112: Chapter 111 First Visit to Dogtown

The sky hadn't fully brightened yet.

Lin Yi crouched in the shadow of a scrapped van, a 3D map of Dogtown generated by Baize hovering before him.

The building outlines on the map were translucent light blue, security nodes were marked with red triangles, and estimated patrol routes were indicated by dashed lines.

The dashed lines were constantly being fine-tuned—Baize was still adjusting the model based on actual patrol data collected over the past hour.

V leaned against a nearby concrete pillar, holding a can of synthetic coffee she'd rummaged from the vehicle.

The coffee was stone-cold, but she still took a sip every now and then, purely out of habit.

Jackie crouched on the other side, boredly carving something into the dilapidated wall with his tactical knife; looking closely, it was a crooked skull.

"Three routes," Lin Yi said, enlarging the map between the three of them.

The first route was marked in red, entering from the Grand Imperial Mall direction and passing through the main gate of Dogtown.

This route was the most direct—follow the main road, and you could reach the core area of Dogtown.

But the red markers clustered densely at the main gate, and the numbers noted by Baize were shocking: four fixed guard posts, two sentry towers overhead, searchlights covering the entire entrance area, plus large-caliber cannons, automated sentries, anti-vehicle barricades, and uncertain shift change intervals.

Lin Yi pointed at the red area: "Taking the main gate is the same as telling them we're here, and there's no way to force our way through."

The second route was marked in green, cutting through from the abandoned stadium parking lot near H4.

V leaned in to take a look. The advantage of this route was obvious—the entrance was hidden in the basement of an abandoned commercial complex, and the parking lot had a complex structure, so as long as the route was figured out, most ground patrols could be bypassed.

But the problem was equally prominent: the area near the entrance was a main shift-change passage for the Wraiths, and Baize's statistics showed a patrol frequency of one wave every seven minutes.

Lin Yi tapped the patrol trajectory in that area: "If we happen to run into a shift change while entering, we won't even have room to maneuver."

The third route was marked in blue, detouring through the scrapyard near Biotechnica.

V shook her head immediately.

Even the Wraiths didn't go to that area often—not because of lax security, but because the environment in the scrapyard was truly terrible.

Industrial waste had been piled there for decades, the air was full of chemical residues, and the air toxicity index scanned by Baize was seventeen times the safety threshold.

If an ordinary person walked through it, their respiratory tract would be burned for three days.

"Then there's only one left," V said, putting down the coffee can and pointing to the green route.

Lin Yi expanded the details of the green route.

Enter from the underground parking lot of the abandoned commercial complex on the east side of Dogtown, pass through a section of blocked maintenance tunnels, bypass the patrol zone in front of the stadium, and enter the interior of Dogtown from the flank of the stadium.

The entire route avoided the main patrol paths, and the entrance was concealed.

The downside was that the underground parking lot had fallen into disrepair, and Baize couldn't confirm whether the tunnel structures in some areas were intact.

Jackie tied his shoelaces and looked up at the map. "This isn't a game, V. Misty once said—"

"Shut up," V and Lin Yi said simultaneously.

Working at the Security Department these past few days, Jackie mentioned "Misty once said" over a dozen times every hour on average.

Regarding tactical deployment, Misty said that clairvoyance could predict enemy positions; regarding personnel staffing, Misty said that everyone's soul had its own color that could be used for classification; regarding budget approval, Misty said that numbers also had feelings.

By the third day, V could accurately roll her eyes the moment Jackie uttered the two syllables of "Misty."

Jackie swallowed the rest of his sentence and raised his hands in surrender.

He sheathed his tactical knife, stood up, and worked his shoulders. "Where's the contact Yorinobu arranged?"

Lin Yi pulled up a coordinate point located inside Dogtown, near the central area.

After zooming in, a bar icon appeared, labeled "Heart-to-Heart."

"Heart-to-Heart Club. We'll talk when we get there."

Jackie stood up and worked his shoulders.

"Then what are we waiting for? While it's still dark, let's go."

"We're not going yet," Lin Yi said, closing the map and leaning against the side of the van. "Wait until noon."

