How many days had passed since Ji-hwan drove off in that beat-up vehicle and disappeared into the Badlands’ sandstorm? Sitting alone in her private room, Dakota let out a deep sigh as she stared at the fortified repair shop spread across the hologram monitor.
The heavy automatic turrets mounted densely across the roof, the smart mines buried along the approach, and the heavy weapons stationed in every corner had already turned the place into a full-blown defensive stronghold.
"Haa... just how much did all that cost?"
She had to do the math in her head to soothe the ache in her stomach—the massive expense of building the defenses, the daily maintenance costs, and the constant drain of consumables.
But that lazy silence was shattered in a thoroughly unpleasant way.
Wuuuuung— kugugugung—!
From far beyond the wasteland, the heavy roar of an engine rolled in, kicking up a brutal cloud of dust as it shook the repair shop to its core.
At the same time, ear-splitting heavy metal and death metal blared at maximum volume from the speakers, savagely tearing through the air and announcing their vicious presence.
At the insane racket, everyone in the shop—whether they were repairing vehicles or just chatting—stopped what they were doing and strained their ears toward the outside.
Beep-!
Then, from the terminal on Dakota’s desk, a sharp signal sounded as an urgent holo-call connected from one of her men on watch outside.
"Th-they’re here, Dakota!!"
It was a report that the Maelstrom gang, a bunch of chrome-obsessed psychos, had pushed all the way to the edge of the Badlands.
After hearing the report, Dakota calmly issued orders to her people.
"Activate every turret! And tell the crew to get to combat positions now!!"
With a cold command, she also grabbed the heavy rifle she’d hidden under her desk, shoved open the alloy door to her private room without hesitation, and stepped outside. By then, the area around the shop had already become a hellscape of gunpowder smoke and swirling dust.
The Maelstrom bastards had rammed straight through the barricade and were using the wreckage as cover while firing wildly into the shop.
"Shoot them all down!"
That was the moment the bastards were cursing their lungs out, sparks flying over their mechanical armor.
Wiiiiing— clack!
From the gaps in the shop roof, from the thick brush nearby, and from every corner of the dirt ground, medium-caliber automatic turrets that had been cleverly camouflaged sprang up with sharp mechanical whines.
Tatatatatang!!
"Kraaaagh!!"
"Wh—what the... Agh!"
The Maelstrom troops who had charged in first, laughing like maniacs, were turned into swiss cheese in an instant and collapsed brutally onto the dirt. When the others saw their comrades being torn apart and dropping in a spray of blood, terror spread across their faces.
"What the hell, you freaks! Why the fuck are military turrets installed in some backwater repair shop like this?!"
Panicking at the unexpected heavy fire, the bastards scrambled behind wrecked cars and screamed as they tried to survive the barrage.
Watching the carnage from behind, one of the three Maelstrom officers sent by the local boss Vice had his face twist into something ugly and murderous.
The grotesque red multi-lens array grafted into his face flashed wildly with rage.
"You useless pieces of shit! Move!"
Grinding his teeth, the officer stomped his mechanical leg into the dirt and charged toward one of the turrets that had been chewing through his men from the brush.
Then the monstrous hammer in his thick arm sliced through the air and came crashing down.
Kwaang!!
The sturdy alloy automatic turret was smashed to pieces by a single merciless blow, crumpling into scrap as black smoke and blue sparks burst from the wreckage.
After brutally trampling the disabled turret under his boot, the officer spat out a savage curse.
"Son of a... This is way stronger than the intel said! When we get back, I’m killing the bastard who reported this place’s defenses like this with my own hands!"
The one stomping on the dead turret wreckage and snarling was Sledge, Maelstrom’s assault leader and the officer known as the wrecking tank.
A giant nearly three meters tall, with his spine and ribs replaced wholesale by a massive steel exoskeleton called a linear frame to maximize strength and bulk. Both his arms were covered in heavily modified Gorilla Arms that radiated overwhelming force, and in his thick hands he carried a brutal industrial hammer made by ripping apart a junkyard compactor column.
