Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

As I left the NCART station in Heywood, I texted Anna to let her know to be ready and then strolled in the direction of my destination. I didn’t want to look too eager in my walk as I didn’t know if my target had eyes on the area around her little hideout. Deng had already texted me, telling me he was in position. Fred, like the extrovert he so clearly was, knew a couple people out in Heywood, and he tasked them with taking care of Deng. If everything went according to plan, Deng wouldn’t even need to be involved in this hit.

I passed Ford Street and kept walking for half a block before turning right and strolling up the slight incline into the homeless camp. The glow of a fire gave everything a slight orange hue and silhouetted a small shack surrounded by trash bags. Deng was off to the right, sharing a drink with a few of the homeless Fred knew. He shot me a quick shake of the head, letting me know nobody had left the shack since he’d got there. I looked around and made a show of picking through a few of the trash bags near the shack, trying to find something I could sell to a street vendor.

I wasn’t decked out in the solo jacket Deng had bought me. That would have made me stand out too much. Instead, I was wearing simple clothes left over from my homeless days. I looked exactly like I did a few months ago when I had still been scrounging through trash bags and selling my findings up at the Roundabout, except maybe a little healthier.

I had left my Chao in my apartment, instead opting for the Kenshin in a holster at my waist that I hid with an oversized shirt that hung mid-way to my thighs. I bent down, rifled through a trash bag, and let my right hand settle on my Kenshin. I slowly unholstered it and charged it up before glancing at the corrugated metal shack in front of me.

It was difficult remembering the exact layout of the place, but I guessed at it and overlayed my estimate onto what I was seeing in front of me. I could remember an entrance room you had to walk through before getting into the netrunner cave. A server hugged the right wall of the room, the cages were shoved against the wall on the left, and the netrunner chair should be about…there.

I whipped up the fully charged Kenshin and fired off three rounds. I charged again, aiming a little to the right of my initial shots and fired, and then did the same a little to the left. That should be enough.

I tossed the trashbag I had been rifling through to the side and made my way to the rear of the shack. There was a small hole in the side of the building that I could crouch through, keeping my Kenshin aimed in front of me. I entered the shack, a disgusting looking mattress laid out in front of me. The place reeked and I had to fight the urge to vomit or run screaming. I quickly moved to the next room and came face to face with exactly what I expected.

Two cages, sitting atop each other, hugged the far wall. A guy who had been bound and gagged in the cage was woken up by my shooting into the shack. As soon as he saw me, relief filtered into his eyes, and I heard his muffled pleas to be released.

In front of the cages, splayed out on a dilapidated netrunner chair, was my target: 8yaga. She was decked out in a black netrunner suit with bright yellow piping, and I noticed it was my second three-round burst that had killed her. The rest of my shots had punched through the thin metal wall of the shack and kept going. Thankfully, Deng had been outside to make sure nobody was standing in front of the shack when I started firing.

Noah: She’s down. Let me deal with Yoko’s thing first, and then you can call in the cavalry.

Anna: K

I crossed to the server in the room and inserted a shard Yoko had given me. It would open a remote connection to the server and let her download everything. She had promised to pay for any useful information she extracted from 8yaga’s servers, and offered to give me copies of any interesting daemons she found. I desperately needed to upgrade my netrunning arsenal and hoped that Yoko would find something good.

After slotting the shard into the server, I texted Yoko the go-ahead. When she was done, I let Anna know everything had been taken care of and she made a call to a cop she knew who worked the Heywood beat. I motioned for the guy in the cage to stay calm, reassuring him that help was on the way, and then crawled out of the shack back the way I came in.

Deng was outside to greet me, and I let him know everything had gone smoothly. He introduced me to a few of the people from the camp and we all got to talking, waiting for the cops to stop on by. Moments later a cop car sped into the homeless camp. Two officers emerged, guns drawn, and approached the shack. Deng rolled his eyes at the theatrics, but I understood their need to capture the drama on camera – proof that they had taken down the big bad netrunner. The video would probably be released to N54, and the police commissioner would be interviewed about the valiant efforts of the NCPD to make the streets of Night City safer.

