“2023—let’s relive yesterday!”
The slogan flashed across one of Arasaka Tower’s massive wall displays while alarms screamed through the building.
Lena Hale sat before her monitor, leaning comfortably against the back of her chair as her fingers danced across the keyboard.
On-screen, the familiar neon-soaked violence of Cyberpunk 2077 unfolded in all its chaotic glory.
She had seen this place countless times before.
She knew every corridor, every security checkpoint, and every group of Arasaka soldiers waiting behind reinforced doors.
After seven complete playthroughs, storming Arasaka Tower no longer felt like an impossible final mission.
It had become a ritual.
For Lena, Night City had always been an escape from reality.
In the real world, she was nothing special—just another exhausted office worker trapped beneath endless deadlines, unpaid overtime, and a salary that barely covered her bills.
Every day followed the same miserable pattern.
Wake up, commute, work until her eyes burned, return home, and prepare to do it all over again.
But in Night City, she was different.
Here, she wasn’t another disposable corporate wage slave.
She was V—a legendary mercenary who could tear through Arasaka Tower alone, crush the most dangerous killers in the city, and seize the wealth, power, and freedom that reality had always denied her.
On the screen, V drew her katana.
The weapon was Byakko, an Iconic blade Lena had earned after completing every gig offered by Wakako Okada.
It was also her favorite melee weapon in the game.
Electricity surged along its sharpened edge.
V lunged.
The Arasaka security officer blocking the corridor barely had time to react before the katana flashed across his neck.
His head spun through the air as blood sprayed across the polished floor.
Without slowing down, V performed two consecutive air dashes and shot deeper into the tower.
Steel flashed beneath the emergency lights.
Thunder cracked through the corridor.
The Arasaka soldiers ahead tried to raise their weapons, but Lena’s reactions were faster.
One man lost an arm before he could pull the trigger.
Another was cut cleanly across the waist.
The third managed to fire a single wild burst before Byakko passed through his throat.
Bodies collapsed behind V as she continued forward.
Blood spread across the spotless corporate floors while the tower’s alarms shrieked without pause.
Lena activated the Sandevistan and watched the world crawl.
“Time to stop the clock.”
She guided V between the frozen muzzle flashes, slipping past bullets that appeared almost motionless in the slowed world.
“Grab the elevator access token…”
A guard attempted to crawl behind a security console.
“And there’s the one who thought I wouldn’t notice him.”
Byakko came down.
The guard stopped moving.
Lena knew the entire assault by heart.
She could remember every enemy position, every locked door, and every objective trigger without needing to glance at the minimap.
Her hands moved almost automatically as V carved a path toward the elevator.
When she reached the entrance, Lena paused the game and opened the character screen.
At the center stood a beautiful young woman who seemed almost too perfect to belong in Night City.
Lena had spent hours adjusting V’s appearance through character customization mods.
Her avatar had a flawless, doll-like face and long hair that faded from pale rose to a deeper pink near the ends.
She wore a blue-and-white school uniform that gave her an innocent appearance entirely at odds with the blood covering her hands.
Pink bows decorated her stockings, while an impractical pair of high heels completed the outfit.
She looked like a dream pulled from Night City’s neon haze.
The cyberware installed beneath that delicate appearance told a very different story.
Every available cyberware slot had been filled.
Each implant had been upgraded to Tier 5++, and nearly the entire interface gleamed with the gold of Iconic equipment.
Armor, reflexes, weapon handling, movement speed, and critical damage had all been pushed beyond anything the original game intended.
Lena examined the absurd build with satisfaction.
“Mods really do make everything better.”
This was her favorite part of every evening.
After spending all day obeying managers and pretending not to resent her job, she could come home, launch the game, and become an unstoppable menace.
Every frustration she swallowed in reality found its release in Night City.
“V!” Johnny Silverhand’s irritated voice snapped through her headphones.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?
Take the elevator down to Mikoshi!”
