LITTLE_CHINA
Ciphere's shop was on floor twenty-seven of the prismatic monolith that was Megabuilding 21-C. The drab, barely windowed slab protruded from the city like a pin out of place on a great chipboard. The floors were rings around a spacious void where the rickety freight elevators heaved up and down 24/7, creating a grinding symphony of gears.
Movement, always movement here. Day or night, it never changed. Steam warped with the colors from the colored sodium tubing that bolstered the many storefronts. Air conditioners with broken fans whined nosily, always at the brink of overheating. There was a food stall on every floor, and by the smells that wafted from each one, they were all serving the same thing. Same as in any megabuilding—all the amenities were here. A resident could spend decades of their life in places like these without ever having to leave the premises. The outside world could just not entice them.
Fiona followed in Ramses' wake shortly after exiting the elevator, trying not to stray too far from him. They made their way up a staircase that had been dirtied from use, trash piled in between the steps. Cheap concrete, a mixture imported from the wrong continent overseas. She imagined her foot bursting through one of the cracked steps and soon she would be free-falling for nearly half a minute, able to reflect her life several times over before she could hit the ground.
She shivered and gripped the handrail, dissuading herself from making a motion to look down.
The shop was close by the stairwell. An unassuming establishment, except for the giant Confederate flag draped over one of the grilled windows. The glowing signage read, "CASTLE." The door was broken. It took a wrenching motion from Ramses to slide it along its hinges so they could step inside. [1]
The shop was not large—just a few aisles containing firearms supplies. Magazines. Scopes. Even hunting garb. The pistols were behind a countertop of glass an inch thick, next to where carbon blades lay upon a cloth bed, pampered until they were to be used to draw blood. Rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns were lined together against the far wall, restrained by an industrial rack colored yellow-and-black. The smell of gun oil was pungent here.
Ciphere was behind a pane of bulletproof glass, reading a magazine on Mediterranean cruises. He looked up upon seeing his guests and he slid the magazine away, arms wide open in a genial motion.
"Ah, le Pharoah," he proclaimed in a slight French accent that had been worn away with the Night City color. "Thought you might have forgotten me here. These days, it's rare I see the sun, let alone a face I recognize from another life outside 21-C."
"Ciphere," Ramses dipped his helmeted head in greetings.
"And you brought a friend? Ramses is finally working with a partner, eh?" Before Ramses could ward off the teasing, Ciphere craned his head to look behind the merc, trying to get a good glimpse at Fiona. "And what might your name be, mon cherie?"
Fiona had edged around Ramses' frame by now. She must have had a shocked expression upon seeing Ciphere, because the man at the counter unleashed an ugly laugh from her reaction.
Ciphere appeared to be more machine than man.
The first thing Fiona noticed was Ciphere's eyes. They were a piercing red-orange set of glowing optics that appeared to jut past his eyelids. Exposed cybernetics trickled across his cheekbones, like tears. He also had no jaw. Not a human equivalent, at least. Instead, the lower portion of his face was a jagged prosthesis, triangular in shape, that seemed to inhabit reptilian influences, mainly due to the fact that it was full of razor-sharp teeth. And his arms were shiny Klipsh prosthetics with gold inserts embedded within skeins of carbon fiber. She was holding her breath in terror, just looking at him.
Ramses noticed this change in Fiona and he placed a hand upon her shoulder, gently stirring her out of her fugue. "Ciphere is ex-Maelstrom," he explained to her. "A gang that has a near-fetishization with cybermodification. He left the gang after the nuke went off back in the 40s, though. Thought he could make more eddies if he went independent and he was right. Couldn't get rid of the chrome, not that he particularly feels like it."
"It's a hit with the ladies, you luddite," Ciphere said in a slithering tone. Fiona wondered who the hell would want to be with a man who looked like that, but she kept her mouth shut. "You still haven't told me who she is, Pharoah."
Fiona opened her mouth, but Ramses intervened, to her annoyance. "Her name's Fiona, Ciphere. She's a newcomer to the city. Needs some reinforcement. Is the range open?"
"Open and ready for business," Ciphere said as he eased his way out of the booth and into the main shop using a thin side door. He was about Fiona's height, but that did not make him any less intimidating. "How green are we talking?"
Ramses took a glance at Fiona and she reflexively met his eyes, or at least his helmet's optics.
"We're going to need to start from the beginning," he said.
A prerecorded whistling sound escaped from Ciphere's vocabulator. His body then seemed to droop a little bit, as if such an admission was akin to stating that Fiona was practically marked for death. Night City and blindness to firearms was not a combination that supported a long life.
"Mon cherie," he swung his optics in Fiona's direction, his voice noticeably softer, "you picked a hell of a place to visit."
The range was in the next room, which sandwiched the cashier's booth between the main store area. Ciphere led them through, where an elongated room stretched out for a couple dozen meters to terminate at a cinderblock wall. It was cold in this part of the shop, the smell of oil now traded for smoke and cordite. Burnt casings littered the ground, some of it having been collected into disorganized piles of brass. It was impossible to step around without a foot brushing some of the spent casings, which created a soft ringing sound.
The shopkeeper gestured to the closest lane and grabbed a foldable table from the back. Erecting it, he then laid an oilstained cloth upon it, making sure that the corners of the fabric lined up with the table.
"So, Pharoah," Ciphere took a rag from his pocket and began to rub his greasestreaked prosthetic palms, "what sort of selection shall I set you up today?"
Ramses considered Fiona again, who was standing in front of the lane, near the yellow-painted line on the floor next to the firing lanes which read, "Do not cross."
"Let's go with a variety. Multiple makes, models, and types. It's a matter of figuring out a preference for today. Oh, and no smart weapons."
"Merde," Ciphere mimed a spitting motion, for he had no salivary glands in his mouth anymore. "When are you going to rid yourself of this notion that smart weapons are inferior? I move product like that twice as much as any other type—"
Ramses leaned forward across the table, cutting Ciphere off. "Product like that is for no one but incompetents who couldn't hit Arasaka tower even if you put them in the lobby. Smart weapons are a crutch. Not to mention, they can be tampered with, made useless. You don't build any skills shooting with smart pistols, Ciphere. If you want to be able to use a weapon properly, you need to know how to aim it. To actually use it. So… no smart weapons."
The cybernetic jaw of the ex-Maelstrom worked for a few moments. Obviously wanting to say his piece, but knowing that someone as obstinate as Ramses would not budge.
"As you wish, Pharoah," he said, before he bustled out of the lane to retrieve some weapons. "No legend for you in the near future, same as ever."
Fiona watched him go, her eyes cloudy. Ramses leaned against the far wall, watching her shift her weight from foot to foot.
