Leo stepped in front of Rhyne and pulled out his personal link.
In that instant, a flood of clues flashed through his mind and snapped into place—
Rhyne had to be saved.
No question.
Because the attempt on Rhyne wasn't just one corp making a move.
It was an assassination backed by multiple corps, a final ultimatum from the corporations to an "independent" Night City.
The corps could not tolerate some little city mayor stringing them up across the battlefield, forcing them into long-term, restrained investment, fattening somebody else while bleeding themselves.
This day was always going to come.
And Rhyne had clearly seen it coming a long time ago.
"I... heh... thirst... always... thirst... wait..."
The muscles in Rhyne's throat spasmed completely. He couldn't get any words out.
What he had wanted to say was that he had always been waiting for Night City to produce a crew like this—some brutal local monsters with tech, guts, brains, and real combat capability.
Sooner or later, Night City was going to get crushed by the corps. His only path to survival was to cultivate a local enterprise before they killed him off.
Or a gang.
That worked too.
Of course, those were all lines from speeches he had been preparing for years. Now he couldn't even finish speaking, and still got saved anyway, which gave him a strange kind of comfort:
Night City's corruption did a better job than all my speeches ever could!
Granted, the fatass was being a little self-indulgent there.
Leo was saving him because no matter how you looked at it, the corps had already ruined this world.
And whenever the corps wanted to do something rotten, Leo was going to stand against them.
So Rhyne could not die.
But reality had drifted a little off from expectation:
Arasaka had not made a decisive move after Rhyne entered the Red Queen's Race.
Instead, Peralez was standing here himself, taking an enormous risk.
Which meant Leo had no choice but to consider several new possibilities.
Just before Leo plugged his personal link into Rhyne's port to deal with the neurovirus in his system, he suddenly asked:
"Arasaka not making a move surprised you, didn't it?"
Peralez showed no reaction at all.
The AI's expression control had reached perfection.
Yes.
Leo was sure Peralez was under AI control right now—
or more precisely, it was the AI speaking through Peralez's body.
That kind of detail wasn't something a normal person could notice.
But today, here, inside Leo's brain and hardware, there was more than one AI.
And that led to the second thing Leo intended to do—
Peralez was a man being controlled by an AI.
But before he was fully taken over, Leo had actually supported Peralez's ideas. At worst, he had just been a little too idealistic.
V and Jackie had both asked Leo, before coming here, what he thought about Rhyne and Peralez.
An emperor of the underworld was still just an emperor of the underworld. No matter how badass gangs got, they couldn't cough up hundreds or thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
So at most, V and Jackie had only imagined helping one side.
They definitely hadn't expected it to turn into this—
them deciding who the future mayor of Night City would be.
As for Holt, everyone instinctively ignored him.
After all, he was openly Arasaka's dog. Nobody respected him, and the corps obviously wouldn't pick him either.
Unlike Holt, both Rhyne and Peralez had very similar rise-to-the-top stories.
Peralez lost both parents early, worked his ass off to get into Night University, and received scholarship support from Night Corp.
Rhyne's parents had both been corpo personnel. His father died in the Arasaka Tower nuke, and his mother was attacked by a rogue AI during a Net operation and became a vegetable.
Even with that background, he still got into Night University and entered politics through sheer effort.
Honestly, both of them were the kind of hard-working, self-made bastards who earned their place.
If Peralez had truly been a "free" man, Leo might actually have leaned more toward helping him.
And that was where the problem lay.
Leo knew there were a lot of things wrong with Peralez—
from the moment Night Corp started funding him, Night Corp had already set its sights on him.
That company was different from the others.
Its real executive authority was, in fact, a hidden AI—
the same entity that had commissioned Muramasa to design the wireless micro-transmitters.
The same mysterious figure from the game:
Mr. Blue Eyes.
From the moment Peralez was chosen, Night Corp had continuously used some kind of device capable of directly affecting the brain, combined with drugs, hormone control, and educational suggestion, to subtly reshape his thinking.
Or to use another word—
the very word Peralez had just spoken himself:
"Conditioning."
Some of what Peralez had told Leo in the past may well have been genuine.
But his thoughts themselves had already been externally altered.
So aggressively altered that he had forgotten one basic fact:
Unlike Rhyne, who had compensation money from both parents dying, Peralez's family had never had enough to support him through a decent secondary education. It was his brother—working around the clock, grinding himself to death—who paid for his tuition and survival environment with his life.
That was the only reason Peralez had the life he had today.
But somehow—
maybe because the model Blue Eyes implanted into him clashed too hard with his actual life—
Peralez, as a child of the slums, was supposed to remain fixed in his social class.
But because of his brother's sacrifice, his own hard work, and a little luck, he had successfully broken out of that class.
