Cyberpunk 2077: Night City Lord

Northside, Watson…

Crouched on the roof of the target building, I took a second to go over the intelligence Regina obtained and the plan of attack one more time.

Out of the 24 Maelstrom in the hideout, only 3 were responsible for the incident, their job being the production of sadistic and violent BD's. The others dabbled in other types of braindances, mostly of the sexual kind. When they were not doing that, they peddled designer drugs. 

Their leader, Raptor, was a 7 foot tall behemoth of high-end chrome and bioware enhanced meat. With an implanted linear frame, heavy body plating, a projectile launcher cyberarm, a gorilla arm, and the customary pain editor every Maelstromer possessed, he was every bit as dangerous and crazy as you imagined. 

Despite all this, he wasn't the one that worried me. This group of insane, cyberware junkies had a netrunner watching their back on the cyberspace front. And he was the reason I was going to deploy the jammer I looted from the scavs and do this job guns blazing. 

Sure, this path was more risky, but I preferred open, bullets and fists flying combat, rather than invisible, can kill you with a simple look, combat. Especially because I had no means to defend against attacks of the latter caliber. Not yet at least. 

Summoning the jammer to my gloved hands, I activated the battery pack I attached to it and watched my interface for any telltale signs such as glitches or fritzes. When nothing of the sort happened, I placed down the device, covered it with nearby cardboard and moved.

I remained crouched and made my way to where I could hear the gruff voices engaged in conversation. Just as I arrived, I reached into my overcoat on the left side and grabbed Severance, my modified Liberty. 

The moonless night hid my armored form as I attached a modified suppressor to the pistol and peered over the roof's edge. I found a trio of Maelstrom gangoons whose behavior suggested they hadn't discovered the jammer's effect. 

Two of them were seated side by side on stacked tires while the third leaned flat against the wall. The crimson glow of their optics and heavy chrome were like beacons, or more accurately, bullseyes against the backdrop of the night.

Suppressor mounted and itching to get this over with, I called upon the surge chip and triggered an adrenaline rush. The triggered glands responded and flooded my body with the substance, placing me in a state of peak strength and sharpness. 

Without further ado, I wrapped my hands tighter around Severance, pointed it straight down over the edge and pulled the trigger. The silenced firearm remained stock still, its muzzle making no sound and as it spat out its first bullet this night. 

The fragmenting, armor-piercing round broke the sound barrier 2 times over and sank into the skull of the wall-leaning goon, removing it from his neck and shoulders entirely. 

Before his seated companions could react, I adjusted my aim and gave them the same treatment. Their craniums dissolved into vapor one after the other, so fast that it was as if I shot them both at the same time. 

The world then returned to its normal speed as I canceled the rush. 

The bodies of the seated goons slumped backward, their mangled stumps thumping against the concrete and bleeding onto it. Their standing friend's body also dropped to its knees and folded on itself like a lawn chair, a large red splatter on the wall where his head used to be. 

A quick scan of the surroundings later, I found that my actions had gone unnoticed. Satisfied, I shifted my position, moving to where the window I'd be using to enter the building was located. While I did this, I inwardly marveled at Severance's performance. 

The points I used on it were truly well spent. 

Name: Severance (Modified Constitutional Arms Liberty)

Definitions:

 1. Recoilless. 

 2. Cannot malfunction.

 3. Barrel increases muzzle velocity by 150%.

Name: Ruination Round (Modified .45 ACP AP round)

Definitions: 

 1. Instant fragmentation upon penetration.

Most of the points I had left from clearing the scav den had gone into making Severance and its ammunition the one-shot, one-kill kind. 

The barrel modification made it so that every bullet I fired traveled at least 3000 feet per second. Work on the spring and the entire gun made it so that it was completely recoil absorbent and would never leave me hanging in a firefight. 

As for the bullets and the suppressor, I had modified the AP rounds I bought from Wilson, using the 3D animation tool in the system to transform them into rounds that split into multiple fragments immediately upon penetration. 

As for the suppressor, making it a 100 percent sound nullifying was quite cheap. It took me less than 100 points, less than one fourth the amount I spent bringing Severance to life. 

There were some hiccups along the way though. I underestimated just how loud and potent I made Severance and had to spend extra points strengthening its overall integrity. Nonetheless, I was very pleased with the outcome. 

Back to the task at hand, I trained my hearing and sight to the limit and hung sideways over the side of the building, my chest pressed flat against it as I used a single arm to hold my body in place. 

With my other hand ready to pull the trigger and end any attempt to reveal my presence, I lowered myself slowly and peered through the stained glass window into the building's interior. 

The view inside was strange. There weren't distinct floors, just a large inside space with a ring of metal gangways and box-like rooms circling, or in this case, squaring, the upper portion of the enclosure. 

Putting that on the backburner in favor of making visual contact with my actual targets, I continued the reconnaissance, only to stop when I heard the loud clanking footfalls of someone heavy. 

The person was drawing close to my position, so I pulled myself back up out of sight, intending to wait for them to pass. Instead of moving past the window though, whoever it was stopped just shy of clearing it and started to curse. 