"What did he mean about there not being a legend for you?" Fiona asked, wheeling around.
Despite himself, Ramses chuckled. "Right, sometimes I forget. In Night City, and in every other megalopolis, a merc's rep is bolstered by the number of jobs you complete. But in Night City, becoming legend takes another step entirely than just being good at your job."
"What's that?"
The merc shrugged. "You have to die."
Fiona pulled a shocked face. She had not been expecting that answer. "Oh."
"Well, dying itself isn't the criteria. Hundreds of gonks die every day doing something stupid—one doesn't get to be a legend by dying in a foolish manner. You need to have died doing something memorable that the city is not liable to forget anytime soon. Something… dramatic. Like when Silverhand nuked Arasaka Tower way back when. City's still dealing with the fallout from that, literally." He also tilted his head in concession. "Plus, if you do become a Night City legend, the Afterlife bar will name a drink after you, in your honor."
The juxtaposition of the prospect of being named for a drink and comprehending one's mortality was so sudden for Fiona that she couldn't help but laugh. It was the first laugh she had uttered in Ramses' presence, deep and throaty. That one had come straight from the gut. A strange feeling. Heat in the back of her throat, derived from the sudden humor. These intransigent emotions rippled through before she could even grasp their meaning.
Still smiling in amazement, she shook her head. "I… I don't think I want to even try to become a legend," she admitted.
"A modest goal," Ramses said. "For what it's worth, I wouldn't want that honor either."
Honestly, Fiona would have believed Ramses either way, but it did not seem that the merc was gung-ho to cut his career short in the name of eternal fame. His deliberate nature, his careful and uncompromising view of the world seemed to be at an antithesis to the core that Night City itself ran upon.
Muffled crashing sounds from the other room momentarily tore both of their gazes to the doorway. Ciphere was swearing in a mix of French and English just in the next room. It sounded like he had just dropped a heavy box straight onto his foot.
"Remember," Ramses told Fiona, "you can always back out whenever you want."
The netrunner shook her head, her loose hair brushing around her neck. "I need to at least try. I'm in this unless… I don't know. It's hard to explain."
There was a bench nearby. Ramses directed Fiona to sit and he took the spot next to her. There was little noise as the heavily armed mercenary sat down, his hands placed on his thighs, the armor glistening in the poor light.
"You think I'm forcing this on you."
"No, no," Fiona jerked like she had been touched with a live wire. "I don't see it that way." The way that Ramses was speaking to her, it surprised her with how tender he could make his voice. Tender, yet in control.
"One could see it as me taking advantage of your situation."
Fiona narrowed her eyes. "Is that how you see it?"
"That isn't the point," Ramses said evenly. "It's not about what value I could possibly get out of you right in this moment. This is new for me, too. Everything interaction I've ever had has been transactional in some capacity."
"And this isn't?" Fiona raised an eyebrow.
A soft sound of acknowledgement passed through Ramses' vocabulator. He then looked straight ahead, hesitating to deliver his answer.
Fiona decided not to press him and she cleared her throat. "If I thought you were taking advantage of me, rest assured, I would have let you know. But now we're here, we understand each other up to that point, so it doesn't matter." She craned her head around the room, desperate for a different topic to direct the conversation. "How did you and Ciphere meet, anyway?"
"The same way you'll be expanding your network," Ramses replied, also eager to tackle another subject. "It's a very interconnected society, merc work. There's a profile on every one of us in some database, like everything we are can be distilled down into a sheet of metrics. Mercs. Fixers. Even clients. A job like this does benefit from cooperation, but you need to be picky about the people you choose to cooperate with. Ciphere's one of those people who provides a greater benefit than most, but you'll only figure that you through experience."
Speaking of, Ciphere soon returned with a cart that had been piled with boxes and crates. Ramses and Fiona stood back up from the bench to greet him. The shopkeeper positioned the cart next to the foldable table and began to place gun after gun upon it. Pistols. Revolvers. Assault rifles. Shotguns. A mixture of various lengths of steel, some of them clearly used as the finish was scratched and the grips worn and stained with old grease.
The shopkeeper kicked a few hardshell crates of ammo near the table, opening them up with a boot. He straightened and appraised Ramses. "Starting small, I wager?"
Ramses just nodded—this was going to be Ciphere's show. He was a bystander for today, just observing.
The ex-Maelstrom gestured for Fiona to come over to the table so that Ciphere could fill her in. She shuffled over, still wrestling with her inner thoughts, despite her claimed dedication.
"Never shot a gun before, eh, mon cherie?" Ciphere asked her again.
On reflex, she looked to Ramses, but realized that he would not provide any salvation from Ciphere's interrogation. "No." Fiona tried to keep her tone light, with little success.
Ciphere then reached for one of the pistols, a durable black piece of equipment with a polymer grip. He ejected the magazine and pulled the slide back to demonstrate that the pistol was not loaded. He then shoved the magazine back into the grip and held it out to Fiona for her to take.
"M-10AF Lexington," he said. "Militech make. It's an automatic. 20-round mag, 9mm, standard issue for NCPD. They call it 'less than lethal' because it's pathetic against body armor. But against some fashionista wearing the latest from Ixis, it'll make short work."
Fiona took the weapon, fitted the grip in her hand. She was unsure what Ciphere expected of her, so she tried to copy the movements that she saw him make. Her thumb fumbled around the outside of the weapon for a couple of seconds until she found the mag release button. She hit it, and the magazine sailed past her hand at the bottom, too slow to react, and the magazine noisily clattered upon one of the rifles that had been laid out on the table. Ears burning, she grabbed the fallen magazine and slotted it back in with a firm motion, hoping that Ramses was not thinking poorly of her at the outset.
She also attempted to pull the slide back, but found that she had to use more of her strength than she was expecting—the slide was on a very tight spring. Once she had it all the way back, she let go of the slide and snapped back into place so hard it jolted the weapon in her grip. A violent motion, like a cobra. Fiona was beginning to think she had made a mistake.
"How's it feel?" Ciphere asked.
"Uh…" Fiona just let the sound escape from her mouth, which earned her a chuckle from the ex-Maelstrom.
"Heh. Most people have the same reaction. They look lighter in the films, don't they?" When Fiona did not respond, Ciphere continued. "I'm going to give you the crash course." He handed over a loaded clip to the netrunner. "That's a half mag. Load it, but do not chamber a round. The shop may be a mess, but I like my range orderly. And that means that once you're in position, that weapon stays pointed downrange at all times. Got it?"
Fiona nodded thinly as she exchanged the magazines. The weapon was now heavier in her grip. She tried to mitigate the weight by putting her left palm underneath the grip, but Ciphere stopped her.
