Adam was in a very good mood.
His armor was cracked and in many places shattered. His servos were strained and hard to move. His frame was beaten to a point that many would look at him and question his ability to move. His entire left arm was gone, sheared off at the bicep area by a railgun shot that he couldn't activate his Sandevistan in time for.
That was the best damn fight he had had in a while, even better than his tussle with the kid. Granted the kid could have pushed him farther if Adam didn't have his weapons for that fight, but he did and purposefully limiting oneself on the job is a good way to get killed. Work and play should be kept entirely separate matters.
He was in such a good mood, he didn't even mind the stupid message PR had sent him. 'We will take this opportunity to update your aesthetics, please delay your repairs for a day.' and an attached image of the most corny bullshit he had seen in a long while.
He sent a message back telling them to change it to something else or he was going to kill half of everyone down there he sees. They quickly responded and asked him to delay his repairs for a day and a half instead. Feels good to have meat listen to him when he talks.
That sniper though, she was a damn satisfying fight. It had been years since he's lost a component like this, and all it took was a single railgun shot that he couldn't fully dodge to do it. He did her the courtesy of killing her really quickly as the building fell on them.
As he was trapped under the rubble, he and Uriel were able to go over the fight in detail. It was going straight into his long term files, a fine addition to his collection for certain. Uriel even got some ideas for upgrading the dye-skinned woman out of it, maybe she'd be useful in a fight in the future.
Mostly as just a turrent, granted, but still useful. The meatbag in that armor had proven that to him. The bossman was happy with the recovered tech too, that railgun was experimental grade-tech and now Arasaka had a still functioning model to work off of. Yes, Adam was in a good mood as he opened the elevator door and walked into his floor.
He sighed regretfully as he looked at his sword. Now that he knew that meatfuckers were already gunning for him and the kid, he couldn't afford to play around with it anymore. It was sad, and it made him sad too. Uriel had suggested trying to use it with Panzerfaust, but running the calculations revealed that it would break the blade before too many uses. Although, if he had something heavier-duty, Uriel suggested, and had an idea…
Footsteps of a moderately high speed alerted him. Judging by the sound they were probably the dye-woman, here to ask him for money or something. Sure enough, she turned the corner and then did something he wasn't expecting. Her eyes widened and she dashed over to him, yelling out as she did.
"Holy shit Big Guy! Are you alright?!" She sounded concerned about something, although Adam wasn't sure what. Then Uriel commented that she's probably alarmed about the damage he took. Ah, she was mostly meat wasn't she, probably best to reassure her somehow.
"I had a good fight. I won." Adam stated simply.
"No, I mean… Your Arm!" She yelled. Adam was confused again, and so was Uriel this time.
"Experimental high-end railgun, I'll have a new one tomorrow."
She stared at him, at a loss of words. She sighed and slumped, before talking much more normally. "Did you enjoy yourself?" She sounded almost resigned.
"Best scrap in a while." At his words, she put her face in her hands for a moment before shaking and looking up.
"I'm glad you had fun, Adam." Ah, that was kind of her. He still wasn't sure why she was upset earlier. Hmm, where was the kid and his girl? He vocalized this question to the dye-girl, who told him that the girl was talking to his handler (fucking finally, you used up hag) and that the kid was with her to make sure no corpo tries anything. Adam thought this was prudent, so he was fine with it.
"Hey, when are you going to take me out?" She said, and Uriel sputtered a bit. She continued, "You've been taking David out to shoot up gonks a lot, but when am I gonna get some of that action?"
Same as the other girl then? Normally that would mean the same answer, but Adam and Uriel had just gone over battle data from a fight with a woman without much cybernetics herself. Unlike the other girl, this one didn't have any particular talent for anything except shooting, so it would have to do.
"You don't have the chrome for it." She was about to get angry about that before Adam continued. "Nor do you need the chrome for it, if you listen to me."
"Alright big guy, where are you going with this?"
