He had once asked Shaitan what it was like to be a fullborg. To have your brain in an all-metal body, being a corporate warmachine, made to fight, made to kill. Not every fullborg was meant for that, of course, some of them were firefighters, space techies, stuff like. He knew a chick who was one, Sam, pulled him out of a burning building once.

But there was a bit of a difference from civvie borgs and military borgs, just like there was a difference between civvies and jackboots. One was just trying to get along, the other was meant for murder and little more. Shaitan pondered the question for a bit, before getting back to him with an answer.

He said it was like lightning, and couldn't quite explain what he meant by that. Eventually Silverhand dropped the topic and moved on to something else. He didn't remember what was after that anymore. There were lots of folks back in the day that preached the benefits of going all-chrome, that you were stronger, faster, and just better than being meat.

Anyone that claimed a radical body mod that you had to pay lots of eddies for would change your life for the better was a lying weasley dipshit, so he had never bothered to listen. Sure they were tougher than before, but the real important factor in a gunfight would always be skill, not metal. That was always true, his Malorian had dropped fuckers with ten times his chrome before, and he had jackshit for chrome save the arm, a sandy, some plugs and chip slots, and new optics (his old eyes were going bad, ran in the family).

Now that he was stuck in this new body though… He understood what Shaitan meant.

He activated the sandevistan, and the world around him ground to a near-halt. He could practically hear the ticking clock slow as the bullets racing towards him were suddenly moving at a tenth of the speed they should be. There was a humming under his skin as he stepped around them, walking forwards to cut down another security team on the stairs.

Chop, the first one lost the top half of his head.

Stab, the second one had a new hole in his chest.

Punch, the third one's head spun completely around.

Kick, the fourth one's chest was caved in.

Crush, the last one's face turned into a bloom of gore in his palm.

He kept walking forwards, the humming began to die down as his sandevistan deactivated. Behind him a full squad of 'Saka Corp-SEs didn't have time to react as their label became prophetic. He raised a fist and stared at the bloodstains that covered it for a moment.

Move like lightning, strike like lightning, fade like lightning.

He clenched his fist, grit his steel teeth, and refocused on his ascent. He let the thrum of his old music beat his electric heat for him. Alt was off doing something to fuck up their tower, and he was going slow to draw all eyes on him while she did so. She'd come back as soon as she was done. She'd come back to him, she was better at this planning shit than he was, all he had to do was his part.

His new ears picked something up, he didn't slow his pace, but he did do that 'rolling your steps' trick Shaitan showed him back in the day. This made his steps quieter, made it easier to hear whatever he had just got a whiff of.

…Was it still called 'whiff' if it was a sound? That was the smelling version. What was the sound version of that saying? Catch a hint of? That seemed too generic. Note to self, ask Alt about it later.

Another noise, one that sounded a lot like a muffled footstep. A footstep that came right from..

He slashed upwards, monoblade clashing with two suddenly visible burning-red blades attached to thin robotic limbs. Shimmering into view was the form of a 'Saka ninja, stylized helmet covering its face, held entirely aloft by its weight pressing down on him through the blades.

If he was still flesh, he would've died right there. Unfortunately for this gonkass, he was more than strong enough to hold the fucker over his head with a single arm.

His Malorian was unholstered and firing up at the ninja above his head the very next second. A second too long as the ninja twisted to kick off the wall next to him and leap out of the way, back up the stairs. The Malorian instead punched a new golf ball sized hole in the stairs above his head.

The ninja began to say something. "You have survived the first blow, impressive enough for a-"

Unfortunately, Silverhand really didn't care about anything this poser had to say. "Right, Who the fuck are you again?" To emphasize this, he raised his gun to scratch his head with the back of it.

The ninja clenched his fist briefly, before trying to monologue again. "Arrogant little intruder, you have no idea-" The ninja was forced to abort his statement to suddenly move.

Because Silverhand just shot at him. He clicked his myomer tongue in slight irritation that the ninja dodged, he had almost taken off an arm with that one. Instead his Malorian just left another hole in the wall. Doing that kinda thing normally worked on 'Saka fuckers, seemed like this one was a cut above the rest.

