was something he had to consider moving forwards. Where was the nearest cover?

There, the pillar that had fallen over…

And it had an explosive laser-tag trap at its base. A single shot with his pistol disabled the laser before he got there, rendering the trap inert until it could be wired to a new trigger. That is to say, long after all these meatbags were dead. Now behind cover he could start picking off meats that decide to poke their heads out for longer than half a second.

Six more dead meatbags later, the ACPAs finally started firing at his position. He ducked back and saw what the kid was doing. Using his Sandevistan every time he poked out of cover to fire to take out more targets, moving minimally while he did so. That was something Adam beat into his head, the mechanics of using the Sandevistan.

You see, all chrome has little quirks to it that makes using it less strenuous on the body. Junkies who pick up Sandevistans burn themselves out really quickly most of the time because they're using it to physically move faster. The real value to the Sandevistan was the faster reaction times. The less one physically moved while using it, the less straining it was to use. Thus, a simple movement of the arms and eyes to take out six additional targets was both more effective and less damaging to the user than running away from gunfire with it.

Sandevistan speed thinking was cheap, actual movement was expensive, in terms of cost to the body. The way the kid was using it now would let him keep up the pace for hours rather than half an hour or similar. Move with efficiency, and you can move for longer periods, fucking simple in concept and so many just don't realize it. It's also why the kid burned himself out so fucking fast in the Cyberskeleton, moving around three effective tons of weight was fucking taxing no matter how you sliced it.

Good, passing grade, A plus kid. Keep this up and you might be a good fight in a couple years.

By about this point, a dozen or so of the gangsters in cover were now thinly spread over their allies, and they realized that there were only two guns that were doing this to them. Needless to say, their morale was in tatters. They also knew that they wouldn't be surviving if they surrendered though, so they kept shooting ineffectually.

It was at this point the pillar Adam was behind was about to disappear, on account of the vehicle machine gun using ACPAs firing at him. He had to find new cover fairly soon. He looked down to the plastic explosive that was intended to explode on him as he approached this pillar.

Uriel armed it, Adam threw it around towards one of the ACPAs, Uriel detonated it. The armored form of the ACPA staggered out of its cover. The explosion probably didn't do more than shake it up a bit, it was fine overall.

But it was now out of cover, and the gremlin nailed it with a railgun round through the center-torso. A titanic boom echoed through the tunnel and probably deafened every one of the gangsters that didn't have cyberaudios installed. The ACPA fell as a hole appeared where its wearer used to be. Good, it was strong enough to take out something of this level. Adam fought down the grin on his face as Uriel sang a lyric.

'Shot through the heart! And you're to blame, darling you give guns a bad name!'

The other ACPA's fire cut off as it noticed its fellow die, and the wearer obviously panicked at that, ducking further behind its own cover. That was annoying, but it didn't matter too much as now it wasn't firing at him. Adam looked at the rest of the gangsters, and noticed the remaining ones all had low-caliber guns. Good, the kid correctly prioritized higher firepower targets. Nothing else out there could threaten his chrome, so Adam just stood openly and started firing at the stragglers.

Bullets ricocheted uselessly off his chrome, barely scratching the fucking paint as he casually eliminated them. The coward in the ACPA was the only thing left that could hurt him, and it was currently shaking in its seven hundred and fifty (by sight estimates on Adam's part) pounds of plasteel. A potential monster of combat and these fuckers wasted it on sentry duty, Adam was almost insulted. Give it a shotgun and let it roam the tunnels, that would fucking be unstoppable for most everyone short of a full borg in straight combat.

Goddamn he hated meatbags sometimes.

The kid took their firing on him as an opportunity to move into their ranks, taxing but probably worth it at this point, getting to their sides and putting a bullet or knife hole in the fuckers that hid themselves behind cover the entire time.

It was all over at this point. The ACPA tried to fire at Adam while behind cover as much as it was, but couldn't get a good angle before he was upon it. He punched the gun out of it's hands and grabbed it by the wrists. It struggled, but his chrome was top of the line.

Adam took a step back, dragging the ACPA into a firing line for the gremlin. Grooves of concrete torn up by their feet and he took another step. The wearer was screaming something that he didn't bother paying attention to. Eventually another boom echoed through the tunnels and the ACPA was torn in half at the waist by the shot.

