If Arasaka Tower's security and intelligence systems in Night City had been turbulent beneath the surface lately, then the city's underground edge-runner world was blazing with life—the start of another profitable year.
Thanks to the growing tension between Arasaka and Militech, and the political tug-of-war between the Free States and the New United States, demand in the mercenary market was booming.
For fixers with good connections, business was thriving—they were raking in piles of eddies.
For skilled cybermercs, whether lone wolves or team operators, earnings weren't as high as those of the fixers, but one year of solid work in 2076 could rival the income of the previous several years—maybe even a decade.
Of course, that was only if they didn't end up dead in some back-alley gutter. You had to live long enough to enjoy the good times.
Whether the money earned in these golden years would last a few more was another matter. It depended on one's instincts—whether you feared when others were greedy, or grew greedy when others were afraid.
Maine decided he ought to chase this fortune.
To lead his family and his crew to enjoy it together.
That was the thought that came to him after he received a call from his old friend Jackie Welles on New Year's afternoon, hinting at a potential big job.
A big job!
Likely no smaller than last year's operation to double-cross Faraday and dig a hole for Militech and the New United States.
However, when he shared the news with his team—who had gathered to celebrate the New Year—their hacker brains and veteran instincts made him pause. Kiwi, their sharp-witted netrunner, and Falco, the well-traveled veteran driver, pressed him for details.
Santo Domingo. The Dogtown autonomous district—or more precisely, the Arroyo area jointly governed by the Barghest mercenary group and the NCPD.
Inside an old factory at the edge of the same neighborhood where the Martinez family once lived—in an alley beside the massive apartment complex—their campfire crackled inside an oil drum. The flickering flames and the blue light of a TV screen danced over Maine's rugged, punkish face.
As night fell, Maine sat cross-legged on a tattered sofa, the springs squeaking beneath him.
His bare, cybernetically scarred torso gleamed in the firelight. He looked around at his crew, clicking his tongue.
"Hey, hey. It's New Year's, guys. Don't be so damn tense," he rumbled. "Jackie just said the gig's big and maybe tricky. It's not like he's asking us to go take out Rosalind Myers."
He burst into rough laughter.
"I trust Mr. Welles' character," Falco said after taking a long swig of beer straight from the bottle. Wiping foam from his mustache, the old driver asked, "Did he say what kind of job it is?"
"Not yet."
Maine shook his head.
"Jackie just gave me an early heads-up, told me to keep my schedule open so nothing overlaps."
"If it's high-paying and qualifies as a 'big job,' it can only be a corporate contract," Kiwi said.
Still wearing her signature red spider-patterned suit, the netrunner leaned against the pool table, hands in pockets. The pink-red iron mask she wore—vented and scarred—had a half-smoked cigarette stuck in it, its curling smoke rising with each exhale.
"It won't be Barghest. We don't touch their meat-grinder turf wars. Wraiths, Kang Tao, Zetatech—they all have their own fixers. They might toss scraps to outsiders, but not something this big."
After a moment of raspy thought, she concluded, "Judging from Jackie Welles' connections, odds are—it's Arasaka internal work."
"Huh?"
"What kind of job would that be?"
Resting her chin on her hands, the green-haired twin-tailed girl Rebecca lay sprawled across the couch, kicking her legs lazily. "Don't tell me it's another black-bag job—stealing something? Steal it for who? Faraday's dead."
Bad news indeed.
Their former golden goose—the biggest fixer in Santo Domingo, Mr. Faraday—had died around mid-last year.
Cause unknown. According to the NCPD's sanitized report, he'd suffered business losses, his assets were stolen, and he'd killed himself in despair.
But Maine had smelled trouble long before the news broke.
Given Faraday's cold and greedy nature, it didn't add up. Militech operatives misled by bad intel would've been furious, and the fixer would've looked for scapegoats immediately. Yet Faraday had gone silent—unnaturally so.
Which meant only two possibilities: he'd either seen the writing on the wall and fled… or Militech's Night City intelligence branch had already caught him and made him the scapegoat.
Just as Maine was considering lying low and waiting things out, the news broke—Faraday had been found dead in his luxury apartment.
Suicide, they said. Whoever believes that's a fool.
Enemies, Arasaka, Militech, rival fixers waiting to kick him while he was down, or even his own hired mercs shooting him in the back—any of them could've done it.
After all, Faraday had only one redeeming quality: he paid well. Everything else about him was rotten.
Even among Night City's shady community of fixers, his reputation was among the worst of the worst.
