"I'm going in to grab Tokugawa. A-Qi, go rendezvous with Ashiya and Kotarō. Spider-type stays as reserve!"
Giving the order, Li Pan kicked off the dropship. He let gravity build speed, rolled his spine to angle himself, then pulsed the anti-grav along his back. He scythed down in a silent glide like an iron hawk, knifing through rings of walls and forested turrets, straight into the Tokugawa stronghold.
He hit the lawn in a sliding tackle, sprang to his feet, and sprinted. Up the battlements, vaulting parapets, bursting doors, smashing through walls—within breaths he'd broken into the keep. All along his path lay Tokugawa guards, sprawled every which way—memories wiped, combat authority nullified—flag-bearing cyborg samurai and mecha-warriors alike.
It felt like stumbling onto a movie set, a fossilized battlefield. Through his aug-eye he swept the downed retainers: top-tier kits across the board, and their qi was no joke—worlds beyond street punks. If he hadn't been "cheating," grinding through them would have been a chore.
But now? They were beetles flipped on their shells, legs wriggling, fingers dead, waiting for the blade.
Once upon a time, samurai had blades and the guts to rebel; "downing the upper class" was practically tradition. But tech marched on. With cybernetic control theory, you can now own a person, absolutely—body, thoughts, the lot. That's how extreme stratification and personal autocracy became technically feasible.
So yes—the board members of Takamagahara truly played gods. No "people" around them anymore, only "dogs" with absolute obedience.
These samurai wore level-5 and level-6 military cybernetics, but their skulls were flashed with loyalty to the house, obedience to order, gratitude toward the corporation. Puppet strings tight as fist-wire.
And in truth, corporate dogs choose to be dogs. You sign the contract; you itemize your body, your skills, your personality, and sell them. Those assets aren't yours anymore. They belong to Takamagahara—belong to Tokugawa. One glance from above and managers or "sword saints" alike prostrate and die.
That's cyber. That's control.
Of course, absolute control has an absolute flaw: centralize every leash in one hand, and if someone steals the hand, the hounds are gone and so is your power—smoke on the wind.
"Boss, main gate unlocked. Hitting the inner-net ICE now."
Li Pan was observing tactic-flow and parkouring in; Spider-type just air-dropped like a bomb. It latched to the keep's roof, eight limbs skittering the eaves to lace a web of monomolecular line around the tower, jacking into the perimeter guns and cams while it tunneled the servers. Its back blossomed with a pod of linked rockets, ready to lay down suppression.
At the threshold, Li Pan glanced back at the carpet of toppled guards. "Eighteen, how long can you keep the outer sentries under? Can you walk them in as a vanguard?"
He could still feel qi moving in plenty of those bodies. Hackers don't kill as easily as movies suggest; most lethal effects are from shorted implants setting meat on fire—and that scales with how wired your nervous system is. Full-mesh netrunners get cooked like shawarma by a blown fuse; meat-only paupers? You can't even stop them from logging on—they aren't on.
These Tokugawa retainers were another thing: highly cybered, but not netrunners. Lots of built-in second hearts, synth livers, life monitors, emergency sealant, metal skeletons, pain editors, EM shielding—designed to stay standing in gunfire and live through maiming. Those lifesavers run in isolated subnets with their own biofuel cells and controllers. Unless you drain the power or crack each device with a payload, you can't just flip them off over the net.
Sure enough, Eighteen coaxed two oni-sized doorkeepers upright. They wobbled three steps and collapsed to their knees outside the keep.
"No go, boss. Anything not Tokugawa-bloodline can't cross that threshold—hard-coded at the lowest layer. Overwriting will be messy.
"As for control time, it depends on how fast Takamagahara pushes a reset. These guards are still their assets. In training I heard they prebuilt multiple ICE stacks for wartime. If the board votes to expel Tokugawa and reclaim assets, they could overwrite control, rebuild the ICE gateways, and snatch the park by midnight—then we're refighting the whole round."