“Yeah, yeah.
I’m going.”
Lena closed the character screen.
“Let’s finish this and send Adam Smasher to the scrapyard.”
She switched weapons.
Byakko disappeared, replaced by a heavily modified Satara Tech shotgun.
The weapon looked brutal even by Night City standards, its reinforced barrel humming with contained electromagnetic power.
The metal doors ahead suddenly trembled.
A deafening impact shook the corridor.
The doors buckled inward.
A second blow tore them from their frame and sent twisted slabs of metal spinning through the air.
One crashed against the wall hard enough to crack the concrete beneath its edge.
Smoke and dust flooded the room.
Heavy footsteps sounded beyond the ruined entrance.
A towering steel figure emerged through the haze.
He stood more than two meters tall, his organic body long since replaced by military-grade machinery.
Thick armor covered his frame, and crimson cyber-optics burned through the smoke.
The missile launcher mounted over his shoulder unfolded with a mechanical hiss, revealing a row of warheads marked by pulsing red lights.
Adam Smasher.
Arasaka’s legendary attack dog.
The monster who had killed Rebecca.
“Pathetic flesh,” he growled, his voice distorted by a cold synthetic filter.
“You’ve got guts.
Shame you’re too stupid to use them.”
Lena’s lips curled into a mocking smile.
“Who are you trying to impress?”
The Sandevistan activated.
Time slowed to a near standstill.
Smasher’s missile launcher had only just begun to turn when V raised the Satara.
Blue-white electricity crawled across the shotgun’s barrel as the weapon charged.
The light intensified.
Lena released the trigger.
The blast struck Adam Smasher directly in the chest.
His heavy armor shattered beneath the electromagnetic impact.
Half of his reinforced torso erupted in a storm of broken plating, severed cables, and synthetic fluid.
The force drove his enormous frame backward before his targeting systems could finish locking onto V.
Lena was already charging the second shot.
Against a normal build, Adam Smasher was supposed to be the final test—a brutal war machine capable of crushing careless players in seconds.
Against Lena’s collection of overpowered implants and heavily modified equipment, he was barely an inconvenience.
The Satara discharged again.
Adam Smasher’s head exploded.
His crimson optics shattered alongside his facial armor.
Sparks poured from the ruined remains of his skull as his massive body froze in place.
For a second, the legendary cyborg remained standing.
Then his knees struck the floor.
His body tipped forward and crashed against the ground with a heavy metallic boom.
Lena leaned back in her chair and released a satisfied breath.
“Now that felt good.”
She guided V toward the corpse.
“Rebecca, that one was for you.”
Opening Photo Mode, Lena positioned V with one heel planted triumphantly on Adam Smasher’s ruined body.
She adjusted the camera angle, changed V’s expression, and captured several pictures.
“Perfect.”
She closed Photo Mode and stretched her fingers.
“Now for the ending.”
This was already her seventh full playthrough.
She had experienced almost every conclusion the game offered.
Some had been hopeful, others devastating.
She had avoided only the bleakest outcomes—the Tower ending from Phantom Liberty and the choice in which V surrendered entirely and ended everything on her own terms.
This time, Lena intended to hand V’s body over to Johnny.
It wasn’t the happiest ending, but after repeating the story so many times, she had started choosing outcomes based on whatever mood struck her that evening.
The scene transitioned.
V appeared in the darkness of cyberspace, surrounded by streams of luminous data.
Johnny stood nearby, his expression caught somewhere between anger and resignation, while Alt Cunningham waited with her usual unreadable calm.
Lena had watched this conversation before.
She knew every line.
She knew the choices that would appear, and she had already decided which one she would select.
Then the options appeared on the screen.
Her hand stopped.
Beside the two familiar choices was a third line of text.
It had no explanation.
No icon.
No warning.
Only four words enclosed within brackets.
[Path to Glory]
“Huh?”
Lena sat upright.
