Ethan Cole never thought much about death.
At twenty, it felt like something distant—a problem for old people, for tomorrow, for someone else. Not for a guy walking home after another soul-crushing shift at a warehouse job that barely covered rent in a shitty studio apartment with paper-thin walls and a bathroom that smelled perpetually of mildew.
His life had been unremarkable. Painfully, numbingly ordinary. High school graduate, couldn't afford college, bounced between dead-end jobs for two years. No girlfriend. Few friends. Just... existing. Going through the motions. Wake up, work, eat instant ramen, scroll through social media until 2 AM, sleep, repeat.
Tonight had been like any other night.
Earbuds in. Lo-fi beats drowning out the city noise—distant traffic, someone shouting three blocks over, the rhythmic thump of bass from a club he'd never been cool enough to enter. Wet asphalt reflecting streetlights and the occasional neon sign from the corner bodega.
One step. Then another.
Normal. Mundane. Safe.
He'd been thinking about nothing in particular. Maybe about the bills piling up on his kitchen counter. Maybe about the leftover pizza waiting in his fridge. Maybe about whether he should finally quit and find something—anything—better.
Then—
Headlights. Blinding white, filling his vision like a supernova.
A horn blaring, already too late.
He didn't even have time to be afraid.
Impact.
Everything went black.
No pain. No fear. Just... nothing.
Ethan floated in an endless void, weightless and formless. His body was gone—no hands to flex, no lungs to breathe, no heart to beat. Only his thoughts remained, drifting like smoke in an infinite darkness that stretched in every direction and none at all.
Time didn't exist here. Seconds could have been centuries. Centuries could have been seconds.
Am I... dead?
The realization crept in slowly, like ice water in his veins—or it would have, if he'd had veins. He was dead. Actually, genuinely, permanently dead. Hit by a car on some random Tuesday night because he'd been too busy scrolling through his phone to look both ways.
What a stupid way to die.
Is this it? Is this hell? Or purgatory? Or—
"Yep. Dead as dead gets, kiddo."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once—casual, amused, like someone commenting on a mildly interesting TV show they'd seen a dozen times before.
Ethan's consciousness jolted. "...What the hell? Who are you? Where am I?"
"Ooh, straight to the questions. I like that. Shows initiative." The voice chuckled, warm and playful. "Call me ROB. Random Omnipotent Being, if you wanna get all technical and boring about it. And 'where' doesn't really apply here, choom. This is nowhere. The space between spaces. The pause between heartbeats. The blank page before the story starts."
"I... I don't understand. Am I in heaven? Hell?" Panic clawed at Ethan's thoughts, formless but desperate.
"Neither. Both. Does it matter?" ROB sighed dramatically. "Look, I'll give it to you straight because I'm not a total asshole—mostly. You died, Ethan Cole. Stepped off a curb without looking because you were too busy staring at your phone like every other distracted millennial. Taxi hit you going about forty-five. Driver didn't even slow down—probably drunk, definitely didn't have insurance. You were dead before you hit the pavement. Messy. Not the most dignified exit, I'll admit. Definitely not going in any highlight reels."
The words hit harder than the car had. Dead. Actually dead. His mom would find out—God, his mom. She'd be devastated. His little sister would cry. His coworkers would probably forget about him in a week.
"Hey, hey, don't get all maudlin on me." ROB's voice brightened. "Because here's the thing—I'm feeling generous today. And when I'm generous, interesting things happen."
"Generous? What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about a second chance, my dude. A do-over. A complete cosmic mulligan." The voice practically sparkled with amusement. "See, I'm what you might call a bored god. Capital-G God? Not me. But I've got power, I've got time, and I've got an eternity of nothing to do with either. So I entertain myself."
"Entertain yourself... how?"
"By throwing wildcards into dangerous places and watching what happens." ROB laughed, genuine and delighted. "Think of it like... reality TV, but I'm the producer, director, and audience all rolled into one. I find interesting souls—people who died before their time, people with potential, people who might actually do something given the chance—and I drop them somewhere fun."
"Fun," Ethan repeated flatly. "You call dying and ending up in a void fun?"
"Oh, you're not staying here. That'd be boring as hell—literally. No, no, no. I'm sending you somewhere much more interesting." The void seemed to pulse with ROB's excitement. "I'm sending you to Night City."
Silence. Long, heavy silence.
"...Night City," Ethan said slowly. "You mean... Cyberpunk? The video game? Cyberpunk 2077? Edgerunners?"
