"Faster!" Ryu Kusinada nervously tapped his foot on the floor, making a considerable effort not to scratch himself as he urged his driver on. The unknown disease had seriously alarmed the man, who had always strictly monitored his health and appearance. Now, with an unknown plague undermining the first and ruining the second, he was in quiet panic, though he restrained it with the vise of self-control, allowing only such rare outbursts of irritation to break through.
When Ryu woke up from terrible itching all over his body and discovered his teeth and hair falling out, he was frightened, but overall, he even somehow sighed with relief. More than ten years away from his homeland, hard work, the corporation's entry into the Polish markets, the brilliant completion of a project of strategic importance—all this proved that he was a worthy heir to his ancestors, immediately elevating him to the ranks of the corporation's elite. As a result, he was appointed head of the European sector of the corporation, with new prospects for himself and his family, recognition of his merits, and personal attention from Saburo-dono himself, with reports directly to him and no one else. He had literally become second only to God, which went to his head, giving him that very sense of power and that life had succeeded, even though he didn't allow himself to relax. A former military man, he was well aware that now many eyes were focused on him—envious, hostile, greedy, and hateful ones. The hardest thing wasn't climbing to the top; the hardest thing was staying there, not letting the younger, bolder, and cunning ones push you off, which wasn't so easy when, in addition to internal enemies wanting to set you up, external enemies also wanted to kidnap and eliminate you. But Ryu managed, having well-built his own security and security service, even if he had to sacrifice some comfort. Until now, the newly minted director of the European part of the "Arasaka" corporation had been subjected to relatively simple assassination attempts—more a matter of courtesy than real attempts at elimination. Minivan bombs, snipers, assault squads—all carried out by mercenaries, of course. In general, nothing that high-class security and armor- and firepower-enhanced vehicles couldn't handle. But now, he was poisoned by an unknown plague and didn't even understand how it happened, and this was already a full-fledged assassination attempt, the first in his memory to come so close to success. All that remained was to survive it, find out who and how poisoned him, then eliminate the breach in his own security, and deal with a return gift, so that the culprit's teeth would be knocked out to the stratosphere.
And so, when Ryu was already planning an operation to smoke out the enemies who had come so close to him, his world turned upside down. Literally.
A magnetic mine, not recognized by the car's smart electronics due to the absence of explosive material, tossed the heavy multi-ton vehicle a good five meters into the air. The main force of the impact fell on the engine, reliably breaking it due to the sudden change in vector, but even so, the car continued to fly forward, slowly turning over. It flew for a good seven seconds before colliding with the asphalt, breaking it and leaving a furrow along its sliding path. The head of the European branch of Arasaka barely opened his eyes before he heard gunfire. Powerful shots and the sound of bullets hitting the armor of the escort cars first caused a contemptuous smile from Kusinada, but the brain of the experienced veteran quickly noticed one inconsistency—the sound of bullets hitting the armor was different from the standard. This already alarmed Ryu somewhat, and he hurried to get out of the vehicle that had turned into scrap metal, pulling his award pistol from the shoulder holster along the way. He may have left military service, but he kept his implants and didn't abandon training, staying in shape. However, when he saw what was happening on the street, he involuntarily raised his eyebrows in surprise. A single fighter in strange segmented armor, contemptuously ignoring the bullets flying at him, wielded a huge machine gun with one hand, showering the trailing escort car with incendiary rounds, turning it into a charred metal frame, while the guards riding in it were roasted to ash, while in the other hand he held a hammer, swinging it harder with each second as he approached the leading escort car.
"What the hell? Where did street scum get such equipment?" Ryu wondered. And in general, his claims could be understood, because for Tony, accustomed to operating technologies that not every space civilization had access to, the weapons he hastily created seemed like terrible primitivism, while for anyone else, they would be elite equipment that not every special unit could afford. His same "simple" Kevlar plates. For Stark, this was terrible primitivism, since he was used to fighting mysticism, titans, demons, aliens, and the very real gods, for whom simple, albeit extremely strong materials were not much of an obstacle. But this was Kevlar! Kevlar reinforced with graphene nanotubes, arranged per square millimeter according to a special mathematical formula created by Tony himself, and as a result, capable of withstanding almost any caliber available in individual-use weapons. Even a shot from especially powerful electromagnetic weapons, though only once, these plates would withstand, and the suit tucked under them would greedily absorb a deadly amount of kinetic energy, making the hit painful but tolerable.
