Do you know how painful a broken arm, cracked ribs, and a gunshot wound to the leg is? The answer is: all the pain.

Take all the pain you've ever felt, wrap it around a brick, and then smash it directly into your body. That's what it felt like when I woke up on a surgical bed in a strange tent. I didn't know where I was or how I got there, a feeling that I was sadly becoming used to. If I had to guess, the Wraiths had dragged me into their camp. But for what? I had no clue. At the same time, I kind of had a good idea about what was going to happen to me.

I never really thought much about the dissected and mutilated remains that could be found in Raffen camps in the game. Now, it was all that my mind wanted to dwell on. Thankfully I wasn't alone with my thoughts for very long.

A hulking brute of a man stepped into the tent, wearing a long black trench coat that I couldn't help but think was wildly impractical in the desert of the badlands. A dust mask hid his face as he stepped up next to the surgical bed I was splayed out across. He 'gently' tapped my leg wound which I noticed had been recently bandaged, before whipping off his dust mask and grinning down at the obvious pain his greeting produced.

"And what's your name?" he asked.

“John,” I mumbled before wincing in realization. I always thought that one of the best things about the isekai genre was how the main character could reinvent themselves. They weren’t stuck being who they were before they got magicked into a new world. They could be a new person with new goals and, more importantly, a new name. John was such a basic name. It wasn’t the name of a great warrior or a leader of men who made people tremble in fear and awe. It was the name of an unidentified body that was found buried in a shallow, unmarked grave in the middle of the desert. I didn’t want to be a John.

“Well John,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. What was up with that? Did he not believe it was my name? Who would pretend their name was John? God, I hated that name. “I think you can guess where we are.”

He took a step back and held out an arm as if displaying the camp I could see through the opened tent flaps.

“My boys brought you here because when they scanned you, no profile popped up. You’re too pale to be a nomad. Too well fed to be poor.” His dig at the slight excess weight I carried kind of hurt, more so because it reminded me that I had run out of breath trying to sprint away from the Wraiths. “And you haven’t chipped in yet. You’ve got no chrome whatsoever. Which leads us to believe that you’re some spoiled rich tit out here, rocking some expensive biomods, looking for some fun in the dangerous badlands.”

He must have misread the stupefied look on my face because he held his palms out in a mock calming gesture. “It’s pointless to try and get you to tell us the truth about who you are right now. Hell, they probably teach you corpo shits how to lie when you’re still in the crib,” he said, pressing a finger down onto my wounded leg.

“You’re still under the delusion that your parents are going to come and save you and make all the bad men go away, and that this story will be just some grand adventure you can brag about to all the other spoiled little rich kids.” He dug his thumb into my thigh, forcing my body to jerk up in pain.

“You’re mistaken. We’re the power out here. My boys can take anyone. Hell, just this morning we knocked off a Biotechnica convoy. A couple of guards flatlined, couple boxes klepped. That was all business as usual for us. In fact, that’s how we found you. My boys were trashing the evidence of the raid out in the dump, and they came across your pale ass free birding across the badlands.”

I wanted to tell him I wasn’t rich. I had so many student loans that I refused to even think about them. Out of sight, out of mind. That was my motto for basically every problem I’ve ever had. The thought of never being forced to pay off that mountain of debt was enough to almost make a smile grace my face despite being pseudo-tortured by the Wraith leader. But before I could get a word-in edgewise, he pushed me back fully onto the surgical bed until I was laying down and looking up at him.

“We had to call our ripper out here and Rufus hates to make house calls. He charges something fierce,” he said as his face hovered over mine. “You took on debt. In a couple days you’re gonna tell us who you are, and we’re gonna ransom you back to your folks.”

He gave me a patronizing pat on my cheek. It was probably meant to make me feel intimidated but honestly it was just plain weird. “And if no one is gonna pay, we’ll just start cutting. Organs can go for a lot if you know who to sell to and something tells me we’re gonna make a lot off you.” He grabbed an inhaler from the side table next to the bed, jammed it into my mouth, and pressed down on the top. Almost instantly the pain in my body receded and my eyelids grew heavy, and I relaxed back onto the bed.

***

I woke to the sound of gunfire. Rapid fire shots from an assault rifle – thank you Hollywood special effects teams for teaching me what that sounded like – warred with what I could only assume was a heavy machine gun. My body instinctively recoiled from the sound, trying to climb into itself to be better protected against any stray rounds that pierced the cloth tent. I tried climbing out of the surgical bed to crawl to safety, or at least put something between me and the fighting, but my body refused to obey my commands. I was only three or four feet above the ground, but that seemed like an insurmountable distance to drop.

So, I just stared out the front of the tent, desperate to know what was happening in the camp. All I could make out were a few shadows thrown up by the campfire still blazing away in the middle of the camp. All I could hear was the panicked challenges bellowed out by the Wraiths, aimed at some unseen adversary attacking from the dark.