While he was spitting fury, Dakota’s armed forces began pouring out of the repair shop like a kicked hornet nest.
The nomad mechanics and guards who had survived the Badlands’ sandstorms were anything but easy prey.
They quickly reformed after being shoved back by the vehicle charge, then used the collapsed wreckage as cover and laid down suppressive fire, driving Maelstrom back hard.
Under the rain of bullets, the front line of Maelstrom troops fell one after another like heaps of scrap.
"Heehee! The rats are putting up a decent fight!"
Behind Sledge, in the smoke-stained darkness, a grotesquely long and skinny figure let out a bizarre laugh.
It was Specter, one of Maelstrom’s officers.
She had beastlike reverse-jointed mechanical legs, and her face was a grotesque thing with the jaw ripped out and replaced by a metal mask. Most of all, instead of ordinary Mantis Blades, her arms gleamed with inward-curving scythes that looked deeply wrong.
But the first to notice that the situation was turning strange as their troop losses mounted was the third officer, Deadzone, who had taken position atop a high scrap pile at the rear of the battlefield.
He was Maelstrom’s sniper, a man with blue coolant boiling beneath the transparent reinforced glass over the top of his skull and a set of red multi-eyes covering half his face. Through a custom Kerenzikov wired directly into his brain, he was forcing adrenaline back into his neural system and calculating the battlefield like a machine in the sensation of slowed time.
Wiiiiing— kwaang!
When the Tsunami Nekomata tech sniper rifle in Deadzone’s hands spat fire with electromagnetic force, the round punched lightly through a concrete barrier and blew one of Dakota’s guards’ heads clean off.
Watching the target burst apart through his scope, Deadzone gave a flat, dry order over the comms.
[Sledge. Stop standing around like an idiot and punch through the wall. We need to scatter their firepower.]
"Shut up!! Don’t give me orders, Deadzone!!"
Sledge barked back furiously at the voice trying to control him.
Still, he knew that if they kept getting pinned down at the entrance, they were screwed. So he pushed the hydraulic motors in his linear frame and Gorilla Arms to the limit, lifting the multi-ton hammer as lightly as a baseball bat.
Thud!Thud!Kwaang!!
Sledge thundered forward on his heavy mechanical legs, then brought the hammer crashing down on the repair shop’s thick outer wall. A shockwave ripped through the ground, and the sturdy wall crumpled like paper as a huge hole was punched through it.
"Wipe them out!!"
The moment Specter and the rest of the Maelstrom survivors were about to surge through the gap with vicious cheers—
"Fine, come on in, you bastards!!"
Beyond the broken wreckage, Dakota waited with a fierce glare. She dropped her hand sharply, and the instant her signal fell, the mounted machine guns stationed deep inside the repair shop opened fire in unison.
Dudududududu-!!Kwaaaang-!
The merciless curtain of heavy fire swallowed the broken entrance whole. Maelstrom troops at the front were shredded and dropped in heaps, and even Sledge, standing at the head of the charge, had to use the enormous hammer the size of his torso as a shield while he staggered backward under the crushing pressure of the barrage.
"Ghk! The rats are shooting nonstop!"
Watching the slaughter from atop the scrap pile, sniper Deadzone’s multi-eye lenses flashed coldly.
Beyond his scope, he spotted the dust clouds of Dakota’s reinforcements pushing through the Badlands’ sandstorm in armed vehicles and converging on the repair shop.
The advantage of surprise was gone, and the enemy numbers were growing. If they dragged this out any longer, they’d be completely surrounded and wiped out.
[This has gone to hell. Sledge, Specter. Get back to the cars now. We’re pulling out.]
Deadzone gave the retreat order in a dry voice, then clicked his tongue as he gripped the stock of his sniper rifle.
But... it’d be a shame to back off like this.
As he scanned the repair shop through his scope, Dakota came into view—standing amid the broken wall, rifle in hand, directing her people.
Without hesitation, Deadzone condensed the electromagnetic charge in the Tsunami Nekomata and pulled the trigger.
Taang!!
A sharp sonic crack tore through the air and split the battlefield.