"Oh, they can take it back? Fine. I'll go talk 'respect' with Tokugawa. Eighteen, spin up a live feed. Have these folks demonstrate a local-culture program for 01."
"What program?"
"Seppuku."
Li Pan mule-kicked the main doors. In the entry, four maids were prostrate, hand-polishing the lacquered floor. They turned together, eyes fixing on him.
Metal bones groaning, Li Pan stomped in and spat onto the waxed boards. "Heh—ptoo! Get your master out here. Have him kneel and cut his gut for me!"
"—Insolence!"
The maids yawed their jaws and screamed like peregrines. Their eyes strobed; seams opened across their bodies—combat frames blooming from within. In a blink the human silhouettes became killing mantises: scissoring limb-blades, belly-mounted chain-guns thundering. The threshold vanished into scorched crater.
"Damn—your floor-polishers come loaded!"
Li Pan flat-slid, SBS boost and top-shelf lightness art skimming him along the floor. His smart-rifle chattered—only for the rounds to tumble as if dizzy, shooting past the maids to chew the woodwork. Some interference field was blanking their guidance.
He ditched the rifle on the run, whipped a meteor rope and a hand-axe—downed one, tripped a second, opened space, snapped the shotgun up and boom-boom-boom—but their kimono cloth was ballistic fabric; the scatter barely dimpled. The fourth used her friend as a shield, barreled through, mantis-edge flicking—she sheared the shotgun's barrel clean off.
"True Dragon Break!"
He clubbed with the ruined stock—one smash, one skull—white system gel, orange LCL, pink brain-slurry everywhere. The headless frame kept fighting, arms and blades lashing. A knee-pike punched from her greave and drove his chest—he felt SBS plates give; only his armored suit beneath caught the edge.
What the hell—this tough for maids? No net support and it's this hard? Do I start with the cheat right out the gate? But come on—boss of 0791, and I need to pop a power-up to beat a cleaning crew? Embarrassing.
He eyed the inner corridor—tight as a flute, human-sized. He'd have to hunch, fold and crab-walk; the SBS frame wouldn't even fit. Sirens were already humming. Footfalls drummed from every side like rats in the walls—reinforcements inbound.
He gritted his teeth, shrugged off the SBS exoframe, ditched firearms—left hand kept the meteor rope and axe, right hand drew the Sword of Saint Catherine. True qi flooded his skin as he charged deeper.
Eighteen had shared maps, but without cracking the keep's ICE she couldn't pin the patriarch's room. Shouldn't be hard, though—Tokugawa's old face was tanuki-like; Kotarō had sent pictures. And funny—every guard he'd seen inside was female. Not a single male samurai. A crystalline Tokugawa harem then—if you're male, you're "family."
Edo Castle's layered guts were designed as residence—maze on purpose. Every corridor became courtyard into room into corridor again. Identical rooms, identical screens, nested loops—the perfect anti-assassin warren. Lose your bearings in minutes.
"Intruder!" "Yaaah—!" "Kill!" "Die!"
No fancy turrets, just waves of maids. Four to a unit, popping mantis as soon as they saw him, slashing down the narrow space like bipedal deathtraps.
Their patterns were simple—no heavy kill routines, just terrain abuse and berserker rushes. The cloth was bulletproof, so they body-checked, clung, then the rest piled on with knives.
Effective… on paper. After one exchange, Li Pan had their number. He'd flick the rope and axe to guarantee two catches, then whirl the sword—monkey-sword patterns—to pick the core.
Decapitation didn't stop them; nor severed limbs. But each torso had a second "brain"—a control nexus. Tokugawa loved "control," after all—maids were heavily modified and slaved to a master switch.
So he didn't need to True-Dragon every target. He condensed qi to the tip, spat three feet of blade-light like a silver serpent, and slid it right into the pulsing core each time. Pop. One stab, one collapse.
Soon he stopped bothering to recover the rope or axe—just stabbed, stabbed, stabbed—no pretty katas, no stylized flourishes—purely reactive: wherever a maid emerged, that's where the thrust landed.
