Cyberpunk: I'm Not Cheating Chapter 1: Welcome to Night City

Vito transmigrated.

He landed in Night City like a busted can of mystery at, dropped under a highway overpass right next to a puddle of foul drainage water and hit hard enough to draw real blood.

"What the actual fuck? I was playing a ga. How did I end up in this godforsaken place? I just started a new save. I'd barely finished tweaking my stats and suddenly I'm HERE?!"

It took Vito a while to accept this. But what threw him was how much it still felt like the ga. He'd appeared out of nowhere, fallen from god-knows-how-high, nearly turned every bone in his body into raw material for Night City's famous grilled skewers, and after a handful of breaths he'd completely recovered.

"No way. Did I just regen?"

He checked himself over. Yeah, fully healed. He looked around and tried to scan his surroundings the way he would in-ga, squinting until he nearly went cross-eyed, but nothing happened.

"Does it need to be activated? Don't tell I have to do it manually."

Vito poked his right eye and got a sharp stab of pain for his trouble.

"WHAT THE HELL — this is stock equipnt!"

He needed a mont after that, then went looking for sothing reflective to check if his eye was okay.

He found a puddle of stagnant yellowish water nearby. In the ambient glow of distant neon, he could just about make out his reflection.

He spotted sothing near his right ear that looked like a data jack. He reached up and touched it.

Beep.

Intrusion successful.

Beep. Program error.

Beep. Welco to Night City, Vito. Please install optical cyberware to access the interface. Beep. Please install optical cyberware to access the inter—

Right.

A man who just fell from the sky. No clothes. No chro. Nothing on him but a data jack, a single cable, and his junk swinging freely in the Night City wind. And now sothing was telling him to find a ripperdoc and pay whatever eddies it cost for eye implants. About as realistic as a gonk trying to mug Trauma Team.

The wind was picking up and everything was getting cold. Vito's most pressing problem was finding sothing to wear. He spotted a factory not far from the drainage ditch and decided to check it out. Maybe there'd be so scrap cloth that would get him out of the Terminator arrival situation.

He'd barely started walking when gunfire broke out.

A group of cyborgs with heavy chro and red compound-eye implants were in a shootout with another crew. The compound-eye faction, looking like they'd lost a bet and shown up cosplaying a budget-tier mage, were shooting and yelling.

"Your gun fires like a limp garden hose, you absolute gonk, eat lead!"

"I'm out, I'm out, cover !"

"Go flatline yourself, idiot! He jacked my gun!"

The compound-eye crew were Maelstrom. They were going at it with a rc squad and the rcs were pure bottom-tier. When Maelstrom backup arrived, the rcs cut their losses, piled into their vehicle, and floored it.

"Those little rats are running!"

"Out of the way, let them eat this!"

One Maelstrom mber shoved out a wheeled cart rigged with a light machine gun turret. When it locked into position, he hit an inhaler, huffed sothing unidentified, and jacked in. The LMG swung toward the rcs' off-road vehicle and opened up.

One rc had fast enough reflexes to bail out, hitting the door rolling and heading toward the drainage ditch. He caught two rounds on the way, but he was the lucky one. The rest of his crew were just a fireball now, gone with the vehicle.

"Get wrecked! That gonk's barbecue! Dum Dum, you absolute legend!"

The one called Dum Dum disconnected from the turret, hit the inhaler again, and roared:

"Hell yeah! That Flash hits different! I could punch through Night City on this stuff!"

"NCPD!"

"Scatter! Back to the factory, let the cops mop up!"

Dum Dum hauled the cart back inside with the rest of the Maelstrom crew.

When the NCPD arrived they poked around for a few minutes and scread off again. Apparently sothing else was already going sideways sowhere else.

The lucky rc made it to the overpass, scrambled over the fence, and tumbled into the drainage ditch. The drop was rough and he felt like his chro had nearly shaken loose, but he was a firm believer in surviving the unsurvivable aning better things were coming. This salvage-grade cyberware he was running, he'd upgrade it eventually.

He shook his head and reached for his gun. That's when he noticed a naked man not far away turning his Unity pistol over in his hands.

The naked man noticed him too, and had the nerve to look a little embarrassed.

"Sorry about that. Figured a fall from that height would keep you down."

The rc's gut clenched. He'd just barely slipped away from Maelstrom and now there was a naked cyberpsycho examining his sidearm. He kept his face neutral and swept the area for his main weapon, a Shingen Mark V. He spotted it nearby, but the naked freak was closer to it.

How to play this.

The rc cranked his pain editor up to max, pushed through the damage, and started edging toward the Shingen.

Vito turned the Unity over a few more tis and asked:

"Hey choom, where's the safety on this thing?"

The rc heard that and made his move. He dropped the Shingen plan and lunged at Vito instead. He couldn't be sure if it was a setup, but it was a better gamble than nothing.

Vito froze for half a second as the rc ca at him, stepped back on instinct just enough to dodge, but lost the Unity in the grab.

Then, as the rc thought he'd taken control, a fist ca out of nowhere and caved his face in.

He didn't get back up.

"Holy shit. Am I always this strong?"

Vito looked at the rc, facial cyberware actually cracked from the impact, then looked at his own fist. He had to be running his cheat ability. The stats he'd set through WeMod before transmigrating had carried over and his Body stat had to be sitting at twenty right now, at minimum.

The wind picked up again while he was thinking about it. After so debate, Vito stripped the rc's clothes and pulled them on. The fit was bad, but anything beat going into Night City with nothing on.

He picked up the Unity, poked around until he found the safety, then put a round through the rc's head. He said, completely flat:

"Sorry, you started it, choom. This is Night City."

Then he picked up the Shingen Mark V off the ground and walked away, leaving silence behind him.

One minute later.

He ca back.

Vito scooped up the rc's head and turned it over in his hands, checking frantically. Then he tilted his head back and yelled at nothing.

"NO!!!"

He was an idiot, a complete fucking idiot. He knew perfectly well that chro was everywhere in Night City and he'd sohow forgotten that optical implants had one of the highest installation rates of any cyberware in the city. His casual execution shot had landed square in the rc's right eye socket, and his earlier punch had wrecked the left one. He'd obliterated a perfectly good pair of donor eyes.

After sitting with that failure for a mont, he headed toward the food factory to see if there'd be a body with intact eye implants sowhere in there.

He climbed to the overpass level to get a look at the factory floor, just in ti to watch a group of scavs load the last of the corpses onto a truck and drive away, leaving a burning car and the sll of roasted at hanging in the air.

Vito sighed. He walked away with two guns and nothing else.