404: Doom Not Found

- 10 years before canon -

The food vendor on Kaimushi Lane stirred his pot of imitation beef with a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

Neon steamed from his cart vents in erratic bursts—somewhere between meat smoke and molten plastic. The aroma would've turned Victor's stomach if he hadn't already adjusted to worse.

Across from the cart, Kirk Sawyer sat hunched, greasy fingers smeared with chili paste as he chomped down on something resembling a burrito. His laughter was nasal and raw. Even in a crowd of degenerates, he somehow managed to stand out.

Victor approached silently.

Kirk didn't notice at first. It was his muscle who clocked him—the one with the slate-grey jacket and too many dermal inlays around the temple. The man nudged Kirk with a thumb. Kirk looked up, mouth full, grinning with a smear of fake cheese on his lip.

"You lost, choom?" Kirk called, raising an eyebrow. "Or just lookin' for a better taco?"

Victor's mask caught the light. Not full-face, not armoured like his final vision—but enough. Silver. Reflective. Precision-forged steel under synthetic mesh. The vendor blinked.

Victor ignored him.

"I'm here to speak with the fixer. Kirk Sawyer."

Kirk laughed and gestured to himself. "The one and only."

Victor inclined his head, voice smooth. "Doctor Doom."

That got a blink. "Right. Sure, and I'm Saburo Arasaka's bastard kid. You got a weird handle, choom. Real old-world. Theatrical."

Victor said nothing.

Kirk snorted, then shoved the remains of his burrito into a napkin. "Lemme guess, this is about the gig I tossed the chica's way? The… what's-her-face. V?"

Victor let the name hang in the air like ash. "She told me you gave her bad intel."

"Pfft," Kirk waved it off. "I gave her cheap intel. There's a difference. Girl looked green but hungry, y'know? Figured it'd light a fire under her chrome ass."

Victor said nothing.

Kirk leaned in slightly, smirking. "Wait… is she yours or something? Like your ward? Don't tell me the big metal boogeyman's playing corpo-daddy to a joygirl dropout."

Victor's voice remained low. Unflinching. "She is under my consideration."

Kirk barked a laugh. "Oh, fuck me. You talk like a brain-dance villain."

Victor gave a faint smile under his mask.

So did Kirk.

For half a second, they both laughed.

Then Victor stopped.

Abrupt. Final.

The moment iced over. Kirk blinked—confused.

Then Victor stepped forward, quick as a scalpel.

His hand lashed out, gripping Kirk by the throat, lifting him half an inch from his seat.

The chair clattered back. Kirk kicked once—instinctively—but Victor didn't budge.

The guards reacted too late.

Victor's left hand dipped into his coat, thumbed a compact capsule the size of a bolt. He dropped it.

A flash.

Bright, searing—targeted at anyone with cyberoptic implants. Not explosive, not destructive, but pure HUD-scramble. A needle-thin burst of optic white meant to short out smartlink alignment, thermal overlays, and iris-track systems.

The average solo and netrunner had numerous countermeasures installed either within their optics or on their person - such items were common in high-profile gigs.

Unfortunately, Kirk's guards weren't on that level.

They were left staggered, blind.

One reached for his pistol, tripped into the food cart.

Victor held Kirk steady as the man's optics flickered, blue-white-blue again, trying to reestablish baseline vision.

"I offered decency," Victor said softly. "You returned mockery."

Kirk wheezed, fingers scraping at Victor's glove. He managed to choke out, "You can't—fuck—you don't know who I—"

Victor leaned closer.

"I know what you are. A coward with scraps, posing like a king. A parasite. A rat believing itself to be a lion. Let me enlighten you."

Kirk's mouth opened. Another protest. A plea. It never came.

Victor's gloved thumb pressed down on the nerve cluster behind Kirk's jaw—then twisted. A compact series of pops sounded beneath the skin. Not explosive. Precise.

Kirk dropped.

Dead before he hit the floor.

The light faded. The guards stared. Dazed. Broken. Neither moved as Victor stepped over the corpse.

"What will you do now?" Victor questioned, his steel gaze terrifying the two victims. 

The guards took one moment to look at one another and raised their hands in defeat.

"I... Fuck it. We're cool, choom. We're cool." 

The two slowly stepped back and ran, uncaring of how horrified they were, one tumbling to the floor before running away, terrified.

The stall, now clear of any soul, was left empty, Kirks corpse now releasing itself of bodily fluids and waste.

"Disgusting..." Victor muttered, walking away, but not before taking his data shard from his neural port. 

Though he didn't do it for the money, he would do it to track those who dared to step upon his people. 

An emperor and a God would protect his people no matter what.

Doom would protect his own. 

