Chapter Summaries
245/245 chapters summarised. Running kill count: ☠ 295
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001 1. Chapter 1
A gamer from our world woke up in Night City, 2075, in the body of fourteen-year-old Kusanagi Motoko. Scavs had stripped her cyberware, someone rescued her, and she'd been comatose for a year. She couldn't walk, couldn't remember being Motoko, and the doctors couldn't care less. The Cyberpunk setting clicked into place fast, and with it the terror of knowing exactly how disposable a weak, unchipped kid was in this city.
Junichiro "Jun-Nii" Kusanagi burst into the hospital room with a katana on his hip and fire-colored hair, swearing his little sister was safe. Three days later, insurance cut her off and Jun brought her home to a cramped Japantown apartment full of Tyger Claw memorabilia and incense. Between awkward sibling bonding and wheelchair-bound leg raises, she started piecing together the life of the girl she replaced. Generational Tyger Claw family, dead parents, and a bag of blood-stained clothes.
At the bottom of that bag she found a shard labelled "Gema / Gamer" in a pristine case. She slotted it, blacked out, and woke to find the Cyberpunk 2077 stat screen in her HUD. Body, Reflexes, Cool, Technical Ability, Intelligence, all scraping the floor or in the negatives. The first XP notification popped after a set of leg raises. She also discovered the system's instant-sleep recovery and the rested XP buff, and by nightfall she was studying her mother Natasha Kusanagi's Tyger Claw netrunner training guide, unlocking Breach Protocol as her first skill. The grind had begun.
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002 2. Chapter 2
The Gamer System's instant-sleep recovery turned Motoko into a grinding machine. She burned through pushups, crunches, and stair climbs on a loop. Exercise until collapse, sleep two hours, wake fully healed, repeat. Body hit Level 1 and suddenly she could stand without wobbling. Her first walk outside took her around the block past Cherry Blossom Market, buying mystery meatballs from a street vendor while gunshots echoed in the distance and nobody flinched.
Jun dropped a Unity handgun and a combat knife on the kitchen table with a one-hour crash course on not shooting herself. She spent every waking moment after that grinding draw-and-fire drills and knife work, unlocking both Handguns and Blades. The skills capped at Level 1 until Reflex caught up, a hard lesson in the system's stat-gating.
Her HUD had been a mess since the hospital. Icons shifting with every eye twitch, menus flipping sides at random. A trip to the scarred Ripperdoc near Cherry Blossom Market revealed the embarrassing truth: she'd been stuck in new-user setup mode since the Scavs stripped her chrome. With the HUD locked down and a gun holster plus knife sheath from the local shop strapped on, she walked home feeling armed, oriented, and for the first time like she belonged on these streets.
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003 3. Chapter 3
Hiromi, Motoko's best friend, all-mohawk and no brakes, kicked the apartment door open and physically dragged her to Ho-Oh, a Tyger Claw youth bar in Kabuki. There she met the crew: Ichi, the only one with a plan; Malcolm, who immediately tried to collect a fake debt; and Omaeda, the heavyset netrunner who barely looked up from his battered deck. Three hours of stories about the old Motoko painted a picture of a street-kid hellion she no longer recognized.
Drunk Hiromi tried to ride her Yaiba Kusanagi home. Motoko flat-out refused, wrestled the keys away, and drove the bike herself. Badly, but alive. The system registered a new Driving skill under Reflex, which meant non-game skills existed and the rules were wider than she thought. Back at the apartment, Hiromi passed out drooling on her shoulder.
Two things stuck after Hiromi fell asleep. First: a conversation with some workers tipped her off to a Scav nest at Megabuilding H2, Floor 24, filed away for when she was strong enough to do something about it. Second: Blades hit Level 2 and the perk screen opened. She took Ambidextrous, making both hands equally deadly. A knife in the left, a Unity in the right.
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004 4. Chapter 4 ☠ 3
Motoko hit Body Level 3 and Jun took her to a secret Tyger Claw underground shooting range beneath a compound in Little China. A grizzled range master watched her quick-draw and was impressed enough to hand over a Saratoga SMG to test. She burned through magazines unlocking Assault, pushed Handguns to Level 2, and took the Quick Draw perk. She spent an hour teaching Jun the same technique, figuring keeping her brother alive mattered more than one session of XP. She also unlocked Ninjutsu after sneaking past a gunfight in her neighborhood alley on her way home from a jog.
Hiromi dragged the crew into a car-theft gig against Gonzales, a fake-Valentino drug pusher working the Kabuki shanty town. The plan fell apart fast: Omaeda couldn't crack the car's security, Malcolm's distraction act wore thin, and Hiromi got pistol-whipped unconscious by one of Gonzales's guards. Ichi tried to bluff his way through the confrontation alone. When both guards raised their SMGs on him, Motoko crept up behind all three, stole the chromed revolver off Gonzales's hip, and opened fire with both hands. Unity in the right, stolen revolver in the left.
Both guards dropped. Gonzales lunged at Ichi and Motoko shot him. Three dead, Motoko coated in someone else's blood, and the whole crew staring at her like she might be the next thing they needed to worry about. She looted the bodies on autopilot, two SMGs, eddie shards, ammo. A Tyger Claw woman at the club washed the gore off her face while she drifted through some kind of shock fugue. The soda she was given was sweet. The spilled puddle on the table was red. She puked on Jun's shoes.
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005 5. Chapter 5
Three bodies and a Cold Blood skill later, Motoko holed up in the apartment for days. The system had given her a full level-up for the kills, a free stat point and skill point, and the reward felt like poison. She wouldn't leave, wouldn't stop exercising, wouldn't touch the Unity without her hands shaking. Jun eventually dragged her out for ramen at Cherry Blossom Market. The city still had murder in it. But it also had noodles.
Hiromi visited to say thanks for dropping the guys who cracked her skull. Her Arasaka-exec mother invited Motoko to dinner at the family's corpo apartment in Japantown, looked her over with clinical detachment, and approved: someone willing to kill for her daughter was an acceptable friend. Five thousand eddies hit Motoko's account without a word of explanation. Hiromi was furious. Motoko pocketed it.
Back at the shooting range her hands still shook on the draw. She pushed through it anyway, grinding Assault to Level 2 and taking the Gun Nut perk, pick up any weapon and instantly know its quirks, its failure points, its kill potential. The grizzled range master handed her Morgan Blackhand's Solo's Manual. Chapter Four laid out a philosophy on why a solo kills: defend yourself, protect your people, and because the rules demanded it. She read past that into Chapter Five. Her hands slowed their shaking.
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006 6. Chapter 6
Athletics hit Level 1 and the Parkour perk rewired how Motoko saw the city. Every AC unit, window ledge, and overhang became a route. She took the train to Chrome Ring Gym, a soulless glass-and-chrome corpo palace, and hammered weights until Body neared Level 5. On the way out she discovered the punching machines, unlocked Street Brawler, and leveled it to 1 in one session.
She dyed her hair purple and cut it short in the back, long in the front. The Major's look from Ghost in the Shell, because if you're going to steal a legend's name you might as well commit. Shopping with Hiromi yielded a neo-military half-jacket and fingerless gloves. No Tyger Claw branding. Not now, not ever. Hiromi sulked about it.
Ichi's crew picked up a low-stakes gig. Babysitting a Tyger Claw debtor through an evening to make sure he didn't flee town. Motoko showed up armed to the teeth with an SMG, embarrassed herself, and watched through a boring stakeout that ended with a drunk guy stumbling into his apartment. The pay was pocket change split five ways. Riding home on the back of Hiromi's bike, she noticed the quiet disappointment that nobody gave her a reason to pull the trigger. The XP addiction was growing teeth.
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007 7. Chapter 7
Maelstrom borgs hit a Tyger Claw Casino at Longshore, retaliation for twelve dead Strom in a warehouse eviction two days prior. Motoko was doing guard duty at Ho-Oh with Ichi when every Tyger Claw in the room got the call simultaneously. Eyes glowed, faces twisted, and the bar emptied in seconds. Shobo confirmed it: the shooting at the club had been a feint. The real hit was the casino.
She raced to Longshore on the back of Ichi's bike, nearly shoved a Unity under a guard's chin to get past the perimeter, and spent an agonizing stretch unable to reach Jun through a Maelstrom jammer. When comms finally cut back in, Jun picked up. Alive, but shot in the shoulder. A close friend didn't make it. He handed her his bike's access shard, told her to go home, and disappeared into the crowd of wounded and dead.
She drove Jun's Kusanagi home alone, Driving leveling up somewhere on the empty late-night streets. Back at the apartment she cleaned everything, every dust bunny, every hidden burrito wrapper, because her hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for a gun. Jun texted the next afternoon: he was fine, he was with the Claws, no details. Then silence. She sat helpless, knowing her hothead brother was planning revenge and not yet strong enough to stop him.
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008 8. Chapter 8 ☠ 1
Jun was still dark. Motoko trained Blades with Hiromi at the corpo apartment. Hiromi was better with a sword, faster, trained at an actual dojo, but she gassed out in three bouts while Motoko barely breathed hard. After that she spiraled into a furious midnight run, pushing Athletics to Level 5, vaulting through streets with no destination and no plan.
She found trouble anyway. A borged-out Cyberpsycho was cornering a couple in a back alley, ranting about thieves and territory. She rushed him with the knife. He caught her wrist with a chrome hand, shattered her ribs with a kick, and dropped her. Unity rounds sparked off his armored skull like firecrackers. But the Gamer System's 1-HP mechanic kept her conscious through the broken bones. She grabbed his own Burya revolver off the concrete and put four heavy rounds through his chest. He died standing up.
She limped home with shattered ribs, slept eight hours, and woke completely healed. Cool leveled up. Handguns leveled up. Cold Blood leveled up. She took Cat-like and Cool Nerves as perks, cleaned the battered Burya, and kept it. Then she sat on the couch staring at the ceiling with her fingers tapping her knee, unable to ignore the truth: she enjoyed it. The fight. The kill. The reward.
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009 9. Chapter 9
With Jun still gone and the murder-XP itch clawing at her, Motoko walked to Jig-Jig Street and talked her way into Wakako Okada's pachinko-parlor office. The fixer didn't bother learning her name, just dropped a test gig: steal an info shard from a man holed up with Valentinos in a chop shop across town. No instructions on method. Wakako wanted to see what kind of merc walked back through the beaded curtain.
She parked Jun's bike blocks away and went in over the rooftops. Parkour got her onto the chop shop's roof but a security camera and a yard full of stolen cars blocked the back. While scouting she caught Dexter DeShawn pulling up and making a handoff with the guy sitting outside. She photographed the exchange. Ninjutsu leveled up mid-infiltration, unlocking Danger Sense. She slipped through an unlocked second-floor window, crept downstairs, and choked the target unconscious with a Grapple hold. No shots fired. She took the shard, the target's laptop, and the item Dex had handed off.
Presenting the full haul to Wakako, info shard, laptop, Dex's mystery item, and the photo of the handoff, earned five thousand eddies and a spot on the fixer's contact list. First professional merc gig, clean non-lethal, with bonus intel on Dexter DeShawn thrown in for free. Walking out of the pachinko parlor she felt something she hadn't felt in days: productive.
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010 10. Chapter 10
Flush with Wakako's eddies, Motoko went shopping for real. Combat boots from 6th Street territory, military-weave jeans, and the big ticket: a Militech Paraline Cyberdeck from Yoko at the Dewdrop Inn netrunner shop in Kabuki Market. She took it to the Japantown Ripperdoc and got it installed with a custom neck port instead of the standard wrist cord. Hands-free hacking, Major Kusanagi style.
Back home she breached everything in reach. Radio. TV. The burrito vending machine in the hallway. Breach Protocol leveled up and Quick Hacks unlocked via her mother's netrunning guide and a Ping program from Yoko. The apartment filled with cascading hack alerts as she pinged every wireless device in range like a kid with a new toy.
Jun finally walked through the door. Both arms were chrome now, cyberware from shoulder to fingertip, covered in fresh Tyger Claw tattoos, installed after the retribution raid on Maelstrom. He was quieter. Darker. Already talking about getting his legs done next. She warned him about cyberpsychosis; he shrugged it off. Hiromi reappeared too, revealing her periodic vanishing acts were Arasaka Academy. Her parents cut her comms if she didn't attend. The tension broke when Motoko teased Jun about his tattoos and his stupid swoop-seat bike until he dangled her upside down by one ankle and tickled her half to death.
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011 11. Chapter 11
Motoko spent the morning grinding netrunning skills around Cherry Blossom Market, pinging vending machines and breaching camera networks. Intelligence leveled up, both Quick Hacks and Breach Protocol hit Level 2, and she picked Wall Breaking and Cyber Security as her new perks. Backdoors into systems and hardened defenses against enemy netrunners.
The real mission was a trip to a hidden tailor shop down a dark Kabuki alley. The shop sold netrunner suits behind a guarded back entrance, and the owner had cut one down to Motoko's specifications. A modified leotard with armor weave, flexible enough for stealth work but tough enough to stop a bullet. A nod to the Major from Ghost in the Shell, and the first piece of gear that made her feel like an actual edgerunner. Hiromi tagged along, called it weird corpo bodyguard chic. Motoko tossed the old T-shirt in the trash on the way out.
Hiromi dragged her to a Tyger Claw dance club dripping with faux-tatami floors and katana-wielding weebs. A rich kid named Tomaru tried to put his arm over Motoko's shoulder and got a Unity pressed under his chin for the trouble. Hiromi traded insults with him, old school rivalry from Arasaka Academy, and a Tyger Claw enforcer stepped in to break it up before blades came out. The night ended back on the dance floor, Motoko moving badly but moving all the same.
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012 12. Chapter 12
Motoko reviewed her stats and wrestled with the temptation to spend her hoarded stat and skill points. She pestered Wakako for work and got a string of insultingly low-end gigs. A courier run across the city via public transit, a bodyguard job for a woman retrieving a shard from an abusive boyfriend. The pay was practically nothing. Wakako was testing her patience, or maybe punishing her for being annoying.
A ring ransom exchange in Rancho Coronado went sideways when the teenage gang leader, a kid with a shotgun and delusions of grandeur, tried to rob her mid-deal. Motoko fired over one boy's head to scatter them, tackled the leader, pistol-whipped his broken nose, and chucked her Unity at the gunman's skull when he lined up a second shot. She secured the ring, paid the full ransom anyway, and extracted the location of a 6th Street chop shop holding the client's stolen car. She also unlocked Annihilation after racking the stolen shotgun.
Back at the apartment, the Maelstrom-Tyger Claw gang war was heating up and Jun had gone ghost again. Two days without showing his face, responding only in clipped texts. The anxiety crystallized into resolve. Motoko decided she needed to be strong enough to save Jun when the inevitable happened, and that meant killing. She bought grenades, ammo, and a shoulder holster for the Burya from the gun shop. On the train ride out, she dumped both free stat points into Cool and both skill points into Ninjutsu. She was going scav hunting.
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013 13. Chapter 13 ☠ 9
Motoko infiltrated a scav den on Floor 24 of Megabuilding H2, dropping from the floor above and shimmying around an elevator shaft to bypass their camera network. The place reeked of blood, apartment walls smashed open to create a hive of ripper rooms and storage. She found her first target scrolling a BD on the couch. Knife across the throat, pillow over the wound, move on. A second scav working a ripper chair went the same way. A third on a BD wreath in a bunker room never woke up.
She knifed a fourth scav in a second ripper room, but a woman with reflex-boosted chrome dodged the first swipe and screamed in Russian, blowing the operation open. Motoko threw her knife into the woman's chest and gunned down a sixth scav scrambling for a rifle. A borged-out enforcer with a tech shotgun pinned her down, kicked back her first grenade, and blew a hole through the wall she'd been leaning against. She faked him out with an unpinned grenade toss. He moved to kick it and she put a Burya round through his chrome at point blank, breaking her own arm in the process.
Two more scavs went down in a desperate shootout that left Motoko bleeding out on the floor. A Max Doc kept her alive long enough to finish the last one with a bullet through the eye. She hauled herself onto the borg's couch to catch her breath amid crates full of harvested cyberware. Legs, arms, synth muscle, eyes. The loot was massive but she had no way to move it alone, so she called Hiromi and Ichi's crew for cleanup.
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014 14. Chapter 14 ☠ 3
Motoko was looting the borg's corpse when the elevator rumbled. More scavs coming home. She sprinted back through the den, dragged the HMG from its bunker mount with her broken arm screaming, and set up in the main room. Three scavs walked in, one carrying an unconscious victim over his shoulder. She opened fire from the hip and the HMG's explosive rounds turned the first man into hamburger, shredded the second through his table cover. She drew her Unity and put four rounds into the third before he could look up. The victim survived, dropped but unconscious on the floor.
Hiromi and Ichi's crew arrived via the hijacked elevator to find a charnel house. Half-scavs on the floor, a borg with a hole through his chrome, and Motoko sitting calmly among the carnage with a broken arm and an HMG she refused to leave behind. She casually recounted killing twelve scavs solo, which left her chooms staring in stunned silence. The crew loaded five crates of harvested cyberware into Ichi's borrowed moving van and Malcolm's hatchback while Hiromi cornered Motoko for an explanation.
Hiromi was genuinely shaken. This was edgerunner territory, not teenage merc work. Motoko admitted she did it to get strong enough to protect Jun, who had been MIA in the gang war. The conversation was heavy but honest. She also unlocked the Crafting skill while jury-rigging the scav elevator controls, and Annihilation leveled three times from the HMG massacre.
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015 15. Chapter 15
With the crates loaded, Motoko let Omaeda handle the scav den's digital intel, the netrunner would sell the data to his own contact in exchange for any scav location leads that came up. The crew drove the haul to Viktor Vektor's clinic behind Misty's Esoterica in Watson. Motoko gave away the entire five crates of chrome, no strings, in exchange for a relationship with a ripper she could actually trust. Vik protested that he couldn't take it all for nothing, scanned the crates and found mostly mid-range civilian stuff, plus one Arasaka show-piece arm and a solid Militech smart link.
Vik insisted on paying ten thousand eddies despite Motoko's protests, calling even that amount a scam in her favor. She split the payment evenly, two grand each. The crew argued about her giving the chrome away, but Malcolm won the smart link after a group huddle and got chipped on the spot. Hiromi threatened to tell Jun; Motoko pointed out she'd tell him herself if she ever saw him.
Back at the apartment with her HMG, two thousand eddies, and a bag of scav weapons, Motoko took stock. The Tyger Claw-Maelstrom war continued to swallow Jun whole. She hauled the machine gun inside, dropped it on the living room table, and collapsed on the couch, only to bolt upright cursing when she realized she never checked the scav den's parking garage for a getaway car.
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016 16. Chapter 16 ☠ 2
Motoko spent her days grinding Intelligence by pinging every device on her jogging route, pushed Street Brawler to level 4 at the gym, and breached vending machines across the city. The monotony broke when Wakako summoned her. At the parlor, a Nomad named Scorpion (real name Driss Meriana, Aldecaldos) needed off-the-books security for a Raffen Shiv meet in the Badlands. He was buying a Brennan Apollo motorcycle from Connor, an ex-Aldecaldo kid who'd fallen in with the Wraiths. After some haggling they settled on 2,300 eddies, and Motoko took the gig.
The four-hour drive out was quiet. Scorpion was impressed by the HMG in his back seat and the girl's military-grade composure. At the wayhouse she cleared the perimeter, hacked a rooftop position, and practically vanished against the AC unit. The exchange with Connor went smooth. Bike for eddies, family letters and photos for a kid expelled from the Aldecaldos. Then engines roared from the south. Five Wraith vehicles bearing down. Connor bolted, Scorpion fumbled with the trailer hitch, and Motoko unhooked it so they could run.
She leaned out the passenger window with her SMG and dropped a biker, then strapped the HMG to a seatbelt and fired it one-handed out the open door, shredding a Wraith truck. A blown tire sent the Gecko flipping across the dunes. Motoko was thrown clear. She crawled back with a bullet hole through her shoulder, stabbed the Raffen who charged her, and slit his throat. Frank, the Wraith leader, put a rifle round through her chest. Scorpion watched her fall and whispered an apology as they dragged him away.
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017 17. Chapter 17 ☠ 10
An interlude showed Ichi drinking at the Ho-oh Club after the scav den raid, confessing jealousy to an older Tyger Claw named Hatake over Motoko's impossible solo feats. Hatake's advice was blunt: edgerunners burn bright and die young, probably before sixteen at this rate. Back in the desert, Motoko huffed a Max Doc, stripped goggles and a dust mask off the Wraith she'd killed, and started walking. An hour through the sandstorm brought her to the wayhouse, where she found the motorcycle trailer already gone. Connor stumbled in after her. Gun in his mouth, she extracted the Wraith compound's GPS coordinates and walked back into the storm alone.
She dumped both free stat points into Cool 8 and Ninjutsu 7 before breaching the compound's camera network, uploading a daemon that blurred her from every Wraith's optics. Intelligence hit level 3 from the hack. Then she ghosted through the camp. Throat-slit the security monitor mid-noodles, screwdriver through Kengo's ear in the barracks, a carpenter's hammer into Boomer's skull at his workbench. Eight men died without a single alarm.
Frank Elder emerged from his basement to find a ghost town. Every room was a charnel house. He panicked, fired blind with his Overture, and tried to auto-drive his Quadra Type-66 Reaver to the exit. Motoko was already waiting at the passenger door. A Burya round blew him out of his own car. She pulled his key shard from his neck port, pocketed his Overture, and finished him with it. Then she went downstairs to cut Scorpion loose.
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018 18. Chapter 18
Motoko cut Scorpion down from the chains in Frank's basement, fed him a Max Doc, and hauled him to the stolen Quadra Type-66 Reaver. She drove the beaten nomad to the Aldecaldos camp, arriving in a Wraith-marked muscle car that got every rifle in camp pointed at her hood. Cassidy, a cowboy-hat-wearing nomad with a drawl, took custody of Scorpion and offered their doc. Motoko declined, passed along the Wraith compound coordinates for looting, and drove off before anyone could ask too many questions.
The long drive home leveled her Driving skill to 3. She parked the Reaver in Jun's empty garage spot, showered off layers of blood and desert grit, and slept until her wounds healed. Wakako summoned her for a debrief. The fixer had already received Scorpion's detailed after-action report and Aldecaldos crime scene photos. A screwdriver in a dead man's ear earned Wakako's genuine respect. The fixer promoted Motoko from disposable rookie to stealth specialist, promising dangerous but well-paying gigs if she could prove herself on infiltration work.
Scorpion texted his thanks and confirmed the Aldecaldos recovered the Brennan Apollo from the compound. Motoko ate ramen at Cherry Blossom Market, then bought sewing supplies from a market vendor and earned her first Crafting XP from stitching fabric. Wakako's interlude revealed the fixer had originally sent Motoko on the nomad gig expecting it to teach the girl to say no to bad jobs. She never expected the kid to single-handedly wipe a Raffen Shiv camp and drive home in a stolen car.
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019 19. Chapter 19
Motoko took a few days off from killing to grind Crafting and Technical skills. She bought a thousand-eddie tool kit from a market repair lady, drove her Reaver back into the Badlands to recover her wrecked HMG from the desert sand, and discovered the gun had taken a fatal hit to its receiver during the crash. Crafting level 1 unlocked a dense knowledge dump covering deconstruction, explosives theory, tool handling, and weapon repair. She hauled the dead HMG home as a future restoration project.
A trip to the city dump for scrap electronics turned surreal when she stumbled across a familiar fridge half-buried in garbage. Inside: the decomposing corpse of Rache Bartmoss, the legendary netrunner. She grabbed his netdeck, dry-heaved her way back to the car, and sealed it in a plastic bag. Too dangerous to crack open now. She needed far higher Intelligence and netrunning skills before touching whatever was inside. She stashed it in her room and told no one.
The gang war dominated the news. Valentinos, 6th Street, and the Moxes had all been pulled into the Tyger Claw-Maelstrom conflict, turning the north side of Night City into a warzone. Jun stayed completely silent. Hiromi finished school and raced over on her Kusanagi to interrogate Motoko about the Badlands job. She got the highlights and demanded to see the Reaver. Motoko showed off the new wheels and the two headed out for a drive.
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020 20. Chapter 20
Motoko and Hiromi cruised the city in the Wraith-marked Reaver, stopped by the Ho-oh Club to show off the car to Ichi. A text from Vik hit different. He'd been installing the scav-den chrome on kids who lost limbs, sending pictures of children with new legs and prosthetic arms. Motoko teared up in the parking lot. Ichi shrugged it off, but Hiromi went quiet looking through the photos, seeing a side of Motoko she didn't expect.
Vik had also tracked down a set of Kiroshi Mk1 optics. Motoko drove to his clinic with Hiromi riding shotgun as a self-appointed bodyguard. The installation went smooth. 720p vision jumped to 4k, scanner synced near-instantly with her Quick Hack targeting, and a built-in lens disruptor blurred her face on any surveillance camera. She paid Vik full price, which made Hiromi grind her teeth. Misty watched the Wraith car outside while they were in the basement.
Driving home with new eyes, everything was sharper. She could clock vehicle speeds at a glance, read pores on Hiromi's face from across the car. Driving skill ticked up to level 4. Hiromi teased her about having a crush on Vik, got an unblinking Kiroshi death-stare in return, and wisely backed down. They headed back to the apartment for food and a movie.
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021 21. Chapter 21
Motoko dug into her stat sheet after Hiromi headed home, discovering new system mechanics. Her Technical Attribute now showed a raised maximum from her Kiroshi optics, and a new Adaptation stat tracked cyberware integration. She picked Parry for Blades and Improvised Weapons for Street Brawler, the latter putting her one perk away from Gun-Fu. The real grind began at her workbench, disassembling scrap electronics for Technical XP while stewing over Jun's maddening two-word text: "I'm alive."
Days blurred into a cycle of soldering, breaching, and building. She rebuilt laptops from scrap, fabricated a working fan she controlled via quickhack, and leveled Crafting to 2, choosing Robotics Wizard as her perk on a hunch about a secret project. A jog through Watson became a revelation when she started pinging every connected device in sight and realized Intelligence wasn't raw smarts but netrunning comprehension. She jacked into a local network node and entered the Net for the first time. A dazzling void of light and data bridges stretching into darkness.
The brief dive nearly fried her Militech Paraline cyberdeck, leaving the hardware scalding hot against the back of her skull. She staggered down to a hacked vending machine, pressed a cold can to her overheating port, and quoted Ghost in the Shell to the Night City sky. Quickhacking hit level 3, Intelligence leveled to 4, and Breach Protocol ticked up to 3. Back home she returned to her wire work, shocked awake that night by gunfire outside the apartment.
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022 22. Chapter 22 ☠ 2
Motoko woke to a full-scale Tyger Claw vs. Maelstrom firefight outside her apartment building. A Borg's arm-mounted rocket punched a hole through a floor below, and she rushed downstairs to drag an injured neighbor into the armored stairwell, burning her last Bounce Back to stabilize the woman. With nothing but her Unity pistol and bare feet, she picked her target: a Borg carrying a Carnage shotgun.
A Parkour-guided drop kick off the third floor ripped the Carnage from the stunned Borg's grip. She executed him point-blank, ducked under the Maelstrom truck, blasted another Borg's leg out, then hijacked the truck itself. The second Borg ended up pinned to a brick wall after she buckled her seatbelt and floored it. The crash didn't kill him, but the last Carnage shell did. Reinforcing Tyger Claws on Kusanagis mopped up the remaining Strom with Mantis blades while Motoko looted a shotgun shell bandolier off her first kill.
A tense standoff with a borged-out Tyger Claw teetering on Cyberpsychosis ended when she asked about Jun and got a flat "No." She retreated home trailing bloody glass-cut footprints, patched herself with a MaxDoc, and cleaned up the mess. The next day brought Body 6, Annihilation 4, and a Driving level-up from the truck crash. She visited the netrunner suit shop, where the old seamstress discovered the armor liner was counterfeit cardboard. The seamstress refunded eddies and taught Motoko suit repair techniques as an apology.
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023 23. Chapter 23
Motoko walked through Mox territory in a new netrunner suit, eating lunch at a cafe near Lizzie's Bar while observing the gang's slow drift from idealism to self-interest. A cry from a nearby park pulled her off the sidewalk. Three teenage boys were beating a Mox BD seller named Nox, threatening worse. She intervened with fists instead of iron, trading blows until one kid broke his hand punching the Burya holstered under her jacket.
Nox insisted on dragging her to Lizzie's Bar as thanks despite a sprained ankle and a bag full of condom-wrapped BDs. Rita the bouncer eyed the Wraith-painted Quadra with suspicion but let them in after Nox vouched. Suzie Q herself showed up, sized Motoko up with a hard stare, and offered a curt acknowledgment: the Mox remember those who help them. Motoko exchanged contact info with Nox and bolted before the attention got worse, narrowly stopping a young Mox girl from spray-painting her car on the way out.
Back to the grind. She got the Quadra repainted black at a mechanic's shop, paying double because the owner feared Wraith retaliation. A Network News 54 emergency broadcast declared Pacifica a no-go zone at Extreme threat level. The mechanic explained that the NCPD would lock down Pacifica, leaving the rest of Night City unpoliced during an active gang war. The Tyger Claw vs. Maelstrom conflict was about to go nuclear. He loaded his Tactician and told her to get home.
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024 24. Chapter 24 ☠ 1
Motoko drove her freshly black Quadra Type-66 through eerily quiet streets as the gang war escalated. Jun finally called. Not to reconnect, but to order her to stay home. She pushed back, begging him to come home, and he snapped: "I don't have time to baby you!" The line went dead. She nearly loaded up to hunt him through every Tyger Claw vs. Maelstrom firefight in the city, but his words cut deep enough that she put the Tactician down and stayed.
Angry tinkering filled the night. She tore down her Carnage shotgun and fabricated a steel replacement for a cheap plastic part using a miniature metal 3D printer from her toolbox, a discovery that unlocked real fabrication potential. Technical Attribute leveled up. She designed and printed an extended magazine for her Unity, pushed Crafting to level 3, and maintained every weapon in her arsenal while explosions shook the windows. Ichi sent updates from supply runs. Hiromi texted novels about boredom. Jun stayed silent.
The apartment door opened. Jun walked in carrying a military-style Arasaka katana instead of their father's blade, his body loaded with new chrome: cyber legs, subdermal armor, different eyes. He was cold, distant, and furious when Motoko confronted him about the chrome overload. He punched clean through the kitchen wall. She chased him to his bike, screaming his name as he drove away. Minutes later, Maelstrom caught her crossing the street. A biker, a truck, a Borg with a shotgun. They blew off her hand, bashed her face into concrete. She bled out enough fight to stab a Borg under the armpit with her knife before losing consciousness. The last thing she heard was Maelstrom goons recognizing her as the Oni's sister.
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025 25. Chapter 25 ☠ 1
Motoko woke chained in a Maelstrom warehouse, hanging by her chest with both hands gone. A near-Cyberpsycho Borg named Ratchet guarded her while the operation's ringleader, a smooth-talking sadist she dubbed "The Bastard," announced the plan: bait Jun "the Oni" Kusanagi into a rescue, then rip him apart. When the deadline passed with no Jun, they dragged her to the Scavenging Pit, a charnel-house fighting ring where the crowd bets on scavenged chrome. She dumped her last stat and skill points into Reflex 6 and Blades 6 before they threw her in.
The Bastard gave her knife back by stabbing it into her bicep. In the pit she faced a young Maelstrom fighter built like a chop shop project with oversized Gorilla Arms on a chromed-out frame. She tore the blade free with her teeth and fought with it clenched in her jaw, slicing the inside of his thigh on her first pass. When he caught her skull in both Gorilla Arms and started squeezing, she kicked the knife hilt jutting from his throat and ripped it free in a gush of white Borg blood. The crowd went quiet.
A spider-bodied Ripper called Cyberweb descended from the ceiling, strapped her into a chair, sawed off what remained of her arms, and forced a pair of deliberately mis-wired Gorilla Arms onto the stumps. The botched chrome flooded her senses with synesthetic noise: colors from her fingers, sounds from her shoulders. Her brain started shutting down. Gunfire erupted above as Jun and the Kamikaze assaulted the warehouse, grenades tearing through the packed party crowd. Jun found her twitching in the pit, barely conscious. She headbutted him and screamed "GET THEM OFF" before blacking out. Jun carried her to a Tyger Claw Ripper, where the sabotaged Gorilla Arms were removed and replaced with a set of Militech Condor combat arms. She surfaced from anesthesia high on painkillers, scolding her floppy new wrist and demanding Jun get Real Skinn for better hugs.
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026 26. Chapter 26
Motoko woke in a Tyger Claw Ripper's clinic with chrome arms she didn't choose. The Militech Condors felt foreign. Phantom limbs lagged behind every movement, and the sensors delivered sensation that was close to right but never quite there. The Ripper explained the arms were a decade-old military surplus line, reliable but dated. The horror wasn't the hardware. It was that none of this was her call. "I didn't ask for this," she whispered, channeling Adam Jensen before stuffing it down.
A heavily borged Tyger Claw lieutenant named Fujimura arrived for his own maintenance and delivered a cold reminder: Jun spent serious favors getting her treated, and the Claws expected repayment. Hours later Jun burst in, the frost cracked, the terrified teenager underneath finally visible. She cut through his guilt spiral with surgical precision: avoiding her didn't protect her, it just left her unwarned. She swore a blood vendetta against The Bastard and the Spider Ripper, promising to beat them to death with their own limbs. Jun pulled her into a crushing hug and begged her to stay safe.
Jun took her to his safehouse, a spartan apartment accessed through a Dojo called Deravaja. This was the hidden headquarters of the Kamikaze, the Tyger Claws' anti-Maelstrom strike force of near-Cyberpsycho borgs. She settled in beside Jun on the couch in the dark, watched him zone out staring at the TV, and gently pressed him about the shakes and blank episodes. He admitted to symptoms but wouldn't call it what it was. She asked him to stop adding chrome. He said he'd think about it. She asked for a hug and complained about his unhuggable metal arms.
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027 27. Chapter 27
Motoko pushed to visit Vik for a second opinion on her Condor arms, dragging a reluctant Jun across Night City in a tinted Archer Hella. On the drive she revealed the Kiroshi optics, the Wakako gigs, and the gunshot wound. Jun nearly crashed the car twice. At Misty's Esoterica, Vik took one look at her shoulders and went into what Motoko called "anger doctoring," silent, furious, and surgically precise. He found doubled-up nerve connectors the Tyger Claw Ripper left behind and spent an hour rewiring everything properly.
She ambushed Jun into agreeing to a future Vik checkup by pointing out his own chrome might be just as shoddy. Vik accidentally told Jun about the scav raid and the boxes of cyberware she donated. Jun exploded. The drive home turned into a full debrief: the Scorpion rescue gig, the HMG, the Raffen camp solo infiltration, every kill laid out in detail. Jun went quiet. In the parking garage he stared into the dark and whispered that she was supposed to be safe, that she should never have had to stain her hands.
She forced him into a hug in the garage, bloodstains from her kidnapping still visible on the concrete behind them. "You didn't fail," she told him. "I was never going to stay at home and hide away." Jun's hands shook against her shoulders as she laid out the truth: the only way she'd ever be safe in Night City was to become dangerous enough that nobody tries.
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028 28. Chapter 28
Motoko used the Gamer system's eight-hour perfect sleep to jumpstart recovery at the Kamikaze safehouse, methodically relearning her own body. She mapped every joint, sensor, and range of motion on the Militech Condors. Fingers longer and stronger than flesh, wrists that didn't ache from Burya recoil, forearms with visible synth muscle through steel gaps. The phantom limb sensation persisted, each movement arriving a half-beat late, but she named them hers and moved on.
Jun dropped off a Lexington pistol and her tools before heading out on Kamikaze operations, ordering light duty. She ignored him the moment he was gone. Pushups, quickdraw drills, magazine juggling between chrome hands. When Jun returned he introduced her to Ozeki Sensei at the Dojo, a gravelly old Tyger Claw master who ran rehabilitation for chromed-out borgs through Tai Chi and sword kata. A sparring session with Akari, a Sandevistan-equipped Kamikaze woman recovering from a blown-off leg, escalated when Akari lost control and hit at sandy speed.
She blocked with crossed chrome arms and survived the blow, earning grudging respect from Akari and a bark of displeasure from Sensei. The meditation that followed was less spiritual exercise and more covert intelligence gathering: she watched over a dozen Kamikaze borgs spar, cataloguing Mantis blade deployment tells, blade-leg balance weaknesses, and Sandevistan timing. She realized assassinating borgs from stealth was her only viable strategy until she got a sandy of her own.
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029 29. Chapter 29
Motoko faked meditation in the Dojo while running arm-calibration drills, then sought out Akari for intel on killing heavily armored borgs. Akari demonstrated superheated Mantis blades that cook targets from inside their Real Skinn. When Jun returned from a Maelstrom raid wearing an Oni mask, she realized the gang war was grinding on but the Claws were holding.
Over XXL burritos she demanded Jun help her acquire a Thermal Katana. He refused. She escalated by threatening to ask Hiromi for help, then panicked when she realized she hadn't contacted Hiromi in days. The Dojo's signal jammer had blocked all calls. She dragged Jun out to make contact, and Hiromi's fury at learning about the kidnapping and chrome surgery crackled through the line. Once Hiromi was calmed, the siblings resumed their stalemate: Jun insisted she stay hidden, Motoko insisted she was leaving.
She challenged Jun to a shinai duel. If he won, she'd stay. Sensei cleared the Dojo floor without a word. Jun had superior strength and reach, but Motoko's Parry perk caught his first strike, and when he disarmed her she backflipped across the room, grabbed two shinai, and went ambidextrous. Dual-wielding at Blades 6, she pushed Jun backward, slipping strikes past his guard to tag his shoulder and wrist. He retaliated with a power grab. She countered with a leg-wrapped chokehold from her Grappling perk. They devolved into a rolling ground fight of elbows, knees, and chrome fingers in pressure points until Sensei physically separated them and put both siblings in meditation time-out while the other Kamikaze laughed.
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030 30. Chapter 30 ☠ 2
Motoko refused to accept the stalemate. She told Jun flat-out that she enjoyed killing: the sneaking, the hunting, the moment a Raffen camp goes silent one body at a time. Jun tried everything. Offered to enroll her in Arasaka Academy with Hiromi, promised to handle her revenge personally. She pulled him into a hug, told him she loved him, then demanded he come watch her work. The deal: one Kamikaze raid together, and if she proved herself, he'd back off. Jun gave her his spare Thermal Katana and immediately tried to take it back, sparking a sibling wrestling match that ended in a hip-toss truce.
The Kamikaze deployed against a Maelstrom armory in unmarked vans. Fujimura led from the front, jumping straight through a second-floor window into the alley. The assault overwhelmed the Strom guards until an HMG turret pinned the borgs down. Akari Sandevistaned through the fire and severed the gun with her heated Mantis blade. Motoko fired her Burya through a wall to drop an LMG gunner targeting Jun, then put a second Maelstrom down with a pelvis shot and a follow-up round.
The loot haul was massive but belonged to the Claws. A Kamikaze netrunner called incoming Maelstrom reinforcements and Fujimura ordered immediate withdrawal. Motoko tried to stay behind and hitch a ride on the Maelstrom counter-assault trucks to find their base. Jun physically picked her up and stuffed her in the back seat. She filed an "official complaint" about murder-blocking. The ride home was tense: Jun still wanted her locked down, Motoko had already decided she was going solo. She just needed to slip Jun's leash first.
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031 31. Chapter 31 ☠ 5
Motoko sat through Fujimura's after-action meeting in the Dojo basement, where the Kamikaze leader dressed down everyone for taking a wound on a basic Maelstrom raid. He singled out Jun for getting distracted by his sister, then told Motoko she should have killed three instead of two. The criticism stung less than the missed XP. Forty Maelstrom reinforcements she never got to touch. Once Jun fell asleep, she suited up, slipped past the jammer perimeter, summoned her Quadra, and drove north into Watson hunting for blood.
