The amber data ring in her pupils faded away.
Kiwi blinked, finally letting out a sigh of relief after ending the data struggle on the Net.
Searing air vented from the openings of her red face mask as her elevated body temperature slowly began to drop.
As she sat up, the two blue light points on her chest swayed slightly with her movement.
Seeing this, Gloria, who had been using clothes to fan Kiwi and help her cool down, rushed over and asked anxiously,
“How is it?
Is the guy I came with alright?”
“He’s fine.
His neural-link signal is still active.
The cyberpsycho’s data signature has vanished.”
“Thank goodness.
I’ll go check on him.” Gloria dropped the clothes in her hand and ran out from behind the changing rooms.
Kiwi stood up, took the underwear Lucy handed her, and slipped it on.
She then picked up her trench coat, which had been spread beneath her, threw it on, and tied the belt to cover her bare body.
“The target wasn’t just some ordinary cyberpsycho, was he?
Cracking a personal ICE shouldn’t have caused you to overheat,” Lucy remarked with a hint of curiosity, sliding her pistol back into its thigh holster.
She was well aware of Kiwi’s netrunning skills.
A normal person’s ICE couldn’t possibly hold her off for so long.
“Yeah.
He was a veteran, using a military-grade counter-intrusion unit.
Fortunately, his defense programs hadn’t been updated in five years, otherwise it wouldn’t have been so easy to find a backdoor.”
Pulling a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket, Kiwi slipped one through the opening in her mask.
She lit it and took a deep drag of the nicotine-heavy smoke, slowly exhaling.
But without a powerful temporary teammate to buy her time, today’s situation wouldn’t have been resolved so easily.
Kiwi sent a message to the signal source she had logged in her neural link.
“Let’s go.
The elevators are back online, we’re leaving.”
[Kiwi: Not bad, kid.
Add me as a contact.
I can give you a discount on netrunning jobs in the future.]
[Lin Ke: Thanks.
Favor owed +1.]
[Added Contact: Kiwi]
*Thud—*
The trunk was stuffed to the brim, and the back seats were nearly piled high as well.
Gloria got into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and looked at Lin Ke, who was still spaced out beside her.
She assumed he hadn’t recovered from the cyberpsycho incident.
And fair enough—a bloody, slaughterhouse-like scene like that was bound to make anyone uncomfortable.
Starting the car, Gloria drove Lin Ke back toward Arroyo.
Meanwhile…
On the system’s holographic screen, Lin Ke was looking at the newly generated quests.
[Gig: A Father’s Final Love]
Quest Description: In the cyber era, machinery has replaced flesh, and memories have turned into data.
On the boundary between sanity and madness, family is the only key keeping his humanity intact.
Objective: Rescue Drew Bruce from the All Foods plant in the Northside Industrial District of Watson.
[Time Limit: 7 Days]
Quest Reward: Pocket Dimension Inventory Space +1
[Gig: Dead Souls Buried in History] (World)
Quest Description: Rumor has it that before Night City was built, a small fishing town called Morro Bay stood here.
The town’s men sailed to catch fish and support their families, while the women repaired nets and cared for children at home.
Hundreds of households lived off fishing, spending peaceful, quiet lives in this little town.
Until a group of red-eyed demons arrived.
Overnight, the town became a dead zone.
Where did the townsfolk go?
They are still here, of course.
Their skeletal remains are buried beneath this city, their souls wailing day and night within the history obscured by Night City.
The Player has arrived.
The time for the dead souls to exact their revenge is here.
Objective: Kill Maelstrom members in Night City to lay their souls to rest.
Quest Reward: For every Maelstrom member killed personally, you will receive 20 General Class EXP.
Lin Ke recalled that the system had generated the first quest right after he decapitated the cyberpsycho.
The first quest had a seven-day time limit.
Lin Ke figured that after seven days, the boy named Drew Bruce would probably die at the hands of Maelstrom.
“But since the reward is expanding my inventory space, does that mean there might be other world quests that expand my equipment slots?”
After accepting the first quest, the system triggered the second.
Hunting Maelstrom members.
According to Cyberpunk 2077’s game lore, Maelstrom had about 1,300 members in Night City.
If he flatlined all of them, he would rake in 26,000 EXP.
Of course, he couldn’t wipe them all out in one go.
He could kill a few dozen every once in a while, giving Maelstrom time to recruit new members—a sustainable farming strategy.
The Hunter class didn’t have a reliable, steady source of EXP yet, but now it did!
Still, Maelstrom gangers weren’t helpless chicks waiting to be slaughtered.
This gang was the closest thing to cyberpsychosis itself.
Not only were they heavily armed, but they also possessed their own factories and tech, with high cyberware integration rates.
He needed to get stronger.
It looked like he had to hurry.
The Hunter had to step out of his cave today and begin harvesting and hunting.
To acquire Bloodstones and Soul Crystals to grow stronger.
To gather ingredients for cooking and leveling up.
The car drove back into the underground parking lot of Megabuilding H4 in Arroyo.
It took Lin Ke and Gloria four trips to carry everything from the car back to the apartment.
In the living room, Lin Ke unpacked the items alone while Gloria went to her bedroom to catch up on sleep.
This was exactly what Lin Ke wanted.
Having someone around made it difficult to act.
Unwrapping the clothes one by one, he stored them into his inventory.
Over in the Hunter world, Lin Ke stood by the stove.
He took off his shoes and outer clothes, retrieved the new garments from his inventory, and began layering them on.
Layer after layer of pants and shirts.
By the time Lin Ke put on two pairs of socks and laced up his high-top tactical boots, his entire frame had swelled to three or four times its usual bulk.
Once dressed, Lin Ke impatiently rushed to the cave exit and began clearing the snow blocking it.
Bending over at the cave mouth, he shattered the snow blocks with a long blade, then took out a soup pot from the kitchen, filled it with ice and snow, and stored it in his inventory.
He repeated the process once the Lin Ke on the other side cleared away the loose snow.
After half an hour, Lin Ke dug through nearly three meters of packed snow and stepped out of the cave.
The cave exit was located halfway up a low, rocky mountain, about twenty meters above the ground.
There was a clearly carved slide that could lead him straight down.
Right now, the outside temperature was around minus twenty degrees Celsius.
The orange light from the setting sun offered Lin Ke not even a hint of warmth.
For dozens of meters around the foot of the mountain, there was only a blanket of white snow, with no trace of vegetation.
But looking further out, dozens of meters away, lay a boundless white forest canopy covered in ice and snow.
In the far distance, a colossal ancient tree that stood like a mountain range formed the heart of this region.
The Ancient Tree was similarly frozen within this white world.
According to the notes, this campsite was established on the outskirts of the Ancient Forest.
Crossing fifty kilometers of forest straight ahead would bring him to the core ecological zone of the Ancient Tree.
To the left, a ten-kilometer trek across the snowy plains led to Astera, the base that the hunters had already abandoned.
And heading backward around the mountain where the camp was located, eighty kilometers away lay the border of the Wildspire Waste.
The buffer zone between there and the Ancient Forest was not yet covered by snow, and many creatures from the Ancient Forest had migrated and settled in that area.
Although the cold climate had killed off much of the Ancient Forest’s flora and fauna, a fraction had still managed to survive in this white, frozen sea of trees.
For example, the Wingdrakes circling high above the forest were only about a kilometer away from this rocky mountain in a straight line.
Lin Ke made his decision.
They would be his first prey.