Rogue's message came with coordinates.
A warehouse in Watson. Midnight. No details.
Ash didn't hesitate.
He arrived early, armor cloaked beneath a patchwork poncho. Kira stayed behind, monitoring through a drone. Trust didn't come easy not in Night City.
The warehouse was abandoned on the outside, just another decaying shell in the industrial zone. But inside? Spotlights. Cam-drones. Two turrets mounted high in the rafters, tracking every motion. At the far end stood a bar, freshly stocked. And behind it, her.
Rogue.
Legend. Survivor. Queen of Fixers.
She looked him over as he approached, eyes cold, calculating. A half-smile tugged at her lips.
"You're taller than I expected."
Ash said nothing.
"Silent type, huh?" She poured herself a drink. "I like that. Cuts through the bullshit."
She slid a shard across the bar. "Your work in the Glen clean, clever, and completely off the grid. Not many can take out a rogue signal like that. Fewer do it without chrome."
"I'm not most people," Ash replied.
"No. You're something new. And I don't like new. Too unpredictable." She paused. "But I respect it."
Ash picked up the shard and scanned it. Job details. Location: Pacifica. Target: a forgotten Militech R&D site, sealed during the Corpo Wars. Rumors said it held unfinished tech weaponized nanites, prototype exosuits, maybe even early AI control cores.
The job? Retrieve what's still functional.
"You're not the first I've sent," Rogue said, lighting a smoke. "But you might be the last. Everyone else died or disappeared. You want a shot at something bigger than street scraps? This is it."
Ash slid the shard into his belt. "When do I leave?"
"Right now."
The ride to Pacifica was tense. Rogue provided a stolen Militech transport with false tags. Ash rode solo, his Mark II armor concealed beneath scavenged trooper gear. Inside the transport crate? New parts from Rogue's contacts composite armor plating, micro servos, and, most importantly, an experimental shielding coil.
He arrived at the site by dawn.
The facility was buried beneath collapsed streets. Reaching the sublevels meant clearing wreckage and bypassing ancient defense systems still twitching with unstable power. Kira, connected remotely, warned him of active sentry bots deep below.
"You sure about this?" she asked through comms.
"I don't do doubt," Ash replied.
He breached the inner vaults after hours of cautious movement, laying EMP charges, deploying noise spoofers, and using his new shielding coil to tank one of the bots long enough to crush its core.
In the final chamber, he found it:
A prototype Militech exosuit never deployed, never finished. Armor plating like obsidian. Neural interface incomplete. Power core humming faintly.
Ash grinned beneath his helmet.
This wasn't just tech.
It was the next forge.
He extracted the suit piece by piece, loaded what he could into the crate, and called in the evac signal. As Rogue's transport drone lifted him out of the ruins, he looked down at the smoking remains of the facility.
Every mission was more than a job. It was evolution.
Back in the bunker, Kira helped him integrate the new parts. The exosuit tech became the skeleton of Mark III. Armor shaped not just to protect but to move with him, learn with him. He stripped out the corp signatures, re-coded the subsystems, and for the first time his armor responded like instinct.
"Rogue wants to see you again," Kira said one night, watching him test a gravity dampener built from the Militech suit.
Ash nodded. "Good. That was just the first step."
He wasn't a myth anymore.
He was a player.
And the board had just been flipped.