Cyberpunk - Badland Madman [Cyberpunk 2077]

Woosh!

Cypher removed the sack from the Wraith leader's head. The face was ordinary with the mask removed. The eyes were Kiroshi with non-human styled irises. The arms were chrome with tubes running over them. He didn't know what kind of cyberware it was.

"Bruce Ward? Never heard of him before." Cypher muttered after Atlas filled him in. "All this just to shake somebody down for cash? Man really brought that much heat for little ol' me?"

Atlas' human avatar was present, leaning against the nearby wall, arms crossed. "After Scav hunting? I would say they went in unprepared."

"True." Cypher clenched his right fist and spat on his knuckles. He pulled his arm and punched the Wraith leader in the face. It instantly woke the man up.

"Looking for me?"

"Uh...? Huh...? Wh... what? Where the hell am I? No! What was that thing? Those monsters! You... you're Cypher Blackwell!"

Bruce Ward tried to break free, but the chains made from Arc Alloy weren't so easy to break.

"Whoa, you know who I am? Guess I'm famous, huh?" Cypher said with no enthusiasm. He wasn't even looking and instead worked to wear metal knuckles on both his hands. "My netrunner says you came clean. You nuked all your data before this raid. Means you're hiding something. And I don't do secrets."

"We just—"

Bam!

Cypher didn't wait and punched with the metal knuckle, ripping the cheek off the Wraith's face. "I wasn't really a violent man before this life. But Night City's a great teacher. So, first question, who ordered you to target me? I know you fuckers were scouting my property for days, so don't lie."

"He is trying to access the net." Atlas suddenly spoke, walking to stand in the field of view of the Wraith. However, Atlas no longer looked like Morgan Freeman. Instead, Atlas had taken his giant Omnissiah form with red robes, cyber arms, tentacles, and other trinkets all over him.

"A-Ah, what the fuck are you?!"

"I am what you should fear," Atlas replied.

Cypher nodded, then pulled the gun off his hip. Just a plain pistol. He pointed it right at the Wraith's cock. "I'm counting to five. You answer the damn question, or I'm turning you into a bitch. Don't worry, I'll patch you up nice and give you a real deep pussy. Ain't it called Midnight Lady? Yeah, that's the one. Then maybe I'll call up some Animals so they can have a little fun."

"..."

Bruce Ward stared at Cypher's face for a very long time, horror all over his eyes and messed-up face. Scavs tortured you, made XBDs, or harvested your organs and chrome. Wraiths did the same. But this was his first time being told his gender would be changed, and then… Bruce failed to even imagine what those Animals would do.

"It was Dogkiller. Never contacted me direct, but one of his lieutenants came sniffing around for this gig."

Cypher eyed Atlas for a moment. Dogkiller's name had appeared before during that cave massacre with Panam. He didn't know where Dogkiller was, but he knew that the man had his Wraiths spread all around Night City. Besides, Dogkiller was the leader of all Wraiths.

Bam!

Cypher punched him again.

"W-Why? I answered!"

"Felt like it," Cypher said. "Why'd you nuke your personal data? What were your orders?"

"Don't know. They just told me to do it. Then rough you up some, see what falls out."

"Did they explicitly instruct you to extort Cypher Blackwell for money?" Atlas asked in a demonic voice.

"No!" Bruce yelped. "I mean, yes! But they didn't drop an eddie count. Just ordered me to lean on you some. Rattle you with my boys. Maybe spill a little blood too, if I could."

"If you could?" Atlas repeated. "They said it?"

"They did! Didn't sound too sure I could pull it off. So I rounded up every gutter gonk I could get... They all zeroed?" Bruce asked.

Bam!

Cypher punched him again, just taking out his annoyance at that point. He looked at Atlas then. "You think someone's tryna feel me out or something?"

"That seems to be the case. I naturally did not allow any communication to go out from the Wraiths, and there was no spy in visible range, nor a drone. However, if someone was watching from a spy satellite, then they may have seen the Leapers."

Cypher hummed, scratching his chin lazily. He wasn't scared or worried that someone saw his tech. The leapers were there for protection, and they did it. The annoying part was not knowing who was spying on him, or who put the Wraiths to this job.

"Make more Leapers. Big ones, gotta be a hundred, then make a bunch of tiny hand-sized Leapers packed with explosives. Crank out as many as you can, like a thousand maybe. Turn all the land and water around me into one giant minefield. We got all these nice people donating their skulls, so turn every last one into Gun-Skulls and slap DL-18 Blasters on them. Keep 'em outta sight though, strictly for indoor security."

