One hour after the Midnight Nuclear Blast Incident, NetWatch was the busiest organization in the city—
From the moment Leo directly attacked Night Corp, Bryce's officially recorded time away from duty totaled less than twenty minutes.
But when he returned to work, he discovered NetWatch's workload had increased by more than tenfold.
Even Bryce hadn't predicted the final outcome…
Night Corp had been directly attacked!
The data barriers themselves had been blasted open in the public Net!
He originally thought Leo was simply volunteering to save Rhyne.
Instead, both Rhyne and Peralez walked out of the underground complex shoulder to shoulder, former political rivals suddenly united—and they immediately hired entirely new security teams.
What the hell happened down there?
Originally, Saburo Arasaka's arrival was supposed to shift the focus of all operations toward intelligence gathering on Arasaka Corporation.
But now the situation had changed.
People realized the problems inside the city itself were equally terrifying.
Bryce returned to the NetWatch office in Night City.
He hadn't personally been inside cyberspace during the attack, but the monitoring software and automated programs had preserved all the telemetry data.
Without question—
An AI had participated in the Night Corp attack.
And not just any AI.
Preliminary estimates suggested multiple AIs had appeared simultaneously, and the battle involved more than a thousand CCUs of processing power.
You had to understand:
The same amount of processing power meant entirely different things depending on who used it.
A script kiddie might use 1 CCU to run a few translation programs and consider it impressive.
A top-tier netrunner could use the same 1 CCU to crack open multiple unprotected neural ports—and with preparation, their destructive capability could surpass a script kiddie using several CCUs.
And compared to AIs?
Even elite netrunners were just beginner script kiddies.
Maybe worse.
Which meant the Night Corp attack exposed not one, but multiple ultra-dangerous AIs—
And now they had all vanished again.
Bryce sat at his workstation while automated systems performed diagnostics on his cyberware.
His mind drifted.
He really had wanted the Hamburger King to save Rhyne.
Because deep down, Bryce wasn't especially loyal to corporations.
His sense of duty came from fighting AIs.
That mission gave him peace of mind.
But now the situation had gone completely beyond imagination—
Beyond everyone's imagination.
There were nukes in the real world.
And now cyberspace had revealed its own nuclear weapons.
Just like everyone terrified by the literal nuclear explosion, the people who worked in cyberspace every day shared the same question:
Where did these AIs come from?
[Dragonslayer (ID Hidden) is connecting to encrypted communication.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: I'm guessing you've already lost contact with those three. Headquarters suspects there were additional AIs besides Muramasa.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: One of them might even be an AI themselves. Who knows.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: Headquarters assigned me to support you. What's the status of your Pacifica servers?]
Bryce froze.
Then asked in return:
[Bryce: I thought our primary suspect was Night Corp? The attack traces clearly indicate Night Corp had highly abnormal systems operating on the public Net.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: Maybe. But you know how it works. Those are another corporation's legal assets. Normally we don't target them.]
[Bryce: That's not very convincing. Soulkiller is also a legal corporate asset.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: Stop asking questions. I need access to your Pacifica network. Hurry up before they escape.]
So now he was supposed to join the hunt for the Hamburger King too?
NetWatch suspecting Leo might be an AI felt like a direct insult to Bryce's professional competence.
Bryce didn't believe any of the three were AIs.
But…
The attack capabilities they demonstrated clearly exceeded what Muramasa alone should've been capable of.
As a corporate employee, Bryce instinctively believed corporate conclusions carried weight.
And honestly, a lot of things could only be explained that way.
But…
If the Hamburger King really was an AI—
Then Bryce's worldview started cracking.
Because one of the foundations of his belief system was simple:
AI equals danger.
NetWatch was humanity's final wall against AIs.
That belief was what kept him passionate about his work.
But he didn't think Leo was a bad person.
And if Leo truly had attacked Night Corp, then that attack was also the process through which he saved Rhyne—
And united Peralez and Rhyne.
Bryce didn't think that was evil.
That single moment of hesitation caused him to submit false intelligence to the corporation for the first time in his life.
[Bryce: All Pacifica systems are offline. I need time to rebuild the infrastructure. I'll require a new communications vehicle.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: Request approved.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: By the way, I remember they had some ties to Militech. I tried a probing intrusion against Militech just now and the results were… unpleasant. What netrunners are they using?]
Bryce looked surprised.
Militech absolutely had respectable network technology.
But after the collapse of the Old Net, their philosophy had shifted heavily toward brute force—massive hardware, overwhelming signal coverage, high-end military-grade systems.
Classic military doctrine.
Their cyberspace espionage and intrusion capabilities were mediocre.
They specialized in defending infrastructure from intrusion.
As for enemy netrunners?
Militech preferred physically unplugging the enemy's network with bullets and missiles.
Yet under tonight's conditions…
Even a Dragonslayer found them troublesome?
So there were more experts involved?
[Bryce: Probably new hires.]
[Bryce: Speaking of which, I sent a squad into the Badlands earlier to intercept someone allegedly being hunted by Arasaka. They still haven't returned.]
[Bryce: I'd like authorization for another field squad.]
[Encrypted Dragonslayer Channel: Not realistic. Your region is overloaded right now.]
[Bryce: I have some contacts. I can get hold of a mercenary squad already operating in the Badlands. You just need to provide support.]
Of course, those "contacts" were actually Night City's newest ultra-wanted fugitives.
And that "mercenary squad" was really the fugitives' own crew.
Bryce suddenly understood Rhyne a little better.
The Hamburger King had left.
Yet somehow all the people he left behind looked more trustworthy now.
Militech Tower.
Like every other corporation, engineers had all been dragged out of bed and forced back to work overnight.
Backup robots rolled out from maintenance bays to assist with system-wide repairs.
To be fair, after the EMP attack on Corpo Plaza last time, everyone had gotten much more efficient at this kind of thing.
Strangely enough, there was only one netrunner occupying the netrunning chamber.
The netrunner was a woman.
Long, smooth hair.
A slim frame.
But on closer inspection, nearly her entire body had been converted into cyberware.
She lay inside the dive chair glowing faintly from head to toe.
Active cooling systems.
Graphene shielding layers.
Multi-layer data interfaces.
In short—
Very advanced.
[Songbird: NetWatch launched a probing intrusion into our systems. Looks like they also suspect the fugitives may not be human, and assume we're involved.]
[Songbird: That's a problem. We should deal with it.]
[Susan: What did Thorton say?]
[Stout: They said they're willing to dump all Mackinaw concept stock directly to us. Intelligence says that even if we refuse, they're planning to liquidate everything anyway.]
The entire operations channel went silent for a moment.
Thorton had completely pissed themselves?