(Vaylin POV)
The wind screamed past me like something alive tearing at my coat and whipping my hair into ribbons that streaked behind me as the speeder bike launched off the rooftop's edge. For one perfect, crystalline moment, the world went silent. Night City spread beneath me in all its neon drenched ugliness, a tapestry of flickering advertisements and crawling traffic and the distant wail of sirens that never seemed to stop. The lights from above hung low over the town, painting the smog a sickly amber that made everything look like it was already burning.
Then I started to fall.
The speeder's nose dipped and the city rushed up to meet me with hungry arms. Across my eyes data swam in frantic pulses, the Galena's signature burning bright red against the river of vehicles below. The truck was exactly where I expected it to be barreling down the surface street with Maelstrom colors splashed across its hood like war paint. Chrome heavy silhouettes moved in the truck bed, their weapons trained on the battered Columbus that was weaving through traffic ahead of them. From up here, the whole chase looked almost like watching insects scramble across a table.
I angled the handlebars and the speeder responded with the eagerness of a hunting bird folding its wings into a dive. The engine howled as we plummeted the bike tilting past forty-five degrees, past sixty and the street filling my entire field of vision. Wind clawed at my face hard enough to make my eyes water and the patterns on my coat caught the neon signs as I fell flickering between cyan and gold like lightning trapped in leather.
"Gloria" I said into the call, my voice remarkably steady for someone in freefall. "Look left."
I could hear her confusion through the connection along with ragged breathing and the distant thump of gunfire against armored panels. Then a sharp intake of breath that told me she'd seen it. Seen me. A woman on a speeder bike dropping out of the sky like a meteor aimed at her problems.
The Galena grew in my vision, swelling from a toy to a truck in the space of a heartbeat. I could see the driver now, some chrome encrusted gangster whose red optical implants glowed like embers behind the windshield. His mouth was moving, probably shouting orders to the shooters in the bed. One of them looked up, and I watched the exact moment recognition dawned on his face. Not recognition of me but recognition of what was about to happen.
The speeder was nearly vertical now its nose pointed at the car's roof like a spear thrown by someone with poor impulse control. I could feel the bike shuddering beneath me the engine screaming its last defiant note as terminal velocity and planets gravity conspired to turn it into a kill vehicle.
Time to go.
I released the handlebars and pushed off launching myself away from the speeder's frame as it continued its death dive. For a fraction of a second I hung in the air beside the plummeting bike close enough to touch its orange accent lighting as it blazed past me, close enough to feel the heat of its overtaxed engine against my skin.
Then I was falling on my own, and the speeder was gone. I watched it hit.
The bike struck the roof like a fist of iron and the effect was everything I could have hoped for. The vehicle's frame buckled inward, the metal crumpling as if it were made of paper instead of armor plating. The driver's side caved first, the roof collapsing onto the chrome-heavy gonk behind the wheel before he could even take his hands off the steering column. The impact sent the entire truck careening sideways tires shrieking as they lost their grip on the pavement. Sparks erupted in a cascade of white and gold as the undercarriage scraped across the asphalt, the speeder bike's wreckage still embedded in its roof like a monument.
The truck hit the wall of a nearby building with a sound that I felt in my chest even from fifty meters up. Concrete met steel and concrete won. The front end crumpled like a crushed can its hood folding upward as the engine block was driven backward through the cab. The madmen in the truck bed were thrown clear by the impact their chrome heavy bodies tumbling through the air like ragdolls before slamming into traffic, through the nearby buildings windows, and disappearing into the alleyways. One of them bounced off a parked car hard enough to set off its alarm but got up right after, adding a piercing wail to the symphony of destruction below.
And I was laughing.
The sound ripped out of me as I fell, genuine and unrestrained and probably more than a little unhinged. I spread my arms wide letting the wind catch my coat so it billowed around me like wings and tilted my face toward the sky. The black metal sky of Night City filled my vision and for one glorious moment I was weightless and free and exactly where I was supposed to be.
This. This was what I had been waiting for all day. Cooped up in that apartment with Mother's books about dead civilizations and the flickering light panel that maintenance would never fix and the crushing suffocating weight of peace pressing down on me like a burial shroud. The cooking shows and the romantic dramas and the mind numbing all of it burned away in the rush of freefall replaced by the singing clarity of violence and velocity that made every nerve in my body ignite like a festival night on Zakuul.
