Oliver leaned against the cracked wall, arms crossed over his faded 6th Street jacket, its frayed edges hinting at years of knife fights and concrete scrapes. His ocular implant flickered gold as the name Faraday registered.
"Low-tier fixer. Hangs around corpo lackeys and Watson gutter trash. Few ex-6th Street took his gigs back in the day. Came back missing fingers or credsticks lighter than a Scav's conscience."
Jackie snorted, tossing a half-crushed X-Cola can at the overflowing trash pile. It clattered against a gutted drone chassis, sending a cockroach skittering into the shadows. "¿Y este pendejo? What's his angle? Peddling fake BD's or selling kidneys?"
"Both." Oliver's voice carried the fatigue of someone who'd spent too many nights patching up half-dead mercs. "Dude's the reason 'middleman' rhymes with 'half-assed.'"
Carl ignored them, Faraday's voice still buzzing in his neural feed—slick, synthetic, corpo-polished. "An old client recommended you. Says you're… efficient." Heh, seems Blanca throwing them a bone. "Got a trial run. Scav den. Extraction. Client wants a body—preferably breathing, but corpse'll do. 6,000 eddies. Half upfront."
Rain drummed against the apartment's reinforced windows, the neon glow of a Tsunami Arms billboard bleeding through grime-streaked glass. Carl's thumb tapped the grip of his pistol, its polymer finish worn smooth from a hundred draw-and-fire drills. "Scav den?"
"Client's desperate. Kid's already on ice. Take it or leave it."
Jackie caught Carl's expression and groaned, slumping deeper into the armchair. "Ay, no jodas— we just sat down!" He gestured at the lukewarm meals congealing on the table, their iridescent sauce shimmering like toxic sludge. "You wanna play hero ahora?"
"Kid's got maybe six hours before they yank his neural port." Carl stood, his subdermal armor flexing under his sleeves like a second skin. The overhead light glinted off the fresh smart-link grafted to his temple, its silver filigree stark against his unmodified flesh. "You wanna finish your comida de mierda first?"
Oliver was already at the door, his Nova revolver snapping into its holster with a click that screamed military discipline. His boots—polished to a mercenary's shine despite the Watson grime—paused mid-stride. "Jackie—stop bitching and grab the damn Copperhead."
The Quartz waited outside; its dented frame slouched like a drunk against the curb. Old bullet holes streaked its once-glossy paint, and the passenger door creaked like a dying synth when Jackie yanked it open. "Pinche cárcel sobre ruedas. How's this thing still running?"
"Prayer and spite," Oliver muttered, slamming the ignition. The engine coughed, spewing a faint black smoke that blended with Watson's smog.
Carl crammed into the backseat; knees jammed against Jackie's muscle-plated spine. The car's interior smelled of synth-leather rot and gun oil, the floor littered with spent shell casings and a crumpled All Foods wrapper. "City Center. Abandoned meat-packing plant. Faraday's sending coordinates."
Jackie twisted, his Saints necklace clinking. "Oye, this fixer—how much he skimming? Client probably paid 30k?"
"50k. Minimum." Oliver swerved around a gutted drone; his tone flat. Rain streaked the windshield, smearing the neon into watercolor riots of cyan and magenta. "Corpo tears cost extra. Faraday's the type to charge 'em for the tissues too."
The Quartz lurched into the City Center's glow, its headlights cutting through the smog like a dull scalpel. Somewhere ahead, a kid's fate hung in the balance—another cog in Night City's meat grinder.
[CITYCENTER]:
Where corpo drones pretend the gutter doesn't reek.
NCPD threat level: "Safe." (For now.)
The neon sprawl of Night City's CityCenter throbbed outside the car windows—a migraine-inducing tapestry of holographic ads and flickering traffic drones. Rain slicked the streets, turning the glow of Tsunami Arms billboards into smeared watercolor across the asphalt. Oliver killed the engine, the Quartz's headlights dying with a wheeze. Ahead, a crumbling apartment complex hunched in the shadows, its cracked façade veiled by the perpetual smog. A flickering sign above the entrance read "HARMONY LIVING" in peeling letters, the irony thicker than the stench of urine and burnt wiring wafting from the alley.
"Who'd have thought one of Night City's busiest districts hides a Scav den?" Oliver cracked his knuckles, hefting his Nova revolver as they stepped onto the sidewalk. Rain dripped from the gutters overhead, tapping a discordant rhythm against his Kevlar-clad shoulders. "And here I used to think downtown was safe."
"You stopped believing corpo propaganda the moment you hit the streets," Jackie replied, his Saratoga SMG looking comically small in his chrome-plated grip. He sniffed the air, nose wrinkling at the tang of rust and stale synth-noodles. "Ooff! Smells like Scav buffet. Bet they're knee-deep in bootleg meds and regret."
Carl's retinal implants flickered gold as he re-scanned the Fixer's intel. The schematics hovered in his vision—a wireframe blueprint of the sixth-floor apartment, four heat signatures pacing near a bedridden fifth. "Sixth floor. Elevator." He thumbed the Kenshin's safety off, the electromagnetic coils humming to life. "Four Scavs. Target's sedated, no visible cyberware responce. In and out."
