The NetWatch agent rode a clean path into the Poseidon subnet and felt a twist of surprise. The wall that never opened before now yielded on the first try. Something had happened to the Voodoo Boys.
He slipped straight into their data fortress.
It was empty.
No live runners. No payloads. No archives on the shelves where years of stolen corp intel should sit.
"You got here fast, NetWatch."
The voice hit his channel without warning.
"Who are you? You are not Voodoo Boys," the agent said. "What happened here? Why does their fortress look like this?"
"You ask a lot. I am not in the mood to answer them all," Rocky said. "Starting today the Voodoo Boys do not exist. You can thank me. You could not finish them after all that effort. I did."
"The Voodoo Boys were eliminated?" the agent blurted.
"You call yourselves the saviors of the Net," Rocky said. "A gang you claim 'threatens the Blackwall' is gone, and you do not sound excited."
The agent fell quiet. NetWatch loved to say the Voodoo Boys were a Blackwall threat, but after all these years the gang had never crossed it. What NetWatch truly wanted was the gang's vault of stolen corporate data. If that haul was gone, whether the gang lived or died mattered less than the loss on NetWatch's balance sheet.
"Where is the data from their fortress?" he asked, cutting to the point.
"So that is what you really want," Rocky said. "It is useless to me. If NetWatch wants it, pay the price."
He had expected NetWatch to come for the haul.
The agent weighed a direct attack on the intruder who held this space, then discarded the thought. Whoever destroyed the Voodoo Boys and now sat inside Poseidon was not a soft target. Negotiation would land faster than a fight here.
"NetWatch needs the data. Name your price."
"Simple. Money. Ten million eurodollars. You pay, you take the package."
Ascension Technology had a funding gap to fill. NetWatch had walked to the door.
The number fit what the agent expected, but he still stalled. Money deals were clean, but he needed the data to be worth it. No one on his end knew the exact size of the Voodoo Boys' archive.
"I need to report this."
"Then move. I do not have time to waste," Rocky said. "You know better than anyone how much confidential corporate material they pulled. Perfect for your dirty trades, right?"
The agent pushed it up the chain. A short time later, approval came back. They would buy.
The transfer began.
Rocky saw the trick as soon as NetWatch tried it. They tampered with the transaction rails, hiding a trace to out the counterparty.
"Your money trail is not clean," Rocky said. "If that is your level of honesty, the deal is off."
Busted, the agent did not panic. He sounded like a man used to this sort of thing. "An accident. NetWatch is acting in good faith. I will reroute clean funds."
"Fine," Rocky said, "but you burned my goodwill. The price just went up."
A beat of silence. "You… can have it."
NetWatch swallowed the hit. In the end they paid twelve million eurodollars and took the full archive.
The last usable value of the Voodoo Boys was squeezed dry.
Rocky left the base with Rebecca.
NetWatch used the freshly cracked Poseidon subnet to pull the location of the hidden site. Teams pushed through the church, down to the maglev tunnel, and into the bunker.
The scene told them everything. These bodies were not fried by ICE feedback. They were broken by hands and weapons. Someone had stood in front of the main server and killed everyone who tried to defend it.
The agents stared at the ruin and did the math.
Against hackers, maybe the best countermeasure in Night City was still physical.