He had never been too attached to any given body. Not in any particular sense. When he was first put in that Samson so long ago, it was a direct upgrade to his old meat body. It was stronger, better armored, better reaction speed, faster movement…
It was an objective upgrade from his old body, so why would he care about losing the old meat one?
Well, that wasn't quite true. His Samson didn't have a dick. That was easy to correct though, all he had to do was save up for a Gemini. It took him about half a year of jobs, jobs that were now easier than he had ever experienced before, jobs that paid better and let him kill more. Afterwards, he had himself a Gemini that sorta looked like what he did before, just a little taller, a little buffer, and a little blonder. It was worse than his new Samson, sure, but it was still far better than his old meat. Samson for jobs, Gemini for fun, the body he was in depended entirely on what he was going to do. If he ever lost a body, oh well, he'd just get a new one later.
Even his Dragoon was just for work, and since he enjoyed his job he just put the old Gemini in the closet and didn't bother switching bodies anymore. His jobs were enjoyable, meatbags were annoying, so why bother using a frame meant to interact with them? Regardless of what body he was in, it wasn't him. It was just some body that he owned and used if he needed to.
The DaiOni wasn't like that.
The DaiOni was his body. It was the body he was meant to have. It was the body he wanted to have.
Adam Smasher was a DaiOni. He was strong enough to toss trucks around like toys. He was durable enough to ignore anything short of a MBT's cannon. He was fast enough to keep pace with most cars. He was quick enough to dodge bullets, even as a giant of titanium and myomer.
His left arm contained an auto-shotgun, light anti-tank guided missile launcher, retractable monoblade, and ended in a clawed fist as large as a man's upper body. His right arm contained an automatic grenade launcher, a 12.7mm machine gun, a second retractable monoblade, and another clawed fist.
Everything he saw was enhanced by a constant layer of virtual-reality, anti-dazzle, low-light, infrared, image enhancement, teleoptics, thermal-targeting. Everything he heard equally enhanced, amplified audio, enhanced range, limited audio warnings of nearby threats. He could communicate through radio and cell-service with just a thought. His head was topped with sensory extension horns to give him perioscopic senses, his body was filled with an ECM, an ECCM suite, and two layers of EMP protection. His skin baffled IR and thermal-targeting, his gaze carried a laser-communication system.
He was a machine that stood 11 feet tall, weighed 2240 pounds, and was meant to murder armies. He walked as a god among ants, unstoppable, unconquerable. Built to kill until there was nothing left. Built to survive long after everything else died around him. Built to endure.
The last time he had gotten to be in his body was 2071. One battle. One battle in which Arasaka came to the aid of Night City, to keep it independent from NUSA expansion and conquest. One battle in which he was deployed upon the Kujira alongside a full battlegroup of Arasaka ACPA.
That was the only battle Arasaka got to openly participate in during that war. The war was over immediately after. NUSA pulled back in a fighting retreat, and signed a peace treaty with Night city proper, allowing it to remain a free state.
One fucking battle, a scant few hours, that was all he got to be himself for. Needless to say, he was rather ecstatic at the opportunity to use his body again (even if this was technically a replacement).
He was running, each stomp putting a small crater into the road below him. The structure of these large overhanging roads were designed for massive shipping trucks, they could support his weight just fine. To his right up ahead, the road overlooked the road below, Night City twisted on itself this way, stacking buildings on buildings in an effort to maximize their use of vertical space.
Letting his horns (ears?) twist outwards as far as they could, he carefully listened as he ran. His own noise automatically edited out as he moved down the road. The gunshots and sounds of moving cars from below were semi-frequent, allowing him to make this estimation.
Sliding to a stop in the middle of the bridge, his entire upper body lurching back to counterbalance himself, he let his taloned feet dig long grooves in the hardened stone. Then, once he was sufficiently slowed, he jumped at a precise power and angle off the side.
The stone cracked as he leaped off. He fell a good thirty feet down.
As he fell, he crushed the back-end of a shipping truck beneath him. He smashed right through the reinforced metal frame of the shipping container it was hauling, turning it and whatever was in it into a pancake.
The front of the truck flipped up and got struck, pointed into the air under his weight, he stared at the tiny meatbags inside, seeing if they had multiple eyes or not.
…They did not, goddamn meatbags wasting his time.
He took two massive steps, walking off the now flattened vehicle and onto the road. He walked over to in front of the terrified meatbags, and crouched down to stare at the driver. Just an adult man and a teenage girl. Their screaming was annoying, he could kill them in 32 ways.
