404: Doom Not Found

Victor watched the battlefield from his perch, a weather-worn catwalk hanging above the skeletal remains of a half-demolished power substation. The shadows bent just enough to swallow him. No light leaked, no noise betrayed. He was a ghost—silent, observant, waiting.

Below, two factions squared off—contractor solos and Maelstrom muscle. Neither trusted the other, but both wanted the prize.

The contractors had arrived first—sharp, surgical, faceless. Five in total. Their blacked-out, angular vehicle had coasted in on near-silent tires, tinted windows hissing open with that sterile hiss only corpos bothered with. Their armor was matte composite, corp-issue. Custom rigs, multi-spectrum optics. Not street mercs. Not gangers. These were operators.

They spread in a practiced wedge, scanning in silence. Every step calculated. Every breath measured.

Then came the chaos.

Maelstrom's convoy rolled in like a middle finger carved out of chrome and noise—three heavily modded cars wrapped in shattered neon and aftermarket plating. Engines growled like starving hounds. Speakers blared distorted synthmetal as chrome-heads leaned out of windows, barking threats and flashing weapons like they'd already won the war.

Victor watched tension ripple between the two groups—coils of suspicion tightening, fuses inching toward detonation. But it wasn't the Maelstrom gangers or the contractor captain who struck the match.

It was Jaeger.

The sniper's first shot cracked the tension clean in two.

High-caliber. Suppressed. Fired from a rooftop to the south.

It punched clean through the visor of the lead contractor—entry through the left eye, exit through the helmet's rear plate. He crumpled before his systems even registered the kill. Blood misted upward as his body hit the concrete like dead tech.

Instantly, the contractor squad scattered. But it was already too late.

Their comms lit up in confusion—scrambled packets, error loops.

Jammed.

One tried to reboot his tactical interface, but his HUD glitched and died in static. Another shouted something, raising his rifle to scan the rooftops—

—and that's when Ruckus hit.

He came in from the blind side like a demolition charge wrapped in bad intentions. No warning, no mercy.

The contractor barely had time to swing his rifle before Ruckus closed the gap, shotgun roaring. The slug hit the man's knee, blowing it backward into flesh confetti. Before he even screamed, Ruckus followed with a piston-punch straight to the head—helmet, skull, and ego all shattered in one motion.

Blood sprayed across the junkyard pavement.

From his perch, Victor didn't move. His HUD flicked briefly to thermal.

MM active. Not visible.

He wasn't surprised.

Somewhere beneath the surface layer of this chaos, MM was already deep in the systems. A flicker of white noise ghosted across Victor's feed—brief, almost missed.

Then another solo, halfway into activating his Sandevistan, froze.

He twitched violently. Sparks leapt from the back of his neck. His eyes rolled upward. His cyberware overloaded mid-sequence. He dropped like a slab of meat, smoke curling from his port.

Victor tapped his comm once—silent signal.

No reply.

Across the lot, V watched the unfolding hell from her position—crouched behind a rusted vending shell, optics flaring softly as she tracked ghost heat signatures and relay fluctuations. Her breathing was tight but steady, jaw clenched.

"That was MM," she whispered, mostly to herself. "That wasn't brute force—that was surgical."

She checked the perimeter—Maelstrom was still unloading, oblivious. Their gangers poured out of the second and third cars, high on tempo and wired bravado. Some took cover, some didn't. One jumped onto the hood of a car and roared, firing a submachine gun into the sky as if the gods were watching.

Another—barely out of the door—caught a round from a contractor sidearm. He fell screaming, clutching his gut.

But they didn't stop.

They saw enemies and red mist and nothing in between.

Ruckus ducked back under cover, loading another slug. His coat was already stained black with blood not his own.

Jaeger fired again—Maelstrom this time. A chrome jaw burst open like a can of soup.

The contractors tried to regroup—two left now, disoriented, systems unresponsive. They went old-school: hand signals, shouting, fallback drills.

MM didn't let them.

Their optics looped. Their HUDs stuttered. One reached for a frag—his arm locked mid-throw. He screamed and flailed, tossing it weakly to the side where it bounced and detonated harmlessly in open dirt.

Victor watched, unmoved.

This wasn't a gunfight.

It was a dismantling.

V whispered, still tracking MM's faint ghosting across alley nodes and flickering network handshakes. She saw the pattern now—how MM moved not through sight, but through absence. She erased noise, not just generated it.

And above it all—Jaeger and Ruckus, coordinated like wolves with different teeth. MM unseen, guiding the kill from behind the curtain.

V swallowed.

"This isn't a fight," she said aloud.

