Sophie was speeding along the highway outside of Night City, heading into the Badlands for the first time. She had avoided the place out of consideration for how horrible she suspected the sand would be. She didn’t have any particular place in mind, she was just on the hunt for a small group of Raffen Shiv.
There hadn’t been any luck with getting intel from the Mox and her research suggested that Dakota Smith, the nomad fixer V meets in 2077, was only just beginning to establish herself. Thus it was up to Sophie to locate her targets.
It was hours of aimless driving before Sophie finally found a possible target. She pulled up in the shadow of a rocky outcrop, hiding her car with a sand coloured tarp. Clothes of similar colouring adorned her body. She wanted to perform a clean operation which meant she had spent hours deciding what to bring with her.
Sophie stalked towards the location she wanted to attack and began to scope it out. Arrayed in a loose semi-circle, a small fleet of six cars had stopped, their occupants setting up camp. A brief scan of the vehicles showed none were the type she wanted. Still, she might be able to find data on other groups if she attacked this one. Or maybe they would come to her.
New Mission
Assault the wraith camp. Leave no survivors.
Difficulty: Medium
Rewards: 2500 M-Coins
She ignored the quest. The rewards weren’t anything special and she planned to eliminate them all anyway.
Sophie found an elevated position that looked directly onto the Wraith encampment. She pulled out a Nekomata, one of the many weapons she had stolen, and settled in. She counted 12 Raffen, all of them armed. One of them even had an HMG resting nearby. Looking at him closer, she could tell he had quite a large amount of chrome typically used in construction. It was likely this that allowed him to wield the HMG. He would be the first target.
The second priority targets would be the enemy snipers. If she allowed, they would be able to suppress her while the remainder assaulted her position with their own weapons. She confirmed that none of the other Raffen seemed too important so Sophie settled in for a long wait. She needed the best opportunity she could get if she wanted to perform well.
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It was a few hours later, after night had fallen, that Sophie found the perfect moment. The HMG wielder was roasting something in the fire they had built and one of the snipers was on the other side of the camp.
Sophie lined up her scope, the reticle coming to rest directly on the HMG wielder’s head. She squeezed the trigger, holding it as she let the Nekomata charge to the limit. With a crack, the silence of the night was shattered as a metal spike pierced directly through a Raffen’s skull, splashing blood across the ground. The Wraith’s, obviously not expecting an attack, took a moment to react. A moment was all Sophie needed as another shot pierced through the closest sniper.
As the second man fell, the camp descended further into chaos, each person scrambling to grab any weapon they could find. Sophie spotted the third sniper arrive, scanning the area for the girl’s position. He spotted her moments before a metal spike arrived, tearing through his throat before he could warn his comrades. The fourth and final shot from the railgun sniper Sophie held dropped a fourth foe. While Sophie could have reloaded and continued to rain death on them from afar, she saw her current situation as the perfect situation to properly test her soulbound weapons.
The Nekomata disappeared into her inventory as she rose and sprinted towards the Wraith camp. In her hands, her Talons appeared. She ducked behind a tent, all of her targets searching the horizon for her. Footsteps appeared to her right and a man turned the corner, staring directly into the barrel of a gun. His eye disappeared silently, Sophie catching his body before he could make a sound.
The girl dove out from behind the tent, firing another two bullets before rolling behind a car. Shouts from the remaining five entered her ears, giving Sophie their locations. She peaked out from behind the car, guns raised. All of her targets were in the same area, which made Sophie’s job very easy. Five bullets later, five blossoms of blood painted the ground red as the bodies fell. Still, the girl didn’t relax.
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She may have stalked the camp for hours but there was a small chance she had missed someone or something. However, a thorough search of the camp suggested that she hadn’t. Once she confirmed it was safe, the thief set about the rather grisly task of looting both the camp and the corpses. The only valuables she managed to find however, was the HMG and some communications data. She stored both away, then checked the battlefield.
She was incredibly satisfied with the performance of her akimbo pistols. Sophie found no bullet remains from the pistols, meaning the special bullets had not, in fact, been damaged and instead they had ended up back in their respective magazines. She also hadn’t had any trouble firing them, her Adamantium arms and Recoil Reduction trait allowing her to deal with the intense recoil.
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With that camp being a bust, Sophie started searching for one of the camps listed in the communication data. She managed to find them in the middle of the night. Just like before, the young girl found a vantage point to observe the group from. However, she almost got caught immediately due to a sniper, perched atop the same rock she was scaling. In fact, the only reason she didn’t get caught was by using Ghost, an ability Sophie had been desperately trying not to rely on.
