Chapter 34: 34
The skyline of Night City stayed the same as ever, covered in sky scrapers that themselves were covered in advertisements that soared into the sky even as changes were constantly taking place within its streets.
Standing at the edge of the roof of one such skyscraper was a tall gangly being wearing a formal red suit and coat that rustled in the high winds. A wide toothy grin present on its pasty white face as its eyes glowed with a eerie red light.
...
It has been 8 weeks since I began my 'Radio Network' project and things were progressing quickly. Over a hundred disguised vox casters were distributed across and around Night City even into the wastelands surrounding the city. Almost immediately they were discovered by the local gangs, fixers, solos, and corpos with expected results. Some tried to hack them, steal them, or even break them. Obviously they did not succeed. Their construction made them nigh indestructible to non heavy weaponry or industrial equipment, their tech made them unhackable, and their built in locators made theft just a delayed punishment to be delivered when I finally reached them. I admit I did originally hesitated to be too rough or violent with the first group of gang members that tried to make off with one of my radio, at least until I proceeded to mind rip one that kept shooting me in the face. When I learned just what their group had done needless to say any empathy I had for them died instantly. Their bodies were still hanging in that alleyway. I could even point to the time when I even crossed my own line and truly lost a piece of my remaining Humanity. A group of kids part of what Night City referred to as a 'Youth Gang' attempted to steal a radio. They were so young, they were not even preteens, so damn young. I just scared them and let them go, not willing to outright murder kids in cold blood. That changed as I witnessed the fleeing children proceed to gun down a family in cold blood in order to steal their car. The family suffered multiple fatal shots including their heads making it impossible for me to help them. My mind had processed the entire scene in an instant and I felt a piece of me die as I did what I had to do to balance the scales. I instantly drew my weapon and killed the youth gang members before they could escape in their stolen vehicle, mind rip occurring to verify my own actions, and verified it did. While the kids were kids indeed, the amount of crimes and Evil they had done matched and in some cases exceeded that of those decades their senior. At that instant I decided, age, word, race, species? None of that mattered, only deeds, and I would do whatever I needed to accomplish my goals, whatever they might be. I had crossed my line, so why not keep going?
Lastly, there were those that simply used them as intended, a radio, listening to the old music I loaded into the Network or even better, figured out that I allowed the radios to tap into random frequencies around the city. That last function lured in the fixers and edge runners like moths to the flame, creating constant skirmishes by hired solos and corpo proxies over access to the radios. Among those I picked those most likely to make a deal out of greed and offered them contracts. There were hits and misses, some obeyed and were rewarded with upgraded weapons, armor, and gear, while those that did not were made to disappear or into examples. This has resulted in a rapidly growing force of fearful mercenaries on my payroll doing missions on my behalf all across the city for essentially nothing, as the high quality gear they have been receiving was still nothing compared to even the lowest of 40K tech. Imperial tech may have essentially been the lowest cast offs of DAOT Humanity, but even the junk of modern civilization would be god like to ancient prehistoric humans. So essentially I was trading the equivalent of dirt for services rendered.
This large force of solos and edge runners had effectively over the course of two months expanded my Network to encompass a wide variety of closed loop systems. A dozen servitors lashed together into a pseudo hive mind bio AI was constantly monitoring and processing all the information obtained by my vox radios around the city, using their passive sensors and hacking unsecured local networks and personal implants. However, they needed some more physical help to create connections to closed loop systems like secure security systems and off grid computer networks, help which I had plenty of.
First the cameras were infiltrated, then the security rooms, then the actual server and computers, with each one being taken making it easier to infiltrate other locations with the data retrieved and identifying more targets to go after.
Now my Network spans the entirety of Night City, the Wastelands, and even into some of the large corporation networks as well with access to all their low level security and communications. I was essentially Big Brother at this point as there was no where for most people to hide.
Of course I did not solely spend my time on gathering information just for the sake of infiltration, I also used it to locate every single ganger and criminal out on the streets to hunt them down.