"This is more like it!" I shouted to no one. My hair whipped across my face as I laughed again, the sound torn away by the wind before it could reach the street below. The people down there the ones who had stopped to stare at the burning wreckage they couldn't hear me. But I didn't care this wasn't for them.
The Columbus appeared beneath me, Gloria's van cutting through traffic with the desperate energy of a wounded animal fleeing the pack. Its dark exterior was scarred with bullet impacts and scorch marks, the driver's side window a ruin mess that was trailing a path of glass like a tear. Even from above I could see the odd, boxy shape of it a family vehicle that had no business surviving a warzone, and yet here it was, still rolling, still fighting. Something about that stubborn refusal to die reminded me of someone. I chose not to think about who.
I reached into the Force. It answered immediately as it always did surging up through me like a wave breaking against a seawall. The currents of Night City were chaotic, thousands of terrified emotions bleeding into each other from every direction but I didn't need finesse. I needed a cushion. The Force gathered beneath me like an invisible hand compressing the air between my body and the Columbus's roof into something dense enough to arrest my fall. The technique was crude compared to what I normally would have done but the situation was calling for power more than elegance.
I hit the roof of the Columbus at what should have been bone-shattering speed and instead landed with the impact of someone stepping off a low ledge. My boots connected with the surface and I felt the van shudder beneath me as it absorbed even that reduced force. The magnetic soles a modification I'd made weeks ago out of bored paranoia locked against the roof with a satisfying click that grounded me to the speeding vehicle.
The wind was different up here. More immediate and violent, the van was still doing at least eighty through Japantown's surface streets, and the slipstream hit me like a wall of noise and pressure that would have thrown anyone without the Force clean off the roof and into the pavement. I crouched low, one hand pressed flat against the metal for balance, and took a moment to orient myself. Behind us, the Galena's wreckage burned against the building wall, a pillar of black smoke rising into the amber sky like a funeral pyre for Maelstrom's ambitions. Ahead, more vehicles were moving to intercept chrome and gang colors visible on at least three of them, with gangers already leaning out of windows to take aim.
Then I noticed the camera.
It was mounted just below the roofline on the Columbus's rear panel a small security lens that tracked my movement. The tiny red indicator light blinked steadily, recording everything. Inside that van, somewhere behind layers of reinforced steel and shock-absorbing foam, two children were watching me through this exact feed.
I grinned at it wide and sharp feeling the corners of my lips crack, the smile Mother always said made me look like a predator scenting blood and gave the camera a wave. Just a small one, fingers waggling in a lazy greeting, as if I were a neighbor stopping by to borrow sugar rather than a woman who had just fallen out of the sky and was currently crouching on a speeding armored van in the middle of a running gunfight. Through the call still active on my HUD, I heard Gloria make a sound that might have been a gasp or might have been a curse, possibly both.
"Hi" I said into the call letting the amusement bleed through. "I'm on your roof. Try not to brake too suddenly."
"You're insane!" Gloria's voice crackled through the link, pitched somewhere along disbelief. "You just—you fell from—how are you even—"
"Alive? Talented." I straightened slightly letting my coat catch the wind as I assessed the situation "Also, you're welcome for the truck. Now keep driving and try to hold it steady. I'll handle the welcoming committee."
"There are more coming from the west!" A different voice cut through younger and female,. Something about that composure made me file her away as worth watching later. "Six no, seven vehicles!"
"Seven?" I repeated, reaching down to my thigh where the magnetic holster held the Unity. The pistol came free with a practiced motion, its modified frame settling into my palm like a handshake from an old friend. The improved barrel Padre's contacts had installed last week caught the neon light as I raised it. "That's almost enough to make this interesting."
The closest pursuer was a Chevillion Thrax with Maelstrom's signature chrome-and-rust aesthetic, its engine screaming as it closed the distance. The driver had pushed ahead of the pack seemingly eager and reckless in the way that zealots always were, whether they worshipped the Eternal Throne or the altar of cybernetic augmentation. Two gangers hung from the passenger windows assault rifles braced against their forearms, their red implants painting lights across the Columbus's scarred hull.
