Fast—way too damn fast. Fast enough to make you sick.
That was the only feeling shared by everyone in the Badlands race.
A hundred miles an hour wasn't the crazy part. The crazy part was that this thing wasn't even tearing down the paved road—it was blasting across dunes.
Legend surged up onto the roadway at full speed. The impact was so violent that when the vehicle climbed the shoulder, it actually dented the road edge.
Even more absurd: once it was on the road, it didn't wobble or stutter. It didn't slow down—it accelerated again.
"Drop mines! Drop the fucking mines!!!"
Up ahead of Legend was another Colby Mule. The guys on it were screaming so hard their faces were turning red—the beast behind them was about to chew them to pieces!
Bang.
"Are you brain-dead?! The mines are in the bed!"
The driver had pissed himself too. He whipped around and slapped his buddy—his extendable arm snapped over the seat and smashed right into the guy's face.
He didn't control the strength at all. Cheap cyberware, adrenaline, and a bad angle—one hit and his buddy's head rang.
The guy lost his footing and dropped to his knees… right onto a prepared mechanism.
Calling it a mechanism was generous. It was just a sawed board. His knee hit one end and the other end sprang up—whack—cracking him in the head again.
But that also fully triggered their completely mechanical mine-dropper. A handful of small mines tumbled out from under the Mule's chassis, scraping sparks along the ground.
If the car behind couldn't brake, it was about to get blown to hell.
A tank-sized armored truck like that couldn't possibly slam on the brakes or swerve—right?
Hiss—
Legend's four wheels each shifted to subtle, different angles. The RPMs changed violently. The body kept a slight lean—
And the whole truck slid sideways across the road in an eerie, impossible "crab" drift.
The Mule driver hadn't even finished turning his head before he pissed himself again. Legend punched the throttle, speed spiking, and swept up alongside him.
BOOM!
A big truck smashed a small truck aside. The Colby Mule lost control, spun out, and rolled right over the mines it had just dropped.
"Welp. I'm cooked," the driver thought, midair.
BOOM!
A black-smoke, flame-spitting wreck tumbled off the highway.
David—alive by pure luck—swallowed hard.
His car had been messed up twice already and was parked on the roadside now, a thin ribbon of black smoke curling from the hood.
But he couldn't take his eyes off Legend.
One by one, the racers being reeled in began attacking it together—rocket launchers, grenades, heavy machine-gun fire so dense it looked like the air was packed solid.
BOOM!
Legend burst out through flame and black smoke, untouched, veered off-road, and kept hunting.
One vehicle—practically herding the whole field.
At first, David had wondered why, if it was an "anything goes" race, they kept emphasizing the word race.
Now he understood.
Lucy clutched the grab handle, drenched in sweat. In an environment like this, a netrunner didn't have much room to matter.
"I'm just—"
"Finish this leg!"
[River: Stolen Militech mines, plus disk-launch anti-vehicle guns.]
[River: Couldn't see which gang. Analysis is still cross-checking databases, but it doesn't matter now.]
NCPD was running real-time ID checks on the dead, feeding Leo a constant stream of updates.
This was still an AI-capture operation, after all—the more intel, the better.
"Anything goes" meant: hit hard, hit first, kill everyone else. That was how a lot of racers thought.
Too bad not everyone had technical depth. Most people had to buy their hardware—and most people were broke. No one could afford to be a perfect, no-weakness "bucket" build.
If you dumped all your money into weapons, your ride would be worse.
And now that "a little worse" was getting people killed.
Legend was fast, brutal, hard as hell, and weirdly agile. Even charging into dunes, it barely lost speed.
"Mano! You said 100 was the limit—"
Bang!
Jackie's head smacked the ceiling. His subdermal armor rang with a crisp clack.
"That's the safe limit! Combat limit isn't safe! And it's still adapting!"
The speedometer hit 110. Even Legend's electromagnetic suspension looked strained—
But it was stabilizing. It was getting steadier by the second.
Legend needed more motion data to squeeze its hardware potential dry.
[Legend: Barrel cooling complete. Firing systems ready.]
Jackie immediately re-linked into the heavy gun controls.
Calling it a heavy machine gun was almost misleading—it was more like a miniaturized armor-piercing autocannon. HEAP rounds fed automatically through the internal belt system, with advanced thermal management. It wasn't going to overheat just because the gunner got emotional.
On the highway, the broke racers who'd neglected their vehicles got gapped instantly.
This was a "death" race. You didn't have to be the fastest—but the slowest was guaranteed to suffer.
A few cars visibly panicked, staring at Legend as it rose and fell across the Badlands, kicking up a massive sand plume. Fingers clamped down on triggers.
But the more they fired, the more hopeless it felt.
Heavy MG fire could hit the truck, sure—but it only mattered against light vehicles. It couldn't even leave a mark. Grenade launchers were the same.
Rocket launchers? They couldn't land hits.
[Jackie: Mano, tag it for me already!]
Leo still hadn't marked targets in Jackie's HUD. It was only a few seconds, but Jackie was so impatient he looked ready to just dump rounds blind.
Leo was scanning the vehicles, cross-referencing NCPD, Militech, and even Arasaka databases.
Mackinaw. Colby Mule. Columbus freight.
RPG—no threat. Rifles, pistols, heavy MG—no threat. Pistol grenades—no threat.
Achilles charged rifle, Nekomata sniper—low threat. Could potentially hit the cannon.
[Medium Threat: Anvil-2 Heavy Anti-Tank Guided Missile]
[Value: €10,000 per set. Laser-guided.]
[Militech report: Stolen 7 days ago. Seven sets.]
[NCPD database: Suspected gang "Midnight Drop Dead." Latest file updated in 2049.]
Well, damn.
Inside a Columbus freight truck, three punks in matching jackets—each printed with "DROP DEAD"—were shoulder-to-shoulder with a launcher.
The launcher was almost as long as their torsos, and the laser guidance module looked like it had been smeared over with some kind of gunk.
Jackie spotted the target instantly—
Whoosh!
Three missiles—meant for taking down a Basilisk-class heavy hover armored vehicle—launched from the truck.
Jackie had already squeezed the neural trigger, but what happened next made him feel like he was hallucinating:
The missiles rocketed out of the cargo bed… and their exhaust blasted the three idiots point-blank in the face, scorching them black.
They died before the HEAP rounds even blew their heads off.
The three missiles screamed upward, then dove straight at Legend.
Hiss—
Three active-defense countercharges popped forward. A thick wall of smoke instantly swallowed Legend.
But Leo frowned. Two high-altitude drones were tailing the fight, feeding him an overhead view:
The missiles didn't lose lock. They punched straight into the smoke—and they were still correcting.
Fwoom!
Legend broke out of the smoke. The three missiles were split, each aiming at a different point.
Two missed.
One slammed dead-center into Legend's front end.
BOOM!
For a moment, everyone forgot to shoot. Even the racers still moving turned their heads.
The shockwave rolled over the desert, made visible by the dust. A fireball bloomed.
Then—
Legend surged out of the smoke.
Its armor was only slightly blackened.
The racers on the highway didn't even think about it.
They just stomped the gas.
All the way down.
Because that was beyond imagination.