Bunraku

The desert waited long before he ever stirred, an expanse of cracked silence and shimmering heat that swallowed sound before it could form. Dawn had only just begun its slow crawl across the horizon, but the light already pressed heavily against the earth, bending the air into trembling waves that clung to the sand as though reluctant to rise. The wind moved in thin, uncertain breaths, stirring the dunes in brief, faltering spirals that died as quickly as they formed, leaving behind faint traces that vanished before the eye could decide whether they had ever existed at all. The emptiness stretched outward in every direction, stripped barren, as if some unseen hand had scraped the world clean of anything living long ago.

Nothing grew here. Nothing dared to linger. Even the small, twisted tree standing above him seemed shaped more by its spite than its survival, its thin branches bent under some ancient strain, its splintered trunk bearing the quiet suggestion of an old wound never fully healed. It rose from the sand like a monument left behind by something patient and unsentimental, a solitary mark against a landscape that preferred to bury its history rather than remember it.

The tree cast a narrow shadow over the kneeling figure below it. The shade it offered resembled less a shelter and more the stark outline of a cenotaph, a marker without inscription set against a landscape eager to erase its own history. Its shadow lay across him like a deliberate reminder rather than a comfort, a quiet impression of something meant to acknowledge a passing without declaring it aloud. The air carried a faint, metallic tang, thin and unsettling, as if the land itself exhaled something old and forgotten, drawn from the blood that tainted the earth. Heat pooled around the roots of the tree and radiated outward, rippling over the man as if the ground itself had been drinking him in.

He woke slowly, drawn upward through layers of gritty filth as though his own consciousness had sunk too deeply to rise without his will, heavy and reluctant in its return. The first sensation that found him was the heat, thick and stifling, pressing down from above while radiating up from the ground beneath him in a suffocating cradle that made his body feel trapped between two merciless forces. His skin prickled under it, the air seeming to carry thin threads of static that danced across him with every faint shift of the wind, each grain of sand a small spark urging him toward awareness even as his mind fought to remain hidden in the dark. The dryness scraped at his throat with each breath, raw and unwelcome, and the act of drawing air felt strangely foreign, as though his lungs had forgotten the rhythm and were relearning it through discomfort and resistance.

He didn’t understand why the heat felt wrong, only that some deep, wordless part of him recognized it before his thoughts assembled enough to question it. His body reacted first, shrinking inward around a weariness so profound it felt anchored in him, a heaviness that clung to him like residue from a long, unfinished dream. Light pressed against his eyelids until he blinked them open, and even that small motion felt intrusive, too sharp and direct for a mind that hadn’t yet decided if it belonged to the living. The brightness pushed into him rather than simply meeting his eyes, making him squint against a world that felt hostile in its clarity, as if waking were an act he wasn’t entirely ready to commit to.

As his vision steadied, he became aware of a strange dissonance inside his own mind, a quiet insistence that something fundamental wasn’t lining up. His thoughts felt scattered, drifting in fragments that refused to assemble into his memories, and the effort of grasping them made his skull tighten as if the act of thinking were something his brain wasn’t used to anymore.

He tried again, reaching inward as if he could coax some semblance of sense out of the haze, but the harder he pushed, the more resistance he felt. His awareness kept catching on something just out of reach, something that should’ve anchored him but didn’t. The emptiness unsettled him, a hollow absence where memories should have been, and the weight of that absence pulled at him until his chest tightened with unease.

The discomfort in his head began to bleed downward, threading into his nerves and settling heavily through his body. His breath felt too measured, too controlled, as though it were almost mechanical in it’s precision. His muscles held a tension he didn't seem to control, and every faint shift of his weight made him more aware of how disconnected he felt from himself.

Only when he let his focus drift lower did he notice the pressure along his legs, the way his knees dug into the warm grit beneath him. The sand pushed against his feet and shins, clinging to his skin in a way that felt both grounding and intrusive, each grain a reminder that his body existed even if the rest of him hadn’t caught up. His hands rested on his thighs, palms open and relaxed, as though he had been meditating, or maybe praying. He couldn’t begin to guess why.

That creeping physical awareness pressed deeper, rising through his abdomen in a steady pulse that screamed 'alien' to him. The feeling settled into something cold and heavy, a clear sign that the tension inside him wasn’t stiffness or shock. It was pressure from something driven straight into his guts, lancing clean through him, literally.

A sword jutted from his abdomen, the hilt jammed hard against the torn fabric of his shirt, red splattering against the interchanging grey and white, its guard resting with an almost intimate finality against his blood‑slicked skin. The blade pushed clean through his lower back, holding him upright in a numb, unnatural stasis that made his entire body feel wrong. The pain wasn’t sharp so much as distant, radiating outward in slow, pulsing waves that his mind struggled to connect to the injury itself. It felt muted, as if his nerves couldn’t decide whether to scream or shut down. The metal was black, its surface too smooth, too perfect, catching the light in subtle lines broken by faint circuitry patterns that pulsed with their own quiet rhythm, mirroring a heartbeat that wasn’t his.

And he knew the blade, though that knowledge felt like instinct rather than memory, rising from somewhere beneath his thoughts without offering him any path back to where it came from. The certainty felt artificial; closer to something inserted and then buried deep, an automatic recognition that was by its very definition unnatural. The Black Unicorn. The name surfaced with quiet assurance, fitting the sword so cleanly it might as well have been carved into him, even if he couldn’t say when he’d first heard it or why it still felt like his.

