Infinite, Progress Begins with Arasaka

Her combat capability and real-world experience were far inferior to those of her subordinates in Night City.

Vera thought silently, then moved.

"Got you!"

Boom!

With exaggerated leg strength and bodily coordination, Vera bent her knees and flipped forward from the edge of the hovercar's open hatch. The instant her body rotated one hundred eighty degrees to face the ground, she straightened her legs, reinforced her muscles and tendons, strengthened her ankles, gathered force in her legs, and kicked off!

With a shrieking sonic boom that forced even the armored hovercar to tilt for an instant, pale golden hair streamed behind her as her black silhouette shot forth like an arrow loosed from a bow.

At that exact moment, whoosh!

From an alley in a dark, chaotic corner of the city, a muzzle flash flickered. A guided rocket dragged a curved trail into the air, like a prowling serpent biting toward the airborne vehicle, crossing paths perfectly with the falling figure.

"It's that Night City bitch!"

In an instant, the Militech infiltration squad hidden throughout the city's corners, waiting to obstruct the enemy and sow chaos, spotted Vera as she fell.

"Quick, detonate it directly!"

Beside the man-portable Anti-air Missile operator, his partner holding a rangefinder spoke in a low voice. But when he said, "Hey, you..." there was no response. Turning around, he saw crimson data streams flashing rapidly through the operator's cybernetic eye. Electric spark burst from the interface behind his ear and his crystal chip. Their electronic warfare unit had clearly been breached.

By then, Vera had already reached out in midair and touched the missile's body. With a light flick, a push, the guidance program failed. Its terminal correction received no response, and the missile slammed into a nearby building. Boom! A blaze of fierce fire erupted.

All of it happened in the blink of an eye. Just as he began raising his gun, Vera's terrifying figure was already close at hand, holding a large-caliber shotgun like a spear as she plunged down.

"Sometimes, advanced intelligence is easier to crack than a mechanical countdown."

Vera's cold voice pierced through their psychological defenses like bullets.

Physically, too.

Clang—boom!

Metal and stone rang together. The ground throughout the dark alley shattered, cracks spread across the old concrete walls of the buildings, and dust billowed into the air. Even the metal dumpster in the corner was jolted off the ground. Blood mist mixed with smoke and debris rose high, blocking the view of the nearby hidden operatives.

"Ken?! You..."

Pebbles clattered down. The hidden operatives standing guard nearby widened their eyes. Within the smoke and dust, a slender black-and-gold figure slowly straightened.

Her face cold, Vera pulled her foot free from the slightly sticky sensation beneath it.

Splat.

She looked down. Beneath her was a heap of flesh mixed with a bent, broken missile launcher and all kinds of shattered cybernetic implants. A man whose lower body had vanished into a pool of blood lay there, his upper body a mangled mass of flesh, artificial muscles and subdermal armor torn open to expose broken ribs and pulsing organs.

Buzz. Orange-red light continued flickering in Vera's eyes.

Intrusion. Rapid breach. Target location.

As flesh tore apart, more than a dozen bullet holes, reeking of acrid gunpowder, appeared across the spiderweb-cracked ground. Vera shifted her gaze. "Eight left. A standard combat squad. Heh, you came all the way from North America to South Africa just to cause me trouble. I'm truly honored..."

Militech. An old rival. She had risen to prominence in Night City, North America, and more than half her achievements had come from stepping on Militech.

"Bastard! Arasaka bitch—"

At the corner of the alley, a burly Black man carrying an MA70HB light machine gun had only fired his first shot when his cybernetic eye was breached. It did not need to be completely shut down; a momentary lapse was enough. Thud! He spun and slammed hard into the cracked wall, blood bursting from the back of his head.

Withdrawing her palm, Vera chambered a round with her other hand and pulled the trigger, firing point-blank into his upper body. Bang! Another spray of shredded flesh.

"Aaaah... pfft—!"

Then, with a casual punch, she smashed through the abdominal subdermal armor and organs of a man whose twin Mantis Blades had snapped out. Like Death's scythe, Vera charged into the infiltration agents who had finally reacted, bringing a silence of torn flesh amid curses and screams.

Crackle...

Less than half a minute later.

"Johannesburg branch, this is Vera Adelheid. The coordinates of some attackers have been cracked and uploaded. Ignore the blast sites. Don't let them lead you around by the nose. Hunt down their infiltration squads and inflict maximum casualties. We absolutely cannot let them retreat after a single strike... Counterterrorism and riot suppression formation, follow me to the industrial park."

Resident Evil, but Cyberpunk 2075

Arasaka Industrial Park, Johannesburg.

The sustained roar of concentrated high-energy automatic gunfire echoed without end. Explosions came faster and faster, shaking the buildings of the Biological Research Experimental Zone.

Glass curtain walls shattered with piercing screeches. Factory equipment warped, pillars and walls collapsed, metal doors twisted, automated combat mechs were destroyed...

