404: Doom Not Found

- 10 years before canon -

"Little drops of water make the mighty ocean." - Julia Carney

Victor, utilising the information gained from the dead scavenger, began his trot towards one of their safe houses.

The places surrounding it smelled like metal and mildew. Rust bled from the ceiling pipes, catching the dim flicker of an overhead bulb.

He moved without a sound through the mid-tier complex off Blake Street, a forgotten corpse in North Watson's concrete graveyard.

Graffiti covered the stairwell walls—crude tags, broken QR codes, and half-slogans about chrome, freedom, and "the killstream." All nonsense. Artless.

Rage pretending to be culture.

He stepped past the first-floor corridor, where a blood smear led from a broken door to a shattered railing. No bodies. Just traces. Typical.

Third floor. Unit 302.

Victor paused, gloved hand resting against the keypad. The locking mechanism had been installed two weeks ago—cheap, Chinese-market firmware, upgraded with a local scav-ver mod. He didn't bother hacking it. A short pulse from his gauntlet—a dead zone charge—fried the circuitry, and the door creaked open on its own weight.

Inside, it was too quiet.

Not in the way that suggested peace. The silence was intentional. Engineered. The kind you only found in Scav repositories—warehouses for cyberware awaiting black-market distribution.

Places where the dead had already been processed, and the next shipment hadn't yet arrived. The smell gave no alternative. 

Victor adjusted his coat and stepped in.

The room stretched wider than the building suggested, a renovation clearly made with illegal tools. The walls were gutted and reinforced with stolen steel plating.

Data nodes lined the corners—offline. In the centre stood a dozen sealed crates, stamped with International Eletretic (IE) branding and falsified Militech manifests.

Each held pieces.

Arms. Retinal implants. Spinal columns. Nanofilament nerves. All stripped clean.

Victor crouched beside the first crate and scanned the serial with his custom datapad. The signal returned—authentic. These weren't knockoffs. They were scavenged from real operations. High-grade. Mil-spec. Some still wet.

He began cataloging: at least 170,000 eddies in raw cyberware. Another twenty, maybe thirty in resale tech, assuming Padre took the bulk.

It would mean upgrades. A fully operational lab. A way to bypass months of patchwork repairs and finally construct the scaffolding for a proper arc-reactor cluster, maybe even interface-level control systems. With that… perhaps a bridge. A channel. A way home.

He closed the lid.

That's when he heard it.

A small cough.

He turned his head slightly.

In the corner of the vault, behind stacked crates of unprocessed drives, a pile of cloth shifted. Not cloth. Blankets. Nestled together like discarded parts were children. Ten, maybe twelve. Not crying. Not talking. Just… lying there. Too tired to panic.

Victor's first instinct was calculation.

Weights. Sizes. Movement capacity. None of them posed a threat.

Second instinct: silence.

He said nothing. Did nothing. Just looked.

The girl was the only one who moved. Couldn't have been older than nine. Her head was shaved down the middle in a surgical pattern, ports still raw where a neural rig had been force-removed.

One eye was natural, the other was glass—standard surveillance ware with no backend access.

She stared up at him.

"Are you the devil?" she asked quietly.

Victor tilted his head.

"No," he said. "I am Doom."

Her lips trembled, but she didn't flinch. The others didn't stir. Drugged, maybe. Sedated between jobs.

The building creaked under the weight of wind or footsteps.

Victor stood slowly, gaze drifting to the entrance. From the stairwell below, a faint shuffle of boots on cement. Multiple. No chatter. Silent return. Trained, but sloppily.

Scavs.

He did not reach for a weapon. Not yet.

Instead, he returned to the crates, closed the lid of the one he'd opened, and began forming a mental map of his surroundings. Two points of entry. No rear exit. One gas line overhead. A secondary bootleg generator hidden beneath the false floor beneath the main table. Perfect.

But the children...

He looked back to the girl. She was still watching him.

"You're not going to save us," she said, matter-of-fact.

Victor regarded her in silence.

"No," he answered. "I came for the parts."

She blinked, as if she hadn't expected honesty.

Victor stepped to the room's far wall and unscrewed the vent panel behind a rack of obsolete optics. A crawlspace—tight, but usable. Large enough for the children if compressed.

Footsteps again. Two floors down now.

He ran the numbers. Every angle. Every probability.

Then he made his choice.

Victor moved with precision.

The vent cover came off in a single motion—no rattling screws, no unnecessary noise. He set it aside and turned back toward the girl, gesturing once with two fingers.

"Move. Now."

She hesitated. Her glass eye jittered. "But—"

"Do not waste the seconds I have gifted you."

That did it.

She scrambled to her feet, too light for her age, and began dragging the nearest child by the collar.

Victor didn't watch.

