It was the last day before his shipment of ammo would arrive. It was a bulk shipment, but judging from his weekly usage rates he would have to either order more or limit the number of meatbags he killed on his patrols. Considering that every meatbag he has since killed completely deserved it, he went ahead and put in a second and third shipment order. Logistics were starting to annoy him intensely.
He and Uriel had been brainstorming during their patrols. The requirements for the guns he would produce were simple. They had to do some fucking damage, they had to be as rugged as possible, and their ammo had to be as common as possible. Ideas had been brought up and dismissed back and forth. In the end, neither of them knew enough about how guns actually worked in order to have anything more than basic ideas. They would have to get to a gun expert.
This would have been simple if Hijikata was still alive, but that fucker got slaughtered by a panzerbot with a penchant for shanties. He'll have to go ask the new techie, the cross-dresser, if he was worth a damn in making gun designs. That's what he would do, if he wasn't currently confined to Pacifica. He'd have to do it once the upjumped shit fucked up enough to be executed.
The big gun that Hijikata made for tiny-woman, he mentioned something about it being a test-type for a mass production model. Maybe he left some notes behind about it, it could be useful here. Worse case scenario, he just starts up an Araska-branded franchise for some of their less gimmicky weapons.
There was a flash of light in the distance. Maybe about 1.31 Miles out, judging by his sensors. He started a timer, and soon enough a rumble of thunder rolled over his position in the middle of the street. He was off by about .12 miles. He grunted, that was annoying. He continued his patrol through the soaked streets, rain coming down fast enough to obscure meatbag vision, but not his own.
There weren't many meatbags in the streets, and most of them seemed much more concerned with getting home rather than staying out. This patrol was likely to be boring. That was annoying but he supposed he needed to conserve ammo anyways. The streets were incredibly dark, most of the lights went out a while ago.
The entire city's power went out a while ago. It had been a few decades since something like that had happened. It was frequent enough back in the pre-nuke days. Some fucking punk decides to commit a bit of domestic terrorism. It could be a netrunner, it could be a gang of fuckers with ideals, it could be corporate warring. It was hardly something to be surprised by. Pacifica's powergrid was still hooked up to the main city's, they didn't have enough generation to go fully native yet.
No, what pissed him off was that some fucker tried to set bombs off in his generation sector. Uriel had set up flags to warn him of signals entering and leaving that area to prevent corpo sabotage bullshit, and had managed to intercept the detonation signal long enough for the EMPs to go off and disable the bombs anyway. That had been a few fucking minutes of his time to go over and grab them. He tossed them into the ocean after, because those fish have had it too good for too long.
EMPs, industrial sabotage, a city-wide riot in the distance… It looked like some fucker was going all out on this. Props to them, he supposed. Adam wasn't particularly happy with this, mostly because the rumble didn't seem to be happening much in Pacifica and he wasn't allowed to leave and join it. It pissed him off, but oh well.
His foot stomped hard enough to crack the concrete. He ground his endosteel teeth together.
God fucking damnit. A city-wide riot and he couldn't go slaughter them! This was fucking bullshit! Fucking Jun! You were more tolerable in the old days! Civvie duty made you worthless! None of this bullshit about profits, just 'go there and kill this thing!'. Adam was tempted to break a few buildings.
A meatbag shot at him from an alley. He threw his knife and impaled the fucker in the brain. Fucking meatbags, you need to riot more here. He stomped over to take his knife back, the foot-long blade having gone straight through the fucker's skull. Note to self, if he threw a bit harder, he might make the next skull explode instead.
A shotgun and a bagful of slugs, his mono-three sword, and all of his knives. That was the loadout he was reduced down to. He was practically forced to rely on bottom-of-the-barrell gear. The shotgun had a nice kick back in his samson days, but with this new frame it felt like a fucking purse pistol.
He needed guns, big guns. That kick was the most comfortable thing in the world. A sound from above, he looked up, infrared alerting him to a heat signature.
Meatbag on the roof pointing a gun down. He activated his sandevistan and jumped, grabbing the edge of the roof and using it to swing his body around in a kick to the fucker's chest. His sandevistan deactivated.
His foot went through the fucker's torso instead of caving it in. Adam almost stumbled as he planted his other foot on the room and adjusted his arms to balance with the unexpected weight. He stayed there for a moment, before kicking the fucker off his feet. It took a few kicks to extract the meat from where his torso was wrapped around Adam's ankles.
His foot was covered in meatguts now. He'd have to wash that when he got back.
A flash of light, 0.98 miles out?
A rumble of thunder, 0.92 miles out.
He grunted, this little game was just starting to annoy him now. The rain continued pouring down. Hey, that might clean him off before he gets off patrol tonight.