"She's already on the move. The delaying interception teams we deployed have been wiped out, one... update, two teams wiped out."

Rat-a-tat-tat! Bullets struck the wall pillars, spraying stone fragments. Sitting atop an Arasaka combat robot with its head blown apart while changing magazines, two soldiers in tank tops beneath heavy Combat Suits exchanged a few words.

"Bitch. No wonder I heard that Adam Smasher cyberware freak once praised her in battle. That monster praises people? Turns out the one he praised was a monster too! A monster with tits and no real equipment down below."

As they talked, data streams flashed across their eyes behind tactical goggles.

Their hackers had extracted fragments from the final combat recordings of their dead comrades. In the first-person footage, almost like a braindance experience, their comrades had been nearly one-sidedly crushed. Whenever that woman flashed into view, the footage lagged, followed by flying flesh and scattered limbs.

"Hiss..." A veteran agent from Militech's African office gasped.

He was not from the Militech faction stationed in North America. Vera Adelheid Russell of Arasaka had only risen to prominence in recent years, and not for very long. He had never been assigned to missions in the Americas or the Pacific Rim. This mission to seize or destroy the Solaris Staircase Project was his first time facing Vera.

Now that he was truly facing the pressure of knowing that she would arrive to kill them all in less than ten minutes, even someone as experienced in African operations as him felt his scalp tingle.

"Fuck, she got stronger again..." muttered a Militech field agent from North America.

His words left his African colleagues staring at one another. What the hell?

"Her processing power and reaction speed are even more absurd now."

As an elite agent familiar with her combat style who had watched her battle recordings many times, he knew very well that Vera's coordination and reflexes during a South American field operation more than half a year ago had not been anywhere near as strong as they were now!

Vera Adelheid's fighting style was completely different from Adam Smasher's.

If the latter represented the ultimate brutal beauty of crude cybernetic augmentation piled to the extreme, then the former was a subtle beauty—an elegant, restrained beauty embodied by the perfect union of human biotechnology and cybernetic technology.

Just as deadly.

After loading a fresh magazine, he said heavily, "There's no time. Everyone, full assault! If we can't get it within the final seven minutes, destroy the laboratory!" He clenched his fist, making no effort to hide the implanted traces of nanofiber plating and subdermal armor on his thick arm.

"Hacker team, this is Assault 1. Concentrate the Puppet Virus. I need you to disable those Arasaka dogs' sentry turrets... Mm, wait for my signal."

Crack. He rolled his thick neck, raised a Russian high-tech military VST-37 Scorched Earth, pulled the charging handle to chamber a round, then grabbed a loaded high-tech military T40 Hurricane rocket launcher. The next moment, he decisively moved forward...

"Attack!"

The instant he stepped out from behind the rear cover, he pulled the rocket launcher's trigger.

Crackle—

The Arasaka sentry turrets that responded by spewing fire seemed to have poorly lubricated turning gears. They jammed and shut down, leaving a sudden gap in the fire net.

Boom, boom, boom! A series of directional explosions tore Arasaka's defensive cover to pieces. Several heavily armored soldiers beside the sentry towers were instantly blown into sprays of blood before collapsing limply.

Arasaka's return fire weakened, but they still wove a dense net of heavy machine-gun rounds and smart explosive shotgun shells. In a single breath, several Militech soldiers were knocked to the ground. Even Assault 1, commanding the assault, took several hits.

This firepower was nothing like the mosquito bites of street conflicts. These were armor-piercing heavy rounds. Combat Suits were ripped apart, dermal armor caved in, titanium ribs collapsed, and large chunks of electrified artificial flesh were blasted away.

Within the smoke, gunfire and bullets surged wildly. Flesh was torn apart, prosthetic limbs dripping with bloody fluid flew through the air, and everything became blurred.

Yet over a secret communication channel unknown to the frontline grunts fighting for their lives, the commander of the hacker assault team, the reserve support force, was fiercely arguing with his superior.

"South African Bird calling Nest. Requesting withdrawal. The situation is deteriorating rapidly. The intelligence was wrong. Apart from Johannesburg's local guards, Arasaka Industrial Park also has Arasaka security forces stationed here. Infiltration has turned into a frontal assault. The operation has failed."

"Request denied. Continue the mission. Hold on for another five minutes. Vera Adelheid's personal involvement, overseas friends risking their lives to provide intelligence, and Arasaka's highly secretive additional stationed security forces all prove the importance of the Solaris Staircase Project. Either obtain it or destroy it. An investment of this scale must bring corresponding returns!"

"But... we have no way to deal with Vera Adelheid's individual combat strength..."

"No buts. Execute the order! You have five minutes before she returns to the industrial park! Within five minutes, either take the Sun Stairflower or destroy it!"

The bloody firefight had already lasted a minute and a half.

