The door wasn’t that hard to pop with a bit of concentrated focus. They had the usual stuff, ‘course. Retinal, finger, and even a DNA reader using a small self-sterilizing prick. The finger print wouldn’t be that hard with my spoofer buried somewhere in my bag, but the other two would’ve been tricky to deal with.

Would’ve… as it turned out, they were a breeze. Vox shifted on my shoulder and dropped down onto my arm from where I was checking the door out with Technical Expertise. Her tail twitched, and the metallic tip pulled away to reveal a thin prehensile data jack. “C-can you get this open for me?”

”Can’t do it remotely?” I eyed the cable. I made it, ‘course, but seeing it in action was a little weird? Maybe I should make a few of those for myself, actually? It’d give me more arms to work with. “Didn’t you open up the hatch just fine?”

“If you want me to take longer. The hatch barely had any ICE on it compared to this thing.” Vox’s blue glowing eyes narrowed on me sassily.

”Fine, fine. You’re the runner.” I tossed my other arm up into the air, and carefully repositioned Vox so the metal fox wasn’t putting all her weight on me.

I disabled an emergency alarm with a burst of electricity and pried off the cover for the scanners. It took way more work than I expected to get it off. A mess of poorly set up wires pulled out alongside the cover. Whoever set this thing up had been in quite a rush, it seemed.

Carefully, so as not to trigger an alarm by severing one of the wires, I pulled everything out and exposed the internal ports and jacks. “Here.”

”Got it.” The tail shot forward, and the data jack slammed into one of the ports. Just like that, Luna had access.

I stood around for maybe twenty seconds before I noticed a duo of red pings headed my way from afar. Although they probably wouldn’t see me, there was a high chance they noticed something was wrong given the state of the door. “Luna?”

”I’m working on it,” she grumbled softly. The metal fox twisted her head toward the source of the pings, and 3D models of two guards showed up through the walls. “Can you stall?”

”With what? A gun?” I didn’t have much in my bag to make a distraction—at least, not one that wouldn’t trigger an alarm somewhere. “Can’t you?”

“She doesn’t have enough processors to run multiple intensive processes. A ping is the best I can do till this finishes,” Luna said.

’Course the fox didn’t. Yet another thing I’d need to rework when given the opportunity. Not that it mattered. I didn’t have anything when it came to netrunning gear. “Never mind.”

I hesitated for a moment and then channeled out my Kinetic ability. A wave of electricity so weak it was invisible surged out and sunk into the ground from my foot. I instantly felt my control weaken as the charge desperately sought to go downward through the path of least resistance.

Carefully, ever so carefully, I held onto the charge and channeled it horizontally through the ground down the hall and toward my targets to create a path. The further it got from me, the weaker the trail grew. Especially when it rounded the corner and went entirely out of my sight.

Using the 3D models on my HUD, I ended the trail of ionized air in a small circle just down before the corner. Once the trail connected, I sent a much stronger jolt of electricity arcing down the hall. In complete defiance of physics, the electricity traveled invisibly through the ground and followed my will.

If before with the weaker charge was difficult, then a full bolt was absolutely agonizing to control. Even just a momentary slip of concentration would see it discharging down through the ground. A migraine built up in the back of my head, and sweat dripped off my face from the sheer focus

The bolt filled the circle I made the moment before the guard stepped into my trap. Then it simply discharged up into him. My kinetic ability completely collapsed, and I lost control over the charge after forcing it up through his body.

“Argh!” A shrill scream echoed down the hall.

”Got it!” The door clicked open a beat later, and Vox’s tail retracted from the heavy locks keeping it sealed. She agilely jumped back up to my shoulder.

”’Bout time.” I wiped my forehead off and slapped the scanner cover back into place like I never even touched it. Then I slipped into the server room and sealed the door behind me. “Are they reporting in?”

”Um—here.” Luna patched me directly into their comms once more. While that was happening, Vox hopped off of me and scampered off toward the server banks to jack in and steal what we came here for.

”—fine now. What’s the call, Overwatch?” What I could safely assume was one of the guards called out to me.

“I’ll raise the alert by another level. Double the patrol up there.” The person in charge of this whole security team sighed.

Another guard spoke up. “Could’ve been Bobby’s chrome just acting up, boss. No need to cause a panic. We don’t call him greasy for no reason.”

”I know that. But what if it was a Discharge hack? You really want to risk that?” He groaned once more. “I want four squads to reroute and go sweep that section.”

A sweep… I’d probably be fine? They were taking their jobs very seriously, though… to be fair, there was an intruder, and it was a suspiciously timed jolt of electricity. Too bad I didn’t have wind powers or something. That likely wouldn’t have roused much attention.

