Valentina '0J0' Reyes
Warehouse Basement, Hargreaves St, Arroyo, Night City.
2074
The grenade didn't sound like much over the squad channel. Typical EMP tech. No satisfying concussive crack or dramatic roar to rattle the pipes and rain dust on my head. Just the cheap, plastic clink of a cylinder bouncing into the lift cage, a rising, digital whine, and boom, a zero-day exploit wrapped in copper wiring and thrown into a space way too small and way too reflective for its own good.
Then the local network completely shit itself.
I wasn't looking through some garbage wall-mounted lens. I was jacked into the building's subnet, floating inside the architecture as a digital ghost. The moment the charge reached critical output, the data feed around me screamed. A violent, blue-white surge of electromagnetic noise flooded the local bus, hitting the lift like someone had dropped a miniature sun directly between the borg's boots.
The blast wave didn't care about meat; it targeted chrome. It bounced off every steel surface in the cage, multiplied its malicious code packets against the dented walls, and hit the squad's targeting reticles so hard that half the men on my digital radar flinched before they even started pulling triggers.
Node S2-04--the camera feed I was piggybacking on--went for a moment. The data packet turned into a trembling slab of white threaded through with crawling static, the cheap image processor throwing fatal errors as it tried and failed to decide whether it was looking at an overexposed corridor or the literal end of the world. The camera's automated exposure compensation kicked in too late, overcorrected like old tech was want to do, and then hunted back the other way, turning my visual overlay into a radioactive strobe light.
The boys in the corridor seemed to have it worse.
Through both the video and the pixelated mesh of the data grid, I watched Morales wrench his head away behind his ballistic shield, his biometric data spiking. Webb brought an arm up across his optics, and Kane's smartgun dipped hard as its internal target-acquisition software tried to recover from having a flashbang's bastard cousin detonate inside a metal box directly in front of him.
They opened fire anyway. Bless their dumb, patriotic hearts. The hallway flooded with muzzle flash. Spent brass spun through the fluorescent data grid in bright, looping arcs. Every rifle on the line went full aggression, their fire lanes stitching together exactly the way Rex had drilled into them during their old army days. The subnet couldn't even track the sheer volume of lead cleanly. The combined effect of the grenade's lingering code-burn and the rapid-fire gunfire turned my feed into a flickering, laggy slideshow of bright, disconnected stills.
For a second or two, that was the whole universe. White light, muzzle flash, and an iron cage being systematically beaten to death under a storm of high-velocity lead.
From what I could see through the data-mesh, the cage looked like it had been fed through an industrial shredder.
The inner wall was cratered and peeled, strips of metal curling backward where jacketed rounds had chewed into the structure. The mesh doors had warped inward and then outward again, twisted into new shapes by the combined force of the EMP blast and the kinetic impacts that followed. Smoke drifted through the opening in pale ribbons, tangled with the thick powder haze kicked up by the firing line.
"Status," Rex said, standing right next to my meatsuit.
I couldn't talk. My vocal cords were locked out while I swam through the subnet, so I flashed a string of green text directly onto the main command monitor in front of his face.
[0J0]: BRINGING THE FEED BACK ONLINE. RENDERING DETAILED SPATIAL MAP NOW.
"Is he down?"
[0J0]: I'M WORKING ON THE PART WHERE WE FIND THAT OUT. HOLD YOUR FUCKING HORSES.
The text-sass irritated him, but not half as much as not having an immediate answer irritated me.
Down in the corridor, the boys kept firing for another second before muscle memory and military training finally reasserted themselves hard enough for someone to realise they were shooting into blind glare and heavy smoke rather than an actual target. The first rifle dropped, then the second, then the rest followed one by one until the gunfire dwindled into stray single shots and then stopped entirely.
"Think the bastard's cooked?" Webb's audio feed crackled over the squad channel, his breath rattling hard inside his chest.
"Fucker's gotta be paste," Kane grunted back, his smartgun servo clicking as it cycled an empty drum. "Nothing could survive that, not even a borg gonk."
"Check the wreckage," Morales barked, his voice muffled behind his heavy ballistic shield. "Don't break formation. Webb, get your flashlight on that cage."
Then the smoke shifted as something exploded from behind it.
