Chapter 2: The Ace of Pentacles
I shot out of the trash heap like an artillery shell night air punching against my chassis as I cleared the jagged lip of the garbage mountain.
Momentum spun me end over end For a moment I was just a hunk of wounded metal flung into open sky.
For a split second I wasn't falling or flying; I was suspended, hanging in the dark like some broken ornament.
I hung in the air, flashes far in the distance, city lights burned — a neon haze on my peripheral.
For a moment I thought I'd stay there forever, like a buoy in the sky, then gravity remembered I existed.
My stomach?—or whatever passed for one now—lurched as the world tilted and gravity hooked its claws into me.
The wind screamed over my plating, and it took me a second to realize the other scream was mine.
I crossed my arms over my chest, bracing for impact like that would magically make any of this survivable.
"Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!"
I hit the ground. Hard.
The landing wasn't graceful. Or stable. Or even remotely dignified. I slammed into the muddy earth, bounced—once, twice—metal shrieking against discarded appliances.
Sparks spat from somewhere behind me as I scraped what I think was an old fridge , tumbling until friction finally decided to be on my side.
I came to a stop on my back, staring up at a slice of night sky framed by rusted towers and smoking trash piles.
A soft chime buzzed in my skull.
[VISUAL SYSTEM: SEARCH EYE — RECALIBRATED]
[STATUS: ONLINE]
Of course.
I fall twenty feet, nearly snap my neck on a fridge, and apparently that is the exact amount of blunt-force percussive maintenance needed to bring a who knows how complicated bit of machinery back from the dead.
"Great," I muttered. "Glad to know the high-end tech in this body works on the same principle as smacking an old TV."
Another line scrolled across my vision, clinical and emotionless:
[PRIORITY OBJECTIVE REMINDER: ESTABLISH CONTACT WITH PRIMARY TECHNICIAN]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: LOCATE CELLULAR OR COMMUNICATION TOWER TO BOOST SIGNAL RANGE]
"Damn, at least let me catch my bre—" Now that I was no longer actively shitting myself, the sound of my own voice finally registered.
It was wrong. Too smooth, too controlled, too… manufactured.
It had that faint synthetic timbre—like every word was passing through a perfectly tuned filter. Not robotic, not monotone, but precise. Even when panicked, it carried this crisp, resonant edge, like a high-end mic was built into my throat.
No cracks, no strain, no rasp. Just engineered clarity. And hearing that come out of me sent a whole new spike of unease shooting through me
A sharp ping cut through my spiraling thoughts.
[PRIORITY ALERT: COMMUNICATIONS LINK WITH DR. KUSENO — LOST]
[RECOMMENDED: REESTABLISH CONTACT IMMEDIATELY]
[SIGNAL BOOST REQUIRED — LOCATE NEARBY CELLULAR OR TOWER INFRASTRUCTURE]
"I heard you the first time..." I muttered, even though my own bitching still sounded like a customer-service android trying its best to act annoyed.
Error messages flickered across my HUD like warning labels slapped onto my thoughts, but despite all that, I pushed myself upright.
And holy shit—my body moved smooth. Too smooth. No hesitation, no lag, no aching joints, no muscles straining. Just thought → movement, clean as a snapped finger.
If this was 23% functionality, then 100% had to be something absolutely fucking absurd. No wonder Genos fought like a guided missile with a grudge.
I got my feet under me and brushed off some lingering scrap and mud—mostly for my own peace of mind, since the plating barely held any dirt.
My optics adjusted to the darkness automatically, sharpening the world around me and I finally took a proper look at where I'd landed.
The landfill stretched out in front of me a giant dumping ground for everything people got tired of dealing with.
Rows of machines, parts, and scrap spread out in piles that looked ready to collapse if you sneezed too hard.
Crushed cars sat in stacks, frames bent and folded in on themselves. Every few seconds a flare from some furnace in the distance lit everything up in quick bursts, turning the mess into a bigger mess I could actually see.
Shredded tarps snapped around in the wind, smacking metal and making this annoying papery sound. Bits of scavenged junk sparkled in random spots. Broken mirrors flashed thin slices of light.