We watched as the cops busted down the door of the shack and fired three performative shots into 8yaga’s corpse. I joined Deng in rolling my eyes at that.

After the cops locked down the scene and called in backup, Anna arrived and came over to where Deng and I were lounging around. The first badges on the scene had radioed in that they had cracked a major case and needed additional support, and the homeless camp was soon swarmed with people from the NCPD. It was a play for the few media who had shown up at the camp, snapping pictures and grabbing video for the story they’d run. An ambulance arrived to pull the guy from the cage, and I watched with relief as he was taken away, grateful the cops wouldn’t let him die in that filthy shack. You never could be too sure with the NCPD.

Under the guise of ‘gathering witness statements,’ one of the officers who had ‘killed’ 8yaga came over to talk with us. All she really wanted to do was thank Anna for the tip.

“She was straight scum. We found bones in there that were…I’m gonna need a drink after this,” said Officer Jenson. I kept quiet, fading into the background while Anna chatted with the badge. She knew how to handle them, what with having been one just a short while ago. “You wouldn’t believe what the cyber guys are pulling from her server. Looks like she was luring kids into her shack, jacking them into cyberspace, and pushing them past the Blackwall. I have no clue what the whole point of that would be, but one of the cyber guys said she was probably working under the misguided belief that the RABIDs wouldn’t take out an innocent.”

“I heard there was a guy in a cage with her,” said Anna. “He was older than a kid. What was he doing?”

“Yea,” sighed Officer Jenson. “He’s the older brother of one of her victims. Tracked her down and was going to get revenge, but she captured him and kept him in the cage. It’s some sick shit.”

Anna looked over at me, a note of disgust in her face. I simply gave her a nod and turned back to continue chatting with Deng. She had joined up with me to chase down the bad guys, and thanks to countless hours and replays of Cyberpunk 2077, I knew where all the bad guys were.

“Cyber’s been hunting her for years,” said Jenson. “What do I tell them when they ask how I found her?”

Anna patted her on the back. “Simple. Just tell them you had some contacts in the homeless community who gave you tips about a big bad using that shack, and you staked the place out on your off-duty hours.”

Officer Jenson nodded vigorously as if just saying it made the story true, then she broke into a grin. “You know this means a detective badge for me. I can’t thank you enough.”

“You earned it,” said Anna. “But if you really want to thank us, give us a heads up when dispatch lets you know a neighborhood in North Watson is off limits.”

“You got it,” said Jenson.

Deng and I waved our goodbyes to a few people from the camp before piling into Anna’s car. Once again, I cursed myself for not having gone car shopping, though in fairness, I’d been busy over the past week.

Our plan to defend the North Watson homeless camps hinged on the idea that the NCPD had foreknowledge about which camps were going to be hit. Anna had explained that dispatch would warn officers when to not answer calls in specific neighborhoods. They’d do that when the higher-ups had made deals with Scavs. It kept cops and Scavs from clashing and gave the Scavs a window when they could attack homeless camps with impunity. If we could get that same information, we could set up ambushes for any Scav targeting the homeless.

But to get that information, we needed favors to call in with the police force. Since Anna’s rise through the ranks had ruffled more than a few feathers, she didn’t have a whole lot of people to reach out to who might have the info we needed. The best way to get friends on the force was to make people look good and boost their arrest records.

There were rumors that the NCPD was going to be firing half the officers in Night City. City Hall was claiming their budget was bloated and they weren’t doing enough for all the money they wasted. To ensure they weren’t the ones on the chopping block, tons of badges were trying to increase their arrest numbers and write more tickets.

We drove back to North Watson, where we’d been camping out. Diego had the bright idea that having a small crew in the neighborhood could lead to a quicker response against any threats coming from the Scavs.

It had taken a few days of scouting the area for a place to crash, but we eventually found a spot in the old WNS building where Regina used to work. I remembered the building from one of the gigs she hired V for. She wanted a former colleague pulled from the building and stuffed in a car. He was a media who had pissed off the wrong person, and V needed to get him somewhere safe. I remembered it because it was a nightmare mission for everyone except netrunners due to the number of mines and turrets the guy had set up.