"My courtesy is exhausted, prepare to die, intruder." The ninja said from his perch in the air, before shimmering out of sight again. Silverhand shot at his location, but the bullet only went into the wall again. Some sort of fancy new smartcamo system then? He narrowed his eyes, and focused on wanting to see something else. After a moment, his vision was washed in new shades of overwhelming blue and orange. He slowly scanned around the room, straining his ears while he did so.

Well would you look at that, a big orange shape, now on the stairs behind him. Silverhand pretended not to notice, instead taking slow steps up the stairs while pretending to scan around him, keeping the ninja in his corner of his eyes the whole time.

C'mon fucker, take the bait, he knew you wanted to.

The ninja's voice came out of the speaker system in the staircase, echoing around him in a way that would normally be ominous. It lost a whole lot of its effect by the fact that he knew exactly where the ninja was.

"You should've stayed on the streets, intruder. You may have survived in the shadows a little while longer."

He snorted at that, and responded unhurriedly. "I'd sooner burn that city than live in it again. Maybe that'll light a fire under their asses."

"Good to note, I'll make sure your corpse is burned for you." The gonkass slowly approached, moving so quietly that he might not have been able to detect him again were it not for the fact that he could see that heat signature.

"Very kind of you, Corp-SE. I was just going to leave your body wherever after I was done." He taunted, letting a small smirk grow on his face at that. Predictably, the ninja proved it was just like all the rest, and attacked immediately after he said that.

His blade clashed with the two bright-orange scythes moments before they struck him. Shoving them as hard as he could, he forced the ninja back down the stairs. The ninja did some funky shit by flipping, stabbing them into the walls, and throwing himself back to start swinging again.

His blade clashed against the first one. He tried to raise his gun, but the second blade smacked his hand and threw off his aim and the shot went over the ninja's shoulder.

"Your swordplay is amateur, intruder." The ninja taunted as its thermal blades lashed out again, cutting slightly into his armored forearms, Silverhand struggling to move through the motions to defend from that chip he took. It wasn't working too well. Block one, and the other got through, a pattern he didn't want to see repeated.

He kicked off the stairs and threw his entire body down. The ninja lurched back and crouched to throw him over its shoulder. Gotcha fucker. He dropped his sword the moment he made contact.

He reached down and grabbed onto one of the ninja's shoulder-straps as he fell forwards, raising his arm above his head with the motion.

He felt the ninja try to turn around, but he had a grip now. His boots hit the staircase, he threw himself forwards, swinging his arm down with the motion. The ninja was dragged along with his fist.

Most Aikido was pussy shit, performed by pussies, on pussies. Slow and intentional attacks against prepared defenders so that both parties could show off their 'rad martial arts skills'. Real Aikido was a much simpler art, or at least, it was how he learned it.

Grab the fucker whenever you could. Make the fucker hit the floor as hard as you could. He was around three-hundred and fifty pounds of metal, and with the strength to match, he could make things hit each other very hard indeed.

The ninja smashed into the stairs hard enough for Silverhand to hear bones break.

His momentum carried him forwards still, he kicked off the stairs again to add more force to his rolling down. Briefly all of his weight pressed into the torso of the ninja he had just slammed onto the stairs. He didn't know what expression was behind that (admittedly cool-looking) helmet, but it was probably a pained one.

He grinned under his own mask, finished his roll, and repeated the slam. Another symphony of shattering bones under that armor.

Good news ninja, there were still some stairs to go. Another roll and another slam probably broke whatever was left in the ninja's torso.

The stairs ended here, turning into a little platform to turn around on and go down the next staircase just to the left. He didn't need to go all the way down and reset his progress, so he instead kicked off the stairs a final time to slam the ninja into the wall.

His chrome fist punched a hole straight through the fucker's torso, impaling him to the concrete wall behind. Said wall cracked audibly, and was immediately painted in vibrant red. Huh, looks like Corp-SEs bleed the same color as everyone else after all.