He wanted to recoil, to move, to react to the impossible sight of a sword in his body, but he stayed perfectly still. The confusion rooted itself deeper than the fear. He didn't understand how he had gotten here. He didn't understand what day it was, or what had happened, or why he felt as if everything he was supposed to remember had been erased and replaced with a raw, gaping wound in his psyche. There was no connection waiting for him when he reached for it. There was only empty space.

He lifted his eyes from the blade and took in the scene around him.

A corpse knelt several feet away, mirroring his posture in a way that felt wrong on a level he couldn’t name, held upright only by the sword punched through the man’s chest. The operative’s torso sagged forward under the dead weight of his gear, dragging his body into an exhausted slump. Blood had dried in dark, cracked streaks across his tactical harness. The man’s face had gone slack, eyes half‑open and dull, staring at nothing with a kind of vacant finality. Sand had piled around his boots and along the bottom of his coat, the wind covering him grain by grain as if already trying to bury the scene.

Behind him, bodies littered the dunes. A dozen at least, maybe more, scattered across the sand in broken clusters. They wore black tactical gear, their armor heavy, high‑grade, and marked by impacts that spoke to close‑quarters violence. Some lay face down with their masks split open by clean slashes, blood dried in thin, flaking lines beneath the breaks. Others sprawled on their backs, limbs broken or twisted from brutal close‑quarters impacts, their bodies marked by deep cuts or gunshot wounds that had taken them down hard and fast. A few had died mid‑motion, caught between reaching for cover and collapsing outright, their final poses frozen around the violence that had ended them.

Shotguns and rifles lay where they’d fallen, most broken, splintered, damaged beyond repair. Sidearms remained locked in stiff, death‑tight grips. Empty magazines were scattered across the ground in uneven trails, the last pieces of a fight that had ended fast and violently. Pieces of weapons, slashed, shattered, broken with a deliberate precision, sat sprinkled across the dusty ground, and the dirt gleamed with what felt like hundreds of spent casings, whispers of a brutal, ungodly, panicked firefight.

He didn’t recognize the faces, but something inside him labeled them anyway. Arasaka operatives. Elite. Trained. The word Ninja came to mind, but the word had a very different connotation to the one he knew. The certainty hit him with the same alien clarity as the sword had, like someone had carved these facts into him and left them to surface when needed. No source, no starting point, just cold, hard data mixed in with an almost clinical detachment.

A faint shimmer cut across his vision, sharp and clean, like light hitting the inside of a visor. Soft teal text locked into place in front of him, always in the corner of his eye, an artificial scroll that flashed with lightning quickness as towers of ones ans zeros flickered in front of him. 

[SYSTEM BOOTING]

[LOCAL PROFILE: CORRUPTED]

[VITAL FUNCTIONS: UNSTABLE]

[HEMOGLOBIN LOSS: CRITICAL]

[REMAIN STILL]

The words didn’t drift or fade; they hit his mind in clean, unbroken strokes, each line delivered with machine certainty and none of the hesitation a human thought carried. He blinked hard, trying to clear the overlay, but it clung to his sight and jittered like a signal fighting to stay alive. More data flashed across his vision for a split second, fault strings, corrupted paths, broken lines of code, there and gone before he could grab onto a single piece of it.

[IDENTITY: UNKNOWN]

[NEURAL IMPRINT: PARTIAL]

[COGNITIVE MAP: RECONSTRUCTION FAILED]

[MEMORY INDEX: UNSYNCHRONIZED]

[BIOMETRIC LINK: DEGRADED]

[NEURAL THREADING: ERROR 3A‑77]

[CYBERWARE REGISTRY: INCOMPLETE]

[WARNING: CORE FILES MISSING]

He tried to speak and found his voice refused him, scraping against his throat like something half‑burned and half‑forgotten. When a sound finally broke free, it wasn’t shaped by intention so much as pushed out by instinct, rough and cracked, too small for anything that might’ve been a real question.

Nothing coherent followed. No name. No anchor. Not even an idea of what he was trying to ask.

The sound vanished instantly, swallowed by dead air that refused to carry anything, leaving him stranded in a silence so heavy it felt physical. Nothing moved to break it. No echo, no shift of wind, no hint that the world had even noticed he’d tried to speak. The quiet pressed in on him from every direction, dense and unmoving, as if the desert itself had already decided he didn’t belong enough to be heard.

He swallowed again, his throat protesting the movement. The pressure of the blade pulsed with every breath, not as pain but as a heavy, twisting presence that didn’t belong in a living body. Each heartbeat sent a sluggish warmth along the metal, a slow bloom that felt wrong in a way he couldn’t name, like his body was recognizing the steel before his mind could. His thoughts wavered between numb detachment and rising panic, neither strong enough to take hold. Instinct told him to pull the sword free. Something colder inside him recoiled at the idea, not out of pain or fear, but because the thought of moving the blade felt like disturbing an old violation carved into him long before he woke.

He lifted a hand and set it against the hilt. The wrap dragged against his palm, textured and warm under the sun, familiar in a way that unsettled more than it comforted. The recognition hit him as a shiver that ran deeper than the wound, a tremor born not of pain but of something remembered. His fingers tightened slowly, feeling the weight settle into his grip, every contour of the hilt fitting into his hand with effortless precision. It shouldn’t have felt right. Nothing about this moment should have felt right. And yet somehow, holding the sword felt closer to remembering himself than anything his shattered thoughts had offered since waking.

His vision flickered again.

[EXTRACTION WILL RESULT IN SEVERE BLOOD LOSS]

[VITALS: UNSTABLE]

[SEEK MEDICAL CARE IMMEDIATELY]

He stared at the burning vehicle behind the bodies, the wreckage still smoldering, its metal warped and twisted by violence he couldn’t recall. Faint flames crackled inside the ruined cabin, more ember than fire now, while thin strands of black smoke crept lazily into the sky. The sight pulled at something inside him, distant, cold, and certain.

