[TN: Will be posting all of this week's chapter , as I have my finals right now]
"Mano, why are these people so dumb and out of it?"
"Brainiac cracked their cyber-body systems and installed a type of skill-chip. This chip can bypass safety thresholds and almost completely take over the body's motor control."
"Turn people into robots? That's kinda…"
On the roadside, they occasionally passed humans standing there in a daze. Their perception seemed infinitely dulled. Only when the three of them practically brushed past would these people show the faintest reaction.
A few with better luck, if their eyes managed to register other people, would suddenly leak a mixture of tears and blood from their eye sockets.
Honestly, Leo wasn't sure whether the fluid flowing from their eyes meant they wanted to cry, or whether their stiff bodies had just moved enough to squeeze the tear ducts with other cybernetics.
The scene was eerie, but not dangerous.
Who knew how many of them were still savable?
Once the Slaughterhouse crew was wiped out, the pressure suddenly vanished.
To be honest, Leo really had the surreal feeling that this was too easy, like he was dreaming.
This was the infamous Brainiac—masters of trickery?
At worst, the only trouble was that it took a bit of time to find the entrance and feel their way in.
Of course, in practice a hundred or so Scavengers and fourteen fully armed full-body cyborgs was already a frightening amount of firepower. If you let that loose topside, one slipup would be enough to summon an urban anti-terror rapid-response team.
It also showed that Brainiac already had the foundation of real power—Slaughterhouse were just hotheaded punks under their control.
They had cannon fodder, high-end combatants, plus unique tech and gear. Given time, they'd definitely grow into something big.
"Most skill-chips don't have this issue," Leo continued. "The general public is already scared of being controlled."
An octo-arm had swapped to a compact sonar head and was feeling along the wall, searching for hidden doors.
V scanned their surroundings vigilantly, walking beside Leo. Watching Octo, she asked, "But you basically never see full-body frames on the open market, right? And chips that work with full-body frames would be even rarer.
Feels like those chips weren't designed for people."
"Both the chip line and the full-body frame are their own proprietary design. In terms of data structure…"
A sharp synthetic voice rang out from the octo-arm:
"Pure AI training output!"
AI-training byproducts were a black box for humans—
but for an AI, still readable.
Most skill-chips were built from captured data of baseline human movement and reaction, adjusted and tuned by programmers and cybernetic engineers to become products that could drive cyber-bodies.
That packaging process was basically building a crude AI—
but the base dataset always came from human behavior.
The chips used by Slaughterhouse were different. According to Octo's assessment, they were half-finished products trained on other skill-chip data at massive scale—
Ninja-type skill-chips still in training.
Paired with powerful full-body frames, they could mass-produce excellent black-ops squads.
Jackie poked the octo-arm with a finger. "Didn't think this thing was an AI. Kinda cool…"
Octo snapped the arm back, clacked off the front half of Jackie's gauntlet, and replaced it with a fresh module.
"Uh… is it mad at me?"
Leo shrugged. "Just a little joke. Consumables are meant to be swapped often anyway."
V toyed with a monomolecular blade Leo had stripped from a cyborg. "Monomolecular blades, full-body cyborgs, high-end chips… Brainiac really is loaded with talent. If they sold this stuff, wouldn't they make a killing?"
"Oh, they'd make a killing, all right. But the way they source this tech… the price is steep."
Brainiac were talented.
It was just that the price behind it all was a bit much: from what they'd seen so far, they still needed a human brain as an intermediary to aggregate all that skill-chip data.
To keep costs down, they would definitely use cheap external memory to stack more capacity onto a single brain. Excessive augmentation and too many chips would send the odds of developing white-matter dementia skyrocketing.
It was a little different from regular cyberpsychosis. The similarity was that both caused cognitive breakdowns, emotional volatility, hallucinations, delusions, schizophrenia and the like.
The difference was that this was a direct brain pathology, so unlike standard cyberpsychosis, simply ripping off the cyberware didn't fix half the problem.
Old-school Brainiac liked to plug chips into their own skulls, spawn crazy ideas, then wreak havoc on society.
The new generation was more insidious—they left the risk of brain damage to these poor bastards and still wreaked havoc on society.
As they talked, Leo found another patch of uneven wall thickness and said to Jackie:
"Here."
