Yes—truth was, the moment Li Pan entered the basement he had already activated his cybernetic eye, spotting Beria cloaked in optical camouflage, skulking in the shadows.
But since Yamazaki's earlier report was incomplete, Li Pan wasn't sure what role the Collector played in the Golden Buddha incident. Were they just messing around? And why the hell would they drop Sky City?
Now she appeared here. Was she tracking Cockroach, waiting to ambush him mid-ritual? Or was she actually standing guard, assisting in his descent?
So Li Pan had pretended not to see her, sparring with Cockroach while deliberately giving Beria a window to act—wondering if she'd lend a hand suppressing the psycho.
But she never moved. Even when Li Pan went all out, drawing Cockroach's focus, Beria stayed still, a spectator.
That was all Li Pan needed to know. Just as the company had wanted to test ACA, this Collector clearly wanted to test him.
Well, no chance.
A decisive Stellar Finger—Li Pan's silver spike burst her skull, shattering the android's chip and severing Beria's link.
With no more hidden eyes watching, Cockroach could be finished off without concern.
The Faceless Knight flashed forward. One palm—True Dragon Break—slammed Cockroach in the forehead. Golden flames snuffed out, protective fire gone. Li Pan jammed fingers into the empty eye sockets, yanked, and tore the head clean off—anti-gravity spine and all.
Done.
What, did you think this thing was really that strong? Cockroach's body hadn't even been combat-grade—just buoyed by the Golden Buddha's blessing. Against Li Pan's cheats, it was instant kill. Could it withstand a hypersonic railgun barrage? Please.
Dangling the head by its sockets, Li Pan shoved a hand inside, pulling out the gallbladder.
Obvious enough—the ritual core was gall. So the monster's descent core had to be gall as well.
Split it open—just as expected. Gallbladders crammed in, clogging esophagus and windpipe. All the "qi" gathered in this one organ.
Naturally, Imai Shōichirō had long since replaced his original. This was a custom-built artificial gallbladder, designed with enhanced bile secretion and coordination.
On certain frontier worlds, the military swapped soldiers' gallbladders with artificial implants tailored to hostile ecosystems, allowing them to digest alien proteins and survive long-term without resupply.
For Sky City's elite, these luxury gallbladders—packed with auxiliary nanoplugs and microbots—meant gluttony without consequence. Eat endlessly, from the seas to the skies, without indigestion, fatty liver, high cholesterol, or diabetes.
The qi gathered in this gall was immense. Li Pan shrugged, gave a thumbs up, and pulled his mouth into a jagged grin. He popped the organ in, not to chew but to absorb its energy like a pill, drawing in the condensed qi.
Bitter as hell. But bitter medicine works. If he digested it all, he'd likely break through to Fourth Turn.
A med-orb floated over, sprouting tentacles. It clamped to Cockroach's severed head like a facehugger, feeding wires into its orifices, trying to preserve brain tissue for resleeving.
Impressive tech—keeping even a decapitated cyber-psycho viable for transplant or memory backup.
Li Pan spat. For him, Imai was long dead. No qi left, nothing but a vegetable. Resurrecting him as a clone with copied memories meant nothing. And after massacring so many Sky Citizens, turning him over to the Bureau was good enough.
This time, even the Imai family's wealth couldn't pay the damages.
Li Pan gathered his gear, picked over bodies, took Cockroach's head and anti-gravity spine, and fired a blue flare—mission accomplished.
Moments later, a yellow flare shot up from the direction of Sky City's control hub.
That would be A-Qi and Spider's team. From the smoke, tracers, and ion fire streaking the sky, it was clear the control hub was a fortress, heavily guarded by automated defenses. The earlier explosion and city tilt had been fallout from that fight.
Sky City's defense systems were hellishly tough. And strangely, Cockroach himself hadn't tried to crash the whole city—he just wanted gallbladders. So who, then, was pushing it toward Night City? Another faction?
Li Pan blitzed forward at Mach 5, shockwaves booming, cutting straight through battlefields swarming with automatons.
He broke through into the command tower.
The problem for Security Bureau and Night Corp wasn't just manpower—it was access and gear.
Sky City wasn't under Bureau jurisdiction anymore. After Takamagahara's defeat, the city had been sold off cheap. Now it belonged to Paradise Realty, an interdimensional corporation running it as a luxury enclave with extraterritorial rights.
The Bureau was still negotiating, but Paradise refused to unlock internal systems. With the deviation rating still too low, no authority existed to send in SMS drones or Cerberus units. By the time Sky City hit the ground, it'd be too late.
