Capítulo 134: To Find Or Lose Yourself 2
(Third Person POV)
The thug barely had time to catch his breath before the roar of engines thundered through the alley. They were coming. Gunther and his boys.
His heart hammered in his chest as he glanced over his shoulder. The shadows seemed to creep closer, swallowing the street whole. No way was he sticking around for Round Two with that freak.
He hit a button on his phone. "Gunther, get your ass down here! This guy, he's—he's like some kinda cyberpsycho. We need the whole crew. Bring everything!" He couldn't stop the tremble in his voice.
Gunther grunted on the other end. "A cyberpsycho? You sure about that?"
"Yeah! He took out everyone, man. We need backup, now."
The line clicked dead, and the thug stuffed his phone away. His hands were shaking, his pulse racing. He knew this wouldn't end well. But he wasn't about to die alone.
Inside the drug den, the man simply flexed his fingers, feeling the hum of his cyberware beneath the skin. His hands still tingled from the fight, blood splattered across his jacket and boots. The thugs were down, broken bones, crushed throats, some barely breathing. It didn't even feel like a fight. It felt… easy.
He glanced at his reflection in a cracked mirror, his eyes dull, cold. A buzzing in his skull pulled his attention. He could feel it, right under the surface, the tech, the raw versatility.
Mantis blades.
A wicked grin crept across his face as he willed the blades to emerge. His forearms split open with a metallic snick, and two curved, serrated blades shot out, gleaming under the neon lights. He flexed them, testing their weight. Fast. Deadly.
But that wasn't all. Another spark. He felt it—wired deep in his spine. Monowire.
He pulled at it mentally, and a thin, glowing wire unraveled from his wrist, whipping through the air with a soft whirr. One touch could slice through flesh, bone, or steel. He let it crackle for a moment, feeling its lethal precision.
The sound of engines outside snapped him back to the moment. He retracted the wire, blades still humming with energy. They were here.
The gang rolled in like a storm, engines growling as they skidded to a stop in front of the den. Gunther, chrome-plated and built like a tank, hopped off his bike, his crew flanking him. The thug from earlier pointed toward the door.
"There! That's the bastard!" His voice cracked, fear dripping from every word.
Gunther's cybernetic arm flexed, servo motors whirring menacingly. "Alright, boys," he growled. "We smash this psycho, and drinks are on me."
With a nod, his gang surged forward, armed with bats, shotguns, machetes, whatever they could get their hands on. They thought they had him outnumbered, outgunned.
They had no idea what they were up against.
The "psycho" stepped outside, eyes scanning the street. Gunther's crew was already spreading out, cutting off escape routes. He didn't care. There wouldn't be any running.
He engaged the Sandevistan.
The world slowed to a crawl, the hum of the city stretching out into a low drone. He watched them move, sluggish and predictable, like they were stuck in molasses. The first thug lunged at him with a rusty machete, swinging wide.
Too slow.
The man ducked low, and the mantis blades shot out of his arms with a sickening shhink. In one smooth motion, he spun and slashed upward, cleaving the thug's arm clean off.
The man's scream hadn't even finished leaving his lips when the second blade drove into his chest, pinning him to the wall. Blood sprayed in slow motion, hanging in the air like mist.
Another thug came at him, shotgun raised, but before he could pull the trigger, the man was already on him. He yanked the monowire free from his wrist and flicked it forward.
The wire lashed out like a whip, slicing through the shotgun barrel like butter and wrapping around the thug's neck. With a sharp pull, the wire snapped tight, and the man's head hit the ground before his body followed.
Time snapped back to normal.
Gunther's crew barely had time to process what was happening. Bodies hit the ground in quick succession, blood pooling on the pavement. The "psycho" moved like a predator, silent, efficient, lethal. He turned toward the next wave of thugs, blades dripping red.
Gunther barked orders, his face twisted with rage. "Take him down! I don't care how, just kill him!"
Two more bikers charged, one swinging a bat, the other brandishing a steel pipe. The man let them come. At the last second, he sidestepped the bat, letting it smash into the ground.
Before the thug could recover, the man drove his mantis blades into his stomach, twisting them for good measure. He tore the blades out, blood spraying in arcs as the thug crumpled to the ground.
The second biker swung the pipe, aiming for the man's head. He ducked, letting the pipe whistle past his ear. In one fluid motion, the monowire lashed out, catching the biker's arm and severing it in one clean cut. The biker screamed, stumbling backward, clutching at the stump where his arm used to be.
Gunther had seen enough. With a roar, he charged forward, cybernetic arm raised high, ready to bring it down like a sledgehammer. The man barely blinked. He kicked off the ground, activating the Sandevistan again. Time slowed, the world warping around him as he closed the distance in the blink of an eye.
He leaped, flipping over Gunther's head, mantis blades aimed down. Gunther swung his arm up to block, but the blades pierced through the joints, ripping apart servos and wiring. Sparks flew as Gunther staggered back, clutching his ruined arm.
The man landed behind him, retracting the blades with a soft click. He spun on his heel, the monowire glowing in his hand.
Gunther turned, his eyes wild, cybernetic arm hanging limp at his side. "You… you're dead, you hear me? You're fucking dead!"
The man didn't respond. He didn't need to. With one quick flick of the wrist, the monowire lashed out, slicing through Gunther's remaining flesh and bone. The gang leader's head dropped to the pavement, his body following with a heavy thud.
The rest of the gang froze, staring in disbelief at their fallen leader. A few dropped their weapons and ran, screaming into the night. The others stood still, trembling, unsure of what to do.
