Chapter Text
Everything had gone wrong. In a matter of seconds, the plan went up in flames.
V sits in the unmoving Delamain, who’s engine is faintly humming amidst the background of sharp raindrops hitting the car windows. Tension and impending doom lingers in the air, choking the merc of a decent breath in. His mind is scattered, the adrenaline from escaping a direct encounter with Adam fucking Smasher alive wearing off. It's hard to piece anything together after going through that, but reality does not wait to settle in.
Saburo Arasaka, dead? Zeroed by his own damn son? How the hell did Dex not get wind that the top dog, family head, CE-motherfucking-O of the Arasaka Corporation was going to show up at the hotel!?
A panicked tremble in V's hand reminds him of just how deep into shit he's gotten himself into. Now what? 'Saka ninjas are gonna be after his ass like no tomorrow, and they won't stop until he's minced meat buried in the deepest acid vat the megacorp can afford. Poked a sleeping bear a little too hard—now it’s awake, and angry.
This must be it, welcome to the big leagues, huh?
Whatever, he has the shard. Dex has to know the next move from here.
V lets out a heavy and shaky sigh as his head uneasily turns to Jackie Welles, sitting right next to him. Or rather, was Jackie Welles. His heart hitches as his eyes land on the corpse of his best friend and partner in crime. The ingrained training of Arasaka counter-intelligence stems the flow of tears for a few seconds, and all he can feel is just emptiness as he stares dumbly at the corpse of the person who picked him up when he was down. It's a damn shame he couldn't return the favor. A few sobs force themselves out of V's throat while his hand gently rests on his friend's massive shoulder.
“See ya in the major leagues, Jack.”
He sucks in another breath to stabilize himself before opening the passenger door.
. . .
“No blaze o’ glory for me,” are Dex DeShawn’s parting words before planting a bullet into V’s skull.
Systems critical.
Augments crashing, software shutting off for good. Systems failing. Vitals dropping, heartbeat stopping. Darkness encroaching.
Flatline. This is it, isn’t it? From the near-top of Arasaka counter-intel to a merc, and now zeroed by a fixer. And of course it had to be a fatass like Dex that does him in.
But V isn’t dead. No such luck.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in some sort of cybernetic cage. His arms and legs are gone, the sockets electrically tethered to a giant metal frame. The ‘human’ part that’s left of him is a torso that doesn’t seem to have any organic matter. No room for flesh between all of the chrome wired in his body.
What is this? Where is he?
Is he in someone else’s body? If so, then how did this guy have so many augments installed on him without keeling over in the middle of the street?
Why is he here?
Suddenly, V’s mind is thrown in disarray, consumed by an indescribable but focused rage. His anger is pointed somewhere, but he doesn’t know what.
Then, his body starts rejecting everything about itself, trying its damned hardest to push away the hardware that’s welded into his bones…if there were any actual ones left. His vision tints with blood as the feeble mind struggles to handle the wave of stimuli crashing into his neurons. Reality splits in two right in front him, and the real is almost indistinguishable from errant signals wildly firing from his nervous system. His synapses have enough electricity flowing through them to power a megabuilding, it feels like. All unheard cries from the unconscious body begging for this madness to stop, even if it meant death.
Is this…cyberpsychosis? Is he reliving the final hour of some a cyberpsycho?
What the hell is going on!?
“I’M GOING TO RIP OUT HIS SPINE!” Bellows a voice that isn’t his, dripping with rage and potent hatred. Hatred for someone. Fear for someone else.
This can’t be his body. He’s a spectator trapped inside a camera, conscious enough to understand what’s going on but only able to watch as whoever this is desperately tries to hold onto reality, lest he burns down into a jumbled mess of despair, madness, and fury. “I’LL KILL HIM! I’LL KILL HIM!” A name appears in his mind, Faraday. All of a sudden, the rush of unadulterated loathing for another human being courses through his veins, enough to make veins pop.
“YOU’RE DEAD! DEAD! FUCKING DEAD!” V’s heart beats in his head as the augmentations push the man’s—and by extension his—sanity to its limits. “I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”
Just as the bubble is about to pop, a needle filled with a light-green substance stabs straight into his chest.
Immuno-blockers. Clarity returns to the mind, at least for the moment.
A small girl is perched on top of him. Her massive cybernetic fists are wrapped around the gigantic needle as it empties itself into his body. She breathes a sigh of relief.
V blacks out.
He hacks out blood as his body zips all around a battlefield, turning Militech equipment into scrap and crushing squadrons of well-trained and well-equipped soldiers like they were synth-meat through a blender. The frame bolted onto him drains a piece of himself every time it’s used, on top of combined usage of the Sandevistan.
Does this guy have some sort of death wish?
The rage and determination that consume his mind drives him forward, keeps him holding onto reality, keeps his head straight and in the fight. Allows one more use of the Cyberskeleton. Another dodge with the Sandevistan. Another slam with the Anti-Grav thrusters.
Or rather it’s the syringes of military-grade immuno-blockers automatically get injected every few seconds. At this rate there will be more of the synthetic green fluid than blood in his body.
Before he knows it, Militech is all wiped out, leaving smoldering heaps of scrap metal, flesh and blood throughout the empty plains.
V blacks out again.
He finds himself face-to-face with Adam Smasher, mechanical limbs interlocked in a stand-off.