A Maelstrom roadblock found her first. Three burning cars, four spider-eyed gonks. Cool dropped like a visor. She floored the Quadra straight at them, ran one down under her wheels, then stepped out with the Burya barking into the dark. Two more borgs dropped to the hand cannon before the last one tagged her twice in the chest with an SMG. She slid over a burning car, closed the gap, and took his arms off with a superheated Katana slash. He was still screaming when she interrogated him about the Spider Ripper's location. He refused to talk, so she took his head. The kills pushed her to Level 6, unlocking the Drifting and Rapid Reload perks.
A second encounter came fast. A van full of Maelstrom joy-riders side-swiped her Quadra and dented the hood. She floored it straight at them, rammed one onto the hood and put the Burya to his face point-blank. Then she used her new Drifting perk to loop around and vanish. Lights off, engine killed, she watched them collect their mangled friend and pile back into the van. When they pulled away, Motoko started her engine and followed, tracking them back toward whatever hole they crawled out of.
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032 32. Chapter 32 ☠ 7
Motoko tailed the Maelstrom van through Night City's industrial sprawl to a walled compound with two buildings, a rolling garage door, cameras, and a rooftop sentry. Her Ping quickhack revealed a locked-down network with a single hub connection, meaning a real netrunner was running security. She vaulted the gate with a silent somersault, found a gap in the barbed wire on the back wall, and used her thermal Katana to slice through it strand by strand before climbing onto the garage roof.
The rooftop guard died quietly, knife slipping past his partial subdermal armor, and left behind a Nekomata sniper rifle that Motoko instantly claimed. She descended through the roof access into the compound's interior, following the golden Ping line to the netrunner's room. A break-room borg got the thermal Katana burned through his armored neck. The netrunner walked in on his own compromised station and got his neck snapped by Motoko's chrome hands. With the security cameras under her control via uploaded Daemon, she began methodically ghosting the garage. One mechanic's head dropped into a toolbox. A woman's throat got opened in a truck cab. Another mechanic bled out into an engine block.
Detection came when a gonk found the headless body and screamed the alarm. Motoko killed him mid-sentence with a knife to the throat, then slashed the light switch and plunged the garage into darkness. Her Daemon scrambled their optics, turning the Maelstrom's own network against them. The kills pushed her to Level 7, and she vanished into the shadows as the remaining Strom fired blindly into the dark.
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033 33. Chapter 33 ☠ 5
The chapter shifted to FrostGuard's perspective, a war veteran packing an Ajax assault rifle. Six Maelstrom remained after Motoko's assault. Despite Spyder Optics that should have cut through the blackout, the Daemon scrubbed Motoko from their feeds. FrostGuard rallied his crew and pushed outside, hoping reinforcements would arrive. He sent a man to the roof. That man came back down with a Nekomata hole through his chest.
The stolen sniper rifle changed the game. Motoko fired through the garage walls, popping one borg's skull clean off. FrostGuard recognized TriggerFinger's Nekomata and screamed at his crew to keep moving. He charged back inside with his Ajax blazing, but Motoko had already repositioned. OilSlick and RustProof got cut down in rapid succession outside while FrostGuard reloaded. StickShift vanished earlier during the darkness assault. When FrostGuard spotted Motoko in TriggerFinger's rooftop shack, he unloaded magazine after magazine into it.
What he didn't know was that Motoko had wedged herself behind TriggerFinger's armored corpse, using the dead borg as a shield. A Burya round punched through FrostGuard's vest and subdermal on the second hit, and he died before he hit the ground. Motoko crawled out bleeding from multiple leg wounds and one chest hit where her leotard finally gave out. A MaxDoc got her moving again. She looted fast, pulling shards from the netrunner's skull and data from his terminal, but skipped ripping his netdeck. She wouldn't tear chrome from a corpse. Then a single engine approached. Katana blazing, she dropped behind the newcomer and nearly took his head, only to freeze. It was Jun, tracking her via a childhood implant.
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034 34. Chapter 34 ☠ 8
Motoko and Jun hit the compound gate to find three Maelstrom trucks boxing in the Quadra and Jun's Kusanagi bike. She charged forward with the Burya, scattered the borgs with three rounds, then dove into the passenger seat for a box of grenades left over from the Raffen raid. Jun covered her with a Shingen smart SMG, mini missiles screaming into the crowd, while Motoko armed and hurled every grenade she had. Frags and incendiaries turned the reinforcements into a screaming mess of shrapnel and fire.
Both siblings drew Katanas and carved through the survivors. Jun fought like the Oni, drawing every eye, tanking bullets against his subdermal, cutting Maelstrom apart with raw power. Motoko ghosted through the chaos behind him, parting heads from necks while the borgs were terror-locked on her brother. She kill-stole the final borg mid-duel, driving her thermal blade through his spine from behind while he parried Jun's strikes. The grenades also unlocked Engineering, which leveled twice in one go. Jun took a bullet clean through his thigh, past his subdermal armor.
Motoko stuffed Jun into the Quadra and floored it home, drifting through traffic at terrifying speed while Jun begged her to slow down. Back at the Dojo, Fujimura stormed into the ripper clinic and backhanded Motoko for costing the Kamikaze a wounded member. She caught his eyes with arctic calm and promised to take the hand next time. Jun defended her, barely keeping his temper. Alone in the apartment afterward, Motoko spent her hoarded stat points on Adaptation: two ranks into the Militech Condor arms, one into her Kiroshi optics. The phantom-limb tension dissolved. Her shoulders unclenched for the first time. She sobbed on the couch until she couldn't anymore, then fell asleep watching cartoons. Level 8.
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035 35. Chapter 35
Motoko woke to Jun returning with burritos and a need to talk. The conversation they'd been circling since the kidnapping finally landed. Jun admitted he couldn't stop her. She handled herself like a pro, didn't need his protection, and would do what she wanted regardless. Motoko matched him: she couldn't stop him riding with the Kamikaze either. They struck an understanding. No death wishes, just bloody paths ahead. Jun called her "Little Killer" and sealed it with a crushing hug.
Engineering had unlocked the night before via grenade kills, and Motoko dove into it with manic energy. She built half a dozen homemade frag grenades and started on EMP grenades using modified power cells before Jun kicked her out of the living room for assembling explosives indoors. With nothing left to tinker on, she drove to Hiromi's apartment in the corpo high-rise. Hiromi threw herself at Motoko in the lobby. Her hair was down, neon whiskers off, no mohawk. Something was wrong.
After Motoko's full debrief, Hiromi broke. She confessed she'd snuck out one night trying to prove she was a real street kid, crashed her bike when a random gunfight spooked her, and hid in a dumpster until the shaking stopped. She called herself a coward, said she'd never be anything but a corpo brat. Motoko shut that down hard, hugged her tight and told her being scared wasn't shameful. She offered to make Hiromi her fixer instead. Hiromi laughed through tears and called her a gonk. They spent the rest of the visit painting nails. Purple, not Tyger Claw colors.
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036 36. Chapter 36
Motoko stayed for dinner at Hiromi's apartment and met her father, a slick Arasaka man with a smile that never reached his eyes. Casual conversation turned sharp when Motoko mentioned wanting to build something like Militech's Flathead drone. Both parents zeroed in. The Flathead was apparently still an experimental secret in 2075. Hiromi's father offered to pay for hard data on the competitor's work, his fake smile gone for the first time. Motoko agreed to pass along anything she found. The man praised his daughter for making a "useful friend," which landed about as well as a slap.
The next day brought errands across Night City. At the Dewdrop Inn, Motoko traded a handful of shards ripped from the dead Maelstrom netrunner's skull for a copy of Arasaka's proprietary CAD design software. Netrunner Yoko accepted the trade more out of pity than interest. Outside, a Mox girl intercepted her on the Kabuki Roundabout, angry that Motoko had ghosted Nox. She checked her messages for the first time since the kidnapping and found a barrage of missed texts from Nox, Ichi, and others.
Nox had a gig for her. She called him back and agreed to meet at Lizzie's Bar. On the drive over, she reflected on the gang war's toll. Empty streets, shuttered food carts, a city holding its breath. But Jig-Jig Street was still packed, because Night City's vices never sleep.
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037 37. Chapter 37
Motoko walked into Lizzie's Bar past Rita the bouncer, who gave her the third lecture of the day about ghosting Nox, and found the kid in Judy Alvarez's basement workshop. Judy was younger than expected, barely out of her teens, surrounded by custom-tweaked BD editing hardware. Nox pitched the idea: record raw BD virtues of Motoko doing merc work, let Judy edit them clean, and sell Edgerunner-experience BDs to kids who dreamed of running the streets. Not snuff, not cyberpsycho garbage. The real thing, from someone their own age.
The catch landed quick. Nox was broke, Judy's services weren't free, and the BD recorder cyberware cost five hundred eddies Nox didn't have. Motoko saw through the hype to the real pitch. She was a young merc desperate enough to accept garbage pay for a smart idea. She called him on it, then shook his hand anyway. Partners. She drove Nox to Vik's clinic in Misty's Esoterica, helped Misty carry a Buddhist statue, and settled into the ripper chair for the BD recorder install and an arm-dent repair.
Vik noticed her shoulder had healed impossibly fast. No scar tissue, as if she'd been born with the chrome. Motoko sent Nox upstairs with Misty for a tarot reading and came clean to Vik: she healed from anything with eight hours of sleep, had walked out of a year-long coma in a week, and couldn't explain why. She trusted him enough to be honest but not enough to explain the Gamer system. Vik accepted the mystery, asked for overnight observation after a future injury, and installed the BD recorder in minutes. He also nearly had a heart attack when he assumed the Mox BD work meant porn. Motoko's giggle fit echoed up the stairs.
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038 38. Chapter 38
Motoko returned to Judy's lab for BD recorder calibration, custom sensitivity settings for her Kiroshi optics and increased emotion bandwidth. Then she headed to Wakako's pachinko parlor on Jig-Jig Street. The old fixer was not pleased. She'd held three gigs for weeks while Motoko recovered, and a photo of Motoko standing with Jun after the Kamikaze raid had her convinced the girl had joined the Kamikaze. Motoko talked her down, clarified the BD recording side-hustle, and Wakako agreed with conditions: one-week delay before any release, and ask permission before recording future gigs.
Three gigs stacked back-to-back. The first was a joke. Walk into Megabuilding H1, past a guy zoned out on a BD, grab a shard from his computer, walk out in thirty seconds flat. The second sent her into 6th Street territory to steal blackmail data from a laptop protected by surprisingly vicious ICE. She snuck through the gang house without a sound, dodged a staircase encounter via danger sense, and spent minutes fighting through layered encryption that outclassed even the Maelstrom netrunner's setup. Breach Protocol and Intelligence both leveled during the hack. She escaped through a window with the laptop.
The third gig was a corpo apartment heist for a fancy statue. The target's skyscraper had LMG turrets and cameras in the lobby, all running on radioshack-grade security that Motoko breached in seconds. She rode the elevator to the eighth floor, crept through the apartment while the owner entertained a joytoy, hid in a walk-in closet during an unfortunate ten minutes, then grabbed the statue from the bar on her way out. She delivered all three items to Wakako and vented about Night City's pathetic security standards. Wakako's response: a fat eddies transfer and a rare compliment about Motoko's ability to work without bullets.
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039 39. Chapter 39
Motoko flopped onto the Dojo couch and caught Jun up on everything. The CAD software, Nox's BD deal, the Wakako gigs. She deliberately phrased the BD work in the worst possible way just to watch Jun's face cycle from approval to horror, and laughed until she cried when he pinned her to the couch shouting "ABSOLUTELY NOT." Once the real explanation landed, merc-work recordings not Mox content, Jun calmed down enough to suggest having Judy scrub her visual identity from the BDs for safety.
With the gigs done and revenge on pause, Motoko turned to her long-term project. She loaded the Arasaka CAD software on an air-gapped laptop and began designing a Tachikoma-inspired combat drone. The first prototype was so bad she wanted to mercy-kill it on sight. She scaled back to individual limb design, thinking smaller. Flathead-sized units, eventually AI-driven. The AI problem loomed large. Even Delamain needed a room-sized core, and she was designing something knee-height. Engineering alerts pinged steadily as she iterated through failures.
Jun interrupted the design session with an invitation. Another Kamikaze raid, and this time she could come. Motoko almost refused. She wanted to keep designing robots. But she remembered her Nekomata needed leveling and grabbed the sniper rifle with sudden eagerness, already picturing wall-bang kills while the Kamikaze played battering ram. Jun looked pleased, thinking he'd kept his sister at safe distance. He had no idea she planned to shoot through every wall between her and the Maelstrom.
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040 40. Chapter 40 ☠ 4
Motoko endured a miserable stakeout crammed in a car with Jun and Akari. The blade-footed borg kept poking everyone and pushing her seat back. Motoko bailed to set up a rooftop overwatch position with her Nekomata, climbing via parkour and settling into shadow behind graffiti-covered brick. She watched through her scope as a cavalcade of Maelstrom trucks screeched to a halt around a Tyger Claw gun shop. The shop's hidden HMG opened up on the first borg through the door, and the Kamikaze hit from behind.
From the rooftop, the battlefield was a shooting gallery. Her first Nekomata round decapitated a borg raising a shotgun at the Kamikaze's flank. The second punched through a truck driver aiming at a Kamikaze gonk who was still beating a corpse. The third killed the massive borg wrestling Fujimura, spider-like head coming apart in a spray of white blood that splattered the Kamikaze leader's face. A Maelstrom gunner spotted her and returned fire, but she rolled clear, repositioned at a jog, and put the final round through the truck panel he'd hidden behind. Four confirmed sniper kills. Assault leveled to 5.
After the fight, she caught up with Ichi driving a Tyger Claw loot-recovery van and learned Malcolm had quit field work after watching a man named Sam die in the back of the truck during a Maelstrom ambush. She promised to check on him. Then Fujimura summoned her to the after-action briefing, called her "acceptably useful," and criticized her rate of fire. Jun looked proud. Settling onto the couch that night, Motoko had a slow realization: Fujimura thought she'd joined the Kamikaze. "But I'm not a Cyberpsycho!"
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041 41. Chapter 41
Motoko dropped by Hiromi's apartment for some downtime, only to find her choom locked in a BD class session run through Arasaka's remote education system. While waiting, she jacked into Hiromi's computer and started probing the corporate-grade ICE protecting it, treating the security like a puzzle game and banking Intelligence and Breach Protocol XP in the process. When Hiromi surfaced, Motoko pitched the BD recordings she'd been making of her gigs and offered to show her.
The visit to Lizzie's Bar proved more tense than expected. Rita was guarding the entrance harder than usual. Tyger Claws had been sniffing around trying to recruit Judy by force, even breaking into her apartment. Motoko's Tyger Claw family connections raised eyebrows, but she squared things with both Rita and Judy, handing over four BD recordings from the Wakako side jobs and the Maelstrom raid. Rita offered a surprising moment of solidarity. She knew what forced chrome felt like, and extended the offer to talk.
Judy agreed to edit the recordings, promising a body filter so no one could identify Motoko in the BDs. On the way out, Rita doubled down on her offer of support, revealing a gentler side beneath the chrome and the baseball bat. Motoko headed home buzzing with good vibes and the sudden realization she still had an unspent perk point waiting to be claimed.
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042 42. Chapter 42
The chapter opened from Judy Alvarez's perspective as she scrolled Motoko's Maelstrom raid BD for editing. The emotional layer hit different. Motoko's heartbeat barely moved during the building climb. Her footsteps made practically no sound. When combat kicked off, the emotion file practically flatlined into pure controlled purpose. Judy lost herself entirely in the experience, forgot she was editing, forgot who she was. She pulled the wreath off shaking, her own body suddenly feeling wrong. Too slow, too loud, too heavy.
Back at the dojo apartment, Motoko turned her restless energy toward engineering. She designed and scratch-built a directional microphone: earpiece, transceiver, wired connection after the jammer killed the wireless version. Four hours of troubleshooting later, the device worked, picking up a TV broadcast from across the room with clean fidelity. The build triggered a cascade of level-ups: Engineering 3, Technical Attribute 4, and Crafting 4, all in one afternoon session.
Flush with new tech skills, Motoko spent her perk points. She took Design Wizard for faster, better engineering work, immediately regretting she didn't pick it before the mic build. For Assault she chose Rifle Ace, a quickdraw perk for long guns that flooded her with muscle-memory certainty. She settled onto the couch for cartoons, content to let the grind rest for a night.
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043 43. Chapter 43
Motoko swung by Lizzie's to pick up the finished BDs from Judy, who spent the entire night editing all four recordings. Judy admitted the Maelstrom BD was terrifying to scroll. Motoko's lethal precision caught her off guard. Four wrapped BDs rolled off the printer in Mox-branded packaging. Nox showed up half-asleep, collected the master shard, and started burning copies to sell on the street, bankrolled by a couple grand Motoko tossed his way.
Hunting for a way to grind her netrunning skills, Motoko visited Yoko's Netrunning Cafe and bought a stack of WET ICE. Solved security programs, useless to real runners but perfect as training locks. She headed back to the old apartment for the first time since her kidnapping, armed to the teeth with her Burya and Carnage shotgun. The familiar space still felt strange, but she forced herself through it, jacking into a spare laptop loaded with the practice ICE and hammering away at breach after breach.
The grinding session paid off hard. Intelligence hit 6, Breach Protocol jumped twice to level 6, and she banked another perk point. She headed back to Jun at the dojo, brain fried from puzzle-hacking, only to be jolted awake hours later by the wail of sirens. The NCPD were back on the streets in full force, enforcing a citywide curfew. Jun confirmed the Tyger Claws knew it was coming. Fujimura ordered everyone to stay off the streets and let the cops sweep past without finding any Claws in their sights.
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044 44. Chapter 44
Motoko spent the NCPD lockdown grinding Breach Protocol on her ICE laptop while a sleep-deprived Jun watched the news beside her. Her attempt to practice quickhacks on Jun got shut down, literally, when he grabbed her face and pinned her to the couch. The sibling wrestling match escalated when Akari strolled into the apartment unannounced and sat on Motoko's legs. Motoko earned her payback with a judo throw that sent the borg flying off the couch.
Akari delivered the real news: Fujimura was calling a full Kamikaze assembly. At the dojo, Fujimura announced the war with Maelstrom was effectively over. Brick had reached out for peace, and the NCPD's return caught Maelstrom flat-footed. The Kamikaze unit was disbanded as a rapid-response force. Members returned to normal duties. Jun was told the dojo apartment was his if he wanted it, but the jammer was coming down and the operation was winding to a close.
Jun took the news hard, staring into the distance as the purpose that kept him together got pulled away. Motoko sat with him in silence, then told him to sleep on it. She'd be there when he was ready to talk. The jammer came down, messages flooded in from Nox, Judy, and Hiromi, and the Kusanagi siblings packed up and drove home to their Japantown apartment. The streets were busier than ever, the curfew pushing everyone outdoors during daylight.
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045 45. Chapter 45
Motoko caught up with Hiromi by phone. School was reopening, but the lockdown at her apartment hadn't lifted yet. Mid-conversation she realized she could fix her own battle-damaged Quadra instead of paying a shop. She hauled her toolbox to the parking garage and hammered out the dents from the Maelstrom side-swipe, replaced crushed circuitry with scratch-built parts, and discovered a busted rear light she'd never noticed. A carwash handled the dried gore still caked on the hood from the earlier kill.
A visit to Malcolm's apartment revealed the kid was still shaken from watching Sam die in the back of a truck during a Maelstrom ambush. Motoko shared her own trauma, the kidnapping, the chrome arms, and gently pulled him back toward the group. He agreed to meet at Ho-oh Club that night. She then talked Hiromi's corpo mother into releasing her daughter for the evening by promising to act as bodyguard, and dropped off the finished BDs at Hiromi's place.
The chapter ended with Motoko gathering the crew. She called Ichi to set up the reunion and got Malcolm's address from him. Ichi confirmed he and Malcolm had a falling out after Sam's death. Motoko visited Malcolm in person, got him to agree to come, then picked up Hiromi. The actual Ho-oh Club gathering carries over into the next chapter.
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046 46. Chapter 46
Motoko and Hiromi rolled into the Ho-oh Club to find it packed with post-war Tyger Claws on edge and looking for trouble. Hiromi's motormouth annoyed a drunk TC sitting next to her at the bar. He grabbed a beer bottle and reached for Motoko's collar. Bad move. She twisted his arm and smashed his face into the bartop. His buddy caught a bottle to the face. The whole bar erupted into a brawl, Motoko fighting with stools, stolen bottles, and chrome fists while Hiromi stood on the bar double-fisting middle fingers at the entire room.
A martial artist Claw landed solid hits and someone cracked a chair across Motoko's back, but Cold Blood kept her sharp. The fun died when one gonk pulled a rusted Lexington. Motoko blew blood out of her nostril, opened her jacket to flash the Burya, and warned him not to escalate. Jotaro Shobo stormed out from the back, furious about the damage to his club. He grabbed Motoko's chin and started talking about punishment. Ichi arrived just in time and name-dropped the Kamikaze and Jun's "Oni" reputation, forcing Jotaro to back down with a fake smile and murder in his eyes.
The four chooms regrouped at the bar. Ichi whispered that Jotaro was genuinely dangerous, not as a fighter but as a man who makes people disappear for profit. Hiromi fussed over Motoko's bloody nose while Malcolm kept one hand near his concealed pistol, watching the room. The reunion held. Drinks clinked, and each of them shared what they'd survived since the war. Motoko pushed them all to open up. Hiromi confessed she'd crashed her bike and hidden in the trash. Ichi and Malcolm reconciled over a falling out from the war. By the end the crew was tighter than ever.
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047 47. Chapter 47 ☠ 10
Motoko drove a drunk Hiromi home and princess-carried her to bed under the withering glare of her corpo mother. Back at the apartment, Jun saw her bloody nose from the bar fight and nearly lost it. She grabbed his face and talked him down. When she mentioned Jotaro Shobo, Jun dropped the name that made everything click: the Devil of Kabuki. Motoko remembered the side quest. Jotaro kidnapped people to produce torture XBDs. She marked him for death on the spot.
Rather than act on Jotaro immediately, Motoko sat on her bed and forced herself to mine her game knowledge for other monsters hiding in Night City. She remembered the Meat Man, a serial killer operating from a farm in the Badlands who kidnapped teens and hooked them to livestock gas masks pumping chemicals. She also flagged a scav ripper running a fake clinic and tabled Fingers as a question for Vik. Unable to sleep knowing the Meat Man was active, she kitted up with the Nekomata and dragged a reluctant Jun along for a nighttime hunt.
The siblings drove into the Badlands with headlights off, hitting the first farm only to find Wraiths, not the serial killer. Jun challenged Motoko to justify attacking sleeping Raffen. She made a bet: full radio control if she could clear the camp without a single gunshot. She slipped into the barn and knifed the Wraiths one by one. One died in his locked car, six more died in their sleeping bags and tents, then she walked out into the open and dropped the last three with thrown blades. One took a knife to the chest and needed a finishing throat-cut. Jun drove the Quadra in to loot while Motoko called Scorpion to offer six ownerless Raffen vehicles to the Aldecaldos.
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048 48. Chapter 48 ☠ 1
Motoko called Scorpion in the dead of night to offload the Raffen vehicles, offering an IOU deal. While waiting, she and Jun looted the camp, stripping weapon mods and optics from the dead. Scorpion, still groggy, was stunned by the generosity but accepted. The siblings pushed deeper into the Badlands searching for the Meat Man's farm.
At Edgewood Farm, the siblings found mines, turrets, and hardened netrunner ICE protecting the property. Motoko's breach attempts bounced off military-grade mine security, so she pivoted. She chucked a rock to detonate a mine, waited for the serial killer to step onto his porch to investigate, and put a Nekomata round through him. She shot out both HMG turrets, then cleared a path through the minefield by shooting mines with her Lexington. Inside the barn, two teenagers hung from livestock masks pumped full of chemicals. Alive, but barely. Motoko and Jun pulled the masks free and shut down the system.
The NCPD call was a bureaucratic nightmare of recorded menus and ten-eddie surcharges until Motoko name-dropped the Meat Man and got patched through to Detective Stints. Patrol officers arrived, handcuffed both siblings on sight, and left them kneeling in the dirt for hours while they processed the scene. Stints finally confirmed the kill matched the Meat Man's profile, including victim DNA on site. He uncuffed them, paid out the bounty, and floated a recruitment pitch. Motoko declined. She and Jun drove home at sunrise.
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049 49. Chapter 49
Motoko drove a zombie-like Jun home at sunrise, then pivoted straight to chauffeuring Hiromi to Arasaka Academy. In the car, Hiromi gushed over the Maelstrom BD but started comparing herself unfavorably to Motoko. Motoko shut it down with a reminder that she once hid in her apartment for days after her first kills. Outside the school, she spotted a beat-up yellow Thorton Galena and watched David Martinez step out while Gloria waved goodbye. The Edgerunners timeline was ticking, but Motoko chose not to intervene yet.
At Wakako's pachinko parlor, Motoko laid out her plan to kill Jotaro Shobo and asked for advice on doing it without the Tyger Claws burning her. Wakako's counsel was blunt: find a different fixer to take the gig through so the contract shields her from blowback. She pointed toward Regina Jones in Watson, then declared the conversation never happened. Motoko filed the lead but realized she had no way to reach Regina yet. The Afterlife was out of reach and she lacked the street cred for a cold introduction.
Scorpion called with good news: the Aldecaldos grabbed all six Raffen vehicles overnight and already had most of them repainted. Saul, the clan leader, was insisting on a proper meeting to settle the debt, and a barbeque. Motoko accepted for the following day and invited Hiromi along for the ride.
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050 50. Chapter 50
Motoko walked home through the crowded Cherry Blossom Market and felt the paranoia spike. Thick crowds, tight spaces, echoes of the kidnapping. She let Cold Blood wash it away and pushed forward, refusing to live by Morgan Blackhand's hyper-paranoid survival playbook. Back at the apartment, she ground ICE breaches on her practice laptop while Jun slept off the all-night Badlands run.
Picking Hiromi up from Arasaka Tower, Motoko got an earful about Tomaru's latest power play before redirecting the conversation to bike repair. In Hiromi's parking garage, she disassembled the crashed Kusanagi Mizuchi's front brake array, fabbed a replacement caliper, hammered out the panel dents, and got the bike rolling again. She showed off her scratch-built directional microphone and invited Hiromi to the Aldecaldo barbeque. A wild test ride through Night City followed, with Hiromi blowing red lights and Motoko screaming behind her.
At Lizzie's, Rita pulled Motoko into a private booth for an awkward but heartfelt conversation. Having watched Motoko's combat BD, Rita assumed she was being forced into violence by the Tyger Claws and offered the Mox as a way out. When Motoko clarified the killing was her own choice, Rita pivoted. She shared how she coped with forced chrome by sculpting figurines, urging Motoko to find something creative that proves her hands aren't just weapons. Motoko dropped off the Raffen BD with Judy and sat in her Quadra afterward, confronting the uncomfortable truth that she had no hobbies outside the grind.
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051 51. Chapter 51
Motoko took a rare day off from grinding, watching TV and reading shard books before realizing she'd funneled her entire second life into becoming a better killer. Hiromi confirmed she'd cleared school to skip for the Aldecaldo BBQ, and the two set out for the Badlands in the Quadra. Motoko terrified Hiromi with high-speed desert driving and casual drifts, then rolled into the nomad camp at a sedate pace.
Scorpion greeted them with a bear hug and barbeque. Hiromi immediately started trading embarrassing Motoko stories with the nomads. Panam showed up in a matching leotard and jeans, acknowledged the debt owed for saving Scorpion, and earned instant respect. Saul pulled Motoko aside for a frank conversation about the Wraiths: over a thousand strong, corporate-backed, and now in a frenzy thanks to her raids. He offered clan membership to settle the debt. She refused, city girl through and through, but counter-offered.
Saul opened the Aldecaldo armory, and Motoko locked onto Mitch's Overwatch, a suppressed Techtronika SPT32 Grad anti-materiel rifle. She demanded Mitch teach her the suppressor's secrets as partial payment. For the rest, she spotted a stack of Techtronika T40 Uragan crates, ten-shot homing rocket launchers collecting dust. Saul sighed and handed one over on the condition she never mentions where she got it. Motoko left the Badlands with a rocket launcher, a debt settled, and a grin that wouldn't quit.
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052 52. Chapter 52
Motoko wrapped up business with Saul. Mitch reluctantly handed over the Overwatch suppressor blueprints on a shard, the secret being a nanite-swarm lining inside a custom-built barrel. The Uragan and other Aldecaldo goodies barely fit in the Quadra's trunk. She found Hiromi at the campfire where nomad karaoke was in full swing, a guitarist named Mark strumming country-cyberpunk tunes while drunk singers belted their hearts out.
Hiromi and Scorpion conspired to shove Motoko into the singing spot. She reluctantly belted out Chippin' In by Samurai, badly, and the crowd loved it anyway. Mid-performance, an alert fired: Rockerboy Experience Gained, followed by Rockerboy Unlocked. A whole new skill she never expected. The embarrassment was crushing, but the revelation sparked an idea. Music could be the non-combat hobby Rita told her she needed.
On the drive home through the dark Badlands with headlights off, Motoko dropped a sleepy Hiromi at home, then hit a 24/7 music store for a guitar and a how-to shard. Back at the apartment, she jacked the guitar into her neural port for silent practice and ground through songs on the radio. She figured out that completing an entire song from start to finish was the trigger for XP. After hours of grinding she hit Rockerboy Level 1. Mid-song on Resist and Disorder, Jun walked in. Their eyes met. He turned and left without a word. She buried her face in a pillow.
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053 53. Chapter 53
Motoko ground Rockerboy through the night, her chrome arms immune to sore fingers and fatigue. She hit Level 2 and picked the Perfect Musical Memory perk. Every song she'd ever heard across two lifetimes flooded back with perfect chord recall and full lyrics. The first thing she played was Nirvana's Come As You Are, a song that didn't exist in this timeline because the First Central American War derailed Seattle grunge. Jun heard it from his room and asked what it was. She deflected.
Jun requested an encore, so she ripped into Smells Like Teen Spirit. He told her she needed more practice, mussed her hair with chrome hands that hurt, and said he was proud of her. Then he headed out for a Kamikaze gig: 6th Street wanted to negotiate a ceasefire with the Tyger Claws. By morning Motoko had hit Rockerboy 4, her playing genuinely competent, her voice passable.
Armed with intel Saul bartered from nomad fixer Dakota Smith, Motoko located Regina Jones's office atop Yaiba Tower in Watson, right down the street from Lizzies. Regina's guard Ian refused to let her up, so Motoko launched Operation Be Fucking Annoying: she hit the elevator call button over and over for an hour straight. When Ian finally came down with a Lexington, she dropped from the ceiling, disarmed him with a spinning takedown, and pinned him with his own gun. Regina got on the comm, and Motoko pitched the job. She wanted to kill Jotaro Shobo, the Devil of Kabuki. She knew his location at the Ho-Oh club, knew his BD studio on the top floor, and needed a fixer to handle the paperwork. Regina accepted the dusty gig.
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054 54. Chapter 54 ☠ 1
Motoko visited Rita at Lizzies to set up an alibi for the Jotaro hit. Rita's face went murderous at the Devil's name, and she agreed without hesitation. The plan: Motoko worked the Lizzies front desk for hours so every camera and patron saw her, then slipped out from the rooftop after dark. Rita helped assemble a disguise. Raffen dust mask, long red wig, borrowed Mox clothes. Nobody would recognize her.
After dark, Motoko climbed from Lizzies' roof onto the highway overpass, crossed the Bellevue Overwalk unseen, traversed rooftops and pipes across Kabuki, bypassed Tyger Claw sentries without engaging, and reached the Ho-Oh club from above. She waited on the roof in perfect stillness, Cold Blood slowing her heartbeat to nothing, until Jotaro stepped to his window to smoke, furious about something. She dropped onto the AC units outside his window and put a knife through his throat before he could make a sound. She held him as he died, their eyes meeting through her dust mask.
Regina wanted a message sent to the Tyger Claws, so Motoko left the supplied knife embedded in Jotaro's throat and hip-checked his body out the window to the street below. The splat echoed through Kabuki as she was already gone, ghosting back across the rooftops. Rita was pacing on the Lizzies roof when Motoko landed. They burned the disguise, and Motoko went back to working the front desk for another few hours. Alibi airtight. The Devil of Kabuki was dead.
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055 55. Chapter 55
Motoko drove home from Lizzies and decompressed by playing Doom soundtrack riffs on her guitar, growling "The only thing they fear is me" in the dark apartment. Midway through BFG Division, she realized she could build an electronic music box to replicate sounds her guitar couldn't produce. The CAD blueprints came together fast, but programming the device was beyond her. She followed her biological mother's netrunning guide to alter a basic Ping Quick Hack, and the system unlocked a new skill: Programming.
Programming proved brutally difficult compared to Rockerboy. Hours of tearing apart and rebuilding copies of Ping finally yielded Programming Level 1. The revelation hit: Breach was movement in the net, Quick Hacks brought net power to meatspace, but Programming was the forge where all of it got made. A lone programmer could create an army. She called Jun to talk through her fear of new chrome. The forced chipping of her arms had left psychological scars. He told her to see her ripper.
At Misty's Esoterica, Motoko spent an hour in meditation and spiritual chat before heading downstairs to Vik. He confirmed she wasn't ready for major chrome but cleared a Cyberdeck swap. She picked the Seacho Electronics Mk. 2, a specialist stealth-hacking deck with four times the RAM of her ancient Paraline. Vik also ran a sleep study, discovering her nanomachines were unscannable and repaired wounds in the final minutes before waking. He promised to keep it secret. Motoko left whistling Foo Fighters.
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056 56. Chapter 56
Motoko ground Programming overnight, debugging her Ping Quick Hack line by line. She hit Programming Level 2 and picked the Debug perk, giving her instant identification of what's broken or improvable in any code she reads. The effect was immediate: she tore through Ping's bloated codebase, stripped it down to interface only with her specific Kiroshi optics, and reduced the program's footprint so drastically it might not even use a Cyberdeck slot. Jun called about Jotaro. The TC believed a victim's family ordered the hit. He warned Motoko never to speak the name again.
Regina summoned Motoko to Yaiba Tower for payment. Two HMG turrets greeted her at the elevator, just a precaution. The eddies landed heavy in her account. Regina revealed she'd spoken with Wakako, who had rare kind words, and that TC leadership found zero evidence pointing to the real killer. She offered future assassination gigs. Wakako grudgingly agreed to share Motoko's services. A second fixer on the roster meant real career momentum.
With fresh eddies, Motoko drove to the ripper Vik recommended for the Seacho Mk. 2 and recognized the place as the pier clinic from the Edgerunners timeline. The same sleazeball who would screw David Martinez on meds. The ripper tried to gouge her from fifteen to twenty grand. She haggled him down to 15,500, snatched the canister, and refused his chair with its bite bar. Back at Vik's, he cleaned the tarnished neural input, overlaid fresh gold, and installed the new Cyberdeck. Motoko steeled herself against the ghost of forced chipping and settled back in the ripper chair.
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057 57. Chapter 57
Motoko walked out of Vik's clinic into a transformed netscape. The Seacho Mk. 2 breached a vending machine's ICE without her even slowing down. She dove into programming a stealth addition for Ping, battling a maddening bug for hours until the Debug perk narrowed it to a mistyped port value. Programming hit Level 3. Jun watched from the couch, eating a burrito, quietly proud of his weird sister.
Ichi called in a panic. Jotaro's death cost him his driving job with the TC, and without income his elderly grandmother couldn't eat. Motoko realized the collateral damage was her fault and pivoted hard: she recruited Ichi for a self-made gig hunting a scav-connected ripper she remembered from game lore. They drove Kabuki's back alleys checking rippers until Motoko spotted the right clinic. To create a plausible cover for their reconnaissance, she made Ichi walk in and ask for a Mr. Studd implant while she played his pimp, recording the entire humiliation.
The ripper doc's identity was confirmed. Motoko called in the full crew: Malcolm for looting muscle, Hiromi for fencing. She planned to clear the scav den solo, loot it with friends, and use the ripper's own records to find the next den. Ichi protested the blackmail recording. Motoko pretended not to hear him and dialed Malcolm. Section 9 was assembling.
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058 58. Chapter 58
Motoko briefed the crew at the Ho-Oh club, now under new and less monstrous management. Hiromi took charge of finding buyers, calling her Arasaka-connected father for intel contacts and leveraging Wakako's network. Malcolm and Ichi were broke from the post-war slump, so Motoko covered gear costs as a business expense. They hit a clothing shop for matching armored outfits, dark and anonymous, while Motoko crafted herself a proper ninja mask.
Back at the apartment, Motoko and Jun had a burrito fight after she unveiled her ninja outfit. She burned nervous pre-gig energy by grinding guitar, picking up the Siren Song perk at Rockerboy 5. Full vocal control and voice mimicry, the works. She immediately tested it in the bathroom mirror, channeling Major Kusanagi's husky voice from Ghost in the Shell. The result was so convincing she terrorized Jun with it, purring mature one-liners until he retreated to his room.
At the crew meetup in Hiromi's garage, Motoko deployed "Sexy Motoko Voice" for the mission brief and the chaos was magnificent. Hiromi tackled her, Ichi blushed to his ears, Malcolm short-circuited. She distributed shotguns from the Quadra's arsenal, assigned roles, and they rolled out toward the scav den. Malcolm spent the entire ride asking about the voice.
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059 59. Chapter 59 ☠ 10
Motoko programmed through the night, finishing a stealth modification for Ping. Messy code, but functional enough to mask her network intrusions. After a nap, she met the crew at Hiromi's garage in full ninja regalia. She rolled out of the moving truck into a back-alley entrance, breached the scav den's ancient ICE in seconds with the Seacho, and lit up ten targets on Ping.
The slaughter was methodical and near-silent. She knifed the first scav as he walked toward a table. The BD-watching gonk died next. A pair on the couch died together with twin blades. Number five got walked up to openly and didn't react in time. She threw a knife into number six as he rounded a corner unarmed, then finished him with a second throw. Seven, eight, and nine died on another couch: thrown knife to the throat, stabbed trachea, and a face-to-face throat strike while sitting in the last one's lap.
With nine scavs cooling on the floor, Motoko strolled into the ripper clinic from the basement, drenched in blood, and addressed the doc in her Major voice. Charles tried the blackmail defense. She'd read his emails and knew better. Three Lexington rounds settled it. Malcolm and Hiromi secured the cyberware stockpile while Ichi backed the truck up. Ten kills, zero alarms, and a shard full of scav network intel pocketed for the next raid.
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060 60. Chapter 60
Motoko stacked the bodies in a corner while the crew stripped the den to the studs. Boxes of cyberware, ripper equipment, chop-shop parts, and scav laptops full of network data. They loaded Ichi's Villefort Columbus truck to capacity and retreated to Hiromi's apartment garage. The haul included Mantis Blades, a Militech Infuser, an Ex-Disk RAM upgrade Motoko pocketed for herself, a Smart Link Ichi tossed her way, and canisters of Real Skinn that would end up at Vik's at a discount.
Hiromi seized command of the fencing operation with terrifying competence, having already contacted buyers through Wakako's network before the loot was even cataloged. She dragged Motoko along as chauffeur and bodyguard, stopping at Vik's first where he got first pick and a new diagnostic tool, then hitting more rippers to sell off Charles's premium equipment piecemeal. The eddies piled up fast, kept pooled until the full haul was moved. Ichi's money problems were solved and Malcolm was grinning ear to ear.