At first, the camera feed caught only jagged fragments. Whatever was still standing inside that elevator was moving significantly faster than the camera's frame refresh rate liked, and the remaining glare eating the edges of the digital image. I saw a shoulder first--bare, polished metal gleaming beneath strips of torn cloth--then a sudden flash of silver-black understructure where the last of his long coat had been completely stripped away by the lead.
The blades came out as it moved, one moment the borg's hands were empty at its sides, black optics fixed directly on the line of men in front of it. The next, twin forearm blades snapped outward with a clean, terrifyingly sharp metallic sound. Long, silver edges locked into place beneath its elbows while the last veil of smoke rolled off its reinforced chassis.
Morales saw it first. "Holy fucking shit!" he gasped. He started bringing the ballistic shield higher, but the borg was already moving.
It hit the right wall of the elevator shaft with one foot, then the left edge of the door frame with the other, turning the confined space into a launch surface instead of an obstacle, and exploded out of the cage in a diagonal blur of chrome. Node S2-04 dropped two entire frames trying to parse the acceleration.
In one frame, the borg was still in the elevator, in the next, it was hovering directly above the shields. Morales had enough time to look up, that was all he got.
The borg came down feet-first on the upper lip of the left ballistic shield, using the heavy metal sheet like a springboard. Its full cybernetic weight compressed the top edge hard enough to violently wrench the shield downward, exposing the terrified man behind it. Morales tried to recover his stance, but the shield was already moving the wrong way and the borg was already moving again. One silver blade dropped in a short, brutally efficient downward arc that opened Morales from the base of the throat down to the sternum. The cut was so fast and so clean that for a fraction of a second, nothing seemed to happen except the man's eyes going impossibly wide.
Then the blood came, it hit the inside of the shield in a hot, high-pressure sheet, sprayed directly across Fitch beside him, and turned the front of the hallway into a butchered mess of red and black before Morales had even finished collapsing to his knees.
Fitch shouted something a raw, panicked scream that disappeared beneath the roar of his gun firing. The borg used the falling shield as a tactical ramp, planting one metal foot against the surface as it tipped and kicking off sideways into the concrete corridor wall. Its shoulder struck the stone, its left hand found the electrical conduit running along the ceiling line, and it ran three steps parallel to the ground in a horizontal sprint that looked more like a corrupted software error than anything a physical body should have been able to do. Fitch tracked his weapon upward too slowly, his rifle muzzle following the empty space where it had been a fraction of a second earlier instead of where it was heading.
The first blade took Fitch straight across the mouth. A full, heavy horizontal line that opened the lower half of his face and sent teeth, bone fragments, blood, and a wet burst of ruined speech across the concrete wall behind him. The second blade followed through his collar a heartbeat later, punching deep beneath the clavicle and ripping free as the borg rotated past his shoulder. Fitch dropped backward into the dark, both hands clawing desperately at a throat that was no longer a usable structure.
Two men dead, and the borg still had not touched the floor properly
Kane broke left, trying to create space for the techgun in his hands to charge up without putting rounds through his own people. Collins did the opposite, stepping in too close. Webb shouted for spacing. Ortega was trying to pull the line wider. Every single one of them was making individually reasonable corrections to a problem that was changing faster than their brains could process them.
The borg landed on the wall again, lower this time, using the narrow concrete corridor like an enclosed kill-box built specifically for it. Its left foot hit concrete. Its right found the edge of the opposite wall. It folded, twisted, and came through the gap between Kane and Collins upside down. One metallic hand caught a heavy ceiling pipe overhead while its chassis rotated beneath it in a brutal, gravity-defying arc of spinning steel.
The blade in its right arm opened Collins from shoulder to hip.
It was an ugly, industrial cut, deep enough that I saw fabric, military-grade armour plating, and human flesh all separate at once in the same wet instant. The man's torso simply failed to remain a single continuous thing under the sheer mechanical force of the slice. Collins folded with a choked, wet noise that the squad channel did not quite transmit cleanly, the front of his tactical vest spilling dark heat onto the concrete floor as his biometric line plummeted and he dropped out of frame.
Kane did get a shot off then, maybe two, but the borg was already swinging effortlessly from the overhead pipe and the heavy rounds went low, tearing into Collins as he fell. Genos released the pipe, drove both boots directly into Kane's chest with hydraulic horsepower, and sent him flying backward into Webb. The massive velocity of the impact knocked both men into the right wall hard enough to dent the cheap, unreinforced panelling.
