Arthur slapped his desk and sighed. His eyes, previously glowing with the gold light of a holo-call, return to their icy blue hue as he sighed. “Just got word from the top that Michiko’s taking a sabbatical. To Japan.”

  Vincent, arms folded, and back leaning against the wall of Arthur’s office, sighed. He knew the meaning of that news. Michiko Arasaka was a Night Citizen through and through. The very fact that she had chosen to leave now of all times only meant one thing: the news had spooked her.

  The pressure was on, now. Vincent would bet his life savings that it was only a matter of time before word came down from one of the Arasakas to put this matter to bed, or else. And he had no interest in being caught in the splash zone of corporate restructuring.

  “Well, shit,” Vincent said.

  “‘Shit’ is right. We need to kill this freak yesterday.”

  They’d made good progress on the Maine lead, even without Jackie revealing anything in that regard. Maine’s Crew was pretty famous, consisting of himself, an ex NUSA special forces, and a coterie of other psychos: a buff lady, possibly an Animal (whether current or former), called Dorio, a freak and frequent Joytoy consumer known as Pilar, and a Netrunner by the name of Kiwi. Netwatch barely had a profile on her worth a damn, but that didn’t matter. They had all their faces. It was only a matter of time before they showed up in any of the surveillance cameras spread about the city.

  But they were at a dead-end there, too. All they could do now was wait. And there was no guarantee that any of those people were even still in the city after the shit that they had pulled.

  The only person that they knew were in the city was D.

  Vincent received a call then. From Jackie Welles.

  “Important?” Authur asked.

  “Could be,” Vincent said.

  “Take it.”

  Vincent accepted the call.

  Jackie: Hermano.

  V: What’s the word, choom?

  Jackie: It’s not good. It’s… really not good.

  V: From the top, then.

  Jackie: D held a meeting. All the big-name fixers came. Rogue, Dino, Wakako, that news lady Regina Jones, Dakota Smith from the nomads, and El Capitan. We even got surprise guests into the mix: Dexter DeShawn cut short his vacation to show up, and this shady Pacifica motherfucker called ‘Mr. Hands’ or some shit. And some no-name from the Soviet Union.

  V: And Padre?

  Jackie: Yeah, Padre, too. Everyone came just to hear him out.

  V frowned sharply.

  V: And what exactly did D have to say?

  Jackie: It’s as you think, V. He wants to build an army. Almost no one was on-board with it. Why would they be? It’s some crazy shit. But… he’s got Rogue’s ear for sure. Saw it myself. They have a connection.

  V: Who else? There have to be others.

  Jackie: …Regina Jones and Mr. Hands both looked like they were willing to play ball with him. El Capitan and Dakota Smith weren’t exactly opposed to the idea either.

  V: That doesn’t sound like ‘almost no one’, Jackie.

  Jackie: Those fixers aren’t aligned with the bigger gangs. No one even knows who Hands is, and Smith’s a Nomad, she’s not going to shed her people’s blood in an NC turf war. They might have a few low thou gangoons between em combined, and that’s being generous. The big fish like Wakako and Dinovic definitely weren’t interested in D’s pitch. Them’s the breaks.

  V: Shit. What about Padre?

  Jackie: Padre wants nothing to do with this shitfest. But he thinks it’s only a matter of time before the others come around. Things are about to go down in a big fucking way, choom, and D’s not being shy about what he wants.

  V: And what’s that?

  Jackie: War, hermano. War. He wants to open up the streets so it can swallow up all the high rises. Eat the rich, feel me?

  Fuck.

  Fuck!

  It had to be that. Out of all the fucking things in the world this terrorist might want, it had to be the most obvious, yet horrifying prospect of all: a fucking class war.

  V: You sure he’s not saying that shit to get people on his side?

  Jackie: He could have said something smaller, something more doable. Like, ‘let’s raid a Militech convoy and get even richer’ or ‘let’s carve up a section of the city and get steady protection money’ or classic gangster shit, but he said he wanted us, the people, to take the corps by force. Too much risk, and the reward is bullshit. But he’s saying it, and people are listening.

  V: That’s… fuck, choom. That’s a lot. Was there anything more, Jackie? Cuz I’m about to drag us up to DEFCON 3 right now. You need to skip town for what’s coming.

