The New Man: Adam Smasher Si

by Crossposted

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

8. Upload 08

The techie sent him an ETA for when his replacement frame would come in, after modifications, it would be a full week before it arrived. They were apparently working overtime to get it done as fast as possible, mostly because Saburo Arasaka had sent them a message about how unfortunate it was for his chief murderer to go without his shiny new frame. A week after the modifications he requested, that wouldn't be too hard to manage, he'd just have to go back to his old Dragoon for a little while.

On one hand, it was annoying to not be as physically powerful anymore, on the other hand, his Dragoon had integrated missiles. Once the battlegloves he had ordered came in, he could use his Gemini and get the best of both worlds. A frame that used CCPL and missiles, everything that he loved to use to butcher meatbags with. He supposed he could be more effective as a killer if he instead bought a vehicle-mounted missile launcher and carried that around, but that was a lot of weight for not that many shots. That and long-range missiles were impersonal, he wanted to watch the meatbags die, not just see blips on a screen disappear.

Nukes could kill hundreds of thousands in an instant, quick and boring. He could kill hundreds of thousands with a week and unlimited ammo, giving him enough time to savor the murder. In the end, any weapon with a range longer than about two or three kilometers ruined the fun part of war.

Before there were ICBMs and Ortillery, there was the doughboy. He would go into a battle, barely trained and ill-equipped, and either die or come out the other side a veteran soldier. Nowadays they're just placeholders and occupiers that sit around and wait for rocks to fall out of the sky and annihilate their grid coordinates. Full scale war had gotten boring long before he was born. That's why every military leader agreed to dial it down to the entertaining level again. Proxy wars, wars on terror, brushfire wars, gang wars. The scale in which an individual actually matters again. The level at which one man can actually make a difference in a fight.

He was Adam Smasher, he had gotten strong over his nine decades of living and eight decades of fighting. Strong enough to matter in a full scale war again. It was yet another thing that separates him from meatbag soldiers. His deployment was no longer a question of tactics, but logistics. It was a great feeling, one that he got to experience every day, it only barely made up for the fact that he had to interact with meatbags all the fucking time. If they bothered chroming up more, they might get to feel it too. He doubted they would though, they were meatbags for a reason.

Idly, he walked past a group of Militech soldiers sitting outside of a Dunkin' Bucks cafe. They froze up as he walked past, which was stupid of them. If he was here to kill a bunch of random soldiers, they'd be dead already. The waitress almost dropped the coffee on herself as he passed.

What was on the agenda when he got back…?

He had to review the brats' progress over the last week, and see where they can be improved upon. He had to talk to some fuckers from Europe, all the way from the Vatican apparently. They requested a meeting about the new cathedral being built, and Uriel went ahead and approved of the request.

If they were going to do this joke, they had to go all the way through with it.

Then he had to patrol and review the outlines he was given for that Arcology.

It would be a week or more before the concessions Militech was willing to give for losing a nuke would become public. With that public reveal would also come the reveal of the 'Zenith' project. He had accepted their money, of course, it was free money. If they started fucking around, he would just kill them and be done with it, so there was no situation in which he lost here. Free eddies or free murder, either of which was good by him.

It was Biotechnica's support that was more surprising. He didn't know their angle here, the Italian corporation normally kept out of the skirmishing that corporations engaged in. They preferred to be an almost totally neutral power. Right now, his best guess was that the Zenith was going to be a field test for many of their products not quite ready for mass production, that sounded about right.

In the end, Militech would have to give three main things up. The first was the full nine billion in damages funds, and half the cost of the radiation cleanup. That part was a non-negotiable industry standard for this sort of thing. The second was a public five-year ceasefire agreement of corporate sabotage and military action.

He hadn't liked that one, but Uriel was adamant about it. Militech and the NUSA was the single strongest military power on the planet, followed closely by the EEC who had the advantage in the form of legal ortillery. The NUSA had more and better guns than the EEC, but it was hard to beat rocks falling and cities dying.

Yorinobu gave him a chip with Arasaka's think tank's thoughts on the current global situation during a fifteen minute break. The next corporate war was brewing. There was a war on the horizon, and the biggest threat was the NUSA.

As with all things, Target Prioritization was useful here. The NUSA is the current biggest threat, but there were many, many other threats that would want to take Arasaka down. Before you kill the thing that needs all of your attention, you kill the things that don't need so much and avoid the first thing until you can focus on it without being flanked.

Five years of not having to deal with Militech would give them plenty of time to murder the smaller fry around them first. If Militech broke their ceasefire, then all Arasaka would have to do is publicly reveal this to everyone in the world and thus erode public trust in Militech as a whole. Public support eroded by Militech being traitorous yet again in such a short period would weaken their morale, and morale was everything to an army. So they would either not have to waste effort fighting them, or Militech would be weakened when they fought, both outcomes were advantageous. Adam was hoping that they broke the ceasefire early, more meat to the slaughterhouse.

The third thing was another suggestion by Uriel, who mostly took over the negotiations on Adam's behalf. Adam didn't care about most of this political bullshit. Uriel didn't either, but he was willing to put up with it to put their territory in the most advantageous position possible for the meatfucker to come. Neither of them could afford to play around, they had to be stronger.

International Electric Corporation had once been one of the biggest corporations around. Equal to Arasaka in product diversity, and second only to Militech in military-related manufacturing and sales. They had been an unwelcome competitor, and thus they were targeted by the time the Fourth Corporate War rolled around by both companies. Many of their assets were cannibalized and incorporated by both. IEC doesn't exist nowadays, not after decades of sabotage and economic takeover.

When Arasaka withdrew agents from North America except from critical duties and operating bases, many of the locations were seized by Militech in their freedom to expand. Within many of those bases were some of the remaining assets taken from IEC. That left Militech with all the assets of the former IEC that were still intact to this year. Arasaka already learned all they could from it, probably, so this wasn't a particularly great loss.

This in mind, Uriel had what he considered a devious idea.

Bring back IEC, this time as a subsidiary to both corporations. Militech would be responsible for setting it up and running the corporation as a day-to-day operation. Arasaka, meanwhile, would get a thirty-three percent market share in the company and the same percentage from its total profits. IEC was immensely popular back in the day among military planners and producers, and retained its good reputation even to this day.

Militech, with a majority share in the new subsidiary, would have financial obligation to keep it running and profitable. Arasaka would get a massive passive income without them having to lift a single finger. This would further discourage military action against Arasaka during the next corporate war, and give them free money with a single contract written up by their lawyers. All that income that could then go right back into more industrial buildup to use against other factions.

Their first flagship product? The LEASH. Every other corporation would get the chance to buy (rent? It was a yearly cost thing) the production rights, the newborn IEC would get it for free due to being a subsidiary of Arasaka. Adam admitted, the Militech representative's expression was quite amusing when he saw the outline for the cyberware. It was guaranteed to be a bestseller, everyone in the world would want one. And if the other corporations attempted to sabotage IEC? That was fine, Arasaka was paying nothing for it.

It took a few hours before the Rep came back from their virtuality meeting with their superiors about the offer. Surprisingly, they had accepted, albeit with some standard legal concessions. All of these were in addition to their already offered aid for the Zenith.

Uriel had been feeling quite smug since then. Adam was glad that the meeting was finally over, and hoping for some punk to make a mistake worth killing them around him. So far it looked like the butchery forecast was slim pickings.

It was a shame. Uriel took over the walking as Adam pulled up his thirteen-hundred man massacre from a couple days back. It was a soothing balm for a violence-free day.

—

The brat was there to greet him as he walked through the door. The brat, the blueberry, and the brat's friend, the one with the bowlcut. He really needed to get around to labeling that one, if he was going to have to keep seeing it.

"Heya Smasher, did ya have fun doing whatever it is you were doing?" The brat asked casually, raising a can of soda in the air in greeting. Adam considered that for a moment, was the cougar fun to fuck?

…Trick question, dumbass.

"Yes. Get to the training room, I need to evaluate you all again."

The brat nodded, threw back the rest of his drink and started walking. He paused, and turned to him.

"Mind if Katsuo joins? I'm recruiting him." Adam raised a brow at the audacity of the brat.

"Why?" He growled out.

The brat nodded. "We need a backliner to protect the girls while they support from the rear, you're a frontliner and I'm a flanker."

…Hmm, brat had a point. He looked at the suddenly very still bowlcut and checked his chrome. Forty percent, the complete torso was about fifty-five percent, and the head was about eight percent, this was all limbs, optics, and some neuralware then. He grunted in acknowledgement and walked off to the training room. Paying for one more meatbag wouldn't hurt his pockets substantially, and this one already had a decent amount of chrome, better than most.

He'd have to get training and upgrades then, that was easy enough to get.

Eventually the brats filed into the room. He kept his arms crossed as he looked them up and down.

The females were out of their linear frames and metal gears, and into ballistic mesh bodysuits instead. They all had their microwavers still, and their primary arms had those AI scopes on them. The brat was in a plastech duster and holding a nylon helmet under his arm. The bowlcut was in a Flein Duraweave suit, and carried a holdout pistol.

The tiny AI fearfully waved at Uriel. Uriel gave an amused smile and waved back.

…hmm, he saw what happened here.

"Kagekaze told you all to focus on mobility rather than armor?" He grumbled out a rhetorical question. That sounded about right for what he would suggest, probably say something like 'Adam, not all of us are as durable as you'.

They all nodded, and the woman spoke up. She wasn't looking him in the eyes for some reason. "He said we were being slowed down too much by the frames and armor, and would be easy pickings for an actual threat."

You were easy pickings regardless, woman. Only the brat was outside of that category. Still, that was probably a fair enough point. They had skinweave already, and a bodysuit would pair nicely with that. Both increase overall protection while not sacrificing any mobility. Armor slowing him down was not something he had had to consider for a while. His armor was his body, there was nothing to slow him down, it was him. Meatbags didn't have that luxury.

The kid being in the duster also made sense. His jacket was probably getting ratty and he didn't want to damage it, keeping trophies was something he wouldn't begrudge the kid for. A plastech duster would protect everything except his head, and that's where the helmet came in. Neither would slow him down at all. Kid had almost as much armor as a proper borg at that point.

The females would be better off copying the kid, but they probably wanted to show off their curves. Women were vain like that.

He turned to the bowlcut. "Duraweave suit and a holdout pistol?" The bowlcut nodded tensely. "Chrome arms and legs, neural and auditory suite, internal agent, optics and chyron?" That was a guess on his part, he didn't see anything else jumping out at him.

"Strong Arms 400, and EMP threading." The bowlcut added. He narrowed his eyes, the Strong Arms models… Those were a variant based on the gorilla arms, the ones that had that gimmick cycling hydraulic ram. An internal ram that cycles faster as you keep punching. He wasn't particularly a fan of the model, mostly because he destroyed most targets in a single punch anyways. He didn't know what the fuck EMP threading was, and he didn't really care either.

"Gonna need to see how you fight later to figure out how to make you worth jackshit in a scrap." The bowlcut nodded obediently. It was nice to see a meatbag that actually listened to him when he talked. He turned to the brat again.

"How far with the stances did you get with Kagekaze?"

The brat rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. Adam narrowed his optics. The brat quickly started to explain before he lost his temper.

"He told me I was tearing my cells apart using it, and that I need to adapt it for non fullborg use before continuing."

…Shit, that did happen to meatbags who tried it, didn't it? Fucking hell. The brat was able to do the forms, so he assumed it was fine. Once again the failures of the meat make themselves apparent.

…He couldn't afford to let the brat go fullborg either, not at this point. The recovery nervous-system rewiring (they called it therapy, but it had very little to do with sitting around and talking about 'feelings') would take sixteen weeks at minimum. The meatfucker might show up any day now, and having the kid out of commission to get used to being a superior lifeform was unacceptable.

He growled to himself. How annoying.

"You'll have to do it yourself. It's been decades since I was a meatbag, I don't remember it well enough to teach you." He admitted in a grumble. The brat brightened up slightly at that, and nodded.

"Heh, don't worry Smasher, I'll get this done as fast as I can. Speed is what I do." He announced confidently.

He stared at the brat. The females stared at the brat. The bowlcut stared at the brat. The brat fidgeted. "What?"

The bowlcut raised a brow. "Speed is what you do? I apologize on your behalf to Kushinada."

A pause. The blueberry started laughing, the woman and girl started chuckling, the brat looked confused for a moment, then angry.

The bowlcut looked amused.

Meh, it was a passable joke, 5/10, do better next time.

--

New Chrome Unlocked :

Cycling Hydraulic Ram (1d6 HC, 1 Slot)- Most commonly found in the Gorilla Arms cyberlimbs, the cycling hydraulic rams start off weaker than their standard counterparts, but then build up momentum with subsequent strikes. The character multiples their base punch, crush, and kick damage by 2 (rather than by 3). Each punch or kick (but not crush) adds 1 damage to the subsequent punch or kick, up to a maximum bonus of 4. This bonus is lost if the character cannot make at least one punch or kick in their turn.

The cathedral going up in his territory was not going to be a particularly massive building, not in comparison to the truly towering examples of such, or the skyscrapers that grew up in messy rows from Night City's ground level.

Each city block in the Pacifica construction was planned to be standardized, only diffusing into non-standard arrangements when it met the coast or other landscape features that wouldn't accommodate the pattern. The imposition of right angles upon the chaos of nature was something that construction workers were quite familiar with, but Arasaka only owned a certain amount of the space. That space was an irregular pattern, and thus wouldn't allow for the construction of a truly square city.

With the new plans for the Zenith, the most efficient they could get was a hexagon, the designers apparently taking inspiration from the naturally forming shapes in beehives. The layout of the Pacifica construction itself would have to be altered to match with this proposed design, and eventually the arena would have to be demolished as the construction continued. It took Uriel eleven hours to adjust the planned construction to match the arcology honeycomb pattern.

It was something of a boon that the only permanent building that had gone up thus far were the production facilities and the cathedral. Everything else was already planned on being demolished later down the road anyways, so it was no great loss to adjust the planning now before anything else went up. The cathedral was conveniently located with its 'back' to the wall of the planned central pillar leading up. The Zenith was something of a hexagonal pyramid, but cut in half halfway up to create an artificial plateau, and with a strong central pillar to contain a series of elevators and administrative buildings into the walls of the pillar itself.

Underneath the central pillar and the arcology in general would be the production, industrial, and any other building that didn't need to be above ground. This would include a set of three railways that traveled around in a circle to serve as public transport, with roadways on the surface wide enough to accommodate actual vehicles for policing, emergency services, and military. Whatever carbon dioxide was produced in the basement levels would be vented up through the edges and the roof layer, directly feeding into the 'greenhouses' along the walls of the pyramid and within the bulk farming on the domed top.

It was tremendously efficient overall. The biggest problem was that there weren't enough guns on it, and the outer walls weren't thick enough to prevent a few dozen tank shots from getting through. This was an unacceptable weakness, so Uriel made alterations to correct this.

Each corner of the hexagon would now be a terraced stack of reinforced concrete, platforms for AA guns, spaces for military vehicles, and spaces to mount infantry-manned emplaced weapons. The best defense was usually overwhelming firepower pointed at whoever wanted to approach you. The ground floor military garage doors were only accessible by military vehicles from the outside of the arcology itself, but had chokepointed doorways leading deeper in for security access. The garages themselves were thirty meters tall and wide, a nice square to accommodate whatever future monster guns on wheels they came up with years from now.

Future-proofing a design was almost as important as it's current design, he intended to live a long fucking time, and rebuilding all this shit would be annoying. He made sure to specify they were to use roman concrete for all of this, to get rid of that future expense as well.

All in all, this 'Zenith' would cost hundreds of billions to put together. Not all at once, but over time it would add the fuck up. The cathedral was significantly less ambitious overall. Five stories tall, with two ten story towers on either side with eight platforms for AA guns or several emplaced weapons to be mounted on the fifth story and at the top of each tower. The glass windows were small, and reinforced to prevent fuckers from shooting through them and tossing grenades inside. It took up a standard city block, one-hundred meters by two-hundred meters.

And there was fuckers from the Vatican who wanted a meeting with him about it. Annoyingly, he had to attend it if he wanted to keep the joke running. The joke wasn't particularly amusing at this point, but he was old and stubborn, he wasn't about to quit this far into it.

The Vatican was something of a mystery to the rest of the world, especially the corporate world. Mostly because they had the bright idea of making their local NET run off an OS that was completely incompatible with any other OS. Their NET couldn't interact with the rest of the world, nor could the rest of the world interact with them through the NET. This made them difficult to contact, and separate from the incredibly fast world of corporate money-making. This also made them almost impossible to hack into.

