Tony Stark
"The clutch is acting up," Stark complained, shifting gears a bit uncertainly due to his long lack of practice. Honestly, it was a shock to him that in Night City—or anywhere in the world, for that matter—you could still find cars that ran on manual transmission rather than automatic. Sure, he knew that manual was generally better than automatic in terms of autonomy, if nothing else, but he still didn't expect to see such an anachronism in the modern consumerist world. After all, what did it matter to modern people that you could start a manual car without jump-starting it if the battery died, that it was easier and cheaper to maintain, lasted longer, and generally consumed less fuel if automatic was more convenient? But no, it turned out that local society hadn't yet forgotten how to prioritize truly important things, pushing their own comfort to the background. "It's nice to be wrong sometimes," he thought, despite his grumbling.
Eva said nothing, just stared at him with wide eyes as if she'd seen a ghost. "So where are we going?" she asked, shaking her head, which she had removed the helmet from, making her impressive chest sway (since standard bras didn't fit, and custom ones were expensive).
"Bucky and Sons Factory," he replied, steering casually with one hand. Stark clearly liked their new vehicle, and he was even considering replacing his expensive, flashy, but not particularly useful sports car with it, focusing on upgrading this one. Install a new, more powerful engine, tweak the clutch and suspension, and it would fly almost as well, but it could carry much more gear.
"A family business? In Night City?" Barnes was surprised, as small entrepreneurs in the "City of Dreams" almost always either lost out in competition or were bought out by corporations, and if they refused... well, no one was safe from accidents.
"It was, seven years ago. But then Militech bought the business, the appointed director deliberately bankrupted the company, extracted a couple of interesting solutions, lured customers to other branches, and now the Sixth Street runs the show there."
"The Sixth Street again?" Eva grimaced. After yesterday, her allergy to the pseudo-patriots had sharply worsened.
"Don't worry," Stark chuckled. "The factory has been half-empty for a long time; now they mostly fix cars and re-stamp VINs there."
"Cars again?"
"No, this time we're interested in their printer. Or rather, the Militech RK-22 station. With this little thing, you can print even a small tank—just keep feeding it materials. We don't need a tank, of course, but a couple of these machines would be very useful."
True to himself, Tony had already thought about further expansion while planning to improve his home filter. After all, his main feature was adaptability and scaling technologies for various situations. He had set himself tasks even before arriving in Night City, taking care in advance to find the necessary components, and the filter, although an important part, was just for basic survival in the city, but far from the only one. Hence, even during construction, Stark embedded the principle of a core in his creation, where the main part was singular, and everything else was just additional layers. As long as the core was intact, restoring the device wouldn't be difficult... on any scale. Of course, he didn't expect everything to spin up so quickly, and in general, he could wait a week, but since the opportunity had arisen, it was better to stock up now, acquiring the necessary equipment for the workshop. And the RK-22 machine would greatly contribute to this.
"Okay, so you're our mechanic," Eva easily accepted the explanation, leaning back in her seat and pulling out her gun. By the way, it was yesterday's, taken as a trophy from one of the Sixth Street guards, which she still couldn't get enough of.
The journey itself took forty minutes, as the object they needed was almost on the other side of the city, but fortunately, they arrived without traffic jams. And it's not like Night City was a big city—it was medium-sized, though its population surpassed some megacities due to megabuildings.
"So how are we taking the place?" Eva asked, surveying the small factory (a thirty-meter-long concrete box with one floor) with an experienced eye. As the leader of a Mox combat squad, she often had to storm Scavenger dens, so she had quite a rich experience in assaults, not to mention all the databases she had absorbed from information chips.
"Loudly," Tony simply replied, driving further away from the gate to gain speed. "By the way, better put on your helmet," he advised, calmly waiting for his companion to fully secure her brain.
"Loudly, as in ramming?" she asked only after suiting up.
"Exactly," Stark enlightened one individual... pressing the pedal to the floor.
"Kya!" Eva involuntarily screamed as inertia pressed her into the seat. "I should have buckled up!" a fairly correct thought slipped through the pink-haired girl's mind... but was quickly pushed out by a wave of adrenaline. "Hahaha!"
