JohnnyZ
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[Demons of NC] Chapter 60
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 23:06:04 +0000 UTCJory agreed. Either he understood it was in his favor or he was just eager to consume rare prey. An experienced runner, blind in the real world—exactly his kind of delicacy.
“Virtual Dogtown—that’s their turf,” I warned. “Even for the two of us, it won’t be a cakewalk.”
“More optimism, please,” Jory quipped, his avatar smirking. The scrawny teen appearance hid a network of code and virtual constructs that seemed even denser than before.
I scanned him for details. Yup, Jory had definitely grown.
“How many people have you killed and devoured since breaking through the Blackwall?”
“No idea,” he sneered. “Do you remember every slice of bread you’ve eaten for breakfast?”
"Actually, yeah," I replied. "I’ve got a good memory."
"More like petty," Jory sneered. "Do you really give a shit about those nobodies? Don’t worry, if I ran into your girlfriend, I wouldn’t touch her. Honest!"
"The NetWatch care. Heard of 'em? This ain’t the Wild Net, Jory. Actions have consequences. You wanna get a body just to land in their hands right after?"
"Fine, fine. It’s just hard to resist when there’s so much juicy, weak prey walking around. Beyond the Blackwall, you have to fight for every scrap, but here people stroll around without even basic defenses."
Speaking of virtual arsenals, I came prepared. After our last scuffle with the Watch, I loaded up for the Voodoo Boys op—armored up with combat programs, fine-tuned shields, cloaking, worms, viruses, and, of course, demons. Whole kit cost me 50K eddies, even with loot from a couple of dead runners in the mix. Pricey, but if you’re gunning for someone like the Slider, you don’t cut corners.
I’d debated taking out Wilky LaGuerre in real life or the Net. From what I know of the future, his base is a goddamn fortress. Plus, there’s the risk that Barghest might step in to help their semi-allied gang. The Slider doesn’t leave his real fortress, but his digital lair? That’s another story. I had a plan to lure him out.
I wasn’t lying about keeping track of breakfast bread, either. My memory’s solid, and I always back up important files. Among the data from Zeitgeist’s memory that got passed to the Slider were research notes on long-term breaches of the Blackwall—places where the Old Net and the New Net had intersected. Using Jory, I’d fake one of those signals, something that could look like a random or preprogrammed activation of another secret bunker.
No way the Slider would resist. He’d rally his best runners and dive in headfirst for forbidden secrets. Of course, he’d be cautious, but creatures like me and Jory have our own advvantages in the Net.
Dogtown wasn’t just walled off in the real world—it was locked up tight in cyberspace, too. The Voodoo Boys had gone all out severing and obscuring pathways into Hansen’s domain. But after the Blackwall? Those measures didn’t faze us. The ruins and abandoned entertainment centers still harbored flickers of digital life on some servers. That’s where we set up our ambush.
In the real world, it was the Terra Cognita tech park—a scavenger’s paradise in the chaos of Pacifica. In cyberspace, it looked like a jagged canyon, its edges lined with harsh, angular lines. On either side, distant points of light marked Scavenger strongholds—ugly, jury-rigged fortresses of stolen gear. They loomed like watchtowers over the chasm below, where chaotic heaps of broken networks flickered like veins clogged with data clots.
I arrived first, beating Jory by fractions of a second. His bloated data mass slithered sluggishly through Dogtown’s frayed connections like an overfed snake.
"Charming place," Jory said, scanning the area with hundreds of simultaneous pings. "Reminds me of home. Cursed, shitty home past the Blackwall. You been here in real life?"
"Yeah. Total dump. You’d love it. Let’s prep for our guests. One of Night City’s top netrunners is coming. Let’s make it a memorable welcome."
"Gladly."
I’d brought along eight imps, three ifrits, and one fourth-gen Balron demon. Some programs I had preloaded into the Net, ready to summon. My spectral army spread out across the battlefield, finding optimal spots to hide. Like during the Susan Tower raid, I disguised my primary form, merging it with two real cyber-imps to form a triangular structure of identical spheres wrapped in tendrils. The other six imps copied the tactic, creating two more triangles.
