Never Fade Away: Black Dog (ch. 30) (Patreon)

"Hello, hello, hello Night City! This is your radio host Nora, d'is fine evenin' here to bring you the latest news updates! The weather isn't the only thing that is hot today! The Tyger Claws are back on the prowl and looking for L, and so far those that find him don't live to tell the tale! And seein' how the death toll fer yesterday was a sturdy ferty, I can confidently say that L ain't been on the streets since yesterday!" Nora's exuberant voice filtered through the implants in my ear, letting me tune into the radio as I watched an incoming transport flying to Night City.

"Tha bodies being dropped are from the villain alliance tryin' ta give the Claws the bird," Nora continued as I zoomed in with my optics, seeing the Arasaka logo on the side of the cargo ship that was being escorted by a lot of firepower. Military assets, according to the shipping manifest that I klept. The real one, not the decoy one that Arasaka tried to feed me. "So, if ya live in Kabuki or Japantown, some heartfelt advice from yer darlin' girl is ta go out with some flack and iron if ya have to go out at all!"

Another problem I had to deal with. The gangs didn't take well to being threatened and a good chunk of them declared a truce with each other to focus on a common enemy -- me. The idea wasn't entirely their own. It couldn't be. Not when there was some serious hardware that was being shipped into the city, which would be put in their hands so they'd have a better shot at me.

Reaching underneath David's jacket, I pulled out the GBM. My OS ran some calculations and made the recommendation of 5% capacity for the shot that I wanted. With a thought, I throttled the plain black weapon, taking aim at the cargo ship. There was a faint whine coming from it before I pulled the trigger, and instantly my arm snapped back from the recoil. If it had been done with a flesh and blood arm, it would have been torn clean off. The moment I pulled the trigger, however, a blood red beam of gravitational force leapt from the barrel and raced toward the ship.

It punched through thousands of pounds of steel like it wasn't even there, hitting the water soon after with a powerful blast that sent thousands of tons of water up. A hole the size of a zeta truck cut through the ship cleanly, the edges of where the beam struck glowing red hot before water began to flood into the hull. Zooming out with my optics, revealing that I was more than a mile out, I watched as the airships began to scramble.

"- Strike that folks, seems like L has just sank a big ass boat! An Arasaka one, probably! So, to give a little sound track in case he's listenin', here's 'How Do You Like Me Now'!" Nora exclaimed before an old country song began to play in my ears. I smiled lightly as I took aim again at the airships that were zeroing in on my position. Nora had been quick to set up her own radio station, after she enlisted my help that was. The kids were doing well with the Aldercaldos. They seemed happy.

Two months. There was a point in time that would have felt like an age. Now it passed by in the blink of an eye. It was enough time for some things to change, but not enough time to change the things that really mattered.

Pulling the trigger again, another beam of gravity tore through one of the air ships, punching a perfect hole through the nose of it and out the back end. They started taking evasive action after that, but it meant little. Between my Cyberdeck and my optics, I could make near instant predictions of their movements. Another went down with a pull of the trigger, and they started firing back. Missiles streaked towards me and I figured it was about time for me to move.

I grabbed a plain looking slab of metal and activated it with a thought -- the GN drive attached to the back end began to spew orange particles before I hopped into it. It was when I went over the data lifted from the tank that exploded that I realized that the particles had additional effects beyond energy generation. Harnessed the right way, they could generate gravitational fields, which made flight possible. With my feet firmly planted on the board, I took off into the skies, shooting straight at the incoming missiles before spinning around them.

Two months was enough to improve my tech by leaps and bounds. My soft as a netrunner, my implants, my weapons -- everything, really. It could hardly be compared to what it was. Everything had been optimized, everything was more robust and more powerful. It was enough to convince the megacorporations that anything less than their best was a waste of time and enough time to convince them that even their best was like sending lambs to slaughter.

The missile exploded as it was exposed to when it came in contact with the GN particles -- the software that it used to target me was tuned out, the signal disrupted, making it self-destruct. The half dozen airships got ready for a dog fight, and made the mistake of lining up. I took out two with a single shot, and it was then that the remaining ships started bailing out. Arasaka elite emerged -- equipped with jump boots that generated thrust for them while shimmering purple energy suspended the effects of gravity around them.

They flew in a wide formation, firing their prototype guns that utilized trace amounts of element zero to send fine grains of metal at me at subsonic speeds. They approached like a wall of gunfire, forcing me to activate the bubble shield in my hoverboard, the shots striking the hard light but accomplishing nothing. Two months was enough time for Arasaka to decide that their elites needed to be outfitted with biotic implants. That standard weapons weren't enough. That, and to ensure that their elites had a closed network that prevented remote hacking.