"How's your sniping?" It wasn't like she was going to be useful for much else. Not enough chrome to keep up when up close, and not enough skill in anything to be useful outside of holding a gun. Might as well be the biggest gun they can give her.
Fortunately, Adam just recovered a very big fucking gun.
"Not the best, but I can manage, why?
…Eh, he'd have to give her a few tips. Better for her to be another gun than a freeloader.
—
"This thing isn't a sniper rifle. It's not even a crew gun. It's a scaled down naval cannon." Said the seemingly young man in front of the partially dismantled railgun that Adam tore from the assassin's power armor after the crew pulled him and it out of the rubble. He was in a rather spacious room with lots of sensors and scanners and other things that Adam didn't care about scattered about the room.
The 'young' man was Hijitaka Kaneda, Adam's personal techie on Arasaka dime, and he was close to eighty years old at this point. Well, he was actually the techie responsible for 'experimental weapons platforms development and advancement', but considering that Adam was Arasaka's chief killborg, those were basically the same thing.
He stood about six feet tall, had sparse brown stubble and dark brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. Most notable were his arms, which he had four of. Two on each side of his body, each controlled with perfect precision. Three of them were fiddling with some sort of screen while the fourth lazy waved in his direction. He was looking fully at Adam, except the camera mounted on his right shoulder, which was still rotated at the screens.
He was in a lab coat, some sort of kevlar body armor underneath that covered his entire body, and loafers. They guy probably slept down here, Adam had never seen him actually leave. The glasses he on were entirely aesthetic, Hijikata wore them because he liked pushing them up whenever someone said something stupid.
"I approve, it's about time they stopped wasting their time with peashooters and started making guns again."
"Figures you would. ACPA grade?"
"More, you could probably use it, but it'd be a pain in the ass. That's probably why they had it on a quad-mounted ACPA, more space to fit the thing on the back than in the arms. You'd need a Dragoon body to handle the thing without an ACPA, and a DaiOni to use it effectively."
Adam remembered the DaiOni, he loved it. It was his favorite frame and he sincerely wished he got more chances to use it. 3.4 meters, 1.12 tons, all death, all destruction, entirely invincible. The Cyberskeleton was such an unbelievable disappointment to fight against in comparison, reliant some the stupid gimmick of gravity rather than pure killing power.
Speaking of the Cyberskeleton…
"The Cyberskeleton was absolute garbage."
"I know, I made that garbage afterall."
"Why?" Hijitaka normally did fairly good work, so the Cyberskeleton being meatshit was unusual.
"Higher ups demanded a humanoid, bipedal frame that used their fancy new gravtech. Fuckers know that the smallest gravtech emitters are still one ton of metal a piece. So I had to upscale it for the frame to hold the fucking thing."
"It still couldn't move without the antigrav."
"Right, so since gravtech emitters get more efficient the more of them you use, I put another one on to handle the weight of the first one. Which means a huge chunk of the system has to be dedicated to keeping the frame mobile at all."
"A technically successful frame."
"They clearly didn't want me to actually succeed this time, it was just about seeing if I could make their gravtech more efficient in the process. I succeeded, of course. One point one to three point two percent weight and bulk reduction across the board. All that for a three ton pile of shit that used a gimmick as its main form of attack."
"They reward you for that?"
"Yep, fifteen million eddies richer and a bottle of aspirin poorer. I get the better of them though when I slipped those sub-hands into the design, fucking worthless and they still gobbled it up. Thing didn't even have any pilot armor, just an exposed torso."
All the while, Hijitaka was looking over the design of the fancy new toy Adam picked up. Hijtaka was beginning to get the way he normally did when looking over a new gun. Of course, the man didn't consider any weapon below fifty caliber to be an actual gun, 'toys' he called those. Anything below one-hundred caliber he called peashooters. It made sense, he used to work on Artillery and naval cannons before Arasaka hired him to make weapon designs for them.
What do you know, what he had in front of him was in fact a proper gun to the high-class fixer.
