Right on schedule, Blue Eyes launched his attack the moment Leo jacked in his personal link, but—
he only felt the slightest flicker of doubt, only lost the tiniest thread of processing...
less than 50 nanoseconds, and the counterattack was already underway.
He was the one getting hit.
In cyberspace, Little Octopus's tentacles in attack posture were overwhelming, covering the sky and swallowing every last detail of the connection, catching nearly every communication trace and pulling from it the protocols and behavioral patterns Blue Eyes used for remote control.
[Packet sniffing... effective frequency band locked]
[Time elapsed: 3 NeuraTics]
Out in the ruins, the Legend fully opened its Aether Grid core.
Its heart became a signal amplifier. Every micro-transmitter array activated at once, bridging multiple city blocks in perfect sync and locking onto Blue Eyes's server—
Blue Eyes's real body was in Night Corp.
He was only communicating through Peralez.
Which meant there had to be a wireless channel linking his server to the outside world.
In cyberspace, steel tentacles wrapped themselves in rocket engines and punched straight toward the target.
[Signal amplification array... frequency alignment successful]
[Time elapsed: 5 NeuraTics]
To Blue Eyes, those tiny octopus tendrils suddenly swelled out of nowhere, massively enlarged by the Legend, and in an instant the signal was driven straight into his server.
Only once contact was made did Blue Eyes realize how catastrophically he had underestimated Leo's offensive capability—
or rather, the number of AIs involved in the attack.
[Multi-layer firewall scan... zero-day vulnerability found... exploiting]
[Time elapsed: 7 NeuraTics]
[Intrusion detection bypass... deep packet inspection evaded... ACL cracked]
[Time elapsed: 4 NeuraTics]
Nineteen nanoseconds passed.
Firewalls that could normally resist most corporate probing and intrusion were punctured open by Little Octopus's attack, compressed to an impossibly sharp point—
the tip of the octopus tentacle became a blade.
Muramasa, acting as the blade point, drove through that opening and began force-overwriting control of the hardware with full power—
[EM shield penetration... signal injection in progress]
[Time elapsed: 6 NeuraTics]
[SCADA intrusion successful... power plants and substations under control]
[Time elapsed: 8 NeuraTics]
[PLC tampering... overload initiated]
[Time elapsed: 5 NeuraTics]
[Metro control system paralyzed... rail network interference successful]
[Time elapsed: 7 NeuraTics]
Forty-five nanoseconds gone.
The cascading destruction commands had already been issued.
All Blue Eyes could do now was sever the hardware that had already been compromised.
[Remote access tool deployed... false data injection complete]
[Signal severed. Intrusion terminated.]
In the final five nanoseconds, Blue Eyes completed the emergency cutoff—
but once the commands were sent, and once the voltage and current had already changed, not even an AI could pull them back.
Bang!
The glasses Peralez was wearing and the back of Leo's head both burst into smoke and sparks—
except the smoke coming off Leo carried the smell of burnt flesh.
One nanosecond was one-billionth of a second.
Fifty nanoseconds—
to a human, even one running a Sandevistan, it was just an instant.
An instant.
Leo's head got cooked.
Peralez collapsed to the floor.
Rhyne didn't even have time to change his expression.
But Jackie caught Peralez.
V caught Leo.
Not because they reacted fast—
just because they had the teamwork for it.
V's expression turned a little complicated, but Leo raised a thumbs-up.
V asked, "So who got screwed this time?"
"Big shots. Or rather—big shots, plural."
MaxTac had 56 official active-duty members.
Under normal operations, 28 were on duty, grouped into four-man teams, seven squads in total.
When Anvil anti-tank missiles hit, they produced towering columns of flame.
Two hitting at the same time was even harder to miss.
The fire and smoke from the blasts made the MaxTac teams, who had been spun in circles the whole time, cut their connection to the office network immediately, and suddenly the world in front of them became clear—
Seven Manticores turned at high altitude over Night City, their engines roaring as they angled straight toward the hidden braindance club.
Susan stood in the middle of the road, staring at the warehouse rooftop.
Honestly, she could understand most mercs.
She could not understand why this criminal crew called Burger King would do something like this.
Not just her—
probably nobody in Night City could understand them.
The Cascade AV burned fiercely, heat melting concrete, softening rebar, the building collapsing slowly...
The armored pickup that had rammed its way inside was gradually being buried under the structure too.
The battlefield had gone quiet.
But the sky over Watson absolutely had not.
The poor could do nothing but tremble at the sound of explosions, gunfire, and engines roaring through the night.
But the people in Watson with a little money had been protected well enough, like audience members watching a movie.
The monster on the screen wasn't supposed to burst into the theater, right?
But now something was wrong.
The engines of the Manticore armored AVs cut easily through even thick soundproof glass when flying low—
and there were seven of them.
Every MaxTac operative was a medal-wearing lunatic.