I raised the Unity, steadied my breathing against the buffeting wind, and fired.
The first shot punched through the windshield on the passenger side and the ganger who had been lining up his shot jerked backward as the round found something vital behind all that chrome. The second shot went wide the Columbus hit a pothole at exactly the wrong moment and my footing shifted but the third caught the driver's shoulder and sent the Chevillion swerving into oncoming traffic. Horns blared, Tires screamed. The vehicle clipped a delivery truck and spun into a market stall that exploded in a shower of synthetic produce and shattered neon signage.
I shifted my stance, boots sliding across the roof before locking again and swung the Unity toward the next vehicle another Galena with blacked out windows and a mounted gun that some enterprising Maelstrom engineer had welded to the truck bed with more enthusiasm than engineering acumen. The gunner was already tracking me, the barrel swinging toward my position with mechanical precision.
Two shots. Fast. The gunner's head snapped back in a spray of sparks and something darker. His body slumped over the weapon, dead fingers still locked around the grips, as the Galena's driver swerved in confusion.
"Mom!" A child's voice burst through a speaker nearby. "There's someone on our roof! She's shooting at the bad guys!"
I laughed. I couldn't help it. The sound tore out of me before I could swallow it, sharp and bright against the roar of the wind and the crack of gunfire. Someone on the roof. I ejected the Unity's spent magazine and slammed a fresh one home, still grinning.
Well. Now I'm off the roof.
I tracked the nearest pursuer a dumb looking car with Maelstrom's aesthetic running maybe ten meters behind the car and closing fast. Two gangers were leaning from the passenger windows with pistols in both hands their arms moving around as they tried to line up a shot. A third sat in the passenger seat beside the driver, some hulking thing more metal than man his arms thick with armor plating and what looked like a Militech combat implant jutting from his shoulder, the passenger seat that was my target.
I rose from my crouch, and in the same motion I pushed off the Columbus's roof with everything I had. Not a jump exactly more of a lunge, across the gap between the speeding vehicles. The magnetic soles of my boots released with a reluctant click and then I was airborne again, the city blurring beneath me as Night City's neon canyons streaked past in smears of pink and blue.
The gangers hanging from the Quadra saw me coming and I saw muzzle flash while three rifles opened up simultaneously, the chrome heavy passengers and one of the rear-seat gangers all swinging their barrels toward me with the mechanical precision of men who had replaced too much of themselves with targeting software. Rounds screamed through the air around me—I could feel them, each one a white-hot needle of intent in the Force, the shooters' killing focus painting trajectories across my awareness like lines of burning light.
I twisted midair. The first burst passed close enough to tug at my coat, the rounds punching through empty space where my torso had been a second earlier. The second volley I caught with a raw shove of the Force that swatted the bullets sideways like a hand brushing away insects. The deflected rounds sparked off the their own hood, punching through chrome trim and ricocheting into the street below. The third burst I simply wasn't where they expected me to be. I rolled in the air, pulling my knees up and letting my momentum carry me into a tight spin that presented the smallest possible target while keeping my angle locked on the windshield.
I raised the Unity and fired twice while still in the air.
The first round punched through the windshield six inches left of center, and the passenger's head snapped sideways as the bullet found the gap between his chrome jaw and his reinforced skull plate. Not a kill shot the round deflected off internal plating and buried itself somewhere in the headrest behind him but it was enough to make him flinch, enough to make him throw his massive arms up in front of his face for one critical second.
Then I hit the windshield. The transparent armor shattered inward around me in a cascade of crystalline fragments that caught the neon signs of Japantown like a thousand tiny mirrors. My shoulder struck the passenger first all of my momentum, all of that velocity from the leap and the fall channeled into the point of impact where my body met his chrom plated chest. The Force cushioned me just enough to keep the collision from pulping my own bones but the passenger didn't have any such luxury. His seat buckled backward under the force of the impact the metal frame groaning as I drove him into it. And then something hit me in the sternum hard enough to make the world go white.
I coughed a violent spasm that emptied my lungs and sent stars cascading across my vision. The thing I'd slammed into wasn't just subdermal plating. It was a full Militech combat chassis a solid block of alloy reinforcement that covered his entire torso like a second ribcage. Hitting it felt like driving my body into the edge of a durasteel bulkhead at speed. Pain exploded through my chest radiating outward in waves that made my arms go momentarily numb.