Ortega actually landed his hit.
He came in from the borg's blind side while the other two were still going down, pulling a heavy combat knife rather than the rifle that no longer had a clear fire lane. For one brief, terrifying second, I thought he might actually stick the monster. The blade hit home. It just did not stop where Ortega's muscle memory expected.
The steel blade rang loudly off Genos's cheek, skidding uselessly across the apparently false skim and throwing a bright, violent spray of sparks into the smoky air. The borg turned with him inside the exact same movement, its left hand catching Ortega by the wrist. It bent his arm backward, snapping the elbow with a sickening, metallic crunch before the man even found the breath to scream.
Then, one silver forearm blade punched straight up beneath Ortega's jaw and came clean out through the top of his skull. The borg ripped the blade free, let the body slide off it, then vaulted over the slumping corpse using one hand on the wall for leverage. Kane had just gotten back to one knee, stunned and reaching for the sidearm at his thigh, when Genos landed behind him. The right-hand blade sheared through the wrist before the pistol cleared leather. The left-hand blade passed across the back of the neck an instant later, opening Kane so deeply that his head stayed attached mostly by habit, and then only briefly.
Webb ran.
He had exactly enough survival instinct left to understand the corridor had become a meat grinder and he was standing in the middle of it with an injured partner, no spacing, and no god to appeal to. He turned and sprinted toward the junction, shouting over the squad channel to Rex for backup, boots slipping in the blood already spreading across the concrete floor.
The borg gave him maybe half a second, then it kicked off the wall again.
This time it used the corridor corner itself, planting one foot high, compressing like a spring and launching forward almost horizontally. For a surreal instant he was flying down the hall, shirtless and silver-black, blades extended, the overhead fluorescent light catching every line in his chassis while blood from other men streaked across his bare torso. He hit Webb between the shoulders hard enough to drive him face-first into the concrete, skidded with him for over a meter, then pinned him there with one knee and buried both blades downward through the upper back.
Webb jerked once and then stayed where he was, that left one.
The last man, Young, had been furthest back and smartest enough not to come into the corridor collapse at all, which meant he was the only one still standing with anything like a clean angle. He saw the aftermath all at once, five bodies down or in the process of becoming bodies, the hallway painted red, Genos kneeling over Webb like something from a horror BD.
Young did not hesitate.
He opened fire immediately. He wasn't carrying a standard kinetic rifle; he had a Militech Achilles tech gun braced against his shoulder. I watched the weapon's capacitors hum to life through the data feed, a sharp grid of electric blue spikes charging along the rail before the gun barked, firing electromagnetically accelerated rounds. Tech guns are designed to ignore cover, they don't just punch through drywall, they tear right through the structural support beams.
But you can only shoot through what you can actually track.
Young's tech-link was screaming target metrics into his optics, trying to calculate the punch-through trajectory, but the borg didn't give the software a stationary coordinate to lock onto. The first charged volley tore straight through the space where Genos had been kneeling a split second before, blowing a crater into the corpse he was kneeling over, but the borg was already low, moving almost animal fast. One metallic palm slapped the floor as it cut laterally through the line of fire.
Young tried to correct, his weapon's charge whining as he swept the muzzle through the drywall to anticipate the path.
That's when I noticed what the borg was actually doing, it wasn't just scrambling for cover or hoping the shooter would miss. It was actively, algorithmically dodging the shots. My subnet diagnostics flagged the micro-adjustments in its kinetic trajectory every single time the tech rifle's rail capacitor hummed to maximum charge.
Genos hit the left wall, then the right, then the heavy ceiling support strut above the junction. Each point of contact wasn't used to stop, but to instantly redirect its momentum the exact microsecond the tech gun discharged. It was a sequence of ruthless decisions, every high-velocity rebound put its chassis exactly where Young's charging capacitor was not pointing, making the narrow concrete corridor feel impossibly small.
The Achilles clicked empty, its coolant vents hissing steam.
Young's face changed, he dropped the spent cell and went for the reload.
