Ken let the morning breeze of Rancho Coronado hit his face.
Rather than feeling refreshed, he felt like vomiting. Running an unedited Braindance before sleep had been a terrible idea.
The smelly morning air of Rancho Coronado couldn’t wash away the lingering nausea.
He had expected to suffer from a nightmare about Elena Gomez’s corpse and Gloria, but he slept like a log and woke up feeling preem.
A glance at his HP bar said he sat at 97%. Other than some muscle pain, his condition returned to peak.
‘Another accelerated recovery?’ Ken frowned. While it was great news, not knowing why he recovered like that wasn’t welcome. Whether it was just his body or the system, well, naturally he didn’t believe he could recover that fast. Neither Ken with spiritual power nor David had ever recovered like this.
With another case to look into, Ken thought back to last night. Unedited Braindance had been far worse than he expected.
Especially this woman. Her thoughts were jumbled. If she was thinking something now, the next moment it jumped to something else mid-thought.
Indeed, as the name BrainDance implied, you literally dance through the recorder’s head. It was not a simple 3D video. It recorded every thought, sensation, hearing, and life like they experienced. It even caught things the recorder couldn’t understand or remember.
Which actually made the matter worse for him. There was this constant ringing in her head that gave him nausea the whole time. Even though he skipped most of the parts thanks to his advanced wreath, it still took him two hours to gather everything related to himself.
And boy, the result made his stomach churn. Not only did she follow Ken Martinez, she had realized his sidegig edgerunner identity. This made one of the weaknesses of his mini-map more prominent to him.
If the people with hostility didn’t enter its range, the mini-map never warned him. With 10x zoom capability of most cyberoptics, his 50 meters outdoor range might as well be 5 meters to their eyes.
As for the matter why she initially came after him?
Ken looked at the NCPD barricaded hospital. He had arrived late to catch the culprit being arrested, but just above the barricade a holographic screen replayed the news.
–Arroyo Meatwagon Arrested for Illegal Acts–
Ken had planned to send the video to NCPD from the very start. Just, too many things had happened and it slipped his mind. Either way, from what he learnt, the Animals would be after him.
Whether his Arasaka Student identity would deter them, he didn’t know, but most gangs weren’t afraid of corpos until they were decimated.
But it didn’t matter, because he would also be after them.
Not now, not yet.
He just had Sandy on him, he needed a few more babies before picking a fight.
Ken shivered and shook his head, “What the fuck am I even thinking?! Vik will put a hole in my head if I even speak of it. Yeah, maybe after I can connect my shot and drive a car? Let’s do that.”
Unwilling to linger around the area, he headed back to the academy despite being almost an hour early. Maybe he could finish another CC book series, “Cyberware & Customization.”
Ken hated the corpo ethics class, but recently, he started to enjoy the meditation class.
It freed him. Having no thought was liberating in its own way.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
You have gained the skill: Meditation Lv. 1
Error: Skill acquisition failed.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The notification popped up just as the class ended.
‘Huh... Why?’ Ken moved to another class as he thought. After some deliberation he closed his eyes, and pulled up the [Log].
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Party 1 disbanded.
Set Ken_M as your RED Framework Alias?
Note: Alias can only be set once per Framework.
Ken Martinez
Level: 1/99
Body: 4
Reflexes: 4
Intelligence: 6
Technical Ability: 5
Cool: 3
Cyberware
Street Cred: Unknown
Reputation: Unknown
You have triggered GAMER’S SLUMBER Lv. 3
You have gained the skill: Meditation Lv. 1
Error: Skill acquisition failed. ◎
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
‘Gamer’s Slumber? That’s new. Let’s check the skill first,’ he mentally clicked the double circle icon. It seemed like a thing in the log screen. Most errors had that icon.
A new screen popped up. However, Ken failed to understand most of it.
Rather than words, it was filled with markings or diagrams (?) but at the end, there was an excerpt which he could make a sense of.
Basically, he couldn’t learn this skill because he didn’t have a spine, or in his case, a biological one.
Ken didn’t know how to feel about it, but it bothered him. It bothered him enough to not be able to concentrate even slightly on class contents.