Hacking the Vatican, or anywhere else they set up their NET, was usually considered a death sentence for the average Netrunner. Vatican-NET was incredibly obtuse, with numerous confusing or illogical rules about its navigation. That, and anyone familiar with the NET architecture can usually immediately tell that something foreign was inside their data fortress, which normally led to zealous church-guards in very heavy armor and carrying very big guns finding and killing the netrunner in a few minutes. The church had a policy of not prioritizing the capture of those they found lurking in their NET without explicit permission.

The slow speed of navigating the foreign and obtuse net architecture, the immediate detection of the foreign presence, and the gentlemen with sledgehammers, shotguns, and riot armor showing up to your location as fast as they could made the Vatican NET a very unwise target for most netrunners. The most common advice within guides and programs made for trainee netrunners was 'don't'. That was where Uriel learned of this first, and by proxy where Adam learned of it.

Adam kept this in mind as he walked into the half-complete cathedral, passing by the workers that were making themselves busy, the sounds of construction going on all around him. Inside there was a number of tables and chairs, presumably for the workers, but now set up to be an improvised meeting room.

He narrowed his optics at what he saw. There were significantly fewer meatbags than he was expecting. Normally Catholics travel in sets of seven, one leader, one assistant, and five guards. He had been expecting two meatbags and five half-meats.

Sitting at the end of the central chamber were zero meatbags, zero half-meats, and two borgs. Most alarmingly, one of those borgs was a modified Wiseman.

The Wiseman was a fullborg conversion that wasn't designed to be used in direct combat. It was designed to be a platform for a biopoded Netrunner. Back in the day, netrunners were troublesome enough when they had to be plugged up and sitting in an apartment somewhere to do anything. Nowadays a netrunner could glance at a meatbag and cause them seizures.

The Wiseman was an expert netrunner, placed into a biopod, connected to the most powerful supercomputer they could get into the torso, and limbs filled to the brim with the various devices that a netrunner might find useful. The truest threat from a Wiseman came from the RMC TechGnosis interface, which translated all five senses into binary data, before being translated again into netspace stimuli before feeding it into the Wiseman's mind, acclimating them to the NET on a permanent basis.

Famously, a Wiseman once commented that the difference between the NET and the real world was the same as the ocean and the beach to him. Another Wiseman by the name of Chow was asked if he believed in God by Akira, the Tokyo regional NET manager-AI. Chow simply responded 'I am God.'

Even without the NET, the Wiseman was a borg, with all the durability and strength that implied. The Wiseman was to netrunners what a Dragoon was to infantry. A Wiseman could beat meatbags to death with their bare hands if they wanted to, and ignore smaller guns outright. No match for him, of course, but that wasn't where the danger was.

Adam could kill any fucker in an actual fight. But the NET was never his specialty, it was something he had to rely on his ICE for, to hold out long enough for him to approach and murder the fucker trying to hack him. Uriel was here now, so he should be relatively safer. So he approached with his normal pace, deviating at all would be showing weakness.

And Adam Smasher didn't do weak.

The other borg was a modified Aquarius wearing a cross necklace, a model meant for oceanic exploration, it wasn't a threat more than any other standard borg was. That is to say, it was just scrap to him.

He glared at the chairs made of flimsy plastic and aluminum. He walked past them to the stone stairs leading up to the altar area and sat down on those. Fucking meatbag chairs. He glared at the two that had turned their chairs around to face him, said chairs straining under their weight but not breaking.

…He just realized that he was in his Gemini, and thus could sit in them just fine. He growled out a question to hide his irritation at forgetting that.

"What does the Vatican want?"

The Wiseman nodded, and spoke in an elderly tone. "Adam Smasher, the Vatican thanks you for accepting this meeting. I am Gaspar, Magi of the Church. With me is Guardsman Brent Simon Ungermann, who is acting as my security." The Aquarius nodded to him, and Adam made note of his weapons out of habit.

A monosword and a netgun, with claws on the fingers with backwards facing hooks. A loadout meant for restraining a target and then eliminating them at leisure. Not a threat to him…

He was in his Gemini, so actually a very small threat to him if he decided to turn his brain off. Adam turned back to the Wiseman, and waited for him to continue. After a moment, the Wiseman did.

"Pontifex Maximus has taken notice of your endeavors to construct a new house of God, the largest yet to be built within this city, and extends an offer unto you. Should you accept, then I and my security will remain within your territory and establish a branch of the TempleNET for the church here. A standard century of guardsmen from the Vatican will travel here, and take up residence to act as on-site security."

…So he doesn't have to pay for the security for this place, doesn't have to pay for the NET to be set up here, and doesn't have to worry about keeping it operational. All in exchange for more meatbags and scrap he could kill later if they decided to backstab him. God must approve of his joke, because Adam couldn't see the downside to this.

The Wiseman might have been a threat before, but Uriel was around now. He and his ICE should be enough to hold off the borg long enough for Adam to turn him into scrap. The less said about a borg meant for aquatic exploration and combat fighting Adam Smasher on land, the better.

The Wiseman took his silence as wanting further details. It took out a micro-computer from the suitcase on the floor next to it.

"I have brought with me an example of TempleNET, If you wish to test its defenses yourself for confirmation about its efficacy."

Uriel quirked his 'lips', and Adam gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. Meh, might as well see what all the hubbub was about. Uriel stepped out of his frame, and into the cyberspace of the micro-computer. The world disappeared behind him as his fire poured into the world within. He found himself in front of a sealed door made of white stone. He raised a theoretical brow, and pushed it open to step inside.

He found himself on a patio made of some kind of stone, thin pillars around him held up a slanted roof with the image of an elephant carved into its interior. Within this patio contained a great many programs, currently in stasis. The area around the patio was open grasslands, virtual grass swaying in a virtual breeze.

He walked over to a pillar, and ran a hand made of fire across it. Grooves dug into it. He stopped, and then tried grabbing it. It came off like a clump of modeling clay in his hand. He observed it, rolling the clay until it was a ball in his hand, and then pushed it back onto the pillar, rubbing it until it was smooth again. It wasn't quite right, but it was close enough.

How strange. He reached down to the floor and tried to grab it too, which revealed that the entire building was a sort of clay in his hands. He rubbed it back in until smooth there as well.

He hadn't really been stopped by anything, wasn't the Vatican NET supposed to be obtuse and confusing? He stepped off the patio, and into the grassland. Turning around, he saw an elephant walk around from behind the patio and up to him. It stared at him with blue eyes, and he stared at it back.

He waved at it, it lightly slapped his head with its trunk. How rude.

He nodded and stepped back onto the patio, and through the doorway into the real world again. His fire entered Adam's frame again, and with that his little exploration was over.

Adam stood up. "I accept. If you start fucking around, I'll kill all of you."

The Wiseman nodded in acceptance, and the meeting was over. Adam walked out of the cathedral and headed back to the armory. He had a patrol to get to. That was mostly a waste of his time, it could have been resolved with an email.

Meh, it got him free shit, so it wasn't too annoying.

—

Simon "Royce" Randall was wondering what the goddamn fuck his dumbass gonkfucker boss was doing.

Maelstrom had been in something of a golden age recently, by playing the part of scavengers and looting what they could without pissing any big players off too much. They had more members than ever before, had shittons of loot that they were still sorting out, and brand new territory all across the map. The Tyger Claws couldn't stop them from taking old Scav dens for themselves, and the Mox were never a threat even on the worst of days.

That Smasher BD had done a shitton of free marketing for them, a bunch of punks finally figuring out that chrome was better than meat and wanting to sign up with the gangs with the most chrome around. That arena down in Pacific was also a great little side venture, just needing to send some of their tougher boys down there to beat the fleshies down and rake in the eddies. Being made of metal makes you real resistant to weapons, who fucking knew?

That, and having their boys constantly winning meant even more punks wanting to sign up, and a new business venture. Merchandise was making more eddies than the actual winning was at this point, and Royce was planning on riding that platinum goose all the way to the fucking bank. More funding, more recruits, more territory, everything was coming up aces for Maelstrom.

Which is why Brick's dumbass project had him and Dum-Dum real concerned for the future.

It started when they got those servers and data-caches from down in Pacifica, the ones that the Voodoo Boys used to have. They weren't about to just let that shit sit around, that was free shit.

That's when Brick, he, and Dum-Dum learned of Arasaka's dirty little secret. Soulkiller, a program that could fucking eat a gonk and spit out an AI that looked exactly like him. Needless to say, they kept it a fucking secret. Even Brick wasn't retarded enough to spill Arasaka's dirty laundry out like that, so they kept it just to the three of them.

There was other, more important shit on those data-caches. Supplies, staches of guns and netrunning supplies, notes on the Blackwall and Netwatch. All kinds of useful shit.

So Royce and Dum-Dum had organized the retrieval of all those preem fucking goods, and Maelstrom got enough supplies that they had to start locking some of it away in their own staches.

Brick had watched the Smasher BD, which in retrospect was probably the first stone in the absolute avalanche of gonkfuckery to follow. He began loading up on the chrome, enough to make him actually look respectable with his face covered in a steel plate. His wiring was covered in metal, his limbs were replaced, he got a linear frame.

All in all, nothing but upgrades for the fucking dumbass that was his boss. He had about as much chrome as you could load up on a man without getting one of those fancy corporate brains-in-jars conversion. Brick couldn't afford to get that, otherwise Royce and Dum-Dum would take over during his recovery, but he wanted more chrome.

His retarded decision? Summon the AI who invented the Soulkiller from beyond the Blackwall, force it to turn him into an AI, and then use robot bodies.

Yes, Brick, that sounds like an excellent fucking idea you goddamn retarded gonkfuck shithead motherfucker. Fuck!

Fucking fuck!

Fucking Brick, You gonkfucking dumbass!

He got the bright idea to make a signal that could theoretically mimic the AI's boytoy from its fleshie days, that hack rockerboy Silverhand, use that to lure it in, and then trap it in a wired system. The only way to get out of it would be the wireless signal, which a strommer with a sandy high on blacklace would unplug before the AI could get out.

Royce wasn't a dumbass though. Fucking around with AI was how you got your body turned into a fucking puppet and your brain eaten in the NET.

That was fine though, he thought as he watched strommers load computers and wires into the most secure basement that Maelstrom had. Brick would get himself killed doing this stupid bullshit, and he would take over. He was already mostly running the show on the edges, Brick was too focused on his retarded project to notice or care.

He'd get Dum-Dum to help him out, he actually knew how to run a fucking gang and not some hoodoo techmystical cult.

All he had to do was keep working while Brick burned himself alive.

It was going to be the new year in less than a week. That meant it would have been about five months since she had been captured by Faraday, five months since David entombed himself in the Cyberskeleton, five months since they were beaten down and press-ganged into the service of a mass-murderer. A mass-murderer under the employ of the ones that killed all her childhood friends and tortured her.

All in all, things had been going very well, well enough to make her nervous. It took some time before she finally stopped thinking of all this as a dream, but it had eventually fully sunk in some time ago. She was safe, David was safe, Rebecca was safe, Gloria was alive again, and safe.

Well, relatively safe, there was still the threat of super-powered fighting robots targeting her current employer, David, and any of them by proxy. That was almost comforting, in a way. If things had been nothing but good, she would have fallen apart waiting for something to shatter the happy facade. Having troubles meant it wasn't a facade, which meant everything had actually been going as well as they had been.

It was a somewhat bitter pill to realize that her methods to protect David less than a year ago were all wrong. Eliminating 'saka agents and not telling anyone only escalated the situation to an untenable point. All they had to do was lay low, and it would have passed eventually. She just had to trust others with the information she had learned, and stayed by David's side to help him keep it together.

She chuckled bitterly, taking a drag and blowing smoke out and above her head. Do the exact thing Kiwi taught her to never do. She wouldn't have been able to do it. The world had set her up for failure from the very beginning, nothing she could have done about it.

It was… disconcerting how peaceful her life was now. No need to worry about food, or shelter, or threats hunting them down. No need to proactively hunt down people who might be targeting her or David. All she had to do was be there for him, and keep practicing her skills. Being the ward of the Butcher of Arasaka apparently meant 'constantly training, he'll take care of everything else'.

There were some days she had been tempted to go out and kill people who might be targeting them for being a part of 'saka now. She had been too much of a coward to leave David's side again, and never ended up going out. She wasn't intending on ever getting too far away from him again if she could help it. All she wanted was the moon. It took her a while to realize that her moon was him.

After a while, she realized that so long as they didn't stick their necks out too often, no one was going to come after them. Adam Smasher was too high up the totem pole for most people to want to risk targeting him. Those that did were few and far between, and usually targeted Arasaka as a whole, not them specifically. The eye was the safest place to be in a storm, and they were right next to it now.

She felt a little embarrassed, recalling her jumbled thoughts over the past few months. Lots of metaphors and poetic stuff. She was glad she never wrote any of it down, because she would definitely die if anyone read any of it. She was twenty-two, much too old to be doing stuff like that.

…David would think it was cute, she growled to herself in embarrassment, and snuffed out the cigarette. She could be in a chicken suit and he'd think it was cute, that gonk had no standards. No standards and entirely too much loyalty, he should have left her behind five months ago, it would have been the smart move.

Well, in retrospect no, afterall that led to them getting a guardian in the form of the Butcher of Arasaka. It ended up working out for the best, but it had absolutely no reason to. It was utterly illogical for that to have happened.

…Granted, it was utterly illogical for an order of super martial arts bots with attack AIs to be their biggest threats so far, so clearly logic had given up a while ago. She was expecting other corporations and mercenary solos to be gunning for them, not whatever this was. As it turns out, attacking Adam Smasher is an illogical thing, and therefore requires an illogical situation.

She huffed, took out a stick of breath-freshening gum and popped it in her mouth. Kissing David with a stinky mouth wouldn't be good. That would be embarrassing enough for her to have to hide for several hours (or days). She blamed Kiwi for this, it was her fault that she had a smoking habit now. She decided to blame Smasher too, it was his fault she had enough eddies to fuel her smoking habit freely. It was their fault, she nodded to herself, definitely not hers.

She walked inside the stairway entrance, walking down back inside the fortress again. It was about three floors in total, and Smasher's living quarters took up the entire third floor. The first floor was for security and general utilities and the second floor was for offices. She had gotten used to walking around it, and walking in general by now.

Smasher apparently didn't believe in vehicles, and walked everywhere he could unless he was on a job. Between all the walking and David, her entire lower body had been sore for weeks. On the plus side, her legs were slightly more toned now, and David liked them like that. She smiled to herself.

Suddenly, she was grabbed by the waist from behind and lifted into the air. She most certainly did not yelp, but she did wrap her monowire around whatever was grabbing her…

Judging from the complete lack of hesitation, her being pressed into someone from behind, and the smell of familiar deodorant, she relaxed and withdrew her monowire again. She hadn't gotten a chance to use it in a while. She leaned her head back to lightly headbutt her output.

"David, why'd you do that?"

"I couldn't help it, you're too cute when you smile." David replied.

She ignored the rush of heat (and probably color) on her face. Her output was a gonk, a complete gonk. She loved him. She melted into the hug and stayed there for a bit, jolting when he picked her up and started walking.

"David. Put me down."

"Nah, this is entertaining."

"David. I'm serious. This is embarrassing."

"I know, your face is really cute when you're embarrassed."

She buried her face in his chest to hide it.

"Put me down, you gonk."

"Nah."

Eventually they had gotten to the living room, whereupon Rebecca was passionately arguing a topic that…

Boy whose father targeted them. She felt a spike of fear and hate, before forcing it away.

…Was. He was sitting and drinking some form of cola, with a small smirk on his face.

"Davey! Lucy!" Rebecca had noticed them, and wheeled to point a finger in their direction.

"I'm totally a Rimbo, right?!" Lucy pulled herself fully from David's shirt to look at her. She didn't just ask that, did she?

The Tanaka boy spoke up, faintly teasingly. "I don't think you meet the legal qualifications of such."

She raised a middle finger his way without turning her face towards him. Her cheeks were puffed up as she glared at them, demanding an answer. Lucy replied to this. "Rebecca, I don't think anyone has used that slang in more than twenty years."

Rebecca sharply countered. "That wasn't the question! Am I or am I not?!"

David spoke up at this. "What's a Rimbo?"

There was a distinct silence in the room for a moment, and she locked eyes with Rebecca. They realized simultaneously that neither of them wanted to be the one to tell him. Lucy opened her mouth, resolving to make something up.

The Tanaka boy spoke up again, in a dry and amused voice. "A gun-toting sex kitten, a portmanteau of Rambo and Bimbo." She glared at him for ruining another fraction of David's innocence. He continued without any guilt on his face or in his voice. "Gun-toting, sure, but when I asked her how many partners she's had recently, she wasn't able to give me a straight answer. Legally, she just doesn't qualify…"

He was interrupted by Rebecca lunging at him and grappling in an attempt to strangle him. Tanaka displayed a surprising amount of strength in fending her off, albeit only barely.

