Way back in middle school there was this kid, Adam. He always had to be the most 'hardcore' person in any given room, always performing for an audience that hadn't asked for the show. I had a theory it was displacement behavior from his parents' divorce but I was twelve... and not qualified to diagnose anything. Anyway, one time at lunch he pulled out his phone and showed me a decapitation video on Youtube, the grainy shaky-cam kind that circulated back when you could find a step by step tutorial on how to cook crack if you had ten minutes and an internet connection. A man's head hanging onto his shoulders by the last few fibers of his neck because whoever swung the machete hadn't committed to the swing.
The image had stayed with me for years, though I never showed it.
[VERBAL DETERRENCE: FAILED.]
[COMBAT IMMINENT.]
This was nothing like that. Whether it was the sharpness of the blade, or the strength of the arm behind it, or some combination of both that I didn't want to think about too carefully, Freddie's head hit the concrete in a clean, complete separation. No hanging fleshy bits. No ambiguity. Just a headless body that had been a person a moment ago, folding sideways, and a sound that I did not have a good word for.
I stood there.
I was aware, in a distant and clinical way, that my body was not responding the way a human body would have responded. No adrenaline dump. No shaking hands. No nausea climbing my throat because I didn't have a stomach that worked that way anymore. The biological machinery of shock and horror, the physical revolt that the body stages when the mind encounters something it cannot process, none of it was available to me.
What I had instead was the full and unobstructed experience of knowing exactly what I had just done, with nothing to hide behind.
I just killed him.
The thought arrived with a clarity that felt almost punitive, not a distant, abstract acknowledgment of an event but the immediate, present-tense reality of it, the understanding that thirty seconds ago Freddie had been a nervous kid with a vending machine gun and a bad plan.
I just killed someone.
I just killed him and my arm isn't even shakingandIhadn'tmeanttoandhecameatmefirstandnoneofthatwasmakingthethoughtgoaway.
The blade was still extended. I looked at them with the dissociation of someone looking at a part of themselves they don't recognize, silver and bleeding red in the parking lot light, the combat suite that had made the decision my conscious mind hadn't finished making yet, still idling, still ready, waiting for the next threat assessment to come back positive.
I just— Running footsteps.
"You fucking killed him!" Sam's voice cracked across the lot, raw and high and past the point where volume was a choice. "You cyberpsycho fuck!" The gun came up. He fired and the rounds came in and I moved without deciding to, grabbing Freddie's body by the jacket and swinging it between me and the incoming fire, the impacts registering against the mass of it with sounds I was going to spend considerable time not thinking about. Blood hit my hands and my arms of my jacket, warm and immediate and exactly as real as everything else that had happened in the last ninety seconds.
I tried to explain, "It, I didn't mean, he was trying to, just lis—"
"AHHHHG FUCK YOU!" His voice broke completely on the last word. "Rex is going to kill you for this! He's going to fucking kill you!" He was close now, close enough that the gun was empty and he had stopped pretending it could hurt me, the knife came out, coming for my face, an action a cold part of my mind informed me, that suggested he had abandoned strategy in favor of pure grief-fueled forward momentum.
[COMBAT SUBROUTINES: ENGAGED.]
Something settled inside me that I did not ask to settle. The turmoil didn't disappear, it was still there, I could still feel the weight of what I had done sitting in the center of my processing like a stone that wasn't going anywhere. But the combat suite drew a clean line between what I felt and what my body was doing, and on the other side of that line my movements became something else entirely.
I felt bad about what I had done. I was not going to let him hack at my faceplate because of it.
I threw Freddie's body at him and as he dodged to the right, in a surprisingly agile move, I let Sam's momentum carry him into the space I had just vacated, and then taking advantage of his unsure footing, I kicked him. It wasn't as complicated as the Capoeira like martial arts I had used to incapacitate those Wraiths, a simple straight forward Spartan kick, full extension, the mechanical force behind it considerably in excess of what the human body was designed to absorb.
The wet crunch of his sternum breaking and his his ribcage folding in on itself echoed in the lot, like snapping wet wood. His feet left the ground, briefly, as he flew back a bit and came back down hard, bouncing once with the limpness of a body that had been structurally compromised, rolling face down before coming to rest on his back, his breathing already changed into something labored and wrong, a wet rattling quality to it that told me everything I needed to know before my VI confirmed it.
[MULTIPLE RIB FRACTURES CONFIRMED.]
[PULMONARY LACERATION DETECTED.]
