“Faster, faster, faster!” Tony shouted, not entirely sure if he was yelling at himself or Eva.
It certainly wasn’t meant for Jackie; nothing depended on him right now anyway as he hung limply over Stark’s shoulder.
“You seriously need to lose some weight, big guy!” he added under his breath, directed squarely at Welles.
With his height and muscle mass, the man weighed nearly two hundred pounds.
Even though one eccentric genius was far stronger than an ordinary human, the laws of mass and momentum hadn’t been repealed, causing the body-hauler to visibly skid on the sharp turns.
“The plan was complete garbage!” Eva declared.
On the run, she leaped into the air, spun completely around to fire behind her, and spun back to resume her sprint without breaking stride.
Somehow, she actually managed to hit one of their pursuers, slowing down an armored brute and buying them a couple of precious seconds.
“But I love it!”
As you might have guessed, the plan had gone south.
Well, partially it worked—they deployed the gas, got closer while everyone was coughing, caught more than half of the uninvited guests in the blast radius, and started shooting the rest, which hadn’t posed much of a challenge.
Unfortunately, due to his lack of combat experience in this world, Tony had failed to account for the specifics of local fighters…a detail that turned out to be incredibly important.
In this cyberpunk reality, the axiom “more chrome makes you stronger” was a basic truth understood even by children.
Since it was an absolute law of survival rather than empty boasting, it naturally dictated small-group tactics.
But the crucial factor wasn’t modern squad tactics; it was one simple rule: the strongest fight alone.
Period.
Even though his initial trick worked and they managed to eliminate a large number of the gangsters, every single survivor left standing was lethal enough to easily tear through a couple of regular “meat sacks,” let alone ones burdened with a wounded man.
“Less talking, more running!” Tony barked.
“If I ever leave the house without a full combat load again, shoot me!” he yelled in frustration.
If he had his armor and its minigun right now, he could have wiped out this entire underworld trash heap without breaking a sweat.
As it stood, even his small hammer was completely useless; if an enemy got within striking distance, they would simply blitz him using a Sandevistan.
“Eat frag, boys!” Eva yelled, lobbing salvaged grenades over her shoulder.
“To the car!” Emerging from the facility into the open air, Tony thanked every god he knew (and a few he had shared drinks with) when he saw that the autopilot had worked perfectly, pulling his baby right up to the exit.
Remotely popping the doors open, Stark shifted Jackie from his shoulder into his arms mid-stride, grabbed him by the scruff of his collar and belt, and threw him unceremoniously through the open door.
“Aya…” Welles groaned, clearly offended by the rough handling.
For the record, he landed exactly as Stark intended—squarely in the passenger seat, even if it was completely upside down.
“Get in!” Tony urged Eva.
Already in the driver’s seat, he tapped his own lap.
Unfortunately, being a sports car, it only had two seats, but right now, Tony wasn’t complaining.
If he had to die, he might as well do it with a beauty on his lap.
Barnes didn’t say a word, silently sitting down on Tony’s lap with her back to the steering wheel.
“Open the window, I’ll fire back at them.”
“You think they’ll follow?” Stark asked, complying with her request while flooring the gas, taking a brief moment to appreciate the Mox’s soft curves.
What can you say—some melons are smaller than the chest currently pressing right against his collarbones.
“I saw a 6th Street ride on the way in. A heavy mod with built-in weapons and armor.”
“Damn it.”
Eva’s words proved prophetic.
The moment they cleared the factory gates, an angular vehicle of an indeterminate model roared out after them, its engine screaming as it rapidly gained ground.
Initially, Tony wasn’t overly worried.
Their pursuers were driving what amounted to an armored personnel carrier rather than a proper car, while he was behind the wheel of a high-end sports car; shaking them off shouldn’t have been an issue.
At least, not once he hit an actual highway instead of this labyrinth of narrow alleys, sharp turns, and random dead ends.
The problem was that the 6th Street boys didn’t care about collateral damage, driving right over sidewalks, ramming civilian vehicles, and running over pedestrians without a second thought, while Tony had to actively dodge the chaos.
The pedestrians were an obvious choice, but he had to avoid the cars because of the fragile frame of his sports car—it definitely wouldn’t survive a head-on ramming.
When the pursuers’ headlights suddenly shifted aside to reveal twin machine gun barrels, things took a turn for the catastrophic.
Stark was forced to weave like a mouse trapped in a house owned by a senile cat lady who kept forgetting to feed her seven pets.
“Crap, the glass is armored too!” Barnes cursed in frustration, emptying the entire magazine of her scavenged iron into the 6th Street truck.
“Hey, handsome, got anything with more kick?!”