"Why?"

"The early morning hours are when people are most alert," Lin Yi said, bringing up the patrol data collected by Baize and displaying a time distribution chart before the three of them.

The Wraiths' patrol frequency peaked between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM, and the sentries' concentration was also at its highest—attempting an infiltration during this time would certainly carry the most risk.

"There's a window of about two minutes during the noon shift change. The old guard post withdraws, the new one hasn't taken its place yet, and there's a brief blind spot during the handover of the surveillance systems."

"Two minutes," V said.

"Two minutes is enough."

The noon sun beat down vertically, baking the entire abandoned parking lot until it was scorching hot.

The air was filled with concrete dust and some indescribable smell of chemical residue, and the hot wind whipped fine sand against their faces.

In the distance, the outer wall of Dogtown twisted slightly in the heat, like a piece of iron plate warped by roasting.

Lin Yi crouched behind an overturned van, his Optical Camouflage already activated.

In the upper right corner of his Kiroshi optic field of view, Baize's intrusion interface pulsed—real-time feeds from three surveillance cameras were arranged as thumbnails, the field-of-view coverage of two sentry towers was marked with fan-shaped red zones, and the location signals of the Wraiths' personal terminals moved slowly across the map in the form of pulse points.

All data was updating in real-time.

"Shift change countdown: ninety seconds," he said, his voice kept very low, transmitted directly to the other two's channels via bone-conduction headphones.

V crouched to his right.

Her Monowire had already deployed, hanging by her side, almost invisible in the harsh noon light.

Her breathing was steady, her fingers tapped a rhythm lightly on her knees, and her gaze remained locked on the direction of the parking lot entrance.

Jackie was to her left, his massive frame becoming a nearly invisible transparent outline under the cover of his Optical Camouflage; only by looking very closely could one notice the extremely subtle refraction in the air.

His breathing rhythm was very slow—a habit he'd formed after Konpeki Plaza, taught by V.

The more nervous you are, the more you need to control your breathing; just like shooting, the moment you exhale is the steadiest.

"Sixty seconds."

In the distance, the sound of the Wraiths' shift-change orders could be heard.

The old guard post began to withdraw, footsteps and the sound of metal clashing mixed together.

A sentry bumped his rifle butt against the railing, making a dull thud.

Someone was grumbling about something, though it was hard to hear clearly; the gist was that the handover log was filled out incorrectly, and he had been on guard duty for two consecutive shifts.

"Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten."

On Baize's interface, the feed from the last surveillance camera flickered—not a malfunction, but Baize having engaged a loop mode.

For the next thirty seconds, what the surveillance room would see was an empty feed identical to the one before.

There were no signs of freezing, no records of signal loss, just the abandoned parking lot in the feed remaining completely empty.

"Go."

The three of them moved simultaneously.

V was the first, her body held very low, her footsteps so light they made almost no sound.

The edges of her Optical Camouflage had a subtle distortion in the sunlight—if someone were staring within two meters, they might notice a mass of "off-looking air" moving rapidly.

But no one would be staring during these two minutes.

Jackie followed behind, his route slightly to the right, maintaining a lateral distance of about three meters from V.

Finally was Lin Yi, hugging the left wall, forming a triangular formation with the two in front.

They crossed the open area of the abandoned parking lot.

The ground was full of gravel and cracked cement blocks; stepping on them made a slight crunching sound, but it was covered up by the noise of the shift change in the distance.

They climbed over a collapsed low wall; the rebar on the wall had rusted through, revealing the brown concrete core inside.

They crawled through a gap in the chain-link fence of the maintenance tunnel; the edges of the fence had been cut open with pliers, not by them—someone must have taken this route before.

"Ninety seconds left," Lin Yi's voice rang in the headphones.

The maintenance tunnel was very long, with no lights.

The three of them simultaneously activated the night vision function of their Kiroshi optics, and their field of view turned into a gray-green low-light mode.

The ground was full of gravel and standing water, with a layer of oil film floating on the surface of the water, making a slight splashing sound when stepped on.

