The rain had let up, leaving the Northside streets glistening under the fractured glow of neon signs. Harmonix's building was a faded ghost in the urban sprawl, its synth concrete facade stained with grime and forgotten aspirations.
Teo moved like a shadow, his steps almost silent on the slick pavement. His optics hummed, painting the world in a detailed emerald overlay, highlighting subtle heat signatures and the faint shimmer of the building's low grade security network.
He found a maintenance entrance around the back, a heavy steel door with a standard lock. Nothing a quick hack couldn't handle. With a few taps on his forearm implant, a whisper of code from his cyberdeck slipped past the archaic lock's defenses. The mechanism clicked, a soft sigh of capitulation, and the door slid open just enough for him to slip inside.
The interior of Harmonix's apartment building was even more decrepit than the exterior, smelling faintly of stale synth smoke and mildew. Teo ascended a grime streaked stairwell, his senses already filtering for threats. He encountered the first real hurdle on the landing of Harmonix's floor, a single, cheap security camera, its lens coated with dust, but still functional. It swiveled with a sluggish hum.
Teo ducked into a shadowed alcove, his SpecterNet Optics immediately tagging the camera's network node. It was rudimentary, barely a firewall. A simple Short Circuit quickhack, deployed directly from his eyes and cyberdeck, sent a jolt of digital feedback into the camera. It sparked once, shuddered, and went dark. Silent. Efficient.
He reached Harmonix's door, which was a standard residential lock, but reinforced. It would take more than a quick hack to bypass without drawing attention. He didn't want to risk an alarm at the entry point. Instead, his optics picked up a faint, almost imperceptible data trail leading from the doorframe.
A maintenance access panel, barely visible. He popped it open, revealing a tangle of wires and a small, integrated keypad. His fingers flew, a rapid dance across the exposed circuitry, rerouting power, cutting lines. The lock clicked, a soft, mechanical breath. He slipped inside.
The apartment was a nightmare of a hoarder's obsessions. Old tech piled high, precariously balanced braindance rigs with cracked visors, stacks of data chips covered in a fine layer of dust. Wires snaked across the floor like digital vines, tangling with discarded synth food containers and forgotten personal effects. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and decay, like a digital graveyard.
Teo's optics became his most crucial tool. The room exploded into a shimmering emerald overlay, highlighting the pervasive, low grade security. Motion sensors clung to doorframes like digital parasites, their IR beams a visible, shimmering web. Dust activated alarms, barely distinguishable from the grime, lurked beneath flimsy rugs, waiting for the slightest displacement. And tripwires, thin as spider silk, crisscrossed the floor, connected to archaic but still functional pressure plates.
'Amateur hour,' a cynical voice in his head scoffed, but Teo knew better. Clumsy traps were often the most effective partly because they were unexpected, designed to snag the unwary.
He moved with the silent grace of a ghost, every step precise, every movement calculated. He wove through the clutter, a human shaped ripple in the static, his enhanced perception his only shield.
The weight of his Kenshin felt like a cold promise against his hip, holstered and ready, but this was a netrunner's game, not a gunfight. Not yet.
He detected two heat signatures deeper within the apartment, faint and sluggish. Squatters? Or perhaps scavs, already picking through Harmonix's remains. He noted their positions, mentally mapping their slow movements. His primary objective remained the BD.
He made it past a particularly cluttered living area, a precarious tower of old comms and discarded flat screens, when his SpecterNet flared. A thump from the next room. Too heavy for a rat. He pressed himself against a wall, blending with the shadows. Through a crack in the door, he saw him, a low level gonk, likely a Scav, rummaging through a stack of old braindance discs, completely unaware. The man's chrome was minimal, cheap, barely integrated.
This was a chance to test his stealth, his new understanding of the digital landscape. He shifted, his hand going to his hip, but then he hesitated. No, not the Kenshin. Wakako wanted silent.
He pushed a quickhack through his eyes into the visible crimson strand connecred to the scav, targeting the Scav's barely protected comms. Short Circuit. The man stiffened, a silent gasp. His body spasmed, then slumped to the ground, twitching for a moment before going still. No sound. No alarm. Just a body, now just another piece of junk in Harmonix's hoarder paradise.
Teo slipped into the room, confirming the kill. One down. His SpecterNet immediately pinged the second heat signature, closer now, attracted by the disturbance, or lack thereof. This was getting messy.
He moved forward, deeper into the apartment, the clutter closing in around him. He heard a rustle, then a grunt. A second Scav emerged from behind a mountain of data chips, his eyes wide, a rusty shiv clutched in his hand. He hadn't seen Teo's partner, only heard the commotion.