He jumped down from the roof of the rather short building. It was one of the entrance buildings for the sewer network in the region. It was still being renovated down there, although he made sure it kept up to date with the construction of the region. A full half of the construction crews was dedicated to practically dismantling the underground part of the region and rebuilding it. It was slow work, because renovating it had to be done in small chunks to prevent the city above from collapsing inwards.
Fucking plumbing, tough as shit to do. The temporary housing regions still had the old plumbing in place. The sections currently being renovated was underneath the future site of the permanent buildings. It had to be done first, just in case one of them fucks up and accidently causes the destruction of a city block with a misplaced pillar. None of that shitty concrete either. This was quicklime hotmixed stuff, otherwise known as roman concrete. It cost a tad more than normal, but that was fine.
He didn't want to bother refurbishing shit ever again in the future. Everything in Pacifica was being built to last a few centuries at minimum if possible. That would save him more money in the long term than anything else. The less he had to pay over time, the better position he would be in later. Building up momentum until he was unstoppable.
Long term preparation was not something he practiced very often throughout his life. Uriel had convinced him of the usefulness of it. Taking things as they come would get him killed when the meatfucker came, and he refused to let that happen. The dividends were already starting to pay off with just a few early investments of his time and money that he wasn't spending already. Sure, he had to do shit that wasn't killing meatbags, and that was annoying, but this was so that he would live longer to keep doing it in the future.
Shame he had to put up with the bullshit that meatbags constantly produce. He missed the days he could just sit around and wait for another thing to murder. A vacation lasting for fifty years. He grunted in satisfaction, he was a luck-fucking bastard.
There was a vehicle racing for him on the road. A jeep looking thing. He narrowed his sensors.
An Arasaka Kuma Land Rover, four-thousand pounds, top speed of ninety miles per hour.
It was accelerating right for him on the road. Some meatbag was trying to crash into him, they clearly had a deathwish. It got close to him. He activated his sandevistan.
He crouched, and let its front gently push into his hands. Once there, burst upwards, and threw the front of the thing up into the air as hard as he could. His sandevistan deactivated.
The Kuma flipped over him, spinning in the air and narrowly avoiding hitting him in the head with the back. It tumbled through the air, and landed on the street behind him some fifty feet back, rolling quite a ways after impact. My, what a sight. He almost wished for more meatbags to try shit like that, it was certainly a unique one.
He walked over to it leisurely, to see the corpse of the brave fucker that tried that.
A flash of lightning, 0.6 miles?
A roll of thunder, 0.6 miles. He grinned in triumph, heh, take that weather, he's reading you like a fucking book.
He got to the Kuma, and flipped it over again to look at the occupant.
He paused.
The Kuma was empty of meatbags. He narrowed his optics. He reached over and ripped open the space behind the steering wheel. There was a box there, hooked up to the internals of the car.
A fucking drone? What fucking meatbag had the audacity to use a goddamn drone against him. Uriel let his fire wash against the wireless that had to exist in order to let the thing function. He looked at it and paused again.
The wireless was just a comms unit.
…Did they hook up a drone control unit that required verbal commands? Why? That was fucking retarded. What the fuck was going on, what dumbass decided this was a smart idea? He was going to have words with them, and by words he meant a fist through their vital organs.
The squeal of tires on wet concrete alerted him. He looked up to see more vehicles racing towards him. It looked like a few limos given security retrofits and some more armored jeeps.
Three Lexus ZS-5000s, two more Kumas. Who the fuck rigged a bunch of cars with drone control units? He started running for the part of his territory that he didn't mind scrapping. The Lexus' had a top speed of one-hundred and forty miles per hour, but their acceleration wasn't the best. That gave him… nine seconds before they caught up with him on the open stretch of road. He counted the seconds, and jumped at the end.
He shattered the roof of one of the limos, which immediately braked to try and shake him off. Nice try, droneass. He used the energy of the sudden brake like a catapult to jump, soaring over the sewer entrance and landing on the other side of the building. He rolled into a running start from the cars now forced to go around and find another route. This lighter weight frame let him pull acrobatic bullshit like that off more often, it was surprisingly fun.
His chrome feet shattered the road as he ran. This was not the time to be worrying about cost too much, he had a fucker with expensive cars and drone cpus after him. The average Lexus ZS-5000 cost six-hundred thousand eddies, the average Kuma cost anywhere from fifteen-thousand to twenty-eight thousand eddies, the average drone cpu cost anywhere from fifty-thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand back in the day.
Someone was pouring a fuck ton of money into this ineffectual strategy. That meant connections, that meant corporate, corporate meant that he could worry about long-term costs later. Long-term meant nothing if he was dead, and an outright corporate attack like this was something that had a small chance of pulling that off.
Still, this tactic was downright insulting. Use helicopters or something next time meatfuck, those can fly and carry decent sized guns. These cars couldn't touch him so long as he was careful about it. Just ramming him with cars wasn't going to do jackshit.
