"Fuck Sixth Street and every shit-spawned ancestor in their bloodline! May their mothers choke on my chrome while I fuck their corpses into synth-paste!"
Demon's voice erupted from her vocal modulator, the words glitching between mechanical snarl and human fury as she crushed the comm unit in her reinforced grip. Sparks spit from the broken device as it hit the wall, joining the graveyard of shattered electronics littering her command post.
The woman who'd earned the name "Demon" wasn't prone to outbursts—not when her six crimson cybereyes could freeze a room of chromed-up killers with a single glance. Not when the twin exhaust ports grafted to her spine still smelled faintly of the last idiot who'd questioned her authority. But today? Today the rage bypassed all her dampeners, flooding her systems with combat stims until her vision pulsed red at the edges.
Her baby brother was dead.
Not in some glorious firefight. Not during a proper raid. But gunned down like stray dog in broad daylight on their own Watson turf. A single, surgical round from some Sixth Street bastard had found the one vulnerable millimeter where his facial plating met the cranial implant. The bullet had cleaved his skull like a rotten melon, leaving his face in two grotesque halves by the time NCPD bothered dragging his corpse to the morgue. And some scav had already ripped out the valuable implant from the back half before the body cooled. All she got back was half a face so mangled she only recognized him by the stupid tribal tattoo peeking through the gore.
Flashback - 12 Hours Earlier
The morgue slab was colder than a corpo's heart. Demon stared at the remains—what was left of them—her enhanced optics scanning every brutal detail. The way the bullet had perfectly bisected his facial plating. The jagged edges where scavs had pried out his cranial implant. The stupid tribal tattoo on his cheekbone—the one she'd mocked him for getting last Christmas.
"Should've kept you closer," she whispered, her voice modulator glitching with uncharacteristic static. "Should've fucking insisted."
They'd lost their father to a factory accident when she was eight. Their mother worked herself to death in the same hellhole three years later. It had just been the two of them against Night City ever since. She'd gotten lucky—Brigitte's favor had pulled her into Maelstrom young. The cyberware had hurt like hell, but the gang became her life. And when she'd risen to lieutenant? She'd tried to keep him out it. Sent him to school. Paid for his damn books.
But the stubborn little shit had wanted to prove himself. Didn't want to be "Demon's baby brother" forever. So, he'd formed his own crew. Taken his own jobs. And now he lay on a steel table with half his face missing.
Her fist hit the morgue wall hard enough to crack concrete.
Regret was for the weak.
Vengeance? That she understood.
Present Moment:
The call from Maelstrom leadership had come an hour later: Stand down. No retaliations. The corporates are watching.
Stand down?
Like hell.
She'd seen the reports. Only one Sixth Street shooter walked away from that firefight alive—some ex-ganger named Oliver. Kicked out of his precious gang the same day, if rumors were true. Perfect. She'd peel the skin from his bones slowly. Make sure he—
"BOSS! WE GOT PROBLEMS!"
The door burst open as one of her scouts stumbled in, his left optic sparking from recent damage. Normally, interrupting Demon in this mood meant losing teeth at minimum. But the raw panic in his remaining organic eye gave her pause.
"Three guys just breached the east sector. They're carving through us like fucking butter."
Demon's six cybernetic eyes cycled through focus modes in perfect sync, her enhanced pupils dilating. "Three?"
This was a fortified Maelstrom stronghold with twenty-plus chromed-up killers. Three men shouldn't even register as a speed bump.
She was about to rip the scout's head off for wasting her time when the security feed pulsed into her HUD.
Her six optics cycled through zoom functions in unison, overlaying targeting reticules across the grainy image.
Sandy hair. Stupid little mustache. The same face that had haunted her every blink since the NCPD file hit her inbox.
Oliver.
The last Sixth Street shooter standing.
Her fingers convulsed around the Militech Crusher shotgun's grip hard enough to dent the metal. The universe had just handed her a gift wrapped in ballistic nylon—the bastard had walked right into her killing floor.
_______________________________________
Concrete exploded inches from Oliver's face as another hypervelocity burst stitched across their crumbling cover. Shards of reinforced barrier peppered his cheeks like angry hornets. These weren't the half-chromed scavengers they'd mopped up in the alleys—this was Maelstrom's A-team. Hydraulic-assisted reflexes. Armor-piercing handloads. A firing line moving with the synchronized brutality of a single organism high on black lace!
"KK!" Oliver's voice cracked as he ejected the Copperhead's smoking mag. The spent casing pinged off the floor, rolling through a puddle of someone's blood. "They're gonna flank us in any fucking second now!"
Across the devastation, Carl moved with eerie calm. The Copperhead in his hands barely seemed to recoil as he put two rounds through a charging Maelstrom berserker's ocular implant. The man's head snapped back violently, his chrome-plated skull erupting in a shower of sparks and synthetic fluids before his body even hit the ground.
Carl didn't flinch. Didn't blink. Just cycled targets with the cold efficiency of an assembly line robot.
Then, as casually as commenting on the weather: "Jackie. Distraction."
Jackie's grin was all teeth and impending violence. He vaulted over their crumbling barricade before Oliver could protest, landing in the open killzone with his arms spread wide. Blood already streaked his thigh from an earlier grazing shot, but he moved like it was nothing."Ándale!"
Before Oliver's brain could scream bad idea, Jackie was airborne—launching himself over their cover with the grace of a suicidal acrobat. Concrete dust hung in his wake like a halo as he landed in the open killzone, arms spread wide in blasphemous invitation.
"HEY CHROMED-UP SHITSTAINS!" His voice boomed over the gunfire, echoing off the warehouse's rusted rafters. "DID YOUR MOMMAS FORGET TO TEACH YOU HOW TO AIM?"
The effect was instantaneous.
Seven barrels snapped toward Jackie in perfect unison.
The first round caught him high in the thigh—a geyser of crimson erupting from the exit wound. The second grazed his bicep, shredding fabric and flesh in a line of fire. Jackie spun with the impacts, laughing through gritted teeth as his blood painted abstract art across the concrete.
Oliver's adrenal implant kicked in hard enough to make his teeth chatter. "JESUS FUCKING—"
Carl moved.
One smooth motion—rising, bracing, sighting. The Copperhead came up like an executioner raising his axe.
Seven targets. Fourteen rounds.
The first burst took the nearest gunner through the throat, reducing his voicebox to pink mist. Carl pivoted, putting two more into another Maelstrom's knee, the hypervelocity rounds detonating the joint in a burst of synthetic lubricant and bone fragments. The man collapsed screaming into his comrade's line of fire, disrupting their advance.
Chaos erupted.
A chrome-plated enforcer charged, twin chainblades whirring to life. Carl's next three rounds punched through the grenade strapped to the man's chest. The resulting explosion engulfed two others in a fireball that sent shrapnel skittering across the warehouse floor.
Jackie, still standing despite the blood running down his leg, wrenched a length of rusted pipe from a shattered crate. He swung it like a batter stepping up to the plate, the impact caving in a stunned ganger's skull with a wet crunch.
Four seconds. Seven corpses.
The math was beautiful.
The aftermath was a slaughterhouse.