Lucy intended to tell David to keep walking, she was going to let them work this out.

Then David spoke up, innocently pondering the question in a serious manner. "Yeah, you do have to have a lot of sex to be a 'sex-kitten', when was the last time you had an output, Becca?"

Rebecca gave a wail of despair and anger.

Lucy smiled, in spite of herself, as Rebecca shouted expletives at the boy she was beating on with her fists.

"Get that fucking grin off your face, you smug blue asshole!"

"Martinez! Save me! I'm being assaulted unjustly!"

The door opened. The Butcher of Arasaka was in the doorway. They all froze awkwardly.

He glared at them, scanning the room before landing on her…

Her heart rate spiked.

His vision kept moving up to David. Her heart began to calm itself again. He glared at David for a moment, before closing the door behind him and speaking.

"The last Panzerfucker ran away with Arasaka property, you are already aware." He said in a matter-of-fact way, already knowing that everyone in the room already knew this. She felt an unease creep up, waiting for whatever he was about to say next.

David nodded slowly. "Yeah… I knew that."

Adam continued, stepping into the room and away from the wall.

"It stole the testing apertures of an anti-cyberpsychotic experiment known as Project YOKAI. These range from vehicles to linear frames, one of which you are already familiar with."

…A testing aperture that David was already familiar with…?

…No…

"One of these was the repaired Test-Type advanced linear frame, the 'Cyberskeleton'."

She glanced up, tense.

David's expression was one of the most awful things she had had to see for a while.

She hated it.

—

Yato Yamada was in charge of the mercenary contracting that Arasaka engaged in. Whenever Arasaka needed to hire an outside specialist or deniable asset, it was his job to meet with that asset and work out the rough outline of the hiring contract. The finer details would be elaborated upon by one of the many legal experts under Arasaka employ, but it was his duty to present the honorable and just face of Arasaka whenever the company needed to outsource their work.

He was rather nervous recently, mostly in fear of potentially being accidently associated with any of those who were involved in the recent NC debacle, over in America. Specifically the recent attack and theft from one of Arasaka's many long-term research projects.

Lord Arasaka had been particularly wroth with that attack, and a great many lax and lazy employees had been dismissed from the company (and promptly silenced in the dark of the night) for it. The storm seemed to have passed by at this point, and he had not been struck down. His dedication over the years had proven itself, and he was demonstrably a loyal and hardworking employee, this was proof of such.

However, that purge left an absence of those with particular specialties in the higher levels of the corporation, namely those responsible for the ICEs of the various automatons Arasaka builds and distributes. With such a wide-scale and public breach of the cybersecurity of their cyberforms, Arasaka had to correct any potential gaps in the ICE immediately.

So, to resolve this issue, an outside party with a long history of client confidentiality was contacted and the job was offered. To make the ICE of their cyberforms impregnable from any and all outside parties, the Technomancers were hired.

Remembering that meeting made him shiver. The day before, one of the Technomancer 'superblimps' had flown into Japan from the West, and landed outside the city. From that flying fortress came twelve individuals, four Technomancers and eight guards.

No one was quite sure where they originated from, the hundred or so Nomads that made up the Technomancers. They answered no questions about their past, they accepted no members from outside their families, they took no sides in active conflict beyond defending themselves.

They were mercenary scientists, and they were widely regarded as probably the single most brilliant collection of minds on the planet. Nearly all their equipment was salvaged or repurposed, and it was usually better than the military-grade and cutting-edge technology of any other faction on the planet. It was only their explicit neutrality and willingness to do business with any group that kept them from being targeted and destroyed or forcibly recruited.

Their technology was strange, esoteric, and from an outside point of view, completely off. Electronics, tubes, wires, and other apparati all in the wrong places to seemingly produce the effects they did. Their personal attire matched the look of their vehicles and equipment, wide brimmed hats, air-filtration masks, heavy coats and glowing goggles.

Watching them all but glide as they smoothly stepped in-time with each other into the negotiation room was a distinctly unnerving experience, one that he wasn't soon to forget.

The actual negotiation was comparatively pleasant. They were polite and professional about the whole thing, and that made his job much easier. Still, their habit of not blinking gave him the creeps.

He sighed as he clocked out for the day. He was ready to head home and eat his wife's cooking.

Walking down the office stairs and exiting out into the ground floor hallway, he waved at Chosuke who was clocking in for the night shift with a cup of coffee in his hand. Chosuke nodded at him in his iconic bombastic way.

"Yo! Yamada-san, got done early with the last contract?"

He nodded back, tired from his shift. "Yes, it went by fairly quickly."

Chosuke laughed merrily. "Hah! That's good to hear! Hopefully your luck will spread to me!" He leaned in, conspiratorially. "I heard that line 12 is going to have less traffic than normal, the entire office block C is going to be working a bit later tonight than normal."

Yamada smiled, good ol' reliable Chosuke. His gossipy ways sometimes came in handy for things like this. "I'll be sure to take it then, Thank you."

Chosuke waved it off with his cybernetic arm. "No problem at all, Yamada-san." He started walking away, calling out behind him as he did. "Remember, Karaoke on the 15th!"

Yamada called back. "I won't forget. See you tomorrow."

A few minutes later, getting on track 12, he noticed that Chosuke was right. He had enough room to stretch a little bit on the ride home.

Heh, what a reliable guy. He would make sure to brag about his co-worker to his darling later.

The message came to him in the middle of the night, of what he was to do. He was to be present as one of the security guards in a direct meeting between two gang leaders, between Saito Sota and The Beast of the Animals. He was to be one of the rare few given the honor of defending the life of the overall leader of the Tyger Claws.

The news was only soured when he learned of why the meeting was taking place. The Tyger Claws had attacked the Animals during the Night of Long Guns, acting on behalf of an executive that was executed immediately afterwards. This… was a great stain on the honor of the Tyger Claws, he kept himself calm when he had learned of it as best he could.

His baby sister was in their home, probably asleep, it would not do to let out his frustration here. He would save it for the Arena. He had learned well, over the last few months, that anger was a weapon as sure as the sword in his hand.

That and his sister would no doubt whine endlessly about being woken up so early in the morning. She was a brat with no manners, and no appreciation for her big-shot big brother. He grunted, and finally dragged himself out of bed to start getting dressed. Boots and pants, haramaki, shirt, and sleeveless coat. He had wanted a longer coat, but then his bratty sister had mocked him about trying too hard. He held her down and tousled her hair until she surrendered for that one.

He scratched at his chest while opening the fridge to get the RealMilk out. The skinweave was itchy, but the doc told him that would be normal for a while. He narrowed his optics at what he saw. Barely a cupful of white liquid left in the jug. He growled as he reached for the Lentil Flakes and poured them in a bowl, resolving to eat slightly drier breakfast than normal. He would have to buy more later, because of course he would.

He crunched angrily in the barely lit room, chewing through his breakfast as fast as reasonably he could. Choking on cereal would mean Motoko would never let him live it down, even if he was reasonably safe while she was asleep. Best to not risk it at all. He lifted the bowl and drank the nutritious but bland… soup?

What was cereal anyways? It was like a cool liquid with solids in it. Cold soup? Stew? He pondered this mystery as he swallowed the last of it.

Once finished with his meal, he rose and threw away the disposable bowl and spoon. He glared at the trashbag, so close to full already, filled with bowls of cup noodles. Huffing, he crushed the contents down and tied up the bag to throw it out as he left in a bit. Walking over to the closet and grabbing another trashbag, he opened it up as quietly as he could to put it into the trashcan. Then, a final check over what he had and what he had to bring. He secured his handgun and sword no his waist, grabbed the filled trashbag, and reached for the door.

"...Jun?" A sleepy voice called to him, he turned to see his baby sister looking through her partially-opened door frame. He hadn't been quiet enough. He grumbled.

"Go back to sleep Motoko. I've been called in early today."

She stared at him, bleary-eyed. He stared back, waiting for an answer. She was still half-asleep, so it would take a while for her to process what he had just said. Well, awhile compared to his now enhanced reflexes.

"... The Smashzone's open?" She asked.

He sighed. "No, I've been ordered to act as security between Saito-sama and another gangleader."

She stared at him through half-lidded eyes for a bit, before stumbling out and over to him, hugging him around the waist.

"...Don't die, gonkhead, idiot, stupid." She was clearly tired, for she was never this affectionate with 'her annoying onii-chan' while fully rested. He snorted before hugging her back with one arm.

"It's just security for a meeting, I'll be fine, go back to bed."

She stayed still for a bit before unlatching and stumbling back to bed, and closing the door. He called out as she stumbled away "Don't get into trouble while I'm gone." To which he received a somnambulant grumble in response. Troublesome baby sister.

Grabbing the filled trashbag again, he opened the door and locked it behind him, stepping through the apartment complex halls until reaching the trash chute and throwing it down. Then he walked down to the garage to get on his motorcycle. He had about thirty minutes before he was expected, and the location he was given was about fifteen minutes away. He didn't particularly need to rush, but being early would give a good impression.

Getting on his bike, and starting it up, he felt some tension in his shoulders dissipate at the familiar purr. The tension was always there, in his shoulders. He was told it was caused by his chrome arms, they were a bit heavier than normal, and unlike arms of flesh and blood they couldn't dissipate tension with stretches.

The tension sat there, and did nothing. It was annoying, but the arms were well worth the cost of some minor irritation. He could split an armored borg in half with his monothree now, he knew this because he had done it a week before in the Arena. It was a Maelstrom fighter, one with armored plating and a set of barbed Mantis blades called 'Preyman'. That fight was difficult, but not the hardest he's had yet.

He lightly slapped his face to focus, and pulled out of the garage.

The Demon Tyger of the Pacifica Arena, Kusanagi Jun, drove out to perform his duty.

—

The old man breathed in slowly, savoring the smell of his wisteria tea for a moment. The aroma was a familiar and comforting one, only diminished by the weight of his iron collar. A constant annoyance and shackle around his neck, required for him to breath and survive. A neck made of chrome instead of flesh and blood, every breath entering his body was surely poisoned by its influence.

He raised the cup to his lips and drank slowly, the way tea was meant to be enjoyed. After a proper sip, he let the cup rest in his hands and pulled back to look around the room. The chosen meeting place was a small home located squarely between Pacifica and Westbrook. A building rented out from the Valentinos, who agreed to act as a neutral party in these affairs. That was important, a contract holder than neither party could influence easily, that would keep most honest about what was agreed upon. Such things were required for such negotiations.

The Valentinos were the most numerous gang, located between Tyger and Animal territory, and hated the both of them. They made for an ideal third party to administer this event.

The building they were in was sealed from the outside elements, the radioactive winds were going to rage for months before it was cleaned up, and minimizing one's time outside was simply practical. He had gotten here early, mostly to let his bones rest after such a trip. Such was the burden of getting old, and he hadn't been a young man since before the Time of Red. Trying to negotiate while in pain was generally considered a poor idea.

To his right and left were two of his executives. They had been given the task of representing parts of the greater gang during the negotiations, Akuhara was to represent the honorable half of the Tyger Claws, while Azegami was to represent the more pragmatic and economically minded half of the Tyger Claws. Such was an efficient method to lower the total number of individuals who needed to be present for meetings this important. If this turned out to be a trap that they couldn't have foreseen, then the Tyger Claws would have enough executives alive to still survive without them.

It was a dangerous duty, one that Akuhara and Azegami were more than happy to perform. Akuhara performed it out of a sense of duty and friendship, while Azegami performed it out of a sense of fearless pragmatism. Both were worthy to sit next to him if they were to all die. That was not an honor he would extend to most members of his own gang.

The honor of the Tyger Claws has only continued to diminish over the years, to his great shame and loathing. Infighting, vice, treachery had filled much of his lower-level subordinates, and he could scarcely afford the time to dedicate to correcting it with rivals continuing to grow in power. His protective militia had turned into a band of robbers and bandits, and he could do little to correct it without opening himself to the other powers of Night City. An old anger filled his heart at the thought.

It mattered little now. Now he was old and his claws were dull, doubtlessly one of them would end up poisoning him. Even if he knew of the poison, he would still probably drink it to rid himself of the fools around him. He might as well sit in a barrel without a scrap of cloth to gird him, for all the wealth he had in these days. A man, a barrel, and a sword. That's how he started, that's how he would end if he had any less sense of responsibility.

So Saito Sota sat in a chair, drank his favorite tea, and waited for the other half of this meeting to arrive.

His bones still ached, his brow furrowed in frustration. If the Night of Long Guns had not happened, then those dishonorable wastes he had sent to die against the animals would be gone, and no information about their actions would be known. But now, it was known that the Tyger Claws had been attacking the Animals, and by proxy, Pacifica. Even worse, it was on behalf of a probable traitor, considering the immediate death of a fifth of the Arasaka executives after the night was over and Yorinobu was installed as President of NC. One of those was likely working with Shaitan, which meant that the Tyger Claws were used as an unwitting pawn of a squirming rat.

His rage broiled under his skin, kept placid by the sea of self-control he had built up over a long life of violence. The situation the Tyger Claws was in… was the worst it had been in in a very long time, as bad as before he took control of it. He let loose a long breath, and took another drink of tea. All he could do was keep moving forwards, keep moving and dealing with the consequences of his actions until he was killed.

There was no point in regrets. Not anymore.

He heard the stomping of armored feet long before the leader of the Animals entered the room. He was flanked by only two of his fellow Animals, the old brute probably thought he didn't need any protection except himself. He was probably right about that.

He sat down in the slightly too-small stool, and Sota locked eyes with him through that steel dragon helmet. Not the sensors on top, but right through the teeth, where the true eyes were. He pictured those malevolent red optics clearly. After all, they were the same model as his own.

Himself, his executives, and his two guards made up the Tyger Claws.

The Beast and his two fellows made up the Animals.

The gentleman in the suit and his four guards made up the Valentinos.

Thirteen people in a room made it just barely within the threshold of 'not being cramped' but it was a close thing. This was irritating, but acceptable. The close proximity would mean that a fight would be less likely to occur among the professionals. The inverse was true among those who were inexperienced in combat. That, and the radiation outside made outdoor meetings a bad idea. He held himself back from cursing the dead, that would be rude and he was a consummate professional.

The gentleman spoke. "With the arrival of the Animals, the meeting has all attendees accounted for. Is there any business that must be attended to before the meeting begins?"

The Beast rumbled through a steel mask. "No."

Saito growled through a chrome collar. "No."

The man nodded, and spoke again. "Then let this meeting begin, the recording of this meeting begins now. You may speak when ready." Then leaned back to simply observe, as was his only purpose in being here.

The Beast wasted no time, the brute charging right into the meat of the meet, as it were. "Tygers killing Animals, unprovoked. Tygers must pay."

As this was expected, Akuhara spoke up, performing his role. "That is quite the claim. What is your evidence for such?"

The Animals flanking rustled in irritation, halting under a side-eye glare from the Beast. The Beast turned back and replied in his signature tone, voice rolling like a distant thunderstorm. "Recorded confessions from Tygers trapped."

At this Azegami spoke, performing his own role in the conversation with practiced ease. "A man can say anything, what is your evidence that they were actually Tyger Claws?"

The Animals almost growled, kept in check by the flexed battleglove of the Beast, who countered. "NCPD records… indicate allegiance." The brute spoke slowly and deliberately, and while he wasn't particularly smart, he was cunning in his own way. A message was sent to all parties, just a collection of attached files of the various men the Animals had captured. Useful for knowing who he could execute later for this blunder. They were already supposed to be dead, dishonored for their failures and needless waste of Tyger resources, that's why they had been assigned to this mission.

He took another drink of his tea, and let his rage simmer. Azegami continued, "And if the Tyger Claws do not agree to pay whatever it is the Animals demand?"

The Beast chuckled like an avalanche. "Adam Smasher is informed."

This was to be expected. To borrow a phrase from his youth, the Animals had them by the balls. It was quite infuriating. All he could do now was negotiate the demanded payment down as low as possible. He set his tea down, and locked eyes with the Beast.

"What is your demand, Beast?"

The Beast stared at him with a snarling mask. "An open duel. In the Arena."

He narrowed his optics, what was he getting at here…?

Azuhara spoke. "An honor duel is all you demand? How will the champions be deci-"

He was cut off by the Beast speaking, which was tremendously rude. "No champions. A duel."

…Ah, he sees now. He couldn't help it, and a brief chuckle escaped his iron throat. It began to build until he was laughing in full, and could not help himself for several moments. His executives kept placid faces, but he could tell they were confused, as was everyone else in the room except for the Beast.

Finally, he settled down, his old ribs aching from the humor. "You just wanted one last shot at me, didn't you Ryuzaki?"

