Chương 33: First Blood II

The physical coordinates of the server node were buried in the initial gig file. It was located in a decaying, heavily industrialized part of Arroyo, an area that had been largely abandoned after a localized chemical spill a decade ago. I killed the headlights and the engine a good five blocks away, letting the Galena roll for three blocks until I was two blocks away from the target structure, where I parked it. I pulled the skull balaclava over my face and pulled the hood of my jacket up.

I approached the building on foot, sticking to the deep shadows of the alleyways. The structure was a block of stained concrete and rusted rebar, about three stories tall, with heavy blast shutters drawn down over the windows. On the surface, it looked completely dead, as if it were just another forgotten casualty of corporate downsizing. But as I slipped through a rusted-out side door that had been forced off its hinges long ago, my Neural Link picked up on the subtle, undeniable signs of life.

The atmosphere inside the building felt off, and the air was thick with the smell of stale dust, damp concrete, and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. To a normal eye, the massive ground-floor warehouse was abandoned, littered with broken crates and rusted machinery. But I picked up the faint, almost imperceptible hum of heavy-duty cooling units running deep beneath the floorboards.

The overhead halogen lights were mostly shattered, but a few of them flickered with an uninterrupted power supply that didn't match an abandoned place. The concrete floor was blanketed in a thick, grey layer of undisturbed dirt. But leading directly from the main loading bay toward a reinforced steel door at the back of the warehouse was a single, distinct set of boot prints. They were fresh, with sharp edges that signified the dust hadn't had time to settle back over them.

Which meant that someone else was here right now, or they had moved through this space recently. A heavy sense of surveillance washed over me, and I felt the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand. I was walking into the jaws of the trap, and I knew it, but the arrogance of my digital superiority pushed me forward. I drew a masking daemon around my personal link, ensuring I wasn't broadcasting any signals, and followed the footprints toward the steel door.

I bypassed the biometric lock on the door with a quick short-circuit from my Paraline, forcing the door to slide open with a grinding screech of metal that made me cringe and second-guess what I was even doing here. But I shrugged off that uneasy feeling and stepped into the server room anyway. Contrary to the decaying warehouse outside, this room was clean and chilled, lined with racks of humming servers. At the very center of the room was a standalone terminal console, glowing with a soft, inviting blue light.

I glanced around for a moment, ensuring I was truly alone before I approached the terminal. Even as I approached it, my eyes scanned the shadows between the server racks, ensuring that nothing moved. Once I reached the terminal, I dug into the pocket of my jacket, pulling out my silver personal interface cable. It was honestly kind of annoying to have to do this every single time I had to jack into something, but Vik was very strict on that "wait until you're 18" deadline.

So he refused to do the kind of invasive butchering required to install retractable wrist jacks. I slotted one end into the neural port at the base of my skull and jacked the other directly into the console, and almost instantly bypassed the physical airgap and forcefully ripped the encrypted crimson data shard from the local hard drive, pulling the file to be stored directly into my Ex-Disk. I watched the download bar flash across my vision.

As soon as it hit 100 percent, I felt the ambient temperature in the room plummet, and a chill ran down my spine.

"You seem to be more inexperienced than I expected, Ghost," a deep voice that seemed to echo from every corner of the room simultaneously called out to me. I quickly ripped the silver cable from my neck and spun around to face the source of the voice. Stepping out from the deep shadows between the server racks was a man who was massive, easily towering over my six-foot-two height.

His body was heavily chromed up with matte-black subdermal armor plating, hydraulic-powered gorilla arms, and his eyes were replaced by glowing, multi-optic targeting arrays. I couldn't tell if this gonk was a Maelstrum scum or some heavily chromed merc.

"You know, you've upset quite as many people as you've pleased with your work, if not more," the man said as he rolled his shoulders and strained his neck.

"There is a certain Voodoo Boy netrunner who put a hefty bounty on the head of the man who's been slicing through their subnets. Forty grand was a cheap price to pay to get you to walk into a physical box where your code doesn't mean shit." I felt my heart hammer against my ribs as realization dawned on me that I had been lured. That this honeypot was not designed to trace a runner, but to force me out of the safety of the digital Net and into a physical room where I could be killed.