He was already moving to the crates, now scanning the largest four. He couldn't carry them all—not without a vehicle and half a crew.

Time was too thin.

He opened one and removed the highest-value components: an experimental spinal mod with redundant fibre insulation, a V8-grade optic set, and three arterial pumps made of ceramic-weave steel. No more than twenty kilos in total. He sealed the rest.

They would stay here.

More footsteps. This time above.

They're already inside.

Victor placed the scavenged parts into a sling rig he'd concealed beneath his coat. He reached into the folds of his armour and retrieved a slim, four-inch prism—compact, black.

A tech mine with a proximity delay and three-meter directional arc.

He slid it under the false generator, adjusted the angle toward the door, and activated the silent charge.

He turned. Four of the children were inside the vent now, crawling forward in a daze. The girl stayed outside, ushering them with quiet words and careful hands.

She moved like someone older than she was. Like someone who'd had to act older for years.

The city did that to those who could think and left the ones who didn't dead.

Victor knelt by her, voice low.

"They will not follow you. If you hear anything loud, do not turn around."

She looked up at him.

"Are you staying?"

"No. I'm killing them."

"But… why?"

He didn't answer.

Because that was the point.

The first scavenger stepped into the room with a grin already forming. Mid-thirties, wearing a spinal servo rig and a makeshift vest of stitched synthhide.

He held a smart shotgun, optics twitching left and right, scanning for movement.

He saw Victor standing still, arms at his sides.

"Hey," the man sneered. "Who the fuck—"

Victor raised one hand and snapped his fingers.

The mine exploded in perfect sequence.

A soundless burst of EM interference scrambled the scav's optics—HUD crash, retinal blind. In the same breath, a directional kinetic shockwave tore his legs from beneath him. The shotgun fired as he fell—off target, into the wall.

Victor crossed the room in one stride and crushed the man's throat with the heel of his boot.

The second was faster.

A woman, lean, tattoos curling up her neck like vines. She entered with a mono-knife already drawn, having seen the flash. Her instincts were sharp—she ducked left, narrowly avoiding Victor's stun-glove sweep.

But she didn't anticipate the other hand.

Victor drove the butt of his pistol into her temple. She staggered. He caught her by the jaw, twisted, and slammed her head into the edge of the crate.

Once.

Twice.

She dropped.

The third shouted profanities from outside, fearful and shaken from the explosion.

"Suka, ne zastavlyay menya tebya ubivat'!" The man spat in russian. 

He stepped in only to find the barrel of Volta pressed against his head.

"Do svidaniya." Victor voiced before pressing the trigger.

Thoom!

Watching as the man exploded, he lowered his weapon and stepped over his corpse.

Victor exhaled slowly.

The room was silent again.

He looked down at the second scav, her body spasmed. Still alive. Breathing.

He holstered the weapon and crouched beside her. The same jagged implants as the others. Rushed work. A body thrown together like trash. She wasn't useful. Not even as a warning.

But perhaps as an investment.

He stripped her comms shard and decrypted the feed. More storage locations. Black clinics. Body chop rings.

Patterns. Routes.

A new network, exposed by blood.

Victor stood and walked to the vent. The girl had vanished into the dark, the last of the children gone.

He sealed the crawlspace behind them and activated a makeshift jamming signal—enough to block trackers, just for the next hour.

She'd bought them time.

So had he.

But not for free.

Victor exited the complex under the cover of rain.

The sling at his side held twenty kilos of raw profit. Likely more, depending on Padre's connections. He would drop them off tomorrow—no names, no records, same as always.

He said nothing to the dying woman in the room behind him. He didn't need to. She would bleed out. Slowly.

The children, if they were lucky, might make it to the street. Might find food. Or sanctuary.

He had done what he would.

No more, no less.

---

Time passed, and Victor was now situated back in his apartment. 

It was here that V finally arrived, her eyes wandering over to Victor's bench. 

The apartment was quiet.

Too quiet.

Only the soft crackle of a soldering iron broke the silence and the low hum of a powered gauntlet, left charging near the door.

Victor stood at the main workbench, spine straight, eyes on the fine wiring of a cranial port he was delicately restoring.

Around him, the workshop had grown cluttered—organised chaos, but with new weight.

Too many fresh parts.

Too many signs of a body not delivered to a ripperdoc.

V leaned against the wall, her shadow stretching toward him in the low yellow light. She didn't speak at first. Just watched. Traced the outline of the man who had saved her life… and perhaps taken one too many in return.

"You hear what happened to Kirk?" she asked finally.

Victor didn't look up. "Should I?"

"Someone killed him. Right in Japantown. In public."

His hands remained steady, but the tension in his shoulders was just perceptible—if you knew what to look for.