"Son of a—" I wheezed, blinking away the stars, and in that half second of disorientation the passenger recovered enough to grab me.
His hands closed around my upper arms with crushing force the servos in his fingers whining as they tightened. Up close I could see the full extent of his augmentation the optics that replaced his eyes the hydraulic actuators visible beneath the synthetic skin of his neck, the combat chassis jutting from his chest like an industrial fixture.
"What the fu—" he started to say.
I headbutted him in the bridge of the nose. Or what was left of his nose. The chrome plating there cracked under the impact, and I felt the satisfying crunch of something giving way beneath the metal. He roared more anger than pain and his grip shifted one hand releasing my arm to reach for a weapon holstered against his thigh. I didn't give him the chance. The Unity was still in my right hand, pressed awkwardly between our bodies in the confined space of the Quadra's ruined passenger compartment. I angled it downward and to the left, toward the driver.
The driver had been screaming since I'd come through his windshield. Some mix of Night City profanity and what sounded like Maelstrom war chant, his hands turning white as he gripped the steering wheel as he tried to keep the Quadra on the road. His eyes flaring as he registered the pistol swinging toward him.
I fired.
The round caught him in the thigh low, below the edge of his tactical vest where flesh still existed beneath the chrome. He screamed, a different sound entirely from the panic screaming, and the Quadra swerved violently as his wounded leg involuntarily spasmed against the accelerator. The car lurched left tires squealing and the momentum threw me sideways into the dashboard.
The passenger used the opening. His free hand came around with a short combat knife colored black, the kind of blade that looked could cut through body armor like cloth. It slashed across the space between us and I barely got my forearm up in time, the blade scoring a line of fire across the leather of my coat sleeve. The Kyber crystal at my back hummed with sympathetic fury, and for a wild instant I considered igniting the lightsaber in the confines of this car. The thought was absurd and beautiful and exactly the kind of thing Mother would lecture me about for a week.
Instead I drove my elbow into the passenger's throat. The blow connected with the gap between his chin plating and his chest one of the seemingly few soft spots left on his extensively modified body. He gagged, the knife faltering in his grip and I followed up by slamming my knee into him. It felt like he had kicked me instead but the impact created enough space for me to shove the Unity under his chin and pull the trigger.
The shot echoed in the enclosed space like a thunderclap, deafening in the close quarters. The passenger's head snapped back, his eyes flickering once before going dark, and his chrome-heavy body went limp against the ruined seat. I shoved him sideways his bulk slumping against the door with a thud.
The driver was still fighting me, his wounded leg pumping the accelerator in erratic bursts that sent the Quadra weaving across the road. He reached for me with one handwhile trying to steer with the other. I swatted his arm aside with a pulse of the Force that sent it slamming into the door panel hard enough to dent the metal and fired twice more into the passenger foot-well. The rounds punched through the floor console near his wounded leg but missing.
Behind me in the back seat, the two idiots who had been leaning out the windows were scrambling to bring their rifles to bear in the enclosed space. One of them managed to get his weapon halfway around before I seized it with the Force and jammed the barrel into the ceiling. His finger was still on the trigger when the rifle fired, and the burst tore through the roof in a line of ragged holes that let the neon night pour in.
The other ganger had abandoned his rifle entirely and was coming at me with a pair of Mantis Blades. The blades deployed with a metallic shriek their edges gleaming in the light from the passing street lamps.
I threw the dead passenger at him.
The corpse slammed into the Mantis Blades with enough force to pin him against the back seat, he struggled beneath the body his Mantis Blades slashing wildly at the air, and I used the distraction to put two rounds into the other man killing him before he could pull his rifle out of the roof.
The driver made one last attempt, before I could stop him his hand found the emergency brake and yanked, and the rear end swung out as the tires locked. The car began to spin the force pressing me against the passenger door as the street whirled outside the shattered windshield. I braced myself against the dashboard, rode the rotation and when the car's momentum brought the driver's side closest to my position I fired the last round in the magazine through his back.
He slumped over the wheel. The car drifted to a stop against a row of parked vehicles the impact barely registering after everything that had come before. Steam hissed from the crumpled hood. The surviving ganster in the back seat was still pinned beneath the dead passenger.