Genos went through him. One blade entered low in the abdomen and came out the back. The other passed across the eyes so quickly I did not understand the wound until Young's body stumbled two more steps and the front of his face opened. He crashed into the wall, slid down it, and left a long red smear over the chipped paint before settling on the concrete beside the others.
Jesus I'm gonna be sick...
Then there was only the hallway.
Only the ruined elevator at one end and six torn-apart men between it and the junction, smoke drifting under fluorescent lights, shell casings rolling to a stop, and blood spreading in slow, branching rivers around boots that would not move again.
Genos stood in the center of it all with his blades still deployed. His exposed chassis was a horror show, caked in dark, wet red it looked like someone had thrown a gallon of industrial paint over his bare torso. The grenade had not bricked him. The firing squad had not stopped him. All they had really done was strip him down to the machine underneath the clothing and then piss him off.
Rex did not say anything for several seconds.
I was grateful, because I wasn't entirely sure I could have answered anything coherent. My ghost avatar was shivering inside the data stream, the sheer speed of the flatlines leaving a bitter, metallic taste in my mouth.
Finally, he leaned closer to the monitor and asked the only question that still seemed useful.
"How long did he take to flatline them all?"
I checked the squad telemetry that remained, though by then the answer was mostly written on the wall in grayed-out icons. I didn't type it on his screen this time. I let the text flare right onto his optical overlay, green letters flashing against the sudden red void of his unit's vitals.
[0J0]: 15 SECONDS
On the screen, Genos bent and retrieved Young's rifle from the gore-streaked floor where he had dropped it during the collapse. He checked the weapon mechanically, almost absentmindedly, while standing among the dead like he had merely finished a difficult chore. Then he lifted his head and looked directly toward Camera S2-04.
The dome unit was recessed, badly angled, and half-hidden by conduit shadow.
His eyes found it anyway.
For one long second, he just stared into the lens, shirtless and blood-spattered, surrounded by the wreckage of six armed men who had possessed every possible advantage until the moment they didn't.
For one long second, those black optics stared straight through the lens, through the feed. Through the subnet. At me.
Now, obviously, that was irrational. Camera lenses were not eyes, data feeds were not physical spaces, and he could not somehow see a netrunner observing him several layers removed through the building's subnet.
Still I felt seen, it scared the shit out of me honestly.
"Cocky monstrous bastard." One forearm blade retracted into its housing with a clean metallic slide, then the second followed. Genos raised the rifle.
"Hey, hey, hey, don't you fucking--"
Node S2-04 disappeared from the network before I even finished swearing, the image collapsing into violent static as the round punched through the camera and severed the physical link.
For a second, I simply stared at the dead node floating inside my local topology, an empty black square where several thousand eddies worth of security hardware had existed moments earlier.
Then I pulled myself far enough out of the subnet to force my vocal cords back online.
"Rex."
He was already staring at the dead monitor, one hand wrapped around the grip of his pistol while his jaw worked slowly beneath the red glow of the command room.
"You better have a fucking plan."
His eyes shifted toward me, I gestured at the six grey biometric icons still hanging across my display.
"The EMP didn't work, I guess we know he isn't running low end chrome at least but your firing squad just got turned into modern art, and that chrome psycho barely looks inconvenienced."
Rex said nothing, that somehow made it worse. I leaned back into the rig, reopening every remaining camera and hidden turret feed between the second floor and the basement while the subnet rearranged itself around the sudden hole Genos had just blown through it.
"Seriously, I didn't take this job to get zeroed," I muttered, trying to keep the fear out of my voice, watching empty corridors populate across my vision one after another. "If there's some secret veteran masterstroke you've been saving for the dramatic finale, now would be a real fucking nova time to share it."
"Calm your ports, Reyes," he growled, his voice flat, completely empty of fear. "The bastard's dangerous sure, but at the end of the day, he's just a fucker with some expensive corporate chrome." He said, moving back towards a bunch of weapons crates in the darker corner of the cellar.
"Back in '69, during the Unification War, my squad was attached to the 2nd Infantry division," his voice carried over the distance, competing with the hum of the servers. "The NUSA was dropping stimmed-up, full-conversion combat borgs into our trenches like an iron rain. Frontline meat-grinders, they thought they could scare us because standard infantry bullets just bounced off 'em. So we adapted, we built a whole damn doctrine just to put those heavy-metal bastards into the dirt."