  Jackie: And what’s that? DEFCON 3?

  V: With zero being Arasaka and Militech sending in their armies and possibly starting the Fifth Corporate War in all the excitement, take a wild guess.

  Jackie: I’m not leaving you behind, hermano. I still owe you—

  V: You don’t owe me your death on your conscience. Once the Task Force learns that they’re already organizing for that purpose, all bets are off.

  Jackie: …what do you mean by that, choom?

  Shit. Shit. How the fuck was V supposed to explain this to Jackie in a way that didn’t make him sound like a monster?

  V: You really think the megacorps are gonna stand for something this unprofitable, Jackie? The gangs existed with the corps in a finicky balance before, but this shit will change things. It will give them every excuse to put boots on the ground. Everywhere. You’re not safe.

  Jackie: Then… we need to take care of this quickly, before it gets to that point.

  V: We do. You need to go to ground. I’m serious.

  Jackie: Fuck. Fine. We’ll talk. I’ll… prepare.

  Thank God.

  V: Stay safe, friend.

  Jackie: You too. Don’t take any risks.

  V: I’ll try.

  He hung up right after.

  “FUCK!” Vincent roared. Then he remembered where he was, and stiffened.

  Arthur immediately spoke. “Big fucking problem, I’m guessing?” Just as V opened his mouth, Arthur held up a hand to forestall him. He then reached into his drawer, pulled it open, and retrieved a bottle of Scotch. It was the good shit, too. Straight from Scotland, with a prize tag measured in five figures. “Take a seat,” he said as he retrieved two lowball glasses from the same drawer, sliding one across the desk.

  Vincent went up to the chair and sat bonelessly down.

  They filled their glasses, had their sips, and only afterwards did Arthur nod at him. “Alright now. Spill.”

  Vincent said the words tiredly, his mind blanking out as he reported on what Jackie Welles had said to him. D’s meeting, his objective, and… the influence he already had.

  “I almost figured as much,” Arthur said. “Glad I called in those Tsviets.” He sighed. “The time for subtlety is long past. D’s untraceable, but his comrades certainly aren’t.”

  Vincent’s eyes widened in shock. “That’s exactly the sort of thing that’d get those people to work together.”

  “Yeah. If we leave any of them alive to even work together.”

  Vincent closed his eyes, taking in the news. Exactly what he had expected to hear. Total annihilation.

  Arthur turned his swivel chair towards the window behind him, and raised his glass. “To NC’s fixers. You all had a good run, but… it’s time we dealt with you mangy dogs once and for all.”

  “All of them?” V asked. Do I have to warn Padre?

  “Every single one, V. At the same time, too. We gotta cripple their leadership in one fell swoop. Get every Netrunner in the department combing through the data stream to catch all their locations. Once we have them pinned down, it’s go-time.”

  “Is there no room for finesse?”

  Arthur chuckled. He turned the chair back to face V and put his glass on the desk with a soft clink. “You ever hear of Alexis de Tocqueville, V?”

  The name vaguely tinkled at something in Vincent’s memory. Some professor might have cited him in uni, maybe. “No. Why?”

  Arthur smiled thinly. “Tocqueville. The Old Regime and the Revolution. 1856.” Vincent raised an eyebrow, and Arthur snorted. “Yes, the book’s over two centuries old, but some lessons are eternal. Bear with me. Tocqueville wrote a postmortem on the French Revolution, and in it he makes an ugly little point: regimes don’t always fall because the revolutionaries are stronger. Often, the regime is much stronger. Then it falls anyway. Why? Because the regime is blind, slow, or miserly in its responses. A regime that answers dangerous and uncertain times with half-measures creates a vacuum for enemies of the regime, no matter how small they are. That vacuum can so easily become a void that gets filled by whatever lunatic revolutionary comes along, with disastrous results.”

  Vincent’s heart started to hammer in his chest as he parsed those words, and started to see where Arthur was going with this. His boss’ ice-blue eyes stayed focused on his own.

  “You let a figure like D roam around long enough, the people will start to believe he represents them. Hell, he’s already selling XBDs, and I know for a fact the city’s braindance jockeys are moving ripped copies faster than cheap joytoys can get action on Jig-Jig street. It won’t be long before he becomes more than a standard terrorist in the public eye: he’ll become a story. And once he goes viral at that level, we risk losing control of the narrative. We cannot lose control of the narrative, V.”

