Chapter 48: A Delightful Revenge

“A?!”

Qiwei’s eyes widened.

Then she witnessed a scene straight out of a horror film.

The lights throughout the sex-doll shop began to flicker as though the wiring had failed. At the same time, the security guards inside the establishment began screaming all around her in perfect unison, like a grotesque chorus.

“Ah! Aaaaah!”

Screams echoed from every direction. Sparks burst through the air, answering each cry in a dazzling, terrible rhythm.

“There’s a hacker! A hacker! Cut the network! Don’t connect to the server—aaaahhh!”

Someone shouted a warning, but Mercer had already seized complete control of the server. At that moment, everyone connected to its subnet became a target for his daemon virus.

That included not only Qiwei and the other unfortunate sex dolls, but even the supposedly “innocent” customers.

Every sex doll in the establishment had been bought and sold. Mercer pitied Qiwei, and naturally, he pitied the other unfortunate girls as well.

Some had been sold by human traffickers. Others had been handed over by their own parents, relatives, or friends. To the gang running the shop, they were nothing more than heaps of rotten flesh bought and sold as machines for making money.

“Help me... please help me...”

A man in a suit reached out from one side of the corridor. The next moment, his cybernetic arm convulsed and went completely limp.

Mercer’s cold voice, heavy with murderous intent, sounded beside Qiwei’s ear.

“Recognize him? Your boss. I left him here especially for you. Go on. He’s yours—but you’d better be quick.

“Someone called the police before they died. NetWatch and the NCPD may arrive soon. Don’t worry. You won’t be implicated.

“Enjoy your revenge.”

Mercer’s voice vanished.

Only the suited man remained. His eyes were wide with terror, and no matter how hard he tried, he could no longer make his body obey him.

Qiwei’s breathing grew heavy. Trembling, she walked forward and lowered her head, looking down at the man who had once held absolute power over her—who had beaten and abused the sex dolls at will, deciding who lived and who died.

“Help... me... Qiwei... help me... shut... shut me down...”

His throat produced a garbled plea.

Qiwei’s breathing became rougher still, like a female leopard on the verge of roaring. But in the end, all she did was extend a cold, expressionless hand.

She pulled the man’s pistol from his waist, aimed it at his head—

—and smashed it down.

Qiwei did not pull the trigger. Instead, she drove the butt of the gun into his skull again and again.

Once. Twice...

Ten times. Fifteen.

Only when his head had been reduced to a bloody, shapeless mass did she finally stop. She gasped for breath, tears filling her eyes so gradually that she scarcely noticed them until her vision blurred.

Her hand trembling, she aimed at the man’s corpse and pulled the trigger several more times. Then she staggered away, sprinting wildly out of the sex-doll shop.

By then, the place had become a living hell.

Qiwei could see it clearly. She was a hacker, and through her cyberoptics she could perceive the signals moving through the network.

Data surged through the system like a violent tide. Invisible waves, backed by the server’s processing power, thundered toward every person connected to the subnet.

The connected lights exploded beneath the overload. Neon signs flickered several times before losing their glow, while Qiwei ran on with her mind fixed on nothing but escape.

As she ran, she pulled the sex-doll chip from her neck—the chip that symbolized her captivity and surveillance. She hurled it onto the ground ahead of her and crushed it beneath her heel as she passed.

She reached the automatic doors that had always been kept locked, forbidding the sex dolls from leaving.

They had already been forced open. Beyond them, the dim alley lay beneath its unchanged streetlights.

Qiwei’s mind had become vaguely blank. She felt as though she had thought about everything and nothing at all. She was simply running—running freely for the first time in years.

Before long, the sex-doll shop behind her burst into flames. Mercer had overloaded the server and every electrical appliance inside, causing the machine room to catch fire.

The stench of the alley gradually faded behind her. When she finally came to herself, she had reached the edge of a somewhat unfamiliar street.

She stood there, gasping for breath, and looked back in confusion.

The sex-doll shop had vanished from sight long ago.

Only sparse traffic moved along the street. Several pedestrians stared at her with wary curiosity: a girl dressed in flamboyant clothes, wearing only one shoe, and clutching a pistol tightly in her hand.

Qiwei’s fingers trembled slightly. In a faint, tentative voice, she said, “A?”

“I’m here.”

Mercer’s voice remained calm.

“I... where do I go now?”

Qiwei looked around. The December night wind made her instinctively wrap her arms around herself.

“Do you have any money?” Mercer asked first.

“I... I don’t have a bank account. They always paid me in cash. Damn it, I... I forgot to take any.”

Only now did Qiwei realize what she had done, and regret began to sink in. She had forgotten to take money from the shop.

She could at least have pulled the manager’s personal chip and taken something from his virtual wallet.

“If you didn’t take any, then forget it. The NCPD is already on its way. I made rather a lot of noise.”

Mercer thought for a moment, then offered a suggestion.

“I know a friend. She’s a good person. Staying with her for a few days shouldn’t be a problem.

“For now, find somewhere to wait. I’ll have her drive over and pick you up.

“Or do you have any other friends you trust?”

Qiwei answered instinctively, “I don’t have any friends.”

