I went out because the geo-pin sat there, close enough to be a joke, and because staying in my unit with that message sitting on my deck kept pulling my attention back to the port until my jaw started working without permission. Kabuki was still doing its thing behind me, generators buzzing under tarps, a vendor yelling over a busted speaker, exhaust hanging low where the alley narrowed, and the street I walked through looked quieter than usual, which only meant fewer people would bother pretending they cared if something went wrong.

  The pin didn’t drag me into an alley. It led me to a square that felt forgotten, two benches bolted to cracked concrete, a thin strip of grass trapped behind wire, and old lampposts that threw tired light onto patches of repair work and old stains. The market noise sat farther out, softened by distance, and the air still tasted of fryer grease and hot plastic, vents pushing warm breath through gaps between buildings. I’d told myself I was adapting to Night City. My throat still tightened when I stepped into an open space and realized how easy it would be to get seen from every angle.

  He stood under one lamp. Neat suit with red accents stitched where corpo taste liked to brag, tie straight, posture still in a way that read trained. He didn’t look fully converted, but when he turned his head I caught chrome at the base of his skull under the collar line, clean work, money work. He watched me cross the square and didn’t shift his weight. I stopped a few meters out, far enough that nobody could touch me without committing to the move.

  “Jax,” he said.

  No “mister.” No warmth. Just my name, flat, and it landed worse than a threat.

  “Try again,” I said.

  He didn’t blink. He lifted his agent and angled the screen toward me.

  My door log.

  The same service event hole I’d found, but his copy had a nested line my deck hadn’t pulled, extra metadata sitting there as if it belonged. That detail hit harder than it should have. He had more of my door than I did. I forced my eyes back up from the screen.

  “You brought me out here,” I said. “Talk.”

  His mouth moved a fraction, then settled back into polite.

  “You plugged into the reader,” he said. “You went hunting for brute force. You went hunting for failed attempts. You never noticed the touch.”

  “You’re Arasaka,” I said.

  He let silence answer it, and silence was enough.

  He reached into his jacket and produced a shard between two fingers. Plain casing. Tamper film still intact. No branding, no serial, nothing that gave me an origin to chase. He held it out and stayed right where he was.

  “Test,” he said.

  I kept my hand down.

  “What does it do.”

  “Software,” he said. “One run. You give me the output.”

  “I don’t run unknown code,” I said.

  “You do,” he replied, and his eyes flicked toward my pocket where my deck sat. “Doors. Readers. Kiosks. You plugged into that reader after someone edited your logs and you still thought the box was safe.”

  “That door is mine,” I said.

  “That door belongs to whoever owns your lease,” he said. “Maintenance belongs to whoever holds the token.”

  The way he said it made my teeth grind. He wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t need to enjoy it.

  “So it reports back,” I said.

  “It reports,” he corrected, and the clean tone slipped for a second, technical irritation showing through. “One run. After that it’s dead. You don’t copy it. You don’t share it. You don’t hand it to a fixer. You don’t take it to a ripperdoc and ask what it does.”

  “You know Regina,” I said.

  “I know of her,” he said, eyes flicking to my chrome hand, then back to my face. “Keep working with her. Keep moving. Don’t get clever.”

  “You don’t pick my fixers,” I said.

  “We’re not hiring you,” he said. “We’re checking what you are.”

  “And if I refuse.”

  He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t step closer. He just said it, calm enough that my stomach tightened.

  “Then the next SERVICE EVENT won’t be clean,” he said. “You’ll notice it.”

  I looked at the shard. I looked at his hands. I looked at his face. Refusing didn’t feel brave. It felt expensive.

  I took it.

  The casing was warm in my palm. It shouldn’t have been. My fingers twitched once, then steadied.

  “Name,” I said.

  He hesitated, then gave me one.

  “Masamune,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  He turned and walked away the direction he’d come from, shoes quiet on concrete, posture unhurried. I stood in the square for a moment with Arasaka in my pocket and the air still thick in my throat, then I forced my legs to move before I froze into the spot and let my head start spiraling.