There should be a medical kit inside.

The awareness didn’t feel like the HUD’s clipped warnings or its sterile data. It came from the same alien place that whispered the sword’s name to him, surfacing without memory to anchor it. The certainty settled into him with the weight of instinct, familiar in a way that made no sense. It wasn’t understanding, not really, just a quiet, unquestionable pull toward truth that didn’t belong to his conscious mind, but rose anyway, impossible to ignore.

He needed that medkit. Needed it in a way that pushed past the slowly building pain and panic, past the numb buzz in his head or the blood slicking his hand. The truck was dead, its engine block a collapsed wreck, but he clung to the idea that something inside might’ve endured. He clutched onto that with the thin, desperate hope of a man who had nothing else to hold onto, a last‑ditch belief that maybe one thing in this wasteland hadn’t failed him yet.

He planted his hand against the ground, fingers digging into the sand as he dragged in a breath that felt like it scraped along the inside of his throat. Standing wasn’t a choice so much as a necessity, one his body resisted with every trembling inch. The moment he tried to rise, the movement pulled at the wound with a deep, wrenching pressure that wasn’t just a sharp pain but something far worse; a sick, twisting weight inside him, as if the blade’s presence ground against his organs with its invasive presence. His legs buckled once, twice, before he forced them to cooperate, muscles shaking violently under the effort. Each breath came ragged, each heartbeat a heavy pulse that sent waves of discomfort rolling through his gut, reminding him with every second that his body had been skewered clean through.

He didn’t dare look down again, doing everything he could to ignore the sudden jolt. The feeling of the wound was enough: raw, wet heat spreading sluggishly under his palm, the unnatural looseness of flesh forced apart, the faint slick of blood dripping between his fingers. He pressed harder, not because it helped, but because the pressure gave him something to fight against, something to hold his thoughts together. The world tilted and swayed around him, shapes bending in the corner of his vision, but he ground his teeth and pushed forward step by unsteady step.

The walk to the wreck felt endless. Every shift of his weight tugged at the torn muscles of his abdomen, sending rolling waves of nausea and cold through him. By the third step his breath had shortened to sharp, shallow pulls. By the fifth, black spots began to gather at the edges of his sight. By the sixth, he wasn’t sure if he was moving because he chose to or because his body refused to collapse until it reached whatever salvation might still exist inside that ruined vehicle.

He fell against the wreck, the scorched metal the only thing keeping him upright when his legs finally gave out. His shoulder hit the husk of the vehicle hard enough to jerk the blade inside him, and a deep, wrenching pressure seized his gut, doubling him forward with a strangled breath. He clung to the frame, dragging himself sideways along the twisted hulk until his hand found the side panel. The latch stuck, warped from heat and impact, but he forced it open with a shaky, desperate pull.

Inside, what had once been a medkit waited in ruins. Most of it was shredded by a stray shotgun blast, its contents torn apart or shattered beyond use. But under the wreckage, half‑buried in broken plastic, a single air‑hypo gleamed back at him, a Bounce Back, miraculously intact.

Instinct moved him before his mind caught up. He snatched it up, rammed the injector against his neck, and pressed the release. The drug hit him like a plunge into cold water. His lungs seized, then expanded in a hard, desperate gasp, dragging air back into his chest. The shock softened around the edges, but agony rushed in behind it, sharp and crushing, blooming through his abdomen as the numbness peeled away and the reality of the sword’s presence returned with brutal clarity.

He sagged against the wreck, barely upright, the metal the only thing keeping him vertical as the drug fought to keep him conscious. A sharp gasp tore out of him as the buried agony hit all at once, flooding his nerves in a crushing wave that left his jaw clenched and his breath shaking. More warnings flashed uselessly across his vision, information he already knew but couldn’t act on.

He dragged himself along the ruined chassis, each inch gained by sheer will, until the distant roar began to bleed into the edge of his awareness. Engines. Multiple. Fast. The sound climbed over the dunes, joined by wild whoops, hoarse hollering, and the scattered crack of gunfire.

He turned his head, vision swimming as he searched the horizon. Four vehicles tore across the desert, kicking up long trails of dust behind them. Before he could process the sight, his vision zoomed in on its own, the HUD snapping into place with cold efficiency.

[SIGNAL MARKERS: IDENTIFIED]

[AFFILIATION: RAFFEN SHIV]

[SUBGROUP: FLESHCHEWERS]

They were coming fast, and straight for him.

The engines roared across the dunes like wild animals, the sound rolling toward him in uneven growls that vibrated in his chest. Heat shimmered off the sand in rippling waves as the dust clouds rose behind the approaching vehicles, a dirty haze of grit and exhaust. He stared at the weapons scattered around the bodies of the Arasaka operatives and felt that old, cold certainty settle into him. Most of them were useless. Broken. Out of ammo. Bent. Jammed with sand. The notifications flickered warnings into his mind each time his eyes drifted near one, ammunition counts blinking red, status reports marked unreliable or inoperable.

He didn't have time for this. He didn't have time for anything.

The Raffen Shiv were coming fast.

He felt the wound in his abdomen pulse with each heartbeat, each throb blooming outward like a slow explosion under his skin. The Bounce Back crawling through his veins burned in a faint, chemical way that never quite dulled the pain, just pushed it farther from the front of his mind. The healing booster worked sluggishly, like a medic half asleep, closing what wounds it could and numbing what it couldn’t. He could move, but only barely, and every shift of muscle dragged across the torn flesh trying to knit itself back together. The sensation was sharp and distant at the same time, as if his body hurt in one world while his mind floated in another. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly. But it’d keep him upright long enough to fight.

