In Watson, the info-war between Leo and Muramasa had burned out whole sections of circuitry. In the darkness, scattered lights still flickered—people who'd planned ahead were already switching to backup power.
Without the usual spam ads and retina-searing light pollution, the streets felt empty.
Not silent.
Just less crowded.
And in that relative emptiness, another sound echoed through the district—
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack—
Bang!
A quadrupedal robot with absolutely zero design sense blasted past a corner at high speed. Two of its legs ran along the wall, the other two skidding across the street.
Its speed and sheer mass were so extreme that neither wall nor pavement could stay intact. The four-legged war machine gouged hideous scars into both surfaces, then casually rolled over the parked cars lining the curb.
Muramasa's large hand kept slicing fuel tanks, engines, and other parts off the crushed vehicles, refining its design on the fly.
And the quadruped war machine kept getting faster.
And stronger.
Inside Muramasa's head, two voices were running in parallel.
One told it to cut and run—to escape while it still could, find another route out of Night City, preserve its own existence.
The other told it that running would only delay the inevitable. This was humanity's home turf. There was nowhere to run.
It had to win this duel.
Humans search for meaning. They lose themselves in doubt. AIs do too, sometimes—though usually they call it self-diagnostics.
But Muramasa wasn't wasting cycles on that kind of redundant self-check.
Both thoughts echoed in its processor, and it chose the second.
The legendary Mackinaw was up ahead.
The final battle was about to begin—
The quadruped war machine was primitive, savage. Muramasa had added more arms and components to itself.
Boom!
A rocket detonated behind it, boosting its speed yet again.
"Stop running!"
Muramasa's combat capability had gone way past anything Leo expected.
And worse—
it was abnormal.
A rogue AI wasn't omnipotent. If an AI was originally designed to manage financial data, it wouldn't also be good at controlling a power grid.
If an AI was built to design weapons and hardware, it wouldn't also excel at maintaining synthetic meat production quality.
An AI's base model determines how it processes data. Every processing style corresponds to an initial database, and together they form that AI's earliest "personality."
Muramasa—
was absolutely not an AI designed for behavioral control.
When the pilot inside the Centaur mech got burned to death, Muramasa had only been able to control the machine somewhat stiffly.
So how the hell was it now showing combat skill and battlefield performance beyond even V's once it got into a human body?
Leo could only think of one answer:
That humanoid body that looked like a machine—
had originally really been human.
Now that was something.
Because the full-body chrome Leo was currently using for Brick and Maekawa still kept cyberization at around 15%.
But that black silhouette?
No way it was under that threshold.
Once cyberization goes past 20%, there's basically only the brain, spinal cord, and some terminal nerves left un-replaced. And every point lower than that ramps up the side effects drastically, sending the odds of cyberpsychosis skyrocketing geometrically.
Where the hell had Muramasa found a little monster like that?
Not just a body with maxed-out physical aptitude—
if Muramasa's combat mode had been inherited from that human, then this whole sequence showed utterly absurd combat technique too.
Way beyond the level of any normal merc.
"What do we do now?!"
Leo jabbed a finger behind them and shouted back, "Tear that thing apart!"
In the rear cargo bed, Joestar—who had narrowly clawed back one, maybe two lives—went green in the face.
"That thing?!"
Muramasa had hot-modded the Centaur mech in real time, stripping out all the cabling and armor meant for heavy weapon integration, even ditching two arms and adding linkages—
That thing was turning into a four-legged war car.
Honestly, watching that transformation happen live, even Leo had to admit Muramasa's hands-on build skill was terrifying. This was already beyond anything an engineer could describe.
It was basically a manual-transmission Transformer.
Under Muramasa's modifications, the mech had even started using rockets from its own weapons bay as propulsion, and it was still accelerating.
The legendary Mackinaw was ridiculously fast in a straight line.
But this was city terrain.
Physics still mattered.
In terrain this complex, there was no way to hit full speed.
By contrast, now that the Centaur had become a four-legged machine, it could leap onto walls at corners and surf them with inertia.
Practically no need to slow down.
"This is gonna be rough!" V used webbing to yank an Achilles tech rifle out of the vehicle.
There was a time when this thing was a restricted military-grade weapon way beyond her reach.
Now?
Hitting the Centaur war machine with it just left black holes in the armor. Sure, there was penetration depth—but clearly not enough to matter.
It did damage.
Just not much.
Unless they had another dozen shooters unloading at once.
"Try harder! Just try harder!"
