Lucy stepped out of the dark like a switch had been thrown, calm as a winter sea. She ran Ascension Technology's counterintelligence in everything but name, and with Lissandra riding the nets, John's spying never had a chance to hide. Petty leaks, she usually ignored. Tonight crossed a line, and John knew it the instant he saw her. The handler in the suit kept pinging distress out through his headjack, but the signals vanished into silence. No answer came back.
Lucy lifted her hand.
The man in the suit rose off the concrete, legs kicking at air that no longer cared about gravity. The datachip peeled itself from his fingers and drifted into Lucy's palm. She checked the weight, satisfied that nothing had left their perimeter, then flicked two fingers.
He slammed backward and flattened against a pillar mid-height, bones cracking loudly in the hush. Breath sawed out of him. Panic took the rest. He had read Arasaka memos about gravity-control weapons and tried to see a harness on her. There was none. The answer wasn't Arasaka at all. It was what Compound V had given her.
Telekinesis.
Lucy didn't waste words. Three knives slid from nowhere particular and curved through the air like they had been born to obey her. They went in clean. The body sagged, then stilled.
Her eyes moved to John.
The car door folded open. Invisible hands pulled him up and out. A fourth blade waited, the tip holding perfectly still in front of his brow. He tried to speak. He didn't finish the first word. The blade answered for him. She wasn't in the mood to listen to the dead.
Another employee is gone. Today, she didn't care. Ascension wasn't the scrappy clinic it had been; it had reached a point where a pool of clean-background talent was lining up to work. You prune parasites so the tree grows straight. She would have let it slide if they'd kept their hands to small stuff. They touched critical data. She moved. She rose on the same invisible force that had broken them, drifted back into shadow, and was not there anymore.
…
Ascension's laboratory burned in a different register. In a cordoned bay, a foundry-shaped rig ran hot enough to turn the air to glass. Heat shimmered and bent the room's lines; an orange bloom washed the far wall. Rocky stood in front of the furnace, unbothered. For him, heat was food. It flowed into him and disappeared.
Metal changed shape behind the viewing ports. The cycle peaked. A silver-white ingot, blue light breathing under its skin, settled into form.
Rocky plucked it up, excitement bright in his face, turning it to catch the glow. Footsteps didn't announce Lucy; a thread of air did. She floated in from the side and came to rest behind him, chin set lightly on his shoulder, eyes curious.
"What is this?"
"Vibranium," he said. "An extremely hard metal."
The module interface confirmed it, neat as a product card:
{ Vibranium & Adamantium Combo Pack }
{ Vibranium: From the Marvel universe; a rare meteoric metal. Extremely high hardness; absorbs sound waves and kinetic energy. }
{ Adamantium: From the Marvel universe; the hardest metal known on Earth there. Once set, it is almost indestructible and unalterable. }
{ Both metals can be used at a workbench to upgrade items into their corresponding metal products. }
{ Price correction: bundle special −30% • world correction +10% }
{ Item module: 160,000 eddies per alloy ingot }
{ Foundry recipe expansion module: 1,600,000 eddies }
Heat licked his cheeks; the ingot hummed faintly against his palm. Lucy's telekinetic lift eased away as she straightened, gaze flicking from the metal to the furnace and back, taking in what this meant for armor, for frames, for blades that didn't bend. Rocky's energy-absorption field stayed quiet, sated by the foundry's bleed. The lab held its breath, orange light pulsing like a slow heartbeat.
He set the ingot down with care, already thinking about tolerances, quench windows, and what a Vibranium-Adamantium stack might do to the rules of what could be cut, or not cut, in Night City.