"Ugh...!"
The instant the shot rang out, Dakota’s body jerked back with a dull impact and she collapsed to the ground.
"Dakota!!"
"Dakota’s been hit! Put up a shield!!"
The panicked shop crew screamed and rushed in from all sides, surrounding her in layers and volunteering as meat shields.
Seeing the target fall through his scope, Deadzone’s mouth twisted upward.
But then his red lenses paused.
Just before he fired, she had twisted her upper body slightly to avoid the collapsed wreckage, so the sniper round had only punched through her abdomen.
"Tch. The old woman’s got a damn stubborn life."
Deadzone clicked his tongue irritably and lowered the sniper rifle. By then, her men had already swarmed in like bees and formed a solid wall of cover, making a second shot pointless.
[Hey, fall back! We’re pulling out now!!]
Deadzone’s urgent shout cracked over the comms.
"Ahahaha! Already leaving? I haven’t even gotten to carve them up yet!!"
From the darkness, Specter let out a dissatisfied cry, flexed her reverse-jointed legs, and pulled back with obvious regret. Sledge also kicked the broken turret wreckage hard and turned away.
"Shit! We’ll be back!"
Only about a third of the invading Maelstrom force was still alive.
They forced their way through destroyed vehicles and barricade wreckage, then scrambled into their modified rides.
Bwaaaang!!
Spitting foul exhaust, their vehicles fled the repair shop at terrifying speed, leaving the hail of bullets behind as they raced into the Badlands’ savage sandstorm.
Bwaaaang!! Kigigigigik!!
Then, with a heavy eight-cylinder engine rumbling like a small tank, a viciously modified vehicle slid through the rough sandstorm and into Dakota’s repair shop yard.
"Dakota..!!"
But the moment the car stopped and the door was yanked open, what flooded Ji-hwan’s vision was a scene of devastation that looked closer to hell than anything else.
The thick barricades that had guarded the repair shop were crushed and mangled beyond recognition, and the Maelstrom vehicles that had rammed their way in were belching red flames and black smoke from every direction.
Across the dirt ground, the bodies of Maelstrom troops with grotesquely modified faces were piled up like mountains. Between the wreckage, the groans of Dakota’s wounded men echoed heavily as they were being treated in a hurry while bleeding out.
The moment Ji-hwan stepped out of the car with a hardened face, one man near the broken barricade, his abdomen wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, coughed and called out to him.
"Cough... Hey, brother. I almost shot you thinking you were the enemy."
At the call, Ji-hwan turned his head and spotted a familiar figure receiving emergency treatment in a corner of the dusty yard.
"Dakota!"
Ji-hwan leapt over the scattered corpses and wreckage and ran straight to her.
Dakota was lying on a makeshift cot, sucking in ragged breaths through an oxygen mask.
The officer’s vicious bullet had passed clean through her abdomen, and a thick bandage was already wrapped tightly around the wound, but red blood was still seeping through and staining the dirt.
Ji-hwan’s eyes shook at the sight of her wrecked condition.
"Dakota, your wound...!! What happened here?!"
As Ji-hwan asked urgently, veins standing out in his neck, Dakota frowned in pain and waved a hand dismissively.
"Ah, stop yelling. My head already hurts."
She muttered a small curse through bloodied lips, then looked Ji-hwan up and down.
His clothes and body had been ripped and punched through by the heavy lead rounds from the Overture. There was no way he looked normal either.
"Hah, well... you don’t exactly look fine either, Ji-hwan."
At her dry, sharp joke—one fixer to another, as if they were both in the same sorry state—Ji-hwan reflexively opened his mouth, then stopped.
"I...!!"
The rest of the words were swallowed. The body that had been riddled with holes was already venting strange red steam, stubbornly knitting torn organs and shattered bones back together.
He had been soaked in blood, but after that merciless firefight, his body was regenerating on its own without any threat to his life. There was no way he could explain that monstrous healing factor to Dakota out loud.
In the end, Ji-hwan said nothing. No excuse, no answer. He simply fell silent and bowed his head deeply.
