404: Doom Not Found

- 11 years before canon -

The rain had stopped, but the wind carried the city's sickness in every gust.

Somewhere in the distance, the hum of an AV cut the sky, vanishing behind the broken skyline.

Victor had returned to the familiar alleyway where he and the old man first met, only now, he came not to scavenge, but to speak.

The man sat by his usual burn barrel, flames flickering softly in the broken glass of his bottle. His blanket was draped over his shoulders like a throne of rags, and though his posture was slouched, his eyes were sharp and aware. He noticed Victor the moment he entered the alley, but said nothing until the younger man stood within the firelight.

"Didn't think you'd come back," the old man said, his voice dry as a rusted hinge.

"My word is bond," Victor replied, hands in his coat pockets. He didn't sit, but he didn't leave either.

The silence stretched for a time before the old man gestured to the empty crate beside him.

"You planning to tower all night or sit like a real person?"

Victor gave a slight inclination and took the crate, resting into the discomfort with the ease of someone who had known worse.

"I've been thinking about you," the old man admitted. "You carry yourself like a soldier, but your eyes… They're too old. Seen too much. Got that fire in you, but it's cold fire. Controlled like a blue flame."

Silence seemed to settle between the two before being broken once again.

Victor had come to repay his dues, not to be preached too. 

"I wish to repay your kindness," Victor urged, his hand reaching out with bills.

But the old man stopped him, his hands gesturing out in a palm.

"I-,"

"Let an old fool speak his peace," the man said, "Name's Elias Navarro. Used to work security out in the Badlands for Militech. The kind that made people disappear. Had a family. A son. Boy was smart… sharper than I ever was. Wanted to be an engineer, maybe even a Corpo. He was good. Real good. But moving around in the badlands meant he never really found a true home... When he came to Night City, he latched on to it... Like a kid in a scav alley."

Elias paused, lifting the bottle to his lips, but nothing came out.

He tossed it aside.

"City chewed him up," Elias continued. "I told him not to chrome up too fast. Told him the city doesn't care how smart you are when your soul ain't bolted down. But he didn't listen. Got into deep cred debt with the wrong kinds of fixers. Lost himself somewhere in the Net. Physically, he's still out there, or at least I hope so. His body's more machine than bone. Mind…? Glitched out. I tried to find him once. Saw what he became."

Victor shifted slightly. Not out of discomfort, but consideration.

"You remind me of him," Elias said. "Not the chrome. The conviction. The rage. You wear it like a crown. But I've seen what that does to men. You burn bright enough, you burn everything around you, including yourself."

"The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long" - Lao Tzu

A common Chinese proverb, a saying Victor acknowledged.

It was here that Victor's eyes finally met the old man's. Elias held that gaze, not as a challenge, but as a plea.

"You think this city is yours to bend? That your mind and will are enough to outplay it?" Elias leaned forward. "Maybe they are. Maybe you're the one in a million. But even then, Night City doesn't let go. It marks you. Breaks you. I've seen enough lions become lapdogs."

He looked to the fire then, as if trying to read omens in the flames.

"You're not like the others I see stumble through this alley. You're still clean. Even if your hands ain't. You've got purpose, sure. But don't let it turn to obsession. Don't let it devour you."

Victor remained silent for several long seconds, absorbing every word like an autopsy in slow motion.

"You ask me to leave?" he finally said.

"Yes," the old man admitted. "If I thought you had anywhere else to go. But you don't, do you?"

Victor didn't respond.

"Then I ask this," Elias added. "Don't forget who you are. Don't let the city define it for you."

They sat there for a while, the fire slowly dying.

"I came to repay what was owed." 

Elias's lips turned to a snicker, as if Victor had told a joke. 

"Don't bother, kiddo. I already ran up dry for my tab," he smiled, his mind slowly lost to the ashes. 

When Victor finally stood to leave, the old man didn't stop him. He merely nodded once.

"You're not my son," Elias said, almost to himself, "But if he were here now, I'd want him to walk like you do. Just… maybe with less blood on his boots."

Victor gave no farewell. But his footsteps lingered.