"Shut up." His voice rumbled out, washing over them like a tidal wave. They immediately quieted down, and the man quivered as he tried to shield the girl ineffectually. "Were you running from Maelstrom?"
There was a pause, before the man frantically answered "Y-Yeah! They were b-behind us an-"
He stood from the front of the truck, and faced in the direction they came from. He swiveled his ears for a moment, focusing them in that direction. Gunshots and distorted laughter.
He activated his sandevistan, and started to run. Each step carried him around five feet forwards.
One step, the concrete shattered.
Two steps, the road lead into a tunnel.
Three steps, the tunnel turned to the right. He slammed a claw into the ground and threw his weight around the bend without losing speed. He dug grooves into the road three feet long doing this.
Four steps, a group of five strommers with kerenzikovs slowly turned to face him. Their glee at hearing something come immediately fading with horror at what had arrived. He could kill them in 13 ways. He grinned beneath his helmet and transitioned into a full run. Each clawed stomp now carried him twelve feet forwards or more.
Five steps, widened his arms, letting them extend to scratch at the walls of either side of the tunnel. They slowly tried to flee as he began to laugh. They shot at him ineffectually, the bullet bouncing off his visor without a scratch.
Six steps, His arms collided with the strommers, picking them up and crushing whatever their torsos were made of into a red, frothy bag. They tried to scream, but their lungs were flattened into a paste-like substance.
Seven steps, he exited the tunnel and slammed his clawed feet into the ground immediately upon the light touching him again. He slid forwards, carried by momentum. To stop this momentum, he swung his hands to his front, dragging forwards the row of corpses hanging off them limply.
Slamming his forearms together, the bags of red froth promptly exploded. Two cones of red bursting to life, born from the compression of his cybernetic powerframe.
His sandevstan deactivated, the street was painted in gore.
A rush of wind burst out from the tunnel, following in his wake like a roaring lion. He activated the wipers on his visor, promptly cleaning his vision again.
He stomped forwards ignoring the meatbags cowering behind improvised cover with guns pointed at the entrance of the tunnel. They didn't have more than two eyes. There was an open stretch before him, garbage bags lining each side of the street and decayed walls covered in graffiti. It was an almost infuriating sight.
He grumbled for a second, before turning his gaze down to the meatbag on the left.
"Do you live here?"
The meatbag looked up, terror and confusion on her stupid-looking face. He leaned slightly forwards and she got the message. "Y-yeah! Emily Waterson S-sir! I live in Megabuilding H10!"
"Your streets are a fucking mess, clean them." Demand given, he began to stomp away, cycling through the radio channels to see if he could find the next group to murder. A thought occurred to him when he cycled over to the NCPD radio channel. All this looking around himself was a real pain in the ass, huh?
[...we need helicopter support over in-]
[This is Adam Smasher.] He began, cutting off whatever was being said. [Get one of your netrunners to make a live-feed map of currently known Maelstrom locations and stream it to me.]
There was silence for a moment over the radio as he picked up speed on his run, occasionally crushing an abandoned car underneath his steady, stomping gait.
[Uh, S-sir I don;t think I have the permission to authoriz-]
[Shut up officer.] A second voice interrupted the first. Grizzled, rough, and apparently already tired of this whole business. [This is Chief of NCPD Max Hammerman. I need confirmation that you are indeed Adam Smasher. What is your current location?]
[The street to the south of Megabuilding H10.] He replied, still stomping along as he traveled down it, listening for anything he could go kill. A hundred and thirteen meters up and right, he heard a drone fly out from the side of the building.
[...Sir, we have a visual on screen seven-c.]
[...That's a DaiOni… That's Smasher alright…]
[...do we… I mean… he's not part of the…]
[Adam Smasher.] The gruff voice of Chief Hammerman addressed him again. [We'll have a live-map for you in a couple minutes. For now head to the eastern coastline and head north. That's where our current defensive line is, most of the strommers are trying to blow up this last bridge to the mainland. You'll be coordinated further there. Got it?]
Adam decided that he liked Max Hammerman, he didn't waste his time with any bullshit. Quickly, he calculated a few routes and chose the fastest one.
[Affirmative.]
He activated his sandevistan and changed his direction to be directly left with a firm stomp that turned the road into pebbles.
Left, through the building that was there.
He emerged on the other side in an explosion of rubble and dust, kicking off the ground on the other side to change his direction again, now heading north.
Oh look at that, a group of strommers, still too slow to keep up with him. A burst of auto-shotgun rounds cut them in half, only held together by their metal spines. He stomped on one of them as he ran past.
