Night City, 4:03 A.M. Dogtown border, Sector K-12
The city was bleeding again.
Outside, Dogtown's poisoned skyline shimmered like oil on fire, blotched with flickering ad screens, falling ash, and the endless murmur of a world devouring itself. Inside a forgotten flat above a noodle stall stinking of burnt synth-meat and mildew, Saw Vincent sat hunched under low neon, wired in and worn out, eyes sunk deep into their sockets like he hadn't blinked in days.
This wasn't strategy anymore. It was survival by attrition.
The holoscreen on the wall pulsed with code—leads, false intel, mapped city grids, data trails, and encrypted burner messages that looped endlessly. In one window, the Black Sapphire surveillance footage played again and again—Aurore stepping off the elevator just before the shootout, Aymeric's body hitting the ground, gunshots, muzzle flashes from the Barghest soldiers, V's gun spinning in slow motion. The whole thing had become ritual. A holy video of failure and fallout. Vincent couldn't stop watching.
He lit another cigarette with a shaking hand, breaking his habit of keeping his lungs clean. The ember tracing trembling arcs through the dim. Burned fingertips. Blood under his nails. His wrist still bore the marks from Melissa's interrogation—the raw zipcut scars never properly healed. A parting gift from Afterlife's back room. That woman had peeled him apart with words and steel. And he'd lied to her face. Promised her Songbird.
But Vincent didn't know where the netrunner was. He never had. That part was real. The lie was that he still cared.
He coughed into the smoke. Static ran across the screen. His sanity was unraveling pixel by pixel.
Vincent's plan was ugly and unclean, stitched together from scraps and lies like a back-alley aug job. He'd dropped the name Songbird like a cursed whisper, and now the whole city buzzed with it—fixers, mercs, corpos, scavvers all chasing the phantom he'd conjured. Melissa's dogs were already sniffing up red herrings he'd planted in the ruins of Charter Hill and the overgrown net-node tunnels beneath Watson.
It was working. But it was also breaking him.
He barely slept. He barely ate. Even Rita, who had patched him up after shit went south at the Afterlife, hadn't heard from him in a week. Judy Alvarez had warned him: "You play too many sides, you end up buried between them." But Vincent wasn't playing anymore. He was drowning.
Rogue's plan had given him breathing room—a false Vincent walking the streets, a fixer named Santiago pulling the wires, and Leon, the body double, being paraded through Kabuki with a fake shard in his skull. But misdirection only delayed judgment. And Melissa wasn't stupid. She'd gotten under his skin once. She'd do it again. On the Rouge's side of the problem, she wanted people like Melissa coming in and treating the afterlife like her turf.
That's why Rouge decided to use him as a pawn since he was going bigger, taking more risk. Dirtier. Final.
He pulled up a file marked Chimera Protocol. A shard containing a plan, a gift from Rouge. Not net-based, but analog—implanted through hardware, activated through specific biometric triggers. A mindfuck of a weapon designed to erase not data, but belief. It would spoof entire identities, overwrite metadata, create ghost profiles in real time.
He was going to use it on Melissa.
Aurore's voice echoed in his skull sometimes. That last moment in the industrial zone when she'd screamed at him over Aymeric's body, her words a mixture of grief and fury: "You brought this on us! You were supposed to get us out, Vincent!"
He couldn't answer her then. He still couldn't. But he kept her photo next to his burner. Grainy, old, a still from her condo camera. Her smile frozen just before everything collapsed.
He didn't know if he was doing this for revenge, for escape, or for her.
Maybe it was all the same now.
Kabuki Market, 6:12 Am, Night City
By sunrise, he was in Kabuki, moving like a shadow between open markets and broken rooftops. He met with Santiago in an alley behind a strip of defunct braindance booths. The fixer handed him a wrapped package. The shard contained the actual virus.
"Biometric shard," Santiago said. "Keyed to a specific DNA strain. You burn it once, it auto-wipes. You sure you want to play this game?"
"I'm already in it," Vincent muttered. "Just making sure the last card I throw is poisoned."
"Right," Santiago said, cracking his knuckles. "Heard from Rogue, said you were getting meaner. Guess she wasn't kidding."
"Mean doesn't win anymore," Vincent replied. "Kicking ass does, I guess."
He pocketed the shard. It would lead Melissa straight to a fabricated version of Songbird, created using fragments of real netrunner code spliced with Vincent's voice samples. A chimera. A digital mirage designed to draw her into a black hole of false leads and disappear her from the board.
If it worked, she'd chase ghosts. If it failed, he was dead by the end of the week.
Back in the safehouse, Vincent plugged in for one final upload. The Chimera Protocol pulsed on the screen, waiting for a command. But he hesitated.
He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror beside his bed. His skin pale. Eyes red. Voice gone hoarse from too many nights screaming into silence. The boy from Yangon—who read history books under solar powered lamps and ran side hustles through the back alleys of a city that didn't want him—was long gone.
All that remained his last glimmer of hope.
I'm not Vincent anymore, he thought. Not really. Just something pretending to be him.
He activated the virus.
