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.