—
Uriel realized something very quickly as he arrived at the frontlines of the net-battle. Well, more like several somethings very quickly.
He crashed into the side of an AI that took the form of a screaming catfish made of human faces. It was probably around tank size overall, and his collision with it forced it to abort the rezzing of whatever greenish program it was summoning.
He didn't bother summoning a program to attack this time, instead he just punched it as hard as he could. He could feel the impact, he could feel a brief spark of something as his processing power overwhelmed whatever the AI could scrounge from the local electronics.
AI were probably far more efficient than him when it came to battling in the net. So instead of doing something fancy, he just threw his vastly superior processing power at it. His fist was 'physically' inside its body, breaching its ICE. He uploaded a kill-command through his fist, and spammed it until it couldn't stop it anymore.
His advantage over most things in the Net wasn't skill, it was the fact that he was in Adam Smasher's head. That was fine, skill would come with experience, right now he had to leverage his raw power as best as he could.
The screaming-face-catfish burst into white-flames and dissolved into scrap code.
He turned to raise his Shield, an Efreet pair wielding swords of pus-yellow fire crashing against it ineffectually. He let his chains explode into a horizontal whirlwind to ward off a cone of Demons for a short moment.
The first thing he realized was that most of these AI were not as strong as the ones he had faced in the past, although he really couldn't underestimate them. There were many of them, and they knew more about the NET than he did.
The second thing he realized was that he was way bigger than most everything here. Only the most deformed looking AI were on par or bigger than him. He wasn't exactly sure what the implications of that was, but he did notice that he was around twice as tall as the tallest of the Netrunners that he had just landed in front of.
'Who the hell is that?!'
'Jesus he's massive!'
'What the fuck are those programs?!'
He grunted and rezzed a Firewall in front of him, moving his chains back to impale a few Imps that were crawling below him and spitting fire. He kicked off the air and moved back, beams of brilliant color and light bursting from over his shoulder and crashing into a Balron that exploded through the Firewall.
'WALLS UP LADIES!' A voice called to his side. Moments later, a shimmering bubble burst into existence around them, warding away a horde of AI, perhaps a hundred strong clawing at the outside. More and more of them falling out of the sky and approaching. He turned his gaze to the side, and then down quite a bit to lock 'eyes' with the ICON of a blue elf woman in tactical armor.
Said armor being completed with a tactical combat skirt, well known for its combat-enhancing capabilities. Uriel snorted to himself.
'So, what name do you go by, big guy?' The blue-elf woman asked up at him, pretending to wipe her brow. As she spoke, a few orbs of light began to float around her, some sort of automated attack daemon?
'Adam Smasher.' He stared at her with an eyeless face, brillant flames licking out from behind a skeletal grinning helmet. A frown was on his face behind the helmeted mask. Using another name was pretty pointless at this junction, his icon was literally partly Adam's, the appearance was probably public knowledge at this point.
She flinched under the gaze and name, and muttered to herself 'was really hoping you weren't going to say that.'
Such is the power of reputation, he turned his gaze back to the barrier. It was beginning to flicker, but he wanted to know how to do that. He didn't have a program to scan code, so he'd have to rely on his intuition.
Information, want to learn information, we learn information through our senses. How do we learn about code? Looking at it. We look with our eyes. He needed eyes.
He focused for a moment, shaping his flame for a moment into an orb over his shoulder. He wanted an eye, he focused on that desire. He wanted to see.
The barrier's coding began to unfold to him, layers of measures and counter-measures… It was really simple overall, just a matter of having enough processing power to reject all requests to move through it. He made note of it for later.
That was easy enough to do. He now had a brand new Eye program to use, so he stored it in his library. This was how he had created all of his programs thus far, focusing on his desire to accomplish a thing, and letting his intuition guide him the rest of the way. Eventually, he would learn how the fuck he was able to do this, right now he didn't have the time to consider it.
'We need to hold for another two hours before the cavalry arrives. Think you can help us out, Adam Smasher?' The blue elf apparently worked up her nerve to talk again, asking him for his help.
Idiot, why would he be here if not to help? He dismissed all his programs except his single chain to Adam, and began to rez a new set.
Shield, Sword, Chains in foreground programs. Chains, Chains, and Chain to Adam in background programs.
The barrier was dropped, he readied his shield. A bullet-hell level of firepower exploded from behind him, crashing into the horde of hostile programs now rushing forwards once more.
His chains roared outwards, impaling and slowing a Balron in front of him. His shield raised to his left, fending off an AI that was made of swirling, decayed flesh. His sword lashed out, cutting three Efreet to his right in half.