Seeing Ji-hwan’s hard, silent face as he stood there with his head lowered, Dakota’s pale lips curved into a faint smile.
"What, Ji-hwan. You worried about me? That’s touching."
Even after taking a bullet through the abdomen, she still had the composure to crack a joke. Ji-hwan let out a short sigh as if conceding defeat, and the stiffness in his face eased just a little.
"...Then you should recover fast. What happened to the Maelstrom bastards who ran off?"
At Ji-hwan’s question, Dakota pointed toward the outside of the repair shop with a chin gesture, her hand braced on the blood-soaked bandage.
"Those bastards weren’t easy, but... well, you can see for yourself. Our losses weren’t as bad as I thought. We held the line pretty well, aside from the ones taken out by the sniper on the scrap pile, the guy with the giant hammer, and the freak using those scythe-shaped Mantis Blades."
Her gaze shifted beyond the shattered wall, toward the Maelstrom vehicles burning and belching black smoke and red flame.
"If we strip those down, there’ll probably be plenty of parts worth money too."
Even in the middle of a miserable battlefield, Dakota was still calculating every angle, grinning as she did it. But then the pain must have hit hard, because her face twisted miserably.
"Ugh, it hurts..."
At her casual groan of pain, Ji-hwan gave a faint snort and said, "You’ve lost that much blood and you’re still full of energy."
"Of course. I’m going to live loud and proud for another hundred years."
Dakota declared it like a vow, then started laughing again as she remembered the Maelstrom remnants fleeing in a panic just moments ago.
"Those bastards running with their tails between their legs... It was like they’d kicked a hornet nest and got the hell out. Ahahaha!"
As Dakota laughed out loud, her gaze returned to Ji-hwan.
She had already read the dark thoughts in his eyes—the guilt he’d been carrying since arriving at the shop and seeing the devastation.
"Don’t blame yourself, Ji-hwan. You did your best from where you stood. This was a fight in my territory, so it’s my fight."
Rough, but sincere comfort. Yet as soon as those words were out, Dakota’s eyelids began to droop heavily.
Between the strain of forcing herself to command and the excessive blood loss, sleep was clearly dragging her under.
Fighting to hold on to her fading consciousness, Dakota asked Ji-hwan in a dazed voice, "Well... obvious as it is. You’ll get revenge for me, right?"
"A contract?"
At that blunt reply, Dakota’s blurry eyes widened for a moment.
Then a chuckle slipped through her bloodied lips again.
"Yeah, whatever... It’s a proper gig. I’ll pay you well later, so for now, make sure those bastards get hit hard."
With that heavy contract sealed, Dakota lowered her head in relief and surrendered her body to the shop crew who hurried over with a stretcher, sinking into deep unconsciousness.
Once Dakota lost consciousness and was carried off by her men toward the inner medbay, only heavy silence remained in the repair shop yard.
Then, from a corner of the broken barricade, a strangled scream burst out with a grotesque metallic sound.
"Kraaaagh!!"
One of Dakota’s men was continuing the interrogation by brutally stomping on the mechanical joints of a Maelstrom remnant who hadn’t managed to escape and was still barely alive under the wreckage.
"I said it! I told you everything! We’re retreating to the abandoned power plant on the outskirts!!"
After finishing the interrogation, the man roughly wiped the blood from his hands and used his personal device to send the coordinates to Ji-hwan’s old comms unit.
When Ji-hwan checked the blinking destination on the screen, the corner of his mouth twisted upward. It was a smile that said it was a relief not to have to hunt those bastards across the whole wasteland.
After stuffing a bunch of things into his jacket and finishing his preparations, Ji-hwan climbed into the armed vehicle with the eight-cylinder engine and slammed the door shut.
Bwaaaang!!
The vehicle spat out a heavy exhaust note, gouged deep tracks into the hard dirt, and tore viciously through the Badlands’ rough sandstorm.
At the same time, at the abandoned power plant on the edge of the Badlands, every time the desert’s fierce sandstorm swept through, the giant wind turbines left standing as little more than skeletons turned slowly with an unpleasant metallic grinding sound of kigigigik-.