"What the... who's there?" the Scav growled, his voice rough, scared.
Teo didn't reply. His Optics locked onto the Scav's rudimentary network, a single, flickering crimson line. He considered another Short Circuit, but the last one had emptied his deck's buffer for a moment. This was about speed now.
Before the Scav could react, Teo launched himself forward. A blur of movement. His slight new chrome infused strength, still untested in direct, unarmed combat, snapped into action. He slammed into the Scav, a silent impact, twisting the shiv from his hand. The Scav stumbled back, wide eyed, a choked gasp escaping him. Teo grabbed him by the throat, slamming him against a stack of discarded monitors, the cheap tech groaning under the weight. A quick, brutal twist and Crack. The Scav's eyes rolled back, and he slid to the floor, lifeless.
No time to clean up. No time for silent kills now. The apartment was no longer a ghost run. It was a hunting ground.
He moved quickly now, his silence replaced by a focused urgency. He pushed past another pile of old synth leather furniture and finally found it, a hidden, heavy door, almost indistinguishable from the grime covered wall. It wasn't just metal, his optics identified a rare, almost antique type of electromagnetic shielding. Behind it, he sensed a strong, isolated power signature.
This was it. The server room.
He bypassed the electromagnetic lock with a complex series of digital maneuvers, forcing the shielding to momentarily demagnetize. The door hissed open, revealing a small, climate controlled chamber. It was clean, stark. In the center sat a custom built, vintage server, glowing with an internal, ethereal light. It was a monstrosity of old vacuum tubes and whirring platters, a true relic from an earlier, more analog digital age.
He played his music through his OS, to help him get in the mood.
Teo jacked into a thick, braided data cable, the familiar surge of connection flowing through him, direct to his cyberdeck, humming to the tune of a song. The server hummed to life, its ancient components groaning under the strain, then settling into a steady, rhythmic thrum.
Activating the server was easy. Bypassing its encryption, however, was anything but. Harmonix, the reclusive artist, had coded it like a symphony. Not standard corporate firewalls and data locks, but intricate, almost fluid patterns based on brainwave schematics and sensory input. It was less a lock and more a piece of abstract digital art, a complex, living puzzle, designed to be unbreakable by conventional means.
"Tricky," Teo muttered, a low chuckle escaping him as he analyzed the data stream through his SpecterNet. He couldn't brute force it, aggression would only corrupt the fragile BD. He had to understand it, perceive its rhythm, find its hidden melodies.
His Biotechnica Processor whirred, sifting through the torrent of information, searching for patterns, for the artist's digital signature. He felt the familiar surge of his untapped potential, pushing at the edges of his consciousness, guiding his fingers across his cyberdeck. He danced with the code, recognizing leitmotifs, finding hidden cadences in the data patterns.
It was like learning a new language, not like words, but of pure sensation, a direct line into the late artist's mind. The glowing emerald slits of his eyes burned brighter as he delved deeper, Harmonix's artistic soul manifesting as a digital fortress.
After what felt like an eternity, the encryption yielded. A pathway opened, shimmering within his optics. He hadn't brute forced it. Instead, he'd found a subtle rhythm, a repeated digital anomaly in Harmonix's meticulously crafted "symphony", a single, recurring dissonant note in the otherwise perfect data stream.
It was a vulnerability that wasn't a flaw, but an ingrained part of the artist's unique digital signature. He'd leaned into it, coaxed it open, feeling the surge of his untapped potential as his mind adapted to this new form of lockpicking.
He found the "sensory symphony" BD, a single, pulsating data file, vibrant even in its dormant state. It was old, encoded on a volatile medium. Any aggressive attempts to extract it, or too much digital noise, could corrupt it beyond recovery. Teo worked slowly, meticulously, a digital surgeon performing delicate, life saving work. He began the transfer to his cyberdeck's encrypted storage, a silent, almost invisible siphon.
As the data streamed, Teo used the now breached server as a back door, pushing deeper into the building's network. He scanned the apartment block's security protocols, dismantling firewalls and disabling internal cameras with surgical precision.
The building's meager defenses folded under the might of his cyberdeck. His optics flickered, displaying a full, three dimensional schematic of the entire complex, all systems now under his ghost like control.
It was then, in the glowing emerald overlay of his vision, that he saw them. Eight distinct heat signatures, moving with a heavy, predatory swagger through the building's lower levels. They were coming from the fire escape route, the same way he'd ghosted in. And those signatures… they weren't just generic street trash. The heavy chrome, the exaggerated biosigns, the sheer, brutal mass. Maelstrom.