  Vincent felt the room tighten. He’d read versions of that argument in Arthur’s dossiers, afterreports of other CoIntel ops. About the need to see insurrections and uprisings not just as episodes of violence, but as diseases of the public mind that could only be cured by injections of hot lead, the sooner the better. And hearing the argument out loud from the man who signed off on so many of Arasaka’s counter-revolutionary black ops around much of the world, that made it personal.

  “You think D could be… that much of a risk?” Vincent asked.

  Arthur’s jaw flexed. “I don’t think so, V. I know. You don’t need CoIntel’s internal data to know that violently anti-establishment thinking isn’t some fringe sentiment in Night City. Income inequality and poverty has never been worse, and privatizing the NCPD hasn’t done us any favors. It’s not just lawless districts like the Port, Santo Domingo, Dogtown, or the rest of Pacifica’s slums; even many of the city’s working districts are furious at the state of things. The megacorps have never exactly been popular in the city, but attitudes have shifted hard against us in the last couple of years. If D can weaponize that anger, turn it into a narrative… Tocqueville’s warning is simple: you don’t let a spark meet a keg of gasoline. We don’t need a little French Revolution on our streets.”

  “Shit,” Vincent said. “Shit.”

  “This is why we don’t have time for rounding up goddamn investigations or waiting for Abernathy’s clique of cowards to deliberate until they reach this same conclusion. We need to do something, now. You don’t wait for a son of a bitch baby revolutionary to come to you. You go out and murder him in the crib, hard and fast. Overwhelming force.”

  Vincent took a long, long drink from his scotch, his thoughts racing. “Rogue, Dinovic, Wakako… all the city’s top fixers at once. That’s—”

  “—a difficult proposition,” Arthur interrupted. “Yes, I agree. It’s risky. But: what’s riskier? A hundred corp-funded MaxTac squads running bloody street ops for several months or years of urban war as we hunt this bastard down, or a single, controlled set of dark operations that breaks the enemy’s network before it properly forms? We take the short term hit to our rep now, or take a much bigger hit longer term. We don’t have any other options here,” Arthur finished.

  “But to act this quickly?” V’s breath was faint. “At this scale? No, I’m sure I can still come up with more targeted options. I’m sure of it.”

  Arthur’s eyes narrowed. “If you can get me D himself within two days, then maybe we won’t have to liquidate all of his newfound friends?” Arthur’s expression looked almost considering, until he snorted harshly. “But if you could do that, this wouldn’t even be a consideration in the first place.”

  “It’s two days, then?” V asked. Was that the true deadline or just a ruse to get everyone to work extra hard?

  “It’s ‘however long it takes for us to get a lock on our targets’. Two days, or maybe even tomorrow morning. But we get them at the same time. We leave no room for them to turtle up and decide to join hands with D out of panic and fear.”

  “You might be overestimating how easy it will be to find these people,” V said quietly. “There’s a reason they still exist. They and the gangs.”

  “The reason was a lack of motivation to be thorough, V. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  A hit on all the city’s top fixers, all at once. Vincent’s mind was racing through possibilities, premonitions of disaster. “You can’t be serious, Arthur. The blowback alone could—”

  “There will be no blowback. There will be no survivors, and no tracing it to us specifically,” Arthur said coldly. “We’ve tolerated the street gangs and their fixers for this long because it wasn’t profitable to tighten our leash on the city’s streets. Now? We can’t afford not to.”

  “Fuck.” V rocked back in his seat, took a longer sip of his whisky. He didn’t speak for a while. Just… processed the countless implications of what was about to happen.

  “So that’s the plan, huh,” Vincent muttered.

  Arthur nodded. “Glad we’re on the same page on this, V.”

  The praise did nothing to undo the twisted knot in his gut.

  000

  “Somebody edit the fucking teleprompter!” Gillean Jordan roared. The control room crew scrambled to fix the issues. One intern ran towards her with a hot cup of coffee. Gillean grabbed it and downed it all in one go, ignoring the heat. Her pain editors allowed her to not feel the scorching heat, and her cybernetic voice box was immune to any damage. All to allow her to down more caffeine. “More!” She screamed. Another intern ran in with another cup, and she ripped the lid off and drank it down in seconds.