The next morning, Motoko nagged Jun into finally getting Real Skinn for his chrome hands, then settled into a lazy day of guitar and programming. Hiromi burst through the unlocked apartment door mid-song, caught Motoko jamming on the couch, and immediately told everyone. At the truck meetup for more sales, Motoko defiantly belted out a radio song in front of the whole crew, and they were stunned silent by her vocals. Ichi adopted the name Section 9 for the group, and despite Motoko's protests that it was just a joke, the crew ran with it. Section 9 was official.
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061 61. Chapter 61
Motoko and her crew sold off the scav den loot at a ripper and split the eddies four ways evenly at Hiromi's insistence. The payday topped anything Wakako's gigs had offered. Back at the apartment, Malcolm celebrated, Ichi expressed genuine gratitude, and Hiromi was already scheming. Jun came home with fresh RealSkinn arms courtesy of Vik, and Motoko demanded a hug from her newly flesh-covered brother.
Digging through the stolen scav computers turned up nothing. The scavs had kept their networks completely siloed, no leads to another den. Motoko pivoted to grinding ICE on her new Seacho Mk.2 cyberdeck, more than doubling her cracking speed with the hardware upgrade. She also noticed a Reflex level-up she'd missed during the den assault. A visit to Lizzies followed: she thanked Rita for the hobby advice, confessed she'd taken up guitar, and dropped off BDs with Judy, including the Ichi prank virtu that Judy edited for a fee.
At Vik's clinic, Motoko chipped in an Arasaka SmartLink and an Ex-Disk neuralware expansion. Neither piece of chrome had any adaptation cost, baffling Vik when she reported zero post-install headaches. She rounded out the day buying Weapon Glitch and Reboot Optics quickhacks from Yoko at the Dewdrop Inn, filling her upgraded deck's empty slots. Between guitar sessions, she ground Programming to level 4, scrapped her botched directional mic code, and started fresh.
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062 62. Chapter 62 ☠ 1
Motoko dug into the Weapon Glitch quickhack code and discovered the program had been deliberately hobbled. Elegant core routines were strangled by intentional memory leaks and process loops, a crippled copy of what was once a multi-target weapon-disable tool. She began excising the bad code, grinding Programming XP in the process. Jun interrupted her marathon coding session with urgent news: Fujimura had personally invited both Kusanagis to a Tyger Claw party celebrating the ceasefire with 6th Street.
The party occupied a Japantown skyscraper club packed with TC brass and 6th Street delegates. Motoko camped the sushi bar while Jun networked. Fujimura delivered a backhanded compliment about her wasted potential before warning she'd need the Claws someday. She ate herself sick and threw up in the bathroom. Jun called it an early night. In the parking garage elevator, they shared the ride with a high-ranking TC boss named Okina and his date, a Doll. Danger Sense fired the instant the doors opened. Motoko kicked Jun's knees out just before an LMG barrage tore through where they'd stood. The Doll went down. The assassin was a full-borg edgerunner with Maelstrom optics, a Sandevistan, a rocket launcher arm, and easily seven-plus feet of chrome.
Motoko jammed the borg's LMG with Weapon Glitch, but his Sandevistan-boosted kick sent her flying across the garage, rupturing internal organs. She popped a MaxDoc, blinded him with Reboot Optics, and slid a knife into the back of his knee while Jun grappled from the front. The Burya punched holes through subdermal armor and the Lexington emptied into exposed internals. Jun ripped the borg's head clean off with his Gorilla Arms. TC reinforcements flooded the garage too late. The Doll was dead, Okina survived in his overturned car, and Fujimura draped a coat over the bloodied Motoko.
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063 63. Chapter 63
Motoko woke in Vik's ripper chair after an eight-hour healing sleep, injuries from the borg fight fully mended. Vik was rattled. Her internal damage was consistent with a pedestrian-versus-car impact, yet she'd refused painkillers and slept it off. Jackie Welles was in the clinic pestering Vik for a boxing lesson, and Motoko got her first look at the man whose death she'd watched play out in another life. She waved Vik off to train Jackie, then followed them to the rooftop ring above Misty's shop.
Vik coached Jackie through footwork and combos while Motoko watched, picking up Street Brawler XP just from observation. She spotted Jackie's tell. His left jab dropped his right guard every time. She volunteered as pad holder, tapping his chin each time the opening appeared until he corrected the habit. The sparring session stretched long, both dripping sweat, and Motoko earned Body XP from the workout.
Afterward, Jackie boasted about chasing a gig to meet Wakako through Padre, not realizing Motoko already worked with the fixer regularly. He refused her offer to watch his back on the gig, insisting she was too young for real edgerunner work. She bit her tongue on everything she knew and instead hatched a plan. After parting ways she called Wakako, bargained two thousand eddies off her next gig, and secured permission to be present when Jackie finally met the fixer. The look on his face would be worth every eddie.
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064 64. Chapter 64
Motoko secured Wakako's agreement to let her be present when Jackie came calling, then immediately received a new gig: steal data from Entity Retail LLC, a nothing company renting office space on the eleventh floor of a corporate tower. She walked through the lobby, bypassed stairwell security, and waited on the roof for hours until the office closed for the night. She hacked into the building's security system from a rooftop access port to kill time. By the time the last employee flipped the lights off, she owned every camera in the building.
The infiltration was almost embarrassingly easy. Building security administrator access let her waltz through the office door without a single breach. The boss's private lock was a consumer-grade pad, and his computer password sat on a sticky note. She jacked in, copied the target files plus some extras for trade at the Dewdrop, and whistled her way out the front door using the elevator she now controlled. Back home, she resumed grinding Weapon Glitch code and leveled Intelligence to 8. Jun revealed he already had Lynx Paws installed, just old cheap ones, and upgraded them using chrome salvaged from the dead borg. Motoko headbutted him for adding chrome, then grudgingly accepted the explanation.
Regina finally called with the delayed assassination gig. The target was hiding at the Lions Den, a bar in Santo Domingo with an on-site ripper who changed faces. Motoko would need to access the ripper's records to identify the mark. Late-night repairs on her salvaged HMG, a new 3D-printed barrel and resoldered wiring, rounded out a productive stretch of crafting and coding between gigs.
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065 65. Chapter 65
Motoko arrived at the Lions Den and discovered it was an Exotics bar. Biomodded animal-people only, no standard humans allowed. A shark-modded bouncer nearly eight feet tall turned her away at the front door. She circled the building: the rear loading dock had been converted into an outdoor lounge crawling with Exotics, the roof hosted a pool, and every employee from bartender to cook was modded. Biomods couldn't be quickhacked, rendering her netrunning edge useless. She breached the camera system from a nearby rooftop and confirmed the target ripper lived in a basement apartment, but the netrunner maintaining the bar's security was skilled enough to make deeper intrusion risky.
An all-night stakeout revealed the club never closed. Patrons rotated in and out around the clock. Motoko ran the math on her options. Optical Camo chrome or temporary exotic biomods could get her inside, but neither guaranteed success, and both cost more than the gig paid. She sent Regina her full recon package including security footage, floor plans, and annotated notes, and admitted she couldn't complete the job without chipping chrome she didn't want. Regina pulled her from the gig without hesitation.
Defeated and furious, Motoko drove home, cannonballed sleeping Jun as revenge for a forgotten grievance, and vented her frustration while wrapped in a blanket burrito with her brother sitting on her. She pulled up her full stat sheet and realized she had four unspent skill points and one unused Breach Protocol perk she'd forgotten about. After deep-diving the perk list she selected Ghost Touch: a slow-burn breach technique that sent bytes through obsolete back channels to bypass ICE entirely without triggering alerts. She swore she would become the kind of hacker that made corpo netrunners piss themselves.
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066 66. Chapter 66
Motoko threw herself into a netrunning grind to claw back confidence after the Lions Den failure. She burned through her remaining WET ICE practicing Ghost Touch, spending over an hour per bypass just on laptop-level security, and experimented with loud breaching to learn alert suppression from the opposite direction. Breach Protocol leveled to 7 after a marathon session that left her mentally exhausted for the first time despite a body that never tired.
Over ramen the next morning she took stock: she needed enemies to fight, XP to gain, and better tools to find both. The answer was obvious. She needed to enter the Net for real. A netrunning setup required a full chair, biomonitors, and cooling systems she couldn't fit in the apartment. She visited Wakako proposing a trade: point her at a netrunner with stealable gear, and she'd kill the target for free, taking the equipment itself as payment. Wakako obliged with a target perfectly suited to her needs.
The target: V3L0CITY, a talented netrunner holed up in the basement of an apartment complex in Valentino territory, protected by his partner Morgan Fields, an ex-6th Street washout, and a street gang of roughly fifty teenagers called the Straight Lane Shooters. Reconnaissance from a nearby rooftop revealed the full scope of the problem. The SLS were kids, most of them teenagers armed with stolen military-grade weapons. Motoko refused to massacre children but couldn't sneak past them or hack biomods they didn't have. She brought the intel to Section 9 at Ho-Oh club. Ichi suggested a killbox, Hiromi pushed for a gang takeover, and Malcolm, rolling his eyes at everyone overthinking it, spotted the detail that cracked the gig open: one of the security lines stretched across the street to another building. An escape tunnel.
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067 67. Chapter 67 ☠ 2
Motoko walked into the SLS rooftop party while Nox worked the crowd selling BDs as her advance scout. She approached Richard Steel, the teenage leader of the kids, armed with a TKI-20 Shingen smart SMG he lacked the SmartLink to properly use, and let him flirt badly before turning cold. She named the gang's vulnerabilities out loud: the security existed to protect V3L0CITY's escape, not the kids, and any real merc crew would chew through them. Richard reached for his weapon. Motoko disarmed him in a blink, pressed his own Shingen to his temple, and told him to keep his people on the roof until the shooting stopped. Then she stepped backward off the building, parkouring down the exterior.
The plan hinged on the netrunner's cowardice. Malcolm's grenades in the empty lobby triggered V3L0CITY's lockdown protocol, trapping the kids topside with a dead elevator. Hiromi, Ichi, and Malcolm staged a fake assault from the front with Motoko's HMG. Motoko sprinted to the office building across the street where she'd found the escape hatch and waited in the dark basement. Morgan Fields emerged first, hauling the emaciated borg netrunner behind him. The Burya punched a hole through V3L0CITY's back. Morgan dived for cover and returned fire with his own Shingen, smart rounds tracking Motoko around cover and cracking a rib.
V3L0CITY was not dead. The borged netrunner launched a quickhack assault from the floor, overwhelming Motoko's defenses and sending a program that spasmed her chrome arms into sparking uselessness. Morgan walked up and emptied his magazine into her chest. They left her for dead. The quickhack ended. Motoko dragged a MaxDoc to her lips with trembling hands, then a second, gasped blood clear of her lungs, and rose. Morgan was trying to carry his partner out. The Burya barked twice into Morgan's unguarded back. She emptied a Lexington magazine into both bodies, then reloaded the Burya and fired four more rounds into them. Just to be sure.
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068 68. Chapter 68
Motoko rode the elevator up with her crew and Nox to confront the SLS kids on the roof. Hiromi took point, striding out of the elevator, introducing herself by name, and informing forty armed teenagers that their bosses were dead with a cheerful smile. Richard Steel advanced furious and found himself staring down Motoko's Burya. Hiromi sat down, grabbed a beer, and talked the kid into a deal: Section 9 keeps the basement and maintains building security, the SLS keeps their autonomy and gets intel on earnable gigs. Hiromi called the arrangement a Section 9 affiliation, and Motoko realized with dawning horror that her crew was now officially a poser gang.
Vik patched Motoko's broken ribs and held her overnight for tests, demanding answers about her MaxDoc-accelerated healing. She confessed the rapid-heal interaction she'd been omitting and endured a battery of scans from a concerned 74-year-old ripper radiating grandpa energy. The next morning she returned to Straight Lane Apartments and established dominance with two shotgun-wielding girl guards by disarming them both simultaneously. Richard came down to the basement to negotiate directly. Motoko laid it out: she wasn't their boss, not their choom, and not interested in running a gang. She would maintain security and share intel. That was all.
Hiromi started a BD revenue discussion with Nox while Motoko purchased a full netrunner suit with cooling system from her usual seamstress. The basement was a treasure trove of Tier 4 netrunning equipment: server racks, a full dive chair, and biomonitors left behind by V3L0CITY. She began the painstaking process of wiping and securing every piece of hardware, starting with the server that immediately attacked her laptop on connection. Ghost Touch became essential, feeding bytes through side access ports to breach the server without triggering its kill-switch defenses.
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069 69. Chapter 69
Motoko spent an entire day Ghost Touching through V3L0CITY's server defenses, bypassing ICE that would have wiped everything if brute-forced. The payoff was enormous: an archive of daemons, netrunning hacks, and programs that she copied to external drives before wiping the server clean. She overhauled the apartment building's security, partitioning each camera into its own system, isolating the escape hatch on a separate laptop, and distributing elevator access keys to her crew. Jun learned about the gang situation and immediately celebrated his sister's rise to gang leadership, which she furiously denied while he swung her around the living room.
That night Motoko suited up in her new netrunner gear, clipped into V3L0CITY's refurbished dive chair, and entered the Net for real. The digital cityscape unfolded above and below her. Servers manifested as buildings, netrunners raced past on exotic mounts and vehicles while she handshaked through gates on foot like a peasant. The Black Wall glowed angry red on the horizon. She explored Megabuilding H4's server and got attacked by a territorial runner named Aaron. His assault bounced off her ICE. She retaliated with a Barrier data-flood, shattered his personal ICE with HELL FLAME, and forced him to disconnect.
At the Kabuki Roundabout server she discovered the true Dewdrop Inn: a full netrunner club with a dance floor, trading booths, and Yoko's security Daemons perched like gargoyles overhead. Teenage runners at a bartering table pointed her to the public directory. Inside the Inn, Yoko appeared as a nine-tailed Kitsune in a barely-held kimono, vastly different from her flat affect in meatspace. She revealed V3L0CITY was a Deep Diver who crossed the Black Wall multiple times, and that his server data was enormously valuable to the netrunner community. Motoko agreed to give Yoko first access in exchange for guidance on net survival and a mysterious personal request.
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070 70. Chapter 70
Motoko woke from her first full net dive and confirmed the XP from the Aaron fight was real. Net combat counted toward leveling, opening a path to growth that didn't require killing in meatspace. She changed out of the netrunner suit, walked past the SLS kids without incident, and drove home to decompress with her guitar before heading to the Dewdrop Inn in the real world. Yoko received V3L0CITY's server data on shards. Motoko traded the archive for eddies, favors, a comprehensive net-survival guide, and one undisclosed personal request that even Yoko found odd.
Rita got the full story of the borg fight at the TC party and relaxed when she learned Motoko hadn't been voluntarily guarding a Tyger Claw boss, just caught in the crossfire. She offered to connect Motoko with Mox netrunners if trouble arose. Rita also knew the dead Doll's name was Cassie, a detail Motoko had never learned.
Ichi and Malcolm rolled up to Lizzies in Ichi's grandmother's Thorton Galena, overdressed in new threads bought with scav-den eddies. Motoko bought the first round, then pulled out the edited BD of the Mr. Studd prank on Ichi. Malcolm howled with laughter while Ichi demanded the chip, which Motoko refused, swearing to weaponize it for the rest of his life. Nox arrived and Motoko deliberately implied her BD work for the Mox was something far more scandalous, turning both boys crimson before revealing the truth: combat virtu recordings of her gigs. The crew settled into Lizzies for a genuine hangout. No gigs, no grinding, just chooms being chooms.
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071 71. Chapter 71
The chapter opened from Ichi's POV as he slotted the scav den braindance. No fear, no hesitation, just ice-cold calculus as Motoko breached security, mapped every scav through Ping, and carved through the den with a knife. Both Ichi and Malcolm walked away from the BD twitchy and shaken, offering only a weak "it was cool" before getting eager to leave. The scav den BD was apparently selling well through Nox, cathartic for anyone who'd lost someone to organ thieves.
With her chooms unsettled and the night still young, Motoko jacked into the net and traveled to the Dewdrop Inn server for combat training with Yoko. The sparring was brutal. Yoko threw fire and breach programs from the comfort of her own server while Motoko burned through ICE shields and barriers trying to keep up. Both Quick Hack and Breach Protocol leveled. Yoko then introduced her to Daemon combat, summoning Imps and Thugs for target practice. Motoko discovered she could earn XP from destroying Daemons on the net, a revelation that had her grinning feral.
The session pushed Motoko's Cyberdeck to overheating before Yoko called it. The accumulated XP tipped her to level 10. She dumped the new stat point into Adaptation for her Condor arms and noticed the max adaptation requirement had dropped from ten to eight, her mind adjusting to the chrome on its own. She selected the Hacking Wizard perk, gaining the ability to upload multiple Quick Hacks simultaneously. Downtime found her strumming Lithium Flower on her guitar, singing a Major Kusanagi theme in the apartment. A call to Wakako about Jackie's stalled Microtech gig set her next move in motion.
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072 72. Chapter 72
Motoko drove past the Microtech warehouse in disguise, wearing an armored suit and tech gogs instead of Section 9 colors. She spotted Jackie Welles himself staking the place out from a noodle bar across the street. Rather than approach him, she slipped over the fence, breached the camera network in moments, and started mapping the entire facility: robot guard patrol routes, worker positions, the locked foreman's office where the shipment schedule lived. The warehouse ICE crumbled under her Breach skill, and she planted a backdoor in the security server for future access.
Inside the security system she discovered another intruder already poking around. A netrunner trying to access the foreman's computer. Motoko opened a text channel under the handle "Ghost" and discovered the runner was T-Bug, hired by Jackie to find a way in. Instead of competing, Ghost patched T-Bug through to the foreman's laptop by bridging the security server and the disconnected terminal. T-Bug took her time, suspicious of a trap, but grabbed the data. On the way out, T-Bug tried to snag Ghost on camera by quick-panning the lens, but Motoko leapt off the catwalk and vanished below the camera's line of sight before it could catch her.
An hour later Wakako texted that Jackie completed the gig. Motoko raced to the parlor, slid into the chair beside Wakako, and was already smirking when Jackie walked through the beaded curtain. Wakako gave him the job, with a condition. Motoko would ride along as his partner on future gigs, evaluating his skills. Jackie's confusion at finding a teenage girl already installed in the room was exactly the revenge Motoko wanted for being underestimated.
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073 73. Chapter 73
Motoko and Wakako argued over a bizarre Night City game show, part Price is Right, part Takeshi's Castle, featuring a borg in Kabuki actor costume swinging a padded kanabo, until Jackie Welles arrived for his formal intake. Wakako ran through her expectations and assigned Motoko as Jackie's partner for upcoming gigs. Jackie's confusion at finding the purple-haired teenager already seated and grinning was priceless. Motoko soaked in every second of it before dragging him out to Cherry Blossom Market for noodles on her tab.
Over ramen, the two hashed out terms. Jackie was still uncomfortable running with a kid, but Motoko laid it flat: she was an infiltrator who needed a bruiser for backup when stealth failed, and he was a solo who could double his gig flow. They toasted to potential partnerships. After they split, Motoko browsed the Cherry Blossom tech stalls, bought printer feedstock, and hauled her grenade-making supplies to the netrunning basement so Jun couldn't yell about explosives in the apartment. She built a fresh batch of grenades and stashed them in the Quadra for Jackie's benefit.
That night she jacked into the net to visit Yoko at the Dewdrop Inn. A netrunner named Walk3r had a corrupted server he needed someone to dive. The Daemons inside were broken and hostile, the architecture a twisted hellscape of melted buildings and fractured sky. Motoko carved through waves of damaged Imps and Thugs with a flaming digital longsword, took an Overheat hack that left her bleeding from the nose in meatspace, and discovered a pristine library room guarded by a Balron-class Daemon. She ICEd the thing and ran for her life as it ripped the server apart behind her, destroying the data Walk3r wanted. She escaped through Yoko's emergency portal, bleeding and fried, and passed out in her netrunning chair.
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074 74. Chapter 74
Motoko woke in the basement with blood caked into her netrunner suit, cleaned up, and checked the damage report from the corrupted server dive. The XP haul was staggering: over 11,000 from forty-four destroyed Daemons. Intelligence hit 9, Breach Protocol shot up to 9, and Quick Hacks jumped to 6. The dungeon-crawl through twisted digital architecture delivered more skill growth in one session than weeks of conventional training.
Back at the apartment she ground Reboot Optics code until Programming leveled to 5. That breakthrough unlocked a cascade. She dumped five skill points in rapid succession, rocketing Programming from 5 to 10. Then she spent her stat point to push Intelligence to 10. The "Human Limit Achieved" alert locked XP leveling. Future gains would require stat or skill points only. The information flood from five back-to-back level-ups nearly melted her brain. She swayed on her feet, Jun caught her, and she collapsed onto the couch under a blanket.
When the fog cleared, the knowledge was transformative. She could see every flaw in her old code and understood rudimentary AI construction. She selected two perks: Inspired Programmer, which kept creative momentum flowing endlessly, and A.I. Whisperer, which opened the door to creating true digital life. Jun hovered, worried about the near-collapse, but Motoko shrugged it off and opened her laptop. Programming 10 meant she could rewrite everything from scratch.
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075 75. Chapter 75
Motoko opened the source code for Ping and recoiled. At Programming 10 the bloated mess read like an insult. She scrapped it entirely and rebuilt from scratch, a stealthy, compact program that slipped through systems without ringing any bells. Where the original blasted every connected device with requests, Ping 2.0 used Ghost Touch principles to silently trace network connections. Jun had to physically close her laptop to make her eat. She'd been coding all day without noticing the sun set.
Hiromi crashed the apartment on Jun's orders to snap Motoko out of her coding fugue. They took Hiromi's TC-decal Kusanagi bike on a midnight cruise through Night City, past the Shinto shrine near North Oak, through winding mountain roads, stopping for food when Hiromi's stomach rumbled. It was decompression Motoko didn't know she needed. After Hiromi dropped her home, Motoko finished Ping 2.0 and installed it. The first test, pinging the apartment TV, cascaded through every connected transmitter in the building and beyond, forcing her to add a spread limiter.
She raced to the Dewdrop Inn on the net to show Yoko. A netrunner named Ex tried to recruit her into a collective. She declined. Yoko examined the code and went from sensual smirk to focused intensity in seconds, then yanked Motoko into her private lobby to keep the program away from prying eyes. The Kitsune wanted trade rights: copies for distribution in exchange for quickhacks and future favors. Motoko agreed. They spent hours geeking out over the code, and Motoko drove home at sunrise buzzing with the knowledge that even a legendary netrunner was impressed by her work.
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076 76. Chapter 76
Motoko finalized the Ping trade with Yoko, picking up quick hacks to fill her Cyberdeck plus future favors. Programming 10 meant she'd rewritten Ping from the ground up in just days. Back at the apartment she channeled that same energy into her music box project, buying a larger memory storage module and coding the sound system from scratch. Jun caught her spacing out without food again and force-fed her a XXL burrito she despised, then talked her into visiting the TC dojo to see Sensei.
The dojo was packed with Tyger Claw students, and Motoko's lack of gang colors drew suspicion. A student named Tsukune forced a spar. Motoko went on the offensive, targeting his face with relentless strikes and pushing him to the wall. When one of Tsukune's chooms tried to quick hack her mid-fight, she breached his ICE, blinded him with Reboot Optics, and beaned him with a thrown bokken. Jun arrived and lifted Tsukune by the throat, dropping the 'Oni of Kamikaze' energy before calling her a gorilla to the guy's face. Sensei watched without intervening, then assigned her a chain of sparring partners that left her bruised head to toe.
Walking to Cherry Blossom Market for the noodles Jun owed her, Wakako called. A gig for both Motoko and Jackie, right now. Jun got a rain check on dinner. Motoko headed for Jig-Jig Street, ready for her first official job partnered with Jackie Welles.
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077 77. Chapter 77 ☠ 1
Motoko arrived at Wakako's parlor early enough to watch terrible TV with the fixer before Jackie walked in. The gig: kidnap Arnold Henderson, a 6th Street enforcer who killed a TC member's family during the gang war. Peace meant the client couldn't go after Henderson directly, so mercenaries handled the extraction. Motoko changed into her Section 9 gear and brought Jackie to the apartment, where Jun glared at the big Valentino like he might rip his head off. She loaded Jackie into the Quadra with a box of homemade grenades between his legs.
From Jackie's perspective, the kid was baffling. She drove like a grandmother, used turn signals, and kept grenades she'd made herself in the car. At the target garage, Motoko slipped through the fence alone, breached the security cameras, and fed Jackie a live tactical overlay. She mapped the hostiles, identified the target on the ground floor, and proposed a flashbang-and-breach assault. Jackie kicked in the door behind dual flashbangs, body-slammed Henderson unconscious, and started hauling him out. When reinforcements pulled up, Motoko blinded everyone with cascading Reboot Optics, buying Jackie time to clear the back fence. They dumped Henderson into Wakako's pickup car without a scratch.
One 6th Street guard upstairs took a Burya round when he pulled a weapon during the breach. The gig wrapped clean. Jackie was quiet processing that this fourteen-year-old just ran a flawless kidnapping op.
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078 78. Chapter 78
Jackie admitted Motoko was the best overwatch he'd ever worked with, and they compared sidearms. She ribbed him about his ancient OZ Soul 3.0 optics. He swore the soulful eyes got him out of trouble. Jackie headed off to a date with his girlfriend Camilla, and Motoko filed away the fact that he hadn't met Misty yet.
Back at the apartment, Jun continued his gorilla campaign, leading to a couch wrestling match Motoko lost because her borg brother was basically a tank. She retreated to her room, patted the Uragan case under her bed, and started rewriting Reboot Optics from scratch. The new version would force a reboot, then silently set brightness to zero and hide the HUD overlay so the target stays blind even after the system comes back online. Programming it to spread through network connections would take real engineering, but Inspired Programmer kept her locked in.
Hiromi called the next morning needing backup for a meeting with Richard at the Straight Lane Apartments. Carter, a kid from the SLS gang, had stolen Morgan's old Thorton Colby, a crate of weapons, and joined the Tyger Claws using the loot as his entry ticket. Richard needed the car back or his leadership crumbles. Hiromi and Motoko weighed options over an internal call: talking to Carter, klepping the car back, or negotiating with the TC crew. They needed intel first.
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079 79. Chapter 79
Motoko and Hiromi rolled up to a TC-front tattoo parlor looking for Carter. The parlor boss, Kotoniki, covered in animated neon dragon tattoos, assumed they were some kid's ex-girlfriends and told them to get lost. Hiromi pushed back too hard, dropping corpo-kid attitude without TC colors to back it up. Kotoniki had the door slammed shut and the two girls put in a back room. They confiscated Motoko's Burya and Lexington. Carter stomped in, didn't recognize them, and started punching Motoko in the face and stomach while she tanked the hits behind Cold Blood.
She played it cool. She'd already texted Jun the moment things went sideways. She dropped the fact that she killed Morgan and V3LOCITY, identified herself as someone with TC connections, and waited. Kotoniki got a call and went pale. Motoko cheerfully told him to say hello to Fujimura for her. Instead of Jun, Akari the Kamikaze borg sauntered in, decked Kotoniki with a chrome fist, and announced that Motoko had Boss Okina's favor for saving his life. The room went ice-cold with realization.
Weapons returned, Motoko got her revenge. She broke Kotoniki's jaw with a chrome-knuckled punch, grabbed Carter by the ears and smashed his face into her knee. She demanded Morgan's car and the TC goons pointed her to the back lot. The Thorton Colby Butte was waiting with a terrible hotwire job still in place. Motoko drove it out with Hiromi riding shotgun, sent the Quadra to follow via remote, and Akari stayed behind to handle the diplomatic fallout.
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080 80. Chapter 80
Hiromi returned the car to Richard, then dragged Motoko up to her empty apartment to patch the bruises with a medkit and guilt. She blamed herself for mouthing off without her old TC cred to back it up. Motoko shut it down. They agreed on a new rule: never go to a gang meet without proper muscle again. The tension broke into a sleepover invite.
At the apartment Motoko coded Reboot Optics while Hiromi snacked and eventually fell asleep on her shoulder. Jun slipped in at 3 AM and they had an entire conversation over internal call to avoid waking Hiromi. Jun wanted to murder every TC in that parlor. Fujimura had sent him to Sensei to cool off instead. Motoko assured him she punched Kotoniki hard enough to break his jaw, and Jun's anger softened. He told her next time, just flatline them.
Morning brought Hiromi's embarrassing sleep-clinging routine and a faceplant off the couch. Quiet hours of programming followed until Jun announced Fujimura wanted a meeting. He drove them across the bridge into Little China, through a TC-controlled alley market, and down into a hidden underground bar that served as Fujimura's nerve center. While waiting for the boss, Motoko spotted a real antique piano in the corner and decided boredom was a perfectly good reason to try it out.
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081 81. Chapter 81
Motoko sat down at the antique piano in Fujimura's underground bar and played Hiroyuki Sawano's aLIEz, an anime OP she bet didn't exist in this world. Her Siren Song perk and Perfect Musical Memory carried the vocals while her chrome fingers hit the keys. The haunting piano-and-voice rendition earned quiet claps from the TC hardcases and enthusiastic applause from Akari, who arrived bracketing Fujimura just as the last note faded. Fujimura's only comment: 'Your piano needs work.'
In the private booth, Fujimura presented two things. First, a business card with his assistant's number, a direct line for mediation if Motoko ever ran into TC trouble again, so no one else made Kotoniki's mistake. Second, an Oni menpo mask similar to Jun's, neon green and snarling. Fujimura framed it as insurance: if she ever needed the Tyger Claws on her side, the mask proves she's not just an outsider. Jun nudged her until she took it. Fujimura confirmed Kotoniki was with a ripper sporting a broken jaw courtesy of Motoko's chrome fist.
Back home, Motoko stashed the menpo in her room and told herself she'd never wear it. She finished coding Reboot Optics 2.0, a self-duplicating viral hack that blinds targets, locks their brightness to zero, hijacks their HUD overlay, and spreads through network connections. Lower RAM cost, wider spread, weaker against dedicated netrunners but devastating against groups. With two custom quick hacks complete, she pivoted to her music box project, then headed to the net to hunt scav dens through information alone.
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082 82. Chapter 82
Motoko jacked into the net and walked into the NCPD criminal database, past the guard Daemons, through a flimsy 'Secure' door, and into an infinite filing room of kidnapping reports. Every missing person was tagged SCAV and listed as deceased regardless of circumstances. She dumped hundreds of last-known locations onto a Night City heatmap and started tracking individual cases by hopping between security cameras along their routes. Most trails ended in drug dens, runaways, or gang hits, not scavs.
The breakthrough came from Hannah Curtis, a Biotechnica subsidiary worker whose biomonitor flatlined two days ago. Motoko followed her car through the city camera by camera, caught her stopping in an alley to meet a dealer named Samuel Alexander Harrington, and watched a scav truck leave with Hannah. The driver's passenger wore an imager displacer with the crossed-out eyes confirming scav affiliation. She tracked the truck through hours of camera footage, hacking system after system, until she pinned the den to a shut-down office building with active power and internet. Her Cyber Ninja Daemon blinded the security dog while she mapped every camera inside.
Den confirmed. Motoko texted her crew, 'Section 9 meeting tonight. Lizzies, 6 PM,' and headed home after nearly twenty-four straight hours on the net. She'd earned a pile of Breach experience from the hundreds of systems she wormed through and was already thinking about the next step: following the scavs' supply chain to wherever the stolen chrome actually goes.
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083 83. Chapter 83
Section 9 convened at Lizzies Bar. Motoko briefed Hiromi, Ichi, and Malcolm on the scav den with floor plans, camera feeds, and guard positions gathered from the net. Malcolm dropped the key insight: the scav cameras recorded months of footage, including shipment runs. If they tracked the outbound van instead of just raiding the den, they might find the central repository where all the stolen chrome gets stored. The crew pivoted from a smash-and-grab to a full supply-chain hunt.
Back at the basement, Motoko jacked in and started pulling camera data from every system along the van's route, feeding it in real time to her chooms on laptops. Hours of work, hacking cafes, hotels, and traffic cameras, slowly traced the van's path through Night City. When they lost the truck near Corporation Street in City Center, Malcolm suggested they track the return trip instead. The reverse path revealed the van using the Ring Road, narrowing the destination to somewhere near Corporation Street.
Hiromi forced a break after six hours of continuous net diving. Ichi slammed the table and refused to quit. Motoko made a food run to the diner, delivered grapple-hugs to all three chooms, and while walking back pieced together the puzzle: the scavs drove into City Center, not away from it. No cargo docks there, no smuggling infrastructure. Just high-end marina clubs and corpo buildings. Something about this operation didn't fit the usual scav playbook.
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084 84. Chapter 84
Malcolm's reverse-tracking trick paid off. The crew followed the scav van backwards and caught it coming off the Ring Road onto Corporation Street. Motoko hacked into a chain of 25/7 capsule shops on Hiromi's suggestion and got ambushed by the shop chain's corporate netrunner, who sicked a chainsaw-mouthed Daemon on her. A tense standoff of ICE walls, Hell Flame exchanges, and barrier spam ended in negotiation when Motoko explained she was hunting scavs. The runner walked her through the recordings and identified the van's passenger wearing a Gold Beach Marina janitor uniform.
Gold Beach Marina turned out to be an ultra-secure private yacht club. The crew drove out to scout it: barricades, guard stations, cameras everywhere, and a fleet of luxury yachts including one angular black vessel that looked like a stealth ship. Ichi wanted to hit it. Motoko shut that down, warning that the heat from robbing billionaires could be terminal. She needed to get inside the security system, and that meant a physical infiltration at night.
Over diner fries, Malcolm brought up their old netrunner friend Omaeda. Ichi shut it down cold: Omaeda bailed during the gang war and wasn't welcome. Motoko tabled the scav den raid to avoid tipping off the higher operation, despite hating the idea of leaving active scavs running. The crew agreed and split for the day.
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085 85. Chapter 85
Motoko infiltrated Gold Beach Marina at 3 AM in full Section 9 gear. She bypassed the front entrance by scaling a corpo office building's unused third-floor walkway, shimmying across behind the marina where there was zero security. She dropped down via palm tree, ghosted past drunk patrons and guards flirting with bartenders, and timed her entry through the security room's open window when the guard took a bathroom break. She jacked in, downloaded a month of camera records and the yacht registry to a shard, and barely finished before the guard returned, buying extra seconds by chucking an empty can into the bushes as a distraction.
Hanging off the pier's concrete edge, she reviewed the footage on her HUD. The scav van drove through both checkpoints, dropped crates on the dock, and left. Hours later, cargo bots rolled the crates into the hold of the GEIshhhhA, the angular black yacht they'd spotted during recon. She boarded the yacht undetected and spent two hours tricking the hold's biometric lock by feeding it spoofed data byte by byte until it registered her as authorized. Below deck: crates and crates of stolen chrome. Jackpot.
She drove out to the Aldecaldos camp in the badlands to pitch the heist to Saul. The plan: steal the whole yacht, sail it down the coast, offload with nomad trucks. Panam was ready to fight for the score. Scorpion saw the potential. But Saul said no. The Raffen Shiv would catch the scent of that much chrome and bring war to the clan. Panam stormed off furious. Motoko drove the long road back to Night City with a problem: she needed muscle she could trust, and the list was getting very short.
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086 86. Chapter 86
Motoko agonized over the yacht heist. Hiromi's dossier revealed the owner, Bartolomeo Mordellini, a party-scene kingpin who hosted drug-fueled events for the rich and famous. Not a corpo, so no corporate hit squads if he disappeared. Jun counseled her to use the TC. Motoko resisted being pulled deeper into Fujimura's orbit. Hiromi pushed from the other direction: Motoko needed a reputation, not anonymity. The argument cut deep when Hiromi pointed out that Motoko's obsession with staying unknown was rooted in fear from the Maelstrom kidnapping that cost her arms.
She sat with that truth. Every instinct screamed to stay invisible, but invisibility hadn't protected her before and it wouldn't protect her chooms now. She decided they were doing this, and they were doing it loud. The BD wreath went on. She recorded herself perched on the office building like a gargoyle overlooking the marina, then launched.
The heist unfolded in a single fluid sequence. She dropped from the building, flipped onto the bar roof, shut down every camera in the marina with a command, and choked out the security guard through the open window. She planted a virus in the security system that branded the Laughing Man symbol, the J.D. Salinger quote from Ghost in the Shell, across every victim's optics. She cut the yacht's mooring lines, booted the engine using a user manual she'd traded from Yoko, and sailed the GEIshhhhA out of Gold Beach Marina while every guard and guest stumbled blind with a blue laughing face burned into their vision.
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087 87. Chapter 87 ☠ 2
Motoko found four people passed out on the yacht's club deck: Bartolomeo Mordellini, two women, and a large Russian man half-under a table with a Burya within reach. She emptied the Burya's magazine and jammed their comms, then woke Bart with a champagne shower. When the Russian, a scav contact named Kajetan, pulled the now-empty Burya and threatened her, Motoko drew her own Burya slow enough to let him pull the trigger first. Click. Then she put a round through his head. Bart started talking very fast after that.
She herded the three survivors to the bow at gunpoint, fired a warning shot when Bart tried to search for a hidden weapon, and sailed south to the Biotechnica flats. The SLS crew was waiting on an abandoned concrete dock with rented trucks. Richard's masked kids hauled crate after crate of chrome out of the hold. Once the hold was empty, Motoko sent the yacht out to sea on autopilot, pulled the Uragan rocket launcher from her trunk, and put a guided missile through its hull. The GEIshhhhA detonated in a fireball of Chooh2 and shrapnel. The SLS kids screamed with joy.
Then Motoko walked over and executed Bart with a single shot. Working with scavs was a death sentence, and she wasn't leaving a vengeful millionaire alive to hunt her crew. The two women got a choice: walk or ride. They rode to the nearest metro and disappeared. The truck convoy rolled into a TC-guarded storage yard Fujimura provided. Jun met her at the lot and pulled her into a side hug. The gig was done. Now came the hard part: selling everything before someone stole it.
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088 88. Chapter 88
Motoko spent a full week perched in a sniper hide on a rooftop across from the TC-guarded storage lot, Nekomata trained on the chrome stash through a carpet-camouflaged peephole. She built the nest from stolen office cushions, a borrowed carpet, and an AC-unit power tap for her laptop. Jun visited and couldn't find her until she sent him a photo of his own head from above. He wasn't impressed with her pillow-fort lifestyle, but she walked him through the gig from start to finish. His reaction to learning about the Uragan under her bed was swift and violent.
Once the last meaningful crate sold, the crew celebrated at the Ho-Oh Club's second floor. Ichi planned to save most of his cut for his grandmother but wanted chrome. Malcolm wanted subdermal armor and his own car. Hiromi was getting Arasaka-grade flash chrome from her father's connections. Motoko tallied her wishlist: Kusanagi bike, Sandevistan, optical camo, reinforced tendons. Jun pinched her and made her promise to at least get subdermal armor.
The next morning she drove to Vik's in the rain, chatted with Misty about the piracy charges likely heading for her NCPD file, and sat in the ripper chair. Vik sourced Militech-Armalite Ballistic Guard subdermal, hexagonal mesh armor woven beneath the skin, and pulled dusty Serano Air-Groove ankles from storage. The tendons were professional basketball-grade chrome, handed to Vik years ago by a Night City Heat player named Dante. Top-shelf sportsware that turned her into a serious vertical leap machine. She went under, got chipped, and woke up itchy and bouncy.
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089 89. Chapter 89
Motoko woke from eight hours of healing sleep, bounced her head off the bedroom ceiling testing her new Serano ankles, and hit the streets for a parkour session that turned into pure joy. She leaped six feet straight up, vaulted vending machines, scaled a building bare-handed, and flipped over pedestrians' heads on the sidewalk. The reinforced tendons turned Night City's vertical landscape into a playground. She laughed from on top of a light pole, arms raised, loving every second of being more.
