The MaxTac officers aboard the Manticore aerodynes felt victory was already in hand.
That vehicle really was far more agile than something of its size had any right to be—but there wasn't just one Manticore here.
They could herd the truck in one direction and wipe it out at the right spot.
Though the way the corps had all panicked and pulled back just now was honestly hilarious.
The operator let out a twitchy laugh, but it did nothing to interfere with his reflexes.
Autocannon standing by.
Come on—
?!
The moment his line of sight cleared the blind corner of the intersection, that damned armored pickup appeared again—in a position no one had expected!
Up until now, everyone, including MaxTac command and the technical analysts from the major corporations, had believed that this Mackinaw was at the end of its rope. At most, they thought the crew was trying to use the Kastek aerodyne's vector engines for acceleration.
But now they knew they were wrong.
The truck really could fly!
The Manticore did not hover especially high, but it was still a full five meters off the ground.
And that armored pickup—its undercarriage was already more than four meters above the street… and still climbing!
Bang—
The truck vaulted through the air. Every MaxTac trooper aboard the Manticore had already realized there was no longer any chance the autocannon would hit that armored pickup.
What they had not expected was that after a sudden, forceful metallic hammering sound, the truck's altitude would leap upward again—
A cliff-like jump!
Bang!
The Mackinaw's front bumper slammed into the Manticore's front-left engine!
In that single second of impact, every MaxTac officer instinctively locked down their stance, preparing to counterattack in the next instant under "extreme close-quarters engagement" conditions. Who could have guessed these lunatic criminals were not done attacking yet!
A mantis blade shot out from the truck window—or rather, a woman did: the only woman in the wanted posters burst out of the armored pickup, driving both mantis blades savagely into the autocannon—
And the autocannon's internal systems were directly linked to the Manticore!
But what kind of person fights like this, as if throwing away her life?!
In that single second of close contact, the current discharged through the mantis blades carried a malicious program jointly crafted by Little Octopus and Muramasa, directly overloading the entire autocannon and detonating the ammunition inside it!
A suicidal strike?
V had completely lost all sense of orientation in midair, but from this angle MaxTac could see an octopus arm gripping her from behind.
Boom!
To an outside observer, the Mackinaw seemed only to have "lightly" brushed the Manticore's front-left engine.
The collision did not look especially severe. Anyone could see that for the Mackinaw to fly that high at all was already close to its limit. Judging by the trajectory of impact, it looked like—
at worst, the Manticore's left-front engine would take some damage, but surely not enough to bring down a million-euro beast like this.
But the reality was exactly that: the armored pickup merely grazed the engine, and the engine immediately failed in the worst possible way, losing power on the spot.
Even more outrageous, the autocannon mounted under the Manticore suddenly exploded. The whole craft belched a muffled blast and black smoke, then dropped straight toward the roadside!
The contact window had been too brief, and the current too weak for the two AIs to punch through the Manticore's ICE through the autocannon link and hack the vehicle and crew.
But the autocannon itself was another matter. That thing had been physically hacked. Muramasa immediately set off the ammunition inside—
The rounds in the internal feed chain detonated one after another, crippling the whole oversized toy from within!
Boom!
Held aloft by the octopus arm, V watched the crashing Manticore with the grin of a cyberpsycho in full episode—
"Haha! I blew up a Manticore with one slash!"
"Quit jerking yourself off—holy shit!"
Leo's voice cut off abruptly—
The unstable superconductive undercarriage system Muramasa had warned about fully manifested after the collision. The magnetic levitation force vanished, and the truck began to drop!
"Jackie—!!"
Leo's voice even went shrill. If they smashed down from this height, the truck might never fly again—
Not to mention all three vector engine sets on this vehicle had been improvised on the spot!
Bang!
Jackie's skull was buzzing so hard he felt like he had turned into an emotionless forging hammer. His head was half-empty; Leo shouted, and he hammered the reactor.
When he brought that hit down, Leo had only meant to raise the reactor's output—boost the power of the four vector engines and incidentally strengthen the undercarriage field by a tiny amount.
He had not expected that one hammer blow would directly fix the maglev undercarriage!
The truck shot upward in altitude, angled across the roadside barrier—
And burst directly out over the river!
Now this was too high.
V was still being held by the octopus arm. With the sudden rise and fall, she no longer even felt the sensation of being hauled—she was just floating in midair, and for a moment, she felt like she was flying.
The first time she had felt that was during the infiltration of the Biotechnica tower.
The second time…
was now.
Behind them, the remaining three Manticores were converging from all directions, and another one was already moving in from their flank.
At Corpo Plaza, the corporations' own armored aerodynes were also mobilizing, fanning out in every direction.
They did not care whether a nuke went off in Night City—unless it was their tower and their assets being blown up.
From their point of view, continuing to chase this impossible-to-pin-down Mackinaw was becoming a bad bargain:
Better to guard their own property. As long as someone else got unlucky, that was pure profit.
Looking down at Night City, thrown into chaos and darkness… looking at the glitched billboards, the severed cables, the leaking arcs of electricity, the crashing Manticores, the emergency ejections by MaxTac, hearing the NCPD squawking in panic over the comms, and feeling all those gazes from the dark—fearful gazes, worshipful gazes, wary gazes—
No one was untouched. On this chaotic night, everyone was watching them.
V suddenly felt exhilarated beyond words—
This was what it meant to make a name for yourself…
What could possibly top this?!
"Woohoo—ugh!"