[BLOOD ACCUMULATING IN PLEURAL CAVITY.]
[WITHOUT EMERGENCY MEDICAL INTERVENTION: FATAL WITHIN APPROXIMATELY 12 MINUTES.]
[CAUSE OF DEATH: HEMOTHORAX.]
I looked down at my jacket.
Several rounds had punched through the fabric and flattened themselves against my chassis, misshapen slugs of metal sitting against the plating like spent wishes. The jacket itself was ruined stained in blood, ripped open where my blade had come free from my arm and littered in entry holes surrounded by scorch marks and powder burns, the reinforced synthetic leather doing what it could and then stopping.
I took it off. For the first time since the Badlands, my arms were exposed to open air, silver and black in the lot lights, the internal musculature visible in the joints, the arm blades retracted now, no sign of what they had done except what was on the ground.
I needed new clothes anyway. I had been wearing the same set since I stripped them off those unconscious Wraiths. Not sweating meant they hadn't gotten unpleasant in the way clothes usually did but there was a mental health argument for not wearing the same outfit indefinitely that I had been planning to address at the first opportunity.
[NOTE: AVOIDANCE BEHAVIOR DETECTED.]
[ADMONISHMENT: USER IS AWARE OF WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.]
I stopped. "Yeah," I said quietly. "I know." And with a heaviness that had nothing to do with my metal frame, I turned to face my actions.
Sam had managed to move. Not far, maybe four meters, dragging himself against the base of the data terminal with the blind persistence of someone whose body was operating on instinct because the conscious mind had other things to deal with. He was on his back now, looking up at the sky, the empty gun still in his hand by force of habit rather than intention. His breathing had the quality of something trying to work through an obstruction it wasn't going to clear.
I walked toward him. He heard me coming and turned his head, found me, and raised the empty gun with a hand that wasn't entirely steady anymore, aiming it at my face. and pulled the trigger twice. The empty clicks echoed in the lot, and then his hand dropped to his side, the gun hitting the concrete, and he leaned his head back against the terminal and looked up at me with a resigned yet still defiant look in his eyes.
"Even if you kill me," he said, and coughed, and blood came up at the corner of his mouth, dark and foamy, "you're dead. Rex is going to find you for what you did to his brother. You understand that? You're going to spend whatever's left of your life looking over your shoulder."
"He came at me first, even after I let him go," I said. The words meant for him as much as me. "Self defense. Clear as day." I could see my own eyes reflected in his, two points of gold light in a face he couldn't read, which was probably a mercy for both of us.
"Don't matter," Sam said. Another cough followed by more blood. "Don't matter if it was self defense, doesn't matter if Freddie was being an idiot, doesn't matter what the law says or what's fair. Rex loved that kid. He's not going to let that lie, 6 Street's coming for your gonk ass, you killed his brother."
He wasn't wrong. I knew he wasn't wrong. I had been in this city less than a day and I already understood enough about how it worked to know that the concept of justified self defense was considerably less relevant here than the concept of what someone was willing to do about it.
I unholstered the Overture.
My arm was steady. I noticed this again, the same way I had noticed it when I had it at the back of Freddie's head 5 minutes ago, it was being steadied by actuators that the combat suite maintained regardless of what the rest of me was doing, or feeling, like a gentle hand holding up my own.
I aimed it at him and I held it there and for a second I considered mercy and about the fact that I had already crossed a line tonight that I couldn't uncross and about what kind of person I was deciding to be on the other side of it, but that look in his eyes brought up a conversation I had had not so long ago. "No one else is gonna have the decency to just knock you out."
Sam looked up at the barrel. Then at what he could see of my face.
"His cousin too," I said. I hesitated for fractions of a second, then I pulled the trigger.
The echo of it rolled across the empty lot and dissolved into the ambient noise of the city, swallowed whole, barely a ripple. Night City did not pause for this. It did not mark it. Somewhere a few blocks away an engine revved, and a horn sounded, and the machinery of the place continued exactly as it had before, indifferent and complete.
I stood over him for a moment.
Then I put the gun away, picked up what was left of my jacket, and walked back to the car.
For obvious reasons, Arroyo was no longer an option.
I pulled out of the lot without looking back, which took more conscious effort than it should have. The car settled into its low, continuous hum as I found the road and pointed it north towards Watson, and after a few minutes something about the rhythm of the hum started to work on me in a way I hadn't expected. The vibration through the seat. The engine note that sat just below thought. The city scrolling past the crystaldome in its indifferent neon procession, not caring what had happened in a parking lot twenty minutes ago, not caring what I was carrying away from it.
