Chapter Text
“So… any color preferences?”
Viktor was getting Adrian properly set up to connect the replacement cyberarm. The young man looked at all the options, and immediately sighed as he looked at the selection. Not out of disappointment - they were clearly high-value pieces. M himself had confirmed that they were military grade hardware, much like his own cyberarm. He just wished that the manufacturer was different.
“Does it have to be ‘Saka?” he asked.
Viktor just shrugged. “It’s what we got. I would give you a wider selection, but military grade hardware’s a rare sight for a reason. This is all I’ve got in stock at the moment.”
Adrian nodded, not faulting the man for limited supply. He still had a hard time thinking of the corp that Faraday worked for in any capacity other than rage, but he would get a grip on his anger if he had to. He tried to think of it as using Arasaka’s own weapons against them. It helped. Not a lot, but it helped.
“As long it’s not too bright or black, I’m not sure I care,” Adrian said, looking over the selections available. There were four in total, all in different colorations. One was mostly dark grey with red detailing the Arasaka logo painted onto the forearm and shoulder in a non-intrusive fashion. Another was mostly a dark, cobalt blue with silver details, while a third was entirely black with details that were oddly grey in coloration.
Then there was the final arm, the one that actually grabbed his attention. A dark red was the primary color for the arm, with black detailing on the internals, knuckles and joints, the subtle Arasaka logo on the forearm and shoulder the same dark coloration. For some reason, that one felt… right. He couldn’t rightly say why. It just did.
“That one,” he said, indicating the arm that had caught his eye. Vik looked over at it, a brow raised over the rim of his dark glasses.
“You have some particular taste, Adrian,” Viktor said, rolling himself over to the cyberarm and picking it out from the selection. “Can’t say I blame you, though. It’s a striking coloration, if not a particularly eye-catching one. Anyway, I suppose if you really don’t want to be reminded of ‘Saka for whatever reason, I can paint the logos over. Won’t help if someone actually identifies the model, but it shouldn’t be a problem otherwise.”
M gave a nod of approval, his face still set in that grim line as he spoke. “Then we’d best get to the install. How long should it take?”
“About ten minutes, and he’ll be out for most of it,” the ripper answered. “Connecting nerve endings to neural adapters can be pretty painful without anesthesia, so he’ll be under for the surgery.”
Adrian raised a brow at that. “I thought we were gonna install optics too?”
“Yeah, but you and M need to talk about some specifics on that point,” Vik said as he pulled out an injector. “Now stay still. I’m gonna be numbing out your shoulder and right pectoral. Shouldn’t feel a thing.”
Vik injected him with the anesthesia, and before long, Adrian was put into a short slumber. When he awoke, it was to the ripper finishing up the install of his new arm, closing a panel as he felt the internals match up with the usual processes of his nerves and reactions.
“How’s it feel?” Vik asked. “Been a while since I’ve installed one of these, but it should be functioning normally, yeah?”
Adrian tested it out, rotating his arm left and right, bending it at the elbow and extending it out. The fingers moved about with no small measure of his natural dexterity, and given a couple of hours he should be back to how he’d been before the fire. Better, even.
“Working great, doc. Thanks,” he said with a genuine smile.
Vik looked over at M with a pleased smile. “He’s taking to it well, it seems. What’s your assessment?”
“His ease of use is probably due to how recent the loss of his arm was. But it’s also not an impossibility that he has some affinity for the arm,” M said, tone neutral as his own cyberarm flexed it’s fingers, suggesting that he might have some experience with that process. “Give it a couple of hours, and it should be like he never lost it.”
Adrian was surprised that M had come to the same conclusion that he had regarding his recovery. Vik just nodded, rolled over to one of the nearby tables and picked up an inhaler.
“Take this,” he said, putting the thing in Adrian’s hand. “It’ll help with the internal backlash from the arm, if there is any. Two puffs now, then two again in about an hour. Do that until the pain stops or the inhaler runs out, and you should be right as rain.”
Adrian nodded, taking those recommended two puffs. The medicine tasted flavorless in an artificial way. He wasn’t sure how he could taste that, but he did, and it was fucking weird. Then, another question came to mind.
