VII
Hunting Ground
Night City, 2077
The club practically shook in time with the overindulgent electronic beat reverberating through the crowd. Heat rolled off the dancing patrons packed shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, sweat and perfume thick in the air. Deathwing moved through the chaos without a ripple, his optics adjusting to the flashing lights, filtering through the smoke, backlights, and laser show that blinded everyone else. He didn’t flinch, didn’t slow: the rhythm was just another kind of static.
The Eclipse was more than a dance club—it was a feeding ground. Neon strips ran up the walls like veins, pulsing in time with the bass. He scanned the crowd with mechanical precision. Half the crowd was half-dressed. Each pulse of the strobing lights froze the dancers mid-motion—a thousand masks of ecstasy and exhaustion. Designer drugs hung in the air like incense, mingling with the smoke rolling off the stage, or were smeared on bare skin, glowing under the ultraviolet. Behind curtained alcoves, silhouettes moved in slow, liquid motion across beds of cushions and syn-leather seats—dancers, clients, and whoever else could pay to forget who they were. This was just one of the places the Tyger Claws’ hunted. Where they .
The mark fit right in. Kenta Sato, forty-one, lieutenant of the Tyger Claws and architect of one of the gang’s largest, darkest braindance markets. He’d made his fortune recording suffering—snuff BDs disguised as art: full experiential recordings of their victims’ slow and painful executions, typically following more than one form of sexual abuse. Sato’s “art” let his voyeuristic clientele feel every dying heartbeat. His studios doubled as torture chambers, and The Eclipse was his favorite recruiting ground. The girls who danced here disappeared as often as they were replaced.
Deathwing didn’t care. The details had been brief: names, victims, photos, all the things that the client on the other side of the fixer had used to justify the hit. None of it mattered. He didn’t do morality.
The only thing he’d looked at more than once was the location and the attached image—Sato leaning against a glass balcony, gold-lined suit and fake smile hiding a man rotted from the inside out. The picture matched the silhouette his optics had just found, high above the dance floor.
Looking down from the glass wall of the office overlooking the dance floor, Kenta Sato was exactly where he was supposed to be. Two escorts—one a woman with a bright pink mohawk, the other a large man covered in Yakuza-style tattoos—flanked him as he laughed through a cloud of tobacco smoke. His shirt was open, his hands tangled in the hair of a woman kneeling in front of him.
The crowd parted only when it had to. Flesh, chrome, and syn-leather pressed together, a writhing ocean of motion and heat. Deathwing was a shadow moving through color—too solid to be part of the dream, too mechanical to belong to the organism pulsing around him.
A pair stumbled into his path—young, eyes glassy, faces painted with sweat and powder. They were already tugging at one another’s clothes, laughing through the high. One of them had a UV tattoo spiraling down her exposed thigh; the other was licking a line of glowing dust from her collarbone. Deathwing pushed past them without breaking stride. The woman barely noticed, murmuring something to her partner as she pulled him toward a low alcove filled with thick cushions, barely hidden behind the half-open cutains. Another couple was already there, silhouettes moving lazily under the ultraviolet glow. No one in Eclipse cared who was watching, and no one cared to stop.
Likewise, Deathwing couldn’t have cared less about the environment surrounding him. This wasn’t the kind of high he was chasing.
The office loomed above it all, glass catching the strobe lights in fractured flashes. Through it, Sato watched his kingdom with a predator’s amusement, while his own personal “entertainment” performed under the dim blue light of the suite, bobbing her head slowly forward and back.
Deathwing thought, pushing past the last of the crowd toward the restroom hallway. Just past the restrooms, a guard stood in front of a flight of stairs, just beyond a security scanner.
Deathwing’s pace fell into sync with the heavy rumble of the music. He walked right up to the guard. The Tyger reached for his gun too late. Deathwing lashed out, grabbing the man’s colorful shirt and punching him in the throat. The Tyger’s knees buckled as he gasped for air. He hit the floor with a thud muffled by the music. Deathwing knelt next him, pulled the man’s own knife from his belt, and drove it into his ear.
He left the guard in the growing pool of blood, and turned his attention to the security scanner. It was similar to a metal detector, except it cast a holographic warning sign across its width. The gate likely was set to scan for the proper credentials on a datashard slotted into the neuroport of whoever passed through it. Deathwing could probably have taken one of these chips from the guard walked right through. Instead, he reached out with his left hand and engaged his Scratchers. The carbo-glass claws extended an inch past his fingertips and sliced through the steel frame of the security gate. The red hologram pixelated and vanished as sparks erupted from the jagged rent int the metal.
At the top of the stairs, the noise of the club dimmed to a dull, distant heartbeat. The bass that had made the floor throb below was little more that a vibration in the walls now. Deathwing’s insectile optics adjusted again, red lenses chittering in their their mounts as they shifted, scanning the narrow hallway. The scent here had changed—less sweat and perfume, more ozone and the sharp tang of disinfectant barely covering the smell of blood. The upper floor of The Eclipse was where the glamour ended. Where Sato’s business was conducted.
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Two more guards flanked the hallway, positioned in front of the door to Kenta Sato’s office. The door was heavy steel. The guards were mid conversation, but they dropped it the moment Deathwing appeared at the top of the stairs.
The one on the left drew a handgun from his waistband, the one on the right tugged a bright green machete from a sheath on his belt. He charged Deathwing, shouting something in Japanese as his partner tugged his personal link cable from his left palm and plugged it into a port on the side of his firearm.