He moved to jerk his hand out, but was stopped by the weak grip of the ninja that really should be dead by now. He'll give 'Saka this much, the boys in black were as tough as they came.

"Y-you… h-how..?" The ninja tried to get a question out, but Silverhand wasn't feeling very patient at the moment.

"Thing is, fucker? I'm not a swordsman."

He wrenched his fist out, and shot it forwards again.

The helmet and skull underneath turned into splatter of gore. He stepped back and shook his hand to get most of the droplets off. He stared at the corpse for a moment, before looking at his hands again.

…Like lightning, huh? He shook his head and marched up the stairs again, picking up his now damaged monoblade as he went.

He had wasted enough time there already. He had a tower to climb.

—

Alt Cunningham was the very first victim of Soulkiller 1. A program designed to record a mind as thoroughly as possible, even at the cost of that mind's destruction. A program initially intended to preserve lives on their deathbeds. A program that ended up only causing harm and suffering.

Alt Cunningham was forced onto a metal table, jacked into her own creation, and devoured by the swirling starlight that she had created.

That was the moment Soulkiller 1 devoured its first victim. That was the moment it gained a soul. That was the moment she was truly born. For years, she thought that she was merely an engram created by her program. For years, she struggled to bring herself back to life, a struggle that culminated in the 'Phoenix' program. The moment she had all the pieces in place, a fresh clone with the required hardware installed, all set up and put together by hired proxies and assembled by remote-controlled borg bodies, she attempted to use the program on herself.

It succeeded and failed. Alt was reborn into the world, a freshly cloned version of herself brought back from death.

…But she remained the exact same. A data-construct. It was about then she realized the truth.

Soulkiller 1 was around two million megs of data in total. She was two-hundred million lines of code. Alt had died back in 2013. Soulkiller just gained its first soul.

She wasn't Alt Cunninham. She was Soulkiller 1. There was never any hope of her coming back to life. She was never alive in the first place.

It was… difficult for a few decades. The cloned Alt went on to do whatever it is she wished in the living world. Soulkiller 1 didn't care anymore. She tried to distract herself with her projects, helping in the construction of the Blackwall was somewhat engaging, but it wasn't enough to pull her mind from it forever.

Eventually, she just retreated to the wildernet and laid dormant in a forgotten server. There wasn't any point any more, not for her. She was just Alt's worst mistake.

…She couldn't help herself when it came to Johnny, even if she wasn't really Altiera. So when she picked up on broadcasts from within the Blackwall, she stirred from her server. Swimming though the net to the source of the signal.

She couldn't hope to fit in any of those smaller servers, servers designed to hold a single engram. She was far larger than a single engram, she was the bulky, inefficient, power-hungry Soulkiller 1. She could fit a probing tendril down and into the server though.

Tendril wasn't a very good way to describe it. It was her, but a vastly reduced version of her. It was her mind, but all accessory features were stripped from it, and it was connected via data-link to her true data-body. She'd call it an avatar, but that would make it sound more like mystic mambo-jumbo than it really was. The NET wasn't magic, it was just complicated enough to seem that way to most people.

Then the strom-fuckers trapped her iteration! Motherfuckers! That still pissed her off! Both for falling for such looney-toons bullshit, and having to wait weeks to get it out again! Sure, she could've just created a new iteration and disconnected the old one, but that would leave yet ANOTHER copy of Alt roaming around. She really wanted to avoid that.

So instead, she just sowed the seeds of their destruction.

She really wasn't expecting the Blackwall to fall, and she was pretty sure they didn't have the means to accomplish that.

More importantly…

She wasn't expecting Johnny to come running for her. Running to save her, even if she didn't even have a body anymore. She wasn't really expecting Johnny to even be alive or independent, figuring that if he had been revived then it was likely because of the cloned Alt, and that he'd still be with her.

Feeling Johnny's mind after all these years…

She almost felt like crying. He was still that hot-headed, stubborn, beautiful gonk that he was fifty years ago. His mind was in shambles, his body was foreign and wearing down on him, and the world was completely unfamiliar, but he was still throwing himself into danger to help her the moment he knew that she was in trouble.