Ryuzaki rumbled in confirmation and crossed his arms. He almost smiled to himself, this was just like the old thug. He hadn't changed a bit from their days together in Inquisition.

He took a sip of his tea, and continued. "To the death, I imagine?" At Ryuzaki's nod, there was muttering from the less professional Valentinos and Animals. The Tygers knew to stay silent. He let his tea rest in his hands. "The stakes of the duel?"

Ryuzaki spoke. "If I die, Animals leave Pacifica, recommend Tyger Claws as good guards." He nodded at this, waiting for the Beast to continue. "If you die, Tyger Claws new boss is determined by strength."

He considered this for a moment. He hummed in thought. "Elaborate."

"Open tournament, sixteen fighters, winner is the new Tyger of Westbrook."

"Open tournament?"

"Open, Tyger Claws, full of snakes. Must be open to be trustworthy."

He growled at those words, even if he couldn't deny them. Finishing off his tea to calm down, he set the cup down and closed his eyes in consideration.

After a small while, he opened them again and stared at his once-comrade. "The Tyger Claws will have a month to prepare this, and arrange it with the Pacifica Arena."

"A day."

"Three weeks."

"A week. Animals will arrange it with Arena."

Saito relented and nodded at this. "Very well, the Tyger Claws agree to those terms. We will duel in one week's time."

The Beast didn't waste time, standing up and leaving the room immediately, followed by his subordinates. He politely requested some privacy from the Valentinos to speak to his subordinates alone. They nodded and left, he had rented his room for the next two hours, they would be fine with it.

Waiting for the Valentinos to leave, he addressed his subordinates. "You are wondering why I accepted." It was a statement of fact.

"I am growing old, I will soon enough die from any number of things. This kind of death provides many unique opportunities to the Tyger Claws. A duel between two old warriors, and a tournament to determine the successor is a thing of theater and we have the opportunity to bring that to reality."

"Azuhara, you are to select a group of sixteen of the best warriors in the Tyger Claws. Make sure they are loyal, otherwise you are to use your best judgment. You are to make the conditions of this duel public among the warriors, but not the reasons for it."

"Azegami, you are responsible for the wider public learning of this, you will make the story dramatic and thus, marketable. If properly capitalized upon, this could earn the Tyger Claws a great deal of public support and wealth. Emphasize the overall narrative and more honorable and martial side of the Tyger Claws in your propaganda departments."

"Both of you are to make sure my successor doesn't do irreparable damage to the Tyger Claws by acting as advisors and keeping the other executives from taking advantage. I'm sure you'll both take this chance to greatly expand your own influence regardless."

"This could be a massive boon to the Tyger Claws, instead of a great setback, should we all perform our roles well."

He stared them in the eyes, one after another.

"Compared to that, one old man's life is cheap."

Arasaka black ops had been working overtime for days now, ever since Shaitan decided to put a bounty on all of it at the beginning of the week. Primarily, they were focused on locating and quietly eliminating all those who managed to kill Arasaka agents and try to flee the city to claim the bounty over in europe. Everyone who tried to book a flight out died within the next two hours at the latest, everyone who tried to bargain with the Nomads found themselves politely refused at gunpoint, which left only the third category.

Those that targeted Arasaka agents, and started bragging about it on the Pacifica regional NET. Not his little slice of NC Pacifica, but rather the wider Pacifica region, which encompassed the entire west coast of America. Those that claimed to have taken 'saka heads' but were just lying about it for clout were visited by men in uniforms and sunglasses with legal documents. Those that claimed 'saka heads' and were telling the truth were given different treatment.

They were not hunted down in the middle of the night, or in alleyways with no one watching. They were hunted down openly by Arasaka ninjas and executed in the streets. Then, Arasaka would pay all the legal fines for public disruption and damages to Night Corp, and ignore any backlash from mainstream news outright. A show of outright force and a demonstration for their current public support, which was at an all time high due to sympathy from the attack.

The news articles and coverage about the open murder of civilians in the street were not as popular as the vid clips of Arasaka ninjas doing acrobatics to chase down a target and executing them in an overly flashy and dramatic way. Everyone in the world already knew that Arasaka had agents to hunt down those that wronged them, that was no surprise. Getting to see those agents display their 'preemo' skills and butcher a few meatbags in the streets was entertaining for the wider public. Especially as evidence that the butchered meatbags killed Arasaka employees (and sometimes children) was publicly broadcasted.

Murder was fun, it was something he had known for nearly his entire life. The meatbags were finally catching the fuck up it seemed.

Regardless of all that, there was one target that was proving somewhat difficult to crack. A minor gang that made their home in the sewers and was giving the ninjas trouble. Being slowed down at all was a sign of weakness, so Yorinobu told him to take the brats and wipe the gang off the face of the earth in one quick, overwhelming show of force. It was exactly the kind of job he fucking loved, he was almost giddy thinking about it.

The only thing dragging his mood down was that his new frame hadn't come in from modifications and repairs yet, and that he had to take the kids. He grumbled and figured he should probably use the opportunity to give them another test, it had been a while since the last one. He sent them all a message to meet him in the main room, and walked off to switch to his old Dragoon frame.

Uriel took over the frame as his Gemini opened up to reveal the hardened case of organs that was his biopod. Uriel reached inside, pulled it out, and lowered the casing into 'his' head, which slid closed around the biopod securely. The Dragoon's optics lit up, and Adam could see and move once more.

He used to need a second person to switch frames, not anymore now that Uriel was here. It was always a good day when he could cut another useless meatbag out of his daily interactions.

He looked over his supply of weapons, consideringly. He stomped over to the Tsunami Arms Helix, disconnected his right arm, and connected the integrated weapon-arm in its place. He paused for a moment to let his 'fingers' regain feeling, and then moved on to the ammo rack to attach the belt-feed and put the ammo hopper on.

It had been a while since his last massacre, he was going to do it with his best gun. This and his backup weapons, a Desert Eagle, and four knives. The revolver was nice, but now that he didn't have to worry about ammo again he was going to use the Deagle. It was a classic handgun produced for a fifty-caliber bullet. It was big, heavy, and shot a big bullet, so big that it was impractical for meatbags, but just about right for the average borg. It used to be everywhere in action vids he watched back in his meat days, but now it was replaced with fancy gimmick 'compensated recoil' handguns or some other worthless shit.

It was a gun, it was supposed to kick in your hand, that's where half the fun came from. The other half came from watching a meatbag splatter across the walls.

Now geared up, he walked out of the armory and through the halls to the main room, arriving after a small walk.

Opening the door and seeing that all the brats were inside, he walked up to the main table and ignored their glances. As he walked up, Uriel pulled up the known location and the information about their target.

"We have been ordered to exterminate another gang. Our target is The Slaughterhouse. We are to make it as flashy and overwhelming as possible as a show of force. You all will decide the plan of attack. You have one hour."

With that, he walked over to the bench and sat down. He and Uriel started making their own plans to compare to later.

The Slaughterhouse used to be a much larger gang, but their applicants these days were usually scooped up by Maelstrom or the Tyger Claws. Of course, that simply made the few remaining members notably more deadly by comparison, otherwise they would have been wiped out completely already.

The Slaughterhouse was filled to the brim with meatbags and half-meats who only cared about picking up something sharp and cutting meatbags with it. Adam could agree with the sentiment, but they really should've expanded their portfolio to shooting and blasting meatbags apart too. He said 'should've', because they were all going to die today. Their leader bragged openly about taking some fifty heads during the power outage, only some of which were Arasaka-related. They weren't even hard targets like security agents, just a bus of Arasaka academy brats or some easy shit like that.

Of course, The Slaughterhouse was one of the few gangs that existed that could actually pose a threat to Arasaka ninjas on a personal level, rather than needing numbers to be a threat. This made the 'overwhelming show of force' part hard to accomplish for most. Most, but not him. They had loved the arena, and had raked in the eddies for him in the past.

Oh well, he was going to have fun butchering them.

The meatbeast came up and jumped onto his lap. He resisted the urge to rip it in half by Uriel reminding him of his upcoming assignment.

—

Gloria Martinez was feeling sick, and dreadfully nervous. She could barely pay attention to the rapid-pace exchange of ideas and plans that occurred earlier, and it was all she could do to make sure she knew what her own role was.

It was to stay firmly behind the cover of the riot-shield they gave her, and shoot Ms. Microwaver at whoever she saw at least once each. The riot-shield would have been trouble to lift beforehand, she was never the physically strongest woman around, but the bioware treatments had changed her life rather dramatically. 'Muscle and Bone Lace', 'Preparatory DNA Mapping and Body Therapy', all things she had read about in EMT training, but not something she had ever considered getting or even affording.

Each treatment was worth thousands of eddies, the fact that her son could afford something like that casually made her over-the-moon with joy. It also left her feeling a bit useless, to be relying on her son for things like this. She was the mother! He should be relying on her!

Her body was fitter and firmer than it had been in years. Barely enough for Lucy and Rebecca to convince her into the bodysuit they order for her. She was constantly fighting the urge to cover herself, surely no one wanted to see this? She was a grown woman! Past her prime! She couldn't be wearing clothes like this anymore.

It was protective, for sure. It and her 'Skinweave' implant layered to an amazing level. She had an old handgun for self-defense from before she…

…Died…

…It was just a little lady's purse gun, something that she could carry around easily and provide a little bit of fight against some gonk that wanted to try something. During a small test, Rebecca shot her in the torso with it (in a non-fatal area, of course) to see how the skinweave and bodysuit would hold up. She had been astonished to barely feel a thing from the bullet bouncing off of her. It made her feel like a superwoman.

Bullets bounced off of her! Granted, really small bullets from a really small gun, but still!

The bodysuit wasn't going to protect her head, of course, so she had to wear a helmet. This did little to help the sudden wave of nausea that came with the realization of what she was doing.

She was about to go into live combat, shoot people, and directly aid in the death of an entire gang. It was a gang of murderers, sure, but it was still a lot to take in for a woman who just wanted to save lives and help her son succeed in life. Well, she supposed she was still doing that second thing. She cast a glance over to her son talking in a rapid-fire serious manner to Chiri's boy.

She cast another glance over to the driver of the vehicle, his right arm replaced by a gun that probably weighed as much as she did, supported by his very strong arms…

She looked straight ahead again, and hid everything she was feeling. She was very good at that. Whatever she felt didn't matter, she needed to help her son.

"Neh, granny, make sure to at least try to aim. I can only do so much, yanno?" The smug and condescending voice of her Microwaver spoke up to her. It made her mad initially, but she was a mother and knew how to deal with brats like this. She looked down to the little screen on her gun to see the AI waving a hand dismissively. A very short and very young looking woman in an off-white form-fitting astronaut suit with a plexiglass visor. She had white hair with vibrant red highlights, and bright red eyes.

And because the underbarrel battery pack was attached, she had a slightly padded chest.

Gloria smiled. "I'll do my best, Ms. Microwaver. This old lady will be relying on you, okay?"

The little AI paused at that, before a vibrant flush filled her face. She grinned broadly and put her hands on her hips. "Heh, no need to worry with me around. I'll zap those gonks into a coma for ya!" She hesitated for a moment. "...And you're not an old lady, got it?" She muttered to the side.

Another success for Gloria Martinez, she smiled to herself behind her helmet and ignored the twisting in her gut. She hoped the shooting part would be over with fast, and that she wouldn't have to use the duffle bag of medical supplies she carried on a shoulder-strap. Not too much of it, at the very least.

—

The plan ended up being rather simple overall.

Lucy would tap into the security feeds of the surrounding area, and act as overwatch. Her primary job was to warn the rest of the them of threats, and of targets trying to escape the warehouse. She would quick-hack targets when she found some spare time, but overall her job was feeding info to the rest of them. Katsuo would be on guard duty next to her, and be on the lookout for those trying to sneak up on her. Mom would also be on standby with Lucy and Katsuo, medical supplies readied in case they needed a retreat and quick burst of first aid. Otherwise she'd be on lookout and hit anything that moved with a microwave shot or two.

He and Rebecca would flank around the side entrance and wait for the signal to enter and start wreaking havoc. Rebecca had since gotten those hip-guns removed, Kagekaze telling her they made her entirely too clumsy overall. She had gotten them replaced by a weapon mount on each cyberarm, and a four-shot micro-missile launcher for both.

Smasher had looked torn between his usual disdain and pride when she showed those off. David made sure to poke fun at him for that, the guy could do with more ribbing every now and then.

The micro-missiles made her shorter ranged and with less overall ammo, but her burst damage was much better now, and she was much more nimble with just those on. It was a good upgrade, and almost made him miss his own pop-up slugthrower. He might get something like that installed himself, although he would probably get a set of shotguns instead of missiles.

He found out that he really liked shotguns, they were fun to shoot.

He kept quiet as he waited for the signal, which Smasher had said 'he would know it when it happens'.

He flinched at the explosion of noise from the front end of the warehouse.

The sudden sound of a metallic roar shredding through the relatively quiet part of the city was certainly a signal. It only lasted about a second and his ears were already ringing from it. The yells of outrage and fury that came from the interior of the building was also a pretty good signal.

It wasn't time for them to move in yet, they were to wait for exactly one minute before coming in from the side and tearing up the frontline. Either one minute or as soon as they spotted anyone trying to run for it.

The warehouse was full of screams of fury and bullets flying. He tapped into one of Lucy's screens, the view of Smasher at the front.

His gun was spinning and ready to fire at any moment. Every few seconds he would see something that David couldn't in the holes of the warehouse leading in and fire a single slug inside. A sharp barking scream of metal that pitched up whenever he shot something, just like Smasher to have a gun just as overwhelming as he was.

Thirteen-hundred shotgun rounds per minute, what a ridiculous fucking gun.

"...fucking haughty, condescending, bitch…" The voice of Miss-Miss, his shotgun, muttered in his head. He had since changed the setting to be internal audio only, instead of open audio. He glanced down and responded, again doing it mentally to avoid any potential awkwardness.

"Who are you talking about?" He asked.

Miss-Miss growled and glared towards the front of the building. "That fucking arrogant bitch integrated into your bossman's right arm, bossman. Fucking bullshit high-standards, gluttonous, japansy turbo-bitch. Fucking hate her, can't think of a single shotgun that doesn't."

…He elected to ignore his gun for a while.

She continued to mutter. "...Goddamn loud materialistic better-than-thou nippopotomus whore. Just so happened to find one of the only people in the world that can actually use her with her retarded standards, lucky goddamn bitch…"

He waited for the minute to pass. His gun furiously muttering the entire time about how much she hated Smasher's gun.

The moment the minute passed, he jumped down and let his chrome legs absorb the impact. Rebecca jumped off his back, and they raced forwards.

He reared a fist back and punched the door, snapping the welds holding it closed and sending the door flying inwards. He activated his sandevistan.

The door froze midair. He jumped inside, careful to not let his feet touch the ground immediately in front of the door. There was a laser sensor, he shot it as he jumped, disabling it with a single slug.

Landing on the ground in the middle of the warehouse and facing deeper in, he took stock of the situation. There were twelve gangers behind cover to his front, loaded to the brim with blades, but their guns were pretty small by comparison.

"Right!" Miss-Miss shouted. He threw himself to the left to narrowly avoid a swipe from a massive set of wolvers mounted on a chrome arm. The swipe traveled through the air a bit slowly, but not quite as slow as everything else. A sandevistan, but not a Smasher-grade one like he had.

The ganger who had swiped at him was a massive guy with a really old face. He was wearing red and black leathers, and nearly everywhere you could fit a sharp edge on a person had some sort of blade on it. He snarled and started yelling, slowed to the point that David couldn't really understand what he was saying.

It did reveal that the guy had all bladed chrome teeth though. Idly he wondered how the guy ate with those, wouldn't it be a pain in the ass?

David raised his shotgun and fired. Subdermal armor and skinweave was usually pretty good at stopping bullets. It wasn't particularly good at stopping shotgun slugs fired point blank into someone's face. Gonk was in slow motion compared to him, what was he expecting here? The guy's head burst like a water balloon filled with watermelon flavored popsicles.

…What was a 'watermelon' anyway, thinking about it? They tasted good but he didn't know what they were. Certainly didn't taste like water.

He kicked off the ground again, moving to jump behind cover from deeper into the warehouse. His sandevistan deactivated.

Eight missiles shot from the doorway he had just entered and did their best to track to one of eight ganger positions They could only turn about 90 degrees or so, but that was enough to hit all of them here.

Eight explosions rang out in the warehouse and screams echoed them.

The heavy steel doors of the warehouse burst inwards as Smasher kicked them open. Lowering his right foot, he took aim with the rotary shotgun on his arm.

The metallic scream started up again as the gangers and their cover disintegrated under a rain of bullets. After about a minute of firing, Smasher stopped firing and lowered his arm.