He hated what he had to do next.

His hand settled on the hilt of the Black Unicorn where it protruded from his gut. The blade felt warm from his blood, and the familiarity of the sword in his body was somehow more unsettling than the pain. It felt wrong to pull it free. It felt wrong to leave it in. It felt wrong to rely on it at all. But he didn’t have a choice. It was the only weapon here that mattered.

He braced his other hand against his thigh, inhaled through clenched teeth, and pulled.

The sound was slick and wet, something muffled and intimate beneath the roar of engines and the hollers of the Raffen Shiv. The blade slid through him with a burning sting that nearly buckled his legs, a sensation so sharp it felt like a wire drawn through his nerves. His breath hitched as his vision flared white, the agony blooming into something bright and consuming before the Bounce Back dulled the edges. The flare didn't vanish, it stretched thin, pulling itself into a distant hum while his mind floated above it in a strange, weightless clarity. Blood spilled down his stomach in a slow, warm sheet, running over raw skin and binding flesh, and every drop felt like it belonged to someone else. His body fought to heal the wound even as he tore it wider, each pulse of returning pain mixing with an unnatural euphoria that made his thoughts drift and sharpen all at once.

He rose to his feet, unsteady at first, gripping the sword in a reverse hold as the first Raffen vehicle crested the dune. The blade was stained with his blood, a dark sheen drying along the fuller, and for a moment it felt as if he were born again. The wound he’d opened to free it throbbed, but it was a distant afterthought, a price paid in crimson to reclaim the only thing in this place that felt real. Pulling the sword from himself had stripped away more than pain. It had peeled off fear, peeled off hesitation, peeled off the fog of confusion that had clung to him since he woke in the sand. The agony had emptied him, and in its place came a hollow clarity that felt almost like release. Whatever he’d been before, whatever questions tore at the edges of his mind, they fell away in the wake of that bloodletting. He stood beneath the desert sun, the sword steady in his hand, the world narrowing to the rumble of engines and the promise of violence cresting the dune before him.

The Thornton Galena shot across the sand in a ragged burst of acceleration, the engine coughing like some feral thing wounded and enraged. Rusted armor panels crackled together like loose bones in a cannibal’s rattle, announcing its charge long before it crested the rise. The driver leaned forward sharply, eyes wide under grimy goggles, pupils blown with chem-cocktails and bloodlust. His mouth stretched into a grin that showed too many missing teeth, each one a story carved from some past depravity. The way he jerked the wheel the instant he spotted the lone figure in the sand wasn't anything but malicious. It was instinctual, the kind of reflex possessed by people who've long since told themselves that anything was permissible, so long as they were strong enough to take it, combined with a wild urge to smash, crush, and revel in whatever pain he could inflict. He aimed straight for the man with a focus so unhinged it was almost religious.

For his part, the man reacted without a thought. A hard jolt of mechanical focus shot through him, tightening every muscle as the world seemed to thin and stretch. The Galena roared toward him, engine screaming and metal rattling like it was ready to come apart, and his mind broke the moment down into raw pieces without effort. The angle of the wheels. The shift of weight across the chassis. The twitch in the driver’s shoulders. The spray of sand under the front tires. He didn’t think about any of it, but he understood all of it, the knowledge slamming through him in a single, electric pulse.

He moved in the same breath the understanding hit, a short, sharp shift to the side that carried him out of the vehicle’s path by the barest of inches. The Galena tore past close enough for its heat to scrape across his cheek, the fender missing him by a margin so narrow he could feel the brush of the wind in its wake. Sand kicked up around his legs as he dropped into a low crouch, boots skidding across loose grit before he caught himself with one hand. He took a single breath, and the world snapped back, his nerves buzzing in a way he could only describe as 'warmly'.

The second vehicle broke over the ridge with a roar, suspension groaning as it slammed across uneven ground. One of the passengers crawled halfway out the window like a feral scavenger, gripping the frame with scarred knuckles. His face was half-hidden behind an oily bandanna, the cloth stiff with old sweat and dust. Patchy scars, sunburnt skin, eyes wide with the kind of violent clarity that came from a lifetime of hurting people because it was the only thing he knew how to do. The weapon in his hands was compact, but vicious looking, opened up as soon as the Raffen had drawn a bead on him, and he cackled as he opened fire. The rattle of the gun filled the air, a chatter of automatic death, coming straight for him.

His vision snapped into a sharp, colorless clarity, the world bleaching itself as time seemed to slow down. Instinct drove him, his muscles flexing with mechanical precision. His arm rose, sword angled just so, and the blade struck each round in a cascade of ringing sparks. The impacts rattled through his wrist, tiny shocks climbing his forearm, but none of it registered as pain. His body moved on its own, fluid and exact, every adjustment made in the space between heartbeats, the sensation so unnaturally natural that it felt like an out of body experience.

He could see the confusion hit the gunman like a slap, the man’s eyes widening as the rounds he’d meant to tear him apart instead sparked harmlessly off the blade. Shock twisted into something darker, a frantic scramble of disbelief, anger, and a flicker of fear as the Raffen’s vehicle drew closer. The deflected shots smattered into the sand around him like hot rain, each impact kicking up tiny bursts of grit while the gunman’s mouth opened in a choked, disbelieving shout.

Then it was his turn.

The sword rose in a flash of black metal and light, slicing upward in a curve so smooth it felt like part of the air itself. The edge passed cleanly through the gunman’s shoulder, cleaving through where his arm met his torso. There was a moment of resistance, a brief snag of bone, a stray thought wondering about a metal reinforcement, before dismissing it, and then the limb separated. The scream that followed was raw and wet, cut short as the vehicle sped past, leaving the severed arm tumbling in the sand.

