[Arasaka Group Encrypted Channel: The target is moving at high speed along the elevated freeway at the edge of Westbrook. Suspected rogue AI "Muramasa."]
[Militech Military Channel: Rogue AI confirmed. High-risk weapon assembly in progress.]
[Petrochem Security Channel: Recommend dispatching security agents for safety sweep and threat exclusion.]
[Kang Tao Security Division: Rogue AI.]
[Biotechnica Security Division: .]
A rogue AI can run rampant on the Net—but Night City's Net is mostly localnets, and almost every localnet with any real scale has a Blackwall tie-in.
So if a rogue AI truly goes loud and careless online, it'll get crushed under enormous Blackwall pressure.
But some AIs—Muramasa, for example—aren't just Net demons. It's a top-tier tech specialist, a weapons designer, and a mechanical-structure savant.
Those micro high-frequency emitters buried all over Night City became its first-wave shock troops for intrusion and sabotage. Those tiny devices effortlessly shattered the city's non-corporate power grid at the physical layer, pooled huge amounts of electricity, and seized control of most wireless bands.
It got the opening move.
And for once, the corps could only grab their hair and swear.
First, wireless triangulation depends heavily on device endurance and the strength of transceivers—and that strength depends on how much power the system can feed.
Muramasa's network had already stolen massive power and distributed it across countless hidden nodes embedded throughout the city. The total capacity was huge, the system endurance was absurd, it was hard to locate, and even if you wanted to hit it physically… there was nowhere obvious to strike.
Second, the frequencies and encoding methods an AI uses are effectively impossible for humans to decode—especially on short timelines. If we're talking "decode it fast," you can confidently drop the word "effectively."
Humans cannot decode an AI's wireless encoding in the time available.
Even if you jack a cable into the signal source, most netrunners would just get cooked.
So inside the corps, everything lit up.
Very loud.
Very busy.
Especially at Arasaka.
Because Muramasa had been captured by them years ago.
And here's the cruel coincidence:
The moment the corps realized this unknown-origin AI—with unknown tech—had appeared in Night City, hijacked power across half the city, and collapsed civilian networks, they immediately spun up their highest-class info channels to report the situation to HQ.
Just as the scramble threatened to turn into a full-blown land-grab for the rogue AI, Arasaka's Kujira carrier quietly dropped every layer of disguise—and suddenly appeared less than fifty kilometers off Night City's coast.
Night City Hall had only just started drafting paperwork to permit a short-term mooring for that monster.
A lot of corporate intel units and security assets weren't even in position yet.
Two crises collided.
Do they investigate Arasaka's sudden arrival?
Or do they chase the AI?
They had to pick their poison.
People cursed under their breath:
Saburo Arasaka, that old dog, timed it down to the second.
But a few who'd lived long enough—and stared Arasaka down long enough—felt something else entirely:
Arasaka. Saburo Arasaka. On major events, he always seemed to seize the weather of fate.
Unfortunately, people like that were vanishingly rare—so rare you could call them nonexistent.
The carrier reached the coast under cover of chaos.
Arasaka Tower. Upper floors.
Saburo's "unfilial son," Yorinobu Arasaka, stared at the stream of HUD alerts and felt his chest tighten.
His father was plotting something.
And he knew nothing.
Meanwhile, the Unlimited Extreme Metal Race had reached the fastest stretch of city terrain, already swung past Kabuki Market, and was about to enter Watson—the final leg of the course.
A convoy and a massive robot screamed down the roadway, while invisible electromagnetic waves pushed the humans hiding in darkness toward extremity.
Explosions came in waves.
Gunfire came in waves.
The rogue AI was practically steamrolling—pursuing the Burger King it had pinned so much hope on, chasing him like a guillotine on wheels.
Yorinobu collapsed into his chair, limbs going slack.
When the race first began, he'd thought this familiar scene looked alive—people venting emotion with the few options they had left, declaring turf, clawing for a future.
But now he felt like it wasn't just the beginning that matched—
The ending would match too.
These street legends would burn bright for a moment, and the moment the corps got what they wanted, they'd be swept away like debris.
He'd thought he'd grown steadier.
But his father's sudden move shattered his confidence.
Even his faith in those three "impossible" monsters started to wobble.
He feared Saburo Arasaka.
That fear poisoned every calculation he tried to make.
Yorinobu's eyes drifted, unfocused, toward the road feed—
Then a sharp flash yanked his vision back into clarity.
The giant robot's shoulder cannon had been hit.
A rogue AI's strike speed is slower than a human's?
He looked closer and realized: in the factory ruins of Watson, Maelstrom—somehow—had scavenged power armor and hauled out a pile of heavy weapons, disrupting Muramasa's assembly.
"Can they win?"
Watson North—nearly crippled by Maelstrom infighting. The final segment.
Muramasa was overflowing with confidence in this "build-the-gun" duel.
It was surprised Leo could jury-rig a high-output electromagnetic cannon from a damaged control board and a Nekomata—but that board had already been cooked by EMP.
How could a human possibly rework a complex three-dimensional stacked control platform faster than an AI?
And the truth was: he couldn't.
Leo really was slower.
Inside Muramasa's chassis, the assembly drones carrying parts underwent violent changes. Heat-collector components that had lost cooling began to melt at full-speed operation—perfectly, almost artistically—bonding cables and components that needed welding, fusing them together in exactly the right places.
Mechanisms and parts moved like limbs—like the AI had a body—each joint obeying the current like muscle obeys nerve.
The moment the final cable locked into place, Muramasa didn't even wait for the structure braces to be fully welded dead-tight.
It began charging immediately.
The EMG-85's electromagnetic magazine snapped into the weapon body.
Cryo agent vented in a rush, expected to drive the conductive pathways down to the critical threshold within one second—
Once the conductive pathway entered superconductive state, a full charge would take under a millisecond.
The slug would launch.
That battered Mackinaw would be perforated.
Leo—its enemy, its rival, the second human it had ever met who dared compete in this domain—
Would be defeated like the last one.
Only…
Unlike the last human, Leo wouldn't survive to remain a rival.
Muramasa would lose this opponent forever.
A sensation it couldn't name.
0.7 seconds. Cryo agent began spreading. Material properties started to shift. Resistance collapsed. Current surged.
0.8 seconds. Muramasa felt its influence radius weaken.
0.9 seconds. It finally registered that someone had reached its side—midair—
It hadn't detected anyone?
"Ha! Tin can—Brick caught you, you piece of scrap!"
Brick, sealed inside power armor, kicked the Centaur mech's cockpit hard enough to skew it sideways. The operator inside was crushed into paste. Then the power armor's massive hand punched straight through the electromagnetic cannon's coil housing.
Muramasa stared at Brick.
And stared at Leo.
Leo's Octo-arm popped out a single claw.
A middle finger.
And for Brick, Muramasa had only one thing to say:
"ばかやろ (You goddamn idiot)!"
That spot's going to blow!