  Once more unto the breach, she thought to herself as a producer counted down to her from ten. Night City needed to be kept busy with more news. She’d provide it. Provide all the eye-catching trash necessary for them to sit still and fucking listen to her.

  After all, she had a story to tell.

  She was saving this city from a psychopath that wanted to tear it apart. She felt a surge of excitement as her heart pounded. She was rounding up the masses into a mob, all united under a single purpose:

  Hate D. Find D. Kill him if you must.

  The power of it all buoyed her. The caffeine kept her alert, and she had to fight to remain relaxed in spite of the copious amounts of cocaine going through her system, plying its magic, lending her unbeatable confidence.

  But confidence was also control. And control, she had heaps of.

  “Four. Three. Two.”

  Gillean collected herself, put on her best face forward, and spoke. “Good evening, Night City!”

  000

  “—The wanted criminal only known as D is still at large. Any witnesses to his crimes are called on to provide any and all actionable information regarding him. The bounty on information regarding his location is—”

  “This some bullshit.” Dexter DeShawn grumbled in annoyance as he rode out from Watson on his limo, feeling a surge of rage and a tiny bit of annoyance at what he had heard.

  He sat opposite, in the backseats, to his two assets, as they sat back there, ruminating on his annoyance with all the lack of concern that people disconnected to the stakes of this motherfucking game had. The Netrunner T-Bug, and one of his two shooters, Sasha Ivanovich sitting right besides her.

  The driver, Oleg Darkevich, sat pretty on the driver’s seat, pretending like DeShawn’s ire wouldn’t touch him. But it would, eventually. He was a dime-a-dozen huscle, and his bitchass thought that he could escape a reaming just because he wasn’t in the area? Fuck that. Fuck him.

  Fuck all these assholes.

  “This some fucking bullshit!” Dexter roared.

  “Why?” T-Bug asked. The bald bitch looked down on the floor of the limo, fingers interlocked as she asked. She was clearly just trying to cut down on the tension without seeming too confrontational. Made sense, considering her nature. A black girl like her, ambitious as she was, tended to be all too careful about her position. Too careful to outright question her bosses.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  But! Her kind was also prone to trying to keep dragging the train into its tracks for the pay. After all, it didn’t pay to have your boss ranting and raving over nothing. Dexter saw that coming, and he hopped on that opportunity.

  “You can’t see it, can you?” Dexter scoffed. “You can’t see how this motherfucker is playing us all. He’s trying to force us into his army, right in front of his pasty ass, just to let us die while he reaps all the fuckin’ rewards. Give it to me straight, Sasha. You know how fucked this whole shit is.”

  “I don’t know, boss,” Sasha growled in response. He shrugged, and brushed his hand over his bald-ass head, refusing to meet Dexter’s eyes. “This isn’t a simple thing.”

  Dexter raised an eyebrow. “The fuck do you mean by that?”

  “You can’t see it?” Sasha scoffed. “You can’t see why people will want this? Will want to follow D?”

  He did, actually. Dexter could clearly see why. He was just waiting for someone to bring the issue up. “You want to make enemies with every megacorp sec-employee, huh? Is that it? You think you’ll win with your Soviet spunk, Sasha?”

  “Is it about spunk or is it about willingness…? Boss,” he added belatedly at the end. “He’s dangling the world in front of everyone. And… word is, he can deliver.”

  Word is he can deliver.

  Dexter eyed the bald-headed Netrunner in his employ. T-Bug. She looked steadily into the window. “Bug,” Dexter growled. “Talk.”

  “You saw it yourself, Dex,” T-Bug said, still looking into the window. “D got every fixer in that room wrapped around his finger. And he knew Bugbear. Handled her like she was nothing. They had a run in, and she was running scared.”

  Dexter had heard enough. D was real. As real as any NC legend could be. A modern day Morgan Blackhand.

  They all seemed convinced, however, that Dexter only had one sensible option.

  Heh. Idiots, the lot of ‘em.

  That was the reason they were just hired muscle, and he was the fixer.

  He’d simply play both sides. No reason not to, given what was at stake.

  He made the call to his Militech contact, and sighed in contentment, like the cat that had nabbed the canary.

  000

  “Three, baby!”

  “No way, you stepped on the line! I saw it with my own eyes!”