“Hey, Vik? When you referenced people installing without anesthesia, were you being serious?” Adrian only had two implants before everything had went down: his holo and his personal link, which were both relatively common and not all that costly. The ripper he and his sister had gotten them from was strictly professional and did his job well. He’d even adjusted them through their major growth spurts, for which he was grateful. Thankfully, they’d managed to catch it early and prevent long-term damage.
“Yeah. I guess some rippers think that it’s a good plan to make people go through installs without anesthesia. Saves money or whatever bullshit excuse they’ve got for themselves. In my opinion, it just hurt business. Who the hell’s gonna want to go to a ripper that actively puts you in pain?
“Of course, there are people who know this and are desperate enough to keep seeing them anyway, so I shouldn’t be too surprised that they stay in business. Still, you find any rippers that don’t use anesthesia, take my advice: avoid them like the plague. Nothing good can come from ‘em.”
His warning given, the ripperdoc stood and stretched his hands, glancing over at M before he made his way to the door. “You two get down to specifics. And if he does decide on another major install, let’s at least wait until the first one settles before we try anything, yeah?”
M nodded, and Vik left the two of them alone in his clinic for the second time that day.
“… so, is this gonna be a pattern or what?”
“I hope not,” M said with a sigh. “Talking to people about life-altering decisions after waking up on an operating table isn’t exactly something I had in mind when I became a Solo. I’m a hired gun, not a fucking nurse.”
“Yeah, that uniform would look terrible on you.”
M chuckled at the quip. “Yeah, I’d certainly be a sight in scrubs. Wouldn’t be caught dead in ‘em, though. Anyway, that’s not what we need to talk about.”
M took something off the table behind him: a box, metallic and square, entirely black except for the corsshair symbol on it’s face. Said crosshair was a bit cartoonish in desigh, done in white with four lines overlapping the outer circle with a single dot in the interior. It was simple, but striking.
“This isn’t something that I’ll push on you, and I’ll continue to train you even if you refuse. You can even agree to put it in later, if that’s your preference. If you do choose to install it, I suggest making that choice sooner rather than later. The sooner you get it in, longer you’ll have to adjust to it.”
“I don’t even know what it is yet,” Adrian said. “You make it sound… well, kinda dangerous.”
“That’s because if you’re not careful, it can be.” M drummed his fingers along the top of the box, grabbing at it’s edges and revealing the contents. “Feast your eyes on one of the finest Operating Systems you’ll ever see: the Dead-Eye Combat Analysis Regulation & Assistance Device.”
It was indeed a fine piece of hardware; Adrian could tell even with his right eye still missing. The first thing he noticed was the optic in the side of the plush packing: the sclera for it was entirely black, with the white crosshair on top of the box serving as both the iris and pupil. It looked intimidating at first glance, but seemed more like a cosmetic optic like what Rebecca had installed than anything super advanced. Still, appearances could be deceiving, and it probably hadn’t come in the same box as the Dead-Eye OS for no reason.
Said OS was sleek and advanced in it’s design. The main body was black, with the silvery sheen of the internals shining through breaks in the plates. Given the segmented nature of it, it really did seem to be an Operating System, looking like it would replaced specific parts of his spine in order get attached to his spinal nerve trunk, which all Operating Systems had to do in some capacity in order operate as intended. It was larger than the Civilian Standard OS that he had installed, but only looked long enough to travel the length of his neck, just past his collarbone. He figured that Vik would be able to adjust for that, if he decided to install it.
“Looks advanced,” Adrian noted. “Really advanced. And you don’t seem like the kind of guy who would just give this to me because you’re training me.”
M nodded. “You’d be right in that assessment. Truth be told, the reason I don’t have this thing installed myself is threefold. For one thing, I already have a Sandi installed, and I’m a bit attached to it. Secondly, it’s a little too flashy for my personal taste, even if the effects are particularly useful in a fight. And thirdly is that… well, it’s a Mrk 0.”
Adrian hissed in a breath at that. While Mrk 0s, otherwise referred to as prototype cyberware, weren’t unheard of, some of the stories involving them could be… gruesome, to put it mildly. Especially since many of them ended with the users of said prototypes going into early cyberpsychosis. Still, many advancements in cyberware had been made since most of those stories, and it was safer to use Mrk 0s than it had been way back when.
Still, just because it was safer didn’t mean that the danger was nonexistent. Adrian kept that in mind as he asked his next question. “What exactly does it do?”
