After a whole night of war, Leo's crew was completely out of any respectable long-range firepower—
V still had her trusty pistol, Overture, in hand, while Jackie had gotten his two golden La Chingona Dorada back. Leo had roughly modded those two large-caliber handguns, stuffing them into the Heated Knuckle gauntlets after stripping out the 14mm caseless feed system, turning them into built-in pistols.
Leo himself had also gone back to using his Yinglong SMG.
Of course, the octopus arms could still pull off one charged electromagnetic shot after transforming.
The holographic crystal ball caught the dark shape in the air and tagged its position and scan results in all three of their optics.
[Benson "Cascade" 2076 Variant (AV)]
[Description: Top speed 420 km/h. Maximum hover height: 5 meters.]
[Note: A high-priced hover vehicle, but compared to the AVs built for corporate elites, this one pushes much harder toward performance limits.]
This ride could only hover up to five meters off the ground, but it was fast.
And the driver's handling was absurd—at 420 klicks, the pilot could use sheer speed to race between buildings!
To amateurs, it just looked like an AV tearing through the city.
But to anyone who knew their hardware—
the Cascade couldn't even fly that high.
The driver was basically skimming over rooftops at max speed, leaping through the city at a height and velocity where one tiny mistake meant total wreck and instant death.
V understood that feeling almost immediately.
She'd pushed the explosive bike to its top speed earlier that day, and even that had only been a little over 300.
Maintaining control at over 400?
What kind of terrifying driving skill did that take?
"I thought AVs were for rich people or armed troops. So what's this? A maniac?"
Leo shook his head. "Hard to say."
Everybody knew official forces cared about efficiency, standardization, and the overwhelming advantage that tech and industrial power brought.
MaxTac was the embodiment of that thinking.
Pulling wild stunts was something special forces did.
Or solos.
And solos...
honestly, solos were edge cases, outliers.
What kind of outlier got to drive a private AV?
Without the right clearance, corpos would blast that thing out of the sky in minutes!
That kind of hardware wasn't meant for street edgerunners!
Jackie, who'd read up on every legend in Night City, suddenly got his gears turning—
"Mano, I think I do know one top-tier merc who liked driving around in a private AV—"
"Hold on!"
Jackie didn't even get to finish before the legendary Mackinaw's engine roared, speed jumping to the limit as it charged straight toward the intersection!
On the cross street ahead, several NCPD armored cars came blasting out with sirens screaming, and the Jefferson 388 was right in the center of the convoy escort!
The cops on duty were dumbfounded:
MaxTac had really gotten lost!
That armored pickup was already right on top of the mayor!
Car wrecks were the most common thing in Night City.
But a wreck this brutal?
Not so much.
The NCPD's Emperor 720, in terms of classification, was already a high-grade riot-control armored vehicle. Against your average cyberpsycho, the firepower on board was more than enough.
But against the legendary Mackinaw?
It might as well have been cardboard.
Boom!
Two steel beasts collided in the night, deciding supremacy in one hit!
The "she" in that matchup was Chevrolet's Emperor 720.
Its thick steel plating and bulletproof glass deformed and shattered on the very first impact. Sparks and debris burst everywhere!
The force of the collision swept the armored vehicle sideways like paper, flipping it over onto the street, twisting its frame into a wreck as it screeched across the pavement—
The whole convoy piled up on the spot!
And the Jefferson 388 carrying Rhyne reacted fast. With a burst of precision driving, it slipped through the mangled wreckage and the rain of sparks and metal shards, shooting past the Mackinaw's flank!
A true near miss.
As the world spun in high-speed rotation, Leo's optics stared at the blacked-out windows.
The Mackinaw's absurd engine power roared at full output. Under the Legend's control, the tires spun at extreme speed, chewing up the road and throwing dirt like an excavator had just torn the surface apart—
It would only take a few seconds to correct the torque from the crash.
And catching a Jefferson with mediocre speed performance would only take one hard acceleration—
But in that exact instant, the Legend abandoned the chase. All four wheels shifted under active control into an impact-resistant alignment:
That Cascade AV still on their tail launched an anti-tank rocket at nearly 400 klicks—
And it was fired manually by a woman standing on the vehicle with the launcher on her shoulder!
Boom!
The missile hit the Mackinaw's side perfectly. Considering the vehicle's posture at the time, and the fact that side armor was generally weaker on armored vehicles, the strike was almost flawlessly timed.
But the Legend was an AI.
And the legendary Mackinaw's core system was AI too.
The Legend bled off the force of the blast, the tires snapping fully sideways as the truck drifted out through the smoke—
Meanwhile, the Cascade also drifted in midair, then after bleeding speed, flipped quickly and slammed its underside against the wall of a building in a brutal hard brake!
The terrifying thrust and momentum from more than 300 klicks got canceled out against the outer wall, crushing it little by little—full stop achieved in under a second, and the wall was wrecked in the process.
The legendary Mackinaw burst out of the smoke, half of its electromagnetic locking system slightly damaged.
The Cascade had used the building wall to brake, then rode the last of its momentum up onto the rooftop.
Both vehicles came to a perfect stop.
You could see the AV's doors already open.
The driver was alone, tossing the launcher aside.
Jackie's eyes went wide and he suddenly shouted, "It's Susan Forrester! Mano, it's—"
"Quit yelling! We're on the job here, not at some fan meet!"
Thunk!
Leo smacked Jackie's head back into the truck with a solid thud. "Watch Elizabeth! Sit your ass down! That woman's a damn tiger—V! Get ready!"
The Mackinaw punched the accelerator and tore off after the direction Rhyne had gone.
Susan Forrester—Leo knew that name too.
That was old-school Night City legend territory.
Legend, not icon, because she came out of law enforcement. Early on she worked in the NCPD, later joined MaxTac, and became a legendary enforcer across the Free States, including Northern California.
A few lines of summary couldn't really explain why people feared her so much.
The people she killed had all fallen before they could become famous.
Drop some wanted criminal before they've made a name for themselves, and people just think, damn, that's one dangerous woman—
but your public reputation stays oddly limited.
And after the Arasaka Tower nuke, and after Militech launched the Unification War against the Free States, stories about her got rarer and rarer.
Everything people still knew about her dated back more than fifty years, to the 2010s.
Never failed.
Calm, powerful.
Almost religious faith and fanaticism toward the mission.
A legendary Night City merc and solo.
V grabbed her pistol, holstering Overture at her waist, then clicked her tongue. "How amazing can she be? Just better gear, right? Guess being a corp dog really pays off if you can afford an AV."
"Jackie!"
Leo barked, snapping Jackie out of rubbing his head. "Focus! We eat two more missiles and we're dying in the street! Where'd all that big-talk swagger go?!"
Jackie jolted back to reality and picked up the badly warped Chronium-Titanium armor plates that had been knocked loose earlier.
All the active defense explosive charges were spent.
If they didn't want to get hit by another missile, they'd have to rely on the sheer ridiculous strength of a borg body.
Steam vented from the powered armor's arms as they adjusted into their optimal operating range.
After catching a helicopter bare-handed—
Jackie was now going to try manually intercepting anti-tank missiles.