There didn't seem to be anything else firing at them in the area, but it was best to make sure of it. So he and the kid went through the standard procedure for gang-clearing missions by stabbing everything that looked like a corpse at least once, before slowly clearing the office interior room by room.

It looked like everything was dead, so Adam called over the comms.

"Ironhands gang eliminated, mission successful, passing grade."

There was a bit of cheering from the kids as they chatted a bit about their job done well (enough). Uriel went ahead and called in the second responders to sweep the area and loot everything Arasaka cared about here. Their jobs were over, and they could leave once the second responders were on-sight.

Adam let them celebrate a bit before running their mood with a mental grin.

"Now we review your mistakes, I counted forty nine."

The three immediate groans caused Uriel to start laughing.

—

The kids were tired as they sat in front of him on the other side of the kitchen table. Adam had just finished telling them, in exhausting detail, everything they did wrong or inefficiently and exactly why. It was a debriefing session that took the better part of three hours, but it was educational for them.

It happened after he visited Chiri, of course. He gave the kids a few hours to unwind and try to figure out where they went wrong themselves. He gave partial credit if they could.

Adam was satisfied, if they kept improving at this rate, they might be an actual help against the meatfucker.

"...hey big guy, we did good, right?" The gremlin asked, a bit unsure.

"Overall, yes."

"So we deserve a little reward, right?"

"The reward is learning."

The gremlin gasped dramatically and threw herself on the table to grab at his chrome with her grubby little hands.

"Come on big guy! We've been cooped up in the tower for a month! Can't we go out!?"

Oh, that's what she wanted? Adam considered it. His vacation days didn't technically expire until noon tomorrow, and they needed at least eight hours of sleep. He supposed a bit of walking around would do them good (the girls that was, the boy had been going out regularly with Adam to kill random scavs. They had to stop that because the scavs began wising up about two weeks in, or their population was too low now, one of those two.).

"We stay out no later than 3 AM, you all sleep by 4 AM." Adam eventually said. All three of them cheered at that. Fucking ungrateful brats, he should throw them out to see if they're still cheering.

"Come on, let's go to the old lady's place! She has the best drinks!"

Adam supposed he should bring out his gemini body for this, but his well-honed instinct told him that going out without his full firepower was probably still a bad idea at this point. Eh, he'd just remove the shoulder missiles (but not the arm missiles, he kept those) and throw on one of his old leather dusters. That'd keep his branding hidden underneath and with his new face he should be mostly unrecognizable. Most folks don't associate 'Adam Smasher' with 'wearing clothes' after all.

His duster was another custom order, designed in such a way he could strap it on around the bulk of his shoulder-guards. The end result was that it looked like he was wearing the duster underneath the shoulder-plates. It was a bit awkward to put on with his new aesthetics changing the exact layout of his plating, but the end result looked about as good as ever.

How long has it been since he wore clothes?

Soon enough he and the kids were ready, and they stared at him a bit. He stared back until they shrugged and the four of them got into the elevator. They went out and Adam followed the kids absentmindedly, looking out for threats as they led him to wherever they wanted to go.

Adam drew stares as he walked the streets, but that was because he was eight feet of pure chrome. As far as he was aware PR was keeping his actual appearance under wraps until they could do a big reveal for it on his next job. Same thing with the kids, he knew the civvies didn't know the full details of their apprenticeship under him, just that Adam Smasher had some kids following him around now. Info Brokers probably knew a lot more though, and surely some people would connect the kids in front of him to 'Adam Smasher must be behind them'.

He had only a passive interest in this little trip, and was fully planning on sitting in some corner where he could watch them all and staying there until they got bored of their outing. It was a good plan.

The kids walked down to some bar lit by blue and yellow lighting. Uriel recognized it as the bar that Maine's crew went to, although he felt like he was forgetting something important. So did Adam, for that matter. There were all the typical bar things that Adam recognized, and that Uriel recognized as well.

The bouncer there greeted the kids with a 'holy shit, thought you chooms were dead.' and there was a happy reunion between them all. The bouncer didn't recognize him, and the kids saying that Adam was with them got him in without trouble.

