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"Amazing, Jax!"
As soon as the call with Babos ended, Jackie let out a triumphant holler from beside Jax. He gripped Jax's shoulder excitedly. "Seven hundred thousand? We're really pulling seven hundred thousand for this?!"
"No, to be precise, it's eight hundred thousand," Maine corrected, his rugged face splitting into a wide, joyous grin. He slapped the roof of the car for emphasis.
"Can you guys dial it back for a second?" Dorio cut in, her voice grounding the group's sudden euphoria. "You all saw them at the road. Those Raffen Shiv were well-equipped, and half of them were packing mid-to-high-tier chrome. They aren't going to just hand that box back because we asked nicely."
"What does that matter?" Jackie countered, his eyes shining. "For eight hundred thousand Eurodollars, I'd fight Adam Smasher himself! I spent years eating dust for scraps—I'm not letting a payout like this walk away."
In the world of Edgerunners, money wasn't just currency; it was the fuel for survival and the price of a legacy. Even Rebecca was nodding along, her green eyes reflecting the hunger for the score. Only Lucy stood apart, her face a mask of cold skepticism.
"Wait," Lucy finally spoke up, her voice cutting through the chatter. "You're actually going to assault a Nightwalker stronghold? For a box of... what, experimental roadkill?"
Maine turned to her, remembering their new addition was still on a trial basis. "Right. Lucy. You're outsourced, so you get a choice. Option one: you stay with us, we hit the base, and I bump your pay to sixty thousand Eurodollars. Option two: you take your eight thousand now and walk. But... you'll have to find your own way back to the city. We need the car."
"Walk back?" Lucy raised an iridescent eyebrow. "I'd be wandering the desert until next Tuesday."
"Well... you could wait here?" Maine's voice trailed off, realizing how absurd that sounded in the middle of a lawless wasteland.
"Kiwi, are you actually doing this?" Lucy asked, ignoring Maine and looking toward the other netrunner. Lucy knew Kiwi as a pragmatist—someone who valued her own skin above almost everything else. She expected Kiwi to back out.
Kiwi took a long, slow drag from her cigarette, the smoke curling around her pink mask. "I'm the netrunner for this squad, Lucy. If I'm not in the chair, who's going to keep their brains from melting? I'm in."
Lucy stared at her friend, stunned. Since when did Kiwi become a team player?
"We won't be fighting them in the open this time," Jax added, stepping toward Lucy. "We choose the time. We choose the angle. I know how to navigate a base, and with my speed, they won't even see the blade coming."
Jax had every reason to be confident. With his Potential Burst skill, his physical stats reached heights that even high-end borgs struggled to match. In thirty seconds, he could turn a room full of hostiles into a memory.
"Sixty thousand," Lucy stated, her emerald eyes locking onto Maine's. "Fifty for the risk, eight for the original job, and the two-thousand-euro bonus you promised at the start."
"Done!" Maine didn't hesitate. A high-stakes assault needed a high-stakes netrunner.
Jax walked back to the open "ice coffin." He looked at the contents that had nearly cost them their lives. It wasn't just vegetables. Tucked beneath the greens were the carcasses of a hyena and a black cat—both fitted with specialized Arasaka cyberware. These weren't pets; they were living prototypes for experimental urban surveillance or bio-weaponry.
"What about the produce?" Maine asked.
"Dump it," Jackie said. "Babos is a suit; if he sees a bruised leaf, he'll try to dock our pay. We're here for the chrome and the data."
The plan was set. They wouldn't strike in the heat of the day. They spent the afternoon tracking the heavy tire treads through the silt until they found the Raffen Shiv hideout—an abandoned pre-war industrial factory nestled in a rocky canyon ten kilometers away.
As night fell, they gathered in the shadow of a large rock outcropping, the factory's floodlights cutting through the darkness like cold teeth.
"Same as always?" Maine asked, checking the charge on his hand cannon.
Jax nodded, pulling a black beanie over his hair. "Wait for my signal."
"Jax, move to the left perimeter," Kiwi's voice echoed in his head. "The main gate is a kill zone with three active turrets. But the left wall is blind. It's three meters high—think you can handle it?"
"Piece of cake," Jax replied.
He moved through the shadows with the silent, predatory grace of a wraith. He reached the wall, pushed off with an explosive burst of strength, and cleared the barbed wire in a single vault. He landed in a silent roll behind a stack of rusted oil drums.
"Lucy, take over his feed," Kiwi commanded. "You're the expert on internal mapping."
"Access granted," Jax whispered.
"Initiating link. Stay still, I need to calibrate your visual sensors," Lucy's cool voice filled his mind.
Jax felt a strange prickle at the base of his neck. Compared to Sasha's playful, warm presence in his mind, Lucy was clinical and distant. He found himself briefly missing the "little cat" and her mischievous smile. If Sasha were here, she'd be ghosting beside him.
But he shook off the distraction. He looked toward the heart of the factory, where the stolen refrigerator was likely being picked apart by Raffen techs.
The midnight raid had officially begun.
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