The impact wasn't particularly strong; Stark pressed the brake pedal at the same moment they broke through the segmented rising gate. Made more for decoration, from thin aluminum, the huge jeep simply didn't notice them, nor the bandit dressed in cowboy gear standing behind them, first embedded in the hood and then in the wall, from which he slid, leaving a bloody trail.
"Forward!" Tony commanded, jumping out of the driver's seat and taking down the nearest Sixth Street member with his first shot.
It might seem that Stark had absolutely no experience in military command and combat operations, but that wasn't the case. After all, no matter how much Stark played the carefree playboy and drunk, his brilliant mind and sense of responsibility often forced him to do work he disliked. He could seethe inside, puff up with indignation, and hiss at those around him, but he did his job. For example, when joining the Avengers, he read and memorized all the paperwork describing small unit tactics, which Fury strongly recommended... and which turned out to be completely useless, simply due to the extremely high individuality of the Avengers' members. However, time passed, the squad grew, he acquired combat drones, and experience was inevitably gained, fully processed by his analytical mind. Yes, in everything related to defense, Stark was a complete amateur, practically a zero, but combat operations where he was the attacker were so familiar to him that he could outdo even a retired special forces veteran. And with the support of a smart AI and a modifier designed to work in the Net, who easily obtained the building's plan and its inhabitants for him, down to their medical records, a full-fledged combat operation requiring a squad of five with good weapons... turned into an easy walk for Stark, which he could have handled alone without problems. Purely on experience and the element of surprise. With Eva's support... clearing a room with fifteen experienced and well-armed fighters took just three minutes, without a single injury. Well, except for a couple of bruises, but those were minor.
"That was... powerful," Eva assessed. Being a street samurai herself, albeit a tier higher, Barnes appreciated the ease with which they dealt with members of a gang where many participants were veterans of corporate wars or unification wars. "I somehow didn't notice last time, but you're damn good," she shared her opinion with pleasant surprise, looking at Stark from a new angle.
She thought Tony was just a cool mechanic forced to risk his skin for eddies, which, though rare, happened regularly. After all, if you had the brains and the right implants, you could be a complete amateur in shooting, but with smart weapons, that was the problem of those around you, not yours.
"I'm just usually the attacker, not the defender. Otherwise, I... get a little lost," he admitted honestly.
"Oh, I get it," Eva nodded solidly. After all, her gang suffered most of its losses precisely when defending some object, not during a cleanup, so the topic was familiar to her. "But still, fifteen Sixth Street corpses is cool," Eva smiled contentedly. "But too fast," now there was a sad sigh.
"We got lucky," Tony admitted honestly.
In general, the killed bandits couldn't do much to them, except maybe give them some bruises, since they were armed only with light weapons, which their suits handled perfectly. Yes, they risked getting bruises and bone cracks, but only due to their own stupidity, otherwise... the enemy was not only stunned but also positioned extremely conveniently for the attackers, and then Stark's reaction and Eva's reflexes did their job, allowing only three Sixth Street fighters to reach cover. Of course, they all had implants to some extent, but with their weapons, the same dubious-quality subcutaneous armor played little role, and everything else... simply didn't come into play due to the premature demise of the owner.
"Okay, let's loot and take what we came for."
"We're always happy to," the Mox cheered up again, as reselling guns sometimes brought her a small fortune.
She did keep some things for herself, some went to the girls in her squad, but overall, every dead gang fighter was a nice bonus. This, by the way, also explained why Night City's bandits and mercenaries were so fierce—somehow a tradition of combat trophies had formed here. Literally, the cult of "what is taken in battle is sacred" reigned here, and no one could claim someone else's trophy, not even the gang boss. Hence, usually cowardly marginals and solos who valued their lives, when faced with a real threat, were quite willing to risk their skins, simply because even a single gun could be worth as much as a car.
"The trophies aren't very impressive," Eva said sadly.
"The guys here were experienced but not particularly combat-ready. They barely managed to keep some of their army implants and joined the gang for a steady income. After all, this is primarily a factory converted into a workshop, and mechanics are needed here more than fighters. And such people usually fought as equipment operators, not simple cannon fodder, so their implants are corresponding."
"So we took out valuable specialists from the Sixth Street?"
"Yeah," Tony nodded.
"Good," Eva nodded contentedly. "Do they happen to have any cop bounties on them?"