The screens flickered. The transmission burst across Night City's fragmented datastream like lightning through oil. Every NUSA node, every corp surveillance grid Melissa had access to—it would all begin to rewrite itself. She wouldn't know what was real anymore. The face of Songbird would blur, locations would loop endlessly, even her own team's comms would start doubting her. It was a trap. A beautiful, digital curse.
But Vincent knew one thing:
You don't cast a spell like that without sacrificing something.
As the upload finished, he looked at the screen with his now dead eyes...
There was no home. Only Night City. And Night City always takes what it's owed.
An hour later, his flat was empty. Vincent cleaned the place out, and had vanished into the alleys.
Melissa would knows what hit her within 24 hours.
And by then, it wouldn't matter whether the game worked or not.
Because Saw Vincent, once a boy from Yangon, now a myth on the edge of cybernetic madness, had already crossed the point of no return.
The city didn't remember mercy.
And he no longer remembered who he was trying to save.
Aurore's Apartment, Corpo Plaza, 9:40pm
Vincent stood outside Aurore's Corpo Plaza apartment, the rain from the upper platforms cascading down like synthetic tears from heaven. His knuckles hovered near the biometric pad, trembling. He hadn't slept in two days. Not really. His thoughts were noise. Static. A loop of paranoia, fire, and regret.
He hit the buzzer.
Moments passed. Then the door opened—slowly, cautiously. Aurore stood barefoot, in a tank top and shorts, her red hair knotted in a messy bun, her face unreadable.
"Jesus, Vinnie," she muttered. "You look like shit."
He shoved his way in, collapsing on the couch like a sack of discarded chrome. "Had a rough week."
Aurore followed, arms crossed, eyes sharp as razors. "You disappear for days, come back looking like a cyberpsycho's wet dream, and all you say is 'rough week'? No, fuck that. What did you do?"
Vincent didn't answer at first. He stared at the sleek walls, the quiet hum of air filtration, the skyline of Corpo Plaza shimmering behind translucent smart-glass. This place was safe. Too safe. It didn't match the chaos inside him.
"I'm going after Melissa Cartwright," he finally said, voice ragged.
Aurore blinked. "You're what?"
"She's been two steps ahead of me since day one. I made a move, a big one… now I'm bait. And I need her to take it."
Aurore stared, jaw tightening. "Vincent… that woman isn't like the rest of Night City's scum. She's trained. Clinical. The kind of ghost who'll smile while dissecting you. You think you're gonna outfox her?"
"I have to," Vincent growled. "It's the only way."
"No," Aurore said, walking over, crouching in front of him. "You don't. You could walk away. You could disappear, go to the desert, start over. But instead you're feeding your own spiral, and dragging the rest of us into it."
Vincent looked at her then. Hollow-eyed. Twitchy. "You think I want this? I'm not doing this for ego, Aurore. I'm doing it because if I don't, we're all fucked. She'll come after you too, eventually. You think she'll stop at me?"
Aurore's voice cracked. "And what happens when you become worse than her just trying to stop her?"
He didn't have an answer. Only silence. Only the weight of everything collapsing inside his head like cheap scaffolding.
Melissa Cartwright's fingers danced across the holoscreen, decrypting Vincent's forged shard in seconds. Amateur work, even for Night City. His move in Kabuki? A trap. But she'd let it play out.
She sat in a sleek penthouse suite above a surveillance hub buried in the old Arasaka sublevels. Cold, clinical light bathed her in sterile white as she rotated Vincent's psychological profile on a holosphere. Her agent's report from Sunset Motel played in the background.
"Subject met with known mercenary 'V'. Confirmed alliance."
Of course he did. He thought alliances would save him. That trust still held meaning in a city built on betrayal.
Melissa leaned back, lips curled in amusement. "Poor bastard still thinks he's in a game of chess."
But Vincent was playing tic-tac-toe.
She'd let him run wild. Let him believe he had the upper hand. The datashard he thought he planted on her mole? Already dissected. Useless. Her own planted data had infected his system instead—a slow worm that watched, reported, archived.
Every contact he met. Every plan he whispered.
She didn't just want to break him. She wanted to use him. Drag him so deep into his own delusion that when she pulled the rug out, there wouldn't even be ground beneath him. Just air. And silence.
Melissa looked over the skyline, her reflection pale and patient against the smartglass. "Soon, Vincent. You'll beg to be used. And I'll oblige."
Back at Aurore's Apartment
Vincent had dozed off for a while, twitching in his sleep, muttering words like "Songbird" and "cut the line." Aurore sat across the room, sipping black coffee, watching him fall apart in real-time.
She could see it now—the deterioration wasn't just physical. His mind was fracturing. The edge was getting thinner by the hour. She'd seen mercs go down this path before. Some came back.
Most didn't.
When he woke, she didn't speak. Just handed him another cup. Strong, bitter, black as the streets outside.
He took it with shaky hands. "Thanks."
"Vincent," she said, voice quiet but firm. "If you're going to keep doing this... if you're going to keep chasing someone smarter, faster, and more connected than you… then you better start thinking like a survivor. Not a martyr."
He sipped, then smiled weakly. "I stopped being a survivor the day I stepped foot in Night City."
Aurore looked away. "Then maybe it's time you remembered why you came here in the first place."