For several seconds, she stared at the unfamiliar option without moving.
“A secret ending?”
Her first reaction wasn’t fear.
It was excitement.
“Did CD Projekt Red add another hidden route?”
She leaned closer to the screen, examining the choice for any clue that it might have come from one of her installed mods.
Nothing about it looked out of place.
The font, color, and interface were indistinguishable from the game’s original design.
“But nobody mentioned this on the forums…”
Lena quickly switched out of the game and opened her browser.
She searched the exact phrase.
Nothing.
She checked fan wikis, discussion boards, video platforms, mod pages, and several old threads dedicated to hidden endings and unused game files.
There were no guides.
No videos.
Not even a single comment mentioning an ending called Path to Glory.
The option seemed to exist only in her copy of the game.
Lena’s pulse quickened.
She opened OBS and began recording the entire screen.
If she had somehow discovered an ending that millions of players had missed, the Cyberpunk 2077 community would lose its mind.
Maybe it was an undocumented addition.
Maybe one of her mods had triggered something buried in the game files.
Whatever the answer was, she wanted proof.
Lena returned to the game.
The selection cursor hovered over [Path to Glory].
There was still no description beneath it.
No indication of what would happen.
The words floated silently in cyberspace, almost as though they had been waiting specifically for her.
Lena placed her finger over the confirm key.
“I’ve had enough of being a nobody.”
She pressed it.
The instant the choice was confirmed, cyberspace convulsed.
A deep rumble erupted through her headphones.
Crimson and pitch-black data poured from the words Path to Glory, spreading across the screen like a broken dam flooding an entire world.
Mikoshi began to collapse around V.
Towering structures of data fractured, disintegrating into countless fragments of light that fell through the darkness like burning rain.
The image flickered violently.
A burst of electronic static screamed through Lena’s headphones, sharp enough to make her tear them off and throw them onto the desk.
“What the hell?”
The game continued to distort.
This didn’t look like a cinematic.
It didn’t even look like a graphical error.
The darkness on the monitor appeared deeper than the screen itself, as though the display had become an opening into something vast and hostile.
A crack formed across cyberspace.
It spread from one side of the monitor to the other.
Lena’s excitement vanished.
“Wait…”
She pushed her chair back.
“What the fuck is happening?”
Her pupils contracted.
A strand of crimson data slipped through the surface of the screen.
It entered the real world.
For a heartbeat, Lena could only stare.
The thin ribbon of light twisted above her desk like a living thing.
Another strand followed it, then another, until dozens of glowing streams poured from the monitor and spread across the room.
They crawled over the keyboard.
The mouse vanished beneath a web of red light.
The desk began breaking apart into flickering blocks of data, its solid surface dissolving piece by piece as though reality itself were being converted into code.
“No.
No, no—hold on!”
Lena shoved herself to her feet.
The moment her back left the chair, an invisible force seized her body.
Her arms locked at her sides.
Her fingers refused to move.
Her legs trembled, then went completely numb.
Even her chest tightened, making each breath shallow and painfully difficult.
She tried to scream, but her voice caught in her throat.
The crimson streams reached her feet.
They coiled around her ankles and climbed her legs, moving with terrifying purpose.
Wherever the data passed, her skin lost sensation.
The light rose over her waist, spread across her abdomen, and wrapped around her chest.
Lena struggled with everything she had.
Her body didn’t respond.
The room disappeared behind an expanding ocean of red.
Her computer, furniture, walls, and ceiling were consumed one after another until there was nothing left but endless streams of corrupted light.
Then the data reached her face.
Crimson swallowed her vision.
Her thoughts began to slow.
The fear that had seized her only moments ago became distant, buried beneath an overwhelming heaviness.
Her consciousness sank rapidly, as though she were being dragged into the darkest depths of cyberspace.
Just before the last trace of awareness disappeared, a cold, emotionless voice sounded directly inside her mind.
[Initiating reality mapping.]