“Where the hell did this bring me?”
“Is this even Earth?”
When Lena Hale regained consciousness, the first thing she felt wasn’t pain.
It was a terrible, penetrating cold, as though her soul had been stripped from her body and submerged in raw data.
She opened her eyes.
There was no sky above her and no ground beneath her feet.
Endless streams of blue code filled the surrounding void, rushing past like luminous rivers without beginning or end.
She stood on a transparent platform composed entirely of shifting numbers.
Whenever she moved, rings of code spread from beneath her feet before breaking apart and rearranging themselves.
Lena stared into the digital abyss.
She knew this place.
Cyberspace.
Mikoshi.
Soulkiller.
Personality constructs.
The terms surfaced one after another, and with each one, the cold feeling in her chest deepened.
She slowly lowered her gaze.
Her body was gone.
In its place stood a translucent humanoid outline composed of blue data.
Countless fragments of code flowed beneath its surface, constantly forming and dissolving.
She looked less like a person and more like a program waiting to be rewritten.
“So I’ve been uploaded into Mikoshi?”
Lena lifted one hand and watched fragments of light scatter from her fingertips.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.
I clicked one hidden option, and Arasaka suddenly started offering cross-dimensional services?”
A brilliant white light appeared in the distance.
The light expanded rapidly, illuminating the surrounding code as an enormous black interface materialized in the void.
[Personality Anchoring: Lena Hale]
[Constructing Virtual Body]
[Establishing Reality Mapping]
Lena barely had time to process the words before the final notification appeared.
[Intrusion Successful]
Cyberspace shattered.
The platform beneath her feet broke into innumerable fragments.
Rivers of code collapsed inward, forming a violent digital storm that swallowed Lena’s consciousness.
Then everything went dark.
Blinding sunlight struck Lena’s face through a dirty car window.
The roar of an aging engine filled her ears, accompanied by the smell of gasoline, cigarette smoke, heated metal, and desert dust.
Her body rocked from side to side as the vehicle struggled across an uneven highway.
Lena’s eyes snapped open.
A cracked dashboard flickered before her.
Loose wires hung beneath it, swaying whenever the car hit a bump.
Outside the windows, clouds of yellow dust rolled across a vast wasteland dotted with abandoned buildings and rusting industrial structures.
Towering advertisement pylons stood in the distance, their faded displays still trying to sell products to travelers who had disappeared years ago.
“Awake?”
A woman’s voice came from the driver’s seat.
Lena turned her head.
The young woman driving had short hair dyed in a striking red-and-yellow gradient.
A half-burned cigarette rested between the fingers of her left hand while her right remained casually on the steering wheel.
Exposed cyberware along her arm shifted with each movement, its metal components gleaming beneath the Badlands sun.
Lena recognized her instantly.
Valerie.
This was the original V Lena had created during her first playthrough—the unmodified version who had accompanied her through her first journey across Night City.
Yet Valerie was no longer a character displayed on a monitor.
She was alive.
She breathed, smoked, and occasionally glared at the dashboard as though threatening the car might convince it to keep running.
“What’s wrong with you?” Valerie asked, giving Lena a suspicious look.
“Did that nap turn your brain into scop?”
Lena didn’t answer.
Unfamiliar memories were awakening inside her mind.
She remembered growing up beside Valerie among the Bakkers.
They had both been orphans, raised not by parents but by an entire Nomad clan.
They had learned to repair engines using scavenged parts, keep watch during freezing desert nights, and fire weapons before either of them was old enough to drive.
Lena remembered fighting another Nomad group over several crates of clean water.
She remembered the recoil of her first handgun numbing her wrist.
She remembered huddling with Valerie inside a battered vehicle while a sandstorm screamed outside, both of them pretending they weren’t afraid.
Then the old clan leader died.
His successor lacked the influence needed to hold the Bakkers together.
Supplies became scarce, tempers worsened, and the clan slowly began to fracture.
Eventually, the new leadership agreed to absorb the Bakkers into the Snake Nation.