Boom!
A deafening blast went off inside all three of their skulls!
An electromagnetic pulse!
Every tool mounted to the octo-arm blew out, the chaotic current frying motors up the chain—until Octo force-tripped an emergency breaker and cut the link.
And it wasn't just the tools. Half the power lines feeding those micro-transmitters burned out too.
Why only half?
Because an EMP in a tunnel had limited propagation, but even then it dealt this much damage.
Leo shook his head hard—he was carrying the most electronics on his body. That blast really did give him a mild brain hemorrhage.
But it also made their direction forward clear—
The area with the heaviest damage was the one closest in a straight line to the blast center.
"Looks like Joestar's found something new. This way."
——
Once you step into society, you might pick up a lot of names.
So-and-so-worker, So-and-so-boss, "Little So-and-so"… friend-given nicknames, or louder titles if you pull off something major. And of course, if you screw up badly enough, you earn a nasty one.
He hadn't been with the gang that long, but Joestar was definitely Maelstrom now—and already enjoying some big-brother treatment, honored with the nickname "Joestar."
Sometimes he forgot he wasn't originally called that.
His real name was Yoshida Hiroichi. He was about to turn seventeen—technically still a minor.
Before everything happened, he had lived in this big city of Night City.
The streets were chaotic, but he didn't see most of that, because he went to a pretty decent high school.
The campus didn't have insane shooting rates or over-the-top bullying. Everyone was poor. Cyberware was rarely strong enough to beat a gun. So the gun incidents and bullying hovered around a weird equilibrium.
Like all teenagers, he watched adult vids, played games, bought his first top-up, used adult toys, and of course, dreamed of getting a girlfriend.
Tuition wasn't outrageous but definitely not cheap. His mom worked as a server in a restaurant. She made okay money. If there was anything imperfect about the family, it was that he had no idea who his dad was.
Then one day, his girlfriend of three years stepped into some rich trust-fund kid's sports car. The girl who had always been modest and composed in front of him turned into cream filling on that car seat right before his eyes…
Since their cyberware weren't on the same level at all, the beating he took from that rich kid basically happened at the same time as the public humiliation.
Sometimes it only takes one spoiled impulse from a rich guy to shatter someone's world.
He'd heard of Tyger Claws, heard all the gang legends…
So he chose to become a street punk. A gang would help him reclaim his dignity. That was Night City's rule. If you wanted a shot at hitting back against the rich, you joined a gang.
But reality slammed his dignity into the ground a second time.
Because—
How could a "well-paid restaurant server" not have a full set of decent clothes and cyberware?
His mom had been supporting them as a sex worker the whole time.
Back then he couldn't accept it. Now, he thought… maybe it wasn't such a big deal.
His memories fast-forwarded to that night on Eren Street—
his mom frozen in shock, the corporate suit smirking thoughtfully, then cackling wickedly…
and himself, confused, helpless, stumbling and clutching his wounds as he ran.
The face in the mirror grew more distant. Yoshida suddenly realized he was lying on a bed, with darkness all around, something moving over his body.
The sensation wasn't clear. Looking around, this seemed like his home.
Shadows moved everywhere in the small place:
a woman cooking at the stove;
a boy at the table using a VR visor;
a woman tidying the house;
a mother nagging her son as he headed out;
a kid brushing her off…
"…Hiroichi, you have to study hard. The economy's rough, jobs aren't easy to find…"
"…Hiroichi, are your classes tiring? Try this drink, I heard it's got amino acids…"
"…Hiroichi, Mom's a bit tired today. Can you do the laundry?"
"…Hiroichi, losing the game isn't the end of the world. Eat something. Win next time."
"…Hiroichi, after today you'll be sixteen. C'mon, smile."
And at the window, a photo of mother and son together.
Yoshida walked up to the window and looked out, seeing a familiar bit of static wobbling in an endless flow of data.
"Hiroichi, where did you go?"
"Hiroichi, Mom doesn't have much in this world—but Mom still has you."
"Where did you go?"
The image of the mother and son at the window grew clearer.
In the hallucination, Yoshida opened his mouth, wanting to speak, but no sound came.
He'd wandered all over this huge city looking to buy a little love.
But that love had always been there.
