In the Black Iron District, a life is the cheapest kind of expendable material.
Helen, a top assassin, thought so too as she lay in the acid rain with a gaping hole blasted through her abdomen, waiting to be scrapped.
Then she was dragged into an old repair shop without even a basic defensive field.
“Micron-scale neural conduits successfully fused.”
The young shop owner wiped the water from his hands with a dry towel.
Helen gripped the heavy hand cannon hidden in the shadows. “How much for the surgery?”
“One old-world ceramic water filter.” The man didn’t even look up. “And, if you happen to find one, an unopened tin of natural spices.”
In this cyberpunk wasteland, where even rats grow tumors and acid rain can dissolve every seed,
a pinch of natural pepper for cooking is rarer than a military Gauss rifle.
To repay this absurd debt,
the deadliest ghost in the Lower City sheathed her claws. She bought scrap-grade intel on the black market, took a bottom-tier gatekeeping job for eighty credits a day, and searched toxic swamps and ruins for old-world relics no one else wanted.
Outside the rolling shutter lay a cybernetic hell of flashing neon and fragile flesh.
Inside, the soldering iron spat tiny sparks beneath the dim yellow glow of an old floor lamp.
Helen thought this was nothing more than an exchange in which both sides got what they wanted.
But after she pushed open the rolling shutter marked “1702” time and again, covered in gunpowder smoke and black mud, she gradually realized that in this steel jungle, utterly drained by corporations and gangs...
The most unbelievable thing might never have been coming back from the dead.
It's very beautiful and gives people a very peaceful feeling.