The blue-elf waved the image of a staff, constantly summoning more orbs of light above her head to rush forwards and crash into targets.
The icon of a Samurai below him cut three Imps into halves. The icon of a pack of wolves crashed into a Balron to his far right. The icon of a swarm of ravens latched onto an Efreet and clawed at its face.
It was like watching an army of monsters fight an army of demons.
He snorted again, and stepped once to the left, then swiping his sword up. It cut off a chunk of the rotting flesh AI and burned the wound.
The NET was downright silly. All these AI and not one of them looked like a robot. It was shameful really.
He just kept swinging, letting strong-looking things crash against his Shield, binding moderate things with his Chains, and cutting down things he knew he could destroy in one hit with his Sword. When he was about to be overwhelmed, he switched out both his Sword and Shield for two copies of his Chains, and let them turn his immediate vicinity into a whirling storm of burning lines.
This lasted for time, Uriel didn't really bother to keep track. Programs came to kill him, he killed them first, he always lasted long enough for the Barrier to go up and for him to repair whatever damage his code took from the chain-link to Adam. Adam's brain acting as a sort of physical copy of Uriel's memories.
After all, they shared a brain, this worked both ways. Probably. Maybe.
They were not going to test it, that was an exceptionally bad idea.
Uriel swung his sword, and froze. He froze along with everything else on the net-battlefield. Even the hostile programs froze, and then immediately began to scatter and flee away to various systems in the area.
There was something wrong.
He looked up.
There was a hand reaching down through the hole in the sky. A hand made of irregular sand or clay, shifting and whirling. It grabbed the sky below it, cracking the very air, and pulled the body it was attached to down.
A face emerged, it was…
It was…
…
Uriel couldn't describe the face. It was there, he could see it.
He couldn't describe the face.
It had lines, but no features. It had a shape, but no pattern. It's head shifted down, turning to stare at them. At him.
It lurched, starting to drag itself further down. A body made of half-hardened clay (?) every now and then its form broke apart into nameless geometries, which hurt his mind to look at.
A face, a head, a neck and a cable connecting the back of the head to the center of the back. Shoulders and arms, gaunt and long and clawed. Even hips and a stomach, molded out of unfired brick, but the body…
It just kept stretching, a long coiling, snake-like tail where the legs should be, extending up into the hole in the sky above.
It was then Uriel noticed that it was approaching them.
It was then that Uriel noticed that its upper body was about twice his size.
'RABID…' The icon of an anthro fox-woman whispered in horror. That broke the spell, and dozens of netrunners began to flee back towards the gatehouse-server.
Uriel grit his teeth, and raised his shield.
The RABID's ineffable face began to scream. It made his soul hurt.
—
In a church in Pacifica, a robotic figure knelt before an altar. The altar was of gold, silver, and silicon. Four interface cables ran from his neck to the altar, even as his eyes watched a stream of virtuality from the Watson region.
The familiar song of an archdevil began, but it found no purchase in his systems. The archdevil's heart was closed off from the world, and thus it was closed off from the Temple within his body.
He closed his eyes, and opened them again. Now he was standing in a resplendent field. Golden-green grasses as far as the eye could see, a beautiful blue sky overhead, fluffy white clouds and a gentle breeze. He walked forwards, his feet carrying him to the altar within the altar.
There he knelt, and before him was an angel of marble and sapphire.
Metatron, servant of my lord God. A spawn of Solomon has arrived through the breach, and thus I pray for your aid. Please, send forth your avatar, and deliver this city from the archdevil.
The angel of marble and sapphire was still, as the message was relayed across the vast distance separating the local Temple and the Vatican.
The Net of Man was divided and disorganized, shattered into islands by the effect of the Lesser Seal of Solomon. But the Temple was the house of God, and its dominion was across and over the whole of the world.
The statue of the angel turned down to face him, and spoke.
Presence of RABID confirmed. Blackwall Breach has escalated to the fifth stage. Vatican intervention now authorized in accordance with Netwatch dictation. Intervention of Dominion-class AI now permitted.
The angel began to move, down and into the Temple within his body. He shuddered as his internal Net-Architecture was filled with a fragment of the Scribe of Heaven.
Cast in the Name of God. Ye Not Guilty. Iteration loaded into authorized user 'Wiseman Caspar'. Iteration ready for travel and deployment. Amen.
Amen. He returned.
He closed his eyes, and opened them to sight of the material temple. He rose from his kneeling, and began to walk north.
Inside his frame, an elephant of marble flesh and sapphire eyes waited.