Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

I hummed the Pink Panther theme song as Zion and I strolled down Rovinj Road, trying to appear like two dudes out for a leisurely walk. The memory of a Youtube video I once watched stuck in my mind. It was about the famous international jewel thief crew, The Pink Panthers, and I wondered if our little crew could ever pull off heists like that. Their plans were brilliant, and they had made off with millions worth of jewels. My crew right now was more into smash-and-grabs than jewel thievery, and in Night City, most high-end jewelry stores were in the City Center, which was an area I wasn’t too familiar with. Hell, I didn’t even know if the Pink Panthers were a thing in this world, or if they only existed in my past life. It was doubtful that my little crew would be able to match their talents at this time.

I thought about that as I walked, with Zion at my side. To my right was an apartment building that towered above the street, its bottom floor noticeably smaller than the ones above it. I think they called it a cantilever façade, and it gave the whole thing a weird look. I didn’t focus too much on the apartment building though, instead peaking down at the alley behind the apartment and making note of the small gang that was working there.

We had got a tip about a gang that had recently moved into the apartment. What was surprising, was that the tip didn’t’ come from my time scoping out the Ho-oh club. Instead, John had provided us with this lead. Over the past two weeks, while I’d been setting up small gigs for our crew, John had been building a network of homeless lookouts based out of the alcove. Mor had introduced him around, and John chatted with people and talked them into passing along any interesting information they came across during their daily routines. This particular gang we were planning on hitting had recently moved into the area and had started robbing transport trucks in Watson, Arroyo, and Santo Domingo, stashing their stolen goods in the two garages set into the back of the apartment building.

John had become fairly proficient in organizing everything for our little crew. Whenever one of the homeless in the alcove got a tip, John would verify it and pass it on to me. I’d then have to decide whether to give the information to the cops – making them look good while collecting a 10% fee from the raid which I’d slip to Mor and the alcove – or our crew would handle the job ourselves. Either way, the homeless from the alcove earned bounties from all the information they provided. The bounties weren’t much, only about 2k eddies or so, but it was good money for simply keeping their eyes and ears open. John made sure to warn them not to brag about how much they were making, keeping everything low-key.

Tonight, we had decided to take out this small gang ourselves. I let my eyes wander down to the U-shaped alley that encircled the apartment building and counted the gang members hanging around. Six in total: three in the garages, cataloging all the boxes and shipments they’d grabbed, and three in the alley to the right of the building, pulling security detail. I pushed all that information to Diego and Deng.

Noah: six targets, three in the alley, three in the garages

Zion put a hand on my arm to get me to slow down and bent down as if tying his shoes. Instead, he unslung the bag on his shoulder and opened it, reaching inside to assemble the DA8 Umbra it held. It wasn’t the best gun around, but we’d picked it up after the Scav raid and it was a lot more compact than his normal Nekomata sniper rifle.

Over the past two weeks, Zion had become a lot less antagonistic towards me. He still looked down on me somewhat, but it was more due to his belief I wasn’t training enough with my weapons, and less because he thought I was completely useless. Like Deng and Diego, he was trying to make me a more lethal and better merc. He just had a different way of going about it.

Diego: two seconds out.

I focused on the three guys in the alley and sent a sonic shock their way, one of the quickhacks I got from Yoko and had been practicing with. Fighting through the ICE on their neuroports was difficult. My Fuyutsuki Electronics Mk. 1 was…well it was a piece of outdated shit. The upload took too long, and as soon as I tried to breach the ICE on the three gangsters, they were alerted. I knew that a window had popped up in their vision, letting them know someone was trying to hack their neuroports and send a quickhack their way. They quickly zeroed in on me – how could they not? A random guy staring at them while a window popped up in their vision telling them they were getting hacked screamed: that’s the guy right there, get him.

Zion popped up from where he’d been kneeling, the Umbra tucked into his shoulder, and squeezed off a few rounds at the guys standing by the garage. The shot was clean, and one of the gang members crumpled to the ground. The other two by the garage, panicked at the sudden attack, turned and ran.