The ifrits fragmented into scattered code, losing their forms but staying connected to my threads. They could reform into fighters in seconds. The Balron I stationed farther away, tying it to a specialized channel.
I began weaving a network of signal threads, subtly embedding them into the surrounding digital landscape.
Jory took a different approach. Masking himself as part of the environment wouldn’t work—he was too massive and unique. Instead, he restructured his data into a chaotic, broken mess. Within minutes, he looked less like a deadly AI and more like a corrupted database—a toothy treasure chest waiting to spring. A clever mimic protocol. A curious runner might poke the "data" and get mauled.
Time to bait the tomb raiders. I sent Jory the signal templates to broadcast. He’d be the lure; I’d strike from the shadows.
The Voodoo Boys didn’t take long. First, a few imps arrived—golden lightning orbs accompanied by a couple of search programs. The hounds of the net shamans sniffed around for danger but didn’t spot our ambush. Jory’s mimicry still held strong.
Searchers are great at finding netrunners and stock combat programs. But ours? Custom. Even the bought programs were heavily modded.
The searchers vanished. The imps stayed. Soon, five runners entered the canyon. Spotting the Slider among them was easy. His virtual form was massive, a pumped-up version of his real body, towering over the others. Empty eyes glowed with unnatural fire. Four lackeys flanked him, their faces painted with white, mystic-looking symbols.
The Slider spoke in Haitian Creole, the translation rendering roughly as:
"To the worthy, fate pours the strongest rum."
Worthy, huh? Guess we’ll see. Too bad you’re about to eat shit.
But the Voodoo Boys didn’t rush the bait. Careful bastards. They started scanning, running detection programs. One of them brushed against a disassembled ifrit but hadn’t yet figured out what they were poking.
"There’s a lot of weird stuff here," one of the runners muttered. "What happened, Wilk?"
"The currents of the Net have thrown us the carcass of a beast," the Slider said thoughtfully. "Like a whale’s corpse washed ashore."
So, he recognized some AI algorithm presence in Jory but assumed the Blackwall had already taken him out. Between the hands of the top net sorcerer appeared a greenish circle. Through it, like a prism, the Slider began analyzing Jory's data without taking too much risk. Damn it. If he figures out what he's dealing with, we'll lose the element of surprise. I thought Jory would strike first, but looks like it’s on me.
And one, two, three. Netrunner, RIP! (1)
In an instant, green lightning burst out from under the depths of the gorge, striking all five netrunners. My threads followed right after. Imps emerged from their camouflage, Ifrits began assembling, and the Balron lit up on the horizon with emerald fire.
"Trap!" one of the Voodooists screamed, claiming the Captain Obvious award of the day.
His prize? A double blast of green lightning from the Brainstormer, leaving him badly damaged. His virtual image flickered a few times, and his face contorted in pain. It's not pleasant having your brain fried. I tried to finish him off with my threads. Looked like it was working.
But the other runners reacted fast. Shimmering black-and-white armor with Voodooist patterns enveloped them.
"Find and kill!" the net-priestess shouted, unleashing a Cerberus.
This program looked like a massive black metal wolf, its eyes glowing white and its skin rippling with fire. Cerberus was a beast of a program—highly lethal, especially against netrunners. It could locate them and trigger a heart attack with a single pulse. But I wasn’t exactly in a human form right now and was disguised in a cluster of Imps.
Cerberus scanned over and over, but it couldn’t lock onto a target. Visually, it looked like the beast was turning its head in frustration. The priestess caught on quickly.
"Spirits!" she yelled to the others, who were fending off my Imps' and threads' attacks.
Spirits? Yeah, that’s about right.
The Voodooists released their own Imps and killer programs. Slider, arms spread wide, summoned a projection of a two-headed dragon, seemingly forged from red crystals and fire. A full-on virtual war had begun. Maxed-out chaos.
