The kids were simultaneously excited and concerned to be heading out to Afterlife again. So was the woman, he supposed. The kid was still recovering, but he was well enough to walk around at this point, the nano-bots put meat back together real fucking fast, and the chrome was real easy to swap out. They had gone to Chiri's funeral earlier today, it was exactly as boring as Uriel remembered funerals being. But now was the afternoon, and they were dressed and ready to go out clubbing.
By clubbing, Adam meant they were going to stay within his line of sight at Afterlife, and he was going to get info from the cougar. She would probably demand info back or something, it was the way info bros worked.
Ah wait, she was a fixer nowadays. Adam didn't really care for the job position, back in the old days a corp and the mercs would do business directly. They send a rep to find mercs that could take the job. Fixers are glorified vending machines that you get jobs out of instead of snacks.
Eh, at least the cougar did other things too, she dealt in info and ran a bar as well. She used to run jobs herself, but she hasn't done that in years now. The last time he remembered her doing such was… on that one job he was on too a few decades back. Heh, what a clusterfuck that turned out to be, he still reviewed the footage sometimes.
He was in his Gemini, and in his now-standard night wear. Duster, button-up shirt, jeans and boots, the works. He had finally gotten the power-pack shipped in (now strapped to his lower-back), which he was happy for. There was some product delay or something like that. But now his CCPL functioned perfectly fine on this frame. Sure, he doesn't have indefinite power for it like his new frame will have, but ten hours of strength far in above even a Dragoon was more than enough to kill most any threat.
Besides, he was carrying his personal Militech borg rifle, customized to hell and back to hit like a fucking truck. Shame the ammo was so expensive. Oh wait, he was rich, who cared? Of course, this body came with the works for cyberware as well, thickened myomer limbs, full-optical loadout lens in his deployable visor, a spinal-sandevistan. For Uriel he had their new cyberdeck strapped to his belt.
He wasn't going fucking anywhere without a full loadout anymore.
The boy was walking somewhat awkwardly, using crutches to move around, being mothered over by both his actual mother and both of the girls. The boy was fine, he was here to murder any street-meat that thought about trying something. He almost rolled his eyes looking back at them.
They continued on to Afterlife proper, looks sent in their direction were more than ever before. Neither Adam nor Uriel cared enough to actually observe and check what their expressions indicated. They were meat, their opinions didn't matter. That and the really big man with the really big fucking gun deterred most all violence.
He almost wished one would try so he could use his baby on them. The shower of gore was always an aesthetic masterpiece. Adam has extended his talent for interior decorating to exteriors as well, broadening his horizons and staying competitive in the marketspace.
Soon enough, even with the boy limping, they were at the entrance of Afterlife again. The bouncer waved them in with an easy-going smile on his face, which the kids and the woman returned as they moved in. Yeah yeah, nice to see you too or something, meat, now stop distracting the kids so they can get a move on.
After that little distraction, they were in, the kids were chatting up the bartender chick, and he was walking to the back again.
The cougar was glaring at him as he approached. The fuck is her problem now? He ignored her glare as he approached and sat down in his usual spot. There wasn't a drink at the table, so he knocked on itand waved a thug down to bring him something. He looked over to see the cougar was still glaring, but she wasn't saying anything.
If she was pissed at him, she should say it, not do this passive bullshit.
He stared back with his usual expression, raising a brow. She kept glaring.
A nervous thug brought him a drink, some sort of whiskey looking thing this time. He sipped it, it was just whiskey, nothing changed. Not bad, at least it wasn't fruity. He continued sipping as the woman glared, unfazed by her apparent anger. It was a game now, whoever spoke first was the loser, and Adam didn't do losing.
He started staring at the kids, absentmindedly sipping his drink.
The cougar kept glaring.
"You're a real bastard, Smasher." Heh, suck it bitch, Adam Smasher wins again. He grunted inquisitively.
"How fucking long were you holding onto Johnny's things?"
…what the fuck was she mad about involving that shit? Was he supposed to sell it instead?
"Since I killed him."
"You just had them all this time?!"
"I was moving, took the chance to clean out my closet. Was going to sell them, figured you'd get pissed at that."
Her furious expression gave way to a baffled one, and then a tired acceptance. "You have no idea why I'm mad, do you?"
"None." Adam said, sipping his whiskey again. She groaned and waved down a thug of hers to bring her a drink.
"It's not even worth being mad at you, that's like being mad at a dog for tearing your couch up."
Adam growled at her, her expression perking up in a smug mocking as he proved her comparison accurate. Adam glowered as he took another sip and leaned back.
She gave a caustic laugh, the same thug nervously approaching and handing a drink over. She took a swig.
"I heard you're quite the manager, aintcha? Pacifica went and fucked up the squad that was sent over to cause chaos, you've won them over pretty fast."
