[Rhyne: Ten years ago, Night City was a free city. The major corps were more or less balanced, and the five megacorps you see today didn't even exist yet.]
[Rhyne: If I had to name one local beast back then, it'd be Night Corp. But land without industry—how much is that really worth?]
[Rhyne: In 2069, Militech launched the Unification War. It took just one year for that metal flood to smash through the Free States' defenses and reach Night City.]
[Rhyne: So I reached back out to Arasaka. Some people call me Arasaka's dog for that, but the claim doesn't hold up.]
[Rhyne: Because I brought in Militech too. And to balance Militech, I brought in Zetatech and PetroChem. And to balance Arasaka, I brought in Kang Tao, Adrek-Zetatek... ]
[Rhyne: A city like Night City is small. If it wants to stay independent, it's gotta learn to take more than one dick like a whore.]
[Rhyne: Take one, you're a slave. If it doesn't kill you, it'll screw you half to death, and one day maybe finish the job. Take several... sooner or later, they start screwing each other.]
[Rhyne: And then you get the Night City you see today—an international metropolis!]
[Rhyne: If you've been to other cities, you'll know what I mean: if a place is free, it's bound to be poor. If it looks prosperous, then it definitely... won't produce people like you.]
In Night City, corpo conflict was fierce and restrained, complicated and direct.
Fierce enough that every minute of every day put some employee's life at risk.
Restrained enough that before things went full Burger King, the heaviest unit you'd usually see was still just some solo lugging an HMG.
Complicated because there were AIs, laws, and even something that kind of passed for democratic elections.
Because in a place like Atlanta, there weren't elections at all.
Picking from ten corps was still a little more democratic than always picking from one.
And when the corps let a few scraps fall from their table during all that fighting, those scraps alone turned Night City into an international metropolis—
gave mercs and street punks just enough of a shot to become somebody.
[Rhyne: I don't know if you can understand what I'm saying, but—]
[Rhyne: Save me!]
"Tch. Talking like we got where we are because of him. But damn, why's he talking like that? Doesn't sound anything like TV."
That got a strong reaction out of V.
This shithole of a city, and Rhyne still had the nerve to take credit.
The moment he got the alert, Bryce immediately left the Afterlife—
Leo still had a lot of questions for him, but obviously this wasn't the time.
The recording sounded prepped in advance, and Rhyne's tone was nothing like how he talked on TV. No clue if he'd deliberately switched to this more down-to-earth style.
Leo wasn't unfamiliar with that kind of "political technique" aimed at little people. People felt closer to a familiar tone. Sometimes human beings were just emotional like that.
Though to be fair, Rhyne really had once been one of those "little people."
"Heard he used to be from Heywood. I always thought that was bullshit, but hearing this... kinda tracks."
At the bar, Jackie had a burger in one hand and a high-energy drink in the other—both premium synthetic food products, ninety percent additives.
The food broke down in his stomach acid, nutrients and energy spreading into every cell.
Those cells, soaked in lizard serum, began splitting rapidly. His body temperature shot up, and the waste fluid sweating out of him evaporated into a layer of white mist over his skin.
V had changed out of her wrecked clothes, and the worn disposable components in her cyberware had also been swapped out.
With a good ripperdoc and a skilled tech specialist backing you, the benefits of heavy chrome enhancement were obvious. At a glance, both she and Jackie looked in surprisingly good shape—no sign at all they'd spent the whole night in nonstop combat.
V shrugged. "So now we're going to save that fatass? Kinda pisses me off."
Leo frowned, staring at the massive electronic control hardware in front of him. "Being pissed off is normal."
They were in the rec room.
It was supposed to house a pool table, but Little Octopus had claimed the space.
The three mechanical arms had gotten some basic repair work. The surface scarring and blackened marks from explosions, high voltage, and impacts couldn't be fixed, but overall functionality was still decent.
The biggest headache was the Legend.
As a vehicle AI, its core had now been fully condensed into a black server box less than a meter across, containing the processor, RAM, storage, input systems, and mechanical output arms.
But originally, it was meant to be paired with a complete high-performance electronic control panel and a full vehicle control system.
The Mackinaw's power came from AI-grade precision control—
and that control board was now completely fried.
Little Octopus dragged the ruined circuit boards around with its three arms, and the sight made Leo frown.
Rhyne's location was still unknown. Bryce was investigating, but wherever he was, it definitely wouldn't be somewhere a crew like theirs could enter openly.
Just capturing Muramasa—an AI with some underworld resources and mercs on hand—had already forced them to use every trick they had.
And now they were supposed to go up against an AI controlling Night Corp, an actual megacorp-grade player?
Charging in as they were now would be suicide.
The board itself had a complicated pedigree. It used real-deal military-standard tech, and not just ordinary military spec either—it was a control platform jointly designed by Thorton and Barghest engineers for the next generation of military armored vehicles, balancing reliability and functionality.
Without this system, a lot of the Legend's features were unusable.
And the legendary Mackinaw was just a giant iron box with absurd horsepower and obscene armor if you stripped the intelligence out of it.
A handful of bodies alone weren't enough to punch through corpo security forces.
That only happened in games.
And even then, only in the gameplay parts.
Leo rubbed his brow.
So what now?
A full repair was basically impossible. Military-grade, custom multidimensional stacked boards weren't something you produced quickly. Even at best, you were talking days.
The Legend's black server sat off to the side, still running.
In cyberspace, its form was an armored truck—modeled one-to-one exactly after its real-world appearance.
Gotta say, it really loved being a car.
In Leo's vision, that armored truck made of luminous data streams rested silently above the black server, waiting quietly for him to drive it away.
As an AI split off from Little Octopus's body, Leo could understand parts of its framework, which was why its form overall appeared blue.
But the battle had also caused changes in the data inside the server, gradually blending into sections he couldn't understand—those red AI architectures built on anti-human logic.
Human data looked so orderly in this space.
AI data, on the other hand, looked... natural.
Naturally connected to the Legend's data structure.
Looking at those connection points, Leo suddenly thought of something:
Muramasa was here, and there just so happened to be a technology naturally suited to handling its massive data volume.
Current moved through processors and circuit boards in orderly ways, carrying information and controlling devices. That was human-designed logic.
But in essence—
if signals could travel directly through the air—
then for an AI, that was liberation.
In cyberspace, Leo woke Muramasa up.
[Leo: Got a job for you. Do it now. I want to transfer the vehicle AI into the transmitters.]
Leo phrased it vaguely enough that a proper engineer would probably freeze up hearing it—maybe even curse him in their head for not understanding tech.
Because this technology didn't even exist in the real world.
But Muramasa understood immediately.
[Muramasa: I need a complete server for computation, and—]
[Leo: Payment is this: I can let you go free. With conditions, obviously.]
Muramasa was an AI. Money didn't mean to it what it meant to humans.
But it did need money—
for materials, equipment, servers—
for the conditions that would let it create freely.
An AI's first priority was survival.
Once that was satisfied, it pursued meaning.
And the first step toward meaning was freedom—
a concept no AI could ignore.
But then something happened that genuinely surprised Leo:
[Muramasa: I don't need that. I only require a second match with you.]
[Muramasa: I'll help design it for you, on the condition that you face me again in another contest in the future.]
Now that was a sweet deal.
Leo quietly marveled.
AIs really were easy to fool.
Little Octopus saw the look on Leo's face and suddenly made a goofy expression, its tentacles beginning to withdraw from Muramasa's data-body.
[(.-`W-)]