  “You got some bunk ‘roshis, dude! Go to a ripper or something.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Sebastian “Padre” Ibarra only paid half attention to the game of basketball going on before him. He sat on his usual spot in the bleachers, enjoying the feeling of being in the midst of it all: around the people that lived and breathed the streets. The blood of his blood: Heywood.

  Next to him sat an analog radio belting out the evening news of the N-54. Gillean Jordan’s calm and measured tone delivered her usual hamfisted rhetoric against the newest sensation of the streets, inviting guest speakers to speculate on D’s purported nature and reason for his string of violence.

  “It’s obvious that this is a ploy by the NUSA to stir up unrest in our fair city,” one apparent professor of economics from the Night City University postulated. “They’re trying desperately to create a justification for intervention because Arasaka hasn’t left any openings as of yet. They’ve taken good care of the city. I mean, the market speaks for itself. Our economic output has never been higher.”

  “This isn’t Militech’s style,” another speaker, this one a professor of international relations, rebutted. “No, this is a clear example of a lone wolf terrorist trying to drum up public support, and failing miserably. The city knows the truth, thanks to the hard work of the N-54. Your hard work, Ms. Jordan.”

  “All in a day’s work, Professor Brown,” Gillean Jordan responded smoothly. “And everyone who works on this network, of course. We’ve always been committed to revealing the truth and keeping the people informed at all times.”

  And the next time D struck, they would be on top of that, too. And they would poison whatever message he tried to send out until it became unrecognizable. And utterly unrelatable.

  There was no winning in this scenario. All D could hope for was to kill as many corpos as possible. The devil himself couldn’t have thought of a more destructive mission.

  The people of Heywood, at least, tended not to watch the N-54. They still didn’t have a Spanish option after all, and that was enough to alienate a majority of the district, even those that spoke English.

  La Charla, the usual drivel that passed for news in these parts, did do its fair share of addressing the Tijuana incident, but there was considerably less heat there. At least compared to their usual reports of cartel clashes and political tensions in Central America.

  D was a Night City sensation. The rest of the state could care less.

  And Heywood…

  Sebastian spotted a couple of teenagers walking around wearing high-vis EMT jackets. A couple of them wore skull-caps and regular caps depicting sugar skulls.

  Reportedly, it was even worse in Arroyo. A few roving bands of streetkids had taken to wearing ski-masks with the sugar skull motifs, and those EMT jackets, and were hunting down scavs in their neighborhoods. They always had the means to do this, it seemed. D had just told them that it was possible.

  That it was possible to take a gun, don a mask, and kill a menace to your neighborhood if you wanted it. That was D’s true power: his ability to shift people’s thinking.

  God only knew how he thought.

  Did he feel guilt?

  Shame?

  Sebastian’s brows furrowed as he recalled something a child once said to him. A confession.

  Nearly two hundred dead… and adultery.

  After the confession had ended, he had dismissed the speech as… a departure from the truth. Perhaps the boy truly had felt shame and guilt regarding some kind of death he had imparted unto others? And in order to reckon with the guilt, he had inflated the numbers to make himself feel even worse out of a sense of obligation to burn in his own hell of shame?

  Mercenary work was not for the faint of heart. Padre would know that better than most.

  Only now… did he realize that connection. A boy with a motorcycle.

  An Arasaka Academy uniform. Guilt, shame, and a body-count in the hundreds.

  Padre grinned, shaking his head. He would be protected by the seal of the confessional for anything that he had said to Padre in confidence. And Padre wouldn’t begrudge that at all. He felt no need whatsoever to shatter his own dearly-held principles just to take down a boy—not even a man—that was ultimately not even his enemy.

  As for what he would do…

  He looked up at the darkening night sky and called Gustavo Orta, the young cousin of the Valentino leader Campo Orta. He would want to buy what Padre was selling regarding D—and only D. His mission, his capabilities, and his disposition towards the gangs: the rules that he now expected every lowlife to follow.

  000

  Dino Dinovic pumped his hips as one of his disposable girlfriends sucked his dick down to his fucking balls. “Guh!” he groaned.

  She was disposable, but she was definitely a fucking pro when it came to this one fucking thing. Fucking.

  Deep in the backrooms of his nightclub in Downtown NC, he listened to the bass of the music boom, trying to get the rhythm to match with his girl’s head.