It was inside the bar itself that Adam and Uriel saw the sign above the Bar that they realized where they were.

'Afterlife'

'Fucking hell Uriel, get a better memory.'

'Fuck off Adam, you forgot too.'

The kids went in and greeted the bartender like old friends, which they probably were. They too had an almost tearful reunion, but Adam had very little interest in it. Adam knew that any second now he would be set upon by one of the most dangerous predators of the concrete jungles of NC…

"Fancy seeing you here, Smasher." The voice of a mature woman called out to his side, and he saw Rogue Amendiares with a pistol pointed at his head, five other meatbags with guns pointed in his direction behind her. She did not sound happy.

…The cougar.

Adam could kill all of them right now, probably faster than any of them could really respond, but that would ruin the kid's night out. The kids looked back and seemed to simultaneously remember that Adam fucking Smasher had probably killed more people that most people in NC combined, and would undoubtably be subject to hostilities in bars. Adam was used to this, and didn't really care besides, he didn't go to bars anyways.

But the kids were looking nervous, so Adam let Uriel handle the de-escalation here. Uriel knew just what to do.

"Your sense of fashion is still garbage." a simple observation, a true opinion from Adam Smasher, and something completely inappropriate to the situation. In short, the perfect way to force everyone here to suffer a soft reboot. A pause as everyone processed that statement.

"...excuse me?" Rogue said, baffled but still furious.

"I stand corrected, it's gotten worse." Adam continued. Before they had a chance to process that part of the statement, he continued.

"You shaved the sides of your hair, I don't know why meatbags do that, it always looks ugly. You did that forty years ago too and it was trash then as well. It's marginally improved by the length but that's not enough to make up for the sides."

"Your choker used to be hot, but now you have the neck part of a turtleneck sweater there. The ugliest part of an ugly sweater and you decided that's what you wanted there."

"Your jacket used to be fine, black biker leathers can look good, but now it's some yellow bullshit with square holes and a midriff. The midriff can look fine but the rest of it clashes horribly, and the words in the center are more meaningless bullshit. "Survive"? You might as well have a necklace with the words "Breathe" on it."

"And your chrome is more pointless bullshit. You have vents on your face, what are they even there for? You have non-functional vents on your face, and they look ugly."

"I know for a fact you can afford rejuvenation treatments, why the hell do you look so old? Did you give up?

"The only part of you that isn't ugly now are the pants."

"Three out of ten, fix everything and try again."

Dead fucking silence in the room.

They completely forgot why they were initially hostile towards him as they took in the fashion based rant he just directed towards one of the most powerful women in NC. Everyone in the room was dumbfounded, except Rogue herself, who was furious.

She lowered the gun and stomped up to him, grabbing his jacket collar.

"You motherfucker, you don't know jack shit about looking good, you're wearing a duster and nothing else!"

"Still look better than you, you couldn't seduce a recruit in basic with the way you look now." Adam attacked one of the abilities she had the most pride in.

"You dumb borged-out bastard!" She took the bait. She had to prove him wrong now.

Uriel drew Rogue deeper and deeper into an argument about her looks, completely distracting her from whatever she was thinking about before. This had the intended side effect of causing all of her back up to slowly lower their own weapons and back down. This lets the kids talk to them and get back to socializing.

All Adam had to do was endure this conversation with this woman, who was the ex-girlfriend of a cheerleader he killed years ago. Still, as Uriel was simply reciting his own opinions on the woman, he let it happen.

Heh, it was surprisingly fun to rile this woman up. He should insult her more often.

Adam and Rogue eventually moved their argument over to one of the corners of Afterlife, in a place where Adam could still watch the kids as they had fun, and Rogue could growl at him out of sight from most of the rest of the bar. Adam was leaned against the wall, arms crossed, for even the reinforced seats of Rogue's bar were not enough to support his weight. Rogue was in the seat next to him, still angry but with a drink in hand as they looked over to the rest of Afterlife.

They proceeded to do what any two experienced mercs did at bars, grumble about the younger generations. She was still mad at him for insulting her state of dress in front of all her cronies, but as she didn't back down from arguing with the Butcher of Arasaka she was able to save face. Neither backed down, but the outcome of the argument changed from violence to cosmetics, so it didn't matter who won.