---

Doom, returning to his workshop, found the blood had dried into flakes across the rusted grates. What had once been an abandoned workshop riddled with filth and forgotten ambitions now stirred with purpose.

Victor stood in the dim light, one hand resting on the handle of a vice while the other adjusted the pressure valve of a crude but functioning welding torch.

Sparks flared across the workbench as he reinforced the internal joints of his exo-frame, now stripped to its skeletal components.

Though primitive by his standards, the materials in this city offered a certain brutal resilience. Forged not for elegance, but for survival.

His jacket, now hanging neatly over a reinforced bar, was heavy black synth-leather, woven with hidden fibre-plates and reinforced stitching. It looked reminiscent of a leather trench coat, with a colour that seemed to never flick down. 

The collar sat high, sharp, capable of being drawn up to obscure his features. The sleeves were tight around the forearms but widened slightly at the biceps, concealing wrist compartments and kinetic regulators beneath.

Doom had fashioned them with simple snap-release segments: one press, and the hidden gauntlets extended into place. 

Those gauntlets—now lying disassembled on a cloth beside him—were his latest improvement. Each housed a high-voltage capacitor, scavenged from industrial equipment meant to repel cyber-rats.

It was now supercharged by the arc reactor that hid snugly around his chest. 

With some delicate rewiring and copper stripping, Victor had turned them into a brutal close-quarters weapon. Upon activation, the gauntlets would discharge a shock strong enough to seize muscles or knock low-tier cybernetics offline, giving him a crucial window.

Next came the pistol—a modified Federated Arms .45 Liberty. He'd stripped its casing, reinforced the grip, and installed a kinetic boost chamber tied to his exo-suit's arc reactor. 

When synchronised, the shot would discharge with extra force, temporarily bypassing certain types of light armour. It wasn't subtle, but it didn't need to be.

Along the belt of his modular harness, Victor attached two concussive grenades, improvised using mining charges and flash-dischargers.

Enough to stun or disorient without rendering permanent damage. He considered it necessary for crowd control or escape, though he hoped to refine their effect radius in time.

Inside the utility pouches sewn into the inside lining of his jacket, he kept:

One compact first-aid applicator with combat stims.

A sealed syringe of trauma-tamper, enough to dull pain for sixty minutes.

One datashard decryptor, limited in power, but useful for field extraction.

Two smoke pellets made from scavenged pyrotechnics, capable of covering a 3-meter radius in seconds.

Victor paused to stretch, the exo-frame whirring faintly as it synchronised with his posture. It was light now—lighter than it had been since his arrival. 

He'd shaved unnecessary mass from its spine and redistributed the weight. The movement enhancement servos in his thighs responded smoothly, compensating for each shift with minor corrective bursts.

Still, it wasn't perfect. Sitting remained uncomfortable. The back struts dug into his lower vertebrae unless he remained upright. It was an irritant—a flaw to be corrected.

He glanced over to a stack of parts: dampeners, gel padding, and spring-loaded inserts. Those would be next. Comfort was not a luxury, but an efficiency.

His computer, such as it was, blinked with crude diagnostics. It had no net access, he refused it, but it served its function. Victor was already feeding it the first set of movement pattern logs, trying to build a framework for a reactive targeting algorithm. Eventually, he would tie it into his optical HUD once his helmet prototype was ready.

That, too, was sketched beside him—drawn in meticulous pencil across cheap cardboard. The mask.

Not yet the one that would one day come to symbolise him across multiverses, but a beginning. 

Angular.

Functional.

Human enough to pass. Inhuman enough to unnerve. In the world before, he had not yet donned the mask.

Soon, it wouldn't matter when, only that it did. 

He set the gauntlet back into place on the workbench and began calibrating the charge capacitor. The coil clicked as he locked the primary fuse.

A noise outside—the scraping of wind through old vents.

He stood, silent, eyes narrowing. Nothing. Just Night City breathing its rusted sighs.

Victor stepped back and surveyed the room.

One generator.

One bench.

One lockable entrance.

One man.

It was enough. For now.

The last weld hissed and cooled as Victor powered down the arc tool. He took a step back, surveying the suit's updated servos and the compact shock capacitors now integrated beneath the gauntlet plates. The insulation still felt lacking. Sitting for too long produced discomfort—compression around the hips and shoulders that would, in time, restrict movement.

