Cyberpunk: I didn't cheat.

"What? Afraid of getting your suit dirty and not being able to kneel down?"

Lin Jiro couldn't figure out Vito's background; he didn't know if Vito was the company's assassin or some reckless mercenary.

“If Your Excellency can put down your gun, then we can talk about much more.”

"Oh? What else can we talk about?"

Lin Jiro continued to use language to attract Vito's attention, and his pupils suddenly contracted, a sign that the super-limit prosthetic mode was about to be activated.

"If you want money, you can join Arasaka. We can offer more than other companies. There's an old Chinese saying, 'A wise man submits to circumstances.' Why don't you..."

boom!

Gunshot.

The punishment exploded with a bang, and the large-caliber bullet from the Malorian Overture pierced right through Lin Jiro's head.

Because of the many prosthetic parts installed on his head, Lin Jiro's head did not explode like a watermelon.

"Why are you pretending to be a China expert with me, you little devil?"

Lin Jiro fell forward, his face buried in the puddle, blood gushing from the hole in his head, turning into a pale red stream washed away by the rain.

Vito fired a few more shots, then went to the back seat of the car and picked up the money chip.

He started the car, and the Villefort's engine roared as it sped into the rain.

The night scene on the mask still flows, only slower, as if the city has finally grown tired.

He turned on the car stereo, tuned to the temperature monitoring station, and randomly played an old song – "I Really Want to Stay at Your House".

The singing mingled with the sound of rain, like a funeral that no one was listening to.

After the song ended, the temperature screening station played another hit by the band Fierce, "Ponpon Shit."

Vito drove to Taiping, a place that the NCPD had officially abandoned. He parked the car not far from the shopping mall, got out, and walked away.

Several strong animal gang members set up a tent not far away and started shooting for fun.

Upon seeing Vito, the members of the Animal Gang mocked him.

"Hey! Square-faced guy, didn't your mom teach you to use an umbrella when it rains?"

"Which lousy doctor installed this TV set in your house? Hahahaha."

"Stop wasting your breath on him, Square Head. You're in the wrong place. This is Animal Gang territory!"

Vito didn't say anything, but instead pulled out his Punishment and fired, shooting the Animal Gang members to pieces.

"grass!"

Bang bang bang bang!

Vito continued shooting the others into a pile of parts.

Finally, Vito dropped the hacked money chip and disappeared into the night.

The rain is still falling, like the tears that the city of night can never wipe away.

Chapter 33 Decent

Arakasaka Tower, 85th floor, Rintaro's office.

There is no dust, no noise, and even the speed of airflow has been precisely calculated. Outside the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, the neon lights of Night City are distorted and deformed in the downpour, like a faulty circuit board.

Rintaro stood by the window, his back to the door. He wore a dark gray custom-made suit, and the Arasaka family crest brooch on his lapel gleamed with a metallic chill in the cold light.

"Go in."

The door slid open silently.

Sato, the security team supervisor, walked in with a steady gait, carrying a data board. His expression was calm, as if he were about to report a quarterly financial statement for the security team, rather than the news of someone's death.

“Director.” Sato stopped three meters in front of the desk, bowed slightly, and said in a steady voice, “Deputy Director Hayashi Jiro was found assassinated under the Sixth Street Bridge. The internal backtracking chip confirmed that he was executed by a high-caliber kinetic weapon, and his vital signs were reduced to zero.”

Rintaro didn't turn around, but simply put down his whiskey glass, the ice cubes hitting the glass with a crisp sound.

"reason."

"Initial assessment indicates that the attack was an ambush by professional mercenaries. The attackers used modified signal masking devices, and neither the trauma team nor the company was able to react. No biometric fingerprints were left at the scene."

"Loss assessment".

"Besides Lin Jiro himself, the vehicle server was brute-forced and dumped in Taiping Prefecture. The money chip was also hacked. The other party did not take the cash, but it cannot be ruled out that Lin Jiro leaked some company secrets."

Rintaro turned around, his face expressionless—no sadness, no anger, not even a hint of surprise. Hearing of his brother's death was as insignificant as hearing that some low-level cannon fodder had died downstairs in the company building.

"Submit the data."

The holographic projection unfolded, and streams of blue light intertwined in the air to form a complex network. That was the last movement trajectory of Hayashi Jiro before his death.

Rintaro walked to the projector and gently traced his finger across the air, as if caressing a work of art.

"Sato, have you ever seen glass?"

"Yes, Director."

“When a nail is forcibly driven into glass, cracks invisible to the naked eye will appear around it.” Rintaro’s voice was deep and calm, carrying a sense of absolute rational pressure. “Foolish security personnel will only focus on Jiro’s death and waste computing power trying to find out who the killer is, what his name is, and where he lives.”

His finger stopped at the red dot where Lin Jiro's signal had disappeared.

“What we need to look at is the cracks, and follow those cracks to the center of the intersection. That’s where the problem started. The cracks are in the affairs he’s handling. He should be in close contact with those Yakuza and give me information from there.”

Sato immediately organized the data, while Rintaro's fingers slid down the data at an astonishing speed.

“In the past two weeks, Jiro has been calling for only one external resource: the Tiger Claw Gang.”

On the holographic map, the Kabuki district was instantly highlighted.

"Have the Yakuza report the locations of their recent attacks, then you just need to find places that have some similarities and filter them out. Go and do it."

Sato wrote on the data board: "Should we immediately dispatch a special operations team to clean it up after finding it?"

"Not urgent."

Rintaro picked up the cup again.