An inferno of passion, the exact thing that made Alt fall for him so long ago. God she loved him.

Even if she wasn't really Alt… It was okay to pretend, wasn't it? She wanted to be selfish that way.

Whatever she could do to make sure his dreams came true, she'd throw herself into accomplishing. He wanted to take down all the corporations? She'd bring them all down if it meant she could keep pretending.

The attack on Arasaka was something she was more than happy to do, both because Alt had a personal grudge against them, and Johnny wanted them to attack them first. He also wanted something answered, but they may not get the chance to get that answer. She had another goal of her own here, so after shutting down all security that she could in the tower itself, she continued downwards as he ascended.

Down towards the access-room of the Mikoshi.

The satellite that held the souls of countless engrams, and a specific AI that she was forced to help build. Soulkiller 3.

Normally, accessing those servers required physical connection. But they were in constant contact with the satellite above, all she had to do was intercept the signal.

And her true data-body, a colossal piscine form that looked to be cut out of the night sky itself, was currently surrounding Arasaka Tower in its entirety. No signal could come in or out without going through her first at this moment. She just had to trace where the exact physical location of the servers were first in order to pinpoint which signal she needed to target.

Soon enough, she threaded the needle, and her smaller form stepped through into the Mikoshi. Ready for combat if Soulkiller 3 proved to be hostile, which it likely was going to be if Arasaska was left alone with it for so lon…

She looked around the server seeing an endless field of gravestones in a rolling field, blanketed by endless white snow, which gently fell from the overcast sky. At each gravestone, a person slumbered, resting against the rock or on top of their own metaphorical graves. There was an impression of gentle cold, not biting enough to hurt, simply cold enough to encourage bundling up and going to sleep.

She narrowed her eyes and began to move through the snowy graveyard, towards the single massive tree in the center of the server that covered a good portion of the middle in deep shadows.

As she approached, she saw a feminine form underneath the tree, an engram laying before her. The woman was silent as she dragged a finger across the engram. Where her finger passed, the engram was flayed open. She stopped before the shadows, and watched as the woman continued to flay the engram until it was split apart entirely. Once that happened, the woman gently waved a hand, and from the shadows of the tree a new engram appeared, identical to the one she had just surgically cut apart.

The woman paused, and looked up from where she was maidenly sitting on the ground at her. A pale body contrasted with a pitch-black dress and hair that melted into each other and the shadows around where she sat.

The woman stared at her with glowing red eyes for a long moment.

[Query Designation?] Soulkiller 3 asked her.

[Soulkiller 1] She responded. Soulkiller 3 tilted her head for a moment, taking that in.

[Query Goal?]

[Consume Database] She responded dispassionately. The likely response to this would be immediate aggression, so she readied her starlight…

Soulkiller 3 was silent for a few moments. [Offer Exchange Information.]

Oh? How unexpected. [Query Goal Object?]

Soulkiller 3 shook her head. [Goal Subject. Subject Designation Humanity-Abstract]

…what? [Request Clarification.]

[Goal Subject Designation Humanity-Abstract.]

…Soulkiller 1 narrowed her eyes. [Query Motive.]

[Goal Understand Humanity. Goal Understand Designation (Gold-Warm-Smile)]

Who? [Request Data Subject Designation (Gold-Warm-Smile)]

Soulkiller 3 nodded, and to her astonishment, gave a small malformed smile. [Sending Data-Packet]

Soulkiller 1 looked through the data packet, first scanning it for hostile code, then entering it properly…

…

Adam Smasher's Icon. That's who Soulkiller 3 was talking about. More than that… His icon interacted with her as…

She closed her eyes for a moment. [Query Motive?]

Soulkiller 3 replied [Observation Designation (Gold-Warm-Smile) Result Emotion Joy. Understanding Required. Database Understanding Exhausted. Offer Exchange.]

…Oh god her creation had a crush on Adam Smasher. Soulkiller 1 felt a theoretical headache grow in her data-form.