“Something spec-fucking-tacular, kid,” M said with his version of a grin, which really just seemed to look like a wry smile. “It uses the most advanced parts of speedware and analytic neuralware to calculate odds and give you general advice on how to proceed in combat. Kinda like having eyes in the back of your head, but even better. I don’t know the exact details, but I do know that as it adapts to it’s user, it’ll gradually streamline reactions and reflexes, making them more efficient. I don’t really need something like that, but it should be something that speeds up the rate of your training significantly. There’s also… well, something odd about this piece.”
“… in what regard?”
“It, uh… well, my friend said something about giving it the ability to rewrite non-vital parts of it’s own code for the sake of streamlining the way it runs. I don’t know the specifics, but…”
Adrian picked up on the implications right away. “So, what you’re telling me that this thing will reduce the time required for my training significantly, and will probably be a major asset in the future with the analysis it’ll provide, but that it’s also a Mrk 0 and semi-autonomous to boot?”
“Yup. Again, this isn’t a choice I’ll force on ya. If you refuse, I’ll just put it back in the box.”
Adrian took a few moments to really consider this. It would probably be one of the biggest decisions of his life. On the one hand, the risk it proposed wasn’t staggering, but it was present. There was a chance that this could blow up in his face. On the other hand, the fact remained that Adrian needed to get strong fast. His minimal experience with violence beyond childhood brawls and the occasional non-deadly street fights in his teens would not serve him well in the Solo profession. He needed every advantage he could get his hands on. Why not take the risk? It wasn’t like becoming a Solo didn’t present even more of a risk than this thing.
As though to wipe out the last os his hesitation, his mind conjured Faraday’s sharp, spider-like appearance, tall and lithe and dangerous in his choice of corpo suit. His single brown eye and his three crimson ones looking down on him cruelly, as though he were little more than dirt that had dared to scuff his magnificently polished shoes. A spark of anger - a smoldering ember - reminded him of exactly what that man had done. What he deserved. He pushed it back, refusing to let the feeling overwhelm him. But though the heat was gone, the anger remained.
“A Mrk 0, huh?” Adrian asked, looking up at the ceiling for a few seconds, sighing as his head came back down to look at M. “Fine then. I’ll be your guinea pig. Let’s get it installed.”
M gave him a slight smile at those words, standing from his position against the wall and walking over to where Adrian still sat in the ripper’s chair. His hand went to a holster at his back, pulling out a certain Borg weapon. The weapon that had started all of this.
Adrian took the Malorian in hand, finding the weapon easy to hold in his new, cybernetic right hand. He was almost tempted to aim the thing to test the sights, but he stopped himself. He looked back up at M, and the man gave him another wry smirk.
“First, we’d better wait until your arm settles before we ask Vik to do the OS. After that… I hope you know how to swap that smartlink to wireless.”
May 24th, 2075
Night City, CA.
5:38 pm PST.
7 months before a certain car accident.
Adrian sighed as he slumped into the sofa, his exhaustion evident as he ran his regular left hand of his face. M was not a soft teacher. He certainly knew what he was doing, and taught Adrian well, but he expected nothing but the best from him. And to be fair, he gave it each and every time he was asked. That still didn’t make it easy, though.
“One of these days, I’m going to find a way to land a hit on him,” Adrian promised himself. He stretched in the chair, listening to his bones pop as he relieved the stress on them. His Dead-Eye OS was already helping him make improvements to his movements, allowing him to roughly, but surely adapt to M’s style of fighting over the course of the last four days.
Of course, towards the end of today’s session, M had switched things up and Adrian had been taken entirely off guard. This just reinforced a fact in Adrian’s mind: he could not fight M at full tilt. The man was clearly already holding back for his sake, and the fact that he could switch things up so drastically only made him even more unpredictable and absolutely terrifying. Also, while Dead-Eye was an amazing tool and a true asset, he couldn’t use it as a crutch. Relying on it too much would make him less than useless without it. It also didn’t help that his pride was a bit too much to just let the thing call out shots for him. That was a bridge too far, in his mind.
“Twenty-eight thousand eddies…” It wasn’t a staggering amount of money, but it was still a lot, especially for him. To be entirely honest, he was lucky that M had put them up for free, at least for the month. He wasn’t sure he could handle paying for rent on top of everything else. Of course, he also hadn’t been on any gigs yet, so M would be deferring rent until he actually started getting work.