From time to time, the sound of loose concrete chunks came from overhead—the structure of this abandoned commercial complex was indeed unstable, and the architectural stress data scanned by Baize showed three areas reaching dangerous thresholds.

The tunnel split into two at a certain junction.

Lin Yi stopped and took a look at Baize's route map.

The left led to the first basement level, and the right led to the ground level.

Baize's real-time scan showed a collapse in the right tunnel at ten meters; people couldn't get through. "Left."

At the end of the tunnel was an iron door, locked.

The lock was a standard electronic lock, an old model, without network functions or alarm modules, just used to keep drifters from sneaking in.

Lin Yi bypassed the password lock in seconds.

V glanced at Lin Yi, and Lin Yi nodded.

The iron door was pushed open a crack, the hinges emitting an extremely faint creaking sound.

Behind the door was the underground area of the stadium.

The air became damp and cold, carrying a smell of mold and urine.

The walls were covered in graffiti, mostly gang tags—the skull and rose of the Valentinos, the gear-eye of the Maelstrom, and some symbols Lin Yi didn't recognize.

In the corner was a line of faded political slogans, the last word scratched out, leaving only "Freedom belongs to—" followed by a blank space.

Footsteps came from the distance.

Lin Yi raised his hand to signal a stop.

The three of them stood still against the wall, all having activated their Optical Camouflage.

Jackie was behind a concrete pillar, V tucked into a doorway, and Lin Yi crouched in the shadow of a row of abandoned lockers.

The footsteps grew closer.

A Wraith soldier turned out from the corridor corner, rifle slung over his shoulder, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, the red glow of the ember flickering in the dim light.

He walked quickly with long strides, clearly in a hurry, not patrolling.

As he passed the corner where the three were hiding, Jackie held his breath.

V's right hand had already reached for her Monowire; if that soldier turned his head, she would slit his throat within a second.

Lin Yi's malicious program was ready; it would only take a single thought to paralyze that soldier's consciousness.

The soldier didn't stop.

His boots stepped into the standing water, splashing, and then the footsteps gradually faded away.

He turned the corner at the end of the corridor and disappeared into another branch.

Jackie let out a long breath in the headphones. "Damn, he was only two steps from me."

Lin Yi didn't respond.

He was focused entirely on the hijacked surveillance interface.

The surveillance density in the stadium's underground area was lower than on the surface, but it wasn't non-existent.

Three fixed cameras, two rotating scanners, and one infrared sensor—the data from these devices was scrolling on Baize's interface in the form of real-time data streams.

Lin Yi didn't hack them; hacking would leave logs.

He just used Baize to generate a forged surveillance data packet, replacing the real surveillance feeds with "everything normal" footage.

It wasn't blacking out the cameras; it was feeding the cameras what they usually saw.

It just needed to ensure no one was watching it frame by frame.

When they emerged from the flank of the stadium, all three squinted at the same time.

The sunlight in Dogtown was no different from outside—the same blinding white light of noon, casting sharp shadows on the dilapidated concrete walls.

But the smell in the air was different.

The scent of sea salt had been replaced by a more complex smell: the pungent odor of low-quality synthetic fuel, the sweet, metallic tang of rust, the smell of barbecue drifting from who knows where, and something else indescribable—Jackie wrinkled his nose and cursed under his breath in his native tongue.

V's expression didn't change, but Lin Yi noticed her Adam's apple bob slightly.

The street in front of them was narrow and chaotic.

On both sides were low-rise shops and residential buildings with mottled outer walls; the windows were patched with various plastic sheets, some of which were already torn, flapping loudly in the wind.

Overhead, all kinds of conduits were strung up—power lines, network cables, and cables of unknown purpose, like a giant spiderweb covering the street above.

Every few meters stood a utility pole, covered in paper advertisements and handwritten missing person notices, the ink on the topmost one not yet dry.

There were people on the street.

Not many, but enough to make the three of them tense up.

An old woman wrapped in a headscarf sat in front of her door smoking; the cigarette was hand-rolled, the rolling paper a torn piece of newspaper, and she smoked slowly, not even raising her head.

