"What the hell is this…"
Joestar moved forward in the dark.
Thermal vision, low-light amplifier, dynamic vision enhancer…
Each of these components on its own wasn't top of its class, but together they formed Fire-Eye Golden Gaze—the Maelstrom gang's proprietary cyber-eyes.
You could say that, although they all looked more or less the same from the outside, since every part was whatever they could scavenge, each Maelstrom eyeset was unique.
"Scattered, it's crap all over the sky; gathered, it's a lump of stars"—a vivid description of this prosthetic.
A ridiculous number of modules had been tested by the Maelstrom gang and proven compatible with this so-called Fire-Eye Golden Gaze, allowing them to assemble full cyber-eyes without needing any high-end materials.
But because of that, the system itself had no real stability.
The good ones rivaled Kiroshi; the bad ones weren't even as reliable as bootleg black-market optics.
Joestar's belonged to the "pretty decent" category.
In a pitch-black tunnel where he couldn't even see his own hand, the outlines of objects were clearly visible to him. Colors were hard to distinguish, but contours were clear enough, and he didn't lose his sense of distance.
He walked for maybe a few dozen meters—
Boom!
The entire underground space began to tremble. The lines that marked walls in his vision suddenly jerked like someone had dragged them with a mouse!
A huge boulder crashed down!
"Holy shit!" Joestar hopped aside just in time, staring at the rock that nearly turned his head into a pancake.
And in that dodge, his foot landed on something with a weird texture.
Having lost his original limbs, his new full-body prosthetic didn't have skin-level sensitivity, but he had become more attuned to joint actuators and motor output.
He wasn't sure what it was, but whatever he'd stepped on felt slightly soft and very sticky—
"Fuck!"
A rotting corpse.
His first-gen cybernetic leg snapped up, but Joestar was unlucky—his foot had already sunk into the corpse's flesh, and as he lifted, the remaining muscle dragged along.
Somehow, the body had decayed in such a way that when his foot hooked the lower leg to lift it, the connection to the thigh tore loose. With a pop, the lower leg flew up—
and kicked Joestar in the face.
The unexpected boot left him stunned for a moment. Instinctively, he swung his shotgun and blasted the severed limb into the wall, losing his balance in the process and landing on his ass.
Bang!
The metal plate on the back of his skull clanged against a tool stuck in the dirt.
Rubbing his head, Joestar muttered, "Son of a… this place is cursed…"
Click!
A faint light flickered to life on both sides of the tunnel, like some kind of indicator lamps—blue, pulsing dimly.
The weak light triggered the low-light enhancer in Fire-Eye Golden Gaze. The world that had been just contour-lines suddenly bloomed into complex shapes rendered in shades of blue.
Only then did Joestar notice…
his hand was shoved inside the corpse's skull.
Squelch.
He pulled his hand back. Foul-smelling sludge gushed out of the rotten head, along with several skill-chips sliding down in the ooze.
Even for a Maelstrom kid, Joestar had to admit—this was beyond gross.
"Urgh—!"
But he quickly realized something: he didn't actually feel nauseous.
He only had half an original skull left. This not-so-advanced, first-gen full-body prosthetic didn't come with fancy features like "simulate nausea and gag reflex."
So his retching motion just… stopped halfway.
"Damn… scaring myself for nothing. This many skill-chips in one skull? Impressive…"
Click!
A sliding-door noise suddenly sounded behind him. Joestar instantly spun, shotgun raised.
But once he'd struck his pose, he realized…
It was just a door.
Open.
"A man's like a bird to the sky—if he ain't dead, he lives forever!"
Bang!
Pumping himself up with that line, Joestar strode through the doorway.
Light flooded his visual system, whiting out his view, but it quickly auto-adjusted back to normal colors.
And what crashed into his brain along with the light and color—
was sound.
A strange combination of vibrations and humming, brutally loud and deeply uncanny—not at all like the natural sound of machines in normal operation.
Looking closely, he realized this really wasn't a normal sound.
There was a complex engine mounted by the door. Joestar vaguely remembered seeing something like it in a school lesson—a kind of negative-noise device that generated specific sounds to confine other sounds to a particular area.
Most noise-control devices didn't work that well, and the really good ones were priced beyond what normal people could ever afford.
But even that wasn't the whole story—because buried in the racket were groans and screams of pain.
The source became clear at a glance:
the new chamber was packed with interface pods, each one containing a human. Their eyes were covered, but their bodies had not completely shut down.
A more time-consuming scan clearly showed their muscles still twitching, like they were running something…
[Pod Slot: 037]
[Loaded Chips: Combat Strategy CST–319P, Music Composition MSS–808M, Gymnastics Expert GM–111C]
[Count: 119]
[Memory Load: 107% (First Batch Overload Test)]
"What the hell—who runs this many chips at once?"
Joestar rapped a knuckle on the pod. The glass was solid, the inside filled with some kind of solution.
"No way… Dum-Dum didn't end up like this too, right? Huh?"
He froze for a moment—
he'd spotted someone familiar inside a pod.
This guy looked a lot like his old neighbor.
A closer look—yep, that was him.
A one-eyed bald guy, left hand swapped out for a welding tool—electrician from their block.
A terrifying thought surfaced in Joestar's mind:
his mom wasn't on the victim list. These people clearly weren't on the victim list either.
What if his mom had been turned into… this?
As the thought hit him, the man in the pod suddenly convulsed violently, his single remaining eye snapping open, veins spiderwebbing across the eyeball—
Bang!
A sound rang out from the corridor ahead, making Joestar jump so hard his hydraulic joints vented hot oil. He dropped straight down behind the pod.
Tap.
"…Idiot. Shut up. Grab a gun."
Footsteps, voices, the sound of rounds being chambered—dragged Joestar out of his thoughts.
Brainiac.
His mind suddenly linked everything he'd seen on the way here—the carnage, the grotesque scenes.
The tension of walking that dark tunnel, the shock of getting kicked by a flying corpse, the unease at the mysterious machinery, and the gnawing worry about his missing mother—all of it twisted together into a tangled mess of emotion and fused with the sudden appearance of the Brainiac gang.
The fights Joestar had been in were intense—but not many.
So for a second, his brain just… blanked.
But the good thing about having seen intense combat was this:
Even if his mind went empty—
chicken out?
Not happening.
The Satara shotgun in his hands began to charge. Joestar recalled Brick's words in his head and couldn't help murmuring:
"Brainiac? Just some clowns Maelstrom stomps on."
Thump!
His cybernetic leg slammed down on the floor.
Joestar of the Maelstrom gang leapt out, loud and proud!
Boom!