Chapter Text
The inter orbital spat us into Neotokyo. Nowhere near the graceful arc of orbital re-entry you see in the corpo ads, it was a gut-punch of gravity and light, the kind that rattles your teeth and reminds your bones that they was never meant to leave the earth. I stepped out of the arrival terminal and the city instantly swallowed me whole.
Towering pagodas of black glass and pulsing bioluminescent kanji poked up towards a maroon colored sky. Somewhere above, the orbital ring bled advertisements for bougie saké and eternal youth. Enormous koi in chrome scales drifting through the downpour, their mouths opening to dispense stock prices and Arasaka loyalty tiers. At the level where the salarymen still had feet, the air tasted of ozone, fried street-meat. Nightcity felt like a mockery of everything Neotokyo prided itself to be.
I walked. The crowds were thick with those who belonged and those who were merely elsewhere. I passed those whose augmented reality overlays painted private zen gardens over the public filth.
The local architecture jutted up in irregular spikes: seven, eight, sometimes ten floors taller than the surrounding sprawl, so the roofscape formed a kind of machicolation of corporate offices.
Laced through it all were the shadows of girdered towers that would make your vertigo act up if you looked at them too long. Arasaka’s tree logo gleamed on every other surface, boldly showing its complex root system.
“Nice view, don't ya think? Looks like Night City fucked a Shinto shrine.” Johnny’s voice slithered up the back of my skull.
The Relic hadn’t killed us yet, but it never stopped trying. Viktor’s cocktail of experimental immunosuppressants and under-the-counter neural dampeners had bought us months instead of weeks. Even after a year of half-detangling our psyches, he was like a leech in the back of my mind.
I smirked despite myself. “Shut up, Johnny. We’re not here for the sightseeing tour.”
“Oh come on, V. Admit it. You’re half-hard for the aesthetics. All this black glass and neon? It’s got that corpo scumminess you secretly still yearn for.”
“Ex-Corpo,” I muttered under my breath, lighting a cigarette. The flame from my chromed Zippo danced across the subdermal plating along my jaw. My hand barely trembled anymore. Small victories. “And you’re one to talk. ”
“Hey, I make excellent company. Witty. Charismatic. What more do you want in a brain parasite?”
A salaryman in a suit worth more than most gonks make in a lifetime bumped into me. His eyes flicked over my scarred face, the black bulge of subdermal plating along my zygos and nosebridge.
It's like he could tell by my gait that I killed more people than he’d fucked. He apologized in rapid Japanese and vanished into the crowd, unseeing the danger the way I un-saw the private AR geishas whispering in his periphery. Smart man.
We’d come here straight from the gig for Mr. Blue Eyes. Barely any time to kiss the ground of Night City goodbye.
The coordinates burnt a hole in my neural implant and a promise, that somewhere in this concrete-steel sprawl, was Saburo Arasaka’s private morgue.
A place where he played out his sick victorious rituals, a-la Dr. Moreau. The old bastard, allegedly, kept his favorite trophies on ice—enemies, rivals, unfinished business he couldn’t let go, including the original meat Johnny Silverhand had worn before they dissected mind from body.
I found a capsule hotel in a side alley that smelled of piss and fried noodles, perfect place to lay low. Paid in untraceable eddies.
The room was a grey coffin with a screen. I dropped onto the narrow bunk and stared at the ceiling. Through the thin wall I could hear the muffled shouts of a street vendor two levels down, selling takoyaki to the night shift. The trains ran on a raised line metres from the pod’s vent, close enough that I could have stared into the carriages if I let myself. They were not entirely in my city. I did not, of course. But I could have.
“One year, V. One fucking year of Viktor poking around in our head like a mechanic. You still think this is gonna work?” Johnny asked, his tone lighter than the words. Close friends by now, after all the shared nightmares. The kind who could roast each other while staring down the abyss.
“We’ve got a few months,” I said aloud. My voice sounded raw in the tiny space. “Vik says the new anti-rejection protocols are holding. The decay’s slowing. We do this right, at least one of us walks away breathing. Your body in a tank, my head finally quiet. Win-win, sort of.”
