"If that charge was really that strong, I hope those three gonk-brains just slammed to their deaths down there."
"Braindead. One tug on the hook and they go rabid."
The Quadra Type-66—an iconic classic born in 2055. A sportier silhouette, an engine built around raw horsepower. The favorite ride of edgerunners and illegal street racers, the king of cost-effective muscle.
Any merc with a little scratch likes this car—looks good, works good, and it's cheap.
But "cheap" is only cheap if you've already made a name for yourself.
Past the overpass comes a downhill stretch. A little further and you hit Heywood. Two Gudra Type-66s are parked on the shoulder here, right on the slope.
They belong to the three mercs who were flipping off the drones and Leo's crew.
All three wear long coats, mostly hiding their full-conversion bodies. Only at the neck seams can you glimpse the cyber-frame beneath—metal and synth composites fused together.
At a glance, none of them looks much bigger than an average person.
"Move. This is our window."
The two drivers slide into their seats. The last one—the slightly larger guy—shakes his head and starts to climb in.
That's when the ground gives a faint tremor. Not as violent as the bridge demolition, but absolutely—
Not normal.
"Get in!" the driver waves him over.
"Wait." The big guy freezes, turning toward his partners already inside. "Do you hear—"
ROOOOM—
A brutal engine note cuts through everything, growing louder by the second as it closes the distance. Only now does he realize the sound that's been echoing for a while.
Not explosions.
An engine.
He turns—and moonlight is suddenly swallowed by something massive overhead. Wind slams down. The soundwave hits like a fist.
BANG!
One of the cars gets flattened—crushed like a toy—under the Mackinaw's weight.
"It's climbing up!"
"No way!"
"I told you—gravity is a corpo lie!"
Night City is a boiling mess, and the Mackinaw's monstrous power plus that electro-magnetic adhesion system delivers the collapsing bridge one last insult—
Bridge decking falls away. Vehicle rises. The Legendary Mackinaw surges out of the break, tires slamming down, and the whole beast lunges forward.
The slope isn't even that rough—yet that rebound alone rips more concrete loose, the tires' adhesion chewing the surface to powder.
The moment the vehicle lands and straightens out, that violent spring-load launches it again. It hops—twice—then kicks off the roadway entirely.
It's airborne.
"Hold on!!!"
Leo's heart is in his throat. The second explosion wasn't unexpected—but once you're trying to cheat gravity, the Mackinaw has zero room to correct.
That catapult was uncontrollable. They didn't drop off the overpass, sure—but at that speed, the downhill grade is meaningless. The truck is flying.
It keeps slamming down. Each tire strike is another explosive burst of acceleration, then it launches off again.
As speed increases, the interval between impacts stretches longer.
Acceleration alone is enough to make a ten-ton vehicle take flight down this slope.
BANG!
Another hit—speed spikes from 150 km/h to 200 km/h in an instant. At this point the slope does nothing. A ten-ton impact like that will hurt even an electro-mag suspension—
Unless you've got an energy absorber.
Leo's vision swims from the impacts, but Big Mac's sensor suite reacts faster than he can, and it doesn't get rattled. On the final strike the tires make a subtle correction.
And through the haze, Leo catches the predicted landing point.
There is an energy absorber.
BANG!
Big truck destroys small sports car.
The entire city seems to suck in a breath so hard the temperature drops.
The Legendary Mackinaw—over ten tons of super-armored steel—comes down perfectly onto the roof of a Gudra Type-66.
The car compresses into a sheet under the impact, the people inside compressing right along with it as their buddy watches in horror.
The front seats take the hit—the Legends tires packed with concrete debris, the fragments melted by heat, and if you look close you can even see flame clinging to the tread.
SSSS—
The Legend crushed Type-66 like a house of cards, sliding forward. Twisted metal plates and supports scrape the pavement, throwing obscene sparks as components snap, grind away, and even vaporize.
Click.
After nearly three hundred meters, the sports car's glorious "crushed soda can".
What's left is basically a flat slab. No telling which part of its occupants ended up where on the street.
Jackie exhales hard. "That just flashed me back to the time we yanked a plane."
"Nice work." V pats Leo's shoulder. "At this rate, Big Mac's gonna start flying."
"Way steadier than that. No black smoke this time. Flying's… still a stretch." Leo taps the dash. "Big Mac, status report."
"Electro-control platform overloaded. Re-routing circuits!" Big Mac pauses. "Enemy detected!"
BANG!
The whole truck jolts.
The other Quadra—brakes gone—slams into them from the side.
And above the Legend's roof, in midair, a massive man swings a gigantic rocket-propelled hammer—bringing it down with world-splitting force.
His eyes are bloodshot. Every cyber-system dumps power into overload. Neural current spikes past safe limits. His implants tremble, arcing with electricity.
"FERANTE!!!"
"Big truck destroys small sports car!"
"Unbelievable! The gonk who was flipping off our seed contestant just became… really hard to locate as a single person!"
"This cocky kid clearly failed to show the proper respect. Now he's spread out across the street!"
"Oh!! Challenger number two has arrived!!"
"That's—"
"That's BeatDance Corporation's super-cyborg weapon: the Hi-Hammer (note)!"
In the viewers' feed, the timing is crystal clear: as the Legendary Mackinaw rides the first Quadra like a board, the second Quadra accelerates almost simultaneously. The big guy—frozen for half a second—suddenly roars and leaps onto the roof.
He rips off his coat, reaches into the spine housing on his back, and pulls out an absurdly oversized rocket hammer.
The Quadra floors it. The man crouches hard—
He's going to borrow the car's momentum for a suicidal strike.
BANG!
His fully converted legs groan. Motors and synthetic muscle pull so much current—trying to inherit the car's 100 km/h speed in one motion—that the draw blasts past safety limits.
Electric arcs dance.
This force punches through the rated operating envelope of an Alpha full-conversion. The chassis screams. The man screams louder.
The hammer's rocket boosters spool to maximum, accelerating the head even further—
"The booster rockets will spike the hammerhead to maximum speed in a very short burst!"
"A skilled user—an over-the-limit user—can potentially drive it to near supersonic!"
"A solid tungsten long-handle warhammer carrying that force will deliver a level of destruction we've never seen!"
"It is—de—struc—tive!"
BOOM!
The hammer smashes into the armor, a visible shockwave blasting out with a spray of sparks.
Thunder made metal.