The world swam, then steadied again.

His breath slowed.

The third vehicle barreled toward him from the opposite direction. He saw the motion of the tires first, then the spray of sand, then the blurred shape of the dune runner as it veered to crush him. He rolled sideways, letting the sand take his weight, and pushed off with his free hand. His body twisted into a tight coil of muscle and vectored with raw momentum. He rose on the other side of the roll, the force of the motion carrying him upright as the third vehicle screamed past, missing him with another hairsbreadth margin.

He didn't feel the pain anymore. The confusion had bled away with it. The questions were gone, taken with the rest of it, and the only thing he felt, beyond the icy pulse of focus, was the weight of the blade, perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

It was perfect clarity.

His nerves hummed like live wire. The desert slowed. Shadows stretched longer than they should. Every sound stretched into a drawn-out echo. He could count the rotations of the wheels as they spun. He could see the glint of the driver’s eyes through the dusty windshield. He could hear the engine’s uneven cough as if the sound were underwater.

He moved with that same unnatural rhythm.

The sword turned in his hand, and his arm extended. The blade slipped through the open window of the passing vehicle with surgical precision. The driver’s head separated from his body cleanly, the expression still frozen in surprise as it tumbled backward through the interior. The vehicle jerked violently, wheels skidding, as the now-headless driver lost all control, sending it into a sharp tumbling turn, end over end. It slammed into a dune, nose-first, and ignited in a burst of CHOO2. Fire crawled up the metal, and the explosion ripped the air apart, scattering debris across the sand.

Heat washed over him in a wave.

The fourth car screeched to a halt, barely avoiding the wreck itself, tires digging trenches through the sand as it swerved past him. The doors swung open, kicked wide, and four figures spilled out. Their clothes were patchwork leather, denim, and scavenged armor. Primitive, barely civilized, much less reasonable, as if that would have ever been an option. Faces smeared with grease and sweat, eyes flickering in the fire, and an uncertainty that he knew hadn't been there before, they moved to action. Weapons raised in shaking hands, voices overlapping into a wild cacophony, they shouted over one another, panic and rage in their tone as they attacked.

There was a breath, the wild shots nothing more than an afterthought, and then he was there.

His feet dug into the sand, and he launched himself forward. The motion felt impossible, like leaping into flight. The distance between them closed in an instant. The first woman barely had time to widen her eyes before the blade pierced her midsection. Her breath hitched in a broken gasp. He felt the vibration through the hilt as the blade sank through skin and ribs, and then he ripped the sword sideways, following the contour of her bones in a curved, slicing drag. Her skin flensed open, filleted, her muscle peeled back in perfect, breathless clarity as her heart perforated and her lung split.

Her legs folded beneath her, dead before she hit the ground, bled out, the life-giving fluid spraying a perfect arc in an eternal moment.

The second Raffen, a huge man in sun-cracked leather, tried to shout something. The sound stretched long and distorted in the slowed world, his mouth forming a warped shape that never finished becoming a word. The man’s eyes were enormous, pupils blown wide with fear. He could see the blood, his comrades, drench him, splashing into his eyes with a blinding, stinging agony.

The blade lifted.

The sword cut through his neck in a single arc. The impact jolted up the man’s arm and shoulder as the edge met the resistance of cartilage, then split through. The massive ganger's eyes bulged almost comically, his lips open in a scream that would never end, as it tumbled down. The force of the cut had jerked the head, the razor edge of the sword pulling the parting meat from the raw weight of the strike.

He didn't stop moving.

The next swing passed through the man’s torso, carving a diagonal line from hip to shoulder, a mechanical cut angled to perfection, with enough force and precision to part bone and chrome perfectly despite the mass in the way. The blade stayed in motion, the momentum carrying it faster, harder, as it all but became an extension of him. The final strike swept low through the knees, sending the body tumbling in three different directions, a combo executed without a thought to the action. Each strike landed with frightening precision, sending mist-like trails of blood into the air that caught the morning light in sharp glints before scattering across the sand.

The two remaining Raffen froze in shock.

A small mistake. A second's hesitation.

It was all he needed to close the distance. One raised a shotgun, hands shaking so violently it rattled against his shoulder. In that brief instant he saw everything in the man's face: the realization that none of this would matter, the raw futility of trying to stop something far beyond him, the terror of knowing he was already dead and firing anyway because fear demanded he try. The shotgun barked, a desperate, useless act, pellets tearing into empty air as he slipped aside in a blur of motion. The shot kicked up a thin spray of sand where he’d been a moment before, but he was already past it, already gone, moving with a speed that made the attempt feel less like resistance and more like a final, helpless gesture against the inevitable.

Then he was in.

As he slid past the shotgunner, the blade swept low in a single smooth motion, opening the man’s belly from hip to hip. The cut was so clean it barely registered at first, a soft parting of flesh before gravity did the rest. His insides spilled out in a heavy, wet cascade, ropes of intestine slapping against the ground as he folded forward with a strangled breath, weapon falling from his hands as he tried desperately to scoop up his guts, his face showing nothing but the desperate will to put it all back, a pointless, pitiable gesture, that meant less than nothing a moment later.

The woman beside him panicked. Her pistol flashed, but her aim was wild. She shot the shotgunner in the back instead, the rounds punching into him, and hitting something vital, as the body dropped like a cut marionette. By the time he hit the ground, the blade was already coming toward her, riding the same perfect line of motion that had gutted her friend.