He'd made a circle and ended up back where he started.
Agonizing pain jerked Yoshida awake. The gray-white, blurry digital world froze. The jittering characters and noisy pixels began to knit together, thread by thread, becoming sharper and more colorful—
He reached out for that increasingly vivid, increasingly familiar figure.
Spatial sense returned. Color flooded back into his world. The figure grew clearer and clearer:
The dark dress that always covered the second layer of clothing;
the thick shawl;
the slightly stooped back;
the hair always pinned up at the nape of her neck.
"Mom?"
Szz—
The world suddenly shattered into mosaic, and on that familiar silhouette—
the head was not a familiar face.
Strictly speaking, it was a mass of grotesquely enlarged brain tissue, bound together with some kind of complex cybernetic rig. Swollen white matter bulged through cracks in the skull, cables and needles jammed in everywhere, covering the eyes and nose and leaving only a sliver of mouth exposed.
"Hiroichi."
Yoshida—
or rather, Joestar's eyes cleared, sharper than ever.
Two long mechanical arms retracted away from his face, while more arms cut into his body and packed new components into his frame.
A storm of error codes almost flooded his vision as strange, never-before-seen cyber components were wired into his body.
A crude but powerful neural-enhancement module made of advanced electrodes and materials was rammed brutally into his brain—
Pain consumed every single one of his sensory nerves!
But Yoshida just stared blankly at that little bit of mouth visible on the monster's face.
"Mom?"
Bang!
A thunderous gunshot rang out behind him. Soaked in some unknown fluid, Dum-Dum burst through the crowd with two guns blazing!
The people hacked by skill-chips swarmed Dum-Dum with fists and feet. Their trash-tier cyberware meant they weren't that strong individually—but there were just too many of them.
It seemed the structural supports had been damaged; the entire underground space was slowly collapsing!
The whole place felt like it could fall apart at any moment!
"Joestar! You still alive, you little shit?! If you're alive, make a sound! This place is coming down! Time to bail!"
Boom!
Shrapnel and shockwaves further shattered the already-cracked interface pods. The liquid inside poured out faster and faster!
Joestar snapped fully awake. The pain was nearly enough to shred his mind, but one thought still broke through:
A brain couldn't be exposed to air!
If the fluid drained out, what would happen to the person inside?!
"Don't—"
Szz!
A mechanical hand stabbed straight into Joestar's throat.
"Hiroichi, Mom got you a singing chip. You're gonna be a pop star!"
The "monster's" electronic voice rang out, and Joestar became more certain than ever—this was his mother.
Memories physically surged from his head:
being six and dreaming of becoming a rock god, entering the neighborhood singing contest and getting crushed by a kid with a top-tier vocal chip…
and never singing again afterwards.
"Joestar! Hang in there! Hold on till I pull you out—you'll be the super badass who took down Brainiac!"
A newly completed mechanical arm suddenly shot forward like a spear—
but almost immediately—
Boom!
The severed limb slammed back, cut short!
"Die!"
Dum-Dum, with only half his body left, shoved away a clutching cyber-zombie and leveled the Satara shotgun in his hands!
Flickering electric arcs, flailing metal arms, a collapsing underground space, a mother whose face was gone beyond recognition—
And himself, powerless, stuck right in the middle.
It was as if his past self and his future self had started beating each other up.
The part of him that had just sworn he wouldn't lose—now quietly wished neither side would win.
But neither side could afford to lose.
Joestar stopped thinking.
Bang!
The room shuddered.
"Brainiac really cooked up some freaky shit…"
The mechanical arm in front of him was twisted apart by two far stronger octo-arms. Another arm scooped glass shards off the floor, pressed them back onto the pod, and sealed the gaps with industrial sealant.
Just like that, a certain hero stepped into Joestar's field of view.
The giant bulk of Jackie stood between Dum-Dum and Joestar, holding up a collapsing main beam with brute force.
The bullet had hit slightly off the side of his head. V popped the spent Satara shell out of the chamber, let it clink to the floor, and looked at the stunned Dum-Dum.
"Long time no see. You've really hit rock bottom, huh?"
Leo glanced at Joestar, who still seemed conscious. "You alive?"
The iron-plated head nodded furiously.
(End of chapter)