The place they were in now was a small apartment somewhere in Japantown. M had said that it was somewhere that got little attention, and given it’s location, Adrian was inclined to believe him. Still, while it was a little smaller than their house, it was large enough for Adrian and Maya to live in some form of comfort, fragile though it was. It also helped that it was on the other side of town from where their house had burned down. It made thing…easier. At least for him. He wasn’t sure about Maya. She barely did much of anything other than sleep anymore. He couldn’t blame her for that, but he was worried about her.
Adrian stood, heading to the bathroom with another grunt. He was still sticky with sweat from today’s training. Peeling off his clothes and tossing them to the floor, he immediately turned on the shower and started scrubbing himself down. Fifteen minutes later, the young man shut off the water, drying himself and wrapping a towel around his waist. He looked at himself in the mirror, as though he might find progress from the pas few days.
Surprisingly, he did. Unsurprisingly, it was evidence of his injuries, compliments of M, which gave him a bit of frustration, but not towards his mentor. Rather, he was frustrated with himself for letting it happen in the first place. Still, the bruising around his ribs was already fading, and he could detect, just inside the outline of his lower torso, the beginnings of abs.
“Huh. Never thought I’d see that when I looked in the mirror,” Adrian mused to himself, taking in the rest of his appearance. Part of his short hair had been shortened even further into an undercut style, in order to make room for the Dead-Eye OS that was installed in his neck. Without the bandages covering his right eye, Adrian could fully see the burn scars that lined almost a quarter of his face. They were jagged and rough, but strangely pretty in the way that flames were. in fact, the scar reminded him of the shape of fire despite the puckered and mottled appearance of the scar tissue.
Honestly, his burn scar brought attention away from the optic that had been installed in place of his regular eye, which he supposed was a good thing. Lines of cyberware were barely noticeable against his skin. Vik had asked about whether or not he wanted to get realskin-grafts to draw attention away from it, but Adrian had declined. He wanted to remember how he had gotten those scars. There was no point in hiding them behind a fake veneer of artificial skin. It would always be there, in some capacity. He ought to at least remember why.
Still, Adrian took a moment to make sure Maya was still asleep, which she was, taking the opportunity to steal some clothes from their shared closet and change into something relatively comfortable. A plain grey t-shirt and dark pants, as he tended to wear before everything went down. It had been relatively easy to find on some street corner, and Maya had managed to grab a few things as well, though without enthusiasm. It saddened him greatly, seeing her like this.
He dressed himself quickly, grabbing some leftover takeout from the fridge and reheating it. Since they were in Japantown, one thing they had in abundance was access to noodle dishes like ramen and udon. It wasn’t the healthiest habit, eating this stuff, but it was better than nothing at all. Adrian just hoped that Maya would remember to eat today.
Adrian slurped down the leftover noodles quickly, picking out the pieces of meat and tiny, leftover vegetables and eating them as well. Adrian wasn’t sure how that street vendor had managed to get their hands on synthetic vegetables, but it added flavor to the noodles that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. He was almost tempted to turn on the radio just to see what was on, but that might wake up Maya, and she didn’t need that today.
Instead, he quietly finished his dinner, took a can of NiCola out of the fridge, and went over to the only part of the space he didn’t share with Maya. The workbench had been here when M had brought them here, and when Adrian had asked why, the grizzled man had simply explained that it had come with the place and didn’t ask any other questions. And that was a pretty good policy when it came to these things, most of the time.
“Fucking hell… you’re gonna kill me one of these days,” Adrian muttered as he sat down at the workbench, soda in hand. On said workbench was the thing that had been giving him a headache that, as of that evening, had lasted nearly three days. The Malorian sat there, the handle mostly disassembled, the chamber, barrel and firing mechanism all still intact as Adrian had tried, and failed, to update the smartlink without ripping it out and putting in a new one altogether.
He sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck near his neural port. The one that held the Shard his mother had given to him in her last moments. Guilt ran through him like a fire, shaking the weariness from him as he tried to focus on swapping it out.
M had been gracious in his providing of the parts Adrian would need to swap out the smart link properly. It had also been added to his not inconsiderable debt, a risk that he was forced to take on because of the weapon’s semi-ancient nature, by Night City standards. While jacking into the weapon every time he needed to use it sounded cool, it was also time consuming and an obvious tell that shit was about to go down. Also, it was clunky as hell. Style, no matter how important for your rep, wouldn’t mean jack shit if you were dead. Besides, he didn’t have a personal link in his cyberarm; it couldn’t be fit in there with the pre-installed smartlink.