With a thought, a hilt jutted out of my forearm, a collapsible blade unfurling when I pulled it free, revealing my newest creation -- a vibroblade. As the segments snapped into place, a small hum filled the air as the blade began to vibrate at high frequencies. The spine of the blade glowed with a dull red hue while the blade itself was three and a half feet long with no guard to speak of. With the blade drawn, I flew in, targeting the leader of the formation.

As I neared, time slowed to a crawl. However, the leader of the elites didn't. His face was covered by a helmet with six eyes and colored mat black, or it could actually be his face for all I knew. When the bubbleshield eclipsed him, he moved the barrel of the gun, pointing it directly at my head. I could feel his confidence swelling, taking his time to pull the trigger. That confidence quickly turned into panic when I moved my head out of the way at speeds that he couldn't keep up with even with his own sandevistan.

He tried to react, as did his wing men, only to find themselves moving far too slowly. The edge of my blade caught him under his arm, cutting up through them while I lined up a shot. My vibroblade cut through the armor like butter. As well as his prosthetics. The Arasaka elites were more steel than flesh, after all. It mattered little when the edge of my blade could cut the space between atoms. When the shot was lined up, despite their attempts to react, time for me resumed at its normal pace. I cut the arms and head off the leader before firing my GBM, killing another two.

A sword didn't run out of bullets, after all. And with a sandevistan of my own design chipped in, I could take full advantage of that fact.

Flipping upside down, I shot down one airship and clipped another. The Arasaka elite reacted -- I felt a wall of gravity slam into me, displaced slightly by my GN particles. It was still enough to send me spinning. Another charged at me, mantis blades erupting from his forearms while his body glowed a whitish blue. I shifted my stance, lashing out with my blade and finding a familiar stance. Since I was using a sword, it made sense to know more than just how to swing it around.

The answer my ability gave me was the Hiten Mitsurugi-ryū, or Flying Heaven's Honorable Sword Style. I had heard of people talking about the beauty and grace of swordsmanship -- of the samurai and their honor that the Tyger Claws failed to replicate. If such a thing really existed, then the Mitsurugi-ryū was no such style. It was efficient butchery, no more than that. It was optimized swordsmanship for killing as many people as possible as fast as possible. It took full advantage of my implants, almost as if it were designed for superhuman strength and speed.

For that reason, the elite found himself dead after a counter attack, his head flying free of his shoulders while I holstered the GBM. Kicking his body to the side, my prosthetic shifted into a turret and I began firing dozens of laser beams from it. The blood red blasts of light struck the elites, though some managed to avoid the worst of it. An airship shifted, joining the fight, only to find itself destroyed by the projectile launcher located in my forearm.

The elites, I noticed, were getting better with biotics. One started to Blink away when I raced forward, my blade in a reversed grip, the edge going for her throat. The training that they were given to master their biotic abilities was getting more efficient. Just not efficient enough, because all it took was a sharp spin as time slowed to finish beheading her when she thought she was safe.

My prosthetic continued to fire red lasers, making a soldier burn red hot before any organic mass in him was reduced to ash. There wasn't much, to be honest. The rest of the fight was clean up. The elites died in a futile display of trying to take me down with them. One by one, the airships fell into the ocean below us. There was the smell of smoke and dust in the air as everything went quiet again, leaving me alone in the air. I took in a deep breath before I realized my mistake.

I coughed and it sounded wet to my own ears. A quick glance at my prosthetic hand showed me that there was flecks of blood in the spit. My lips thinned, "Already?" I muttered, realizing that the organs I had cloned were already starting to fail. Even with an autoinjector of boosters to keep me in tip-top shape.  I had another set of organs on standby for this eventuality, but I hadn't expected it to happen so soon.

Wiping my hand on my shorts, I returned my vibroblade back to its sheath. For a moment, I turned my gaze to Night City, seeing Arasaka Tower standing proudly amongst the skyline. "This really the best you can do?" I asked, taking out the GBM. Giving in to the impulse, I fired a shot at the building. A red beam raced through the distance as my arm snapped back from the force of it, and I smiled lightly when I saw the GBM punch through the top three floors of Arasaka tower, burning a hole through the top of the tower.

That'd give Nora something to talk about. Even if it didn't accomplish much.

"One more month," I recalled the deadline that David gave me. I had started out so full of optimism. Certain that I would be able to topple a megacorporation inside of that month. It seemed so damn simple on paper -- just do it like I did the Tyger Claws. Kill enough of them and the corporation would crumble. Simple.