There were a LOT of gangs in Night City. Youth Gangs, Combat Gangs, Culture Gangs, Family Gangs, Guardian Gangs, Chrome Gangs, and much much more. There were even entire sections of the city abandoned by the government to pure lawlessness cause they could not oust the gangs in them called Combat Zones. No law enforcements would dare to step inside such areas without heavy armor support. In short, there were a lot of acceptable targets for me to hunt. Dozens of gang infested buildings, warehouses, drug dens, hidden caches, sewer hideouts and more were cleared out by me and looted for everything.
Speaking of which my Network flagged a gang skirmish nearby. I immediately proceeded to dash over the roof tops leaping over street wide gaps with ease, easily avoiding the notice of those on the roof tops with my Stealth skill and ignoring the surveillance cameras which were under my control. I reached the gunfight in under a minute stopping on the roof top above to look down and take in the situation.
At opposite ends of a basketball court were two gangs having a shoot out. A trio of Tiger Claws were hiding behind their motorcycles trading fire with a half dozen Valentinos taking cover behind corners. My glasses lit up as my Network processed the faces of the gangers beneath me and fed me their personal information. All of them had minor bounties for a variety of crimes from murder to theft. This was not even the first skirmish of the night, this was the sixth, for the night. Just during the day there were over a dozen firefights between gang members across the city, usually more along the outer edges of the city or in or around the combat zones, and with the rate of the night skirmishes it seemed that there would be even more tonight. Most of which were not even between the major gangs of the city, there are dozens of minor gangs constantly carving out their own territories or raiding others for more of everything. It honestly reminded me a bit of Nostromo before I invaded, kind of, Night City was still leagues better.
After identifying all the targets I proceeded to pull out two stun grenades, set them to contact detonation, and tossed them at the two groups. The two were immediately deafened, blinded, and disoriented by the sudden explosion of sound and light leaving them easy pickings for my sniper rifle. In seconds both sides were dead and were subsequently looted and inventoried to clean up the mess before disappearing myself. Just another mystery for Night City's finest, just like the hundreds of other cases in the past couple months.
Ignoring the blue screen listing out my experience gains and loot from the recent skirmish I sat on a nearby rooftop to rethink about my plan.
Main goal is to take down Arasaka and Militech, that meant war as each one was effectively a nation unto itself with its own army as well with both having nuclear capabilities. So I would need an army of my own, my own corporation or equivalent level of influence and resources.
I needed information, money, equipment, manpower, and a base of operations. Equipment I can handle personally, information was already being taken care of, manpower was still in the planning stages along with the money. A base of operations however, that would be trickier. I could not use the junkyard location as that would be the hidden back up location, and a main base of operation would have to be known to everyone else working for me.
So the real question is do I want to have a public base of operations like the corporations or do I go underground with a hidden organization, both with its own pro and cons.
If I went public then I would have access to all the markets and manpower that can be publicly accessed. However, I would have to be under the public and governmental scrutiny and the other corporations would be aware of me.
On the other hand if I went with a underground organization I would have the element of surprise and ability to do as I see fit, but I run into the problem of being the enemy of the government as well as the corporations. Also it would be a lot harder to recruit and obtain resources as they would have to go through black market channels.
Or I could do both. Create a public persona or use a proxy while at the same time using my real persona to manage the dark underbelly of the city. Yes, that would work, starting my own company under a public persona while growing my control over the underbelly of society and then expand outward. I would need a reliable second in command for both sides to take over whenever I needed to handle issue on whatever side needed help. It would not even be truly an issue to manage both sides as the amount of experience gained from the slaughtering of these minor gangs was enough to complete the repairs of a couple four star skills, one of which was Teleportation. As long as I had two secure rooms as my offices then I would be able to immediately arrive from one headquarters to another to manage whatever issue needs addressing. Yes, this would work.
However, let's first check up on V, he should be up and about now.
It is time for the demon to collect his due.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone