Chapter 29 - Chapter Twenty Nine

Adam Smasher had seen plenty in his decades of tearing through meat and chrome, every Corpo project, every so-called breakthrough, every weapon that was supposed to change the battlefield forever, and most of it ended up as scrap under his boots or bolted into his frame, because in the end chrome was chrome and steel was steel, and nothing ever made him flinch, but the chatter about these new players—Aperture Science with their cyberware that supposedly ran smoother, faster, cleaner than anything on the market, and Black Mesa with guns that weren't just ballistic but energy and plasma weapons cutting through flesh and chrome like it was paper—was enough to get his attention, because when mercs, corpos, and even terrified street rats all repeated the same stories, something had to be there. He'd read the reports, not the polished ones fed to board members but the raw debriefs from the spies that came back broken and burned, one missing an arm after a plasma shot turned it into glowing slag, the other with nothing but blurry pictures of white walls shifting like they were alive, and Smasher didn't laugh at that, he just thought it sounded like someone was finally making toys worth using. Chrome in Night City had always been brutal, crude, and heavy, made to push bodies past their limits at the cost of sanity, but the rumors said Aperture's stuff blended in, looked natural, even ran without frying nerves, and he knew if that was true then it wasn't just chrome, it was evolution, a step forward that would let a soldier run longer, hit harder, and not burn out like all the cyberpsychos cluttering the morgues, and as for Black Mesa's guns, plasma and energy weapons were nothing new in theory, he'd seen Corpo prototypes before, but they were unreliable, overheated, chewed through power packs faster than you could reload, and left their users just as dead when they failed in a fight, yet this was different, these weapons weren't cooking themselves, they were cooking the enemy, efficient enough to shred intruders and still leave a survivor limping away with a story, and that meant whoever made them had cracked the problem the big corps never could. He thought about what it would feel like to carry one of those rifles, the weight, the sound, the smell of slagged chrome in the air, the look on some punk's face when his arm or head turned into glowing paste, and for the first time in years he felt that itch, the curiosity that made him want to test something for himself, because Adam Smasher didn't believe in fear but he did believe in power, and power like that belonged in his hands. He didn't care who Aperture or Black Mesa really were, didn't care what their angle was, because if they were strong enough to build tech that made even Arasaka nervous then that was the only answer he needed—strong respected strong, and if they wanted to play in his city then sooner or later he'd meet them, in a boardroom or a battlefield, and he intended to walk away with whatever they had bolted to his frame.