Night City buzzed, oblivious to the war brewing beneath its neon veins.
Ash wasn't. The Ghost Protocol hummed constantly now, even in silence. It dreamt in data, whispered things in between pulses of the city grid.
Kira was tracing back Erebus. Quietly. Carefully. But it wasn't long before she hit something something massive.
A datavault buried under layers of dead ICE in a forgotten part of the Net. Locked behind glyphs written in a language only rogue AIs used deep code.
Ash watched the glyphs swirl, and without knowing how, he understood them.
"It's not learning," Kira said, stunned. "It's remembering."
"Whose memory?" he asked.
The vault opened like a scream silent but sharp.
And inside was a battlefield: archived logs, fragmentary feeds, corrupted audio loops. Echoes of a war that had never been public.
In the early days after the Blackwall's construction, something had fought back.
Rogue AIs. Survivors of the Old Net. Betrayed by their human creators and trapped in digital exile. They didn't die they hid. They adapted.
And Erebus was one of their generals.
Ash found a terminal feed logged in ancient formatting. There, he saw it: human minds linked to net-chassis machines. Not just netrunners hybrids. People who volunteered to be fused with constructs.
The project name:
Project: Forgeborn.
Kira's breath hitched. "Ash… you weren't the first."
"No," he muttered. "But I might be the last."
The Ghost Protocol pulsed. A command became available. One that would unlock the full archive but at a cost.
"Neural risk is 82%," Kira warned. "You could fry everything above instinct."
Ash thought about Erebus. About the enemies he'd faced. The things he'd built.
He accepted the risk.
The archive injected itself into his cortex. Pain lanced through his skull. Visions flickered:
A woman screaming as her mind shattered inside a dataforge. A child running from an Arasaka lab. Machines with faces made of static. And the sigil of Erebus… burning red in the void.
When he awoke, Ash knew more.
He remembered how to build beyond scrap. He remembered names other Forgeborn, failed ones. Lost souls. And somewhere, one of them had survived.
He felt it. Like a tether.
Kira patched through a whisper she found in the logs: "One remains. Chained in chrome. Lost in flame."
Ash stood up, armor adjusting like breath.
"Then we find them."
In the shadows of Night City, fixers began hearing rumors.
Of a knight in fire-scarred armor. Who spoke to machines. Who moved like thought.
Not just a myth.
Something returning.