  I took the long way back through the crowd. A noodle sign flickered in a puddle. A vent blew heat across my knuckles when I passed too close to a wall. Ads barked at strangers who didn’t look up. People moved around each other without eye contact, and I kept my pace steady because hurrying made you visible in the wrong way.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The reader let me in. The unit was quiet. Techilancer sat on the kitchen table where I’d left it, deck beside it, cables coiled because I’d done that while pissed and hadn’t undone it yet. I took Masamune’s shard out, stared at it, then put it away without running it. He’d told me not from home. I believed he meant it.

  I showered, watched the water run pink from my waist bandage, rewrapped it, and crawled into bed with the Omaha within reach. Sleep came in chunks, broken by heat and the memory of my door log sitting on someone else’s screen.

  Morning came bright. I washed up fast, ate something that barely counted, and laid my gear out on the counter until my hands stopped fidgeting. Talon went into the trunk in its case. The Omaha sat under my jacket. Ammo pressed against my thigh. Quickhacks were queued. Subdermal hummed faint when I flexed. I didn’t feel ready. I went anyway.

  Regina’s pin led me to an old factory on the edge of her turf, concrete and rust, windows punched out, chain-link bent where trucks used to squeeze through. I parked out of sight and did the boring work, cameras, antenna lines, any sign someone inside had a real netrunner instead of a scav with stolen toys. The cameras were live. The angles were lazy. I pinged bodies inside and got eight hits, moving around in separate rooms, scattered.

  I pulled the deck out and stared at Masamune’s shard again. Running unknown code made my skin tighten. Refusing had its own problems. I jacked it in with my jaw clenched, and the deck filled with text I couldn’t read fast enough, my processor choking under the load. A progress bar appeared without explanation, crawled forward, then vanished. The deck gave me one line.

  PACKAGE: ARMED

  Heat climbed behind my eyes. Pressure under my skull. The familiar warning that my neuralware was cheap and I was pushing it anyway. I pocketed the shard and settled Talon into my shoulder.

  The first shot cracked hard and the factory answered with thunder. One of the red blips vanished and the body hit the floor behind the wall with a wet thump I felt in my teeth. Panic erupted. Voices rose. Footsteps scattered. I kept shooting until the movement inside turned into fewer options.

  One of them ran toward the camera node, crouched low, head down. Talon punched through him mid-step. Another blip spiked toward an access point, and my next round ended that attempt before it became anything smarter. The deck pulsed once against my palm through the casing, a small vibration that felt wrong, and I kept my eyes on the scope.

  When the inside went quiet enough that the building’s old hum sounded loud, I backed Talon down and rested it in the trunk with care, shaded and positioned so I could grab it again if something changed. The rifle ran hot when you let it work, and I wasn’t interested in learning maintenance lessons the hard way. My hands stayed steady, but the pressure behind my eyes kept climbing.

  I went in with the Omaha and a slow pace, following the last pings deeper inside, boots crunching over grit and broken glass. The factory smelled of old coolant and rot, metal dust in the air, blood warming fast in stale rooms. The first scav was behind a crate with his shoulders hunched, weapon aimed at a doorway that had already failed him, and my body moved before my thoughts finished lining up. Four shots. Two in torso. One in arm. The last one in his head because my brain wanted certainty.

  Double tap. Zombieland had one rule worth stealing, and this city didn’t forgive sloppy habits.

  DRIFT: MODERATE

  The text hit my vision clean and cold, and my timing slipped by a fraction. A second scav came from the side and my first two rounds tore into metal instead of meat, muzzle climbing harder than it should have, my hand overcorrecting. Murk Man surfaced in my muscle memory and steadied the violence into something efficient, and the next shot caught him in the torso, folding him into the wall with a sound that was more air than anything else. I stepped in and put another round into his head, because I didn’t want him getting back up on a technicality.

  The last one came at me with a polearm hacked from scrap, sharpened point catching light in the dust. He drove it into my chest and it rang off my subdermal with a jolt that flashed pain along my ribs, loud inside my skull. I grabbed the shaft with my chrome hand, felt cheap metal flex, and hit him square in the face with the Raven arm. The punch landed heavy, teeth sprayed, and when he fell I shot him point blank, because I wasn’t gambling on mercy in a room that smelled of butcher work.