(On My Way To Hell- Potoz, Tinntus, trust me play ts.)
A cold, hard knot tightened in Teo's gut. Wakako said no security. Or at least, no info. 'Fucking Bullshit.' His Biotechnica Processor instantly cross referenced the tactical data. Maelstrom didn't move in packs of eight for a casual stroll. They were here for something. And given the nature of Harmonix's final work, and the anonymous "Collector" Wakako was dealing with, the conclusion slammed into him with the force of a tech round. 'Multiple collectors. Multiple factions. This BD is hot. And I'm caught in the middle.' He thought pinching the bridge of his nose.
He estimated their speed. They were moving fast, clearly knowing exactly where they were going. The server room. They were moments away.
Teo completed the BD transfer with a final, desperate surge of mental effort, ripping the last byte from the decaying server. He then initiated a full data wipe of the server's contents, scrubbing everything clean, burning the original BD data to ash, leaving nothing but dead code behind. The apartment would appear untouched, a silent tomb.
He unjacked, pulling his arm free with a soft hiss of displaced air. The server, its mission complete, powered down with a final, faint whine. The Maelstrom were now on the floor below, their heavy footsteps a grim percussion against the synth-concrete.
Teo didn't hesitate. He pulled the Arasaka Kenshin from his waistband holster, the cold black steel a welcome weight in his hand. The smart pistol hummed, a low, predatory purr. He aimed it at the door. The moment it hissed open, revealing the hulking, chromed out face of the lead Maelstromer, Teo fired.
The Kenshin kicked violently, a concussive thunderbolt CRACK! echoing in the confined space. The tungsten tipped round, electromagnetically propelled, tore through the Maelstromer's cheap subdermal plating and into his face. It wasn't clean. It was a wet, tearing impact.
Fragments of cybernetic skull and raw, biological brain exploded outwards in a grotesque crimson spray. The Maelstromer's enhanced optics went dead, his head half torn off, a mangled ruin of meat and metal, before he crumpled to the floor like a stiff plank, already dead before his body hit the grimy linoleum. (Im pretty proud of this one.)
The other seven Maelstromers posted up outside, momentarily stunned by the sudden, brutal death of their leader. A chorus of guttural roars and expletives erupted. "Prey! We got a gonk in here!"
Teo didn't give them a chance to regroup. His Optics locked onto the closest Maelstromer behind a plaster wall, a burly brute with gleaming chrome arms. With a mental command, Teo fired an Overload quickhack. The brute's cyberware spasmed, smoke curling from the joints of his artificial limbs as the internal wiring cooked.
A strangled scream ripped from his throat, his chrome arms seizing up and grinding, leaving him exposed. Teo, already moving, emptied half a mag from his Kenshin into the man's chest through the wall, like he had xray vision. The high velocity rounds punched through the now useless armor, splattering thick, black synth blood and tearing loose chunks of organ across the decaying wall.
Another Maelstromer lunged, a blade glinting in his hand. Teo sidestepped, fluid as smoke, his movements a practiced dance of evasion. As the Maelstromer overextended, Teo slammed a Weapon Glitch quickhack into the attacker's neural interface. The blade arm spasmed uncontrollably, the weapon clattering uselessly to the floor. Before the Maelstromer could recover from the abrupt disarm, Teo brought the Kenshin up, firing twice into his exposed throat. The tech rounds ripped through flesh and windpipe, the man gurgling, blood frothing from his mouth as he dropped, clutching at the ruined mess. Blood spraying all over Teo's form.
Two down, five to go. They were learning, spreading out, trying to flank him. Teo felt the raw, brutal exhilaration, the cold efficiency of his netrunner chrome flowing through him. His Processor processed every detail, enemy positions, weapon types, their weak points, all in a fraction of a second. 'Thank you Vik.' He thought with a smirk.
He spotted a Maelstromer ducking behind a pile of old furniture, aiming a high powered smart rifle. 'Not on my watch, choom.' Teo targeted the rifle itself with another Weapon Glitch.
The Maelstromer's weapon snarled, then went dead, the smart targeting failing. As the Maelstromer cursed, wrestling with the useless gun, Teo popped out from cover, putting three precise rounds from his Kenshin into his chest, each shot a perfectly placed impact, drilling through his combat vest and shredding the organs beneath.
"HAHAHA!" He giggled like a goblin at the pure destruction of the kenshin. Feeling the adrenaline, and watching his new Iron make quick work of the chromed up freaks.
