The massive explosion in the distant bay did little to distract him from his current frustration. The distinct teal glow told him that it was highly radioactive, an interesting detail that meant that someone had brought out the heavy weapons on this. That much radiation meant that it had to be a nuke, the plume being so puny meant that it had to be one of those mini-nukes. The kind that he could probably throw like a baseball nowadays.

Meh, he'd have to get rad scrubbers for the workers. The storm was blowing north-west right now, inwards from the sea, so the rads would be carried up to the north half of the city. That was… Maelstrom territory? Might be a good idea to tell the ripperdocs to stock more anti-rad implants.

…Wait, why the fuck would he tell them that? He didn't make money off them. They could figure it out on their fucking own. Distraction over, he turned his gaze back to the street to keep limping back to the temp HQ. Yes, fucking limping like he was a goddamn cripple. The myomer in the right leg and arm was melted through, he couldn't bend the lower half of those limbs at fucking all. It made walking pretty fucking irritating, although it was managable after the meatbag broke all the temporary welds.

So limping up the street as fast as he could, using his very expensive Kendachi Monothree as a fucking cane to make sure he didn't fall. His dignity was already in fucking shambles right now, he wasn't going to allow it to get any worse. He ignored the perimeter of meatbags with cat ears doing their best to avoid his sensors.

Fucking bitch. He told you to get the fuck away from him. That meant your fucking pets needed to go too. He didn't need protection from things objectively weaker than him, which meant everything on the fucking planet. Needing protection meant relying on someones 'good nature' to keep you the fuck alive. That was how you got turned into a pet. That was how you died the moment they got tired of you. He had seen it happen too many times growing up.

One of the streetrats sucks up to some fucker for protection. They get turned into meat within a year. Every fucking time, like clockwork. He was Adam fucking Smasher. He wasn't about to fucking die to anyone.

There was a car in his way on the road. He grunted in frustration, and braced his still-functional foot and the sword. He kicked with his right leg, the partially melted foreleg crashing into the car and sending it flying out of his way with a scream of metal on pavement.

He unbraced himself, and got back to limping up to the temp HQ. The cats around him thought they were being sneaky with all their oohs and ahhs. Fucking cats. He could still fucking hear and see every one of you. Arrogant little cocksure fuckers that think they know how the world works. He ignored them and their fucking crocodile tears. Fucking lying little bitches.

Uriel had been checking the broadcasts to find something to distract him. They had figured out why the city turned into a riot earlier. Apparently one of the fuckers that slipped away from him decades ago had declared open season on every Arasaka employee in the city. How exciting, shame that he was still fucking stuck in Pacifica.

He was contractually obligated to protect Arasaka employees while on an active job. The old man had told him to take care of Pacifica, but that was a long-standing order, not a job. It was fucking frustrating to be unable to go join the slaughter that was no doubt filling the streets right now. He had a plan for this, however.

As he approached the temp HQ, his fury continued to build. The defensive fortifications were all being manned by Arasaka security agents, his rent-a-cops, and a whole bunch of fuckers in skintight bodysuits and fucking cat ears. He had a goddamn infestation, he wasn't even allowed to kill these ones either. They were basically rats for how much of a nuisance they were.

He ignored the rats as he stomped through the fortifications. He ignored the whispers and mumblings and pointing by the fucking meat bags.

That was fine, let them point. He was going to fix his reputation before the night was over. He refused to let this shit go.

He walked through the main entrance. The lobby was fill to the brim with meatbags and security guards and more fucking rats. Many of them on some sort of comms to coordinate bullshit that he didn't care about. He walked past them and into the hallway leading to his rooms in the back. He walked past the fuckers guarding back here too.

The door was still locked. He didn't feel like fucking around with the lock, he just reared back a fist and smashed the door open. The alarms started going off, Uriel immediately disabled them. The sound was annoying, just like everything else was right now. Once inside the still quiet rooms, he walked over to his closet of other bodies, and Uriel interfaced with the only other thing he had right now. His personal Gemini, still untouched after his last session of pumping Victoria.