“No!” Tony yelled back, violently whipping the steering wheel to slide the car into a hard drift, fighting to keep them on the road through a sharp turn.
“Then…” Eva said, her voice suddenly dropping into a much calmer register as she let go of her gun and reached straight for Stark’s trousers.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Tony blurted out, completely losing his train of thought despite the life-or-death situation.
“Shut up!” the Mox snapped, her cheeks flushing slightly.
“I am not dying a virgin! And getting to lose it to my savior, who also happens to be an absolute knockout? Not many girls in Night City can brag about that!”
“Woman are you crazy?! What am I saying, Of course you are!”
“Shut the fuck up and enjoy the ride,” Eva declared resolutely, working more aggressively at his belt.
“Why on earth are you so convinced we’re going to die?!” Tony demanded.
“It takes fifteen minutes to reach the main highway. Your scrap heap is going to get torn to shreds way before that, and then they’ll take us alive,” she explained rationally.
“…” Whatever Tony wanted to say next remained a mystery, because at that exact moment, the loud wail of police sirens cut through the noise.
Generally speaking, the NCPD isn’t particularly eager to do its job, and they have perfectly objective reasons for that.
It ranges from rampant corruption at the very top of the department to a minuscule budget that forces rank-and-file officers to look for alternative streams of income.
In reality, the NCPD was just another gang, albeit one that tried to maintain a thin veneer of legitimacy and possessed the backing of the city administration, only interfering when corporate interests, the mayor’s office, or their own people were targeted.
However, even they couldn’t ignore a massive column of fire, active explosions, and a high-speed chase leaving a trail of bodies through the district.
Nobody likes cyberpsycho-level chaos, especially on their own turf.
Not just because it causes a massive financial loss and attracts unwanted media attention, but because it forces them to actually drop what they’re doing and deal with it.
‘Irony at its finest,’ Tony thought, pulling a tight maneuver to slip right between two converging police cruisers.
‘We came here to deal with out-of-control Scavengers, and we ended up becoming the public menace.’
With the arrival of the police, things took a turn for the better.
The 6th Street gangers, completely riled up by the chase, the casualties, and the adrenaline, made the brilliant decision to open fire on the law enforcement vehicles.
This immediately drew the bulk of the cops’ aggression, leaving Tony’s sports car as a secondary concern.
Furthermore, despite their sturdy chassis and decent engines, standard police cruisers lacked built-in weapons systems, meaning the officers could only fire back with their service weapons—which they rarely did, preferring to use their vehicles as battering rams instead.
That tactic was entirely useless against a high-speed sports car driven by Stark, who possessed professional-level racing experience.
Consequently, reaching a wide highway and slamming the pedal to the floor to leave their pursuers eating dust proved to be a simple task.
“Alright, all that’s left is to get our friend to a ripper, and then we can finally call it a day,” Stark stated.
“There’s a heavy combat stimulant in the glove compartment. Inject Jackie with it; we need the address of a ripperdoc we can actually trust.”
“You think he knows one?” Eva asked skeptically, though she complied with Tony’s instructions without further argument.
“He’s a Valentino. Gangs like that always have a dedicated doctor on payroll to patch up entry wounds and install black-market chrome,” he shrugged, dreaming of only one thing: a massive glass of neat whiskey. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Misty’s Esoterica.
Twenty minutes later.
“This is an incredibly comfortable chair,” Tony murmured, sinking deeply into a rather strange but exceptionally relaxing piece of furniture.
It was a cross between a recliner and a lounge bed with plush upholstery, placed right next to a set of incense sticks that slowly burned, filling the room with the scent of lavender.
“Uh-huh…” Eva agreed from an identical chair right next to him.
As if sharing a single mind, they simultaneously took a long swig from their respective bottles of beer.
In Tony’s opinion, the brew was absolute swill, but after a adrenaline-fueled nightmare like that, even trash tasted like heaven.
“Thank you,” the owner of the shop, a young woman, smiled gently.
Tony wouldn’t have called her a striking beauty, but to be fair, he was incredibly spoiled in that department.
His past bedpost included supermodels, prime-time news anchors, superheroes with flawless physiques, and even a couple of literal goddesses.
By comparison, the face of Misty—the owner of Misty’s Esoterica, where the two shaken solos were recovering while a doctor stitched up the third—was relatively ordinary.
She was somewhat cute, largely due to her soft smile and kind eyes, but nothing extraordinary.
On the other hand, she naturally drew attention with her striking blue eyes and a literal halo of blonde hair, which was an achievement in a modern world where dressing like a complete cyberpsycho passed for mainstream fashion.