I managed to take out the wounded Voodooist, despite the others’ attempts to shield him or sever my threads. Distracted by an Ifrit’s feint, my thread destabilized his essence. The runner started glitching, screaming, and emitting pulses of nonsensical code. That’s when the others abandoned him—they knew he’d never be the same. My threads dragged him away, shredding him into pieces. But the enemy had gained enough time to mount a counterattack.
At first, the Voodooists couldn’t locate my primary structure. They saw individual threads and tendrils everywhere but couldn’t pinpoint the core. That changed when the Slider pulled some special signal-tracking move. He locked onto the cluster where I was hiding.
"It’s here!" he shouted, marking me with a blue beam. "Show it the fury of Pacifica, brothers and sisters!"
Jory... You gonna step in sometime soon? I cast you in one of the lead roles, not as background scenery. I sent him the message, but my "partner" stayed quiet.
Maybe he wanted the Voodooists to wear me and my arsenal down before he made his move.
The Slider’s dragon easily obliterated one of my Ifrits. The Balron was still holding its ground, but it now faced a swarm of killers resembling robotic skeletons in samurai helmets.
If you don’t step in now, I’m pulling out.
Unlike Jory, I could bail quickly. With his bulk, the Voodooists might just corner him—or at least strip him down hard.
Patience, patience he finally deigned to reply.
A few seconds later, his massive data structures rippled and swelled like a festering boil. And then—boom—they exploded. Once again, we were being sucked into one of Jory’s illusions. He sure loved this crap. But honestly? It worked here. We’d grown used to his extreme virtual constructs, but the Voodooists? They’d be caught off guard.
The space around us transformed into a vast dungeon. Massive columns wrapped in stone serpents supported a towering ceiling. Shadows danced along dark-brown walls, cast by flaming braziers. Programs morphed into monsters—real imps, horned djinns, hellhounds. The runners now appeared as four dark-skinned sorcerers decked out in bone talismans. Jory, meanwhile, hovered near the ceiling in his usual semi-transparent ghostly form.
"Welcome to my theater of horrors!" he announced. "The worst is yet to come!"
The Voodooists didn’t let him gloat long. They fired off four silver mist clouds, deadly to rogue AIs. But Jory... just popped. His form burst, unleashing a torrent of phantom figures from where he’d been floating. Each was a subroutine. Alone, they weren’t much, but the sheer volume was overwhelming. It completely distracted the enemy from me.
This is why working with Jory in the Net was worth it. His over-the-top moves were perfect cover for my precision strikes. We were like a tank and DPS combo.
And now, the little freak had given me free rein—or free tentacles. Breaking from the Imp cluster, I dashed toward the enemy, blending into the swarm of ghostly figures. My own form adapted to mimic them.
Three bursts of green lightning pierced the Slider’s armor, and then I launched my full assault. A multi-pronged attack aimed to overload his memory buffer while injecting hundreds of lines of corrupting code. It looked like he was about to crumble.
But instead of breaking, Slider dragged me into another subspace.
"Did you really think it’d be that easy, demon?" I heard his mocking voice.
The subspace was an icy labyrinth, untouched by Jory’s projection. Massive blue structures loomed in the Cybervoid’s darkness. How many hundreds of thousands of eddies had this cost him? How the hell had he wired this up? Must be nice to be rich, smart, and unhinged all at once.
But as Jory pointed out earlier, persistence was my strong suit. This grand fortress couldn’t intimidate me—or scare me off. Those feelings were buried, dormant, until I returned to flesh. I began the assault. Wandering through the maze was pointless—I was sure Slider had ensured it was near impossible to navigate. This wasn’t just a digital fortress; it was a complex defensive machine. One I’d have to break piece by piece.
The ice repaired itself constantly, dynamically reconfiguring. But compared to the defenses that had once protected Abernathy, this? It was second-rate.
I pushed forward, mixing brute-force assaults, viral injections, and subtle workarounds of already damaged structures. I didn’t hesitate to use worm samples I’d snagged from Arasaka. At the same time, I managed to breach the outer gates, letting Jory’s subprograms flood into the labyrinth. They added numbers to my precision strikes.