"Damn it, why won't these fucking Arasaka leeches die already?! Fuck... Arasaka reinforcements are less than five minutes away... Another team's been wiped out. We don't have time to wear them down anymore! Blow open the laboratory first!"

Before his words finished, boom—!

An especially violent explosion shook the laboratory building, drowning out the continuous roar of gunfire beneath its thunderous blast.

The powerful shockwave spread like ripples. Thick smoke and fire burst through the walls, and the air was filled with the scorched stench of burned flesh and electronic components.

"Cough, cough, cough..."

Blasted to the ground by the hot wave, the collapsed wall and pillars shattered into a triangular space that instead protected this Arasaka security agent squad leader.

He struggled to open his eyes. In the flames, the temporary defense line had been blown entirely to pieces. His subordinates and the laboratory's basic security personnel had become mixed together with the twisted, melted machine-gun turret.

"Damn it, just how many restricted weapons did those Militech bastards smuggle in... cough, cough."

The scorching airflow made his eyes and enhanced respiratory tract burn painfully. He looked behind him. The laboratory door housing the Sun Stairflower had been melted through by the blast.

Inside was a complete mess. Several cables hung from the broken ceiling, spurting flames and crackling, occasionally bursting with small flashes of lightning. In a damaged glass enclosure, some Little White mice that had been killed by shockwaves, flames, or electricity lay dead in a corner.

Most importantly, inside stood a machine. His analysis plug-in, still barely functioning, concluded that it was a DNA analysis and synthesis device. It was severely damaged, and some viscous pale liquid was beginning to seep from a twisted metal breach...

"Sun Stairflower extraction sample... No, Lord Saburo, it belongs to Lord Saburo. We absolutely cannot let Militech's barbarians take it..."

Using a pain editor to suppress his body's shock and spasms, he struggled out of the rubble and crawled toward the laboratory. Even when twisted metal fragments on the ground sliced open his pants and shredded the flesh of his legs, he kept crawling inside.

"Lord Saburo..."

He was a member of the security force at the Arasaka Family Estate. Since childhood, Arasaka had selected him from an orphanage, trained him, installed cyberware in him for free, allowed him to freely enter doll brothels, and made him superior to ordinary people. Therefore, he had to repay Lord Saburo!

"As long as Supervisor Russell is still here, the experiment can be restarted..."

As he neared the machine and collapsed onto the dripping viscous liquid, the laboratory's polished walls and floor allowed him to see what he looked like now.

He raised a hand, touching half of his mangled face with fingers stained by the sample liquid. Shrapnel had sheared away nearly half his helmet and face guard, revealing reinforced teeth in his upper and lower jaws, bionic flesh, and cybernetic structures inside. Electric spark crackled.

Bang! Bang!

At the same time, the screams from the remaining defenders outside and the increasingly sparse gunfire told him that, to prevent the experimental results from falling into enemy hands, he had to destroy the samples. He pulled out the high-explosive grenade at his waist and was about to pull the pin.

An electromagnetic steel needle round pierced his heart.

"Fuck, that Arasaka dead dog nearly pulled it off." The Militech agent who entered the laboratory clutching his severed arm fired several more shots into the man's torso, then kicked aside the motionless corpse leaning against the machine.

"Whew..."

Looking at the dark-red flower inside the shattered cultivation tank, he let out a long breath.

"Take the flower. Don't leave even a speck for Arasaka. Collect the data. We have less than two minutes..." As he spoke, he walked to the control console. The technician who had followed him in immediately pulled out a personal connection cable and began cracking it.

"Sir, cracking it will take time. Also, part of the console's storage chip is damaged, and data has been lost. I may only be able to identify, repair, and extract part of it from the backup chip..."

"Fuck, identify whatever you can. It doesn't matter if you can't identify the rest. With the flower, are we really afraid we won't be able to research it?" He crouched before the damaged DNA synthesizer and looked thoughtfully at the liquid dripping from the breach. "Who brought a medical sealed container?"

As he called out, two more Militech agents entered the laboratory carrying cases. Just as they focused intently on transferring the Sun Stairflower and collecting the unknown liquid dripping from the machine, a crisp sound like bones and tendons being worked rang out.

"Now isn't the time to relax, you—"

He frowned and turned, only to see:

"Aaaah—!"

The technician cracking the laboratory control console was tackled by the Arasaka soldier whose heart had been pierced and whose torso still contained several huge cavities. Horrifying sounds of gnawing and chewing rang out.

"For... Lord Saburo..."

He raised his head. His eyes bled, his face was mangled, and his open upper and lower jaws displayed steel teeth stained with chunks of flesh, bronchi, and other organs.

He let out an inhuman howl. His entire body writhed unnaturally, then he lunged at the one-armed Assault 1.

But, bang!!

Flesh splattered, and the headless corpse fell.

"Fuck, that scared the hell out of me. What the hell was that thing?!"