I had heard people talk about driving as meditation. I had always assumed that was something people said because they didn't have access to actual meditation. Sitting in traffic didn't seem spiritually useful by any measure.
But maybe there was more to that school of thought than I had given it credit for. The speed and weight and the particular quality of a machine that had been built to eat road was strangely soothing, it was strange, especially considering I was never a car guy...though to be far I've never had a car like this before.
Somewhere in the combination of those things my mind stopped circling the lot and started moving forward instead, the same way the car was moving forward, not because the thing behind me didn't matter but because forward was the only direction the road went.
I let it work.
"Hey, you," I said, after a while.
[QUERY?]
"What is it they actually call you? I've been saying 'VI' this whole time and it occurs to me I never asked." I asked it as I stopped at a redlight, pedestrians passing by, littered across the street, even at this time of day.
[DESIGNATION: M-CORE OS.]
[FULL TITLE: MULTI-CORE OPERATING SYSTEM. STANDARD INTERNAL DESIGNATION FOR INTEGRATED COGNITIVE ASSISTANCE ARCHITECTURE.]
"MK," I said, as I pressed down on the accelerator as the light turned green, road feeding into the highway, "I'm calling you MK from now on."
[AFFIRMATIVE. DESIGNATION FILED.]
"Alright MK," I said, taking a long curve as the highway fed into the northern arterial, the city opening up around me in its full evening spectacle, towers and light and the endless recursive advertisement of a place that had decided the human field of vision was commercial real estate. "Get me the contact information for the landlord or management office of Megabuilding H10 in Little China, Watson. Should be public record, don't need you to dig too deep." I paused. "This isn't Santo Domingo. The runners in Little China are second only to the Voodoo Boys, also while you are at it, point me towards the nearest properly established clothing store in Watson."
[UNDERSTOOD. SURFACE-LEVEL PUBLIC REGISTRY QUERY ONLY.]
[ADDITIONALLY: ROUTING DIRECTIONS TO NEAREST ESTABLISHED CLOTHING RETAILER: STYLISHLY. GOLDSMITH STREET. LITTLE CHINA. WATSON.]
[PROJECTING.]
A glowing amber arrow materialized at the edge of my vision, overlaid on the road ahead in a way that made the asphalt itself seem to be pointing me somewhere, the distance marker updating smoothly as I drove. It was honestly novel, in a good way, the kind of thing that should have felt intrusive and somehow didn't.
Twenty-eight seconds later a contact card appeared, in both my agent and the internal spoof I had for it.
Damn, it's like having a netrunner and a PA all in my head.
[EZ ESTATES, WATSON DISTRICT. PRIORITY LINE. PUBLIC REGISTRY CONFIRMED.]
I dialed. It rang three times before an avatar populated the small display in the corner of my HUD, a middle-aged Filipino man in a white wifebeater, reading a screamsheet with a focused expression on his face, he didn't even look up to see who was calling him, engrossed as he was on the digital magazine in his hands.
"Hoy! EZ Estates Priority Line, Watson District. This is Kuya Jun." He hadn't looked up yet. "If you're calling about the laundry machines on Floor 3, I already told you, they're not broken, you just have to kick the side hard twice. Susmariosep...so many complaints today."
"Genos Harker," I said, taking a right turn. "I'm calling about renting a studio apartment unit. One that comes with a parking space."
"Oh, you're looking for an apartment." He set the screamsheet down and looked at the screen properly for the first time. "We've got some available on the eigh—"
He stopped. "Holy shit!" He exclaimed as he saw the borg on the other end of the call, without the jacket, my heavy augmentations were far more visible.
"Uh," Kuya Jun said. He had the specific expression of a man whose customer service instincts were fighting his survival instincts and neither was winning cleanly. "We actually don't have any rooms available on the lower floors right now, so—"
"Nice try Kuya," I said. "I heard you clearly the first time. You were about to say the eighth floor."
A pause.
"I get what you're worried about," I continued, keeping my voice even, truly I did, anyone as heavily augmented as I was either worked for a Corp which was a world of trouble, or had stuffed themselves with substandard chrome, which was a cyberpshyco waiting to happen, and no Corpo would hire out a middle floor apartment. "But I'm of sound mind, I have a clean SIN, no mention of suspected psychosis, and my money is exactly as good as anyone else's. Better, actually, because I'm going to transfer it without arguing about it."