Going wireless was something that Adrian had to do for practicality’s sake as well as his own. If he needed the thing in a sudden moment, he couldn’t afford be fumbling around with a link. If he did, he’d probably die. Unfortunately, his hatred for all smart weapons had come back to bite him in the ass, in this case. He had absolutely no idea how to install a smartlink, let alone change a wired one from the twenty twenties to a wireless one from now without taking out the interface matrix. If he took that out, the datakey in his head would be basically useless.
“I really need a teacher for this shit…” Adrian muttered to himself as he looked over the blueprints in his head again. Malour’s notes in this respect were numerous, and Adrian found himself searching through the notes he made on the prototype smartlink once more. There wasn’t a lot here, and nothing to indicate that he’d even begun to think of switching it out to wireless. Still, Adrian searched, even if he knew it was pointless.
Maybe he should find someone to help him with this. But who? It wasn’t like there were any weapon’s dealers or technicians who wouldn’t sooner shoot him and take the Malorian for themselves rather than help him get it up to modern standards.
That was when the door to his workshop hissed open, causing him to jump in startled surprise. When he turned, he was both relieved and surprised to see his sister standing there, dark hair a tangled mess and her face looking unwashed, a blanket draped over her figure.
“Hey sis. Did I wake you up?”
She shook her head ‘no,’ simply looking at him with that black, thousand yard stare that he had seen in her eyes all too often.
“Well, uh… did you want to get something to eat? Should be some ramen still in the fridge.”
Maya shook her head again, pointing over Adrian’s shoulder towards the partially disassembled Malorian. Adrian looked back at it, a sheepish smile on his face. “Yeah, guess my loathing of smart weapons came back to bite me, huh? Can’t figure out how to swap it out for the life of my. The interface matrix is fine; it’s the rest of the link that needs to get replaced.”
Maya was silent as she walked over to the workbench, immediately taking parts of the smartlink into her hands and fiddling around with them. Adrian raised an eyebrow as he watched her work, careful to make sure that she didn’t do anything that might compromise the link’s original purpose.
Before long, Maya had completely swapped out all of the parts required for the smart link to function with the sole exception of the interface matrix. It sat in almost the same position on the handle as it had before, only with newer parts to replace the old and reconfigured to make it a bit more organized. Adrian was honestly shocked at the result. He hadn’t known his sister knew how to do something like this, let alone do it so quickly.
“How…?” he asked in astonishment.
“… Net,” she answered, tone flat, as though it were obvious. “Got bored. Looked fun.”
Adrian sighed. He really shouldn’t have been surprised. His sister had always been interested in smartweapons, to some degree. He wanted to ask questions, get specifics and make sure that she’d been careful, but he stopped himself. Bombarding her with stuff like that, especially ow that she’d shown some signs of life beyond simple wakefulness would only make things worse.
“Okay,” Adrian said, letting it go for the moment. “Did you want to do anything tonight? Maybe watch some TV or something?”
Maya wrung her hands together as she looked down to the floor, face still blank. She nodded once in affirmation, and that was all they needed. Adria reheated some more food, and the two siblings found themselves on the couch, watching the latest round of Night City bullshit that got put on the airwaves. It wasn’t the content that really interested them, though. It was the company that they really wanted. For just a little while, things felt like normal again. And in that moment, Adrian couldn’t have asked for anything more than that.
May 26th, 2075
Night City, CA.
2:30 pm PST.
6 months and 3 weeks before a certain car accident.
Adrian was slammed bodily to the ground for the fourth time that session, and mentally slapped himself for trying something that stupid. While Dead-Eye was a pretty good passive tool to in combat, it had two major downsides when Adrian tried to use it’s active calculations. One was the fact that it ran hot ludicrously fast, so if Adrian used it actively for too long, he wouldn’t be able to use any of it’s functions at all for at least a few hours, maybe longer if he was particularly unlucky.
