“HOLO! Get your ass out here man!”
Holo must have been his alias as it took but a moment before my choom from last night walked out to sort shit out.
Aliases are usually only used by big shots trying to hide anything important about their daily life, so he sure was planning far ahead.
“All good here choom! This guy’s the newbie I was talkin’ about getting to fill the ranks!” Holo said with his usual poker smile, slinging an arm around the punks shoulder.
“This one’s Tadano.” he said much to the annoyance of Tadano it seems as he was quick to throw Holo’s arm off.
“C’mon, lets head back to the others and get this kid caught up!”
Tadano followed along begrudgingly while I was just a little bit more enthusiastic to join a bunch of chromed out killers as an almost completely Ganic gonk with no track record, but hey!
I’m thinking I’ll pitch stealth as my capabilities, as it’s a role I probably could fill without issue... unless they already got someone to fit that niche... I’m not getting anywhere standing here worrying, damn my paranoid brain, so lets get moving.
Inside the place certainly was a lot cleaner, and it wasn’t hard to spot the heavily armed team sitting at the back of the shop who must have been the rest of the group. Sure enough, Holo strode up to them with zero hesitation along with Tadano slumping angrily into an empty chair.
There were two others, the obvious lack of numbers why they settled for recruiting us, and they both had a decent amount of chrome visible, seemingly both fitting the bruiser role. Holo seemed more of a supporting weapon, and I assume Tadano was too.
Not a very balanced team setup but then again this wasn’t a very difficult mission... supposedly.
“This is Tadano, who you’ve already met!” Holo spoke up, introducing the trio.
Tadano was older than me, but not much taller at roughly 5”10, his hair was a strong black and he had orange plastic pants and accents on his clothes, his only noticeable cyberware was the brownish-orange iris of his optics, and shock absorber pads replacing his palms.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“The two mean looking ones are the brothers Charles, left, and William, right.” He continued, gesturing between the two. “They’re the ones setting up this little merc group, and will probably do a lot of the heavy lifting.”
William and Charles look mostly the same, probably due to being brothers but you could never really know in night city. With brown hair, blue-grey eyes, and many silver cyberware lines running across any visible skin, they certainly fit a more stereotypical look.
“We can speak for ourselves, you gonk.” William replied, checking me over.
“Now ‘Holo’ here went and recommended you for this mission, so you better have some skill worth more than the mere meat shield standing before me. We don’t need some useless ‘ganic!”
“I’m proficient at stealth.” was how I chose to reply as all of them, including Holo, looked me over once again, sceptically, which was only mildly annoying. “Got some good hacks for getting by unnoticed.” I add, which isn’t technically a lie.
“Not good enough to do it alone I’m guessing... hahh, that works. We’ll be drawing a lot of attention either way, you’ll sneak through and grab the dataslate.”
“Tadano, send him the detes.” A flurry of information lit up my vision as I opened received file, marking a smaller corpo tower next to what must have been the start of an Arasaka megabase. It’s location, security measures and positions, average body count, etc.
“Now, this was going to be a false flag... but that fell through when their runners returned a low priority to said slate, so they’re throwing us in just cause. Doesn’t mean this is some suicide mission though, more that it was the type of mission best of a few hired mercs than a whole military advance.”
“Now, lets get moving.”
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I gotta say, whatever I was expecting when we were to approach the big corpo building, this certainly wasn’t it.
There was not disguises, and not even a cover car, we literally just walked up towards the entrance with guns in hand. Tadono must have hit the system as the turrets by the entrance failed to activate.
The group of moderately armed mercs marching towards a corpo building menacingly was noticed of course, but I had started to split off from the group a distance away from the front doors, LAG active obviously.
So while the sounds of gunfire started to fill the evening air... well more than usual at least, I was rushing in ahead to the elevators.
I’m not some ninja.
There is no way I’m climbing through the floors from outside the building.
LAG currently had quite a few limitations, but thanks to last minute modifications I could switch it to Erase Only mode to become invisible to thrice the number of people.
That’s right! A whole 6 individual beings!!
AND my brain only starts to melt after a whole 10 minutes at that count.
So yeah, speed and efficiency were the name of the game.
Some louder shots and what was probably a good handful of grenades exploding reverberated through out the elevator shaft. I wasn’t worried about them, mostly cause I was in just as much danger, but also because no one down there was particularly noteworthy.
Just your average grunts.
No, the real threat was going to be up here with me, as it was one talented merc tasked with defending the one area of real importance.
So.
As the elevator reached the 2nd highest floor (Don’t know why its only second highest), I put a mask on to cover my face, and raised my hands in surrender as the doors opened to 4 armed guards, guns trained and ready to fire...
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