"I don't know, maybe they do, but I wouldn't if I were you."
"Yeah, the cops would sell info about me in a heartbeat," Eva stated regretfully.
Night City had a generally good and favorably acting system of bounties for gang members' heads. They were appointed and paid in real-time; all you had to do was send a photo with the corpse and the biometric data of the deceased, and you received the bounty from the police and a plus to your reputation as a tough fighter. One problem: being a thoroughly corrupt organization, the Night City police willingly shared data about such bounty hunters. And while large gangs could ignore a couple of corpses in their ranks simply because the fuss wouldn't cover the costs, a professional exterminator of their kind would eventually end up as a hunted victim. Tony and Eva, however, didn't shoot street scum that any gang could recruit more of from the streets at any moment, but valuable, brainy specialists, so the hunt for them could start immediately. And they didn't need that kind of happiness; they hadn't even recovered from the past yet.
"Stop," Eva halted, looking at the very machine Tony needed. "How are we going to drag this to the car?! It's huge!"
"We'll disassemble it," he shrugged, picking up a set of screwdrivers and wrenches. "We shouldn't expect new guests in the next couple of hours anyway."
Jumping ahead, they spent precisely those couple of hours, like ants disassembling the equipment they needed and stuffing it piece by piece into their vehicle... which then had to be repacked, playing Tetris in real life, as the car turned out to be capacious but clearly not intended for transporting industrial equipment, which included the RK-22 station-machine. Then... then there was a trip to one nondescript garage-storage where they unloaded all this goodness, and four more addresses. Tony needed: a Biotechnica VR-71K-03 analyzer, a portable army carrier KK-4, three mobile smelting furnaces of the ARM-98 model from the fifties of this century to convert them into one medium-sized one, a supply of inertial gel, and a number of chemicals. The task was complex, tedious, and required traveling all over the city, but as a result, Stark acquired the necessary components not just for modifying the water filter, but also for upgrading his 3D printer, which, after all modifications, promised to transition into a fairly industrial class, albeit in the small-medium ranks, where printing something larger than a car in volume wasn't envisaged. But even so, it turned out well, and after a couple of modifications and some help from Omnissia, Stark would be able to convert his property into a full-fledged industrial class, where you could print even a super-heavy tank in a couple of days, albeit with a wild consumption of the mechanism's resources.
Eva Barnes, meanwhile, was in deep cultural shock. How to put it... in her career as a fighter in the shadowy alleys of Night City, she had quite a bit of blood on her hands. Debtors, spies, a couple of traitors, and a whole host of Scavengers, but even so, her personal graveyard barely numbered twenty people. Yes, if you added those who died on her orders and/or were killed by her people, this number would sharply rise closer to a hundred, but still, for her, the number of corpses Stark produced in just one day was something off the charts. Ninety-eight. A truly terrifying number, because you could fill a twenty-meter pool with them. Stark made these corpses in batches simply because he wanted to save money.
He didn't see the killed as individuals or even people, just parasites on the body of society that would have to be dealt with sooner or later. In any case, even if he wanted to leave Earth, since without full control over Night City, his Mars colonization project simply wouldn't work. So the death of a bunch of social parasites didn't bother him, and all pangs of conscience were suppressed by cold logic. Eva, however, wasn't horrified by such a scale but was simply in cultural shock. A child of her time and environment, for her, the violent death of a person was something close and normal. When she killed for the first time, she didn't worry, didn't reflect on taking someone else's life, didn't even wonder how easy it turned out to be, because she already knew all about the fragility of human life. She didn't feel anything about it, just a little shame for stupid actions during the process, and that was it. Eva was in shock because of the scale of the operation Tony had arranged, its thoughtfulness, and the audacious (or rather, brave) way it was carried out. Her eyes beheld the power concentrated in one person who, in one day, had destroyed a number of gang fighters almost equal to half of the Moxes, without receiving a single wound and achieving his goals. The demonstration of power that Stark, accustomed to solving global problems, hadn't even thought about was so vivid that Eva decided to break her neck but convince her boss to accept this tough guy into their gang, even if they all had to lie down under him. Because if there was anything truly sacred in Night City, it was power. And Stark had shown it more than vividly.
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100 power stones= 1 Bonus Chapter
advanced chapters available on{P@treon/Anna_N1}