He muttered a note into his recorder: Need gel-based padding. Or reinforced mesh with pliant weave. Investigate textile synths later.

The workshop had evolved in the days since he'd cleared it out.

Where once the place stank of burnt rubber and decay, it now held the sterile scent of solder, hot metal, and the faint ozone of overworked circuitry. It still looked abandoned from the outside—a deliberate choice. In Night City, obscurity was safety.

Victor closed the workbench lid and walked toward the terminal he'd fused to a salvaged monitor. The flickering screen showed no signs of interference. The cameras remained dead—he'd destroyed them all. No watchers. At least none that used traditional means.

He paused, thumbed a contact into the encrypted comm. Gina J.

The name Bubbles had muttered once, with a look that was more reverent than sentimental.

The line went live almost immediately.

"What?" Her tone came sharp, with a static-laced undertone.

Victor didn't flinch. "I require gang intelligence. A detailed account of their movements and hierarchy within Watson."

There was a silence. Then came the scoff—sharp, annoyed.

"Do you ever say please, or is that just beneath you, chrome-brain?"

"I see no reason to request what should be common knowledge."

"Oh, that's real cute." The sarcasm in her voice crackled. "Look, you might've earned a call 'cause of Bubbles, but I ain't your assistant. Far as I can tell, you're just another narcissist with a bootleg exo-rig and an attitude problem."

"I did not initiate this connection for your evaluation of my temperament."

"No, but you're getting it anyway."

Victor let the silence settle. In many ways, this conversation reminded him of speaking with Reed Richards—unapologetically blunt and unwilling to back down. Except this woman lacked the genius. She had something else instead: teeth.

"Why haven't you burned the bridge then?" he asked.

Another pause. Then, softer, grudging: "Because Bubbles once dragged my half-dead ass out of a Wraith ambush when I was fifteen. Would've bled out in an alley if not for him. I owe him. And he says you're worth something."

"I am."

"Yeah, well, we'll see." She exhaled sharply. "Alright, here's your crumbs. Watson's crawling with Maelstrom—chrome-heads that love mutilation more than money. They've taken most of the docks. Valentinos run the east block—mostly flash and flair, but tight on loyalty. Claws're spread thin these days, but they've got backbone. Gigs, enforcers, you name it."

"Who governs their operations?"

"Claws? Their elder council's dead. These days, I have no clue. Most likely old captains. Each one crazier than the next. You see them move in numbers, run."

"They aren't as formidable as you make them out to be."

"Then you're still lucky to be breathing."

Victor's voice remained level. "I require a netrunner. One adept with covert signal tracing and deep-layer surveillance."

She groaned audibly. "You really are a whole damn headache."

"Can you provide one or not?"

"I could. But the one I trust? Off-grid right now. Lying low after frying a Militech system. Not gonna risk her. I've got someone else. Spectra. She's young, green, but has potential. Works out of an old arcade in Kabuki."

"Will she answer?"

"She might. She's not good with people. Kind of a recluse. You show up swinging that arrogant attitude, she'll ghost you hard. I'll vet her for you.. Give her a call myself."

"Noted."

"Listen," she added, her voice cooling just slightly, "I don't like you. Don't trust you either. You talk like a corpo and walk like a merc who thinks he's above the game. But I'm only helping you because of Bubbles. That old bastard's got more faith in broken junk than most folks do in saints."

"I'm not broken."

"Didn't say you were." She paused. "But Night City doesn't care. It eats the arrogant faster than the desperate."

Victor remained silent.

She exhaled. "Look, you're not the first off-the-grid freak trying to play kingmaker in this dump. Just do me a favour and don't die like the rest of them. At least not before you do something worth remembering."

He considered that. A moment passed.

"Send me the netrunner's details. And if I need a favour again—"

"You'll ask nicely next time. Or not at all."

The call ended.

Victor stood in the stillness of his hideout. Around him, the dim light caught glints of metal—his tools, his armour, the beginnings of something greater.

He had power. But now, he had direction.

And enemies worth understanding.