56 armed vehicles. Twelve of them belonged to the Aldecaldos.
From the very start, they'd never planned on running the whole route. Hell, they hadn't even planned on making it to the next segment. So when the sandstorm rolled in, their Badlands instincts had already picked up the stink of danger.
A haboob was a terrifying kind of storm. Even for people this familiar with the wastes, haboobs almost never rolled deep into Night City's territory—and they weren't insane enough to charge onto a restricted highway and try to race through one.
So when the storm came, they pulled off the track early. With their experience, they skimmed along the storm's edge, using better routes and higher speed to reach the designated position ahead of schedule, ready to carry out the plan and drag Militech's forces away.
Someone might ask: was it really necessary to put on this whole show?
Of course it was. You always leave yourself some room to maneuver—that's exactly why the corpos liked hiring Leo.
Reality just turned out a little hard for the Aldecaldos to believe.
Taking the long way did increase the distance. But their speed was higher.
And they didn't have to fight. Plus they'd started from a very favorable position up front—and even with all that, they'd still almost missed their timing to peel Militech away—
Leo's crew was just too fast.
If they'd missed it, Leo might've had to tangle directly with Militech's armored units.
"Damn shame," Panam muttered in the cab, eyeing the Militech APCs in the rearview, full of regret.
She wanted to race. She wanted to run it to the end.
But the Aldecaldos weren't Night City's homegrown lunatics; they didn't cling so hard to the idea of "winning" at all costs.
"Eyes on the road. Script or not, it's still Militech," Saul's voice came through the comm.
"Ha, now you know corpos can't be trusted?"
"I knew that before you did," Saul shot back, frowning as he watched the trailing convoy, "Militech isn't slowing down. And they're not turning around either. Something's off."
"Mm. So what do we do?"
"Stick to the plan." Saul glanced at Carol in the passenger seat and gave her a look.
Every Aldecaldo ride in the "retreating" convoy had opened its bed, launching Iron Beetle drones—stripped-down, EMP-and-comms-jammer variants—to cover their escape.
The drones were small and fast. One well-timed explosion at the right distance was all it took to break pursuit.
Even if this was all "pretend," Leo had still left the Aldecaldos a little insurance in case the corpos decided to flip the script.
FWOOO—
In the middle of the high-speed chase, the drones were yeeted out by mechanical launchers. The relative velocity was so insane the Militech convoy struggling to keep up barely had time to react.
The drones had lost their gun modules, but each carried a self-destruct EMP warhead. At the very front, each drone had a small shaped charge, like a missile's precursor charge.
Drone hits the vehicle, the charge blows, cracks the armor, and the EMP wave hits at maximum effect, instantly frying the full-vision crystal-ball sensor suite—turning every pursuit vehicle blind.
By the time their systems rebooted, the Aldecaldos were long gone.
Militech grunts climbed down and picked through the drone scraps with their rifles out.
That didn't count as a complete failure… right?
Past the barricade, you entered the far outer edge of Night City's sprawl. Technically, this place had once been farmland—local farmers using biochem-fertilizers to grow bioengineered methanol crops just to scrape by.
Eventually even that stopped being viable.
The result: an abandoned settlement, houses rotting, walls caving in.
"Holy shit, this is sick."
A lot of people hadn't dared show up on the official starting line, but jumping in halfway and ganking people? That they were more than happy to do.
It was no-rules, after all. Nobody ever said you couldn't join in from the middle.
As for the shining mid-race stars? Once those guys died, they'd be nothing.
Plenty of locals felt like this race perfectly reflected Night City's reality: sure, it gave you infinite opportunity, but there was one iron law—keep climbing. No matter how glorious you once were, once you croak, you're nothing again.
This was where a nest of ambush-happy old snakes were squatting, just waiting to screw people.
And of course they were old acquaintances—the Crazy Blades, a nomad pack roaming the Badlands just like the Aldecaldos.
The little ghost town straddled the one inevitable road into town. Leave the town behind and it was only a few hundred meters to the overpass split where you had to choose your route into the elevated highways.
Legend Mackinaw was tough as hell, sure—but this town had a whole stash of anti-tank missiles, including the same Iron Anvil-2s from the Death Race route.
They'd planned a full barrage for whoever came barreling through to show off—that was the idea.
Three Crazy Blades sat at a small round table on a rooftop. Two were playing cards. One took watch.
The rest were scattered through the town, also playing cards.
"Yo, boss, something's wrong."
"Bomb. Drop it," the boss said, tossing two cards down.
"It's not the bomb…" The spotter's twin cyber-eyes extended out unnaturally far. "It's them… I don't think they're coming through here."
He was right. Mackinaw had completely bypassed the town.
A heartbeat later, a cluster of vehicles burst out of the dunes beside the highway.
Okay, that was awkward.
Nobody was planning on coming this way.
And yeah—this stretch of desert highway didn't even have guard rails.
"Boss! They really drove past us!" The spotter was starting to panic, but the boss still didn't react.
So the kid watched and reached out to grab his boss—
His hand came away slick with something warm and wet.
"Uh…?"
His cyber-eyes snapped back to normal focus. The boss and the guy across from him, who'd just been playing cards, each had a little knife buried in their foreheads. Both were staring at the sky, permanently clocked out.
Thunk.
A second knife found his face and dropped him into a peaceful sleep. Two heavy hands pulled him aside and took his chair.
The man who sat down was dressed completely plain.
His hands, however, were anything but.
"Still a bit short," he muttered, looking toward the settlement's comms tower.
Just a bit more—then he could reach the Moon.
He turned his gaze outward. Violent engines were screaming down the highway.
On the other side, in the dust, another group of vehicles was heading for the course.
The sight made his chest tighten—the arrivals were NetWatch. They were probably here to confirm the identities of the dead racers.
"Fuck… Everyone decided to crash the party tonight, huh."
He didn't rest any longer. He headed straight for the comms tower.
Even as he walked, he pinged another message through his implants:
[Peter Feldheimer: I know why Holt teamed up with Arasaka!]
[Peter Feldheimer: Luna Command! This is Agent—]
Leo had taken the long way around.
Sure, there'd be more ambushes inside the city too—but if you could avoid one, there was no reason not to.
Even so, he'd been watching that little town the whole time—right up until a wave of camo-painted vehicles burst from the desert flanking the road.
Leo couldn't help but laugh.
These guys hadn't chosen to get into the city first and attack there. More likely, they wanted the city to think they were also hardened Death Race survivors.
Of course, they might've just decided this was the easier play.
As those camo rigs surfaced and surged toward the overpass first, some of them charged straight toward the ramps, fully blocking the roadway.
"Unbelievable. Just absolutely shameless."
"Got any mines left?" V wiped her blades clean. "'Cause I feel like—"
"There are," Leo said, rubbing his forehead.
The sensors hadn't picked up a single mine.
But there was no universe in which someone smart enough to stage a roadblock ambush at the ramp hadn't also thought about planting mines there.
A chain of explosions and a nice fat barricade would be more than enough to box him in.
Night City's lights flickered behind the smog in the distance, and Leo finally made his call.
"We keep going around."
Then he looked at V. "But there's a real pain-in-the-ass job I'm gonna need you to handle."
Jackie and V both had questions now.
How the hell were they supposed to go around?
That overpass was the only on-ramp into the city from here. Did he mean they were going to slink all the way around to another checkpoint tens of kilometers away?
They weren't seriously about to drive off the cliff, right?