AN: Apologies for the late chapter. I've been working on my portfolio and simply forgot to upload.
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The House of the Reaper welcomes Operative Jamie Klod. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
- Sun Tzu
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Santiago stood perfectly still at the edge of the massacre as the cold, acidic rain of Night City beat down on the small, weed-choked parking lot, hissing as it struck the roaring flames of the burning Galena. He pulled the collar of his jacket up against the biting chill of the late February day, squinting his eyes through the torrential downpour. It had only been a month since the turn of the new year, but 2069 was already proving to be a year bathed in blood and political upheaval.
The screamsheets were practically drowning in reports of violence, and Santi, at sixteen years old, had learned the hard way that paranoia was the only currency that truly kept you alive in this city. His hand remained hovering near the pocket of his jacket, his fingers brushing against the grip of his Malorian Overture.
For several minutes, Santi just stood there, not moving a single muscle, allowing his eyes to sweep across the courtyard, analyzing the flickering shadows cast by the burning CHOOH2. Once he was completely sure that the immediate threat had delta'd, Santi let out a slow and shallow breath.
He needed to know what had happened here. After all, he had come to the furthest northern edge of Watson, right where the city's concrete bled into the desolate Northern California oil fields, to claim the rotting frame of the 1970 Mustang Boss 429 he had been obsessively searching for. He was supposed to come here for a simple transaction since the scrapper had sworn the supposed previous owner had been zeroed a week ago.
But a dead owner didn't explain a preem, high-end Alvarado V4F 570 parked next to a burning Galena, nor did it explain the heavily armored Maelstrom Thrax and the half-dozen corpses littering the wet concrete.
Santi moved cautiously, his heavy boots splashing through the puddles of rainwater mixed with diluted human and milky synthetic blood. He approached the body of one of the dead stromers piled near the ruined gate. The ganger was a grotesque mess of heavy chrome and torn RealSkinn, his face completely replaced by a multi-optic cluster that was now spider-webbed with high-caliber bullet holes. Santi crouched down, wincing slightly as images of his first kill and Jax's suicide flashed through his mind and the damp cold seeped into his bones.
He reached out, his fingers brushing against the cold, wet leather of the Maelstromer's jacket, and began to pat the corpse down, methodically searching the pockets. Santi had never scavenged or looted anyone, but he knew that the dead didn't need their secrets, secrets that may help answer his questions about what went down. However, the ganger's pockets yielded nothing but a handful of loose, blood-soaked eddies, a half-empty inhaler of Black Lace, and a few spare magazines for a tech-pistol that was nowhere to be found.
Santi moved to the next Maelstromer, who was pinned against the brick exterior of the warehouse by a piece of rebar. The sheer force required to drive a steel bar through a man's chrome-plated chest and anchor him to a brick wall was staggering and hinted at mil-spec cyberware, Gorilla Arms, or perhaps a linear frame.
This meant that this wasn't a standard gang shootout over turf or a bad deal. The Maelstromers, who were known for their psychotic disregard for human life and heavy combat implants, had been butchered by someone, or a group of someones, who heavily outclassed them. Santi patted the pinned ganger down, finding nothing but an encrypted drug ledger on a cheap, disposable shard.
"Fucking useless scop," Santi muttered as he tossed it aside and left the gangers behind, slowly making his way toward the burning Galena.
The heat radiating from the blazing vehicle was intense, but it was a warm welcome against the freezing rain biting at his exposed face. Sprawled near the rear bumper was the security guard. Santi knelt beside the man, examining the shredded remains of his tactical vest.
The guard's arms were lined with the faint seams of subdermal plating, but his internal cyberware was currently sparking and popping violently. As Santi examined him, his suspicions of this having been a massive, localized short-circuit were confirmed. Someone had hit this man with a catastrophic quickhack, frying his nervous system and cooking his internal hardware from the inside out before the huscle had even managed to unholster his iron.
Santi frowned, his mind racing as he compiled a narrative of the events that had unfolded in the courtyard. The Maelstromers had been taken out with overwhelming physical force and high-caliber ballistics, while the guard had been neutralized with elite-tier netrunning, hinting that this had been a gig pulled by a hybrid squad, most likely highly professional, and obviously, dangerous.
Finally, Santi turned his attention to the Corpo.
The man lay face-up on the wet concrete, just a few feet from the open driver-side door of the gold-plated Alvarado V4F 570. The vehicle itself was a glaring anomaly since it was the kind of ride that belonged in the garages of Corpo Plaza or the lavish driveways of North Oak, not parked outside a dilapidated warehouse bordering the toxic oil fields. Santi approached the Corpo, his eyes immediately drawn to the exit wound in the center of the man's chest.
An expensive, chrome-plated briefcase lay spilled open next to the corpse, and Santi crouched down to inspect the interior of the briefcase. It was lined with shock-absorbent foam, featuring several custom-fitted indentations that were completely empty. Whatever highly valuable merch the Corpo had been carrying was long gone, and the killers had taken their prize.
Santi shifted his focus back to the dead man and began a search of the Corpo's suit. He checked the breast pockets, the inner lining, and the trousers, but found nothing. The killers had clearly tossed him. But something about the whole thing didn't allow Santi to stop there. He noticed a slight, unnatural stiffness in the lining of the Corpo's left sleeve, just above the cuff. It was a subtle imperfection that an ordinary street thug or gonk scavenger would have missed.
Santi drew a small knife from his boot and sliced the expensive fabric of the sleeve. Hidden perfectly within a concealed micro-pocket was a single data shard. It was completely black, devoid of the usual neon branding found on commercial tech.