The guard with the machete only got to swing it once. The blade was deflected, sliding harmlessly over the armored surface of Deathwing’s carbon-black cyberarm. Deathwing stepped in close, and grabbed the man by the face. A thin electrode needle extended from the palm of his hand, crackling with electricity. It skewered the guard’s eyeball before pumping roughly 300 joules into his brain. Deathwing had moved on before the guard, or his machete, had hit the ground.
The second guard shouted as his eyes glowed orange, contacting someone through his Agent. The smartgun in his hand whined as its targeting system locked on. The muzzle flared, spitting a tight burst of caseless rounds that streaked toward Deathwing’s head and chest.
They hit—hard—but didn’t . The few that penetrated his flak jacket impacted the subdermal armor of his Sycust FleshWeave. Each bullet flattened against one layer of armor, or the other, before tumbling uselessly to the floor. Thin streams of smoke rose from the scorched fabric where the rounds had struck. Deathwing didn’t flinch. If anyone had been watching, they might have thought the shooter had missed.
As he stalked toward the guard, his optics tracked the gunman’s stance, not the weapon, predicting the next burst by the tension in his shoulders and the twitch of his eyes.
Deathwing closed the distance in an instant. The gun barked again, rounds sparking against the ceiling as Deathwing caught the guard’s arm mid-trigger. The projectiles showered down around them, shattering before the smartgun’s tracking system could reorient them.
The carbo-glass Scratchers slid easily through skin, muscle, and the polymer lining of the guard’s combat vest. He raked upward in a single, brutal motion, opening the man from hip to sternum.
The guard’s eyes went wide, air and blood escaping from his mouth in a half-formed scream. Organs and implants spilled onto the floor, followed by the dead Tyger.
For a moment, the hallway was quiet again—just the hum of the overhead fluorescents and the muffled thump of the music. The quiet stretched until it was almost unbearable. Blood pooled around his boots, and Deathwing watched it for a few breaths before he moved on.
He ripped through the security scanner, just like the other, then flexed his left hand and retracted the Scratchers. The door to Sato’s office was heavy steel, thick enough to muffle the laughter and screaming on the other side. He shifted his optics to infrared and found four heat signatures inside. Two were standing next to each other to the left of the door. The other two were tangled together on the right.
He tested the door. It was locked, as expected. The steel door was designed to slide rather than swing, vanishing into the wall on an electromagnetic track.
Deathwing’s cyberarm tensed, servos whining softly as he drove his fist through the seam where the door met the frame. The steel folded like foil. He hooked his fingers inside, pried outward, and tore the slab from its rails with a heaving wrench of his carbon-black arm. The panel twisted and screeched, vanishing halfway into the wall before sparks flew and the mechanism failed.
Sound and smoke spilled into the hall—music, laughter, and a woman’s screams. The scene inside the office was hazy and chaotic. Deathwing appraised the room in an instant as he looked through the half-opened door.
Sato’s guards were still by the window, weapons half-drawn as they turned toward Deathwing. Across from them, Sato was on top of the woman who had been kneeling down, pleasuring him earlier. He had turned his head toward the door, grin curdling into a snarl. The girl beneath him flinched. She was nude, with makeup streaking down her face. Her hands were bound above her head, handcuffs cutting into her wrists. Bruises, burns, and abrasions covered her body, particularly her throat and breasts. Sato had been putting cigarettes out on her skin.
She tried to twist away from Sato’s grip as he looked toward the door, but he shoved her back down with one hand, the other fumbling for the pistol on the table beside him. The sound she made barely rose above the bass leaking through the broken door and the window overlooking the club, a hoarse, exhausted whimper.
Deathwing didn’t stop. He wasn’t here on a mission of mercy, just to get paid. The guards were shouting now, pulling their triggers as they scrambled for cover. Muzzle flashes strobed through the smoke; the rounds struck where he’d been a heartbeat before. He dropped into a low combat posture and his right arm unfolded with a series of metallic clicks.
The single shot Popup Grenade Launcher emerged from beneath the black plating of his forearm. He didn’t bother aiming. Deathwing just fired.
The blast blew the exposed half of the door against its frame, bending it further out of shape, and turning the interior of the office into a blender. Deathwing pushed past the remains of the door as soon as the explosive had detonated. The office had been painted red by shrapnel. The bodyguards had been thrown into the window, which must have been made of bulletproof glass because instead of tumbling to the dance floor below, they had become piles of gore on the office floor.
On the opposite side of the room, Sato was still moving, trying to drag himself upright. One of his legs was mangled beyond recognition. His exposed manhood was missing. The girl was bleeding from her head and several shrapnel wounds in her belly. She was screaming and trying so frantically to escape her bindings that she had cut her wrist down to the bone.
Deathwing crossed the floor in three steps, picking up the the pistol Sato had been reaching for, and pressed it to the man’s temple. With one pull of the trigger, a single , the Tyger was no more.
Deathwing dropped the gun and turned away. Behind him, the girl made a wet, broken sound—a scream, or a plea, he didn’t care. He didn’t look back. The job was done. She was none of his concern.
The perfume of drugs, sex, and alcohol hung in the air over the dance floor as he plunged back into the crowd. His optics automatically shifted modes to compensate for the strobing lights. No one even looked up as he passed.
A pair of Tygers sprinted into the hallway toward the stairs behind him, ignorant of their boss’s killer mere feet away.
Deathwing pushed through the ocean of bodies. The dancers were still moving, oblivious, drug-bright eyes rolling beneath the UV lights. He passed within inches of dozens of people and none of them saw him.
A woman laughed as she licked a trail of shining powder off another woman’s bare chest. They fell to the floor, wrapped in each other’s arms, right across Deathwing’s path. He stepped over the girls, and continued to push through the throng, silent and unbothered.
By the time the first alarm sounded, Deathwing had already disappeared into the rain.