Kuya Jun looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at something off-screen, some internal registry or availability chart, and then back at me with the expression of a man making a practical decision.
"Eighth floor studio," he said carefully. "Four hundred and twenty square feet. Standard shower, not the big one. Holographic TV package included, basic tier, you want premium that's extra. Wall vending machine is stocked weekly, you put in requests through the building management app." He paused. "Parking is in the basement, one designated space, accessed by chip. The space is narrow, I'm going to tell you that now."
"That's fine."
"Security deposit, as well as first month and last months rent." He named a number. "Ten thousand eddies total, upfront."
I opened my mouth.
"As well as €$250 for parking," he added quickly.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I closed my mouth and pulled up the cross-reference MK had already started running, the building's public listing, comparable units in the district, current market rates for Little China studios with parking. The numbers assembled themselves in the corner of my vision, in an ordered list that stopped my forming argument.
It was a good deal. Genuinely, objectively a good deal for the district, for the floor, for the included amenities. Kuya Jun was not gouging me. If anything the rate was slightly below what the comparable listings suggested, which told me either he was terrified of me or he had done this long enough to know that a difficult tenant who paid reliably was better than an easy one who didn't.
It was probably both.
"Fine," I said, "Price seems fair, I'll transfer the money now, I got some errands to run, but I should be by, in an hour at the latest."
"Good," Kuya Jun agreed, with a relieved expression on his face, clearly having prepared himself for me to put up more of a fight.
The transfer processed in seconds, the balance in my account dropping with a finality that I felt more than I expected to.
[€$25 000 - €$10 250]
[€$14 750]
Twenty five thousand to fourteen thousand in under a day. The city was already doing what the city did.
"I'll meet you in the parking garage," Kuya Jun said, pulling the screamsheet back toward him now that business was concluded. "One hour. I'll bring the apartment chip, the parking chip, and the building management app download code. Don't be late." He paused, seeming to remember something. "And don't scare the other residents."
"I'll do my best." I answered with a sarcastic tone.
He hung up.
I looked at the road ahead, at the amber arrow pointing me toward Goldsmith Street, and at the clothing store that MK had flagged as my next stop.
It took me around twenty minutes to finally make it to Goldsmith Street, mostly due to traffic, the evening commute pulling shifts worth of people in every direction at once, a slow-moving river of vehicles and pedestrians that would have looked almost normal if I hadn't driven past at least two shootouts on the way there. Not bystander-scattering, police-response shootouts either. The kind that the surrounding foot traffic navigated around with the practiced lateral movement of people who had learned to identify gunfire by sound and adjust their route accordingly, without breaking stride, without taking out their phones, without doing anything that suggested the event was remarkable.
I noted this and filed it away under things I was going to have to get used to.
Goldsmith Street didn't have parking, or rather it had parking in the sense that Night City always technically had parking, which meant the sidewalk existed as a theoretical option if you were willing to absorb the fines and didn't mind the particular social consequences of being that person. I was not that person. I pulled into an alley a street over, verified MK had the location logged, and walked the rest of the way.
The storefront was familiar in the way that places were familiar when you had seen them through a screen, the signage and the window display and the particular arrangement of mannequins dressed in things that cost less than they looked like they should. A bit more formal than my natural inclinations ran toward, but needs must.
The man behind the counter looked up when I came through the door and went through a very visible sequence of emotional states in approximately two seconds. Recognition that a customer had entered. Assessment of what that customer looked like. Then a longer, steadier look, taking the bullet holes I was sporting and the general presentation of someone who had clearly had a difficult evening.
The tactical cargo pants had taken three rounds from Sam's Unity during the lot incident, the entry holes ragged and powder-burnt at the edges, each one a small precise record of the last twenty minutes. The skull print shirt underneath had fared worse, partially shredded where the chassis beneath it had shed fragments during the impact sequence, the fabric pulling away from itself in strips where the structural stress had been highest. My arms were bare from the shoulders down, gunmetal silver in the evening light, the internal musculature visible in the joints, the plating catching the neon from the storefronts in cold geometric reflections.
I looked, in other words, like a bionic murderer looking for his next victim. Which was a problem I was here to solve.
"If you're here to rob the place," he said, with a careful delivery that showed being robbed was a common occurrence he had long since came to terms with , "I should let you know we don't keep more than a thousand eddies in physical bills in store at any given time."
"We're all good," I said. "I know how I look. That's actually what I need your help with." I gestured vaguely at the bullet holes. "Almost got robbed on my way to my new place. I need some new clothes. A whole wardrobe, while I'm at it."