This was part of the careful posturing that Rogue had to do in order to maintain her position of powerful neutrality among the NC underworld. Adam was already pissed off about it, and this was the first time he bothered participating. There was still bad blood between them of course, but they were old mercs. Professionalism takes priority when not on the job. You don't pick fights you can't afford the consequences of.

For Rogue, this was her life and everything she's ever worked for. For Adam, this was the lives of the kids he had spent a month training up. This was not equal of course, but all she could do is accept it. One does not pick a fight with Adam Smasher and expect to win without an army at your back, and even that was an unlikely outcome.

So, postured conflict and show of force out of their way, they retired to a far corner to grumble about anything that came to mind. Rogue had zero desire to fight Smasher if she could avoid it, and that made sense. Adam wouldn't want to fight him either.

…Or would he? It'd be a good fight.

"So what changed this time, Smasher? You haven't been this talkative in decades now. One might think you're finally figuring out how to be a fucking human now."

Adam snorted at the implied insult.

"I'm better than you meatbags and we both know it." He stoically growled out, and nodded at the kids. "Got tired of the shitty backup bossman always gave me, thought I would train up my own."

"Kid slaughtered his way to 'Saka tower and let him live?"

"Job was to scrap the Ex-APCA he was in. It was scrapped. Boy was handling lots of chrome, has potential."

Rogue grunted unhappily at that, and took another drink from her glass. She continued her line of questioning.

"The others?"

"Boy likes them, so I got Arasaka to back off."

"By letting PR sink their claws into you."

Adam snarled at that. The implication of anyone except the long-term contract holder having 'their claws in him' was fucking insulting and they both knew it. Rogue glared a bit back, before conceding that point, leaning back in the seat again. She didn't apologize, that would show weakness, and neither of them did 'weak' anymore.

"You're on vacation, huh?"

"Until noon tomorrow."

Rogue cursed to herself. "If I had known that I would have been more bold. You fucker. I was paranoid at whatever the fuck 'Saka had you doing clearing out scav territory, but you were just doing that shit for fun."

Adam corrected her. "Not only fun, training the kid."

She considered this for a moment, taking another sip. "You trained the kid by roaming scav territory and killing everything that came at you for a month?"

"Three weeks."

"You're still the same bloodthirsty maniac underneath all that new stoicism."

Adam grunted in reply. Rogue gave an insincere chuckle at that. Her voice took on a mocking tone as she continued.

"What is it you used to rant about? 'Meat is inferior, get upgraded or get wiped out!'? What happened to that, huh?"

"I tired myself of evangelism." In a way, that was true. Adam was an old killer, and old killers don't see much point in talking anymore most of the time. All he needed was violence.

Rogue stopped for a minute as she processed the fact that he just made a joke. When she had, she gave a bitter laugh before quieting down for a few minutes. She finished off her drink in this time, Adam kept his focus on the kids as they were doing some sort of party trick involving bullets.

"PR knew what they were doing with you. You're downright charming with your new face now that you've mellowed out."

Adam grunted. "Bitch, I was always charming."

Rogue gave a bark of laughter. "Sure, tell yourself that Smasher."

Another silence, this one a bit more comfortable than the last. Rogue tapped the table and got one of her grunts to bring her another drink. The grunt was noticeably nervous around Adam, but managed to hand off the drink and get out of there before making a mistake due to it. Rogue sipped on it a bit more before speaking up again.

"...Smasher, earlier what you said about my style. How much of that was just you trying to piss me off and how much of it was true?"

Adam glanced over at her, to see a hint of red on her cheeks. Ah, she was tipsy, no wonder she's bothering with this question. All women get touchy when the topic of their beauty is brought up. If Adam wanted to be a gentleman, he'd call her beautiful still and say everything before was just to get her mad.

"All of it was to piss you off, all of it was true. Lying is for meatbags, I'm above it."

She growled at him for that.

"You motherfucker, you're lying right now. My fashion is fucking great and you know it."

"You gotten senile if you think that's true. You used to be charming, now you're just embarrassing."

She paused at that, and took another drink. She grunted after a moment more. "You fucker, just you wait, I'll blow you away next time."

"Next time?"

