Poland.
Warsaw.
One of the city’s mercenary bars.
“Master Tony, I will have my revenge on you,” Omnissiah thought with a displeased curl of her lips, plotting her “terrible vengeance.” And yes, she now had lips, and a face.
A minor cosmetic modification installed for better communication while performing the various tasks her selfish master placed on her shoulders.
What was the reason for this mood from a robo-girl?
Well…there was a whole list.
First and foremost, she was dissatisfied with Tony’s wastefulness and his readiness to abandon everything.
Poland served as an excellent place to open his own corporation, with the prospect of being absorbed into the structure created by Stark.
That is to say, from the head of a company, he would become the unofficial, but actual, head of state in Europe.
Tremendous prospects for her foolish master, which he wouldn’t find anywhere else.
Only here did the situation freeze in the shaky equilibrium of a political crisis; only here did the head of state look favorably upon Tony Stark; only here was there access to a shadow market where you could obtain anything from antiques and experimental prototypes to nuclear elements and slaves specially grown for sale.
In America, on the other hand, there was currently a post-war state of affairs—the war for the restoration of the USA waged by Militech, which was in fact a forced seizure of the states and their resources, had stalled at Night City, which had called Arasaka into its city.
Although years had passed since then, the tension had not gone anywhere.
It was obvious that the first sparks of a new corporate war would ignite right there, and her foolish master, for reasons known only to him, was dragging himself precisely there.
Not just to America as a continent, but into the future heart of the storm.
Foolish?
Paradoxically, after a thorough analysis, Omnissiah found herself forced to admit Tony’s reasons for heading to this specific city-state, but the risks…the risks, in her view, were completely unjustified.
And for what!?
Because of Kushinada!
The little cat was a promising asset, showing promise to grow into a genius of programming, hacking, and network security, but in Omnissiah’s view, her value did not exceed everything Tony had sacrificed to pull her out of Arasaka’s dungeons.
Make no mistake, Omnissiah could behave however she liked with humans, even love and value them, but her primary objective was the safety and development of Tony Stark; everything else in the world was secondary to her.
If the choice came down to the destruction of all humanity or Tony’s life, she would choose her foolish master without hesitation.
The second object of her dissatisfaction was Tony himself, or rather his unyielding desire to dive into the fray.
Just looking at his deployment against Ryu Kushinada’s convoy—what was that even worth!?
If she were human, her hair would have turned gray!
And now he had also decided to lead an assault at the head of a mercenary squad.
Is he not a fool!?
It was a good thing that the basics of small-unit tactics had been beaten into him by his father, so he wouldn’t rush into the front ranks, sitting it out behind the backs of the hired specialists…right?
Well, and the third reason for her displeasure was…
“Hey, baby, don’t you want to shed your pieces of iron and have a good time?” a drunk mercenary, who considered himself irresistible, approached her for the thirtieth time that evening.
A coat made of armored fabric, a tactical visor, a bald head with a whole scattering of Eastern-themed tattoos, military trousers with knee pads, and heavy combat boots created the image of a retired military man who had managed to serve with the Chinese long enough to become imbued with their culture.
However, everything was ruined by the foul-sour aroma of stale sweat and the smell of rot from the soldier of fortune’s mouth, indicating either a serious stomach disease or an addiction to heavy drugs eating his body from the inside.
“How would you like me to answer you, in words or action?” once again cursing the artistic talents of her master, who had sculpted her a face and figure that were simply TOO attractive, she nevertheless tried not to create a conflict.
“Well, let’s say action.
I love girls who don’t talk, but specifically act,” THIS spoke an utterly unoriginal phrase, making the most vulgar face possible while already stretching his paws toward her face, the only “exposed” part of her body.
“Well, action it is then,” Omnissiah nodded, and with a swift movement indistinguishable to the naked eye, she severed the extended hand of the hapless suitor.
The wrist blade disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, flashing only for a moment with a white-hot blade.
There was no blood; it had been cauterized by high-temperature plasma.
“A-a-a-a-a-h!!!” the mercenary bawled.
There was no reaction to her actions; the bartender only lazily watched the fallen limb, which was far from the first one this evening.
No blood, so it was fine.
A portion of the patrons who had been sitting there long enough began talking among themselves, handing over money to the winners of a bet, while two thugs peeled themselves off the walls and began pushing through to the groaning Don Juan, aiming to get him out quickly before a scandal started.
They had already had enough of the first two failures getting them chewed out by management.
But since they didn’t risk messing with a person clothed from head to toe in armor and armed with clearly elite blades, it was her unfortunate interlocutors who caught the flak.
And yes, this was the third reason for Omnissiah’s dissatisfaction.
In just one evening, she had seen more freaks, degenerates, drunks, and junkies who genuinely believed themselves to be irresistible than she had seen in all ten years of working the streets of Warsaw.