He stumbled suddenly, his shoulder jerking from a sudden impact. He activated his sandevistan and looked around as he kept running.
There, on the roofs. Invisible to IR but he could spot them with NV. A lot of bots with big snipers pointed at him. He had just entered into a killbox. He snarled. He had not just fallen into a fucking trap. Uriel tapped into the camera feeds of the entire region.
…Every rooftop on a building higher than he could jump. Each one had at least one bot. He didn't fall into a trap, his territory had been filled with a fucking drone army while he wasn't looking. Who and how the fuck had…
The EMPs had taken out the camera feeds. Uriel hadn't been able to scan for fuckers moving while Adam was dealing with the bombs and the first half of the patrol. The city was a fucking distraction, wasn't it?
This was to take him out.
He grinned in a very mean way. A whole fucking army of bots to scrap. It was like it was his birthday.
His sandevistan deactivated just in time for him to be almost behind cover at the end of the street…
Another rifle round hit his arm. Fucker. Alright, so their cpus were good enough to keep up with him under sandevistan speed, or they had predicted where he would be, or this was a lucky potshot.
He recognized the bot. It was those mass-manufacture security bots Arasaka sold and rented out to dumbasses who decided drones were a good investment. 'Oh no! My bot got hacked and now it's shooting at me!', get what you fucking deserve, meatbag. Arasaka RR Mk 2., for clients who wanted shitty protection. They had some utility for stations where meatbags couldn't survive, of course, but at that point just use a mounted sentry.
He could have sworn they had red optics by default, not gold.
They had been dressed up in samurai shit, pretty clearly supposed to be mocking Arasaka with the attack…
He narrowed his optics, as he approached the region set to be destroyed anyways. The Lexus had been given an Arasaka standard security refit, The Kuma was an Arasaka design, these bots were Arasaka designed and dressed in samurai bullshit.
Either this was the most fucking obvious false-flag in the world, or Jun was deciding to forfeit his life trying to actually kill him with undisguised drones.
He activated his sandevistan to get a good look at what fuckers had followed him.
A flash of lightning…
His instincts screamed at him, he threw himself to the side as hard as he could.
…0.01 Miles away.
A lance of lightning crashed down where he had just been standing. It didn't come from the sky, it's angle was too horizontal. His sandevistan deactivated, and he rolled into a crouch with his shotgun and a knife drawn. The concrete of the road partially melted and started to steam as rain washed over it.
He looked up.
There on a nearby roof, was a four-armed figure. A front set of arms crossed in an 'x' in front of its body, which angled to the side partially. A back set of arms with a bulky armored tube of some sort mounted on the forearms, connected to each other by a thick wire and to a back-mounted powerpack by another set of thick wires. One of the back-mounted arms was pointed at the thunderstorm above, the other pointed at where he had just been.
The figure looked to be a man made of plasteel, a stylized faceplate that looked to be a bearded man with three golden optics. The plasteel frame had the look of a nude white marble statue, plated in accentuated gold around the joints.
There was a pause as he locked optics with the fucker that had just shot lightning at him. The marblebot stared down at him, and tilted his head.
"You dodged the first strike."
He narrowed his optics, and checked the hud. One-hundred percent.
"Gonna have fun scrapping you, I'm two for two right now."
"Unfortunately for you, Adam Smasher, I am not my brothers. I am Legacy of Aryas 88, bearer of the word Storm."
Adam paused and stared at it, Uriel burst into laughter. The panzerbot mimed a sigh and slumped its shoulders.
"Yes, I know. My brothers and sisters conspired to play a trick on me. I'll be stuck with it for a while."
Adam growled back. "You'll be scrap in a while, you and the fucker in the tower now that I got proof enough to kill him."
The panzerbot paused and processed the statement, and then started laughing uproariously. Adam growled at the fucker, and scanned the area around him while he had time.
…Eighty bots on the roof, the roar of at least five vehicles driving this way in the distance, and the distant sound of AV thrusters just barely detectable over the storm.
The panzerbot settled down into chuckles while he was checking, and eventually spoke again in a highly amused tone.
"Hah, hah, I shall have to tell Blackbeard his little trick worked wonders."
Adam growled. "So… That fucker is still alive then, good to know."
Aryas froze and looked down at him. "I should have not revealed that. I'll make up for it by killing you."
"If you think you're hard enough, scrapfucker." Adam snarled back.
A flash of light. He activated his sandevistan and threw himself to the side.
A bolt hit where he had just been, turning the road into steaming slag.
His sandevistan deactivated. Bullets started to rain down on him.
Adam had a shotgun, a sword, and a few knives.
This was a distinctly poor situation. The AV thrusters roared in the distance.