Some members considered it necessary for survival.
Others saw it as the death of everything their family had built.
Lena and Valerie belonged to the second group.
They refused to surrender the Bakker name and left the clan together, hoping to build a new life in Night City.
These recollections didn’t feel like artificial information forced into Lena’s brain.
They carried emotions, sensations, and tiny details no simple biography should have possessed.
She remembered desert wind scraping against her cheeks.
She remembered Valerie’s laughter beside a campfire.
She remembered the smell of engine grease on her hands and the terror of waking up to gunfire in the middle of the night.
The memories felt lived.
Lena turned toward the passenger window.
Her reflection stared back from the dusty glass.
She saw flawless features, long hair fading from pale rose to deeper pink, and bright pink eyes widened in disbelief.
It was the same appearance she had used from her second playthrough onward—the modded V she had once named Rose.
That avatar had stormed Arasaka Tower again and again.
Now Lena was looking out through her eyes.
“What?” Valerie asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Finally noticed how pretty you are?”
“It’s nothing.”
Lena paused when she heard her own voice.
It was soft and clear, exactly like the voice she remembered selecting for Rose.
She touched her throat, then looked down at her slender hands and unfamiliar clothes.
The body felt strange, but not completely alien.
Lena had spent hundreds of hours seeing it run, fight, climb, and bleed.
Accepting that it now belonged to her was easier than accepting everything else.
Besides, this was Night City.
Bodies were products.
Faces could be redesigned, voices replaced, and memories bought or stolen.
Compared with the possibilities offered by modern cyberware, waking up in the body of a game avatar almost felt ordinary.
Almost.
Lena focused inward.
A pale-blue interface appeared before her eyes.
A translucent model of her body floated at its center.
Different regions had been divided into nervous system, circulatory system, skeleton, integumentary system, hands, arms, legs, face, and operating system.
There were fifty-one cyberware slots in total.
Lena recognized the interface immediately.
It was identical to the heavily modified cyberware menu she had used in the game.
There was one major difference.
Every slot was empty.
All her Tier 5++ Iconic cyberware was gone.
Several lines of text appeared beside the virtual model.
[Reality Rule Discrepancy Detected]
[Retained: Virtual Body Template]
[Retained: Cyberware Fusion Module]
[Retained: Inventory Module]
[Retained: Combat Experience Mapping]
Lena couldn’t hide her disappointment.
If her original cyberware loadout had crossed over with her, she could have marched directly into Night City, kicked open Arasaka’s front door, and taken another picture while standing on Adam Smasher’s corpse.
However, the explanation beneath the Cyberware Fusion Module immediately restored her interest.
[Cyberware Neural Load: Transferred to Virtual Body]
Lena stared at the sentence.
Then she understood.
Cyberware was dangerous because every implant replaced a portion of the human body.
Flesh, nerves, bones, and organs were gradually exchanged for machinery.
The more extensive the modifications became, the greater the strain placed on the user’s nervous system and sense of identity.
At some point, certain people could no longer withstand that conflict.
Reality and hallucination blurred together.
Empathy eroded.
Everyone around them became a target, a threat, or an object.
Eventually, they became cyberpsychos.
Despite the danger, almost no one in Night City refused cyberware entirely.
Chrome offered too much power to ignore.
Strength could be purchased.
Speed could be purchased.
Memory, perception, reflexes, and even emotional responses could be altered for the right number of eddies.
A person might dedicate their entire life to pushing the human body to its natural limit, only to be surpassed by some street thug equipped with secondhand Gorilla Arms.
Talent was valuable.
Chrome was faster.
Lena, however, possessed something no ordinary mercenary had.
The cyberware installed in her physical body would be mapped onto the virtual body stored in the data space.
Most of the neural burden would be transferred there instead of accumulating inside her brain.
It didn’t necessarily make her invincible, but it removed one of the greatest barriers to extensive modification.
She could install far more cyberware without gradually losing herself.
New information appeared.