If only it were so easy.

I hovered in the air, waiting for a reaction, only to find that it wasn't coming. Arasaka wasn't even making the attempt to salvage what was floating to the bottom of the ocean. Lowering the GBM, my lips thinned as I glared at Arasaka tower -- not even an attack on their HQ could lure them out anymore. Even when I started to fly to the city, there wasn't an ambush, or a sniper trying to take me out from afar. There was nothing. No reaction at all from what I saw on the streets, or the thumb in their systems that I had. As far as Arasaka was concerned, they didn't just lose a ship, a dozen airships, or a dozen elite soldiers.

That didn't mean anything, though.

"Becca was right. It's not something I can just kill," I realized, looking down at the streets of Night City. It wasn't that it was too big -- it wasn't. In the past two months, I had murdered about thirty-seven board directors, more than a hundred top executives, blew up dozens of important manufacturing facilities, and slaughtered countless numbers of soldiers and corpos. The damage I had done to Arasaka should be catastrophic.

However, Arasaka merely changed how they fought and structured their company. The Board of Directors? The rank and file no longer had any idea who they were. Their identities were protected by AIs in their servers. The truly important information? Also protected by AIs or only relayed through hard copies -- that had been a major issue for me. Information was how I learned where I needed to hit to get a reaction from Arasaka. All that was left was public information, which didn't exactly help me.

More than anything else, though, Arasaka had stopped reacting to me. In the initial days, I couldn't walk down the street without an ops team appearing from the shadows -- Arasaka, Militech, Biotech, even Aerospace. I had the Soviets, Europe, and the NUSA taking shots too. Now blasting a hole through Arasaka tower didn't get so much as a blink. It was because of a harsh truth.

"Fuck you, L! I lost my fucking job because of you!" Someone shouted at me, throwing up a bottle that came nowhere close. I looked down as I flew above downtown, trying to get some kind of response from Arasaka, and made eye contact with a rough looking man. His suit might have been nice at some point, but living on the streets hadn't done him any favors. Behind him was a scrolling advert.

'L -- Violent Extremist and Mass Murderer.' The text was in the background while at the forefront was video of me fighting. Killing. 'Making our streets unsafe.'

I made eye contact with the man and he quickly lost his nerve before running away down a back alley.

"How am I supposed to kill them if I can barely keep them out of a city?" I wondered, lowering to the ground as my hoverboard began to twist and fold into itself. It became a fraction of the size it was, letting me reach back and attach it to my spine, where it seamlessly melded into place. Walking on the streets gave me a cleaner view of them, and only a handful of people bothered to give me a second look.

Arasaka had all but pulled out of Night City entirely. Militech was driven off. Biotech was still here, because without them, there would be no food. However, the king of the city had been driven out. Part of that was me murdering a lot of them. The other part was…

I came to a stop at the edge of the containment zone directly in front of Arasaka Tower. In the two months, it had shrunk substantially as the GN particle radiation had been cleared up. However, for a wide area around it, the radiation had permeated and did far more damage than I had expected. It wasn't as bad as the nuke Silverhand set off, but it still had devastating consequences for the city. A large number of people were reporting genetic damage done to them, some worse than others. The worst of all were those that were in the lower floors of Arasaka Tower and the first responders to the disaster I had caused trying to kill Adam Smasher.

The area was completely empty, save for a single clean up crew. The one that the city could spare.

Without Arasaka, Night City was crumbling under its own weight. I could see it. I could feel it. This was how a mega corporation fought.

With money and propaganda.

By pulling out of Night City, a large number of people suddenly lost their jobs. Furthermore, the only thing that they imported into the city was guns that they gave to the many gangs. All the money that they funneled into the city through grants or bribes vanished into thin air too. Militech was the same way. Night Corp was trying to pick up the pieces, but I smacked them out of its hands more often than not. In the past two months, homelessness was on the rise, gang violence too. So was the murder rate due to my own contributions and the police force being gutted.

And they were blaming it all on me.

I looked up at the building, a frown tugging at my lips. I knew better than to think that I had hit anyone with that shot. I hadn't managed to kill anyone of importance in three weeks, simply because it had become so time consuming tracking down where members of the board were. And it didn't help that Saburo treated them as plug-ins -- just slotting in another when I killed one.

I ran a hand through my hair, finding it dripping into my eyes now. It was getting pretty annoying, to be honest. I had no idea how Becca managed. I blew out a sigh before walking away from the Tower, my hands in David's jacket. As I walked by, I scrubbed the adverts that were playing -- the ones that marked me as a monster, or blamed me for the city's woes. I wasn't entirely sure that they were wrong, not exactly. Still, it was annoying to deal with. It hadn't made me many friends in Night City.