“So this is Adam Smasher in the chrome, NC boogeyman of legend!”
The fact that this kid isn’t even flinching when mere inches away from Smasher himself must mean that the augments have broken his brain.
“You’re packing some pretty heavy artillery for your size, boy. I’m surprised you could string two words together.” Adam Smasher’s words are flat, emotionless. He’s unphased by the giant mechanical hulk controlled by the very volatile teenager inside it.
V blacks out again and finds his body—what’s left of it—ripped apart in a crater underneath Arasaka Tower. He’s missing an eye, several limbs and the Cyberskeleton is strewn about in bits around him.
V wants to scream, wants to feel something that spurs him on to survive, but all that passes through his mind is acceptance of his fate. Content with the life lived. Zeroed by the legend himself, Adam Smasher.
“You could prove an interesting construct.”
The man scoffs. “Whatever, choom. Like I give a shit.”
“Oh, well.”
A blast from Smasher’s arm-mounted cannon and the madness finally ends.
Now, V finds himself in a digital representation of the plaza at the base of Arasaka Tower. It feels like he's floating, but at the same time he can feel his feet on solid ground. Bits of data can't truly simulate touch, it looks like.
Standing closer to the tower entrance is a single figure, red in color. They’re wearing an oversized EMS jacket and are looking up, towards the very top.
V approaches the figure. His footsteps are completely silent. In fact, the only sound is the ghastly whoosh of Cyberspace packets floating all around above him, akin to white noise.
Once he’s close enough, he reaches out his hand and taps the stranger on the shoulder. They startle at the sudden touch, before turning to V.
The eyes that meet him burn with a fire bright enough to burn Night City to ashes.
“Who…who are you?” The man says.
Suddenly, the NC mercenary is ripped screaming back into realspace.
. . .
V wakes up seated in the passenger seat of a two-seater car. To his left is Saburo Arasaka’s bodyguard at the wheel.
A system malfunction error is splayed across his peripheral vision, his operating system struggling to get back into action. The rest of his body desperately clings onto life, and can barely remain conscious.
“You hear me!? I need your help!” The bodyguard says as he places a Bounce Back injector inside V’s limp hand. By instinct the merc holds onto the palm-sized medical device, and with all strength he can muster, stabs it right back into his chest, piercing through his shirt. The unit injects a much-needed dose of painkillers that’s enough to bring his faculties back.
He breathes out a sigh of relief as he throws the medical device out, only to come face-to-face with the blank red stare of an Arasaka agent riding a motorcycle. Must be one of their fabled ninjas.
The bodyguard yells some sort of curse before driving into the motorcycle of one of the assassins, flipping it over the roofless car and exploding behind them.
V gets handed a tech-pistol and it’s obvious what he must do.
Not entirely sure how much damage he can do with this small thing against ‘Saka’s most skilled agents, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least try to make it work.
. . .
V wakes up lying on a small bed in Viktor’s clinic. His head explodes with a migraine, dulling his other senses.
“V? You in there?” Viktor asks, his smooth and deep voice a reassuring presence.
“Ugh…my head,” V rasps back.
“How ya feelin?”
Doctor should already know the answer, and it's like shit.
V sits himself up. “Fuck…dunno Vik, ears are ringin’. And I’m seeing shit.”
“These…hallucinations, describe ‘em to me.” Vik’s arms are crossed and the grave look on his face doesn’t tell anything good.
“I’m trapped in some sort of frame. Everything hurts, more chrome on my body than flesh, and I’m so…so angry.” V pauses to rack his mind, give himself a second to just process the clusterfuck of hallucinations his mind must've come up with. “Then I’m crushing Militech by the dozen, turning their stuff into a junkyard. My body’s ripping itself apart, but I keep getting immuno-blocker injections, keeping me sane for a few seconds.”
“Then…promise not to laugh…I’m face-to-face with Adam Smasher, and talk shit to him right in his face.” V chuckles. Viktor doesn’t share the amusement.
“Nothin’ there to laugh about.” The doctor shakes his head.
“I was on top of Arasaka Tower…then crushed in a hole below it. I felt…at peace, like I did everything I wanted to.”
Viktor sits down.
“I felt everything…it was too real, even for a lucid dream.”
“You weren’t dreaming, V. Those were memories. There’s a personality construct on that shard. Dreams you had, were from his past.”
The Relic, the exact one that’s slotted right in one of V’s interface ports.
“Sayin’ I experienced another psyche’s memories? How’s that possible?”
Vik dejectedly sighs. “You two’re connected in a way I can’t make head or tail of.”
“Two? Me and who, Vik, who’s the other?”
The doctor rubs his chin. “David Martinez, he was a merc like you. Caused chaos at Arasaka Tower last year when he came swooping in with an experimental Arasaka Cyberskeleton.” He sighs again. “Anyway, that’s not what’s important right now.”
The lack of eye-contact is worrying to V.
“You’ve never given me that look before, Vik. What is it?”
Viktor rubs his forehead, and struggles to come up with words. “You…uh, don’t got a lot of time left, kid.”
“What?”
“The biochip…it’s basically a bomb, fuse lit already. You don’t have much time left, much…life. A few weeks tops. Martinez’s construct is overwriting your consciousness, gradually taking over your body until one day you’ll just be…gone.”