"Wait, wait..." A voice echoed through the labyrinth, far less confident now. "It’s you, V? We can still cut a deal."
I didn’t answer, hammering away. The labyrinth’s structure began to collapse. The Black Ice generation systems started eating themselves under my influence. Wilky had prepped well, but even the best swimmer won’t outpace a shark. We were on entirely different levels. For every countermeasure he deployed, I threw a hundred different attacks back at him.
"You think you can fuck me over that easy? I’ve already planted a dead-man’s switch. Go ahead, try me! Hansen and all of Night City will know who you are!"
Go ahead and try? Sure. You convinced me. And if he’s lying about the dead-man’s switch, I’ll find out in his memories. I’ll have time to neutralize it. I doubt the Slider shared this intel with a third party. It’s all got to be stashed on his base or nearby in Dogtown.
"Wait, V, hold up! Just listen—" The labyrinth’s heart, a massive disco-ball-like core, cracked open, exposing the Slider’s plain virtual form, stripped of the ridiculous muscles he’d painted on. "You’re not gonna hit a cripple, are you?"
No. I’ll just eat you alive before Jory catches up.
The last thing Wilky LaGuerre saw in his drawn-out life was a cluster of red tendrils bursting through the breach in his fortress’s heart, shredding the final shields, and…
I felt what gold rush prospectors must’ve felt, pulling a nugget the size of a fist from an unknown river. Klondike! El Dorado, with a dash of his slimy thoughts thrown in. Terabytes of valuable intel poured out—names, passwords, locations, insights on the Net, the underbelly of Dogtown and Night City. I didn’t even sort through it all, just shoved it into myself to sift through later. But one critical fact stood out—he wasn’t lying about the dead-man’s switch. I had to act fast, while his body was still twitching.
Grabbing the data, I slipped out of the collapsing labyrinth. Jory was still dealing with two netrunners. He’d handle it. Using the cover of his phantom barrage, I slipped out of the virtual trap. The Voodoo Boys’ sniffers were still lurking nearby. Perfect. I slipped into one of them and gave the order to return to base.
Under this guise, and using Slider’s virtual keys, I accessed the local network of his base.
The stash was there. The problem? It was physical. That’s how it was protected from Net-based attacks. Just an ordinary safe, set up for his crew to crack open if he died. A last will and testament. Inside was also a shard detailing all our dealings.
Smart move, Wilky. But I still had options. Through the local network, I tapped into the surveillance cameras. Then I found one of his goons with weaker ICE and puppeted him.
A regular gunman, but one of LaGuerre’s trusted guys, marched purposefully to the office. A pair of bots stood guard at the door.
"Access currently prohibited," one security bot announced.
"Twelve. Eight. Osiris. Torpedo," my puppet responded.
"Emergency shutdown protocol acti—" The bots’ voices faded as they powered down into standby.
And there we were. A metal safe packed with the dead man’s secrets. But I didn’t need it anymore. I already had everything in my memory, just waiting to be sorted.
The puppet keyed in the right combination. Then he grabbed an incendiary grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, tossed it inside, and slammed the door shut. A muffled hissing sound came from the safe. A faint wisp of black smoke trickled out through the seal. Good safe, but everything inside was now toast.
Then my zombie pulled out a frag grenade, this time stepping up to the Slider’s half-dead body slumped in his chair. The pin hit the floor again. One second. Two. Three, and...
I left the puppet a split second before the explosion. Alarms were already blaring across the base, but I could still loot a little before dipping. Everything was going my way. I’d scored priceless intel and eliminated a potential enemy.
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(1) In Russian there is a common phrase, a rhyme that is used during New Year celebrations: “One, two, three. Light up, Christmas tree.”
P.S. In Russia and most post USSR countries, New Year is a much more significant holiday than Christmas. What’s more, Christmas there is celebrated on Jan 7th (not 25th because of the Gregorian calendar) and it considered religious holiday not secular.
