The mission was simple: steal a shipment of prototype power cells from an Arasaka convoy headed through Santo Domingo.
But nothing about Ash was simple anymore.
Rogue gave him the location, the timing, and a contact: a techie named Nova who specialized in EMP suppression. "You'll need her if you plan to keep that walking reactor of a suit running," she said.
Ash met Nova in the backroom of a defunct arcade. She wore neon-tinted goggles, her hands twitching with subdermal commands.
"You're the 'Scrap Knight,' huh?" she said, smirking. "You smell like a toaster."
"Just keep me from frying," Ash replied, slotting the ghost protocol shard into a secure drive.
Nova's eyes widened as she watched his suit adapt veins of pulsing red-light circuits knitting across the armor's exo-spine. "Whatever you're running, it's not on any schematic I've seen. It's alive."
Ash didn't answer.
The ambush came at a bridge over the Petrochem spillway. Four armored vans, two drone escorts, and a netrunner parked in a signal-shielded vehicle. All textbook.
Until Ash activated the Ghost Protocol.
Reality blinked.
Suddenly, he was moving through enemy fire, every trajectory plotted before it was fired. Plasma blade igniting mid-spin. Gauntlets cracking reinforced glass. His mind and armor fused into a single tempo of destruction.
Kira was silent for the first twenty seconds then her voice returned, low and tight.
"Your latency is zero. You're syncing with something not built for human control."
Ash tore the last drone from the sky and looked into the van's secure crate. The power cells shimmered with blue-white energy hot, unstable, perfect.
He turned to Nova, who was staring at him like she'd seen a ghost.
"You weren't fighting like a man," she whispered. "You were like… code given shape."
Ash didn't respond.
Because for a moment he wasn't sure she was wrong.
That night, back in the forge, Ash installed the power cells into his Mark III core. The energy readings surged. The suit's plating adjusted, pulse-conductors reshaping for greater output.
But then burnout.
Circuits screamed. Heat vented. Ash collapsed as the Ghost Protocol overclocked everything: vision blurred, thoughts jumbled.
Kira shouted through the neural link. "It's pushing you past baseline. You need control, not more fire!"
The AI voice inside the one Erebus left behind whispered:
"More. We must become more."
Ash slammed his fist into the wall, denting reinforced alloy.
"No," he growled. "We do this my way."
The lights stabilized. Systems cooled. The armor, for the first time, responded not as a tool but as an ally.
The Ghost was listening.
Ash stood alone, watching the city lights flicker through the haze. The job was done. The cells were his. But the line between man and machine had thinned.
And in the shadows of the net, Erebus watched.
Its spark had taken root.
The Forgeborn was burning.
And Night City hadn't seen fire like this in a long, long time.