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The 800,000 euro payday was no longer a dream; it was a blood-soaked reality.
Inside the third-floor office, the air was thick with the smell of ozone, scorched meat, and the metallic tang of blood. The office was a ruin. Filing cabinets were shredded, the steel desk was twisted into scrap metal, and the walls were pockmarked with the impact of high-velocity combat.
Jax sat in the center of the carnage, his chest heaving. The red glow in his eyes was slowly fading, replaced by a deep, bone-weary exhaustion as the Potential Overdraft began to take its toll. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been shredded and re-knit with hot needles.
He looked at his Katana. The Arasaka blade was notched and dulled, the thermal edge flickering weakly. It had served its purpose, but it had reached its limit.
Beside him lay the leaders of the Nightwalkers. Krisfen Zobert was a grisly sight, split nearly in half from his skull down to his alloy-reinforced navel. Boett Mitchell lay nearby, his head missing entirely, his high-end Mantis Blades still extended and twitching with phantom electrical impulses.
The belief in cyberware supremacy had died in this room. Boett's last realization—that a "natural" human could move faster and hit harder than his Mk.4 Sandevistan—had been his final, terrifying epiphany.
Clatter—
The iron door, already bent out of shape by Jax's earlier entrance, was kicked off its remaining hinges.
"Jax! Jax!"
Jackie burst into the room, his black jacket torn and soaked with blood from a nasty gash on his left arm. He held his pistols high, his eyes scanning for threats, but he froze the moment he saw the state of the room.
Rebecca followed a split-second later. She was limping, two red blooms of blood spreading across the midsection of her outfit, but her expression was one of frantic concern until her eyes landed on Jax. She let out a breath that sounded like a sob, though she quickly masked it with a fierce scowl.
Lucy was the last to enter. She was physically unscathed, but her face was pale. She looked at the corpses, then at the destruction, and finally at Jax. Her logic-driven mind was struggling to process the scene. This wasn't the result of a tactical skirmish; this was a slaughter.
Jax looked up at them, his cap missing and his black hair matted with sweat and grit. He didn't look like a hero. He looked like a man who had stared into the abyss and forced it to blink.
He leaned back on his hands, a weak, lopsided grin spreading across his face. In the middle of the charnel house, surrounded by the wreckage of his enemies, he let out a dry, raspy laugh.
"You guys are damn late, you know?!"
"Late?!" Rebecca shrieked, her voice cracking with a mix of relief and fury. "We fought through a whole army downstairs, you ungrateful bastard!"
"Mano..." Jackie breathed, stepping over Krisfen's remains to reach Jax. "You actually did it. You zeroed both of them alone."
Lucy stood at the edge of the room, her iridescent hair reflecting the sparks from a broken light fixture. She looked at Jax, and for the first time, she didn't see a "little lamb" or a "tool." She saw a man who had rewritten the rules of the city with nothing but a blade and a terrifying will to survive.
"The box," Jax managed to say, gesturing toward the corner where the stolen refrigerator sat, undisturbed. "Get the stuff. Let's get out of this desert."
As Jackie and Rebecca moved to secure the cargo and patch their wounds, Lucy walked over to Jax. She didn't say anything at first. She just reached down, offering him a hand to help him up.
Jax took it. Her grip was firm and cool.
"Sixty thousand eddies," she whispered, a faint, genuine smile playing on her lips. "I guess it was worth the risk."
"Eighty thousand for me," Jax replied, leaning on her as he stood. "But honestly? I think I'm going to spend most of it on a new sword."
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