65 The Comfy Club

Dogtown was still the same old Dogtown.

That wasn't to say the string of chaos triggered by the president's crash hadn't changed it at all. It was just that Dogtown's underlying nature remained the same.

Chaotic, noisy, insane.

Scenes that had become increasingly rare in Night City—especially the lawlessness that had nearly vanished from Pacifica after the NCPD's heavy-handed crackdown—were now laid bare before Carl's eyes.

Car crashes, gunfights, and people doing things in the street that belonged in age-restricted braindances.

"Sometimes I really wonder whether Hansen deliberately keeps Dogtown like this, or whether she simply can't control it."

Carl sat in a barely modified car—one they had fixed up from an abandoned vehicle by the roadside after sneaking into Dogtown—and spoke to Oliver and Jack.

"In theory, wouldn't a stable place make it easier to collect taxes and make money?"

"You say that like Hansen can actually control the place."

Oliver snorted. "Isn't Dogtown's whole selling point being a 'paradise of chaos'? Anyone who can't make it outside, anyone being hunted, anyone with nowhere else to go—they all come here looking for an opportunity. Hansen chose this road herself. She wanted to muddy the waters in this little crack between powers and start the fire herself. And you expect her to be able to keep it under control?"

She leaned back in the driver's seat and shook her head. "As for taxes? Hansen probably doesn't care about that little bit of money. Using this chaos to prop up her arms empire, constantly selling weapons and expanding Barghest—that's her real goal."

"True."

Carl nodded slightly. "If she weren't so obsessed with chaos, always trying to profit from disaster, she wouldn't still be locked in a standoff with the president, waiting to see who slipped up first."

Two weeks had passed