The blade slid between her fingers and the gun, severing both in a single clean line. Her scream was high and sharp as she fell to her knees, staring at the damage in disbelief. The air sat heavy between them as her eyes went from her hand to his face, tears beading at the edges as she moved to say something, anything, to beg, to barter, to get one more fragile second on this earth. he could see it, the moment she realized that the sword was already in her, the terror, the incomprehension.

Her breath hitched and bubbled, a droplet of red coming from her mouth in a foamy exhale.

She grasped at the blade with her remaining hand, fingers slick with her own blood, pupils shrinking as she struggled to understand the reality of what had happened. She slumped forward, the life leaving her body in a slow, quiet collapse.

The desert drank their blood greedily. The sand darkened around the bodies, beheaded, dismembered, gutted and stabbed. Four dead in as many seconds, and he felt... nothing. No shock, or revulsion, or guilt or... or anything really. Was that... normal? He didn't know. The dead weren't talking. All they knew was that it was better to be living, a lesson learned too late.

He stood there for several moments, the sword dripping red, his breath steady and even, waiting for something, anything, to bring him pause. All he got was the rippling roar of the last two Raffen Shiv vehicles, and the calm, icy certainty that he wasn't done yet.

000

The darkness wrapped around Kiwi like a hot, suffocating blanket, thick with the stink of rust, sweat, and old blood baked into metal. The air inside the trunk tasted stale, the filter of her mask clogged with the stench of her own sweat and whatever garbage had been forgotten back here. She lay on her side, spine forced into an aching arch by the hogtie that bound her wrists to her ankles. The flex-cable bit into her skin each time she tried to shift even a fraction, the plastic sheath digging deep and uncomfortable in her flesh. The metal under her was blisteringly hot from the Badlands sun hammering the vehicle from above, and it radiated steadily into her bare skin until she felt half cooked.

Naked, bound, and dumped like refuse, she silently ruminated over her situation. Shock was a luxury she’d burned out of herself a long time ago. She’d been naked before, trussed up before, locked in cramped dark places with the air going stale while men worse than these decided what they were going to do to her. The only new variables this time were the dry heat that tried to suck the water out of her body and the particular flavor of stink that clung to the Raffen Shiv’s junker. Oil and sand. Old blood. Rotting food. Unwashed bodies. She let the inventory of smells roll past her awareness and then pushed it aside.

It was a small mercy they hadn't ripped her mask off of her. It always felt weird when she had nothing there, where her jaw used to be. Cold, a bit numb, and the rigidity of it had been a hard thing to get used to. Everything else felt exposed, vulnerable, and at the mercy of whoever opened the trunk next. She wiggled her fingers once, feeling the cable tighten across the bones of her wrists, and then forced herself to stillness again. Stillness kept you alive. Stillness let you think.

So she thought.

The job replayed in her head in jagged cuts, like a cheap BD with bad editing. It had sounded simple when that prick Faraday pitched it: disrupt an Arasaka prisoner convoy out in the Badlands, cause some trouble, get the prisoner loose, then jet. No details on the prisoner, no need to pick the target up, all of the rest was 'handled'. She was well paid enough to not ask too many questions, more fool her, but it was too late to worry about it now. The eddies had been excellent and she’d needed the cash, so she took the gig. Faraday had the details all sorted, and had thrown together a team for her: two discount solos with more muscle than brains and a nomad who wouldn’t shut up about being "Badlands born and bred." The type who thought the sun rose to give him something to squint at. Solid, the four-eyed bastard had said, especially on such short notice.

They’d ridden out in two mismatched vehicles that rattled over the roads, patched-together engines roaring and coughing in equal measure. The nomad, Yoj, insisted on taking a wide loop around the projected route. He kept twitching, scanning the horizon, muttering about Shiv signs in the sand, old tracks, markings of a cookfire or camp here or there. Kiwi hadn’t picked up anything on the scanners she had with her, but she’d conceded because nomads knew the wastes better than a city rat like her. Or that was supposed to be the rule.

The less said about the two 'solos' the better, one trying to play up the hardass angle, all "You don't need to know my name, just my job." She referred to him as Gonk 1. Gonk 2 was a chrome junkie who would not shut up about his 'ware. More specifically talking up his Mr. Studd like it was going to score him a night with her, and he just wouldn't lay the fuck off. Like she would waste her time on a spazzy little borg wannabe. Needless to say, it was a long ride out into the deep wilds, almost three days of hard driving to make the intercept, and when they got there? That's when things ultimately went tits up, just like she feared they would.

They were lining up the last pieces of the plan, engines idling low while Kiwi threaded herself into the convoy’s network, fingers dancing as she worked to shut down the escort vehicles and trigger the release on the prisoner’s secure-cuffs. The solos stood guard beside her, rifles ready, the nomad pacing near the ridge line nervously, like he knew they were in a bad way. For a moment it all felt steady, controlled, the kind of job that actually came together when everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do. The firewall was cracked, the commands sent, and they were packing up the rig. Then the Shiv roared over the dunes and tore everything to shit.

She remembered the sun glare off chrome as two Raffen bikes knifed over a dune, trailing dust higher than the bikes themselves. Gunfire spit from them a heartbeat later, the bullets chewing through sand and metal as if they were ripping paper. The nomad had dived for his ride, blind-firing and freaking out, before peeling off like the devil's own hell was after him. The bikes and one of the cars roared after him, but Kiwi didn't have time to find out how that ended because she had more immediate problems.

More engines had risen from every direction, like the desert itself had started coughing up rusty, screaming metal. Kiwi barely had time to swear before the rest of the raiding party was circling them. Her first solo went down with a neat hole through his forehead, Gonk One going down like a chump in the opening seconds of the fight. Mr. Studd bolted as soon as he dropped, pissing himself and screaming that the pay wasn’t worth this.