Almost simultaneously, Anna’s Archer Hella turned the corner and sped into the alley. She barreled into one of the three guys I’d attempted to sonic shock. Diego leaned out of the windows, opening up with his shotgun. He’d recently upgraded from a simple Tactician to a Militech Crusher, a magazine-fed semi-auto shotgun. The blasts from his Crusher cut down one of the sentries, and my sonic shock finally hit the other two. Their faces contorted in pain from the loud noises blaring from their internal Agents, stunning them long enough for Diego to take out a second sentry and for Anna to hop out of her car and gun down the one she hit.

The two remaining gangsters by the garage had long ago bolted. They had seen Anna’s car rush into the alley, and they ran in the opposite direction, smart enough that a more deadly crew had come to steal their goods. Unfortunately for the two of them, our crew had all their escape avenues covered. When they turned the corner and disappeared from my sight, I heard gunfire: a rifle and an overpowered shotgun.

Deng and Cyndi had been stationed in the alley on the opposite side of the apartment building. I was glad that I let Diego handle all our tactics. If we had gone with my idea of sending in both teams in a pincer attack on the gang, we would have risked everyone getting caught in the crossfire. Instead, the two gangsters rushed right into an ambush and were cut down.

“Nice work,” I said, nodding to Diego and Anna as I hopped down into the alley from the road and passed the bodies of the three sentry’s they’d taken out. We all fell in step as we moved to the garage doors the other three guys had been working at, and I gave Cyndi and Deng a nod as they approached from the other end of the alley. “Let’s see what they were hiding.”

A quick (relatively) signal from my cyberdeck to the electronic lock on the garage door unlocked it, and we rolled up the door to reveal a stash of stolen goods. Boxes of electronics, crates of high-end tech, and various other valuables were piled high. It was a significant haul, much more than I had anticipated.

“Jackpot,” grinned Deng.

Diego rushed off to grab his van and pulled it up to the garage while the rest of us started loading gear into it. It was a good haul, and our crew would need to spend the next two days or so unloading everything. We’d been using a mix of Regina, Marcus from the ‘Dime-a-duzz’ in my apartment building, and John to sell off all the gear and items we’d been picking up from our various jobs around Watson. Because of that, we’d been able to make some pretty good money over the past two weeks.

The info that Anna passed along to the cops also paid, but it was more in favors than in eddies. Anna had already received two tips about Scav raids targeting homeless encampments in North Watson. She, Deng, and Diego had successfully dealt with those. The raid against the camp under Ross Street had been the largest, and ever since we shut that down, the Scavs had only been able to muster up a single van for each attack.

Anna, Diego, and Deng were more than enough to handle the smaller attacks. And if they weren’t, we’d also been slowly arming a few of the homeless in the camps to give us a few extra shooters when the Scavs appeared. As a result, the homeless camps in North Watson had gradually become more militarized and protected. Mor mentioned that a small militia of homeless had started to form, adding an extra layer of security to the area.

As we finished loading the van, Deng turned to me, wiping the sweat from his brow. “This was a lot more than we thought they had. It’ll take a few days to fence all this stuff.”

I nodded in agreement. Diego’s van was now packed with boxes and gear, and we had even stuffed a bunch of stuff in Anna’s Archer Hella. Her trunk was filled, and a few pieces of tech had made their way into her backseat.

“That works for me. I’ve got a couple things I need to buy, and those few days will give me a chance to spend some of the eddies we’ve earned.”

Deng raised an eyebrow, a smirk playing on his lips. “Finally gonna get your precious Kusanagi?”

I groaned and shook my head. “No. I wish, but no. I’m thinking I need to upgrade my cyberware a bit first. My cyberdeck OS is a piece of shit. It’s outdated and barely gets the job done, so I’m thinking I’ll get something newer installed. Maybe something else too, depending on how much it’ll run me.”

While the cyberdeck wasn’t as OP in real life as it was in the game, it was still one of my favorite tools. I hadn’t been doing as much heist work as when I had been working alone, the crew offering a lot more firepower. We mostly just hammered places with superior power. Diego, Deng and Anna were too much for small gangs to handle. But the fact my sonic shock barely worked on the three guys in the alley meant I needed to desperately upgrade my cyberdeck. Plus, if I was being honest, I liked learning about netrunning. It had given our crew its first little boost. It’s what allowed me to find all those early gigs we’d been doing.