"Uh-uh. You're going for the cup grip, ain't'cha? Yeah, you'll find that doesn't do shit against recoil. Gotta use both hands around the grip, like this." With another pistol that he had taken up from the table, he demonstrated where his hands would go to Fiona.
Absorbing the instruction, Fiona slowly maneuvered her hands until the thumb of her left hand was positioned just below the thumb to her right hand, both palms clenched tightly.
Ciphere looked over Fiona's grip. "That's the ticket. The two-handed grip gives you more control when firing and recovering from recoil. Now, step to lane one, mon cherie. Wanna see what you've got."
She complied, making sure that the weapon was indeed pointing downrange once she arrived in position. The range walls and floors had been scuffed of paint at the midway point from many a poor shooter. Some of the light fixtures were even shattered, Ciphere not having bothered to replace the bulbs.
"Chamber the round," she heard Ciphere order from behind.
Reaching up, she pulled the slide back and snapped it home. A red light at the rear of the weapon blinked. Locked and loaded. She heard a clicking sound and then, from the ceiling-mounted rail that ran down her lane, a four-quadrant target swung into view about ten meters away.
"Range is live, fire when ready," Ciphere told her.
Fiona realized that her chest was tight. There was a distinct tremble in her hands. Even her hearing felt as if was being washed out, a distant rumble overtaking everything else as if the megabuilding was collapsing on its foundations all around her. She tried breathing in, that hurt, and told herself that she was only shooting at a target. What expectations could she possibly have for something as banal as this?
She sucked in a breath and focused her eye down the pistol's iron sights. No one had told her to do this. It just came… naturally.
Her finger brushed the trigger. Like it was meant to be there. She squeezed it.
The gun bucked in her hands like it was a rabid animal trying to escape. There was an explosion in her ears and she instinctively ducked, but halted the motion midway so that it looked like she just tried to retreat her head into her chest.
"Don't stop!" she heard Ciphere shout from behind. "Empty the clip!"
A fresh pang rippled through her body. A surprising locus of calm, like being dipped into a still pond. Fiona straightened, her arms snapping taut. Eye sighted down the range again. Finger at the smooth trigger. Repeating the motion. That crisp feeling of her finger pulling until it could go no further.
Brass sailed in the air, bursts of fire rippling from the muzzle, the recoil jolting up her arms.
Each jolt of the pistol felt less and less magnified every time she fired, the sensation becoming more and more expected as her grip adjusted to the assault. She pulled the trigger in one-second intervals, allowing a short moment to gasp a breath before she focused on the target. She heard metal pinging, the clatter of brass on naked concrete, and the rush of blood in the membranes of her ears.
She tried pulling the trigger again but felt no resistance. It was only then did she notice that the slide was locked completely open. Smoke crinkled from the opening.
"All right," Ciphere said. "Range is locked down. All weapons safe. Come here, mon cherie."
The overhead rail rattled and Fiona stepped back a few paces, the target coming up before them. Upon seeing the results, that same recorded whistling noise came from Ciphere again.
At first, Fiona did not know what the ex-Maelstrom was marveling over. She was concentrated on the lone dot at the lower left corner of the targetboard. A clean miss. She was poring over that incompetence with a dark intensity, when she suddenly noticed where the rest of her shots had landed.
The center of the target was peppered with neat, perfect, little holes. Only one got into the inner ring of the target, not exactly a bullseye, but there was a distinct and tight grouping that Fiona thought had come from another shooter before her until Ciphere clapped a hand on her shoulder.
"Never held a gun, my ass," he chuckled. "Nah, you see, this is potential. This is something we can work with."
"It…" Fiona breathed around a cracked throat, "…it's good?"
Ciphere spared a look behind him as he brought the target down. "Good? I've seen people come here for decades and they would pay to have a result like this. You see this, Pharaoh? Girl's got something, here."
"Yes," Ramses said quietly, inscrutable. "She does."
Fiona chose to believe that Ramses subdued reaction was one of pride, though logic prevented her from subscribing to that theory. She looked at the target, souring on the fact that one bullet was out of place. "Didn't get them all, though."
"Your first ever shot," Ciphere shook his head. "No one's perfect right out of the gate. Believe me, there've been worse. Had one young kid try to pull that fast draw trick that he saw in some shit film somewhere. Pulled the trigger as he was yanking it out of the holster. Shot himself in the dick. The other patrons were very annoyed about all the blood on the floor that I had to clean up."
The ex-Maelstrom set the punctured target to the side and racked a fresh one onto the hangar. He pressed a button and a pulley yanked the new target back to the old position down the range.
"Just got to remember that the tendency for a lot of pistols tends to pull down and to the left," he continued. "Well, it's not really the pistol's fault. More of the shooter's—they're tensing up and anticipating the recoil that they lurch forward when they're firing. Throws the aim off. That's what happened with your first shot… but you kinked that out for the rest of them. And I didn't have to instruct you on that." He cocked his head toward Ramses. "You're sure he didn't give you any tips before coming here?"
"No, not at all," Fiona said emphatically. She whirled to the merc, as though as she expected him to rise to her defense, but he simply shrugged. That clouded expression returned. She was wondering why he was so subdued right now. Why the caution? Was he studying her?
Ciphere was back to rearranging guns around the table, taking cursory glances at Fiona. "Think we'll take a minute before going back to sidearms. We're not going to up the caliber there just yet. Some of those guns will break your wrist if you're not careful. Automatics have springs that eat the recoil, and a 9mm will do you handy in a pinch. No sense in taking up a .45 if your muscles aren't prepared for it."
His fingers then scrambled over the tableau of tabled weapons, like he was miming a sonata. He then grabbed something from the table—a bullpup rifle. Even with most of his facial features missing, Fiona could tell that Ciphere was putting on a wicked smile. He held the weapon out.
"Now, this is just for my own indulgence. See what you can do with this, mon cherie."
Two hours later and Fiona was exhausted.
Ciphere's self-described indulgence was nothing more than shuttling her weapon after weapon, wanting to see how she could handle them in a range setting. He offered no instruction, no direction, other than point the weapon and shoot the target. Destroy the enemy, whatever that implied.
The weapons came in all shapes and sizes. Despite what Ciphere had said earlier, he soon began offering her guns that came in bigger and bigger calibers. Each one an experiment, leading to a new data point. A new outcome.
He had her fire many assault rifles. Automatic, semi-automatic, and burst fire modes. Unlike the pistols, the weight of the rifles meant that the recoil could be distributed more evenly throughout the weapon rather than directing the bulk of it on her wrists. With the stock bunched at her shoulder, her left arm at the foregrip close to the muzzle, it was easy to take control of such a weapon. She took a few rifles through a couple of test runs, before deciding that she preferred precision rifles that could only shoot semi-auto.
