Ash stood atop a crumbling overpass, armor glinting beneath the harsh neon of a busted billboard. Below him, Night City pulsed violent, alive, desperate. With Kira's help, he'd turned his bunker into a fortress. His armor, now Mark II, was sleeker. Stronger. Reinforced chest plating. Integrated EMP coils. A collapsible forearm blade forged from scavenged Sandevistan spine alloy.
But even fortresses couldn't grow without supply lines.
He needed access. Tech. Credits. Influence.
And that meant stepping out of the shadows.
Kira picked up the signal first encrypted fixer chatter bleeding into the darknet. A local job no one would touch. Heavy risk, high payout. Data retrieval from a derelict Arasaka vault beneath the old Glen subway line. Rumors said the vault was cursed guarded by malfunctioning turrets, dead ICE, and something worse: a ghost signal that fried every netrunner who tried to interface.
"Suicide run," Kira muttered, eyeing the data stream. "But it's your kind of suicide."
Ash didn't hesitate.
The descent into the Glen's ruins was like crawling through a corpse. Rusted train cars. Graffiti-bombed platforms. The deeper they went, the colder it got no airflow, no light. Just the echo of their footsteps.
Ash moved with purpose. Kira hung back, jacked into her portable deck, running interference. Motion sensors were disabled before they triggered. Turrets fried from feedback loops.
But then the signal came.
A low hum.
Like an old modem screaming inside the skull.
Kira winced. "It's broadcasting in layered code. Not ICE. Something else. Like… corrupted net-echoes. It's alive."
Ash pushed forward. Down into the central vault chamber.
And there it was.
A shattered data core, leaking blue static like blood. Around it, three corpses—netrunners with blackened eyes and foaming mouths. The signal pulsed with each breath he took.
Kira staggered. "I can't stay jacked in… it's tearing through my dampeners."
Ash stepped between her and the core.
He didn't rely on chrome.
He didn't need neural links.
He knelt beside the core and opened the access panel manually, ignoring the sparks. Then he pulled a deck from his hip one he'd built from salvaged Arasaka chips, physically isolated from any net link.
He wired it in.
The room screamed.
But the signal began to distort. Stabilize. Ash's HUD lit up with red warnings—but he held fast. Ten seconds. Twenty. The signal broke.
Silence.
Kira opened her eyes, blinking in disbelief.
"You just… broke a digital ghost with a homemade deck and no implants."
Ash stood. The deck in his hand glowed softly. He had the data.
Back at the bunker, they decrypted it. Arasaka subcontracts. Weapon blueprints. A cache list of hidden storage sites scattered across the city one near Pacifica. Another in the Badlands. All off-grid.
Kira whistled low. "You realize what this means, right?"
Ash nodded. "It means we build faster."
He sent an anonymous message to the fixer who posted the job. The file would upload. No names. No trace.
Ten minutes later, 40,000 eddies transferred into an unlisted account.
And more importantly a ping.
From a fixer named Rogue.
"Whoever you are… I'm listening."
Ash stared at the message.
The signal had gone out.
And now, Night City was starting to notice.