"This is my fucking house. You can get the hell out now..."
"Dammit, I told you, this is my fucking turf..."
"You little shit... you better pray... don't—"
"Let me finish..."
"..."
At dusk, David pulled on his yellow jacket and stepped outside.
He believed his mother's jacket brought him luck—and so far, it always had.
In the garage, David slid into the driver's seat. He didn't bother with a seatbelt; he just started the engine.
And why should he? If you lived with the chance of being hit by artillery shells, machine-gun fire, or grenades, a seatbelt wouldn't save you.
He'd been working solo for a while now. Though truthfully, he wasn't alone—there was a netrunner backing him.
Knowing someone he trusted was watching his back gave him peace of mind.
"How's it going?"
Lucy's voice echoed in his head. Her cool tone made David grin like an idiot.
"We're not even there yet. What do you think?"
Chuckling, he pressed the accelerator. The car rolled out of the garage and slipped into the packed stream of traffic.
"Don't dodge the question. I mean the link. Is it stable on your end?"
"Stable... yeah.
How many times have we done this? Nothing's gonna go wrong..."
David kept his eyes on the road, answering without much thought.
"If you're so confident... then hang up already."
Her voice turned icy, and David ducked his head instinctively.
"Haha..."
One hand on the wheel, he wiped his forehead with the other and laughed nervously.
"My bad...
Reporting in, ma'am—link stable. Over!"
"Just drive."
...
The job was in the Northside Industrial District—same filthy place as always.
Inside a large abandoned steel mill, a crew of Scavengers had set up shop, supposedly working with the Maelstrom gang.
This time, they'd kidnapped a corporate executive. The Fixer hadn't said who.
But there were biometric details: a middle-aged Asian man, overweight. Easy enough to recognize once found.
It wasn't a short drive. By the time David reached the Northside Industrial District via the elevated expressway, night had fully fallen.
The city's glow was swallowed by the towering apartment blocks behind him. His headlights carved out only a narrow stretch of road ahead.
"Why the hell did it have to be at night? What a shitty request..."
David muttered as he studied the road, easing off the gas.
It was the Fixer's demand—claiming nighttime meant more cover, and better odds of keeping the target alive.
Not entirely wrong...
The district itself had been laid out with modern planning. Though much of it was unfinished, giving it a desolate feel, the buildings had gone up only in recent decades.
Factories were zoned logically by type and pollution level.
Heavy industry like steel mills—loud and dirty—was pushed deep into the district, as far as possible from Night City proper.
On the roadside, beyond the reach of headlights, faint shadows shifted.
He didn't need to guess—it was Maelstrom. These lunatics usually didn't go wild at night, not when they had something even more tempting than murder: Maelstrom bars.
That's where they indulged in their beloved "Shiny."
That was the terror of drugs. It didn't matter if you were a psycho, a lunatic, a broken soul, or some iron-willed tough guy—touch it once, and you earned yourself a new name:
—Junkie.
And from then on, until the day you died, that name was yours to keep.
...
The car rolled on until a massive silhouette loomed out of the darkness. Inside, the outline of industrial machinery rose like the claws of some colossal beast.
David slowed to a stop outside the vast factory.
Slamming the door shut, he looked up.
At the heart of the complex stood a colossal cylindrical structure.
Its diameter spanned nearly a hundred meters. Its height disappeared into the darkness above, impossible to gauge.
The central blast furnace.
This wasn't old-fashioned chemical steelmaking—it ran on modern magnetic micro-control.
Sure, the extreme heat demagnetized nearby parts, shortening the equipment's lifespan. But the steel it produced was nearly flawless at the microscopic level, making it all the more valuable.
David pulled his gaze away and walked toward the entrance.
Beside the security booth, a broken crossbar lay flat on the ground. Inside was only darkness; in the faint light, weeds poked through the pavement.
It looked deserted.
Thinking that, David pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket and slipped them on.
The darkness shifted into ghostly green outlines—a straight path leading to the mill's central furnace.
In scale, the mill couldn't rival Biotechnica's CHOOH₂ plant. But its central blast furnace was even larger than the fermentation tanks in that facility.
The memory came rushing back—the massive explosion that had risen like a sea of fire, the shockwave hurling the four tanks into the sky like balloons hundreds of meters wide.
When they crashed down, they cratered the inferno below—like stones breaking water. But instead of ripples, waves of fire surged outward, drowning everything.
Even from a distance, he had felt the hot blast lash his face.
David shook his head, forcing the memory away, and strode toward the furnace looming like a skyscraper.
This one wasn't going to explode...
Through his eerie green vision, the massive steel gates—wide enough for trucks—stood open.
Weeds grew through the grooves of the tracks, proof the doors hadn't closed in years.
Inside, despite being a "furnace," the space was vast and silent.
The magnetic generator units were mounted separately on the inner wall, away from the heat source.
Looking up, David saw a steel staircase winding upward in a spiral, vanishing into the dark.
Even with night vision, he couldn't see more than a few hundred meters.
As soon as his foot hit the first step, the stair groaned. The harsh scrape of metal echoed through the cavernous chamber.
David frowned, pausing.
But in the end... he let his steps fall naturally.
The grinding of metal underfoot rang out in steady rhythm, reverberating through the empty furnace, repeating endlessly in the suffocating dark.
...
(70 Chapters Ahead)
p@treon com / GhostParser