He hoarded information, never disclosed job details to his hired mercs, and as a result, had gotten many of them killed. He was arrogant, pretentious, and distant.
You think you're a corpo?
You're just another dog—worse than the real ones!
The moment he showed weakness, everyone he'd ever wronged lined up for payback.
After Faraday's death, the biggest fixer in the Santo Domingo area became the man known as "Old Captain" Muamar Reyes.
He was much more to Maine's liking—their team had worked with him several times before.
"My opinion? We shouldn't take it."
A clear, bell-like voice interrupted.
Everyone turned at once, following the sound.
"Reason?"
Falco looked toward the young woman with soft, neck-length, pastel-rainbow hair and asked, puzzled, "Lucy, it's still about Arasaka, isn't it? Sorry, I know you don't like talking about your past. But come on—after working so often with Gloria's son while picking up Maine's meds, you should know Arasaka's no different from the rest of the corps."
Lucy's past ties to Arasaka were a well-known secret among the crew.
Then again—who didn't have their secrets?
Even Falco never pried. They all just assumed Lucy had been hurt by Arasaka before.
These megacorps—they controlled lives with every move. People like Lucy, scarred by their greed, were everywhere.
Just like Sasha Yakovleva, Kiwi's former netrunning partner—killed on a mission because of her past ties to Biotechnica.
Lucy was the one Kiwi picked up afterward to fill the gap.
"No," Lucy shook her head gently. "It's not about my personal feelings toward Arasaka."
Though introverted, she wasn't oblivious. She could tell that Maine and Kiwi meant well by assigning her to handle the deal with David Martinez—they wanted her to face her fear of Arasaka, to confront her lingering trauma through someone she could trust.
Through Pilar—the lanky, long-armed man busy grilling Mexican barbecue nearby, Rebecca's older brother—Lucy had learned about her predecessor, Sasha Yakovleva.
Sasha, during a solo infiltration mission into Biotechnica to steal data, had accidentally uncovered evidence about the drugs her mother had once taken. Determined to expose the truth, she'd fought to the death after being discovered by Biotechnica's security bots—shot and thrown from a high floor.
Maine and Kiwi just didn't want Lucy to end up the same way—snapping mid-mission and going out in a blaze of vengeance.
Lucy understood that—and she was grateful.
But she wasn't Sasha.
Lucy knew well what set her apart. Yes, she hated Arasaka—but she wasn't an outsider hurt by it. She was a victim of its twisted inside.
Only she knew the truth: in some ways, she and Vela Adelheid Russell were the same—descendants of Arasaka's decorated employees.
The only difference was that her parents were still alive, posted in a different division, raised under an even more warped form of "corporate education," and far below Vela's parents in rank.
Most importantly—Lucy admitted she didn't have Vela's strength or mental steel.
She couldn't do what Vela did.
Even if she were in Vela's place, she couldn't have risen so fiercely, won Saburo Arasaka's recognition, or dared to challenge Yorinobu Arasaka himself for control of the company.
Arasaka…
There was nothing left to fear.
With the North American crisis escalating, her parents were unlikely to find her.
Perhaps they'd already started over—new lives, new children, new IDs.
Over the past year, Lucy had found herself occasionally looking forward to the future again.
The shadows that had lingered since her childhood days at the Arasaka training facility—where she'd performed "deep dives" into the Old Net—had begun to fade.
People change. They grow.
And in truth, she had that dumb kid named David Martinez to thank for it.
When they first met, she'd been terrified. His cold face, his heavy military-grade cyberware—he looked every bit the killing machine.
But after multiple meetings for the new Arasaka neural suppressant deal through Maine, Lucy had hacked some of David's student records from his time at Arasaka Academy. What she saw surprised her.
Such clear eyes.
He looked goofy—like the kind of kid who'd get sold and still help count the money.
Through indirect probing and casual conversations, she gradually got a sense of who he was. Though David strictly followed Arasaka Security Division protocols and never leaked sensitive information, Lucy came to understand his nature well enough.
Little by little, her bad habit of tensing up and losing control whenever she saw Arasaka operatives had started to fade.
With the kind of jobs the crew took, she'd encountered plenty of Arasaka employees by now. Even the red-haired woman with the undercut—Jackie Welles' friend in the Arasaka Counter-Intelligence Division—hadn't tried to track her down or uncover her identity.
Looking at the bigger picture, Jackie was a good-hearted brute, and that redhead—while fierce—seemed decent enough too. Compared to Lucy's own parents, who'd handed their daughter over to a 'deep-dive expendable lab,' they were practically saints.
Honestly, she'd begun to let go.