“Right, so you’re good here, Luna?” I moved over patted Vox on the head. Her ear twitched, but her silver eyes were otherwise focused on where her tail jacked into the server banks.

”Should be… w-why?” Vox’s head looked back up to me with glowing blue eyes. “You planning on leaving?”

”Just a quick jaunt upstairs.” Specifically, to the netrunner rooms that Artoras had set up. There was that Raijin showcase coming up, but it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and start getting an idea of what I was about to work with. ‘Sides, the main Artoras corp was a net company, so they’d likely have the good stuff here.

“You’re just going to leave her here?” Luna asked. “What if they come in?”

”I doubt they’ll do more than a quick sweep.” I pointed up toward the top of the server racks. “If someone comes in while I’m away, have Vox jump up there.”

”Right. What about you?”

“It should be safer if I’m not here for them to find.” I summoned a second Spectral Flock crow. A wave of pressure built up in the back of my head from having two active at once. It was never a comfortable feeling, but it was one I’d have to bear with for a bit. “I’ll be back. You don’t need me here anyway, chek?”

”Not really. If you’re sure she’ll be fine…”

“She’ll probably be fine by herself, then?” I eyed Vox. Her silver eyes flicked back toward me for a moment before refocusing on the server banks.

We tested her before sending her into the field, ‘course. Luna even ran the code through a ton of simulations before we even put the core in. Granted, we could only do so much. Luna was limited by not having better gear, so it was an unfortunate truth some things would slip through the gaps given our time constraints. Especially with the interactive model of SAI she made.

Hopefully, that little hiccup from before would be the last of the issues until we could run the metal fox through some more tests. Not to mention we were already working off a reliable baseline SAI from the Crusade. ‘Sides, if the worst came to pass, I could instantly teleport back and abandon my side goal.

I made sure everything was ready and then slipped back out through the door while eyeing my HUD. The locations of all the guards across the floor showed up as small red dots. They were moving in a perfect search pattern, completely erasing all blind spots and ensuring no one would be able to slip through the gaps without being spotted.

“Which of these were the original two guards?” I asked quietly. I knew both of them had full sets of chrome eyes for me to slip past, but the same couldn’t necessarily be said for the others around here.

My neck warmed up a bit as Luna used me to Ping their network. Without Vox, it seemed I was back to relay duty. “Should be these two.”

“Chek.” I adjusted my route and slipped down the hall.

It wasn’t long before I crossed paths with them once more. They were much more serious looking this time around, though, and both prowled down the hall with pistols at the ready. I pressed up against the wall to let them pass and headed for a side staircase.

Getting up to the Netrunners wasn’t all that difficult. Security was supposed to increase sharply, ‘course, but they’d just rerouted a bunch of guards down to sweep the floor below. It left me a perfect little gap to work my way down the halls.

A few offices were still lit, and a cubicle farm I rerouted around was half full of workers. My Dragonflies zipped around well ahead of me to sweep, so I wasn’t too worried about being spotted. Other than that, the halls were mostly barren all the way toward the spot.

Just down the hall from my next target, the small drones pulled away instead of scouting it out. “This is as far as these guys can go without getting spotted. You’re on your own, Shiro.”

”Got it.” I’d have to remember to come back to at least this point before teleporting back, then.

I slunk down the hall—

“Hey,” a weak voice called out. I flinched back to see a frail guy in a netrunner suit coming down the hall with a cup of steaming coffee in his hands. A baggy hoodie enveloped his thin frame. “Overwatch is going to throw a fit if two of us are on break at the same time.”

I froze for a moment before I coughed lightly and nodded along. “Yeah, well, they already work us like mutts. Seriously, they expect us to be plugged in twenty-four seven?”

“No kidding. I feel like my mind is melting recently.” The man sipped at his coffee and rubbed at a set of baggy eyes. Flesh eyes. My Blinder was entirely useless against him. His loose hoodie bunched up down around his elbow with the motion.

“What the heck is going on?” Mira finally burst the bubble and asked. She was likely watching from the Dragonflies just down the hall.

“No idea.” I whispered back, and then tossed a friendly smile toward the man. Not that it mattered given my mask. “You see those firmware updates recently? What are they trying to do? Fry us?”

“Seriously. Do they even have runners on staff?” I followed behind the man as he opened the secured bunker door into the netrunner facilities. He held it open politely for me. “C’mon, let’s get back to it.”

“Thanks.” I slipped into the area just like that. I had a sneaking suspicion about how, too. Master of Disguise was a powerful perk. Nothing else included, it blurred my face so nobody could recognize me. That wasn’t exactly a disguise, though, was it?

I pulled softly at my bodysuit—an almost exact match for the kind of suit that the netrunner had on. I was in disguise at the moment, so was it warping his perception? Nothing too crazy, but just enough to make him think I was a fellow netrunner with Artoras?