"You're the only fucker I can talk to that isn't intimidated by me, you're coming back here every now and again." It was a command, she didn't even bother to look at him while saying it. He didn't have to listen of course, the Reaper is a fair bit more important than the Queen of the Afterlife. He could kill all of them right now and there would be nothing they could do about it.

Adam snorted. He was only here because the kids asked to be here, and he wasn't about to ruin their night out.

"I'll make sure to bring the kids."

—

It was about twelve thirty the next day when the first job came in. The kids were rested and on standby, currently busying themselves with another one of his old vids. Adam was in the armory again, making sure everything was up to par for when they would deploy. Dragoon frame, one shoulder-mounted micro-missile launcher with 4 missiles, two arm mounted micro-missile launchers with six missiles each, four backup knives mounted on his arms and legs, two backup pistols mounted at his waist, An assault rifle in hands, and three additional clips on his belt for it.

The assault rifle he had was just another Arasaka HJSH-18 Masamune. It wasn't his favorite gun, but it would serve him well enough.

It should be enough for most jobs. If the job was a bit bigger than usual, he can grab more.

Unfortunately, the job he was sent was not one of the fun ones. Arasaka and Petrochem were entering renegotiations for the sale of fuel on the large scales that megacorporations operate on, and this was another bodyguard mission. He was to go and protect the Arasaka assets that ended up being selected for traveling to enter the negotiation table, so to speak.

This would include a representative team of finances, and the PR team that was going to coordinate with Petrochem's own PR team on the best way to break the 'happy news' of their cooperation to the public. It would be a delegation of five and Adam's own team to protect them. The probable reason why he and his new team were being sent on this was as a public unveiling of Arasaka's main attack dog's new aesthetics and his new team.

The representative of finances, his own lackeys, the PR representative, and a promising PR intern that was coming along for the job experience.

Adam had no idea why they didn't just do this over voice call or something, but who knows maybe daemons would eat them or some shit if they did that. All he knew is that at best this job would include conflict with nomads along the way.

Or punks that want to strike at corpo assets…

Or rival corpos that want to disrupt the meeting…

…Huh, maybe this job would be fun after all.

"We have a job, get geared up!" Adam yelled out to the main room.

"What?! Already?"

"Yes."

"Alright, alright, we're coming big guy!"

Damn brats, you should have already been doing that.

His new chrome matched up with the kid's own, who was clad in his body armor and iconic jacket (apparently PR had to pay royalties to Trauma Team in order to let him use it, but cashing in on the look was going to be worth it Chiri told him). He carried a shotgun (A VST-37 Pozhar, it seems), his pistol, and two knives.

The gremlin was in her new ACPA and holding her very big railgun with two backup shotguns strapped to her waist and a backup assault rifle on her back. She looked downright giddy, bouncing in place as she was.

The girl was now in a black leotard, with a flak jacket and armored gloves and boots, hair partially hidden under her new visored helmet. The girls gloves, boots, and helmet matched with the kids. She carried a submachine gun (An Arasaka Shigure), pistol, and her monowires in her arms. On a strap from her shoulder to her back was a duffle bag with all of her required comms equipment.

Each of them had an Arasaka marketing logo on their right breast. They looked downright cute, kids playing dress up to look like killers. Marketing was going to have a field day with them. Uriel wondered how they felt, now in service to a corporation they probably hated and still probably hate. Adam didn't actually care, so long as they did their jobs well.

"Come on."

Adam started walking to the vehicle meeting point. They would all be loading up into some transport and then be flying to the destination. For the day or so that the meetings would be held, it would be their duty to make sure no Arasaka employee died. There was nothing in the contract about preserving anyone else's lives, but it would be nice if they could ensure that the negotiations go through suitably by chipping in to protect Petrochem's employees too.

Adam relayed this to his team, but made sure they knew to not bother attempting to save someone at the cost of their own lives. They were carry-on soldiers on his behalf for this mission, and not bound by the long-term contract to protect Arasaka employees. He'd be damned before he lets his investment go to waste from one of them being stupid. If worst comes to worst, do what you can to help but don't stick your necks out for them.

This seemingly made them much happier to work for Arasaka, the knowledge that they didn't have to give up their lives for anyone in the company if worse came to worst. Adam wasn't in any danger himself either, he was Adam fucking Smasher, there wasn't a fucker alive who could kill him.

