Six Psycho Squad Members

Chapter 796: 6. Psycho Squad Members

The Psycho Squad—the armed force feared throughout Night City—consisted of ten elite squads, with its official membership always maintained between sixty and seventy people.

For a metropolis whose population had recently swelled from seven million to nearly eight million, this special unit responsible for suppressing riots and eliminating cyberpsychos was astonishingly small. Yet this deliberately maintained "scarcity" was itself part of its terrifying deterrence.

That was because the Psycho Squad itself was made up of "tamed beasts"—nearly every member was an extremely dangerous individual captured and modified during a cyberpsychotic episode.

In this jungle of steel, only killing machines with blood-soaked hands and nerves driven mad by cyberware deserved the title of "cyberpsycho." And only cyberpsychos tamed through cortical inhibition surgery and medication could become members of the Psycho Squad.

Maintaining the unit's numbers was practically a miracle.

Considering the rate at which nervous breakdowns recurred during missions, the almost mutual-destruction casualty rate when hunting their own kind, and the cruel reality that each member served for no more than two years on average, the Psycho Squad was always on the verge of running out of personnel.

The Psycho Squad was forever understaffed, yet it had never truly faced the predicament of having no one to use.

It sounded like a paradox, but anyone who understood the nature of this unit would understand the cruel logic behind it—in Night City, madness was as commonplace as breathing.

Every day, new cyberpsychos emerged on the streets. Every day, out-of-control mercenaries, cyberware soldiers driven into overload, and citizens consumed by despair appeared. They endlessly filled the Psycho Squad's vacancies.

The question had never been whether there were enough lunatics, but how long the lunatics could survive.

Most newly recruited members could not last three months—either they were