I kicked the passenger door open it took two attempts, the frame was warped from the earlier chaos and rolled out onto the pavement. My chest ached from the collision with the combat chassis, my forearm burned where the knife had scored my coat, and my ears were ringing from the gunfire in the enclosed space. But I was standing, and they weren't, and that was the math that mattered.
The Columbus was already a block ahead, Gloria maintaining speed despite the carnage chasing her. I could see the remaining pursuers closing the gap now that I had apparently removed myself from the equation.
I swore and started running.
The Force surged through my legs as I sprinted, each stride covering ground that should have been iseveral steps, my boots barely touching the pavement before launching me forward again. I vaulted a parked car, slid across the hood of a stopped taxi, and closed the distance to the Columbus in seconds, My hand found a grip on the van's rear bumper and I hauled myself up onto the vehicle's roof and laid down flat on my bacl.
"Miss me?" I gasped into the still-active call, trying to sound casual while my lungs burned.
"You're certifiably insane"
"So I've been told. How far?"
"Five blocks."
Five blocks. And four hostiles still on our tail, their engines roaring as they accelerated as they were still getting closer. My HUD painted their positions in angry red, the targeting data flickering as the Columbus wove through increasingly familiar streets. Watson's industrial architecture was giving way to something I recognized the transition zone between Maelstrom territory and Padre's domain. The buildings here bore different markings. Not the silver and red of Maelstrom but the distinctive gold and scarlet of the Valentinos.
Then I felt them before I saw them. They came roaring out of every side street like an avalanche of chrome and fury. Valentino riders on modified Arch Nazares, their gold-plated frames gleaming under the street lights, riders hanging low over the handlebars with submachine guns braced against their thighs. Behind them came the cars a convoy of Valentino vehicles that had been waiting, engines idling in the shadows of Padre's territory for exactly this moment. Lowriders with hydraulic suspensions and reinforced bumpers. A pair of modified Thorton Colbys with the distinctive paint jobs that marked them as Valentino war wagons.
The lead Valentino car a gold Villefort Alvarado with suspension low enough to scrape sparks off the pavement cut across three lanes of traffic and slammed broadside into the nearest Maelstrom vehicle. The Alvarado caught it perfectly behind the rear wheel, spinning the truck ninety degrees before the momentum carried both vehicles into a light pole that bent like a reed under the combined force. The pole snapped at the base and toppled across the road in a shower of sparks and shattered glass, and the Galena wrapped itself around the stump with a shriek of tearing metal that I felt in my teeth.
The Alvarado's driver some Valentino with gold-capped teeth visible even through the cracked windshield kicked open his door and stepped out, apparently unbothered by the collision. He dusted off his leather jacket, gold chains swinging, and drew a pistol from his waistband with casual confidence before firing into the trapped vehicle.
The remaining Maelstrom vehicles tried to scatter, but the Valentino motorcycle riders flanked the pursuers peppering them with accurate bursts of submachine gun fire that shredded tires and punched through engine blocks. The second Valentino war wagon a Colby with a mounted turret that definitely was not street legal positioned across the road behind us and opened up on the trailing Maelstrom car with a sound like tearing canvas.
The Columbus crossed the final blocks to Holy Angels Church without another shot fired in our direction. I could see the bell tower rising between the factory buildings, its stone walls defiant against the chrome and concrete, and something that might have been relief settled into my chest alongside the aching bruises over my body.
"We're here" Gloria said through the call, and her voice cracked on the second word.
"We're here." I confirmed, sliding off the Columbus as the van rolled to a stop outside the church's heavy wooden doors. My boots hit the pavement, and the sudden stillness after all that velocity and violence felt almost disorienting. The sounds of the Valentino cleanup echoed from a few blocks back gunfire, shouting, the crunch of metal on metal but here, in the shadow of Padre's church, there was something that almost resembled quiet.
I slammed a fresh magazine home out of habit then holstered the Unity afterwards leaning against the Columbus's battered wall. My chest ached. My forearm burned. My ears were still ringing. I made sure to wave at the rear camera one more time. The same lazy wave, fingers waggling as if none of this had been remarkable at all.
Mom was absolutely going to kill me.