Not even Blackhand managed that, and he had a fucking nuke when he tried.

Adam and Uriel pointedly ignored the meatfucker to come for now. They were already taking steps to counter them.

Ah, he almost forgot.

"Boy, if you do well on this job, I will allow you a single chrome upgrade."

He didn't bother looking back to see how the kid reacted.

Eventually, they had reached the transport to see that the employees were already waiting for them, the only one who wasn't there was the finances representative himself. Adam grunted, another fucking corpo power play, to make the rest of them wait for the meat to show up. He was on a job right now, so unfortunately he couldn't kill him for the insult. In front of them were the two financial cronies, both of which were talking with each other about some numbers or whatever, and the PR delegation.

It was some guy who worked under Chiri, but in another area of specialization, Adam didn't know which. The intern was some brat about the kid's age, in a professional looking suit and with a weird blue bowl cut. He had some sort of screen-glasses on and he was reading over something.

The PR rep walked up to him and offered a hand. Adam begrudgingly took it and shook.

"Ah, Mr. Smasher, a pleasure to have you with us today. I'm Douglas Brown, and this is my intern, Katsuo Tanaka." Ah, this was Chiri's kid, wasn't it? Uriel then remembered that this kid used to bully the kid, and Adam frowned mentally. Ah, well this would be a decent test of his professionalism he supposed.

Chiri's kid looked up from his screen, and did a proper greeting to him. "A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Smasher." Huh, actual respect from a corpo brat felt strange.

The two then were about to introduce themselves to the kids, but were stopped when Chiri's kid caught sight of the kid and all but recoiled in shock.

"M-Martinez?"

The kid hummed a bit, he wasn't happy about meeting this kid again. The PR rep spoke up at this, looking between his intern and the kid briefly. "Oh, do you two know each other?"

The kid looked at Adam, before looking back at the intern and rep. "We went to school together, but that's about it." Huh, seems like he wasn't going to let his feelings get in the way of the job. Good, that's going to be required on jobs for corpos and their bullshit.

The intern coughed into his hand and spoke up at that. "Ah, yes, I was simply surprised to see him again, it's been about a year now."

The PR rep gave both of them a long and searching look, before finishing his introductions with the kids and walking over to the transport proper. The intern followed, looking a bit awkward at the whole affair.

Adam couldn't wait for the fucking finaces representative to stop with his bullshit and show up. The sooner he did the sooner Adam could have a chance at shooting something.

Eventually the Finances Rep showed up, strutting in like they were the most important person in the room. Adam was already pissed off, the bitch had trashy yellow hair. She opened her mouth to probably say something infuriating, but Adam cut her off.

"I am contractually obligated to keep you alive for the duration of the job. Piss me off like that again and I nail you to the wall with your own spine as soon as it's over." He said it loud enough for everyone present to hear. She was not the top dog here, she was the shitty lapdog that yapped and yapped. Adam was the goddamn wolfhound that was starting to get growly.

She stumbled midstep, and all the confidence she had before was completely gone. She swallowed, and attempted to excuse her actions.

"A-ah, Mr. Smasher, I was unfortunately delaye…" trying to lie her way out of this one. Unfortunately for her, Uriel hated lies.

"No, you weren't."

The bitch certainly quieted down at that. Adam turned and gave a commanding line to those present. The job hadn't even started and it already pissed him off. Fucking meatbags and their shitty power plays delaying his violence.

"Everyone load up, we're leaving." He had no actual authority to do this, he was just the contracted protection for this job. They were under no obligation to listen to him.

But most folks don't try to argue with Adam Smasher nowadays.

—

The ride in the (Plane? Helicopter? What the fuck are these things called?) would take them at least three hours to arrive. It was a somewhat awkward affair. The financial division was dead quiet, probably communicating with each other via messages. The intern and the kid kept giving each other awkward looks, like they didn't quite know how to interact around one another at this point. The other kids were pretty quiet, looking like they were still getting used to the idea of working for Arasaka.