Stark couldn’t really gauge her figure, as her baggy, comfortable-looking clothes completely obscured her frame.
“So, are you two friends of Jackie’s?” she asked softly, giving them enough time to catch their breath before raising the question that was clearly torturing her.
Tony respected the restraint; the girl was obviously deeply attached to the Valentino, and she was clearly willing to talk about absolutely anything just to keep her mind off whether he would survive the surgery downstairs.
“Nah, we literally met today,” Tony waved it off.
“A joint contract from the Valentinos. They desperately needed someone to clear out a Scavenger nest, so I signed up, and Jackie was brought in as the ‘heavy muscle,’ so to speak.”
“Great heavy muscle,” Eva snorted.
“Considering we had to haul his shot-up ass out of there.”
“Just a stroke of bad luck,” Tony defended him.
“It happens to the best of us.”
“Sure, but you can do whatever you want—I am buying the heaviest combat vest I can find with my very first paycheck. I came within an inch of catching a bullet at least ten times today; I’m pretty sure I used up my entire lifetime supply of luck in a single afternoon.”
“Tell me about it,” he nodded in agreement.
“Though all things considered, it ended pretty well. The contract is complete, we made a name for ourselves by surviving a clash with two elite squads from major gangs, and we even managed to walk away with a nice pile of their custom iron. If my baby hadn’t taken a dozen rounds to the chassis, it would be a perfect day.”
“Yeah, your car took a massive beating,” Misty noted, casting a worried look toward the front door.
She had no idea how the vehicle had managed to limp all the way to Viktor’s clinic, but the trunk alone looked like it needed a total replacement; there were more bullet holes than actual metal left.
“A thorough engine rebuild, proper lubrication, and tightening a few loose bolts will do wonders for a machine’s durability.”
“Wait, so you’re a mechanic?” Barnes asked, showing a spark of genuine interest as she cracked one eye open to look at him.
“Mechanic, engineer, nuclear physicist, chemist—a bit of everything,” Stark replied, skipping the finer details.
“And just how good are you?” Barnes pressed on.
“Well…” Tony paused to think.
By the standards of his old world, he was an undisputed prodigy; there were barely a dozen people on Earth who could match his intellect, and perhaps only a couple who could actually surprise him.
But by the standards of this cybernetic era, he wasn’t entirely certain.
Yes, he had been self-studying, but his experience with cyberware was strictly theoretical; he had spent most of his time mastering local software architecture, material sciences, and advanced programming.
“…I designed and built those incendiary grenades myself,” he offered as a practical benchmark.
“Wow,” Eva murmured, visibly impressed, giving him an appreciative nod.
“I take it you’re not just asking out of idle curiosity.”
“Guilty as charged,” she admitted without hesitation.
“I’m with the Moxes. Ever heard of us?”
“Umm… no, sorry. I’m fairly new to the city, so I only really know the major heavy hitters.”
“Not surprised,” Eva replied with a slightly melancholy smile.
“We aren’t exactly a massive gang. We don’t even have our own dedicated turf, just our businesses. Bars, brothels, braindance clubs, and working girls.”
“So, sex work,” Tony summarized plainly.
“Yeah. We protect the girls, and they pay us for security. Obviously, it’s a rough gig, but we make sure to regularly clean out the Scavengers—they’re our biggest threat. If we get there in time, we pull victims right off their tables.”
“And you need a mechanic?”
“Like I said, we’re small-time. We’re more like bodyguards than a full-blown criminal syndicate, which doesn’t exactly make us popular on the streets. We have to get creative to survive. Providing rookies with combat databases, arming them out of our own pockets, helping them get their first combat implants—anything to boost our numbers.”
“You don’t exactly look like you’re carrying a ton of chrome yourself,” Misty observed.
“The Moxes paid for my optics,” Eva said, pointing a finger at her eyes for emphasis.
“They also upgraded my nervous system and threw something into my brain to cut down my reaction time.”
“You don’t even know exactly what model they installed?” Tony asked, slightly taken aback.
“My brother is a talented techie,” she shrugged.
“He’s the one who chose the cyberware based on what I wanted out of it. He can be a complete idiot sometimes, but when it comes to hardware, I trust him completely.”
“Then why not just use him for the gang’s needs?” Tony asked the obvious question.
“Well…” she hesitated.
“To put it bluntly, he’s an abrasive prick,” she stated flatly.
“The girls in our crew have zero patience for bullshit, and he has absolutely no filter. He doesn’t know when to shut up. When I finally convinced him to join up, I spent half my time saving his stupid skin; the idiot managed to piss off literally everyone in the gang within two months.”