---

The door to Kirk Sawyer's apartment didn't creak—it sighed.

Victor disabled the building's internal alarm with a ghost-ping five floors below. No one paid attention. Not in the Glen. Especially not when the building stank of expired noodles, unwashed concrete, and desperation.

Inside: cramped living quarters, the kind sold by the square meter and rented by the ounce of poor judgment.

Victor stepped over a tipped-over bowl of synth-chow, its congealed contents hardened on the floor. Empty cans, wrappers, and a half-broken toy drone littered the shelves. The stench of body spray and fried oil clung to the air.

He found the laptop in the bedroom—duct-taped at the hinge, screen bruised at the corner, still warm. Sloppy. Kirk had left it running. Password protected, but weak: "s4wy3rking."

Pitiful.

Victor connected his datapad and opened the log archive.

A string of message threads—cryptic, scattered, marked with slang and half-buried payment trails.

Most were benign: low-tier gig chatter, pay-when-delivered deals, and questions about iron.

But two threads stood out.

One, labelled "HandOff." The other: "GutterEat."

He opened the first.

2x warm bodies, willing to move steel and not ask. Told 'em it's just a tail, maybe a quick scare. Don't mention V.

The client didn't care who got tagged, just wanted noise.

Sending the case to them next cycle. They'll be outside the Arasaka tunnel.

The second thread confirmed it: photos. The same two gangers who ambushed V. Junked out. Visible dermal plating. One had teeth like pliers.

Scavvers.

Victor leaned back, letting the pad process the data. The chat log painted a clear enough picture: Kirk had hired local bottom-feeders to make the grab look dirty—Scavvers, cheap and disposable. If they died, no one would care. If they succeeded, he could blame them. Cowardice disguised as plausible deniability.

Victor's eyes drifted toward a rusted-out baseball bat mounted on the wall. Fake blood still crusted along the handle. A relic, or a warning? Hard to tell.

He clicked open a corrupted media file titled "PackageContent_eyesonly.vdk"—encrypted. Locked out. But it was enough to confirm the body part angle. Human trafficking. Controlled flow. Someone upstream was orchestrating this.

He unplugged his datapad and stood.

A half-eaten burrito sat on the kitchen counter. Victor looked at it with disdain—flour paste and meatless protein. Junk food for a junk soul.

Scavvers.

He'd heard stories. Everyone had. Chop-shops carved into underground laundromats, fingers sold by the knuckle, children cut open for optical implants they couldn't even afford to power.

But Victor?

He didn't flinch.

Every ecosystem breeds its bottom-feeders.

"Even carrion has purpose," he murmured to himself.

He glanced once more at the cracked screen, at the message trail Kirk had left behind. There was no ideology here. No loyalty. Just a transaction. Greed without clarity.

"Waste eaters. Every system needs them," he said aloud, voice edged with cold philosophy. "They take the rot, the offal, the unclaimed meat. Their crime is not a function. It's aspiration."

A pause.

His fingers traced the broken frame of the laptop before he crushed it underfoot. Sparks hissed as the core warped.

Victor adjusted his coat.

"Take what you want—if you have the strength to hold it. That is Night City's creed."

Then he moved to the window, peering out at the lights below.

"But what is Doom's… is Doom's alone."

He turned, leaving the apartment in silence, data traced, targets marked.

The hunt had officially begun.

Night City's rain had a rhythm to it.

The Scavs' location wasn't hard to figure out.

Victor had simply messaged them under the guise of Kirk.

K1rk_S:

got another gig real preem deets below

A crude facsimile of Kirk's usual style—lazy syntax, lowercase slop, half-cooked street slang. Victor had read enough of his message logs to emulate it perfectly. Sloppiness was a language, and Night City had too many fluent speakers.

He sent the text from Kirk's old slate, decrypted and cloned into a burner shard running a sandboxed instance of the man's entire neural pattern. It wasn't perfect, but Scavs weren't sophisticated. They ran on impulse, greed, and hunger.

The response came four minutes later.

V0rK_2:

srs? thot u got burnedwho's the meat?

Victor didn't reply right away. Timing mattered. In the digital gutters of Night City, desperation was a currency—wait too long and you seemed suspicious, reply too fast and you seemed fake.

After a minute and forty-three seconds, he typed:

K1rk_S:

client's green. wants a clean rip. chrome still fresh. watson pickup. i'll give u coords10k split. we good or not?

Another pause.

Victor leaned back in the dilapidated armchair of Kirk's apartment, one hand resting against his knee. His other hand idly adjusted a lens drone that blinked twice before darting out the cracked window, scanning down the alley.

Another message buzzed.

V0rK_2:

yea ok. whens the scoop?