Adam rolled his eyes and half-complained, half-boasted. "Took them a week to get them to stop fucking around again after. Whole affair was annoying as shit. Kid scrapped a fucker that hits around my level, he's growing fast."
Rogue stared at him contemplatively for a long few moments. She huffed and shook her head, a smile on her face. "Kid's a regular desperado, huh? What about the others huh?"
Adam grunted in a displeased manner and took a sip. "Give it a few more years."
Rogue let out a bark of laughter.
A few moments of silence passed, the two old mercs nursing their cups and staring at nothing in particular. It had been a while since the kids came here, so they hadn't spoken in a while now. The only other legend of NC still left was the cheerleader's groupie, and neither of them wanted to talk to that fucker. Everyone else had long since passed, and no new legend has risen in a long while.
Well, that wasn't true. Most new legends ended with 'then, Adam Smasher showed up.' It's where Rogue got a good portion of her memorial menu. Idly he wondered if he should ask for a portion of the profits there.
Some of the old legends were coming into NC, like old Kagekaze, but there was a difference between a legend and an NC legend. It wasn't the same.
So the only legends worth a damn left in the city sat around in a corner, nursing drinks, and suppressing their grudges with each other.
"So what brings you by, Smasher?"
Adam paused and looked over to lock eyes with her.
"Disable all recording devices within the proximity." He demanded. She sat up a bit straighter at that, and looked at him searchingly. Slowly, she nodded and they waited a moment for the devices her techies put in the area to turn off.
Adam scanned around, his visor snapping into place. Uriel looked around their vicinity as well.
There, in the wall, something was active that wasn't a powerline.
Adam reached across the seating, his body half going over the cougar as he readied his fingers above the position through the wall. The cougar paused completely as he reached over, letting him get to work.
Vibrating his arm, his fingers punched three holes in the reinforced wall, grabbing onto the fucker on the otherside. Pulling back, he ripped out a chunk of concrete and bot.
It was about the size of a coke can, flattened out and pressed against the interior wall, spider-like legs squirming in his indomitable pinch. He pulled back to display it to the cougar, her face slightly red from the alcohol. You're a lightweight? That's just embarrassing.
"This one yours?" He asked, glaring at it.
She looked at it, her expression slowly turned murderous.
"No."
Adam crushed it in his grip, concrete and all. A thug brought over a trash bag, he opened his hand to let the smashed bot and dust fall in and wiped his hand on the thug's jacket. The thug was noticeably upset by this, and walked away. He wasn't so nervous anymore, more mad. Good, that was getting annoying.
He looked back at the cougar, and spoke low and quiet.
"The attack on Arasaka Tower. There is a traitor among the executives."
Rogue leaned back at that. Face immediately clearing into a completely serious expression as he continued.
"There is a fucker responsible for taking my shit. I'm going to kill them. So I'm snooping to find out who it is."
Rogue was silent for a moment, before asking. "What do you specifically want info on?"
"Kaneki Issei received a large sum from Declan Griffin, leader of Maelstrom. He is one the list of suspects."
Rogue closed her eyes and rolled her fingers across the table.
Adam sipped on his drink.
Rogue opened her eyes again. "I might know something, but it's gonna cost you in info."
Adam grunted, it always does, that's what being an information broker does, woman. "What do you want to know?"
She paused for a bit, sipping her drink. Adam began to take a swig of his own.
"Your story."
Adam stopped, drink an inch away from his lips. He lowered the glass as he glared at the woman suspiciously. "Why the fuck would you want that?"
She glared back at him. "That's my price, you paying it or what?"
Adam scoffed dismissively. "All the questions in the world and you ask for pointless shit."
He continued before she could speak up again. "Fine, gimme a second."
He tried his best to dredge up the long-buried memories of his early life. Back when he was weak meat, scraping and clawing in gutters to survive. Adam finally got the story straight in his mind, and started talking.
"Dad bailed on us before I could remember much. I knew his voice, and that's about it. Mom stuck around long enough for me to walk on my own and then went off on her own too. I came home one day to find it empty. When the cans of food ran out, I grabbed Pop's old baseball bat and left too."
Rogue started staring into her drink about halfway through his first few sentences.
"I joined up with the other street kids, staying alone was a good way for men in suits to come by and snatch you. That's what we called them, snatchers. They called me Bats back then, and an older kid helped me out by wrapping some barbed wire around it."
He remembered that bat, back when he was weak and easy to hurt. He didn't let go of it no matter what, the reassuring weight of hardwood and steel wire in his hands kept him together.
"We'd rumble around Yankee stadium, and that lasted until I was about eighteen, maybe younger. The army came in and killed everyone else, and I broke my bat caving in a few dozen skulls. They got me pinned down, and offered a job killing things, so I joined up. Realized I didn't have any papers, so they drafted some up and Adam Smasher was my new name."
