404: Doom Not Found

- 10 years before canon -

The gas was the first sign that something was wrong.

It hissed through the vents, slow and low—unseen, unsmelled—but enough to put his men on edge. The younger ones started jittering, tapping their fingers against their triggers, pacing in circles like caged dogs.

The lieutenant grunted, flexed his wrist. His Sandevistan responded with a reassuring flick of subdermal hum. He'd used it enough times to know the rhythm. Speed killed. He was the fastest man in the room. Always had been.

He pulled his mask tighter and gave a silent hand signal to his second-in-command.

They still had twelve men outside. Two on the roof. Four covering every known exit. Two on watch behind. Three with him now, outside the panic room, ready to breach.

Plenty.

Too many for some burned-out fixer or techie to handle.

But then the silence came.

No comms chatter.

No updates from the exterior.

No noise.

And then—gunshots.

Muffled. Controlled. Professional.

He turned sharply, his audio dampeners spiking from the sudden echo. The shots came from below, floor-level, maybe just under.

Another round. Then silence again.

He keyed into the squad channel. "Report. Main floor. Status."

Nothing.

He tried again, this time to the roof team. "Roof. Visuals?"

Still nothing.

His jaw tightened.

One of his goons shifted behind him. "You think Borden called in backup?"

"Negative. We jammed outbound comms." He stepped toward the door of the panic room, staring at the reinforced slab like it might blink open and swallow him. "Could be mercs."

"Two scouts outside, boss," another muttered. "One on the street, one rear alley. They'd see anyone comin'."

The lieutenant didn't respond. His eyes traced the gas drifting from the vents, too dense, too engineered. There was something… off.

Then came the thud.

Right above them.

A single impact. Followed by a scrape. Then something heavy—something armored—landing just outside the corridor.

His goons aimed rifles down the smoke-thick hallway, optics flaring red. One turned on a thermal scope. He started to speak.

He never finished.

A snap of movement—faster than it should have been. Then a crack. Bone? Metal?

The first goon dropped. Shot in the leg. The second moved to engage—but something stabbed through the mist. Not a bullet. A blade.

"It's just one guy!" the third shouted, backing up.

Impossible.

The lieutenant activated his Sandevistan.

The world slowed. Time fell into syrup.

He turned just as a shadow slipped into the hall, smoke parting like a veil.

One man.

Not a crew. Not a gang.

A man in full armour—strange, almost regal. Not Chrome. Not street. Something alien. Cloaked in grey and green, blade in one hand, pistol in the other. The mask was blank, smooth, wrong. No logo. No rank. No light in the eyes.

Just him.

Moving through the hallway like death walking.

The goon opened fire. The stranger deflected the first burst with a twisted dodge, stepped in with unnatural precision, and cut the man's hand from his rifle.

The scream came a second later. Then silence again.

The lieutenant stepped back. Fast.

He was faster.

He surged forward, time buckled by the boost.

Blade forward, mantis arms out—he struck center mass. His weapon sank into armor—but only just. It didn't go deep.

What the fuck?

The stranger twisted, absorbing the momentum, letting it roll through him.

The lieutenant swung again—faster, three jabs in a blink.

Two landed.

The third—

FLASH.

The world went white.

Then blue.

EMP spike.

His optics fuzzed. His targeting failed.

Too late.

The stranger shot him twice in the chest.

Heavy rounds. Not smartlinked—manual. Old-school.

Then the mask tilted. The stranger didn't say anything.

He just shot him in the head.

The last thing the lieutenant saw wasn't the muzzle flash.

It was the faint gleam of metal as the pistol lowered.

And the sound of boots walking away.

---

The screams had stopped a while ago.

Now it was only gunfire—short, controlled bursts. Followed by silence. Then footsteps.

Lizzie Borden sat slumped against the reinforced bulkhead of the panic room, her breathing shallow and uneven. Blood soaked the bandages she'd wrapped around her midsection. Makeshift pressure, nothing more. The bleeding had slowed, but her heartbeat felt like it was crawling uphill.

She'd locked herself in after the third solo went down.

The fourth had screamed longer than the rest. She hadn't asked their names.

That's how this business worked—at least how it had worked before.

She clutched the pistol tightly, knuckles bone-white. A TKI-20, compact polymer frame. Four rounds left. One for the first through the door. Three for the rest. If they didn't kill her quick.

She'd already made peace with it. Almost.

The Tyger Claws had sent more than the usual trash. This wasn't revenge anymore—it was a message. No survivors. No exceptions.

You don't hang our boys from a club wall and expect to walk away.

She blinked, ears ringing. That last gunshot had come from just outside the main corridor. Closer now.

Footsteps again. Not rushed. Measured.

Not gang. Too calm. Too... deliberate.

"Fuck," she breathed, bracing herself upright, dragging her back against the cold steel. Her grip shook. Not from fear—blood loss. Too much of it. She could feel her body running dry, her thoughts thinning like static.

Don't pass out.

The bolt lock clicked.

Her body tensed.

No passcode entered. No hacking indicator.

It opened manually.

Lizzie raised her pistol with both hands, the weight of it feeling like it had tripled. She aimed center mass. Or tried to.

The door cracked open.

The silhouette in the doorway wasn't what she expected. Tall. Broad. Armour catching faint flickers of hallway light, gleaming wet from rain and blood. The mask—blank, iron, ghostlike. Eyes unreadable.