Coils of wire sat in tangled piles. A few cracked screens still flickered, stubborn little bastards refusing to admit they were dead.
The whole place looked like the exact nightmare every environmentalist warned about—and the exact future every communist manifesto promised if you let corpos run the show.
My HUD blinked again, a little more frantic this time:
[HAZARDOUS MATERIAL DETECTED:]
[Strontium-90 (trace)][Cesium-137 (particulate)][Battery acid aerosolized in air][Corroded heavy metals: lead, cadmium, chromium][RADITION LEVELS ELEVATED:]
[ 0.43 mSv]Jesus fucking Christ.
The only good news? I'd landed in a small clear spot without getting crushed or taking a bath in whatever chemical cocktail was cooking here.
Bad news? I was pretty sure I'd stood in this exact patch of garbage before.
Which was fantastic, because nothing says "your life is stable" like déjà vu in a scrapyard that could probably sterilize a small village.
There's no fucking way this is where I think it is. There is no fucking way.
Now that I actually looked around, I knew this place.
There wasn't a fat bastard lying in the middle of it like I remembered, but everything else matched.
Every pile. Every busted machine. Every stupid detail. Even the fridge I had apparently bounced off on the way down.
Because of course I did.
I stared at it for a long moment, rationalizing that I was wrong. That this was just my brain mixing panic with déjà vu. That I had not, in fact, landed in the most recognizable landfill in video game history.
But there was only one way to check.
I walked up to the fridge. Brushed off the loose trash and dust that had rained onto it when I crashed into the pile. Placed my hands on the sides, bracing myself for the dumbest confirmation of my life.
And I opened it.
Inside was a body I had seen at least ten different times.
Same dumb hair cut. Same weird ice blue pallor.
Same bloated corpse.
Rache. Fucking. Bartmoss.
The godfather of netrunning. The digital boogeyman. The guy who turned half the world's networks into spaghetti code before dying in a fridge like a leftover burrito.
I looked up at the sky and let out something between a sigh, a groan.
"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck."
Now I know what you're thinking:
What sort of basement dwelling NEET of a neckbeard recognizes an entire form of media, after being launched out of a trash volcano… by one specific trash clearing
A fair question.
Well, one: Panam Palmer. I must have replayed the game the first three times just because of the Basilisk scene. Don't judge me.
And two: it was a really good game. Not mechanically—at least not when I first bought it—god knows it felt like I was a witch hiding from the Inquisition for being one of the few people who didn't refund the thing when it was a buggy mess.
Not that I blamed them, when it first came out the game was barely playable on console, the random T- poses and car explosions I could forgive, but the crashing made the game near unplayable, it was a hot mess, but the story?
The story sucked you in. It made you care about the people in the neon hellhole that was Night City as if they were real.
Like you'd grab a drink with them. Like you'd jump into the fire for them. You cared about V in the end, about how their story ends based off of your choices.
My point is: some people remember birthdays. Some people remember faces.
I apparently remember digital trash heaps from video games I played way too much of instead of going outside like a functioning adult..
I walked along a stretch of near-deserted road, mountains of trash on either side. Rusted power towers leaned at weird angles, more scrap than structure, their lines hanging loose in the wind.
The asphalt was cracked and patched, half-buried under dirt and old tire tracks.
Off in the distance, those familiar giant holographic billboards flickered—ads cycling on loop, lighting up the sky like someone duct-taped a rave to a skyscraper.
It was the road that led out toward Medeski Fuel. I'd driven it a hundred times in-game. Desert on both sides. Dead quiet. A convenience store, a gas station, and a whole lot of "don't stop unless you want problems."
Except now I wasn't holding a controller. I was holding a dataslate of the man who crashed the net.
Still reeling from the fact I had just found Rache Bartmoss.
In a fridge.
Like a fucked-up collectible.
My HUD pinged.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CONTACT PRIMARY TECHNICIAN — Dr. KUSENO RECOMMENDED]
"Yeah, yeah," I muttered. "I heard you the first forty times."
Another prompt blinked insistently across my vision.
[OBJECTIVE: LOCATE TOWER OR ANTENNA TO BOOST TRANSMISSION]
I snorted.