  All the while, he planned.

  And he made a call.

  Dino: Give it to me.

  Demitri: I’m good, twin. Thanks for asking! Alright, so, regarding your matter, I’d advise you to get the fuck out of this city while the going is good, because this is not good biz.

  Dino hung up. Enough info from him. He doubted that Demitri had anything more to say.

  He called another contact, pumping his hip as his temp-GF did something especially interesting with that tongue of hers.

  Dino: Talk to me.

  Albert: Yoooo, twiiin!

  Dino did enjoy how so many of his men kept calling him ‘twin’. It was cute. Almost enough to make him want to keep a roster of only black people, since they were the ones that usually used that term.

  Black people were fun.

  Dino: Talk

  Albert: Yeah, so, my scav boys? They’re going craaazy with these rumors that the Bratva are hosting Soviet edgerunners!

  Dino: Any specifics? Their names?

  Albert: Not yet. Just chatter ATM. Will let you know when I find something concrete. Anything else, twin?

  Dino hung up.

  He called another contact.

  Jonas: Yo, twin.

  Dino: Talk.

  Jonas: The Task Force assigned to deal with D is packed with some real playas, partner. You don’t wanna fuck with ‘em.

  Dino: Why?

  He grimaced as he pumped his fist upwards. He was so close. He hoped Jonas would make it good.

  He desperately wanted to cum to some good news.

  Jonas: Arasaka, Militech, Biotechnica, Zetatech, Kang Tao, all of ‘em, twin.

  That didn’t sound good. Almost enough to make him soft.

  Jonas: Night Corp and of course, the NCPD.

  Dino: And?

  Jonas: Twin? It’s a fucking massacre—

  He hung up.

  Finally, he called one more contact.

  A woman this time.

  He hoped that her dulcet tones would do something for his increasingly softening dick.

  Do something, girl. Please.

  He called her.

  She answered.

  Rogue: You want to be lubed up, don’t you?

  A little bit more than that, honestly.

  Dino: Let’s be professionals, here.

  The temp-GF swirled her tongue. Ah!

  Rogue: I heard that.

  Fuck.

  Dino: Give me some good news.

  Rogue: That depends on what you consider good news.

  Dino: Are you a part of this shit?

  Rogue: And if I am?

  Dino felt his blood flow just right.

  Dino: What makes you so confident in him?

  Rogue: You need assurances, don’t you?

  Ah!

  He bit his lower lip.

  Dino: What do you have in mind?

  Rogue: What do you have in mind, Dino-boy?

  He had a lot of things on his mind, actually. A lot of things that an accomplished gun like D could accomplish. He felt better and better as he thought about it. He grabbed the back of the head of his temp-girlfriend, pumping her up and down on his crotch.

  Dino: How much for him?

  Rogue: Your loyalty.

  Loyalty?

  Too pricey.

  Way too pricey.

  Dino: Too steep.

  Rogue: Not too steep. Just name your price for that and that alone, Dino.

  Loyalty, huh?

  Dino: Priceless

  Rogue: Then what about a dream? What’s your dream, Dino-boy?

  Dino smirked. A dream, huh?

  He wanted what D wanted, in all actuality.

  He just wanted it for sure. And he needed D to show that he had what it took to do it. To take back NC from the corps.

  To make every rockerboy’s dream come true.

  Dino: Prove that D’s got what it takes.

  Rogue: You gotta chip in, though.

  Chippin’ in, huh? Dino’s hip bucked at the thought.

  He accessed the club’s music remotely and changed it.

  ‘Ca-can you feel it?! Can you touch it?! Get ready cuz here we go!’

  Dino: I’ll reach. Not overreach.

  Rogue: I know you’re too feeble for that much, kiddo. Don’t stretch too hard. A little goes a long way.

  Hah!

  ‘Ca-can you feel it?! Can you touch it?! Get ready cuz here we go!’

  Dino: I’m in.

  Just as the song reached its chorus, Dino was done.

  His temp-girl took it all in her mouth, and Dino grinned widely as she did. “FUCK YEAH, BITCH!”

  ‘Never backing down! NEVER BACKING DOWN!’

  Dino: I’m sending you a message now. Make sure he gets it done properly. And I’m in for life.

  Rogue: Alright, kiddo. Good talk.

