Chapter 21 - 19: Those Who Hear My Night Song Need Not See the Dawn

Chapter 21: Chapter 19: Those Who Hear My Night Song Need Not See the Dawn

The silver-haired woman charged forward again, Blood Flame surging violently around both fists as she drove a punch straight into the spot where the blood silk had cinched the tentacle tight.

BOOM!

Under the combined assault of all three fighters, the tentacle snapped. Black viscous fluid sprayed from the stump, and the severed limb convulsed against the ground a few times before finally going still.

The remaining half retracted into the earth at frightening speed and vanished without a trace.

The silver-haired woman glanced back at Adeline among the ruins, confirmed she was unharmed, and let out a quiet breath of relief.

"Fall back — it won’t come out again."

The bald man released his grip and rolled his shoulder. "If the captain were here, it never would’ve gotten away."

"The captain isn’t here," the lanky man said, walking over. "Do you honestly think the three of us could’ve taken that thing down?"

The bald man scratched the back of his head and said nothing.

The fight ended quickly. Yin Zhen descended from high above, shifted back into human form, and fell into quiet step behind Adeline.

The Blood Clan had no heartbeat — yet she could sense it with perfect clarity: something inside her was pounding fiercely for those three people.

More precisely, for their Extraordinary Abilities. The Attack-type Extraordinary Abilities she so desperately needed.

Adeline, composed as ever, stood at the edge of the ruins as all three approached.

"Inspector General." The silver-haired woman dipped her head in a salute. "I’m the deputy captain of the Bloodthorn Squad, Third Brigade. Codename White Phosphorus. These two are Lighthouse and Tuner."

The bald man stood ramrod straight, his head catching the faint glow of the night air. Paired with his towering height, he really was the most brilliantly lit ’Lighthouse’ in any crowd.

The one codenamed ’Tuner’ dropped into a low, sweeping bow — old-fashioned and refined. A few curling strands of golden hair fell loose at his temple, framing sharp, striking features and the faintest upward curl of his lips. Elegant. Romantic.

Adeline held her gaze on Tuner a beat longer than the others. The Bloodthorn Squad — Lucia Dracula’s personal unit, and one of the elite squads not just in the Third Brigade but in the entire Night City Guard Team.

With Lucia absent, White Phosphorus was acting squad captain.

"I’ll leave you to it."

Adeline left with Yin Zhen in tow, wary of letting anything slip — after all, her memories of this body only went back one week.

The three soldiers resumed their mission. Throughout the entire exchange, not one of them had so much as glanced at Yin Zhen. Not a single look.

Along the coastline, mass-produced test subjects like Yin Zhen died in droves every day. They were tools, nothing more. One batch gone, another would follow.

On the way back, Yin Zhen quietly checked her System Panel.

[Gray Card Event ’Professional Human Shield’ complete. Reward: Good Person Card ×1, Word Count +500]

[Good Person Card (One-time Item): Present this card when you need a favor. The recipient has an 80% chance of helping you with one small request.]

[Special Note: What counts as ’small’? You’d better have some common sense about that.]

They were nearly at the aircar when Adeline clicked her tongue and stopped abruptly, turning to face Yin Zhen. "Thank you. For saving me back there."

Yin Zhen answered in her usual flat tone. "It’s my duty."

Adeline reached into the holster inside her coat, drew out a gun, and held it out. "A thank-you gift. I don’t like owing people."

Yin Zhen had used this gun once before, but she’d never taken a proper look at it.

It was a silver revolver. The grip was inlaid with silver wire worked into the laurel branch motif of the Cavendish family crest, the whole piece finished in a deliberately aged, vintage style.

Beneath the slightly elongated barrel sat a row of pale blue energy indicator lights — hidden within the silver when dormant, but baring their teeth the moment they lit up.

Along one side of the frame, an inscription had been engraved: *Those who hear my Night Song need not live to see the dawn.*

"’Those who hear my Night Song need not live to see the dawn; those who hear my Final Curtain have already glimpsed eternity.’ This one is called Night Song. The other is called Final Curtain. My father had them custom-made for me. The moment Night Song fires, electromagnetic coils around the barrel deliver a second acceleration — the round hits with more than twice the muzzle velocity of a standard handgun."

"Hold the trigger to enter overload mode. After a three-second charge, the round will punch straight through the hardest bone on any Fallen Species. It takes 12.7mm armor-piercing high-explosive rounds — standard issue in the Guard Team armory. Each round has a micro explosive charge embedded in the tip. It detonates 0.05 seconds after impact, giving it enough time to punch through the surface layer first and blow apart inside. Fragmentation spreads in every direction, leaving a cavity that won’t heal."

"Your reaction speed and accuracy at close range are exceptional. The Guard Team’s standard-issue sidearm is wasted on ability like yours. My own shooting is mediocre at best, and the high-powered explosive rounds in Final Curtain suit me better anyway. Take it — before I change my mind."