The tension went out of him in a visible exhale.
"Oh." He calmed down at a visible rate, and from behind the 'bulletproof' glass he stared at me, a professional assessment of someone in the business of dressing people replacing the previous concern entirely. He was somewhere in his late twenties, slim, with the kind of considered personal style that people develop when they spend their working hours thinking about clothes. His own outfit was layered and deliberate, Kitsch in the Night City sense, bold pattern work over clean structure, the aesthetic that had grown up in the working districts.
He looked at my arms. Then at my face. Then at the overall silhouette with the particular focus of someone solving a problem.
"Okay," he said slowly, more to himself than to me. "So we're working with full sleeve replacement, partial torso visible, and—" He tilted his head slightly. "You know, most borgs that buy clothing are trying to cover everything up. You've got good lines. The chassis work, whoever did it, understood proportion." He looked at my face again. "And you've got good cheekbones, which helps."
"I'm going to take that as a compliment."
"It is one." He was already moving toward a rack, pulling things out by instinct, holding them up against the light and returning most of them immediately. "You're Kitsch, whether you know it or not. The chrome, the face, the whole pretty boy borg thing, you lean into that rather than fighting it and you're going to look very intentional instead of very beat up." He glanced at the bullet holes again. "Which, no offense, is currently not the direction you're going."
"None taken."
"What are you working with, budget-wise?"
"Five thousand."
He paused in his rifling through the rack. Turned to look at me with a reassessment that was purely professional. "Alright," he said. "We can work with five thousand. We can actually do quite a lot with five thousand if you trust me."
"I'll trust you."
What followed was twenty minutes of being handed things and told to hold them up, a process the shopkeeper, whose name turned out to be Dae, conducted with a focused energy of someone finally getting a project worth his attention. Combat trousers in matte black, reinforced at the joints, enough pocket real estate to satisfy any reasonable need. A dark sleeveless undershirt in cut-resistant material that wouldn't pretend to be anything other than functional. A fitted overshirt in deep grey, the kind that could pass for civilian in one context and operational in another depending on how you moved in it. Boots that were heavier than the looted ones and better constructed. Gloves with the fingers cut at the second knuckle, which I didn't ask for and immediately understood the logic of.
And then Dae pulled something off the end of a different rack entirely and held it up, and I stopped moving.
A jacket. Structured, with a slightly raised collar, the base fabric in worn burgundy leather that had been treated to look older than it was, panels of heavier material at the shoulders and forearms, zip-up with a series of buckle details down the front that served no structural purpose but earned their place aesthetically. The back was plain.
I looked at it for a long moment.
"That one," I said.
"I thought so." He turned it over in his hands with the satisfaction of someone whose instinct had been confirmed. "You know it's plain on the back, I can do the lining custom if you—"
"What would it take," I said, "to put a design on the back?"
Dae looked at me. "I don't usually offer that in store. There's a place on—"
"I know," I said. "But I'm not in the mood to run around from store to store."
A pause. He glanced toward the back of the store and then back at me, the expression of someone weighing a professional principle against a professional interest. "What kind of design?" he asked.
"An Oni's face, shattered with, exposed gears and circuitry, a fire glowing from within." I said. "And text. I want to change the text on the back panel as well, to GENOS."
Something in his expression shifted, a small recognition. "You a Samurai fan?"
I looked at him.
"The Oni imagery," he said. "The jacket style. My dad's obsessed, won't stop going on about how if Silverhand was still around things wouldn't be as bad as they are." He said with a bored tone, people often took when referencing their parents. "He's not wrong, probably. Just loud about it."
"Something like that," I said, and I wasn't lying I quiet liked their whole aesthetic.
Dae looked at the jacket, then at me, then at the empty back of it. Something decided itself behind his eyes.
"It's my first commission since that damn algorithm put me out of a job," he said. "So let's call it five hundred and I'll have it done in a few days. You can pick it up when it's ready."
"Deal," I said.
He held out a hand and I transferred the payment with MK routing it through the virtual layer cleanly, the total settled in the corner of my vision.
[€$14,750 - €$3,700]
[REMAINING BALANCE: €$11,050]
Twenty five thousand to eleven thousand in the space of an afternoon, again I thought on how the city was efficient in its way of reminding a person that having money and keeping it were different skills.
I changed in the back, folding what remained of the previous outfit into the shopping bag for disposal, and emerged into the store in the new clothes feeling something I hadn't expected to feel, which was approximately like a person.