"Let's make it quick."
The elevator groaned like a dying hound, its rusted doors shuddering as they sealed. Flickering LEDs painted the trio in corpse-blue light. Oliver adjusted his grip on the Nova, the revolver's pearl handle slick with rain. Jackie cracked his neck, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the cramped space. Carl stared at the floor indicator—each dimming number a countdown to violence.
The doors lurched open on six. The hallway reeked of mildew and scorched circuitry. A shattered holo-screen spat static near Apartment 607, its distorted "World of Corpo Luxury!" ad casting jagged shadows over bullet-pocked walls.
Carl didn't knock.
The door exploded inward under Jackie's boot, splinters raining onto stained carpet. The first Scav spun—a wiry man with a rusted mantis blade grafted to his spine—just in time to catch Oliver's round between his bloodshot eyes. The shot echoed, a thunderclap in the cramped room.
Chaos erupted.
A second Scav lunged from a gutted sofa, a sawed-off shotgun roaring. Buckshot peppered the wall above Carl's head, shredding a peeling "NUSA Pride!" poster. Carl's Kenshin barked once—a hypersonic round liquefying the Scav's shoulder before detonating the shotgun's chamber. The blast vaporized the man's arm in a shower of sparks and bone fragments.
Jackie charged the third, his chrome-plated fist caving in a scavenger's ribcage with a wet crunch. The fourth scrambled backward, fumbling a pistol with trembling, grafted hands. Oliver put a round through his throat mid-plea, the man collapsing into a heap of mismatched cyberware and frayed nerves.
Silence fell, broken only by the drip of coolant and the tinny wail of a neighbor's BD stream.
"Aim's improving." Carl nodded at the bodies as Oliver reloaded, his boots crunching over shell casings. "Three headshots, one center-mass. Two-second draw. Speed's decent."
"Gotta catch up to you somehow." Oliver holstered his Nova, grinning. His gaze lingered on a gutted medkit and blood-stained surgical tools littering a makeshift operating table. "Been grinding those old Western BDs. Turns out, they're good target practice."
"You were just watching the tits before," Jackie called from the far corner. He crouched beside a bloodstained mattress, where their target lay—a pale, brown-haired kid no older than eighteen, his chest rising in shallow, drugged breaths. An IV drip snaked from his arm to a half-empty bag of murky synth-dope. "He's out cold. Scavs pumped him full of enough juice to drop a rhino. Might sleep till tomorrow."
"Name's Julio. Japantown kid." Carl's neural interface flickered as he cross-referenced the Fixer's dossier. A holographic ID shimmered in his vision: Julio Marquez, 17, last seen hawking bootleg BDs outside a Kabuki market. "Dumbass wandered into Scav turf. Got lucky."
"Lucky?" Oliver snorted, checking Julio's pulse. The kid's wrist was bruised, track marks spiderwebbing up his forearm. "Kid's got two kidneys left. That's a miracle in this district."
As Jackie hauled Julio over his shoulder, the kid's head lolling like a broken puppet, Carl jacked into the Scavs' terminal. The machine was a Frankenstein rig—cracked screens fused with scavenged military motherboards, its keys sticky with dried blood.
The holoscreen flared to life, vomiting a scroll of encrypted logs. Carl's golden finger sliced through firewalls, revealing a grimoire of horrors: organ prices (€5k per liver, €8k for paired kidneys), shipping manifests to black-market ripperdocs, and—
A red-tagged file pulsed like an infected wound.
Carl tapped in.
Surveillance photos flooded the screen—grainy, timestamped. A warehouse, its corroded walls streaked with acid rain. Shadows loomed in the gloom: hulking, angular silhouettes with hydraulic joints and armor plating thick enough to tank a tank. One image caught a shoulder emblem—a snarling wolf's head, half-eroded by data corruption.
"Jackie. Oliver. Check this."
Jackie squinted, his Saints necklace glinting as he leaned closer. "The hell…? Some kinda heavy machinery?"
"Worse." Oliver's voice tightened. He traced a finger over the hologram, zooming on a segmented leg joint. "That's a fucking ACPA. Armored Combat Power Armor. Militech's toys—or they were, before someone greased a warehouse guard."
Carl's fingers flew across the interface, decrypting a fragmented shipping manifest. "Prototype suits. Stolen three weeks ago from a Militech convoy. Listed as 'lost in transit.'"
Jackie whistled. "Since when do Scavs deal in military-grade chrome?"
"They don't." Carl's jaw tightened. The screen glitched—a crimson error message devouring the data. DATACORRUPTED flashed in jagged pixels. "Someone's using them as mules. These suits were headed to…"
The terminal died with a hiss, smoke curling from its overloaded circuits.
"Damn ICE." Carl yanked the neural link free, the smell of burnt plastic clinging to his gloves. "But one thing's clear—we just kicked a hornet's nest."