The Kerenzikov, working in tandem with its Boost System, engaged before conscious thought could even form, and my perception of the world ground to a sudden halt. The humming fans of the server racks slowed to a deep, agonizingly low pitch, the flashing blue lights on the terminal froze in mid-strobe, and my central nervous system flooded with synthetic adrenaline, stretching the millisecond into an eternity of cognitive processing.

To my utter horror, I saw the man smile before a high-pitched, whining screech of displacing air tore through the chilled room, and something along the man's spine flared with a blinding yellow light. This gonk had a Sandevistan. Even with my slowed perception, he moved in a way that felt almost imperceptible, as if reality itself was actively skipping frames. One millisecond he was standing ten feet away, and in the next frame of my vision, he was suddenly blurring across the space, closing the distance.

My perception fractured under the strain of trying to track him. I was able to see the attack coming, my brain processed the trajectory of his fist, aiming directly for my chest, but my physical body was trapped in the slow reality of baseline human biology. I tried to dodge, to twist my torso away from the impact, but I was lagging behind in motion, and my visual awareness was completely out of sync with my physical capability.

I didn't even get the chance to get my hands up in time before the merc's fist connected with the center of my chest. It felt like I had been hit by a Maglev train moving at full speed as the impact instantly shattered two of my ribs with a sickening crack that echoed in my own ears, expelling air from my lungs in a choked gasp. The force lifted my hundred and eighty-pound self completely off the ground, launching me backward through the air. This book was originally published on Royal Road.

Check it out there for the real experience. I slammed hard into one of the server racks, denting the metal casing, and crumpled to the freezing concrete floor in paralyzing pain. The Kerenzikov pulse I had previously maintained collapsed, and reality snapped back to its normal speed. I gasped for air, tasting copper and blood in the back of my throat as my vision swam with dark spots. Every nerve ending in my torso screamed in agony as I tried to push myself up, but my arms trembled and gave out.

The merc walked slowly toward me, his footsteps echoing on the concrete. He drew a pistol from the holster at his hip and aimed it towards my skull.

"There is a reason why ghosts tend not to mess with the physical world," the merc mocked as he raised his pistol.

"You should have stayed in the Net, little Ghost." Up until now, I had never truly met my match in hand-to-hand combat. So I never expected to find myself in such a situation where I was completely outclassed in direct combat by a fully chromed professional killer. I was not built for this kind of confrontation, and if I didn't do something quick, I was going to die on this freezing floor. Panic seized my brain as I was forced into emergency survival behavior and opened the floodgates of my Paraline Mk.

1, unleashing a desperate digital counterattack, utilizing my raw 15-terabyte processing power to hurl a massive wave of corrupted, chaotic daemons directly at him. I had exactly five combat-oriented quickhacks loaded in my active memory, and the rest of my deck was purely tailored for infiltration and stealth. In a sense, what I just did was the equivalent of a digital shotgun blast under extreme pressure. I threw every single hostile line of code I had at the merc simultaneously.

I flooded his optics with a Reboot Optics daemon to scramble his visual receptors, forced a Weapon Glitch into his pistol's electronic safeties, slammed a Cyberware Malfunction into his gorilla arms, hit his internal plating with a localized Short Circuit, and capped it off with a desperate Synapse Burnout aimed directly at his brainstem.

The volume of garbage data hitting his systems at once succeeded, causing the merc to stop in his tracks and stagger backward while a roar of pain and disorientation tore from his throat. He dropped the pistol, and his massive hands flew to his head as his optics sparked, blinded by the hostile hex-code, and at the same time, the yellow lights of the Sandy on his spine flickered and died as his cyberware struggled to process the conflicting, overloaded sensory inputs.

He was temporarily blind, deafened, and neurologically stunned, but I doubted that a merc of his caliber would just go down from a single burst. He blindly swung at the air while his ICE was actively fighting to reboot his systems. Ignoring the excruciating pain coming from my shattered ribs, I scrambled backward, putting a server rack between us. I couldn't try to run and let him recover since he'd surely kill me if he did.

So I decided to turn this into a battle of attrition, forcing another Short Circuit through him as soon as I saw his optics flicker back online. Every single time he took a stumbling step toward my position, I spiked his neural temperature with another Burnout. I bled his systems dry, dancing just out of his reach while my Paraline Mk. 1 systematically cooked his nervous system from the inside out.