Cypher looked into the distance, frowning.

"If we had our energy shit sorted out, we could've built a couple of SecUnits for security. Those things are straight-up super soldiers. Anyway, design hidden turrets with energy blasters in mind. And make some Microbots packed with explosives, scatter them everywhere, maybe all over Night City.

"Spy on every patch of land nobody's watching. Run all the data. Think we're in the big leagues now with the shop open and all. NUSA sent Morgan Blackhand after me, and that tells us something."

"What about your security?" Atlas asked.

"I'm gonna get chipped in. Not the crazy shit, just Bioware. Grafted Muscles, maybe toss Vik and Nina Kraviz that new stuff we pulled from the SecUnit designs. Gonna get Skin Weave too, and since it's all nanites, I want you running them. I'll grab Subdermal Armor while I'm at it. Oughta be enough to keep direct bullet hits from punching through me."

"I believe I can merge this world's bioware designs with the knowledge we gained from SecUnit to create superior bioware for you. I can also enhance the Subdermal Armor's capabilities," Atlas replied at once, already working. "It's done. The designs are ready."

Cypher didn't even flinch, so used to Atlas being a god stuck on Earth with his dumb ass. "Alright, get the Microbots to move the dead bodies from outside, keep it under wraps. I'm gonna go sketch out the design for this damn hoverboard. The SecUnit itch's starting to pound like a headache. Finishing this new one out might help."

"What of this Wraith?" Atlas inquired.

Cypher looked back at the man, bloodied and terrified. "Thanks for donating your skull, I guess."

"N-No! I told you e—"

Bang!

Cypher pressed the gun's muzzle on the man's chest and shot through the heart, killing him without damaging the skull. In any case, Wraiths and Scavs were the same to him.

Quickly after that, Cypher turned and went back to the part of the first underground level where he'd bashed his computer screen before. He quickly replaced it with a new one and fired up the Atlas-made design software. The computer was completely offline and didn't even use market parts. It was all custom.

Soon, he started drawing all the parts, writing all the steps, making diagrams, and making files for the printer. As he worked to fully write it down, he slowly realised how advanced this damn thing was, despite looking so low-tech and coming from futuristic 2015.

It was laughable because what he'd discovered in it was something not even this world of 2077 had.

"Atlas… Did I just discover a room-temperature superconductor?" Cypher gawked at the screen. "This shit's straight sci-fi. Why the hell would you use it to make hoverboards of all things?"

"Maybe the tech was so standard to them that building hoverboards with it made business sense," Atlas said, scanning the designs virtually.

Cypher leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "Man, this is magic. Lossless power grids. Maglevs getting cheap as shit to make. Night Corp's rebuilding the city's Maglev Network and hooking it up outside the city, too. Soon it'll reach Chicago. Problem is, it's still hella expensive right now. With this stuff, it'd be cheap as building NCART. Night Corp'd sell their soul to get their hands on it."

"Or terminate you for it," Atlas added. "But it resolves an even greater obstacle for you, Cyph. The primary limitation in nuclear fusion is the immense energy and spatial capacity demand to cool reactor magnets. Once hydrogen plasma exceeds one hundred million degrees Celsius, electromagnets contain it within a magnetic field to prevent the reactor walls from melting.

"This eliminates the massive energy demand required to sustain the cryogenic system that keeps the magnets stable at low temperatures, significantly simplifying the path to net energy gain, where the reactor generates more power than it consumes. In addition, without large-scale cooling systems, the reactor can be designed far smaller, possibly compact enough to fit within the size range of a car."

Cypher felt excited just hearing all that. Thankfully, he was no longer so dumb as not to understand. "That means… making a nuclear fusion reactor is highly possible now."

"That is true, Cyph."

Cypher clenched his fist. "Man, I was hoping for something like an Arc Reactor. That could make power by itself. With this thing, we're still boiling water, but fuck it. Let's roll with it. If the next itch sucks, we're storming Arasaka and snatching those scientists."

"I have already begun preparing for it, Cyph."

"Well, I'm heading to bed. I'll make the Hoverboard tomorrow morning."

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Advance chapters on [PATREON] are in long-form format. I have 10 long chapters of this story on P@treon. That's equal to 35-45 NovelPhoenix chapters.