Disguises weren’t really my strong suit, so I didn’t use them all that often. I likely wouldn’t even notice this small benefit of the Perk… if I thought about it, though, just recently I was in disguise at Mickey’s party, chek? We’d barely been questioned, and that hadn’t exactly been smooth. Weird. I’ll have to test this further when I get the chance.

”Hey, well, I’ll see you around. We should go get coffee sometime.” He lifted his cup in salute.

”Maybe if I can finally get off for once.” I forced a tragic sigh and rubbed at the back of my head. “They bumped my hours up this week.”

“That’s rough. Well, never mind then.” His eyes seemed to just glaze over my panther holomask, and he headed down a short hall toward a runner room.

”Shiro? SHIRO, come in! Are you safe? Do we need to exfil?” Mira’s voice held a trace of panic to it. I was totally out of their vision since Luna didn’t want to hack in this close to the heart of their operations.

”Chill, mikata. I’m fine.” I sighed and looked down the hall for an unoccupied runner room. There were easily dozens of runners on staff here, far more than would be usually needed for a corporation this size. It suggested they were either paranoid about their security… or they were running something else out of this building.

That isn’t what I’m here for, though. I slid into an empty room. A series of server banks and background processors sat against the side wall covered in layers of cooling arrays and systems. The far wall had a full suite of monitors, terminals, and hologram projectors sitting entirely inactive. The center piece, though, was the Neural Interface Chair sitting in the middle of the room—the Netrunner’s throne.

I walked around tapping on all the tech to memorize the blueprints for everything. The server banks and processors weren’t anything too complicated. Even at a glance there was some stuff I could upgrade now that I had the basic layout.

The Neural Interface Chair, though, was an entirely different beast. Although it was called a chair, it looked a bit like a bed that could move and adjust to the user’s comfort. I had to tap it repeatedly to get down just how complex the thing was.

The ones that Artoras used had a full built in spinal cooling system interlinked with EM shielding. Beyond that, though, the actual neural interface was entirely different then what I expected. I expected something similar to Neural System Interface Crome. It wasn’t way off track, but the methodology and layout of the tech was something that I likely would’ve screwed up if I just went and built one without any idea of what I was doing.

I scanned the rest of the room and slipped out of the door. Getting out of the runner bunker was even easier than getting in. It was built to keep intruders out, not in. I simply hit the exit switch and slipped out into the hall. Once I was far enough, I slipped into a janitor’s closet and teleported back to the main server room.

A rush of vertigo passed over me quickly as I staggered a step into the server room. I took control of a Dragonfly and ripped it through the feather left behind, completely destroying any evidence that I was there.

”It’s so weird how you can do that.” Luna muttered. “How’s that even work?”

”Magic.” I shrugged and glanced around for Vox. She was hooked into a separate server than where I left her. “How close are we?”

”I finished a while ago.” Vox unlinked herself from the server banks and bounded over to me with a happy gleam to her silver eyes. “Just looking for anything else of note.”

”Was there?”

”Not really.”

“Go ahead and bring my bike around, then.” I stretched out and shook out my limbs. Not bad for a day's work. I got what I wanted, and the mission objective was naturally completed too.

“We finally getting out of here?” Mira groaned across the Packheart Link. “I’m freezing my nose off up here.”

”Don’t even. I know I built that one with a heater.” I’d given her Roughrider the full fix up. It was even nicer than mine, which still had some small leftover issues from the prototyping stage.

”It’s coming.” A ping went off somewhere above me.I looked up and spotted a blue spot overlaying my HUD far up above the building. It was rapidly descending down toward the building.

“Oh, and don’t bother getting rid of the feather this time around.” It was a sign of Nightshade, yes, but it was also a threat. Not toward Artoras, but toward the manager of Smith&Sons that we were dealing with.

If Feras’s mystery client could get Nightshade to pull a gig, then they could definitely get Nightshade to invite a certain backstabbing manager to a nice steak dinner. For once, my killer reputation might actually help me out. Afterall, if I killed a bunch of Raijin’s employees, what would stop me from killing anyone else? Not that I would, but they didn’t know that.

I swiped Vox up into my arms and lightly tugged on my connection to the Spectral Flock crow on my Roughrider. In one smooth motion, I vanished like a ghost with no one the wiser.

— — —

AN: Bit of a longer one today. Thought about splitting it into two chapters, but I’m about ready to be done with this arc so we can move onto something else. I dunno. Just felt like this one started rough, and then kept being rough? Anyone else get that vibe? Or was I just being too critical of my own work as per usual?

To be fair, I was also super excited for the upcoming stuff, so maybe it just made this feel like a slog by comparison. I really, really like the next arc, and the arc after that slows things down and goes back old school in a way I really like.