The tactical trousers sat right. The overshirt moved with me. The vest like sleeveless jacket, worn open over the sleeveless undershirt, did exactly what Dae had said it would, made the chrome look deliberate rather than incidental, made the overall picture read as a choice rather than a condition.
Dae looked at me from behind the counter with the expression of a craftsman whose work had come together correctly.
"Come back when the jacket's ready," he said. "I want to see how it sits with the full design."
"I will," I said. I left the store with the bags in my hand and my thoughts already somewhere else entirely.
Viktor Vektor.
I needed to get to Viktor as soon as the situation allowed, and the situation was going to need to allow it soon. The arm blade deployment in the lot had been the most direct reminder yet that smooth as this body felt, smooth as the combat suite ran, I was operating at under thirty percent of what this chassis was capable of. The diagnostics I had been running in the motel and the schematics I had been studying since showed me that most of the damage was theoretically repairable, the complication being that properly repairing it required recreating the proprietary alloy Kuseno had built me from, a material that had no equivalent in this world and would need to be synthesized from base components if it could be produced at all.
The nanomachine question was separate and also unresolved. What the nanomachines couldn't fix would need to be machined and installed by hand, which required a ripperdoc I trusted with the access, and there was exactly one of those in Night City.
Viktor was that one. The man had a reputation built on decades of not selling his patients out, which in Night City was the rarest possible professional distinction. If I was going to let anyone open up the chassis and do work inside it, it was going to be someone with that particular track record.
The modifications I wanted went beyond repairs. A neural link cable. A chipslot. The ability to connect to infrastructure and access datachips without having to find a maintenance port and a coiled cable and a back room willing to host the process. I was tired of working around the incompatibility in ways that required either trust or improvisation, and both of those resources had limits. A proper interface, built into the virtual layer architecture the way the rest of the software was, would make me functional in this world in a way I was at the precipice of.
The other thing, the thing that connected all of it, was money. The eleven thousand I had left would cover Viktor's consultation and probably the first round of work, but not all of it, not the full scope of what I was planning, and certainly not the materials question, which was going to require either significant eddies or significant ingenuity or both.
There was one reliable way to generate both in Night City.
My mind went back to the jacket Dae was going to put an Oni Cyborg on. I thought about the Bartmoss framework sitting in Dakota's hands and the daemon architecture I was building from it. I thought about the combat suite that had made a decision in a parking lot tonight faster than I could think, and about the thirty percent figure sitting in my diagnostics like an insult.
An edgerunner, a merc.
The word had a specific meaning in Night City, not quite mercenary, not quite criminal, not quite soldier, a particular kind of person who operated in the space between those categories and filled the gaps that the corps and the gangs and the NCPD between them couldn't or wouldn't.
The city ran on them the way it ran on everything else it used up and discarded, hard and fast and without sentiment. The ones who lasted were either very good or very lucky or, rarely, both.
At thirty percent capacity I was already better equipped than most of the people doing that work. At full capacity the question of what I could do in this city stopped being interesting and started being something else.
That was the plan, then. Get to Viktor. Get intergrated. Get to work.
I found the car where I had left it, untouched, which given recent events felt like a minor miracle. I loaded the bags into the trunk, got in, and sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel while the engine idled.
"MK," I said. "Find me the contact information for Misty's Esoterica. It should be somewhere in Little China, Watson."
[SEARCHING.]
[RESULT FOUND. PUBLIC REGISTRY CONFIRMED.]
[MISTY'S ESOTERICA, URMLAND STREET, LITTLE CHINA, WATSON.]
I pulled out of the alley and pointed the car toward what was going to be home.
Spoiler: Conviction, Determination
Authors Note: That's it for Chapter 8, Strength, hope you enjoyed it.
This one felt like a turning point to write and I hope it felt like one to read, I wanted this chapter to feel like the end of a prequel. Less than a couple of hours in Night City and he's already killed two people, one by accident, one with conviction, and I wanted the thing that lands to be that the city has a way of corrupting people, I mean he went shopping after killing people for the first time.
As for the chapter name, Strength in tarot terms is not about physical power, which is the common misreading of it. It's about composure under pressure, a quiet conviction to keep moving when everything behind you is unresolved. Genos took a step forward today, he choose to stop holding back, to follow through and pull the trigger , even if it means turning his back on a fundamental rule; that murder is bad. That's Strength. The conviction to keep walking toward something even if you have to leave a piece of yourself behind in the process.
As always leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed it, and any criticisms on what you didn't, see you in the next one.