Rocky's refusal left no room for debate.
Brigitte understood the negotiation was over. This man did not think like a corpo.
Before she could speak, a crushing force slammed down from above and drove her into the floor. Blood spattered. The Voodoo Boys' leader died instantly.
Rocky stood beside the body. The Tyrant cyberware along his spine glowed red and lit the angles of his face.
Weapons snapped up across the room.
"Brigitte is dead!"
"This beast should've been put down! Fire!"
Rounds poured at Rocky. They changed nothing. In the Tyrant state, the Voodoo Boys looked slow, almost still. Rocky cut through them in bursts of motion, sending bodies to the ground one by one.
Rebecca was not idle. She dove in from the flank and took her share without asking permission.
In the so-called secret base beneath the abandoned maglev tunnel, the two of them erased the Voodoo Boys. Corpses and blood sheeted the concrete. The wrecked bays and smashed consoles looked like a bunker breached at the end of the world.
The gang's end was official.
The few runners still at large would not last. Without the Rezo Agwe subnet's protection, their traffic patterns stood out. Any competent operator in Night City could spot them, and NetWatch would gladly finish the sweep. Lissandra would do it faster.
Inside the base, Rocky found the Rezo Agwe subnet server. He drove the data knife into the frame.
Lissandra flowed through the open path into the core and took control. This domain had belonged only to the Voodoo Boys; even NetWatch had never reached this deep. With the maintainers dead, the takeover was completed in moments.
Data fortress archives streamed to Lissandra. Much of it was stolen corporate intel from across Night City, years of theft piled into terabytes. Most of it meant little to Ascension Technology.
What mattered was the Voodoo Boys' research on the Blackwall and the Old Net.
"Lissandra, what's your reading on the Blackwall?"
A projection opened in front of Rocky, mirroring cyberspace. Lissandra stood before a vast barrier that swallowed the horizon like night given shape.
It was her first close look.
She had always known the Blackwall was there, but probing it had never been her job. The Voodoo Boys' obsession had moved Rezo Agwe close to it; once she seized their subnet, she could step to its edge.
"The Voodoo Boys' records describe the Blackwall as a powerful AI that filters and determines whether traffic is permitted," Lissandra said. "From here, that reads true. Its structure is AI."
Rocky was not surprised. "The Voodoo Boys are ridiculous. They found the secret and convinced themselves that this AI would evolve into a catastrophe. That's why they chant apocalypse and hunt for answers from AIs beyond the wall."
"That matches their notes," Lissandra said.
"Can you cross it?" Rocky asked. "Through force, if you have to."
"With force, yes," Lissandra replied. "I will need time to break its constraints."
"Will it hurt you?"
"The Blackwall attacks any stream or AI that forces a pass, but it cannot harm me now."
She paused, testing its surface again.
"The strength of this wall is not as absolute as advertised. If there are countless roaming artificial intelligences behind it, it cannot block them all. The top-tier ones could still pass."
Rocky thought of the Voodoo Boys' public claims versus what they could actually do. They had never crossed. They had tried to bait help from beyond the wall using Johnny Silverhand's relic engram to reach Alt Cunningham. They had needed outside power because they did not have their own.
Now Ascension did.
The work in the tunnel continued.