Where the Badlands and the Santo Domingo track met, there was a low dirt hill, not all that tall, with the highway cutting straight through it.
Once the mid-race entrants blasted across the road, a string of busted trucks rumbled up behind them, lining up nose-to-tail to block the lane.
Every one of those trucks was a heavy rig on its last legs, struggling just to move—but still damn heavy.
After witnessing Legend Mackinaw's brutal acceleration and combat capability, though, the blockade crew started doubting their own handiwork.
Could these rusted hulks really stop that steel monster?
If they'd asked Leo, he'd have given them a definite answer: no chance.
The people who planned all this had thought of that too.
Clank—
Chains ran under the vehicles, binding them together, anchoring the barricade even harder into the asphalt. A dozen or so mercs fell back in a hurry, taking cover behind the rocks behind them.
"I used to think there was nothing on the road that could punch through these semis. Now I'm not so sure."
"Nothing to doubt, choom. Road's full of mines. Once they're forced to stop, all we gotta do is keep squeezing the trigger. This easy a gig and you're worried?"
The mercs were fully kitted out in body armor and standardized tactical gear.
LMGs, sniper rifles, rocket launchers—they had it all. As soon as they stopped the car, they could pour on the fire.
And of course, they had a dedicated toy set aside just to crack that insane turtle-shell ride—
Behind them, a massive railgun had been set up, easily thirty-five kilos of hardware.
Just by the look, it was a Rheinmetall EMG-85, a superconducting gauss rifle firing 15-gram polycarbonate slugs wrapped in polyester film at 2400 meters per second.
This thing was nasty. On land, there basically wasn't any armor it couldn't punch through: ACPA, heavy APC—
The only catch was that it hit so hard that, without top-grade linear-frame bracing or power armor, the recoil could shatter most people's bones.
Each magazine held five shots. Five power rings. And just charging each ring cost 1200 eurodollars.
On the European front, this was a common heavy weapon—the kind of superweapon these mercs had all heard about for years.
And clearly, this particular railgun had been modded by that "mysterious tech expert," same as every piece in their hands—just a little tweak, and junk became god-tier hardware.
The mercs lay prone against the rock, watching Legend Mackinaw roll up via embedded micro-cams hidden between the stones—
They watched the armored pickup bypass the roadside gas station entirely.
"Taking the long way, huh. Real cautious," the commander muttered. "Unless you're planning on driving twenty klicks out to the landfill, you're not getting around this minefield."
The sandstorm had thinned near Night City, but it was still night. Visibility barely broke a thousand meters.
Thanks to their specialized optics, they could pick up blurry silhouettes at around four thousand meters, but it was still hazy as hell.
If tonight had been clear, they'd have fired ages ago. The storm was doing what storms did best—nerfing everyone equally.
"They're here!"
Legend Mackinaw appeared out of the storm, the silhouette sharpening by the second.
The commander tightened his grip on his gun. It was a basic A-80 heavy assault rifle—stable as long as you had one reinforced arm. After a few tasteful mods, it could chew through car body panels without breaking a sweat.
An old partner who'd been with him for years—just like the big bastard standing next to the railgun, ready to pull the trigger.
He glanced over just in time to see the big guy wave at him.
"Hey!" the big man laughed. "Deo! We're super–edgerunner mercs now!"
He lifted his shirt to show off the composite fibers and chrome underneath—
A full-body conversion.
Deo snorted. "Look at you, you clown."
"'Clown'? I'm fraggin' jacked, choom. I can lift a car now!"
"Feels like you're actually less badass than before. Get ready. They're coming in."
"Yeah, yeah—" The big man dropped his arm and pulled the tarp off the railgun.
The monster of a weapon would kick like a titan when it fired. The tripod would take some of it, sure—but wrangling it was still an art.
To handle it, the big guy had gone through full-body replacement. Everything but the brain was chrome.
Tonight, right here, under Night City's neon sky, he was going to complete his contract and kill that Legend.
"Shit," he grinned, grabbing the railgun. "Night City's a fraggin' wonderland. Way better than that pisshole Europe ever was."
Here, he'd gotten a full-body cyberware set.
Here, he had the chance to fire a super-heavy weapon.
Here…
He had a shot at making his name across the whole world.
They called his full-body cyberframe "Samson." The beautiful hum of actuators spun up as he powered it, and he settled the gauss rifle's stock into his shoulder.
"Deo!" he suddenly shouted. "We're gonna be legends!"
"Target inbound!" Deo yelled back. "Wait… that's not the Mackinaw. That's a bike!"
At a thousand meters, the silhouette came into clear view: a motorcycle.