For good reason, too. On full-auto, Fiona had trouble trying to wrangle the weapon in the direction she wanted. Sure, she was hitting her targets, but the spray was inefficient. Too much time and collateral damage to "down" what she was shooting. She swore that she had shouted in alarm the first time that she had fired in such a mode, the clinking of spent casings like a steel rain over corrugated metal rooftops. She preferred the control that semi-auto offered. The fact that each bullet would be made distinct by its own separate trigger pull, plus she found that she could use a scope far more easily with such a weapon than she could if she was shooting on automatic, and the results spoke for themselves.
The groupings on her targets got smaller and smaller until she was shooting empty air through the holes she had made, the bullseyes in tatters. After expending each clip, Fiona was deliberate in lowering her weapon, the barrel smoking, heat warbling from the open ports, as she allowed a moment to gather herself again, a fine sheen of sweat at her brow.
"Think I'm getting the hang of this," she had said around her panting.
Ciphere had laughed his oddly metallic laugh at that. "Not yet, you're not."
He then handed her a shotgun.
She was soon sorry she had said anything. Firing a shotgun was nothing like a rifle. For one thing, the kickback was so severe that the weapon brutalized her shoulder and nearly tore itself from her grip. She had to remember to clench down on the handgrip so that she would not lose control of it. And after three more shots, a tremendous bruise was forming on her shoulder where the butt of the shotgun was smashing into her.
But her aim was on target and soon the floor of the range was littered with shredded paper, the remnants hanging onto the metal hangar by pulped threads.
The same result occurred when Ciphere had Fiona try out a sniper rifle and a submachinegun. Despite liking the additional control that a semi-auto SMG could bring, she found herself oddly drawn to the slow and methodical patience that seemed to inhabit her when firing the sniper rifle. Perhaps that was because the rifle behaved better when it was not being fired rapidly, that she could look through the twelve-power scope and feel that she could take all the time that she needed.
Soon, she had a wealth of trophies that certainly told the story of her progress. A large stack of paper targets sat nearby, each one riddled through the center.
"I want to try one last thing," Ciphere beckoned to Fiona, who had been rotating her shoulder, already feeling the stabbing-knife sensation in her deep tissue from the shotgun's ferocious recoil. "Follow me."
The shop had what looked like a small dojo—a soundproofed room that had a thin layer of carpet over concrete. Swords of all shapes and sizes hung from racks upon the nearby wall. Ciphere walked over and plucked one out at random.
"Don't know nothing about swords, right?" He offered the grip to Fiona. "Someone pawned this military katana to me a while back. Check it out."
She grabbed the handle, which had a molded handgrip, and a segmented construction, where the outer edge of the sword was a bloodred metal that seemed to glow with an internal heat.
Slowly, Fiona flexed her grip upon the blade and lifted it up. It seemed to hum in her hand, like she had a connection with it, almost as if it was alive. She waved it around, carefully, swearing that she could hear the hissing sound of the air parting as the tip of the sword sliced through the emptiness with impunity.
"Wow," Fiona whispered. She turned the handgrip over. There was a Japanese symbol on the bottom. Her translator automatically deciphered it for her. Errata.
Ciphere plucked a shard from his belt and held it out to Fiona. As she took it, he said, "Training program. Swordsmen use it to build their skills as beginners. See how well it fits you."
Fiona slotted the shard into her porting and primed the program to execute.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then a grid overlay momentarily blinked across her vision. A flatspinning graphic in 48Hz shunted in the middle of it all. Cyrillic text at the bottom before it disappeared.
The program calibrated, synching with the direction of her optics. Then, directions appeared in her HUD, but it was all in Russian. The program was independent of her own software, so she could not apply her translator in realtime. The graphics morphed and shifted. Chrome and neon burning together.
A crude AR simulacrum of a featureless humanoid shape materialized in the center of the dojo, a blank human blob. Flashing red diamonds appeared upon certain points of the shape, which Fiona now understood was a target. The diamonds were hitpoints. This was a game.
Understanding that she was probably not going to receive any further direction from Ciphere, Fiona gripped the katana in both hands and slowly made her way towards the holographic target. She sucked in a few breaths, trying to psyche herself up.
She appraised the featureless humanoid blob, body vibrating like a current constantly ran through her body. She held herself in the ready pose that her HUD was now displaying—a miniature diagram was being projected at the side of her vision, detailing steps of certain stances from beginning, middle, and finally completion of each phase of attack. It detailed the length of each step, the power required for certain outcomes which took speed and the type of weapon into account, as well as the proper angles for both offense and defense, allowing for improvisation.
Gritting her teeth, Fiona stutter-stepped forward and swung the sword towards the holographic target, but she miscalculated the weight of the blade and ended up stumbling clear to the left, missing her mark entirely.
There was that burning sensation in her ears again as she tried to straighten back up. As though as she imagined someone was laughing at her.
Something burned in the specter of her mind. A green line, scribbling a random scrawl, suddenly pulled taut like a violin string.
Hands clenching upon the grip of the katana, this… Errata, she whirled and swiped a neat diagonal line that perfectly intersected one of the diamond hitpoints on the holo-dummy. The simulacrum jerked, as if it had been actually struck, but bobbed back to its full upright position. A normal human would have been split from the collarbone to the hip from such a blow, but the dummy merely acted as if it was made of rubber.
With a growl, Fiona stabbed the sword forth and impacted perfectly on the dummy's sternum, driven from her indignant rage. An X-ray overlay analyzed the details of each blow—that one would have severed her target's heart in two, were she practicing on a real human.
Stepping back to gather herself for a moment, Fiona's eyes then scrambled to the preset movelist that scrolled by in the corners of her vision. In her anger, she had nearly disregarded it, but now sought to use its knowledge to guide her very form. As soon as a new stance came into play, she lunged into a near-perfect imitation of the move. She could not explain what was going on—her body seemed to instinctively understand what to do, as if she had done something like this before, or if it had been imparted upon her a long time ago.
The blade scrambled through the air in a confine of sharpened metal. Virtual hitpoints shattered and disappeared like breaking glass, the training dummies whipping this way and that in response to Fiona's blows. To the outsider, it would appear that Fiona was fighting against the air. Within her own little world, imprisoned by the virtual grid that surrounded her, she was a devastating whirlwind.
She rolled, jumped, and swung the blade, every blow hitting their mark, every stance replicated picture-perfect. Sweat dribbled down her face, but she strangely did not feel tired. No, she wanted to keep going. This… she liked this. The control that the sword offered, the singing of the metal, the feel of the weight in her hands… this was the first weapon that felt like had been made for her, as if she and it were bonded on a molecular level.