Yin Zhen took Night Song. Her fingers traced over the engraved inscription, and something stirred deep in her chest.

She hadn’t gotten an Attack-type Extraordinary Ability — but a high-powered handgun was the next best thing. At the very least, it filled the most glaring gap in what she could do.

Test subjects didn’t understand social niceties, and Yin Zhen saw no reason to perform any. She slotted Night Song into her holster, swapped out the standard-issue sidearm without ceremony, and pulled open the car door for Adeline.

...

Over the next several days, Yin Zhen accompanied Adeline as her bodyguard to many corners of Night City.

Night City was enormous. It was the first time Yin Zhen had truly registered that fact since arriving in the Red Corpse World.

Before this, her whole world had been the Saint Group laboratories, the training grounds, the Guard Corps Building, and the rubble-strewn sewers of the Seventh District.

Those places were cramped and suffocating, soaked through with the smell of death. The places Adeline took her were nothing like that.

There was a bar — no sign, no number on the door — occupying the entire top floor of a building somewhere in the east of the city. The elevator required an iris scan just to select the floor.

Walk down the corridor, push open the soundproofed door, and the world exploded into deafening electronic music and strobing neon light. Companion-type androids danced in the crowd — male, female, dark-skinned, pale-skinned — every configuration imaginable.

Adeline lounged in a booth, glass in hand, laughing and chatting with strangers she didn’t seem to know at all. Every one of them had blood-red irises in varying shades of intensity, dressed in clothes that cost fortunes, their laughter loud and completely hollow.

Some were injecting themselves with something, then hurling themselves into the crowd on the dance floor in a frenzy, or turning on the androids with open violence.

"That’s blood source element," Adeline said, explaining to Yin Zhen. "The core component of artificial blood plasma. Inject it directly and you’ll be riding high for three days straight. One syringe contains enough to produce ten thousand milliliters of artificial blood plasma at eighty percent purity."

Bathed in the blinding light pollution, surrounded by the thundering music, those faces were flawless, pale, and lost in pleasure. The image of the people in the Seventh District — clawing at each other over half a bag of expired blood plasma — flashed through Yin Zhen’s mind.

She stood behind Adeline and watched it all in silence. A few people drifted over trying to strike up conversation. She fixed them with a cold stare until they thought better of it and moved on.

The next day, Adeline took her to the Saint Group’s R&D division. Someone had cleared the floor in advance, and the most advanced immersive Training Pods had been opened exclusively for the two of them.

Yin Zhen was ushered inside. The hatch sealed shut. Her vision lurched — and she was already standing somewhere else entirely.

The peak of a snow-capped mountain. Bottomless chasms yawning beneath her feet. The aurora bleeding and shifting overhead.

Adeline let out a delighted yell, grabbed a snowboard, drew her gun, and threw herself down the slope — shredding through the snow at breakneck speed while picking off the creatures that kept hurling themselves from either side.

This was Saint Group training equipment. Every sensation inside the pod registered as real — feeding directly back into muscle memory and the nervous system, so that a brief practice session after leaving the pod was all it took to rapidly acquire and sharpen any number of Skills.

In here, even members of the Blood Clan — who feared and fled from sunlight — could feel the warmth of the sun on their skin again, taste the food of the old world, and revisit what life had felt like when they were still human, twenty years ago.

"Fun?"

Adeline, sufficiently satisfied, had settled herself on the edge of a cliff, legs dangling in the air.

Yin Zhen nodded. Just one day in the Training Pod playing a ski-and-shoot game alongside Adeline had bumped her firearm Skills from Basic to Intermediate, with a noticeable improvement in combat reaction speed as well.

Adeline lay back in the snow, watching the aurora roll overhead. "Virtual worlds are prettier than the real one. The real world is just too filthy." She paused. "This Training Pod is something else. I’ll get you a set."

Yin Zhen said flatly, "I don’t have anywhere to put it."

She was still living in a single-occupancy rest room at the Guard Team barracks.

"Easy fix. The apartment next to mine is sitting empty — it’s yours. Training Pod plus a full set of all the other equipment. Your getting stronger is good for me too. My Identity and abilities don’t lend themselves to direct combat. I’m not fond of the people my father assigns me, but you’re good. You don’t talk much, and you know where the line is."

Yin Zhen: ......

She didn’t know what to say. She was half-convinced Adeline had some kind of system forcing her to spend money and keep up the image of a bottomless heiress — the woman had already given her an absurd amount of things over these past few days.

Time bled away in a haze of wealth and indulgence, as though the story of the Red Corpse World had shifted its focus entirely elsewhere, leaving the two of them behind.

Yin Zhen and Adeline, background characters in someone else’s novel, drifting freely through the parts of the story no one was watching.

The days were easy. Yin Zhen was anything but.

[36:30:11]

A day and a half left on the countdown. She hadn’t triggered a single Special event recently. Her cumulative word count sat at 3,133 — still 1,900 short of what she needed to pay the penalty.