"Speaking of which, you got your new student or whatever by tearing him out of the thing, didn't you? How'd he do in it? I was working while that business went down and I thought I'd ask you instead of watching the news."
"Tore through a Militech division, needed me to deal with him."
At this Hijitaka paused, and dedicated his attention fully to Adam.
"A division and you? In that pile of garbage?"
"Yes."
"...well I'll be damned, send him my way when he's free, I wanna get feedback from someone who actually pulled that off."
"Right, now I wanna thank you for the gift of the big gun you brought me, but I also wanna ask what you want. Normally you don't bother coming around anymore."
"I need a custom ACPA, Bipedal, that can handle a gun about that big, at least fifty percent as strong."
Hijitaka was getting the look on his face like he was thinking about something, which means he was thinking about something really fucking hard for it to show up visibly.
"...This for someone else? What chrome do they have?"
"Optics and Arms, they cannot get more."
"...give me a challenge, why don't you? Normally I'd tell you to fuck off but between those schematics and this gun I'd say you've earned a custom. I'll work on something in my free time, and get it to you in a few weeks. You'll have to pay me for the parts though."
"Deal."
"Alright, now buzz off, higher ups want this thing fully cracked before the week is over."
"Before I go, how long until the schematics are done?"
"It'll be months more, maybe about ten before they get done. The basics are all already there, we just have to put them together and integrate them to the Smasher standard. That's the hard part. We already got higher-up approval when I started ranting about 'increased mission viability through modular framework and viable machine and martial interface'."
Adam nodded and turned to walk away, but then Hijitaka spoke up again.
"Oh, Adam, how much chrome did you say the pilot of this thing had?"
"Minimal, from what I could tell, the ACPA took care of the handling."
"...I recognize some of the software. Militech basics for the most part."
Adam knew that Hijitaka wouldn't just say that out of nowhere, so he was clearly going somewhere with this.
"And?"
"...Smartware chip interface has the hallmarks of being a Blackhand custom."
—
"Your new chrome is ready to use, Mr. Smasher! Thank you for bearing with us at the PR department." Chiri Tanaka said to him as he looked at himself in the mirror they had in the room.
It had been some time since he had lips, and the feeling of anything on the lower half of his face was strange. He had no complaints about the rest of it, it didn't impact his functionality when it came to slaughtering meat, and it should be compatible with the new chrome Hijikata was cooking up some months from now.
The only two in the room were himself and the woman who had been annoying him for the last few days, but it looked like they were finally starting to settle on a design for his 'marketing' and 'customer appeal'. Adam personally felt like this was all a waste of time, but he knew that going in when he agreed to cooperate with this.
He flexed his new arm, it had been a while since he had a fight good enough to need anything replaced. To think it was with something that had the bastards influence was just his fucking luck. An entire fight ruined by his fucking existence. It was typical of the fucker to do just that.
"Look at me Smasher, a tenth of your chrome and still kicking your ass!"
Adam snarled at the memory, and noticed the PR woman flinched. Ah, she was still here, he would have thought she would be gone by now. Adam took a good look at the woman.
She was hot, he admitted. She was a little woman with non-garbage hair that so many meatbags nowadays seemed to love. Just a bob cut that went a little below her chin. Her breasts were nice and handful-sized, her hips were a bit meaty. She was in one of those office lady outfits that were somehow still popular even to the modern day.
Adam supposed that made sense, you can't beat the classics. She was practically shivering in front of him, but not moving away as his gaze crawled over her body. Such a timid little thing, huh?
---SCENE CUT DUE TO LEWD---
Several hours later, Adam Smasher opened the door leading to the hallway and beheld the two guards that were stationed outside. They were looking straight ahead, their faces the picture of pure professionalism. Adam walked by them and to the elevator, he had things to do and an apprentice to teach.
As he walked he heard them talk behind him.
"Holy shit, Adam Smasher fucks."
Damn right he does.