Nova didn’t know how long he’d been out. Seconds? Hours? Days? The flickering fluorescents above felt like a dream loop, and every breath tasted like rust. Pain pulsed in waves through his spine, and the chill of cold metal beneath him told him he was on a ripperdoc's table.
He blinked, slowly.
“Who would've thought. You’re still breathing,” came a familiar gravel-toned voice. “Honestly, kid, I didn’t think you’d make it. I did what I could... hell, I lost you for a minute.”
“Viktor...?” Nova’s throat was dry, his voice cracked. “What... what happened?”
“You tell me,” said Viktor, arms crossed under his faded synth-leather coat. “Found you bleeding out inside a wrecked car, full of glass and red. Looked like someone had fed you through a wood chipper. What the hell did you get into?”
Nova tried to remember. Anything. The chase. The briefcase. The impact.
But all that came back was the scream—his own—when something latched onto his back.
The pain came rushing again, hot and blinding. He shot up from the table, gasping, reaching for his spine.
“Whoa—hey! Chill, choom!” Viktor placed a firm hand on his chest. “Didn’t think you were the type for chrome. Hell, you only got that scanner 'cause your gig forced you. And now this? Whatever the hell it is… it’s twisted. I’ve never seen anything like it. When did you even have time to get something like this installed?”
“I didn’t. I don’t... I didn’t install anything.”
Viktor scowled and turned to his monitor. “Then you got a real problem, Nova.”
He walked over and flicked the holo-display on. A 3D scan of Nova’s spine came into view: embedded just below the skin were thin, almost imperceptible plates shaped like a “Y”, nestled against his vertebrae like bio-metal vines.
“This thing? It didn’t come with an instruction manual, but I poked around. It’s organic. Not grafted. Looks like it bonded with you—parasitic interface, maybe even sentient. It’s got some self-repair function running in the background, kept your cells from flatlining. That might be the only reason you’re still kicking.”
Viktor zoomed in on one of the nodes. “Closest thing I can compare it to is a Millitech Falcon Mk V sandevistan. But this? This ain’t corporate tech. It's… something else. Something rare.”
Nova stared at the scan. Shock was an understatement.
Whether it was what he’d been searching for… or what he’d been running from… he didn’t know.
“All right,” Viktor finally said, folding his arms again. “Eleven thousand eddies.”
Nova blinked. “What?! Why?”
“Hey, I gotta eat too. You were bleeding like a pig for three straight hours. Be grateful.”
Nova chuckled, coughed, then grinned. “Tell you what, choomba. I appreciate what you did. I’ll knock 30% off your next upgrade and throw in a piece of cyberware, no charge, if you cut me a deal.”
Viktor squinted at him. "...You’re a bastard. Fine. 9,500. Final offer."
“Now that’s business,” Nova said, shaking his hand.
“Your gear’s over there. Somehow still in one piece. Grab it and get the hell outta my clinic.”
Nova walked over to the corner, opened his duffel. Miraculously intact. He dug through, pulled out a neatly packed Audio recorder implant. He lobbed it toward Viktor.
“On the house!” he called out as he headed toward the door.
Nova stepped out into the flickering glow of neon-drenched streets, the buzz of distant hovercars humming overhead. The night was thick with smog, pixel graffiti danced on cracked walls, and the sour stench of synth-grease lingered in the air. Every step toward his apartment made his back itch—burn, even. A low throb that came in pulses, as if whatever was fused to him was… awake.
"Sandevistan… damn thing’s not even mine."
He muttered under his breath, adjusting the strap on his bag. "Could be Militech, Arasaka, or some back-alley lunatic project. Doesn’t matter—someone might come looking. For it... or for me."
His eyes scanned the street—civilians, corpos, joytoys, a chrome junkie twitching near a power junction. Same chaos as always. But now he felt… marked.
"Gotta admit… having something that powerful wired into me? Feels good."
He paused.
"But it’s not worth it. Not if it gets me flatlined before sunrise."
The thought churned in his head like static. He stopped walking, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as cold rain began to spit from the sky. Holo-signs blinked around him, colors bleeding onto wet concrete.
A deep, buzzing frustration bubbled up. The kind that claws at your ribs from the inside. He clenched his jaw, turned, and with zero hesitation grabbed a half-empty glass bottle from a nearby trash pile.
Crash.
He hurled it into the alley next to him. The shatter echoed through the steel corridors like a shotgun blast.
A voice snapped back immediately, low and pissed:
“Hey! Idiot!”
Nova’s eyes shot toward the alley.
A silhouette stepped out of the shadows, wiping glass shards off a reinforced shoulder. Human… maybe. The glow from a dermal implant traced the left side of the figure’s face, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. Their eyes locked with Nova's, mechanical irises narrowing.
“You got a death wish or just bad aim, slick?”
Nova was caught off guard—no plan, no reflex—just raw instinct. He bolted.
The guy gave chase instantly, no hesitation. Nova barely got a few strides in before the pounding of heavy synth-muscle legs thundered behind him like a war drum. The chrome-runner was faster, stronger, built to close gaps and snap necks.
Just as the enforcer lunged, a split-second before cold metal fingers could clamp around Nova’s throat, something snapped in his spine—a jolt, like lightning in his veins.
Time blurred. His body twisted mid-stride, reacting faster than his mind could follow. In a blink, Nova was behind the chromehead, delivering a sharp, precise kick to the back of the neck. A flash. A thud. Silence.
The body dropped. Unconscious. Motionless.
Nova staggered, heart racing, breath short.
“Shit! That was something…”
He stared at his own hands, still trembling. He hadn’t hit that hard—not enough to drop a runner with reinforced muscle and neural dampeners.
“No way I had the juice for that… unless it was this thing…”
His fingers hovered over the faint, Y-shaped ridges on his back. The implant. Whatever the hell it was. It wasn’t just riding along—it acted. Reacted. Protected.
“I need to know what this thing does,” Nova muttered, eyes darting through the alley’s neon-soaked shadows. “If I’m already screwed, might as well learn how to make it worth it.”