Sure enough, after leaving the subway station, Li Pan took a familiar route through the warehouse district and found that the Vortex Gang lunatics had already blocked the road and begun their operation.
It wasn't even dark yet, and they had already [attacked] three police cars. These instantly recognizable gang members were covered head to toe in crude metal implants—most scavenged from junkyards and dismantled factory machinery—radiating a heavy wasteland-punk vibe. Add in mohawks or Maori-style horn haircuts, and just standing there they could draw the gaze of any man unlucky enough to have seven moles on his chest.
Because of their rap sheets—robbery, murder, theft, vandalism, public disturbance—they'd long been on the Public Safety Network's red list. To avoid identity scans, account freezes, and tracking by the city's security systems, Vortex punks liked to slash their own faces, pierce and tattoo them, and stud them with all manner of spiked cybernetic mods. But their most infamous feature was gouging out their eyes.
This was the gang's proud "homegrown tech": pluck out your eyeballs, sell them to the organ black market for startup cash, then rip low-grade infrared sensors from factory machines and robots, and patch your skull with clusters of fake eyes—packed so tightly they looked like a spider's—thus evading iris scans and psychometric profiling by the network.
At first glance, they looked like demons straight from hell, and the things they were doing were just as grotesque.
Some were hooking the mangled remains of police officers onto motorcycles and dragging them up and down the street, carving a bloody warning line across the asphalt. Others were performing open-air surgery, carving organs from the dead and wounded to pack into coolers for preservation, then stringing up the hollowed carcasses by their intestines on lampposts as a show of force.
Others sealed off intersections with burning vehicles and smart mines, setting up remote-controlled machine guns to open fire on any passing civilian car—laughing hysterically whether they killed people, blew up vehicles, or both.
For people like them, watching the world burn was probably the most fun left to have.
In a scene like this, even NCPA officers—paid by the corporations—didn't dare show up. This was an outlying precinct; no way they'd get Cerberus heavy units here. The cushy police school graduates with connections stayed in city-center offices, while the ones patrolling out here were underpaid auxiliaries on shady contracts—often with overtime and bounty bonuses skimmed by their own chiefs—making less than corporate interns.
As the saying went: two thousand a month, and you think I'm dying for that?
But the Vortex Gang was going big today. Dozens of lookouts at one intersection? That had to be multiple families working together—maybe a full battle-group operation. Looked like they wouldn't rest until Warehouse No. 7 was cleaned out.
Li Pan loaded his pistol, took aim from a distance, adjusted his sights, and—bang!—one shot dropped a corpse-dragging biker five hundred meters away. The bike swerved into the flames, detonating in a fireball that blew the rider's flesh clean off, leaving only a burning skeleton, cybernetic eyes sparking red like a Ghost Rider from hell.
Damn, that was almost artistic.
Before they could react, Li Pan rolled his shoulder and—bang!—dropped a second one.
Nice. But better conserve ammo—each round cost half a yuan.
A good marksman was made by firing countless rounds.
A true gun god was a good marksman plus a mountain of experience… and a pinch of luck.
That mix of experience and luck was called "gun sense."
Not that Li Pan was bragging—he knew his skills weren't exactly divine, and he had no special hacks. At best, it was muscle memory from too many hours gaming. Without his ballistic processor tuned to his "gaming comfort zone," he probably wouldn't hit a thing.
With it, though—different story.
Bang!
"Ah!"
"Sniper!"
Bang!
"Ah!"
"Where is he?"
Bang!
"Ah!"
"He's on the rooftop!"
"Shit! He's in a suit! Corporate dog!"
Bang!
"Kill him!"
"Damn! The MG's elevation's too low! Which idiot mounted it like that?"
Bang!
"RPG! RPG!"
"Holy shit, RPG!"
BOOM!
Li Pan dove from the rooftop, nearly knocked out by the shockwave.
"Kill him!" Tat-tat-tat! "Go, go, go!" Bang-bang-bang!
Damn, these lunatics had serious firepower.
If he had a bulletproof suit, he'd rush them and gun them all down. But he didn't—and that slide earlier had ripped his already-dead suit pants, leaving his leg bleeding.
So much for being a five-hundred-meter headshot "gun—god!"—he'd barely dropped four or five goons before a dozen cyber-maniacs with SMGs, RPGs, and motorbikes had him running for his life, unable to lift his head.
Ah, life—such highs, and so many lows… lows… lows…
If only he had the cash for a sniper rifle—but even then, you couldn't buy one.
Sniper rifles, assault rifles, any long-barreled weapon—these were all military-grade now, heavily regulated. Get caught on camera holding one, and you'd be tracked down and fined at minimum.
No one could tell whether you were holding an antique musket or a Gauss railgun disguised as a cello case.
Without special permits, even the NCPA wasn't allowed heavy weapons—smart SMGs were the limit. No wonder gangs pushed them around.