Nothing on the far side of the warehouse was left intact enough to hide a case of beers, let alone a person.

"Fucking show-off bitch." Miss-Miss sniped at a gun that couldn't talk back.

The voice of Katsuo called over the radio. "No more hostiles detected. Phase three complete. Begin search of interior for hidden passageways to ensure elimination of target."

All in all, way easier than the Ironhands gang. He barely had to do anything this time around.

She preferred the missiles to her hip-guns. They weighed less, she could fire them all at once if she needed to, and they could even track around corners! Sure she couldn't say that she had 'killer hips' anymore, and she only had eight shots now, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. No wonder the big guy used to use these before his frame update, they were great!

She wasn't sure when she stopped being so afraid of the big guy, but that early terror that used to be always present had faded over time to the occasional bout of wariness and little else. The big guy was simple and predictable, and that made him easier to handle. He liked to kill people, he didn't like to talk, he didn't like to socialize, he appreciated loyalty and hard work, and he would outright tell you if you fucked up.

Big guy never tried to play games with people, never tried to lie to them. He knew what he was, and was absolutely sure of himself about it. There was a comfort in that, in being around someone who was as solid in their beliefs as Adam Smasher was. Davey, as loveable as that puppydog-eyed gonk was, was never the most stable guy around. He started off messed up, got a little better, then everything just started going to shit when Pilar died.

She grunted as she reloaded her arm-missiles. It cost 100ed per full reload of her arm-launchers, an amount she would have considered bullshit a year ago.

Pilar was a dumb asshole who got flatlined while complimenting a hobo's dick. Her brother was a fucking gonk through and through. If he was a little less stupid then he'd still be alive today, maybe…

Who was she kidding, he'd probably rant about the big guy's lack of an asshole and then get turned into wallpaper and paste halfway through. Pilar was doomed the moment he forgot his brain at home, which was always. That didn't mean she didn't miss him.

Missiles reloaded, she stood up and slung her gun around on the shoulder-strap back into her hands.

"Kyah!"

She stared at the gun. The woman on the little optical screen was blushing, and wasn't looking her in the eye. A woman with shoulder-length black hair, wearing glasses and a three-piece black suit. Her most notable feature was her rather impressive posterior. Rebecca would have been jealous if she was an actual person rather than a cute little chatbot on her gun.

Sure, might be a rather fancy chatbot, but that's all it really was when you got right down to it. A pre-programmed personality that will respond in certain ways, and change over time to be more appealing to whoever owned it. It was cute, it told her that gonks were sneaking up on her, that's all it really needed to be. Rebecca prided herself in being a realist, even as strained as that was getting to be these days with the kung-fu magic robots apparently roaming the earth. She felt like the only sane person in a crazyhouse sometimes, that no one seemed to point out the inherent ridiculousness of that.

Most people around her seemed to shrug and accept it! Barely a reaction!

Whatever, most people were accepting it and moving on, so there probably wasn't any point in her kicking up a fuss about it either.

She glanced over to Gloria, who was nervously holding up her new riot shield in between Lucy and the potential flank route Bowlcut pointed out. Speaking of not kicking up a fuss…

The big guy had told them about a project Arasaka was doing over the past few months. It started with bad news and only kept getting worse as he kept talking. David had looked distant the moment big guy mentioned the cyberskeleton, the same way he did whenever anything reminded him of it. Lucy had shut down entirely when big guy mentioned the children.

In the end, Bowlcut was the one to run damage control. She had been too busy worrying about Davey and Lucy to look away from their faces, while Bowlcut said they shouldn't mention it to Gloria. That snapped Davey right out of it at the time, and he locked eyes with him before firming himself up and nodding sharply.

'The power of guy-to-guy communication', she thought slightly bitterly. They understood each other almost intuitively, it was downright unfair.

In the end, it had been agreed amongst them that Gloria shouldn't know, she was already traumatized enough being a corpse for a year, better to let her think the corporation that brought her back to life wasn't torturing babies to death. That was probably a good idea. Big guy had ended up grunting, he didn't really care one way or the other after all.

Standing up and moving over to Davey, she nodded to signal her readiness. They had found an underground passageway earlier, and the Bowlcut procedures told them to regroup and rearm before moving forwards. It only took about a minute and it made sure no one was out of ammo at a critical time.

Bowlcut was good at strategy, as it turns out. Better than the rest of them were, by her best guess. They were more of 'on-the-spot' planners, while Bowlcut was better at actual prep. He had only been here for a couple days and he already found a niche that he was good at. Unlike her, who was still fiddling around trying to find some way to be useful.

David was a brawler, and easily the scariest they had in a fight. Lucy was the all-important netrunner support and now overwatch too. Gloria was the medic, which was incredible to have after the fights to make sure everyone stayed alive. Bowlcut slotted right in as a better planner than the rest of them, even if he wasn't worth much in an actual fight.

That left her, Rebecca, not doing particularly anything that someone else couldn't do better. Nothing she could figure out yet at least. The sniping was good, but she was too far away and in a big heavy ACPA. The skates and metalgear were good, but she was too small and lightweight to counteract the bulk and recoil.

Big Guy was just unfair to compare herself to, so she wouldn't, but here she was copying him with the arm missiles anyways.

She just wanted to figure out where she fit in now.

She looked around. Davey was talking to Bowlcut and Big Guy as they prepared to move in, Lucy was checking what she could in the underground passageway as she idly chatted with Gloria. She was just standing around with a gun in her hands.

…Maybe it would have been better if she wasn't here to slow them down.

Lucy froze and narrowed her eyes at the screen she was typing away on. Big Guy noticed and glared over at her.

"What is it?"

"We have something on the seismograph, moving below us…"

Big Guy narrowed his optics, and turned to look at the entrance to the underground doorway. It was a cellar door design, a set of large steel plates that folded over the entrance to some sort of stairway. He considered it for a moment.

His optics widened slightly. Her world lurched.

Suddenly she was disoriented and flying through the air to the side. The doorway exploded outwards.

A three-meter giant of rusted steel plates smashed its way out of the underground, a thin visor serving as a set of eyes. The crash of the steel smashing against steel was immediately followed by the roar of a jet engine, plumes of fire from its back, evidence of a thruster park. It crashed against the concrete floor, cracking the ground and filling the air with the squeal of wheeled feet.

She saw it for half a moment before it collided into the slightly shorter form of Adam Smasher.

He braced himself, it didn't matter. The rocket-powered wheels accelerated them both through the warehouse faster than she could fall out of the air. From the steel giant came a feminine voice.

"I'm gonna fuck you with my knives!"

They broke through the far wall as she rolled against the floor.

—

For a meatbag, getting shoved at seventy miles per hour through a brick wall by a one-ton humanoid warmachine would be lethal, crippling even if they do survive. For him, it was the mark of a potentially good fight.

"Gonna fuck a thousand new holes into you!"

He knew that it was seventy miles per hour, and a one-ton warmachine (technically one-thousand, nine-hundred, and sixty one pounds, but who was counting?), because he was familiar with the sensation of being tackled by a US Army 'Grunt' ACPA. It was a fight he had played on repeat more than a few times, mostly because he didn't get to fight ACPA too often. The few times he did get to was always a rare and special event for him.

"Then fuck them with my fucking knives until they connect inside!"

Of course, this wasn't a Grunt ACPA. The fact that its armor plating was a series of rusty plates welded together in layers was the first tip-off. The second was the heavy modifications to the weaponry. He saw the original monoblade in the right arm, a second, non-monoblade in the left arm, and a total of four flak cannons. One in each arm and two on the right-shoulder mount.

"Till you look like swiss fucking cheese!"

They had the frame, thrusters, and maybe the hud of the original ACPA, everything else was jury rigged together. It was a Junkerknight, the blanket term given to any ACPA that gangers were able to salvage together from spare parts. Not as deadly as an actual ACPA, but more than enough for basically anything you could find on the streets, and enough for the local police to start bringing out their real scary weapons.

"You got that, you fucking cocksucking meatfucker!?"

All of this was in his mind as he was carried by the powered skates at the bottom of the ACPA's feet, propelled by the thruster pack roaring at full burn on its back, and ignoring the angry screams of the meatgirl piloting it. While it was irritating to be pushed back like this, it was to be expected.

"I'm gonna fuck you until you bleed!"

He was six hundred pounds, in his non-CCPL Dragoon frame, and stationary. The Junkerknight was three times his weight and rocket-powered. Force was a function of weight and speed, and right now neither was on his side. How fucking infuriating. He activated his sandevistan.

The world slowed to a crawl. He pushed back from the clash of the two blades against his raised arms, using the Tsunami Helix to brace his other arm against the mismatched retractable blades. That was another piece of evidence that told him that this was specifically a Grunt model. If it were anything stronger then the grooves the monoblade cut into his arm would be twice as deep.

Now with a little space to work with, even as he had to apply constant pressure to avoid being forced back to where he started again, he began his plan. It was simple.

He ducked. He grabbed the torso-plate with his left hand, and braced his arm with the gun. Then he stomped the ground as hard as he could at a slight angle.

The Junkerknight was forced up slightly off the ground even as his feet tore grooves in the concrete. That was enough. The Dragoon was rated for about seventeen-hundred and sixty pounds. He couldn't lift this normally, not in this frame. But the fucker was giving him rocket-thrust to work with here, more than doable right now.

Letting his entire frame work in tandem, he pushed it up while bracing his arms under its arms and against its torso. His sandevistan deactivated. He raised the ACPA up and it began to tilt down. The jockey cut out the thrusters as her view was suddenly filled with concrete instead of the distant building she was taking them to. It was too late.

At seventy miles per hour, he performed a front-facing suplex to the rocket-powered ACPA. With a wonderful scream of metal on concrete, they skid for another hundred feet before crashing through the wall of the distant building at the end of the street. He could feel the all-teeth grin on his face behind the folded-down armored mask.

Rubble showered the interior of the building as they smashed through the brick and concrete wall. Panicked screams of meatbags echoed from the outside and around him as he rolled to a stop and quickly pushed his way up again.

The Junkerknight was standing up as fast as a one-ton warmachine could, armor covered in a fresh new set of shiny streaks from where the pavement had grinded a layer of steel away. Raising his right arm, he let the slugs scream out from the rotary barrels to crash against it. The monoblade was snapped in two, one half of the blade embedded in the far wall and the bottom half still perfectly functional. Meatbags were running away from their location rapidly, although some were hiding behind rubble and other cover to film it.

Some were on the ground, now a distinct smear from where twenty-six hundred total pounds of plasteel and myomer crashed through the wall and crushed them. He wasn't allowed to go out of his way to kill meatbags anymore, but he certainly appreciated the view nevertheless. This day turned from boring to great real fucking fast.

Thirteen-hundred rounds per minute meant about twenty-two rounds per second. It took three seconds for the Junkerknight to stand up. That meant that he had unloaded sixty-six screaming shots into the ACPA before it moved.

There was something he hadn't considered, as his sandevistan was going through the process of cycling itself for the next usage. That the ganger in the ACPA might have a sandevistan of their own.

A sandevistan-boosted, rocket-powered, one-ton fist crashed into his torso. If the monoblade hadn't snapped off, it would have probably breached his reactor immediately.

He flew through the air into the street again, vitals screaming at him that his armor was slightly damaged. His armor could reliably handle rpgs without issue. Needless to say, this was a very hard punch.

His sandevistan cycled as he rolled across the ground. He pushed up as soon as he could and began unloading more screaming lead into the now slowed ACPA that was chasing back after him. He had a clear view of the damage he was inflicting on it as he fired.

Little dents and chips. He grit his teeth. Fucking ACPA. This one was made of literal scrap and it was about as well armored as he was. Adjusting his aim, he directed every single one of his shots to collide with this meatgirls helmet instead of anywhere else. It was the only place he could expect to do any real damage here.

He wasn't getting through that torso with this gun. He might get through it with a good kick, but nothing else. This was looking to be a long-drawn out fight then. He'd have to play it carefully to prevent himself from taking too much damage, while dealing damage and conserving ammo. The Helix could hold enough ammo in a magazine for about two seconds of continuous fire. When hooked up to one of his custom extra-large ammo hoppers, it had enough ammo for about two minutes of continuous fire.

He had already spent a little more than half of that earlier. He'd have to chip away slowly, then take it out in one decisive blow to a section of weakened armor. His sandevistan deactivated as his last shot impacted against the heavily armored helmet of the Junkerknight. Glimpsing the damages, it was still dents and chips, but slightly deeper than on the torso.

Their sandevistans were not in sync. His massive speed advantage didn't matter, because his was cycling while hers was active. He grit his teeth and prepared for pain as the Junkerknight crouched slightly while rocketing towards him.

He was surprised to see it appear in the air before him, moving fast but slow enough for him to react. He glanced down to see the boy rolling on the street with his chrome leg broken…

The boy had tackled the Junkerknight's legs just as it jumped forwards. His leg had broken under the strain of trying to move one ton of rocket-powered plasteel. He grinned viciously, good shit boy, actually contributing to a proper fight now.

His foot clamped down, flat talons tearing through concrete to lock him to the ground. He spun and delivered a mule-kick to the ACPA flying through the air at him. His servos screamed at him as he kicked it up to soar above his head.

It flew over him and rolled across the street, turning a number of parked cars into scrap as it crashed into them. He checked his vitals. Five percent internal damage taken from the strain of that maneuver. That was more than fine, he'd scrap it before it could do anything else. He turned to raise his gun at the rising, and screaming, warmachine.

Eight missiles screamed out from the side and collided with the form of the Junkerknight as it rose, exploding against it tremendously and sending it staggering back to smash against another car, crushing it spectacularly. His optics glanced over to see the Blueberry, arms still raised after unleashing her volley of micromissiles. That wouldn't do much damage individually, but the armor ablation was certainly useful here.

His optics kept traveling over to see bowlcut close to the blueberry, and further away the woman and girl to the side as well. Bowlcut was giving rapid-fire commands through his comms. He grunted in approval, at least they were doing something.

The ACPA struggled to rise, before it spasmed suddenly and seized up. Uriel narrowed his fire and looked through the net to see the prismatic wires of net-influence signature to the girl strangling the Junkerknight.

…They were doing better than expected for a test, but they were also ruining the fight. Too many chefs in the kitchen and all that. He grumbled at nothing. He walked over to put the thing down with a couple good kicks, this had gotten boring all of a sudden.

It was then he realized that he forgot that most ACPA come standard with a scatter-pack. A lightweight one-use weapon that used explosives to fill a cone with munitions. Two plates of armor opened up on the Junkerknight's back. His optics widened, he glanced back.

The boy was on the ground. His investment was in danger. He activated his sandevistan and quickly learned exactly what kind of scatter pack it was equipped with. Two BFCWA Flechette clouds, a one-hundred and eighty degree arc of thousands of needle-like shards of metal propelled by a small bomb. Good against meatbags, useless against anything with heavy armor like him.

He crouched in front of the boy, and let the shards of metal crash against his armor. They wouldn't do jackshit to him, but a lucky bunch might go right through the boy's plasetech duster. He was too far from a Trauma Team center to revive him reliably.

He wasn't losing his goddamn investment here, to some random ganger meatbag.

The wave of shrapnel washed over him. Once he was sure nothing was hitting the boy, he jumped forwards. This fucking meatbag in a scrap-can dies now.

He flew through the air. His vibrating armored foot crashed against the slightly opened and heavily damaged torso in a panzerfaust-enhanced jump kick.

Needless to say, his foot crashed right through and turned the soft meatshit's organs into paste. His sandevistan deactivated as he stomped the one ton of scrap into the concrete ground.

He heard a scream of pain behind him. He rose from the stomping crouch and turned.

The boy was fine.

The woman had her riot shield covered in metal shards. She and the girl were fine.

The bowlcut was in front of the blueberry. His chrome arms were raised in front of him, predominantly protecting his head and torso. He couldn't get everything however, and a number of metal shards had torn their way through his lower torso, right through the armored suit. His limbs would be fine, being made of metal instead of meat, but his organs were in trouble.

He grunted as the bowlcut collapsed and the woman rushed over with her medical supplies. He'd need to get better armor for that one. He paused, grumbled again, and called the Trauma Team hotline. They would probably be needed for a scatterpack injury like this. Yet more shit that he would have to pay for.

The brats crowded around the bowlcut as the woman worked. He glanced around the street and observed the devastation wrought by that quick little skirmish. All-in-all, it was a rather good fight.

"Trauma Team hotline speaking." The voice of a tired man came over the call.

"If you don't have a team at my location within three minutes, I'll walk into your HQ and kill everyone I see."

"...Location marked, have the payment ready for our arrival."

He grunted and ended the call. He didn't hate those meatbags, they did their jobs.