So Bureau agents, contractors, punks-for-hire, and Night Knights were forced into suicidal infantry assaults—charging fortified choke points and armored blast doors without heavy ordnance. Futile.
The defenders weren't just machines. Human troops in Sky City staff uniforms fought back, each wearing a black armband marked with a red tengu.
Akaten-gū.
Yes—the Red Tengu.
After their Taiping District and Kyushu Castle attacks, they'd gone quiet—until now. Now their elite troops had infiltrated Sky City, seized the command hub, and redirected the city to crash into Night Corp HQ.
Even as wreckage, Sky City could kill thousands.
It wasn't about East Castle Society. Too small. This was clearly a long-laid Red Tengu plan, executed under cover of Cockroach's chaos.
Li Pan didn't waste time on details. Unlike the Bureau, he didn't need to crawl through sewers.
Holding Cockroach's head, he strode through the main gate, platinum VIP clearance opening every door. Automated drones ignored him, bullets curved away, and without top-grade optics the defenders couldn't even track him.
Green lights all the way. Straight into the core server room.
Red Tengu had hacked it the old-fashioned way: a brain-in-a-jar wired into the server, puppeteering Sky City's descent. Four ninja bodyguards waited, cloaked in stealth.
Their job wasn't to win, just to ambush Bureau hackers when they arrived.
But against the Handkerchief Knight? Trash mobs.
Li Pan restrained himself from overpunching and smashing the servers. Instead he unleashed a series of Mach 5 groin kicks, blasting the ninjas into the ceiling, pulping them into gore.
Cheats were nice.
But costly. Peeling off the bloodstained handkerchief, his face nearly came with it. Prolonged transformation still ground his body like a meat mill. His armor, cracked earlier by Buddha palms, now shredded. Tens of thousands of credits' worth of gear gone in a night.
Better than rollback death, though.
He yanked out the hacker's cable and jacked it into his own Fuxi chip.
The real world vanished. Consciousness fell into the QVN sea.
A wall of ICE loomed—firewall of data. Beyond it, the QVN Deep Net. Inside, a city of light—the Sky City local net.
From outside, impenetrable. But from within, Li Pan was logged in on the trusted side. He was now a relay, a bridge for Eighteen to piggyback through.
Red Tengu's hacker-brain was doing the same. But Li Pan's chip was no match for industrial compute.
"Eighteen. Control room secured. Can you link in?"
In the net, Li Pan's digital soul stretched out, trying to pierce the wall.
A red figure appeared before him, reaching out a hand.
"Oh? Eighteen, that fast? Wait—you're on this side…"
Too late. The red figure grabbed his shoulder.
His ICE shield flared—shattered instantly. Flames of data seared his nerves, his brain cooking. He smelled himself burning.
Something else clutched his other hand from the wall's far side—icy blue code surging in. The two forces clashed, battling across his body.
Li Pan convulsed, caught in fire and ice.
Shitshitshit—
He couldn't disconnect. He overclocked his OCA, shunting signal back through his cyber-eye. One eye snapped open in reality—just enough to see the brain-in-a-jar beside him flashing with blue light.
"You bastard—still hacking after I pulled the cord?!"
He lashed out, bile bursting from his mouth as the gall cracked, but he stomped the brain jar into the wall. It burst, spilling orange nutrient fluid reeking of rot.
The flames inside him snuffed out.
Eighteen's voice came through, low and strained:
"Linked, boss. Your chip almost fried… wait—ugh! What the hell did you eat?!"
"Shut up and work!"
Spitting bile, Li Pan refocused. Before him, the ICE wall cracked. Blue data poured through like serpents, battering open defenses.
Eighteen was in. Safe—sort of.
Boom! A massive blast shook Sky City. Data lights winked out. The city tilted further.
"What now? Don't tell me Night Corp's Plan B started already!"
"No," Eighteen said grimly. "Red Tengu. They're detonating charges, blowing the anti-gravity engines and power relays—trying to disintegrate Sky City."
Figures. Always with backup plans. Always ruthless. These were battle-forged corporate war veterans, professionals through and through.
Li Pan's instructor had been the same—old soldiers forged by endless company wars. He grimly calculated:
"Their goal is to destroy Night City. Even if we stabilize Sky City, Night Corp won't keep it afloat above their HQ. Safer to dump it in the ocean. What's Security Bureau's stance?"
Silence. Then Eighteen:
"Boss, they agreed. Damages will be settled between Night Corp and Paradise Realty."
Li Pan cursed. Saving the world, and still liable for damages. Thank god they were just contractors this time—or the bill would've been his.
.
.
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⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
💥 High-voltage cyberpunk. Urban warfare. AI paranoia.Read 30 chapters ahead, only on Patreon.
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