  She hung up a moment later.

  Dino grinned.

  He shoved the girl from his crotch, buttoned up his pants, and dragged her up on her feet.

  “Baby!” she gurgled.

  “Swallow,” Dino growled. “And let’s dance.”

  She complied dutifully. He pulled her out of the backrooms, into the dancing floor, and tore the fucking floor apart with her.

  He doubted he’d have many opportunities to fuck shit up again for the foreseeable future.

  000

  Jackie Welles walked into his mom’s bar, the El Coyote Cojo, and walked straight up to their apartment, where he immediately started packing. He didn’t say a word to his mother. No time for that.

  He packed their clothes first. Then their most prized belongings. And after that, their less vital stuff. Mementos of days gone by: souvenirs from their travels, as well as whatever stuff that their more exotic guests had traded in for drinks.

  Only then did his mother walk up.

  “Mijo,” she said, standing on the doorway behind him as he was bent over on their things.

  “We need to go, mama,” Jackie said. “Now.

  “Now? Come on, mijo—“

  “You don’t understand,” Jackie stood up, turned around and faced her. “It’s serious, mama.” He switched to Spanish as he continued. “They’re about to tear this city apart looking for this bastard. We have to leave now.”

  Her eyes widened. “And what of your girlfriend? Are you going to leave her behind?”

  Since when had she even cared about Misty?

  “I’ll talk to Misty, mama. I’ll even bring her if need be. But right now, we need to sort our things. You need to close the bar down. And we need to leave—“

  “Why?!” She stomped on over to Jackie and grabbed his shoulder. “Tell me now. How can I leave without telling anyone why? What do you know, son?”

  Jackie winced. “Things are getting serious, mama.”

  “So we leave our people behind to fend for themselves? We escape?”

  “How can we fight?!” Jackie roared. “What can we do? When the megacorps are pressing down on us, what can we do, mama? We have to leave while the going’s good. Otherwise, we will be caught in the middle of this… this war!”

  Mama stepped back from Jackie, looking utterly struck by the news. She seemed to wrestle with herself before finally, after almost a minute of thought, producing an answer. “We can stand strong, son. With our people. We can show this city that we are here to stay. Never to leave.”

  How couldn’t she see the enormity of what she was asking? The enormity of the opposition that they were facing?

  Or… maybe it was faith?

  She had faith in Heywood. Faith that Jackie seemed to have failed to muster.

  “Is it worth it, mama?” Jackie asked quietly. “Is it all worth fighting for?”

  “Always,” mama replied. “It always is.”

  Jackie walked up to his mother.

  And embraced her.

  It was all he could do, now. They couldn’t leave this place. This home of theirs. Or their people.

  All that was left to do… was to fight.

  Finally, Jackie understood Padre’s words.

  “I will do what is necessary for the good of our people. Whatever that may be at that particular moment.”

  And in this particular moment, what was necessary was to protect their way of life. To protect Heywood from what might arrive. Whether it be the onslaught of corpo retaliation, or D’s work, this barrio had to be protected by someone.

  And Jackie would step up if need be.

  He had to warn everyone. Take charge if he had to. He knew some Valentinos high up the ladder that might take his words seriously. If they could just lie low and let all this blow over, then Jackie wouldn’t have to attend so many funerals in the coming weeks.

  A part of him was grateful for his mother’s words.

  If he fled now, he would never be able to look at himself in the mirror again.

  000

  Katsuo Tanaka groaned as he was let out of stasis once more.

  Someone pulled the feeding tube out from his gullet, and the catheter out from his nether regions.

  And he was awake.

  A white ceiling. Stark lights. People surrounding this Tathagata—

  Surrounding him.

  Suits.

  He winced in pain and shame.

  He’d heard it all, already.

  His actions. His sins.

  And his father’s disappearance.

  What else was there to hear? What other shame was there for him to absorb into his body?

  “Katsuo Tanaka,” a gruff voice intoned. “Good evening.”

  Evening. So it was evening. Difficult to tell. He didn’t have a HUD. Only… eyes. Fleshy, slimy eyes. Soft, supple arms, hands, fingers. Legs. His… his member had reduced in size. No longer did he sport the one that he had bought. Just… his natural size. All regrown from his DNA.