If Peralez had been a whole person, Leo would, deep down, have preferred helping him.
But unfortunately—
the current Peralez couldn't even remember that brother.
That slight tremor in his voice may have been his brain screaming under the weight of too much data flow.
Maybe he already knew something was wrong.
Maybe his brain had already started sounding the alarm.
But—
all it took was a little current beyond the human threshold to fully suppress human brain activity.
Leo didn't hate Peralez.
Not even if a huge chunk of his worldview had been fabricated by Mr. Blue Eyes through technology.
So while saving Rhyne,
Leo also intended to free Peralez from control.
Killing Rhyne was just another familiar scene in this world: the strong exercising their freedom to kill the weak.
Mr. Blue Eyes reshaping Peralez's mind, on the other hand, was technology twisting free will itself.
If Leo let Rhyne die, and let Peralez fully become a tool for Blue Eyes to "maintain" social stability, Leo could become an underground king—
a king recognized by the corps—
but he would only ever be an underground king.
Beautiful.
But fake.
If he insisted on standing against the corps and against Blue Eyes,
Leo might very well flatline tonight.
But he still chose the latter.
Real.
And brutal.
So how exactly was he going to do it?
That went back to the line he had just used to test Blue Eyes:
Rhyne had arrived at the Red Queen's Race right on schedule. No matter how you looked at it, Arasaka only needed to make one move and the whole thing would be over.
But in reality, Rhyne was still alive.
And Blue Eyes had pushed his highest-grade political asset, cultivated over a long stretch of time with enormous money and effort, right in front of three violent edgerunners.
Maybe Blue Eyes still had some interest in pulling Leo back to his side.
But—
even then, he should not have been standing there calmly, leaving Leo with such an obvious survival option: kidnap both him and Rhyne and run.
Unless he himself was the trap.
That logic made perfect sense.
At the end of the day, Arasaka's unexpected restraint had pushed the whole situation toward the worst possible outcome. Blue Eyes had gone to all this effort to deliver Rhyne to the Red Queen's Race, clearly expecting Arasaka to make the move.
And they had done nothing.
Even though they had already made Holt file the room reservation request.
Because Arasaka had not acted, Night Corp's Mr. Blue Eyes had no choice but to act personally—
but he also couldn't leave traces that would attract suspicion from the other corps.
So he could only wait for Leo to make the move, and shift all the traces onto Leo instead.
That required extremely high-level netrunning—
and for the victim to take the bait voluntarily.
To willingly jack into Peralez's network.
Thinking through that, Leo continued:
"What you wanted was to use the virus in Rhyne's head to hack me too. Kill Rhyne, get rid of me while you're at it, rescue your wife, appear on TV as a hero, win support from the gangs and the corps, and secure victory over Holt in the election."
"And you think Arasaka refusing to go along with it was because they were wary of this exact play, right?"
Mr. Blue Eyes stopped pretending and nodded.
"Very smart. But realizing it now is a little late. Though if you're willing to turn back... it still isn't too late."
"No matter what, you can't win this hand. Without the shelter of politics, you can only be hunted down and killed by MaxTac and the corps."
"All you can gain now is the truth: yes, we all want Rhyne dead. Accept it."
"I could kidnap you," Leo said suddenly. "Kidnap both of you."
"Go ahead. Try."
Leo smiled.
Classic honeypot tactics.
That kind of strategy never got old in net warfare.
He turned the personal link in his hand toward Peralez.
Rogue AIs were always confident in their own network skill.
Especially when they had enough backing.
And right now, Mr. Blue Eyes was supremely confident: supported by Night Corp's vast servers, about to execute a precise, rapid cyberstrike against an opponent who didn't know he was dealing with an AI.
Too bad for him—
there was more than one AI inside Leo's head.
And more than just the one body standing here—
The cross-dimensional network compute from the Marvel world could provide a full 700 CCUs.
More than twenty times what Mr. Blue Eyes could reasonably estimate as Leo's upper limit.
In network combat, the side with initiative had enormous freedom.
An unexpected AI.
Unexpected compute.
Unexpected counterattack.
Leo was going to use Peralez's body, this link, this route—
to strike directly into Night Corp's internal network.
Just before the personal link pierced Peralez's port, Leo suddenly grinned and fired off a short, contextless message:
[Little AI. You were hiding pretty deep.]
A situation completely outside its model and database caused Blue Eyes's server load to spike sharply.
That was doubt.
But before the doubt could be resolved, an assault beyond imagination punched a hole straight through Night Corp's network defenses.
A mere human—
yet outputting the compute power of a mid-sized corporation.
A mere human—
yet launching three attack vectors changing at speeds comparable to Blue Eyes's own.
No—
four.
A one-man army.