Chapter 56: Malicious Competition

[Incoming Call: Angie]

Seeing the communication signal on the verge of dropping, Lin Yue hurriedly halted his steps.

He ducked his head to evade a heavy punch swung by an approaching Animals gang member, then drove a direct right straight into his opponent's abdomen, sending a spray of blood erupting from the wretch's mouth on the spot.

*Crack.*

Lin Yue's hands effortlessly snapped the man's neck. Just as a distant security camera swiveled toward him, the kinetic pistol in Lin Yue's grip fired a round that left the lens smoking.

"Rin... Mister, what do we do now?"

Angie's face flickered continuously on the screen. The netrunner's signal jammer had a limited radius, but just a few more steps would sever Lin Yue's connection with her entirely.

"Find a place you consider safe first. I'll have someone on my end deal with the netrunner hunting you. If you want to run the books for the Dogtown Animals, you need to prove your own worth."

Lin Yue kept it brief. Clients had to shoulder a certain degree of risk; that was the rule.

Right now, he was engaged in a commercial rivalry with Mr. Hands—a malicious form of competition initiated by Lin Yue himself, and this "corporate war" was touching upon Hands' foundational assets.

As everyone knew, combat boosters were used by the vast majority of corporate soldiers, mercenaries, and gang thugs throughout Night City.

Tyger Claws, SynLush, and the like all counted as stimulant drugs. Beyond those, there were the muscle-building hormones injected by the Animals; the gang made their living off this exact trade.

Just how massive was this pie? Even the Scavengers were a business venture Hands had introduced to Aaye, and Hands himself couldn't resist dipping his fingers in for a share of the profits.

Where Angie was clever was that, knowing she couldn't muscle in on the drug and hormone trade, she instead focused squarely on underground fighting and cyberware.

That was the only reason she had managed to barely secure a foothold within the Animals.

Lin Yue hung up on Angie and traced the network cable, sprinting toward the netrunner's location.

Though the situation had been somewhat reversed, this netrunner still needed to be dealt with swiftly. Once the hacker freed up his hands, he would only cause greater destruction.

Sometimes Lin Yue wished he could cut himself in half—one half holding down the fort and commanding in Dogtown, and the other personally getting his hands dirty to clean up messes for clients!

An automatic door began to warp rapidly. Lin Yue's Gorilla Arms caught the seam and violently tore the doors apart.

To hell with authorization access tokens! A brawler with a Body attribute in the double digits felt no fear whatsoever.

...

Piles of construction materials and miscellaneous debris lined both sides of the second-floor mall corridor that the Animals had cleared out.

Thick network cables were twisted together into a single trunk leading toward an emergency exit deep within the shopping center.

Rebecca hid in the shadows on one side, waiting for a few Animals grunts to pass by.

Up ahead, a security camera swept across the entire hallway. Her communication system's partner seemed to be jammed; she could no longer notify the others of the netrunner's exact location and had no choice but to press upward on her own.

The camera rotated in all directions. The netrunner inside the server room had successfully dove into the local network, leaving him with two tasks: first, he had to use the local area network of the decrepit facility to help Marta eliminate targets; second, he needed to track down Angie's location.

At that very moment, Marta stood with her hands on her hips, pacing back and forth beside the netrunner, while two thugs guarded the left and right sides of the automatic doors, remaining on high alert for any potential developments.

"Where the hell is Aaye?!" Marta growled, angrily clawing at her hair.

The netrunner's voice transmitted through the room's security camera.

"Dead. Most likely taken out."

Marta's chest heaved as she muttered curses under her breath. "Aaye talked out of his ass, claiming the business in Dogtown was backed by a fixer, swearing up and down he could handle most of the trouble... What the hell is this then? Damn it!"

"The fixer didn't even have time to warn Aaye. Who the hell knows when simpletons like you let someone dig up your itineraries—"

"The new guy in Dogtown has corporate backing. Digging up the info of a few brainless thugs like you is child's play."

"And let me advise you to show some respect to Mr. Hands. If you want the drug business to keep running in Dogtown, shut your mouth. Once I locate Angie, Mr. Hands will handle it... As for you, just forget it, you useless piece of trash."

The netrunner spoke without a trace of politeness, carrying a condescending and arrogant tone.

It was utterly impossible to communicate with these Animals whose brains had practically turned to muscle; their vision was confined to a tiny patch of dirt, completely devoid of foresight... Only Aaye had possessed a sliver of sense, and unfortunately, he had gone and snuffed it.

"Huh?"

The netrunner muttered something unintelligible.

"Marta, send your people to this sector. A little brat has snuck up here."