The Wraith, after seeing nothing was wrong, turned away. Sophie quietly breathed a sigh of relief before creeping up behind him. Her left hand wrapped around his face, grabbing the right side of his jaw while her right hand grabbed the back left side of his head. She twisted, snapping the man’s neck in a way very similar to V in Cyberpunk 2077. However, she could feel how sloppy the execution was when she compared it to her other skills.
In fact, she was sure the only reason she managed to execute the manoeuvre was because, despite having no additional features, the sheer strength of the Adamantium in her arms rendered the Wraith completely unable to resist. However, regardless of her musings, Sophie was on a mission. She cleared her head, then took up position, scanning the camp.
She took note of the significant increase in enemy number. There were more than twice as many Raffen in this camp than the one Sophie had hit earlier. However, she was able to spot her prize. Amongst the many cars in the Wraith’s possession was a modified Type-66 Quadra, the exact car Sophie was hunting for. The Raffen Shiv decal was admittedly quite ugly, but she could always get it painted. There was only one problem. She had no idea who the car belonged to which meant she either had to identify the owner or she could battle and flatline everyone in the camp. Obviously she chose the latter. She needed to take every opportunity to level up her skills after all.
With over half of the camp asleep, Sophie took her time devising a plan. She found four priority targets, just like she did with her previous attack, then found a more suitable position to infiltrate the camp during the chaos her opening salvo would cause. She opened fire with her Nekomata, rapidly blasting sizable holes in four Raffen. As expected, the group was immediately kicked into a frenzy like a nest of angry hornets.
By the time everyone in the camp had woken up and grabbed their weapons, Sophie was already upon them. Her soulbound pistols fired, entirely silent apart from the thud each body made when it hit the ground. The silent deaths of their friends clearly sent the remainder into a frenzy but Sophie didn’t stop. One of her Talons had built up sufficient energy from previous shots to start doing incredible damage. She pulled the trigger at a small group of Raffen that had just arrived. Instantly, three of them fell to the ground. Well, their heads and legs did. Their torsos had been completely obliterated by the bullet.
Sophie grinned, then turned her guns on her next opponents. She continued firing, a fact her enemies could only despair at. However, she was forced to stop when a hail of bullets erupted from her right. Obviously she had missed the man now wielding a HMG when she’d scouted the camp. Bullets slammed into her, yet they didn’t do anywhere near enough damage to put her down. Her new subdermal armour had protected Sophie from most of the damage, though she still had a few new holes across her body.
She raised her second Talon, the gun faintly humming with barely restrained energy. Like his friends before him, the HMG user dropped to the ground in a pile of limbs and blood. At that point, Sophie decided it was time to leave. While she could have left, if any stray bullets found their way into the holes left by the HMG rounds she might find herself in deep water.
The girl raced to the Quadra, the vehicle she had started this fight for. Inside, a man had just turned the engine on. Well, this makes things easier. She ripped open the door and pulled the man out of the car by his collar. At the same time, her deft fingers grabbed the key chip from his neck, courtesy of her thief skills. Sophie shot him, then jumped in the car. If they were smart, they’d let her leave. Obviously, these people were not smart. As her freshly stolen Quadra roared and sped off, the remainder of the camp quickly followed in their own cars.
The sound of gunfire plinking against the side of the car, not even making a dent, made Sophie smile. She set the vehicle to autopilot, then opened the window and stuck her body out. Her pistols created beautiful art across the desert. Raffen cars exploded, Wraith’s died and within a minute all of her pursuers had been turned into broken corpses, strewn across the bleak landscape of the badlands. Sophie thought for a moment, then turned back and returned to the camp. She might as well loot it after all.
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After returning to her apartment in Night City, Sophie set out at midday the next day, Rita in the passenger seat of her new Quadra. They were going to pick up the young thief’s Shion, abandoned after Sophie took her new semi-bulletproof monster home. Rita was gobsmacked when they passed the trail of broken vehicles and bodies.
“Fuck me. Since when was little Sophie so scary?” The Mox bouncer’s words were almost too quiet for Sophie to hear. She didn’t mind though, instead smiling happily to herself. They grabbed the Shion, Rita driving it back to NC. They parted ways and Rita looked like she had gotten over her shock, seemingly happy that the previously weak little thief had finally grown some fangs.