The bunker lights dimmed without warning.
Ash froze mid-solder, a fine wire suspended between his fingers. The welding arc sputtered out. For a second, the only sound was the gentle hum of the coolant unit kicking into emergency mode. Then came the flicker screens stuttering, diagnostic lights blinking random patterns.
It wasn't a power issue.
It was an intrusion.
Ash dropped the soldering iron and lunged for his console. Lines of alien code scrolled across the monitor, breaking through his weak encryption like paper. A name flashed briefly in the logs :NE0L1T3: before the screen went black.
Then the voice came.
"Nice hideout. Shame about your firewalls."
A distorted female voice, glitching every few syllables, oozed confidence. Netrunner.
Ash ripped open the panel beneath the terminal and yanked the emergency cutoff, killing power to every connected system. The lights died. The air went still.
He waited.
Silence.
Then movement. A soft clatter behind the bunker's vent.
Ash reached under the bench, pulled a makeshift baton fashioned from a carbon-alloy strut and an old stun module, and moved toward the sound.
The vent burst open.
A figure rolled out, cloaked in digital shimmer a stealth mesh cloak shorting out as she hit the floor. Slender frame. Glowing ocular implants. Fingers dancing with residual charge from the quickhack attempt.
Ash lunged.
She dodged left, palm out, trying to reboot his optics—only he didn't have chrome. Her expression faltered for a split second.
Big mistake.
He slammed her into the wall, pinning her with one arm. She grunted, trying to activate a viral injector. He crushed it in her hand.
"Who sent you?"
"W-Wait! Nobody! I was just scouting! You're new! Word's out 'scrap guy who builds his own chrome,' they said. I was curious!"
Ash narrowed his eyes. She was lying. But not completely.
"You tagged my system. Could've fried me if I had implants."
"Yeah, well, you don't. That's interesting. You're like... analog Jesus in a digital wasteland."
He held her there a moment longer. Then let go.
She dropped to the floor, coughing.
"You're lucky," he said. "Another second and I'd have turned your lungs into scrap, too."
She grinned despite herself. "Name's Kira. I don't work for anyone. I steal from them."
Ash said nothing.
Kira stood and brushed herself off. "Your setup's a fortress now. Not bad. But if someone like me got in, others will too. You need net defenses. Real ones."
Ash crossed his arms. "…I'm listening."
Over the next few nights, the bunker became something more. Kira helped him harden his systems air-gapped firewalls, logic bomb triggers, spoofing loops. All coded from scratch. No corp fingerprints.
In exchange, she asked for nothing. Not eddies. Not protection.
Just a place to belong.
"I like what you're doing," she said once, helping wire a new EMP trap into his shoulder plate. "You're not another chrome junkie. You're building a future."
Ash didn't reply. But for the first time, he didn't work alone.
And when a group of Netrunners backed by a minor Arasaka node came looking to loot his workshop, they didn't find a lone engineer.
They found Ash and Kira, surrounded by firewalls, traps, and armor that bit back.
They didn't survive long enough to report it.
Ash etched new words on his wall that night:
"They watch. We build."
The storm he sensed was growing.
And now, he wasn't just preparing for it.
He was recruiting.