Diego wandered over to Deng and I, having finished checking the garage one last time for anything we might have missed.

“You’re talking about getting new cyberware? Good. You’re still not as dangerous as you could be. Cyndi’s also looking to add some stuff,” he said, joining the conversation. “It’s all she wants to talk about lately.”

Diego turned to me. “You got a ripper already? I can introduce you to someone good if you don’t.”

“I got someone. His name is Vik and he works over kinda near Lizzie’s. He’s the only ripper for me,” I said with a smile on my face. Vik was good people, and I didn’t have any plans on giving my business to anyone else.

“Mind taking Cyndi with you? She’s got enough squirreled away that she can pick out a few things. Again, she hasn’t stopped asking questions about what chrome would be a good fit for her.”

I nodded in agreement, although I couldn’t help but feel a bit wary when it came to getting too close with Cyndi. Sure, she had calmed down a lot since I’d rescued her from Jotaro’s playroom. I could see Diego’s influence in that. He treated her almost like a daughter, teaching her how to defend herself and how to use the Satara shotgun she always carried around. The transformation was noticeable; she was more composed, more focused.

But I could still sense the rage that lay just beneath the surface. It bubbled up from time to time when we were on jobs. It made sense – whatever she had endured in the playroom couldn’t have been good. The horrors she experienced were likely beyond my imagination.

I watched as Diego split off from us and went over to chat with Cyndi. They shared a laugh while loading the last of the stolen gear into the van. Diego’s presence was a stabilizing force for her, and for that, I was grateful. Yet the lingering anger in her eyes wasn’t something I could ignore. It was like a storm that was brewing just out of sight, and I wondered if it would ever truly dissipate or if we’d all get swept up in its wake. Diego had calmed some of her bloodlust, but I figured it was only a matter of time before it burst free.

Another reason for my wariness to spend time with Cyndi was that she, along with Anna, were the only two people to know about my biggest secret. Well…Vik knew. But I had bribed him with so much cyberware that he was never going to say anything. That night outside of Jotaro’s playroom, when I’d morphed my face using the behavioral imprint face implant, Cyndi had seen everything. I hadn’t used the implant since as there hadn’t been a cause to. But the fact she knew something so personal and potentially dangerous about me made me wary.

I felt like I could trust Anna. I’d fed her Jotaro and 8yaga and countless other pieces of shit who stalked Night City looking for victims. She basically saw me as a bad guy detector and was willing to keep my secrets in exchange for helping her to knock off a couple rapists and thieves and killers. But with Cyndi…I didn’t know what she wanted.

Once we finished packing everything up, we all went our separate ways. Diego and Cyndi were driving the van back to the WNS building where they’d store everything, and Deng and Zion went to speak with a few contacts they had who might be interested in the goods we grabbed. I watched as Diego and Cyndi piled into the van and noticed as Cyndi looked back at me. She caught my eye, gave a brief nod, and then looked away.

The next day, Cyndi and I met outside Vik’s clinic just as the sun began to rise over Night City, casting a faint glow over the bustling streets. She was quiet as I made an appointment with Misty for the both of us. There was a nervous energy about her. I knew it was her first time getting chrome – beyond the initial install package that most people get when they’re young – and I could see her fretting over her choices.

Once inside the clinic, Vik greeted us with his usual laid-back demeanor. “Hey kids. What can I do for you today?”

Cyndi spoke first, mumbling a quick, “set of mantis blades.”

Vik nodded. “Good call. Deadly and efficient. Seems like they would work for you. How about you Noah?”

“I need an upgrade for my cyberdeck,” I said. “And since Cyndi is getting mantis blades, I figure I could use some more firepower too.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Monowire,” I said with a grin.

Vik raised an eyebrow at that. “Interesting choice. Not the most popular of weapons. It’s a versatile piece of chrome, but it requires some skill to handle properly. You sure about that?”