Three remaining. One with a shotgun, two with blades. The shotgunner burst through a doorway, spraying buckshot. Teo dodged, his body twisting and falling behind a overturned table, the pellets embedding themselves in the wall behind him, spitting plaster.
He fired a quick Short Circuit at the shotgunner, frying his optical implants. The Maelstromer screamed, blinded, firing wildly into the ceiling. Teo closed the distance, his Kenshin spitting tungsten. Two shots to the chest, then a final, gruesome one through the side of his head as the man staggered, ending his mindless spray in a bloody halo against the dirty wall.
The two blade wielding Maelstroms were on him now, a furious, chromed blur. One lunged low, aiming for his legs, the other high, a gleaming katana whistling towards his head. Teo didn't think, his cybernetic reflexes, honed by constant input from his SpecterNet Optics, reacted.
He twisted, ducking under the katana, simultaneously driving a Short Circuit into the low attacker's leg cyberware. The Maelstromer's limb seized, locking, and he went down with a roar, tripping over his own frozen leg. As the second Maelstromer committed to his swing, Teo brought the Kenshin up, firing a burst point blank. The tech rounds tore through the man's chest, throwing him back against a wall of old server racks, sending sparks and wires showering down as he died, his chrome enhanced arm twitching in a final, involuntary spasm.
He looked down at the squirming grunt, aiming his kenshin at the freaks borged up head, and firing once watching the bullet tear his head apart like wet tisue.
The room fell silent. No more roars, no more screams. Just the ragged sound of Teo's own breathing and the distant, constant hum of Night City. He looked at the crumpled bodies, a gruesome tapestry of shattered chrome and splattered meat. Five down from quickhacks. Three more from the Kenshin. Eight in total. He felt no remorse, no lingering nausea. Only a cold, hard satisfaction.
He pushed the bodies aside, careful not to step in the pooling black blood and oil. He swept the room with his SpecterNet, ensuring no hidden cameras, no lingering digital signatures. He'd eliminated every trace of his presence, leaving behind only the dead and the silent echoes of violence.
He looted the fallen Malestroms, taking their advanced weapon's, well the ones that were in tact still. He ejecting their Eddie chips from their napes sliding the small chips into a pocket in his jacket.
He stepped back out into the Night City streets. Rain, again... it was still falling, a steady, depressing drizzle that turned the chrome slicked streets into a blurry canvas of distorted neon. It was dark and miserable, and the wet chill immediately killed the high from the fight. He hated the rain. It was wet. It clung, and it gets everywhere.
He began his walk back to the cold comfort of his basement at El Coyote Cojo, his little hacker dungeon.
Teo pulled up Wakako's encrypted comm channel. The static was a familiar comfort against the backdrop of the city's hum.
"Job's done, Wakako," he stated, his voice flat, devoid of the recent violent atrocity he just committed.
"Oh?" Her voice, as smooth as polished steel, carried a hint of surprise, quickly masked. "And the ghost run? Was it as 'low key' as you prefer, Teo?" A subtle emphasis on "low key" that didn't go unnoticed.
"Ran into some unforeseen complications," Teo replied, glancing back at the silent, darkened building, where eight Maelstromers now lay in a mangled heap. "Had to improvise." He wasn't going to volunteer details. Wakako would find out if she wanted to; she always did. "BD's extracted, wiped clean from the source. Sending the encrypted file over now, along with the decryption key."
He initiated the secure transfer from his Zetatech Cyberdeck, a flash of data across the Night City grid, invisible to all but the most dedicated prying eyes.
A beat of silence from Wakako's end. Then, a low, satisfied hum. "Received. Excellent work, Teo. The Collector will be pleased. My payment will be transferred to your account within the hour."
"Good to hear," he grunted, already starting his walk. The rain was starting to pick up, cold drops stinging his face.
"You handled yourself well," Wakako continued, a rare, almost approving note in her voice. "Word travels fast, even in the shadows. Your reputation precedes you, Teo. Seems Night City has a new ghost."
"Just trying to earn an honest eddy," Teo mumbled, pulling his collar higher.
"There are always eddies to be earned, for those capable of earning them," she mused. "Keep your comm open. I have a feeling we'll be speaking again soon. You've proven... effective."
The line clicked dead. Teo shoved his hand into his pocket. Effective. That was Wakako's highest praise. He tilted his head up, blood washed from his face as the rain beat at him like an abusive ex wife. "Fuck the rain." he said before stalking back toward his dungeon.
A/N: Dat was fun, lemme know if I fucked anything up.