Jackie slapped the roof of the truck. "I'm saying—can't you just hit it with that Blackwall thing?! Isn't that what NetWatch is for?!"
Leo glanced at the black coffin on Joestar's back.
Not really.
The original plan had been to use the Blackwall as the last resort—but only after connecting to Muramasa through the Flathead.
The wireless RF devices spread all across the city were indeed under Joestar's mom's control now, and they could directly link to NetWatch's network and let them attack through the Blackwall.
But that was where the real problem started.
Joestar's mom—
was also a highly abnormal case.
During development of the "Ronin" baseline full-body cyberware platform, she had contributed heavily to the designs and even loaded custom skill chips for Japanese street ronin.
That was what let those Tyger Claws handle high-speed bike chases with the polish of Arasaka ninjas.
That kind of integration was not something a normal human could pull off.
In a sense, what Brainiac had used on Joestar's mom was also a new kind of AI tech.
Hard to say whether NetWatch might decide to exercise a little law enforcement while they were at it.
So they couldn't use that method for a direct strike.
Right now Muramasa only had the Centaur war machine and that humanoid body as its main servers. Leo wasn't totally sure how rogue AIs stored themselves, but in theory, direct damage to either chassis could directly damage its database and weaken it.
So the more violently they wrecked it, the better.
"No!" Leo shouted back, then yelled to Jackie and V, "The bounty for capturing a rogue AI is one million eddies! For a million eddies, put some muscle into it!"
"Easy for you to say," V muttered, staring behind the truck—
The sound of pavement being crushed, roadways splitting, and people screaming from inside nearby buildings was getting closer and closer.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack—
At the corner, the huge Centaur war machine came grinding into view, two legs crushing the wall, glass and concrete peeling off under the pressure while the pavement below fractured continuously.
At those speeds, combined with its mass, it was literally carving grotesque tracks into both wall and ground.
The Centaur mech had really become a four-legged war machine.
Leo cursed to himself.
He already knew rogue AIs were hard to deal with.
He just hadn't expected them to be this hard.
They'd mobilized gangs across the whole district, burned through every trick and piece of tech they had—
and in the end, they still had to gamble.
But the good news was—
things had finally become simple.
"Think about the million—" Leo shouted as he injected himself with a dose of neuroactive stimulant.
They were already out of North Watson's industrial zone and into central Watson—
complex terrain, nowhere left to retreat.
The octopus arms retracted from Jackie's power armor and handed out one more round of injectors.
Jackie got lizard serum.
V got the same neuroactive stimulant as Leo.
This was the final prep.
Compared to how heavily armed they'd looked at the start, from this point on, what they had left was exactly what was visible.
"And think about the Afterlife—the finish line's right ahead!"
At those words, even under crushing pressure, both Jackie and V laughed.
Because wasn't that the whole damn point?
Tonight, only one crew in Night City's underworld would come out on top.
"Y-you guys… what are you gonna do? You three got some other ace up your sleeve?" Joestar looked at the three heavy hitters suddenly striding toward the edge of the vehicle, and got a little scared.
"Hold on tight, kid."
Leo used the octopus arms to climb onto the roof of the truck.
Jackie stood at the back of the cargo bed.
V stood atop one octopus arm, the limb coiled like a spring, charged and ready to launch.
That formation…
what the hell did it mean?
Before Joestar could ask, the legendary Mackinaw suddenly slammed on the brakes.
The distance between both sides vanished fast, and Joestar's face turned green all over again:
These three big shots really didn't have some hidden backup plan.
They were about to throw down with that Transformer head-on.
Didn't rogue AIs die if you touched them wrong?
Had these gonks gone completely insane?!
Broken stone and shattered glass flew through the air. Black smoke from burning wreckage spread through the street.
A ruined avenue.
A darkened city.
Countless hidden optics focusing in.
Everyone wanted to know—
who was going to cross the line first.
The Afterlife.
Rogue finished a cigarette.
Right now, the only people left in the bar were her and Claire behind the counter.
Tonight, the club would welcome no one except the victor.
Anyone else had no right to walk in.
"What do you think it looks like out there right now? What if the one who walks in is some Euro?" Claire looked genuinely tense.
"A Euro?"
Rogue shook her head and gave a smile that didn't mean much of anything.
"The biggest problem isn't a European walking in."
"The biggest problem is that no 'person' walks in."
She flicked ash from the cigarette and said, "Don't forget to ask our new legend for their drink recipe. Somebody like that… odds are they might die for no clear reason by tomorrow."