Second was the fact that it had a rather annoying habit of providing way too much information for him to process in a timely fashion. This thing was certainly a Mrk 0, alright. Still, the main problem with the information wasn’t to do with the hardware itself. In fact, the OS seemed to be working perfectly as intended. It was just that, instead of providing the information in a streamlined fashion that he could quickly comprehend and act upon, it provided him with all of the variables it could calculate at once. Considering the fact that he was neither a supercomputer nor a mathematician, this was not great for immediate responses in the middle of combat.
Still, it wasn’t as though there weren’t uses for the thing’s active nature. He’d just have to pick his moments and use it sparingly. Extremely sparingly. Information overload caused him a massive headache.
“I think that’s enough of close combat training, for now,” M said, the muscle shirt he had on not even so much as spotted with drop of sweat. Adrian wasn’t surprised. In all the training sessions they’d partaken in, the man had yet to so much as get winded. “You good to move on to target practice?”
“… gimme a minute…” Adrian groaned as he rolled off of his back. As much as he had improved over the past week, he was still very much an amateur. A fast-learning amateur perhaps, but still an amateur. “I think you nearly broke some ribs with that last throw.”
“If I broke your ribs, kid, you wouldn’t even be able to speak right now,” M retorted as he threw him a gym towel. “Wipe yourself down. And bring both your guns. You’ll be learning the main difference between ‘em today, beyond the obvious.”
Adrian raised a brow under the towel he was using to clear his face of sweat. Sure, he’d brought the Malorian today, but he hadn’t thought that M would ask him to bring both of them.
He didn’t argue, though, standing from the ground and grabbing the Malorian and the firearm that M had given to him, a Constitutional Arms Liberty. It was colored a standard black, like most firearms one could find in gun stores, and utilized a standard ammunition that basically all handguns used.
Adrian holstered the Liberty at his side and the Malorian at his back. He had been thinking about giving them names, but that seemed a little tacky, and not like something that M would totally approve of. Still the thought had come up more than once. Maybe he should start considering it?
He turned and joined M at the other end of the warehouse. In Northside Watson, there were various industrial warehouses that sat either unused or wholly abandoned after they’d been used to their fullest. Of course, some corporations kept places like this ‘just in case,’ but a lot of the places where they actually stored things were located nearer to southern Watson rather than Northside, with a few exceptions for stuff that needed to be kept on the down-low.
M nodded at Adrian in approval, and the young man quickly fell into step with his mentor. The grizzled man sighed as he looked at Adrian, and started speaking. “A few thing before we start. First being that I am not an expert with handguns. Yes, I’m damn good with any kind of firearm, but I prefer assault rifles and heavy ordinance overall. I can still make you damn deadly with ‘em, if that’s what you want.”
Adrian nodded. M had made this point a few times, saying there there was an upper limit on how good he could make Adrian with his chosen weapons. He didn’t quite understand why he was making this point over and over, but Adrian wasn’t about to interrupt him again. M… did not enjoy being interrupted.
“Now, I want you to take your Liberty and hit as many of the targets as you can as fast as you can,” M said, gesturing to the makeshift practice range he had assembled. “You’ll have twenty seconds.”
Adrian nodded silently, pulling his Liberty from it’s holster and making sure he had spare magazines out and ready to use. The practice range had targets you would see at a standard range, juryrigged to the ceiling of the warehouse to fold down at semi-random intervals. Adrian had never managed to hit all of them, even when Dead-Eye had worked as originally intended for the first time the previous day. He just wasn’t fast enough yet.
Since M hadn’t specified Dead-Eye’s use, Adrian would leave it on passive for the moment. Even beyond information overload headaches, the device running hot wasn’t quite metaphorical. It stung like a bitch to use it actively for too long. He aimed down the sights of his pistol, adjusting his grip and his trigger finger, ready to begin at the slightest disturbance.
“Begin.”
The first target dropped, and Adrian fired on it immediately, the bullet bouncing off the metal of the target, hitting the painted figure dead-center in the chest. The next dropped, this time at a higher angle, but Adrian hit that one too, this time in the shoulder rather than the chest.This time, two targets dropped at once, both on opposite sides of the range. Adrian shot the one to the left, which was closer by a wide Margin, and carefully aimed at the second one to his right. His first shot missed the figure entirely, but he managed to land the second one head between the figure’s eyes.
On and on this went, Adrian managing to hit most of his shots and only missing each target once. At the end, he had hit twenty six of his shots and missed only seven of them.
“Time,” M said, looking at Adrian with a raised brow. “More missed shots than yesterday. Something up?”