"All of the above! Well, you're going to the Edgerunners timeline specifically. 2076, to be precise. David Martinez is probably still a kid right now, his mom's still alive, Maine's crew is tearing up the streets, and Arasaka is being its usual evil megacorp self." ROB's voice turned almost wistful. "God, I love that world. It's got everything—neon, chrome, corpo scum, street gangs, deadly tech, gorgeous people, ultraviolence... It's perfect."
"That's... that's insane. That world is a nightmare! Everyone dies! The city chews people up and spits them out! I'll be dead in five minutes!"
"Not with what I'm giving you, you won't."
The void shivered. Static crawled at its edges, reality beginning to fracture like broken glass.
"See, I'm not a complete asshole. I don't just throw people into the meat grinder naked and screaming—where's the fun in that? They'd just die immediately. Boring. Predictable. Waste of a good soul." ROB's voice dropped, becoming almost reverent, like a priest describing a miracle. "No, I give my wildcards gifts. Powers. Abilities. Something to give them a fighting chance. And you, Ethan Cole, are getting something very special."
"What... what are you giving me?"
"Bio-Femtomass Manipulation."
The words hung in the void like a thunderclap.
Then something cold, electric, and utterly alien surged into Ethan's core. His consciousness screamed as impossible knowledge burned itself into his being—information that shouldn't exist, patterns smaller than atoms, equations that defied physics, concepts that made his mind want to fold in on itself.
"What—what is this?!" Ethan gasped, or tried to—he didn't have lungs anymore, but the sensation was the same.
"Power," ROB said simply. "Control over matter at the femtoscale. You know what a femtometer is? It's a quadrillionth of a meter. Smaller than atoms. Smaller than protons and neutrons. Smaller than quarks. I'm talking about the fundamental building blocks of reality itself."
The knowledge kept flooding in—endless, overwhelming, terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Ethan could feel it settling into him, becoming part of him, rewriting whatever remained of his existence.
"You'll be able to manipulate biological matter and technology at that scale," ROB continued, voice warm with pride like a parent showing off a favorite child. "Absorb biomass from anything living—or formerly living. Consume cyberware, chrome, tech, whatever. Break it down to its component parts and integrate it into yourself. Reshape your body into weapons, armor, tendrils, blades, whatever you need in the moment."
Images flashed through Ethan's mind—his arm dissolving into a thousand writhing tendrils, each one capable of cutting through steel. His skin hardening into organic armor that could deflect bullets. Wounds closing in seconds as stolen biomass knit flesh back together.
"Regeneration. Adaptation. Evolution." ROB's voice grew more excited with each word. "Get shot? Heal it. Get poisoned? Develop immunity. Get hit with some experimental corpo bioweapon? Absorb it, break it down, make it yours. You'll be able to adapt to almost any threat given enough time and biomass."
"Biomass," Ethan repeated, his consciousness struggling to keep up with the flood of information. "You mean... I have to eat people?"
"Eat, absorb, consume—semantics!" ROB laughed. "Look, you're not gonna be chowing down on corpses like some kind of cannibal, calm down. Your power will let you break down matter at the molecular level just by touching it. Skin contact, a tendril, whatever. You touch someone and boom—their mass becomes yours. Clean, efficient, and way less gross than actual eating."
"That's... that's horrifying."
"That's surviving in Night City, choom. You think the gangers care about your moral qualms when they're pumping you full of lead? You think Arasaka gives a shit about ethics when they're dissecting you in a black site lab? Night City doesn't do mercy. It does chrome and corpses. You'll adapt or you'll die. Simple as that."
Ethan's thoughts churned. This was insane. All of it. But what choice did he have? He was already dead. This was... what? A second chance? A cosmic joke? Both?
"There's more," ROB said, and Ethan could hear the grin in his voice. "The really fun part. See, bio-femtomass manipulation isn't just about survival. It's about evolution. You'll be able to shift your appearance—age yourself up or down, change your build, your features, your entire physical presence. Want to look like a teenager? Done. Want to look like a grizzled veteran? Easy. You'll be whoever you need to be."
More knowledge burned in. Ethan could feel it—the potential to reshape himself completely, to become a living chameleon, to be anyone and anything.
"And here's the kicker, the real prize—" ROB's voice dropped to an excited whisper. "Once you're strong enough, once you've mastered the power, once you've consumed enough and evolved enough... you'll be able to manipulate reality itself. Not just matter. Reality. You'll tear through the fabric of space-time and walk between universes."
"What?"