<Warning: Student Martinez. Neural synchronization has fallen below acceptable educational standards. Please stabilize your mental state.> The AI teacher even warned him about his unstable neural patterns.
“Ah, fuck! Will future skills be like this too?” Ken complained as he left the academy. He wasn’t in the mood for games or studying. Skills were a main component in any game. The requirements for learning a skill were already too high for him.
Meditation wasn’t new to him.. This class continued from the first year to the last after all. Even then, the acquisition condition only popped up after 5 days of meditation since he gained the system.
As Ken passed by the corpo plaza, he instinctively glanced at the usual resting place of a certain girl. To his surprise, she was there with a cigarette kissing her lips and her eyes shifting through the people with the usual boredom.
This time, Ken didn’t hesitate. He calmly changed his destination and moved without faltering. What was he going to say? Ken had no fucking idea. His brain drew blank no matter which direction he tried. At this point, another round with the dead Elena Gomez felt like a better alternative.
Fzzt
A gonk walking just beside him suddenly short-circuited.
An electric current ran through his neck followed by his spine, Sandy activated by his conscious will.
He only glanced at the poor guy before focusing on his target. In this slow world, Ken noticed. The girl he always thought was in her own world had glanced at him. She probably didn’t even realize their eyes met in this slow world.
He watched as she turned her head and walked away. Slow... In a really slow motion.
Time snapped back to normal before he stepped after her and screamed inwardly, ‘Now this is basically stalking, isn’t it?!’
Thankfully, she boarded the NCART with the same destination. Not even glancing back to check her rear.
Not once. She boarded the NCART as if he had never existed.
The doors slid shut. Ken slipped inside just before the warning chime sounded.
The carriage wasn’t too crowded. Office workers returning home, a tired salaryman asleep by the window, a mother scrolling through her holo while her child played with a toy drone.
Ken’s prey walked toward the rear without hesitation and leaned against the wall, cigarette between her fingers.
Ken hesitated. ‘Do I... just walk over? What do I even say? Hey, I just accidently stalked you? Absolutely fucking not!’
Just as he decided to confront her anyway, she moved. Then, something flew to her hand mid-walk. It was too fast for him to see what it was. Conflicted, Ken decided to wait.
A few moments later, the same thing happened. This time, Ken was able to get a proper look.
‘Fuuuu–She really is PICKSOCKETING!’ Ken panicked, he followed a picksocket! Normally, it was the other way around!
As Ken lost himself in his preference of girls, he felt a presence walking past him. Instinctively, he grabbed at his neck and the money shard just happened to fly into his hand.
The girl walking past him stopped, not feeling the shard landing on her palm.
Their eyes locked.
‘Oh damn,’ Ken was troubled. Looking this closely, he found her absolutely gorgeous and even felt like he fell even harder.
By the time he returned to his senses, she already approached him and slammed her hand against the NCART wall.
‘Damn, she is Ayase Momo-san v2!’ Ken screamed in his mind. No wonder she pulled him so hard!
She touched his temple with her fingers and traced it to his chin. Lifting it, she spoke in a tone Ken could only receive as confidence, “Hm, you seem familiar.”
“E-eh?! No way–I don’t think we have met!” Ken started to sweat that instant.
“You say that even when you were checking me out with such hot eyes?”
Ken self-destructed on the spot. “W-hot hot eyes? You are too conscious of yourself!”
Ken’s voice was rather nervous and loud. She eyed left and right and added, “Is that so? Follow me.”
Even though she said ‘follow’, she practically pulled him inside the compartment between two carriages.
“So, tell me what’s your angle?” She asked.
“My angle?” feeling that the topic changed, Ken felt little confident. Out of habit, he pushed his glasses up, only to realize it was not there.
She noticed his action. “What do you want? You’re messing up with my work.”
“Work, huh? When did stealing become a job?”
“Is it really stealing if I only hit Arasaka suits?”
“Come on, why hit me then? Do I look like an ‘Saka to you?!” That was his genuine thought.