Adam grinned into his drink.
"Army was great. I got to do what I was good at, killing fuckers, and they gave me all I needed to do that. Three meals a day, a roof over my head, all the guns I could ask for. I stuck around for another three years or so, before a higher up got pissed that I was showing him up all the time. Pulled some strings and got me dismissed."
Adam glared as he remembered the fucker, the son of some governer or something. He got killed a few years later, so fair is fair he supposed.
"I went back to stomping around Yankee stadium. I looked after the new street rats that settled in, and got the older ones to help me out on jobs. They called me Bossman Smasher back then, and I made sure the dumbasses didn't get themselves killed doing something stupid. I got jobs on the regular, and things were pretty good for me."
They all died a few years later, so eh. He frowned harder at the next part.
"Then I got myself blown up like a fucking idiot doing a job for a bunch of suits alongside a few other pros, turned into a bunch of meat in a fucking backpack as my boys ran off from a bunch of assholes with rpgs. My boys got gunned down by the suits, and they plugged me up into a computer so I could talk. Docs said I was dead for eight minutes before they brought me back. They had a offer for me, a borg body and all the murder I could want, or I would die."
"Of course I accepted, best fucking offer I've ever received, way better than the army. A fifteen year contract for this and guaranteed jobs? Hell yeah."
Adam grinned at his good fortune back then. Lady Luck wasn't shining on him, she was sucking his dick in that moment, and his hands were tangled in her hair. Suck harder baby, he wanted to ruin your mascara.
"Life was good for the next few years. I would go around murdering fuckers they wanted me to, and got paid in big bucks and experimental guns. It was awesome. I was high on life back then, and made more than a few mistakes."
'Hey, Adam. If we ran away right now, how far do you think we could go?'
Adam paused, and cracked the glass he was drinking from. He set it down and let out a long deep breath.
"Even tried romance out for a bit. Not making that fucking mistake again. I'm meant for murder and not much else, that incident made it fucking clear to me."
Adam shook off the memory of the naive bitch. He took a sip from the cracked glass again.
"Then Blackhand rallied up a whole bunch of fuckers, brought them to the tower, and tried killing me with a nuke. He failed."
"I was put back together by Arasaka again, and this time Saburo had a better deal for me. More upgrades, more support, a longer term contract, and lessons in how to punch through walls by shaking my fists really hard from his borg ninja. I accepted, got the training, then got assigned to act as the Tower's guard dog. Whenever something started being a problem for the boss, I went out and turned it into a not-problem."
"'Round this time they started calling me the Butcher of Arasaka. I liked the name, so I started leaning into it."
Adam nodded at the kids.
"Then a few decades later the kid showed up, murdered a whole bunch of Militech fuckers, and I realized I was tired of the shitty meatbag backup the boss kept giving me."
"You know the rest."
Rogue was quiet for a long while, as was he. He didn't like thinking about shit from the past, none of it mattered anymore. He finished his drink and waved down a thug to bring him another. The same thug did, glaring at him from earlier, and set down his drink in a professional manner. This was a well-trained one, huh?
Rogue eventually spoke up, transferring a set of coordinates to him as she did. "Griffin and Issei were seen talking by my guys, this was shortly before Maelstrom managed to raid a Militech delivery of some sort. Issei had some mercs transfer a coffin-sized thing to one of his private warehouses in that meeting. My best guess is that Griffin is paying him to hold onto it for them."
Now that was some good fucking info. Coffin sized and a Militech raid? Issei agrees to hold onto a panzerbot body in his warehouse and transfer it to the roof of Arasaka Tower before the attack in exchange for Maelstrom raiding a Militech cargo haul and a sizable sum of eddies? The pieces were coming together in his head.
Panzerbot contacts Maelstrom, Maelstrom works with it because they worship AI or some shit like that. Maelstrom gets it onto the roof in exchange for a raid job from an executive. Panzerbot breaks out and starts the attack from behind defensive lines, and pulls off tower-scale hacking to disable any defense for their group of mercs to hit the place.
Heh, had he nailed this on his first go? Turned out he was real fucking good at this investigation thing.
Adam grinned at Rogue, who had been looking at him while he was thinking. It was not a very nice grin. Man, this was a real good deal for him, he was right to come here.
He leaned back and started sipping his drink again.
"That's all I need to know."
He'd stick around for a while still, the kids looked like they were having fun over there. The girl was doing a handstand or something while the gremlin unloaded and reloaded a gun while resting on her feet in the air. The boy and the woman were cheering them on, as was half the bar. He didn't really understand the appeal here, but that was how kids were.
Rogue eventually started chatting about something or another, he went along with it to pass the time.
She looked bothered by something, but he didn't really care enough to find out. He and Uriel were more focused on looking over all the info the net had on that warehouse. They had to plan their assault.
Meat was going to die.