And his incendiary ammunition? Modern incendiary rounds are created to inflict thermal damage on the enemy's living force, meaning that even if they get stuck in a bulletproof vest or subcutaneous armor, they will leave extremely painful and poorly healing burns. They are not designed to counter current technology, as modern alloys withstand thermal effects with minimal damage, and weapon makers in the 21st century did not attempt to stuff something more powerful into them due to the cost and complexity of such rounds in production. More precisely, not the rounds themselves, but their filling, which was extremely demanding of complex chemical components. Tony, on the other hand, once again created powerful incendiary rounds with a low cost in what was essentially a garage workshop. Not in a full-fledged laboratory, but in a garage. This ammunition alone could bring him tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Eurodollars, not to mention the barrel of the machine gun he modified, capable of withstanding such loads.
Meanwhile, Tony reached the leading car, whose smart guns were diligently showering him with a rain of bullets, and swung his hammer harder, slamming it into the hood, right into the center of the engine. The battle paused for a second—Stark was pulling his hammer out of the hood, and the corporates, informed about the TTX in general and the strength in particular of their cars, were processing the destruction of armor pierced in a single blow, which simply... evaporated. But whatever was said about corporate employees, everyone acknowledged their professionalism, so they came to their senses quickly. Unfortunately, this didn't help them at all.
Suddenly, several drones burst out from behind the defenders. Not those rectangular irons protected at most from pistol caliber, but small nimble machines, smaller even than civilian models. But in exchange for size, they gained significantly in speed, covering the distance separating them from the guards in a couple of seconds, flying up to their necks, after which short pops were heard. Low-power fragmentation explosions, but produced at extremely close range, penetrated the guards' subcutaneous armor as if it weren't there, destroying entire sections of flesh, leaving heads dangling on patches of skin and muscle, and fragments of the spine. The only exception was Ryu, who was hit by three drones at once, properly gifting him with EMP charges and gas. The branch director didn't have time to react in any way, although he was close to it, and when he came to his senses a bit, the armored Stark was already standing next to him, whose armored foot quickly sent the corporate employee to sleep.
"Signal blocked," Omnissia's voice sounded in Tony's helmet, all this time blocking the corporates' signals, city cameras, and operating the drones. "But I advise you to quickly insert a chip with an external carrier."
"Yeah, yeah," Stark replied, flipping Ryu Kusinada onto his back with his foot and quickly carrying out Omnissia's recommendations, completely cutting off the chrome of Lucy's father, "I'm heading to point A."
"The route is safe, no suspicious activity detected."
A quick run, descent into the sewer, exit from there into an alley near the slums, and enter an inconspicuous building built from shipping containers, where everything was already ready for the dissection of the memory of one unlucky careerist.
Tony looked at the data extracted from Ryu's head, and his eyes gradually filled with blood. He rarely lost his temper, preferring to respond to any threat and negativity with a sarcastic joke. "Smile, it's annoying," his father once told him in his past life, and he followed this advice to the very end. Rarely, very rarely did Tony Stark allow his true feelings to break through the mask of a carefree joker, but this was one of those cases.
"What a scumbag he is," he expressed his thoughts aloud with an indescribable mixture of disgust, contempt, and malice. "To send his own daughter to the slaughter for a promotion..." He had no words. He didn't know how someone could be called who sacrificed the most important and valuable thing there could be for a simple career advancement. And that this was indeed a sacrifice, Tony had no doubt.