“Pfft, if you are trying to lie, it sucks beyond comparison. At least try to change your uniform and scan did pick your academy ID.”
“Fuck!” Instant regret. He really didn’t like being a corpo so much that he subconsciously had yet to categorize himself with that part of his identity. “Besides that was self-defense! Ever heard of that?”
“So what are you going to do now? Put cuffs on me and throw me in the Arasaka experiment prison?”
For a moment, Ken felt venom from her neutral voice. He honestly found her red eye paints a bit intimidating. They succeeded in their job if that was what they were for.
Leaving alone what he felt, he ran a finger through his head and tried to reason, “Big ‘Saka does probably have that. Look, can we just, well, you know, pretend like I never saw you doing that?”
“Really? Is that what you want after gathering months of courage and stalking me all the way here?”
‘Ok, I’m so done for. She didn’t just realize I stalked her here, she noticed me all this time!’ How could he reply to that? Ken averted his eyes and forced an awkward chuckle, “Haha, whatever could you be talking about?”
“Let’s see.” Suddenly she pushed him to the carriage door, her eyes flashed and a ton of holos flashed before them. “Hm, what do we have here? Ken Martinez, Arasaka Academy student, huh. Not that your uniform doesn’t say that. Eh?! Lookey, here, boy! You are in trouble. Chippin’ a Sandevistan? Mark II model but still not someone like you should be chippin in just cause you have ‘Saka–”
Suddenly, a black screen popped up before them. “Uoh, that surprised me! ICE on Mk.II model? What were you even thinking? Add some shockwave modules.”
“Wait! Don’t touch that.” Ken desperately thought of an excuse. “I was foolish and didn’t have extra eddies, so just slotted a Black-ICE I had laying around. I will get fried even if you don’t, so please don’t touch that.”
“You put a Black-ICE on your Sandevistan?!” She had an indescribable look for a moment while Ken cursed his luck.
If just being a goddamn picksocket wasn’t already enough, she was a fucking netrunner. And did she just break his basic defensive mechanism in an instant? Ken felt like an open book and felt himself in grave danger.
Instinctively, he glanced at the mini-map which was also noticed by her.
“Even now you can’t help your eyes running over me, huh. Do I attract you that much?”
Ken didn’t mind her misunderstanding. He welcomed it. At least even after all this she wasn’t completely hostile. Her icon sat at stable yellow.
Then, he saw something on the other side of the mirror.
The world slowed. Ken grabbed her arms and pushed her on the right side of the wall, as gently as possible. He caught a thin metallic filament flick past beneath her wrist.
‘Monowire?! That dangerous monowire?’ Ken paled for a moment before recovering. If the icon had turned to red, he would really not know how to handle the situation. Now, he genuinely wanted to ask Gloria, ‘Just how dangerous girls in Night City are?!’
The world resumed and the rapid change of position seemed to piss off his adversary. Just as what seemed like she was about to flare, Ken said with conviction, “That’s right! You are too much!”
For a moment, she paused. Not understanding what he meant.
Ken exhaled sharply, his gaze pinning hers, “I keep telling myself not to look, but somehow my eyes always end up finding you. Before I realized I had been staring like an idiot. Then something always happens. My optics glitch out, some random gonk suddenly faints, a billboard shorts out... and by the time I finally work up the courage to come talk to you... you’re always gone.”
Yeah, as he spoke, it was all starting to make sense. She was a netrunner. All those distractions were done by her, she had spotted him way long before.
Contrary to his expectations–which was a sharp rebuke like, ‘huh, like I care’–she just turned her head away, avoiding his gaze.
The situation inside the gangway turned painfully awkward.
{Alt Titles: Collision; An Unavoidable Encounter; The Girl Across Corpo Plaza; Caught Red-Handed; Failed Skill Acquisition; She Already Knew; I Followed the Cute Girl and Somehow Got Pinned Against the Train Wall; Apparently the Girl I've Been Watching Is a Netrunner; The Pickpocket Stole More Than My Money; My First Conversation with a Cyberpunk Grill Went Horribly Wrong; She Thought I Was Stalking Her (Because I Was); }