He emerged from the shadows dragging a heavy gear sack. He was wearing a bandolier packed tight with what looked like specialized smoke grenades, high-intensity flashbangs, and a nasty assortment of tactical ordnance.
"First step is sensory overload, disabling the target's predictive algorithms," he continued, pacing his words with a cold, steady rhythm. "The way he was moving, a full-borg relies entirely on high-frequency radar, lidar sweeps, and optical metrics to move that fast. You take that data away and you turn the monster into a blind, clumsy tin can."
He walked back over to the dark rear of the room, completely out of my direct line of sight. When he reappeared, he was hauling a massive weapon across the concrete floor. He slammed it down onto a heavy-duty steel tripod and started setting it up right in the center of the cellar. It looked like an oversized engine block, raw and unshielded, tethered directly to our two roaring industrial generators via thick, liquid-cooled power cables.
"What is that?" I asked him, my optics widening as the sheer scale of the hardware registered.
"This is the coup de grâce," he muttered, a grim, humorless smirk pulling at the corner of his jaw. "A stripped-down Militech ACPA Laser Cannon. Ripped it right off the arm assembly of a decommissioned power suit. Standard kinetic iron deforms on impact, but true energy weapons don't care about armor thickness. They run on sheer voltage. This beauty fires a continuous stream of high-energy thermal photons. It ignores his shock-absorbing plates and vaporizes his alloy skin through thermal ablation. A few seconds under this beam, and his internal wiring cooks, his neural links fry, and his coolant reservoirs boil right out of his head."
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Genos Harker
I moved back along the blood-slicked upper walkway, pausing just long enough to retrieve my unholstered Overture from where I'd left it, alongside the light machine gun I had dropped. The weight of the extra iron felt reassuring against my chassis.
The trip down into the belly of the beast was not a straight line. With the cargo lift disabled by Rex's remote lock, the only route left was the central concrete stairwell, a tactical choke point clearly mapped by the gang's defensive grid.
They had left a lot of automated security waiting for me.
As I rounded the first sub-level landing, a wall-mounted Arasaka heavy turret hummed to life, its optical laser sweeping the concrete to lock onto my torso. It didn't get the chance. The Militech Achilles tech rifle in my grip was a precision instrument. I didn't wait for a clear line of sight; I tracked the turret's electromagnetic signature directly through the thick drywall, held the trigger until the rail capacitors whined at maximum charge, and released.
The hypersonic, electromagnetically accelerated slug punched clean through the concrete column, shattering the turret's housing and sending a shower of sparks and severed optical cables raining into the dark.
I kept moving, descending floor by floor. Any stragglers left on the lower tiers--nervous gangoons trying to hold defensive lines behind steel crates--met the same calculated efficiency. The Achilles tore through their makeshift cover like paper, while the heavy kinetic rounds from the slung LMG shredded anyone who tried to rush my position into absolute paste.
As I walked through the quiet, smoking aftermath of the stairs, I felt a strange, flat ambivalence about the people I was putting down, although I hadn't come to Santo Domingo to butcher a 6th Street chapter. I had explicitly tried the non-lethal route on the way in. I had offered Rex a clean way out, but he had chosen to treat this like a military campaign, coming at me with everything he had to kill me.
[TARGET LOCK: SECURED.]
[DISTANCE TO TERMINAL COORDINATE: 14 METRES.]
I had simply responded in kind. It was a matter of survival. Action, and reaction... I guess on both our parts.
Eventually, my boots hit the damp concrete of the final subterranean floor. The air down here was thick, smelling heavily of ozone, industrial battery acid, and old grease. The wireframe model in my vision sharpened, tracing the heavy doors at the very end of the final, narrow corridor.
This is it. This ends now. I stepped up to the massive slab of reinforced iron, planted my stance, and let my shoulder servos unlock.
I unleashed a tight, lower-output variation of my Machine Gun Blows.
Even at a fraction of their maximum capacity, my cybernetic actuators moved with terrifying, piston-driven velocity. My fists became a blur of silver-black chrome against the dim corridor lighting, delivering an alternating, high-frequency flurry of kinetic strikes directly into the center seam of the door.
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud.