  From first shot to last body going still took seventeen minutes. I stood there a moment longer, breathing through my nose, listening to the silence settle, and the pressure behind my eyes kept climbing until my vision threatened to shimmer at the edges.

  The den behind the fight was what I expected and still worse. Tables stained dark. Trays of half-cleaned implants. Bins of cables and bone. The smell hit the back of my throat and stayed there, chemical and human, and I dug anyway, hands working through filth, eyes scanning labels, nausea riding high while I forced myself to keep moving. Scrapwork Protocol didn’t make it clean; it made it quicker, my hands finding seams, my eyes catching inconsistencies that meant value instead of junk.

  After an hour of sorting through barely wiped chrome and used coupling rings, I found a neural processor in a cracked case with Zetatech stamped on the side, higher grade than the trash I was running, and a frontal cortex module sealed in foam with a label that made my stomach unclench.

  SELF-ICE.

  I didn’t trust it. I still wanted it. I bagged both, took photos of the room, grabbed serials where I could, and packaged the proof for Regina. The deck buzzed again, that same small vibration from earlier, and it made my shoulders tighten, because I couldn’t tell whether my hardware was dying or Masamune’s software was touching something it shouldn’t.

  I sent Regina what she needed and kept the message short. Coverage stuttered on the way out, my agent lagging when I tried to confirm the upload, the icon spinning longer than it should have while my head pounded. Her reply didn’t show until I was halfway back to Kabuki.

  **Regina**: Good.

  **Regina**: Payout sent. Keep one piece. Don’t get greedy.

  A beat later, the numbers arrived with the same indifference as always.

  CRED // IN: E$4,800

  CRED // IN: E$1,200

  NOTE: BONUS

  I sat in the car with the engine off and stared at the totals until my shoulders loosened a fraction. Money meant options. Options meant breathing.

  Viktor didn’t ask where I’d been. He took one look at my posture, the way I moved around pain, and told me to sit. He checked the dent in my subdermal, pressed fingers along bruised ribs, clicked his tongue once, and told me I’d gotten lucky in a way that didn’t sound reassuring.

  “Stop trying to tank polearms with your chest,” he said.

  “I didn’t plan it,” I said.

  “You never do,” he replied, tired under the edge. “Your processor is screaming. You keep pushing budget neuralware and you’re going to cook yourself from the inside.”

  “I brought upgrades,” I said, and I placed the bag on his counter as if it might bite.

  He eyed it, then me. “Stolen.”

  “Recovered,” I said.

  He let out a short sound and waved me closer. “Sit still.”

  Misty was in the corner, incense and quiet, eyes steady. She handed Viktor what he needed before he asked, and when our eyes met she gave me a nod that didn’t try to fix anything.

  On the way out, Jackie was coming in, shoulders filling the doorway, grin ready to happen. For a second my chest tightened with something I didn’t want to name. I gave him a nod and kept moving. He nodded back, quick, no questions.

  Back at the unit, I locked up and set the loot on the counter, then pulled up the deck’s file tree and went hunting for whatever Masamune’s package had done while I’d been busy making scavs stop moving. A folder sat there that hadn’t been there before, nested deep under a directory name that looked random until I stared long enough to see the pattern. Inside was a single data dump, compressed tight, and a second file that read as a receipt.

  RUN: COMPLETE

  I opened the dump and recognized the shapes, routing data, device IDs, handshakes, timestamps, but the meaning stayed buried, and the parts that felt important were the parts I couldn’t turn into a clean answer yet. It was proprietary in the way corporate tools always were, built to be used by people who already knew what they were hunting.

  My agent buzzed.

  Unknown caller. No name. No number displayed.

  A line of text appeared on-screen.

  **Masamune**: Send the output. Now.

  I stared at it, then at my deck, then at my own hand resting on cheap plastic and bargain ports, and I held still long enough to hear my breathing again. My thumb hovered over the send button, and a second message arrived beneath the first.

  **Masamune**: You passed the first part. Don’t fail the second.