“Hey! We chill, we chilled!” Jack replied, trying to de-escalate the pissed off punk with a bit too much of a trigger finger.
“I know a Badge’s mole when I see one! who tipped you off!?”
“Woah woah, I’m here for the gig!”
“Just! Call Holo, he can vouch for me I swear!” He tried to explain.
Mentioning his choom worked only to annoy the punk further, though he did turn away from Jack before shouting into the small shop. That was more trust than he was probably owed given the circumstances.
“HOLO! Get your ass out here man!”
It took a minute, but Holo rushed out from a beaded doorway with his annoying grin still plastered solidly on his face.
His name was most probably an aliases, usually only top mercs or other big shots trying to hide from their daily life used them, so he was planning far ahead.
“All good here choom! This guy’s the newbie I was talkin’ about getting to fill rank!” Holo grinned, 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, thankfully also holstering his gun.
“C’mon, lets head back to the others and get this kid caught up!”
Tadano followed along begrudgingly as Jack was lead to a more private back area. Most places hosted them for situations like this. Brought in more eddies than you’d expect.
‘Thought I’d be just a little more enthusiastic to join a bunch of chromed out killers as an almost completely ganic gonk with no track record, but hey! At least the catering looks good!’
‘I should 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...’
Inside the place certainly was a lot cleaner, and it wasn’t hard to spot the heavily armed pair making up the rest of the group. Sure enough, Holo strode up to them with zero hesitation, Tadano slumping angrily into an empty chair nearby.
Only these two were waiting, the obvious lack of numbers why they settled for recruiting Jack, and they both had a decent amount of chrome visible, seemingly both fitting the bruiser role. Holo seemed more of a supporting weapon, he bet Tadano was one too.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Not a very balanced team setup but this mission wasn’t meant to be anything too difficult... supposedly.
“This is Tadano, who you’ve already met!” Holo spoke up, introducing the mean looking trio.
Tadano was older than me, but not much taller at roughly 5”10, his hair was a strong black, with striking 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.
“These two 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 had similar looks, 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 for the average street punk.
“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 what Jack settled on as everyone looked him over once again, sceptically, which annoyed him only mildly. “Got some good hacks for getting by unnoticed,” he added, which isn’t technically a lie, “And some proficiency in codeware in general.”
“Well they say ghost types are unassuming...” he mumbled to himself. “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 in Jacks vision as the markings of a smaller corpo tower next to what must have been the start of an Arasaka Megabase rendered out. It’s location, security measures and positions, average body count, etc., everything important was listed.
His paranoia was shouting at him that they shouldn’t have access to half this stuff, especially without a competent netrunner on the team.
“Now, this was going to be a false flag... but that fell through when their runners returned a low priority to said slate, and already had a buyer lined up so they’re throwing us in just cause. Doesn’t mean this is some suicide mission though, more that it was the type better handled by a few hired mercs instead of a whole military advance.”
“Now, get moving.”
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Whatever Jack had expected from an assault on Arasaka grounds, this certainly was the very last thing he could come up with.
There were no disguises, no covers, not even an attempt to conceal the very real and very obvious chrome the brothers were rocking.
The team literally just walked up the main pathway stairs entrance with guns in hand. Someone must’ve hit their systems, otherwise they would have all been craters in seconds from heavy turret fire.
The group of moderately armed mercs marching towards a corpo building menacingly was noticed, if rather late all things considered. Jack however, split off for an employee only entrance while the group stared with the distractions.
So as the sounds of gunfire started to fill the evening air... well more than usual at least, Jack was linking a bypass to the scanner locking the door down through his terminal.
The whole thing was premade by whatever corp wanted this raid, Jack just needed to bounce it to get in, so he brought his compact terminal clipped to his belt.
If it got trashed during the gig, he could cover it with the payout.
Some nova merc night have just scaled the building and klepped the dataslate unseen, but that wasn’t an option for Jack.
He’s not some ninja, that’d just be stupid.
Do you have any idea how easy it is to mow down a gonk from outside the building?
*CLICK*
The door unlatched itself as Jack shoved it aside.
The longer he took, the more chances something goes wrong.
‘Okay Jack... You’ve got this.’
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