The roar of the heavy machine gun fell silent, followed quickly by the rest of the Wraith weapons. I didn’t know if that meant they had won or lost. I couldn’t see anything from my unprotected spot up on the surgical bed and I couldn’t get my body to climb down and go look.

Eventually I did notice a few figures stalking through the camp. Their outlines grew more distinct the longer I watched, and I noticed they were much more uniform in appearance than the Wraiths I had seen earlier. They wore Kevlar vests, knee pads, military style boots, and helmets. A few of the figures let loose rounds from their rifles at the wounded bodies scattered throughout the camp and all I could do was watch, wide-eyed, as one of the figures stepped into the tent.

Unlike when the Wraith leader made his appearance earlier in the day, this guy didn’t deign to take off his mask. He cocked his head and spoke into his comms system as he kept his eyes on me.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Camp cleared. 12 hostiles down. One unknown on a surgical bed. It looks like the nomads haven’t started operating on him yet.”

My mouth grew dry as I kept an eye on the soldier’s finger as it hovered near the trigger of his rifle. I tried to quiet my ragged breathing. I didn’t want to do anything that might draw his attention to myself or make this guy think I was a threat to him or his team.

“Understood. Pickup in ten minutes.” As suddenly as he appeared the soldier was gone, having turned on his heel and left the tent. I could hear the rest of the soldiers scouring the camp, grabbing containers stamped with the Biotechnica logo. An AV landed in the distance and the soldiers filed out of the camp, loading the containers onto the AV.

They had to work for Biotechnica. That would explain their armor, weapons, access to an AV, and training capable of turning a Wraith camp into nothing but a pile of bodies. This was a military op and the Raffen never stood a chance. There were a couple missions in the game that pointed to Biotechnica being as underhanded and unethical as the rest of the megacorporations in the Cyberpunk world, but all that flew out the window of my thoughts with the reasoning that: they had doctors and medicine that could fix me. I needed to get out there and beg them to take me back to civilization.

I struggled to sit up on the surgical bed, desperate to make my way outside to the idling AV. Even if Biotechnica was an evil corporation that conducted illegal human experimentation on Nomads, they could still give me pain killers and at least get me closer to a town or a doctor or something. As it was, even though the Wraiths all seemed dead and I was free to go, I’d still be stuck out in the middle of the desert, naked and unarmed, and damaged from multiple wounds.

I finally managed to force my body to obey as I rolled onto my side. But that was the last coherent command my limbs listened to. My legs didn’t want to work properly, so when I managed to rock my way off the surgical bed, I collapsed and fell what felt like thirty or forty feet, face first, to the ground. My clumsiness managed to help me land on both my injured right leg and broken left arm at the same time. And that’s when I passed out again.

***

Here’s an interesting fact about Human anatomy. The pontine micturition center is the part of the brain stem that controls communication between the brain and the bladder. It’s what tells your bladder when it’s okay to pee and when you need to hold it until your back teeth are floating. It’s a relatively low-level functionary in the whole of the brain bureaucracy, akin to the accountant lady who oversees giving you your per diem on work trips; only ever really noticeable when she doesn’t show up to work.

When you’re knocked unconscious or have a TBI, communication between your bladder and the pontine micturition center gets disrupted. It’s like the accountant lady embezzled some of that per diem and is now sitting comfortably on a beach somewhere, earning interest and drinking pina coladas, while the bladder is panicking over how full it’s getting.

All of this is just a pretentious way of saying that when I came to after falling unconscious again, I found I had pissed myself. For once, my nakedness came in handy as I didn’t have to do much to clean myself up. I simply rolled away from the growing wet pile of ground and dragged myself out of the tent.

Once I stood up a wave of nausea hit me, and it grew worse as I left the tent and stepped out into the camp and was greeted by the sight of so many dead bodies. The Biotechnica squad had really put in the work, and I spent a couple minutes just walking around the camp, taking in the carnage. My left arm hung uselessly by my side, my ribs were feeling tender and abused, and my right leg felt both hot and stiff – not a great sign. But I ignored all of that to take in the scene of brutality laid out in front of me; red blood and white borg fluid stained the desert ground, bodies littered the camp, and spent shell casings were scattered around.

One of the Wraith vehicles was parked off to the side. It was a Colby something or other. I struggled my way over and tried to open the car door to drive away from the bloodbath in the desert but once I got there, I found the door locked. You remember when Tesla first started getting popular and seemingly every Uber driver had one and you’d try and open the door, but Tesla designed to design a needlessly complicated handle?

Yea. It was like that. No matter what I tried, the door to the Colby remained stubbornly shut. Finally, my body gave out and I slumped to the ground to try and catch my breath, my back resting against one of the SUV’s wheels. That’s when I remembered that everything in this world ran off those chip shard thingies. In the game you could pick up money shards or cyberware capacity shards off dead bodies. Car keys obviously ran off the same system.