And that was a lot.
“Well, at least I tested the blade,” the AI comforted herself, slightly rotating her hand.
Her analytical programs found a small flaw in its construction, causing an increased wear of 0.84 percent on that specific area.
As is easy to guess, over these years, Tony had not neglected the only surviving member of his family.
Having received almost complete freedom of action, access to impressive accounts, and a whole mountain of free time—no longer occupied by an educational program due to the death of his primary educators—he gave free rein to his imagination and mischievous hands.
First off, Tony got to work on the material of Omnissiah’s main platform, replacing it with a gold-titanium alloy, having previously constructed a high-pressure furnace with directed magnetic influence to compress the resulting alloy and give it the desired structure.
Almost a year of calculations, only three months of work, and Tony obtained unique equipment and a protector that a shot from a tank wouldn’t even dent—at most, it would scratch the paint.
Next, having sorted out Omnissiah’s defense, he turned his attention to her combat potential.
He chose not to make repulsors, simply due to their inefficiency.
Back when he was Iron Man, operating worldwide and predominantly in open areas, he required maneuverability, even to the detriment of firepower.
Omnissiah, however, operated within the limits of a single city, albeit a large one, and her opponents were for the most part not ordinary people, but cyborgs, and often heavily armored ones.
Instead of repulsors, he built in thermal blades that cut and melted almost any modern personal armor like a hot knife through butter, a system of smart miniature missiles in her shoulders numbering one hundred pieces, and in her thighs sat holsters with extremely powerful pistols—one electromagnetic, the second effectively a sawed-off shotgun.
Both had such recoil that for a human to use them, they would need to replace their arms with high-strength military chrome, metallize their skeleton, and replace their spine; otherwise, these babies would break bones with their recoil and displace spinal discs.
Although he had stopped producing weapons for sale at one point, the skills remained, and since then, his knowledge had increased considerably.
Well, the rest of the upgrades were responsible for Omnissiah’s maneuverability and speed.
Magnets in her limbs, back, and chest allowed her to play with inertia like Spider-Man, replaced wiring increased her speed, and reassembled internals—this time not made from repurposed obsolete military-grade implants, but fully-fledged mechanisms designed personally by Tony—made Omnissiah one of the strongest combat units in the city, capable of single-handedly standing against a squad of borgs.
She only lacked area-of-effect attacks for complete happiness, but alas, it was no longer possible to fit anything else into her platform.
“Finally,” Omnissiah thought with relief when the owner of the bar, a retired solo, stepped out from the back rooms and nodded to her.
Omnissiah had arrived at this bar with a single goal: to meet with several fixers to place an order.
Gathering a small army of mercenaries on a tight schedule is an extremely difficult task, and finding someone who can turn this crowd into at least a semblance of a fully-fledged military formation is harder still, because it requires not only talent and brains, but also a corresponding reputation in their circle.
And Omnissiah had only one chance to accomplish the required task: to turn to the top fixers in the city.
Stepping into the room for negotiations, she entered a closed space lined with black glass that did not allow sound, vibrations, or heat to pass outside the room.
There was a circular sofa and several tables, at which sat three people of an extremely…expressive appearance.
A girl, or rather a young girl who didn’t look a day over twelve, sat closest to the exit, happily devouring french fries.
Two pigtails of pink hair, contentedly narrowed pink eyes, a manicure matching her eyes, and two rags instead of clothes.
The image (whatever one she wanted to create) was ruined only by sharp teeth capable of vibrating at an ultra-high frequency to tear even through metal, and a cold gaze that betrayed the “child’s” true age.
The second guest resembled a wet crow, being dressed entirely in black, with greasy long hair, white skin, and eyes with black sclera and red irises.
As for the third, he turned out to be a withered old man in an expensive suit, a bowler hat, with a cane, a monocle, and a splendid, curled mustache.
“Glad to see you all,” having drawn the attention of some of the most influential people in the city to herself, she sat down at the head of the table without pausing.
“Our time is short, so straight to the point. I need an army. Three hundred people, or better yet, five hundred, and not just trash from the street, but fully-fledged dogs of war with chrome, several years of combat experience, and good weaponry.”
“…” Silence set in.
All three were digesting what they had heard.
In their careers, this was the first order of this nature, and their surprise was understandable; it is rare for a new, but clearly extremely wealthy client to come in and ask you to assemble a force of several hundred elite operatives.
Fixers usually solve delicate tasks: steal documents, find evidence of treason, kill, rescue, rob, carry out sabotage, and everything of that nature.
Here, they were being asked to gather an army, and not just any army, but one composed of elite combatants.
Not that it was impossible—after all, the three bosses of the mercenary world present here were titans of their trade—but they were used to operating with small forces to solve precise tasks.