Inside the power plant building, Maelstrom remnants who had fled while swallowing their defeat were cursing loudly as they repaired each other’s broken implants.
"Damn it, not that way!!"
"Shit, fucking dust! It’s all in the joints!"
"Aagh! Don’t grab the nerve socket in my arm, you hack doctor!!!"
For bastards who had only ever rolled around on Night City asphalt, the Badlands environment—where tiny grains of sand worked their way into every mechanical seam—was pure hell.
Leaving the howling underlings behind, the three officers were in a heavy mood as well.
Specter, the female officer with the enormous inward-curving scythe-shaped Mantis Blades, rattled them as she spat out a curse in a voice full of metal.
"Damn it! That old fixer bitch turned the repair shop into a damn fortress! We got chased out before we could even carve them up properly because of all those smart mines and automatic turrets!"
Beside her, Sledge set his giant hammer down on the floor and ground his teeth.
The heavy mechanical legs and linear frame had gotten packed with sand and become sluggish, and he could barely contain his rage.
"We only managed to turn a few of them into bloody pulp... If we run into those wasteland rats again, I’m crushing every last one of them."
Behind the two of them and their murderous complaints, Deadzone, the sniper and executioner, was trembling his leg with obvious unease.
Then an encrypted comm signal came flying into the corner of Deadzone’s vision.
"...The boss is calling."
Deadzone said it in a suppressed voice, leaving Specter and Sledge behind as he hurried into a darker room deeper inside the power plant.
In the dim room, Deadzone carefully manipulated his personal device to connect the call.
Zzzzt— shhhhk—
In the dim room, as Deadzone carefully worked his personal device to connect the call, a hologram with ominous red noise flickering through it shimmered into the air.
And beyond that distorted light, the terrifying silhouette of Vice—the local Maelstrom boss—appeared, his lower jaw completely rebuilt into something like a metal shredder and his eye sockets packed with countless spider-like red LED lenses. The shape of him pressed down on the room like a weight.
"B-boss..."
As Deadzone barely managed to speak, sweating coldly, Vice’s multi-lenses flashed with a chilling mechanical sound inside the red glitch noise.
Deadzone stammered out the miserable report that they had failed to take Dakota’s repair shop and had retreated after losing a large chunk of their force.
[...So you came crawling back without even being able to raid a single nest of wasteland rats?]
Vice’s voice, warped with mechanical modulation, rang through the room like a blade.
"That’s... their forces were on another level! It wasn’t some ordinary repair shop. They had turrets and mines laid out like a fortress..."
[Cut the bullshit!!]
Vice’s furious shout cut Deadzone off mid-sentence.
[Not only did you smear my name, now you’re making excuses? If you fail there and crawl back empty-handed... I’ll rip every last part out of the bodies you’ve got those pieces bolted into, right in front of your eyes!]
Click. With that threat, the hologram call was cut off unilaterally.
"Fuck!!"
Deadzone knew better than anyone that Vice would absolutely carry out those cruel words.
They couldn’t go back empty-handed like this.
Kwaang!Pzzt-!
Unable to contain his rage, Deadzone smashed the steel console that had been projecting the hologram with his mechanical arm, crushing it inward as blue sparks flew in every direction.
"Damn it... what the hell am I supposed to do..."
That was the exact moment he was clutching his throbbing head and cursing.
Kwaaaang---!!!!
With a heavy explosion that shook the entire abandoned power plant, a terrifying vibration surged up through the floor.
"W-what the hell?!"
Through Deadzone’s comms, the panicked scream of the guard on watch rang out.
[The front gate barricade has been breached!! Some crazy bastard drove a truck straight through the main entrance... Kraaagh!!]
(Beep——)
Did those nomad bastards already hit us?!
Deadzone suppressed the headache boiling under stress and roughly grabbed his main weapon, the tech sniper rifle Nekomata, which had been propped against the wall.
He burst out of the room and ran toward the outside of the power plant.
"Everyone arm up!!!"
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