I crawled my way to the nearest body and twisted the head so I could look at the side of its neck. Yep. There it was. A USB port looking thing was embedded in the body’s neck, along with a couple of those shards. I tried to wrestle them free of the port but quickly gave up on the idea. Either I was doing it wrong, or the chips were wedged in too tightly for me to pull them out by hand and I didn’t want to take the chance they’d snap before I could pry them out. Didn’t Lucy just pop them out of the port in the anime? I sat back to think over my options and grimaced when the only solution presented itself.

I never had the most accurate internal clock, but I’d wager that it had taken me a little over three hours to finish my work and get ready to finally leave the camp. I had decided to address my nakedness first. Over 24 hours in this world and I still hadn’t put on a single stitch of clothing which was…odd to say the least. Most of the pants I found I’d discounted for various reasons. Some were too big, some were too small, some were too stained with various fluids I refused to think about. Stripping corpses for their pants was a little much, which left a single pair of jean shorts that ended a few inches above my knees as my only option.

I wasn’t as lucky with my choices when it came to shirts. The first time I tried to slip a shirt over my head, my body screamed in pain as I jostled my arm. I quickly gave up on the idea that I could completely cover my torso and instead settled for an armored jacket I had found in one of the tents. I slid my right arm into it and then just draped the rest of the jacket over my left shoulder. It made me look entirely insane, but it would do until I could figure out something better. I also grabbed a pair of Wraith boots that were a size too big. I did take those off a body. There was something different between taking a corpses’ shoes and stripping and wearing a dead man’s pants.

After I was somewhat clothed, I got down to the true work of leaving the camp. It took me a few hours to wrestle some of the Wraith corpses into the bed of the Colby. Since I couldn’t pop the chips out of the ports in their necks without risking breaking them, I figured I’d just take the entire corpse with me. Getting the bodies up and in the back of the cab was both awkward and backbreaking work, made even more difficult because I only had one functioning arm and was still limping around because of my leg wound. But I finally managed to unlock the Colby door with the fourth corpse I stashed in the truck bed. I also grabbed a couple guns that were scattered around the camp and tossed them in the cab.

I climbed up into the front seat and blanked as soon as I saw all the knobs and switches and doodads on the console. I had no clue what any of them did, but fortunately the big red button on the steering console started up the Colby and I was away.

I crested a sand dune and gazed out at the desert. Night City was to my left, the big highway was directly ahead of me, and I could just about make out a cluster of buildings I figured was probably the Sunset Motel. If I was remembering the geography from the game correctly, Dakota’s garage would be to the right of the motel, set just back from the highway. I pointed the Colby in the general direction of what I hoped was her garage and pushed down on the gas.

Every bump in the ride, every sand dune crested, every jostle of the Colby sent pain shooting down my arm and up my leg. I couldn’t move my left arm anymore, just hugged it close to my body. My right hand was barely holding onto the steering wheel. My legs shook with what I hoped wasn’t some new injury. And my vision blurred around the edges until it narrowed down to a small cone so I could only make out what was directly in front of me. I hoped I was driving in the right direction because otherwise I was screwed. All I could do was keep my foot on the gas, one hand on the wheel, and fight to remain conscious.

Midway through the drive – how many hours was it? – I realized I hadn’t eaten or drank anything since I woke up in the world. That was a disconcerting thought and went a long way towards explaining why I was sweating so much and had cotton mouth. I didn’t think I blacked out during the drive, but I do remember being startled at finding myself driving once or twice. How did I get in this car? Where am I going? What the hell is happening here?

I focused enough momentarily to realize I was coming up on some sort of building. Or buildings. Blurs were scattered out front. They were blocky and…I think they were stationary. My mind told me I needed to get someone’s attention and that cars were usually equipped with horns for that very reason.

My eyes shifted around the dashboard, searching for the horn, but I couldn’t see anything except a tiny red button by my hand. I pressed it and the sound of gunfire snapped out of the car. Hmmm…is someone shooting at me? That’s not good.

Then the car jerked to a stop, and I heard honking. I must have run out of gas or something and now there was a traffic pile up behind me which was incredibly weird. I was in the desert. There shouldn’t be any traffic in the desert. Why was there traffic here? It wasn’t like we were on a road or anything. There were literal miles on either side of me for the drivers behind me to squeeze on past, but they were being dicks and blaring their car horns at me. I started to fume at them and decided to do something about it.

“Oh my God! Go around,” I screamed and tried to wave the cars behind me forward with my left arm. The sharp pain and lack of control in my hand snapped my attention back to the present. My face was smashed into the weird joystick handle steering wheel and I could feel blood trickling down from my scalp to get into my eyes. On the bright side, I realized that the car did in fact have a horn. It was exactly where every other car horn ever designed was, directly in the middle of the steering wheel, currently crushed by face.

I peeled my head off the steering wheel and the horn cut off and then I passed out for the…fourth time in 24 hours? Man, I really need to get better at this.