Having left Viktor’s clinic, Ruan Xian wanted to test the combined effect of his Spirit World aura masking and his tech-based optical camo.
Spotting two vagrants sitting near Viktor’s entrance, Ruan Xian activated both aura masking and optical camo simultaneously.
He walked right up between them.
Neither of them reacted in the slightest.
Deciding to play a little trick, Ruan Xian stepped behind one of the vagrants and blew softly on the back of his neck.
“What the hell?” Vagrant A shivered, turning around only to find empty air.
“What are you jumpy about?” Vagrant B asked.
“I felt a chill on my neck, like someone was blowing on me,” Vagrant A replied.
“Are you an idiot?
I don’t see a damn thing.”
Ruan Xian didn’t say a word.
Instead, he condensed a small chunk of ice out of his abundant spiritual energy and slipped it down Vagrant A’s collar.
Causing mischief like this made him completely forget any fatigue from spending spiritual energy.
“Holy shit, holy shit!
Ice!
There’s actual ice!” Vagrant A jumped up and down, flailing his arms until the tiny chunk of ice slipped out of his shirt, hitting the ground and melting instantly.
“Where?
I don’t see anything,” Vagrant B muttered, giving him a look that said he thought his buddy was just messing around.
“Motherfucker, there really was ice!” Vagrant A’s scalp went numb, his face turning pale.
“Sure, sure.
You’ve got ice, alright?
Whatever you say.” Vagrant B silently slid further away from him.
*Awesome.
Unless they have high-end scanners or top-tier optics, this setup grants total invisibility.* Ruan Xian, already powerful, felt practically invincible now.
It was a shame Watson didn’t have much of value—the truly lucrative targets were in Corporate Plaza.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to resist playing the phantom thief.
In Watson, the wealthiest faction was Maelstrom.
But those psychos spent money the second they got it and sold off goods immediately.
Besides, their brains were completely fried; trying to steal from them to make a quick buck wouldn’t be easy, and there wasn’t much big money to steal anyway.
However, if he could catch them right after they hijacked a corporate transport, it might be worth a raid.
Having verified just how broken his new ability was, Ruan Xian was about to connect to the NCPD dispatch net to see if there were any lucky Scavengers around.
Right then, Sean Donnelly’s phone rang.
Regina Jones: “Sean Donnelly?
I heard you cleaned out that nest of Scavengers in Kabuki.
Neighbors didn’t hear a single gunshot, and the local surveillance didn’t catch a thing.
Sounds like you’re pretty good at quiet jobs?”
Sean Donnelly: “Are fixers’ networks always this fast?” Find the original chapter at g.com.
Regina Jones: “Being well-informed is the bare minimum for a fixer.
For instance, I know you snatched that identity of yours from a guy you flatlined.”
Sean Donnelly: “Whoa.
It feels like everyone knows this ID is fake.
Did I really do that bad of a job?”
Regina Jones: “You can wipe camera feeds, but you can’t kill everyone who’s ever seen you.
Do me a favor, and I’ll clean up your trail.
Deal?”
Sean Donnelly: “I’m listening.”
Regina Jones: “A corporate vehicle was stolen on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.
Some Maelstromers were bragging about it in a bar, and one of my scouts happened to witness the whole heist.
I’ve located where the car is parked now.
I need you to go in and retrieve the data bank inside it.
Keep it quiet, don’t kick up too much of a fuss.
Can you handle that?”
Sean Donnelly: “Simple enough.
But I can’t guarantee the Maelstromers will survive.”
Regina Jones: “Don’t care about them.
Just keep the noise down.
If you get the package, I’ll throw in a bonus.
Details are in the attachment.”
*Read an attachment?
Screw that.
A professional assassin only needs to know where to go.* Ruan Xian got a headache whenever he saw walls of text.
He simply glanced at the target location and what the car looked like, deciding to head over first.
“Offshore Street, meat shop warehouse, enemy: Maelstrom.
Go, go, go.” Ruan Xian hopped onto his beloved stolen scooter and sped off.
—Press F to skip travel and enter the tank—
“North Watson, Night City’s heavy industrial base.