Back home, she started rewriting Weapon Glitch from scratch. The new version wouldn't just jam guns. It would spread through network connections, bouncing from weapon to weapon within a hostile group's system. Lower lethality than making guns explode, but it meant more loot and a single hack that could disarm an entire room. The news ran stories about the 'Laughing Man Hacker' who blinded dozens of rich and famous partygoers at the marina, including a singer caught mid-affair with his boss's wife. The icon she burned into their optics trended for days before the story faded.
She dropped the yacht heist BD off with Judy at Lizzies, where Suzie Q, leader of the Mox, connected the dots between Ghost, the Laughing Man, the girl who saved Nox, and the one who killed Jotaro Shobo. Suzie gave a single curt nod of approval. Back home, Motoko decompressed with her guitar and music box, playing until Rockerboy leveled to 6. Then Yoko called. The net community wanted to meet the Laughing Man. Everyone who got blinded, everyone who couldn't crack the hack for hours, and every netrunner who wanted to buy or study the code.
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090 90. Chapter 90
Motoko walked into the Dewdrop Inn server to find about ten netrunners waiting for her, including Otter Business, a media personality with a primetime economics show, and the ever-smirking Yoko. Otter was furious she blinded him mid-coitus on Bart's yacht but grudgingly impressed she killed the man and blew up his eyesore ship. R1ot, a corpo security runner, and Walk3r from a previous session were there too. One runner, Ma><, recently hired by Arasaka, tried to backtrace her physical location during the meeting. Motoko slammed a barrier into the trace and threatened to kill him. Yoko banned him from the server permanently.
The mood reset and the group got down to business. R1ot warned her never to join a corp, saying they'd lock a programmer of her caliber in a lab forever. Someone connected the handle 'Ghost' to T-Bug's complaints about an unknown runner who locked her down in a Microtech warehouse months ago. Motoko confirmed it was her, earning laughs at T-Bug's expense. The netrunners pushed hard to buy the Reboot Optics code. Motoko refused to sell her personal hack but offered debugging work in exchange for scav intelligence.
At home over ramen with Jun, she recapped the meeting and the flood of debug contracts now filtering through Yoko. Jun told her to stop worrying about the heat. 'If you piss someone off and they come for you, we can kill them together. Just be as safe as you can. But don't stop.' He called her an edgerunner. She denied it. The next morning Vik checked her chrome, adjusted a few subdermal mesh bundles causing the itch, and confirmed everything healed impossibly fast. He mentioned Jackie took a solo gig from Wakako and earned a bruise he was proud of. Motoko resolved to reconnect with Jackie and hit the scav den she'd been sitting on.
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091 91. Chapter 91 ☠ 4
Motoko brings Jackie along on a Scav den raid in an old office building. She loops the exterior cameras, tags all six hostiles through the security system, and feeds targeting data straight into Jackie's new optics. Armed with her Copperhead instead of her usual stealth loadout, she opts for a loud-and-fast breach for the first time ever. Jackie bum-rushes the entrance with his Nue and drops two before they can blink. Motoko punches rounds through the drywall walls, flatlining the rest sight-unseen. One crawler earns a double-tap.
Ichi and Malcolm arrive to haul crates of stolen chrome to the TC storage lot while Jackie charms the TC enforcers outside like old drinking buddies. He also teaches Motoko something embarrassing: she had never once registered NCPD bounties on her kills. Jackie invites the whole crew to El Coyote Cojo for celebratory drinks. Mama Welles meets Motoko, Malcolm, and Ichi, welcoming them as Jackie's chooms.
Back at the apartment, Motoko finds Jun doing paperwork because Akari botched a management assignment for Fujimura. She spots a few errors in the budget report but bails once it gets above her pay grade. She spends the rest of the night working on her music box project, determined to finally finish the code.
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092 92. Chapter 92
Motoko finishes two days of nonstop coding on her music box. She buys a Digi-tizer synth keyboard from a music shop, picks up holo emitters separately, and solders everything together in the apartment. The synth lets her play any instrument through her neural link, the amp outputs sound, and three holo emitters project holographic performers. The hardware and software finally come together into a single portable system.
Recording her first track requires recreating every instrument digitally through the synth interface. Guitar, drums, electronic textures, even guttural vocals, all pulled from Perfect Musical Memory. The song is "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" from the DOOM Eternal soundtrack, reproduced note-for-note inside her head while the apartment stays dead silent. She etches the song title onto a shard, then decides it demands a proper christening: a solo Scav raid with her Carnage shotgun and a pocketful of MaxDocs.
Jun catches her heading out the door armed to the teeth and refuses to let her hit a Megabuilding H11 Scav den alone. Despite her protests about embarrassment, Jun insists on watching from the floor above. She calls Ichi and Malcolm for post-raid looting, locates the den through hacked cameras, pings the entire Scav network with her rolling Weapon Glitch loop, and prepares to breach with the song queued in her neural port.
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093 93. Chapter 93 ☠ 18
Motoko slots the shard, drops from the upper floor as the first guitar riff hits, and charges into the Megabuilding H11 Scav den recording everything on her BD implant. Her rolling Weapon Glitch loop jams every firearm on the network, leaving the Scavs defenseless. She beats the first Scav to death against a table, blasts the ripper doc's partner into a wall with her Carnage, then caves in the doc's skull with the shotgun stock. A knife-wielding Scav gets a thumb through his eye socket for his trouble.
A Sandevistan-equipped Scav boss punches her across two rooms, cracking ribs and fracturing her skull. She tanks the hits, burns through MaxDocs, and waits for the Sandy cooldown. The moment his speed drops to normal, she quick-draws her Burya and separates his head in two at point-blank range. Six more Scavs converge from a connected apartment block. One gets dropped by a Carnage shot, another carved up with a Cut-o-Matic chainsword she picks up mid-fight. A frag grenade gets batted aside with the Carnage. The last runner tries to hide in plastic sheeting in the ripper room. She hunts him down and beats him to death with her fists.
As the final lyrics leave her mouth, six red Maelstrom optics stare back at her from behind the carnage. A half-dead Maelstrom woman named GearSlot lies ripped apart on a Scav operating table. Every instinct screams to finish her, but the chapter ends on a knife's edge: Maelstrom and Motoko locked in a stare over the bodies of the dead.
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094 94. Chapter 94
Motoko wrestles with the urge to execute GearSlot, a Maelstrom victim of the Scavs who triggers every ounce of her trauma. She nearly draws her Burya, but Cold Blood reins her in. After reading the woman's rap sheet and enduring her desperate plea for rescue, Motoko pulls a shard blocking GearSlot's agent from her neuroport, jams a canister of borg blood and a MaxDoc into her failing body, snarls that it's all the mercy Maelstrom will ever get, and storms out. She cuts the BD recording and scrubs the Maelstrom encounter from the footage.
Three Maelstrom arrive by elevator to collect GearSlot. Motoko stalks them through the hacked camera network, then triggers the Scavs' stereo to play her song as a psychological weapon. When one suggests looting the chrome, she blinds two of them by shutting down their optics, bashes the greedy one's knee and face with her Carnage, and holds the shotgun barrel against his cheek. A single growled warning in Sexy Motoko Voice sends them fleeing to the elevator with their injured choom.
Vik patches her up overnight with a skull fracture and two broken ribs. Jun steals the music shard from the Quadra's stereo and refuses to give it back. Motoko drops the edited BD at Lizzie's Bar for Judy, who isn't in. Back home, she reviews the XP haul from the eighteen kills, hits level 12, and sinks her stat point into arm adaptation. She starts recording Samurai covers on the music box.
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095 95. Chapter 95
Motoko spends the night recording the full Samurai catalog into her music box, leveling Rockerboy to 7 from the work. When Jun comes home she ambushes him for the stolen shard but gets bodied. He catches her mid-leap, bombs her onto the couch, and sits on her. She retaliates by hacking the apartment radio, the TV, and even his remote to blast Samurai music on loop, then ejects the shard from his neuroport with a remote quickhack. Jun wins the wrestling match anyway and reveals he already shared "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" with the Tyger Claws. Akari is obsessed.
Hiromi storms in furious about being excluded from the Scav raid, extracts an apology dinner at an upscale restaurant, and pumps Motoko for details. Mid-meal, Judy fires off panicked texts saying the new BD nearly gave her a heart attack and threatens to sic Rita on Motoko for potential cyberpsychosis. Motoko talks her down and promises to replace her caffeine stash. Back at the apartment, Hiromi and Jun bully Motoko into performing "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" live with the full holographic setup: holo-drummer and holo-keyboardist flanking her as she plays guitar.
The live performance floors Hiromi, who literally leaps onto Motoko screaming about super-passes to future shows. Motoko privately apologizes to Mick Gordon for taking credit, then shuts down Hiromi's ticket-selling fantasies. She spends the rest of the night composing BFG Division and other tracks while Hiromi dozes on her shoulder.
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096 96. Chapter 96
Nox is riding high. Motoko's BDs are selling fast, word of mouth from the Boat Heist driving prices into XBD territory. He keeps meticulous records of cuts owed to Motoko and Judy, and is flush enough to have bought an internal agent and a car. Then Judy calls screaming. She has finished editing Motoko's new BD and can still feel the rage in her nervous system. Nox races to Lizzie's and slots into the virtu himself.
The BD of the Scav den massacre hits different from anything Nox has sold before. Seven minutes of pure brutality: thumbs through eye sockets, shotgun-stock skull-crushings, the Burya decapitation. Both Nox and Judy are left gasping on the workshop floor, questioning whether Motoko is edging toward cyberpsychosis. Nox decides to sell the BD uncut. The title etched on the shard, "The Only Thing They Fear Is You," is perfect marketing.
Jackie wakes Motoko with a late-night call begging for netrunner help. At a Santo Domingo warehouse she finds dead bodies in Kang Tao armor and street-gang bandannas. Jackie explains: a small offshoot gang called the Red Piratas klepped a corpo car with something hot in the trunk, and Kang Tao executed them all, including Danny, a neighborhood kid Jackie mentored. Padre wants payback. Motoko bypasses the Black ICE-trapped laptop by building a wireless virus byte-by-byte through Ghost Touch, cracks Kang Tao security without ever jacking in, and comes face to face with Jackie's backup: a red-haired woman in a corpo suit. It is V.
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097 97. Chapter 97 ☠ 3
Told from V's perspective. She's an Arasaka Counter-Intel operative running on stress suppressants, and Jackie is her only real friend. She dismissed Motoko as a street brat, but the kid just wirelessly cracked Kang Tao security that should have fried her brain. V pulls dispatch data revealing the stolen tech is at a Kang Tao drop site, downloads everything onto a shard for Jenkins, and commandeers a Kang Tao van with Jackie to infiltrate the site.
V shoots the checkpoint guard through the van's tinted window with her silenced Kenshin, then kills the camera network with an expensive daemon she doesn't understand. Inside, her Arasaka skill-chip integration takes over: robotic precision fire from the Kenshin, smart-lock tracking from the Shingen, a GASH anti-personnel grenade bounced perfectly into a corner. Jackie finds the stolen case. As they move to extract, a Kang Tao QRF rolls in hot, pinning them at the warehouse entrance with heavy fire.
Trapped with no back exit and an AV inbound, V and Jackie trade banter about garbage chutes and broken asses, echoes of a border escape that cemented their bond. Then Motoko speaks from the catwalk directly above V. She's been lying there the entire firefight, eating chips in stolen Kang Tao armor, invisible to V's high-end Arasaka optics. She blinds the entire enemy squad through their own network and opens fire with her Copperhead. V deploys her Mantis Blades and carves through the helpless Kang Tao alongside Jackie while Motoko provides overwatch.
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098 98. Chapter 98
Still in V's POV. A Kang Tao AV screams in on a strafing run, missiles shredding the parked vans and nearly killing V and Jackie. V grabs the wheel at the last second and spins the van clear of the direct hit, but the van is dead. Then a rocket streaks from the flank and slams into the AV's cockpit. The pilot loses control, and the aircraft grinds into a building before crashing onto the street. Motoko stands on the roof of her Quadra holding the Uragan launcher over her head, honking in victory.
A Kang Tao pursuit van bears down on them. Motoko picks up V and Jackie in a screeching drift. V ends up flopped across Jackie's lap, legs dangling out the door. A car chase erupts through Santo Domingo's industrial park: Motoko drifts intersections one-handed while popping Burya shots at the pursuing van, V fires her Shingen from Jackie's lap, and one of Motoko's homemade grenades blows out the pursuit vehicle's tires. V is horrified to learn the box under her seat is full of DIY explosives.
They ditch in a Heywood parking lot. V catalogs Motoko's skill set and grudgingly respects the kid who drifted them to safety. At Lizzie's, Rita waves them past the line on Motoko's voucher. Motoko flatly refuses to drink, and she and V bond over a vicious Samurai debate: V stanning Chippin' In, Motoko die-hard for Never Fade Away. V realizes she is having fun for the first time in longer than she can remember.
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099 99. Chapter 99
Motoko, V, and Jackie get wrecked at Lizzie's. What starts as a post-gig toast escalates into Motoko and V singing Never Fade Away on top of a table while Motoko hacks the bar's music system to loop Samurai on repeat. Rita physically extracts them. Motoko lands in a pile of trash bags, V face-plants into her own vomit. Jackie calls a cab after Motoko screams that drunk driving is bad.
She wakes up on Jackie's couch the next morning, no hangover, to find V already immaculate in her corpo suit. V warns Motoko to repaint her Quadra and scrub the vehicle ID since the downed Kang Tao AV cost twenty million eddies and the NCPD is involved. Motoko gets the car detailed with new black-and-purple paint and resets the identification via netrunning. Jackie's girlfriend Camilla bursts in accusing V and Motoko of being homewreckers. Both women bail, leaving Jackie to his fate.
Back home, Motoko records more songs. Never Fade Away, then Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," a track that doesn't exist in this world. Jun interrogates her about the gig. She eventually confesses to blowing up a Kang Tao AV with the Uragan. Jun hits her on the head, twice, and demands she stop escalating into anti-aircraft warfare. She taunts him about getting on her level and eats a third bonk.
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100 100. Chapter 100
Motoko picks up Hiromi from Arasaka Academy for a lunch break and discovers her best friend has chipped in new chrome. High-end Arasaka optics with a neon-green swirl, darker matte EMP threading replacing the old kitty-whisker aesthetic, and hand chrome wrapping her knuckles. Goth Hiromi is born, though the term confuses everyone in 2077. Hiromi reveals she has been selling Motoko's BDs inside the academy after executing a hostile takeover of another student's amateur operation, a street kid Motoko suspects is David Martinez.
Hiromi loved the "Only Thing They Fear" BD and reports it is blowing up among the rich kids. Motoko heads to Lizzie's to apologize to Rita for the drunk-singing-on-tables incident and the hacked-to-infinity Samurai playlist. Rita forgives her, then invites herself over to hear the music in person. Motoko performs "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in full with guitar, holographic band, and Sexy Motoko Voice crooning Kurt Cobain. Rita declares it is well beyond hobby territory.
Jun walks in on the private concert, and the apartment goes tense. Mox bouncer meets Tyger Claw enforcer. Motoko defuses it by crediting Rita with inspiring her music hobby. The tension melts into teasing as Rita shares the drunk-karaoke story. Then Motoko catches it from the bathroom doorway: Rita giggling, actually giggling, at something Jun said. They exchange deets. Motoko tackles her brother's head and screams about flirting under her roof. Chapter 100 closes on Jun asking himself "Was I?" after insisting he wasn't flirting.
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101 101. Chapter 101
Motoko buys a red Yaiba Kusanagi through Wakako and discovers it has bad brakes and a blown headlight. She parks at a racing-parts shop to wrench on it herself. Jun shows up in her Quadra to deliver her toolbox, and the two bicker over the repairs. Motoko threatens him with a wrench when he tries to touch her new ride.
Fresh brakes installed, she tears out of the lot over Jun's protests and spends hours learning the bike on Night City's streets. A Tyger Claw kid on a Mizuchi challenges her off a red light. She dusts him through a sharp turn with a full drift, earning a nod and an invite to an underground street race.
Back at the apartment she parks her new baby next to Jun's Mizuchi. She grabs a meat stick from the old man downstairs, strips the Kang Tao insignia off stolen armor, repaints it purple, and settles onto the couch for some truly awful 2070s action cinema. A rare quiet evening in Night City.
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102 102. Chapter 102 ☠ 3
A Nekomata railgun round punches through the apartment window mid-movie night, fired from the highway overpass above. Motoko tackles Jun off the couch just in time, and they gear up fast: Tactician shotgun and Katana for her, his Katana for Jun. Boots in the hallway tell them a kill team is already at the door.
Jun breaches first, skewering one attacker and snapping another's neck bare-handed while Motoko fires and hacks weapons offline behind him. She catches a dying Scav trying to transmit their position and puts a shotgun round through his skull. Downstairs, two vans wait with drivers. She interrogates one at gunpoint, learns the Scavs marked both Kusanagi siblings, and executes him when he refuses to talk. Jun beats the second driver to death. The sniper turns out to be Maelstrom, one of the gonks from the night she rescued GearSlot. She rams his Thorton Mackinaw with the Scav van to pin him. Jun rips the door off and tears the chromed-out sniper apart.
Fujimura arrives with twenty vehicles' worth of Tyger Claws and offers Motoko a choice: go solo, or accept the gang's help hunting Scavs. She doesn't answer, dragging Jun to a ripper instead to get the bullets dug out of him. The attack on their home has changed the calculus entirely.
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103 103. Chapter 103
Motoko refuses the Oni mask, drops it in the trash, and walks out of the apartment armed to the teeth. She ignores Fujimura's recruitment pitch and Jun's pleas to stay together. She contacts Yoko for Scav intel, calls in Wakako for paid locations, and warns Hiromi, Malcolm, and Ichi to hunker down. Then she mounts her Kusanagi and rides alone into the night.
The Tyger Claws launch their own raids under Fujimura's command. Jun fights at the edge of cyberpsychosis all night, massacring Scavs alongside Akari and the Kamikaze squad. When they breach a den already cleared, Akari identifies Katana wounds and a Burya hole: Motoko got there first. Jun texts his sister. She responds with two words: "Fine. Busy." A Scav corpse smashes onto a car hood below another target building, and Fujimura orders them up, suspecting Motoko is directly above.
Jun's POV reveals the scale of the night's obsession. He kills relentlessly, driven by terror for his sister's safety. Akari watches him with equal parts interest and clinical concern, privately doubting any solo operator can sustain this pace without dying. The Oni doesn't care about odds. He just needs to kill more Scavs than Motoko so she'll realize she needs him.
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104 104. Chapter 104 ☠ 15
Motoko hits the tutorial Scav den, the same Watson apartment where V and Jackie will rescue Sandra Dorsett two years from now. She recognizes the elevator, the hallway, the room numbers. She rides up to floor fifteen alone, leaps over a laser-triggered mine in the entry corridor, and scouts the defenses through hacked cameras.
Dropping a Weapon Glitch on the entire network, she kicks a smoking Scav off the fifteenth-floor balcony and storms inside dual-wielding Lexington and Burya. Blinded guns, blacked-out optics. The defended pillbox of crates and armor becomes a slaughterhouse. She walks through executing anyone still breathing, then exits through the back door to find Jun, Akari, and the Kamikaze squad stacked up at the front entrance ready to breach. Jun charges. She flees back through the den, detonates a mine with her Burya to clear the path, and leaps across the street gap between buildings, fifteen stories up, to escape his overprotective wrath.
She parkours down the skyscraper and retrieves her Kusanagi from the parking garage, passing Fujimura without a word. Dawn finds her blood-soaked at Lizzie's Bar, turned away by a bouncer reading full cyberpsycho energy. Back at the apartment, a TC guard Fujimura assigned tries to flirt with her. She ignores him entirely. The night's toll across all dens: roughly forty-seven kills, two new levels to level 14, and a growing awareness that her obsession might not be entirely healthy.
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105 105. Chapter 105
Motoko scrubs blood out of her chrome joints and braces for Jun's return. He storms in full Nemesis mode, screaming her name and shaking her like a ragdoll over the building jump. She headbutts him to break free, discovers his face is armored now, and kicks out both his knees when his swing actually aims for her. Being attacked at home has shattered Jun's sense of safety, pushing him right back to the edge of cyberpsychosis.
She talks him down by combing his hair on the ruined couch. Towel, comb, quiet words about how they're both alive and intact. He laughs when she admits the worst injury of her solo rampage was bruising her butt slipping in blood. A burrito and enforced calm later, Jun finally sleeps.
Alone on the couch, Motoko confronts her own obsessive need to keep hunting. She reviews the night's XP haul, roughly 23,500 from about forty-seven kills across multiple dens, putting her at level 14. She drops a stat point into adapting her Serano Air-Groove Ankles, completing the adaptation entirely. For the first time, a piece of chrome feels wholly hers: no phantom itch, no misaligned stretch. She puts her second stat point into her subdermal armor. The system confirms what she already knows: she can go full borg without losing herself. The Scavs just need to survive long enough for her to get there.
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106 106. Chapter 106
Motoko reached out to every fixer she could tap. Regina got a free-labor offer for Scav gigs. Jackie put her in touch with Padre. Wakako sent a possessive warning but didn't block the move. Armed in full Kang Tao armor with her Copperhead clipped to her vest, Motoko drove to Heywood for a face-to-face. Then realized she looked like she was invading Valentino territory in combat gear.
She solved the optics problem by going full stealth, scaling the building behind Padre's bleachers and materializing at his back without a sound. Miguel nearly triggered a firefight before Padre waved him off. Sebastian Ibarra was impressed despite himself. This teenager had just demonstrated exactly how easy it would be for a real assassin to remove him. He handed over Heywood Scav locations for free, called her crusade a fool's errand, and quoted the actual Crusades as a warning.
Padre watched her leap to a second-floor overhang and vanish over the rooftops faster than he could walk the same distance on flat ground. He told Miguel to leave her alone. She'd made her own war, and there was no profit in interfering. Motoko loaded the intel in her Quadra and drove toward the first target. The sun was still up, but she didn't care. She had armor, a full magazine, and a building full of soon-to-be-dead men.
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107 107. Chapter 107
Motoko was stacked up on a Heywood Scav den, pinged, scoped, ready to breach, when Jun called with news that changed everything. Maelstrom reached out to the Tyger Claws, denying responsibility for the sniper attack and claiming the shooter, Randall, went rogue. They wanted a sit-down. She abandoned the den and raced to Fujimura's bar.
The meeting was a powder keg. Azegami, a TC boss above Fujimura, accepted Maelstrom's story. Brick himself represented the Strom, flanked by GearSlot, who confirmed Randall traded Motoko's home address to Scavs in exchange for chrome. Motoko quickhacked the Maelstrom door guard's optics to walk past him, sat across from Brick, and briefly contemplated assassinating him to spark a war that could destroy both gangs. Brick read the calculation in her eyes and smiled. He might even be fast enough to make it interesting. She let the moment pass.
GearSlot caught Motoko at the bar afterward, stumbling through gratitude for the rescue and gushing over The Only Thing They Fear BD. She had a ripped copy of the audio and had been sharing it around. Motoko suppressed a shudder at Maelstrom fandom and pocketed the contact info. Outside, Jun summed up the day in two words: "Fuck today." They went for ramen. Hot broth soothes what politics cannot.
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108 108. Chapter 108
Motoko was sprawled on the couch muttering "fuck today" when Hiromi stormed the building with Malcolm and Ichi in tow, nearly brawling with the TC flirt guard to get upstairs. The crew took in the bullet holes and shattered windows. Hiromi immediately called in a repair contact without asking permission. Motoko discovered Hiromi had gotten Biotechnica muscle upgrades and the two wrestled on the couch until Jun emerged to brief everyone on the Maelstrom meeting fallout.
Jun dropped the real bombshell: he wanted to move to a more secure apartment on Fujimura's floor, twenty-seventh floor of a TC-controlled building. Motoko refused on instinct. This was home. But Jun pressed with quiet logic about bombs, better shooters, and the fact that their current security was a few teenage thugs. The next morning he dragged her to see the place: clean carpets, white walls with painted tigers instead of graffiti, a hidden HMG turret in the ceiling at the elevator entrance, and actual separate bedrooms.
The apartment was objectively better in every way. Motoko hated admitting it, but she watched Jun's face light up exploring the entertainment system and realized this wasn't just about safety. Her brother actually wanted something for himself. She called dibs on the bigger room knowing Jun would fight her for it, engineering the argument so he "won" the master bedroom. Sometimes being the mature one means letting your teenage brother have the happiness he earned.
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109 109. Chapter 109
Motoko packed up the old apartment with Jun, finding relics of her predecessor's life behind the dresser. A digital photo of the original Motoko in full TC swag on Jun's Kusanagi, faux-hawk and all. She pocketed the blackmail material of teenage Jun's wannabe tough-guy phase for later. The family shrine came down carefully. Some things demand reverence even during a move.
Ichi brought his truck and the Kusanagi siblings' entire life fit in a single load. A last meat stick from the old man outside the apartment, a tip that was too generous, and they were gone. The new building's garage came with TC teen punks hassling Malcolm and Ichi. Motoko dropped Fujimura's floor number like a trump card and hated herself for it. Unpacking revealed Jun's gun bag, something Motoko realized she didn't own because all her weapons were looted. A wrestling match over her HMG ended with Motoko winning on principle.
Jun was insufferably happy. He teased about the new place while Motoko finished Yoko's debugging contract in a fraction of the expected time, clearing the favor she owed for Scav intel. She discovered a neighbor playing live Japanese electronica through the walls. Good taste, not Us Cracks. But domestic bliss had a shelf life. She suited up in Kang Tao armor, grabbed her Copperhead from the Quadra's trunk armory, and slipped out before Jun could stop her. The crusade wasn't over.
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110 110. Chapter 110 ☠ 10
Motoko cleared a storage-unit chop shop on the way to Heywood. Three freelance scavengers who weren't even official Scavs, just opportunistic butchers. Dead is dead regardless of gang affiliation. She rolled on to the basement den she'd abandoned for the Maelstrom meeting, breached through the garage, and dropped two Scavs before they could react. One painted the van windscreen, the other collapsed into his own toolbox.
The main room was a concrete killing floor hung with plastic sheets to contain blood splatter. She leapt past the doorway, glitched every weapon in the network, and methodically executed the blinded Scavs. Copperhead first, then Lexington when the magazine ran dry. One charged with a machete and she emptied the remainder of her rifle into him at point-blank. Another was hiding under a table. But two Scavs barricaded a back door and escaped by car before she could circle the building. Two got away. The realization nearly sent her into a spiral.
She drove home vibrating with fury and frustration. Not just at the escaped Scavs but at the move, the loss of routine, the couch that smelled wrong. She screamed into a cushion, grabbed her guitar, and channeled everything into a dark, heavy cover of Franz Ferdinand's "This Fire." Rewritten as a threat, not a celebration. Hiromi showed up unannounced, bonked her forehead on the locked door she no longer had a key to, and demanded a private concert. The song earned Motoko a boost in her ability to stay cold under pressure. Hiromi declared herself Motoko's number-one manager. They fell asleep on the new couch together, two girls in a city that wants to eat them alive, holding on to what softness they can.
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111 111. Chapter 111
Motoko woke in the new Fujimura-owned apartment to Rockerboy Neighbor's bass rumbling through the walls and a fridge stuffed wall-to-wall with Jun's XXL Burritos. A tactical elbow-drop on her sleeping brother kicked off a high-ceiling chase through the apartment, leaping off Jun's head repeatedly, before the Oni caught her and blasted her with a freezing shower. The sibling war settled into an uneasy ceasefire over disgusting burrito breakfasts.
The morning's real visitor was Fujimura himself, who lived down the hall and owned the entire floor. The old Tyger Claw lieutenant dropped knowledge that hit harder than any Scav ambush. The group that attacked Motoko's home was gone, wiped out entirely, but the Scav problem ran deeper than any gang hierarchy. Most Scav crews had zero connection to each other. Just desperate immigrants and copycats putting on the same mask. A Stand Alone Complex, Motoko realized. Hundreds of independent cells replicating the same horror with no central leadership to decapitate. Fujimura warned that the Russian Bratva, the originators, would come for her if she kept her crusade up alone.
The conversation left Motoko rattled enough to retreat to her room for a system nap. She emerged clearer-headed, acknowledging that obsession had been steering her and that she needed to step back from the Scav hunt for at least a few days. The new apartment still felt foreign despite its carpet and bigger rooms, but she picked up her guitar instead of her guns, choosing music over murder for the evening.
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112 112. Chapter 112
Motoko was coding a stealth alarm into the apartment's security system when Malcolm's panicked call shattered her downtime. He'd been shot through the chest trying to buy his dream car, a second-gen Rayfield Caliburn, from sellers who turned out to be armed scammers. She abandoned the code mid-line, grabbed her guns, and tore out of the apartment garage in her Quadra at full throttle, ignoring every traffic law Night City had.
A white-knuckle drive through Westbrook, sidewalks as passing lanes, pedestrians scattering, got her to the NCART platform where Malcolm sat slumped in a pool of his own blood, ignored by every bystander. She hit him with an Airhypo and MaxDoc, princess-carried him down the escalator, and raced to meet Vik in his beat-up Villefort Columbus van. The old ripper worked roadside magic, plugging bullet holes and stabilizing Malcolm within ten minutes. Ichi arrived shortly after, nearly collapsing with relief.
With Malcolm resting at Vik's clinic, Motoko and her crew pivoted to hunting the four street thugs responsible. Hiromi and Ichi both refused to stay behind. The team tracked the shooters to a courtyard near Charter Hill, found Malcolm's blood still pooled on the concrete, and gathered intel from a homeless witness and nearby camera systems. The trail pointed north, and Motoko's netrunning skills would take it from there.
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113 113. Chapter 113
Motoko jacked into the net from her basement in the Straight Lane Apartments, tracing the shooters' escape route through cafe cameras and street surveillance across Charter Hill. Within five minutes she had eyes on the four thugs. Gonks who piled into a rust-bucket Archer Hella with the parking brake still on. Ichi and Hiromi fed her directions from meatspace as she tracked the car east through Heywood and into Rancho Coronado, deep in 6th Street territory.
The camera trail went cold in the suburbs, so Motoko devised a longer game. Rather than storm 6th St. turf, she hired Jackie Welles to play the role of a half-hearted merc poking around Rancho Coronado. Eating burgers, flashing photos, visibly giving up. The plan was to convince the shooters that no one could find them, lure them back into the open later. Jackie took the gig cheerfully, reporting that one of the targets was the nephew of a 6th St. higher-up, which complicated things but also meant the locals didn't much like the crew either.
Section 9 regrouped at Vik's clinic where Malcolm was recovering well. Motoko played Smells Like Teen Spirit on her guitar for Malcolm and Hiromi, the first time she'd performed for more than one person. Vik wandered in for an encore. Jun surprised Motoko that evening with ramen from their old Sakura Market spot, an olive branch acknowledging he'd pushed the apartment move. The siblings traded compliments about the new place until cold noodles and warm feelings settled the night.
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114 114. Chapter 114
Motoko hit the Tyger Claw gym outside the apartment again, using Jun as a pacing stick while old trainer John tested her boxing form with mitt drills. She picked up the speed bag instantly and impressed the veteran enough that Jun stepped in to claim credit, calling his sister a genius before pulling her into his sweaty armpit. The elevator ride home delivered a new rival: Rockerboy Neighbor, a leather-and-neon guitarist from the band Violent Hemorrhage, who played at a nearby club called Yomi and flirted shamelessly with Jun.
The cool rocker girl dismissed Motoko with a syrupy "maybe just stick with pop," igniting an instant musical vendetta. Motoko redirected her rage into visiting Malcolm at Vik's clinic, where Hiromi had been press-ganging the bedridden boy into her Corporate Commander mobile game empire. Motoko played Smells Like Teen Spirit for her chooms to genuine excitement, and even impressed Vik enough that he asked for a replay.
Jackie called in with a progress report from Rancho Coronado. The decoy merc gig was going smoothly, the targets were hunkered down, and locals were hinting they'd give up info cheap since the crew wasn't well-liked. After Malcolm's embarrassingly doting mother arrived at the clinic, the crew scattered. Hiromi to homework, Motoko back to the gym for more reps, finding that mindless exercise had become genuinely relaxing.
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115 115. Chapter 115
Motoko ground out a new tier of physical capability through a marathon of acrobatics around the apartment. Flipping wall to wall, spinning kicks, faux superman punches, all while blasting Doom's "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" through her speakers. The breakthrough hit mid-routine, sending a shudder through her muscles and delivering superhero abs she admired shamelessly in the bathroom mirror. Feeling reborn, she copied her finished rendition of Inner Universe to a shard and headed for the roof.
What followed was a freefall BD recording that would make any sane person vomit. She leapt off the penthouse roof, caught pipes, swung from decorative lantern wire like a cyberpunk Spider-Man, smashed through a walkway at terrifying speed, slid across rooftops on chrome hands trailing sparks, and bounced along street lights above Jig-Jig Street. The whole run ended at Sakura Market where she sat down for ramen, still recording, and didn't cut the BD until the broth hit her tongue.
The stunt cost her some chrome. Concrete had ground her palm pads raw, exposing what felt like a nerve, so she went to Vik for repairs. The ripper replaced a section of palm chrome, scolded her gently, and sent her on her way. She helped carry a freshly discharged Malcolm to his mother's car in a princess carry. He hated it. She kept the photos.
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116 116. Chapter 116
Motoko dropped off her parkour BD at Lizzie's Bar, but Rita intercepted her at the door. The Mox bouncer had seen the Scav massacre BD and needed to hear directly that Motoko wasn't going cyberpsycho. A frank conversation in the side room covered the Scav raid, the apartment move, and Motoko's admission that she'd pushed too hard with the music-and-murder experiment. Rita pulled her into a spiky hug and offered the Mox's protection if things with the Tyger Claws ever crossed the line.
Back home, the bass through the floor drove Motoko into a furious songwriting session. She hammered out Think by Kaleida, finished The Pretender by Foo Fighters, and ground her Rockerboy skill deep into the night. The next day she found Malcolm, Ichi, and Hiromi in a full snack coma at Malcolm's apartment. Casualties of Ichi's raid on Saka-Go, an Arasaka import snack shop Hiromi had dragged him to. Malcolm was healing well, scars fading, and he thanked Motoko quietly for saving his life.
Section 9 assembled that night in Motoko's netrunning basement to spring the trap. Malcolm had been lured through a shady car-trade website by scammers using the handle NCAutoRepairRC, the same crew running the con for months with recycled photos. Motoko jacked in, torched a pack of spam daemons for easy practice, broke into the site's spaghetti-coded admin panel, and rigged it so their bait listing would appear fresh whenever the scammers logged in. The hook was set.
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117 117. Chapter 117 ☠ 2
Motoko's parkour BD nearly broke Judy Alvarez. The editor, crippled by her fear of heights, couldn't finish the final sequence without grabbing for a trash can. Nox took over as test dummy, handled it fine, and declared it another premium experience. The BD's ending left both of them craving ramen from Sakura Market, a testament to Motoko's accidental marketing genius baked right into the recording.
The bait worked. While Section 9 waited in the basement, Malcolm obsessively refreshing his agent, Ichi watching TV, Hiromi gaming, NCAutoRepairRC finally responded, claiming they had a Mizutani Shion for sale. Motoko set up the ambush at the same courtyard where Malcolm had been shot, planting herself on a second-floor balcony with her Nekomata. Hiromi played the bait in full TC fangirl regalia, dripping corporate disdain as the four gonks rolled up in their Archer Hella with pistols stuffed in waistbands.
Hiromi delivered a cold monologue about how they'd been played from the start. The hired merc, the fake listing, the deleted cameras. Then asked Motoko to demonstrate. The Nekomata blew Aiden Michaels' forearm clean off. Malcolm stepped out of Ichi's van at the alley mouth with his Tactician shotgun and dropped the first runner dead, then blew the leg off a second. Motoko matched him, removing the third man's knee with a follow-up shot. Malcolm beat Aiden to death with the butt of his shotgun while his crew watched. Motoko then walked over and double-tapped the two wounded survivors with her Lexington. Malcolm got his consolation prize: a blood-soaked Archer Hella nobody wanted.
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118 118. Chapter 118
Motoko took the crew to Yomi, a TC-owned music club in Watson, to celebrate Malcolm's recovery and scope out the competition. Ichi almost blew his cover by suggesting Lizzie's instead, revealing his fondness for the Mox bar a bit too loudly. The club's expensive entrance fee and overpriced drinks made Malcolm grumble. Ichi kept placing himself behind pillars to avoid former associates from the war, still bitter about being forgotten after Jotaro's death.
Violent Hemorrhage took the stage and Rockerboy Neighbor's guitar work was genuinely impressive on her expensive Orphean, but Motoko's trained ear caught the truth. Throat chrome was pitch-correcting a weak singing voice in real time. The crowd mostly didn't notice, but some did. Between sets, Section 9 discussed the future: Motoko announced she was shelving the Scav raids to avoid retaliation, promising to find other income gigs while she plotted a long-term strategy to destroy the Scavs completely.
After the show, Hiromi discovered Motoko had secretly bought a Kusanagi motorcycle and erupted. The ensuing lecture about Motoko's terrible haggling skills drew Ichi and Malcolm into a unified front of financial outrage. Hiromi banned Motoko from spending money "forever," then demanded a ride. They tore through Night City together, ending up on the mountain roads of Westbrook with Hiromi howling into the wind. The next morning, Motoko committed to grinding her physical and reflex capabilities hard. Gym with Hiromi, then a gun range where she coached her choom through chrome-adjusted trigger pulls.
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119 119. Chapter 119
Motoko came home to find Jun and Akari huddled over a tablet in serious conversation. Serious enough that Jun shut her out with a firm "TC business, Imouto." Rather than push, she retreated to her workbench and dove into Technical Ability grinding. She stripped down her Lexington for maintenance, studied Mitch's nanite silencer schematics from the Overwatch, and realized she lacked the tech knowledge to replicate the self-repairing nanomachine goop. A standard electronic-baffled silencer would have to do for now.
The crafting session bore fruit. She 3D-printed a steel silencer frame, built a vibration-dampening baffler powered by a small battery, fabricated a new barrel for her Lexington, and assembled the whole package into a functional suppressor that turned gunshots into whispers. The work even sparked ideas for a future "Noise Bang" quickhack. One problem: the silencer didn't fit the holster. She also began CAD designs for a Copperhead silencer, earning tech knowledge just from the blueprints.
With Jun and Akari still plotting in the living room, Motoko seized the empty apartment for a songwriting session, cranking out Rise as heavy electronica through her speakers. Jun and Akari caught the tail end when they returned, but neither explained their mysterious project. Motoko hit John's gym afterward, where the old trainer pitched her a deal: spar with a girl he was training named Hayato Nakagawa for three hundred eddies. The kid had Kerenzikov chrome, extensive biomods, more TC tattoos than Jun, and the impatience of someone who'd never been challenged.
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120 120. Chapter 120
Motoko stepped onto the mats at Gomorrah gym to face Hayato Nakagawa, a biomodded, Kerenzikov-equipped TC princess whose fists hit like Jun's and whose reflexes let her react to attacks before they landed. The Keren made Hayato a nightmare on defense, slipping every punch and reading Motoko's moves like she was telegraphing in slow motion. After getting tagged with an uppercut that broke through her guard, Motoko adapted: she went airborne, planted a jump kick into Hayato's back, and learned that grappling was the counter to precognitive reflexes.
Round two went worse before it went better. Hayato's biomod-enhanced muscles delivered a punch that knocked Motoko off her feet and drew blood even through padded gloves. But Motoko adjusted again. Feigning a grab, spinning her chrome hand 180 degrees to lock onto Hayato's wrist in a move no organic fighter could replicate, then folding her with a knee to the stomach and locking an inescapable arm bar. Hayato tapped out for the first time. The rich girl's tantrum was volcanic but brief, and she recovered enough composure to offer a formal martial arts bow and request a rematch.