The man walked through them, calm, detached. His heart didn't race, his breath didn't quicken. It was over. They weren't even worth his time.
He stopped at the edge of the alley, glancing back at the carnage he'd left behind. Blood painted the streets, bodies piled high. He seemed to almost chuckle at the nonchalant attitude of the people near the alley.
As he stepped into the neon-lit streets, he flexed his fingers, feeling the hum of his cyberware. Mantis blades, monowire, cyberdeck, Sandevistan.
Yet, that didn't even feel like the end. He didn't even know the extent of how much the shopkeeper had changed his body.
But there was one thing he knew: he needed a name. That was the one thing the shopkeeper took from him. The contract had to be established somehow. The price was the memory of his name.
So as the man sat down on top of one of the corpses, he assumed a thinking pose. After a couple of minutes, the man snapped his fingers.
"Elijah. Yes, that feels like a good name… Now, what should I do next?"
After saying this, Elijah's eye projected a holographic map of the city. After seeing a highlighted building, he decided to check it out.
As Elijah took in his current position, it seemed that he was in one of the drug dens in Santo. Looking back at the house he had just destroyed the front door of, he thanked the shopkeeper that he wouldn't have to worry about paying that off.
Soon enough, police sirens began to ring out in the distance, and Elijah, standing up, took off running. Almost instinctively, and with a bit of applied muscle memory, he jumped. He gained a lot more air than expected, and as he did so, blasts of air propelled him upward from the bottom of his feet and parts of his legs.
"Hahaha… it's me, Mario." Elijah laughed at the absurdity of the situation, and after focusing on propelling himself forward, a blast of air erupted from his back, launching him straight to the ground. When he landed, he barely felt the impact. But as soon as he landed, he began running again.
After a few minutes and several miles, Elijah came to a stop near the bridge between Arroyo and Vista Del Rey. He climbed down into a small divot, most likely meant to divert water. Sitting down against the slanted wall, Elijah looked up at the holographic screens that displayed advertisements, seemingly all the way up to space.
It was beautiful in its own way, but Elijah didn't miss the irony of being sent here. After all, the best place to find yourself was Night City.
Taking a moment to breathe, Elijah noticed how easy it was, even though he should be choking from the pollution. He assumed his cyberware filtered out the smells, which he appreciated. He silently thanked the shopkeeper.
Between breaths, Elijah searched his mind, checking for anything else out of place. His heads-up display began to almost reflect his thoughts, showing them in front of him, almost like a computer. His brain had essentially been simplified into files.
The heads-up display was a miracle of science. Real-time updates of his physical and mental well-being. He could browse the network, listen to the radio, then things got weird.
As he delved deeper into his mind, his surroundings began to warp into digital space. A blue warping effect enveloped him, and soon he was surrounded by blackness, though he knew he was still in the same spot. He looked at his hands, now appearing as outlines of pure code.
But as he looked outwards, he saw it.
A ginormous black wall. He could almost hear the scraping and screams of rogue programs and artificial intelligences. They weren't close, more like background noise.
Elijah focused again, and the world warped once more. He found himself back in the small divot.
"Was that a hallucination, or do I somehow have a physical and digital presence at the same time? That's cool as fuck." Elijah couldn't describe it any other way.
But what made it better was that he felt protected. His outline had a proverbial wall between him and the viruses and programs suffusing the new net.
He laughed, imagining someone trying to quick-hack him and getting nothing.
However, amidst the excitement, Elijah placed a hand on his chest and felt two heartbeats, one mechanical and one flesh. He wanted to make a Solo Leveling reference, but this wasn't esoteric or spiritual. It was quite literally a physical heart.
*Boom, Boom*. *Boom, Boom.*
Elijah simply listened to his heartbeats, focusing on the moment. After a while, he initiated a scan of his body, and a full display of his cyberware appeared before him. Of course, the shopkeeper had to be making a joke, the display looked exactly like the Cyberpunk menu screen.
Sadly, there was no inventory, so no pocket space for him. But with nanotech existing in this universe, maybe he could make use of nites to construct weapons on the fly.
Ideas flowed through Elijah's mind about the improvements he could make to his cyberware. But problems arose. His design was biological. It still had cybernetic elements, but they were physically grafted onto him.
The benefits were clear: while less durable than normal cybernetics, his enhancements could regenerate over time, depending on his intake.
Although it was going to suck having to take vitamins to regenerate his cybernetics if they were damaged.
Another advantage was that his body still looked organic, with barely any visible cyberware. He was happy about that, he wasn't ready to go full machine. He wanted to keep all his parts, especially the important ones.
Maybe that explained why someone like Adam Smasher was always so angry. When the brain can't release anything but killing urges, it's bound to turn someone into a monster. Then again, Adam Smasher was a full-blown sociopath.
Elijah took another breath and stood up. After taking a look at the large bridge separating Arroyo from Vista Del Rey, he jumped over the railings.
Thankfully, it was late at night, so the sidewalks were mostly empty. Even now, though, Elijah noticed how Night City had ten times the amount of people out at night compared to his own time.
As he walked across the bridge, Elijah took in the sights, enthralled. There was a certain kind of beauty in the concrete, and in certain moments, his view would shift to the digital space, showing him the city's data streams flowing through it.
It was beautiful.
After crossing the bridge, Elijah began walking down alleyways so he could make use of his double jump and dashes, returning to an almost childlike bliss.
The thought crossed his mind that he could create a type of wiring and go full Spider-Man. But for now, Elijah had a building to check out, and the night was burning.
Estado de energía semanal
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