Two children crouched by the roadside playing with a toy car made from plastic scrap; the axle was already crooked, making it draw arcs on the ground when it ran.

A middle-aged man in a tattered suit leaned against a utility pole, twitching, his eyes unfocused; the cybernetic prosthetic on his left hand was severed at the wrist, exposing the cables inside, not knowing if it was broken or torn off by someone.

Lin Yi said in the headphones: "Walk normally. Don't avoid them deliberately, and don't stare."

They walked through the middle of the street, their pace neither fast nor slow, like three travelers who knew where they were going but weren't in too much of a hurry.

The two children looked up a few more times as they passed by, not looking at their faces, but at the zipper of Jackie's tactical jacket—silver, reflective.

Jackie looked down and made a face at the children, and the children were so frightened by his fierce face that they turned and ran.

V held back from laughing out loud.

Lin Yi adjusted Baize's scan range to fifty meters.

There were more and more shops on both sides; the windows selling synthetic meat hung with reddish chunks of meat, and the stalls selling second-hand cybernetics displayed various models of arms and optic eyes, one of which was still powered, its pupil following passersby.

A bar with a neon sign had a letter misspelled in its name, and a bearded man reeking of alcohol crouched at the entrance, talking to a holographic projection of a cat.

Moving forward, the street suddenly opened up.

A small square appeared before them, with a rusted metal sculpture standing in the center, shaped like some kind of abstract creature—maybe a dog, maybe a wolf, or maybe some creature that didn't exist at all.

On the base of the sculpture, a huge Wraiths logo had been spray-painted.

Behind the sculpture was a pyramid-shaped building, with green as the overall color scheme, the windows sealed tight with blackout curtains.

Two guards in plain clothes stood at the entrance, pistols tucked at their waists, their posture loose and sloppy, but their eyes were constantly scanning the street.

A small sign hung above the doorway, with four characters written on it—"Heart-to-Heart."

Lin Yi stopped.

He glanced at the building's exterior wall, then looked at the internal structure scanned by Baize—two floors above ground, the first floor being the bar and dance floor, the second floor being VIP lounges, and one basement level, which the structural diagram indicated was a warehouse. The two guards at the entrance each had two networked cyberware implants, with medium-to-low signal strength. "We're here."

The interior of the bar was much larger than it appeared from the outside.

Passing through a short corridor, there were dance floors on both the left and right sides.

The lighting was dim, the air was filled with a mixture of synthetic tobacco and cheap perfume, and the vibrations of the subwoofers traveled through the floor to the soles of their feet.

The bar was in the center of the first floor, occupying the core position of the entire space. Behind the bartender's workstation was an entire wall of liquor cabinets, with the bottles emitting an eerie, cold light under the blue backlighting.

A dozen or so people were sitting around the bar.

There were mercenaries dressed like drifters, their equipment worn but well-maintained, clearly veterans who had been taking contracts for a long time.

There were a few middle-class faces, elegantly dressed but clearly not belonging here, huddling in the corner, whispering to each other, and nervously glancing at the door from time to time.

There were also four or five soldiers wearing Wraiths uniforms gathered in a corner booth playing cards, their guns leaning against the table legs, and a small stack of cash piled in the center of the card table.

Jackie swept a glance at the soldiers, his expression unchanged, but he subconsciously shifted half an inch closer to V.

This wasn't nervousness; it was an instinctive reaction developed from spending too long in Night City—seeing people with guns meant subconsciously adjusting formation to allow teammates to cover each other's lines of fire.

V also adjusted her position by a step, compressing the lateral distance between the three of them from three meters to two meters.

Lin Yi walked straight to the bar.

The bartender was a woman with a scorpion tattooed on her neck, crawling from her collarbone all the way to her earlobe.

She was wiping a glass, doing it very carefully, holding the cup up to the light to check for water spots, then continuing to wipe.

"What are you drinking?" she asked expressionlessly.

"One Johnny Silverhand, hold the Johnny," Lin Yi said.

The bartender continued wiping the glass. Lin Yi didn't repeat himself, just stood there waiting.

