Brayden_Wetzel
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"Little China delivery point… and the code is…"
Karl input the numbers and retrieved the data he needed.
A single shard.
On his way back, he grabbed breakfast—a synthetic egg pancake made from artificial eggs and processed flour.
Crispy, yet carrying a faint plastic aftertaste—Karl couldn't decide whether it was decent or disgusting.
The synthetic egg was awful.
But the pancake itself? Pretty good.
Progress, I guess.
He used to find this kind of food inedible.
Now? He could tolerate the bad as long as there was something good mixed in.
At this rate, maybe one day, I'll even be able to eat synthetic meat without flinching.
Biting into the pancake, Karl stepped into the elevator, scrolling through the intel while sending out a few messages to Brown and Mann.
Karl: How's the progress? Any solid leads?
Brown: The target is cautious—constantly shifting locations. But we've picked up movement patterns. Should be wrapped up in ten days.
Ten days?
That meant before Christmas.
Finishing everything before Christmas and relaxing for the holidays? Sounds like a bad omen.
Mann: We've already found a lead. Brown's team is top-tier—way better at street-level intel than us. We mostly rely on netrunners, but their guys actually work the ground. This tip came from one of them.
Karl: Got it. Keep at it.
After finishing up with Brown and Mann, Karl found himself wondering—
Was this what fixers did all the time? Just checking in every once in a while to ask, "Hey, how's it going?"
Thinking back, Karl realized something—
No fixer had ever rushed him to get a job done.
Most of his contracts were same-day jobs—show up, handle it, done.
The only long-term gig he ever took was posing as a student at the academy.
Even then, every night was packed with action—Cyberpsychos, gang shootouts, you name it.
And technically, he wasn't even there a full week.
"Huh. Guess I really am an efficient guy."
Muttering to himself, Karl returned to his rented apartment, inserted the shard into his computer, and ran a full virus scan.
After confirming the data was clean, he opened it—
And one name immediately stood out.
Lazarus.
[Lazarus]:
Lazarus Group—A premier private military contractor.
From large-scale military operations to lone-wolf mercenaries, Lazarus provides the best fighters money can buy.
"Lazarus—Your ultimate combat support partner."
Lazarus, huh?
A renowned PMC.
They had pulled out of Night City years ago due to corporate peace agreements. With megacorp relations stabilizing, they had faded from the spotlight.
But their name still carried weight.
Karl recalled the training shard he had acquired—
Inside, there was combat data from full-fledged Lazarus mercenaries.
So why the hell was 'Lazarus' showing up in the shard Blanca sent me?
Karl admitted—
His curiosity was piqued.
"Lazarus mercenaries."
By Karl's estimation, a trained Lazarus mercenary was an elite combatant, comparable to Arasaka's Sandevistan-equipped ninjas with Mantis Blades.
Top-tier muscle.
Most regular mercs weren't even in the same league.
And now—one of them was on Blanca's intel list?
Interesting.
As Karl scrolled through the shard, he realized Blanca hadn't just provided intel on the former ACPA trainee.
She had practically dumped a list of every major individual who had recently arrived in Night City.
To any fixer, this kind of information would be a goldmine.
Yet Blanca had handed it over like it was nothing.
Of course, Karl understood why.
She was hiding her key target within a mass of unrelated data—
Classic misdirection.
It was the same trick as hiding a single person in a crowd.
Even a white-robed assassin could disappear if they blended in well enough.
Blanca wasn't sloppy.
If the shard contained only the ACPA trainee's data and it got discovered, it would be way too suspicious.
But if it included a long list of Night City's newest arrivals, at worst, it could be dismissed as just another corporate info dump.
Karl, for one, wasn't complaining.
To any other fixer, obtaining intel like this would have been an expensive, time-consuming process.
But Karl?
He got premium corporate intel handed to him on a silver platter.
And that made him very, very happy.
Just from seeing a Lazarus mercenary's name, Karl could already think of three or four possible reasons—
Lazarus was trying to re-establish operations in Night City.
They were on contract for a high-profile job.
A major op was about to go down, and Lazarus was involved.
With this intel in hand, Karl could prepare in advance.
It was like knowing the weather would change—
A clueless fool would walk outside and deal with it as it came.
Karl?
He'd check the forecast and bring an umbrella—just in case.
Satisfied, he forwarded the ACPA trainee's intel to his squad's private channel, where T-Bug was handling security.
Karl: Go over this when you wake up. Once you've read it, let me know. We'll figure out how to handle Blanca's long-term job.
T-Bug, as always, responded instantly.
Then—silence.
Karl knew exactly what that meant.
Jackie and Oliver were still dead asleep.
8:20 AM.
If Blanca was still working, that meant she had been on duty for 31 hours straight.
"Damn. Glad I'm not a corpo dog."
Feeling smug about his freedom, Karl continued browsing the intel on the shard.
There was a LOT of it.
Too many big names had entered Night City recently.
"The God of Rock" Kerry Eurodyne
Arthur Jenkins
Meredith Stout
Kirk Sawyer
Big shots, corpos, fixers—
The list went on.
Blanca had handed him an absolute goldmine.
.
.
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