After exchanging numbers with her new sparring partner, Motoko hit the gun range solo and ground hard. Hundreds of rounds through the silenced Lexington and her Copperhead until her shooting and reflexes both sharpened noticeably. TC grunts at the range recognized her as the Onryo, the vengeful ghost who'd carved through Scav dens ahead of the Kamikaze cleanup crews. A nickname she hated but couldn't shake. Back home, the silencer's internals had melted from sustained fire, so she redesigned it with heat sinks and reprinted. Jun and Akari finally revealed the source of their exhaustion: five of Akari's people were dead.
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121 121. Chapter 121
Motoko walked in on Jun and Akari looking gutted. Five of Akari's subordinates were dead, a stolen shipment of ten million eddies worth of Glitter hanging over both their heads. Fujimura had given Akari a drug operation to manage as part of her dechrome training, and someone hit the stash overnight. The penalty for failure was Yubitsume, cutting a piece of yourself off and offering it to your boss. Motoko refused to let her brother mutilate himself over Tyger Claw politics and called in Section 9.
The crew set up at the Straight Lane Apartments netrunning basement, with Hiromi, Ichi, and Malcolm working terminals while Motoko dove into the net. Four hours of breaking into every camera in the area turned up a lead. Malcolm spotted an Archer Quartz with a TC sticker that lingered twenty minutes too long near the bar. Cameras shut off in sequence as the car approached, confirming a netrunner-assisted inside job. They identified the driver as Haruka Itami, a Tyger Claw who had cased Akari's shop the day before the heist.
With Haruka identified, Motoko started back-tracing him from his home at Megabuilding H8. While waiting for her team to search through hours of camera footage, she finally decorated her netrunner lobby. Neon lights, a circular leather couch, holographic displays, equal parts Tron and retro smoking lounge. The investigation still needed more leg work, but they had their man.
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122 122. Chapter 122
The back-trace on Haruka Itami paid off. Hiromi found him on camera a full day before the heist, and Malcolm tracked his route from Akari's shop to a Sixth Street base covered in gang tags. With actionable intel in hand, Hiromi switched into full corpo mode. She sauntered into the apartment opposite Fujimura, pulled out a Section 9 business card she'd made after the yacht heist, and presented their findings like a boardroom shark.
Fujimura paid the two hundred thousand eddies after Hiromi made it clear the discount was for first-time customers only. Jun's jaw dropped at the fee. The TC boss took Jun and Akari to recover the Glitter while Section 9 celebrated with takeout noodles and terrible TV. Motoko paced the apartment worrying about her himbo brother until the door finally opened. Jun came back in one piece, smelling like a fight but grinning.
Most of the shipment was recovered. Haruka got pulled off the streets by Fujimura, and the Sixth Street crew that thought they could move on TC turf got cleared out. Hiromi offered Section 9's services to Fujimura for future work, planting the seed for repeat business. After the crew left for the night, Motoko channeled her restless energy into tech work, 3D-printing a silencer holster attachment for her Lexington and starting plans for a Copperhead silencer.
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123 123. Chapter 123
Motoko finished her Copperhead silencer and headed for the range, only for Jun to hijack the trip entirely. He hogged her rifle at the Tyger Claw range, plinking away while the grizzled range master critiqued his trigger-jerking. Jun begged for a silencer on his Fujimura-gifted Malorian Overture, but Motoko shut that down fast. The solid upper receiver meant a complete barrel rebuild, and she promised to look into it later.
The old TC armorer tested Motoko by handing her a clamped Arasaka Masamune. She diagnosed the problem in seconds: bullet shrapnel lodged in the firing assembly after someone patched the upper receiver without checking the chamber. She unscrewed a dozen Arasaka-engineer screws, pulled the debris, and reassembled the rifle under the man's watchful eye. He offered her part-time work as an assistant. She declined but left the door open, then helped fix an Ajax while Jun finished his marathon session.
Outside the range, Motoko hacked Jun's bike key shard right out of his socket mid-sentence. She led him on a chase through TC territory, leaping over obstacles, hacking a vending machine to spill Ni-Cola under his feet, and bouncing off his chromed-up face with her ankle. The chase ended on a fire escape with Jun gasping for air below. After that, Section 9 reconvened at the Gold Beach Marina to back Malcolm's Caliburn purchase. Motoko sat in the back of Ichi's truck with an HMG while Hiromi and Malcolm handled the deal. The transaction went clean, complete with a Rayfield security contract transfer.
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124 124. Chapter 124
Motoko ground out Assault XP at the range until her Copperhead overheated, pushing her Assault skill up a notch. The quiet afternoon shattered when Panam Palmer called. No longer with the Aldecaldos and working solo as a merc in Night City, she needed a shooter for a fixer gig that required driving all the way to Seattle. Details were scarce and security tight. Motoko packed her Nekomata, grenades, armor, and a bag of Jun's burritos, then rolled up to a storage unit on the east side of the city.
Panam's Thorton Mackinaw Warhorse was already modded out with armor and a roof turret. The drive north meant days of broken highways and detours around Raffen Shiv territory. They stopped at a Jodes nomad camp where old cowboy Scott warned them the main pass was sealed. Raffen with military-grade hardware had been shredding every convoy, possibly corp-backed. Panam decided to swing east through rougher territory rather than wait it out.
Camped in the desert that night, Panam admitted she expected trouble the next day. Motoko volunteered for all-night watch since her stats meant sleep was optional, and promised to keep them both alive. When Panam scoffed at the idea of bringing a rocket launcher on a road trip, Motoko stared at her like she was the crazy one. The Nekomata got a cleaning under desert stars while both women prepared for whatever the badlands would throw at them.
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125 125. Chapter 125 ☠ 3
Motoko got her wish for action when six Raffen Shiv vehicles boxed in the Warhorse on a desert road. Panam, narrating in her own POV, watched the teenager wrap a seatbelt around her shoulder, pop the passenger door at speed, and climb onto the roof with the Nekomata. The first tech-sniper round punched through a Mizutani Shion's crystal dome. A second car broke off after catching similar attention. The entire Raffen pursuit scattered without closing to effective range.
Seattle appeared on the horizon the next afternoon. A bribe at the border checkpoint got them through since Panam's forged papers weren't as clean as promised. Motoko explored the city on foot that night, wandered into Cougar Claw territory, and stumbled into a confrontation between a local kid named Liam and a Rat gang boss named Franco who was forcing smaller gangs under his thumb. When Franco threatened her, Motoko drew her Lexington and flatlined him with casual precision, then hacked his guards' weapons so they clicked empty before gunning them down too.
After looting car keys off Franco's driver, Motoko stole the Villefort Alvarado and drove across Seattle to a ramen joint. She called Hiromi, who was horrified that Motoko had already killed someone within hours of arriving. An arcade bar caught her eye on the drive back, where she played vintage fighting games with the owner and they bonded over lost data from the Datakrash era. She spotted SPD behind the stolen car and ditched it. The long walk back to the motel was worth the belly full of real ramen.
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126 126. Chapter 126
Motoko scouted the drop-off point ahead of Panam. An abandoned industrial dock that screamed ambush. She scaled an old dock building, crawled to the roof edge with the Nekomata, and pinged three men in a half-circle with two cars. A quick-hack sweep revealed a sniper on an old shipping crane wielding an Ashura smart rifle. Rather than flatline him outright, Motoko hacked the Ashura's targeting system so the first round would drill into the sniper's own boss, then weapon-glitched every other gun on site.
Panam handled the exchange herself, slamming the buyer against his own car with a DR5 Nova shotgun-pistol under his chin when negotiations got heated. The man laughed it off, handed over a data shard, and Panam delivered the package: a music record wrapped in bubble wrap. The entire multi-day cross-desert haul to Seattle had been for a vinyl. The shard Panam received was the real payload, information for Rogue.
On the three-night drive home, campfire stories about Aldecaldo kids crashing bikes into rivers gave way to harder truths. Motoko pushed Panam to visit the camp on the way back, pointing out that seeing family didn't mean admitting fault. Panam shut it down cold, insisting Saul would see it as surrender. The regret and homesickness were obvious. Motoko let it go, resolving privately to keep an eye on Panam's trajectory, especially the Raffen contact she knew would eventually come sniffing around.
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127 127. Chapter 127
Motoko made her Afterlife debut riding Panam's coattails past bouncer Em. Inside the legendary merc bar, she spotted someone far more interesting than Rogue: Sasha, the catgirl netrunner from Edgerunners, alive and ordering drinks at the bar. Blue-and-pink custom optics, netrunner suit, the works. Motoko blurted out a compliment on her eyes, fumbled through what Sasha mistook for flirting, and managed to drop Yoko's name as a programming reference before the woman sashayed back to Maine and Dorio's booth.
Rogue's handoff was efficient and cold. Panam surrendered the data shard, got paid, and received confirmation of steady work and a place to live in Night City. Rogue acknowledged Motoko's name but dismissed her as a kid. No job offers, no interest. Motoko clocked Maine and Sasha plotting in their corner booth and began calculating how to insert herself into Sasha's orbit before the Biotechnica gig that would kill her.
Back home, Jun ambushed Motoko with a bear hug that turned into a grapple when she admitted she'd called Hiromi but not him. After a hot shower and ramen on the couch, Motoko recounted the trip while Jun listened with dopey pride. The next morning she destroyed her legs with squats at the apartment gym, ran into John, and agreed to a spar with Hayato at Sensei's Deravaja dojo.
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128 128. Chapter 128
Motoko visited Vik's clinic for a post-desert chrome cleaning, catching Jackie mid-boxing-session with the ripper. Vik blew compressed oil through her arm panels and ankle joints while roasting her self-maintenance skills. The visit turned sour when Motoko snapped at Jackie for refusing subdermal armor because his girlfriend Camilla didn't like chrome. She knew exactly which unarmored stomach wound would kill him at Konpeki Plaza years from now. Jackie went quiet. Motoko left without apologizing.
Back home, Motoko threw herself into composing "Let You Down," Sasha's song from the Edgerunners anime. Every note served double duty: the music was art, but the scenes playing through her Perfect Musical Memory were intel. She identified the Arasaka Robot R Mk.2 units that cornered Sasha at Biotechnica, and started planning which hacks could counter them. Weapon Glitch and Short Circuit topped the list. Jun waited on the couch through the entire process and got a full live performance, Sexy Motoko Voice and all.
That night Motoko rode her Kusanagi to Yoko's shop and negotiated for a high-quality Militech Short Circuit hack. She haggled properly for once, Hiromi's voice in her head, and left with the Short Circuit plus a second shard Yoko offered with kitsune glee. The price included a copy of whatever custom version Motoko built. On the ride over, she'd made peace with the limits of heroism: she would arm Sasha with the best tools she could craft, but wouldn't risk Jun or Hiromi's lives to save a woman she barely knew.
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129 129. Chapter 129
Motoko tore into the Militech Short Circuit code, a corporate black-box hack with multiple attack vectors and bloated targeting lists. She wanted two things from her rewrite: area-of-effect crowd control inspired by Kiwi's room-clearing hack from Edgerunners, and enough punch to disable high-end borgs. The all-night programming session bled into morning, with Jun side-eyeing her sleepless state before leaving for work.
A spar with Hayato at Sensei's Deravaja dojo filled the afternoon. Sensei wordlessly conscripted Motoko into shinai practice the moment she walked in, and she ground out forms under his judgmental gaze until earning a Blades 7 level-up. Hayato arrived in a gi with pads, demanding combat. Her reflex booster dominated close-quarters timing, but Motoko's stamina and a Street Brawler level-up to 8 kept her competitive. The spar ended with a kick to the chest that left Motoko wincing and Hayato scandalized at the complaint.
Then Sasha called. She'd talked to Yoko, heard the praise, and wanted to meet at the Afterlife. Motoko got stopped by the bouncer again, embarrassing, but once inside she sat with Sasha and Maine in a booth. Sasha handed over a half-finished Cyberpsychosis quickhack riddled with cat emojis in the codebase. Motoko spotted a mistyped emoji breaking compilation in seconds, then offered to debug the entire hack on the spot for eddies. Sasha paid up front, and Motoko jacked into the laptop with chrome fingers flying on the keyboard.
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130 130. Chapter 130
Motoko compiled Sasha's Cyberpsychosis quickhack in two hours, work that Sasha had budgeted a week for. The catgirl netrunner dropped her playful persona and admitted Motoko was a better programmer. Maine grudgingly acknowledged the kid had talent. Motoko pitched herself as a freelance asset for infiltration and combat gigs, but neither Maine nor Sasha took the fourteen-year-old seriously beyond her coding skills. She left the Afterlife with eddies in hand and a promise to deliver her custom Short Circuit when finished.
Hiromi burst into the apartment in a panic. She'd accepted a bodyguard gig on Motoko's behalf without asking first. A classmate named Asuka Kimigari was being hunted by Thomas Anderson, a Unification War veteran and solo-netrunner hybrid seeking revenge after Asuka's Arasaka-agent parents killed his brother. Section 9 mobilized in full: Malcolm rolled up in his Caliburn with a new Militech Saratoga, and Ichi revealed he'd bolted an MK.31 HMG turret into the back of his van, a gift from a transport gig that turned his moving truck into a pop-up tank.
The team met Asuka in her twentieth-floor apartment, where the corpo kid was so twitchy she swept a Tactician shotgun across everyone before letting them in. Motoko shut down two automated HMG turrets with quickhacks before they could target friendlies, then called V at Arasaka Counter-Intel for a dossier on Anderson. V reluctantly sent what she had with a warning: Anderson was a genuine professional, not street trash. Section 9 split up. Hiromi and Malcolm headed out to investigate Anderson's movements, while Motoko and Ichi held the apartment.
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131 131. Chapter 131
Motoko dug into V's Arasaka Counter-Intel file on Thomas Anderson, a former NUSA solo-netrunner hybrid who wanted the Kimigari family dead after his brother was killed in an Arasaka op. She set a trap in Asuka's luxury apartment, physically disconnecting the HMG turret from the security grid and planting a daemon to alert her the moment another netrunner touched the system. Then she vanished into a closet near the front door with her knife and her Burya, waiting.
Anderson walked in wearing a black trenchcoat and dark glasses like a Matrix cosplayer, and somehow detected Motoko the instant she left cover. The apartment erupted into a brutal close-quarters brawl. Burya versus Liberty, chrome fists against reinforced bone. Motoko managed to force his pistol off-target when he tried to shoot the fleeing Asuka, and Ichi dragged the client out the front door. The disconnected HMG turret spooled up as Motoko's trump card, but Anderson's netrunning speed was terrifying. He shut it down and flattened her breach almost simultaneously.
Hand-to-hand resumed with Anderson deploying a Mantis Blade. Motoko deliberately impaled herself on it to close distance and rabbit-punched his throat, but the borg ripped the blade free, spun, and launched a size-twelve boot straight into her gut. She crashed through the apartment window and out into the Night City sky. The gig to protect Asuka held, but Motoko just learned what fighting a real professional without Jun as backup actually costs.
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132 132. Chapter 132
Motoko woke up draped over a Soulhiker energy drink billboard several stories down, having grabbed a pipe on the way and ridden it until something broke her fall. A MaxDoc got her functional enough to answer Ichi's panicked calls and wave at a confused kid through an apartment window before she limped to the Quadra and drove to Vik's clinic. Her right arm had completely stopped working. The connection port tore free from the bone when she grabbed that pipe.
Vik put her back together, but the damage was a wake-up call. Returning to Asuka's apartment afterward, Motoko found Thomas had left a kill-daemon in the security system, rigged to turn the family's own HMG turrets on them when they came home. She purged it and recovered her scattered weapons just before Asuka's mother stormed in wearing full Arasaka combat gear and nearly put a Nowaki burst through her head. A tense standoff ended when Motoko proved she'd saved the daughter, and the two drove across town to Arasaka Tower where Hiromi had stashed the client.
Section 9 reunited in the tower lobby as Asuka awkwardly thanked them and transferred credits. Hiromi sneaked in a corporate slogan mid-heartfelt moment. Motoko admitted to Ichi she should have kept him in the fight instead of going solo. Walking out of the tower, she made a decision: it was time to chrome the fuck up. Better stats, better gear, and never let an enemy like Thomas Anderson take her apart that easily again.
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133 133. Chapter 133
Motoko and the crew crashed at her apartment for a post-gig party, gorging on takeout and ragging on terrible action movies. The near-death experience against Thomas Anderson lingered. Ichi confessed he thought she'd died when she didn't answer his calls. The conversation pivoted to upgrades: better armor, assault rifles, trackers, and mobile cameras for Section 9's investigative work. Hiromi started calculating budgets while Motoko reminded everyone that enemy corpses were free loot.
At Vik's clinic, Motoko went under the knife for MoorE Titanium Bones replacing her shoulders, back, and ribs. The kind of invasive surgery that would kill someone without her unique healing ability. Vik also installed Biotechnica Muscle and Bone Lace to reinforce the connection points. Eight hours of healing sleep later, she woke up with zero scars, her chrome arms finally anchored to something that wouldn't tear loose when a borg kicked her through a window.
Vik ran sensitivity tests while Motoko marveled at how her Condor arms finally felt properly attached. No more holding back to avoid dislocating her own shoulders. The titanium bones needed only one adaptation point, and the bone lace cost nothing. Checking her character sheet, she discovered she'd forgotten to pick an Annihilation 5 perk entirely. The chrome-up campaign had begun, and the rematch with Thomas Anderson just moved from fantasy to feasible.
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134 134. Chapter 134
Motoko wrestled Jun on the couch to test her reinforced skeleton, actually forcing his gorilla arm to bend before the big brother casually flipped her onto the floor. That cemented her private vow to chrome up until she could throw him around. She retreated to her room and hammered away at the custom Short Circuit quickhack, designing a sequential battery-discharge function that forced each piece of cyberware to shock the target one after another instead of all at once. The result was devastating against heavily chromed targets and especially lethal to drones and robots.
Wakako called after a long absence and assigned a car-theft gig: steal a TC-colored Quadra Turbo-R from a gonk who stiffed her on payment. Motoko hacked the car's security from a rooftop, waited for the owner to get distracted at a Tyger Claw block party, then walked through the crowd with a hip-swaying strut and drove the Turbo-R out without anyone noticing. Wakako was delighted enough to pay a bonus when the target didn't even realize the car was gone.
With the hack finished and burned to a shard, Motoko called Sasha. The catgirl invited her to a party at Turbo's bar on Longshore. Motoko was stunned to realize Maine's crew partied barely a block from her old apartment this whole time. She grabbed the Short Circuit shard and headed out, hoping the compact control program might save the netrunner's life during the Biotechnica gig that loomed in the future.
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135 135. Chapter 135
Motoko rolled up to Turbo's and met Maine's crew face-to-face for the first time. Maine and Dorio were tangled on a bench, Pilar was hitting on some girl, and Rebecca stomped over demanding to know who the stranger was. Becca's tiny stature nearly broke Motoko's composure, but Cold Blood kept her cool as Sasha dragged her into the group as her little Kohai. The crew roasted Sasha for only ever using maximum-RAM hacks, and Motoko shamed her into installing the custom Short Circuit by pointing out she'd never once used a compact program.
Wakako interrupted the party with an emergency call. The Quadra Turbo-R Motoko had just delivered was stolen back out of storage by three masked Tyger Claws. Section 9 assembled to track the thieves through Night City's camera network. Motoko dived into the net, chased footage across Japantown, and narrowed the search to a specific street. Malcolm proved his worth on the ground, sweet-talking a local man who was sick of the thieves breaking into things. The man verbally denied knowing anything but slipped them the address digitally.
The crew hit the apartment complex basement, breaching garage after garage until they found the TC-painted Turbo-R behind door number three. Motoko already had the car's security cracked from the first theft, so the doors popped open before she touched them. With Ichi and Hiromi covering the street exits, Motoko and Malcolm recovered the vehicle and prepped to call Wakako about what she wanted done with the gonks who dared steal from the Queen of Japantown.
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136 136. Chapter 136 ☠ 5
Motoko parked the Quadra-R back in Wakako's garage and got the green light to remove the three TC gonks who stole it. She tracked the thief Michael Hideki to Room 303 of a rundown apartment complex, climbed from the fourth-floor balcony down to the targets' balcony, and breached the door with her silenced Lexington ready. The suppressed pistol tore through all three before they could mount a real response. One made it to the door only for Malcolm to take his head off with his Mantis Blades. Motoko finished the survivors, looted the bodies, and gushed over Malcolm's chrome she had totally forgotten he even had.
After celebrating at Lizzie's bar, Motoko dove into a Technical Ability grinding session back home. She designed and built a dozen magnetic tracking discs, each containing a battery, signal repeater, and a net-pinging chipset that texted location data at intervals. The crafting binge triggered a cascade of skill-ups in Engineering and Crafting. Inspired, she started designing TachiCamas: tiny spy cameras shaped like miniature Tachikoma with three-legged grips, spike-and-magnet feet, and a triple pin-camera eye setup in a rotating orb.
Between projects, she walked into her local tech shop mid-robbery. The first gonk had his Unity pointed the wrong direction. A Burya round blew a fist-sized hole through his chest. His partner opened up with a Carnage shotgun, but Motoko fired from the floor and dropped him. The shopkeeper was already dead, brains on the wall. She confirmed both kills with Lexington rounds to the skull, called NCPD, endured being cuffed and interrogated, collected bounties, and headed to a second tech shop to actually buy her supplies.
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137 137. Chapter 137 ☠ 3
Motoko landed a major gig through Hiromi's Arasaka connections. A downed AV's cargo was seized by raiders, and Hiromi's father wanted the data recovered while letting Section 9 keep the hardware. A call to Aldecaldo leader Saul confirmed it wasn't his people and pointed the finger at Raffen Shiv. Saul connected them with Dakota Smith, the Badlands fixer, who agreed to provide intel and a staging garage in exchange for payment up front that would be refunded through salvaged Wraith vehicles.
Section 9 met at Hiromi's apartment for a pre-mission briefing, interrupted by her father's unsettling inspection of the crew. The Arasaka middle-manager radiated casual corruption. He didn't care about the lost shipment, only that Hiromi stayed safe and his department looked competent. Dakota's intel revealed the attackers had a rocket-launcher-equipped vehicle that took down the AV, making a head-on vehicle assault suicidal. The plan: Motoko scouts and clears camps solo while the team stages from Dakota's garage for loot extraction.
The crew caravanned into the Badlands and Motoko hiked to the first Raffen camp. An old mine entrance with trash-wall fortifications, an HMG turret on a fridge, and a sniper on overwatch. She ghosted the exterior with her silenced Lexington and knife, slitting the throat of a woman in a workshop and a man working on a car before picking off the sniper with the silenced pistol. Three down on the surface, a dozen more waiting in the mine below.
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138 138. Chapter 138 ☠ 16
Motoko reprogrammed the camp's HMG turret to target the Wraiths and pushed deeper into the mine. She knifed a man through his car window in the garage, then dropped two more with a simultaneous blade-and-bullet combo before the bodies hit the floor. A sleeping Wraith in the crew quarters never woke up. The last cluster, ten Raffen and a Sandevistan borg leader in a lounge, got the full treatment: individual breaches on every target, Reboot Optics uploaded system-wide, and a frag grenade tossed at the netrunner.
The borg activated his Sandevistan and charged through the grenade blast with one organic eye still working. Motoko sprinted back through the mine garage, taking a round to her armored back before gaining enough distance to deploy her Short Circuit hack. The sequential battery discharge caught him mid-charge at full speed. His chrome locked up and he faceplanted into the concrete, sliding to a gory stop. A Burya round removed his head. The grenade-shredded survivors were executed blind and helpless.
Searching the dead leader's laptop turned up emails complaining about a Wraith named Isaac who hit the Arasaka AV. Exactly the lead Section 9 needed. Dakota confirmed Isaac Webb ran a growing warband out of an old electrical substation deep in the Badlands, with a skilled netrunner and enough fighters to make a frontal assault impossible. The crew looted everything not bolted down, took two extra vans from the Wraith garage, and loaded up for the drive back to Dakota's garage.
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139 139. Chapter 139 ☠ 40
Motoko spent a full day scouting Isaac Webb's electrical substation from a mountainside with her Nekomata, cataloguing dozens of tents, vehicles, a rocket-launcher Shion, and a growing trash-wall that signaled the Wraiths planned to stay permanently. The team debated options from miles away, but the math was simple: sneak in, kill the netrunner, hijack the network, massacre everyone else. She loaded up with her silenced Copperhead, grenades, and dark armor, then jogged across the desert as the sun went down.
Inside the substation she found an empty concrete shell, until dusty bootprints led to a hidden cupboard with a modern keypad behind a fake panel. Military-grade ICE fought her breach, but it was Unification War-era code and she cracked it. An elevator shaft dropped four floors into a NUSA-Militech listening post packed with servers monitoring Night City and Arasaka traffic. Isaac Webb himself was down there with his netrunner and two other Wraiths, all unprepared for the silent killer descending their own maintenance ladder.
Four bursts from the Copperhead shredded the netrunner in his chair, and Motoko went full auto on the remaining three before they could draw. Isaac Webb and his inner circle died in seconds. She jacked into the dead runner's station, pinged every Wraith in the camp above through the compromised network, climbed to the substation roof, and unleashed Reboot Optics across the entire encampment. Blinded targets dropped one by one to silenced rifle fire as golden Ping lines guided her shots through tents and cover. Ichi's dual HMG turrets and Malcolm's rocket launcher broke the survivors' nerve, and the camp stampeded into the desert.
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140 140. Chapter 140 ☠ 1
Motoko's victory lap hit a snag when an Arasaka Minotaur, a bipedal kill-bot with dual HMGs and smart missiles, stomped out of the cargo container truck, its pilot screaming challenges. Weapon Glitch bounced off its military ICE, and the bot shredded the substation roof with suppressive fire. Refusing to destroy her new toy, Motoko hot-wired Isaac's rocket-launcher Shion into autopilot as a decoy, leapt from rooftop to Minotaur to cargo container, and buried her knife in the pilot's neck before he could reacquire.
Two level-ups cascaded in as Section 9 converged on the ruined camp. Motoko bear-hugged every crew member in reach, including a punishment squeeze on Hiromi for firing the Uragan rocket launcher without permission. Dakota rolled up with nomad trucks after a fleeing Wraith begged her for help, confirming the attack's scale. Motoko lied about the underground bunker, framing Isaac's death as a rocket hit, and suggested Dakota leak that Arasaka wiped the camp to discourage Wraith retaliation. The fixer agreed and started haggling with Hiromi over salvaged vehicles.
The crew spent hours looting corpses, stripping weapons, and loading the Militech Behemoth truck. Motoko discovered she could pilot the massive rig thanks to her Driving skill, and Malcolm claimed a Mizutani Shion for his growing collection. They convoyed back to Dakota's garage without incident, the Arasaka data package secured for Hiromi's father. Motoko sent V a cryptic text about the NUSA listening post, got a terse one-letter reply, and settled in to wait while her crew took turns stumbling around in the captured Minotaur.
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141 141. Chapter 141
Motoko dropped a bombshell on her crew at Dakota's garage: beneath the electrical substation they just cleared sat a Militech NUSA listening post, Unification War-era, that had been silently tracking every Arasaka AV in and out of Night City. She called in V from Arasaka Counter Intelligence to handle the find, driving her back to the substation alone while the rest of Section 9 stayed put with the loot.
Down in the bunker, V's composure cracked at the scope of the intel. Motoko partitioned a laptop off the listening post's network, spoofing the system into marking the hardware as a destroyed drive so the data could walk out without triggering any NUSA alert. V walked away with a laptop full of classified flight telemetry and dumped a fat stack of eddies into Motoko's account without a word.
Back at Dakota's lot the crew loaded up and convoyed home to Night City, stashing their haul in a Tyger Claw storage lot arranged by Hiromi through Fujimura. Motoko distributed her homemade TachiCama spy cameras and trackers to each member of Section 9, slapped a tracker on the Behemoth they had no place to park, and bullied Ichi into a crash-course on driving the massive truck. After burgers and a long shower, she crashed on the couch next to Jun and recounted every detail of the badlands op.
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142 142. Chapter 142
Motoko woke refreshed and reviewed her stat sheet, finding that her Militech Condor arms had dropped to an adaptation cost of just one point remaining. She spent the last point to fully adapt the chrome, a quiet milestone marking her complete recovery from the Maelstrom attack. She also picked the Slam Fire perk for Annihilation, instantly improving her pump-shotgun speed with the Tactician.
The real breakthrough came when she pushed Intelligence past 10 and slotted a skill point into Programming 11. The upgrade hit like a freight train. Suddenly she understood how to code as a cyborg, splitting focus through her cyberdeck and working without touching a keyboard. Half her project timelines evaporated overnight.
Armed with new capabilities, she headed to the Tyger Claw storage lot to haul Arasaka tactical armor and weapons back to the apartment for customization. She tore apart a trooper helmet hunting for hidden Arasaka trackers, found it clean, and began designing a directional-mic housing in CAD. The triangular protrusions she designed were absolutely not cat ears. A group chat erupted over color schemes for the new gear while Hiromi cheered from class.
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143 143. Chapter 143
Motoko finished integrating the directional mic into the prototype helmet, picked up a roll of Armadillo weave from the old seamstress who made her leotards, and began planning holster modifications and armor resizing for Section 9. She assigned weapons from the Arasaka haul. A Shingen smart SMG for Malcolm, and Yukimura smart pistols for Ichi and Hiromi, banking on smart-link accuracy to keep her less combat-focused chooms alive.
When the crew gathered at the apartment, the helmet reveal went sideways. Everyone immediately identified the directional-mic housing as cat ears despite Motoko's furious denials. Malcolm asked about trademark issues with Danger Gal, Hiromi confirmed kitty ears were not trademarked, and the nickname stuck. Hiromi pitched the idea of netrunner undersuits as a team look, but the boys flatly refused the skin-tight option.
Motoko headed to Vik's clinic for her next chrome appointment. She found Jackie Welles in the chair and caught something off about him. A wince at the mention of eddies, a forced deflection. She floated the idea of Jackie joining Section 9 as hired muscle for future gigs, planting the seed before settling in for surgery.
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144 144. Chapter 144
Motoko woke from surgery with a full-body MoorE Titanium Bone upgrade covering legs, pelvis, ribs, and toes. Vik warned her to take it easy despite her healing factor, and she headed home to channel the recovery time into crafting. An all-night session building directional mics for the remaining three helmets pushed her Crafting to 5, and she picked the Enduring Builds perk to make her gear tougher.
Rogue called with two words: come by the Afterlife. At the club, the Queen of Fixers laid out what she knew. Dakota had sold her recon photos of the Wraith massacre, confirming a four-person team dismantled a large camp with surgical precision. Rogue formally invited Motoko into the Afterlife, granting her own access and the right to vouch for her crew. The subtext was clear: this was also Rogue keeping a closer eye on a rising asset.
Down at the bar, Motoko stumbled into Maine's crew. Rebecca bristled at a kid getting Rogue's invite before her, but when Motoko shared her ECM armor integration plans and mentioned the Militech Light Aegis system, Becca's hostility flipped to tech talk. She suggested a KangTao flexible battery bank for the chest rig. Practical, impact-resistant, elegant. The two parted on friendly terms, with Motoko floating a future gig invite to Rebecca.
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145 145. Chapter 145
Motoko and Rebecca bonded over a stealth-versus-firepower debate at the Afterlife bar. Becca admitted her frustration. Pilar blocked her from shooter roles on Maine's gigs, and Maine only brought her as a distraction. Motoko offered a standing invitation to run jobs with Section 9 as freelance muscle, no strings attached, and Becca grudgingly considered it after hearing how much loot the crew pulled from the badlands op.
Back in Section 9 territory, Hiromi dropped a bomb: the Militech ECM units they needed were only available through a black-market dealer inside Dogtown, the combat zone in Pacifica controlled by Barghest, an ex-Militech outfit that never left after the Unification War. Motoko fought the plan tooth and nail, terrified of dragging her crew into what she imagined as a cyberpsycho hellscape, but Hiromi outmaneuvered her by hiring Jackie Welles as additional security.
The three-car convoy rolled through the Barghest checkpoint into a Dogtown that was nothing like Motoko expected. Orderly, commercial, almost boring. Hiromi handled the buy at the stadium black market with corpo precision, Jackie hauled the crate of ECM units, and they extracted without incident. Motoko grudgingly apologized to Hiromi for the overreaction, then headed home to strip the Militech firmware and write her own ECM program from scratch rather than trust whatever backdoors Militech baked in.
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146 146. Chapter 146
Motoko ground Body XP at the gym and on a jog through Jig-Jig Street, feeling the difference her full titanium skeleton made under load. She spent the rest of the day finishing the ECM program she wrote from scratch, then field-tested it by firing a spare Yukimura at the activated unit. Smart rounds went haywire the instant the holographic emitters kicked in, one bullet even curving back toward her and forcing a duck.
Installing the ECM into the chest rigs meant threading holo emitter wires through Kevlar, actual sewing with armored fabric. The grueling work pushed her to Tech 6 when she completed the first unit. Jun watched from the couch, baffled by the sewing but proud of the result.
With the armor functionally complete, Motoko summoned Section 9 for final fitting. Ichi got drafted as the guinea pig, struggling with the bulk of the chest rig until Motoko demonstrated that a point-blank Lexington round would bounce off it. Malcolm arrived late but eager. Hiromi tried to argue that fixers do not wear tactical armor. Motoko picked her up like a sack of potatoes and carried her into the fitting room. Protection was non-negotiable.
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147 147. Chapter 147
Motoko strutted out in her netrunner undersuit beneath the Arasaka armor to demonstrate superior mobility, and the crew unanimously passed on skin-tight fashion. Jun and Akari walked in on four armored teenagers splayed across the couch watching TV. Akari called it the start of an XBD, Motoko attacked her, and Jun had to physically separate them before someone lost an eye to Akari's chrome fingers.
Customization of the ECM holo emitters turned into a personality showcase: Malcolm picked Caliburn-yellow with silver accents, Hiromi demanded green flames cascading from her hands and back, and Ichi just said "don't make it stupid." Motoko gave Ichi and herself matching Tron-style light lines. Orange-red for him, pure white for her. Hiromi protested the color coordination but was ignored.
At the gun range the next day, Motoko burned through Arasaka-branded ammo testing a Masamune rifle before switching to her beloved Copperhead for full-auto therapy, pushing Assault to 8. She swung by the Afterlife on a whim and watched the fixer economy in action. Mercs lined up for Rogue's gigs, teams recruiting techies on the spot. The club operated like a merc stock exchange, and Motoko filed it all away.
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148 148. Chapter 148
Motoko began building the Tachikoma Mk.0.1, a two-foot-wide spider-drone prototype with four articulating legs, wheels, and a brain running iterative learning algorithms rather than true AI. The CAD work pushed Engineering to 5 and earned her the Robotics Engineering perk, which synergized with Robotics Wizard to unlock a deep understanding of synthetic muscle structures and robotic physics. She redesigned half the drone on the spot, replacing per-limb motors with a centralized synthetic muscle system to free up battery space.
Over lunch near Arasaka Tower, she met David Martinez, Hiromi's BD salesman at the academy, who was starstruck to learn she was the Ghost behind his favorite braindances. David gushed about The Only Thing They Fear while Motoko gently warned him that edgerunning without a plan to come home was step-one failure. Hiromi arrived and got visibly territorial, but Motoko smoothed things over by talking up David's salesmanship.
Back at the apartment, Jun's snack choices led to catastrophe when Motoko blindly grabbed a handful of ketchup-flavored Shwabshwab. Ants. She spat the red-colored insects across the living room table in horror, desperately chugging Ni-Cola to wash the taste, while Jun demanded she clean up the mess. The Tachikoma blueprint was complete but the actual drone was still in pieces on the 3D printer.
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149 149. Chapter 149
The chapter shifted to Hiromi's perspective at Arasaka Academy, revealing her growing BD distribution empire. David Martinez sold product on the campus lawn while Hiromi managed three revenue streams: Nox and the Mox supply chain, the Straight Lane Shooters as street-level muscle and delivery runners, and a Citinet storefront for direct-to-door BD orders. Every eddy flowed upward to Hiromi, who was less interested in profit margins than in scaling the operation.
Katsuo Tanaka, a well-connected but incompetent classmate a year above Hiromi, approached her with a dinner invitation at Dark Matter, framing it as a business merger his father wanted. Hiromi shut him down cold, noting he brought zero value. Tanaka exploded into insults, calling her a street rat, but she walked away without flinching. Her private assessment was sharp: Tanaka would be pulled up by his father's connections, but he would never be more than a company drone.
Back at the Kusanagi apartment, Jun tormented Motoko with the bag of ketchup-flavored ants while she retreated to her room to blast Chippin' In on guitar at maximum volume. A knock at the door introduced Alice Fujimura, the rockerboy neighbor from Violent Hemorrhage and niece of TC boss Fujimura. She came to flirt with Jun through a music angle, only to discover Motoko was the guitarist. They jammed together on Alice's songs, Motoko matching every track from memory using Perfect Musical Memory, and Alice pivoted her flirtation strategy to using Motoko as the bridge to Jun.
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150 150. Chapter 150
Motoko reviewed her stat block at Level 17 and decided to grind crafting and engineering through grenade production. She hauled supplies to the netrunner basement under Straight Lane Apartments and assembled dozens of grenades by hand, each custom-built with adjustable timers ranging from 1.5 to 10 seconds. The session pushed Crafting to 6.
At the apartments, the Straight Lane Shooters approached Motoko directly. A rival gang backed by 6th Street weaponry was muscling their territory, and they were too scared to tell Hiromi they were struggling. Motoko cut through the politics, telling them to just call Hiromi and be honest. She walked away hiding a smirk at the realization that street kids viewed Hiromi as some elite-tier fixer.
A new Vance T-Form 3D printer went into Motoko's room to handle the tight tolerances needed for Tachikoma parts, while the old printer got reassigned to grenade casings. She began assembling the drone's brain, just basic hardware running an iterative OS, and started programming. Her final act of the chapter was dragging all of Section 9 out to the Badlands for a mandatory grenade training course, over the strenuous objections of Hiromi and Ichi, who wanted no part of live explosives. Malcolm, naturally, was thrilled.
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151 151. Chapter 151 ☠ 1
Motoko took Section 9 out to the Badlands for grenade training. Hiromi had a decent arm once she compensated for her chrome hands, and Malcolm and Ichi turned it into a distance competition. Two carloads of Wraiths rolled up demanding the Quadra as a "tax" for using their turf. Motoko dropped her Copperhead to lull them, then quick-drew the Burya and punched a hole through the leader. Ichi's HMGs and Malcolm's Shingen tore the remaining three apart before they could regroup. Hiromi was shaken but unhurt, and the crew used their leftover grenades to blow the Wraith cars into scrap for practice.
Back home, Motoko finished assembling the Tachikoma drone prototype. A four-legged walker running a basic iterative learning program, it managed to walk in circles on a cord tethered to her laptop. The junk CPU she'd bought couldn't handle both movement and learning simultaneously, so she offloaded the learning side to the laptop. The little blue bot kept trying to walk through walls, but it was learning. She patted it on the head with a "Ganbatte Tachikoma-Chan" and headed out to craft more grenades.
An all-night crafting session pushed Technical Ability to rank 7. Grenade grinding was hitting its limits, so she needed new blueprints. EMP grenades specifically. She called Malcolm to watch her back during a net dive, then jacked into a Gun O' Rama server expecting light security. Instead she found Guard Daemons, Imp Daemons, and a pair of turret Daemons with barrier-protected cubbies that bypassed her stealth. She burned through them with Hell Fire hacks, wave after wave of ICE melting as her body overheated from the strain.
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152 152. Chapter 152
Motoko finished looting the Gun O' Rama server, snagging EMP grenade blueprints, other grenade schematics, and silencer data. She covered her tracks and jacked out with a splitting headache. She and Malcolm spent the day shopping for components across Night City, hauled everything back to the netrunner lair, and Malcolm helped run the 3D printer while Motoko assembled her first EMP grenade. They drove out to a dirt lot to test it, and the burst of visible light and electricity that fuzzed her Kiroshi optics earned gleeful screaming and a high-five.