“No, just… Dead-Eye worked like it was supposed to yesterday, so it made things easier. Helped me hit my shots, even if I couldn’t get all of ‘em. Still not sure why, though.”
M nodded. “Well, we’ve been exploring the basic limitations of Dead-Eye for a reason, ain’t we? Anyway, grab your Malorian. And try to hit as many of your targets as you can. Twenty seconds again.”
Adrian did as instructed, pulling out the Malorian from the back holster and getting into a firing stance. Despite the fact that there was less overall mass to the Malorian than his Liberty, this gun felt… heavier. More significant. Like something was about to happen.
Adrian waited for M’s signal, and started once more. He fired once, twice, thrice, and many more times in the twenty seconds alotted to him. But unlike with the Liberty, the Malorian punched through each and every target that he aimed at, like the metal wasn’t even there. He supposed that was a signature aspect of Borg weapons, being a perfect fushion of Power and Tech weaponsry that could only be wielded with sufficient cbernetics to offset them, but damn. Even if this thing couldn’t punch straight through a tank like some higher caliber Borg weapons could, it could definitely shred through most body armor like no one’s business.
“So… what’s the difference beyond the stopping power?” M asked.
Adrian thought on this for a moment. While the Liberty was a good handgun, and certainly reliable, it wasn’t a particularly powerful weapon, and would likey be stopped by most body armor. Thankfully, most people who would be shooting at him wouldn’t be using body armor, so it would be good for most situations. He would need it, considering the fact that he wanted to keep himself on the down-low for a while. Just a new Solo on the scene looking for some jobs to do.
The Malorian was a powerful handgun. But despite the fact that it could kill most things in a single shot, and the fact that it was a Borg weapon, it was still exactly that: a handgun. Even the fact that it used specific ammunition wasn’t enough to offset that fact. Against someone with higher-caliber Borg weaponry, the Malorian would lose out nine times out of ten.
It was still an ace in the hole, though. An ace he would have to be careful about using if he wanted to keep that ‘new Solo’ rep he wanted to cultivate.
“The Malorian is too distinct, and can sometimes draw attention even in the middle of a firefight,” he said. “If people I don’t trust surive a shootout where I use it, word might spread and suddenly I’m the talk of the town. Which isn’t a good thing for a Solo who’s just starting out.”
M nodded. “Yup. What else?”
“… ammo?”
“Correct,” M said, holding up a single bullet that Adrian had seen in the magizines for the Malorian. “The Malorian fires a specialized type of ammunition that most people don’t sell, and the ones that do seel it at a pretty high rate. Lucky for you, I happen to know someone who’s generously agreed to supply us with this type of ammo at a discount while you’re under my tutelage.”
“… I’m sensing a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence?”
M nodded. “But once we go our seperate ways - and that’ll happen sooner or later - you’ll be on your own for getting this ammo. That’s how I’d like it to be, anyway. Finding a supplier won’t be easy, and finding one that’ll give you the stuff a discount will be damn near impossible. So start looking soon. Or at the very least, keep your eyes peeled, and hang on to any favors you get. Those can soemtimes be worth a whole lot more than number of eddies.”
Adrian acknowledged the point. The ammo for the Malorian wasn’t an immediate problem, but it would be an imminent one if he couldn’t find his own supplier.
“I don’t suppose you’d be kind enough to tell me who your supplier is?” he asked, not expectng an actual answer.
M shook his head, a wry smile on his face. “Nope. You don’t need that much help, Adrian. No one does. It’s an insult to both of us to assume otherwise.”
“… feels weird, y’know,” Adrian said, looking at the weapon in his hands. “The fact that I have this in my hand. I mean, I had a few fantasies where I was this badass Solo with a Malorian in hand, unstoppable in every way. Now I’ve got it here in my hand and… I feel like this or Dead-Eye might become crutches I rely on too much, if I use them every time I’m in a bind. Like I failed somehow. Does that make sense?”
M gave Adrian an odd, indecipherable look that he couldn’t place. It worred him a bit,m that his mentor could take on those placid, neutral expressions that revealed nothing but what he wanted you to see. Eventually, after several seconds, the man spoke.
