Bloody Aftermath (Dakota's POV)
The smell of ash and blood weighed heavily in the air.
Dakota's men stood stiffly as they kept their iron in the ready, their tense nerves clearly visible to any onlookers. The elderly fixer normally would have admonished them for blatantly showing such weakness in the sight of city dwellers, but nothing about this was normal.
Many in her crew were too young to have seen the massacres done or mass graves created during the time of The Red like she did. They didn't remember hiding in reinforced garages to avoid the radiation storms or rationing insect paste to avoid starvation.
They did remember the violence of the Unification War, but that was a drop in the bucket compared to the multitude of dark memories that filled the mind of the Mad Coyote.
The Badlands have always been a cruel place to those not familiar with its ways, and large scale warfare only made the landscape bleaker still. Even now, 5 years later, the Metal War and older conflicts left their marks on the battered landscape and on the lives of the static people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thankfully, the ill-fated invasion from the NUSA ended and a semblance of peace returned to the desert. Before the Raffen Shiv returned with a vengeance, but they were an old menace that could be curtailed to a limited degree.
The scene before her, however, was giving her unwelcome flashbacks she would have preferred not to remember.
She warily stared at the four teens approaching her convoy. They were the only individuals still breathing in the destroyed outpost. All dirtied by desert dust and gunpowder ash, but smiling all the same.
Grinning happily as they apathetically stepped on the unrecognizable meat of dozens of shredded corpses without a care in the world. Shattered glass, smoking bullet casing, burnt rubber, and blood. So much blood it was leaking into every nook and cranny in the surrounding sand. Someone had also clearly had fun as overwatch because it's been many years since Dakota has seen so many shattered skull fragments and brains splattered on the hot desert gravel.
The fixer awaited them and took a deep breath of pure oxygen from her hanging mask. She was trying to figure out what to say in the face of such carnage.
Just…how was she supposed to respond to this? What the fuck could she say?
Days ago, when she decided to humor the corpo brat about the attack and crash landing of the Arasaka AV, she thought very little would come out of it. If some stupid girl and her sycophants desired to pay her for intel so they could slum it out and play nomad, who was she to argue? Eddies were eddies.
The main thing that gave her pause was the growing file she had on one Motoko Kusanagi: 14 years old (so young to already have a file), affiliated with the Tyger Claws since birth due to legacy parents, and younger sister to 'The Oni' who was one of the barely leashed Kamikaze cyberpsychos the Tygers kept in their back pocket.
The poor girl was doomed to a life of violence before she even learned to crawl. But then again, with Night City being what it was, would her being born in a more 'standard' household have made much of a difference? Life was a minefield, and a childhood in the 'City of Dreams' was like a newly born filly trying to walk in a wolf-invested watering hole - during a drought.
However, it looks like the filly had good kicking legs because this pony certainly seemed fond of wearing wolf pelts.
She reviewed and cross checked some of her subjects' real and supposed feats. Kusanagi risked her life to save Scorpion from Wraith captivity and wiped out a Raffen camp with her brother some months later. She also guarded Panam, the recent self-exiled daughter of Saul's group, during an excursion to Seattle. There were more actions listed, but Dakota had a harder time verifying those claims.
The old fixer took a page out of her long experience and gave them a trial run in the form of some 'cheap' intel - just to see what they were made of. Terry Hamilton was becoming a nuisance and could use a good pruning.
As it turned out, the reports she read on the Oni's sister were actually inaccurate - she was better than recorded - way better. The fixer had a hard time comprehending how a single teenager somehow wiped out an underground Wraith den which included a dedicated netrunner and an enraged Terry who happened to have a Sandevistan - and reemerge from the tunnel without a single scratch at that.
Even so, she thought for sure that Issac's growing army would finally be an obstacle that not even the spirits touched girl could handle. Dakota fully anticipated that this 'Section 9' would have returned to her autoshop bitter and empty handed. She even went through the trouble of preparing a short speech to give the brats when they inevitably had a tantrum over their failure.
Well, it looks like the vulture shit was on her hood this time.
She badly underestimated both the capability and the sheer bloodthirsty brutality of Section 9.
One one side, four teenagers with almost no marks on their person. On the other side, dozens of ripped apart Wraiths.
What happened in Issac's camp wasn't a battle. It was wholesale slaughter.
Maybe it would have been better if they had given up. At least that way, they could have returned to their normal lives with some additional wisdom.
This…warzone…wasn't something that would or could be forgotten. Some of the Raffen had to have escaped, and a whipping of this scale wasn't something that could be dusted under a rug.
The events that happened here was going to be remembered for good and ill.
The purple haired Asian girl, looking every bit the proper soldier complete with banged up body armor, bound grenades and webbed ammo punches, giggled openly as she approached the fixer in a merry jaunt. As if she didn't just kill dozens of hardened desert men in cold blood.
The nomad fixer had to constantly remind herself that this desensitized killer was only 14.
"Dakota, we weren't expecting you." The walking war crime stated smugly with a large grin. It didn't escape Dakota's notice that the teen had a hand on her holstered Techtronika Burya (a damn borg gun) the entire time, as if daring Dakota or any of her nomad crew to try something funny with her.
Her men evidently noticed too based on the increased trembling of their iron. They had several times more gun sights on Kusanagi than vice versa, and yet they acted like they were the ones on the backfoot.
What a fucking day this was.
On one hand, Issac the shit stirrer was clearly no longer a problem. On the other hand, how the hell was she supposed to handle this?
Dakota, as calmly as she could, took an especially deep breath of her oxygen as she rapidly considered how to start this conversation.
It pays to be cautious when chatting with a budding cyberpsycho after all.
I'm sure that Motoko's charms will eventually work their wonders on Dakota like most of the other characters in Night City, but first impressions are a big deal and I don't think the Mad Coyote will ever forget what happened today.