Of course, 0113007 didn't clone just one Kiriko—he cloned two.
Using the two clone bodies recovered from the OHSUMI lab as raw stock, 0113007 produced two bionic template frames.
One version was the female clone in front of Li Pan—Artificial Human No. 35—and the other a male version, Artificial Human No. 111.
But No. 111 had already had his profile wiped by the 0213 GM and had no "persona" backup from another subsidiary—no so-called "soul," "mind," or "autonomous will." Just an empty puppet chassis, a mindless artificial beast. He remained restrained in Tech, continuing as a human test platform.
No. 35—the cloned Kiriko—was essentially stable and ready to report for work.
With a mature template like this, as long as they expanded the lab and the production line, the company could even mass-produce a combat clone army locally in 0791.
That said, the Holy Grail War hadn't reached the point where corporations fought openly. It was still a proxy war. Unauthorized bio-mods, once flagged by Security, still meant fines—so they had to tread lightly.
Also, as a first-version emergency product using local clone primaries grown by indigenous scientists, these bodies would carry all sorts of hidden issues—berserk episodes, collapse, progeria, cancers, mutations—genetic flaws that made them unfit for true mass production.
Hence 0113007's plan: register No. 35 as a temp and use her as the test unit—observe day-to-day performance, develop her potential, and help iterate and upgrade the whole line.
No. 111 would serve as the Gen-1 mass template, pushed into limit tests and weaponization in Tech, with a small pilot run to prepare combat backup bodies for company staff soon to slip in off-the-books.
As a side note, with 0113007 acting as Tech's proxy head, TheM had already signed NDAs, tech-coops, and patent assignments with Ryōhei Ōsumi of OHSUMI Lab.
During this Holy Grail bid war, OHSUMI Biotech would work as a secret outsourced R&D team with TheM Tech—continuing to illegally produce clones. As legal representative, Ōsumi would assume all legal liability, including (but not limited to) biocrises from illicit clones, environmental contamination, gene dysregulation, and ethics fallout…
Equipment, funding, and technical guidance would still be provided by the company. And the team's "temporary restriction of movement" didn't mean signing temp indentures. In big-corp NDA projects, it was perfectly "normal" for researchers to "go missing" for a year or two.
Be reasonable, do the work, and once the war ended they could go home—maybe even level up the lab's tech under corporate tutelage.
So Ōsumi and his research cattle signed.
(As if they had a choice, after being hauled in…)
In short, 0113007 worked with crisp efficiency. No sooner had Li Pan delegated Tech than the scaffolding went up—and a long-term bid-war support program, neat and well-argued, landed on his desk.
Corporate dogs—never underestimate them.
Li Pan signed with a flourish, registering the cloned Kiriko as Temp 0791038, assigned to Tech under 0113007's direct command to assist with the combat-bionics program.
No sooner was the record filed than 0113007 brought another proposal.
"What are you getting at…"
The very first page made Li Pan frown—it was the contract hiring the Kōga ninja that he'd asked Shiranui Kiriko to handle, bearing his own signature.
0113007 said,
"The Chiyoda Incident stems from Kōga violating their agreement with us, colluding with internal agents to steal the Grail and attempting to activate old-legion tech—causing enormous losses. They must pay the price.
I propose deploying 0791038 to exterminate the remaining Kōga cells—while load-testing 038's combat profile and assessing personality integrity."
Send her? That was a blade to the heart.
Li Pan paused.
"We're at war; no need to tangle with small fry. And 038 is a brand-new corporate data body—if she's damaged…"
0113007:
"Precisely because other companies are circling, 038 needs combat data now—to confirm weaknesses and apply reinforcements.
Rest easy. With the space-air arm combat-ready, Tech assets backing, and the ability to roll back, even if she's destroyed we can re-produce the template. Risk is controllable.
Also, Kōga's betrayal does carry a whiff of managerial oversight on your part. I strongly advise you to handle it first, close the book on Chiyoda, and be done.
If you leave it to the GM council and HQ orders you to act after others drag it into the light, it'll be too late."
So this was "helping him clean up," and he was supposed to be grateful?
In the end, Li Pan still signed.