"Raise the encryption level of all projects related to Jiro, and upgrade the security level of important projects by two levels. As for Jiro's personal accounts and assets, handle them according to company rules. He didn't create value for the company while he was alive, so he doesn't need to occupy resources after he's dead."

"Understood, Director."

Sato turned and left, the door closing silently.

Looking at the wide-open eyes of Rinjiro in the death data, Rinjiro took a sip of whiskey.

"Jiro."

Rintaro swirled his glass again, raised it to his brother's eyes on the screen as a silent farewell, and then drank it all in one gulp.

……

When Jotaro Seiho pushed open the heavy soundproof door, his expression was still so gloomy it could drip water. As the "artistic director" of the Tiger Claw Gang in the Kabuki district, he hated accidents more than anything, especially accidents like this that disrupted his filming plans.

"Damn it, I was only gone for two hours..."

He strode into the photography studio he called "the temple," muttering curses under his breath at his incompetent subordinates. He had imagined countless possibilities: equipment malfunction, unruly models, or some foolish cop coming to sweep the place.

But to his utter surprise, he was met with a pile of minced meat and a pool of blood that had not yet dried.

His director was now lying on the ground like a pool of melting wax. Scattered around were the corpses of several Tiger Claw Gang members, some with twisted limbs, others with their heads smashed open. The blood mixed with the pungent smell of strong acid fermented under the pink neon lights, producing a strange sweet and fishy odor.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

"Which bastard did this?! He wrecked my place like this!"

He roared, his hands clenched into fists, his knuckles turning white from the force.

Anger surged in his chest like magma; he wished he could capture the intruder right now, skin him alive, and turn him into new Mewtwo material.

This was his long-planned "Symphony of Pain" series, and now it's all ruined!

"Boss..."

One of the underlings huddled in the corner, trembling as he pointed at the still-operating camera.

"That guy... he didn't seem to turn off the machine when he left."

Jotaro's anger froze instantly.

He turned his head sharply and looked at the high-definition camera mounted on a tripod. The red recording indicator light was still flashing, like a tireless eye, silently watching over this hellish place.

In that instant, Jotaro's expression underwent an extremely strange change.

The anger receded like a tide, replaced by an almost morbid ecstasy. His pupils dilated, his breathing became rapid, and the corners of his mouth stretched uncontrollably.

"It's not off...it's not off..."

He lunged at the camera, his movements as gentle as if he were caressing a lover's face. With trembling hands, he pressed the replay button, projecting the image onto the enormous holographic screen.

The video begins to play.

There was no script, no rehearsals, and no fake performances.

On the screen, the man wearing a glowing square mask descended from the sky. His movements were fluid and decisive. The Nine-Tailed Rifle spat fire, and the whistling sound of kinetic bullets tearing through the air was perfectly captured by the high-fidelity microphone.

In the scene, the unfortunate director struggles and screams in the strong acid; his extreme fear and despair are a million times more real than any professional actor.

"So beautiful..."

Jotaro muttered to himself, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical light.

"This is art! This is true violent aesthetics! Look at the composition, look at the light and shadow, and the splattering blood... What a perfect parabola!"

He completely forgot about the corpses on the ground, his dead men, and even the enemy who had ruined his place.

In his eyes, this was not a crime scene at all; it was an unadorned, raw, and primal documentary.

"Boss, this content..." the underling asked cautiously, "is it still usable?"

"Use it? This is simply a masterpiece!"

Jotaro suddenly stood up and excitedly waved his arms.

"The previous scripts were too fake! Audiences were already tired of those fake screams. But this one... this one is real! It's death! It's pure killing!"

He carried the terminal with him during the live connection, his fingers flying across the keyboard like a pianist playing a stirring piece.

"Here, brighten this shot to highlight the neon reflection on the mask. Here, amplify the gunshots; I want the audience to feel the thrill of their eardrums shattering. And this one, slow down the moment the Tiger Claw Gang member gets blasted away. And the emotions—edit the emotions, ah, so satisfying!"

As Jotaro edited the clips, he hummed an off-key tune, his face beaming with the ecstasy of creating a great work.

"I've already thought of a name: 'The Execution Song of the Square Head: Act I'."

Chapter 34 Cold-blooded Animals

In the old neighborhoods of southern Santo Domingo, garbage and abandoned vehicles are everywhere. Vito and Jack look at the H06 skyscraper and the spherical industrial gas tanks that are joined together at a particular angle.

“Tsk tsk tsk, I dare say the people who had H06 repaired there definitely know about this, what do you say, Vito?”

Vito sipped his cocoa, waiting for Qiwei's message.

This is the territory of the Sixth Street Gang, but yesterday, they encountered a large number of ships. The value of this batch of goods does not lie in the fact that it is The weapon is still a prosthetic body, but it lies in itself. It is a mobile data terminal of military technology. It contains encryption algorithms that are enough to give several large companies in Night City a headache for a week.

Qiwei is already in place; she's probably in a nearby parking lot right now.

“Listen, I’ll only say it once.”

Qiwei's voice was transmitted through an encrypted channel into Vito and Jack's minds. She was in a modified van two kilometers away, lying in the hacker chair inside the van.

Her eyes were vacant, the standard expression after "emotional block" was activated—no fear, no hesitation, only absolute calculation.

"The target is Warehouse 4 in Zone C, the office on the second floor. The Sixth Street Gang has sent a three-man squad to guard it this time, all heavily armed infantry. A frontal assault would attract more trouble. But there's good news: their internet firewall is an older version of military technology, and I have a backdoor."

"Got it, how do we get in?"

Jack's voice was low, but his massive frame, huddled behind the container, still seemed out of place. He held reason in his hand, the source of his sense of security.