In fact, the only one who wasn't quiet was Douglas Brown, who kept trying to chat with Adam in the transport. Adam was somewhat annoyed by this, but the meatbag was polite all the way throughout and didn't mind his grunts and growls as replies, so he couldn't complain too much. Like so many others in the PR department, it seems like he was a fairly social sort. Adam stepped back and let Uriel handle the conversation, he'd rather watch his compilations again.

"...With all the high-quality footage we've gotten of you and your new team this past month, the reveal trailer of your new image is certain to come out splendidly." The PR rep leaned forwards at this,smiling and conspiratorial. "Personally I think they focused on your rear a bit too much, but the female focus groups certainly seem to appreciate it."

Adam grunted exasperatedly.

"I know right? But the clips of you using the sword are excellent, and were my personal favorite overall. The slow-mo we have of you cutting the rail-gun shot was pure kino. Is there any way I can convince you to carry the sword around still?"

"It's not enough against high-tier targets."

"Well that's just unfortunate, ah well, it was a long shot regardless.The clips we have of your apprentice are rock-solid as well, lots of quick movements and lots of expression on his face. He also scored highly among female focus groups for it, they like his boyish charm."

The girl gave a small panicked noise at that, and the PR rep took that as his chance to include her in the conversation.

"Ah, and I have to say your own attire does a fantastic job of both coordinating with the team as well as demonstrating your own appeal. Did Mr. Smasher come up with it or was it something you came up with?"

The girl hesitantly replied. "Ah, we came up with it as a group, Mr. Smasher stayed out of it…"

"Well let me give you my compliments, it's a very good blend of both professionalism as well as charm. Do you have any prior experience in design or is this your first time?"

"...I, uh, made my old street clothes, but this is the first group thing…"

"Well you have nothing to worry about young lady! It looks quite good and conveys itself well to observers! If you three ever decide that combat is not something you want to do, then you'll have my recommendations for the PR team, because this as your first major work speaks well of your capabilities…"

"Ah I let myself get distracted. Mr. Smasher, there is a clip that I wanted to ask you about, we're having trouble filling in the scene from the footage angle, also, what's your opinion on wearing a coat on your jobs? Also I wanted to ask you about your music, to see if we could get something that we can incorporate into certain clips of your work."

And so on it went. The PR rep was fast-talking and wouldn't stop talking either. Fortunately he was polite, otherwise Adam would have another person to kill after this job was over. Or unfortunately he supposed, as tearing meat in half with his bare hands never got old.

Eventually, the constant chatter from the PR representative loosened the tension in the carrier, and the meats started socializing properly among themselves. The intern and the kid seemingly exchanged some private words via message, and they relaxed a bit around each other. They resolved to ignore each other unless they had to, it seemed, and that was a perfectly fine compromise for whatever issues they had before.

One was going to be a corpo, the other a merc. Personal grudges had no place on the job. Uriel refrained from pointing out all the times Adam let that exact thing happen, and Adam was thankful for it.

Eventually, the PR rep suggested playing the "Smash hits soundtrack" and Adam wanted to strangle him. Fucking PR, snatching those files from the netrunner and publishing them. No, he didn't want the whole world to heard him fucking sing.

'Uriel you fucker, this is your fault.'

'Sorry about that Adam, didn't know they would grab it like that.'

Adam grumbled as he heard his own voice start to play in the transport speakers, and the group quieted down to listen. He knew it wasn't really Uriel's fault. If he found the PR fucker that was responsible for it he was going to practice his painting with their vital fluids. Now he just had to tolerate this bullshit until they got bored of hearing him sing songs from eighty or more years ago.

"Build a fire a thousand miles away

To light my long way home

I ride a comet, my trail is long to stay

Silence is a heavy stone."

"I fight the world and take all they can give

There are times my heart hangs low

Born to walk against the wind

Born to hear my name

No matter where I stand I'm alone."

"Stand and fight

Live by your sword

Always one more try

I'm not afraid to die

Stand and fight

Say what you feel

Born with a heart of steel."

Adam wanted this trip to be fucking done already. He leaned completely back in his seat, ignored the way it groaned under his weight, and stared at the ceiling until it was over. Goddamn it Uriel, god fucking damn it.

He could feel the kids staring at him. He made sure to make a note to kill the next meatbag he found in the most brutal way he could to compensate.