[The first cyberware installed in a body region will merge with the corresponding virtual component]
[Additional cyberware installed in the same region will be analyzed, fused, and used for enhancement]
[Active cyberware with incompatible forms cannot be manifested simultaneously]
Lena’s eyes brightened.
Multiple sets of cyberoptics wouldn’t force her to grow a dozen eyes.
Several leg implants wouldn’t transform her lower body into a tangled mass of machinery.
Every compatible implant would merge with the corresponding section of her virtual body, preserving useful functions while strengthening its existing structure.
Conflicting arm cyberware followed a similar rule.
Gorilla Arms and Mantis Blades could both be integrated, but their combat forms couldn’t be deployed at the same time.
Lena would need to switch between them when necessary.
No repeated surgery.
No removing one expensive implant to make room for another.
A single thought would allow her to change the active structure.
Lena finally relaxed against her seat.
“Good.
The mods came with me.”
The inventory module opened next.
Rows of empty storage slots appeared before her.
Lena closed them without testing the feature.
Valerie was sitting less than a meter away.
Making a weapon disappear into empty air would lead to questions Lena wasn’t ready to answer.
A secret like this could easily get her killed.
She turned her attention to the last retained ability.
[Combat Experience Mapping Complete]
Lena glanced down.
An RT-46 Burya rested in a holster at her waist.
The weapon hadn’t come from her game inventory.
According to her new memories, it had belonged to this version of Lena long before her consciousness arrived.
She wrapped her fingers around the grip.
Knowledge surged through her mind.
The correct drawing angle.
The optimal grip.
Recoil control.
Charge timing.
Target leading at different distances.
Each movement felt familiar, as though she had practiced it thousands of times.
Lena quickly recognized the limitation.
The system had transferred her combat knowledge, weapon-handling habits, and learned instincts.
It hadn’t given her body the physical ability to perform every technique perfectly.
Her strength, reaction speed, and coordination still imposed limits.
Knowing the correct response also didn’t guarantee she would remain calm when real bullets started flying.
Still, it was more than enough for a beginning.
Lena released the Burya and smiled faintly.
More than two thousand hours spent playing the game had finally become useful.
A sharp mechanical clatter came from beneath the hood.
Clack.
Clack.
Clack.
Black smoke began escaping through gaps in the metal.
Warning lights flashed across the dashboard, and the entire vehicle shuddered violently.
“Damn it!”
Valerie struck the steering wheel.
“Couldn’t this piece of junk hold together for another ten minutes?
We’re almost at the checkpoint!”
Lena studied the trembling dashboard.
She knew exactly what was happening.
This was the beginning of the Nomad path.
A small Badlands town waited a few kilometers ahead.
They would stop there to repair the car, climb an old radio tower, contact a fixer, and accept a smuggling job that would take them across the border into Night City.
“Find somewhere in the town ahead and repair it,” Lena said.
After a brief pause, she added, “And try not to start trouble.”
Valerie slowly turned toward her.
For a moment, she looked genuinely stunned.
Then she burst out laughing.
“Did the sun rise in the west today?
You’re telling me not to start trouble?”
Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Valerie reached over and pinched Lena’s cheek.
“Let me check whether that nap actually broke your brain.”
“Piss off.”
Lena slapped her hand away.
“The sheriff in that town is a Corporate War veteran.
People call him Silver Shotgun.
Avoid provoking him if we can.”
Valerie blinked.
Then her grin returned.
“An old sheriff wasting away in some Badlands backwater?”
“He’s Silver Shotgun,” Lena repeated.
Valerie pointed at herself with the hand holding her cigarette.
“Then I’m Silverhand.”
Lena couldn’t help laughing.
The battered car continued along the highway, leaving a thick trail of black smoke behind it.
Through the swirling yellow dust, the silhouette of a small town gradually appeared.
Lena’s smile faded as she watched it approach.
She knew the sequence waiting for them.
Repair the car.
Climb the radio tower.
Contact the fixer.
Accept the smuggling job.
Cross the border.
And then they would meet the man destined to change both their lives.
Jackie Welles.