"Wait here for a bit."
Watching Oda Santayu get blasted away by a burst of unexpected strength, Karl left a brief message for Johnny Silverhand before striding forward in pursuit.
The knife Karl had just stabbed into Oda's chest was laced with a neurotoxin—specifically designed for dealing with ninjas like Oda, who still retained a certain degree of physical prowess. Paralyzing his body first would make the cleanup much easier.
Using an EMP blade would've been a mistake. From Karl's experience fighting Adam Smasher, personnel of Arasaka's level were almost certainly equipped with counter-EMP tech from Kang-Tao. Even someone as heavily cybered as Adam could recover quickly from EMP disruption. For someone like Oda, whose mods were less extensive and who relied more on physical training to protect his principal, that might still have worked—but it wasn't a guarantee.
Karl charged into the room Oda had been flung into. Dust choked the air, visibility was poor—but it only took Karl a second to spot his target.
Oda was struggling to his feet, clutching the hilt of the neurotoxin dagger as he pulled it from his chest. His torso had caved in, blood streaming down his chin. That he could even extract the blade in that condition made Karl pause.
Karl knew the potency of that neurotoxin. Even the musclebound Animals would drop after just a few breaths once it broke the skin. He'd stabbed it straight into Oda's chest, and yet the man, despite being fully dosed, still managed to rip the knife free.
Was it some kind of ninja poison-resistance training? Did he have toxin-filtering implants? Or perhaps both? Karl didn't know, but he welcomed the outcome.
Seeing that Oda had survived both the toxin and the brutal impact was, in fact, a relief. Karl had no intention of killing him—he needed Oda alive.
If he'd wanted to kill him, he could've stabbed the knife directly into Oda's left chest—his heart. Unless Oda had a secondary heart implant, the kind advertised as "a second chance at life defying nature," he wouldn't have survived.
But Karl had gone for a different spot—serious, but not lethal. Proof that he had always planned to spare him.
The mission Karl and Johnny received from Rogue was to obtain Arasaka Hanako's activity records.
That was the sole requirement—how they achieved it, how risky it got, Rogue didn't care. Even if, say, Karl and Johnny accidentally killed Hanako, it'd still be within acceptable limits. Worst case, Rogue would just start prepping for a life on the run with Johnny as her outlaw partner.
Of course, Karl didn't intend to do something so reckless and pointless. His original plan had been clean and methodical. He and Johnny hadn't killed anyone while taking out the snipers earlier—they'd simply hacked them.
That hadn't been because Johnny was going soft on Arasaka goons. It was Karl's explicit instruction.
Karl had been overseeing surveillance feeds while Johnny did the grunt work. But he wasn't just watching—he was also hacking into the snipers' systems.
His plan was to wipe and alter their short-term memory, leaving them with the impression that nothing unusual had occurred. Then, with them effectively neutralized, he would slip into the festival float and retrieve the data—all without setting off a single alarm.
It would've gone perfectly.
But Karl hadn't expected Arasaka's security detail to be so lax. Lax enough that Oda and Adam Smasher were bickering in public. That disagreement had led Oda to ditch the assigned protection detail and act alone—and by pure bad luck, the first area he chose to sweep happened to be Karl's most critical hacker node.
Even worse, with his optical camo active, Oda was practically invisible. And then he ran into Johnny Silverhand. Things escalated. Oda made the first move.
With things that far gone, Karl had no choice but to scrap his original plan and start over.
Luckily, Rogue's data was incredibly detailed. Karl had memorized every stage, every detail of the parade's itinerary. He knew exactly when Arasaka Hanako would be exposed—when the guards would be at their most distracted, protecting her from potential public assassins while the interior defenses of the float would be weakest.
That was when Karl planned to slip in, using a virus he'd planted earlier, get the data, and leave—quick, quiet, and clean.
No deaths. No attention. A perfect ghost job.
But Oda had ruined everything.
Perhaps because of the trust Hanako placed in him, Oda had discretionary authority. He broke protocol. He acted on his own. And now, since he was the one who ruined the plan…
Karl would just have to "help" him out.
"Huff... huff..."
Oda, panting heavily, emerged from the dust cloud. His arms once again glowed with the blazing orange light of his thermal mantis blades. Even under the influence of neurotoxins, he was still determined to resist.
Even now, in such a wretched state, those mantis blades still made him a force to be reckoned with.
To him, that blade was dignity—every swing, glowing in the dim room, left scorching arcs in the air. Though his movements were sluggish, each strike was sharp and lethal, every ounce of strength focused in his arms. Even now, no ordinary spec-ops soldier could take him lightly.
But to Karl, it was all meaningless.
Oda's strikes sliced through air. Karl dodged them all with minimal motion—just a simple sway of the body, and he was out of reach.
A quick sidestep. Before Oda could even react, Karl was behind him, drawing out his monowire.
"Zzzzt—"
With a sharp sound as the monowire connected to a neural port, Oda's struggling face slowly relaxed, his eyes dimmed, and moments later, his entire body went still—completely under Karl's control.
Hacking someone like Oda was no trivial task. His internal ICE defenses could make even top-tier netrunners sweat. But that only applied to remote hacks. Now, with his body at its limit, teetering on unconsciousness, weakened by neurotoxin, and directly connected via monowire—it was much easier.
Karl's monowire was made of top-tier transmission material. Just one gram was worth more than most high-end wires on the market. With such a high-performance link, taking control of Oda's body was like controlling his own limbs.
"All right, hack complete. Hmm, now let's see what kind of little tweaks I can make…"
He opened Oda's system diagnostics.
"Oh, so you didn't trust Arasaka Night City enough to run regular integrity checks? Well, that's..."
Great news.
That meant that even if Karl implanted something inside Oda now, it was unlikely he'd check or purge it later—not unless prompted.
"No need for any subtle subliminal triggers then. Let's start by rerouting some neural pathways. And while we're at it, how about a Type-III Regeneration Boost? Can't have Miss Hanako suspecting something's off because you look too banged up."
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🔥 CYBERPUNK: THE RELENTLESS
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🔥 THE STORY DOESN'T STOP HERE. NEITHER DOES HE.
Night City breaks people every day.
Some crawl away.
Some disappear.
And some simply refuse to stop.
Cyberpunk: The Relentless has 500+ chapters ahead available for readers who want to keep going.
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⚡ NO BRAKES. NO MERCY. NO TURNING BACK.
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⚔️ One relentless road forward
Every victory creates another enemy.
Every enemy leads to something bigger.
And Night City always wants another body.
🔥 500+ CHAPTERS AHEAD.
👉 Why stop now?
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