Seven heavy AVs like that could wipe out an entire street—
No.
Several city blocks.
The feeling that your life was sitting in someone else's hands felt awful.
And just as they were preparing to file complaints with NCPD, contact their bosses, call anyone who might reassure them—
what happened in cyberspace silenced every corporate network in the city.
Militech.
Arasaka.
PetroChem.
Biotechnica.
All of them had already assumed the situation here was settled, busy dealing with the issue of Arasaka's Kujira carrier making landfall.
The probing, espionage, and signal testing embedded in corporate communications were already intense during times like this. Their net tech teams were all working overtime, fully immersed in cyberspace.
But none of that would clue in ordinary freelance netrunners.
To them, the public Net might just feel sluggish. Busy.
Night City's cyberspace, unlike the dreamlike image of the city itself, was a true snarl of chaos.
You couldn't see the giant corporate networks directly.
What remained visible was the public net—a twisted maze built from overlapping systems.
The corporate data fortresses sat hidden above that mess, and unskilled netrunners could only poke around carefully, avoiding dangerous signals.
If they were smart enough, and lucky enough, they might go their whole lives without ever seeing those colossal data walls that could crush hope just by existing.
But today—
today was different.
Several districts had been turned into data ruins by the last few months of criminal activity, the destruction from the Metal Race, and the large-scale sabotage of public infrastructure by Muramasa's wireless transmitters.
Watson counted as an orderly data structure.
On a night like this, it stood out.
Many netrunners in the ruins looked up toward Watson—
Thin data ruins meant poverty.
Dense, complex networks meant secrets, opportunities, and money.
"Damn..." one netrunner muttered, kneeling in the ruins and piecing together data blocks, trying to repair a client's database.
He fit two chunks together in his hand while his tech partner finished rewiring the line in realspace, successfully restoring part of the data.
Afterward, he looked toward Watson with envy.
Even though all they could see was the public side of cyberspace, it was enough to spark fantasies.
People who understood tech found it hard to respect brute-force gang goons.
His partner said over comms:
[Don't get ideas. See that Burger King guy? Loud name, sure, but he still doesn't dare touch the rich.]
The netrunner shook his head.
True enough.
The gangs could tear up the streets all they wanted, and the corps wouldn't care.
They'd just invest in the winner.
"I'm saying—"
[Tech specialist: Wait—no. All the Manticores are heading toward Watson!]
The netrunner stared, shocked—
but before he could say anything, he saw something completely unbelievable.
In Watson's public network, the twisted, dense streams of public data suddenly erupted into chaos, all of it washed red.
In a single instant—
a gigantic black-red steel tentacle erupted out of nowhere.
It was unlike anything he had ever seen.
At the tip of that tentacle, a katana so red it was almost black dragged strange broken-stream lightning through cyberspace as it plunged forward—
And then a tower—
a colossal tower, so tall it was impossible to fully perceive, revealed just one corner of itself.
It stood in cyberspace, immense, endless, with countless data lines running down into the ordered labyrinth below.
Some network techs working on public infrastructure could even see those lines connected directly into the local space near them.
That complex data maze, visible only for an instant, already showed impossible density and scale.
And the height of the tower?
Unthinkable.
That monstrous steel tentacle was probably over a hundred meters long.
But the tower—
the tower had to be over a thousand meters tall.
More than a thousand meters.
No visible top.
The mass of lines across its body was enough to make your skin crawl.
What was that?
The netrunner dumped all 3 CCUs of compute power in his rig into the data-probing module—
and still couldn't see the top of the tower.
But he could see one thing.
On the shattered firewall pierced by the steel tentacle, there was a broken line of data.
Enough to spell out a name:
Night Corp.
Everyone could see it.
Night Corp's firewall had been breached.
Across the Net, complicated data structures flickered under the assault, and the entire cyberspace layer shook from the aftershock of the attack.
In reality, it looked like a far grander fireworks display:
Night Corp Tower erupted in a massive burst of arc-lightning, blasting straight through the building's glass so violently that even people outside could see it.
Automated office buildings and apartment towers became uncontrollable mechanical labyrinths. Doors opened and shut over and over until the metal warped out of shape.
Then came the explosions at substations and distribution stations.
Neon ads on holographic billboards turned to static—
then died out completely.
The metro and rail control systems failed.
The shriek of braking screamed across the skyline.
The sparks from metal-on-metal friction fell like rain, joining the fire from the explosions as the city's final lights.
Train cars slammed straight into office buildings.
Fear—
real fear, equal and indiscriminate—
arrived in the wealthy part of Watson that night.
It struck their hearts evenly.
And evenly—
it made them scream.
It made them truly, genuinely confused.
Rhyne's cyberware implants came back under his control—
and the first thing he felt was all of this.
He was dumbfounded.
How the hell had Watson's network suddenly become as broke as Santo Domingo?