2076: the Past Returns Again

In Night City, each floor of Arasaka Tower is made of bones. Gawain Renato knows this well - he has been in the Counterintelligence Department for eleven months and five days, never being late, never questioning, and never making mistakes. He wore a discounted suit with frayed cuffs and a basic Qilushi prosthetic eye, and it cost money to buy an extra can of synthetic coffee. In this empire built of steel and algorithms, he is just a screw that can be replaced at any time. Until the supervisor threw him a smuggling surveillance report. Three hours of logistics records were erased with scalpel-like precision, a batch of prototype combat stimulants marked as "destroyed" were circulating in the dark, and an encrypted text message from a street middleman quietly surfaced. Gawain faces a choice: sign obediently and be a safe screw; or use this report to take a gamble. He chose the latter. Within a day, his boss was fired, and he was sitting in an office that still smelled of cologne. But this is just the beginning. In this tower, every time you climb up a floor, there is one more corpse at your feet; every time you defeat an opponent, there is one more pair of eyes staring at you from behind. From work station to office, from chess pieces to players - Gawain's war has just begun.