404: Doom Not Found

- 11 years before canon -

Gina coughed violently, soot and terror lacing her throat as Victor stepped closer through the drifting haze. Her pistol slipped from her hand, clattering uselessly to the scorched floor.

"Victor…" she rasped, retreating a step. "This isn't you. You're—this isn't you."

"Then perhaps," Victor said, his voice muffled through the mask, "you never understood who I was to begin with."

He raised his hand slowly, gloved, insulated, faintly humming with residual charge. She didn't run. Not yet. She was calculating. Always had been.

"Let's speak plainly," he said. "You knew they were coming. You called them in. I want names. Purpose. The case, explain."

"I didn't—" she started, but he cut her off with a step forward and the hiss of his gauntlet charging.

She swallowed. Her façade cracked—chipped paint trying to hide rot.

"Okay, okay. I didn't call them, not directly. I was holding the case for a client. One of the heavy hitters, all corpo hush-hush. They wanted it delivered, no peeks, no pings, and I followed protocol—"

He tilted his head.

"Until I became inconvenient," he said flatly.

"You disappeared! You went dark! That case had a trace on it. Not my doing. They saw the trail and pulled in contractors. I didn't send them, I just… didn't stop them."

Victor stepped forward and gripped her by the chin. She flinched as the voltage in his glove hissed, just close enough for her skin to feel the tingle.

"You knew they'd find the old man," he said. "You used him to get to me."

Her eyes widened, but she didn't deny it. That was enough.

"Who hired you?"

"I told you," she stammered. "No names. No comms. All blacked out. The payment was clean, a digital ghost. But—" she choked on the word as he tightened his grip, "—but the logs I couldn't crack, Victor. It's corpo-level blackmail. Hidden behind logistics files. I tried. I swear."

"You don't strike me as the type to try unless there's a payout."

She gave a broken laugh. "That's fair."

Victor turned his head slightly, flicking his internal comm open to V's line. Her voice came through fuzzy—likely busy pacing or pulling data.

"What's your transfer ID?" he asked her calmly.

"Huh? Why—"

"Just send it."

V hesitated, then sighed and relayed it.

Victor tapped the numbers into his cracked screen, holding Gina by the chin the whole time.

She stared at him. "What—what are you doing?"

"Payment," Victor said. "Your remaining funds. All of it."

"You bastard!" she shrieked, twisting in his grasp.

Victor's voice didn't rise. "Thank your god, I'm not interested in theatre. If I were like the rest of this city, you'd already be in pieces."

"Come on, Vic," she said, panting. "I get it. I screwed you. But let me live. I'll disappear. You'll never see me again."

He released her chin.

She slumped down slightly, hope rising in her eyes.

"I won't kill you," Victor revealed, his cold gaze looking down at her.

"Really?" She smiled, her eyes looked up in hope, only to feel a chill.

"Your soul will remember what your flesh will not..." 

He raised his glove again.

The electric surge hissed from his gauntlet, and he pressed it against the side of her skull. Her body convulsed—once, twice—then went limp.

Smoke curled from her temples.

Her eyes stared forward, blank, glassy.

Not dead.

But gone.

Victor stood over her, his breathing even beneath the mask.

"Doctor Doom never forgets his debts," he muttered to no one.

Then he turned and walked away, the firelight casting his silhouette like a spectre reborn.

Victor paused at the threshold of the ruined apartment. The air smelled of scorched synthetic, ozone, and whatever Gina had been smoking before it all went to hell. Behind him, her body twitched once more — muscle memory trying to reassert life. But the eyes said it all. Gina J was a blank slate now. Not dead, but hollow.

"You might want to Delta choom, your little bomb just woke up the entire neighbourhood. Badges are going crazy to make it over... Fuck... Maxtac just got word... You need to leave Victor!" 

He adjusted the gloves, the heat still bleeding faintly from the conductors.

Doom moved at his own pace. 

Above the doorframe, a small security camera blinked red. Still live. Still recording. A relic — old corp tech, probably still on a backlogged local feed.

Victor stared into the lens. A single breath.

Behind the mask, his mouth curled.

V's voice buzzed through the comm line, sharp but cautious. "Listen, Victor... You're on cam. Want me to scrub it? Can't be hard. I've already looped three others in the area but that doesn't mean the cops and civi's haven't stopped hearing"

Victor didn't answer immediately. He tilted his head, letting the camera capture the polished gleam of his mask in the burning half-light.

