Honest Company. Abandoned Toy Factory
"We're cursed," Jackie stated melancholically, calmly reloading his pistols. Unfortunately, he had lost his rifle—it had heroically taken a bullet for him right in the bolt mechanism, dying a brave death.
"You're exaggerating," Tony objected, calmly walking around the half-destroyed warehouse and collecting various old junk.
"Well, come on, who's brave? Who wants to die first, you freaks?!" Eva Barnes raged, freed from her restraints and actively firing into the doorway. Judging by the occasional groans, she was even hitting her targets. The freed Mox was extremely angry at her kidnappers and happily shot at them.
"You're exaggerating," Jackie objected, ignoring the exclamations of their new acquaintance.
As it turned out, not only the Valentinos were looking for the overly bold Scavenger gang. The Tiger Claws had also not forgotten their humiliation, and one of the particularly bold but not very smart bosses of the gang decided to get the Night City scavengers at any cost, without considering such trifles as territory, spheres of influence, and consequences. And so, the Tiger Claws burst into the old factory loudly, with noise and gunfire, ramming the rusty gates with a van, then immediately poured out and began shooting at everything that moved. The situation itself wasn't great—Jackie had taken a couple of extra bullets, weakened by the armored fabric of his jacket but still lodged in his body. And Stark had done well, unloading the entire magazine of his submachine gun into the newcomers, taking down three at once... including the organizer of the whole event. If before, they still had a chance to part peacefully with the Claws, now the enraged Asians, mourning the loss of their boss, craved the blood of his killers, and they didn't care who they were. But as if that wasn't enough, a few minutes after the start of the new shootout, the guys from the Sixth Street arrived, as their shouts made clear, for goods. Apparently, the patriots of the NUSA and loyal dogs of Militech wanted to buy cheap implants and organs from the Scavengers, but instead, they ran into the Tiger Claws, a gang with which they had the most clashes.
The worst thing was that both gangs were represented in this squad by the captains of the guard of each of the groups, meaning they were extremely chromed, armed, and experienced. Against their background, Jackie, with only a couple of implants, looked frankly pale. Tony was doing somewhat better due to his insane reaction and powerful revolver, and Eva was a Mox fighter, and among them, due to their small numbers, it was customary to invest in their fighters from the start, giving free access to old but combat implants, but there were catastrophically few of them.
"Calm down, Big Guy," Tony reassured Jackie, tossing some chemistry under his ear and shaking it. Well... or rather, he tried to reassure him, and even then, with a "get lost.""Everything will be fine," he smiled, but not at Jackie, but at the image transmitted by his drones from the site of the clash of the main forces of the gangs.
As mentioned above, two guards of the captains of some of the strongest and most influential gangs in Night City were now clashing in the factory, and that was a level. The Tiger Claws drilled their new recruits for combat actions like a full-fledged training, only the methods were harsher, and in the Sixth Street, there was a pervasive presence of veterans of corporate wars and mercenaries, so their overall level was quite comparable to the army of a fairly developed state. Plus, all of them had extremely powerful custom guns, some more expensive, some cheaper, but even the worst gun, by a rough estimate, could fetch around three thousand eddies when resold. Quite decent money, some people's monthly salary. And the top guns of the bandits, who were actively killing each other and Eva, could cost ten or even twenty thousand with luck. In Tony's opinion, a very nice bonus to their reward for the order, all that was left was to take these little things for themselves, clean them up, fix them, and they could be resold to the same Valentinos. And nullify their current owners.
"We're stuck in a room with the only exit, between a fight of two squads of heavily chromed monsters," Jackie winced from the wound in his side and regretted not buying better stims. "I highly doubt we can get out of here and everything will be 'fine'."
"Well... we'll find out now," Tony muttered, putting his finds in one place and actively mixing something.
Honestly, they were lucky that the vandals who occasionally occupied the abandoned factory weren't very interested in the storage rooms. Primarily because of their inconspicuousness, and secondly because of the assortment there—mostly cotton, fabrics, and dyes, which were of little interest to drug addicts, bums, and bandits. But rare chemicals and lubricants for machine maintenance and everything related, up to cleaning sorters, were hidden between the shelves, surviving almost half. And this was enough for Stark to create one nasty mixture that, upon reaction, begins to evaporate, and when inhaled, causes dizziness, suffocation, and vomiting. A weak thing, quickly spoils, acts for only three to four minutes, but in theory, it is effective even for people with synthetic lungs. Many people like to replace their lungs, even civilians, so that they can smoke cigarettes without consequences, but few replace their nasopharynx. There are many reasons: little effect, complexity of the operation, too high cost of the implant for such small changes in capabilities, but the main thing is that such an implant is a rarity. It is produced in openly small batches due to low popularity, and what is produced goes to the Marine Corps, saboteurs, and military divers.