"Tokuuuu-gaaawaaa—where aaare youuu—come ouuut, To-ku-gaaawaaa—"
He murdered his way inward, projecting the taunt.
And no, not a metaphor—Li Pan could literally throw voice by qi. A Nine Yin trick: in tight spaces, inner power rides the sound; the echo sketched outlines of rooms and heartbeats—an organic sonar gauging depth of cultivation.
He had aug-eyes and chips to navigate, and he could feel qi plainly at this range, so he'd barely used the trick till now. Turned out handy.
Not male/female resolution, but those maids were fearless in "guard" mode. The heartbeat that spiked among them, panting?
Bingo.
"Got you, Tokugawa—!"
"Aaaah—!"
A door shattered; a smiling face poked out from a closet—and shrieked itself hoarse when it met his eyes.
"Oh? So young. One of the Tokugawa grandsons?"
Li Pan flowered the blade—two arcs of sword-qi slashed his thigh. Shock: no cut, no blood—only a stagger and a tear in fabric as the youth crawled, scrambling.
Two more strokes—this time the back split…but he still wasn't dead. Not even butchered—just tumbled, clothes shredded.
Right. Nice implants. Skin looked like skin—but tougher than armor. The sword-qi left chalky scars and little else.
"—Grass-Mud-Horse True Dragon Break!"
No more restraint. He lunged. Full power. One waist-thrust, True Dragon Break.
BOOM. The blade sang. Qi howled. The Tokugawa grandson blew through a wall, then another, then a third.
"Uuuaaagh! Help—help!"
Still alive? Still yelling?
Li Pan blinked, leaned in. The synthetic skin was torn, but beneath lay a turtle-shell carapace—keratin armor plated under the dermis, punctured and already knitting.
What grade was that shell…?
"True Dragon—"
If one won't do, make it two—he started forward, when a new qi flared up from behind, from beneath the tatami. He twisted, spine snaking; his left hand loosed—meteor rope and axe flashed.
The rope cinched the grandson's legs. The axe kissed Li Pan's fringe and thunked into the forehead of a ninja who'd ghosted up behind him for a back-stab.
The blade found air; the axe found skull. Through the mask he could see her shock—how did that happen?
She spat a cloud of smoke. With a pop her body shed like a skin.
Empty cicada trick—seen it.
"True Dragon Break!"
Li Pan bellowed. His right hand threw the sword—pinning the grandson's cheek to the floor—while his left snapped the axe again.
It curved mid-air like a sudden "7", whipped out into the hall, and nailed a chameleon-blur hugging the wall—the invisible shinobi's brow split around the wedged steel.
She'd barely settled when he arrived, sliding, twisting—already on her. One palm slammed the axe haft.
BANG.
Blood geysered. The kunoichi split, top half flopping. Li Pan shouldered through and finished with a short-range shock-punch, pasting her into the wall.
"Chiyo—!"
The scream came from behind. Fire blossomed down the corridor—within it a hiss of poisoned senbon and needles. A streaming iron rain—ninjutsu "fire release," no doubt.
Didn't matter. One trick, eat the map.
"Zhe!"
He turtled behind his suit to catch the needles and flung the axe into the flame. A scream—then he drove a fist into the blaze.
"Break!"
Nine Yin Godfist—qi roared like a dragon. Shockwave flipped the ember tide, pounded back upwind, and body-checked the fire-nin into orbit.
He moved to finish when the floor softened underfoot. He looked down: the boards and tatami had become a tangle of writhing pythons, coiling his hips and legs and biting in. Four, five new qi signatures blinked into existence all around, rising like knives to pin him.
Right—this was the pit. Iga had him.
The name Iga carried thunder. Compared to Iga, "Demon-sealing Kōga" were wine sacks and rice bags. Reputations mattered.
Li Pan squared, all levity gone. No more sandbagging. No more delay.
Cheat.
"Handkerchief Knight—transform!"
.
.
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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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