Finally, with a heavy thud of metal hitting concrete, the massive merc could no longer take the strain of my daemons and collapsed face-first into the ground, fully incapacitated and unconscious. I stood there for a long moment, clutching my ribs as I struggled to breathe without sending a spike of pain through me. I limped slowly past his motionless body and toward the weapon that lay on the floor a few feet away from him. I bent down, wheezing in agony as my chest ached, and picked up the iron.

This was my first time ever holding an iron, and it felt cold and heavy, surprisingly heavy. So I scanned it. Malorian Overture Weapon Type: Revolver Drum Capacity: 6 rounds I walked over to the merc and stood over him, aiming the revolver's barrel directly at the back of his skull.

"Funny thing about people who hunt ghosts," I rasped, my voice trembling but cold, "they tend to disappear while chasing them." I pulled the trigger, sending a deafening roar that shattered the hum of the server room. The recoil on it was heavy, but I managed to barely even control it. I watched blood begin to leak out of his head, but I didn't stop there. A movie I had downloaded about zombies had taught me to never leave a target unless I was sure they were dead. In other words, double-tap!

So I kept pulling the trigger, the heavy recoil shaking my broken ribs with every shot, until I emptied the entire drum into his head, and heard the empty click the seventh time I pulled the trigger. I felt the echoing gunfire fade as it was replaced by a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I looked down at the mess I had made on the floor. There was synthetic fluid, dark blood, and brain matter splattered across the ground and the server racks, as well as a bit of his own blood on my face.

My vision blurred as I looked at the merc's corpse, and suddenly, I found myself staring at Jax as the metallic smell of blood and ozone hit the back of my throat. The image of Jax's suicide, the exact same spray of gore, the sudden, violent end of a life, flashed behind my eyes intensely. My breath caught, and the revolver slipped from my trembling fingers, clattering onto the floor. I dropped to my knees, and a choked sob tore out of my throat.

My hands shook uncontrollably, and I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing the heels of my palms against my temples, desperately trying to block out the image, but it was burned into my retinas. My first kill. I had just taken a human life, painting the floor with his mind. It took several long minutes of hyperventilating on the concrete floor to force the panic attack back down into the dark corners of my brain.

I forced my eyes open, grabbed the empty revolver off the floor, and shoved it into my jacket pocket before limping out of the server room, crossing the dusty, abandoned warehouse. The silence outside was deafening, and the sound of the rain didn't help much.

I slowly made my way to where I had parked the Galena and threw myself into the driver's seat, my hands shaking so violently I could barely interface with the ignition, and I had momentarily forgotten the fact that I could start it up with a signal from my Neural Link. The pain in my chest was intensifying, and I could feel I was overheating from the overexertion of quick hacks under such a short amount of time. I mentally sifted through my contacts, quickly finding who I wanted to call, and hit their agent.

It rang three times before a groggy voice answered.

"Santi? Kid, do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Vik," I gasped, clutching my chest.

"I need your help. I got a couple of shattered ribs, and it hurts to breathe." There was a sharp rustle of sheets on the other end of the line, and the sleepiness instantly vanished from Vik's voice.

"I'm heading down to the clinic now. Keep pressure on it, breathe shallow. I'll have the chair ready waiting for you." I cut the call and slammed my foot on the accelerator, tearing out of Arroyo. As I navigated the neon-lit, rain-slicked streets toward Little China, the last bits of my adrenaline slowly bled out, finally leaving my system as I parked near Vik's clinic, leaving me shivering and weak. I sent Vik a message. Me - [Outside in car. Gonna pass out] Vik - [Coming to get you, kid] I let out a sigh of relief and reached into my jacket, pulling out the revolver and resting it on my thigh. The illusion of my untouchable digital superiority had just been permanently shattered. Netrunning alone wasn't sufficient when pulling gigs like this. Being a ghost in the machine was useless when forced into a hybrid environment where physical confrontation was unavoidable.

That old hag Wakako was right, Night City does not care about my code when a stray bullet, in this case, a merc's gorilla arm, finds its way into my unarmored chest. I was completely outmatched, and my deck was barely even able to save me from a bullet. I traced the cold metal of the barrel, staring at the weapon that had saved my life. I looked at the revolver in my hand, then at my pale reflection in the rain-streaked window.

"Not bad for a first kill," I told myself before passing out.