From what I could make out, he was having a problem making a call. 

Not in the least surprised, I took in a deep breath and psyched myself. It was now or never. I had my physique, Spider-Sense, Severance, my armored clothes, and the surge chip. So long as I trusted and used them to the fullest, I would be fine. 

With a renewed burst of confidence, I straightened myself, placed my feet against the building, and pushed off it while keeping my hand in place. I swung back, activated another adrenaline rush and shot the window, shattering and throwing myself through it onto the walkway. 

With a loud crash, I landed amidst glass fragments and crouched, just in time to raise Severance and aim at the startled, slowly turning chrome junkie. A quick and simple trigger pull later, he lost his head and I spun around to see what Spider-Sense was warning me about. 

It was a camera and a door. The former was a split-second away from bathing me in its red scanning lights while the latter slowly slid open, the goon behind it with his rifle at the ready. 

Quickly prioritizing the goon over being caught on camera, I shot him through the widening gap, separating his lower leg from his body in a localized explosion of red mist and shrapnel. 

"Fuck!" 

He screamed and fell back, letting the door slide back shut and remove him from view. This gave me time to move up my aim and remove the source of the red lights bathing me, the camera reduced to smoking and crackling scrap. 

Right after that, I reached inside my coat, retrieved three modified sleep grenades and pulled their pins. With three light tosses, I sent them into the mess of scrambling gangoons below and reached into my coat for two more. 

Once they were also on their way down, I focused back on the goon behind the door. He was shouting curses left and right, probably leaning against the wall with his gun pointed at the door. I could just see it. 

Crossing the gap between myself and the door with a single step, I opened it and sidestepped left, letting the rain of expected bullets sail through the empty doorway into equally empty air. 

The grenades hit the ground and went off at this moment, obscuring the entire lower floor with dense green gas. I smiled when the curses and shouts of confusion began, and nearly laughed when the discordant discharges of firearms entered the fray. 

The tweaks I made to the grenade had taken effect. 

My smirk hidden by the ballistic mask on my face, I watched and waited until the goon emptied his magazine, all the while calculating his most likely position based on the bullet trajectories. When the bullet rain ended and I heard another curse, I poked Severance over the door's edge and pulled the trigger three times. 

After hearing a series of shocked grunts, the unmistakable sound of multiple bullet-metal collisions, and an all-clear from Spider-Sense, I stepped into the doorway with my gun at the ready. 

The first thing I noticed was the goon, his familiar face a picture of hateful wrath. The right side of his torso was a mess of mangled flesh and metal, the arm supposed to be attached there laying on the ground near him. 

Severance. What a fitting name. 

According to Regina's info, this guy was one of the perpetrators behind the attack. When I first saw him and his buddies in the alley, I wanted to make them suffer. Now though, I wasn't angry in the slightest. To me, he was just another target, the same way he considered his victims. 

Nothing more, nothing less. 

I kept my obscured gaze impassive and moved it from the sparks and occasional blood spray at his side back to his face. Deactivating the surge chip, I felt the world return to normal as I registered and ignored the faint effects of repeated and sustained adrenaline rushes. 

My physique could handle way more than that. 

Sliding a foot back to avoid the rapidly expanding pool of blood, I aimed at his forehead. This seemed to make him angry rather than fearful, his mouth and teeth bloodied as he spat out his crimson lifeblood in an attempt to curse at me. 

I twisted my head in confusion. What the hell was he angry for?

"Just accept your fate…." 

I stared at his hateful visage for one more second and fired, dissolving his head along with the small chunk of wall behind it. I then turned around and went back to see what the formula I cooked had wrought. 

Peering down the walkway, I noted the flailing and stumbling crimson optics in the dense clouds. These Maelstrom really liked making themselves easy targets. 

Gun at the ready, I started picking off the ones I could spot. One after the other, the glowing crimson optics exploded and displaced the gas around them, producing visible but brief expansions in the thick mist. 

I had just lined up my forth shot when my hearing and the tingle in the back of my head prompted me to look right. A door on one of the box rooms slid open to reveal another goon, one who managed to avoid getting caught in the sedative blasts. 

I didn't even need to activate the surge chip. My baseline reactions were enough to process the sight of the goon, the dentist chair and servers in the room behind him to know I'd found my netrunner. 

Just like I'd done many times before, I raised my gun-holding arm, took aim at the bullseye in his face, and fired a shot. The bullet ripped through and destroyed his head like many others before, leaving just one round remaining in Severance. 

I took out another Maelstromer in the mess below with it and replaced the magazine with a fresh one, resuming the hunt right after.

Seven more shots later, there were no more bullseyes for me to hit. Either the sedative had done its other job and knocked out the other ones or they were hiding and waiting, either for it to wear off or catch me off guard. 

Honestly I believed it was the former. Say what you will about Maelstrom, but they were one of if not the toughest gangs. 