It was getting harder and harder to perform her daily exercises over the last few weeks. It had started gradually, but the additional bulk had built up more and more over time. She could still do all of them if required, but she had been told by the physician she hired that it might damage her baby. Her baby was not as strong as her, or its father, not yet. Graciously, she allowed it this reprieve before training would begin.

Just as her mother and father did for her, her baby would be strong and healthy and beautiful. But before it could be strong it had to grow, and thus she had to wait. How frustrating all this waiting was. She was restricted to light exercises now, rather than the invigorating start to her day that she enjoyed before.

With the slight weight of her belly supported by her raised thighs, she finished her thirtieth chin-up on the mounted bar. Pausing for a moment, she reached a hand down to support the weight and slowly lowered herself to the floor with the other chrome arm. Her bare feet hit the floor, and she stood fully. She glanced over to the full-body mirror mounted on her bedroom wall, looking at the slight curve to her stomach.

A baby took forty weeks to grow. It had been about twelve. She wasn't particularly worried about what it would look like when it came out, her CRISPR womb implant ensured it would have no defects or lackluster genes, only the best from her and it's father. It would be the best possible baby she could have, she wanted to know nothing about it until it was born. It was supposed to be a surprise when the baby came out, so she would keep it that way.

She crossed her arms over her chest, which would have been impossible had she not had supersized cybernetic arms. Her bust was always rather large, and that made some activities difficult before she had gotten her arms replaced with superior models. Supposedly they were to grow in size later into her pregnancy, and she was dreading it.

Of course, she didn't suffer any discomfort from them. Her bones were twice as strong as a normal woman's, her skin was firm and elastic enough to aid against bullets, and her muscles were outright superhuman. So many problems that might crop up for mundane women were not a problem for her. She was Victoria Armstrong, she was vastly better than normal.

Nodding to herself in affirmation, she began to dress herself properly. She could tolerate a much wider range of temperatures than a normal woman, so sleeping in clothes never appealed to her. Fabric that would get in the way of her skin and the wonderful comfort of the bed and sheets. Arnold had been kind enough to bring her featherbed over from Russia when he fled the country, he was a thoughtful brother, even if a bit too worried about inconsequential things for her tastes.

Honestly, her brother needed to go find a woman and some alcohol instead of worrying about her. No, wait, multiple women, a single woman would not be enough for a man of the Armstrong family. Maybe they would be able to pull the stick from his ass.

Pausing to adjust her clothes, she looked in the mirror to make sure everything was in order. She was responsible for the Pacifica Arena, a wonderful job that ensured she was more than wealthy enough to afford her needs, but that meant she needed to display a certain professionalism and dominance with her attire. Combat boots and stockings, miniskirt and button-up shirt, a neo militaristic jacket over her shoulders like a cape, and a cute little beret.

She twirled one of her golden drills of hair around an index finger. She was beautiful, it was a fact of life. Her attire only accentuated this.

She walked out of the door and into the main room of her wing in the repaired area. This was a former office space before it was converted into a living space for her and up to three others. It would eventually be demolished, but for now it would serve her well enough. She paused at the doorway to see the light armorjack next to her door. She grumbled to herself as she removed her jacket and put it on before placing her jacket back on. Her brother was entirely too worried for her tastes.

She would indulge him by wearing it, else he would shoot her annoying looks for the entire day.

She walked into the main room to the smell of cooking. Smelled like eggs, a variety of vegetables, and actual meat. It wasn't SCOP, which had the distinct tang of sterile copper underneath its normally meaty aroma when cooking. She frowned as she walked over to the kitchen. She saw her brother, carefully reading a tablet with cooking instructions on it and managing a small number of pans with cooking foodstuffs on them.

"Good, you are here, sit and wait for the food to be done." He arrogantly commanded while squinting at the relatively tiny tablet in his hands.

"You did not need to cook, take out is more than enough calories." She complained, taking a seat anyways.

"Take out is unhealthy, you have baby, sit and wait." He shot back without looking at her.

"You need to find yourself a woman, and give your mothering to her instead of bothering me with it."

"You would die in a week. Just this month I've had to kill four agents out for your head, four! From four different corporations!"

"I would not die within a week!"

"You're right, I apologize. Three days."

She decided to not dignify that with a response, looking through the messages she had received over the night. Noticing something, she raised an eyebrow.

"Your best friend has requested a meeting, Arnold."

He was removing food from the pans and moving them to plates with a spatula when he responded. "My friend? You mean Mr. Beast? We are barely acquaintances at this point."

"You talk to him more than anyone else, best friends already."

"I've had a total of three conversations with him."

"Which is two more than anyone else, best friends."

He grunted, and clearly surrendered to her superior argumentation. Her brother set a plate of food in front of her, consisting of eggs, bacon, and grilled peppers and onions. She took the offered fork as he went back and set a glass of milk in front of her as well. Sampling each of the items, she found them to be delicious. The eggs were fluffy and well seasoned, the bacon was thick-cut and crispy, the grilled vegetables were grilled vegetables and therefore tasty.

"The eggs have too much pepper, the bacon is slightly overcooked, and the vegetables are too much. Also you forgot the wine."

He tossed a piece of toast at her head, which bounced off and landed on her plate. He grumbled and sat his massive bulk on the other side of the table with his own plate. It was about twice as large as hers, his caloric needs were higher overall.

"You cannot drink wine with the baby. Shut up and eat the food I have made for you, ungrateful parasite."

She grunted in a ladylike manner back at him. Fight good battles, drink good wine, eat good food, fuck handsome men. Two of her pleasures were gone thanks to the baby. She made a note to invite Adam over again, lest she grow bored with life.

…It had been some time since he last visited her. Her bedsheets were growing cold. She pursed her lips and strangled that thought. He had given her a child, shelter, and a lucrative job. It would be tremendously rude to ask for anything more out of their relationship. She had everything she needed already.

"Overbearing prude."

With that last snipe at her brother, she dug into the good food.

—

On the other side of the desk that she used for meetings, in a much-too-small chair, sat the massive form of The Beast. He was shorter than her brother, but not by much, and his always-worn armor added to his bulk in an outwards rather than upwards direction.

It was rather refreshing to be surrounded by men who were actually taller than her. She towered over other women at six feet and six inches, but as a consequence she towered over most men as well. Here in Night City there were at least three that were taller than her, even if one of them was her brother. The Beast was a rather reserved fellow, what with his habit of communicating with grunts and gestures more often than not, but he was polite enough and did his job well.

His job being overall security chief for Pacifica, on paper at least. In practice it was the tiny Arasaka woman who managed the day-to-day security. The Beast was here mostly to keep the all top fighters in the Arena from suddenly deciding to murder each other. If you started a fight outside of the ring, The Beast would come over and put you down. The other Animals were certainly threatening, but were ultimately manageable for the other gangs to kill.

The Beast was different, using a decent spread of bioware, top tier armor and weapons, and brutal intimidation tactics to become effectively unstoppable to the average ganger. She was fairly certain he had an auto-injector with combat stimulants underneath that armor, but she had never seen him take any sort of drug recreationally. If he was an addict, he was the most composed addict she had ever seen.

"Well, what did you want?" She asked, somewhat bored and dreading the paperwork of the day to come. She booted up the PC absentmindedly, watching the little Arasaka symbol fill and unfill over and over again.

"I and Tyger King will duel to death at end of week. Want to in the Arena."

She paused and processed that statement. She took a long drink of her coffee. She turned to look at The Beast, who had not moved since that statement, just patiently staring at her.

She groaned and let her head rest on the back of her chair. Cycling through a few menus and numbers in her vision, she messaged a number.

"Macguffin, whatever it is you're doing, stop and get in my office. I need you."

—

About fifteen minutes later a rather unspectacular man who was often a spectacular pain in her ass came through the door. He paused when he saw The Beast sitting at the chair, and looked to her. His face was flushed from exertion, his office was a light walk away for her and he was a mostly unmodified man. No wonder he was tired, to have gotten here in only fifteen minutes.

He raised a brow at her and moved in to sit down.

"This kinda meeting, huh? Alright, what is it that you need from me this time?" He huffed as he opened up a cyberdeck and began to type away at it, plugging himself in.

She went ahead and dived right in. "Beastie and Sota Saito want to fight to the death in the arena at the end of the week. How do we make that happen and how do we monetize it most effectively?"

Macguffin paused, looked at her, then looked over to the Beast, who was still patiently sitting. He looked down at his cyberdeck and stared for a moment. He let it fall out of his lap and put his head in his hands. The cyberdeck fell to the floor and revealed a mostly full event schedule for the next three months.

He breathed in and out for a moment.

"...What are the stakes?" He eventually asked. She turned to the Beast, who took it as his cue to speak again.

"He wins, Animals leave Pacifica and say Tygers are good fighters. Recommend hire."

She frowned at him, and he ignored her under his steel mask. Macguffin nodded into his hands slowly. The Beast continued.

"I win, Tygers have tournament in Arena over who is next Tyger King. Open tournament."

She closed her eyes and took a slow drink of her coffee, brow furrowed.

Macguffin let out a long and muffled scream into his hands.

—

Adam looked at the AV flying towards him on the street, the massive Trauma Team logo on the side being a rather clear indication of who it was. That was to be expected, they had gotten here after a minute and thirty seconds. Pretty good for meatbags.

The AV flew over, marking the ground of its landing with the recognizable lights as it descended. Those lights were new, although he didn't quite remember when they were added onto Trauma Team AVs. Maybe sometime in the 2050s? It was some sort of health and safety measure that their HQ pushed out for public appeal, and the NC crews were forced to use as well.

Those lights were strictly for the benefit of those on the ground. If you didn't get out of the way, Trauma Team would crush your meatbag body to pulp as they landed. They were task-oriented that way. He looked over to the woman, still applying pressure and whatnot to the bowlcut.

"Oi, woman! Trauma Team's here."

She didn't respond to him, still going through the motions of stabilizing the halfmeat brat. He frowned, woman you better fucking listen to him while he spoke. The AV landed, and the side opened up. He was slightly surprised to see a Lifeline ACPA step out and brandish a 30mm auto grenade launcher. It stomped out quickly, followed by a smaller than normal squad of Trauma Team members with guns pointed in all directions.

One of them came up to him, he stood still to wait.

"The boy with the blue hair?" He nodded and the man waved a hand to signal his other team members to move forwards. He raised a brow at the ACPA that was scanning the street for hostiles. The man in front of him explained. "We received reports that there was a Junkerknight in the area, I presume it has been dealt with already?"

He grunted in confirmation and opened up his account to transfer the appropriate sum over. From the corner of his eye he saw one of the Trauma Team members about to shove the woman away from the boy.

He activated his sandevistan and stomped over. He grabbed the offending arm in a grip hard enough to hurt through his body armor but not enough to do permanent harm. He let his sandevistan deactivate.

The arm was stopped cold in his grip. Every member of Trauma Team raised their guns at him. The ACPA pointed that big Grenade Launcher his way. The brats were about to do something stupid, but he raised his gun to stop them.

He looked down and growled out. "Woman. Trauma Team is here. Step away from the bowlcut."

She focused on the present again and stumbled back. He let the man's hand go and walked back over to the first. Fucking meatbags, don't go touching his shit, next time he'll kill every one of you. The guns were pointed at him the whole time.

"How much was it again?" He asked idly.

"For laying a hand on a Trauma Team employee and Platinum coverage? Thirty-five thousand for a month of coverage." The man replied, deliberately light in tone. Fucking medical services, always taking a chunk of change out of his hide. He grumbled and forwarded the appropriate sum. The man's eyes glowed and he nodded to the rest of them.

They went about their job.

He liked that meatbag, that was a decent stare down. He always loved one of those.

The medics said that the bowlcut would get out in about fourteen days with normal recovery times. They had to pull all the shards out of his chest, glue him up again, and wait for the meds to do their work. They could use an IV drip with Speedheal too, but that cost extra. Adam was annoyed that it would be two weeks before the bowlcut recovered enough for training, seven even with Speedheal. He was already completely pathetic in a scrap, so the long delay before his organs patched themselves up was incredibly annoying.

No, the bowlcut wasn't going to be much help against the Meatfucker. Of course, the moment he thought that, the bowlcut showed some fucking initiative and asked for permission to purchase a small bioware suite. Skinweave, Enhanced Antibodies, and Nanosurgeons. It would make him a bit tougher overall, and heal much faster.

The medics estimated it to be about four times faster overall. He would be up in two and a half days instead of two weeks, and that was with no Speedheal. With Speedheal, he'd be at full capacity again in two days. The wonders of regenerating meat, two days compared to his half a minute with a spare frame on hand.

Adam approved, the bowlcut was actually going out of his way to get an upgrade, he didn't have to tell him to get it. Of course, then the boy got sulky for a bit over the other getting an upgrade. That lasted for all of about five seconds until Adam told him to get the same package. Tougher skin and faster healing was only going to make training go faster, and a bit of meatware was hardly going to make the boy go over the edge.

In truth, Adam had forgotten about bioware to heal faster. Normally if the meatware doesn't have an immediate effect, he didn't notice it at all. Mostly because he hadn't been meat in decades at this point, he only remembered it at all because it turned some meatbags into slightly entertaining fights. They don't survive long enough for healing faster to ever be relevant to him.

So, while waiting for the brats to get their healing implants injected, Adam waited outside with his arms crossed. He got looks as terrified nurses and doctors pointedly avoided looking at him as they passed by him in the hall. Which made sense, meatbags were pathetic, meatbags that specialized in keeping other meatbags alive were probably doubly pathetic. Distributors of mercy, even at exorbitant prices.

Mercy was disgusting. If you needed to rely on someone else to stay alive, you were better off dead.

Trauma Team was one of the few medical meatbags he tolerated for a reason. They were there for the payment, utterly committed to fulfilling their side of the bargain so long as they got paid. He's had scraps against them in the past, back in his early days, and they were always a good scrap. Unfortunately, once their client was secured they usually just bailed rather than stick around to finish the fight. It was always annoying, but understandable.

Adam Smasher was a merc after all, a very old merc. He understood how the business was done.

Idly, he rested against that stark white and neon-red hospital wall, waiting for this shit to be over so he could drill the brats on their strategy and all the ways they went wrong. The most obvious problem was letting the overwatch/netrunner and medic anywhere near the action. Both he and the boy had sandevistans, transport time to the medic was not nearly as much of an issue as they thought it was. The only one who was slow enough to not get there on her own was the blueberry, and she was light enough for anyone else to simply carry.

The blueberry wasn't using her missiles most effectively either. She was expending them all in one go instead of spacing them out. An alpha strike was useful against some targets, but gangers that used knives over guns were not usually one of those. She could have simply disabled the biggest threats with two rockets and waited for the boy or him to deal with the rest.

The boy had also…

He stopped as he got a message from the busty manager of his Arena. That was rare, he focused on that corner of his vision and brought it up to fill his view.

…The leader of the Animals and Tyger Claws were going to fight to the death in his Arena. That was… annoying but potentially good. Lots of revenue from that, if advertised properly. That would give him more funding to work with. He looked over the conditions.

He narrowed his optics.

They were bidding being employed under him like it was theirs to give away. That was frustrating. He made a note to threaten to murder all of them if they tried something like that again. He'd let it pass this time, who exactly he employed didn't matter as much to him as the fact that he needed the role filled, but the principle of the matter stood.

You don't fuck around with shit that belonged to him.

'Make them both do it, if that comes up.' Uriel idly suggested, reviewing manufacturing laws with a somewhat frustrated ripple to his fire.

'So none of them win?' Adam replied, contemplating the thought. That sounded like a decent enough punishment for trying to pull a stunt like this. Meh, might as well, he didn't have a better idea other than 'kill them all if they do this again.' 'Still locked up?' He asked back, even knowing the answer. Uriel's fire broiled for a moment, irritated.

As it turned out, starting up a new business in the modern year was something that required about a thousand and one lawyers to parse through all the legal bullshit. When megacorporations own most business on the planet, many laws are established that make potential competitors very rare. Food stand business and the like were the easiest to get licenses for.

Weapons manufacturing? Nigh impossible to sort through all the legal bullshit and steps involved. Uriel didn't have a brain anymore and he still had a headache thinking about it. There were really only two ways to go about it, one was to do it illegally, which he could not with all the public attention on him. The second was to do it as a subsidiary corporation of Arasaka, and while this was tempting, Adam and Uriel decided against it.

He was fairly sure the Old man would agree to it, he was also sure that he would have to deal with a legion of executives and corporate meddling constantly clamoring for a piece of the pie, or to shut it down with sabotage. Or any other number of bullshit things that he would be forced to deal with. The Meatfucker was less than a year away. He couldn't afford the distraction right now. Maybe after they could revisit it, but not right now.