Engineering hit rank 6 as Motoko dove into designing laser grenades on her CAD software. A chunkier build requiring multiple emitters cut through the casing. Outside the lair she ran into Nox, the Mox boy now sporting tech hair in Mox colors, who revealed that Hiromi's BD sellers had been beaten and robbed. Nox had deliberately gone around Hiromi because he felt she wasn't taking the attacks on his people seriously enough.
Hiromi was furious at Nox for going over her head, insisting she had feelers out and suspecting the lowest-performing sellers might be faking the attacks. Motoko pushed past the drama and called a full Section 9 meeting at the netrunner lair. Malcolm pointed out the sellers may have wandered onto someone else's turf, and the crew debated which gang fit the pattern. No one did. Ichi went on a snack run while Motoko sighed her way over to the netrunner chair to start hunting through the net.
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153 153. Chapter 153
Motoko dove into Charter Hill's net hunting camera access near the Lele Street alley where the BD seller was attacked. The corp-controlled servers were heavily protected, and she nearly got spotted by a resident netrunner before slipping away. A contract security runner named Blazed confronted her, initially hostile, but impressed when Motoko breached a transport company's server in about thirty seconds flat, grabbed an hour of camera footage, and walked right back out.
Blazed was left sputtering at the speed and the two exchanged netrunner contact info before parting. Motoko's crew gleefully misinterpreted the whole thing as flirting over the audio feed. The camera footage showed the truth: two men wearing Scav-style glowing face masks pulled up in a nondescript van, beat the seller, stole the BD bag, and drove away casually into Arroyo. Motoko tracked the van through cafe cameras, clothing shop feeds, and food stand security cams until it crossed a bridge into North Arroyo's industrial parks and vanished.
Hours of searching turned up nothing more. Malcolm suggested spy cameras or a trap with a bait seller, but Hiromi's people refused to play bait. Back home, Motoko found the Tachikoma stuck on its back with legs wiggling in the air. While fixing its code and chatting with Jun, the realization hit her like a lightning bolt: she knew exactly where these Scavs were hiding. The Electric Corp power plant in Arroyo, the same XBD snuff factory from V's quest to find Evelyn Parker, had been operating right under her nose this entire time.
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154 154. Chapter 154
Motoko rode her Kusanagi to Arroyo and parkoured across abandoned factory rooftops to confirm the target. The Electric Corp power plant was active, with tire tracks through the gate and a familiar van parked inside. She breached the external cameras slowly, photographed everything, and ran NCPD database checks confirming the occupants were wanted Scavs. One photo sent to Section 9: "Found them."
Planning began at the apartment with the full crew plus Jun, who accepted an offer for a sibling murder session. The Tachikoma prototype kept walking off the table during the demo since edge detection was still in alpha. Mid-planning, Rebecca called with news that Sasha was hurt but alive after a big gig. Sasha lost an arm and was in hiding with Maine's crew. The Securicine scandal had broken on N54, but Sasha survived. Motoko's earlier interventions had changed the timeline enough that the worst outcome never happened.
She invited Rebecca to join the Scav raid, and the small solo agreed after hearing the even-split pay structure. Section 9 debated tactics, and Malcolm and Ichi revealed they'd been secretly training with the Minotaur, spending Section 9 funds on fuel with Hiromi's approval. Jun wanted a turn too, Motoko threw a fit about her stolen mech, and then Rebecca arrived at the apartment and immediately started flirting with Jun. Motoko screamed internally as another woman fell for her brother.
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155 155. Chapter 155
Motoko briefed Rebecca on the Scav raid via brainshard while trying to keep her away from Jun. The original plan had Jun and Motoko clearing the plant quietly, but everyone pushed back wanting in on the action. The plan shifted to a loud simultaneous assault through both gates, with Jun, Motoko, Malcolm, and Rebecca as the strike team, Ichi on the Minotaur, and Hiromi on guard.
Through Rebecca's eyes, Section 9's loadout came into focus. Motoko strapped on dual Unitys, a Katana, the Burya, a silenced Copperhead, and a Carnage shotgun, then quick-drew the Carnage so fast Rebecca demanded to see her chipslots. No skill chips. Just practice. Rebecca inspected the neural link herself and found nothing but car keys and data shards. The realization that she was outclassed by a teenager stung, but it also lit a fire. This was what real edge looked like.
Rebecca watched Hiromi threaten to "disappear" her if she caused trouble. A flash of corpo ice behind the crush-addled teenager. Malcolm and Ichi suited up in modified Arasaka guard armor with Shingen SMGs and smart pistols. Motoko dragged everyone into a huddle, forced hands into the center, Rebecca's landing right under Jun's warm palm, and screamed "Section Nine!" with pure unironic joy. Rebecca was left wondering what she'd gotten herself into.
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156 156. Chapter 156 ☠ 14
Motoko popped the Quadra's trunk for Rebecca before the assault, revealing the Uragan rocket launcher alongside an Ajax, Carnage, and spare mags. Rebecca took the Ajax and two frag grenades, mentally noting she needed a proper weapons rig if this was how Section 9 rolled. The convoy split: Ichi peeled off for the Minotaur while everyone else staged a block away as Motoko hacked the Scav cameras and monitored enemy positions in real time.
The Quadra roared through the unlocked gate and drifted sideways, perfectly framing the passenger door toward the lot. Rebecca opened fire with the Ajax as golden Ping lines revealed every Scav position. Ichi backed the Minotaur out of the truck and stomped into the dirt lot, HMGs roaring. Motoko hit the Scavs with Optic Reboot to blind them, then vaulted two stories up to an overwatch position with the silenced Copperhead. She dropped Scavs from above before leaping across the entire lot to ride the Minotaur's back as a mobile gun platform.
Jun ripped a Scav apart and charged into the plant while Malcolm worked Smart rounds around cover from behind the Quadra. The strike team pushed inside with Jun on point, Motoko behind him using her brother as a human shield, and Malcolm and Rebecca clearing flanks. They discovered a drug lab alongside the XBD operation. Motoko fragged the stairwell guards, and the team descended into the basement levels where a Scav netrunner fought back against her hacks. Jun got shot but refused to admit it, so Motoko tossed him the Carnage and demoted him to backline.
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157 157. Chapter 157
Motoko and Rebecca fragged the Scav rec room from both sides of the security blinds, then the strike team surged in. Malcolm hugged Jun's back for cover while firing Smart rounds, Rebecca went full auto with the Ajax from atop a crate, and Motoko leapt ceiling-high to fire down into the fleeing Scavs. The assault broke the last of their morale. Motoko chased fleeing Scavs down the tunnels with the Copperhead, confirming each kill with a round to the back of the head.
Upstairs, Ichi's Minotaur caught five Scavs, including the netrunner, trying to escape via elevator. The HMGs turned the cramped space into a kill box. From Ichi's perspective, the operation cemented how far Section 9 had come from a crew of gonk kids. Below, the teething issues piled up: Malcolm tripped mid-advance, Rebecca nearly shot Jun, and Jun kept charging ahead solo until a Scav stabbed him. Motoko tackled Rebecca off a crate to shield her from return fire, then pulled her back to her feet.
After clearing the basement maze, including the XBD killing rooms full of victim clothing and ripper chairs draped in plastic sheeting, Motoko called for looting. Hiromi arrived to catalogue crates while Jun got drafted as heavy lifter. Ichi returned with the Behemoth armored truck that Hiromi had secretly kept and rented out to a SCSM delivery company. Rebecca and Motoko traded overwatch shifts as the crew loaded the entire Scav operation's worth of equipment, disappearing into the Night City darkness with a massive haul.
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158 158. Chapter 158
Motoko came home to find Jun already bandaged up from the ripper. His "scratches" were clearly more serious than he'd admitted. She showered and reflected on the raid's implications: Sasha surviving the Biotechnica gig meant Maine's crew timeline had shifted. Kiwi and Lucy might never join. The Edgerunners arc was only months away, and Motoko set her sights on intercepting the military-grade Sandevistan destined for David Martinez, planning to save Gloria in the exchange.
Jun pushed Motoko to stop hoarding eddies and chip in a Sandy now rather than waiting for the perfect one. The advice cut through her gamer instinct to min-max. She'd been letting fear of chrome from the kidnapping hold her back. She messaged Vik requesting an appointment. The next day she and Hiromi sold off the Scav loot across the city, with Hiromi fleecing a skeevy buyer by flirting with him for an extra two grand while Motoko fantasized about giving him a "late night visit."
At Vik's clinic, the ripper presented two pieces of chrome: a Dynalar Sandevistan Mk.2 and an Arasaka ODA neural link. A heavy-duty military-grade replacement for her civilian model that could run both the Sandy and her Cyberdeck simultaneously. Vik pulled favors with old rippers across the city to source the ODA. Motoko wanted it the instant she saw it, settled into the chair, rolled over to show the back of her neck, and went under the knife.
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159 159. Chapter 159
Motoko woke twenty hours post-surgery to find the entire back of her neck replaced with gleaming black-and-red Arasaka chrome. The ODA neural link stretched from her occipital bun down past her shoulder blades, with flash running along the sides of her throat. Misty cleaned up her hair while ranting about patients who ignore Vik's recovery instructions. The chrome was sinister and beautiful, and Motoko loved every millimeter of it.
Jun admired the install, but when Motoko pushed him to wear proper armor he flatly refused. She deliberately punched his fresh bullet wound to make a point. Hiromi arrived and immediately started poking at the new chip ports behind Motoko's ears, giggling as the personal link cords popped in and out. The Tachikoma continued its slow learning cycle, now attempting to pick up a steel block by ramming it headfirst. Motoko manually corrected the gripper code and then programmed late into the night, designing a manual control interface for the Tachikoma.
At dawn Motoko broke into Ichi's home in Arroyo, stole his Yukimura while he slept, and kabedon-walled him fresh out of the shower to demand the Minotaur's location. She downloaded the Minotaur control program through her new neural link, filling multiple shards simultaneously at speeds her old hardware could never touch, and installed a TachiCama spy camera on his garage rafters for security. A forehead flick for stealing her mech, a back-slap for finding useful work with the SCSM delivery gig, and she was gone before Ichi could process what just happened.
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160 160. Chapter 160
Motoko received her first partial payout from the Scav raid and got a frantic call from Rebecca. The solo couldn't believe a single sixth of the loot haul was more eddies than she'd ever earned on any gig with Maine's crew. Rebecca was stunned by the even split, the lack of fixer fees, and the fact that Motoko handled intel herself for free. She demanded to know when the next gig was, fully bought in on Section 9's model.
Rebecca invited Motoko to visit Sasha at Maine's safehouse in Rancho Coronado, partly out of friendship, partly because she needed a ride to haul Pilar's toolkit. Dorio answered the door with an Overture in hand, Maine grumbled about operational security, but Sasha appeared from the basement with a brand-new chrome left arm. Still raw at the seam, no Real Skinn yet. She pulled Motoko downstairs to her makeshift netrunner setup, faking cheer over obvious pain.
Sasha revealed Biotechnica barely noticed her attack. Stock didn't dip, they fired one manager for optics, and the kill order would quietly expire in a month through a contact's database "update." Biotechnica produced food, medicine, and Chooh2 fuel, making them untouchable. Sasha's voice went dark with the admission before snapping back to her teasing senpai persona, dragging Motoko along as a distraction from the bitter truth that her sacrifice barely registered as a blip on the corpo balance sheet.
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161 161. Chapter 161
Motoko hung out with Sasha and Rebecca at Maine's safehouse. Sasha wanted a netdive together and showed off her ice bath setup, but Motoko begged off since her freshly chipped neural link and Sandy needed rest. A lecture aimed at Maine about ignoring ripperdoc recovery advice went over like a lead balloon. Maine dismissed resting after installs as weakness, and Motoko chewed him out for it before heading home with a stiff neck.
Back at the apartment, guitar in hand, Jun arrived with Alice from Violent Hemorrhage in tow. The rockerboy girl was desperately trying to get Jun to attend a recording session at a private studio in City Center. Jun, dense as a black hole, invited Motoko along too, turning Alice's date into a group outing. Alice drove them to a music studio where her band was cutting a track for a Ni-Cola commercial.
A chrome-haired singer in the booth leaned hard on auto-tune. Motoko listened through headphones, quietly critiquing the production while Jun bobbed his head to the mediocre music. His terrible taste was on full display. After thirty minutes of takes, the session broke for a break.
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162 162. Chapter 162
Motoko hacked into the studio's instrument room and commandeered a private recording booth, which turned out to belong to Denny from Samurai, to lay down a full rendition of "Tank!" from Cowboy Bebop. Working solo across cello, drums, trumpet, trombone, and sax, she pieced together the jazz classic track by track using her personal link to edit in real time. Multiple copies of the brass tracks gave it the big band sound.
Denny caught the trespassing teenager mid-saxophone, but instead of calling security she ordered Motoko to finish the song. Denny even made a few adjustments to the track from the production room while Motoko played. Once the song was done, Denny grabbed the drum set and started jamming to Tank. Motoko picked the sax back up and the two played together, entwining sounds while Jun beamed with pride and Alice stood starstruck in the doorway.
An offer landed before the night ended: Denny wanted to buy the rights to Tank. Motoko almost fumbled the business side, but a mental image of Hiromi scolding her about money saved the day. She promised to have her "manager" call Denny's firm, earning a direct contact number and a stern order to clean up the booth and never sneak in again. Rockerboy hit level 9 from the session.
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163 163. Chapter 163
Motoko activated her Dynalar Sandevistan for the first time and promptly slammed face-first into her bedroom wall hard enough to bloody her nose. Jun patched her up while lecturing about not testing chrome indoors. A trip to Vik confirmed the nerve strain from the Sandy was a persistent side effect. Manageable with MaxDocs but not something that would go away.
Over lunch in the City Center park across from Arasaka Tower, Hiromi got the news about Denny's offer on Tank and immediately declared herself Motoko's music manager, demanding twenty percent off the top. Motoko worried about overloading her choom with work on top of Arasaka Academy classes and Section 9 fixer duties, but Hiromi insisted contacts were worth more than eddies.
Sasha called wanting that promised netdive, bouncing between flirtatious teasing and chaotic energy as she insisted on meeting at Elysium, a hidden netrunner club buried deep in the net's architecture. Motoko jacked in from her netrunner chair, navigated layers of inverted digital space and heavy ICE, and arrived at a speakeasy-styled server where Sasha revealed the real agenda: Elysium was Night City's premier netrunner combat zone, and she needed a doubles partner.
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164 164. Chapter 164
Sasha dragged Motoko into the Elysium combat arena before she could finish asking questions about the rules. The server dropped them into a garbage-dump battlefield against a pair of netrunners running coordinated daemon armies. Sasha opened by trying to spawn-camp the opposition with a server-breaking plasma hack, confirming she was exactly the kind of toxic gamer Motoko feared.
Left alone while Sasha went full glass-cannon, Motoko breached the arena server to grab a minimap and deployed her Face Hugger stealth daemon to stay invisible. She spent the match guerrilla-hunting squads of soldier daemons and search dogs with Hell Flame hacks, racking up XP while avoiding a Balrog-class daemon that the enemy netrunners deployed as their heavy hitter. Quick Hack hit level 9 from all the daemon kills.
The situation turned when Motoko linked back up with Sasha to play defense, throwing ICE walls and barriers against missile barrages while Sasha charged her devastating star-shaped attack. Together they cracked the enemy formation, and Sasha blasted the Balrog apart with a single data-blending strike. But the fight was far from over.
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165 165. Chapter 165
Motoko watched Sasha take a sniper hack straight through the chest. A modified Overheat that punched a fist-sized hole in her avatar and booted her from the arena. The rational part of Motoko's brain knew Sasha was alive, pulled safely by Elysium's system. The rest of her didn't care. She activated her Sandevistan on the net and went berserk.
From Sasha's perspective in the spectator box, the aftermath was terrifying. Motoko breach-jumped behind both netrunners, pinned them with cascading Hell Flame orbs, and hunted them down one at a time. She dodged a locked-on missile barrage by blurring through the projectiles like raindrops. Her cyberdeck screamed overload warnings the entire time, but she cut both opponents down with flame-blade executions to claim a solo victory.
The win cost everything. Motoko's cyberdeck was practically melting when she jacked out, the smell of burning pork filling her netrunner den. She burned through her last MaxDocs just to stay conscious, dunked her overheating chrome under a faucet, and called Vik in a panic. Jun got a frantic call from Rebecca relaying Sasha's warning, and Motoko barely made it to the Quadra before heading to Vik's.
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166 166. Chapter 166
Motoko lands on Vik's table with a fried Seacho Mk.2 cyberdeck. Heat damage to the outer connections, cooked meat smell from the port, and the ripper's maximum dad glare aimed right at her. He pulls the ruined deck, confirms no permanent damage thanks to her healing, but the Seacho is beyond saving. Vik offers to source replacements, but only has older Paraline decks on hand. Breach Protocol maxes out at level 10 during the aftermath, unlocking awareness of a deeper metaphysical layer beneath the net's architecture.
Back at the apartment, Jun holds her tight and listens as she explains the arena disaster. His blunt comparison to his own cyberpsychosis episodes hits hard. A system check reveals 10 open adaptation points, the highest since her arm installation, raising the terrifying question of whether she just had her own psychosis fit. She knew Sasha was alive but couldn't stop herself from acting like she'd watched her die.
Rebecca gets the full story via text and promises to chew Sasha out. Hiromi storms the apartment for a wellness check, confirms Motoko isn't drooling from brain damage, and wrestles her over wearing a netrunner cooling cap in the future. The two hang out on the couch for the evening while Motoko tinkers with Tachikoma code, trying not to think about the adaptation debt still gnawing at her.
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167 167. Chapter 167
Sasha spirals in the opening interlude. Her chrome arm triggers memories of her mother's Securicine-fueled rages, and the guilt over nearly killing her kohai in the arena is eating her alive. Rebecca and Maine try to talk her down, but the real wound is deeper. Fear that she's becoming the same kind of uncontrollable threat her mother was. Motoko sends a terse text confirming she's alive but makes it clear she isn't ready to talk.
Motoko needs a new cyberdeck and Night City's supply chain isn't cooperating. Vik can only source a Seacho Mk.1 downgrade, and Wakako called Motoko down to Jig-Jig street purely to verify her agent hadn't melted her brain. No leads from either. Without her deck, the world feels wrong: cameras she can't blind, vending machines she can't hack, a phantom limb sensation that won't quit.
A visit to Yoko at the Kabuki Roundabout changes everything. The fox-avatar netrunner has a lead on an Arasaka Shadow Mk.4, a top-of-the-line stealth deck that somehow ended up on the black market in Dogtown. Motoko calls Hiromi, who ditches class to handle the negotiation and set up the meeting. The two drive to Dogtown, get stopped by a Barghest door guard at the club, and settle in to wait for their contact.
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168 168. Chapter 168
Motoko and Hiromi meet their contact in a private room at a Dogtown club. The seller is a rich kid in flashy chrome who can't believe Yoko sent a couple of teenagers. Hiromi handles the negotiation like a born corpo while Motoko squares off in a silent standoff with the seller's bodyguard. A tense moment when a waitress delivers champagne nearly escalates, both Motoko's hand on her Burya and the guard's hand on his piece, before everyone exhales and the deck changes hands.
Vik scrubs the cracked cyberdeck clean of malware, and the install goes smooth. The Shadow slots into Motoko's empty port like a lost limb restored. Hiromi plans to register the deck through Arasaka's found-property channels using her father's connections, keeping the paper trail clean. Motoko hugs the old ripper tight enough to make him blush.
While Vik works, Motoko engineers a hangout between Hiromi and Misty at the esoteric shop above the clinic. Tarot readings and big-sister energy do their work. Hiromi loosens up, and the three share a meal that turns into hours of easy conversation. When Vik sends the all-clear text, Motoko practically skips down the stairs to claim her new deck.
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169 169. Chapter 169
Motoko loads hacks onto the Arasaka Shadow Mk.4 and dives back into the net from her freshly scrubbed netrunner chair, feeling the expanded capacity like breathing room she never had. A visit to Yoko at the Kabuki Roundabout turns into a full after-action review of the Elysium arena fight. The fox-avatar netrunner dissects every decision, questioning why Motoko Breach Jumped from the Balron instead of just outrunning it, and highlights the strength of Breach as a core netrunning skill.
Yoko dumps data on Motoko, then sneaks a spy Daemon through with the transfer. Motoko catches and kills it, earning genuine approval. Yoko's parting lesson: never trust any data from anyone, even someone you trust. Check, double check, and assume you missed something. The old netrunner kicks Motoko out of the shrine and back to the roundabout entrance.
A night spent debugging a building power-shutdown virus for Yoko pays off in combat hack knowledge and netrunner theory. Motoko works through forced-logout programs and daemon-killing scripts, picks the Strong Breach perk for her maxed Breach Protocol, and dumps a stat point into her ODA Neural Link adaptation. Then Wakako calls with a time-sensitive extraction gig. No details, just a shard and an order to move.
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170 170. Chapter 170
Motoko gears up and drives to El Jefa, a Valentino-run BD bar in a strip mall, to extract Susan Shinama, one of Wakako's spies who got burned and beaten. After quietly breaching the camera network and spotting a jacked-in netrunner on security, she hatches possibly her dumbest infiltration plan yet: knocking out a dancer named Melody, stealing her stripper outfit, and stuffing the top to pass as staff.
The disguise holds long enough to get past the entrance and start hacking the security door, but a coworker named Mariana spots Motoko's Militech Condor chrome arms and has to be choked out. The netrunner gets emergency-booted from his chair and short-circuited into unconsciousness, netting Motoko enough knockout experience for a level up. She rides the elevator down to a hidden VIP party room where Susan hangs handcuffed to a stripper pole, guarded by two men with six more gangsters partying nearby.
Eight Valentinos with glitched-out weapons barely register as a threat. Motoko walks in like she owns the place, presses her Unity's silencer against the lead guard's throat, and talks the room into surrendering Susan. She disarms one knife-wielding tough with a wrist lock and pins him to a couch with his own blade. She carries the unconscious spy out over her shoulder, drops Optic Reboot on the entire club floor, and saunters barefoot up the stairs to her Quadra.
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171 171. Chapter 171
Motoko delivers Susan to a TC safehouse where a ripper and Wakako herself are waiting. Wakako praises her restraint. No Valentino bodies means less friction with Padre. Back at the apartment, Jun catches her still wearing the club disguise, leading to a merciless round of sibling roasting before she retreats to change.
Down in the netrunner cave, the Tachikoma project takes a leap forward. The drone's digital avatar is little more than a mess of squiggles, not even IMP-tier yet, but Motoko syncs it to the server and begins crafting a personality kernel from scratch. She drops a stat point into Intelligence, bringing it to 12, and levels Breach Protocol to 11 and Programming to 12. The way she programs changes after that. Physical keyboards become preference rather than necessity.
Hiromi arrives after school buzzing about finalizing the sale of "Tank" to Master-Space Records, demanding Motoko show up to sign the paperwork. The two spend the evening on the couch eating junk food and watching bad TV while discussing the Tachikoma's need for better data storage. Hiromi floats the idea of hijacking a transport truck for processing chips, and Motoko can't help but laugh at how casually her corpo bestie suggests grand theft auto.
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172 172. Chapter 172
Motoko accompanies Hiromi to a City Center tower for the formal signing of "Tank" with Master-Space Records. Sam Henson, expensive suit and faker smile, tries to strip Motoko's songwriter credit and eliminate royalties through boilerplate corpo contracts. Hiromi fires back with the Denny connection, threatens to walk, and forces Henson to call his bosses for a revised deal that preserves both the credit and a royalty agreement.
The signing sparks a Section 9 celebration back at the apartment, with Malcolm, Ichi, and eventually Jun all piling in. Hiromi beams over her first real corporate deal while the crew teases Motoko about her reluctance to embrace the Rockerboy life. Jun immediately conspires with Hiromi to push Motoko toward performing, ignoring her protests entirely.
The next morning Motoko hits the gym for squats and free weights, running into John who nudges her toward sparring with Hayato again. A text exchange with Hayato's clipped, imperious replies sets up their next session at the dojo.
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173 173. Chapter 173
Motoko spars with Hayato at the dojo, testing her Sandevistan against Hayato's Kerenzikov for the first time. She parries every swing with her Blades skill, then activates the Sandy to disarm Hayato in one burst. Hayato is furious about not being warned, but thrilled to have a boosterware sparring partner. After switching to dual Shinai, Motoko dominates again, leaving Hayato sulking with a cold can pressed against her neck.
Back at the apartment, Jun's old choom Yuto, fresh out of a three-year prison stint, is partying with TC boys on the couch. Drugs, eddies, and guns all over the living room table. When Yuto starts pressuring Jun to help flatline Kisaru Moritaka, the TC lieutenant who ratted him out, Motoko ends the conversation with a knife to Yuto's throat. She makes the terms simple: Jun isn't throwing his life away for revenge, and if Yuto asks again, she'll handle the situation permanently.
After sending Jun's chooms packing, Motoko channels her energy into upgrading the Overheat quickhack Yoko gave her. The reworked version, HEAT Bullet Mk.01, flips the script on the original design. Instead of sending a massive data packet, it alters enemy configuration settings so their own systems flood with junk data. Cheaper, faster, and installed into her deck before heading to the netrunner cave for testing.
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174 174. Chapter 174
Motoko jacks into the netrunner combat zone with Malcolm watching her back from the chair, this time armed with proper knowledge of the arena's rules after a tutorial from Admin. She enters a match against Hamm3r, breaches the arena system for the minimap, and deploys a stealth Daemon that renders her invisible to digital constructs. The spectator chat buzzes with speculation about her trick.
A Jun interlude reveals the full weight of Yuto's pressure. Over drinks at a TC bar, Yuto keeps demanding Jun help flatline Kisaru, invoking old debts and childhood loyalty. Jun realizes he's changed. Rep isn't everything anymore, not when he'd burn it all to protect Motoko. He physically hauls Yuto out of the bar, promising to introduce him to Fujimura-Sama for legitimate work instead.
Rebecca's subplot unfolds as Hiromi drops off an armor kit and a stack of Motoko's combat BDs at her apartment. Scrolling the Scav raid BD, Rebecca loses herself in Motoko's body. The perfect drift, the fearless leap onto the Minotaur, the complete absence of hesitation. The parkour BD "Inner Universe" hits even harder, leaving Rebecca shaking on her bed as the sensation of Motoko's flawless movement lingers in her muscles.
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175 175. Chapter 175
Motoko's arena match against Hamm3r plays out as a slow, methodical hunt viewed through Malcolm's eyes at the netrunner cave. She picks off his IMP Daemons one by one with Hell Flame, invisible to every digital construct thanks to her stealth Daemon. The spectator chat debates her tactics while Hamm3r rages, summoning replacement Daemons that she farms without ever engaging him directly.
When Hamm3r finally stops summoning, Motoko walks out of hiding, activates the Sandevistan, Breach Jumps, and ends the match in seconds. The spectators are split between amusement and irritation at the drawn-out affair. Admin warns her that weaponizing patience will cost her reputation in the arena, but the massive haul from Daemon kills makes the tradeoff worth it.
Back in meatspace, Malcolm ribs her about the boring stretches but admits seeing a live netrunner battle was rare and preem. Motoko floats the idea of recording arena matches as BDs or videos for Hiromi's distribution network, always thinking about the next angle.
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176 176. Chapter 176
Motoko endures a diner lunch where Malcolm gets baited into a street race by a mouthy gearhead with a modded Quadra Sport R-7. The guy tricks Malcolm's Rayfield Caliburn by revving its engine to kill the launch control, smoking him off the line. When the gonk pulls a Nova after the race, Motoko hacks the pistol dead, closes the distance, twists his wrist, and drops him face-first into the asphalt.
Bored and restless back home, Motoko arms up and heads to the Afterlife for freelance work. When Rogue arrives and a crew leader named Bishop calls for an infiltrator, she answers with her voice modulated older and joins his team: Samuel Perry the ex-Militech corpo, Mira the shark-toothed Exotic sharpshooter, and Hakase the silent Street Samurai. The gig is extracting a Kang Tao defector holed up in a City Center apartment building guarded by twenty Animals with LMGs.
A climbing route on the building's northeast heating units catches Motoko's eye, letting the team bypass the elevator killbox entirely. Bishop assigns her to the security room while his crew handles the assault. She'll blind cameras, disable silent alarms, and provide overwatch. The plan is set, and the group moves out.
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177 177. Chapter 177
Motoko infiltrates the hotel through a rear service entrance, bypassing security with factory-default admin codes and reaching the empty security room without being spotted. From the cameras she pings every Animal on the top floor for Bishop's team, uploads Weapon Glitch across their hardware, and drops Short Circuit into the group the moment gunfire starts. Hakase's katana does the close work while the rest of the team drags the unconscious Kang Tao defector into the elevator.
After the gig, Bishop's crew celebrates Afterlife-style, standing on tables, toasting survival, bottles raised. He offers Motoko a spot on the team, but she declines, explaining she already runs with Section 9 and only took the job because she was bored. Mira discovers Motoko's deep frustration with Exotics stems entirely from how impossible they are to stealth around, not prejudice, just professional annoyance over a failed Lions Den infiltration.
Home alone with a pocket of eddies and a guitar, Motoko records Nirvana tracks, "Something in the Way" and "Come as You Are," using her cyberdeck to cut and edit in real time. Jun returns visibly worried about Yuto going radio silent, makes some calls, and heads back out without explanation. The quiet evening turns tense as Motoko realizes her brother's old life keeps pulling at the edges of their peace.
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178 178. Chapter 178
Hiromi ambushes Motoko's apartment for a fun day, hears "Come as You Are," and immediately loses her mind demanding a proper gig on a real stage in front of a real crowd. After weaponizing her upcoming birthday as emotional leverage, Hiromi gets a reluctant agreement: one gig. The boys pile in and start scheming while Motoko assembles a five-song setlist. Smells Like Teen Spirit, Rise, This Fffire, The Pretender, and Let You Down.
Hiromi's contract for "Tank" pays dividends as the crew heads to Denny's recording studio, where Motoko has discounted access. She tears through the sessions with frantic energy, drums, guitar, vocals, all played and re-recorded with professional equipment while Malcolm and Ichi watch. Hiromi books the Red Dirt Bar in Arroyo for the venue, the same dive where Samurai played their first gig.
Malcolm's internal monologue captures the Section 9 dynamic perfectly. Watching Motoko pour combat-level intensity into music while Hiromi simultaneously runs business calls with one eye locked on her crush. Both boys silently acknowledge Motoko's effect on them before wisely deciding Hiromi must never find out. The gig is set, the songs are polished, and Motoko demands nobody tell Jun. A request her chooms immediately plan to violate.
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179 179. Chapter 179
Motoko grinds Body to level 9 through a punishing gym session in the TC building. Squats, crunches, and push-ups pushed past failure with MaxDoc inhalers resetting her muscles between sets. The stat-up forces an outfit adjustment as her leotard suddenly fits tighter, sending her across the city for alterations before the pre-show jitters fully set in.
A visit to Rita at Lizzies gives Motoko the pep talk she needs. Rita laughs at her stage fright, reminds her she already sold a song to Denny, and delivers the real advice: get on that stage and play so loud even the corps at the top of their towers hear it. Motoko reframes her anxiety as excitement and drives to the Red Dirt Bar to set up.
Jun arrives with Alice in tow. The chooms betrayed Motoko's "tell no one" order unanimously. Rita and Alice size each other up over Jun's oblivious head as the bar fills beyond Motoko's comfort threshold. With twenty minutes to showtime, she sits with her guitar and music box, tapping the table and wondering why she agreed to this.
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180 180. Chapter 180
Motoko takes the stage at Red Dirt Bar, the same cramped dive where Samurai once played, with nothing but her guitar, a music box running holographic backup musicians, and raw nerve. She opens with Smells Like Teen Spirit, letting the Cobain chords grab the rock crowd by the throat while her Rockerboy skill handles the rest: eye contact that locks individuals in, body language that forces the room into her rhythm, and a presence that compensates for the missing band.
Each song builds the narrative she designed. Rise shifts to a huskier, more mature vocal register that shocks the crowd. This Fffire turns the bar into a headbanging frenzy. The Pretender has strangers roaring the chorus back at her with fists in the air. She closes with Let You Down, the Cyberpunk elegy about an edgerunner's final blaze, voice at full husky tilt as the kaleidoscope lighting dies color by color.
Afterward Motoko melts into a puddle of embarrassment at the Section 9 table, face buried in her hands while Jun shoos away well-wishers and her chooms tease her mercilessly. The Red Dirt owner extends an open invitation to play again with one piece of advice: get a real band. Hiromi collects the payment with the satisfied grin of a manager who just launched a career her client still refuses to acknowledge.
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181 181. Chapter 181
Motoko dropped off her Red Dirt concert BD with Judy for editing, only to discover hours later that Judy had already handed it to Nox, and Hiromi had ordered full production without asking. Panicked calls to Nox and Hiromi followed. Hiromi talked her down, pointing out the BD was amazing and that Motoko's anxiety was the only real obstacle. Motoko relented, letting the concert BD go to market.
Back home, Jun revealed his old choom Yuto had attempted to assassinate Kisaru, a Tyger Claw higher-up's son, and failed. Worse, Jun knew about the plot beforehand and said nothing, putting him in Fujimura's crosshairs. Akari sat on the couch as Jun's assigned watchdog, ordered to kill him if he helped Yuto. Motoko's Sandevistan fired on pure instinct and she nearly buried a knife in Akari's eye socket before Jun physically restrained her. The two women reached a silent understanding about threat levels before Motoko backed down.
At the shooting range, Motoko burned through magazine after magazine, letting Cold Blood wash everything numb. She leveled Reflex to 9 along the way. Down in her netrunner cave with Malcolm and Ichi on overwatch, she logged into the Combat Zone net arena and watched the Tachikoma wander its digital habitat, slowly learning to distinguish new objects from old.
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182 182. Chapter 182
Motoko hit the netrunner fight club looking for Daemon specialists and locked in a match against St33lSister, a well-known summoner who fielded custom hound Daemons backed by IMP and Soldier types. Using her HEAT bullet hack for low-RAM kills, Motoko turned the Digital Jungle into a killing field, mulching over a hundred Daemons while staying completely invisible. St33lSister ragequit after two minutes of broadcast cursing, and Motoko walked away with two full level-ups.
Back at the netrunner cave, she invested her gains carefully. One adaptation point went into her Dynalar Sandevistan Mk.2, one stat point into Intelligence. The Programming level-up hit like a freight train, flooding her brain with structures and pathways that pushed past mortal comprehension of the digital sea. She had to crack open a cold soda just to ground herself after the knowledge dump.
Hiromi called with the news Motoko had been waiting for. Rebecca's Arasaka armor kit finally came through, complete with a Kang Tao ECM package. Motoko picked up Becca and brought her to the netrunner cave, where she cut, reshaped, and custom-fitted the chest rig to Rebecca's small frame using her Kiroshi scans and Arasaka CAD software. The whole crew assembled with shark grins and a plan already cooking. Time to go Raffen Shiv hunting in the Badlands, and Rebecca did not yet understand what she had signed up for.
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183 183. Chapter 183 ☠ 4
Motoko led Section 9 plus Rebecca into the Badlands on a Dakota gig. Raffen Shiv had been setting up fake desert parties and kidnapping anyone with eddies, accumulating over twenty hostages. The convoy rolled out: Motoko in her Quadra, Malcolm in his rocket-launcher car, Ichi driving the Behemoth, Hiromi bringing up the rear. After linking up with Dakota's contact Milton, Motoko infiltrated the old farmhouse alone on foot with her silenced Copperhead.
A Sandevistan-boosted knife throw opened the first Raffen's throat on the couch before he could scream. Downstairs she found two guards watching the hostages, pinged three more Raffen on the upper floor, and went to work. A backflip off the stairs, two more throat-cuts in Sandy-time, and the basement was secure. Rebecca opened the party topside by unloading Ichi's truck-mounted Militech Mark 31 HMG straight through the farmhouse's second floor, shredding two Raffen through the walls. Motoko and Malcolm pushed upstairs and finished the last one hiding in a bathroom with Copperhead rounds.
Clean-up revealed some hostages had been stuck for over a week with dwindling food and water. Malcolm played hero for the traumatized teens while Ichi and Rebecca looted the compound. Dakota collected the target girl and the leftover vehicles. Section 9 loaded twenty-two hostages into the Behemoth for the long drive back to Night City.
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184 184. Chapter 184
Motoko watched Rebecca bypass the cute little Archer Quartz and claim a massive Thorton Mackinaw, complete with hidden dual machine guns that Rebecca discovered by accidentally obliterating a shed. The goblin cackle that followed sealed the deal. Section 9 dropped the rescued hostages at the nearest bus stop, endured complaints from entitled rich kids, and split up to sell loot through Hiromi and celebrate at Lizzies.
The next morning, Motoko tinkered with Quick Hacks on the couch, daydreaming about Laughing Man-style real-time perception hacking and Optical Camo she couldn't find on any market. She picked up a freelance netrunner gig from Yoko, crafting a skeleton key breach hack for a client's secured network, and slipped a confetti-bomb Daemon into the return file as payback for Yoko's own hidden Daemon. Jun and Akari kept disappearing together over the Yuto situation, and Motoko silently promised to hunt Yuto down if any blowback touched her brother.
Hiromi dropped the bomb: she'd gotten Motoko's music on Growl FM through a chain of Judy to Rita to pirate radio host Ash. The song that played was Smells Like Teen Spirit, not The Pretender. Motoko screamed into the couch cushions, chewed Hiromi out for going behind her back, but ultimately forgave her. She booked Denny's studio, recorded clean studio versions of all her Red Dirt tracks, and told Hiromi to push the Rockerboy career as hard as she could.
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185 185. Chapter 185
Motoko wrapped her studio session and handed Hiromi five shards of polished tracks for radio distribution, with Morro Rock and Growl FM both on the target list. Needing to burn off the Rockerboy anxiety, she headed to the Deravaja Dojo and ground Blades up through sword forms under Sensei's eye. The reward was a match against Musashi, one of the dojo's top students, a tall skilled swordsman with real reach advantage who battered Motoko's defense with relentless strikes.
Patience won the day. Motoko outlasted Musashi's stamina, exploited a failed disarm attempt against her chrome wrists, and bonked him with a flourish that earned Sensei's disapproval and Musashi's white-hot fury. She was sent back to forms as punishment for the showboating while Sensei pulled Musashi aside for a private talk. The glare Musashi sent her way afterward promised trouble down the road.
Back home, Jun heard the news about Motoko's music career and lifted her off the couch, spinning her around in celebration. Akari reported Yuto was still at large but Fujimura had been updated. Section 9 hit the gun range together with Rebecca, where Malcolm earned the nickname "Stick" for nearly crashing into a pole showing off his car, and Ichi became "Speedbump" courtesy of an unfortunate speed bump incident.
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186 186. Chapter 186
Motoko spent the evening at Lizzies with the crew, listening to Rebecca tell stories about Pilar hacking Maine's car as a recruitment audition. Rebecca admitted Maine still treated her like a hanger-on rather than a real crew member, which only fueled Motoko's quiet Operation Steal Rebecca. Judy showed up tired from the editing grind, asked Motoko to sign her Red Dirt gig BD, and handed Rebecca a copy to experience.
Rebecca came out of the BD screaming "NOVA" and immediately upgraded Motoko's nickname from "Kitten" to "Strings," then demanded free tickets to every future show. Judy quietly offered individual Mox protection for Motoko's budding music career, noting that Suzie Q had been pulling back on helping outsiders but individual Mox members could still lend a hand. Malcolm and Ichi both struck out trying to pick up the same girl on the dance floor, losing a bro-bet in the process.