It wasn’t, but she kinda hated him for breaking like he did anyway. Weak, unreliable, useless jackass that he was, he was a gun hand. Her supposed protection, if that meant anything.

They ran the solo down and turned him into a skidmark right there on the hard-packed badland dirt. Kiwi saw it through the cracked windshield while she was trying to get the piece of shit CST-40 to turn over. She’d already pulled her hand-port by then, jack sliding home with the smooth familiarity of muscle memory. No net, no city infrastructure out here, but there were chips in their bikes, processors in their weapons, junky control modules threaded through their vehicles. She’d gone fishing for something vulnerable and found a sliver of cheap hardware in the nearest bike. One quick short-circuit pulse, one Shiv suddenly hurtling sideways as their ride locked up and flipped.

She hated AR-work, half in the real and half not. It wasn't her specialty, something hammered in when something slammed into the back of her head, heavy and sharp. Bright light burst behind her eyes, the inside of her skull popping with pain, and then she went out like someone had hit a switch. She didn’t know who came up on her, but it didn't matter. She was done.

Waking up left her with a pounding headache, but her internal chronometer told her it couldn't have been more than a minute, if that. Her head throbbed, her limbs were dead weight, and cold air scraped across suddenly bare skin. Voices rumbled around her, low and mocking, but muffled by the ringing in her ears. They were rough in stripping off her jacket and netsuit, hands moving everywhere, touching and groping, laughing, half horny and half sadistic. Something hard and tight clamped onto her neural socket at the base of her skull, the pressure invasive and wrong in a way that made her stomach lurch.

A breaker ring. She knew the type even half-conscious. Cheap, probably unstable, designed to block her from doing anything useful and punish anyone stupid enough to try and tamper with it. One wrong surge, one clumsy attempt to pry it off, and it could fry her port. Or her brain. Maybe both. Then she was lifted, someone taking their liberties as they pulled her supine form along, and the next thing she knew, she was tumbling into the trunk, flex-cable biting into her wrists and ankles while her captor leaned in and she could taste the stink of his breath, something about having lots of fun with her, and slammed the lid.

Now she lay in the heat and dark and did what she’d always done when the world decided to actively fuck her. She thought about probabilities, ran the odds, started making choices, and maybe a plan in the process.

They’d rape her. That was almost a given. The Raffen used bodies like any other resource, and a naked woman tied up in their trunk wasn’t going to go unclaimed for long. Just one more violation, but she'd gotten used to that familiar pain. She’d burned through the sharp edge of that years ago, back in the brothel, before she lost her jaw to that pigfucking psycho. She still had the program she used to switch off her emotions, just in case, and she had no problem taking a few for the team if it meant keeping them from killing her or carving her up for a while. Let them think they were in charge long enough to get sloppy.

Step one was always about surviving long enough for a step two.

From there it would be about picking her moment. A guy or a girl or a borg or something in between, there was always a weak link, someone wanting to just 'feel loved'. She snorted at that, but if it meant maybe getting the restraints off, getting enough leeway to make her way out, then that was that. The Blocker would be an issue until she could find a phone, get someone to pick her up, and take her to her Ripper to get it disentangled. Fucking thing would be a real problem, and they were deep in the wastes besides. She had no illusions about Faraday sending help. She was just as disposable as the other three were. But it was nice to dream.

Yeah, right, she thought bitterly. Then she'll just get an AV out here to fly her home, set up a manicure and a cabana boy joytoy to suck her clit off while she drinks this whole fucking mess away. Really live it up for a few days. What a goddamn joke. She knew in her most sardonic heart that she was going to get fucked half to death, then get her throat slit, her organs harvested, her chrome ripped out and whatever was left maybe cooked and eaten in the interim. It really depended on that particular gang of Raffen Shiv, and they were always worse the farther out into the Badlands you went.

She tested her restraints again, even though she already knew it was pointless. The hogtie was efficient, no lazy slack anywhere. She twisted her hands, trying to find some give, but the flex-cable had been wrapped multiple times and cinched tight. Her shoulders ached. The tendons in her knees and ankles pulled with a constant sharp stretch. She’d be cramping bad in another hour, maybe less, and goddamn was she picking up some serious rugburn on her tits from the scratchy interior.

The numbness came on in waves, familiar, almost comforting. She let it wash over her, flattening everything under its weight. Fear, anger, disgust, they all slid down into a quiet pit where she could ignore them. Above that line, only the necessary thoughts floated.

How many of them are out there?

How many are dead already?

What direction are we even facing?

Is anyone looking for this convoy, or is this stretch of dirt so far off the maps that nobody cares?

The vehicle lurched suddenly, pitching her into the side of the trunk hard enough that she slammed into the roof of the trunk. Her shoulder took the brunt of it, a white-hot spark of pain flaring down her arm, and she hissed through her teeth. The car bucked again, each bounce thudding her body against uncushioned metal. It felt like being shaken in a can.

Shouting filtered through the vehicle around her, muffled but sharp. Someone yelled something wordless, a drawn-out cry that twisted with panic instead of triumph. Another voice cut off halfway through a curse. Kiwi felt the vibrations of heavy footfalls on the chassis through the floor pressed against her skin.

Her pulse ticked up despite the numbness she’d wrapped herself in. She pressed the back of her head into the trunk floor and listened harder, focusing on the pattern of noise. The vehicle had stopped cold, shaking as bodies exited it. A higher, ragged shriek tore through the air, female, pained, and terrified. The texture of it made her think flesh, not metal. A single shot cracked close enough to make her ears ring. The world outside the trunk exploded into overlapping chaos.

