The Good Company.
Abandoned Toy Factory.
“We’re cursed,” Jackie stated in a melancholic voice, calmly reloading his pistols.
Unfortunately, he had lost his rifle—it had selflessly taken a bullet directly to the bolt mechanism for him, dying a heroic death.
“You’re exaggerating,” Tony countered, calmly walking around the semi-destroyed warehouse room and gathering various scraps of junk.
“Come on then, step up if you’re brave! Who wants to die first, you freaks!?” Eva Barnes raged, freed from her bonds and actively firing into the doorway.
Judging by the occasional groans, she was actually hitting targets.
The rescued Mox was furious with her captors and was happily gunning them down.
“How else do you explain a quiet sweep that went off without a hitch suddenly turning into a total casa loca!?” Jackie argued, ignoring their new acquaintance’s exclamations.
As it turned out, the Valentinos weren’t the only ones looking for this overly arrogant gang of Scavengers.
The Tyger Claws hadn’t forgotten their humiliation either, and one of their particularly bold—but not very bright—gang bosses decided to get the Night City bottom-feeders at any cost, completely disregarding minor details like territory, spheres of influence, and consequences.
And so, the Tyger Claws rolled into the old factory loudly, with a racket and gunfire, ramming the rusty gates with a van before immediately spilling out and blasting at everything that moved.
The situation itself was already bad, as Jackie caught a couple of stray bullets—which, though slowed down by the armored fabric of his jacket, still got lodged in his body.
To make matters worse, Stark had done his job too well, dumping the entire magazine of his submachine gun into the newcomers and dropping three at once…
including the organizer of this entire operation.
If they had a chance to part ways with the Claws peacefully before that, now the Asians, enraged by the loss of their boss, thirsted for his killers’ blood and didn’t give a damn who they were.
But as if that wasn’t enough, a few minutes after the new shootout began, some boys from 6th Street showed up—crashing the party for the cargo, based on their shouts.
Apparently, the NUSA patriots and loyal Militech lapdogs wanted to buy cheap cyberware and organs from the Scavengers, only to stumble right into the Tyger Claws, the gang they clashed with the most.
Worst of all, both gangs were represented in this detachment by their respective elite vanguard, meaning they were chromed out to their eyebrows, heavily armed, and highly experienced.
Against them, Jackie, who only had a couple of implants, looked downright pale.
Tony was holding his own reasonably well thanks to his insane reflexes and a powerful revolver, and Eva was a Mox fighter—and because of their small numbers, the Moxes generally invest in their people early on, giving them free access to combat implants that, while old, get the job done—but it was still catastrophically insufficient.
“Keep your cool, Big Guy,” Tony reassured Jackie in an indifferent tone, picking up a canister of some chemical and shaking it next to his ear.
Well…or rather, he tried to, mostly just to brush him off.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he smiled—not at Jackie, but at the feed his drones were transmitting from the clash site of the gangs’ main forces.
As mentioned before, two elite squads from some of the most powerful and influential gangs in Night City were currently locked in combat at the factory, and that was a serious tier of engagement.
The Tyger Claws drill their recruits for combat like a full-on boot camp, just with harsher methods, while 6th Street is heavily overrun with corporate war veterans and mercenaries, so their overall proficiency is on par with the army of a fairly developed nation.
Plus, practically every single one of them had extremely powerful custom guns; some more expensive, some cheaper, but based on a quick assessment, even the worst piece among them could fetch about three thousand eddies on resale.
Quite decent money—a monthly salary for some people.
And the top-tier guns held by the gangsters actively dying against each other and against Eva could easily go for ten grand, or even twenty with a bit of luck.
In Tony’s opinion, this was a highly pleasant bonus to their contract payout.
All that was left was to claim these babies for themselves, clean them up, patch them up, and they could sell them to the Valentinos.
And, of course, zero out their current owners.
“We are trapped in a room with a single exit, stuck between a fight involving two squads of heavily chromed monstruos,” Jackie noted, wincing from the wound in his side and regretting that he hadn’t bought higher-quality MaxDocs.
“I highly doubt we’re making it out of here with everything being ‘fine.'”
“Well…we’re about to find out, aren’t we” Tony muttered, placing his findings in one spot and actively mixing something together.
Frankly speaking, they were lucky that the vandals who occasionally occupied the abandoned factory didn’t show much interest in the storage rooms.
Primarily because of their inconspicuousness, and secondarily because of the inventory inside—mostly cotton wool, fabrics, and dyes, which held little interest for junkies, transients, and gangsters.
However, a few rare chemicals and lubricants intended for machine maintenance and related upkeep, all the way down to toilet cleaners, were still hiding among the shelves, with nearly half of them intact.
And that was more than enough for Stark to whip up a nasty concoction that begins to evaporate upon reaction, causing dizziness, suffocation, and vomiting when inhaled.
It was weak stuff that spoiled quickly and only lasted three to four minutes, but in theory, it was effective even against people with synthetic lungs.
Many people replace their lungs, even civilians, just to smoke cigarettes without consequences, but very few replace the nasopharynx.