After a few more rounds, she swept back to her feet, and brought up the training menu in her HUD. She toggled the number of opponents after brute-forcing her way through the language barrier.
The training dummy in front of her disappeared, only to be replaced by three more. And these held swords of their own.
Fiona brought her own weapon to bear. The smile came easily, this time.
Watching from behind a two-way mirror, both Ciphere and Ramses gazed out into the dojo, watching as Fiona made mincemeat of her imagined enemies. The sword seemed to glow as she swung it in back-breaking blows and rapid ripostes. Hell, it looked like she was having a complete ball.
Ciphere looked at Ramses, who had been staring silently at Fiona the whole while.
"All right," Ciphere made a contorted face. "Just who the hell is she?"
"Still in the process of figuring that out," Ramses admitted.
"You mean you don't know?"
"I will."
The ex-Maelstrom seemed lost for words for a moment. He then gestured past the mirror, where Fiona was still dazzling away with her blade. "She's either lying to you, or she's a fuckin' Manchurian candidate. She's good. Too good. No one has that kind of beginner's luck. Guns or blades, she's picked it up quicker than you, I bet. You sure she isn't a sleeper?"
"The thought had crossed my mind," Ramses said. "Haven't ruled it out yet."
"So I'm certain that the next question is, if she is a sleeper agent, who's the target?"
Ramses crossed his arms, silently glowering. He did not like to admit that Ciphere was bringing up some good points. He had screwed up badly with his moment of empathy, he was realizing more and more. All the softscans ever developed would never uncover the type of traumatic brain programming that Arasaka and Militech employed with regularity. That was how they got the PM of Egypt, back in the day. Sleeper agent got his passcode triggered and sliced his target's throat open with a butcher's knife before using the knife on himself. The only consolation Ramses would have was that there was no way that NetWatch would have programmed Fiona to kill him, specifically. That would have been too coincidental. Too unrealistic.
He was dealing in hypotheticals, now. No way to tell if any of this was the truth.
But, as he kept watching Fiona pull off these movesets in the next room, movesets that he knew typically took months to master, a creeping doubt began to manifest.
Somehow, he doubted that Fiona was truly that quick of a study.
"She lacks direction," he ignored Ciphere's rhetorical question. "I aim to provide her that. If doing so gets me closer to the truth, then…"
He let the sentence hang and Ciphere mustered a shaky laugh. "Pharoah, I trust you know what you're doing. But you need to consider the fact that you have a nuke on your hands. One wrong move—" he spread his hands in an imitation of an explosion.
Ramses made sure to affix his glare in a stance that mimicked exasperation. "You aren't telling me anything that I haven't told myself. But at least I now know that I have more of her skills that I can put to use. If I can get her to trust me, that's one less risk off the board."
"And when do you think you'll be able to trust her?" Ciphere countered.
The silence that radiated from Ramses' helmet was all the answer the shopkeeper needed.
"Comme on fait son lit, on se couche," Ciphere muttered with a rueful shake of his head.
"I've been lying in it for a while, now," Ramses responded gruffly. In the dojo, Fiona gave a triumphant cry as she executed a perfect leap-slash, her virtual opponent's head probably rolling around on the ground somewhere. "I have one more thing to ask of you, Ciphere."
"Yes?"
"Know where we can get her some clothes?"
CITY_CENTER
The access door slammed open, allowing Ramses and Fiona to emerge. Sunlight streamed from the buildings that congested the sky—Fiona held up a hand to ward off the glare. [2]
The wind was savage, whipping by so hard that Fiona thought she was about to take flight. They were walking along a catwalk, with darkened orange lights mounting the guardrails at even intervals. Ramses strode forward, the wind seemingly parting for him, and stopped in the middle of the skybridge. He made a partial turn, looking out in the direction where the massive avenues all converged, towards Corpo Plaza, the air humming with the sound of horns and the whirring of helicopters.
Fiona tried not to look down. They were forty stories up from the ground, standing on one of the many connecting bridges that interlocked Night City's downtown into its own sprawling growth, like a tree's complex root structure.
She zipped up her brand-new jacket, which was a dark blue Gore-Tex windbreaker with iceblue lights embedded into the oversized collar. The left shoulder was ridged and an icon near the jacket's breast pocket also gleamed the same blue neon color. Ramses had also bought her a taut burgundy top, and some well-fitting white pants. Ciphere's tip was good, and Fiona was somewhat grateful to be wearing clothes that just felt a hell of a lot better.
At her back, the katana seemed to thrum with its own internal heat, as if she was carting a bolt of lightning that had somehow fused solid. Ramses had also bought the blade for her, along with a couple of other weapons. A holstered sidearm bumped against her hip as she walked, the weight foreign and almost impeding her gait. It felt odd to travel this city strapped, but she picked up from Ramses' body language that this was how things were in the city. Everyone was apparently packing, so it only made sense that she had access to weapons in case she needed to protect herself. A little self-assurance never hurt anyone.
She sidled up to Ramses—it seemed he expected her to do just that, as if he was waiting for her to get into position.
The wind battering her and trying to force its way down the collar of her jacket, Fiona shivered as she stood there, watching the smogchoked city churn and grumble away before her. Below her. Around her.
"I never thanked you," she had to raise her voice to get over the wind. "For purchasing the clothes and the weapons." The sun was in her eyes and she held up a hand to throw them into shadow. The filtered light made her pale skin look stark white. Were the environment not so horribly damaged, she would start to get a sunburn in five minutes flat. "Really, thank you."
Ramses just disregarded the comment, as though he was averse to having someone be in his debt. "You're going to need them. It would just make what comes next only harder if you aren't prepared. The least I can do is set your expectations, your skills. Think you're up for it?"
She was still uncertain, but clenched her jaw and tried to put on a brave face.
"I'm ready to learn," she said.
Nodding his helmeted head, Ramses then brought his hands behind his back and slowly began to walk in a circle around Fiona, the blazing spears of his optics never leaving her face, choppers slicing by like flat blades overhead, the blaze of the holoboards cutting azure into the constantly shifting background.
"If you're serious about this," he said, "then both of us are going to have to be honest with one another. I've never taken a partner before, for my own reasons. Being a merc is an automatic way to shorten one's life expectancy. There's no stability in what I do. A lot of turnover. But you can stay alive longer if you play the game right, play it smart. You know the basics?"
Fiona did not, so Ramses continued.
"An independent merc, someone who hasn't gone corpo, should ideally take great pains to ensure that they remain a free agent. We take jobs from the fixers in the city—they're the ones who find and meet with the clients, the ones who create the need for the job in the first place. Are you with me so far?"
