Joestar had never in his life fired a gun with this much power.
When the Satara shell left the barrel, the sound wasn't a "bang"—
it was a boom!
The floor shook noticeably, the entire ground seeming to sink!
A closer look—
and it turned out that wasn't from the gun at all!
The shot had gone off at an angle with a crack, blowing apart pipes and relays on the wall!
Of the three Brainiac members, two were startled. The woman in front reacted lightning fast, braced herself, and snapped a shot straight into Joestar's chest!
The bullet struck his half-synthetic, half-metal chest plating, sparks flying. Joestar didn't care about pain at all—he just snatched a chunk of rubble from the floor and hurled it!
Thud!
The two dazed men were clocked right in the head. Their skulls made a dull sound; whatever material they were made of, they dented slightly.
Joestar rolled back behind an interface pod. Sophie raised her gun, sighted on that pod, and kept firing—
"Two useless wastes. All you've got is a little brain, that's it. You hear me?!"
Raymon and Elio flinched behind the pod.
Joestar, meanwhile, kept reloading without pause—
The chick was using a handgun. Average power. At most it'd punch a small hole in his chest.
His full-body prosthetic wasn't anything special in strength or agility, but what was the most basic function of a full-body cybernetic frame?
Taking a beating.
That shot just now—if it had hit a normal human, it would've punched straight through a lung.
On him, it just leaked a bit of hydraulic fluid and made his left hand stutter slightly. Other than that—no big deal.
Sophie maintained continuous fire while closing in, a very seasoned tactic, but she was actually scared too:
A Satara-tech shotgun could blow open massive wounds. Even with her full-body frame, taking that hit would cost her sixty to seventy percent of her functionality; with bad luck, she might be done outright.
So while it looked like Sophie was using his reload window to keep him suppressed…
The scales had already tipped.
And the winner—was him.
"Trash-ass Brainiac scum! The one killing you is Joestar of the Maelstrom gang!"
Joestar slammed a fresh shell in, dove out from cover—he was going to catch them completely off guard!
Sophie really hadn't expected this lunatic to fling himself out from behind cover. Her barrel tracked Joestar, and the bullet only barely grazed his leg—
But as Joestar's body hung in midair, the charged barrel of his shotgun did not fire when he'd imagined it would!
He didn't have a Sandevistan, yet he did feel the world suddenly slow: he was falling, and the barrel was already fully charged!
[System: Warning! Cyber-body system locked!]
[System: Warning! Motor current anomaly!]
[System: Power output falling; stability risk; system rebooting; reboot failed.]
Szz—
Wham!
Joestar smashed into the floor. His hand jolted against the trigger, and the shotgun went off, punching straight through the interface pod beside him. The liquid inside gushed out, drenching him.
Sophie quietly let out a breath of relief, swapped magazines, and glanced at her two buddies behind cover.
"Not bad this time… I heard Maelstrom uses a self-developed full-body system?"
"Haha." The skin over Elio's brow had split where the rock hit, a trickle of blood leaking out. "Yeah, never seen this kind of system. It's as barebones as those old toilet-cleaner robots."
Hundreds of years of cybernetic development had made cyber-systems complex and diverse.
Then came a global internet crash, data loss, and several world-spanning corporate wars…
Humanity had largely lost the ability to build many hardware and software stacks from the ground up.
So Joestar's from-scratch system was, without question, a complete outlier.
The ones who understood knew how rare that was.
The ones who didn't just saw it as a stripped-down piece of junk.
"Brain-dead Maelstrom," Sophie sneered as she walked up to Joestar. "You're being killed by Brainiac. I thought whoever snuck in here would be hot shit. Turns out you're garbage too."
Szz—
Maybe Joestar had shot something he really shouldn't have, because the entire server room started flickering.
Sophie frowned. "Elio, Raymon! Go check the mainframe. Prep for transfer."
"Leave it to us."
The two men stood and headed toward the room at the end of the corridor.
Sophie stayed behind to finish Joestar off.
"Fuckfuckfuck—you mother—soft-ass punk, if you've got the guts—"
"Huh?" Sophie pressed the barrel to Joestar's face. "What? Still got something to say? That skinny guy before was one of yours, right? The one the Mox chased half to death in the street? And now, the one getting pinned and pounded…"
"Also you. Maelstrom, huh? Should call you the Toilet-Flush Gang."
"Sophie!" came the shout from the far end, the voices of the two Brainiac men. "Things are… a bit more complicated than we thought…"
"Then fix it, fast!" Sophie yelled back. She crouched down, letting her arm hang in front of Joestar. "Look at this. This is real overmodding, you get it?"
It was an arm with a nearly perfect curve.
Black synthetic material replaced what should have been muscle, tracing contours only pro bodybuilders could dream of, all the mechanical components hidden completely beneath the surface.
Joestar suddenly felt dazed.
The rich pretty-boy who stole his ex-girlfriend had an arm like this too.
High-grade artificial muscle, expensive composite surface materials, curves shaped by top-tier designers, solid natural hardwood sourced from virgin Nordic forests…
Full-body frames were the ultimate endpoint for the overmod scene—
but Brainiac's were even better.
He'd thought he'd broken free from that crushing sense of inferiority. But here he was again, seeing everything he had get overshadowed:
His cybernetics weren't as good as theirs. The big bro from his gang who'd taken care of him—Dum-Dum—was gone. The gang pride he was so proud of was being trampled. And his mom…
might be locked up here too.
Everything was just like back when he was still a normal human.
No money. No strength. Naively trying to buy the love of someone "lower" than him on the social ladder, but in the end—
It had always been his own fault.
And this time, he was about to lose even his life.
But he didn't want to lose.
He didn't want to be that pathetic loser who got kicked aside again.
Didn't want to go back to being the idiot who didn't even deserve to be loved.
Didn't want to wander this gleaming city with absolutely nothing.
Didn't want to just—
Get stepped on.
"AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!"
The lights seemed cowed by Joestar's roar, flickering faster and faster!
His cyber-eyes pulsed wildly. All four limbs shook uncontrollably, but with the software locked down, no matter how furious he got, none of that rage translated into actual power.
Feeling this "praying mantis trying to stop a carriage" resistance, Sophie smirked, bent over, and pushed Joestar's already-weak head to the floor with her gun.
The metal shell on his skull shouldn't have let him feel the cold from the floor.
But somehow, he really did feel it again.
"New era, new tech. How stupid do you have to be to drive yourself insane? In this business, you've gotta have strategy."
"Goodbye, broke little nobody."
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!"
Bang!
The lights went out all at once.
The interface pods around them erupted into wild electrical arcs, which lashed across Sophie. The electromagnetic surge was so strong it mimicked a physical blow, hurling her away!
Hydraulic regulators failed. Glass snapped under the sudden pressure, fluid bursting out in high-pressure jets—
Crash!
Everything fell into darkness.
Sophie wasn't the only one flung away by the arcs. In fact, the ones in the worst shape were the two Brainiac techs who'd gone to "fix" things.
The bullet had only grazed Joestar's head. It hadn't penetrated his skull, but it hit hard.
In the haze, he seemed to hear his mother calling his name—
He'd nearly forgotten he wasn't originally called Joestar.
"Yoshida, see if this basketball chip works with your system. Mom made a little extra in tips serving dishes today."
"You're gonna love it."