Didn't matter, a Gemini's skin was as well armored as a set of metalgear plate. He didn't feel like wasting any time looking for his riot armor and putting that shit on. Uriel interfaced with the system as Adam crouched on the floor and mentally triggered his skull to open up. Uriel plucked out his biopod and inserted it into the Gemini, letting the faceplate and skull close shut around the braincase again.

Adam opened the optics of his gemini and checked his vitals. He stood still for a moment and just cycled through sensors and screens. Reactor online, sensors online, ccpl online.

…Everything was green. This frame was fully functional. Good.

He and Uriel could theoretically control two frames at once in a fight. They had been holding off on this to reserve it as a nice surprise for when he absolutely needed it. The most recent fight taught him that he could no longer afford to hold back any advantage against the panzerbots. Next time it wouldn't just be him, it would be two of him. Those scrapfuckers wouldn't stand a chance.

He shoved the damaged frame into the closet and shut the door. He'd get it repaired later. He walked over to his armory closet, and pulled out his MG42, and hooked up the ammo belt. Shrugging on the backpack ammo hopper, he walked out of the armory and made for the HQ entrance. This gun used cased ammo, but he found himself far past the point of caring about litter.

He was going to indulge himself in his oldest and most favorite hobby, killing meatbags always made for a good time.

He walked through the fucking masses of meatbags, ignoring their points and whispers. He walked through the entrance doors, ignoring the fucking rats all over his HQ. He walked past the line of fortifications, and the occasional meatbag walking up to the tower with Arasaka ID's looking for protection.

A standard Gemini frame was nothing more than a slightly worse Alpha frame. You couldn't upgrade its armor, myomer, or structure without defeating the point of making it a Gemini. A Gemini was supposed to look human, plates of armor or reinforced joints did not look human. The best you could do is make it look like a bodybuilder with thickened myomer strands of the standard amount, or make the joints reinforced internally which wouldn't do a whole lot.

His Gemini had thickened myomer, it looked to be about eight feet of rippling musculature. He made everything but the most jacked up meatbags look like jokes next to his body. That did not tell the whole story of course, because his frames came standard with ccpl these days. A normal Gemini was only slightly stronger than the most powerful of unmodified meatbags. His Gemini had thickened myomer and ccpl. His Gemini was stronger than most ACPA were.

Uriel joked about something called 'the pillar men', he wasn't in the mood for jokes until he got a nice fresh coat of gore on his frame.

He kept walking until he got to the border between Pacifica and the rest of night city, and stood in the middle of the highway. Uriel prepared to broadcast his words across all frequencies.

Adam spoke.

"I am Adam Smasher. I am standing in the middle of the south-side highway leading into Pacifica, with no armor and a single gun. The bounty on my head is an insultingly low one-million. I am bumping that up to one-billion eurodollars for the next twelve hours."

He can't leave Pacifica to join the slaughter. The next best thing was to bring the slaughter to him. One MG42, fifteen-hundred shots, and his bare frame against all the meatbags of Night City. It was slightly frustrating how easy it was going to be for him.

He could hear vehicles start to race in his direction in the distance. He rolled his shoulders and pantomimed cracking his neck. Good, they were already on their way. The storm was already beginning to dissipate overhead.

—

It was somewhat annoying to see the meatbags begin to slow down their attacks on him after a few hours. By the time twelve hours had passed and the sun was beginning to rise again, he had barely stacked up thirteen-hundred bodies. They started off frequently enough, but began to fall off later on.

Sometimes a truck would start driving up, see the field of corpses he had made in a circle around him, and immediately turn around.

In fact, most of the non-corpse population around him was meatbags with cameras instead of guns. They weren't attacking him, and they weren't littering, so he didn't have a justification for killing them. He was in charge of Pacifica now, which meant he couldn't kill meatbags unless they broke one of his rules. It was annoying, but after about a hundred fuckers ripped in half by his antique firearm, or turned into a donut by his fist, he was somewhat less annoyed than before.

Murder was always great stress relief, and for a while there the targets were just walking right up to him. He could tolerate the excited shouts of a bunch of meatbags cheering him on. The one with the dog-mods was the least annoying, he decided arbitrarily. A message popped into his field of view, he opened it idly.