No need for speeches—cross a corporation and there are consequences.
Apologize with a blade to the belly, jump from a tower—or see your village erased.
High above, Takama Ga Hara was a lesson. Didn't Kōga see that?
If—if—you had real skill, conjured a Weave, proved your value as super-magic ninja, the company could talk.
But you weren't up to it. You mobilized and got wiped. What's left to say? You expect the company not to clean up?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
This time, Li Pan stayed in his office, watching the live feed.
The Kōga mountain compound he'd seen in the dreamspace was laid bare under low-light spy sats.
Clear as day: base sites, traps, which room held people, who carried combat implants—and what model, what price.
Like last time, 0791038 rode a drop pod under a screen of twelve UAVs, inbound over Kōga's ranges.
Invisible medium drones orbited with bombs at the ready.
As the test's lead, 038 jumped with no gear and no armor, engaging cloak and acceleration, parkouring through the ridgelines.
With superhuman base stats and 035's inherited ninja experience, 038 killed with effortless economy. Perimeter sentries never even reacted—heads popped, necks twisted like braided dough, bodies shredded. Instant kills.
There wasn't much to "test." As 0113007 said, this corporate chassis benchmarked a full AG-A—a Grade-5 super-soldier—crushing mere humans.
Even the low-spec 111 body had given Li Pan trouble; Nine Yin Third Turn barely moved it—without monkey-sword qi it was a pain.
Kōga's genin and chūnin were at best special-forces or hired-assassin tier. No match for a corporate super-dog.
And the veteran jōnin and heads had already gone down in Night City under Asahime—and every Seal of Demon heirloom had been lost. No trump cards left—no hope.
In the melee, some recognized the killer as "Kiriko." They howled in grief—"Kiriko, what have you done!" "Why!" "Why betray us!"—some raging, some pleading, some trying talk-no-jutsu.
Reality doesn't care for speeches.
038 was pure cold blood—she emptied the village. Not even the ninja dogs lived.
Then the UAVs dropped incendiaries, turning Kōga into a sea of flame—leveled to bedrock.
From his office, Li Pan felt like he'd just watched a Category-III gore flick—adult black super-dream.
From a performance angle, Temp 0791038 (Artificial Human No. 35) was superb.
Her speed, agility, and endurance matched Grade-5 neural-center enhancements, with sustained activation. A few ninjas with central accelerators could keep pace—until their implants overheated. Then 038 closed and one-tapped them.
Attack and defense were first-tier as well. This body's potential was unknown, with two more transformations to go. Without Grade-5 blades or munitions, hurting 038 at all would be hard.
With chameleon biocamouflage, she could hide indefinitely. Combined with inherited stealth-kill ninjutsu, she outclassed those "infiltrate-and-fail" clowns by orders of magnitude.
What shocked Li Pan most wasn't that.
It was that 038 also wielded onmyō arts and psy-powers.
Yes—though she could have just pummeled everyone to death, using Kōga to test power meant letting them throw a few moves.
Fire, wood, water, earth—ninja sorcery—fireballs, water javelins, earth dragons—none could harm 038. She absorbed the yin-yang of each, made it her own, and flung back bigger, harder blasts—vaporizing foes.
The psy was even wilder.
Purple spirit light lanced from her eyes—mind-reading, telekinesis, domination, psi-barriers. If she had you in her gaze, she could strangle you at range—or glare your brain into jelly.
"Ridiculous… a one-woman omnipotent kit…"
0113007 was unsurprised.
"As expected. 0791035 dove too deep. She didn't make it back alive, but she clearly touched the Root. Thus various rules apply to her derivatives. If the genome can sustain it, we can push further…"
He looked at Li Pan.
"By the way, you recovered the Grail—you should've touched the Root as well. What law did you awaken?"
Li Pan explained his water-when-drinking principle.
0113007: "…If you don't want to say, fine. I need to compile the 35's data report. I'll take my leave."
Li Pan: "…I'm not messing with you! It's real!"
Fine. Don't believe him.
He followed 007's advice anyway—filed a report to HQ on the Chiyoda Incident and the Kōga cleanup.
Unconsciously, he'd worked through the night. A few hours to clock-in again. No point going home.