"I'm telling you, even if I connected to a satellite, I'm not gonna reach that mushroom-headed fucker."
Kuseno might've been a genius, but cross-dimensional support was very much not in his customer service package.
I kept walking. The desert stretched on. Trash on both sides. And the sinking feeling that my life had just gone off every possible rail.
My footsteps echoed on the cracked pavement. A sharp, metallic clack every time my feet hit the ground. Too steady. Too clean. Like someone put sound effects on my legs.
And as I walked, something kept poking at the back of my mind. A wrongness I couldn't place at first. Not danger. Not a threat. Just… off.
Then it hit me.
It was quiet.
Not nighttime quiet. Not desert quiet. Dead quiet. No crickets. No lizards. No little things rustling through the brush.
Nothing shifting under the trash piles.
No wind carrying any kind of life.
Just my footsteps, the hum of my own body, and the buzzing static of my HUD.
I slowed a little.
"God… they fucked this world up... still better than if I was in One Punch Man though."
On the way out of the landfill, I caught my reflection. I'd been curious which iteration of Genos I'd become. The silver plating was a clue, but the shattered glass of a wrecked vehicle confirmed it.
My new hair was short and blond. The ends moved slightly in the wind. My eyes were gold, surrounded by black. They didn't move like a biological pair would. They held focus.
That's fucking uncanny.
I could almost pass for an over chromed edgerunner.
Almost.
My body below the chin immediately dissuaded that. Silver metal formed my arms, shoulders, chest and legs. Steel plates covered the structure. Tubing ran along the joints. Power conduits were visible under the surface.
My arms were obviously meant to be weapons, bulkier than the previous iterations. Black and silver plating, layered and reinforced, with exposed internal artficial muscles, shifting when I tensed.
They looked like they were built to punch through buildings. Smooth housing on top, power conduits along the underside.
I was completely naked. Whatever outfit this version normally wore was gone—burned off or blown apart. My body was all steel, not an ounce of skin artificial; or otherwise existed below my chin.
I look like a damn T-800... I am getting a Mr. Studd as soon as fucking possible.
I knew which iteration this was. My second favorite, after the anti-Saitama armor. The version that had fought Elder Centipede.
Judging by my current state, this had to be right after he tried to implode Elder Centipede from the inside.
Shouldn't I be missing a leg?
Though I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
[PRIORITY ALERT: COMMUNICATIONS LINK WITH DR. KUSENO — LOST]
[RECOMMENDED: REESTABLISH CONTACT IMMEDIATELY]
"I fucking got it! I'll look for a tower, fuck!" I snapped, just to shut it up. It had been spamming my feed nonstop ever since it failed to connect to Kuseno.
[MISSION DIRECTIVE ACKNOWLEDGED]
[NOTIFICATION SUPPRESSED UNTIL NEW DATA IS AVAILABLE]
"..."
Ahem
In the distance, I could see a familiar filling station the road had been nothing but broken asphalt and dead silence for so long that the glow ahead almost felt like a glitch.
Medeski Fuel finally came into view, first as a weak smear of orange light, then as something that actually looked like a building.
CHOO2, I knew the sign would say. It looked a stereotypical near-abandoned gas station with a convenience store stuck to the side.
One short, low rectangular building. Roof patched up with steel panels, air conditioner unit, a comm link antenna—probably the only thing keeping this place vaguely functional.
Two fuel pumps out front. Dry. Concrete cracked and eaten through where leaks had sat too long. A busted vending machine slumped beside the door, screen flickering between dead pixels and garbage code.
The lights above the forecourt buzzed, barely holding themselves up.
The GAS sign burned weakly above the pumps—its glow tired, like it had been awake longer than the sun.
Trash littered the lot—loose paper, broken plastic, who knows what else. Old tire marks scarred the concrete, evidence of desperate drivers or dumb luck.
Behind the station, a mountain of junk loomed, smoke drifting lazily toward the sky from some unseen fire.
A towering power structure stood nearby, skeletal against the dark, humming faintly.
Everything around it was either on fire, or looked like it should be, old tire marks, and the kind of depressing ambiance that meant nobody came out here unless they were desperate.
