Pain.
Shock.
Fear.
A flurry of raw emotions surged through Placid's system as his digital avatar flickered in a sea of corrupted data. His facial expressions changed rapidly—an unsettling mix of disbelief and horror.
He simply couldn't understand it.
No matter how hard he tried to wrap his head around it, the conclusion didn't change:
How had David found his physical terminal and launched an attack so swiftly?
In Night City, Placid prided himself on being one of the top-tier netrunners in the Voodoo Boys. His legend in cyberspace wasn't for nothing. Manipulating local network supervisors? Child's play. Infiltrating black-market server farms? Done it before breakfast.
And yet, for the first time in his entire life, he was being routed, cornered, and annihilated inside his own base of operations.
Zzzzt—!
Streams of glitched code crackled across cyberspace as David's neural data spike surged into the Voodoo Boys' virtual architecture. The visual representation of Placid's avatar—a tall figure clad in black armor—began to twitch and distort, limbs spasming from the overload.
Placid's mind screamed:
"This shouldn't be possible! Who the hell is this guy?!"
All he could think of now was escape.
"I need to jack out. I have to retreat before—"
But before he could act, his avatar tried to move—only to stumble.
One step.
Two steps.
And then...
Nothing.
The cyberspace around him had changed. The once-fluid data pathways he relied on to flit through the net now felt like he was wading through molasses.
"Sluggish...?"
His heart dropped. No, this wasn't just lag.
This was deliberate.
A system effect. A debuff.
David's [Source Plan] passive attribute: Frost Slowdown.
"He's not just fast… he's freezing the damn network!"
Placid's eyes widened in terror as the cold realization settled in. Every fraction of a second mattered in cyberspace. And now, every movement he made was delayed, distorted, or outright rejected.
And then—
David appeared.
His virtual avatar was lean, almost spectral—wreathed in a halo of cascading code. His eyes glowed a pale electric blue. His outline shimmered with an eerie fusion of organic fluidity and mechanical precision. Like a ghost built from quantum fire.
Placid's heart skipped a beat.
No. It screamed in desperation.
If what he felt earlier was surprise at David's technical skill, what he felt now was pure, unfiltered dread.
The kind of fear one feels when staring directly into death.
"You… who the hell are you?!"
His voice shook. This wasn't defiance anymore. It was pleading.
"How do you have this kind of power?! You—You must be linked to the AI beyond the Blackwall, right?! That's the only explanation! Only an entity from beyond the wall could wield this kind of force!"
He babbled now, eyes wide, limbs trembling in virtual space.
"No! You can't kill me! I'm Placid! I'm the central controller of the Voodoo Gang! If you do this, the entire gang will come for you! They'll turn Night City upside down to avenge me!"
David said nothing at first. He just stood there in cyberspace, his avatar utterly calm—like a judge waiting for a criminal to exhaust his excuses.
And then, with a low voice dripping with disdain, he said:
"You talk too much."
That was it.
No flourish.
No explanation.
Just finality.
With a smooth, fluid motion, David extended his virtual hand—his fingertips humming with threads of pure algorithmic energy, forged through the fusion of hacker-style attack commands and [Source Plan] nanocode logic.
The moment his hand touched Placid's data shell—
—the entire environment exploded into shards of corrupted light.
KZZZAAAT—!!
Placid's avatar fractured from the core, glitching and screaming in mute horror as lines of code were disassembled, burned, and deleted in real time. The very identity of his net presence began to unravel.
His voice, once loud and arrogant, now echoed like a child's, weak and distant.
"Wait… no, no please… I was wrong, I—"
ERROR.
TERMINAL DISCONNECTED.
In the real world, Placid's body jerked violently in his chair. Sparks burst from the neural interface plugged into his skull. His eyes rolled back, and with a final exhale, his body slumped forward—lifeless.
Dead.
Back in the virtual realm, David remained still, his avatar surrounded by decaying fragments of Placid's corrupted code. The space, once colored with Voodoo-style aesthetics—neon sigils, tribal encryption patterns, creole-coded graffiti—now lay silent, overwritten by [Source Plan]'s precision-driven design.
"System intrusion complete."
A faint voice buzzed in David's interface—his onboard assistant AI reporting.
"Target: Placid. Status: Terminated. External network threats: 0. Internal Voodoo command center: Paralyzed."
David blinked, slowly regaining awareness in the real world as the jack-out process initiated. Lights from monitors faded around him, the pulse of active cyberspace dying down. He leaned back in the cracked leather seat of the netrunning chair, exhaling deeply.
His fingers were still trembling.
Not from fear.
But from adrenaline.
He'd done it. He had wiped Placid from existence.
And not with brute force—but with strategic precision, combining advanced Source Plan functions with his own honed hacker instincts.
It was the first time he'd fully synchronized his combat style with the evolving framework of [Source Plan], and the results were nothing short of terrifying.
Instant kill. No delay. No resistance.
Elsewhere in Night City, chaos was spreading.
Word of Placid's disappearance hit the Voodoo ranks like a shockwave.
Some screamed sabotage. Others whispered about a ghost netrunner with impossible power.
"Some say it was the AI behind the Blackwall."
"No—someone said he used frost protocols. That's not AI. That's human..."
In the dim corridors of the Voodoo Boys' encrypted bunker, a group of elite netrunners gathered around the empty command seat where Placid had once ruled.
"He's gone." one of them whispered. "Our systems show a full ID wipe. Soulkiller-level purge."
Someone else added, "And whoever did it? Didn't leave a trace."
Just a single line of code, burned into Placid's neural shell before deletion:
"Stay quiet next time."
David stood on the rooftop of a ruined high-rise, watching Night City breathe below him. The neon lights flickered through the misty evening like stars gasping in pollution. His mind was quiet, but the weight of what he had done lingered in the air around him.
He had just killed a top-level operative of the most feared netrunning gang in the city.
And he didn't feel fear.
He felt ready.
The [Source Plan] had evolved again. His mind was sharper, his digital tools now embedded directly into his nervous system. He wasn't just a runner anymore. He was a storm inside the network.
He didn't need allies.
He didn't need warning shots.
From now on, anyone who dared to cross him wouldn't get a second chance.
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