Westbrook, Japantown— in some ways, it was even more prosperous than the ring around Corpo Plaza.
As a service-industry hub, as long as you were a person, you could do business here. That meant dense, towering buildings, and to squeeze every last cubic meter of space, pedestrian skybridges and aerial walkways stitched the high-rises together into a tangled lattice.
It was a better filming location than the apartment-lined streets of Heywood—
The closer the convoy got, the more the horn blasts rattled nerves. People leaned out from glass windows, and shattered light fixtures spat arcs of electricity. In the dim neon, those bursts of sparks painted a drifting ghost-shadow in the air above.
The electromagnetic surge and the high-power movement weren't in the plan. Eclipse's stealth module could no longer fully mask him. The full-body borg scrambled up and across the towers at maximum output.
He had only one thought in his skull:
How is this happening?
Clack.
Metallic fingers bit deep into a concrete wall, tearing a fresh handhold out of the uneven surface.
With two powerful legs loading and kicking, the force was enough to shoot him more than a meter straight up—no effort—snatching the underside of a higher skywalk.
Vertical climbing was harder than rappelling between buildings, but he moved so fast people could barely track him. Every time the city's lighting flickered, and a lightning-bright arc briefly outlined his shape, he was already somewhere else.
Citizens watching from inside their apartments felt their guts turn cold. If something like that hunted you, where would you even hide? To an unaugmented eye, it looked like teleportation between rooftops—
Like a demon: erratic, unreadable, impossible to focus on—let alone stop. And if it caught you, it could pulp your head like cheap fruit.
And it wasn't just one demon.
The disrupted optics, the motion trails under neon, the afterimages overlapping with the real body—normal people couldn't tell how many cyberpsychos were moving between the towers at speed.
It felt like a Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
What they didn't know was that this was already the frame's limit—because the "demon" the public feared had an even nastier demon on his tail.
Boom!
A violent blast rolled up from a lower skybridge. Down there, an Eclipse unit was forced into a self-detonation.
Concrete liquefied by the heat poured off ruptured steel framing, and one motorcycle after another burst out of the explosion, tumbling through flame.
If Eclipse were a demon, then the rider on that bike was a hell-knight.
This time, everyone could see it clearly.
The Blastburn Boomsteed's absurd rocket-pulse drive kicked it into the air. Under V's control, the tires slammed onto a wall—torque howling, rubber glowing red, masonry spalling—then the boosters lit again.
This kind of savage ride couldn't cling as a human could, but even a single touch was enough. The insane twist and thrust gave it far more lift than any Borg jump.
The bike shot upward like a rocket, leaping well past Eclipse's ceiling—more than two meters in a single bound.
V's mantis blades snapped out. Warm Croni-Titan alloy tore into an existing crack in the wall and sank deep. Her other hand fired webline—one hand levering off the wall, the other yanking hard.
The Boomsteed swung in an arc through open air and slammed down onto the crown of another pedestrian skywalk, regaining traction and surging again at full burn.
Viewers went slack-jawed. A motorcycle was jumping—higher and higher.
With that chain of moves, she caught up to a full-borg still scrambling in panic.
He looked back in terror.
And that look lasted him the rest of his life.
He wanted to run, but Eclipse's mobility was more than cut in half in V's presence. So he did the only thing left: he turned to fight.
In midair, a fully mechanical body had an edge in attitude adjustment. The borg's rear heat sinks flared wide, dumping scalding vapor to smear V's sightline and spoof her sensors.
At the same time, the pop-out blade in his forearm was loaded and ready for a last-ditch, all-in strike.
Each of those launch blades was forged from a specialized alloy. Internal spring-kinetic accumulators compressed to the limit while moving, and with a powder kicker, muzzle velocity could rival some Tech weapons—
Too bad it wasn't just V catching him.
The motorcycle was coming too.
The Boomsteed's boosters blasted flame. The heatwave shredded the vapor cloud, and the temperature flash-cooked the borg's head, turning his facial sensors and meat into a smeared, melted mass.
His throwing blade snapped out—but it only skimmed past V's side. If anything got clipped, it was just the bike's outer fairing.
Thump.
The front wheel traced a tight circle in the air and smashed him down onto the very landing point he'd been reaching for.
Crushing force. Burning heat. The supposedly rugged full-body conversion came apart under pressure and temperature. The tire kept spinning, shredding the collapsing chrome into fragments that rained toward the street below.
"Woooo!" V's face flushed with adrenaline. "This is so damn fun!"
[Sandevistan Power Monitor: pseudo-time-stop effect increasing; new neural current detected; deviation correction; power correction; re-estimation…]
[Current pseudo-time-stop effect: 31%]
[Exceeds stock firmware theoretical limit.]
Pff—pff—
Just as V tried to chase the other runners, the boosters coughed like a junker.
Fuel had dropped below the threshold for aggressive drive mode.
The bike started to fall.
The fleeing borg saw it and, for a split second, felt relief.
Good. Physics can still leash her.
Then the smile died in his throat.
Because the legendary Mackinaw—this ten-ton armored monstrosity—shoved itself into the alley like it had a death wish.
Not just the truck, either. Look closer, and you could see some poor bastard plastered across the hood, an arm venting superheated flame like a cutting torch.
Why call him "poor bastard"?
Because the alley was only barely wider than the Mackinaw. It didn't "enter"—it rammed its way in.
The brave idiot who'd tried to crack open the armored truck with a thermal jet got snapped between a building corner and the truck's mass. The chassis kept its balance by sheer brutality, and the pinned merc was ground down to nothing in the friction between armor plate and concrete.
And Jackie—
Jackie had both hands raised, holding the motorcycle he was supposed to be riding. Face red, he hurled it like a discus.
"Catch the ride!"
Boom!
The bike Jackie threw hit the wall. The wheel, still at full spin, slammed into masonry—one bike climbing, the other dropping.
V grabbed the rising one by the handlebars.
Jackie caught the descending one solidly on his shoulder like it weighed nothing.
V flashed him a thumbs-up, and after two bounces off the wall, the Boomsteed shot straight back at the enemy.
The Borg's chest filled with despair.
In less than a millisecond, Night City's power distribution glitched.
An invisible electromagnetic wave—amplified hundreds of times over—washed through the air. For full-body conversions, especially the ones running Chrome sourced through Muramasa's pipeline—
Their skulls filled with static.
[Heart of Evolution: cognitive disruption and extremity induced by specific electromagnetic patterns]
[Effect cleared.]