"Eva," Tony distracted his new acquaintance from actively spending lead.
"What?" she pouted displeasedly, as she was being distracted from such an exciting activity, but still, the Mox responded.
"Take a minute off, I'll explain the plan."
"A plan? And what kind?" she asked skeptically, raising an eyebrow. Honestly, she no longer had much hope of getting out of this mess, quite satisfied that she would have to die not on a dissection table, soaked in the blood of previous victims, but in battle, shooting at various bastards. In Night City, even death could be a luxury.
"Do you know how to throw grenades?" Tony grinned unpleasantly, pulling out clearly homemade grenades from under his jacket.
Tony only took a submachine gun, revolver, and bulletproof vest from home. But he was Tony Stark! And if his guns weren't particularly impressive by local standards (due to lack of access to high-tech equipment and materials), just decent crafts, then the bulletproof vest, like the entire suit as a whole, was already something from the top league.
Yes, you couldn't make something truly significant out of them—the simple behind-armor effect hadn't been canceled by anyone, even if you had a cocktail of Soviet genetic achievements in your heritage—but no one forbade trying. For example, Tony would only wince at a pistol caliber, a rifle caliber would cause a severe bruise and cracks in the bones, a machine gun caliber wouldn't pierce through but would get stuck in the bone, albeit shattering it to pieces.
Already much more than what novice solos had. And in the car, he carried a number of his creations made on a portable 3D printer, like the same drones... or handmade grenades. Even in his world, cleaning agents could be used to make a bomb—not very powerful and capable of exploding at any moment, but the fact itself was important. In this one, when words like "operational safety," "environmental pollution," and "harm to the user" had become something comparable to white noise in an old radio, truly lethal things could be cobbled together from cleaning agents, even with knowledge of chemistry at the school program level. And Tony was far beyond this program, not being too lazy to prepare in advance for troubles, making a supply of incendiary grenades. This choice was justified simply—all others could catch the owner as well, especially those that came out from under his crazy hands, while incendiary ones... in principle, could too, but the fabric of his suit was fireproof enough that he didn't worry about getting roasted. And in general, incendiary grenades were equally effective against all types of enemies, better only than fragmentation and laser ones, but the first were too loud and his suit didn't hold them, and the second cost as much as a hearty lunch in a good restaurant. And yes, his creations were powerful. VERY powerful.
Even in his past life, when quite habitable stations with artificial gravity orbited the Earth, people knew how to build full-fledged spaceships and played with genetics in ways that locals couldn't even dream of (hello, Dr. Connors), the general population didn't have such wide access to complex engineering tools as here. And at a relatively low cost. The same mobile 3D printer could be acquired for relatively little money by almost any employed person. And local models, by the way, had been polished by decades of active use and competition, which is why they were extremely convenient to use, reliable, and multifunctional. In fact, you were buying a machine capable of accepting almost any materials that it itself extracted through processing. Want a knife but don't have the money? If you have a printer, just find a rusty piece of scrap, set the shape, and it will process that piece of scrap into a quite decent knife with good balance and perfect internal structure, making it stronger even than one made by a master gunsmith.
And this was exactly a MACHINE, to which there were quite additional modules that expanded the functionality of the machine. Yes, it wouldn't show sky-high heights and wouldn't compare with specialized equipment (at least the cheap, unmodified models), but in theory, having only a mobile printer with a couple of modules, you could print an internal combustion car engine with three hundred horsepower. The lifespan of such a creation was a separate case and depended solely on the materials that went into it, but the very fact that you could assemble something like this from scrap spoke volumes. In fact, local printers had almost reached their maximum; in another twenty or thirty years, they would hit the limit of the technology's potential, beyond which would be a synthesizer operating at a much deeper, atomic level.
Why such complications with gas if you could cover enemies with grenades? Three reasons. First, Tony made these grenades as a last resort if he was caught with his pants down, confident in his hopeless position, and he would set them on fire. And based on this, he tried to create the most powerful grenades possible. And... he succeeded. He spent a lot of time designing, assembling them in stages over four days, the filling was so complex, but he achieved the desired result. Thirty meters of affected area, combustion temperature of 3760 degrees (that's six times the melting point of tank armor!), coverage in one-tenth of a second, burning time from four minutes at the edges to nine minutes at the epicenter of the explosion.
Moreover, the fire created by the grenade was so hot and persistent that it couldn't be extinguished by any available firefighting methods. Even if a cyberpsycho got under such a little thing, he was a guaranteed corpse, even if it didn't melt, the brain in the jar would simply boil. But their strength also led to the second reason for their complexity—the small number of these grenades. Stark only had five of them, and three were in a stash at their home. So their chance to cover both groups was only one, which was why they needed the gas, so they could take a good position for the throw.