Late that night Motoko worked on the Tachikoma, pruning its decision trees and teaching it movement patterns through direct neural link. She caught The Pretender playing on Growl FM and sat with the strange, shivery reality of hearing her own voice on the radio for the first time alone. The next day she sparred with Hayato at the dojo, trading blows in an extended martial arts session where Hayato's Keren-enhanced perception kept her elusive but Motoko's grappling and chrome-backed endurance won out with repeated hip tosses and pins. Hayato's guard interrupted on orders from Nakagawa, pulling her away. Outside, Motoko found Musashi and a horde of Tyger Claw gangsters sitting on her car with live blades.
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187 187. Chapter 187 ☠ 7
Motoko flipped over the dojo wall and punched Musashi's netrunner Misaki unconscious with a single chrome-fisted blow, severing the digital protection keeping her from hacking the squad. From the rooftops she became a ghost, slitting Brian's throat in an alley, stabbing Carter through the heart with his own Katana, and picking off the rest one by one while taunting Musashi over a hacked call he couldn't disconnect.
Told from Musashi's panicking perspective, the hunt was a masterclass in terror. Every order to regroup failed as his men turned up dead in hallways and stairwells. He called Moritaka for reinforcements and Motoko cut into the line to threaten the TC boss directly. By the time Musashi stumbled outside, Motoko was calmly cleaning blood off a borrowed blade, having already flatlined the car watchers. Carlos caught a Sandevistan-speed decapitation mid-draw, leaving Musashi alone against the girl he thought he could bully.
Their sword duel was real steel this time. Musashi had raw aggression and reach but Motoko's defense was water-tight. She cut his cheek, stripped his pistol with Sandy speed, and watched the arrogance drain from his face as he realized he was going to die. Komorebi arrived on motorcycles with four elite Tyger Claws and ordered Musashi to finish the duel himself or die trying.
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188 188. Chapter 188 ☠ 1
Motoko decapitated Musashi mid-sentence and turned to face Komorebi Izuku, a genuine Tyger Claw swordsman with a high-end Sandevistan. Their duel was everything the Musashi fight was not: two skilled fighters testing each other through webs of steel, Sandy activations used as decisive trump cards rather than crutches. Komorebi's offense was relentless and technically sound, but he couldn't breach Motoko's dual-wielding defense. The stalemate pushed Motoko's Ninjutsu to 10 and earned her the Ninja Running perk, the ability to vanish from line of sight like Batman.
A phone call ended the match. Jun contacted Motoko in a panic. Yuto made a second attempt on Kisaru, injuring him this time, and Moritaka demanded Jun's head. Akari defied her orders to warn Jun, and Fujimura called an emergency meeting of the TC leadership. Komorebi was recalled and departed respectfully, promising a rematch. Motoko collected Musashi's Katana as a trophy and drove to meet Fujimura, Jun, and Akari.
They were escorted to a penthouse where Nakagawa, the actual head of the Tyger Claws, presided over a room full of Oyabuns in formal kimono. The meeting was pure Yakuza theater. Moritaka pushed to punish Jun for knowing about Yuto's assassination attempts. Fujimura defended Jun methodically. Motoko handed over her weapons at security, three knives, two frag grenades, her Burya and Lexington, but kept Musashi's Katana on Fujimura's word. She sat in seiza, watched the political maneuvering, and quietly cataloged every way she could kill Moritaka from across the room.
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189 189. Chapter 189
Motoko sat through the Tyger Claw tribunal as Fujimura and Moritaka traded political blows. Nakagawa confirmed Motoko killed Musashi and asked if she understood the cost. She shrugged and said the boy lived by the sword and died by one. Jun offered to take all punishment meant for Motoko, which was exactly what Moritaka wanted: a way to damage Fujimura's powerbase through his best enforcer. Rescue came from an unexpected quarter. Okina, the TC boss Jun and Motoko once saved from an Edgerunner borg, spoke up and argued the whole thing was youthful self-defense.
The doors crashed open and Hayato stormed in wearing a formal kimono, furious about being lured away from the dojo by a fake message, followed by Wakako Okada. The room went electric. Hayato was Nakagawa's daughter, making her literally the Tyger Claw princess Motoko had been casually punching in the face during sparring sessions. Wakako declared Motoko worked for her, shutting down Moritaka's push for punishment. Nakagawa ordered Fujimura to hunt down Yuto and deal with the 6th Street connection, censured Moritaka for targeting family members, and dismissed the assembly.
In a private room afterward, Wakako casually dropped that she knew Motoko assassinated Jotaro, the TC club owner killed chapters ago, and Motoko maintained her denial with Cold Blood-fueled composure. Hayato was stunned to learn her sparring partner was a professional killer. Wakako revealed that Motoko's friendship with Hayato was pure coincidence. The two roasted Motoko for her obliviousness to Hayato's identity until Wakako cut the laughter short with business.
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190 190. Chapter 190
Wakako hired Motoko for the strangest gig of her career: a long-term contract to not assassinate Moritaka Kuwabara. The condition was that Jun stays untouched. If Moritaka causes more trouble for her brother, all bets are off. Hayato remained skeptical that Motoko could actually kill a TC lieutenant, which only irritated the assassin further. Fujimura cornered Motoko in the elevator with a second job: find and kill Yuto Gonzales before he makes a third attempt on Kisaru. Motoko directed him to Hiromi for pricing, refusing any family discount after the night's betrayal of trust, though she relented to a small one by the end.
Section 9 regrouped at Hiromi's apartment where the crew had been anxiously waiting. Hiromi already had Fujimura's intel packet. Yuto was last seen in a 6th Street safehouse in Rancho Coronado, deep in Arroyo near the dam. Motoko scrubbed the file for bugs, planned the infiltration route from the freeway above, and kitted up for a solo night insertion while the crew staged backup nearby with a secret surprise.
Creeping down the desert mountainside into Rancho Coronado under Kiroshi night vision, Motoko slipped past balcony smokers and 6th Street patrols to reach the basement safehouse. She bypassed the Militech security lock with knife-and-thumb electrical work, cleared the armored door, and found the studio apartment empty. Half-drained Brosef on the table, unmade bed, no laptops or security systems to hack. Before she could extract, bootsteps echoed on concrete outside, and Motoko launched herself into the ceiling pipes to hide.
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191 191. Chapter 191
Motoko clung to the ceiling while a 6th Street gangoon named Grant stumbled in below. A knife to the throat and some Sexy Motoko Voice later, she extracted what she could. Grant claimed ignorance, but his agent gave up the name Roger Almeda. A phone call to Roger went sideways fast, the 6th Street lieutenant refusing eddies and daring her to come find them. Before leaving, Motoko blinded Grant's optics and locked him in with no way to call for help.
A lucky break saved the whole op. Yuto logged into his NCTV subscription from wherever he was hiding, kicking Grant off the shared account in real time. Motoko breached the TV system and saved the account data to a shard, giving Section 9 a repeatable way to track him through his streaming habit. She regrouped with Ichi, Malcolm, and Hiromi at a Turbo's gas station across Arroyo to lay out the next move.
The real work started in the net. Motoko slipped into the NCTV corporate data fortress, cracked through the admin server's dated security in forty seconds, and pulled Yuto's address from his account records. Four corporate netrunners caught her on the way out. She talked her way free, trading access logs and code-debugging favors brokered through Yoko's reputation. She punctuated the deal by chain-firing four Breach Jumps straight through their security and vanishing, leaving the NCTV runners staring at a massive traffic surge and grateful she didn't flatline them.
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192 192. Chapter 192
Motoko tracked Yuto's NCTV signal to a Japantown apartment complex, the same building she and Jun used to live in. Section 9 rolled in: Ichi and Malcolm held the ground floor while Motoko rushed the second-floor unit. The apartment was empty, but a stolen cable line rerouting the signal to the neighboring unit revealed the trick. Hiromi spotted Yuto jumping out a second-floor window, and a high-speed car chase tore through Japantown as Motoko leaned out of the Quadra with her Copperhead, punching rounds into his armored Archer Quartz.
The chase was brutal and messy. Yuto drove through a strip mall, clipped pedestrians, and bulldozed civilian cars as Motoko steadily cracked his rear windshield with burst after burst. He made it across the bridge into Arroyo with his car leaking oil and a front wheel wobbling, and Motoko finally shredded through the back glass on a straightaway. But 6th Street trucks swarmed the crash site before she could close the kill. A cowboy-hat lieutenant blocked Section 9 from finishing the job, claiming territorial rights while his men dragged Yuto from the wreckage.
Back at the apartment, Fujimura delivered intel on Roger Almeda, ex-Militech special forces, the kind of methodical solo who sleeps in a different cardboard box every night. Roger had surveillance cameras watching Yuto's Japantown hideout from across the street, triggering the escape. Fujimura rebuked Motoko for not calling in backup sooner, and she accepted the criticism. The gig terms shifted: a BD recording of Yuto's death would satisfy the contract, since dragging him out alive was off the table.
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193 193. Chapter 193
Motoko burned hours in the net working two projects: a vehicle quick hack that force-triggers emergency braking, stripped down from Yoko's bloated code full of heated-seat data, and continued training for the Tachikoma AI, which kept taking only left turns in a digital maze. Yuto's NCTV subscription still pointed to the Japantown address, confirming he was recovering from the car crash somewhere in 6th Street territory.
A Mr. Stud cyber-dick commercial set to the brass-and-strings opening of Tank sent ramen noodles out of Motoko's nose at a street vendor. Her song, sold off ages ago, was now hawking chrome genitalia on Night City television. Misty offered sympathy at her Esoterica shop but steered the conversation toward Motoko's reluctance to embrace her Rockerboy side, having watched the concert BD that Hiromi distributed. Vik handled routine maintenance on Motoko's worn-down finger grippers while she fumed.
Jackie Welles turned up at Vik's doing a courier run for Wakako, and the two grabbed drinks at the Coyote Cojone. Jackie couldn't help with the 6th Street angle, too many people watching gang politics right now, and dodged Motoko's offer to work together more regularly. Later, Motoko checked the NCTV backdoor again and found Yuto had logged in from a new location. She fired off the coordinates to Section 9 and Fujimura: time to end this hunt.
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194 194. Chapter 194 ☠ 1
Motoko deployed the Tachikoma prototype for its first real field op, piloting the four-legged drone down the canal embankment into Rancho Coronado. The little spider-bot infiltrated Yuto's safehouse through the back door, hacked a kitchen radio for audio since it lacked a microphone, and confirmed the target: Yuto sprawled on a couch with two 6th Street guards who looked more like jailers than protectors. She parked the Tachikoma under a coffee table and began quietly draining intel from the guards' agents.
Section 9 met at a restaurant in City Center to plan the hit. Jun and Akari arrived on Fujimura's orders, but Motoko shut down Jun's offer to join the assault. He was too slow and too obviously Tyger Claw for a deep strike into 6th Street territory. The plan was surgical: Malcolm's Caliburn as flashy insertion transport, a Mizutani Shion Reaver stashed for extraction, Ichi and Hiromi on heavy weapons at a fallback position. Rebecca got called in for extra firepower on Malcolm's suggestion.
She rode Malcolm's Caliburn to the canal edge, used the Tachikoma's live feed to blind and shock both guards with quick hacks before she even hit the door, and caught Yuto mid-step. She lined up the Copperhead and put him down with a single shot plus three insurance rounds to the head. The Shion Reaver carried her out through New Pacific Highway before 6th Street could mount a pursuit. Jun got the news over comms and masked his grief behind a public celebration, toasting Yuto's death in front of Fujimura's people to rebuild his reputation with the Tygers.
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195 195. Chapter 195
Motoko woke to gunfire and explosions echoing across Japantown. 6th Street launched a retaliatory raid on a Tyger Claw distributor. Jun confirmed the attack was being framed as payback for Yuto's death, but Wakako's call revealed the real problem: 6th Street claimed Motoko killed multiple gangoons, not just Yuto. The BD recording she scrolled during the hit proved otherwise, and Wakako dispatched her to deliver a copy to El Capitan, Muamar Reyes, the Santo Domingo fixer, as evidence.
Section 9 piled into Rebecca's truck to avoid recognition and rolled through Rancho Coronado to El Capitan's overlook. Reyes confirmed the BD checked out, but the real meeting was with General Rick Morton himself, the leader of 6th Street, who showed up in a convoy of armed trucks. Motoko stared down his Malorian Overture at point-blank range while El Capitan stepped between them vouching for the intel. Carlos, Morton's BD specialist, verified the recording, and the guns finally dropped.
She refused to flinch through the entire standoff, countering Morton's threats with cold logic about who really benefits from a gang war. When the General called her a kid with balls, she fished a crumpled Section 9 business card from her back pocket and handed it over. Morton and Carlos shared a chuckle before rolling out. The ceasefire between 6th Street and the Tyger Claws held, at least for now.
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196 196. Chapter 196
Motoko burned off frustration with a parkour sprint across Night City, still fuming over the Tyger Claw kidnapping attempt and the 6th Street frame job. She ran from Japantown to City Center without stopping, backflipping over obstacles and grinding Athletics the whole way. A group of Valentino teenagers tried to chat her up at a vending machine. She slammed the lead kid into the SCSM by his throat, bought a Grape NiCola one-handed, then backflipped onto the machine and vanished up a guard rail before his boys could react.
A late-night motorcycle ride through Watson cleared her head enough to start planning. Wakako texted that a ceasefire held between the Tyger Claws and 6th Street while the bosses met. She also nudged Motoko to visit Hayato at the dojo in the morning. Sensei greeted Motoko first, bowing low to apologize for the kidnapping that violated his dojo's sanctity. Motoko accepted, recognizing the apology meant more than just training access.
Hayato waited in a formal kimono with her Kerenzikov chrome visible at the temples. She dropped the request without preamble: she needed Motoko to assassinate Kanada Tsukimura, one of her potential fiances. Motoko accepted before Hayato even finished explaining, barely able to stop teasing her long enough to get the details. Hayato handed over a Wakako-style intel packet, and Motoko invited her along for the whole operation. Section 9 assembled at the apartment to meet their client. Malcolm recognized the Tyger Princess and nearly launched off the couch. Hiromi hadn't arrived yet, sparing Motoko that explosion. Hayato and Hiromi hashed out payment while the boys watched in amusement.
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197 197. Chapter 197 ☠ 1
Motoko infiltrated Kanada Tsukimura's ritzy apartment building through the back door, subverted the security room, and planted an access shard. She found a hidden space above the modified entryway of his unit and wedged herself in to wait. Rebecca's POV from the back of Ichi's truck revealed her frustration with Pilar and Maine's crew. Section 9's calmer, less ego-driven culture was growing on her. Malcolm took her on a Kabayan's snack run while they staked out the garage for Kanada's yellow Shion.
Hours of boredom ended when the Shion pulled in. Motoko intercepted a phone call from Kanada's underling Hiko about missing product, and heard Kanada say he was heading to speak with Moritaka. She shadowed him from elevator to garage as Section 9 tracked his car a few blocks to an upscale TC-owned bar in Japantown. A scan of the second-floor VIP area through hacked cameras and one very large non-bulletproof window gave her a plan.
Motoko walked into the bar, leapt to the second-floor VIP railing, activated her Sandevistan, and drove a katana through Kanada's heart and spine before anyone could shout a warning. His body crashed through the glass window. She held the dripping blade while locking eyes with Moritaka Kuwabara, delivered Hayato's regards, performed a chiburi, and stepped out the shattered window onto Ichi's truck as it pulled up below.
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198 198. Chapter 198
Motoko and Section 9 rode the elevator into the Tyger Claw high-rise for Hayato's post-gig debriefing. Hiromi finally discovered their client was Hayato Nakagawa the Second, heir to the Tyger Claws, and short-circuited on the spot, stammering through three attempts at the name while Malcolm collected twenty eddies from Ichi on a bet about when she'd figure it out. Wakako was present in the meeting hall, casually confirming to her tattooed son that Motoko was professional enough to leave Moritaka alive despite the opportunity.
Shinobu Nakagawa, Hayato's father and leader of the Tyger Claws, entered and demanded an explanation for Kanada's assassination. Hayato presented recorded evidence that Kanada had boasted about marrying her and becoming the next Shinobu through a coup. Wakako independently verified the recordings, and the room of TC bosses collectively flinched at the dead man's audacity. Nakagawa condoned the killing, then wearily asked his mother-in-law to please stop giving his daughter access to assassins.
Hayato privately told Motoko she wanted to formalize their relationship as client and mercenary, a retainer arrangement to solidify her position within the Tygers. Section 9 celebrated at Turbo's, where Rebecca turned the party public by buying rounds for the crowd, spreading word of the gig through street-level reputation building. Hiromi and Motoko discussed formalizing Section 9's future, and Motoko awkwardly deflected when Hiromi misread "our future relationship" as something more personal.
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199 199. Chapter 199
Motoko offered to set up a space on the family shrine for Yuto, a quiet gesture that caught Jun off guard mid-burrito. He accepted, and the siblings headed out shopping for incense together. On the streets, Motoko noticed the shift: Tyger Claw goons who used to flinch only for Jun's reputation now flinched for hers. Word of the Hayato Nakagawa connection had spread fast through Japantown, and Motoko's days of being underestimated were officially over.
Three TC gonks cornered Motoko at a gun range parking lot after a Handguns training session, trying to recruit her on behalf of Moritaka Kuwabara. A power play to weaken Fujimura by stealing his asset. She activated her Sandy to savor the moment, then laid into them: chrome fist to the leader's face, a flying kick off the Quadra's hood, a throwing dagger pinning the gunman's shoulder. Jun arrived with Akari, one-handed the leader off the ground by the throat, and established the narrative that the gonks started the fight. Fujimura would handle the rest.
Back home, Motoko channeled her fury into a new optical quick hack: the Onryo Daemon. Built on her stealth daemon's carrier function, it planted ghostly images of a white-haired, red-eyed, fanged version of herself in the corners of a target's vision, flickering in shadows and over shoulders. If the Tyger Claws wanted to call her Onryo, she was going to make the name mean something that keeps people up at night.
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200 200. Chapter 200
Motoko field-tested the Onryo hack on Ichi and Malcolm at a diner, watching from a rooftop across the street as ghostly apparitions flickered in the corners of their vision. Both boys twitched and jumped before figuring out it was her and demanding she buy dinner and snacks as penance. The hack worked but needed refinement: shared-network sync so groups see the same apparitions, and a tactile component exploiting the neural-link alert system to simulate phantom touches.
Jun delivered the resolution on the TC gonks from the gun range: Moritaka Kuwabara had been trying to poach Motoko to weaken Fujimura's position, and Nakagawa himself was now leaning on Moritaka for overstepping. Motoko installed a microphone into the Tachikoma chassis, drilling holes in the case and soldering in spare parts from around her room, then wrestled with its AI bloating its sound-file library until she taught it to process audio as inquiry rather than raw storage.
Jun caught This Fffire playing on the radio and went full proud-big-brother, spinning Motoko in the air and pushing her to write more songs. He floated an offer from Alice of Violent Hemorrhage for a jam session, transparently hoping Rockerboy work would keep his sister out of firefights. Motoko threatened love songs to horrify him, belted out a verse of Shape of You while dodging his grabs around the couch, and retreated to her room laughing. The chapter closed with Section 9's first official gig day: Hiromi booked a Maelstrom data-recovery job through Regina, and the crew suited up at the Straight Lane Apartments.
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201 201. Chapter 201 ☠ 17
Motoko led Section 9 on a Regina Jones gig to recover stolen Kang Tao data from a Maelstrom-occupied ripperdoc shop. She breached their security from a rooftop across the street, uploaded Ping, and coordinated a devastating crossfire. Ichi's truck-mounted HMGs hammered the front, Rebecca and Malcolm covered the alley, and Motoko rained fire through the skylight with her Burya and Lexington. Malcolm finished the stragglers with grenades until every golden Ping light went dark.
Kang Tao crashed the party before the crew could exfil. Smart rounds punched through the storefront, clipping Rebecca in the leg and cracking Motoko's helmet. Ichi rammed their orange minivan with his truck while Malcolm lobbed a grenade into the chaos. Motoko tossed a grenade into the Kang Tao van, then ordered everyone into the truck and they peeled out to Vik's clinic for patching up.
At Vik's, Hiromi relayed the ugly truth: Kang Tao wanted the data back and had Regina's building surrounded. Motoko volunteered to deliver the hard drive solo, executing a precise stealth infiltration across street lights and ledges, slipping past Kang Tao snipers and guards to reach Regina's elevator. After handing over the data, the fixer brokered a ceasefire with the corpo. Regina told Motoko to call back in a few years if she was still alive.
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202 202. Chapter 202
Motoko regrouped at Hiromi's apartment after delivering the Kang Tao data, carrying a wounded Rebecca in her arms. Hiromi's mother hovered with a stern eye over the crew of teenagers sprawled on her fancy couch, but relaxed once Motoko confirmed Kang Tao had backed off. Section 9's first official gig day ended with everyone battered but alive, and Ichi quietly marveling at whatever Mama Mitsunashi served for dinner.
The next morning Hiromi barged into Motoko's bedroom with music industry news. DJs and producers had been reaching out through Ash. A meeting at Morro Rock Radio with DJ Richard Fox went better than expected. Fox agreed to thirteen plays of Pretender including prime midday slots, plus free airtime for Motoko's Samurai covers on his Sunday amateur hour. The man's charm won even Hiromi over. He was playing the long game, banking on Ghost in the Shell remembering him when she was famous. A jam session sealed the deal: Fox started Chippin' In and Motoko matched him note for note, singing along without missing a single transition.
Between music meetings Motoko stayed sharp. Sparring with Hayato at the dojo, a failed hip-toss earned the Tyger Claw heir a hard slam onto the mat. An afternoon at Ichi's grandmother's place was spent repairing the Minotaur's deliberately designed-to-fail leg joints, earning a Tech level up. Grandma brought out lemonade, and Ichi mentioned her medicine was helping.
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203 203. Chapter 203
Motoko dragged Malcolm on a morning run under an overpass, pushing the kid through cardio while she backflipped and parkoured alongside him. The Kang Tao ambush had rattled him. He admitted he froze while Rebecca got shot and Ichi reacted. Motoko talked him through it, promising tactical training with paintball guns while mocking his suggestion to just use a BD instead. The run pushed her Athletics to level 8.
Hiromi cornered her into scheduling weekly music time. Jun had mentioned Alice wanted a jam session, though internal band drama made that a headache Motoko would rather avoid. She started laying down electronic samples at a rented sound stage, working on the bones of multiple songs at once. An uncomfortable encounter with Denny at the studio soured things. Motoko was still furious about Tank getting sold for Mr. Studd ads. Denny shrugged it off as the cost of doing business, but Motoko made it crystal clear she'd rather burn the industry down than let another song become corpo jingle fodder.
Rebecca and Motoko rebuilt Rebecca's old HMG with a 3D-printed gas exchange part at the siblings' apartment. Pilar walked in and reignited the argument about his sister running gigs, calling her too emotional and comparing her to their mother. Motoko shut it down cold: Rebecca had what it takes to make a great solo, and she'd always have a spot with Section 9.
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204 204. Chapter 204
Motoko dove into the Netrunner Combat Zone looking for fights, offering free code debugging to lure opponents into dueling her. A netrunner called Vortex took the bait after Yoko vouched for Motoko's legitimacy. The deal: Motoko got pelted with every Daemon Vortex could throw while she tested combat techniques against AI constructs, smashing waves of Soldier Daemons with salvos of HEAT Bullet attacks. She also realized the Onryo Hack concept could work against Daemons, since they weren't smart enough to tell a fake netrunner from a real one.
Vortex landed a massive AOE nuke that booted Motoko from the server, but not before a cascade of XP pushed her to a new level. She honored the deal by diving into Vortex's absolute trainwreck of frankensteined code, a casino eddie-skimmer so bloated and obvious it would get the runner caught within a week. Motoko agreed to keep debugging in exchange for future Daemon fights and intel on an old server infested with rogue Daemons.
Section 9 gathered at Motoko's apartment for their next job briefing. Hiromi, fresh from a meeting with Padre in full corpo attire, announced an assassination gig targeting Miguel Hernandez, a rich boy holed up in a North Oak mansion guarded by Animals. Motoko tapped Malcolm's Caliburn as camouflage for the wealthy neighborhood and deployed the Tachikoma through the compound's security. After discovering the father's hidden security room was protected by nothing more than an unlocked mechanical push-door, she seized the entire system: cameras, robots, and all.
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205 205. Chapter 205 ☠ 2
The chapter opened from Miguel Hernandez's perspective as he panicked about his father going silent and the Animals ignoring his orders. Motoko uploaded Short Circuit to lock down the Animals, then walked into his room where the target found his engraved Overture already gone from the table. She put him down. The crew swept through the North Oak compound in a clean mop-up, Rebecca and Malcolm peppering twitching bodies. Hiromi pulled in with the Behemoth for a full-scale looting operation that stripped the mansion to its walls, including the security robots Motoko had shut down intact.
Celebrating outside Turbo's with drinks, Motoko spotted a familiar flash of rainbow-pastel hair on a rooftop across the skyline. She parkoured up the apartment building and dropped a sweating Brosef on the ledge beside Lucy Kushinada, extending a casual party invite before vaulting over the railing with a cheeky wave, bouncing off a street light to stick the landing below. Back on the grind, she finally hit Body 10 after a punishing gym session with the Tyger Claw workout crew.
Sparring with Hayato showcased the new strength. Blocks that knocked the heir backwards, a Sandy-assisted wrist grab into a hip toss that had Hayato screaming all the way down. Motoko also reconnected with Vortex on the net, reluctantly agreeing to more debugging on the casino skimmer in exchange for coordinates to a Daemon-infested server. The code was still dogshit. The skim integer so high it would be caught instantly. Motoko cleaned it up anyway, lecturing Vortex on the difference between stealth and suicide.
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206 206. Chapter 206 ☠ 2
Motoko bodyguarded Hiromi during a routine sale of mansion loot to Valentino buyers in Heywood when a crew of Tinos rolled up in an Alvarado and a pickup. Their leader pulled a Nova revolver and started hurling slurs, demanding the two girls get off his turf. Motoko stalled him with talk while furiously uploading Weapon Glitch into every gun she could breach, but only got through about eighty percent before the shooting started. She shielded Hiromi with her own body and took bullets in the back as Ichi's van HMGs opened up behind them.
Vik patched the wound. Her subdermal armor caught the worst of it. Motoko was ice-cold with fury. She dove into the net from her runner cave to track every member of the crew through nearby security cameras, building a kill list with names and addresses. Hiromi demanded to pilot the Minotaur for the retaliation, and nobody argued.
The strike hit at night: Motoko kicked in the back door with Katana and Lexington, Malcolm's smart rounds dropped a man at the front entrance, and Rebecca's HMG swiss-cheesed the entire storefront through the wall. Hiromi in the Minotaur burst through the front, twin HMGs turning one specific gonk into mist. Motoko dragged the beaten leader out to the Minotaur and Hiromi stomped him flat. Section 9 looted their stolen merchandise back while Motoko walked across the street to the gathered Valentino onlookers and delivered a cold speech: this was personal, Padre-sanctioned work gone wrong, and the dead men earned what they got. The local Tino leader agreed to take it up with Padre rather than escalate.
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207 207. Chapter 207
Alice invited Motoko to a jam session with Violent Hemorrhage after their lead guitarist Carmen bailed. Motoko took the drum seat and ripped into No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age, Dave Grohl style. The rest of the band scrambled to keep up, playing along badly but with enthusiasm. Klein and Jared were sold immediately, begging her to join for their upcoming Saturday gig.
Payment came as a wrecked DeLuze Orphean guitar, same model Johnny Silverhand played, that Carmen had smashed on his way out. A grumpy music shop clerk pointed Motoko to Time Machine in Heywood for proper DeLuze parts. The staff recognized the damage and sold her what she needed. She spent the day doing a full teardown and restoration: new bridge, replaced connectors, fresh paint in Tachikoma-inspired white and blue.
Testing the restored Orphean with Never Fade Away confirmed the sound quality blew her old store-bought guitar away. Jun's excitement about the gig was embarrassingly wholesome. He spun her around the apartment until she warned him about the drying paint. Late into the night Motoko pivoted to engineering work, designing detachable wheel modules for the Tachikoma to solve its mobility problem without sacrificing the compact leg design.
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208 208. Chapter 208
Motoko picked up Hiromi from Arasaka Academy and immediately ran into Katsuo Tanaka, David Martinez's bully, who called Hiromi a whore. She lifted the kid off his feet by his lapels and forced him face-to-face with Hiromi to apologize, only backing off when two Arasaka Tower guards intervened. The guards scanned Motoko, recognized something in their systems, and walked away without incident. Katsuo screamed impotently about his father while the guards declared the matter resolved.
Lunch with Hiromi and David turned into a casual hang. David mentioned wanting more Ghost BDs, and Motoko made a mental note to record some on future gigs. She quietly observed David's Sandy use and decided against recruiting him for Section 9, preferring a second netrunner like Lucy instead. Motoko also started planning to intercept the Cyberpsycho incident that would lead to Gloria Martinez getting the prototype Sandevistan, plotting to grab it before Maine's crew could.
Back at the apartment, Motoko finished painting the restored Orphean in Tachikoma white-and-blue and tuned it with Never Fade Away. The real project came after: designing and 3D-printing detachable wheel modules for the Tachikoma. Trial one sent the little robot flipping onto its back at max RPM. After nineteen iterations, a crashed shrine, and a dented fridge, she solved the problem by dropping the Tachikoma into a VR racing game to teach itself how to drive.
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209 209. Chapter 209
Motoko dragged all of Section 9 to the shooting range for a group training session. She opened with a Sandy-boosted Copperhead dump that maxed the scoring system, earning synchronized cries of "Cheater!" from every member of the crew. Rebecca tackled her in mock punishment and got bench-pressed off the floor then launched at Malcolm as a "Rebecca missile."
Hours of practice pushed Motoko's Handguns to level 9, maxed against her Reflex stat, but she emerged to find her entire team already lounging at a table outside. She convinced them to commit to regular short practice sessions funded by Section 9's ammo stockpile, and checked in on Rebecca's progress toward getting Gorilla Arms installed. Hiromi revealed she'd already secured backstage passes for the upcoming Violent Hemorrhage gig and floated the idea of hiring Section 9 as Motoko's permanent Rockerboy security detail.
At the Tyger Claw dojo, Hayato's sensei challenged Motoko to a spar. His refined swordsmanship punched through her dual-shinai defense and pushed her to Blades 9 mid-fight. It took his hidden Sandevistan to finally crack her guard with a head strike. Hayato revealed he'd used cyberware, and Motoko fumed about playing fair while he cheated. Cooling down, she invited Hayato to grab food, surprising the heir into a rare moment of flustered acceptance.
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210 210. Chapter 210
Motoko arrived at a dive bar for her gig with Violent Hemorrhage, spotted Malcolm flirting by his Caliburn in the parking lot, and headed backstage to tune the restored Orphean. The set was technically flawless on her end but creatively dead. Six songs of repetitive noise and Alice's autotune-dependent vocals left Motoko feeling nothing but boredom. Carmen, the band's ex-guitarist, showed up backstage to gloat about his corpo music career and flash a Malorian.
Carmen's parting shot, calling the band and Motoko worthless nothings who'd never amount to anything, left Alice near tears and the group splintering. Then the bar's radio kicked on with Motoko's cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Something snapped. Motoko hacked the sound system dead, tossed her amp and music box onto the empty stage, and stepped up to the mic, hijacking the rest of the night for a solo set.
Teen Spirit ripped through the dive bar first, followed by Rise, This Ffffire, and a rage-fueled Pretender dedicated to every sellout Rockerboy like Carmen. After Let You Down, the crowd called for an encore. She closed with an acoustic Everlong, Dave Grohl's love song crooned raw and soft to a room full of rockers who came for cheap drinks and got a concert instead. Rebecca stood on a chair howling, and Motoko grabbed the mic one last time: "My name is Motoko, and this isn't the last you heard of me."
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211 211. Chapter 211
Motoko recovered from an impromptu solo club performance, face-down on a table with a cool towel over her head while Hiromi tried to negotiate a future gig with the club owner. Outside, Alice from Violent Hemorrhage cornered her with a desperate pitch: she wanted Motoko to front a real band with her, Jared, and Klein as backup. Hiromi swooped in with full corpo grace, handing out business cards and deflecting the conversation before Motoko had to commit on the spot.
Restless energy drove both girls to the Deravaja Dojo, where they sparred with shinai until Hiromi was gasping for air. Mid-bout, Motoko's Reflex hit 10, a massive milestone that reshaped her muscle memory on the spot. She dodged Hiromi's strikes like they existed in slow motion, then lifted her off the ground in a burst of joy. The two ended the night parked outside a club eating fries and laughing at drunks puking on the sidewalk, trading dreams about Motoko's name on a billboard next to Lizzy Wizzy.
The next morning, Motoko rode her Kusanagi to the dojo hungry for more. She asked Sensei for a sparring partner who could push her to her limits, and he issued a full dojo challenge. Every student and Tyger Claw ganger lined up to face her. She beat them all, fought Sensei himself to a near-draw before exhaustion cost her a bonk on the head, then went through the entire gauntlet a second time until she physically dropped. Sensei ordered her to rest before driving, and the TC guys she just beat bought her lunch.
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212 212. Chapter 212 ☠ 8
Motoko slurped soba with Tyger Claw gangers who joked about her dojo beatdown like she was one of their own. Back home, she tinkered with "Heathens" on her guitar until Bishop from the Afterlife called with an emergency: his crew's corpo frontman Sam got snatched by Ion Frontier during a meeting gone sideways. Motoko grabbed her Thermal Katana, hit the Kusanagi, and lane-split through traffic to the meet point.
The infiltration was textbook ninja work. She slipped through a rear door, choked out a rent-a-cop for his badge, rode the elevator to the second-floor security room, and choked out another guard. All without tripping a single alarm. On the seventh floor she knocked on the Ion Frontier security office door, drew her Thermal Katana when it opened, and cut through three guards in seconds with a thrown knife and brutal bladework. Mira, Hakase, and Bishop watched from a fire escape across the gap as the girl they hired simply walked through a corpo fortress.
Sam's rescue was fast and violent. Motoko burst into the interrogation room, killed three more guards with blade and thrown knife work, then shot corpo exec Hanson with a Burya at Sam's request. She fireman-carried Sam at a dead sprint through the office, emptied an Ajax into the hallway to clear a path, smashed through a pre-weakened window on the seventh floor, and leapt across to the fire escape. She slammed into the metal railing hard enough to hurt but stuck the landing. Bishop's crew hauled Sam to safety while Motoko clutched her ribs.
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213 213. Chapter 213
Motoko followed Bishop's crew to their ripper where Sam got patched up, turned down another offer to join their Edgerunner team, and rode home through Night City traffic exhausted from a day of dojo fighting and corpo infiltration. She crashed on the couch next to Jun and accidentally revealed she challenged the entire Deravaja Dojo, which Jun explained was a massive deal in the Tyger Claw hierarchy, not just casual sparring.
A sibling brawl erupted when Jun grabbed her face, escalating into a pillow fight that cost Jun his live TV episode. Motoko grudgingly hunted down a recording to make it up to him, then passed out on the couch under a blanket Jun threw over her. The next morning she performed "Heathens" for Jun, complete with using an unloaded Carnage shotgun for its pump-action sound effect on the drop. Jun immediately tried to claim it as his personal anthem.
Alice showed up at the apartment to press the band question. With Jun playing enthusiastic wingman and Alice laying bare that Violent Hemorrhage was falling apart, Motoko reluctantly handed over her DeLuze guitar and started teaching Alice the chords. She admitted to herself, bitterly, that she wanted to be on stage again. Later, driving Hiromi home, the two hashed out contracts and copyright protections for the new arrangement, with Hiromi buzzing about future business deals while Motoko rolled her eyes at her corpo best friend's relentless ambition.
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214 214. Chapter 214 ☠ 2
Motoko hung upside-down from electrical conduits a hundred feet up beneath a walkway, Nekomata charged and soda in hand, running overwatch for a Section 9 gig. Fujimura suspected a mole in his drug operation and hired them off-book to stake out a shipment. When three Tyger Claw vehicles rolled in, confirmed traitors by Fujimura himself, Motoko dropped her Ni-Cola can at a gonk's feet, then put two charged Nekomata slugs through them from directly above while Rebecca opened up with her HMG from across the street.
The ambush was over fast. One traitor escaped in a Shion until Malcolm T-boned it and finished the driver with Shingen smart rounds. NCPD actually showed up, but Hiromi buried them in Section 9's official paperwork, the merc company's legit registration paying dividends. The crew split the loot and Fujimura's payment while Rebecca fumed about the cops confiscating bodies and cyberware before they could strip them clean.
With eddies in pocket and the gig wrapped, Hiromi dragged Motoko to Denny's music studio where Alice, Jared, and Klein were waiting. The full band ran through "Heathens" for hours. Klein on drums, Jared on bass, Alice on guitar, Rebecca cocking the Carnage on cue, while Motoko handled synth, vocals, and directing every arrangement detail. She checked her character sheet and discovered a free stat point from a Militech Condor adaptation refund, dropping it into Intelligence to hit 14. The itch to dive back into netrunning hit hard.
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215 215. Chapter 215
Motoko jacked into the net with Malcolm on babysitting duty and pumped two skill points into Breach Protocol, feeling knowledge flood in about server architecture and data movement that made digital walls look like cardboard. She followed an IP from Vortex to a buried pre-Datakrash server, an ancient relic with flat, Tron-like visuals and security so outdated she literally walked over its defenses by stepping outside the server architecture. Six IMP Daemons guarding the server died to HEAT Bullet hacks.
Deep in the server's hidden data nodes, she discovered stolen Militech Electronics laser weapon blueprints, pre-Datakrash tech from a defunct corp called Elite Electronics. The data wasn't worth a fortune, but it was worth something to the right buyer. She copied everything, patched the router adjustment she made to get in, and headed to Yoko's net club to sell. There she ran into Sasha, who apologized properly for the arena incident and showed off a new flash-cloned arm replacing the one she lost.
Yoko force-booted Sasha from the club mid-sentence, brokered a deal for the laser data, and traded Motoko several new Daemon-heavy server locations in exchange. The haggling left Motoko certain she was being swindled, a feeling she accepted with the resigned awareness that she should have brought Hiromi to negotiate.
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216 216. Chapter 216
Motoko exited Yoko's club to find Sasha throwing petty breach attempts at the door like a cat scratching furniture. Sasha dropped her goofy act long enough to explain a real problem: she mouthed off to Kiwi during a gig with Maine's crew and now had a netrunner challenge on her hands. Breaking into corpo security, fastest team wins. Kiwi had Lucy as her partner, and Sasha needed Motoko to be hers. The promise of ruining Kiwi's day, and seeing Lucy again, was enough to get a reluctant yes.
Sasha led Motoko to the old No/Brainer corporate server, a dead-code jungle packed with IMP Daemons, static turrets, and a Succubus guarding a hardware-disconnect data moat. They ran it as a two-woman team: Sasha cracked ICE and bridges while Motoko shredded every Daemon in sight, including ripping the Succubus apart before it could deploy its four attack programs. A massive wave of Soldier Daemons battered Motoko's defensive ICE as Sasha charged a ten-second upload that wiped the entire group in a wall of fire.
By the end of the run, the server was cleared and both runners had a solid feel for each other's combat style. Sasha's heavy, slow-charging attacks complemented Motoko's rapid low-RAM hacks. Back in meatspace, Malcolm had demolished all the snacks but stayed vigilant the whole time. Motoko thanked him for the overwatch and promised to buy him food, only to discover he was already stuffed.
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217 217. Chapter 217
Motoko hit Quick Hacks 10 after the server grind, unlocking the Ninja Hacking perk. Knowledge of how to slip programs below human and digital perception, one more step toward true Laughing Man capability. She tried to dump a stat point into Intelligence and got an error tone: she was already at her cyberware-boosted cap of 14. The realization sent her scrambling for new chrome, calling Vik and Hiromi to hunt for RAM upgrades.
