"Oh, the road into the city got blocked by a bunch of psychos. I was just thinking—if they mined this spot, threw up a few barricades, pinned down that big beast… then no matter how hard it is, it's still just a bigger, tougher sandbag."
"If you ask me, these guys are just cowards. But this is Night City—only the survivors get to run their mouths."
"And yeah, you gotta have firepower. You know what the nastiest weapon is? That Hammer-30 autocannon on that super armored truck!"
"I was gonna break down the specs… forget it. You can't afford it anyway. Just know it's Militech-made."
"I'm thinking if the driver of that steel monster knows how to use that thing, they might actually have a shot—since they just punched straight through the storm…"
"Holy shit!"
Everyone had the same thought—simple, pure.
Even Leo.
He was used to trusting the math, but if that stunt had drifted even a hair off-course, V would've died on the spot. No alternate outcomes. No "close calls."
So why do it?
The biggest reason was honestly that classic street-kid disease: pride. They wanted to crush every competitor so the whole race would be perfect.
The moment he sent V out, Leo started regretting it. When did he pick up that gonk impulse? The old him wouldn't gamble like that unless there was literally no other option.
But the result…
It was good. Better than expected.
The railgun V spotted—Leo had seen it too.
And it proved the enemy never truly believed mines and barricades would stop them.
That railgun looked almost plain at a glance—nothing flashy, nothing "boss weapon" about it.
And that was the problem.
An EMG-85 was an over-spec corpo war weapon—restricted hardware that even ACPA deployment required special approval for. Two-thousand-four-hundred meters per second was something Leo could replicate back in the Marvel world, sure, but not at that size. Not with that footprint.
And he couldn't guarantee Crony Titanium would hold if it got a clean hit.
"Jackie!" Leo shouted—right after yelling his praise.
With the minefield cover gone, Legend Mackinaw didn't need to slow down at all. The mercs—heads still turned—caught the counterpunch full in the face.
The vehicles blocking the road got shredded instantly by the autocannon. The shells punched through metal like it wasn't there, setting off huge secondary blasts, snapping the chained barricade apart like cheap jewelry.
At the same time, the micro-missile bays hidden around the cannon popped open—smart missiles derived from the full Hachisei Gun system. With the aerial angle V had provided midair, the lock was perfect.
Sixty micro-missiles launched in a single volley.
A missile rain.
They weren't fast—but they were small, surgical, and every pop was a real kill.
BOOM!
A burst of violent fireworks declared this cheap little ambush completely erased.
The merc captain got burned by the blastwave. Shrapnel sank into his back. A concussion blurred his thoughts into soup.
He fumbled for a rock that was still radiating heat. His synthetic arm hissed as the heat bit into it; the pain made him jerk away.
When he looked up, he saw his best friend still standing in the smoke.
He almost felt relief—
Then the smoke thinned, and he saw his friend's head sag forward. The remaining cables and hoses couldn't hold it. The weight dragged everything down, down, down.
The big man's full-conversion frame had gone uneven—layers peeled, buckled, scorched.
Samson was originally industrial-grade heavy chrome. Massive output meant it could carry more armor. His chest and abdomen were only blackened and cracked, no deep ruptures.
Which meant Muramasa's cyberware really was premium.
But the core blast temperature on an RPG-7 was still brutal.
No ceramic plate coverage could seal every joint. Anywhere the armor didn't overlap, the metal warped. The soft hoses and functional composite lines around the neck deformed and melted under the heat.
The disaster zone was the neck.
It didn't fully liquefy, but the heat softened it enough that the shock wave bent it, wrecking the structure and severing the head-body linkage.
That was why the head dropped.
And Samson was stupid hard—so hard that the brain was only partly turned to paste by the impact. The man still had awareness. He wasn't dead yet.
What his mind would look like afterward?
That was the real question.
The captain stared, frozen.
The big man's one remaining eye—still recognizable—looked at him with startling clarity. The voice box, pulled by ragged lines, spat out a mess of electrical distortion like a machine talking.
"Deo… this chrome's legit. If something happens to me someday, it's yours. Or when we make it big, we'll make Muramasa's gonk ass give you a set too."
Other than the heavy distortion, the sentence was… complete. Coherent.
The captain's face twisted into something unnameable. Some kind of strength came from nowhere. He grabbed the scorching rock and forced himself upright—
THUD.
Their target slammed through the broken barricade, the weight too monstrous to resist.
The truck rolled over him.
As it passed, Leo's octo-arms snapped out through an opening in the armor, yanking the damaged railgun and a handful of parts off the ground like it was looting a crate.
V was still parked at the roadside in that same "stopping" posture. The bike and her gear were smoking; the machine twitched and shuddered. It didn't make her look stupid.
It made her look like a cover shot. A poster. A myth.
"Holy shit… that was too good." Every channel went dead quiet—except Stanley, who kept yapping.
"Best driver Night City's ever seen. Maybe the best it'll ever see."
"It's like they crawled out of hell—look at that black smoke, like inferno breath!"
"Choombas, that's style. I swear I'm getting that inked on my body!"
"Night City's baddest driver—destructive, savage, mysterious. A devil. A wraith. A cursed omen from the pit—Doomstar!"
Of course, V wasn't posing.
That kind of violent kinetic swing could scramble you in ways nothing else could.
Her exo-frame was a functional integration rig—bio-monitoring and bio-boost. Stuff like maintaining circulation under extreme conditions, basically an active G-suit.
But what happened was too extreme.
So yeah—V was spacing out. Recovery phase. Her awareness, memory, and thinking were back, but her behavior was glitchy—cyberpsychosis-adjacent, at least for a minute.
Mackinaw rolled up beside her. Leo jumped out, hurried over, and smacked her helmet twice like he was knocking on a door.
"Sis? Your vitals look normal—"
V snapped awake and grabbed Leo's hand.
Overpass. Moon. Burning wrecks. Bodies. The entire city watching.
The feeling hit. The mask opened.
Now she had to say something.
"I—"
"Nova!" Leo shot her a thumbs-up. "Absolutely nova. Night City's best. The legendary V!
Jackie—lift the bike! Hustle up, before Sixth Street gets turned into paste—"
V went blank.
That wasn't what she was trying to say.
The octo-arms fired, thunk, scooped her up, and tossed her into the truck. Jackie hurled the motorcycle into the cargo bay. Loadout complete in seconds.
This was not a place to talk.
Only when V was seated again—when Little Octopus showed up in her world wearing a white lab coat and started running checks and tuning, when the engine roared alive, and the chassis began to tremble—
Only then did V fully come back online.
And then she lunged for Leo's throat.
"I'M GONNA FRAGGIN' CHOKE YOU!"
"Hey! What the hell— stop it, you fricken cyberpsycho!"