Santi pulled the shard free, turning it over in his hand. As he did, the flickering light of the burning Galena caught the side of the Corpo's exposed neck, causing Santi to freeze.
The rain had washed away some of the blood and grime, revealing the man's pale skin. The Corpo was of Asian descent. But what made the blood in Santi's veins freeze was the faint, intricate subdermal markings pulsing faintly just below his jawline. It was an ID tag with the stylized logo of Arasaka.
Santi stumbled backward, his boots scraping loudly against the concrete.
"No fucking way," he whispered, his heart suddenly hammering against his ribs.
Santi's mind instantly flooded with the history he had devoured during his deep-dive educational braindances with Kotka. Decades ago, at the climax of the Fourth Corporate War in 2023, a pocket nuclear device had detonated inside the Arasaka Towers right in the heart of Night City's Corpo Plaza.
The blast had leveled the city center, killing hundreds of thousands and turning the sky a bloody crimson, plunging Night City into the horrific period known as the Time of the Red. The blame had fallen squarely on Arasaka, and the President of the NUSA at the time, Elizabeth Cress, had officially banished the Japanese megacorp from operating on North American soil.
For nearly fifty years, Arasaka had been legally barred from returning, branded a national enemy hunted by Militech and the federal government alike. Yet here, in the freezing rain of an abandoned Northside warehouse, lay an Arasaka operative, dressed in bespoke clothing and carrying hidden, encrypted intelligence.
"What the fuck is Arasaka doing in Night City?" Santi muttered, his grip tightening around the black shard. If the NUSA or Militech discovered that Arasaka operatives were actively moving through Northern California, it would be considered an act of war, dragging the neutral city into the fighting.
Santi looked down at the shard in his hand. He knew he should drop it, turn around, hail a combat cab, and vanish back the way he came. Getting involved with this meant stepping into a world where they wouldn't consider your age before flatlining without a second thought. But the intoxicating thrill of discovery, the exact same reckless curiosity that drove him to explore the dangerous depths of the Old Net, overpowered his logic.
He reached up to the base of his skull, and with a sharp exhale, he slotted the black shard into his neuro-port. Instantly, his vision was overlaid with a blinding wall of crimson warning vectors, his internal HUD flashing frantically as mil-spec ICE protocols attempted to isolate the connection and scrub the shard's contents. It was a self-destruct encryption, designed to melt the data, and potentially the brain of the unauthorized user, the moment it was accessed.
Ten months ago, this level of Black ICE could have been a threat to him and probably would have flatlined him. It might have cooked his synapses and left him twitching on the wet concrete next to the dead Corpo. But Santi was no longer the inexperienced kid who had stumbled into a physical honeypot.
He anchored his consciousness against the massive data flow, and time slowed to an absolute crawl as his Kerenzikov activated. The aggressive attack of the Arasaka encryption felt like it was moving through molasses, and because of his immense bandwidth, he possessed temporal dominance.
With effortless grace, Santi compiled a polymorphic subversion daemon and injected his code into the microscopic gaps of the ICE's rotating cipher, adapting to the encryption key faster than the defensive AI could generate it. He peeled the layers of the Black ICE apart, dismantling the self-destruct protocol and forcing the encryption to yield.
The crimson warnings on his HUD dissolved, replaced by the clean white text of an unprotected file directory.
Santi let out a slow breath, opening the primary file. However, contrary to the expectation of bank accounts, corporate blueprints, or technical schematics for powered armor, he found himself reading a highly classified, heavily redacted conversation log. The timestamps indicated the exchange had taken place over the last three weeks, utilizing proxy servers to mask the origin points. One of the speakers was designated as 'A-Prime' and was clearly the Arasaka handler, while the other various speakers were designated with localized Night City gang ciphers and Free State military designations.
As Santi read through the logs, his blood ran colder than the rain soaking his clothes.
The logs detailed a massive, clandestine logistics operation. Arasaka was operating entirely from the shadows behind the backs of the federal government, funneling astronomical sums of untraceable eddies, alongside shipments of cutting-edge military hardware, ballistics, and cybernetic combat implants, directly into the hands of the Free States.
But it didn't stop there. The logs revealed that Arasaka was explicitly arming the gangoons of Night City. The Maelstromers, the Valentinos, the Tyger Claws, and the Sixth Street veterans were all slated to receive mil-spec weaponry to defend themselves from the NUSA.
"They are turning the entire region into a heavily armed powder keg," Santi muttered as he rapidly skimmed the data. "But why?"
He didn't have to wait long before piecing the geopolitical puzzle together. It was because of the Unification War.
Just over a month ago, in early 2069, the political landscape of North America had fractured. The newly elected President of the NUSA, Rosalind Myers, the former ruthless CEO of Militech, had officially launched her 'Unification Program.' After decades of the country being split between the federal government in Washington D.C. and the autonomous Free States that had broken away during the chaotic years following the early 2000s, Myers had declared that the time for separation was over. She intended to bring all the states back under the banner of the NUSA, by diplomacy if possible, and by overwhelming military force if necessary.
The Free States of Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, and Arizona had immediately resisted, and Myers had unleashed the fully nationalized might of the Militech armed forces upon them. The NUSA forces, backed by South California and Utah, were already bombing their way through the resistance.
Night City, existing as an independent, corporate-controlled city-state on the border of Northern California and the NUSA-allied Southern California, had desperately declared absolute neutrality. The city council, terrified of having Militech artillery rain down on their newly rebuilt skyline like in the old days, had shielded themselves from the limelight, begging to be left out of the crossfire.
But the conversation log in Santi's head painted a terrifyingly different picture.
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Mine... the stones are all mine!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).