"Multiverse travel, baby! Infinite worlds, infinite realities, infinite possibilities!" ROB practically shouted with glee. "Night City is just the start. Once you've got the hang of things, once you're powerful enough, you'll be able to jump to other universes. Other versions of Night City. Completely different worlds. Bring allies with you if you want. Build yourself a crew. A family. A harem, if you're into that—and let's be real, who isn't?"
"A harem," Ethan said flatly.
"Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it! Night City's got some gorgeous people, and plenty of them are dangerous, competent, and down for a good time. You're gonna be a walking bioweapon with reality-bending powers—trust me, you'll have options." ROB chuckled. "But that's all down the road. First, you gotta survive your first day. Then your first week. Then we'll see about the multiverse stuff."
The void was collapsing now, fragments of reality bleeding through—flashes of neon light, the smell of ozone and garbage, the distant sound of sirens.
"Wait—" Ethan tried to organize his thoughts, tried to ask the thousand questions screaming in his mind. "Why me? Why are you doing this?"
"Because I'm bored. Because you have potential. Because I think you'll be interesting." ROB's voice started to fade, growing distant. "And because every story needs a protagonist. Might as well be you."
"But I'm nobody! I'm just... I was just a warehouse worker! I'm not special!"
"Not yet. But you will be." The void shattered like glass, light pouring through the cracks. "Oh, and one more thing—Ethan Cole is a boring-ass name. Sounds like an accountant who golfs on weekends. You need something with more bite. Something that fits what you're about to become."
"What—"
"Raze. From now on, you're Raze. Short, punchy, memorable. Sounds dangerous. Sounds like someone who breaks things down to their component parts and builds something new." ROB laughed one last time. "Good luck, Raze. Try not to die immediately. That'd be embarrassing for both of us."
"WAIT, I'M NOT READY—!"
"Nobody ever is!"
ROB said to Ethan - Raze- Cole as he was swallowed up by the vortex of light
Everything snapped
"...."
"Well, time to watch and see where it leads to, Hehe I'm rooting for you, Buddy"
Rob sat down and watched his newfound entertainment with Excitement in his shining white eyes devoid of pupils.
NIGHT CITY – WATSON DISTRICT
2076
The first thing Ethan—Raze—felt was scorching heat.
Not the comfortable warmth of a summer day, but the oppressive, suffocating heat of a city that never slept and never cooled down. Heat from thousands of bodies packed into too-small spaces. Heat from machines running 24/7. Heat from neon signs and holographic advertisements burning bright enough to sear retinas.
The second thing was the stench.
God, the stench.
Piss and rust and burnt plastic. Cheap synthetic food rotting in dumpsters. The acrid tang of ozone from overloaded power lines. Something chemical and sweet that made his stomach turn. The metallic scent of blood, old and dried. Sweat and smoke and desperation.
He gasped, stumbling forward, hands hitting rough concrete covered in layers of grime, old chewing gum, and graffiti. His body felt wrong—too solid, too real, too physical after floating in nothingness. Every sensation was overwhelming, like someone had turned all his senses up to eleven.
Where the fuck—?
He looked up.
And his breath caught.
Pink and blue neon bathed everything in artificial twilight, turning shadows purple and highlights electric. Holographic advertisements towered thirty stories above, massive and impossible, screaming in Japanese and English and languages he didn't recognize. A woman's face, beautiful and vacant, promising braindance experiences beyond imagination. A corporate logo rotating slowly, sleek and threatening. Kanji characters he couldn't read flickering and glitching.
Steam hissed from broken pipes running up the walls. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed—police, ambulance, impossible to tell. Gunfire crackled, sharp and quick. Someone was screaming in Spanish. Bass pounded from a club blocks away, so deep he could feel it in his chest.
He was in a narrow alley, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. Trash overflowed from rusted dumpsters—food containers, broken electronics, torn clothing, discarded cyberware still trailing wires. Graffiti covered every surface in layers upon layers—gang tags in stylized letters, corporate logos spray-painted over with crude insults, anarchist slogans, crude drawings of genitalia, territorial markers, memorial murals for people who'd died here.
The walls themselves were a patchwork of corrugated metal, crumbling concrete, and plasteel panels covered in rust and bullet holes. Fire escapes zigzagged up into the darkness above. Cables—power lines, data cables, illegal taps—hung between buildings like spiderwebs, some sparking where insulation had worn away.
No fucking way.
Night City.
He was actually here.
Raze looked down at himself, half-expecting to see chrome or combat gear or something appropriate for this world. Instead: jeans, a grey hoodie, worn sneakers. The same clothes he'd died in. Normal. Mundane. Completely out of place in a city where everyone was either armed, chromed up, or both.