Something slammed into the side of the vehicle with a meaty impact that shuddered all the way through the frame. The trunk wall rattled against her spine. She imagined a body hitting the sheet metal and sliding down, leaving a streak. The car jerked, and her head shot back as something sharp and long screeched through the metal, barely missing her head as blood dripped down the blade, before being wrenched out, leaving a single line of light piercing through.

“What the fuck,” she whispered to herself, voice barely audible under the engine noise. Her tongue felt thick. Her lips were dry. She tried to lever herself up to look through it, but the angle was wrong. Instead she tried to listen through it.

It didn’t sound like a Shiv victory. They weren’t whooping. They weren’t jeering or hyping each other up over an incoming good time. The sounds out there were panicked, ragged, punctuated by short, ugly screams that cut off too fast, followed by silence where voices should’ve been. The gunshots were wild, some pinging perilously close to her little metal coffin, and through it all she could hear the sounds of bodies hitting the ground.

Someone was killing them.

Kiwi’s heart hammered harder. Hope and dread hit at the same time, colliding somewhere under her sternum. It could be Faraday. He might have had another team out there, doing some other part of the mission, pulled back to get her. She almost laughed at that despite herself. Rescue was a nice idea in theory, but Night City and the wastes didn’t breed rescuers. They bred opportunists. You could get pulled out of one nightmare and dropped into another one that was quieter and more patient.

Even so, the part of her that had survived this long by clawing for every advantage didn’t sit still. She twisted, pressing the side of her mask into the floor, levering herself as much as the hogtie allowed until her shoulder met the trunk wall. Her heel found purchase against the opposite side.

“HEY!” she yelled, voice cracking on the first shout. The sound slammed back into her off the metal, too loud in the tiny space. “Hey! In here! I’m alive!” She drove her shoulder into the wall, hard enough that the jolt shot up through her arm. “Open the trunk, you shitheads!”

If it was the Shiv winning, they’d either ignore her or decide to speed up whatever they had planned. If it wasn’t, she wanted whoever was out there to know there was cargo still breathing. A person who could bargain. A person who could make herself useful. If nothing else she didn't want to be left there to bake to death in this glorified oven.

Something else hit the car, hard enough to dent the hatch over her down. The gunfire was starting to thin out, even if the frantic shouts kept getting louder and more panicked. The screams that followed had a different edge to them than the rough laughter she’d heard when the Shiv tossed her in here. They were higher, rawer, cut short by things that sounded final.

Then, just as abruptly as it began, it stopped.

No more noise. No more shots. No more shouting.

Only the faint crackle of hard-packed dirt and the whistle of the wind.

Kiwi held her breath without realizing it, the sudden quiet settling thick and heavy around her. With the fighting over, everything felt sharper and closer, each heartbeat loud enough to fill the trunk.

She waited. A few seconds, maybe more. Hard to tell in the tight dark where time never behaved right.

Something bumped against the rear of the car. Light, tentative. Then again, heavier, accompanied by the scrape of metal on metal. The trunk latch above her head clicked once, then again as someone fumbled with it.

The lid lifted.

Sunlight poured in like a physical blow, bleaching everything white for a heartbeat. Kiwi squeezed her eyes shut instinctively, then forced them open a sliver at a time, blinking tears away until the blurred shape above her resolved.

A man stood there, blocking part of the sun. Tall. Broad shoulders filling the cut of a long-sleeved shirt, heavy for the heat, dark grey on white, deep brown hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and something thicker. As her vision adjusted, the colors slid into focus.

He was covered in blood. Drenched in it, really, like he'd been bathing in it. It soaked his chest, smeared across his arms, spattered up his throat and jaw. Some of it had dried into a darker crust, some still gleamed wet in the unforgiving light. In his right hand, angled loosely toward the ground, he held a sword, a katana. Black metal, sleek lines and a script that she didn't recognize, its edge filmed with a fresh red sheen that dripped slowly onto the sand beside the bumper. He towered over her, his heavy frame against the light, as he just... stood there, dripping lifeblood, in the middle of a Badlands desert with no more or less care for her than he would for the gunk under his nails.

His eyes met hers, the gleam of cybernetics tinting his pupils with a glowing green ring. Quiet, unassuming, measuring. Kiwi knew better than to take that at face value. She braced herself for the usual things men’s faces did when they looked at her in this position. Hunger. Cruelty. Ugly amusement. Indifference. A quick, dismissive evaluation of what she was worth as entertainment... or as a product.

What she saw instead was confusion. No, not confusion, it was... hard to describe. He tilted his head just so, like a bird observing something it found as a curiosity. He seemed to have frozen up for a moment, processing things.

Kiwi stared back at him, feeling sweat cooling on her skin now that air could actually move over her. The cable dug into her wrists when she shifted, a small, sharp reminder of exactly how helpless she looked. She watched his gaze flick across her, and she knew she was particularly exposed as she was, but he didn't linger on any one spot more than another. His eyes came back up to hers, as if he was trying to decide what, exactly, he was supposed to do with her.

Of all the ways this day could’ve gone sideways, being pulled out of a Shiv’s trunk by a blood-drenched stranger with a sword and a blank stare wasn’t on the list. For all she knew he was weighing up which parts of her would taste best before deciding her skin would make a nice dress. And wouldn't that be just perfect. Saved from the Shiv only to wind up as some drifter-hobo's fuck-snack. A drifter-hobo who, she shouldn't forget, just apparently murdered an entire Raffen Shiv raiding party and looked little worse for the wear for it.

Fuck. She might have been better off with the rapist desert bandits.