Restless from a full day on the net while her body sat idle, she pulled Musashi's Katana and practiced forms in the apartment until Jun walked in. A sheath-only duel broke out. Motoko read every Sensei-taught pattern in Jun's technique, disarmed him with a flick, and landed on her feet like a ninja when he hurled her at the couch. Jun was equal parts impressed and annoyed. Vik found a Zetatech 6.5 RAM, but Hiromi one-upped him with a lead on a Raven Microcybernetics T3716, top-of-the-line hardware.
The catch: the seller operated out of the old stadium in Dogtown. Motoko swallowed her hatred of the place and drove them through the Barghest checkpoint to a van packed with cyberware hanging from hooks in plastic bags. She picked up four pieces: the T3716 RAM, a Raven Ex-Disk upgrade, a Camillo RAM Manager, and a Self-ICE unit. Enough to roughly double her available RAM. Hiromi went to war on pricing while Motoko watched the Barghest patrols and tried not to think about scav sellers.
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218 218. Chapter 218 ☠ 8
Motoko watched her Quadra roar out of the Dogtown stadium parking lot, stolen while she was inside buying chrome. She activated every tracker in the car and held her breath as it nearly reached the exit to Night City proper, where it would vanish into chop shops within hours. A Barghest truck blocked the turn by chance, and the thief drove deeper into Dogtown instead. Motoko stashed Hiromi at the Heavy Hearts bar, armed herself with Lexington, Burya, and Katana, and jogged across the district on foot following tracker pings.
She found the car at a Scav construction-site fortress called the Scrapers, fifty-plus hostiles dug into an unfinished skyscraper. The thief, a kid named Tony who stole a car-cracker from a dead VDB runner, sold her Quadra for a pathetic six thousand eddies. Motoko followed him out and opened his throat in an alley. Then she uploaded Onryo, her custom ghost-woman quick hack, into the entire Scav network and began the slaughter. Blinded Scavs fired at phantoms, one shot his own choom when Onryo appeared on the man's face, and Motoko moved through the container maze with her Katana, decapitating and stabbing targets who couldn't see her coming.
Down in the construction yard, the kills stacked up fast. A sniper with a Grad got a Katana through the heart from behind. A netrunner took a thrown knife through the throat via Onryo distraction. One Scav got blasted with his own Pozhar shotgun after Onryo blinded him. Three more Scavs lost their heads to a single Katana draw. The chapter ended with Scav boss Daniil sending his borged-out enforcer Dmitri and a heavy squad down in the elevator to deal with the ghost terrorizing his operation.
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219 219. Chapter 219 ☠ 8
Motoko continued her systematic extermination of the Dogtown Scav nest, picking off stragglers with knife work and Onryo illusions. She hacked the construction site's HMG turret and waited as Dmitri's heavy squad rode the elevator down. Using Onryo to puppeteer one Scav's voice into taunting the borged enforcer, she flipped his biomon into overdrive, rewrote his Kiroshi IFF tags, and watched him gun down his own people in a full Cyberpsycho meltdown. She lured him back upstairs via a friendly-tagged Onryo apparition to massacre the upper floors.
With Dmitri dead from taking too many bullets from his own victims upstairs, Motoko rode the elevator up herself, Katana drawn and hunting for the perfect cut. She dropped into a room of Scavs, activated the Sandevistan, and carved through them with Weapon Glitch hacks disabling every firearm before her blade arrived. One blinded Scav stumbled backward through a hole in the unfinished wall and fell screaming to his death. The Scav boss Daniil went down to a Burya round after his jammed gun clicked empty.
Cleanup was efficient. Motoko called in Section 9. Ichi pulled up in his van with Malcolm and Rebecca ready to loot. She pranked both Malcolm and Rebecca with Onryo apparitions before putting them to work stripping the dead of Eddie shards, weapons, and chrome. The Grad sniper rifle, an HMG turret, and stacks of gear got loaded into the truck as Motoko guided the crew through the elevator to the upper floors for a full sweep.
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220 220. Chapter 220
Motoko re-keyed her stolen Quadra after the car-cracker bricked her original shard, rescued her Tachikoma drone from where it got wedged upside-down under the passenger seat, and handed the car-cracker device to Rebecca, who immediately started scheming about stealing Malcolm's Caliburn. A Barghest patrol rolled up in an armored truck: three green recruits with Copperheads and one grizzled ex-Militech sergeant who sized up the teenage girl sitting in a graveyard of dead Scavs without flinching.
The sergeant explained Dogtown's bizarre fee structure for unauthorized violence, a literal price list for disrupting Barghest's peace. Motoko sent the absurd document to Hiromi, who contacted Barghest guest services and got the charges sorted in minutes. When one of the young Barghest soldiers talked trash, Motoko casually pulled an Uragan rocket launcher from her trunk to make a point. The sergeant left with a look of professional respect while Motoko called the crew to wrap up looting before more trouble arrived.
After picking Hiromi up from the Heavy Hearts, where she'd been stewing in guilt over dismissing Motoko's Dogtown warnings, they drove to Vik's clinic in Watson. Vik cleaned and checked all four pieces of new chrome, caught a nasty infection risk in the Ex-Disk and a dormant bug in the RAM, then installed everything: Raven Ex-Disk, T3716 RAM, Camillo RAM Manager, and Self-ICE. The RAM slotted in and Motoko felt her netrunning capacity expand like gaining a longer arm. Hiromi and Misty kept her company through the procedure while Vik delivered a quiet warning about chrome addiction, one Motoko cheerfully acknowledged.
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221 221. Chapter 221
Motoko woke up in Vik's clinic after getting four new pieces of cyberware installed. The Camillo was the only piece causing adaptation issues, a phantom hitch in her neck that wouldn't quite settle. She sent Hiromi on an errand to privately explain her adaptation ability to Vik, asking him to take detailed scans before and after she healed. The first time she trusted him with that secret directly.
A stat point went into Intelligence, pushing it to 15 with a new cap of 20 thanks to the cyberware's Cyberization bonus. A skill point raised Quick Hacks to 11, crossing the threshold from human-speed hacking into true cyborg territory. Configuring, uploading, and activating hacks now overlapped in milliseconds instead of running sequentially. The gap between meat and machine narrowed every level.
After dropping Hiromi at Arasaka Academy, the real grind began at the Tyger Claw Dojo in Little China. Sensei himself stepped onto the mat, and the two pushed each other through escalating exchanges. Shinai clacking at human speed before both activated their Sandevistans and blurred into something far beyond. Motoko landed a strike on Sensei's hand, unlocking Blades 10 and the Bullet Parry perk. Sensei bowed, the spar ended, and he told her there was someone she needed to meet.
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222 222. Chapter 222
Motoko rode shotgun in Sensei's beat-up Mahir Supron up through North Oak to the Chram Denya Jinja, a Shinto shrine dedicated to modern Kami of chrome, night, and electricity. Inside the private inner chamber, three monks waited in seiza. The eldest was a full-body-conversion cyborg in a Gemini shell, and before introductions finished he drew a tanto and swung without warning. Blade instinct saved her. She blocked the strike cold, reading the attack through shifts in wind and light rather than sight.
The elders formally acknowledged her as Night City's youngest Kensei on record and requested she perform calligraphy of the kanji for "sword." Mortified at her complete lack of brushwork skill, she crushed every emotion with Cold Blood, swiped the brush twice, and accidentally cut clean through the paper with sheer intent. The monks were delighted. Motoko fled the shrine before they could critique her penmanship. A Katanakaji would forge a blade worthy of a Kensei, though she barely registered the honor.
Back at a rented storage lot, the real test began. Malcolm fired a Lexington at her from across the yard and she parried the bullet with her Thermal Blade. Then Rebecca upped the ante with a three-round burst from her Omaha, all three rounds deflected in a Sandy-assisted blur of sparks and shrieking metal. Fujimura's men arrived to buy salvaged Scav gear while the crew watched their leader casually swat bullets out of the air. Hiromi tried to throttle Motoko for the stunt. The afternoon also included dropping off a new BD, "Don't Steal My Car," at Judy's workshop for editing.
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223 223. Chapter 223
Judy slipped into the new "Don't Steal My Car" braindance and felt the cold surgical confidence of an Onryo hunting Scavs through a Dogtown construction yard. Knife kills, stolen turrets, a hacked-to-Cyberpsychosis borged-up enforcer tearing his own crew apart. The intensity rattled her badly enough to yank the wreath off after just the opening kills. BD seller Nox rode deeper, all the way through the skyscraper assault and the Sandy-fueled katana slaughter, and came out the other side intoxicated by the feeling of being the most dangerous thing in the room.
Motoko continued bullet-deflection drills with Malcolm and Rebecca, testing the limits of Bullet Parry under Sandy. The perk had real constraints: rapid-fire from SMGs or overcharged tech weapons could still overwhelm her, but against pistol-caliber fire she was effectively untouchable with a blade in hand. Rebecca's cackling delight at each shower of sparks made the practice feel more like a party trick showcase than serious training.
Alice showed up pushing for a live gig soon. Violent Hemorrhage's remnants needed eddies, and the band members had rent to pay. Motoko dropped a skill point into Quick Hacks 12 and spent time juggling Cyberdeck RAM management. Alice pitched the idea of debuting a new song at every gig as a signature gimmick, and after some friction the two agreed on the plan.
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224 224. Chapter 224
Motoko and Sasha dove the No/Brainer server together for another training run, Sasha clearing rooms with her signature overwhelming hacks while Motoko handled breach duty with her upgraded RAM and Ex-Disk. The new cyberware doubled her available processing power, and Sasha noticed immediately. Motoko was crushing security gates faster than the veteran netrunner expected. After the duo run, Motoko went back in solo, redistributing hack payloads across all her cyberware to avoid overloading the main Cyberdeck. She leveled up mid-dive from all the Daemon kills.
Band practice took center stage as Stand Alone Complex worked through the studio version of Everlong. Klein nailed the tricky snare run, Jared held down the bass, and Alice pushed to add an electronic backtrack, a creative tension Motoko swallowed her purist instincts to accept. Taking over drums, Motoko hammered out Linkin Park's "Faint" from memory, Chester Bennington's scream ripping through the storage-unit studio. Alice was stunned, then fired up. The two agreed that every gig would debut a brand-new song as the band's signature gimmick.
David Martinez got his hands on the "Don't Steal My Car" braindance through Hiromi's distribution network and rode every second of the Scav slaughter. The Sandy-powered katana kills, the Burya execution on the bridge, all of it. He replayed it immediately, chasing the high of being dangerous. The hunger that burned in Motoko's chest during the BD now burned in his, and the gap between Academy student and aspiring edgerunner felt a little smaller each time he put the wreath back on.
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225 225. Chapter 225
Motoko spent a quiet morning putting an adaptation point into the Camillo RAM Manager and a skill point into Programming 14, then headed out for noodles. She was ambushed by a furious Hayato Arasaka, stomping out of an Alvarado in full kimono with a katana in hand. The Tyger Claw princess refused to accept that Motoko, this ramen-slurping, chrome-armed teenager, had been named Kensei by the Chram Denya Jinja elders. Hayato's guards fanned out around the street vendor while the two girls bickered over lunch like old friends.
A spar at Gomorrah gym settled things and didn't at the same time. Hayato's Kerenzikov-boosted speed couldn't crack Motoko's guard. Every strike was read like a book, every assault stalled and returned. Hand-to-hand went better for the princess, whose close-range technique powered by speedware landed hard enough to earn a genuine win. Hayato demanded Motoko attend a formal Tyger Claw party celebrating the Kensei achievement, organized by her father.
Over lunch with Hiromi near Arasaka Academy, David Martinez made his pitch: he wanted to join Section 9 as a proper merc, not just a BD pusher. Hiromi was livid, but Motoko laid down the rules. School comes first, no solo work, her pace and her rules, and absolutely no chroming up like a gonk. David agreed to everything without hesitation. Motoko quietly planned to hand him off to Malcolm for basic training, then dropped her last skill point of the day into Programming 15, ready to put the new knowledge to work.
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226 226. Chapter 226
Motoko locked herself into a programming marathon on the couch. Programming 15 came with a perk choice, and she picked Stress Testing, a meta-skill that revealed weaknesses in her code through accumulated usage data. Every program got a full audit. Ping had a multi-ping bounce artifact she tightened up, Optics Reboot's upload rate got rebalanced, and the rest of her hack loadout was cleaned and re-partitioned across her cyberware's RAM. She also cracked open the Cyberpsychosis ultimate hack for the first time, dissecting its kludged-together adrenaline spikes, IFF corruption, and forced-fire subroutines before starting a ground-up rewrite.
Alice texted about setting up a gig, and Motoko agreed, telling her to loop in Hiromi. After wrapping up programming, she grabbed her guitar and played along with Black Dog on the radio until Jun got home late. He watched her play for a moment, smiled, patted her head, and told her to go to sleep.
At Maine's safehouse, Sasha tackled Motoko with her usual manic energy before introducing her to Kiwi and Lucy. Rebecca stood watch as bodyguard while four ice baths with open ports awaited. Motoko recognized that four elite netrunners hitting one data fortress was massive overkill and suspected Faraday had planned it that way. Rebecca discovered Motoko's crippling shyness around undressed netrunners, turning the pre-dive stripping-down into an extended roasting session. Kiwi's spiderweb bodysuit, Lucy's combat suit, Sasha's enthusiasm. All of it left Motoko tomato-red and sputtering denials while Rebecca howled with laughter. She fled into the net to escape the embarrassment.
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227 227. Chapter 227
Motoko dropped into Sasha's aggressively pink cat-themed net lobby and immediately questioned the older runner's taste. The four-netrunner team hit the corporate data fortress hard. Sasha and Motoko breached from one entry point while Kiwi and Lucy took another. A data moat slammed down mid-run, splitting Motoko away from Sasha and pairing her with Kiwi instead. Working with Kiwi was a revelation: no babying, no delineated roles, just two runners hitting everything at full speed. Kiwi used a CC hack to lock Daemons in place while Motoko's Strong Breach shattered security walls like a freight train.
Lucy, Kiwi, and Motoko converged at the fortress core, where the corp's security netrunner made his stand backed by server-boosted defenses and massed Daemons. All three runners went loud. Motoko burned Sandy cycles to clear Daemon waves while Lucy and Kiwi dismantled the runner's ICE. When he surrendered, Lucy tried to flatline him anyway. Motoko threw up triple-layered ICE to save his life, earned a quiet "thanks" from the terrified corp runner, and told Lucy off for trying to kill a surrendering opponent over some data nobody was dying for.
Post-dive chaos erupted in the basement as everyone climbed out of ice baths. Sasha tackled a naked, mortified Motoko demanding acknowledgment of their team's victory. Rebecca towel-whipped her way into a brawl that ended with Motoko holding the tiny gremlin upside-down over an ice bath. Maine refused to investigate the screaming from downstairs. Upstairs, Kiwi and Sasha both claimed victory while Motoko declared "the real winner was the friends we made along the way." She drove home acknowledging she couldn't have solo'd the fortress, and that working with Kiwi had been better than working with Sasha, who she now realized had been babying her.
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228 228. Chapter 228
The data fortress Daemon grind pushed Motoko to a level-up, and she agonized over where to spend the stat point. Jun came home tired from double-checking Fujimura's year-end books ahead of the Tyger Claw bosses' annual meeting. Their sibling banter devolved into a couch wrestling match that ended with Jun picking Motoko up and throwing her across the room.
Stand Alone Complex finalized the set list for their gig at the Electric Orgasm: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Rise, Heathens, This Fffire, The Pretender, and the debut of Faint as the new closer. Alice argued for Faint over Everlong, since the harder sound fit the venue better. Klein and Jared were itching to get back on stage, and even Motoko's perfectionism bent to the band's collective hunger to perform.
Motoko visited an old seamstress who called her a gorilla and teased her about getting bigger, then went clothes shopping for new jeans and leotards. She also stopped at the Electric Orgasm early and ran into Klein at the bar. Fixer Dino Dinovic introduced himself, rocking an aviator-jacket look while scoping talent. He tipped Motoko that real producers were in the house tonight for the band playing after Stand Alone Complex, and suggested stealing the spotlight. Intelligence got pushed to 16, Breach Protocol to 15 with the Team Breach perk, and Motoko headed into the gig with new netrunning power and familiar stage anxiety.
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229 229. Chapter 229
Motoko took the stage at the Electric Orgasm and tore through the set. Smells Like Teen Spirit opened with crooning grunge energy, Rise got the crowd pumping fists in the air, and then Heathens dropped the room silent. She pulled a loaded Carnage shotgun from a guitar case mid-song, racked the slide into the mic for a grinding metal punctuation, and started tossing live shells into the crowd. A girl in glowing eyeliner and fishnet stockings caught the shotgun itself at the song's climax, clutching it like a trophy the rest of the night.
The Pretender kept the energy volcanic, and then Faint debuted. Alice rapped Mike Shinoda's verses while Motoko channeled Chester Bennington's iconic screams into a crowd that had never heard anything like it. The audience roared back every chorus, the walls felt too small, and by the final "I WON'T BE IGNORED" the entire bar was on its feet. Hiromi, Malcolm, and Ichi worked the crowd selling shards between songs. Rebecca cackled from the bar with her legs kicking in the air.
After the set, CCT Records talent scout Charles Davis approached with a business card. Hiromi intercepted with shark-like corporate precision, and Alice buzzed with barely contained excitement. Dino pulled Motoko aside to praise the Carnage stunt and pitch a stealth gig: a shard swap at a Rayfield dealership, clean infiltration with no flatlines. She agreed to hear the details and split off to nurse her churning stomach, riding the post-performance adrenaline crash alone.
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230 230. Chapter 230
Motoko accepted Dino's stealth gig, swapping a shard in the back office of Night City's only Rayfield dealership inside a secured Downtown high-rise. She picked up the replacement shard from Dino's delivery man Simon, scouted the target from a parking garage across the street, and called Rebecca in her oversized Thorton Mackinaw for overwatch and extraction backup. The plan hinged on the dealership's VIP test-drive routine: when a client took a car around the rooftop track, every salesperson followed, leaving the back offices exposed.
Execution was textbook infiltration. A spoofed Kiroshi keypad got her through the private garage, a looped camera feed covered the crossing, and she climbed through the building's stairwells and a call-center office to reach an exterior walkway one floor above the dealership. On Rebecca's signal she dropped onto the track during a blind spot in camera coverage, breached the mechanic's side door in three seconds, and monkey-barred across the ceiling struts to avoid the lone mechanic. The shard swap in Sales Manager White's filing cabinet took moments, then she reversed the route, removed all traces of her camera loops, and slid down a street light to blend into pedestrian traffic.
Dino confirmed the gig clean. No deaths, no fires, no reports. Motoko split the payout fifty-fifty with Rebecca over noodles despite Becca's protests that she "didn't do shit." Rebecca revealed she'd received her new Gorilla Arms, big bulky quick-change models, and had been replacing finger joints and having Sasha check the programming before chipping in. An Athletics level-up pinged from all the climbing and dropping, capping a perfect zero-body-count heist.
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231 231. Chapter 231
Motoko heard Stand Alone Complex's full Electric Orgasm gig broadcast on Growl FM, with DJ Ash stopping the recording mid-Heathens to beg for a studio version. Alice was thrilled; Motoko wanted to crawl under a blanket. She dropped a skill point into Quick Hacks, then headed to her netrunner cave in the Straight Lane Apartments to grind Daemons on the No/Brainer server.
Section 9's training session at a rented range revealed an uncomfortable truth: nobody wanted to drill. Ichi called target practice "repetitive" and argued his truck turrets were his real weapon. Malcolm followed orders but admitted it was boring. Rebecca flatly refused any talk of a desert boot camp, insisting edgerunners learn by surviving real firefights. Motoko's frustrated speech about wanting all her chooms to live to sixty landed with warmth but no traction. She admitted to herself she was just a bad teacher.
Hiromi dragged Motoko to a kimono shop for the upcoming Tyger Claw year-end party. The seamstress, an imperious old woman who called Motoko a gorilla, produced a genuine silk kimono with flowing sleeves once she learned Motoko was a Kensei. She also made an obi designed to carry a blade. Motoko hip-tossed Hiromi onto the faux-tatami for trying to pinch her, got scolded for roughhousing, and silently plotted to smuggle her Burya under the sash. Practice sessions with Alice and another gig loomed on the horizon, the band riding high on producer interest and Growl FM airplay.
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232 232. Chapter 232
Motoko and Jun sparred at Gomorrah gym after a morning of sibling trash-talk. Jun was heavier, stronger, and faster than expected thanks to his Kamikaze-era cyberware. A hip-throw attempt failed spectacularly when his bulk just lifted her off the mat. She activated her Sandy, wrapped her legs around his head, and flung him sideways. The gym manager kicked them both out after their "sparring" devolved into full-contact screaming and choking on the mats.
Back home, the Tachikoma drone got a major upgrade. Programming 16 flowed through Motoko like second nature, code born at the speed of thought. She cleaned up the little bot's racing-game-trained movement code, taught it spatial mapping through optics, and accidentally helped it develop object permanence when she rolled to a new spot and it processed the change. Processing power remained the bottleneck; the old laptop acting as secondary server was nowhere near enough.
A visit to Yoko, the Fox fixer who ran a little shop as her meatspace front, put a heist on the table. Militech's City Center showroom sat above an underground supply room that might contain the drone hard drives the Tachikoma desperately needed, plus Paraline units Yoko wanted for herself. Six-month-old security layouts were better than nothing, and Motoko agreed to start probing Militech's corporate ICE. Band practice that evening confirmed the momentum: multiple producers were circling, a studio version of Faint was needed immediately, and Alice's fire was burning hotter than ever.
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233 233. Chapter 233
Hiromi's morning started with a shower-office routine: managing SLS drug operation logistics, offloading leftover security bot loot, and coordinating Section 9 business. A call to her SLS dealer Richard sorted out a lost-bag discrepancy. She texted Motoko about lunch, handled marketing data for the drug operation, and reminded herself she still had homework to finish despite running a small criminal empire. The gig at 7th Hell was tomorrow night, and everything needed to be locked in.
Motoko and Stand Alone Complex tore through their set at 7th Hell, a much fancier club packed with corpo suits and screaming fans. Three music producers were in the audience scoping the band. After the set, Alice pushed Motoko to join the VIP afterparty instead of hiding in the band room. Rather than play the flirtatious Rockerboy, Motoko dragged a chair to the back wall and started an impromptu acoustic set, crooning Everlong to the crowd. Half the club migrated upstairs to listen, sitting on the floor in a reverent hush.
Hiromi walked the three producers out of their private room to witness the spectacle and let the scene sell itself. Ian Carver from MSM Records, practically the biggest label in the city, cut through the rival bids and demanded to sign Stand Alone Complex on the spot. Hiromi smirked like a shark and started squeezing for better terms, all while mentally cursing the homework she still had to finish.
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234 234. Chapter 234
Motoko got dragged out of bed by a buzzing Hiromi and hauled to MSM Records headquarters to sign the label contract. Hiromi forced a detour for new jeans because the old pair smelled like merc work. Alice, Klein, and Jared had already signed by the time they arrived. Ian Carver introduced them to Raney from Point Break Candy, and Motoko scrawled her name on the dotted line with the private thought that contracts were only worth the paper they were printed on if you murdered enough people.
The celebration barely cooled before Ian started pushing chrome sponsorships. Kiroshi optics, new cyberarms, the whole corpo package. Motoko shut him down cold on replacing her Condor arms, but Hiromi smoothed things over by suggesting they ease into the conversation. When Motoko asked about access to the Militech Showroom, Ian bit without hesitation, not knowing she was scoping the place for a heist.
Back at the apartment, Jun pried the plan out of her and immediately demanded in on the Militech job. He wasn't about to let his sister rob a corporate showroom without him. The next morning brought the real culture shock: Motoko had a job with actual hours, studio sessions, and a schedule. She stared at the ceiling wondering who in their right mind decided to give a professional killer a day job. A text from Hayato reminded her the Tyger Claw year-end party was coming up too.
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235 235. Chapter 235
Motoko donned a dark blue kimono with a flowery hair piece, courtesy of Hiromi's fussing, and rode to the Tyger Claw end-of-year bash as Hayato Nakagawa's personal guest. After surrendering her Burya at the security checkpoint (the katana got a pass), she stepped into a ballroom filled with TC bosses, their dates, and semi-famous faces. Hayato steered her upstairs to meet Hagihara, a chrome-armed master swordsmith who examined Motoko's trash-tier katana, grunted in disapproval, and built her a proper blade right there on the spot. Reinforced hilt for cyborg grip strength, orbital-grade steel, and a hamon like flickering fire.
Shinobu Nakagawa put Motoko on display downstairs. A tatami cutting post was wheeled out, and Motoko drew the new blade in a single silent iaijutsu cut that dropped the mat head clean off. The performance earned quiet claps and a pointed suggestion from Shinobu that she might teach at the Deravaja Dojo. A political move she clocked immediately but swallowed without complaint.
Jun cornered her afterward, furious she'd never mentioned the Kensei thing or the party invite. The siblings bickered through the rest of the event until Motoko escaped upstairs to sit with Wakako, who warned her that eddies from her Rockerboy career would change things. Motoko brushed off the concern, insisting the merc stuff was the main gig. After the party, she shed the kimono, strapped on her guns, and took the Kusanagi out for a midnight ride through Night City, ending up at the Cherry Blossom Market ramen stall, quietly eating noodles alone.
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236 236. Chapter 236
Motoko endured the Tyger Claw party's political circuit at Hayato's side, fielding introductions from TC bosses who wanted a Kensei on their roster for face value alone. Jun hogged the snack table while Motoko played loyal samurai bodyguard. Hayato introduced her to Kuzo, who praised the killing of Kanada Tsukimura and acknowledged the Nakagawa heir's growing power base.
A ceremonial gong signaled the main event. Shinobu Nakagawa delivered the annual TC report. Red envelopes were distributed to each boss: rewards of territory, businesses, or punishing failures disguised as opportunities. Wakako explained the tradition from her balcony perch and pivoted to warning Motoko that Rockerboy money would test her commitment to merc work. Motoko brushed off the concern, insisting the music gig was the side hustle.
After the party, the Kusanagi siblings argued their way home. Jun was livid about being blindsided, Motoko insistent she just forgot. She changed out of the kimono, racked her three katana (Thermal, Musashi, and the new Kensei blade), and took the Kusanagi for a midnight ride to the Cherry Blossom Market for ramen. The next day brought the real fight: a producer at the MSM recording studio who couldn't stop adding reverb to every note while Motoko refused to let anyone butcher her songs.
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237 237. Chapter 237
Motoko survived a photo shoot with a domineering photographer who critiqued her unpolished chrome, then got ambushed by Alex Angelopoulos, MSM's slick new "assistant" assigned to manage her. He was a corporate handler disguised as a helpful liaison, dangling restaurant reservations, celebrity meet-ups, and Militech Eagle cyberarms in front of her like bait. The Eagle specs were genuinely tempting: Orbital Crystal reinforcement, better dexterity than her Condors, modular weapon mounts. Motoko saw the devil's bargain underneath and told him to talk to Hiromi.
Back at the apartment, Jun listened to her vent about MSM's corporate playbook, the assistant trick designed to wedge between artist and manager. The conversation derailed when Jun gleefully recounted how young Motoko once dug a used Cybermatrix Holo Tattoo out of the trash behind Ryder's clinic and got it chipped in. The chrome had been pulled from a rotting corpse. Motoko's horror was palpable.
A late-night call from Wakako snapped her back to business: a TC wife-killer needed his murder weapon pulled from a hidden safe before the NCPD found it. Motoko raced to the apartment only to find cops already inside, the dead woman likely had police connections explaining the fast response. She hacked the TV to blast Watson Whore at max volume as a distraction, slipped through a bedroom window, cracked the safe (which beeped loud enough to alert every badge in the building), and Sandy-dashed out with the Unity pistol just ahead of the officers.
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238 238. Chapter 238
Motoko collected from Wakako after the messy gun retrieval. The fixer admitted the dead woman likely had police connections, explaining the rapid NCPD response. Frustrated by the Rockerboy grind, Motoko hit a Japantown gun range with her Tactician Shotgun to grind Annihilation, burning through shells in a meditative loop of fire-pump-reload until the XP ticked closer toward level 6.
MSM threw a rooftop launch party for Stand Alone Complex's debut single Pretender, rubbing shoulders with Night City's rich and famous. Motoko ordered Beef Wellington, real baked potato, and a sushi platter on MSM's tab, then nearly stabbed Alex's hand to the table when he reached for her food. The band played Pretender to a room of mostly indifferent elites, and Motoko poured genuine fury into every lyric because the performance interrupted her meal.
After the set, Kitty Thunder, the star of Watson Whore, cozied up to the band playing drunk but razor-sharp underneath. She signed autographs, kissed Jared's chest with a marker, and whispered a pointed warning about Alex into Motoko's ear during a photo op. Alex pushed hard to get Motoko on Kitty's show and into more brand deals, but Motoko deflected everything to Hiromi. The ride home in MSM's limo cemented her suspicion: Alex wasn't just annoying, he was dangerous enough that even a seasoned actress felt the need to flag it.
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239 239. Chapter 239 ☠ 5
Motoko and Hiromi hashed out the MSM situation over noodles. Alex kept setting up gigs behind Hiromi's back, forcing her to rubber-stamp deals or cost MSM money. They agreed to let him dig his own grave while Hiromi learned his corporate playbook, with murder firmly on the table the moment he crossed the line. At the recording studio, another night of fighting with the sound tech over electronic edits to Everlong left Motoko boiling, and she tore out of the MSM parking garage on the Kusanagi looking for trouble.
Trouble found her at a Valentino-run rooftop pit fight in an emptied swimming pool. A chrome-skulled 6th Street banger called the American Devil had been dominating all comers, and when he chucked a half-full beer cup into Motoko's face, she dropped into the pool fists-first. The brawl was brutal. He was a better boxer with an armored brain case and chrome fists. Motoko wall-ran the pool, launched off some poor gonk's crotch, and landed an aerial haymaker that folded the Devil cold. She kicked him in the nuts for good measure.
When 6th Street drew guns over their champion's loss, Motoko hit them with a Mass Weapon Glitch and went feral. Her own song blasted from the radio as she donkey-kicked the first ganger off the rooftop, pulled her knife, and carved through the rest. She rode one screaming 6th Streeter off the edge of the building like a surfboard. Back home, she told Jun she was nova. Sometimes a girl just needed a little extreme hyperviolence.
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240 240. Chapter 240
Motoko woke up feeling nova after the rooftop bloodbath, reviewed her Street Brawler XP gains, and headed to Lizzie's Bar to drop off the fight BD with Judy Alvarez. She found the editor running on energy drinks alongside Evelyn Parker, the blue-haired Clouds doll. Evelyn excused herself when Motoko arrived, and Judy grudgingly accepted the shard after confirming there were no eyeballs in this one.
Lunch with Malcolm and Ichi at the Sakura Market ramen stall turned into therapy when Malcolm told Motoko to stop hyperfocusing on the negatives of her MSM deal and start milking the perks: real food, rich contacts who need mercs, free chrome. Ichi confessed he'd been using the Minotaur mech enough to seize its ankle actuator, nearly getting himself strangled before Malcolm's earnest intervention saved his life. The conversation reframed Motoko's Rockerboy frustrations as normal job complaints.
Judy's POV closed the chapter as she edited Motoko's rooftop BD, experiencing the pit fight through Motoko's emotional feed and marveling at the flat, iron confidence where fear should be. The Sandy-assisted wall-run punch landed with perfect clarity. Then the 6th Street massacre played out in rapid succession: knife to jugular, thrown knife to chest, stolen gun, and the stomach-dropping freefall of surfing a screaming ganger off a building. Judy paused the scroll at impact and whispered a quiet curse.
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241 241. Chapter 241
Fancy shampoo in the shower reminded Motoko that the Rockerboy gig had perks worth embracing. Free chrome topped the list. She psyched herself up for the day's main event: a Militech brand deal that would swap her old Condor cyberarms for a fresh set of Eagles, all filmed as a commercial at Vik's clinic. Outside Misty's Esoterica, the area was swarming with camera vans and corpo vehicles. Hiromi was already there managing Alex, who was clearly scheming something despite playing the obedient assistant.
A Chevilion Emperor rolled up carrying the Militech delegation, and out stepped a face Motoko recognized instantly. Thomas Anderson. The same gonk who once stabbed her in the chest and kicked her out a twelfth-story window during a past gig. Now he was bodyguarding Katalina, the Militech middle manager overseeing the ad shoot. The two locked eyes in a mutual threat assessment before deciding the other wasn't worth drawing on. Motoko mocked him for failing to kill a defenseless teenager, offered him a job with Section 9 (he declined), and promised to kill him if they ever clashed again.
Katalina nearly torpedoed the entire event the moment she clocked Hiromi's Arasaka Academy uniform, refusing to work alongside an enemy corpo's student. Alex jumped to smooth things over a little too eagerly, because this was his play all along: get Hiromi removed from the equation. Motoko told Katalina to stuff it, and Hiromi shut the whole power grab down by quoting the exact loss projections Katalina would eat if she walked away. The corpo folded, and the two women pivoted into grudging mutual respect, bonding over cost-benefit analysis while Motoko worried about "Dommy Mommy wiles."
Down in Vik's basement clinic, now buried under cameras and lighting rigs, Vik inspected the brand-new Militech Eagle Mk.V arms. Orbital Crystal reinforcement on the bones, thickened myomer for serious strength gains, a Gorilla arm mod, subdermal grip, and EMP-hardened shielding. A Militech doctor kept fussing about voiding the warranty while Vik calmly popped panels to check for spyware. Motoko felt nervous but ready. It was time for new chrome.
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242 242. Chapter 242
Motoko woke up on Vik's operating chair with brand-new Militech Eagle Mk.V arms. Silver chrome, sleeker than the old Condors, and feeling like a million eddies. She refused to parrot the cringey Militech taglines the corpo handler kept feeding her, settling on "they feel like I can take on the world, or at least a small Corp" before the cameras finally stopped rolling. The Eagles only needed four adaptation slots compared to the Condors' five, freeing up a point she dropped straight into her Sandevistan adaptation.
Hiromi swung by the clinic glowing after watching Alex seethe over his failed power play. She admitted she should have anticipated the Militech-Arasaka friction and resolved to stop getting swept up in Alex's rhythm. Then she deliberately fed Alex details about Motoko's merc work in front of her, running some play Motoko couldn't quite read yet. Back at the apartment, Jun gave the new arms a flat "Nice arms," insisted she get them checked for bugs (Vik already had), and the two bickered about whether anyone actually does the post-surgery exercises Vik prescribed.
Next morning, Vik ran her through boxing drills in the alley outside his clinic. Jabs, weaves, and full Gorilla mod punches that sent the old fighter back a few steps shaking his hand. Her brawling leveled up mid-session. Jun kicked her out of the apartment until five for a mysterious "business meeting," and every friend she called was suspiciously busy. Hiromi cancelled events, Malcolm and Ichi had stuff to do, Hayato turned down a spar. She wandered Night City bored until five-oh-five, opened the apartment door, and instinctively punched one fist through the ceiling while drawing her Burya with the other hand as a room full of chooms screamed "Surprise!" Happy birthday, Motoko.
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243 243. Chapter 243
Motoko dropped from the ceiling hole she'd punched through on reflex, holstered the Burya, and let Hiromi's surprise party run its course. Her fifteenth, by Kusanagi's calendar. Confetti everywhere from Ichi, spiked punch she didn't realize was spiked, and Rebecca on the couch eyeing Jun like a shark. The chooms chanted her into drinking despite her insisting she doesn't touch alcohol. She figured the only way through the taste was to slam it fast.
She woke the next morning to a disaster zone. Hiromi draped over the kitchen counter, Ichi rolled off the couch, Malcolm crumpled under the table, all three green and refusing to say a word about what went down. She fetched meat sticks and water from the guy downstairs and nursed the walking dead through hangovers. Then Rebecca strolled out of Jun's bedroom in her underwear, slapped Motoko on the ass, christened her "Charmer," and sauntered off. Whatever happened during the karaoke blackout, the chooms unanimously agreed she was never drinking around anyone but them again.
Aggressively not thinking about Jun, she took the Kusanagi to MSM Studio 48 and built Daft Punk's "One More Time" from raw. Every sample crafted from scratch, every lyric layered in solo, the most complex song she'd ever made. Finishing it pushed her to Rockerboy Level 10, max rank, and she picked Force of Personality so no stage could ignore her again. Alex caught her on the way out, dangled a movie soundtrack gig with a fat bonus attached, and made sure to mention he was looping Hiromi in whether Motoko cared or not.
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244 244. Chapter 244
Hiromi camps out at Motoko's place to prep for Morro Rock's battle of the bands the next weekend, a live radio gig with a middling crowd and a heavy camera setup. The insurance paperwork covers cyberpsycho hits and ordinary punters smuggling internal hardware, so Hiromi greenlights the katana on stage without blinking. Pre-show nerves itching, Motoko pitches training over pacing: find an abandoned building and clear it like real spec ops, drill the chooms while burning off the static. She waves Hiromi off the scouting job and takes it herself.
She prowls the industrial northwest in the Quadra, dodging Maelstrom haunts and shantytowns until a fenced warehouse reads dead enough. Fence vaulted, second-floor door popped with bare chrome, the inside checks empty except for a homeless camp with no one home. The crew rolls up, Malcolm dragging David along in a cheap vest and helmet while Rebecca no-shows. Motoko sets the rules: mags out, gun-tag, assault versus defense, fifty eddies and dinner pick to the winner. Hiromi tries to draft Malcolm for the pot, so Motoko stuffs Malcolm with David instead.
The drills devolve fast. David walks around with the Unity hanging like a luncheon prop and turns it sideways once, earning a wrist twist and a lecture about not being a gangoon. Malcolm wraps himself in a filthy squatter's blanket for ninja cover and gets sent off to wash his hands. Ichi quietly piles double kills, picks up the fifty eddies, and drags the crew to Lizzie's for nachos and free BD time, where David's Mama calls mid-meal and he panics through the worst alibi a street kid never told. Tomorrow brings the concert, the Militech Showroom recon, and the start of heist prep.
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245 245. Chapter 245
Battle of the bands at Morro Rock: a middling room, a paid crowd to amp the energy, a live radio and TV feed pulling the real ratings. Stand Alone Complex plays "Heathens" again instead of new material, Hiromi's call to push the upcoming album. Motoko walks out in sharp stage makeup with her Orphean already humming, lets the temperature in her head drop, and runs every trick Rockerboy 10 gave her to grab the crowd on the opening line.
Carmen, the trio's old bandmate and the original owner of Motoko's guitar, shows up after the set in a bio-sculpted face and a tantrum, mocking Stand Alone Complex as coattail riders. Motoko jabs back about his obvious obsession, Alex politely throws him out, and Alice flings a water bottle after him screaming traitor bitch. Then Carmen's solo project takes the contest, clearly bought, and Motoko runs a real mental sketch on putting a bullet through him before talking herself down. Alice settles for screaming "Fuck you Carmen! You suck!" over the live broadcast loud enough to bleed past the paid crowd, and the actual laughter she pulls feels better than the trophy would have.
Back in the car Alex spills that MSM never expected a win, the whole play was visibility, and post-contest chatter has Stand Alone Complex pegged as one of three bands the public thought should have taken the top spot. The next morning belongs to the Militech Showroom. Motoko rides in with her BD recorder hot and Tyler Harris waiting at the VIP garage, cataloguing cameras, scanners, and guard posts before the elevator opens. The first hall is a Hot Topic of teen-angst Militech, pink Strawberry combat knives and keychains for guns, which she waves off until a pair of armored Orca boots catches her eye and Hiromi pounces on the brand deal. Seven halls and the storage area still to walk, brand-deal eddies already in motion, and she keeps reminding herself this is recon for the heist, not shopping.