“Got it. Well, I wouldn’t mind sitting down with your boss to discuss potential employment terms,” Tony admitted openly.
Ultimately, he was going to need an established faction to act as a front or backing sooner or later, so why not the Moxes?
If he upgraded their gear and optimized their information brokers, a second-tier gang could rapidly rise through the ranks.
“But not today.”
“Pff, obviously,” Eva snorted.
“Today, I am strictly doing nothing. And tomorrow, too.”
“In that case, maybe we should grab a drink tomorrow?” the playboy inside him smoothly extended the invitation.
“Tomorrow?” Barnes echoed.
“Tomorrow. You were certainly very… persuasive back in the car,” Tony smiled wickedly, watching a crimson blush rapidly creep across the Mox’s face.
“Oh, fine. Consider it a token of my appreciation for saving my life,” she retorted, crossing her arms and tossing her chin up defensively.
Their budding flirtation was abruptly cut short as two women burst into the shop.
The first was an older woman; though her face was free of heavy wrinkles, the complete lack of cosmetics made it easy to read the heavy weight of years in her eyes, a fact reinforced by her silver hair, suggesting she was at least in her fifties.
Beyond that, however, nothing else betrayed her age; her shirt and jeans revealed a remarkably fit, slender physique—somewhat between a dedicated athlete and someone on a strict diet.
‘Either a caloric-regulation implant paired with light workouts, or a lifetime of physical labor and an irregular eating schedule,’ Tony analyzed automatically.
The second woman was a stunning Latina.
Long legs, a generous chest, a piercing gaze from dark brown eyes, a cascade of wavy hair cascading down to a perky rear, and a style of clothing that was loud and provocative.
She wore micro-shorts, high-heeled open shoes, long nails with pitch-black manicure and matching lipstick, and a tied-up t-shirt that doubled as both a top and a bra.
And then there were the tattoos. New chapters come out on g.com first.
If this woman had any previous chance of catching Tony’s romantic interest—given that Night City’s moral boundaries were significantly looser than his old world’s—the ink immediately killed it.
Stark wasn’t a purist by any stretch of the imagination, but he genuinely disliked large tattoos on women.
Mediocre artwork rarely looked good even on rugged mercenaries, let alone on smooth skin that was meant to be soft and pristine.
A small quote on a forearm or a subtle rose on an ankle was fine, but a blood-drenched tiger head stretching across an entire back looked tacky and entirely unnatural.
“Where is Jackie?! How is he?!” the older woman demanded, addressing Misty exclusively, making no effort to conceal her mounting panic.
To be fair, the younger woman beside her was in a similar state, her bitten lips and smudged mascara telling the exact same story.
“Down with Viktor,” Misty answered immediately.
“They just brought him in,” she added, gesturing toward Stark and Eva, earning a brief, exasperated look from Tony.
He already knew exactly what kind of emotional storm was about to hit them.
Stark’s Apartment.
Two hours later.
“Ohhhhh…” stumbling across the threshold of his home, Tony immediately began shedding his ruined clothes, turning his steps toward the bathroom.
The high-stakes shootout, the frantic pursuit, and the subsequent interrogation by a pair of hysterical women had thoroughly drained him.
He wasn’t completely broken, but he was exhausted enough to want nothing more than a hot shower, a cold snack from the fridge, and a bed to collapse onto while staring blankly at the ceiling.
Unfortunately, his hopes were immediately shattered.
The first thing Stark noticed as he tore off his jacket was the absolute silence in the apartment.
Despite the chaotic day, it was only mid-afternoon, meaning Lucy should have been home, but the familiar low hum of cooling servers was noticeably absent.
Deciding to investigate, his hand instinctively drifting toward the grip of his revolver just in case, Tony began a quiet sweep of the apartment…and found them almost immediately.
She was sitting in an armchair in the living room, arms crossed over her chest, drilling him with a gaze that mirrored a furious wife waiting for a cheating husband.
Right beside her stood Omnissiah, adopting an identical posture, her faceplate deliberately lowered as she cast an equally accusatory glare from her synthetic eyes.
“So, how was work?” Lucy asked, arching an eyebrow as she narrowed her striking, iridescent eyes.
“Uh…fine,” Tony replied.
He knew that lying, deflecting, or trying to talk his way out of this was entirely futile, but hope was a stubborn thing, so he gave it a shot anyway.
“Oh, really?” Omnissiah chimed in.
With a theatrical snap of her mechanical fingers, she remotely activated the television.
‘Show-off,’ Stark thought, though all coherent thought vanished the moment he saw the broadcast.
