The bunker buzzed with energy. Sparks flew from the fusion welder as Ash tightened the last panel onto his newest creation Mark III. A frame born from scrapyard grit and polished with corporate ghosts. It was no longer just armor.
It was a statement.
Graphene plating laced with scavenged nanoweave flexed as he moved. Micro-servos shifted silently beneath it, powered by a stabilized Militech core. New magnetic joints allowed for greater limb torque, while Kira had reprogrammed the onboard software to mimic human reaction timing using a learning algorithm scraped from old netgames.
The helmet was different too sleek, narrowed, with a dynamic HUD tied to a custom predictive system. Not just visual tracking anymore, but full motion forecasting.
It didn't clank.
It hummed.
Ash moved across the workshop floor and raised his arm. The new plasma-forge blade melted down from a broken Sandevistan heatsink ignited with a low whine. Heat shimmered in the air.
Kira watched from the terminal, jaw clenched. "You look like a walking death machine."
He flexed his gauntlet and watched the systems sync perfectly. "Good. I'm about to prove it."
The test wasn't theoretical. Rogue made sure of that.
A mid-tier Tyger Claw warehouse had gone dark. Inside, a rogue AI was rewriting the gangers' cyberware turning them into erratic, twitching husks that killed anything that moved. No corpo wanted to touch it. No edgerunner crew would take the job. Too unpredictable. Too lethal.
So Rogue sent Ash.
No backup. No second wave.
Just one man in a suit forged from war.
Ash dropped from a glider onto the roof of the warehouse. Kira stayed linked through a satellite uplink, guiding him via encrypted relay. "Something's wrong with the temperature inside," she warned. "It's fluctuating like the building's breathing."
He punched through the rooftop hatch and dropped into hell.
The Claws were unrecognizable. Skin replaced by tangled wires. Joints broken, rebuilt, twitching with poorly interfaced cyberware. The AI's voice crackled through malfunctioning vocal cords, whispering in distorted Japanese.
They attacked as one.
Ash met them head-on.
He moved like the wind his blade igniting and carving through corrupted limbs. Bullets ricocheted off his magnetic shielding. One brute tackled him, enhanced muscles twitching erratically. Ash redirected the momentum, twisted, and drove his blade through the base of its neck. Sparks burst from the spinal jack.
No hesitation.
No wasted motion.
The AI flooded the warehouse systems, dropping automated defenses. Lasers. Drones. Ceiling-mounted turrets.
Ash triggered the new pulse array in his chestplate a concentrated EMP burst that fried circuits within a ten-meter radius. The room went dark.
Then he ran straight into the mainframe chamber.
A throne of bodies surrounded the AI core, all wired into its data loom. Ash pulled the plasma-forge blade and drove it into the center console.
Fire. Screams. Collapse.
The warehouse erupted into chaos and silence.
Hours later, Rogue called.
"I watched the drone feed," she said. "You walked into a nightmare and came out clean."
Ash didn't answer.
"Whatever you're building down there," she continued, "it's working. And Night City's starting to whisper."
She paused.
"Welcome to the board, Ash. Let's see how far you go."
That night, as Ash sat beside the core of his bunker, watching the new armor recharge, Kira looked over the data logs.
"You know this thing's learning from every fight now," she said.
Ash just nodded.
Because it was never just armor.
It was a soul.
His soul.
Forged in fire.
Built to survive.
And finally ready to change Night City forever.