In summary the place looked like it hadn't seen a paying customer since before Adam Smasher had a working dick.
You're one to talk...
...
"Fuck I just pissed myself off."
I muttered it under my breath, my own thoughts somehow managing to annoy me more than the landscape. In a foul mood, I picked up my pace—more of a light jog than anything.
I kept it controlled, careful not to push past whatever my systems clearly wanted me not to do unless I wanted something to snap, spark, or fall off.
As I got closer, details sharpened in my HUD. Shapes became outlines. Outlines became hard edges. And parked out front of the station—
A group of cars.
Not normal cars.
Futuristic, welded-together, rust-and-chrome Armor plates bolted onto frames. Exposed engines. Spikes. Reinforced grills.
Half-finished paint jobs. Their headlights glowed faintly through dust and grime, like lazy predators that couldn't be bothered to pretend they weren't watching.
Wraith rides.
The world of Cyberpunk isn't just bad—excuse my Russian but— It's a capitalistic hellhole, a nightmare of corporate greed where everything is owned, monetized, or exploited. Cities run on human suffering the way engines run on fuel.
Most people scrape by under neon lights and smog, having some semblance of a life, the lucky ones die before they have to take out another loan.
You've got the regular civilians just trying to survive. You've got the street kids, learning fast or dying faster. You've got the gangs, carving territory out of whatever crumbling concrete they can.
And then the mercs, the edgerunners, the cyberpunks, lunatics who think they can play the game long enough to profit before it kills them.
At the top of it all, like vultures circling a corpse, sit the corpos, smiling while they choke the world with zero-guilt efficiency.
And then there's the sensible people who looked at all of that and said:
"Nah. Fuck this."
Those are the Nomads.
They didn't leave society. Society sort of left them. When Corps bought out towns, poisoned the land, or turned communities into bargaining chips, people packed what they had and drove out into the wastes.
Whole families, whole towns—hundreds at a time. Over time, they became clans. Caravans. Roads turned into their home, and the only law that mattered was the one they could enforce themselves.
They fix things, haul things, smuggle things, build things.
Some are peaceful. Most are dangerous. All are independent.
The Aldecaldos, Jodes, Snake Nation—those are Nomad clans. Families. Caravans. Armies. People who stick together, look after their own, and try not to make an already miserable world worse.
Then you've got the Raffen Shiv.
Raffen aren't a clan. They're what's left when a clan kicks someone out. Bandits. Exiles. People who got cut loose because they broke the rules, hurt their own, or went full psycho.
Wraiths are one of the biggest Raffen groups in the Badlands of Night City.
They don't trade. They don't negotiate. They raid. They steal.
They strip you down to parts, biological or mechanical, depending on what's worth more.
If actual Nomads are the neighborhood you trust to watch your kid for five minutes, Wraiths are the guys who'd steal your wheels, your wallet, and your kidneys before you finished asking.
And here I was, strolling right toward their cars with a shiny chrome body, zero working boosters, and most of my weapons either dead, dying, or throwing error messages like they were paid per pop-up.
Fantastic.
Might as well be wearing a suit of ham in front a pack of starving wolves.
I moved closer to the station, steps soft on the cracked pavement. As I got within maybe thirty meters I heard it.
Shouting. Swearing. Something metal crashing.
Then a sharp crack of a gunshot.
"…Damn. They've gotta be real desperate to try and stick this place up."
Curious I focused on the building, my hypersensors, responding to my silent command sent a pulse outward
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCANS INITIATED][SEARCH EYE — ACTIVE][INITIATING THERMAL MAP][AUDIO LOCALIZATION ENABLED]
[THREAT DETECTED]
A silent pulse spread from my vision outward, and suddenly the whole building lit up in wireframe outlines. Heat signatures glowed through the walls—orange, red, white-hot where temp spiked.
Six figures inside.
[6 HOSTILES DETECTED]
[1 CIVILIAN IN DURESS]
One heat signature stood near the counter with their hands raised above their head. Elevated pulse. Erratic breathing. Civilian.