"Snapped his neck, people say. No shots fired. No signs of cyberware failure. Just—" she mimicked a short twist with her hand, "—clean."

Victor didn't reply.

V pushed off the wall, walked slowly past his spare weapon mounts. She paused at the corner table.

A pair of fried optics sat there. Burnt out, the edges fused and crusted with slag. Behind them, a damaged ocular flash grenade—casing still faintly warm.

"You know, Kirk used to say he had friends. Friends who could kill a man with one hand."

Victor adjusted the cranial port. "He said a lot of things."

She turned toward him. "Was it you?"

His silence wasn't hesitation.

It was dismissal.

V's eyes scanned the room again—saw the reinforced gloves. The small dent in the steel strut near the entryway. The thin bloodline traced beneath the mat—nearly scrubbed, but not quite.

Victor finally set the port down, looked at her, calm and sharp as a scalpel. "The work we do invites consequences."

"So that's a yes?"

He didn't answer.

He didn't need to.

She exhaled, sharp and low, rubbing her temples. "Guess he had it coming."

Victor turned away. "Then we agree."

She lingered, gaze locked on his back.

And yet… part of her wasn't repulsed. Not entirely.

Because for all the menace, all the chill in his methods, he was still the reason she was alive. Still the one person in this city who didn't try to use her—or throw her away.

She crossed the room, leaned against the opposite bench. "You're not gonna explain yourself, huh?"

Victor didn't stop working. "No."

A beat.

Then V nodded.

"Okay."

V had gone quiet again.

She didn't press him further—not about Kirk, not about the way the workshop suddenly looked more like an armoury than a lab.

She just stood there, staring at the tools and torn mesh, and eventually walked into the kitchenette to heat up noodles she wouldn't eat.

Victor remained at the bench, but his hand moved away from the soldering iron. Slowly, he slid a shard into the slot on the modified data relay.

The screen flickered once. Then his contact list appeared.

He tapped "P. Rojas" —Padre.

The call went out. One ring. Two.

Then the familiar voice answered, smooth and deliberate.

"Señor Victor. I was beginning to think you'd left Heywood behind."

Victor didn't bother with pleasantries. "I have merchandise."

"Ah. The kind I can list, or the kind I need to fence?"

Victor turned slightly, eyeing the crate tucked beneath his second worktable, filled with cybernetics stripped from the scavenger safehouse. Cleaned. Catalogued. Bagged.

"Fifteen pieces," Victor said. "Twelve viable. Three rare, bespoke. One with biometric locks. All traced to subs working under Watson's south-east ring."

A beat of silence on the other end.

Then Padre replied, more careful now.

"That's a serious pile of hardware. You didn't get this from a dead drop."

"I don't answer that kind of question."

"And I don't pay full price for stories I can't retell."

Victor leaned closer to the interface, tone sharpening. "You'll pay because you know what happens if I sell them elsewhere. Someone will ask where I got them. You don't want that someone being a fixer in Pacifica or a Tyger lieutenant sniffing around for missing parts."

Another pause.

"Very well. I assume you've cleaned the serials?"

Victor glanced at the blanked metadata and scorched contact logs. "Thoroughly."

"I can move them. Quietly. You'll get your cut. Expect a pickup request by midnight."

Victor didn't respond. He simply ended the call.

No thanks. No acknowledgment. Transaction complete.

He unplugged the shard and returned to his notes—data he'd extracted from the scav's comm. Routes. Drop points. A whisper trail through dead zones.

Somewhere in that web was a deeper network. The real players. Not gutter-level trash, but the ones who orchestrated the meat economy from behind mirrors and proxies.

The ones with enough power to open gates back to magic—if twisted through sacrifice.

Victor stood, rotated his shoulder with a mechanical hum, and walked to the window.

Outside, the rain had slowed, but the city still crawled with electricity. Down below, neon washed over puddles and gunmetal alleys. Night City breathing.

V moved behind him, holding a mug.

"Was that Padre?" she asked.

He nodded once.

"More side work?"

"Resources," Victor said.

She didn't ask more.

They both stared out into the dark.

From somewhere beyond the haze, someone screamed, far off and fading.

Victor's voice was quiet, almost reflective.

"Men like Kirk are easy to remove. No one notices when roaches disappear."

V sipped her drink, eyes never leaving the street.

"Maybe. But people remember the boot that crushed them."

Victor didn't reply.

He was already thinking ahead.

Padre would move the parts. The money would come. More tools. More components. Maybe, if he could secure enough rare alloys, the next stage of armour fabrication.

But all that was secondary.

He was closing in on the ring. And somewhere in that chain, blood would buy him something even rarer than silence.

A foothold into the deeper dark.

And Doom did not intend to stay in the shadows forever.