Victor smiled—cold and without mirth. He typed:

K1rk_S:

twenty minutes. bring gear. it's a messy one.

Then he stood.

He walked to the cluttered desk in Kirk's apartment and tapped a holo-projection on the cracked datapad. The messages disappeared. The rigged slate self-wiped and shorted itself out. A whisper of smoke curled from the chassis.

He checked his belt—shock gloves charged, short sword holstered. His pistol, custom-fitted with a thermal suppressor, gleamed faintly. On his back, his M4 hung beneath his coat, folded down and magnet-clipped.

Victor opened the fridge and placed a detonator inside a can of "DynaSpark." Subtle, but enough to break every window in the place and give him five seconds of cover.

He turned back to the map feed. The scavver's reply came with a pinged location: a defunct power substation on the edge of Rancho.

"Fitting," he muttered.

A place meant to power lives, now just another place where they'd be ended.

Victor closed the door behind him and disappeared into the rain—his shadow long, his intention longer.

Tonight, the Scavs would come to feast.Instead, they'd be offered.

Rain didn't fall in drops.

It hissed.

A curtain of acid mist cascading down rusted signage and neon scaffolds, devouring color, veiling noise. It clung to everything in Watson's underbelly—abandoned convenience marts, choked alleys, the broken bones of a city pretending to live.

The first Scav stood beneath a flickering arcade canopy, trying to light a synth-cig. Fingers trembled. Too many chems, not enough sleep. His optics clicked rhythmically, scanning shadows that weren't there.

He was nervous.

He should've been.

Victor stepped from the dark—soundless.

Two fingers pressed to the base of the skull. A muted jolt from his shock glove discharged into the cranial port.

The Scav dropped instantly. Collapsed like he'd been erased from the world, limbs folding in on themselves. Dead before he hit the ground.

Victor stared at the body for a moment. Then walked on.

There was no sport in it. Only efficiency.

The second Scav was still breathing.

He'd been waiting in a half-gutted cyberware shop on the edge of Kabuki, surrounded by rusted frames and open circuit trays. Dust mixed with blood in the corners. The chair he was zip-tied to creaked when he twitched—old ripperdoc steel bolted to concrete.

Victor stood in front of him without a word.

The Scav flinched. "What—what is this?" His voice was high-pitched, reedy. He wore an oversized jaw implant—cheap chrome, too big for his face. One eye blinked, the other whirred, attempting to calibrate despite static interference.

"You don't work for her," he said.

Victor remained silent.

"You're not one of hers. You're the one who took out Sawyer. The… the techie."

Still nothing.

Victor watched him squirm. The man tried to sit straighter, like dignity might offer protection. It didn't.

"I didn't kill her, alright?" he snapped. "The gig went sideways. That greenhorn had no business poking her nose—"

Victor stepped closer.

"I'm not here for apologies," he said quietly. "Or for vengeance."

The Scav swallowed.

"I—I can give you names. Routes. Whatever you want."

"Good, speak and you shall live," Victor confirmed. 

He knelt beside the chair, tapping a shard to the man's neural socket. A flicker of light passed across the screen—decrypting local comms, warehouse registries, encrypted fixer calls.

"You work in rings," Victor muttered. "Tiers. You ferry product."

"Yeah! Y-yeah," the Scav stammered. "We don't handle the big stuff. Just move crates—sometimes parts, sometimes full slabs. No faces. Nobody asks questions."

"And the bodies?"

The Scav hesitated. "Dead. Mostly. Some… some are alive. Junkies. Runners. Easy grabs. Not my job. I just move 'em."

Victor stood slowly. "Do you believe in purpose?"

The man blinked. "W-what?"

"In Latveria, even scavengers had order. They cleaned rot from the edges of civilisation. But this city has no edges. Only rot."

He turned toward the door. "I promised I'd let you go."

The Scav let out a long breath. "You did, yeah."

Victor nodded.

Then tapped his gauntlet.

The capacitor flared—white and silent. The man jerked once. Smoke curled from his jaw.

Victor caught the chair as it toppled, set it gently upright.

"I lied."

He stepped into the cold, head lifted toward the skyline—Watson rising above in layers of grime and steel.

Victor didn't flinch from the city's filth.

He understood it.

Waste was not weakness. It was inevitable.

Even systems required refuse to measure their function. Even power required decay to sharpen its edge.

What mattered was who owned the rot.

And in time, this network of scavengers—its fixers, tiers, and nameless corpse-runners—would be his.

Sacrifice, in his world, had meant control.

Here?

He would teach them meaning.

One body at a time.

And in the alleys where the dead whispered, a new name took root.

Doctor Doom.