The rampaging Blastburn Howler was hitting 350 miles per hour; thanks to its explosive thrust system, it was basically skimming the ground like a low-flying missile—and still accelerating.
At that speed, a thousand meters vanished in about ten seconds.
Mines—everywhere, and they were proximity-based.
With a 10-millisecond reaction time, the bike was traveling nearly a full meter between trigger and detonation. Each explosion went off just behind V's tail, and every shockwave was being grabbed and repurposed by the bike's aero vectoring, pushing her faster, and faster…
And faster.
The scene turned downright surreal—two screaming bikes streaking across the minefield, trailing afterimages, while every blast detonated just half a beat behind them.
It looked like something out of a live-action supers show—some spandex hero's stunt sequence.
"Shoot! Light that gonk up!"
Even V was starting to struggle to keep the bike under control. If it weren't for Big Mack's child-process AI assisting, she probably would've lost the handlebars.
The sheer speed had the battle-hardened merc squad scrambling. Even the ones with Sandevistan gear were ready to scream.
Even if they doubled their reaction speed with their implants, at over three hundred miles an hour, it still felt like a hundred-fifty-plus.
There was no way their aim could keep up with V.
The bike, boosted by shockwave assists, spent the last stretch completely skimming the road surface, practically airborne. At the end, it snapped sideways, hitting the slope of the dirt hill at a just-barely-possible angle, nearly parallel to the ground, and began sliding up.
One poor bastard happened to be standing directly in her line.
He screamed, dropped his gun, and turned to run.
V had zero bandwidth to care about him. On her shoulder sat a simple, unassuming rocket launcher—an RPG-7. Pure old-school.
That rocket was the key to braking.
Since the start of her run, V hadn't taken her eyes off the barricade line. The launcher had, in theory, only been there as a braking aid—but suddenly, she'd spotted the massive figure crouched behind the truck barricade with that gigantic cannon.
She didn't know exactly what the weapon was. She just knew it was big, and it looked mean as hell.
So the launcher's muzzle shifted, just a fraction.
Under normal circumstances, that tiny shift would have thrown off Leo's calculations—at this kind of speed, a small deviation could easily get V killed.
But this time was different.
The Blastburn Howler was running a child-instance of Big Mack. The AI could adjust on the fly.
Its processors began to metaphorically smoke, and V pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
From Leo and Jackie's perspective, riding in hot behind her, it was pure nightmare fuel.
At over four hundred kilometers per hour of closing speed, if the braking stunt failed, V wasn't going to be landing on the overpass—she was going to rocket off the edge and splatter into paste.
Leo trusted his math. He trusted V's skill. But in that instant, he still clenched the wheel in both hands.
The moment he saw the rocket launcher shift off optimal angle, he popped his Sandevistan. All his processing bandwidth, overclocked to the edge, pumped through the neural bridge into Big Mack.
The rocket streaked out, arrowing straight toward the big chrome hulk still desperately trying to swing his railgun around to track V—and failing miserably.
The instant the rocket left the tube, the bike hit the slope at a ludicrous angle, almost perfectly parallel to the ground, and started carving up the dirt.
The chassis rolled under inertia, pivoting from flat to upright. The rocket launcher's recoil and the thrust-vectoring of the explosive drive combined, sending the bike into a violent spin.
And even that wasn't enough.
The bike clipped the barricade's unlucky sentry "by accident," the massive impact shredding him like paper. The forward momentum of the bike was converted into angular momentum by all these forces stacking together. By the time it launched off the crest of the hill, it was spinning hard in midair.
From that moment on, the bike's movements were beyond anything a human could consciously control. Even V couldn't.
From that moment on, whether she landed or died was decided purely by one perfectly tuned physics calculation.
On the ground, the mercs watched with horror as the suicidal biker flung herself at them, looking for all the world like a kamikaze run.
And right then, as the bike left the peak, something occurred that their starved mental RAM had no chance of understanding.
The motorcycle spun at high speed, shedding velocity in exchange for angular momentum, dropping from over four hundred klicks an hour down to around a hundred-fifty before it even cleared the lip.
A cliff-edge speed drop—from over four hundred kilometers per hour to around one-fifty.
That kind of decel felt completely wrong to any experienced driver.
But it was real.
The bike tumbled and rolled, tracing a bizarre arc through the air, then hit the pavement with both wheels first, gouging a long, brutal scar into the road—
THUD!
Then slammed into the guardrail and finally came to a full stop.
Jackie had just opened his mouth to yell when Leo beat him to it—louder, faster:
"Holy shit, V, that was insane!"