Man, this place is bleak.” Arriving at Offshore Street, Ruan Xian surveyed North Watson, which had once been the core of the city’s reconstruction.
All he felt was utter desolation.
It was a jungle of steel, with exposed rebar branching out like dead limbs and rusted wire thorns growing wildly over crumbling walls.
The bustle of the reconstruction era had long faded.
Countless heavy factories had aged and withered, leaving behind nothing but cold ashes.
“Monsters born from devouring the flesh and blood of workers and factories.
God, Maelstrom is so fucking ugly.” Using his Oracle optical implant, Ruan Xian peered from a distance at the Maelstrom thugs, who had indiscriminately crammed cyberware into their bodies. The source of this chapter is g.com.
With their hideous, multi-aperture optics, missing noses, and heaps of scrap metal grafted onto them, they looked like brainless idiots bound for cyberpsychosis.
“With cyberware installed like that, they’d get instantly wiped if they ever ran into a decent netrunner or a rogue AI.” Having just learned netrunning, Ruan Xian had no intention of engaging these trash mobs in close combat.
“Let’s have a look.” Ruan Xian no longer needed to brute-force his way into the security cameras to find targets by eye.
A simple Ping quickhack was enough to instantly lock onto every Maelstromer inside the warehouse.
*Just a bunch of small fry.
Fifteen of them, and their total bounty is only 5,600 eddies.
That’s less than 400 eddies each.* Now that Ruan Xian had a reliable fake identity, Sean Donnelly, he could finally collect NCPD bounties.
All he had to do was record the takedowns with his optics, and the money would be credited immediately.
The NCPD was definitely taking a massive cut of the transaction fee at this rate.
Using the Ping lock-on, Ruan Xian prepared a Cyberware Malfunction followed by a Synapse Burnout for all fifteen Maelstromers.
Since he possessed his own Data Fortress, his RAM—a netrunner’s mana bar—was effectively infinite.
He was just about to upload the quickhacks when he recalled that during the system settlement, there was a “style points” metric in his experience gains.
Clearly, the High-Dimensional Observer enjoyed some theatricality.
He needed to find a way to show off.
“They severed all humanity.
Nothing remains but death, and the approach of their final hour.” Slumped over his motorcycle, Ruan Xian struck a classic JoJo pose that would be highly awkward for any normal person, then gazed up at the abandoned heavy factory at a forty-five-degree angle.
“The Reaper has come for his harvest.” Ruan Xian snapped his fingers, and the quickhacks began uploading.
“Holy shit!” “Aaargh!” “I can’t see!
Fuck, I’m blind!” “Enemy!
My chrome is locked up!”
Clamorous shouting erupted, but a second later, the world fell into dead silence.
“Perhaps it is insignificant to the city as a whole, but in this brief moment, Night City became a slightly better place.” Ruan Xian took off his hat and bowed slightly, mourning the workers and citizens who had died at the hands of these Maelstromers, wishing their restless souls peace.
Perhaps comforting the souls of the dead aligned with the principles of a Shaman.
Ruan Xian felt a distinct sensation as a tiny sliver of his Shaman progression potion digested.
*So killing more of them helps digest the potion.
Good to know.
I can’t stand gang members anyway, so I’ll just slaughter more of them next time.* Ruan Xian strolled into the warehouse as if taking a casual walk, casually sweeping the Maelstrom corpses and their weapons into his Spirit World.
“Maelstrom really is loaded.
An Ajax, a Buzzsaw, a Saratoga…
Whoa, is this a Satara?” Ruan Xian felt a wave of satisfaction looking at the guns.
These weapons and the secondhand cyberware were worth far more than the bounties.
The NCPD bounties weren’t nearly enough to make anyone risk facing these guns, which is why they paid so quickly when someone actually cleared them out.
Of course, that didn’t stop the NCPD from taking a massive cut; the amount that actually reached the merc’s hands probably wasn’t even thirty percent.
No wonder there was no such thing as a bounty hunter profession in Night City—high risk, low reward, taking cyberpsycho risks for a pittance.