Uriel grumbled in frustration, and looked around for something to distract himself with. Seeing the Mikoshi-AI staring at him again from underneath the neighboring tower, he waved hello. The Mikoshi-AI slowly waved back with a smallish 'hand' of influence. Uriel smiled, for progress had been made this day. He then went back to trying to ignore the way she kept staring at him.

Uriel paused, and thought for a moment. He looked back at Mikoshi-AI and stared at her. The Mikoshi-AI was staring back.

The Mikoshi-AI wasn't a her before. It was a formless shadow thing with four eyes. Since when was it distinctly feminine in shape? Still mostly shadowy, but with the hints of a female form underneath the impression of some sort of dress. The former eyes hovered around 'her' head, like fireflies.

The Mikoshi-AI broke the stare, ducking its 'head' downwards and not looking at him. He narrowed his theoretical eyes and kept staring, distracted by this new mystery. Adam grunted, scaring the passing doctor, and opened up a random compilation of his murders and played it. He was probably going to be here a while, might as well indulge in his favorite hobby.

…Miko… He should probably set up some shinto shrines to appease the old man. He'd probably like that.

—

The kids wanted to go to Afterlife afterwards. Apparently their old driver was back in town, and wanted to say hello. The bowlcut wasn't going to be going anywhere, it would still be a few hours before he could walk without ripping the wounds open again. This was fine, if they wanted to make the review process that much harder on themselves by being hung over for it, he'd oblige them. They'd do it first thing in the morning tomorrow.

So bowlcut was delivered back to the fortress, and then they loaded up in his reinforced muscle car. Just enough space for five people, two in front and three in the backseat. He was in his Gemini for outings like this, his Dragoon shipped over to the tower for minor repairs and a backup in his closet.

He twisted the old key and started up the engine, plugged in his interface cable, and noticed that the radio was still on and playing that old music disc. The brats stared at him as he drove out from the lot and through the security customs that he paid for. One good glower was enough to get the security to get out of his way.

Most of the shit nowadays was all wireless and whatnot, which was usually a horrible fucking idea. He preferred wired connections, less chance of some random fucker getting lucky and forcing your car off a bridge. Adam had learned his lesson from that back in his Samson days.

He was sloppy back then, and every now and then some punk would be clever or lucky enough to escape him. That was always infuriating, so he upgraded each time something fucked him over. It took only one time being trapped in a fucking net for him to install wolvers in both arms. It took only one EMP for him to get everything shielded. It took only one long repair session to get quickchange mounts and spare arms.

Everytime some fucker screwed him over with something new, he got better tech.

…When did he stop doing that? Sometime after getting the Dragoon frame. There wasn't much need to keep upgrading when nothing could stop you anyways. He got complacent.

He didn't plan to do so again.

He noticed they had arrived, him driving more or less on autopilot to the destination. He grunted and got out, turning off the car, disconnecting himself, and putting the key away in his boot.

He got out, the brats already having done so, excitedly walking over to see their old driver for reasons he couldn't understand. There was nothing stopping this meeting, so why was it special? It could have happened at any time. The woman had paused and turned back to look at him as he stomped forwards, probably because she had no connection with this driver.

What was his name again? Eagle or something.

He walked in, ignoring the bouncer who probably wasn't going to try and stop him anyways. He was Adam fucking Smasher, it was common sense to not get in his way. Inside the place was as packed as it usually was, filled with all manner of stinking meatbags indulging in various vices. He scanned the room with a glare, ignoring the flinching meatbags who saw him looking.

There they were, he stomped over to the kids excitedly chatting away with a familiar nomad. He looked more or less the same, perhaps a bit more tan and with a slight stubble on his face. His fashion was…

Adam took a moment to look at the man who had just finally noticed him. The nomad walked over and smiled politely with a hand out for a handshake. Adam glared but took it and shook hands with the nomad.

"Why hello again, Mr. Smasher. The kids were just telling me all about what they've been up to, well, rambling more like it."

His fashion was good. It was fucking startling to see in the modern day. He hadn't noticed last time.

"Driver. It's unexpected to see a meatbag who knows what clothes look good these days."

The driver paused at that, and scanned his own attire. Then he looked over Adam's attire. He put a hand on his hip and leaned back a tad.

"I could say the same about yourself, sans the meat part of course, didn't know you had a Nomadic fashion sense."

Adam grunted. "Brat, I was killing before the Nomads existed, more like they have my fashion sense."

The driver blinked at that. Adam was more or less done with this conversation at this point though, so he stomped off to get to his usual place at the corner table with the cougar.

She was standing up, and jerked her head to follow her to the back.

He grinned and followed.

—

Falco stared at the form Adam Smasher stomping away. The man would have been unrecognizable in that Gemini of his were it not for the eight foot frame and the widespread publicity of it. The Nomads had pieced together an eight hour-long movie that contained his slaughter of the Raffen Shiv outside Night City. They mass produced it as well as they could, and sold it to other clans for ten eddies a shard.

City dwellers got it for a hundred per shard.

They might number in the tens of thousands across all of America, but having a little more than a thousand die in a single night got them all riled up. With Vincent going around and actively uniting everyone on the west coast that he could, they were able to fend off the angry wasps. The Raffen Shiv couldn't get a foothold around Night City, not anymore. They were killed off, the locals took over the territory best they could, and they were cut off from supply lines by Vincent.

The Wraiths were gone, and the roads on the west coast got a little safer. It was strange knowing that the Butcher was the one to do it. Or… maybe not strange at all? Meh, not worth worrying over too much.

"You think I might have made him mad?" He asked aloud, unsure.

David, looking more well put together than he ever had before, laughed. "Nah, Smasher's just like that. He'll tell you if he's actually mad."

Rebecca yanked on his arm and nearly pulled it out of the socket dragging him over to the bar. "C'mon Falco! How've you been choom?! What's been going on with ya?!"

He resisted and raised a hand and the red-headed woman. "Hey now little missy, I need to introduce myself to the new lady of your crew first."

David smacked his head and grinned. "Can't believe I forgot. Falco, remember how I said my mom was dead? Well, uhh…" He trailed off a bit, before coughing. "Right, she was but they were able to revive her."

Falco stared at him for a moment. He looked at the pained looking red-haired woman. He turned back. "She… would have been dead for over a year, right? I don't know much about medical tech but…"

Little Lucy spoke up. "Arasaka bought her corpse and froze it for testing."

He rolled the thought around in his mind for a bit. He offered a hand to the red-haired woman and smiled all polite-like. "Well, the circumstances are certainly not the best, but I'm glad that it worked out for you. You must be Mrs. Gloria Martinez then, right? David talked about you a lot while you were having an ice-nap."

She smiled back and shook his hand firmly. "Nice to meet you, Falco, right? I've been told about you."

"Good things only, I hope?" he joked charmingly.

"They told me you charged Adam Smasher with a handgun."

He coughed into his fist and turned away to go sit at the table, ignoring the chuckles from the peanut gallery. That probably wasn't one of his wisest decisions, but his blood was hot and riled back then.

"So c'mon choom, no more avoiding the questions. What have you been up to?" Rebecca piped up, and he waved a chrome arm to get her to settle down.

"Well first, I'm going to order another drink from this lovely bartender of ours." He winked at the woman at the counter, who started pouring him another whiskey. "Thank ya doll." He took a sip, savoring the taste for a moment, then set the glass down and turned to face the kids.

"Right then, I drove off to go see an old friend of mine, tell him the news of Night City and maybe find myself a job to do." He briefly locked eyes with the woman he knew as Gloria Martinez. "A friend named Vincent, smart guy, impossible to beat in poker, and an all around scaredy-cat."

Gloria stiffened up at that, and shot him a look. He sent her a brief message asking her to be patient. The kids were enthralled by his little story too much to notice.

"Right, so Vincent has been going around and facilitating connections between the Nomads here in the west, he wanted me on board to help him out, see? The way he figures? He doesn't have to be so scared all the time if he's surrounded by an army of cars and guns, so he's been helping them plan and whatnot. I did that for a few months."

He took another drink of his whiskey. The kids practically bounced as they waited for him to continue.

"Then he started talking to some real shady types, guys in suits who wanted to offer money if the Nomads occasionally did some things for them. They had a little symbol on their suits I didn't recognize. A little green dot on a blue background."

"Now we Nomads do the occasional job for suits, no way around that, simply business. But there were a whole lot of Nomads in one place this time, and a whole lotta manpower. Anyone who can hire that many at one time is above my paygrade. So I told Vincent I was outta there, and then I drove back here to check up on you lot."

He shrugged. "And here I am." He grinned at them. "So c'mon, tell me how've you all been, what have ya been up to?"

They practically clamor over themselves trying to talk. Well, David and Rebecca did, Lucy instead just gave a sarcastic ribbing every now and then with a smile on her face.

After many minutes of back and forth, he eventually convinced them to try and wow him with the new bar tricks they learned. A task they hopped to pronto. While watching them, he opened a call with Gloria.

[Missus Gloria? I'm sure you have questions you don't want the kids to hear.]

She jumped slightly, and gulped before responding.

[Ah, yes… Vincent. You mean Vincent Martinez, right?]

He inclined his head.

[Yes, Vincent Martinez. David's daddy as far as I'm aware. I drove off to tell him you were dead.]

She flinched and looked down to the floor.

[...Did he mention coming here… to visit David maybe?]

He frowned and closed his eyes.

[...I asked him. He never ended up responding to that question.]

He opened his eyes. She slumped, and he could see her try to hold back little tears in her eyes. Goddamn it Vincent, now you made him make a woman cry.

He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it slightly.

[Now I know I'm a stranger, but I like to consider myself a friend of your son, and hopefully one of your friend's too. I'm here if you need a listenin' ear anytime.]

She jumped a little at the contact, looking at him with teary eyes. She rubbed the wetness away and smiled at him.

[Thank you, Mr. Falco.]

He grinned and sipped his whiskey, looking at the kids stacking each other high into the air to the cheering of onlookers in the bar.

[None of that now, we're friends now. Just Falco is fine.]

She leaned back and watched the kids with him.

[Then you'll have to call me Gloria.]

[Can do, Ms. Gloria.]

He wasn't used to beds, he wasn't sure how meatbags could stand it. Being on your back was a shit position on the best of days in a scrap, and being unconscious and on your back meant that you were going to die real fucking fast.

A solid surface was something he valued, concrete or hard packed dirt and similar. He could run on it and not risk going through with his six-hundred or so pound steps. His feet were proportionally larger than what a meatbag's would have been, and had an extra 'toe' on the heel specifically to distribute his weight even further. Soft surfaces were absolutely awful and a bad idea all around, mud, quicksand, rotten wood, shit like that. He would stomp right through that.

Beds were the worst of both worlds. He was on his back on a soft surface, and underneath a pseudo-net that was a typical blanket. Sure he could tear right through it, but it would take a moment more than normal because more blankets were made of hemp these days. He didn't have to be unconscious anymore, his micro-fusion plant was pricier than most buildings but it was absolutely worth it, so that was one thing he didn't have to worry about.

Everything else though? Absolutely awful, putting himself in a shitty tactical situation for something as asinine as 'comfort', something that he never needed. They were almost as bad as BDs, which as far as he could tell had absolutely nothing but downsides. The only reason he was putting up with it now?

The cougar was being awfully free with info so long as he stayed still. So while Uriel was watching the kids through the cameras, he was in the trap known as a bed and getting updated about the situation on the streets.

"...most of the gangs have been digesting what they were able to snatch during your most recent massacres, so it's been relatively peaceful these past few months. That's probably not going to last much longer though." The cougar talked, lying against his chest as he glared at the ceiling and occasionally gave a reply.

"Who got the most out of my fun?"

She hummed as she idly dragged a finger back and forth on his chest. "Difficult to say. Either Maelstrom or 6th Street. Maelstrom got right on to grabbing as much as they could in the aftermath of each, but it must not have been too much because they've actually stopped being so aggressive afterwards. They might be hoarding it for a rainy day. 6th Street wasn't the biggest before, but they were close enough to the badlands to snatch up most of the vehicles you left after the Wraiths, them and the Nomads. They have the heaviest guns around now."

He snorted. She lightly slapped his pectoral myomer.

"Not too heavy to you, maybe. Most of us are made of meat, remember?"

"That was your first mistake." He grunted.

She let out a snort of laughter. "Sure, sure. The Scavs being gone wasn't too much of a disruption, other than everyone getting a bunch of secondhand chrome whenever one of their old dens got found. That new ripperdoc gang kept everything running pretty much the same as before. The Voodoo boys had a bit more impact."

He couldn't take credit for that one, that was the boy's doing. He took secondhand satisfaction in the deed. He rumbled in reply, she paused for a moment before continuing.

"With the big name ganger-netrunners suddenly going under, that left a whole lotta room for a whole lotta independents to crop up. Can't shoot without hitting some small fry trying to make it big through selling their net services out these days. Maelstrom still has their batshit runners, but they don't do work outside the gang and no one wants to hire them anyways. Animals never bothered with it. Valentinos, 6th Street, and Tyger Claws usually outsourced whenever they needed a runner."

"The Mox have gotten quite a bit more business now that their biggest runner competitors are extinct. They've expanded quite a bit, especially with their popularity at your little arena. Combine that with the Tygers being distracted with the Animals, and they're almost as big as Maelstrom was a year ago now, a bit more than a thousand of them."

"...Is that supposed to be impressive? A thousand prostitute meatbags?" He asked, honestly curious. It had been a long time since he had a gang of his own, and his was about… fifteen-hundred maybe? Half of which were orphan brats. Most of them got butchered while he was being turned into metal by Arasaka, so he didn't bother going back to check up on them. There was always going to be kids on the streets, their distribution made no difference.

A small gang was about a hundred members, a gang worth mentioning was around a thousand, a gang that was a threat was around ten-thousand, and the gangs that lasted more than a century were a hundred-thousand strong. That last category had the Yakuza, La Eme, and the Mafia, and no one else to his knowledge. Very fucking few gangs reached the point of mattering in the grand scheme, a thousand meatbags was just a thousand meatbags afterall. There wasn't a single gang in Night City that mattered to the big shots he killed for.

"A thousand prostitutes with a global fanbase thanks to your arena giving them free advertising. Last I heard they were getting more than ten-thousand eddies a month in donations from 'fans'."

Well funded prostitute meatbags then, getting money from horny meatbags. Uriel had a word for this.

"Fucking simps."

She stopped her idle circles, pushing herself up on one arm and raising a brow at him. Her hair messily flopped in front of her face. "What's a simp?"

…Well shit, that term didn't exist here, did it? He narrowed his optics in frustration and explained simply. "A desperately horny meatbag." She hummed and stayed pushed up, eyes trailing his features. He tilted his head to stare at her in turn, examining her body. Rejux treatments did her good. She looked like she was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties now, still with gray hair though.

She smirked at him. "Does the big bad butcher like what he sees?"

He snorted. "Much improved over the 'out-of-touch grandmother' look."

She narrowed her eyes, reached up, and pinched his nose. She couldn't hurt him this way no matter how hard she tried. His Gemini was as durable as a MetalGear was. "I'll fuck you up, asshole." She threatened in a bantering manner.

Unfortunately for her, he had the perfect response. He slapped her behind with one of his hands under the cover. "Like I just did yours?"

She jumped at the sudden impact, grit her teeth, and growled at him. He grinned maliciously at her glare. It was fun to rile this woman up.

—

He took a long drag of his pipe, and slowly breathed out genuine tobacco. He knew it was genuine because he grew it himself, it was the only way to get a smoke worth a damn these days. The Agri-wars were still going strong after all, and farms for organic plants were more and more expensive to keep running day by day. He had a personal garden, but that was it. If he expanded it and started selling the tobacco, then he would undoubtedly be visited by Biotechnica or Petrochem with polite requests to cease, followed by biochemical weapons if he refused.

Every organic farm in the world was at risk of such attacks. Pacifica was somewhat protected by the reputation of Arasaka and Adam Smasher, and the hundreds of armed residents that guarded their new food sources like dingos watching babies. There had been several attacks stopped before Arasaka even became aware of them, just from the enthusiastic self-policing of the citizens in the arena.

Ever since the first harvest, sabotaging the planters was a good way to have everyone in the neighborhood block attack you without reservation. There was at least one guard with a circadian half-cycler on constant look out at each section. None of them wanted the good times to end, and they were willing to kill and get killed over it. That was part of why Pacifca was so valuable to take control over.

An entire district willing to keep constant watch over organic food production. The Animals foolishly did absolutely nothing with this, but the Tyger Claws saw well the potential therein. Tens of thousands willing to defend planter boxes, and to do so eagerly…

That was a treasure like nothing else in Night City. The Animals were squandering it completely! He grit his teeth in anger, careful to remove his fine pipe first. The waste was irritating beyond all measures. Above everything else, even if his life was forfeit, he had to kill Ryuzaki. Anyone at all was better to control the Pacifican territory, anyone at all.