Yes, in theory, they were capable of gathering a much larger crowd of armed people, even if of lesser quality, but the last time they had to pull off something similar was during the corporate wars, with the backing of a powerful corporation behind them.
Now, they were being asked for something similar, but exclusively on their own.
Anyone would grow cautious here.
Just imagine: an unknown individual in particularly sophisticated armor arrives, slices up several dozen average-grade mercenaries with a look of universal boredom on her face while waiting, and furthermore, this very individual was spotted in the company of a person close to Skalk’s office.
Uncomfortable questions and assumptions about the purpose of the crowd they were assembling arose naturally, along with the question: will people just try to kill them after this happens, or will they torture them first?
“Ahem,” the oldest fixer recovered first.
“We would like to know the details.”
“We need to fight our way into a corporate facility and hold the line there for thirty minutes to an hour. However, due to the high level of defense, high coordination of squads will be required, with strict execution of orders minute by minute; otherwise, the entire operation will go south.”
“Phew, that’s something we can work with,” the pink-haired girl exhaled with relief, resuming her brutal slaughter of the french fries.
“You really scared me there, you know,” she mumbled off to the side.
“Are the commanders on us too?” the long-haired one asked what he deemed the primary question.
“Yes. The general plan of the operation has been developed, blueprints of the facility with its defense systems are available, and the client is coming along,” the last clarification was important.
In the solo community, the risk of a double-cross from a client—where a mercenary squad is used as a bargaining chip—is part of the professional hazard.
For example, six months ago, an information broker pursuing his own purely personal goals hired a promising five-man squad to seize a SovOil convoy.
The task promised to be easy: two trucks, a standard number of far-from-the-best guards in the form of a dozen soldiers.
A five-man squad of combatants chromed to the throat, attacking from an ambush to boot, should have been more than enough.
And at first, that’s exactly what happened: the guards were wiped out, the cargo was seized and delivered to the location, but before they could even catch their breath, a whole squad of borgs was sent after them.
Borgs!
As it turned out, another squad was waiting at the cargo transfer point, setting an ambush for those very borgs, laying low the hired solos in the process.
Only one survived, and he was the one who revealed that they had apparently pinched some particularly valuable, latest-generation reactor passing in transit through Poland somewhere to the East.
So, having the client right beside them during the job automatically reassured the mercenaries, shifting even the most insane missions into the category of transparent ones.
And when you know exactly what you’ll be dealing with, especially in such a murky environment as the shadow world of megapolises, you can have at least some certainty and hope of returning alive.
Negotiations began to simmer.
The trio of Fixers discussed candidates for the role of leader in the future hodgepodge of a force, discarding one candidate after another, but overall they saw no problems in accomplishing the task.
Especially when they were shown a briefcase with three million in cash and promised twice as much for each person upon completion of the operation.
Lucy lay on her bed, curled up into a ball.
Yesterday another one of her friends died, and she had taken a serious beating herself.
Another venture into the old network, more risks for the sake of data and technology, obtained at the cost of someone else’s life.
Everything was supposed to go fine.
It had to!
They had been going past the Blackwall for over a year; they had learned a lot, learned the habits of wild AIs, and discovered their hunting methods.
The price for that was ten lives, which were traded for “priceless” experience.
Lucy gritted her teeth in helpless hatred.
“Priceless experience,” “acceptable losses,” “all for the good of the corporation,” “they were doing their duty”—she had heard this nonsense so often that she felt sick every time the handlers opened their filthy mouths. The source of this chapter is g.com.
It wasn’t them risking their lives by going into the net!
It wasn’t them losing comrades time after time!
It wasn’t them being sent to the slaughter against their will, trading THEIR lives for technology they would never get access to!
In the end, it wasn’t them watching their comrades burn to death in terrible agony!!!
Lucy squeezed her eyes shut.
The last dive into the net had not been easy for her.
The wild AIs hunted in pairs, and that was exactly why they managed to catch them off guard.
While one lured them into its trap, the second spun a new web, which they fell right into.
Yesterday, out of the fifteen who had successfully completed the training program, five were alive.
Today there were already four, and there could have been three, because Lucy had also fallen into the trap, managing to break free only at the last moment.
She could already feel the malicious program invading her mind, searching, assessing, preparing to rip out her soul by force to devour it later.
But she got out.
She managed to escape, though she left pieces of herself on the other side.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Lucy realized with crystal clarity.
She wouldn’t be able to go past the Blackwall again; she wouldn’t be able to gather new data there and hide from the wild AIs.
She just couldn’t.
The past year had been a continuous torture for little Kushinada.
Rare glimmers of fun among friends increasingly resembled the fun of terminally ill people joking about each other’s illnesses, because they had nothing else left.
Despair, along with a clear awareness of their imminent death, had settled in the minds of the children—something that should never have happened to them.