“Then you can have one now. Her name is V. She’s a good girl you can trust. It should take her about half an hour to reach you, so find somewhere to sit tight.”

When Mercer finished speaking, he gave a soft laugh.

“We’ll talk later. NetWatch has arrived, and I need to concentrate on dealing with them. Let’s see what these network inspectors can do.”

Qiwei did not know what moved her to reply, “They’re dangerous. Be careful...”

Mercer sent her an emoticon, then severed the voice connection.

Qiwei wandered about in a daze before finding a railing to lean against. Even now, everything that had just happened still felt like a dream.

She tilted her head back and gazed at the stars. She had not seen them in so long, yet tonight they did not seem inclined to shine for her. The full moon appeared and vanished behind the clouds.

And still, to Qiwei, it was the most beautiful night sky she had seen in years.

Eventually, an old Galena Gecko sedan came rolling down the street.

A beautiful white-haired woman with a reckless, devil-may-care air lowered the window.

“Hey. You’re Qiwei, right? Get in. I’m V.”

This time, Qiwei did not hesitate. She walked over and opened the passenger door.

“That’s me... Hello, V.”

“I’m actually not doing so great.” V looked thoroughly disgruntled. “Someone dragged me out of bed at two in the morning to play chauffeur. A told me what happened to you. Don’t worry. You can stay at my place for a few days.”

“Thank you,” Qiwei said awkwardly. She was not accustomed to thanking people.

V glanced at her and chuckled. Taking in Qiwei’s exhausted yet still beautiful face, she suddenly grew curious.

“So how did you meet A? He actually gave me a thousand euros in the middle of the night just to babysit you for a few days?”

Qiwei was silent for a moment before answering honestly.

“I don’t know him.”

“Huh?”

V stared blankly for a second, then made a sound of realization, convinced she had figured it out.

“So you’re his client?”

“He’s a mercenary?” Qiwei had heard stories about edgerunners. To her, they were simply mercenaries who sold their lives for money.

She could not imagine that someone like A, who spoke constantly about justice, could belong to that sort of crowd.

“...You don’t know?” V sounded uncertain. “Well, I suppose he is. He even tried to recruit me.”

Mercer remained something of a mystery to V as well.

All she knew was that he was a big shot who could walk into the Afterlife and joke around with Rogue, a man whose extensive cyberware could not even be identified by her cyberoptics, a top-tier hacker who was no slouch in a fight.

She knew nothing about his origins, his age, or even his appearance. The only thing she knew was that his real name was probably Mercer.

“I see... I don’t know him either.”

Qiwei studied V’s handsome profile and suddenly wondered whether A simply had a weakness for beautiful women.

That explanation seemed more believable than something like kindness.

“He suddenly hacked into my system and asked whether I wanted freedom. Then he told me that if I sincerely begged him, he would help me.

“I tried it, and he helped me escape from the sex-doll shop. In return, I have to repay him fifty thousand euros in installments.”

When Qiwei finished, V’s eyes widened.

“Fifty thousand? Damn, that’s a lot!”

“Is it?” Qiwei gave a self-deprecating smile. “That sum is already enough to buy a living woman’s entire lifetime.”

Qiwei drew a long breath.

“Would you mind if I had a cigarette?”

“Go ahead. There’s no ashtray, though, so open the window.”

“Thanks, V.”

Qiwei suddenly realized that thanking someone was not as difficult as she had thought.

She lifted her head and lit a cigarette. The night wind stirred her short hair as she watched the neon lights outside, her heart still filled with confusion and uncertainty.

V, meanwhile, asked curiously, “Were you sold there? Otherwise, I suppose it wouldn’t really count as rescuing you...”

“Yes.”

Qiwei did not want to say more. She regarded those memories as shame and scars.

“So what are you going to do now? I mean, you can’t exactly go back to being a sex doll, right?”

V was asking mostly because driving in silence was boring—and because she was a little sleepy. It was nearly three in the morning by then.

Qiwei was silent for a while. Then she suddenly laughed.

“I don’t know.”

Thinking about it now, she realized that her life had been frozen in place ever since she was fifteen, when her parents sold her to a factory.

There, the foreman controlled her every day, forcing her to work on time, without a single day off throughout the year.

Then, after repeatedly failing to rape her, the enraged foreman sold her to a sex-doll shop. From that day on, her life became a routine of putting on the chip, entertaining customers, and returning to her room to wait.

Twenty-four hours a day, whenever there was even a little work for her, she was required to report for duty. Even if she received a small amount of so-called “pay,” she had no chance at freedom.

Her purchase price was a full one hundred thousand euros. How could a sex doll—whose food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and even the mandatory chip forced upon her were all counted as expenses—ever save enough to buy her freedom?

She had spent a year teaching herself hacking and another year secretly saving money to purchase a network access rig. After that, hacking became her last hope of survival.

Every day, she had done nothing but imagine freedom—imagining that one day she would use her skills to take revenge on the scum who controlled and enslaved her life.

And yet...

Freedom had arrived without warning.

What would she do with the future?

For the first time in her life, Qiwei was finally free to consider the question.