Of the six, one had their guns aimed at the clerk. The other five were tearing through shelves, grabbing whatever they could stuff into bags. My VI tried to identify the guns, but only spat back:
[UNKNOWN FIREARM MODELS — DATASET INCOMPLETE]
No shit. Wrong universe.
I raked a hand through my blond hair and let out a long, ragged sigh, more a vocalization due to my lack of lungs.
Don't think about it.
"I can't just fucking leave him to get killed," I muttered.
I pulled the data feed back up, letting the VI run through every error, every warning, every pathetic reminder of how busted I was. My HUD lit up with flashing orange—damaged servos, compromised plating, suboptimal coolant flow—yeah, no kidding.
[THREAT PREDICTION ALGORITHM]
[ACTIVATING COMBAT PREDICTIVE SUITE:]
[RUNNING SCENARIO]
A thin line of static crawled across my vision as it processed.
Then the readout stabilized.
A cascade of numbers spilled across my HUD—raw data, error margins, probability trees branching and collapsing faster than I could blink.
// INITIATING THREAT‑MODEL SIMULATION
// COMPILING DAMAGE INDEX…
→ Structural integrity: 41%
→ Servo efficiency: 27%
→ Heat tolerance: 84%
→ Weapon functionality: 12%
The VI stitched the values together, crunching them through a dozen predictive matrices.
// RUNNING ENGAGEMENT PROJECTIONS
Variables:
• Hostiles: 5–6 suboptimally cybernetically enhanced humans
• Arms: Conventional firearms
• Environment: Confined interior, low visibility
• User State: 23% operational capacity
Lines of probability arcs snapped into place, collapsing toward a final value.
// RESULT:
ENGAGEMENT SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 0.973 ± 0.014
(97.3% likelihood of neutralizing all threats)
The numbers faded, leaving the summary in cold blue text:
Projected outcome: HIGH PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS.
I blinked at it.
"…Huh."
I guess even as busted up as I currently am, my VI thinks I should be more than capable of wiping the floor with these Mad Max rejects
"Damn, might as well and one of these fuckers looks like his clothes would fit." I muttered as I carefully placed Bartmosses cyberdeck on one of the oildrums littered around the lot.
Knowing my luck they might shoot it.
Once I was sure it was not anywhere near the line of fire, I dropped low, one hand and both feet planted, metal fingers digging into the gritty concrete. The stance felt natural—muscle memory that wasn't mine settling into place like it had always been there.
I should've been scared, maybe. Six armed assailants in a shoebox of a store, guns out, nerves high. But this body didn't do fear the same way. Every hinge, every actuator, every shard of combat data whispered the same thing:
You're built for this.
And, honestly… I really needed clothes.
Inside, their voices bounced around the cramped store. One guy had the clerk in his sights, muzzle aimed at his skull.
Four more were busy digging either through shelves, or the cash register shouting about flavors like they were arguing over a vending machine instead of committing armed robbery.
Then one of them—gun still leveled at the clerk—turned his head and yelled,
"Oi! Grab the red-bean one, you gonk, not the—"
That was it. The opening.
Everything inside me snapped into place.
I launched forward.
No hesitation.
No warning.
Just pure, engineered acceleration.
I tore across the forecourt, feet hammering the cracked concrete, sprinting past the dead pumps in a straight line toward the storefront.
Every servo in my legs whined in sync, pushing harder, faster, until the world narrowed to a single objective: center mass of that window.
I didn't slow. Didn't think. Just planted, kicked off, and threw myself forward—full-body commitment—like I was auditioning for a remake of Every Action Movie Ever Made.
Glass didn't matter. Momentum didn't care.
I exploded through the window in a shower of shards, arms tucked, leg extended—perfect flying kick form that I absolutely did not earn through personal training and totally owed to this bodies previous tenant.
Stop thinking about it.
And maybe it was luck.
Maybe it was instinct.
Maybe he heard the angry whine of my servos screaming at max output as I sprinted like my surname was Bolt.
The genius holding a gun to the clerk's head, let's call him Mohawk, due to the dumb-ass neon blue affront to common sense he had sticking off his head—turned right as I came through.