Lucy missed her family, her home, the old days, and even such a mundane thing as the sky!
She was tired.
Tired, burnt out, and she practically didn’t care anymore.
If before she had held on purely out of stubbornness, now she moved more by inertia, because she had no other choice.
Every day they got up early in the morning, ate tasteless but nutritious sludge in the common canteen, and then went to their stations, where they spent the whole day combing the Old Net for new technologies or valuable data.
After that, they came out, ate another portion of sludge, and went to sleep.
Such a schedule was terribly draining mentally, and in digital reality, time flows faster because of all the equipment they were allocated.
Not by a lot, but in subjective time, they spent more than twenty-four hours in the net during a single session.
Even a plastic child’s psyche couldn’t withstand that, and when regular deaths of friends were added to it…
It was especially hard for Lucy.
Not only because of her father constantly flickering somewhere on the periphery, whose very presence reminded her of how things used to be, but also because of the endless trips to the laboratory.
She gave samples every month—sometimes particularly painful ones, like spinal fluid—which meant that even the little free time she could have spent with her friends was taken away from her.
Instead, she was forced to lie on a medical couch and listen to the doctors muttering about her development, blood counts, and the approximate timeframe for when they could harvest her eggs.
Ryu Kushinada turned out to be pleased with his daughter’s results, planning to breed an heir for himself, or even more than one, based on her samples.
Fortunately, now that he had climbed so high, access to advanced genetic equipment had become much easier for him, along with the best scientists to fulfill his desires, but Lucy herself did not suit him.
Extremely patriarchal attitudes persisted in Japan to this day, only worsening since the beginning of the century due to terrible overpopulation and unemployment, so he specifically required a son, as Ryu, raised and grown in this environment, did not see a daughter as an heir.
But besides questionable traditions, there was another, far more pragmatic reason: Ryu’s position had changed.
When he ordered the procedures for his daughter, he was a promising but overall not particularly prominent head of a project that was just launching.
Now, having taken charge of Arasaka’s entire European branch, he had gained opportunities that were simply incomparable to his old ones.
So why settle for the first, so to speak, test sample when you could get a better model designed not by back-alley shadow ripperdocs in crude conditions, but by full-fledged scientists using equipment worth not even tens, but hundreds of millions of eurodollars?
Frankly monstrous, inhumane logic of a natural sociopath, but not devoid of a grain of common sense aimed at career growth.
After all, it was precisely thanks to his daughter’s participation in the project, with her subsequent use in extracting valuable knowledge that provided Arasaka with a strategic advantage on the world stage, that Ryu was able not only to take his place but also to keep it.
Every time Lucy brought back trophies from beyond the Blackwall, the name Kushinada flickered in the reports.
Every time they checked the loss statistics at the main office, they saw the remaining participants of the project, among whom was Kushinada.
Every time Arasaka’s financial departments and scientific luminaries opened new laboratories to study the received technologies, they saw exactly who had retrieved them.
And often, extremely often, it was Lucy who did it.
It would be no understatement to say that half of all the project’s achievements were her credit alone.
She was smarter, faster, sharper, simply better than all the other children, coping where the rest could not.
Moreover, she protected her friends, detected traps, ambushes, and could almost feel the approach of new AIs, leading her squad away from their hungry gaze.
Had Lucy not been in the project when the necessary expertise for operating beyond the Blackwall simply didn’t exist yet, the current team might have been completely knocked out six months ago.
But with her, the speed of their adaptation, development of strategies, and methodologies for acting in a digital reality full of demons appeared with astonishing speed, rarely requiring refinement.
Lucy, without even realizing it, became the implicit leader of their small group, while completely failing to notice her own highly important role.
She simply did what she could, contributing her share to their common survival, just like all the other children trapped in this terrible snare.
But just because she didn’t notice it didn’t mean that such a burden didn’t take its toll on her.
Being a modified individual and simply a genius who had studied since early childhood, she could do much more than the others, working practically for three.
Even for an enhanced organism, this was excessive, and it was not surprising that in the end she overstrained herself, simply breaking down under such vast loads; rather, one should be surprised at how she hadn’t broken down sooner.
And so, brewing in her own thoughts, Lucy was drawn by a loud voice ringing out from the public announcement system.
A familiar voice.
“Testing, one, two. Am I being heard? Though why do I ask, of course I’m being heard,” a cheerful, carefree tone, charming notes in the voice, and the unmistakable timbre of an arrogant bastard instantly yanked the little girl out of her heavy thoughts, bringing the sparkle back to her eyes.
“It’s a bit gloomy in here, ladies and gentlemen of the corporation. We need to fix that!” And no sooner had the last sound of the speech faded than a massive explosion shook the entire base, the echoes of which reached even them.
“If you didn’t hide, don’t blame me!”