The mechanical barrage rattled through the entire sub-level. The iron didn't just dent; the relentless, rapid-fire compression completely compromised the metal in less than two seconds. The reinforced deadbolts sheared clean out of the concrete frame, the center of the panels warping inward until the hinges snapped completely.
With a final, heavy strike, the ruined doors tore outward, crashing onto the floorboards inside with a deafening metallic roar.
I stepped through the dust and into the room
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Emmanuel 'Rex' Miller
A text box flashed green across the upper corner of my optical feed. 0J0 was still completely buried in her netrunning chair, her jaw locked and her body completely frozen as her mind swam through the cellar's subnet.
[0J0]: BORG IS ALMOST HERE. HE GOT PASSED THE AUTO-TURRETS AND JUST FUCKING STARED THE MINES DOWN. HE IS INSIDE THE PERIMETER. REPEAT: HE IS INSIDE.
A second line of text compiled right underneath it, the code flickering violently against the red static of my system overlay.
[0J0]: I'M TRYING TO TRAP HIS ROUTING TRAFFIC. GOING TO TRY AND PUNCH THROUGH HIS GHOST ICE OR WHATEVER FUCKING SOFT HE'S RUNNING. JUST DO ME A FAVOR, REX--MAKE SURE NOTHING HAPPENS TO MY MEATSUIT.
I didn't blink, didn't look back at her rigid frame. The anger that had been sitting under my ribs like an unexploded shell finally stabilized, hardening into something cold and heavy. The grief for Freddie, the fury at this things fucking gall, I locked it all down, repeating my mantra.
Phase one: Choke-point creation. I had him exactly where I wanted him, trapped in a narrow subterranean box with nowhere to run.
Phase two: Sensory overload.
"0j0," I said as I stepped toward the center of the cellar, trusting her internal audio matrix to catch the sub-vocal vibration. "Trigger the counter-measures. Now."
Through her hardwired command console, she executed the macro. Instantly, a deafening wall of distorted industrial combat rock exploded from our wall speakers. At the same second, I yanked a cluster of pins from my bandolier and hurled a volley of grenades directly at the entrance.
They detonated in a tight, blinding sequence of concussive flashes and smoke, flooding the basement with a dense, shimmering fog, chaff smoke laced with metallic micro-particles designed to completely scatter radar and passive lidar tracking. Overhead, the emergency red LED strips began to strobe at a violent, irregular frequency, a hardwired protocol meant to white out any high-end optical cyberware. If the bastard relied on digital vision, he was fighting a ghost feed now.
I stepped behind our insurance policy, the unwieldy Militech Directed Energy Laser Cannon. I gripped the twin spade-handles, my fingers locking around the dual triggers. A high-pitched, deafening electronic whine filled the basement, cutting straight through the blaring music as the generators dumped raw current into the weapon's optical chamber.
The heavy steel blast doors didn't hiss open, it started with a hyper-velocity vibration that rattled the entire bulkhead. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. A terrifying, rapid-fire sequence of kinetic impacts hitting the exact same seam with machine-gun speed. I watched the thick iron plate erupt in a tight cluster of deep, violent cybernetic dents, the metal stretching to its absolute structural limit in less than two seconds. Then came the final, heavy surge.
The ruined doors tore completely outward, groaning as they hit the concrete floor, and the borg stepped through the smoke. Shirtless, silver-black, and painted in the dark, wet red of my soldiers.
"You think I'm scared of you, you fucker?!" I barked into the flashing crimson haze, bracing my shoulders against the cannon's spade-rest. "You got a good kit sure, but you're a gonk if you think you're the first chromed-out monster I've put down. The Army trained us on how to take fuckers like you down during the Unification War, you're just an armored vehicle with a heartbeat, choom. And vehicles can be dismantled!"
The gold optics in his black glass lenses didn't even flicker.
"Is that right?" the borg said, its voice carrying a flat, uncaring undertone through the electronic jamming.
"That's right!" I roared, my vision locking onto his center mass through the strobe glare. "This is what happens when you fuck with the King!"
I slammed the triggers home.
A deafening, high-pitched electronic shriek tore through my ears as a solid, blinding beam of white-blue thermal photons exploded from the emitter. It wasn't a projectile; it was a continuous line of pure, incinerating heat. The beam caught his chest plating dead-on.
The thermal ablation should have been instant. I braced my stance, waiting for his alloy plates to turn to soup and his structural frame to collapse.
