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Adam Smasher—Night City's chro juggernaut—stord back onto his ship with thunderous steps. Each one clanged against the steel floor, echoing with urgency and the kind of fury only a fully synthetic killing machine could manifest.
The second his foot hit the gangway, his targeting HUD lit up.
Sothing was wrong.
He scanned the cargo deck. Containers that should have been untouched were clearly shifted. Tracks in the dust. Grease prints. A faint thermal trail, still cooling.
These weren't ordinary shipnts. Each box on this ship wasn't cargo—they were extensions of him. Backup gear, specialized mods, spare exoskeletal fras. Nobody touched them without his approval.
Nobody dared.
And yet—soone had.
Smasher's cybernetics humd louder as he broke into a sprint, heavy limbs driving him through the corridor. When he reached the weapons depot, he didn't need confirmation.
He saw it imdiately.
The door had been sliced open. Precise. Clean. With a laser blade.
Red.
Old model.
No alarms had triggered. That ant only one thing—soone had hacked his surveillance grid. And only a few people in Night City were insane enough to pull off both a stealth break-in and a breach of Arasaka protocols.
Arthur.
Smasher kicked open the door.
There, slumped on the floor, was Gleason—his personal errand boy. Still "intact," though sothing was clearly wrong. A red stain of saliva trailed from the corner of his mouth, and his lifeless eyes stared upward in silent horror.
Then, Smasher turned and saw the true insult.
The glass casing where he kept his backup prosthetic fra? Empty.
Gone.
But in its place, taped inside the compartnt, was a note.
Smasher stalked forward, punching straight through the alard glass and tearing the note free. Sirens wailed around him as he read:
> "My dearest Mr. Battlefield Blender,
In celebration of my triumphant return from hell, I gratefully accept your heartfelt gift.
Stay tal,
—Arthur"
Smasher's fingers crumpled the note into a tight ball, hydraulics whirring as his grip crushed it into paste.
His optic sensors zood in on Gleason's remains. Red-eye wide, lips parted. He looked... surprised. Possibly at his own beheading.
"Useless."
Smasher kicked the head across the floor, where it struck the wall with a wet thwack, leaving a sar of brains on the tal panel.
Then, with zero ceremony, he grabbed Gleason's headless body by the ankle, dragged it to the edge of the ship, and chucked it into the sea without a second glance.
He activated his comm line.
"Get the full dossier on Arthur Martinez. Now."
The voice on the other end hesitated.
"Yes, sir... Arthur Martinez... last known record is over a decade ago. Suspected cyberpsychosis, presud dead..."
"He's not dead," Smasher growled. "He's worse. He's back."
He paused, chanical jaw tightening.
"And I'm going to turn him into scrap."
Far below, in the dark waters of Night City's harbor, Gleason's body sank beneath the waves—just one more corpse in a sea already saturated with ghosts.
---
By the ti Arthur got back to the Umbrella Company's makeshift lab, dusk had draped itself across the skyline. The orange glow of the city shimred through the dirty windows like an illusion of peace.
Inside, the workers had clocked out. Only Maine and a few others remained, watching over the place like dutiful chro shepherds.
So Rangers were also present—Saul's crew had agreed to provide low-cost security in exchange for food and beds. Arthur didn't even mind. It was practically free labor.
As long as they didn't break anything, they could stay.
Arthur entered the lab and set to work imdiately.
Inside, the lab looked like a chaotic fusion between a black market clinic and a back-alley chop shop. Tools were everywhere. Schematics, blueprints, and open panels littered the benches. Half of it was tech scavenged from Arasaka. The other half? Straight off Smasher's freighter.
Arthur sat down at the main bench and began disassembling the backup prosthetic he'd stolen. This wasn't just a suit of armor—it was a puzzle box designed for a body that no longer resembled a man.
Unlike most rcs, who kept so organic structure, Smasher was all machine. His fra was customized for a atless core.
Which ant Arthur had to reverse-engineer it—strip the interface layers and reinstall compatibility converters. If he wanted to use it—or give parts to others—he had to make it human-ready again.
Each joint, servo, and connection had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Maine sat nearby, cigarette dangling from his lip, watching Arthur's hands work like they had minds of their own. He watched as Arthur transford monstrous killing tools into refined, usable prosthetics.
Within an hour, two polished, gorilla-sized arms sat on the table—brutal, powerful, and glistening with potential.
"Since when did you get this good?" Maine asked.
Arthur, without pausing, carefully inserted a chip into the arm socket and twisted a screw into place.
"You know how things are outside Night City. No decent ripperdocs, no safety nets. If sothing breaks, you fix it. You don't wait. You learn."
He gave a sidelong glance at Maine.
"I told you to read more books."
Maine rolled his eyes. "Great. So going full chro maniac turns you into a damn engineer now?"
Arthur grinned. "Worked for ."
Maine looked at the arms again. Polished carbon-alloy. Internal stabilizers. Modular mount points. High-tier craftsmanship. This wasn't scavenger junk—it was closer to sothing from Militech's black labs.
"I gotta admit," he said, "if we had this level of skill a year ago, we wouldn't have needed to steal anything."
Arthur paused, then looked up.
"Steal? Nah. That was a gift from Heavy Hamr."
Maine laughed. "If he heard you say that, he'd gift you a missile to the face."
Arthur stood, casually tossing the finished arms into Maine's lap. "Take those to Victor. He'll handle the install. Might need Lucy to flash a proper gorilla arm driver too."
Maine stared at the arms. "Wait, these are just hardware?"
Arthur nodded. "Yeah. Software's separate. Just don't plug them in raw unless you want to lose bowel control."
Then he added, almost as an afterthought: "Tell Vic to tweak the drive ratios. These aren't corpo-standard calibrations. If you don't re-balance the load, it'll feel like you're getting arrested mid-climax in Twisted Street."
Maine shuddered. "Jesus."
Arthur grinned. "Welco to my world."
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