WNS had shuttered the building about a year ago, opting to instead rent a few offices in the Glen for their reporters. WNS was a wire service, which meant they were a news organization whose clients were other news companies. They sent medias out to gather information, packaged it all together with some fancy graphics and videos, and sold the finished product to a news agency. WNS likely decided they didn’t need such a large space to house all their reporters, and with how North Watson had declined in recent years, they probably figured it was safer – or cheaper for insurance purposes – to shutter the building and move their reporters elsewhere.

Their loss was our gain as it was easy to jimmy open the locks of the building and clear it. The power was off and there was no running water, but those were simple issues to fix. Zion had some skills with jerry rigging stuff together and I was able to tap into the city power grid. Soon enough, we had the lights working again and a place to call our own up in North Watson.

“So, how did you know about her?” Anna asked once we had parked the car and were safely ensconced in the WNS building. “You heard Jenson. She said cybercrime had been hunting 8yaga for years.”

I hesitated at the question. I couldn’t exactly tell her that I had come across 8yaga’s body numerous times in all my playthroughs. Ever since they added the legendary clothing items to the game, that shack had been one of the first stops I made as soon as the city opened in Act 2. I always made sure to head there to grab the legendary netrunning outfit 8yaga wore.

No matter how much 8yaga had invested in her anonymity and defense, all that meant nothing against my near encyclopedic knowledge of Night City’s hidden gems. Thanks to reading some random reddit post years back, I knew how to find the legendary netrunner outfit and 8yaga’s hard-won anonymity amounted to nothing.

“Uh, I think I just attract crazy,” I lied as I nodded to Deng who rolled his eyes at me. “I came across info on her when I was shut up in my apartment a few months ago. I was hanging around netrunner messenger boards and I was reaching out to anyone who could help me with netrunning. I think she contacted me, or I contacted her…can’t be sure. And she was super creepy. I think she was trying to lure me into her cave. If I didn’t know any better, it probably would have been me in one of those cages. I was going to check her out, but then the whole Jotaro thing came up and I’ve been busy ever since. This was my first chance to do something about her since then.”

“You do attract a certain sort,” said Diego. “First it was Peter Pan, and now this 8yaga chick. Remind me not to hang out with you too much. People’ll think I’m trying to coax you into a creepy van or something.”

I laughed good naturedly, hoping that Anna wouldn’t keep poking into how I was able to find all the creeps in Night City. Peter Pan was the name the NCPD used for the serial killer in River Ward’s quest chain. I told Anna that he had tried to get in touch with me while I was hanging around the messenger boards, and I was able to track his IP address from a video file he sent me.

Sure, I was stealing the plotline from River’s quest to sell my lie about him, but Anna believed me and passed off the information to a few badges she knew. The next day, the news was filled with stories about how the NCPD had finally caught Peter Pan and saved two kids from his weird cow torture chamber farm.

“We hear anything from our new cop friends?” I asked Anna.

“Nothing yet. We’ve got people listening to dispatch, so as soon as they get the word a neighborhood is off-limits, we’ll know.”

I sighed, not wanting to just sit around while the Scavs were out there planning to hit another homeless camp. Diego noticed my unease and patted me on the shoulder.

“Waiting is part of the game. We’ve been busy the past week, and we’ll get forewarning before another attack comes. We’ve got the locations of all the large homeless camps in North Watson. As soon as we get the word, we’ll make our move.”

“Yea, I know.”

Our crew had been incredibly busy over the past week. The Jotaro gig had earned me a list of gambling dens, pachinko parlors, “massage” rooms, and gun runners working with small-time gangs in Watson, and I traded a substantial amount of that information to the NCPD for favors and a cut of the spoils. Anna got in touch with a few cops she trusted, and she passed on the information I had about all the small gangs operating in the area. Every time the NCPD made a raid based off one of my tips, our crew would get a 10% cut of everything they seized.