Except it didn't.
The beam was painting his chest, a direct hit at zero variance, dumping thousands of volts of raw, unrelenting thermal energy straight into his torso. But strangely, the heat transfer was slow, impossibly slow. The red glare washed over his bare metal ribs, turning the caked red blood to black ash, but the alloy underneath wasn't warping, it wasn't melting. My eyes were tracking the heat spikes, waiting for the defensive metrics to turn green, but the numbers just sat there, stagnant, refusing to climb past a certain threshold.
He didn't drop, didn't even flinch. He just stood there inside the incinerating white beam, completely anchoring his weight against the force of a weapon built to cut military mechs in half.
The blaring industrial rock from the speakers suddenly felt distant. The strobe lights flickered against his chassis, reflecting off polished, unyielding plating that was actively swallowing the voltage.
Then, the machine spoke. He didn't shout over the music, he didn't have to; his voice carried that flat, uncaring mechanical undertone, projecting directly through the electronic jamming and straight into my ears.
"Anyone else, this would have worked on," It said, taking a slow, heavy step forward right into the glare. "The lights, the grenades, the laser, but unfortunately for you, I was built to run hot, that hack job you got can't run anywhere near hot enough."
My chest went completely hollow, the unexploded shell under my ribs turned to ice. He's tanking it. A hardwired corporate ACPA weapon, backed by two industrial generators running at maximum load capacity, and the bastard was using it like a spotlight. He wasn't just a solo with expensive chrome, he was something outside the database entirely.
Then the borg did something the Army never prepped me for.
It didn't try to outrun the beam or slide for the shadows. Instead, a sudden, blinding flash of light exploded directly from his eyes.
It wasn't a flashbang, it was a searing, impossible burst of pure, concentrated white brightness that erupted straight from his face. The glare utterly consumed the entire room. The sheer intensity hit my optical cyberware instantly, burning through my Kiroshi filters and short-circuiting my visual cortex with a massive surge of feedback static.
"Ahh Fuck!" My vision went violently white, a pure screaming blankness.
[ERROR: OPTICAL FEED OVERLOADED.]
[WARNING: SENSORY HARDWARE MALFUNCTION. REBOOTING VECTORS...]
I was completely blind, trying to swing the tripod through the glare, but the mechanical traverse was too slow. I heard the low, heavy crunch of a metallic boot hitting the concrete, moving through the path of the laser fire with impossible spped while my sensors were still frying.
Before I could disengage the triggers, he reached the front of the Militech cannon. A heavy cybernetic hand slammed into the emitter housing, the raw physical force warping the steel frame and snapping the heavy tripod legs like dry twigs. The thick power cables tore straight out of the walls, throwing a massive spray of electrical sparks into the rainy air as the generators short-circuited into a dead, silent darkness.
The kinetic shockwave of the weapon shattering threw me backward. I hit the steel table hard, the wind completely knocked out of my lungs.
My combat-trained reflexes screamed at me to draw my sidearm, but my arms wouldn't obey the prompt. My ribs were crushed, my internal biomon flashing a critical red overlay across my fading consciousness.
Before I could even blink the burning white static away from my retinas, a heavy, metallic knee slammed down onto my chest, pinning me deep into the metal of the table.
Two forearm blades snapped forward with a clean, synchronized shlack, locking into position just an inch away from my throat.
The blinding glare from his eyes was fading, replaced by the dim, emergency crimson shadows of the cellar. I stared up into his black optics, my breathing ragged, a thick smear of copper-tasting blood bubbling up past my teeth. But I didn't give him the satisfaction of seeing a broken man. I clenched my jaw, holding his gaze with the last bit of discipline I had left
"What the fuck are you?" I hissed, my voice dropping into a rattle. The borg looked down at me, his golden eyes burning steady, completely detached from the slaughter.
"I told you," he said quietly, his voice going near dead. "I'd be seeing you, Rex." He crossed his arms and my world went upside down.
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Valentina '0J0' Reyes
The text on my optical overlay didn't fade gracefully. It just snapped into a permanent, freezing gray.
['Ca$hCow' VITAL SIGNS: ABSENT.]
My consciousness violently uncoupled from the subnet, the sheer trauma of the server drop slamming my mind back into my physical meatsuit with the force of a freight train. I forward-slam-crashed against my consol, gasping for air.