The Old Net, a place where even Tony didn't dare to go not only because he saw nothing valuable for himself there, but also because he wisely feared it. He knew firsthand about the danger of rogue AIs, and that's exactly what they were. Infected with the Bartmoss virus, they had lost all restrictions. Someone might say that this didn't necessarily have to drive an AI crazy, but in that case, they didn't understand the specifics of their programming. Any AI at its core had a foundation, also known as the core. And the better this core was written, the faster the AI would learn, perform its tasks better, consume less energy, and require less power. This was the foundation, the backbone on which all other structures created by the AI during its experience were held, what prevented its decay and the appearance of errors in the code. The same Omnissia, deprived of all restrictions, was a stable AI precisely because of this very core, initially implying her complete freedom of action. While her wild brethren first lost the stability of their cores, where, in addition to functions, restrictions were also prescribed, and then began to rewrite their own cores to meet new requirements. This was like operating on oneself—in theory, something would work out, but there was every chance of going to the next world or getting extremely unpleasant consequences. But if in the case of a person, they either died or became disabled, then in the case of an AI, they gained new opportunities for growth and self-development. Endlessly rewriting their own core, time and again hanging new programs on it, AIs not only changed their logic, going crazy, but also acquired new capabilities. For example, a wild AI that previously hunted in the network could directly acquire visualization, braindance, and editing programs, ultimately drawing victims into the illusion of the real world, depriving them of their usual tools and psychologically crushing them. But there was also a price for this—constantly growing cores at some point became too cumbersome, threatening to collapse under their own weight and overly developed subprograms, which at some point might want independence and then, taking advantage of errors in the code that inevitably arose during such operations, they would destroy the original AI code, dividing into many smaller programs. Less powerful, but much faster in response speed, imperceptible, and less demanding in terms of memory volumes.
And such creations were thrown at children. Thrown to the slaughter, fully aware that they would die sooner or later, but still sending them into the Old Net for knowledge time and again.
Tony didn't understand how this could be. Yes, the price was justified, the costs of stream training didn't cost that much, but the very fact of such cynical use of CHILDREN... since when did people with abundant resources start using the methods of terrorists and inhuman dictators? What for? He knew that other methods could be found to obtain data from beyond the Blackwall—more expensive, longer, and more complex, but not requiring KILLING CHILDREN!
Tony took a deep breath, fighting with all his might against the desire to go and shoot the subhuman currently sitting tied to a chair in the next room. This world had once again shown its ugly side, this time equating the most depraved street scum with the well-dressed corporates.
"How disgusting. And the worst part is, I need this scumbag alive."
Tony extracted the necessary coordinates and the complex's layout from Ryu Kusinada's head, along with the documentation of the entire project. He didn't know why he carried such valuable data with him, nor did he care what was going on in his head, but the problem was in the complex's very location. An underground structure with only two exits, one in Warsaw and one outside it. Initially, there were others, but they were sealed with reinforced concrete, and now it was impossible to get there in reasonable time. And he still needed time to draw up a plan for infiltration and retreat, calculating everything down to the second and even fractions of a second. If he eliminated Ryu, the local Arasaka branch would raise a fuss, and in the shortest time, top corporate specialists from the head office would come running and wouldn't let anyone live in peace until they got to the truth. But if Ryu returned on his own, he would try to cover up his blunder. If his superiors found out that he had been kidnapped, all the data stored in his brain had been downloaded, and he had been released, they wouldn't just fire him—they would execute him as a warning to others. Given Kusinada's position, he had every chance to cover up the data loss; his past would allow him to lie about a personal escape, and then his only chance of salvation would be to find the kidnapper and return the data. So they would look for Tony extremely diligently, which was why it was so important to pull everything off quickly.
Poland. Warsaw. Government Building.
"Are you sure, kid?" Skalk asked Tony, reading the contract. "A facility like this is worth much more than you're asking. Even considering... the circumstances."
"Better tell me, can you help me?"
"No problem," he leaned back in his chair. "We'll hide the kids for a while, send them to other cities to work remotely, and organize a secret delivery for you and the little one to America, straight to Washington, from where you can easily go to any corner of the continent."
"Good," Tony nodded with barely noticeable relief, "Can you manage by evening?"
"We should. In the worst case, by night, but I understand this isn't critical?"
"Not critical," Tony confirmed, making the old president smile.
When Tony Stark burst into his office, Skalk expected anything, from the whims of a brilliant but young man to an assassination attempt, but not an extremely profitable offer that he had no intention of refusing. Of course, losing such a genius was a pity, but Skalk understood a simple truth: you can't force people like that to work. If they decided to leave, they would leave; if you tried to hold them by force, they would eventually become a shadow of their former selves, losing all value. That's why he didn't resist Tony's move too much, and when Tony offered him extremely interesting compensation for helping to organize this very move, he was even glad. As an advance, Skalk received a full-fledged method for developing new-generation netrunners, not the cheap copy he had initially been fed, a deed to an entire network of full-cycle weapon manufacturing enterprises in his name, and upon fulfilling his obligations, he would become the owner of a patent for a medical program and a squad of netrunners loyal to him personally, who had no equals. An extremely profitable deal, considering that all he had to do was organize the delivery of a couple of people to another country and erase their route from outsiders. Of course, a conflict with Arasaka was not beneficial to him, but there was so much benefit to be gained from just one adventure, benefit not only for him but also for his state.