If a bust netted the NCPD 50,000 eddies in contraband, we pocketed a tidy 5,000 of it. This arrangement not only lined our pockets with minimal effort, but it also provided us with a thin layer of protection. The cops whose careers were boosted and wallets were padded due to our information had a vested interest in keeping our operation running smoothly. They also paid us with information, and they weren’t the only ones.

Earlier in the week, I contacted Regina Jones to let her know about a ripper in Kabuki working with the Scavs. Charles Bucks was a small-time ripper who had a few of her mercs as clients. In the game, Regina gave out a mission to track a laptop that V finds in a Scav den below Charles’ clinic. If you poke through his emails, its easy to learn he was stripping cyberware from randoms who ended up on his operating table and then funneling the goods through the Scavs. When I let Regina know about that, she wasn’t too happy to find the ripper she sent her mercs to was in bed with the Scavs. The day after I tipped her off, Charles disappeared, his clinic was shuttered, and Regina called to let me know she owed me a favor.

“What about when we get the call? Are we going to be ready?”

Zion grinned. “Don’t you worry. Got a bunch of new toys from our gigs, and I’m eager to try a few out.” He disappeared into one of the back rooms of the WNS building and returned lugging a giant crate. When he opened it, I peered over his shoulder and saw the crate was filled with weapons and gear.

“Jesus, what the hell is all this?” I asked, pulling a DB-2 Satara out of the crate. It was a double-barrel shotgun with electromagnetic rails jerry-rigged onto the barrels to give the slugs it fired a little more oomph. I never used shotguns in the game, instead relying on either a katana or pistols, but holding the Satara in my hands, I could see the appeal of it. It felt…dangerous.

“This is the result of all our hard work,” said Deng as he came over to check the crate. “While you and Anna have been kicking back with the NCPD, the rest of us have been putting in the hours.”

I chuckled at that and scanned through the rest of the crate. There were some mines, a couple Guillotines – cheap SMGs – and even a Carnage shotgun. I tried lifting the Carnage and struggled under its weight. How the hell could Rebecca lift something like this? The gun weighed more than she did.

Over the past week, while Anna and I were trying to gather favors with the NCPD, Diego, Deng, and Zion had been hitting a few of the spots I had information on, taking down their share of gang hideouts and gambling dens. Deng had told me they’d been stockpiling most of what they seized, and this was the first time I got to see the benefit of their efforts.

“That right there,” said Diego, pointing to the Satara in my hands, “is the favorite of our little Cyndi.”

Deng and Zion chuckled at that while I grimaced. I wasn’t entirely happy about the fact our crew also counted the two people I had saved from Jotaro’s playroom. Diego seemed to think that training Cyndi to be a merc would help break her out of her shell and calm some of the rage that still bubbled from her. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but Diego had taken her under his wing and was teaching her all about guns and merc work.

But more than Cyndi’s craving of violence, it was John who most surprised me. He was still quiet, at least around me, and only opened up to Fred and Mor. Most of the time, he could only be found either in the alcove or out in Arroyo at the underpass. He had taken on the job of organizing the raids, documenting all the loot the crew was grabbing, and doling out everyone’s cut. He was also keeping track of the cops we’d given information to. I had heard from Mor that John had started chatting with a few people in the alcove, probing them about any new gambling dens or gang hideouts we could hit. Mor was helping him with that project, introducing him around to the various homeless in Watson.

I set the Satara back in the crate and sighed again. Diego was right: I had to get used to the wait. It was, surprisingly, a large part of being a merc. It was also a pain in the ass, and I wanted everything to be finished. Frustration at the lack of action was starting to gnaw at me and I got up to pace around the room. Deng and Zion started going through the crate of weapons, making sure everything was in perfect working order. Anna’s eyes glowed gold, probably checking in with some of the badges we’d worked with over the past week. Diego just watched as I paced the room and thought about anything I could do to help us against the Scavs.

When nothing came to mind, I let out another weary sigh, settled back, and tried to take a nap. It was going to be a long wait.