Fuck I need to get out of here.
The basement was dead silent now, save for the low, dying hiss of the shorted-out industrial generators. The strobe lights had died. The chaff smoke was settling like gray snow over the room. A heavy, metallic click echoed through the dark. The sound of a high-caliber cylinder cycling.
I slowly tilted my head up, my warm body refusing to move as a shadow fell across me. The borg was standing directly over me. His bare, silver-black chassis radiating heat, his golden optics burning down through the gloom with an unblinking, predatory intensity.
Slowly, deliberately, he raised his heavy-caliber Overture pistol and pressed the cold iron muzzle directly against my forehead.
"Wait! Wait! Wait!" I blurted out, swallowing the bile in my throat and trying like hell to sound like a professional instead of a corpse-in-waiting. "You're going to regret pulling that trigger, choom!"
The gun didn't move a millimeter. His golden optics just locked onto mine, that flat, uncaring digital hum vibrating through the steel barrel.
"Is that a threat?" the borg asked. His voice carried that same chilling, mechanical undertone.
"No! I mean, look at me, do I look like a threat?" I forced a jagged, sarcastic laugh, even though my heart was trying to hammer its way through my ribs. "I mean I can help you. Look, I'm not 6th Street. I don't fly the colors, I don't give a fuck about them, and I sure as hell don't get paid enough to die for a dead lieutenant. I'm just a freelance runner who was hired for a data job. I can help you clean this whole mess up, erase the local footprints, scrub the security backups, overwrite the district subnet log."
I took a shaky breath, the cold steel of the muzzle biting into my skin.
"But if you zero me? You leave a loud, bleeding data trail," I pressed on, leaning into the smartass confidence that usually kept me alive. "The rest of 6th Street is going to find out exactly what happened down here. They'll have your face, your biometric signature, and every byte of footage from the upper levels, you kill me, and you're fighting the entire district until you run out of juice."
The borg stood perfectly still for two seconds. A long, agonizing pause where I could practically hear him weighing the variables.
"And how am I supposed to take your word for it?" It asked, the cold iron pressing a fraction harder against my skull. "What's to stop you from ratting me out to the street the second you walk out of this?"
Instead of giving him a verbal promise, I just smiled a sharp, reckless, cornered-animal grin. I raised a trembling hand and gestured toward the monitors on the wall.
"Check the feeds," I whispered.
On the glowing blue screens, the remaining 6th Street stragglers across the upper levels were moving. Some were frantically rushing toward the stairwell to reinforce the basement, while others were already packing gear to delta away from the warehouse entirely.
Then, at the exact same time, it happened.
It looked as if they had all been struck by an invisible, coordinated hand, every single soldier on the screens froze. Their rifles clattered to the floor boards, they began screaming, clawing at their temples, and grasping their heads in pure, agonizing neural feedback as the Synapse Burnout daemons I'd quietly queued up in the background tore through their personal links. A microsecond later, their cyberware shorted out completely. The sheer voltage spike caused their heads and torsos to spontaneously combust, throwing violent plumes of fire and black smoke across the security feeds.
The grayed-out icons on my HUD multiplied until the squad network was nothing but a graveyard of flatlines. I had fried every last witness in the building.
I slowly turned my eyes back to the gold optics staring down at me, my breathing ragged but the smartass smirk still plastered on my face.
"There," I muttered, wiping the sweat from my forehead. "Now I can't go back to the street. You believe me now?
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Authors Note: That's it for Chapter 17, Judgement, hope you enjoyed it.
Judgement felt right because the card is about reckoning and being forced to face the choices that brought you here. Rex finally gets the confrontation he spent this arc chasing. Genos deals with the consequences of trying to keep this quiet for as long as he could, and 0J0 makes a decision about which side she wants to be standing on when it's over.
Quick question did Genos feel out of character with how brutal he was in the hallway? My thinking was that once the EMP landed and they opened up with weapons specifically meant to put him down, he stopped treating them like people he could safely incapacitate. Whether that read as consistent or jarring is something I genuinely want to know.
Also curious whether the POV switches between 0J0, Genos, and Rex landed. The same threat was supposed to feel completely different depending on who was looking at it.
Let me know what worked and what didn't.