Most of these cyberware junkies were up to their eyeballs in chrome, had pain editors, and relatively good ICE. On top of this, most of them had given into the crazy, weaponizing their budding or fully realized cyberpsychosis to fight like absolute lunatics. 

Unless you had copious reserves of sanity, EMP'S, and heavy duty armor and weapons, Maelstrom was a gang you did not want to tango with. It's one of the reasons I developed Severance and brainstormed other ways to deal with these psychos. 

If I was going to engage them in a fight, it was going to be on my terms. Meaning, I first needed to deal with their pesky optics. Those bright red goggles embedded into their heads weren't just for the fear factor. 

From the little I already knew and the data I got from Regina, I learned that any Maelstromer with the signature implant had thermal, night, anti-dazzle, and ionizing vision. 

The first three were self-explanatory. The goons could see fine in the dark and low-light areas and were also immune to the visual effects of bright light or flashbangs. Ionizing vision however, is something I never heard or saw anywhere in all the Cyberpunk media I consumed. 

It allowed the gang to see through smoke, clothes, flesh, and thin sheets of metal unhindered like an actual X-ray, just limited in power and range. The instant I learned of this, I decided I had to take away this advantage, and that meant EMP grenades. 

There was a problem with that though; those things were heavily restricted. Even in Night City where the common person could easily obtain a mini railgun or have a grenade launcher in their arm, this caliber of armament was not easy to come by. 

You needed to have the money, the rep, and knowledge of the right people, and I had only one of those. That left my consistent fallback, the system. However, another problem came up on that front also; I didn't have enough points. 

Oh I could make an EMP grenade, but the number of points left wouldn't be enough for another, or another. And one EMP wasn't enough. I needed multiple to do the trick. 

So I looked at other grenades, mainly the ones I looted from the scavs. They were mostly gas ones, but a few were frags. I'd been considering the latter, intending to soup them up into mini nukes when I noticed the description of the former. 

Name: Sleep Grenade (Modified)

Description: Releases a sleep-inducing gas that renders those who inhale it unconscious for 20 minutes. Has been modified to extend sedative potency and density.

Their excessive and downright dangerous amount of chrome made Maelstrom members highly resistant to attacks that targeted the flesh like this. That's why gas grenades were not a popular way of dealing with them. For me however, they solved the issue perfectly. 

With less than 20 points each for the five Sleep Grenades, I managed to turn them into this: 

Name: Midnight Grenade (Modified Sleep Grenade)

Definitions:

 1. Fast acting. 

 2. Payload can seep through skin.

 3. Payload targets and deactivates the occipital lobe. 

I got the idea from Slider, the Voodoo Boy netrunner in Dogtown who appeared in the Phantom Liberty DLC. The sedative grenade and mention of how his damaged occipital lobe prevented him from using any optic implants came together and gave birth to this idea. 

And so looking down into thinning clouds of green gas, I singled out the nearest incapacitated goon and leapt down, his back my intended landing spot. With a loud thump, followed by a crack and a choking grunt, I landed on the unlucky guy, my 100 kg weight turning his ribs to dust. 

His agony only lasted a moment as I put him out of his misery with Severance. 

Training all my senses to the limit, I holstered my anti-tank pistol and equipped the Crusher strapped to my back. I gave it a once over, cocked it and started a cleansing sweep. 

Unlike its shy brother Severance, the Crusher was not at all afraid to boast about its prowess. It barked every time I pulled the trigger, shredding and igniting the sedated or near-sedated targets with the armor-piercing incendiary rounds I fed it. 

Tongues of flame, bloody craters, and mangled torsos were all that was left in my wake. 

Any goon I encountered got that treatment, their numbers dwindling like flies in my mental count. I'd just reached the last to one 'stromer when Spider-Sense urged me to move. 

I heeded it like an obedient servant and leaned to the side, a projectile with smoke trailing it sailing through where my torso had been. Unsurprised by Raptor's resilience and glad he'd revealed himself, I aimed at the goon at my feet once again and turned him into a smoldering, bloody smear. 

The projectile collided with a wall this moment and detonated, but my attention wasn't on it. My gaze and aim were both pointed in the direction of where the shot originated as I advanced towards it. 

Another projectile shot through a stack of loosely arranged boxes, instantly confirming where the Maelstrom leader was hiding. Unlike before though, I didn't bother dodging. This shot missed me entirely, confirming that the modified grenade has affected Raptor as well and that the first shot was a lucky one.

Not one to give the enemy a chance to reload or even breathe, I shot the remaining slugs into the boxes, tearing them to shreds and lighting the pieces on fire. When I ran out of shells, I replaced the magazine with a fresh one and emptied it too. 

By the time I arrived with my freshly reloaded Crusher, there was nothing between me and the borged out leader… or what was left of him, just shredded pieces of brown cardboard, smoking and burning. 

Most of Raptor's torso was now part of the ruined and bloodstained wall behind his lower body, his cyberarms smoking and ruined as they lay at his sides. I raised the Crusher and rested it on my shoulder, savoring the taste of blood, smoke, and guts in the air. 

'Gig complete… time to loot and burn everything.'