I closed my eyes.
The partial disentanglement had been the worst part. Not the pain, that I could handle. It was the clarity that threw me off.
Waking up some mornings and knowing exactly which memories were mine and which belonged to Silverhand after months of brain fog. Feeling him flinch when I remembered the clinical orders I’d given in Arasaka boardrooms. Hearing him go quiet when I thought about Jackie bleeding out on the floor of that damn conapt. Vik’s therapies have been slowly dissecting us from one another.
“And if it’s you?” Johnny asked. The question we’d been circling like sharks in the same tank.
“Then you get your body back for the last time and I get some goddamn peace and quiet.”
He laughed, a sound like gravel in a meat grinder. “Liar. You’d miss me.”
I chuckled. “Nah, you’d miss me. Who else is gonna put up with your endless rants and terrible guitar solos?”
“You’ve gotten almost tolerable, V. Almost. Still got that corpo stick up your ass, but at least it’s a stylish one now.”
I half-assed a smile I couldn’t hold for long, then pulled up the fixer’s contact. High-end, even for Neotokyo. They called him Kage, didn’t even know the guy’s face.
The call connected on the third ping.
“Konbanwa. You’re early, gaijin,” Kage said.
“Mr. Blue Eyes sends his regards. I need a cryocase, you know the deets. For difficult cargo. We already planned the transport back to Night City.”
A pause. I could feel the man gauging my name, my reputation, the invisible ledger of favors and corpses that followed ex-Corpos like me across continents and corporate borders.
“Saburo’s vault,” he said finally. “The private collection. Security that makes your Night City Avos look like children playing with toys.”
“Yeah, I understand the price of failure. Get that you don’t move product like that easily. ”
Kage’s silhouette shifted. The background neon bled across his outline in slow, deliberate pulses.
“There is a cryo tank available. Capable of preserving… larger cargo. And the price—”
“I can cover the eddies, don't worry.”
A soft chuckle, the sound of someone who had already calculated the odds of my survival.
“That’s not what I’m after, V. The Blank Slate Relic. Prototype 2.0. The version Hellman’s team was preparing for Saburo himself. Contained in the same vault, so it should be simple.”
I felt Johnny tense in my head. “Bold ask, choom. You sure you wanna trade one Relic for another?”
“You deliver the tank and the body back to Night City,” I told Kage. “I deliver the Relic. And then, consider us strangers.”
“Coordinates for pickup will come when I have confirmation on the Relic,” Kage said. “You have forty-eight hours to secure the tank from your end. After that, the vault moves again. Wait for my call to confirm the tank. I will send my men to help transfer. And gaijin?”
“Yeah?”
“Watch your back.”
The line went dead.
I exhaled smoke toward the low ceiling. The nicotine wasn’t cutting it anymore. The slow decay in my veins felt almost comforting now, like an old debt finally coming due on terms I could almost accept.
“You really gonna trust this guy?” Johnny asked.
“Trust? No. Use? Absolutely.” I crushed the cigarette against the palm of my chromed hand. Sparks danced like dying fireflies against the glow leaking through the pod’s vents. “This is the only play we’ve got, Johnny. You want your body back. I want the fucking Relic out of my head before it turns us both into vegetable soup. ”
“Well you deserve to not die for my sorry ass. We’ve been through the wringer together, V. Mikoshi. Alt’s bullshit. All those nights where it felt like we were the only two bastards left who got it. You sure you wanna risk the coin toss?”
For once, I didn’t have an instantaneous comeback. He materialized, silhouette flickering under the hospital colored lighting.
“You know what this means, right? If we pull this off… one of us probably ends. No more sharing a body.”
I perched up on my elbows, checking the Malorian under my jacket. Developed a habit of sleeping on top of the blanket, shoes on. “We’ve been sharing this rotting brain for over a year. You’re the closest thing I’ve got to family now, you narcissistic prick. If one of us makes it out, it’s better than both flatlining.”
“Sap,” he scoffed, but there was warmth in it. “Fine. This goes sideways, I’m haunting your ass forever. No refunds.”
