The underground passage wasn't narrow, but it was certainly not wide.
Most of the floor was cluttered with tools, generators, and cables. The severed limbs of robots and humans alike were scattered everywhere.
A freshly dug tunnel was clearly more cramped than the original corridor, its weight supported by several load-bearing pillars.
Fifty centimeters in diameter, reinforced special-grade steel-concrete, able to bear more than 300 tons.
Whoosh!
A figure, dodging a deadly slab of flying metal, retreated at high speed—
and found himself with nowhere left to retreat!
Terror flashed in his cybernetic eyes:
in his vision, a massive fist was advancing—
Not swinging.
Advancing, like a rocket!
Each shove of the power armor's legs drove him forward, the ground denting like soft clay. Jet-turbines on elbows and calves fired in perfect sync, their exhaust plumes blazing like miniature suns in enhanced low-light vision!
Even the fist glowed red-hot, as if its surface temperature came from atmospheric friction—
an honest-to-god rocket.
Warm air tore into screaming vortices as it closed in—
Boom!
A thunderous strike!
The red-hot gauntlet smashed into the thick support pillar.
At that instant, Leo's sensors recorded the release of roughly seventy thousand joules of kinetic energy, all discharged in an extremely short burst. Impact depth: 0.1 meters. Converted to force—
the strike equaled 71.3 tons slamming directly into the pillar.
Full-body cybernetic enhancement granted the victim unparalleled mobility and reactivity, fast enough to avoid a direct hit.
But the terror of a near miss pierced his mind—
More than 23 tons of force erupted beside his ear in a single breath. Sound and air pressure drowned out everything.
And what he saw shattered what remained of his psychological defenses—
Such overwhelming power concentrated on the pillar made the abstract concept of force feel like a physical monster:
A 30-centimeter crater bloomed across the concrete face, the impact piercing inward to the steel reinforcement. The entire pillar bent slightly. Outer steel bars snapped outward like broken stalks bursting through the wall!
Dust turned the shockwave visible; the whole tunnel trembled!
Cracks spider-webbed rapidly along the pillar, the once-unyielding structure groaning as it bowed.
What kind of monster was this?
And then, another question hit him:
if his heels were already pressed against the wall…
how was he seeing the entire side of the pillar—
seeing the force ripple outward?
Thud.
His flying head hit the floor.
He saw his own heels.
So that was why.
His head had been cut off.
Slick.
Darkness swallowed his vision. V's mantis-blade had pierced his brainstem, then snapped back.
Steam hissed from the gauntlets as Jackie withdrew his fist—
The glowing-hot portion of the gauntlet remained embedded in the concrete. The armor's armory module popped open, ejecting replacement components. Two of Leo's octo-arms snatched them up and completed on-site repairs on the spot.
"Seventy-kilojoule impact module showing slight irregularity. Reduce output a bit."
"Got it."
Heavy footsteps rumbled again; V twirled her mantis-blades and followed behind Jackie—
All she needed was a single opening.
It was like a game of whack-a-mole: Jackie wasn't as fast as the moles, but he could smash the entire floor through.
Invisible moles were hard to hit—
panicked moles only needed one clean strike.
Two octo-arms switched tools and sliced more components off another enemy corpse.
A few more bodies and he would completely decipher the specifications of this cybernetic frame.
"Interesting." A blue gleam flickered in Leo's eyes. "Advanced skill-chips… able to turn anyone into a top-tier assassin."
[Little Octopus: Interesting(.) Boss, let me read it.]
"What do we do? What do we do?"
Boom!
Night City didn't have earthquakes—
But this underground tunnel was definitely experiencing one.
The Slaughterhouse gang members, hidden in the shadows, had no idea what to do anymore. What was happening?
The enemy wasn't human. He was a goddamn bulldozer!
Why had the ambush failed?
Why had the battlefield turned into a nightmarish killing ground—
why…?
Slaughterhouse boss Irakli felt his brain shutting down:
Why were they the ones dying nonstop?!
Weapons of absurd power tore through the passage, along with flying slabs of metal, generators, ceiling rubble, rebar—
all of it hurled recklessly by that giant man at lethal speeds like stones from a sling!
The Slaughterhouse gang loved slowly slicing victims apart with blades—
but this big guy…
he was a butcher.
Only he wasn't butchering people—
he was butchering the entire underground space, using debris as his meat cleavers.
A force capable of tearing the structure into eight pieces, sweeping mercilessly like a carpet of destruction—
their stealth gear and assassination rigs were utterly overwhelmed.
Agility, cunning—completely crushed under absolute strength.
Boom!
"Boss! Should we—should we just… run?!"
A colossal crash echoed from the corner. Irakli snapped out of his stupor as his underling shouted, his cybernetic head jerking mechanically toward the voice.
"Run? Run where, you idiot?! Look around—how the hell do we run?!"
He pointed around them: tunnels everywhere, crisscrossing the subterranean maze.
They only knew the one route leading back to Eren Street!
As for all the tunnels the Brainiac gang had dug—
how were they supposed to know which led out?!
A long straight blade snapped from Irakli's arm and plunged into the wall beside his underling.
"We're not running! Fight! Disable all your skill-chip restrictions!"
"W-we…"
"Fight! Disable!"
Smoke puffed from Irakli's skull. His demonic eyes locked onto his subordinate—
and in the underling's vision, the boss's eyes suddenly doubled, then trembled in distorted overlays!
Cybernetics meant for stealth operations screeched with static as systems overloaded.
His body temperature spiked.
Then everything stabilized again—
unnervingly so.
Boom!
At the far end of the tunnel, his peripheral vision caught a massive figure smashing straight through a wall!
From his vantage point, he saw a companion leap high, latching onto the ceiling.
But behind the giant bulldozer…
a thin streak of light glided unnervingly fast—
a blade.
As the companion clung to the ceiling, the streak reached the same spot—
close-quarters contact—
cloaking collapsed—
and the blade pierced body and skull, dropping another corpse.
This tunnel was long, yet also short—long because all ten surviving companions were gathered here.
They wielded cutting-edge full-body cybernetics, swift, lethal, and silent.
But also short—because that giant bulldozer looked like he needed only a few seconds to flatten the entire place and slice them all into scraps.
The power armor's jet-turbines, muzzle-fire, and faintly glowing gauntlets cast the shadows of three figures onto the walls, floor, and ceiling.
One surged forward with unstoppable momentum.
Another shifted posture with each flicker of light.
And the last one…
kept picking things up from the ground.
Each punch shook the tunnel.
Each blade swing dropped a corpse.
Every step—not fast, not slow—was irresistible.
The tunnel was far too short—
short enough that in just a moment, everyone else was dead.
Survival mattered more than sanity now.
The underling suddenly disabled all safeties. His internal skill-chip blew past behavioral limits, electric current stabbing through his nerves—
and his body began to move without any conscious command.
And it moved fast.