Victor, even from two blocks away, finished the sentence with her in his head:

"It's a demonstration."

---

MM moved unseen.

Somewhere between the rooftops and the feed gutters, between line-of-sight and code-space, she glided—less a person than a shadow folded into signal. Her presence wasn't marked by noise, but by absence—camera feeds turning black, motion sensors going deaf, drones dropping from the sky with no warning.

From the shell of a collapsed warehouse north of the scrapyard, she raised one gloved hand and flicked her fingers like a maestro conducting violence.

A chain reaction began.

The remaining three contractor solos pivoted mid-formation—one jerking to aim, another trying to sync tactical overlays—only to seize in place. Their neural loops blinked red. A scream cracked from one throat as his Sandevistan collapsed into neural backlash. He convulsed, pupils wide, then fell.

The second solo stumbled backward, disoriented, firing blindly. Bullets chewed through rusted sheet metal, kicked sparks near Ruckus—who barreled forward regardless.

The third tried to retreat toward the ruined sedan they'd arrived in, only to find the locks frozen, engine bricked. MM had burned their fallback.

Behind her visor, MM's lips curled slightly. Not a smile. An acknowledgment. This was working.

Her fingers danced again. Code pushed. Another lock engaged—this time inside one of the Maelstrom cars, its onboard music system hacked mid-track, now blaring high-frequency screech. A Maelstrom gunner screamed and clutched his ears. A moment later, Jaeger put a round through his face.

In the mess of it all, Ruckus charged forward, limping now. Blood soaked his pant leg, black and wet from a burst fired earlier. He didn't care. Pain was something to consider after.

He shouldered into a Maelstrom ganger mid-stride, snapping the chrome from the man's shoulder joint, and pinned him to a concrete pillar. His shotgun barked once—just once—and left a red smear that used to be a face.

He turned and pumped another shell home.

Around him, Maelstrom fired indiscriminately, rounds pinging off the broken husks of cars and scrap walls. Their aggression was feral, but sloppy. Most had no tactics, just bravado and chrome.

They dropped another contractor—blind luck and sheer volume of fire—but then paid for it. Jaeger dropped two Maelstrom in under five seconds—head, neck. Surgical. The third tried to run. Jaeger didn't bother wasting a bullet.

He was calculating.

Ruckus reloaded.

Another Maelstrom ganger jumped him, screaming, blades for arms. Ruckus took a hit to the shoulder, staggered, then turned and drove his knee into the ganger's gut. He grabbed the man by the chin and ripped out one of his cyber-eyes.

"Too shiny," Ruckus muttered, throwing the body into a burning tire stack.

Across the battlefield, MM slipped deeper into the net. She accessed what was left of the contractor's internal comms, rerouting the squad leader's voice into a recursive loop.

"Fall back—hold—Team Bravo, relocate—"

"Fall back—hold—Team Bravo—relocate—"

"Fall back—hold—Team—"

The solos still standing had no idea who was alive. The noise cluttered their ears as bullets whistled past their heads. One tried to call for a drone drop—only to have his wrist-deck spark violently. MM had severed uplink at the node level.

In a back alley, V tracked it all.

She crouched beneath a mangled duct system, optics flaring as she caught fragments of heat signatures. She'd lost MM's trace again. The netrunner had dipped into a null zone, and every time V tried to reacquire, her own HUD stuttered—like MM was leaving landmines in the network just to slow her down.

Victor's voice crackled over her comm, low and calm. "Not yet."

V froze. She didn't argue.

She just watched.

The battlefield was in full spiral now.

Maelstrom and the remaining solos were locked in a three-way bloodbath, neither side fully realizing who was killing who.

A Maelstrom rider mounted his car's roof and fired an auto-pistol into the crowd, only to take a ricochet to the throat. He dropped, flailing. His buddy tried to drag him back in—Ruckus shot him through the chest with a slug that punched through two people behind him.

And still, the contractors clung to protocol.

They fought back.

A wounded solo managed to drop a smoke canister and lay down suppressing fire, giving the last of his team time to crawl toward cover. But their optics were scrambled. One of them was firing at shadows. The other was already half-dead.

Jaeger shifted positions—quiet, methodical. His cloak flickered as he moved to another rooftop. Still unseen. Still untouched.

Victor marked his new position without looking. Then returned to the chaos below.

Data streamed in.

Names. Movements. Patterns.

He was almost ready.

V, scanning thermals again, caught a flicker—too brief, too clean.

MM.

She was repositioning—moving not toward the fight, but around it.

V tapped her interface. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "She's not in this to kill."

Victor responded with one word: "Observe."

