Helaus gets to work. Seconds later, his quickhack lands. The Scav's feed goes black.
Blind, the Scav can't lay down accurate fire. He rakes the room on guesswork.
Jackie starts to lean out to shoot, but Rocky is already moving.
Pinned behind a mini-freezer with a machine gun, chewing the wall, Rocky has had enough. With the Scav's optics rebooting and his aim drifting, Rocky won't waste the opening. He yanks a green stimulant from his belt, pops the auto-injector, and drives it into his shoulder.
Lightness floods his limbs. He holsters the pistol. Faster nerves and cleaner timing let him slip the line of fire. He bursts left, skims the wall, and closes hard.
The blind Scav never catches up. Rocky hits his flank with a driving shoulder, knocks the weapon out of his hands, and buries a punch in his gut.
Subdermal armor doesn't save him. Cold metal meets meat with real force. He folds up, stomach clenching so hard it almost throws up acid.
Rocky doesn't let him fall. He snaps a right hook into the face, teeth scattering, then brings the Gorilla Arm up in a full-power uppercut that lifts the Scav off his feet. The man's optics finish rebooting midair, vision snapping back just in time to see the last thing he'll ever see.
Rocky twists through his hips, plants, and loads his fist.
When the Scav hits the floorboards again, Rocky throws.
"Eat this charged shot!"
A pro's fully loaded punch caves the skull. Red and white spray the wall. The body drops and doesn't move.
"Damn. Too clean," Rocky says between breaths.
Behind him, Jackie is still behind cover, gun up. Watching Rocky rush in and work the Scav over barehanded leaves him blinking. "L, you're nuts. You just rushed him."
Rocky squeezes his fists and checks the buzz in his system. The stimulant makes him lighter and quicker. With guns, the boost reads mostly as speed. With fists, it turns into speed and power together. For him, it fits like it was made to order.
"The Scavs are down. No more hostilities on the net," Helaus says over comms.
"Clean the site," Rocky answers.
They sweep the apartment. In the operating room, Rocky's right-eye scanner tags a body hung on the wall. The mess is rough, but the read comes back clear. "Our target. His cyberware is still installed."
Jackie grimaces at the blood-soaked corpse and tries to figure out how to haul it out in one piece. "How are we moving this?"
"I got it."
Rocky slides the corpse off the table, sets the target down, and starts the tear-down. Tools flash through his hands with practiced rhythm.
"Right. Ripperdoc on scene. Guess my bike stays clean tonight," Jackie says with a thumbs up.
In short order, Rocky strips the hardware: six implants total, all decent stock. Looks like a Valentinos mover. He passes the recovered cyberware to Jackie, then breaks down the remaining bodies in the room, Scavs included. If there's cyberware, he takes it. Salvage counts as part of the payday. He can refurbish and sell to street crews for good eddies with his clinic coming.
Taking Scavs apart the way they do to others feels like justice. He doesn't lose a wink over it. The only pity is that the Scavs don't have much chrome on them, and most of it is trash.
Steel kisses skin again and again. Under the knife's sting, the Scav Rocky knocked out earlier jerks awake.
"Ah! What are you doing? Bastard!"
He thrashes, but Rocky has already taped his wrists and ankles to the table.
"Yo, awake? Relax. Just doing what you people do every day. Pulling chrome."
Rocky's tone doesn't change. He keeps working. The last scraps of cyberware come out. Blood loss and pain fog the Scav's head. Real fear finally lands. Whether he regrets his own work or not, he'll never say.
Soon it ends. Under Rocky's unblinking hands, the Scav goes still for good. The last thing he saw was Rocky lifting a heart free and giving him a small smile.
"Quit the games. Those gunshots carried. Someone's going to ping NCPD," Jackie warns, impatient now.
"Yeah."
Rocky drops the heart into a tray and pulls the Scav's optic next. He left the ocular for last on purpose, so the Scav could watch himself get taken apart.
They button up and leave the apartment with the reclaimed cyberware, then meet their middleman for the handoff: Padre.