On the screen, a neat field reporter stood against the backdrop of their little afternoon adventure: a toy factory burned completely to its foundation, its structural concrete visibly cracked from the sheer intensity of the thermal blast.
To add to the surreal scene, a squad of firefighters was lazily hosing down the still-smoldering ruins.
“Care to explain what that is, then?” the machine continued to corner him.
“That’s the news,” Tony replied smoothly.
“A local bonfire festival?” he offered in the most innocent tone he could muster.
“And this?” Lucy joined the interrogation, spinning her laptop around to reveal a high-resolution snapshot captured by a city surveillance camera.
The image clearly caught both him and Eva speeding down the highway.
“Photoshop, AI generated?” he continued with a straight face.
“Who is that girl?!” Lucy demanded, practically hissing like an enraged kitten as sparks of anger flashed in her eyes.
“And what is her genetic history?” Omnissiah added instantly, earning a pair of sharp, annoyed glances from both humans in the room.
“What? My primary directive remains unchanged: the optimal development and genetic legacy of the subject. A large number of offspring across diverse partners is the primary metric of successful genetic transmission.”
“We will discuss your programming parameters later,” Lucy warned the machine in a dark, promising tone.
“That’s Eva. She’s with the Moxes,” Tony sighed heavily, collapsing onto the sofa.
“We managed to pull her out right before the Scavengers could harvest her for cyberware. And is that seriously the only thing you two are worried about?” he asked, raising an eyebrow of his own.
“We already know everything else,” Omnissiah shrugged.
“Who do you think called the NCPD dispatch to distract the perimeter?”
“And scrubbed your facial profiles and license plate from the grid,” Lucy chimed in.
“And manipulated the traffic grid to clear your escape route.”
“Oh…” Tony murmured, his defenses melting away.
“Thanks, girls. Seriously, you saved our asses today,” Stark thanked them from the bottom of his heart.
“You’re missing the point,” Lucy pouted, looking exactly like a kitten that had its treat stolen right from under its nose.
“What were you thinking?! You could have died out there!”
“Yeah…I could have,” Stark admitted quietly, caught off guard, which surprised both of them.
“Forgive an idiot,” he offered a small, apologetic smile, while internally thinking…
‘Here we go again.’
During his tenure as Iron Man, Tony had made plenty of mistakes, but he always adapted.
He wasn’t the kind of visionary who tried to invent a perfect countermeasure for every hypothetical scenario in advance; he was the kind of engineer who took a hit straight to the chin and built a solution based on the impact.
When he nearly crashed the Mark II due to icing issues at high altitude, he formulated a gold-titanium alloy.
When he encountered enemies utilizing energy attacks, he integrated specialized capacitors into his chassis to absorb the feedback and weaponize it into a counter-strike.
The first time he realized his raw firepower was lacking, he overhauled his armor’s servos and wrote custom close-quarters combat algorithms, and with the advent of nanotechnology, he could carry an entire arsenal in his chest.
Here, however…he had simply grown complacent, assuming that street-level thugs, no matter how much chrome they packed, couldn’t pose a legitimate threat to him.
Real-world application had proven him entirely wrong, and the situation had escalated so rapidly that he hadn’t even had a spare second to ping the girls for netrunning support.
And to be completely honest, the Avengers had never been a defensive unit; they were an strike team.
There were far too many massive egos in his old circle to ever establish a cohesive set of preventative safety measures.
The absolute best he and Steve had ever managed was damage mitigation and rapid deployment times, nothing more.
“It won’t happen again,” Tony reassured them.
“Well…fine,” Lucy agreed, clearly caught off guard by Stark’s uncharacteristic humility, as he rarely admitted to being wrong.
She reached out and gently patted his hair.
“Just don’t scare me like that again. I don’t have anyone left besides you and Omnissiah. I can’t lose you too,” Kushinada admitted, her eyes welling with genuine emotion.
“Oh, kiddo,” Tony smiled warmly, a visible flicker of protective guilt in his eyes.
“Come here.” He pulled the distraught girl onto his lap, wrapping his arms tightly around her.
Omnissiah stepped forward from the side, locking both of them in a sweeping, mechanical embrace, resting her metallic head on Stark’s shoulder while gently leaning against the girl’s pale hair.
“I promise you, I am never, ever going to leave you behind,” Stark added, reinforcing the machine’s hold.
“Promise-promise?” the young netrunner asked softly, her small hands clutching tightly at Tony’s shirt.
“Promise-promise,” he smiled in spite of himself, deeply touched by how vulnerable and sweet Lucy was being.
It was a stark contrast to her usual guarded demeanor, making it easy to forget that beneath the edge, she was still a profoundly fragile soul.