And to cut off the tastiest guns, so to speak, compensation for moral damage. And the last reason was the speed of the fire's spread. It would be monstrous, because there were PLUSH toys lying around everywhere. Old, soiled with everything possible and impossible, but still very flammable. If they were too far from the exit, they might simply not make it through the fire. Well, Tony would make it, although he would have to make a face afterward, replacing the burned skin with synthetic, but Jackie and Eva would definitely roast. And Tony, although he had hardened in his new life, hadn't turned into a beast to abandon even situational, but innocent people to perish in a fiery hell.
"I can," Eva smiled, looking at her unexpected savior in a new way.
"Then listen to the plan and remember the specs of this little thing," Tony said, handing his creation to the Mox. And the longer she listened to what the small, toy-like ball in her hands could do, the wider her eyes became, her breathing quickened, and between her legs... let's just say, after this mess, one lover of fighting would need to change her underwear.
After finishing speaking, Tony called Jackie. In this plan, the wounded man was given the simplest task—go behind, cover, but most importantly, don't fall behind. But when there was no response to his words, Tony realized that the plan, which wasn't that complicated, had suddenly become much more complicated.
Jackie was in bad shape. Pale as a corpse, breathing heavily, weak pulse, and the wound peeking out from under the T-shirt had unpleasantly black edges.
"Thermal rounds," Tony frowned. Yes, mass-produced products were far from his analog, capable of hurting a tank, but they were created precisely to defeat the enemy's living force. The hits themselves weren't dangerous; the lodged bullets plugged the holes, and the blood wasn't flowing heavily. Jackie could have lasted a couple of days with such a wound, but thermal rounds were a different matter. "RX-56 or HP-12?" Tony wondered.
"What's there?" Eva asked, although she didn't leave her position. No matter how she behaved, she was a professional fighter, firmly knowing when she could fool around and when it was better to keep her character on a tight leash.
"It turns out Jackie was hit by thermal rounds," Stark replied.
"So what?" she didn't understand. "I've been hit by those a couple of times too. It hurts, of course, but with a stimulant, you can hold out until you reach a ripperdoc."
"That's the problem—Jackie wasn't in pain. Which means he was shot with something more powerful than standard."
Like any in-demand item, thermal rounds had several manufacturers, each making several models of these ammunition types. Without going into details, they were almost always divided into cheap, medium, and expensive. The cheap ones simply caused severe burns, prolonging the recovery time of the wounded and disabling them with pain shock. The mid-range ones were already specialized—technology, drones, increased damage, blinding. They worked so-so, but in the dark, when you needed to illuminate the enemy's positions, there was nothing better (except for the corresponding implants). And the last ones were created exclusively for directional action and were popularly called "painless agony" because the wounds from them were almost painless. Such ammunition was developed against cyberpsychos and heavily chromed fighters, and instead of chemicals, they had a miniature thermal energy accumulator that released its charge directly into the enemy's body upon impact. Two or three hits with these in the head of a cyberpsycho, and he would die. On paper, it sounded beautiful—this ammunition was called the "cyberpsycho killer," and formally it became one, but in fact, only soldiers, who had seventy percent of their bodies replaced with combat implants, including those that increased reaction, could use it normally. So although the ammunition wasn't taken out of production, its price was heavily cut, not to the point where street scum could buy it, but those higher up in the hierarchy were quite capable of shelling out. And if it was this, then Jackie was already a corpse.
"Jackie, I'm going to spread the edges of the wound now; I need to see what you've got in there," Stark warned, placing his hand on the shoulder of the descendant of Spanish conquistadors and even calling him by name. The other just agreed with a grunt.
"Mhmm..." he groaned softly, followed by a relieved sigh from Stark.
"A burn, but chemical. Lucky you, you'll live a little longer," Tony cheered him up. It was a strange ammunition—most likely, the shell was serial, but the filling was homemade. Unpleasant, increasing the area of damage, but if you didn't die immediately and made it to a ripperdoc, you could pull through.
"Well, then we'll carry him," Eva commented, catching Tony looking at her intently. This girl pleased him more and more. First with her extremely attractive twins, then with her willingness to get involved in the problem without trying to run away alone, and now she didn't even suggest abandoning Jackie, although she should have understood the situation.
"If we get out, I'll invite you on a date," Tony decided, thinking that such a beauty shouldn't be missed. And the fact that she was a combat maniac who loved shooting people... everyone had their flaws.
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100 power stones= 1 Bonus Chapter
advanced chapters available on{P@treon/Anna_N1}