The city screamed around them.

And the trap kept tightening.

--- 

The last Maelstrom ganger didn't scream. He just blinked, confused, as the smartgun in his hands locked up mid-reload. His optics flickered white, HUD dying. Behind him, one of their cars burned—engine block ruptured, flames licking chrome.

He turned to run.

Jaeger didn't let him.

A final shot cracked the sky. The ganger dropped, half his skull missing.

Of the ten Maelstrom who'd stormed in laughing and loaded, only three remained—dragging themselves out from under shredded steel, bleeding from pulse rifles and glass, gurgling curses through broken teeth. One tried to shout something about backup, but another grabbed his arm, eyes wide.

"Run."

They did.

Their last car reversed hard, bumper torn, smoke pouring from the hood. The wheels screeched as it peeled off into the alley's far end, scraping against a light pole.

Jaeger didn't shoot.

They were no longer worth the bullet.

Across the yard, the contractor solos were barely breathing.

The survivors—three, maybe four—were pinned against the south wall of the scrapyard behind scorched cover. Their comms were still looping garbage, their internal systems barely functioning. One had dropped his rifle and was jabbing a medstick into his thigh with trembling hands. Another fired a round blindly, only to have his smartlink fail mid-shot—bolt jamming.

MM's final hack had just gone live. A localized short pulse that severed linkups between neuralware and smart targeting systems. All preem tech flickered out like a storm shorting a power grid.

Victor watched as the remaining solo stared at his now-useless smart rifle—weapon glowing red, screen cracked.

That was the breaking point.

The man didn't drop it. He just sat back against the wall, head bleeding, eyes wide as if he'd finally seen what they were fighting.

Victor tapped his HUD.

Jaeger had moved again—one rooftop north. No heat signature. No shadow. Ghosted.

Ruckus limped toward cover, steam hissing from a torn plate in his thigh. Hydraulic fluid mixed with blood. His coat had been shredded. One lens of his goggles hung cracked and dark. But the shotgun still worked.

He didn't look around. Just slumped near a wall, reloading. Slow. Mechanical.

Victor didn't move.

He had what he needed.

Every player was marked. Every move mapped.

Now came the next part.

He shifted—calm, smooth—and began moving through the elevated scaffolding to the west of the yard. Step by step, soundless in his exo-frame, leaving no signature. Toward the sniper's perch. Toward Jaeger.

The real plan hadn't started.

But it would.

Behind him, V crouched low beneath a ruined canopy, her optic flickering through filtered modes. Her heart was pounding. Not from fear—at least not entirely—but from the sheer speed of everything. She'd grown up in Night City, seen shootouts and bloodbaths, but this?

This was orchestration.

This was something else.

Ruckus, the blunt force. Jaeger, the scalpel. MM, the invisible hand pulling the strings. It was like watching a military op dressed in street clothes. They weren't fighting the contractors.

They were breaking them.

And Maelstrom? The gangers thought they were walking into a warzone. They didn't realize they were cannon fodder until the last shot fired.

It made her shiver.

She rechecked her trace on MM.

Nothing.

Then—just for a second—she saw it.

A flicker of motion in a peripheral alley cam. Too quick for a pedestrian. Too slow for a drone. The signature barely lit her HUD before disappearing.

But it was enough.

She leaned into her mic.

"She's moving."

Victor stopped.

"Toward the car?"

V nodded, even though he couldn't see. "Flanking. Fast. Ruckus is limping. She's going to the case."

"Copy."

His voice stayed flat. Emotionless.

Just like always.

But she heard something new underneath it this time.

Timing.

Victor changed direction.

Back inside the charred heart of the scrapyard, wind kicked up dust and the scent of blood. MM ghosted through smoke and metal like a rumor come to life. She didn't speak. She didn't run. She slid through the cracks of the world.

No one saw her pass.

The last contractor didn't look up.

The Maelstrom survivors were already gone.

Jaeger watched from afar, optics focused elsewhere.

And in that blind spot—between chaos and silence—she stepped up to the bait car.

Her fingers hovered.

She scanned.

She hesitated.

Victor saw her through the upper scope of the building now. Saw the faint shimmer of her coat's reactive camo catching sunlight. Saw the way she moved—like she wasn't just stealing data, but studying how people would try to stop her.

She didn't open the trunk.

Instead, she reached into her coat and pulled a small relay box—marked with a familiar corporate cipher.

She's not here to steal the case, Victor realized.

She's here to reroute it.

V's voice cracked in again. "What's she doing?"

Victor's answer was quiet.

"Finishing the real job."

And then, without a word, he drew his rifle.