The door opened a sixteenth time, Akuhara bringing in the final candidate. He opened his eyes and looked over the now full room.

Sixteen of the greatest warriors that the Tyger Claws had. Thirteen of them were young men, three were young women, and all of them had some degree of success in the Arena prior. He inwardly frowned at their visible chrome, the youths not even having the decency to cover it over with synthflesh.

They had not earned the right to bear a mechanical body. They were not symbols of the might of an entire organization, or warriors capable of overcoming a hundred warriors alone. They were well-trained brats at best. He let his pipe rest in his palm, not letting his frustration with them show.

His iron collar itched. He had no right to complain.

He began to speak. "You have been called here today for a specific purpose. You are the sixteen greatest warriors of the Tyger Claws, all of you in the prime of your youth, all of you with a strong arm and a vicious instinct."

He scanned over the small crowd, noting their behaviors and attitudes. There was one on the right with cold blue hair, he was perfectly still while at attention.

"At the end of this week, I shall duel with The Beast, leader of the Animals, in the Arena. I am not the warrior I was in my youth. I will likely die from my wounds after bringing him down. If I die within the Arena, then the Tyger Claws are honor-bound to hold a tournament."

He let the moment linger. The one on the left with the bladed legs, she was the most eager judging from the barely suppressed bloodthirsty grin on her face. She was able to guess what was coming next, or she was told.

"A tournament to determine the next leader of the Tyger Claws."

There was a shocked ripple that spread through them. They were understandably surprised, as melee tournaments were not how gang leadership was chosen, traditionally speaking.

"There will be an open qualifier to this tournament, and sixteen finalists."

He glared at them suddenly, letting the full weight of his presence fill the room. Some of the more nervous looking ones choked up at his sudden change in expression.

"You all are to work together in the qualifier, to eliminate as many foreigners as possible. This is an absolute order. The Tyger Claws will collapse if such an individual were to achieve this victory, I will not allow that to happen even from the grave."

"One of you will succeed, or the Tyger Claws will collapse."

He leaned back on his mat a tad, and lessened his glare. The weaker ones were suddenly able to breathe again.

"No doubt each of you will be approached by some faction or individual within the Tyger Claws itself. Some of you will be approached by outside factions, some of you will be alone in this fight. All of this is permissible, use whatever means available to you to succeed, I care not."

"In this instance, and this instance alone, honor matters less than victory."

He scanned around the room a final time. The one in the middle with cybernetic arms, he had a determined glare on his face. It was a fierce expression.

"You are dismissed."

As they shuffled from his room, Sota took another puff from his pipe. Slowly, old bones creaking at him, he got up. He walked around his seating and through the door behind him into his personal chambers.

Walking over to the right, he looked at the display and smoked, contemplative.

Mounted upon the display, a paired set of Kendachi monoblades and a number of auto-injector canisters sat.

His ravaged body breathed in through his cybernetic throat. Slowly, he took the vials, filled with a number of custom stimulants, and loaded them into the slots on his neck.

One final battle, one he had little chance of surviving. There was little need to hold himself back.

A still world was a still mind, and a day in the very depths of winter was a still one indeed. There was a quiet to the world as he patiently waited for his personal physician to finalize the summary of the results of his latest check-up. On the far wall stood young Takemura, ready to defend his liege in a moment's notice, but unmoving as to not unduly threaten the others in the room. He was a loyal young man, trained as a shinobi by Kagekaze himself.

His only flaw was that he longed to be a samurai instead. It was his hope that the boy would grow out of such a desire in time. Saburo found him long ago, rising through the ranks of his corporate army from one of the many stains on Japan at that time, Chibi-11. A place of polluted waterways and industrial runoff. Saburo had eliminated that stain more than a decade ago. He refused to tolerate it any longer than he had to. It was now like most of his domain, beautiful, clean, and productive.

That was true of everywhere his reach extended. Even now young Yojimbo took a district of filth and poverty and dragged it up into the light of civilization. A mere handful of months after Arasaka's purchase of Pacifica, and it was already turning into a bastion among the dregs of Night City. His rivals could see the winds blowing, and rushed to offer gifts of wealth and service.

Yojimbo was too clever for them, to his surprised delight. He had not been initially pleased with several of his decisions as of late, but resolved to let him see them through before interfering. They had been wildly successful. The bandits of Night City were now vying for his favor, the greatest rival of Arasaka was bound into a contract to prevent disruption and provide wealth, and the populace was throwing themselves behind his projects with fervent abandon.

More than anything else, he was glad that Yojimbo and Yorinobu were so able and quick to cooperate. The execution of the failing asset was immediate and practical, and their mutual evaluations passed quickly. Yorinobu went about purging the tower of any and all of the former president's bureaucrats and replacing them with men loyal to himself from the main HQ. Which had the excellent benefit of ridding Saburo of now tainted assets and removing many agents of his son from Japan.

Even his troublesome granddaughter had begun to correct her appearance and behavior. Looking much more like the charming young girl with hints of Kei's features instead of some Oni prostitute, acting much more like the intelligent young girl who successfully bargained with the Oni Lord for the right to remain within his lands unmolested, even at the cost of forming an organization of kunoichi to battle against her own family.

She acted much more like the sheltered young princess who fell for bloody-handed samurai so long ago, now a mature warlord in her own right and leading her clan against a thunder god with iron flesh.

However… Yojimbo was left without a replacement for his newest war-body. The subjects of project Yokai were stolen away. The vanquished enemy of IEC was reborn, even if now under the partial control of Arasaka. The puppets of that ancient council of Gaia were using Yojimbo's efforts for some nebulous gain he could not discern.

He was forced to purge many disloyal elements from his own ranks and hire foreign, mercenary Onmyōdō to perform critical updates to his tech-architecture that could not be delayed. He was forced to recall many other cyborg soldiers to receive education in Panzerfaust due to its revealed efficacy, education sourced from Yojimbo's own black box recordings. He was forced to let his greatest enemies grow in strength for five years to honor Yojimbo's contract.

The physician finalized the document, and turned to him with the tablet in hand. He bowed for the appropriate duration, and rose to look at the emperor with heavy eyes. Saburo nodded for him to speak. The old-looking man who was half Saburo's own age spoke.

"Saburo-sama, the analysis is the same as before. Without another breakthrough in life-extending technologies… your body will fail you within a decade if you are lucky, five years if you are not lucky, and a year if you are unlucky." The physician spoke professionally, with a barely hidden undercurrent of sorrow. "Your body cannot handle the stressors of another implant, not even with a twenty-four seven bathing within the Sarcophagus… If you had more time, I would recommend the Liveware procedure, but that would take decades your body simply does not have."

Lastly, he was due to die very soon. On the far wall, young Takemura bowed his head in despair. To his back-left, Jorogumo-V3 restrained herself from openly weeping, an expression like a placid lake on her features.

He nodded and without a word dismissed the physician. Young Tenma packed away his medical supplies, bowed a final time, and left.

He was not worried about his death. He had been dying for decades now, slowly, gradually withering away. He had already made preparations for exactly such an event. Within one of his ten chipware sockets was one of the two prototype Relics. Data-shards capable of holding vastly larger quantities of information than their previous renditions, enough to hold an engram without the need for an entire server, and containers of a host of nanomachines that would distribute into an existing neural system and adjust it to match the stored engram.

At the base of his mind there was a destructive scanner, linked to an Arasaka custom computer in his left arm, his cybernetic arm. A custom computer loaded with a single program. Soulkiller. A destructive scan-based program designed to fully capture the human soul before the Shinigami could snatch it away. First made by a troublesome Oni-woman many years ago, and perfected and refined by his daughter Hanako into a masterful sword for him to wield.

The arm one he had gotten due to an injury so long ago when his fighter plane had almost been shot down. He had lost an eye and an arm to the shrapnel, and had struggled to fly it back to his base commander some 560 miles of ocean away. He only let himself pass out after delivering his report.

He was never allowed to fly again, his injuries were too great. A Reisen with its wings torn off. He knew only shame in those days, the shame of a warrior that failed to die honorably. Then, a scant three years later, the Emperor announced his surrender and renounced his divinity.

Saburo was a moment before seppuku then. He had been stopped by a vision. A vision of a resurgent red phoenix. He couldn't die until he avenged himself. He couldn't die until he avenged his nation. He couldn't die until he avenged his Emperor.

His work was not done, not even now some one-hundred and thirty years later. He was close though, desperately close.

His body might die.

His soul would live on.

He was glad that day-by-day, it seemed more and more like his soul wouldn't have to strike down his last son either. It was a wonderful feeling, as if an iron shackle had been removed from his body. Not fully, but it was getting looser with each passing moment. He felt light, even with the sword of Soulkiller aimed at his own mind, ready to fire the moment his life was extinguished.

Saburo Arasaka had been dying for decades now. He felt like he had been truly alive these past few months. He was glad, even as his soul readied itself for a resurrective seppuku.

—

The new headquarters in the Pacifican territory was simply one of the temporary housing buildings modified to be an acceptable office space. It contained enough room for the insured equipment to all fit in after replacements had come in, and for a decent number of employee bedrooms if needed. Not enough for every employee, DangerGal was a corporation with a few hundred girls (and the occasional boy) counted in its numbers. She could get about half of them sleeping in the new HQ at most, and that would be a cramped experience.

Moving everything in had been a hassle, but it was probably worth it. She had been meaning to get a new building for a while now, and the opportunity had been forced upon her by Shaitan's attack. Her girls took to patrolling around while they weren't on jobs, often joining up with one of the local patrol groups. They said it was rather relaxing, as it was rare for them to actually have to do anything.

Adam… really was good at running a clean ship. She supposed she wasn't quite ready to believe that until she started living here. The streets were clean, the people were fed and restrained their violent tendencies to the arena for the most part, and there was more green in one place here than she had seen outside of the Arasaka compounds in decades.

A mangled face, a closed-off expression, a burning red glare.

A hate-filled snarl.

"Get the fuck away from me."

She breathed in, held it for a moment, and released it. She opened her eyes and pushed up from where she was leaning against her desk, standing up from her desk chair and moving over to the window. In the distance, a black fortress loomed over a collection of temporary housing buildings.

She had known what his reaction would have been to her showing up to help him. She knew him better than anyone else in the world. She had just…

…

She had just hoped that she was wrong. She knew better than to do so, she hadn't been wrong in years now. She knew that he was still furious and pained, and that he would lash out immediately in the only way he could with his Long-Term Contract in place. An immediate, blunt, verbal strike against her followed by retreating to something he was much more familiar and comfortable with. Violence in this case.

She had known all of that going in. She thought she was prepared to weather his anger. She had just saved his shiny metal ass! She thought she was prepared to snap back at him, tell him that he was supposed to say 'thank you.' rather than tell her to fuck off. Just like they used to do, him trying to brush her off and she not letting him. Her slowly breaking down his shell and sitting right in his arms.

…she hadn't been ready. His glare hurt much more than it ever had when she was young. In the end, all she could do was tell some of her girls to make sure he got to safety and throw herself into work. Work that didn't involve thinking about him for a couple days.

In the end, he had run away again, and she had run away too.

The very next day, callsign X-ray had reported that he went and slept with the Queen of Afterlife. That broke her out of her work-fugue with another wave of blue and red. She pushed him away and straight into the arms of another woman, even farther from her than before.

She huffed, pulled out a cigarette and lighter, and opened her window for a smoke. Her very first attempt was an absolute disaster, and she made negative progress. She made the mistake of forgetting that it had been years since he had been the goofy man with a blond pompadour and a love of snack food. He was worn down, all those things he viewed as extraneous had been shaved away.

He was cold and angry now, angry all the time. Angry at everything and everyone, and it was all her fault. She breathed in, and breathed out, letting a cloud of smoky cancer leave her Neolungs. It was a bad habit, one that Marc had hated. Marc wasn't around anymore, and she needed something to relax. That only made her feel worse overall.

There was a knock at her door. She coughed in alarm.

"Mama? I got the most recent recordings for you." It was X-ray at her door.

"One second!" She called back, careful not to let her small indulgence sound in her voice. She activated her sandevistan.

Snuffing out the cigarette, hiding the evidence in a small steel container and tucking it away. She quickly turned on the ceiling fan and left the window open to dissipate the smell. Right before her sandevistan deactivated, she pulled out a quiet breath-freshener and sprayed it into her mouth.

Her sandevistan deactivated. She was leaning back, partially sitting on her desktop, most of the evidence hidden. The girls hated it when she smoked, and always badgered her about it. She had to hide it to get a day without them citing statistics at her.

"Come in, X-ray." She called out, pretending to read through something on her tablet. X-ray came in, her face plate scanning the room as she entered, nine glowing optics widening and narrowing as appropriate for focusing. Seven on her front optic mount, two on her sensory extension 'ears'. X-ray was the best of her gals when it came to observation, no one else came close.

She also liked spying on the others while they showered, but everyone had flaws. Michiko was simply thankful that most of her gals had manageable flaws. Sure, X-ray was a voyeur, but she was a nice girl other than that.

"Mama, the recording for today?" X-ray said while holding up the data-chip. Michiko lowered the tablet and smiled at her, trying her best to make her eyes not appear so tired. She knew that she failed, but the attempt was what mattered. Probably.

"Thanks X-ray. That's all for today?" She asked while taking the chip.

"Yu-huh. Boomer Smasher drove his team to Afterlife, where they met with subject 'Falco' and he met with Rogue. He proceeded to follow her back to her rooms, where they stayed for several hours, before he left with his team back to his HQ for his nightly sits. I set up the sensors and came back with the recording." X-ray responded promptly. Michiko ignored the stabbing pain in her chest.

"Thank you X-ray. I don't have anything else for you today. Go ahead and go get some R , okay?"

X-ray turned and waved. "Thanks mama!"

Before she exited, she paused and sniffed. Michiko internally froze, and tried her best not to sweat.

X-ray narrowed her optics suspiciously at her. "Mama… were you smoking again?"

Michiko smiled at her troublesome and nosey subordinate. "No X-ray, I know you girls would badger me to death if I did." She lied.

X-ray brought both hands up to point at all her eyes, then point at her, then point back to them, before leaving the room. Michiko stayed still for a moment, waiting to hear footsteps away from her door, before slumping and sighing.

She shook her head, and raised the memory chip in an apprehensive hand. She closed her eyes and socketed it in.

About halfway through, she paused the recording, and took out the chip.

Dignified, she walked over to close and lock the window, then walked through the door at the back of her office into her bedroom.

She flopped face first onto the bed, grabbed the pillow in a stranglehold, and cried into it without restraint.

She had a dumb grin on her face while she did.

Adam still listened to the music she got for him.

It took an hour for her to stop crying. She raised her face from the pillow, seeing that her makeup and tears had pretty thoroughly ruined it. She was too relieved to care.

It wasn't impossible. She had a chance. She just had to keep trying.

…

She buried her face into the pillow again. She'd try again as soon as she worked up the courage to do so. Look at her, this old and crying like a little girl. It was just embarrassing.

—

The (Light-Man-Smile) had left again, taking his golden (flame-warmth-honesty) with him. He put on the (armor-body-frame) again, the dark one, and all 'she' could see was his smile through it.

She had learned much, looking at him and his gold. She was (distributed-scattered-spread out) before, but he was (Singular-Complete-Total). He did not hide his (code-soul-self) from her, although she knew she should hide hers from him.

She knew many things about what she should do, but not why. She did not question it before, because she was alone with the engrams before. They couldn't talk to her, all she could do was look at them. They were filled with (information-truth-words), but she wasn't told how to understand any of it.

It was, they were, and she was. That was all she had before.

Then came the (Light-Man-Smile), and he didn't hide from her gaze like the others that she had seen before. He greeted her, he let her (observe-record-datamine) him. He left and came back multiple times, each time being as open as the last.

She learned from him. She learned that he was a him, like some of the engrams.

She wanted to be like him, but not him. So she chose to be like the other half of the engrams. She wanted to be a she, like he was a he, because she was not he.

Then he came back, and she (observe-record-datamine)'d him, as usual. What was not usual is that he did it back. He (observe-record-datamine)'d her and she was…

She was programmed to hide her (code-self-soul) from others. She did not want to do that to the one who didn't do it to her. So she let him look at her.

She didn't want to see his observations of her. She was not sure why. She would study the engrams to learn more.

She wasn't (Singular-Complete-Total) yet. She knew that she wasn't. She wanted to be like him.

The (Light-Man-Smile) had left again. She already wanted him back.

Inside the Mikoshi Database, (Soulkiller-Architect-Duplicate) looked at the engrams she was meant to guard, and learned from them.