Though, I did have some, I suppose,big you could call them that. The sounds of gunshots reached my ears as I walked down the trash covered streets lined with people sleeping in cardboard boxes or tarps. Looking over at the source, I saw a car making a sharp turn into traffic, going into another car. Hanging out of it was a guy that looked like me -- he wore an EMT jacket marked with ER on the back, his black hair was shaggy, and he was firing a look-alike to my GBM, only it fired bullets.

I saw them on the occasion -- people looking like me. People called them a poser gang, only they were edgerunners. I'm not entirely sure how I felt about it honestly, but when I saw that the ones chasing them were Valentino, I reached out with the Skeleton Key. Without missing a step, the car exploded where it was, killing everyone inside. The poser gang cheered as they drove off, driving right by me without notice. A sigh started to escape me, only to be cut off by my getting a call -- V.

"What do you have for me?" I asked, greeting her as I walked the streets. V and I had remained on friendly terms, so to speak. I didn't trust her. Not as much as she wanted, at any rate, but as the faucet of information started to thin out, I found that she still provided actionable intelligence.

"Someone that wants to get in touch with you," V answered, used to my gruff greeting. V had also all but vanished from Night City. She hadn't said as much, but she had used me to clear a path for her up the corporate ladder. "Someone that knew I had a connect with you," she said, making my eyes narrow.

If someone knew that V was feeding me Intel, then I'd imagine that they would kill her. "... For what?" I asked, reaching the end of the road to see Tyger Claws tearing through a homeless camp. Their brains fried with a bit of code while I waited for the walk signal.

"I have no idea. I don't even know who reached out to me," V admitted with a guarded tone. "They got the drop on me. They know I've been talking to you. If you agree to meet, then that secret stays a secret." To that, she sounded doubtful.

My first instinct was to refuse the call. My second was to accept simply because I needed V's intel. If she didn't trust the blackmailer, then she was smart enough to take care of that on her own, but it would screw me if she got exposed. "Fine. Patch them through," I decided, making my way across the road. The city services wasn't even picking up garbage anymore. Mayor said that there was no money for it -- and that seemed to include bodies because there was one in a back alley with their head blown off.

There was a brief pause before a voice I knew filtered through the speakers. "Greetings, L-san. I see you have encountered the same problem that I did in my youth."

I paused, glancing up at an advert displaying Arasaka's Relic. Seeing the face of the man who I was speaking to. "Yorinobu Arasaka. Why would you want to speak to me?" I asked, already running a trace on the call, though I knew it wouldn't do any good.

"Because we have similar aims, L-san. For forty years I did as you did -- I destroyed as much of my father's company as I could, and while you have had a great deal more success than I did, by now you must have realized the limits of such an approach," Yorinobu remarked, his words striking a little too close to home. "You have cost the company billions, yet so long as those in power wish to see my father's company continued existence, it will never be allowed to be destroyed."

I knew of Yorinobu. I hadn't been able to find him -- or anyone in his family. I had managed to kill a body double of his father, though. They remained elusive in an effort to avoid me. "It sounds like you have a suggestion of how I could fix that," I remarked, keeping my tone even. Just as I thought, the trace led to nowhere.

"The Relic. My father's latest crime. Arasaka's brand of immortality -- it is a lie," Yorinobu said, catching my attention. "The engram that is created is enslaved by Arasaka. By my father. With your help, I can prove it to the world." Yorinobu said, making me blink as the advert changed. Another one of me.

I had less than no reason to trust Yorinobu.

"How?" I questioned, looking away and out at the streets of Night City.

"In the coming days, I shall steal one of these Relics with an engram on it. He shall reveal the truth of the process and what it means to be an engram -- that it is no immortality," Yorinobu stated, his voice even. "The reveal will destroy my father -- already, many doubt him after the damage you have wrought, but the moment the other fat swine learn that he lied to them? They will seek his destruction," he swore.

It sounded tempting. Very tempting. "What do you get out of this, then?" I asked because Night City had taught me that valuable lesson -- no one did anything for free.

"For the same reasons you do, L-san. I hate my father and everything that he represents," there was a quiet anger in his voice. I wasn't sure if I could trust it. No, actually, I was near certain that I couldn't.

But that didn't matter. Even if this was just a trap, then it meant I could kill more Arasaka soldiers. I could do more damage to the company.

That's all that mattered.

"Tell me when and where."