Tilting her head, Fiona asked, "So… the fixers are middlemen. Just people managers. They handle the cases and the mercs, and I'm guessing they take a percentage out of what you end up making. But… what's stopping you from just going to the clients yourself and cutting the fixers out?"
Ramses softly laughed. "Personal preference. You'll soon learn something about the clients: they're not exactly the most rational of people. Bear in mind, it takes a lot of guts to call up a fixer and tell them that they want to order a hit on someone, especially if they're a first-timer to the whole biz. So, when they first call the fixer, they're emotional. They're wrestling with themselves, providing superfluous detail, possibly forgetting other matters that could be related to the job. It's a lot of raw data to parse through and most mercs wouldn't have the patience for such a thing. It's the fixer's job to cut through all of the crap and distill it down into a usable format. Sift out all of the emotions to leave only the most pertinent details."
"So the fixers just give you only necessary details for your jobs, like names, places, timestamps, routes, those sort of things?"
"In essence, yes," Ramses said, noting how Fiona was starting to warm to this conversation. She was a good listener, paying attention to the details and able to connect the dots. A good sign for a protégé.
Protégé? I'm committed now, it seems.
"You don't like meeting clients, I'm guessing?" Fiona lifted her chin. "After all, the way you seem to be putting them in contempt…"
Another decent inference. "Not particularly," he admitted.
"And this is just because they're 'emotional'?"
"That comprises some of the reasoning. But another aspect to consider is that clients can be very fickle. They may add additional objectives to your job at the drop of the hat, even if you're in a bad position to carry out those objectives. Or they want you to do a job a certain way, with a certain amount of style, or 'cool', as if they want to put a signature on the whole affair. That's what the fixer is supposed to prevent, and why you should not meet with a client unless absolutely necessary."
It was not lost on the merc of his own interactions with Michiko, though he was performing an admirable job of convincing himself that he made constant attempts to divorce himself from whatever working relationship that existed between the two of them. If Arasaka was keen on making more overtures to him, then that was just human nature. Nothing he could do about that.
"A good fixer has their own rep to maintain in the city as well," Ramses kept on the topic. "Jobs that are completed and completed well are reflected back onto the fixer, because it's their responsibility to ensure that the merc they hire comes back from the job. The best fixers that you can find today have built themselves up because of their meticulousness. Any info that is relevant to the job, they will provide you with. Any fixer who fails to do this… the city tends to swallow them up."
His thoughts turned to Faraday and the formerly-alive fixer's botching of that one job in Corpo Plaza. He still harbored a modicum of annoyance reserved for the man, even though Faraday was no longer among the living. Mistakes added up. Blind spots got people killed. Faraday was too focused on himself to see the bigger picture—probably the reason why he had taken a grand fall from the top of Arasaka Tower in the first place.
And look where Faraday's efforts had gotten him. Forgotten by all except a scant few.
Fiona partially turned so that she could affix Ramses with her stare. "How many jobs have you actually done for these fixers?"
He was quiet for a moment. He kept detailed notes on each job that he accessed via his cyberdeck. Just took some time to properly parse and total the files.
"Seventy-nine," he said.
The netrunner raised her eyebrows, impressed. "All successes?"
"All of them."
"Wow."
"The result of maintaining self-discipline. You'll find that adhering to a code is the only way one can survive in Night City. Without a code… one is vulnerable."
Fiona rubbed at her jaw, intrigued at this admission from the merc. "Can you tell me some of them?"
It had been the first time in Ramses career that someone had actually bothered to ask him of his process. For years, his whole mantra was to keep things close to the chest—what the fixers and clients didn't know would not hurt them. For a split-second, he was almost about to put himself in an unwilling position, as if he was about to divulge a trade secret or something. But then he remembered why he was here in the first place, what he had gotten himself into.
"I think there are two things that people like you and I have to accept in order to fully address where we fit in this city." He held up a finger. "The first thing: everyone is an enemy. You can't guarantee the allegiances of those that you work in close proximity with, because they aren't you. And because you can't make that guarantee, you should not place your complete trust in anyone."
"Should that include you?" Fiona asked.
"What? You mean if we can trust each other?"
Fiona nodded, trying so hard to see if she could relax into her situation, with this stranger making an orbit around her.
The masked mercenary made a slow exhalation that sounded like a digital rasp from his vocabulator. He tilted his head up, appraising the bright sky, before returning back down. "I suppose the final link is yours to complete," he said. "The both of us would not be here together had I not pulled you from that bath. I have no choice but to maintain that trust. Yours has yet to develop. But consider this: how far are you willing to actually trust someone?"
What Fiona nearly said that she would have been willing to go all the way, but figured this was a naïve way of putting it and that Ramses detested naiveté. Something in her head was sounding warning bells, but she disregarded them as she tried to fold the logic into her own fabric, knowing that it would take time.
"And… the second thing?" she asked, moving on.
"The second thing," Ramses said. "The resignation to the fact that you will never be able to make a clean getaway in any job."
"How does that—"
But Ramses held up a hand. "It's the era of digital surveillance. You can't avoid being seen. Not in a darkened alley, where CCTV is on every corner. Not in cyberspace, where monitoring programs are in lockstep like an army regiment. Even when you get lucky and manage to exfil any AO without drawing attention, you need to behave as if you've been spotted anyway. Moving—you always need to be moving. And remain calm. Even if you go your whole career without being spotted, never get complacent, because it will happen to you eventually. The debt accumulates with every job, so you need to always be prepared when that clean getaway disintegrates. Think about what you would need to do in order to survive."
It did not take long at all for Fiona to begin to consider the multitude of options she now had at her disposal, but she was limited by her imagination, which had not been bolstered from experience. She tried to visualize what she would do were she in Ramses' position, only for a massive blank to arise without any stimuli to back it up.
Fiona gazed out toward the concrete canyons of the widened and glowing boulevards below her, momentarily putting Ramses in her background vision. She hugged herself, presumably to grasp one last sliver of warmth.
"Is that what's expected of me?" she asked, her words carried aloft by the wind. "I'm to become a killer?"
"No," Ramses said at her back, before he moved in front of her, a dark specter against the sun. "There are many ways to carry out a job. There is no one path that suits everyone. There is only the path that suits you."
She was unable to help herself from feeling uneasy. "It just seems like you're expecting me to emulate your every move. Even if I don't want to follow you to the end."
Crossing his arms, Ramses appraised the ground for a second, compiling his thoughts. "What I am doing now is giving you the tools and the experience needed for you to be able to survive on your own. If I coddle you, that's practically giving you a death sentence in this city. You will need to be prepared for every eventuality. I have my own ways of working because I have accepted that this is who I am. Other mercenaries have figured out what works best—some choose to run roughshod and inflict maximum damage on any job they're on, others carry out their work so far on the down-low that they effectively pull their work off as if they're invisible. You're not expected to transform in such a fashion that goes against your instincts. Otherwise, the work and you are constantly in conflict. Emotions are a distraction. You will need to find out which path silences those distractions."
