A fireball rose from the street. In the dark of night, everyone could see the explosion.
This was nothing like a rocket launcher or anything of the sort.
[Name: Samson] [Category: Full-body Cyberware; Industrial Full-body Conversion] [Registered Company: Xinke Co., Ltd.] [Special Patents: Ultra-Dense Artificial Muscle Fibers and High-Power Magnetic Piston Mixture, with enough strength to rearrange steel beams and tear down old apartment buildings with bare hands.] [Manufacturing processes were lost after the Old Net collapsed, driving production costs up several times over.] [Market Price: 270,000 eddies]
Network Watch was the world's largest intelligence organization. Lier quickly obtained Samson's full specifications from Bryce, then used some of the data and the materials on hand to roughly estimate the explosion's power:
10 high-capacity battery cells, 100 kWh; 5 kg of CHOOH2-hydrogen fuel, with a density of 90 MJ/kg.
Judging by those figures alone, the energy inside was equivalent to just over 200 kilograms of TNT, on par with some small low-drag aerial bombs.
Of course, Samson was still a piece of Cyberware, not an aerial bomb. Since the structural strength of the full-body conversion wasn't uniform, the weaker parts would rupture first, releasing the energy prematurely. The final explosion wasn't as powerful as one might imagine.
But it was still astonishing.
The blast had blown a shallow crater nearly ten meters across in the road. A huge column of smoke continued to billow after the fireball vanished, rapidly spreading until dust shrouded the entire street.
The Sixth Street thugs hiding inside the building found that they could no longer hear anything, only a ringing in their ears.
When they looked up, one of the building's wooden walls had been shoved askew and broken by the shock wave. Armor plates and fragments from Samson had embedded themselves deep in