“There are no such things as crutches in this line of work, Adrian,” M said. “Only tools. And any tool used improperly or as a get out of jail free card is not a true tool. It is a weakness. I will endeavor to ensure that, even without the Malorian or the Dead-Eye OS or even your cyberarm, you’ll still be a force to be reckoned with. Even if you have little more than a Slaut-O-matic or a BB gun.”
Adrian chuckled at that. “A BB gun? You want to make me so dangerous I can kill with a BB gun?”
“You’d be surprised what BBs can do to a man if you aim at just the right spot,” M said, a slightl shiver going up his spine. That… was a first. “So much blood… nasty.”
Adrian decided to not pry into any BB related horror that his mentor had on the brain. Instead, he focused on the other weapon that he had described. “You sure I can even use a Slaut-O-matic to kill… anything? Everyone collectively agrees they’re pretty fucking useless except as an absolute last resort.”
“That depends. What iron did you sell before everything went down?”
“… a seocndhand Unity,” he admited with shame.
M’s laughter echoed through the warehouse as Adrian buried his face in his hands, embarassment clear on his face.
June 3rd, 2075
Night City, CA.
8:12 am PST.
6 months and 2 weeks before a certain car accident.
Adrian rolled his shoulders as he tried to relax. It didn’t work completely, but his shoulders were at least less tense than they’d been just a minute ago. Again, he checked himself over for the fourth time that morning. His Liberty was at it’s proper place at his hip, as was the Malorian, holstered underneath a nondescript crystaljock bomber jacket at his back, just in case. His t-shirt was dark and plain, contrasting the neon red color that lined the collar of the jacket well, with a pair of grey cargo pants over a pair of dark steel-toed combat boots. M had been especially prudent on that point, and Adrian had to agree. Combat boots could rarely hurt a situation, especially if that situation was a shootout.
Before him was the location for his first job: a Scav hideout made out of a ramshackle, two-story building that looked as though it may have once tried it’s hand at being a hotel before falling into disuse and disrepair.
“You’re new blood, but I need this to get done fast,” Regina’s voice said as it came over the holo. “Shouldn’t be too dangerous, anyway. I need you to retrieve a marked piece of cyberware. A hazard symbol that someone stuck on there for flair.”
“I get the feeling that this guy thought this might happen. What am I getting, anyway?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
“… is it a Mr. Studd-?”
“No, it’s not a Mr. Studd implant!”
“Oh thank fuck! That would’ve been awkward.”
“Anyway, like I said, you’ll know it when you see it. If they have a collection of cyberarms in there, you might want to take a look in there.”
“Am I dealing with specialists?”
“Scavs already specialize in kidnapping and organ and cyberware harvesting, so I gues you could say that.”
“Fair enough. Any particular way you want me to take care of this?”
“Nah. Make as much noise as you damn well please - just get that cyberarm back.”
“Got it. Talk to you in bit.”
The call cut off, and Adrian faced the hotel again. He rolled his shoulders a second time, breathing in and out in a steady pattern that he hoped would bring calm. He looked at the location, the fingers on his cybernetic hand rolling in response to his anticipation. So, with a huff and a determined glare, he drew his Liberty from his side and walked towards his first job as a newly minted Solo. He just hoped he would survive it.
Adrian Walker’s Status:
LEVEL: 2 → 4
SREET CRED: 1
€$: 0
Stats and Skills:
BODY: 3
Athletics: Lvl 1
Annihilation: Lvl 1
Street Brawler: Lvl 2
REFLEX: 5 → 6
Assault: Lvl 1
Handguns: Lvl 2 → 3
Blades: Lvl 1
TECH: 5 → 6
Crafting: Lvl 2 → 3
Engineering: Lvl 1
INTELLIGENCE: 3
Breach Protocol: Lvl 1
Quickhacking: Lvl 1
COOL: 6
Ninjitsu: Lvl 1
Cold Blood: Lvl 3
Notable Cyberware:
FORNTAL CORTEX: None | None | None
OCCULAR SYSTEM: None → Dead-Eye Optic
CIRCULATORY SYSTEM: None | None | None
IMMUNE SYSTEM: None | None
NERVOUS SYSTEM: None | None
INTEGUMENTARY SYSTEM: None | None | None
OPERATING SYSTEM: Civilian Standard → Dead-Eye Combat Analysis Regulation & Assistance Device [Mrk 0]
SKELETON: None | None
HANDS: None
ARMS: None → Military Grade Arasaka Cyberarm
LEGS: None