Two hours after the Midnight Nuclear Blast Incident.
"Nuclear blast…"
Rhyne and Peralez looked at each other from inside an armored vehicle, staring out through thick reinforced windows.
NCPD was organizing rescue operations.
Many officers had been injured in the blast, and large numbers of cyberware systems had malfunctioned.
These weren't ordinary failures like burnt wiring or damaged circuits.
High-energy radiation and radioactive particles directly damaged any matter they touched.
Radiation burns were far nastier than simple thermal burns.
Still…
The scene outside felt strange.
The workers were talking way too much.
Everybody knew corporate employees possessed "professional discipline," and in practice, that meant thinking first, speaking second, acting third.
For jobs like municipal radiation cleanup and casualty extraction?
Things were usually dead silent.
Efficiency mattered.
Security and information containment mattered.
And jobs like this usually meant massive overtime shifts, so nobody had the energy to yap endlessly.
But these workers were different.
They talked constantly.
And not just them—
Even the robots working beside them…
Talked too damn much.
"Nuclear radiation ain't a joke! Don't touch that shit with your bare hand! You brain-dead?!"
"I just thought the glowing stuff looked pretty…"
Before the sentence finished, the foreman smacked the worker across the head with a huge mechanical slap.
Honestly…
This didn't look like a professional cleanup company at all.
Because it wasn't.
It was Maelstrom.
To be fair, all matter was affected by radiation, but replaceable cyberware components were obviously safer than flesh.
Like protective suits.
If the chrome got irradiated?
Rip it off and replace it.
As for why it was Maelstrom—
Rhyne was a smart man.
The corps already wanted him dead.
Now that he'd survived, he absolutely could've pretended nothing happened and continued cooperating with the corporations like before.
But honestly…
That would've been pathetic.
Especially after seeing the "overwhelming vitality" of the Hamburger King, he felt maybe he really could change something.
Unlike Peralez and his moral cleanliness obsession, Rhyne genuinely looked down on criminals—
But if conditions were right, he was perfectly willing to use them.
Work with them.
Give them contracts.
The corps wanted him dead.
So he could just redirect some municipal contracts toward the gangs active in Night City.
Before this?
He never would've dared.
After all, gangs could always take corpo money and put a bullet in his skull.
But now?
The corps had already taken their shot and nearly sent him to hell.
Meanwhile those gangs had all developed complicated ties to the Hamburger King for one reason or another…
And the Extreme Metal race had proven exactly that.
So long as the gangs could complete the work, these locals actually became surprisingly reliable options.
Even for Peralez.
At this point, he trusted almost nobody except the Hamburger King.
The gangs were well-equipped.
Their procedures looked weirdly formal.
But when they actually started working…
The entire thing somehow looked ridiculous.
What kind of foreman smacked workers with radiation-covered mechanical hands?!
Rhyne shook his head and continued watching them work.
Maelstrom handled the most dangerous radioactive dust cleanup and packaging work.
They used water systems to wash down fallout, dug out irradiated soil with cybernetic limbs, crushed and packed it, then loaded it onto Aldecaldo cargo convoys for transport into the Badlands.
The Aldecaldos had manpower and logistics.
Outside illegal activity, nomads were basically migratory laborers anyway.
They were perfectly suited for transport and isolation barrier construction.
As for low-tech materials like sand, concrete, steel bars, steel plating, and basic construction machinery—
Those came from the Valentinos.
Like every city on Earth, the lower levels of the construction industry were usually controlled by local construction firms.
And local construction firms almost always had…
Gray-area connections.
The Tyger Claws controlled Westbrook.
Although Japanese medical corporations had collapsed years ago after Arasaka destroyed them, the medical workers themselves hadn't disappeared alongside the companies.
Now they were providing medical services for NCPD.
They even had synthetic blood supplies—a massive surprise to Rhyne.
The 6th Street guys wore combat gear and drove Mackinaws while guarding the cleanup perimeter.
Morton, the former New United States Army sergeant, had somehow turned their security work into something surprisingly professional.
The guards looked ugly as hell, but considering tonight's performance, Rhyne felt they were more than qualified.
Of course…
The entire operation only worked because of the robots directing the labor crews.
The robots were actually being remotely operated by engineers from the Marvel world.
For them, this was a field test.
A real-world simulation exercise.
Coincidentally, Africa had also suffered a nuclear explosion just one month earlier in the world.
They had experience.
And over there, construction in New Jua City had already been underway for quite some time.
Those engineers handled this sort of thing effortlessly.
So…
The spiritual leader unifying the gangs existed.
The knowledge base existed, too.
That was what shocked Rhyne and Peralez just as much as the nuclear blast itself:
Several Night City gangs were actually completing a legitimate engineering contract together.
Sure, it looked crude and ridiculous…
But Rhyne found it strangely nostalgic.
It reminded him of fifty years ago, after Arasaka Tower got nuked, when the people of Night City rebuilt the city brick by brick from the ruins.
Gangs.
Nomads.
Then, eventually, the corps climbed back on top of the city again.
Peralez felt similarly.
Watching them work…
Actually felt weirdly comforting.
Even though he used to despise criminals.
[Bzzt—]
The nuclear EMP was still disrupting Earth's magnetic field, though some specialized communication equipment continued functioning.
[Joestar: Two mayors, somebody's snooping around outside. Someone's also trying to hack City Hall. Heh… we can solve that problem for you. But it'll cost extra.]
Rhyne shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
[Rhyne: Which corporation are they from? You people even have this kind of tech now?]
[Joestar: What's the phrase…? Trade secret. So? You want the service or not? I'll send the boys to unplug their network cable.]
[Rhyne: No! Just keep watching them. Don't start any conflicts.]
[Joestar: Roger that.]
Inside Maelstrom's Totentanz club, Joestar stood before his mother.
She was the source of his netrunning skills.
Night City's gangs generally had mediocre netrunning capabilities.
But his mother was a human modified using AI technology.
Her body hadn't fully recovered yet, but her consciousness had stabilized considerably.
Honestly, making money through netrunning was still better than doing… that other stuff.
"Fate really is strange…"
Joestar stood and replaced his mother's maintenance fluid.
Rhyne felt the same way.
Tonight, everyone shared the same realization.
Fate really was strange.
And somehow…
Things no longer felt so cliché.
Disobedient politicians weren't automatically assassinated by corps.
Gangs didn't immediately collapse the moment corporations got serious.
Criminals didn't feel universally disgusting anymore…
For once, things weren't following the same tired path everybody expected.
Rhyne sighed and patted Peralez's shoulder.
"Fate really is strange. Who would've thought yesterday you were still my strongest political opponent?"
"You still are." Peralez smiled and shook his head. "You'll retire eventually."
"But today's better." Rhyne shrugged. "At least you're not trying to lure me out somewhere and have me butchered."
Knock knock.
Someone tapped on the vehicle window.
It was MaxTac commander Hammerman.
Rhyne lowered the window.
Hammerman leaned closer and calmly delivered the last thing Rhyne wanted to hear:
"The Kujira has docked. Saburo isn't probing anymore. And he's personally aboard the carrier."