With a bit of money saved up, Vito found an underground ripperdoc and got himself a new haircut, then picked up a cheap ronin mask from a street vendor. He'd originally wanted a digestive system upgrade, but one look at the state of the clinic killed that idea fast.
The doc, who went by Janpeng, still had two strips of flesh hanging off him. That wasn't even the worst part. That was his chair.
After the haircut, Vito went to check himself out in the clinic bathroom, but the mirror was completely blacked out. He called through the door:
"Hey doc, why is the mirror blacked out?"
"Five eddies to use the mirror!" Janpeng called back.
Vito walked out, handed the man five eddies cash, and got the mirror switched on.
He admired his face, put the mask on, and decided nobody was going to recognize him as Watson's honeypot robber now.
He walked out of the clinic satisfied.
The mont he was gone, Janpeng made a call.
"Hey! What do you want? Today's not delivery day."
Janpeng lowered his voice: "We hit the jackpot. Just had a client co in."
"Saburo Arasaka walked into your place? The fact that you even get clients with more than a couple of secondhand implants between them is practically a miracle."
"I'm serious. The kid is full factory standard and in perfect condition."
The voice on the other end sharpened with interest: "Which company's product?"
"No company's product," Janpeng said, getting more excited. "Factory standard, you get ? Not a single implant installed, all solid original at."
A pause. "Could be so corp brat slumming it?"
Janpeng laughed: "Are you losing it? What corp brat cos to a place like mine? He just left. I didn't get a tracker on him since he only ca for a haircut, so get your people out here and sweep the area, he's wearing a beat-up old rock band mask."
The breathing on the other end picked up: "Your cut's guaranteed if this pans out. Sending people now."
The man on the phone was a scav boss. Their whole operation ran on ripping implants out of people and selling them, and this was the kind of score they rarely stumbled across. A full set of healthy original parts would fetch serious money from the right buyers.
A scav crew near Watson mobilized fast. There was a gold brick walking the streets and they needed it before it walked away.
Vito had no idea. He was working out how to land so legitimate work and save up for a set of Kiroshi eye implants.
Walking down the street he ca across a man with no hands completely losing it in public, jumping onto the hood of a parked car and screaming.
"Jesus, another cyberpsycho?" soone nearby muttered.
Vito watched the man raging on the hood and said, to nobody in particular.
"That's not a cyberpsycho. That's just a regular person who got pushed too far."
A middle-aged woman who seed to know him rushed over to talk him down and got kicked to the ground for her trouble. The man kept screaming, but nobody around understood a word of it. The most advanced translation chip in the world couldn't parse what was coming out of him, because it wasn't language anymore.
"NCPD! NCPD! Stand down imdiately! Stand down imdiately!"
Patrol officers who'd picked up a cyberpsycho call ca running, but what they found was one gaunt middle-aged man screaming on a car hood. They called off the MAX-TAC request.
Officers approached with weapons drawn. The middle-aged woman tried to stop them.
"Please don't hurt Fredo, he's just not doing well right now, please, don't hurt him!"
The officers kept at it: "Get off the vehicle now. Stop all aggressive behavior imdiately."
Fredo only got worse when the cops showed up, jumping and screaming on the hood.
The car owner pushed forward to lodge his complaint.
"Can you people not deal with this lunatic? He's tearing my car apart!"
A tall detective turned on him.
"Back off and let NCPD do its job."
The car owner flared: "I work at Arasaka. You people better watch out for that complaint."
The detective was about to co back at him when his partner grabbed his arm.
"ndez, drop it, deal with the suspect first."
Then a MAX-TAC AV ca in overhead, scanned Fredo, held position, opened its bay door, and a MAX-TAC officer put half a magazine into him from the air with a casual sweep of his assault rifle. The bay door closed and the AV left.
Poor Fredo ended up a crumpled heap on the hood, and sohow he looked at peace.
"My car! You bastards are going to hear about this!"
The crowd dispersed. The only one left was the middle-aged woman, kneeling at the side of the road with her face in her hands.
Vito let out a long breath. That was Night City, a city that drives people out of their minds.
He was cutting through the alley beside his hotel when sothing felt off, the specific crawling sensation of being watched. He reached inside his jacket and thumbed the safety off his Unity.
He'd walked a little further when he picked up three people behind him, drifting closer in that way designed to look casual. He picked up his pace and ducked around a corner into another alley. The three followed, dropping any pretense.
The scavs rushed in after him. The first one through got a glass bottle across the head. The sound of breaking glass was imdiately followed by the Unity firing at close range, rapid shots dropping one scav where he stood. The second scrambled behind a dumpster.
The scav on the ground cranked his pain modifier and swung his gun up at Vito. Vito had already reloaded and got there first, putting a round through his head.
The scav behind the dumpster watched his partner go down in under two seconds and panicked. He hit his Flash inhaler, ca out from behind the dumpster and laid down suppressing fire, spraying toward Vito.
With only the Unity, Vito couldn't push back against the sustained fire. One scav left, he'd counted. He thought about doing what he'd do in the ga, walking into the bullets and tanking them while regen caught up, but he wasn't sure a factory-stock body with no armor implants could absorb SMG rounds fast enough to matter.
Clack.
The SMG ran dry and locked open. Vito took the opening, sliding hard across the ground toward the dead scav to grab the Shingen, but the last scav was fast on the reload and was almost back in the fight.
He had no choice. Unity in his right hand, he grabbed the dead scav's body with his left and hauled it up as a shield, trading shots from behind it. When the noise stopped, both of them were down.
Vito lay there breathing Night City's terrible air in big gulps. These scavs were bottom-tier and didn't even have proper subdermal armor. He'd caught a round in the gut where a bullet punched clean through the body shield, while the last scav had taken one in the chest and wasn't getting up again.
Then, from sowhere in the back of his mind, a song lyric surfaced unbidden.
You've already sunk into the human swamp. Welco to what you can't escape.
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