The netrunner was silent for a moment, biting her lip. Mulling over the morality of a future that she had previously never given thought to.
She wondered if this was truly what she was supposed to be. Maybe her life had more meaning when she was in that ice bath, her brain utilized as processing power for NetWatch. Her basic needs had been taken care of and she had no fears as to what the next day might bring. Just the terror of the here and now while trying to slip through the Blackwall.
Just as there was the terror of trying to think even a day ahead and there being… nothing. Nothing that she could possibly expect. Instead of everything being routine, there was just the emptiness of the unknown.
Fiona nearly turned away then and there, almost making a break for the exit, thinking that this was a mistake, that she had made her decision too hastily, that she had no idea what the consequences would even be like—
The thought came and went as she forced herself to push it down, like Ramses had said.
A deep breath in and out. Eyes clamped shut, forcing everything aside. Breathe. Remove distractions. Find the path that suited her.
She could do anything she wanted. Anything.
The scribble in her mind became crimson. A self-reinforcing feedback loop. Ideas gelling, taking shape. Cascading signals opening up to a matrix of possibilities.
She opened her eyes.
"I'll look for that path," she told Ramses, who had been standing in the same position in front of her, as if he could peer into that internal war that constantly raged her thoughts. "I don't know if I'll ever find it, though."
"There's no guarantee that anyone will," Ramses acceded.
"But I do know something. What I truly want to do at some point."
"What?"
The sun did not seem to bully her eyes anymore. Her skin remained blinding against the harshness of the glare and a cold grasp ironed on her cheeks.
"I want to make NetWatch pay for what they did to me. I can't get those years of my life back. But I want them to regret that they stole them."
At that, Ramses lifted his arm and placed his hand upon Fiona's shoulder, the grip strong and paternal. The armored gauntlet looked cybernetic up close and Fiona could imagine harsh mechanical sounds emanating from each sparse movement.
Gently, the air around them swirling with cold and the roaring of VTOL-craft, the merc led Fiona back to the door, where the promise of warmth and the entire city awaited. In a place with millions of eyes, no one paid any mind to the two figures atop the skybridge, for they were all wrapped up in their own private worlds, ignorant to the changes that occurred in the lives of strangers.
Fiona would not know it at first, but she had passed a major step today, in Ramses' eyes. Her future had been written by others for as long as she had been alive. This time, she would be the one holding the pen.
WATSON
The Extremaduran raised a fist and banged loudly upon the door. Iron clangs that sloshed into the night. He turned around, surveilling the darkened alley that lay behind him, a splintered crevassed embedded within an abandoned factory. Streetglow from passing cars out near the opening hemmed and died, like failing embers in a fire. [3]
With a rusty scraping sound, an embrasure in the door clanged open. A seagreen screen of static filled the small void—a digital mask that no security camera could untangle.
A sound grunted behind the door. "Early," a ragged voice said. Turkish accent. "One moment."
The embrasure slammed shut, but there was another rupture of tortured locks moving out of position and the door swung open. A scrawny man in a bloodstained tanktop stood in the entryway. The digital mask was a projection from the band he wore about his forehead. Twin red "Xs" marked the man's eyeline as part of the mask.
"Follow," the man said, motioning his fingers forward. The Extremaduran obeyed, making sure to close the door behind him, as a courtesy.
They passed through what seemed to be a tunnel of refuse. Piles of discarded technology. Clothes. Even spent cyberware. All of it mingling and cooking down to form some concentrated type of mulch. The piles were so tall and so old they could have been their own fungus growth. The concrete floor was wet, stained with a dark color. Pipes and matted pieces of paper lay strewn about the place, which strobed from the massive air ventilation fans in the ceiling rotating languidly, as though as the very act of cycling was an effort.
Moving through another antechamber, the Scav in front of the Extremaduran, the two then hooked a left up a small metal staircase. Then they were traveling across a catwalk that spanned an enormous room that used to be a smelting plant—the Extremaduran could still see the darkened furnaces line the ends of the room, massive cylindrical pieces of engineering, long cold and encrusted with frozen carbon. Atop the catwalk, the Extremaduran could see that the Scavengers had separated the large room into square partitions using medical-grade curtains, each about ten feet in dimension. Below him, more Scavs wearing their constantly shifting masks skulked around the place, most of their heads shaved and clothes all or partially stained from bodily fluids.
From his viewpoint, the Extremaduran got a glimpse into some of the partitioned sections. Tripods with HD cameras on them had been setup in all corners of each cordoned off area. Many had hospital beds bolted into the middle of each one. Some of them had people strapped upon them, bound by thick leather loops around their limbs, and by the signs of their struggling, they were not here by choice. The prisoners were all gagged, contraptions around their eyes holding their lids open, their pupils scrambling in their sockets as they could do nothing but pray for freedom or for their hell to end en masse.
The merc could spot medical tables that glinted with rusty scalpels. Chainsaws laid surreptitiously within view of the bound men and women.
One room had two Scavs fiddling with a holographic pig, while a naked man had been restrained to a pole, his arms splayed out as if he was in some long-abandoned position of exaltation.
More prisoners were left alone in their rooms, their bodies or parts of their bodies trapped underneath powerful mechanical contraptions that looked like miniature crushing machines or elaborate torture devices that bolted directly to the bones of the victims, appearing as if each device had a complex worm gearing with a built-in gain. Some of them were strung up by meat hooks piercing underneath their shoulder blades and hoses had been snaked underneath their skin, pumping some dark looking liquid into their abdomens through ragged slits.
The Scav in front of the Extremaduran noticed that he was looking and gave a tortured chuckle. "No one will miss them. They were in debt to society. We are just helping to balance the accounts. They had no name when they came in here. They will leave here and they still will not have a name."
The Extremaduran was not fooled. As much as the Scav tried to justify himself, the merc knew that all of this was the modus operandi for this particular gang. An unscrupulous bunch, Scavengers were anything but, seeing as their entire business was designed on taking from the unfortunate. Organs and cyberware could fetch a fair premium at any black-market or underground clinic, no matter if it was used or not. If executed efficiently, the process of extracting the items the Scavs needed from a host could be accomplished in as little as two hours. The organs from a body could fetch 150,000 eddies total, if clean and undamaged. If there was any usable cyberware, then the resale on that could be exponential in comparison to the flesh products. To a Scav, a body was money, whether it was dead or alive.