Meanwhile, the gangs' arsenals kept upgrading. The Vortex Gang had so many ex-military factories they could cobble together anything from light to heavy firepower out of scrap.
So Li Pan turned and ran—facing that much firepower, at least a reinforced platoon's worth, he couldn't break through head-on.
Worse, after the Vortex maniacs unloaded their barrage, they didn't even give chase. They pulled back to the intersection, called in two more vanloads of reinforcements, and dug in like trench fighters. No openings at all.
Damn it—since when were they this disciplined?
Now Li Pan had no choice. If he couldn't lure them into the alleys for ambush shots, he'd run out of ammo before he could headshot them all.
That left only the sewers.
He'd seen the Warehouse No. 7 floor plans—Monster Corp had built a hidden passage into the old Night City sewer system for emergencies, to evacuate assets if under siege.
Unfortunately, that also gave the Vortex vermin an opening.
Whether they were hired or just crawled out of the sewers to score a big hit, the place was bound to be crawling with them. The sewers were a maze—get caught in there and it'd be close-quarters chaos, with no room to dodge or escape like out here.
But he had to risk it. Beyond the monsters inside, there was Big Bear—the hulking military-cybernetic brute the Vortex would see as a treasure. If Li Pan waited too long, they'd strip him for parts.
Li Pan wasn't exactly a saint, but after all his time in Night City—sending resumes, begging favors—Big Bear was the only one who'd actually pulled him up. Whether into safety or into a pit, the guy had still reached out.
If someone extends a hand, you don't just ignore their fate.
Alive or dead, he needed to see for himself. Without a body, the system would mark him missing and pay nothing.
So Li Pan pulled a ragged tarp from a junk pile, smeared his face with mud and grease, and disguised himself as a vagrant. Following the company's route map, he slipped into the sewers.
These weren't your average storm drains—they were broad flood channels, with walkways for maintenance drones. Being on the Pacific coast and in an earthquake-prone zone, the underground construction was built tough.
Planned as far back as the first New Tokyo era—when Earth-0791 was in the Cold War—the sewers had doubled as bomb shelters and nuclear defense bunkers. Alongside the drainage tunnels were secret military and civilian escape routes.
After countless disasters—volcanic eruptions, quakes, tsunamis, nuclear wars, biocrises—the system had been destroyed and rebuilt over and over, with contracts changing hands in corrupt deals. The result: a labyrinth even the Public Safety Network couldn't fully map.
When the Night Group rebuilt Night City, they decided New Tokyo was too much of a mess and built a new alloy island for the city center—partly to keep pests from tunneling up.
Thus, the marginalized found refuge here—the "inner world" of Night City, its underground Tokyo.
Monster Corp was even older—founded at the end of the 21st century, one of the very first transdimensional companies.
So here in 0791, while their offices could move to the city-center corporate parks, the old monster containment warehouses—forty-two of them—remained in the old district.
Li Pan, though raised in the slums, had never been in this kind of underworld. Down here, cyberpsychos were small fry—everyone hiding here had serious charges, the kind that'd bring a full Cerberus mech-cavalry unit down on them for instant kill-on-sight.
He moved carefully along the maintenance walkways, guided by limited sewer sensors and lighting from his Xingtian system. Luck wasn't terrible—he found the hidden entrance, and no gang guards nearby.
Luck wasn't great, either.
There was already a "monster" at the entrance.
Not the kind TheM wanted—just a regular, well… dead one.
After watching it and aiming his gun for a while, Li Pan confirmed it was dead.
At first glance, it looked like a giant rat; at another, like a man; at a third, like a dog. Sparse black fur, the stench of rotting organs—disgusting.
If it stood up, it would be about 1.8 to 2 meters tall. Its humanlike features were twisted, limbs distorted, bone structure warped toward that of a carnivore—muscular, with a protruding skull-snout like a dog's.
Its cause of death seemed to be a blade wound—no bullet holes—cut clean from shoulder to belly, organs spilling, now swarming with maggots. A stake pinned through its heart deep into the ground.
What the hell? Bio-beast? Cyborg? Why here, at the company's secret passage? And who killed it?
The organs still there suggested it wasn't the gang's work. But a stake through the heart? What kind of psycho killed like that?
Could that killer already be inside the warehouse? If so, they were definitely after something in No. 7.
On alert, Li Pan stepped over the carcass and maggots, gun raised, heart pounding.
First day of overtime, and all this crap already—and the Vortex might actually be the simple part. His civilian pistol couldn't even punch through a suit's armor. He should've picked the Muramasa Mk. IV Mantis Blades in his last mod slot…
But for now, he'd just have to play the cards he had.
.
.
.
⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
💥 High-voltage cyberpunk. Urban warfare. AI paranoia.Read 30 chapters ahead, only on Patreon.
🔗 patreon.com/DrManhattanEN