I slid off the bed, looking out the small stained window.
Outside, the city pulsed and bled and screamed in ten thousand languages. I could hear the fish-market vendors a few blocks over even from inside the pod, their voices rising and falling in rhythmic haggling. Young women in patterned aprons that hid the stains of gutting, men who looked like they’d stepped straight off the boats with their catches still dripping. The punters lingered, prodded the goods, examining the holographic overlays that priced every scale and tentacle in real time.
There was one more call I needed to make.
Takemura.
I hesitated, thumb hovering over the ping. We’d already talked about this weeks ago, right after the Mr. Blue Eyes gig wrapped. An encrypted call where I laid out the plan and Goro listened in that heavy silence of his. He hadn’t said yes or no. Just that he would think on the debt. This was only confirmation. A final nod before I walked into the fire.
“You sure he’s still good for it?” Johnny asked, his voice low and serious for once. “Man’s been ghosting Arasaka for months. Hiding ain’t exactly stress-free living.”
“He owes me,” I muttered. “And he can help navigate the vault’s layout better than any fixer out there. We do this clean, nothing blows back on him.”
I hit the ping. The holo connected after two rings.
Goro Takemura’s face appeared, grainy, the background deliberately blurred into nondescript shadows. He looked leaner than last time, eyes sharp but tired. A man in hiding, surviving on discipline and old honor.
“V,” he said. No surprise in his voice. He’d been expecting this.
“Hey, been a while. It’s time,” I replied. “I’m in Neotokyo. Coordinates from Blue Eyes check out. I’m hitting Saburo’s private trophy vault once Kage pings me. Need your eyes on it. Confirming what we discussed. And nothing traces back to you, I give you my word.”
The silence stretched, broken only by the faint hum of the pod’s ventilation and distant market shouts bleeding through the walls. I could see the calculation behind his eyes: the life debt versus the risk of even remote involvement. Arasaka had long memories.
“...Understood,” he said at last, voice measured and low. “My position is… precarious. I will monitor from here and provide what guidance I can remotely. Floor plans, patrol patterns, biometric weak points. When you are on site, open the secure channel. I will be ready. But V—there must be no link. No records.”
“None,” I promised. “You helped me once when the world was burning. Least I can do is keep you out of this one.”
Takemura gave the smallest nod, almost imperceptible. “Saburo’s collection… it is not merely storage. It is a monument to his grudges. Tread carefully. And V?”
“Yeah?”
“Do not die foolishly. You have carried Silverhand this far. Finish it with honor.”
The line clicked off. The holo dissolved into static.
“See? Samurai’s still got your back,” Johnny said, a low chuckle warming the inside of my skull. “Even while playing digital hide-and-seek. Guy’s probably holed up in some mountain monastery eating rice and sharpening his honor blade.”
I let out a breath. “He’s risking a lot just being on call. Respect that. We do this right, he helps and we get your body out clean.”
“Yeah… respect. Never thought I’d say that about yet another Arasaka suit.” Johnny’s tone softened into that easy familiarity we’d built over the year. “Remember when he had a sword to your throat? Life’s weird, choom.”
“Life’s a fucking mess,” I corrected, smirking. “ You’d be lost without my planning and I’d be bored to death without your commentary.”
“You know, if we pull this off,” Johnny said, voice carrying that cocky grin, “first thing I’m doing is getting a new tattoo on this arm. Something tasteful. Big flaming letters — ‘V Was Here.’ Maybe a little heart underneath for extra sugar.”
I let out a short laugh. “You do that and I’m going to shoot your arm off.”
“Worth it,” he shot back, words coming out with that rare, genuine edge he only let slip around me these past days. “Least I’ll finally have my own goddamn skin to ruin. And you’ll have your head back. Quiet, for once. Might even start to miss my commentary, choom.”
I stared out the small, stained window of the capsule pod, watching the endless neon bleed of Neotokyo pulse against the rain. For a moment the heist, the coin toss waiting for us back in Night City, the very real chance that only one of us walks away, settled heavy in my chest.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Maybe I will.”