Then, slowly, he spoke.

"No."

A pause.

"You sure?" V asked, her tone shifting. "That's heat on your back. That's a trail. People are gonna trace this."

He simply ignored her words and kept moving forward. 

He turned and disappeared into the smoke, the camera's faint whir following him as he vanished from view — a message left in silhouette and silence:

Doctor Doom had arrived. And he was done hiding.

The world will bow and Night city will be first. 

---

"They torched it?"

Jäger's voice came cold and precise through the comms, tinged with disbelief.

"No," MM replied, her jaw locked tight as she stared at the drone feed. "He did worse. He desecrated it."

The building that once housed Gina J's operations was now a skeletal ruin. Fire suppression drones hovered like carrion birds, spraying foam over what was left of the top floors. Civil responders and armoured NYPD-SWAT units moved in behind them, pushing civilians back and sealing off exits with portable barricades. A perimeter was already forming.

It wasn't just scorched.

It was deliberate.

Explosives were placed, fire paths plotted, and even the spacing of the casualties was surgical.

Victor hadn't just attacked. He'd sent a message.

Jäger swore in Polish under his breath. "We lost the case."

"Yes," MM replied, still watching the live stream. Her expression was unreadable, but her fingers twitched against the side of her tablet as she zoomed in. "And Gina's alive. Barely."

Ruckus, standing beside her in the safehouse with arms crossed, let out a dry grunt. "That a win or a loss?"

MM didn't answer right away. She studied the footage: Gina J's charred apartment, scorched walls and shattered chrome, responders dragging out survivors. Gina was among them, carried limp on a gurney, face pale and eyes glassed over. She twitched once. Then nothing.

Brain-dead. Not a scratch on her, but her mind fried like old hardware.

"He left her alive," MM muttered. "Didn't finish the job."

"Sent a warning," Jäger said grimly. "Or left bait."

He had seen such examples left in war, women given the grace of life but not cleansed. 

MM's nails tapped once on the table, quick and sharp.

"He's no longer playing defence," she said. "And now every badge in Night City is crawling through that building. We can't move on her, not now."

She walked away from the screen, letting the feed play in the background. Sirens wailed faintly through the speakers, then the crackle of crowd dispersal systems being activated.

"He's forcing us to change the tempo. It's a bluff."

"Not a bad one," Ruckus muttered.

"No. It's a declaration." Her voice dropped. "The Demon is saying he's ready for war."

Jäger didn't respond. He lit a cigarette instead, exhaling smoke near the window, eyes locked on the skyline.

MM finally sat down, folding her arms, the tension shifting from fury to calculation.

"The case is gone. The contract's technically still open, but now it's radioactive. Half the city will be watching his next move. Gina J was our best lead, and now she's reduced to meat with a heartbeat."

"And we still don't know what was in the case," Ruckus added.

"We don't need to," MM said. "Not anymore. Our orders were to erase the trail. The girl. The fixer. The ghost."

She looked over her shoulder at them both, her tone iron.

"We stay the course. We finish it. Clean. Quiet. No more games."

"Victor's not going to stop now," Jäger warned. "You saw what he did with just scavenged gear. And he's smart. Ruthless. He learns."

"So do we," MM replied, standing again. "Start vetting our fallback options. We'll flush him out another way."

She walked toward the encrypted wall console and keyed in a sequence. The screen blinked, then loaded a full NCPD operations map. Gina J's building was marked red. A dozen patrol units were fanning out from the site. Cameras across Watson, Heywood, and parts of Charter Hill were spinning to trace anything out of the ordinary.

Victor's image was already being circulated through private channels.

"He'll surface again," MM said. "He won't be able to resist."

"And if he does?"

"We hit him hard. No more theatrics. Just erasure."

Jäger stepped forward, eyes narrowing. "And what if he comes for us first?"

MM turned, lips curling just slightly.

"Then he dies with style."

---

The low hum of the arcade's backup generator buzzed in the background, static crawling along the broken screens and gutted panels.

Doom stood over a rusted table, pieces of scorched circuitry and dismantled drives scattered across its surface. The acrid scent of burnt chemicals still lingered, a reminder of the thermite's fury.

