The terminal's death rattle lingered like a bad omen. Smoke coiled around Carl's fists, the acrid stench of burnt circuits clawing at his throat.
Across the room, Julio's shallow breaths synced with the flickering overhead light—a metronome counting down to disaster. Jackie adjusted the kid's deadweight over his shoulder, Saints necklace clinking like loose ammunition.
"Hermanos, we got maybe five minutes before whoever owns those tin cans comes knocking. Vámonos."
Oliver kicked aside a scav's severed mantis blade, its edge still glistening with synth-blood. "ACPA? Here? Fuck. Those things eat Copperheads for breakfast."
[ACPA]
Assault Combat Power Armor. Walking tanks with enough firepower to level a block. Favored by corpo black-ops and anyone rich enough to ignore the Fourth Corporate War's "demilitarization" clauses. Price tag? More than your life.
Carl's Kenshin hovered over the terminal's corpse, its coils humming like a pissed-off hornet. "Militech's missing prototypes. Scavs didn't jack these—someone's laundering chrome through gutter trash." His neural interface pinged—a grainy holo of a wolf's-head emblem flickered. UNKNOWN AFFILIATION. "Chingado. So we stumbled into a corpo proxy war?" Jackie shifted Julio's limp form, eyeing the door. "Can we please discuss this after escaping the killbox?"
Oliver's ocular implant flickered gold as he scanned the hallway, the faint whine of NCPD sirens bleeding through the walls. "Patrol AV logged a 'disturbance' two blocks out. They'll be scraping scav guts off the walls in three minutes."
"Perfect." Carl ejected the Kenshin's spent mag, the clatter of metal echoing down the stairwell. "Let's gift-wrap this shitstorm for the badges."
The stairwell reeked of piss and paranoia, the air thick with the tinny echo of a joytoy's BD stream bleeding through the vents. Julio's sneaker dragged against concrete, leaving a smeared trail of synth-dope and blood. Jackie froze mid-step, his chrome-plated knuckles tightening around the kid's arm. "Oye. Hear that?"
A low, tectonic groan shuddered through the building—steel bending, concrete cracking. Dust rained from the ceiling, catching in the flickering emergency lights like fractured snow. Oliver shoved Carl toward a fire exit, his voice sharp over the rising whine of engines. "AV landing! Move!"
They burst onto the rooftop just as an NCPD Aerodyne screamed overhead, its searchlights carving through the smog like monofilament blades. Below, the street boiled with patrol cruisers and rubberneckers, their faces upturned like scavengers circling fresh meat. Carl's retinal HUD tagged a black van idling in the alley—Faraday's extraction team, its windows tinted darker than a Scav's conscience. "Delivery's here."
Jackie hesitated, Julio's head lolling against his shoulder. "What about the ACPA intel? That wolf-head shit's gotta be worth—"
"Not our circus." Carl tossed a scrambler grenade into the stairwell. It detonated with a pop, frying cameras and filling the corridor with static. "Faraday wants the kid, not a corpo war. Let the badges clean up the rest."
The van stank of antiseptic and desperation, its interior lit by the cold glow of a ripperdoc's spider-leg optics. The doc jabbed a hypospray into Julio's neck without ceremony, the kid's eyelids fluttering like moth wings. "He'll live. Kidneys intact—mostly."
Oliver slumped against the bulletproof glass, his Nova revolver still smoking in its holster. Outside, the city blurred into a neon hemorrhage, the Aerodyne's spotlights shrinking to pinpricks. "ACPA in scav dens… Night City's proper fucked now."
Carl scrolled through the salvaged data shard, the van's uneven tires jolting the hologram. Grainy footage flickered—wolf-head emblems stamped on armored titans, hydraulic limbs crushing concrete like eggshells. SANDEVISTAN pulsed in his HUD, the text bloody and bold.
[SANDEVISTAN]
Neural accelerant that bends time—for 12 seconds. Side effects include cardiac rupture and existential dread. Standard issue for ACPA pilots.
Jackie cracked a stolen X-Cola, the fizz drowning out the ripperdoc's muttered diagnostics. "So… prosthetics vs. power armor? Which wins?"
"Corpos." Carl crushed the shard, sparks dancing in his palm like dying fireflies. "Always the fucking corpos."
The van swerved into a tunnel, plunging them into artificial night. Somewhere in the rearview, a wolf's-head emblem glowed through the smog—hungry, patient, and very much alive.