After about ten seconds, the bald woman put down the glass.

She took an opaque plastic box from under the bar and pushed it toward Lin Yi. The box was very light and wrapped in a layer of shock-absorbing bubble wrap. "Someone told me to give this to you." After saying that, she turned to attend to other customers, her movements as efficient as if she were handing over something she wasn't interested in but had been paid to deliver.

Lin Yi took the box and returned to the corner booth where V and Jackie were waiting for him.

The booth was in a great spot—backing against a solid wall, with a line of sight that could cover the entire bar hall and all entrances and exits.

V had chosen it; before sitting down, she had spent about three seconds scanning the spatial structure, then walked to this position without hesitation.

Lin Yi put the box on the table and opened it.

Inside were a few data chips and a paper document.

Paper documents were a rarity in Night City—print shops were even scarcer than cyberware clinics, and most information transmission went through electronic channels.

Intelligence that could be transmitted via paper documents was either from an extremely old-school source, or the content was so sensitive that one dared not leave any traces on the network.

V picked up the chip and inserted it into a terminal to read it.

Jackie leaned over to look at the document, frowning after reading two lines. "What is this? Is it encrypted?"

"Not encrypted," Lin Yi said, flipping the document to the second page. "The information is just too fragmented. Look at this part—" He pointed to a line of text and read it out, "'Heavy Hearts, basement level three, security clearance unknown, suspected existence of unregistered experimental area.' " His finger moved to the next paragraph, "'Wraiths patrol shifts are estimated to be three-shift rotations, but actual conditions deviate from estimates, deviation value unknown.' " He flipped further down, "'Hansen's personal security team has about twelve members, all former Militech special forces, but at least three have been transferred recently, whereabouts unknown.' "

Jackie's voice rose a little: "What does this mean? This is the contact Yorinobu arranged? 'Suspected,' 'unknown,' 'estimated'—we came all this way, risked our necks to get into Dogtown, just to get a box of 'suspected' and 'unknown'?"

V pressed his arm, signaling him to keep his voice down.

Those few Wraiths soldiers in the corner had just finished a hand of cards and were shuffling. One person stood up and walked toward the bar, passing by their booth.

He glanced at the plastic box on the table as he passed by, but didn't pay it any mind and continued walking forward.

Jackie lowered his voice, but the dissatisfaction in his tone didn't decrease by half. "No, I mean, if the contact person Yorinobu arranged is at this level, we might as well just stake out the entrance of Heavy Hearts."

Lin Yi continued to flip through the document.

When he flipped to the last few pages, his movements paused for a moment.

"What is this?" V noticed his pause.

Lin Yi flipped the document over to show her.

Tucked between the last two pages of paper was not intelligence or data, but an invitation.

The design was exquisite, dark gray cardstock, gold-stamped fonts, feeling twice as heavy as ordinary printer paper.

In the bottom right corner of the invitation was a logo—the hotel logo for Heavy Hearts.

The content was an invitation to a private cocktail party in one week, located in the top-floor banquet hall of Heavy Hearts.

The host was signed: Kurt Hansen.

V frowned. "How did this thing get here?"

Lin Yi didn't answer, turning the box upside down.

A small slip of paper fell out from the lining; it was ordinary memo paper with unevenly torn edges, and on it was written in crooked handwriting: "The intelligence is a freebie, the invitation costs extra. Money's paid, don't thank me. Remember to destroy the paper."

The three of them were silent for a moment.

Jackie said gloomily: "The contact Yorinobu found is just a scalper?"

Lin Yi expressionlessly crumpled the note into a ball, then unfolded it after a few seconds and flipped it over to the back.

On the back was another line of small text, even smaller, as if the writer felt they hadn't finished after writing the front and had crammed it in: "The Heavy Hearts structural diagram is in the chip. Don't thank me a second time."

"...Damn, this asshole is actually quite humorous," V said.

When Lin Yi dialed Yorinobu's encrypted communication, V was synchronizing the structural diagram data from the chip into the three of them's cyberoptics.