His hands—normal human hands, twenty years old, calloused from warehouse work—trembled. But underneath the skin, he could feel something else. A presence. A hunger. The power ROB had given him, coiled in his chest like a living thing.
Bio-femtomass manipulation.
He focused, trying to understand it, and knowledge flooded back—not words, but understanding. He could feel the billions of cells in his body, each one a tiny machine he could control. He could sense the concrete beneath his hands, the organic residue in the trash, the bacteria in the air. Everything was matter. Everything could be broken down, absorbed, reshaped.
"Holy shit," he whispered, voice hoarse. "It's real. This is actually real."
A rat scurried past, chrome glinting where someone had replaced half its body with scavenged tech. Even the vermin here were cybernetic. Even the rats had chrome.
Raze pushed himself to his feet, legs shaky. The alley stretched maybe thirty meters before opening onto what looked like a street—more neon, more people, more noise. Behind him, it dead-ended at a wall covered in a massive mural of a woman's face, beautiful and crying, tagged with "REMEMBER THOSE WE'VE LOST."
He needed to think. Needed to figure out where he was, when he was, what the hell he was supposed to do now.
2076, ROB had said. Edgerunners timeline. Which meant David Martinez was still a kid, his mom Gloria was still alive, working herself to death as an EMT. Maine's crew was active. Lucy was probably already running from Arasaka. Rebecca was... somewhere. Doing Rebecca things. Being terrifying and adorable in equal measure.
And Adam Smasher was out there. Arasaka's pet monster. The chrome-plated boogeyman who killed legends and laughed about it.
Raze shuddered. He had power now, sure, but he was still new to this. Still human in most of the ways that mattered. And this city ate people like him for breakfast.
Before he could spiral further into panic, voices echoed from the mouth of the alley.
"Yo, check it out. We got fresh meat."
Raze's head snapped up. Three figures were silhouetted against the neon light, swaggering into the alley with the casual confidence of apex predators in their own territory.
Fuck.
As they got closer, the light revealed them in all their chrome-soaked glory.
Maelstrom. Had to be.
The gang was unmistakable even if you'd never seen them before—chrome covering most of their faces, red optical implants glowing like demon eyes, bodies more machine than human. They'd chased transhumanism past the point of no return and kept going, replacing flesh with metal until they were barely recognizable as human anymore.
The one in front—the leader—had a face that was more machine than man. Chrome jaw, LED teeth that glowed red with each word, optical implants that whirred and clicked as they focused on Raze. His arms were heavily modified, pistons and hydraulics visible under synthetic skin that had been partially flayed away to show off the tech underneath.
The second had mantis blades folded against his forearms—illegal military cyberware, black market installation judging by the scarring around the ports. His face was tattooed with circuit patterns that glowed faintly.
The third was the smallest, but carried a Militech M-10AF Lexington with illegal heat-sink mods, barrel still warm from recent use.
All three wore the red and white colors of Maelstrom. All three looked like they'd killed before and would again without hesitation.
"Wrong alley to be sleepwalking in, choom," the leader said, voice distorted by vocalizers, dripping with synthetic menace. "This is Maelstrom territory. You wanna pass through? That'll cost you."
He grinned, LED teeth flashing.
"Everything you got."
Raze's heart hammered against his ribs. His instincts screamed run—he was outnumbered, outgunned, out-chromed. These weren't humans anymore. They were weapons. Killers. And he was just some dead guy in a hoodie with power he'd had for all of five minutes.
But something deeper stirred. That presence in his core. That hunger.
The power recognized threats. Recognized prey.
Fight.
"I don't want trouble," Raze said, raising his hands slowly, trying to buy time, trying to think. "I'm just lost. I'll leave."
The leader laughed—a sound like grinding metal. "Too late for that, gonk. You're in our territory. You breathe our air, you walk our streets, you pay. That's how Night City works."
The one with mantis blades stepped forward, chrome fingers flexing. "And if you got nothing worth taking..." He grinned. "We can always pull your organs. Ripperdocs pay good eddies for fresh meat. Especially young meat like you."
"Last chance," the leader said, pulling his pistol—a Rostovic Kolac, heavy caliber, definitely not legal. "Empty your pockets or we empty you."
Time seemed to slow.
Raze could see it all with perfect clarity—the way the leader's finger tightened on the trigger, the micro-movements of the others preparing to rush him, the exact angle of the gun barrel, the heat distortion from the barrel from where it had been fired recently.
ROB's words echoed in his mind: Adapt or die.
The gun fired.
And something inside Raze snapped open like a floodgate.
[End of Part 1 - Chapter continues...]