They finished crossing the catwalk and the Scav led the Extremaduran to a security room. Footage of all angles of the facility were being displayed in monochrome on tiny cathode monitors. Antiques. The Extremaduran swept his gaze across the cavalcade of screens, observing the torture and suffering of the prisoners in the other room with disinterest.
A small fridge sat underneath the desk. The Scav kicked it opened and retrieved a small canister. He set it on the desk, next to a smudged keyboard without any labels on it, and flipped the locks.
"Frozen shut," the Scav muttered as he fiddled with the canister. "Didn't use to happen this much. The boys were sloppy with one of the cattle out back. This thing got a hit from an artery. Think that did it."
Whatever was encrusting the lock finally gave way and the canister snapped open, revealing a pile of cyberware microsoft inside. The Scav took out a handful of shards and spread them out on the desk carelessly, not bothering to organize them.
"The feeler you sent out," the Scav was saying, attention still on the loot before him and not the client, "we only got the one program in stock just yesterday. Rich bastard had it in his deck. Shoulda seen the look on his face when we pulled it from his head. Good cyberware on him, too. His optics sold instantly at the night markets—custom models."
The Scav looked over, found that the Extremaduran had the expression on his face that indicated that he was not at all interested in this conversation.
Clearing his throat, the Scav started to parse through the shards in front of him. "If you've changed your mind, we can get something else for you. But… you were specific, and your eddies were good. ZevTek. Man's got taste for Soviet-ware. Got enough RAM to run something like this?"
Finding the shard he was looking for, the Scav held it out to the Extremaduran, who calmly took the offering and slotted it into his deck. He closed his eyes for a moment, calibrated the program to his deck, and ran a diagnostic. His readout was indicating that there were no firmware updates needed or software incompatibilities.
"The Killshot is good up to fifty meters," the Scav explained. "But it is finicky. Russians couldn't even get it working right. It needs direct line-of-sight for it to take effect and I mean direct. Can't have any obstructions between you and the target—even glass won't allow any lock-ons. More than likely you're going to need to get up close and personal, though… you look like you're able to handle such matters." He cleared his throat. "There is the matter of the other half of the pay. Cash for goods, you know?"
The Extremaduran fiddled with the cuffs of his jacket. Then he looked at the Scav—his eyes flashed with static, only to return to his cold gaze, dull as lead.
The Scav's body posture straightened in satisfaction. "Much obliged." He swept his arm to the other shards. "Know this was the best that we could get on short notice, but if you find anything else you fancy—"
As he talked, the Extremaduran was already in the process of sifting through the chips in the little box. A finger delicately pushed the shards around until he focused on a particular subject. He lifted it from the box and the Scav eyed the merc's new catch.
"Ah, the Contagion? That's a motherfucker right there. This one's been particularly refined—stacks up to three times if you've got a powerful enough deck. Seeps enough cadmium and mercury into your circulatory system to cause toxic arrest in seconds. If you—wait, the fuck are you doing?"
While the Scav had been talking, the Extremaduran had slotted the chip not into his own cyberdeck, but into the slot in the security console. With a flick of a switch, he had connected the contents of the shard to the building-wide network, amplified by the many routers that pirated the Net connection in their ropes of wires and cables that had been hastily slung up against the walls of every room. Signal amplifiers had been embedded in every room, presumably as a means to bolster security.
Before, the Scav could get another word out, the Extremaduran forced his persona access through the building's now wide-open security, their ICEgates completely circumvented, and used his newfound root access to initiate the program. He copied the program, courtesy of the signal amplifiers, as though ten people were executing the same command at once.
The effect was immediate. The Scav in the room fell to his knees, vomiting blood so hard that his throat was ripped to shreds. Blood seeped from every orifice in his face and dribbled past the edges of the digital mask, the red "Xs" upon the covering perversely prophetic. He twitched and spasmed in a pool of his own blood, thick and heavy gurgles spluttering from his mouth as he finally flopped on his back and, in a matter of moments, died.
The Extremaduran glanced at the array of screens. The same outcome had stricken everyone else in the building. No one was spared, Scav or hostage alike. If they weren't bound up, they were rolling and heaving their guts out on the ground, every one of them incapacitated and making horrific wet noises. No one had time to cry out or comprehend why this was happening. They only understood the tremendous pain and the desire for it to end, their collective wish granted within the minute.
Soon, the raw noises stopped. The bodies on the feeds stopped moving.
The Extremaduran waited for another minute to make sure that no one else in the building was alive. Calmly, he then punched the shard out from its slot and made sure to disengage his tri-layer ICE.
Turning perfunctorily on a heel, the Extremaduran slid out of the room, which was slick with blood and vomit. He stepped over bodies in the hallway, their corpses in a rictus of pained and rigid death.
The main factory floor was strangely quiet when he was marching across the catwalk. One could hear a pin drop from the other side. The Extremaduran had spotted a few stacks of fertilizer and other industrial chemicals in the corner, which had been poorly cordoned off from the rest of the floor. Reaching into his jacket, the merc took out a cylindrical grenade, an incendiary device, set the timer for two minutes, and threw it towards the towering sacks.
Quickly marching out of the building, the Extremaduran had reached his vehicle when the factory exploded. A great orange fireball lit the night sky, rolling up in a gigantic mushroom formation that nearly took out a helicopter that had been passing overhead. The shockwave was enough to shatter windows within a two block radius and car alarms for miles screamed their cacophonic songs.
He had not been looking at the explosion, not even when debris rained around him, smoking bricks that weighed as much as his head impacting against corrugated metal roofs and smashing the hoods of nearby cars. He simply opened the door to his truck, turned the key to start it, and headed on towards the highway as though he had never been there in the first place.
A/N: The next chapter will feature an appearance by a rather… surprising character. Keep an eye out for when it drops!
Playlist:
[1] Guns, Lots of Guns (And Swords, Too)
"Paradox III (Deluxe Version)"
woob
ULTRASCOPE
[2] Skybridge
"0.04 内部"
woob
Tokyo Run
[3] Scavs
"Fuck."
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
The Killer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
THE CAST (so far):
MAIN_CAST:
Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, infiltration, assassination.
Fiona (JP422-7C): Netrunner, formerly in the employ of NetWatch. Early twenties. Unconfirmed origin.
SUPPORTING_CAST:
Michiko Arasaka: Corpo. Head of Hato faction of Arasaka and member of the corporation's board of directors. 68 years old.
Rzhevsky: Unknown age. Estonian origin. Housed in DaiOni cybernetic conversion. Personal bodyguard of Michiko Arasaka.
Wakako Okada: Fixer in Japantown. A former mercenary. Known for her brusque manner and high (sometimes unreasonable) expectations with the contracts she holds.
The Extremaduran: Assassin. Hails from Europe. Under NetWatch employ. No Night City identification.