The case was gone. Gina J was a husk. And the enemy—those three predators—would be watching now.

Victor didn't care.

Footsteps approached from the side corridor, soft at first, then louder. V's silhouette emerged, slouched against the cracked doorframe. She was chewing gum, hair messy, boots dragging with that usual teenage defiance.

"You blew her whole damn place to hell," she said, voice sharp.

Victor didn't glance up. "And?"

V gave a crooked smirk. "Not judging. Just surprised. Thought you were the calculating type, not the kind to go full-on supervillain."

Victor finished wiring a small black puck and dropped it into a container. "Calculation leads to elimination. Gina J was a liability, one that needed to be wiped."

V stepped closer, arms crossed. "Yeah, well, you turned her into a horror story. Word's already getting around. Some fixers are spooked. The street thinks you went psycho."

Victor paused, then met her gaze. "Good."

She whistled low. "You really don't care what they think, huh?"

He returned to his work. "Let them build a myth. Fear is more efficient than reputation."

V watched him quietly for a moment, her eyes scanning the scorched walls and repurposed machines. A fractured holomap flickered nearby, triangulating zones across Watson, Heywood, and Pacifica.

"They might get desperate, you know." 

"That changes nothing." 

V leaned in and dropped a shard onto the table. It contained encrypted messages she'd intercepted. "Here. They're still searching for you. But not random-like. Someone's feeding them partial data, but it's delayed. Either it's an internal leak or a tracking system with lag."

Victor parsed through it quickly. "They're triangulating safe houses. Assuming I'm wounded."

"Aren't you?"

He didn't answer. The side of his abdomen still throbbed. His shoulder screamed every time he moved. The gel helped, but pain was no stranger.

"We need to bait MM out," he said, shifting topics. "She coordinates. Remove her, and the others scatter."

V rolled her eyes. "She's a ghost. Her comms are scrambled six ways from Sunday."

Victor turned to face her fully. "Which is why we draw her out. We create a scenario she has to intervene in directly."

V raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"

"The case has a potential buyer, no?"

V blinked. "You want to finish the job?"

Victor was already walking toward a mounted console. "The only way to salvage this situation is to complete the task. They'll come one way or another. Keep your eyes out, let them know Doctor Doom is waiting." 

V was quiet for a moment. Then: "You do realise this is all kinds of insane, right?"

"Do you have a better plan?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it. "...not yet."

A silence settled. The air smelled of rust and oil. Finally, V slumped into a broken seat, arms draped across her knees.

"You ever feel like we're gonna lose?" she asked, softer now.

Victor didn't turn. "I don't plan for survival. I plan for control."

She snorted. "That a Doom-ism? Hell, what kind of name is Victor Von Doom anyway?"

"It's reality, and do not say my name in vain..."

V kicked a soda can across the floor. "You know, for a guy who acts like a machine, you sure burn hot."

"So do engines," Victor replied. "Until they stop."

The line hung in the air. V tilted her head, thoughtful.

"One of these days, you're gonna get me killed," she muttered, smirking through the sirens now faintly echoing in the distance.

Victor didn't look at her. His gaze was locked on the building that now lay in ruins.

The air smelled like carbon and copper—burnt wiring and blood. He'd timed the thermite to detonate just as the vehicle crashed through the entrance.

The result was total. Gangers reduced to scattered limbs, the smell of scorched chrome filling the air.

"Then stay away," he said at last.

"You're a real ray of sunshine, y'know that?"

She crossed her arms. There was humour in her tone, but it didn't reach her eyes. Not after seeing Gina J twitching on the ground, brain-fried and barely breathing.

Not after watching Doom move through the wreckage like a shadow, calculated and silent, as he delivered precise, final shots to the survivors.

"I did what needed to be done," Doom said, finally glancing her way. His voice was low, calm, but there was something under it—a tension straining against reason. "They made their decision. I made mine."

V let the words hang for a second before responding.

"Yeah, well. Night City doesn't forgive, even if you think justice was served." She clicked her tongue, nodding toward the broken camera mounted on a nearby pole. "That lens caught your little mask monologue. I know I asked you before, but are you sure you don't want me to scrub it? I think our situation is still salvageable."

Victor looked directly at it, the crimson lenses of his mask flickering as they scanned the shattered feed.

"No."

She raised a brow. "No?"

"Let them come."