…Huh, Yorinobu was in town. He had just gotten an order to come up to the tower and meet him there. He grunted in satisfaction, he hadn't left Pacifica in a week, it was about fucking time. Yorinobu had tier two priority on his long-term contract. Jun's order meant jackshit against it.

He pushed himself up from where he was sitting on the corpse-pile he had made while waiting for more meatbags to show up. Like a hill of meat and murder, it gave him a slightly better vantage point to shoot at meatbags with.

He rolled his joints to make sure nothing was welded together. All clear. He stepped down from the pile of corpses and began walking for Arasaka Tower. The radiation increased as he made his way through the city, but as he was in a shielded Gemini frame that literally meant nothing to him.

Well no, not nothing. He would have to get his frame scrubbed of rads later. That wasn't too hard, just a rad-foam shower would get it all off. The rad-foam was rather toxic to meatbags, but it worked wonders on anything that wasn't flesh. Just another advantage metal had over meat in the end.

There were a whole bunch of meatbags in radiation suits spraying foam everywhere in the streets. Well, the main street that was, they didn't have the manpower to get everything right away.

The blast earlier couldn't have been more than twelve kilotons. Uriel started running the numbers on how long it would take to get radiation cleaned up. It didn't look optimistic.

Most corporate buildings were shielded against radiation, they would go on more or less fine. The civvie buildings would need to be basically destroyed entirely and replaced to prevent rads from seeping into the concrete and staying there for years.

Wait, did radiation do that? Neither he or Uriel were quite sure, and they didn't feel like checking either. In the end, it wasn't something they cared that much about. It was mostly outside of Pacifica, from the looks of his scanner. The worst that would happen is having to take care of the shoreline. He wondered if he could hire a few Samsons for that.

There were stares at him as he walked, probably from the fact that he had a fresh coat of gore-paint on.

He approached the entrance to Arasaka tower, the entrance guarded by the red and blue pair of DaiOni…

He just realized the joke, and grunted to himself. He walked forwards, his IFF checking out on their scanners. The red one cheerily waved at him as he approached and walked through the entrance doors. There was a group of employees in radiation suits and foamers, he grunted and let them foam him down.

Then came the vacuum, which carried the radiation-soaked foam into sealed canisters. It was a decently efficient system. This was the non-toxic foam, which was substantially more expensive to produce or something like that. He didn't know, he never studied the cleanup procedures for post-nuclear weapon deployment.

Now de-radiated, he walked through the entrance properly. The metal detector went off, he ignored it and the meatbag that walked up to him. He was Adam Smasher, he was fucking made of metal, dipshit. He walked up to the elevator, and punched in the button for the top floor.

The elevator music played for a few seconds as he waited to go up one-hundred and twenty floors. The elevator paused and picked up another employee, who stared at him the entire ride up. Why not take a fucking picture meatbag?

About a minute later, he stepped off the elevator to the top floor.

He raised a brow, the door to the president's office was shattered and opened from what looked to be a kick. He walked past the guards at the entrance and into the office itself.

The window had been broken open, the wall had been cracked from what looked to be a borg being thrown against it, and there was blood everywhere.

Jun was sitting on the entrance-side of the desk, his face was badly damaged. Yorinobu Arasaka was looking out to the city below through the shattered window, hands crossed behind a straight back. He had a suit on, but the jacket had been replaced with a black leather biker jacket with a robotic dragon on it.

His hair was slicked back, and a single cigarette hung from his lips. He pulled it out and blew out smoke, finally turning around and looking at Adam over his red-tinted aviator glasses.

He paused for a moment.

Adam waited for him to say something.

Yorinobu took another drag of the cigarette.

Blowing out the smoke, he finally spoke.

"Why are you naked?"

—

The December storm of 2076 would bring with it one of the deadliest riots in American history to Night City. The casualties tally would not be finished for some weeks later. In the end, a confirmed thirteen-thousand four-hundred and sixty individuals died in the chaos, and an estimated forty-eight thousand suffered severe injuries. This would put it in the top ten deadliest riots in North American history, and among the top thirty deadliest riots in global history.