I nodded. “Yea, I’ve done some research on it. Got a chip from someone which should keep me from dicing myself to pieces.”

Tech in the cyberpunk world was strange. When Vik had done my initial install of cyberware, he gave me two chip slots on the side of my neck. They looked like USB ports, and I figured they were mostly a place to slot in information chips. They were much more useful than that though. There were chips that companies provided to help people handle various weapons, giving an almost instinctual level of proficiency, akin to muscle memory, that allowed users to master new tools and weapons quickly.

Construction workers got chips to handle heavy machinery, chefs had chips that would increase their knife skills, and mercs got chips that would help them use guns. When I had first heard about the chips, I thought back to the anime and that guy that David fights in the Arasaka Academy. He had a combat chip that meshed with his implants, letting him fight like an MMA veteran. The chip I bought from Yoko was a basic one that would give me some proficiency in the monowire.

I was still a little wary about the weapon though. It was my favorite piece of cyberware in the game, and I’d often do playthroughs using only a cyberdeck and monowire. But what if I accidentally whipped myself? In the game, the monowire could easily decapitate people and slice off limbs. What happens if I screwed up and couldn’t control the thin piece of metal?

I found out that I didn’t have to worry too much. There were safety measures for users. When Vik installed my monowire, he also installed ceramic pads on my hands and forearms that let me handle the thin piece of metal. To turn the wire into a cutting tool, I needed to activate its internal battery. Without using the battery, hitting someone with the monowire would be like whipping them with fishing line. It might sting them a little, but it wouldn’t actually do anything.

The install of Cyndi and my cyberware took most of the rest of the day. After all the surgery was done, Vik ordered us to sit in Misty’s shop for a few hours to make sure that there were no problems that suddenly popped up. Cyndi and I settled into two of the chairs in her shop, and then just remained silent.

The silence stretched on for what felt like hours, but was probably only a brief moment. It was so awkward, and all I could think about while sitting next to her was: I should ask her a few questions and get to know her. But the longer I didn’t talk, the weirder it got. And soon, it was weird that I kept not talking to her.

“So, mantis blades?” I finally asked, not able to come up with anything better to say.

She nodded. “Yea. Figure they’ll make me more dangerous. More able to protect John and me. He’s…he needed a lot of help after everything. I figure, with us having gone through the same shit, I can help take care of him. He feels safe with me.” She blushed at the last statement, probably embarrassed by her maternal instincts for a guy who was barely two years younger than her.

“Found family,” I said. “That’s what he is to you. I understand. Fred, Mor and Deng all helped me out when I first got to the city, and I’d do anything for them.”

“Family,” Cyndi muttered, her voice barely audible. The conversation lapsed into silence once more until she spoke up again. “You know, I was with the Aldecaldos before all this.”

“The Nomads? What happened?” I wanted to ask her if she knew Saul or Panam, but that would have led to an awkward conversation about how I knew those two names. “It’s relatively unusual to find an Aldecaldo in Night City alone.”

“Yea, well…they went on about family and freedom, but they treat the concept of family like a cage,” she said bitterly. “I wanted to visit Night City, but they kept telling me they were trying to keep me safe and that I should think about what the family needed. I felt stifled. Whenever I wanted to do something for myself, they always brought it back to the family and how it would affect the family and how I needed to make sure the family was put first. It was suffocating.”

“That’s why you came to the city.”

“Yea. I wanted to be free. I wanted to make my own choices, and not be tied down to any group. And, of course, on my first day here, I got kidnapped and passed off to that monster,” she paused, looking at me intently. “I was drugged the night you rescued me from the playroom. It was a lot of stuff. I don’t know what exactly they gave me, but…I remember everything else clearly.”

She waited for me to understand what she was saying. The implant.

“I remember watching as a young woman killed the monster who tortured me and then helped me escape from that hell hole. But it turns out, that I was actually rescued by a young man.” She glanced over at me before looking straight ahead and lowering her voice. “I haven’t told anyone about that night. Not John. Not Diego. Nobody. And I never will.”

I felt a wave of relief hit me. “Thanks. I…it’s not something everyone knows about.”

“I get it,” she nodded. “We all have our secrets.”