For a moment, she couldn't breathe.

The gun trembled in her hand.

No Claw wears that mask.

The figure stepped in. Unhurried. Boots soft against the floor. Weapon lowered.

She tried to keep the pistol up. Her elbow gave. It clattered to the ground beside her.

That was it, then. She couldn't even fight back anymore.

"...Fuck you waiting for?" she rasped, half-laugh, half-cough. "Kill me, or don't. I'm done."

The figure paused.

Then spoke.

Calm. Cold.

"I'm not here for you."

She blinked.

Not because of what he said, but because she recognised the voice.

Just faintly. Just enough.

The techie.

The man from a few days ago who fixed her AV relay and watched her slaughter three men without so much as blinking.

Her eyes fluttered, heavy.

"…'Bout time," she muttered, head falling back against the wall.

He knelt beside her.

No words. No promises. Just movement.

She felt the cold sting of a stim injector against her neck.

Then the static behind her eyes cleared, just a little.

And the club didn't seem so far away from surviving anymore.

She lay there on the safe room floor, body shaking under layers of blood and cold. Most of it wasn't hers. Some of it was.

Her left side throbbed where something had torn through skin, maybe bone. She couldn't remember. It was all static now—heat, pain, the copper taste in her mouth, and the buzzing in her ears that wouldn't stop.

The pistol had slipped from her fingers somewhere between blackout and surrender. It rested inches from her hand, still warm. She'd meant to die with it pointed at the door.

But the door had opened, and it wasn't the Claws who stepped through.

She blinked again. Vision swimming.

Not a ghost, but something like one.

He hadn't spoken. Hadn't rushed. Just stood there—like the smoke and gunfire had summoned him. Like death had been delayed because it was waiting on his schedule.

She hadn't seen his face. Only that mask. Black. Cold. Familiar in the way nightmares were familiar.

It wasn't a rescue. She was certain of that.

Rescues had smiles. Comfort. Some stupid line about "you're safe now."

This wasn't that.

He had looked at her like a contractor inspecting broken drywall. Calculating. Silent.

Then, and only then, had he walked forward. One hand reaching down—not to hold her, not even to help—but to check her. The way you check a fuse box or a dying server.

She didn't know who he was. Didn't care.

What mattered was that he came when no one else had. When her hired muscle bled out against neon-lit walls. When the Tyger Claws had laughed and kicked down her doors.

She tried to remember their faces—those gangers. Tried to count how many he'd killed. Ten? More?

Didn't matter.

They weren't standing now.

She inhaled sharply. Pain flared in her ribs.

Her mind drifted to how it all began. The bodies she'd hung out front. The axe. The warning. She knew it would come back on her eventually. Violence always circled back.

But she hadn't expected to survive it.

Not until he showed up.

Not for you, she told herself. Never for you.

Whoever he was, he didn't save her because she deserved it.

He saved her because, for one moment, she mattered to something bigger than the Claws. Bigger than the city's rules.

Maybe just to him.

Or maybe to whatever reason made him pull that trigger.

Perhaps it was the eddies. 

The buzzing in her ears shifted. Footsteps overhead. Silence again.

No sirens yet. No flashing blue lights. The NCPD wouldn't come until the smoke cleared and the blood dried.

Her gaze moved back to the ceiling. The lights flickered.

She thought of the others—Joytoys who hadn't made it. The ones who screamed. The ones she didn't protect. Her rage flared again, but it had nowhere to go. Her body wouldn't respond.

Still.

Still breathing.

And the club might survive.

Tomorrow would come with more war. She felt it in her bones. Retaliation. Power struggles. Maybe corpo interest. She didn't care. Not yet.

She closed her eyes and whispered to no one.

"Thank you."

She passed out.

Outside, the rain came harder now.

Victor stood just outside the ruined facade of the club, the neon sign sputtering above him like a dying pulse.

It reeked of gunpowder and carbonised flesh.

Ash floated in the humid air. Inside, blood pooled beneath broken lights, and the remnants of the Tyger Claws were scattered like butchered cattle.

Cars drove by, but none stopped, scared of what would happen. 

He tapped the side of his gauntlet. A thin flicker of blue danced along his mask's HUD before stabilising. Connection acquired. Uplink secure. Padre's proxy node lit green.

Victor spoke in a calm, even tone.

"Job's complete. Target's alive. Stabilised."

A pause on the line. Static hummed.

"Confirmed?" Padre's voice came through, dry and unbothered, as always.

Victor turned back toward the safe room. Behind the barricade, she was breathing shallow but even—her body wrapped in a thermal blanket he'd pulled from a medkit on-site. She looked more corpse than woman, but death wasn't winning tonight.

"She'll live," Victor said. "Your contract holds."

Another pause.

Then: "You always leave a trail this clean?"

Victor didn't answer.

Instead, he turned away from the doorway, stepping over two of the last kills—one still twitching in a pool of smoke and melted chrome. A mangled mantis blade clacked against tile as he moved.

The line stayed open a moment longer before Padre's voice returned. Quiet. Measured.

"I'll make sure the rest is wired before morning."

Victor ended the call without ceremony.

Money was money.

He descended the back stairs, boots echoing in the flooded corridor. Behind him, the club still breathed—barely. But it breathed. A miracle, or something colder than that.

He didn't save her because he cared.

She was a client. A transaction.

But even Victor Von Doom honoured his contracts.

And for now, Night City still owed him.