Even her old dream of escaping to the Moon—to live far from the filth of Night City—felt less urgent now.
She'd been naive before.
After all, look at last October's "Frankfurt Incident." There were Arasaka operatives on the Moon too. The place was crawling with corporate enclaves.
If she ever made it there now, it would be just to see it once—to check it off her list.
But that was a dream for another time.
For now, money had to be spent where it mattered.
Money could be earned again. A lunar ticket could wait. But upgrading her netrunning capabilities couldn't.
Dedicated netrunners' suits. Higher-bandwidth data ports. Cyberware that amplified hacking speed. Cooling chairs fitted with computing-boost modules.
She and Kiwi had been steadily upgrading.
The whole team had, really. Riding the booming merc market of 2076—and flush with the profits from their Faraday job—they'd all earned big and reinvested in themselves.
The only one lagging behind was Maine. His military-grade Sandevistan was powerful, yes—but deadly on the nerves. What he needed was a lighter model, or a new-generation one that reduced neural strain without compromising speed. That, and a steady supply of meds to hold off cyberpsychosis.
Upgrading meant spending.
Thankfully, 2076 had been a good year. Maine decided to postpone the neural load reduction surgery again.
In his words: "Earn first."
Fortunately, Arasaka's new drug worked wonders—suppressing symptoms effectively. The internal special edition released this year was even better. Through Jackie and David's below-market connections, they'd secured a steady, affordable supply. Expenses covered, income stable.
Lucy didn't want that balance to break.
Maine was a good man—warm, loud, and full of life.
Under his leadership, the team laughed, fought, teased, and lived like a real family.
She cherished it deeply.
"Kiwi," Lucy said seriously, turning toward her mentor. "Do you remember last October—the massacre at the European Space Assembly (ESA)?"
"You mean the Frankfurt Incident?"
Catching the gravity in Lucy's tone, Kiwi straightened her posture. Her yellow sclera and red cyber-eyes narrowed slightly. "Yeah. That was Arasaka's doing. Why? What's the connection?"
As she spoke, a thought flashed through her mind.
"Information leaks are Counter-Intelligence's domain—and Jackie Welles' friend, that redhead… she's Counter-Intelligence, isn't she?"
"Exactly."
Lucy nodded. "And that operation was sloppy. Too crude to be an executive decision. More likely a mid-level trying to cover their own ass."
She knew how Arasaka worked.
In the past, she'd been too blinded by resentment and fear to see clearly. Too busy hiding, too tense to think.
Once Lucy had truly calmed her mind—no longer wasting time pickpocketing in subways or chasing odd jobs in clubs, but instead following Kiwi to hone her netrunning and technical skills—her perspective began to change. Combined with the inside knowledge she'd absorbed from her upbringing, she now saw the world far more clearly than Maine and the others, who had spent their lives scraping by in the merc world.
"We're not corpos, so we'll never see the full picture," she said. "But we don't need to. The simplest logic—burying something like that costs a lot of money. Overspend that budget, and someone's gotta take the blame. But this is Arasaka we're talking about—not some family account book. There's no IOUs here. There's accountability."
"Office politics." ×2.
Lucy and Kiwi exchanged a glance and spoke in unison.
As if to confirm their suspicions—ring, ring, ring.
Maine's encrypted phone buzzed.
Caller ID: Jackie Welles.
Maine glanced at his teammates. Orange light flickered briefly in his cybernetic eyes.
"…"
When the light faded, he stayed silent for a long time.
He didn't have to say a word—his expression said it all.
Then—clang, clang.
Dorio, the brawny woman, pushed through the door carrying crates of beer, drinks, and frozen food.
"Maine?" she asked, tilting her head, noticing the usually loudmouthed bruiser sitting there like a philosopher lost in thought.
"Ahem."
Maine forced a dry laugh. "This gig's a real bitch… fuck, Kiwi."
Cursing under his breath, he shot a glance at her.
"Got it," Kiwi replied smoothly.
A flicker of blue data light swept across her eyes.
Clack-clack.
The skylight sealed shut. The factory's interior partitions and soundproof barriers slid into place. All windows locked automatically. Anti-surveillance systems whirred to life.
After confirming that every camera feed and data terminal in the room was under her control, Kiwi turned to Maine. "Talk."
"Jackie's got a new job offer," Maine said slowly, rubbing his palms together as he scanned the faces around him. "High-paying one."
He paused for effect.
Then, in a low voice, he said:
"He wants us… to take out Arasaka's Special Operations Director in Night City."
"What?!" ×6.