Which put his face exactly level with the incoming foot attached to three-hundred-fifty pounds of specially treated, badassium— actually a Hyper-Dense Titanium–Tungsten Composite, a proprietary superalloy created by Dr. Kuseno—heat-immune, impact-immune, and nearly unbreakable unless something punches at multi-cityblock force— a face I used as a springboard towards the other assailants,
I hit the floor in a slide, shin skidding across cracked tile, and the whole room jolted like someone had just turned gravity sideways.
Mohawk was already out cold, body folding to the ground behind me like a dropped marionette.
The other five froze for a heartbeat—just long enough for me to reach my next target.
He was the biggest of the lot, and the most heavily armed, he held some sort of pump action shotgun, that I had never bothered remembering the name of. He was also the closest.
Bad luck for him.
I twisted up from the slide, rotating off my left palm. Capoeira spin—clean, sharp, mechanical precision. My heel snapped up in an arc. His shotgun barely came halfway to his shoulder before my foot smashed into his jaw.
His head whipped sideways, the shotgun clattering as he flew back into a shelf of canned kibble. The shelf caved like wet cardboard.
Someone screamed, "Borg!"
Just for that you're next
I lunged toward him.
He panicked first—wide eyes, shaking pistol, tattoos crawling up his neck like someone had scribbled on him drunk.
"Don't—! Don't—!"
He fired before aiming.
I leaned with the shot, rotating low on one knee. The round whizzed past my cheek. Before he could pull the trigger again, I spun, heel sweeping under his stance. His legs flew out from under him, and I rolled with him, mounting straight into a flurry of body blows.
Boxing software kicked in—tight combinations, piston-fast strikes.
Rib, rib, solar plexus.
Every strike thudded into him with blunt mechanical force. His pistol skidded across the floor.
His consciousness blinked out just as quickly.
Three down.
I didn't even fully rise before the next one was on me—charging with a mismatched chrome cyberarm cocked back like he really thought he could dent me with it.
He swung.
I dipped under the swing, pivoted around his back, grabbed his arm, and used the momentum to swing myself up—feet planting on his shoulders for half a second before I torqued down.
One brutal rotation.
His arm, the flesh one, wrenched sideways with a snap. He hit the floor howling.
I landed light, barely a sound.
Next was the buzzcut rifle chick who actually knew what spacing was. She was the smart one—actually backed up, tried to get aome distance between us for a clear shot.
I lunged anyway.
"You're fucking dead!!" Her modulated voice ringing throughout the small shop.
She fired three rounds. I juked hard left, then right, body weaving in fluid, unnatural angles—servo-driven dodges that would snap a human spine. She tried to adjust her aim.
"Stay the fuck back!" she yelled, voice pitching into panic.
But I was already in the air.
One spinning kick, my heel clipping her rifle, bending the barrel like warm taffy.
"What the—?!"
Second kick came instantly after—straight to her chest.
She slammed into the lottery terminal. The machine screamed in protest. She didn't.
Only three of us were left standing—me, the clerk, and the last Wraith.
He was like 45% of the reason I even bothered intervening.
Tall, wiry guy, maybe early twenties. Patchy beard trying its best. Jacket torn at the sleeves, some kind of repurposed Nomad vest over a stained shirt, pants held up by a novelty belt he probably looted off someone with better fashion sense.
Hands up. Eyes wide. Sweating like he'd just run a marathon.
"I—I give up, choom, I swear! I'm done!"
I pointed at him. "Strip."
In his confusion, he let down his hands. "Wha—? But you don't even got a di—"
My uppercut was a thing of pure beauty.
It came from the floor—hips twisting, spine coiling, shoulder rolling forward in a smooth, rising arc. A perfect transfer of force: heel to knee, knee to hips, hips to torso, torso to fist. My knuckles cut through the air with a soft, violent whisper, the kind of sound a blade makes when it knows it's about to matter.
His jaw met the strike at the exact moment my body reached full extension—everything aligned, everything committed.
His feet actually left the floor—two full feet—before he collapsed in a heap, limbs folding like dropped laundry.
The clerk stared at me, mouth open.
I dusted my knuckles.
"Yeah. That's what I fucking thought."