There are plenty of reasons: minimal effect, the complexity of the surgery, and the excessively high cost of the implant for such minor performance changes—but most importantly, such an implant is a rarity.
It is produced in frankly small batches due to low popularity, and what does get manufactured goes to the Marines, saboteurs, and military divers.
“Eva,” Tony called out, distracting his new acquaintance from her active spending of lead.
“What?” the Mox reacted, pouting with annoyance at being pulled away from such an engaging activity, but she listened nonetheless.
“Focus for a second, I’m going to explain the plan.”
Frankly speaking, she didn’t have high hopes of making it out of this mess alive, and she was perfectly content with the fact that she wouldn’t have to die on a chopping table drenched in the blood of previous victims, but in battle, shooting back at some bastards instead.
In Night City, even death can become a luxury.
“Do you know how to throw grenades?” Stark smirked sinisterly, pulling obviously homemade grenades out from under the folds of his suit jacket.
It was true that Tony had only brought a submachine gun, a revolver, and a ballistic vest from home.
But he was Tony Stark!
And while his guns weren’t particularly impressive by local standards—given his lack of access to high-tech equipment and materials—and were simply decent custom pieces, his ballistic vest, much like his entire suit, belonged to a higher league.
Granted, you couldn’t make anything truly miraculous out of them, as blunt force trauma was still a factor even if your genetic lineage contained a cocktail of Soviet genetic engineering achievements, but nobody was forbidding him from trying.
For instance, Tony would barely flinch at a pistol caliber; a rifle round would cause a severe bruise and hairline fractures in his bones; and a machine gun round wouldn’t punch clean through him but would instead get stuck in the bone, even if it shattered it to splinters.
That was already far more than rookie solos had going for them.
Furthermore, he carried a number of his fabrications in his car, created on a portable 3D printer, such as his drones…or hand-assembled grenades.
Even in his old world, one could make a bomb out of surface cleaning agents—not particularly powerful and prone to blowing up at any second, but the fact itself mattered.
In this world, where words like “operational safety,” “environmental pollution,” and “user hazard” had become comparable to white noise on an old radio, one could cook up something truly devastating out of cleaning agents using nothing more than high school-level chemistry knowledge.
And Tony was far beyond that curriculum, having taken the trouble to prepare for trouble in advance by creating a stash of incendiary grenades.
This choice was simple: anything else could catch the user too, especially things coming out of his eccentric hands, whereas an incendiary…
could technically do the same, but the fabric of his suit was sufficiently fire-resistant for him not to worry about getting roasted.
On top of that, incendiary grenades were equally effective against all types of enemies; only fragmentation and laser grenades were better, but the former were too loud and his suit couldn’t withstand them, while the latter cost as much as a hearty dinner at a fine restaurant.
And yes, his fabrications were powerful.
VERY powerful.
Even in his past life, when fully inhabited stations with artificial gravity orbited Earth, and people knew how to build proper spaceships and played with genetics in ways locals couldn’t even dream of (hello, Doctor Connors), the general population didn’t have such widespread access to complex engineering tools as they did here.
And fairly cheap access at that.
Almost any employed person could purchase a mobile 3D printer for a relatively small amount of money.
And the local models, mind you, had been refined by decades of active operation and competition, making them extremely convenient to use, reliable, and multi-functional.
Effectively, you buy a machine capable of accepting practically any materials, which it salvages itself through recycling.
Want a knife but don’t have the eddies?
If you have a printer, just find a rusty piece of scrap metal, set the schematic, and it will reprocess that scrap into a perfectly high-quality knife with great balance and an ideal internal structure, making it more durable than one coming out of a master weaponsmith’s forge.
And this was just a basic machine, for which there were plenty of add-on modules that expanded its functionality.
Sure, it wouldn’t reach astronomical heights and couldn’t compare to specialized industrial equipment—at least the cheap, un-modified models couldn’t—but in theory, with just a mobile printer and a couple of modules, you could print an automotive internal combustion engine with three hundred horsepower.
The operational lifespan of such a creation was a separate matter and depended entirely on the materials fed into it, but the mere fact that you could assemble something like that out of trash spoke volumes.
In fact, local printers had almost neared their peak; another twenty to thirty years and they would hit the limit of the technology’s potential, beyond which lay molecular synthesizers operating at a much deeper, atomic level.
Why go through all the trouble with the gas if they could just blanket the hostiles with grenades?
There were three reasons.
First, Tony had made these grenades as a last resort in case he was caught with his pants down by enemies confident in his hopeless situation, only for him to turn around and spark a blaze.
Based on that, he had tried to create the most powerful grenades possible.
And…
he succeeded.
He had spent a mountain of time designing them, assembling the components step-by-step over four days because the internal payload turned out to be so complex, but he achieved the desired result.
A thirty-meter blast radius, a burn temperature of 3760 degrees—six times hotter than the melting point of tank armor!—full coverage within a tenth of a second, and a burn time ranging from four minutes at the edges to nine minutes at the epicenter of the explosion.
Furthermore, the fire created by the grenade turned out so intensely hot and persistent that it couldn’t be extinguished by any methods available to firefighters.
Catch even a full-borg under a baby like this, and they were a guaranteed corpse; even if it didn’t melt them, it would flat-out boil the brain inside its jar.