The octopus arm jerked hard enough to almost wrench the breath out of V, though admittedly that had a lot to do with the ill-timed decision to express her feelings by cheering.
Unlike V's sudden thrill, Leo felt only that things were getting troublesome—
The good news was that the truck had narrowly avoided smashing back onto the road. In the end, it had not crashed, and although its altitude kept surging and dipping, its horizontal speed had never once slowed.
The Manticores were purpose-built aerodynes, and very fast; but after dumping a huge amount of equipment, Dumai itself had become surprisingly light, and the density of Chroni-titanium was far lower than that of any high-strength steel!
As a result, the Manticores were indeed closing the distance on the Mackinaw—but actually catching up…
would still take time!
The Mackinaw had already reached the main thoroughfare. All they needed now was one final sprint…
Out of Night City. Into Pacifica!
Bang!
"Jackie! Eat!"
Another hammer blow. Leo sharply noticed that the pressure Jackie was delivering had weakened, so he immediately yanked the last few high-energy liquid food bars from his toolkit and stuffed them straight into Jackie's mouth—
Jackie desperately wanted to ask whether he could at least get some water, but after the night's high-intensity combat, prolonged use of the lizard berserk module, and the effects of the lizard serum, the changes in his upper body and throat had grown severe enough that he instinctively swallowed them, wrappers and all!
Bang!
"Go!"
High above Night City, the Manticores and the Mackinaw tore through the air at full speed. Autocannon fire and engine roar, mixed with the heavy, rising clang of hammer blows, created a noise so savage it nearly burst the eardrums of the residents below.
People watched as the suicidal wanted criminals were slowly, steadily reeled in under the Manticore barrage. Bullets began striking the Mackinaw's few remaining Chroni-titanium armor plates, then the body shell beneath, punching through the shell and triggering small explosions.
No one knew whether the three inside had been hit, but most people assumed their luck had to be absurd beyond belief.
The truck wobbled on, charging toward the absolute end of the avenue. Beyond that lay only the rivers dividing the city—
Night City was a coastal city, and decades of rising sea levels had naturally split it into several districts with waterways.
Only then did people suddenly realize:
Where were they trying to run to?
And that was the other bad news Leo had been worrying about: they did not, in truth, have many options left.
Strip away every unrealistic idea, and in the end there was only one big move left.
The corps had assumed these lunatics were going to repeat what that old crew had done fifty years ago and launch a suicidal nuclear strike, so they had all withdrawn in a panic.
But as the aerodyne-rigged truck blasted through Watson, through Westbrook, through the Glen of Heywood, through Santo Domingo's industrial district, and then through every possible turnoff into those areas without slowing once, they realized—
These bastards had really just feinted and frozen them all in place!
As the Mackinaw lost its chance for a suicide airstrike, the corporations did indeed breathe a little easier—but MaxTac…
For the first time, MaxTac felt the helpless frustration of being ruled by physics: Car A and Car B are moving in the same direction. Car A pursues at 420 kilometers per hour. Car B…
Car B is fucking fluctuating between 390 and 410 mph, shaking all the while, making it impossible to hit and impossible to catch…
At last, the road ran out.
Straight ahead… go on, try charging forward.
And if it turned, then no matter how agile that wreck of an illegal custom vehicle was on the ground, there was no chance it could outmaneuver a real aerodyne in the air!
Whoosh—
The Mackinaw flew off the road!
Some were shocked. Some were not—Rory among them.
Right now, only one thought occupied her mind: Fuck, finally out of the blast zone.
The distance between the Manticore and the Mackinaw had closed to about one thousand meters.
On her shoulder rested an anti-vehicle tracking missile.
It wasn't close enough to enjoy the thrill of combat and slaughter firsthand, but she had no desire to be shipped off to correctional conditioning either.
"That fucking Burger King with his dumbass business and dumbass big-shot names."
Click.
Rory pulled the trigger.
Click.
The Mackinaw fully opened the armored shutters over its rear cargo bed.
An octopus arm hoisted up the reactor, while Jackie—both fists thrust out—moved like he was hitting a ball.
Playing volleyball.
The density of Chroni-titanium was very low. So was graphene's. Both were classic high-strength, low-density miracle materials, superb in every respect. Easy to throw.
And just as easy…
to smash flying.
Rory stared in bafflement. She didn't know the first thing about nuclear physics, and forget her—even if you added MaxTac's netrunners, they were still utter illiterates in fields this specialized.
All she knew was that the madness of those three had gone beyond imagination.
At the end of the road, they threw away the thing powering their vehicle?
She was baffled.
The missile was not.
Tracking missiles are either laser-guided, infrared, heat-seeking, or AI-vision locked. Any of them can be thrown off by intense nuclear radiation and glare, causing a false lock.
So the missile did not stay locked on the Mackinaw.
Instead, it streaked toward the thing all the watching technical experts had, only moments ago, provisionally defined as a nuclear battery.
At the instant before collision, the cleverer experts suddenly had a revelation and arrived at a theory:
Those hammering sounds earlier were these garage maniacs compressing the reactor!
No wonder the truck had gone from bouncing like a lowrider to becoming this unstable flying vehicle—its output had been rising!
But while the experts were figuring it out, MaxTac's pack of illiterates were still marveling at how good it felt—
It had been a long time since they'd enjoyed a chase this exhilarating and this maddeningly desperate.
The moment all that pent-up frustration finally broke free, it felt fantastic.
And then their optics were all burned out by the flash.
Above the river, a searing burst of light illuminated the darkened sprawl of Night City.