Three weeks had passed since Ash clawed his way out of the scrapyard.
By now, his bunker was more than shelter it was a workshop. Crates of salvaged cyberware parts lined the walls. Disassembled neural link drivers, corroded optical implants, and scorched combat implants littered the workbenches. To an outsider, it was junk. To Ash, it was potential.
He stood in the center of the room, wearing the Mark I armor his first crude exosuit. It was nothing more than reinforced scrap: steel plating over a modified exo-frame, servo-assisted joints cannibalized from an old cargo hauler, and a cooling system jerry-rigged from a busted micro-reactor. It clanked when he moved, hissed steam when overworked, but it let him throw a man across a room or tank a 9mm round to the chest.
Still, it wasn't enough. Not in Night City.
He needed better. Smarter. Sleeker.
Every day, he refined the suit. Cut weight. Rewired joints. Installed a simple hydraulic feedback system to redirect kinetic energy primitive, but effective. He lacked real tech. No eddies. No connections. Only what he could steal or scavenge.
And that meant risk.
He started making trips to Kabuki's lower levels. Masked, hooded, quiet. In the alleys where no NCPD dared tread, he lifted parts off dead gangers and hijacked cyberware from half-dismantled ripperdoc clinics. Every fight was calculated every move an investment.
It was in one of those alleys that Ash found something special: a half-functional optical targeting module from a Militech drone, still intact. Heat-synced. With a bit of tuning, it could be tied to a HUD system. Target tracking. Ballistic prediction. The start of something bigger.
Back in his bunker, he integrated the module into a crude helmet fashioned from an old MaxTac visor. For the first time, he had tactical vision. His HUD showed distance, heat signatures, structural weaknesses.
And with that came confidence.
Word spread in whispers. Gangs started calling him the "Scrap Knight." They spoke of a guy in junk armor who hit like a tank and vanished like a shadow. Fixers dismissed it as street myth, until a Maelstrom cyberpsycho he took down alone wound up twitching in a back alley with his cyberware ripped out and a message carved into the wall:
"I build. You break."