The projector still showed Kōga Village aflame. Stifled, he left the office alone, a cloud of stealth drones in tow, and grabbed a rideshare to the CBD.
Night City was the city that never sleeps—especially the corporate core, open 24/7.
If you had money, it was paradise.
Never mind the past days of nukes, terror, biocrises.
Never mind a mountain village of contract killers erased far away.
Downtown still danced itself senseless.
And despite the bid war's huge losses and hit to Night City's business climate—
people's sorrows rarely align.
With multiversal corp dogs pouring in and arming up, 0791's local consumption actually rose. TheM alone had thrown down ten trillion; eleven competitors hadn't even dropped out. Think the investment would be small?
Luxury-tier cyberware that had sat unsold for years—gone. Shuttles, weapons—swept clean. The OPA above was jammed with orders—hundreds of cargo warships filing through the 0791 gate lanes.
Offworld firms opened by the dozen; capital inflows and gray goods pushed even the local market up. Li Pan's one billion in dark money had inflated to 2.3—believe it?
To Wangshan and his crowd, Li Pan had become a gullible ATM. He'd coaxed over a hundred Cerberus vets to throw in résumés. Those vets knew other vets; Orange finished hiring a crew with 10+ years of spacefaring experience for the HAYABUSA. Whether that experience was navy or piracy… unclear.
…And Eighteen had just lost money shorting Little Pony. Fortune really doesn't track personal ability.
Watching the market jogged Li Pan's memory.
He'd been busy all day and hadn't bagged Yulia's four billion—no, six.
He smart-searched a law firm, tossed 12,000 credits to book an hour with a specialist, and aimed to lock the money down.
Money buys service. Talk to a Mediterranean-bald attorney at 2,000 per minute—worth it. He broke it all down—policy, procedures, fees.
An asset transfer counted as a gift; four billion taxed at the top tier. If Li Pan inherited and liquidated within a year, Tax could claw back up to 45% gift tax.
The rich set up trusts to avoid that. Li Pan's case was special; he'd just have to grit his teeth and not sell for a year.
Even so, he'd have to file with the Security Committee, get official certification and valuation, and pay 0.5% of current market value as a probate fee—through a licensed firm, which also took 0.2%.
And those assets were mostly 0791 local equities—and the market was up.
Not as wild as the black-money market, but near six billion now.
So: 30 million in probate and 12 million in legal fees to inherit a 6-billion portfolio—then no selling for a year or risk 270 million lost.
Acceptable. He didn't have to liquidate. Stock could be reassigned. Safer than black cash; more convenient for urgent payments.
The hitch: assets sat under a citizen's name. If tied to illicit trades, they'd drag him down—less flexible than black money.
Still, the thought of sixty-hundred million on a signature thrilled him. He slapped down cash to extend the session. Let's close this whale today!
The Mediterranean smiled; what he'd feared was a murder walk-in turned into a 12-million payday from Heaven. He even poured Li Pan a whisky.
It tasted like water—flat, joyless.
He hadn't reckoned with how valuable—and how dangerous—six billion could be.
"Citizen Li Pan: Tax has detected abnormal flows and equity swaps in your accounts indicating suspected financial crimes and laundering. Your accounts are frozen pending audit. You may file an appeal if necessary…"
Li Pan breathed deep and kept a grip; he wasn't the kid who threw desks out windows anymore.
"What the hell is this? Huh?! I wire you 42 million and you pull this? Huh?!"
"Stay calm, Mr. Li! Calm!"
A pro to the last—even dangling outside a hundred floors, the Mediterranean screamed, worked his contacts, and pieced it together.
"There's only one explanation! Your up-line—the vampire elder—reneged!
She gifted you the shares, but the company assets are still under her control. She can run illegal trades and self-report to Security—get the assets frozen!
Then the old company is seized for violations; she files bankruptcy. Once the news hits, your equity and debt are worthless—you get nothing and face a Security case!
By the time Security sorts it out, she'll have swapped shells, restructured, gone public via reverse merger—or simple phoenix—already gone!"
Li Pan threw back his head and howled at the moon, murder in his heart:
"Yulia!! I swear to—!!"
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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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