The Sandevistan — military-grade neural overdrive. It hijacks the user's nervous system, flooding it with enough electrochemical fire to bend perception itself.
To the one using it, time slows to a crawl — seconds stretch into eternities. To everyone else, the user simply vanishes, moving faster than the brain can process.
In theory, once a Sandevistan activates, no one can touch its user.
In practice, tonight proved the theory wrong.
Because someone did.
…
James Norris — the cyberpsycho drenched in blood and chrome — stared dumbly at his missing left arm. Not in pain. Pain had long been erased from his programming.
But in disbelief.
He hadn't even seen it happen.
He turned, sensors scrambling, optical feed glitching with static, trying to locate what had just cut him.
Through the haze of burning circuits, he saw it — a shadow gliding through the smoke and neon.
A man.
Tall, lean, walking straight toward him with a blade hanging loosely from his hand. The steel scraped across the cracked concrete, leaving a faint trail of sparks behind every step.
Step.
Scrape.
Step.
Scrape.
The sound echoed across the plaza like a countdown.
Neo's coat fluttered in the breeze. His eyes, cold and calm, never left the cyberpsycho.
By the time he stopped moving, the distance between them was gone.
…
Norris screamed. A roar of rage, static, and mechanical feedback.
He no longer remembered what fear felt like — only the instinct to destroy whatever stood in front of him.
Around them, the NCPD's finest lay sprawled across the plaza, skulls burst open, helmets shattered, the air heavy with the smell of ozone and blood.
Every officer had been reduced to a silent, cooling corpse.
Now there were only two living beings left in the ring of flashing police lights.
One man.
One monster.
And the monster was already losing.
Norris spat out a thick spray of blood and hydraulic fluid, veins pulsing with overdrive energy. His remaining arm twitched.
He didn't care that his body was breaking down — he'd push it past the limit one more time.
He triggered the Sandevistan again.
…
The world slowed to a crawl.
Streetlights froze mid-flicker. Dust hung motionless in the air. The faint hum of distant sirens stretched into a low, eternal drone.
Within that frozen frame, Norris moved — faster than thought, faster than bullets.
He reappeared behind Neo, arm cocked, weapon aimed at the back of the merc's skull.
But before his finger could even tense around the trigger, Neo's head turned.
And his blade sang.
Shhh—click!
A green flash split the darkness.
Norris didn't even register the pain — just the sudden, lightless emptiness where his right arm used to be.
The arm — gun still clutched in its hand — hit the ground with a dull clang.
…
Then came the second cut.
And the third.
Two flashes of steel. Two quick, precise strikes — both aimed low.
Norris's knees exploded in a shower of sparks and shredded polymer as his legs folded beneath him.
In the span of a heartbeat, his limbs were gone.
He toppled forward, chest heaving, a metallic hiss escaping his lungs.
Neo stood over him. The blade gleamed faintly, unsullied by blood.
The final stroke fell silent.
A whisper of steel through air.
Norris's head rolled away into the neon dust.
…
Above the plaza, red lights pulsed across the smog.
The hum of approaching MaxTac dropships cut through the night air.
Neo glanced up once, his reflection shimmering in the gleam of the descending aircraft.
He wasn't stupid enough to pick a fight with them.
By the time the first dropship engines roared overhead, he had already crouched beside Norris's corpse and gone to work.
The blade slipped under metal and flesh with surgical precision, prying free a gleaming black spinal core.
The military-grade Sandevistan.
He wiped it clean, slid it into a reinforced case, and vanished into the shadows just as the first dropship hit the ground.
…
The MaxTac hovercraft door burst open, gale-force wind roaring through the cabin.
"NC9527, report!" a woman's voice barked over comms.
Melissa Rory.
A woman who'd seen so many horrors that nothing surprised her anymore — or so she thought.
"Captain?" she called again. Silence.
Melissa's eyes narrowed. "They're all dead."
Her voice cut through the comms like a blade of ice. "Raise the threat level on the cyberpsycho. He's more dangerous than we thought. Deploy the suppression field."
A technician beside her obeyed instantly. A column of red light shot down from the ship, enveloping the entire plaza in a gravity well so dense it could crush a tank like paper.
Any living body caught inside would be reduced to paste within seconds.
Even a cyberpsycho would buckle.
"Now, burn his neural unit."
"Ma'am," the tech stammered, "target's using a military-grade anti-intrusion system — full neural wipe will take three minutes."
"Three minutes is too long," Melissa hissed. "Keep burning him. Everyone else, drop in and finish the job."
She grabbed a descent line and jumped.
Wind howled as she plunged through the air, boots slamming into the plaza floor with military precision.
Her squad landed behind her, guns raised — but froze instantly.
…
James Norris wasn't moving.
He wasn't even a body anymore.
What was left of him looked less like a man and more like a grotesque art piece — limbs severed, spine torn out, head cleaved clean from his neck.
The so-called unstoppable cyberpsycho had been turned into nothing more than a pile of cooling chrome.
The plaza was silent, save for the low hum of the pressure field still active around them.
Melissa crouched beside the corpse, her sharp eyes scanning the wounds.
"Left arm — clean sever," she muttered. "Right arm, same. Knees — symmetrical cuts. Neck — one strike."
She paused.
Then her expression changed.
"These aren't from mantis blades… or a monoblade… No kinetic weapon either."
She touched the edge of one of the wounds. The slice was smooth — impossibly clean.
"This…" She looked up slowly. "Was done with a normal sword."
Her squad stared at her in disbelief.
"That's not possible," one of them blurted. "Nobody could cut through cyberware like that with a regular blade."
Melissa stood, her jaw tightening. She didn't answer.
Somewhere out there, someone had just turned a military monster into scrap metal with nothing but steel and skill.
And that, in Night City, was more terrifying than any cyberpsycho.
"Ma'am," one of her men spoke up cautiously, "should we report that the Sandevistan's missing?"
Melissa's eyes flickered toward the empty cavity in Norris's back.
Then she shook her head. "No. Military-grade or not, it's not worth much. Reporting it will only bring corpo eyes on us — and this ghost clearly operates beyond their leash."
She turned toward the city lights, eyes narrowing.
"Whoever did this," she said quietly, "I'll find him."