But the second reason for their complexity stemmed from their raw power: the sheer lack of numbers.
Stark only had five of these grenades in total, and three of them were sitting in a stash back at his place.
So they only had one shot at catching both factions at once, which is why the gas was necessary—to allow them to take up a good throwing position.
And, of course, to lift the juiciest guns afterward, as compensation for moral damages, so to speak.
The final reason was the speed of the fire’s spread.
Old and fouled with everything imaginable, but still highly flammable.
If they were too far from the exit, they might literally fail to make it through the fire.
Or rather, Tony would make it through—even if he had to get his face done up afterward, replacing burned skin with synthetic tissue—but Jackie and Eva would be guaranteed to roast.
And while Tony had grown hardened over the course of his new life, he hadn’t turned brutal enough to abandon situational but innocent bystanders to perish in a fiery hell.
“I can throw,” Eva smirked, looking at her unexpected savior in a new light.
“Then listen to the plan and memorize the specs of this little lady,” Tony began, handing his creation over to the Mox.
And the longer she listened to what the small, almost toy-like sphere in her hands could do, the wider her eyes grew, her breathing quickened, and between her legs…
let’s just say that after this mess, a certain fighting enthusiast was going to need a change of undergarments.
Finishing up, Tony called out to Jackie.
In this plan, the wounded man was assigned the simplest task: stay in the back, provide cover, but most importantly, don’t fall behind.
But when his words received no response, Tony realized that an otherwise straightforward plan had just gotten complicated.
Jackie was in bad shape.
Pale as a corpse, breathing heavily, his pulse weak, and the wound exposed from under his t-shirt had nasty black edges.
“Thermal ammo,” Stark diagnosed with a frown.
Yes, mass-produced fabrications were far from his own equivalent, which was capable of hurting a tank, but they were specifically designed to neutralize enemy personnel.
The impacts themselves weren’t fatal; the lodged bullets had plugged the holes, so the bleeding wasn’t severe.
Jackie could have held out with a wound like that for a couple of days, but thermal rounds introduced entirely different circumstances.
‘RX-56 or HP-12?’ Stark wondered.
“What’s going on over there?” Eva asked, though without abandoning her position.
No matter how she carried herself, she was a professional fighter, knowing exactly when she could mess around and when it was better to keep her attitude on a tight leash.
“Turns out Jackie got hit with thermal ammo,” Stark answered.
“So what?” she didn’t get it.
“I’ve taken a few of those myself before. Hurts like hell, sure, but you can easily hold out on a stim until you get to a ripper.”
“That’s the problem. It didn’t hurt Jackie. Which means he was shot with something way heavier than the standard issue.”
Like any high-demand item, thermal ammunition had several manufacturers, each making a few models of these rounds.
To put it simply, they were almost always categorized into cheap, mid-tier, and high-end.
The cheap ones just caused severe burns, prolonging the wounded target’s rehab time and taking them out of the fight through pain shock.
The mid-tier ones were designed with specializations: anti-vehicular, anti-drone, high-damage, or blinding.
They performed decently, but in the dark when you needed to illuminate enemy positions, there was nothing better—aside from corresponding cyberware.
And the high-end ones were designed with strictly directed action, popularly dubbed “painless agony” due to the fact that wounds from them were practically painless.
This type of ammunition was developed to counter full-borgs and heavily chromed soldiers; instead of chemicals, a miniature thermal energy accumulator was built into them, discharging its payload directly into the target’s body upon impact.
Two or three hits to a borg’s head with these, and they were dead.
It sounded great on paper, and the ammo was called the “borg killer,” which it technically became, but in reality, only soldiers whose bodies were seventy percent replaced by combat cyberware—including reflex boosters—could utilize it properly.
So while the ammunition wasn’t taken out of production, its price tag was slashed drastically; not to the point where street punks could buy it, but those higher up the food chain could certainly shell out for it.
And if that was what hit him, Jackie was already a corpse.
“Jackie, I’m going to pull the edges of the wound apart right now, I need to see what you’ve got going on inside,” Stark warned, placing a hand on the shoulder of the descendant of Spanish conquistadors, even addressing him by name.
The man only gave an affirmative grunt.
“Mmhmm…” he groaned softly, followed immediately by a sigh of relief from Stark.
“It’s a burn, but a chemical one. Lucky break, you’re gonna live,” Tony broke the good news.
The ammunition was strange—most likely the casing was factory-standard, but the payload was custom-made.
Nasty stuff that expanded the trauma zone, but if you didn’t drop dead immediately and made it to a ripperdoc, you could pull through.
“Well, guess we’re hauling him out then,” Eva commented, causing Tony to look at her intently.
This girl was growing on him more and more.
First with her highly attractive twin assets, then with her readiness to commit to a problem without trying to ditch them and run alone, and now she wasn’t even suggesting they leave Jackie behind, even though she should presumably understand the reality of the situation.
‘When we get out, I’m taking her on a date,’ Tony decided, figuring that a gem like her shouldn’t be passed up.
As for her being a combat psycho who loved shooting people…
everyone has their flaws.