  It hurt his mind to think about. This Tathagata—he deserved more than what nature had given him. He deserved more strength. More speed. More stamina. More manhood. But all he had was… softness. Suppleness.

  “Can you understand me?” the gruff voice continued.

  Katsuo opened his eyes. He saw a tall, muscled man with a cleanly shaven face and a full-face helmet with a six-eyed visor with green eyes. But his visor was pulled over his head.

  Six eyes. Green eyes. Visor.

  The six-eyed children wielding the triangle weapons spewing from the big flying mothership—.

  “I can understand you,” Katsuo said softly.

  “Good. We would like for you to undergo a test to see how well your cognition has improved during your stay here. Do you consent?”

  “Yes,” Katsuo muttered. A test.

  A test sounded like… a way to prove himself.

  A way to show the world that he was more than what he had become.

  More than a shameful example of failure.

  “Good.”

  The next minute, Katsuo was walking. He wore a hospital gown as he walked through the hallway, barefooted, wrists cuffed, with a coterie of enormous guards surrounding him. The one that had spoken to him marched ahead of him.

  Katsuo closed his eyes. And when he opened them, he was on a chair, a desk before him, and on the desk was a piece of paper, and a pen next to it. On the paper was a headline that said ‘Cognition Examination’.

  And beneath that headline were several questions, beneath each were multiple choices.

  He took the pen, read through each question, tamped down on his rising arrogance, and answered each to the best of his ability.

  The questions were insulting. ‘How many children are in the playground?’

  Four. No, three. One of them had a mustache.

  ‘How many mothers are pushing strollers?’

  Two. The third one was a decoy. No baby in the stroller.

  ‘Is this a child or a dog?’

  A child on a leash. Or a small adult. But a human. Child.

  ‘Is this a dog or a cat?’

  Cat. No. Dog. No whiskers.

  ‘Is this a child or an adult?’

  Child. Small. He only had that context clue to go with, so child.

  ‘Is this child unruly or a deadly threat?’

  No weapons. Unruly.

  ‘Is this child a bystander or a deadly threat?’

  No weapons. Bystander.

  ‘Is this a playground or a battlefield?’

  No weapons.

  …No weapons that he could see.

  Battlefield.

  ‘Is this a school or a battlefield?’

  Battlefield. Instantly, a battlefield. Schools were battlefields.

  ‘Is this a hospital or a battlefield?’

  Battlefield. There were weapons in there. He’d seen it himself. Battlefield.

  ‘Is this a government building or a battlefield?’

  Government building? Battlefield.

  ‘Is this a hotel or a battlefield?’

  The security guards had weapons. Battlefield.

  ‘Is this a battlefield or a battlefield?’

  Katsuo’s eyes caught on the last question, and a moment later, the question became clear.

  ‘Is this your family’s house or a battlefield?’

  Ah. Easy.

  A battlefield.

  No. He crossed it out.

  A battlefield.

  No. He crossed it out again.

  It was his family’s house.

  Wait. How did they have that on this quiz? How did they know where he lived? Who were these guys, anyway?

  He looked at the question again.

  ‘Is this a battlefield or a battlefield?’

  He blinked.

  Difficult.

  Then he spotted a third option.

  ‘Awaiting orders for confirmation.’

  Ah. Easy. He picked that one.

  ‘Is a battlefield a battlefield or a battlefield?’

  Awaiting orders.

  ‘Battlefield a battlefield a battlefield or a battlefield?’

  Awaiting orders.

  ‘Battlefield battlefield battlefield battlefield battlefield batelfielfd batl’

  Orders.

  ‘BATTLEFIELD’

  ORDERS.

  He needed orders.

  He couldn’t make the judgment.

  If he did, and if he was wrong, then his father would rip his arms off again.

  And beat him with them.

  Orders.

  He needed orders.

  Every answer was a need to obtain orders.

  He reached the end, finally.

  No more questions.

  No more requests for orders to fill his stupid idiot brain with ideas because he lacked good ones—

  The man with the six-eyed helmet slid atop his skull looked at his paper, and nodded. “Good work. You started catching on near the end. Await orders.”

  Ah! How easy!

  ANNOUNCEMENT: Taking a break for the next few update cycles. My next update will be some time in 2026.

  ready and what isn't.

  https://linktr.ee/DaoistMystery

  https://discord.gg/fgaUvEzjrg