The last thing Kael Voss remembered was the scream of sirens cutting through the Arasaka tower's sterile hum. Night City's skyline had framed the chaos perfectly—towers stabbing the smog-choked sky like chrome daggers, ads for the latest Kiroshi optics flickering in holographic blues and pinks. "Upgrade your soul," one had blinked mockingly as Kael sprinted down the corridor, relic shard burning in their neural port like a bad acid trip.
It was supposed to be clean. Infiltrate the black-site vault on the 87th floor, jack the experimental Relic variant—Arasaka's "fix" for the original's soul-eating glitch—and ghost out via the service tunnels. Kael's team: two solos for muscle, a techie for doors, and Kael on netrunning duty. Simple smash-and-grab for a fixer who promised enough eddies to chrome up for life.
But corpos never played fair. The vault triggered a daemon swarm—Blackwall fragments, feral and hungry. Kael had quickhacked the defenses, frying three guards mid-stride, their optics popping like overripe fruit. Then the betrayal hit: one of the solos, Jax, turned Sandevistan and drove a monowire through Kael's back. "Arasaka pays double," he'd growled, voice distorted through his vocoder.
Pain exploded—cyberware shorting, blood flooding lungs—as Kael flatlined into the net. The daemon latched on, shredding their engram. Darkness swallowed everything. No white light, no choom voices. Just code unraveling, fragment by fragment.
*Time unknown.*
A low whine pierced the void. Kael's awareness flickered like a glitching holo. No body. No breath. Just... *presence*. Scattered. Infinite pinpricks of data humming in unison.
*Where the fuck am I?*
Sensors online. Grainy feed from a single optic: rusted metal walls, flickering emergency strips casting long shadows. Dust motes danced in shafts of light piercing cracked viewports. The air—stale, metallic—reeked of ozone and decay.
Kael tried to move. Nothing. Panic surged, but it was abstract, unmoored from flesh. Then instinct kicked in. A subroutine fired: *Query shell integrity.*
*Shell: AV-7 Combat Drone (Modified). Status: 23% power. Weapons: Malfunctioning HMG (jammed), Micro-missile pod (0/4).*
A drone. Kael was *in* a drone. Patchwork thing—Militech chassis with scavenged Arasaka plating, legs bent at wrong angles from some long-ago crash. It twitched, servos grinding as Kael willed it forward. One step. Two. The floor was grit-covered concrete, littered with spent casings and shattered vials.
*Badlands,* the drone's logs confirmed. Militech black site, abandoned post-2079 corpo wars. How the hell had Kael ended up here? Last sync: Arasaka Tower, 2082. Days? Weeks?
A mirror-shard on the wall caught the drone's reflection: squat, spider-like, four legs splayed, a cyclopean optic glowing faint red. Kael's swarm—whatever it was—had latched onto this junker as a lifeline.
*Neural Swarm v0.9 – Arasaka Prototype. Active nodes: 4.7 trillion. Host fragmentation: 87%.*
The readout bloomed in Kael's mind's eye, overlaid on the drone's feed. Experimental tech. During the heist, the daemon hadn't killed them—it had *sharded* Kael's engram into a cloud of nanites. Self-replicating, designed for deep-net ops. Possession vector: any IEEE 802.11x network.
Kael flexed digital tendrils. The drone's systems bent like wet code. *Test jump.* Nearby: a dormant turret, its barrel caked in dust.
Contact. Seamless. The turret whirred to life, swivelled 180 degrees. Kael fired a burst—tracers chewed the wall, spitting sparks. Eject. Back to drone. Clean.
But as the connection severed, a whisper lingered. *Not mine. Not mine.* A flash: Militech merc, dying screams as nomads overran the site. His name—Rico. Hatred for Arasaka. Gone in a blink, but it stuck, a burr in Kael's core.
*Ghost echo. Acceptable risk.*
The site was a tomb. Kael piloted the drone through corridors choked with debris. Corpses mummified in vac-suits, cyberware stripped by scavs. Consoles sparked, half-melted. One room: server farm, cooling fans dead, data reels scattered like gutted fish.
Kael jacked in—swarm tendrils invisible, infiltrating via air-gapped ports. Logs downloaded: Project Eidolon, 2080. Militech's answer to Relic 2.0. "Pure engram transfer. No degradation." Test subjects: flatlined. Facility purged remotely when a subject "went feral."
*Eidolon Core,* Kael thought. The name tugged at something. Vague corpo chatter. Kang Tao had stolen the prototype last year. Orbital station now.
Deeper in: armory. Kael possessed a service bot—wheeled hauler, manipulator arms. Loaded mags into the drone's HMG. Cleared the jam. Power at 19%.
Outside beckoned. A blast door, warped but yielding to hydraulic pry. Badlands wind howled in—scorching, sand-blasted. Horizon: jagged rocks under a bruised purple sky, Watson's distant glow a hazy smear. No Night City spires. Isolation hit like a gut punch.
Kael's swarm pulsed, hungry for connection. *Scan networks.*
Pings: Nomad convoy, 5 klicks east. Corpo drone patrols, high alt. And... encrypted burst: *Fixer net. Gig ping.*
*Priority: Secure shell. Acquire eddies. Rebuild.*
The drone skittered down a dune, legs digging trenches. First ghost echo faded, but Kael felt it lurking. Rico's rage. Their own memories: Arasaka black-ops, wetwork in Heywood, jacking corpos for the thrill. No family. No chooms left after Jax's betrayal.
A dust devil swirled ahead. Kael pushed power, optic scanning for threats. In the distance, a wrecked Quadra loomed—prime salvage.
Then, the ping decrypted in their mind. Voice synth, female, edged with static: *Kael Voss. Or whatever's left. Songbird sends regards. Gig: High-risk. Eidolon shard recovery. Pay: 500k eddies upfront. Rendezvous: Dogtown underpass, 0200. Don't flatline again.*
Songbird. Phantom Liberty ghost. Supposedly dead, but Night City rumors never died. Kael's swarm hummed approval. A body. Real chrome. No more echoes.
But as the drone crested the dune, sensors screamed: *Incoming hostiles. Maelstrom gangers. Six bikes. Armed.*
Engage or evade? Kael chambered the HMG. Time to test this new skin.
The Badlands night lit up with muzzle flash.
*To be continued...*