Hearing the netrunner's words, Marta leaned in close to the computer monitor. On the screen, a short girl with twin tails was sprinting up a long-out-of-service escalator, rapidly darting into a side emergency corridor.

The beast-like woman stared fixedly at her prey, grinning savagely. "I'm going to stomp her flat!"

The automatic doors slid open, and Marta charged out with her crew in tow.

The netrunner lounging in his chair let out a cold laugh. "Muscle-bound morons."

*Huff, huff...*

Rebecca didn't dare slow her pace. She knew she probably wouldn't be able to close the distance to the netrunner, but her teammates' situation was too perilous, and with the communication link severed, she had no turning back.

Almost there.

Rebecca shattered the network camera above the automatic door ahead of her, stuffing the thick cable into a hole smashed through the wall.

Her intuition told her this was the netrunner's hideout.

Discovering a keypad lock on the door, she panicked slightly and hurriedly tried to locate an alternative entrance, whether through ventilation shafts or anything else.

Just as she was searching all around, the door before her gave a sound and unceremoniously swung open. She snapped her head around in reflex—

Filling her vision were a pair of thick, muscle-bound thighs crisscrossed with prominent veins, easily as wide as Rebecca's own waist. Before she even had time to raise her head to see the intruder's face, a heavy punch hurtled straight toward her!

Rebecca dodged on pure instinct, but her shoulder still took the blow. The sheer force swept her completely off her feet, slamming her viciously against the concrete railing behind her!

*Crack*—Rebecca's rifle was knocked from her grip, sliding across the floor and coming to a halt right beside her hand.

The camera inside the doorway shifted rapidly to lock onto Rebecca.

A mountain of a red-haired woman bent down and crawled out from the interior, glaring down at her with bared white teeth like a wild beast.

Dizzy and disoriented, Rebecca dug her fingertips into the ground and forced herself up, blood streaming uncontrollably from her mouth. She felt as though every bone in her body was on the verge of shattering.

Yet she refused to yield. Even with agony flooding her entire frame, she violently whipped out her hand to grab the rifle, twisted her body toward the enemy, and pulled the trigger without a second thought!

*Bzzzt!*

Arcs of electricity burst from Rebecca's slender arm!

"Damn it!"

Lacking any built-in countermeasures against netrunners, her cyberware rapidly malfunctioned, causing the gun to slip from her grasp once more. She could only watch helplessly as Marta, that behemoth of a woman, raised her knee, intent on bringing it down brutally upon her face!

Though evasion was impossible, Rebecca stubbornly kept pressing her trembling arm, attempting to force a reboot of her motor controls. As long as she wasn't dead, she hadn't lost!

She wasn't going to show fear. Baring her teeth, she let out a low snarl.

"Go fuck yourself!"

*Whoosh—*

A sound etched deep into her bones.

The discharge of a Nekomata and the tearing of flesh sounded strangely melodic, reminiscent of when she used to face the Maelstrom, and bullets would emerge from behind her to clear out enemies in her blind spots.

Marta's descending foot froze mid-air as she staggered. A massive hole in her waist billowed with wisps of smoke, and her hands instinctively clutched at the wound, though blood gushed like a spring from between her fingers.

The moment Marta raised her head, a length of rebar whirling with tremendous momentum had already spun right toward her face!

In that instant, time seemed to stand still.

The exact moment the rebar struck Marta's cheek, her bones began to warp, her skin bulging and swelling like weathered plastic before bursting apart!

*Thud!*

The dull impact of metal hitting flesh echoed out, and Marta crashed head over heels!

That stomp never did come down.

Lin Yue tossed aside his sniper rifle. A kinetic pistol round ricocheted off the wall behind Marta's two remaining flunkies, and he immediately broke into a sprint toward Rebecca just a few paces away.

Unwilling to give up, Marta twisted her deformed, terrifying face, exposing the frayed wiring and fractured bone of her cyberware. Pain editors and long-term hormone abuse had long since numbed her to physical agony; she was utterly driven to pulverize this woman's body and grind her skull into a pulp of flesh and bone!

Scrambling back to her feet, she locked her hands together and swung them down furiously toward the top of Rebecca's head!

*Bang!*

Lin Yue raised his arm, his body sinking abruptly as his cybernetic limbs emitted a sharp mechanical groan.

For the very first time, his Gorilla Arms registered actual pressure, the drive joints exposing their black synthetic casing as they hissed with plumes of heat...

...

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[Combat Boosters]: In the game Cyberpunk 2077, scanning most armed personnel with the TAB key reveals this information. Combat stims are the most common auxiliary combat method within the 2077 universe.