[System: Unstable energy burst countdown – 24 hours]
Pa pa pa!
A series of hard slaps landed mercilessly across Dum-Dum's face.
"Mm!"
An octo-arm's claw opened and closed in front of his eyes with a clack-clack, and an electronic voice sounded: "You awake?"
"Uh?"
"Hurry up and get ready to bail. NCPD's boxed us in."
"Who's talking?!"
Leo glanced at him. "You fry your brain or what?"
"Oh—NCPD again, those shit-stirrers…"
Leo looked over the scene and felt a headache coming on.
At this point, keeping Night City municipal and NCPD neatly played in the palm of his hand was getting difficult.
From the beginning, his plan had been to take everyone out of here—
Otherwise he wouldn't have signaled Jackie and V to protect the mainframe. He hadn't known at first that it was Joestar's mom.
Forcefully yanking the plug might well fry the brains of those still under control.
Granted, after that EMP blast, there weren't many still alive.
After the preliminary cleanup just now, sixty-four survivors in the server room had been cut off from the mainframe's network. Aside from them, there were likely still over a hundred workers lying in the dark tunnels…
Those were relatively easy to handle; the real black-tech lay in the special skill-chips installed on them.
The hard part was Joestar's mom.
Click, click-clack—
Seeing Leo staring at the massive mainframe, Dum-Dum pushed himself up on one leg and hopped in front of him:
"Choomba, how 'bout you fix me up first? With one leg like this, it's gonna be tough to run later."
"Even if you say that…"
Thump!
One of the mechanical arms linked to the mainframe suddenly pinned Dum-Dum down, ripped a cyberleg off some poor bastard on the floor, and jammed it onto him on the spot.
Leo didn't stop it—
because he realized that move had come from the mainframe; more accurately, Joestar and his mom had triggered a surgical protocol.
"The fuck are you doing?!"
"I don't know either! I just really wanna do cyber-surgery on you all of a sudden!"
Joestar shouted too, but the one arm still attached to his body just wouldn't stop—
For a moment, the scene turned downright bizarre: the mainframe's arms were performing a full-body conversion on Joestar, while Joestar was doing prosthetic work on Dum-Dum.
In other words, Joestar had inherited the mainframe's "ruthless surgical machine" function.
[Little Octopus: Boss, what if we go more aggressive? I can try copying part of the Soulkiller code to boost recognition and just shove it into Joestar's head, then we slowly separate it out later.
I'm just not sure what side effects we'll get if we dump Joestar's mom's data straight into his skull.]
Hm?
Leo froze for a moment. Originally the plan was to slowly pull Joestar's mom out of the mainframe; in that setup, they couldn't just shut down the entire mainframe array, which made sneaking everyone out harder.
But if they could shove the core directly into Joestar's head… things would get a lot more convenient.
It's just…
Wasn't that basically Arasaka's relic chip?
Just jacking one person's consciousness into someone else's brain?
[Leo: Shove it in directly? No nanotech pairing needed?]
[Little Octopus: I don't know either (￣▽￣*)ゞ]
[Little Octopus: We just need a few specific chips and some hardware assistance, plus the remaining robotic arms for the surgery.
Total weight: 164.63 kilograms. Still kinda heavy, but way better than trying to haul this entire roomful of equipment out.]
"AAAAHHH! You little shit, you even have a medical license, doing surgery on me like this?!"
"C'mon, bro, nobody in the gang has one of those!"
Pinned to the floor, Dum-Dum howled miserably, getting caked in weird fluids and dust—
The scene looked more like a slaughterhouse than an operating room. If some lightly augmented civilian went under the knife here, they'd probably drop dead of infection even if they survived the surgery.
"Quit screaming." Leo jabbed an immunosuppressant under Dum-Dum's metal skull. "I checked—this leg's solid. Don't start whining."
"Listen up. In a bit, I'm going to block the path from above. You dig in the direction I mark."
As he spoke, an octo-arm picked up a dust- and rust-covered impact drill from the ground and lined up a string of other essential tools beside Dum-Dum.
"Dig a hole? This feels kinda—"
"Just dig when I tell you to dig." Leo turned to Joestar. The kid's new body was mostly assembled—
the latest addition was a multi-function arm able to house several tools internally.
A limb laced with synthetic muscle and composite fiber-bionic nerves.
"Kid."
"Yes, choomba?"
"I'm going to use a special method to pull your mom out of the mainframe. You're going to see more hallucinations. And it's very likely you'll keep seeing them for the rest of your life."
Joestar shook his head. "Those aren't hallucinations. Those are memories."
Leo's lips twitched—
Medically speaking, memories you can see and hear like that are hallucinations.
"…You heard what I just said, right? I'll pull your mom out of there—but you're carrying the whole pod. Total weight is 164 kilos."
"Huh? I can't carry that!"
"Jackie!"
Hss—
The power armor vented pressure as Jackie stepped out of it.
Once the gauntlets and other modules were removed, only the lower half of the frame remained.
Leo dumped the armor's specs into the mainframe. As expected, Joestar's mom immediately pulled it into the surgical workflow.
No wonder Brainiac had managed to master multiple full-body cyborg templates.
Clack!
The power armor linked into the empty lower body. Motors and batteries were slotted in one after another.
At the same time, Joestar felt his brain heat up, like it was processing something even more complex.
There were a lot of unanswered questions in this plan.
Like why NCPD, who'd been fine when they got here, suddenly wanted to box them in and force them to escape via a tunnel—
why his head was heating up—
But before he could ask, Leo shut him down with one sentence.
"From now on, it's your turn to take care of your mom."
Joestar looked at his mother in the pod. That mouth, half-buried under swollen white matter, seemed to be smiling; both hands were bent slightly, as if cradling something.
A hallucination surged up before his eyes, showing a version of his mother he'd never seen.
The backdrop was a cramped, filthy room, the kind squatters would live in. His mom was dirty, hair plain, clothes tattered, the corner of one eye a little deformed, and the hand sticking out of her sleeve seemed to have three extra fingers.
But what she held in her arms—
Was spotless.
It was a baby.
A healthy baby.
"Hiroichi, you're going to grow up healthy and strong."
"Councilman Peraleź, it's dangerous here, we—"
"I know. I appreciate all your efforts. I've heard about Brainiac—they've caused serious problems for the city's safety. I needed to see the scene myself. You might need backup."
Bang!
Two Centaur rigs dismounted from a pickup. The drivers on the truck were fully armored in some kind of heavy gear, their faces invisible.
The Centaurs were indeed powerful, but anyone who knew what they were doing would be looking at the people in the truck instead.
River felt a bit lost. He wasn't the type who handled politicians well.
The one good at that—Han—was currently watching silently from the side.
Just as River was trying to think of a way to stall Peraleź and buy Leo some time, the ground began to tremble again.
The building that marked Brainiac's home base suddenly tilted visibly. The next second, the already-warped, impassable front door was blown open by a massive force!
Boom—
The Centaur rigs raised their shields in front of Peraleź. Flying debris hammered against them like a stony rain.
At the same time, the entire building began to sink!
Almost as if someone had done precise calculations, the structure didn't topple sideways in any massive way—it dropped almost straight down in one clean motion.
Dust billowed.
Three figures walked out of the cloud. Their clothes were stained with blood and grime, but no one thought they looked beaten.
Peraleź watched Leo emerge, and a barely noticeable flash of displeasure crossed his eyes.
When the dust fully settled, Leo stood before the two Centaur rigs.
"All wrapped up. But they were crafty."