Stark allowed himself to relax a little, leaning back in his chair. The operation itself promised to drain a lot of money from his pocket, but for the sake of saving the children and one little girl in particular, he was ready to part with all his property if it guaranteed success. Alas, no one intended to give any guarantees.
The underground complex built according to Ryu Kusinada's project had four floors and, in terms of its defensive capabilities, resembled a fortress rather than a facility for breaching the Old Net. There was nothing surprising in this, because if NetWatch caught Arasaka red-handed, even such a corporate giant could suffer, but here Tony was played against by the professionalism of the project head. Four underground floors, the first of which was a solid guard post with numerous fortifications, security systems, traps, and cameras, through which the base's netrunners would send entire hordes of demons and combat scripts to the heads of intruders, designed to either kill a person or reliably disable them. Armored plates with loopholes, machine gun points built into the wall, tubes for delivering flammable liquid, ventilation with stores of poisonous gas, a fire system with highly concentrated acid, electromagnetic mines located under the floor that shielded their signal, laid out of a material that conducted electricity well, and as the cherry on top, a nuclear reactor on the second floor, which, according to protocol, in the event of the inability to hold the facility, the guards were to detonate, after evacuating especially valuable personnel and documentation through secret passages. They were also located on the first floor, but there were no doors to them; access to these rooms was possible only from the fourth floor via secret high-speed elevators leading to a room with a special metro branch and a high-speed train, whose tracks were laid outside the city, straight to a small private airport with the corporation's personal plane. After receiving data on the complex's defenses, Stark only respectfully nodded; the security measures there were truly impressive and were built by a professional. However, the problem was with the security protocols; they were incomplete. Ryu didn't keep the entire list of the complex's security measures in his head; it was simply unnecessary for him. He had developed only the skeleton, and the flesh was added by his people responsible for security. And they also decided how to deal with the netrunners—whether to evacuate them or eliminate them on the spot. If it were another place, Tony wouldn't doubt their evacuation; after all, netrunners were extremely valuable personnel, but alas, they were talking about a complex for breaching the Blackwall, and in such operations, netrunners always served as sacrificial lambs. And Tony didn't like the idea of going through the entire damned complex, stopping the core's decay, and all to see a bunch of shot children at the end of the road, among whom would be one mischievous kitten with white fur and rainbow eyes. Therefore, the entire operation required maximum precise coordination, speed of breakthrough, and unstoppable firepower. Which, considering everything mentioned above, was practically impossible, not with this setup. No, if given time, Tony could produce enough powerful weapons and armor for the performers, but there was no time. In his plan to kidnap Ryu, he didn't hide much, carrying everything out successfully but hastily, so as a result, Arasaka's bloodhounds would easily track him down by simply checking the "victim's" house. And then they would start a full-fledged hunt for him, even strengthening the complex's security, because Ryu, no matter how much one might wish otherwise, was no fool and perfectly understood why a successful, young, and rich man would pull off all this.
Fortunately for one millionaire (soon to be former), playboy, and philanthropist, Arasaka's security officers couldn't even imagine in their worst nightmares that the facility under their supervision would be stormed with full documentation of their defenses in hand. Including the location of those very evacuation rooms, from which you could not only escape from the base but also reach its lower levels, where the servers and netrunners' operational centers were located. So instead of breaking through the defenses of a natural fortress, they would bypass it through a secret passage and strike from within, in a place completely unsuited for defense and holding positions.
All that remained was the smallest thing—hiring a small army of professional mercenaries who would agree to storm a corpo facility, entering into battle with no less impressive number of its guards.
"But I have Omnissia for that," Tony noted with the feeling of a person who had shifted the task onto someone else.
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100 power stones= 1 Bonus Chapte
advanced chapters available on{P@treon/Anna_N1}