The 3D model of Heavy Hearts slowly unfolded in their field of vision—the ground level wasn't important, but the three basement levels, with every floor's corridor layout, room distribution, and ventilation shaft locations marked out.

But the third basement level had a large blank area, with no annotations, only a bracket inside which were three words: "Unexplored."

Jackie leaned against the wall nearby, watching the Wraiths soldiers in the opposite booth playing cards, bored out of his mind.

One soldier held two cards in his hand, hesitating for a long time, before finally throwing out an Ace of Spades, drawing a chorus of boos from the people at the table.

The corner of Jackie's mouth twitched slightly—that soldier clearly had a good hand, but played it at the wrong time.

The communication connected.

Yorinobu's holographic projection appeared before Lin Yi's eyes.

The background was the study in the Arasaka estate, with several documents spread out in front of him, and he was still holding a pen.

Seeing Lin Yi's expression, he seemed to realize something and put down the pen.

"So the intelligence you provided is just a bunch of 'suspected' and 'unknowns'," Lin Yi said straight to the point. "The contact is a scalper. The invitation costs extra."

Yorinobu's fingers paused. "...Invitation?"

"Don't tell me you didn't know."

Yorinobu was silent for two seconds. "The contact person I had arranged was not a scalper. What I arranged was—"

"What was it?"

"Onii-chan, are you free? Can you come help me? I forgot my bathrobe."

Hanako's voice came from Yorinobu's side.

It wasn't the sound in the communication channel, but background noise, that hazy quality of sound coming through a wall.

The volume wasn't loud, but it was enough for Lin Yi and the two people beside him to hear clearly.

Yorinobu's expression changed in that instant—not panic, not embarrassment, but a kind of expression Lin Yi had never seen on Yorinobu's face before.

Lin Yi had seen this man in all kinds of situations: during the negotiations at Konpeki Plaza, he was cold and hard; when passing messages through a joytoy in the private room, he was restrained and sharp; last time in the study, watching Hanako call him "Onii-chan," he was lost and at a loss.

The expression on his face now could only be described with one word—busted.

"Lin Yi, I've been too busy these past few days and forgot to make it clear to you," Yorinobu's speech speed noticeably increased, as if using work topics to cover something up. "On the surface, the three of you were sent by me to negotiate cooperation with Hansen. Both Arasaka and the Wraiths are local snakes in Night City, so having cooperation intentions is normal; no one will doubt this reason. Once you've successfully completed your mission and retired, I'll treat you, and I'll punish myself with three cups for this mistake, alright?"

The communication hung up.

Lin Yi leaned his head back, closing his eyes for a moment against the back of the booth.

Jackie spoke cautiously: "That... Hanako?"

V was right next to Lin Yi and had listened to the entire communication, her expression much calmer than Jackie's.

"Didn't I tell you earlier? When I was still working at Arasaka, I had heard about Yorinobu and Hanako. Back then, it was already rumored like this in the company, it definitely wasn't groundless. I just didn't expect the 'reborn' Hanako to have such a huge influence on Yorinobu."

Lin Yi opened his eyes and said with an unhappy face: "Damn, a total sis-con. I actually thought it was a normal sibling relationship; I even wasted effort getting rid of my stereotypes about Yorinobu." His tone was between annoyance and helplessness, like someone who discovered they had been using the wrong formula to solve a problem the whole time.

After V finished synchronizing the structural diagram, the 3D model of Heavy Hearts reopened in the three of them's cyberoptics.

The structure of the floors above ground was clear and complete—lobby, guest rooms, restaurant, banquet hall, every room had a number and usage labeled.

The first and second basement levels were the security center and logistics area, where the power distribution room, armory, and surveillance room were clear at a glance.

The third basement level, that blank area labeled "Unexplored," was like a black stone embedded in the bottom of the building.

"Above the third floor are the hotel and banquet halls, and the two basement levels are the security center and logistics area," V said, tracing her finger layer by layer over the model. "The third level has no labels—that should be what we need to find."

Lin Yi stared at that blank area for a while.

Then he exited the structural diagram interface, turned on Baize's active scan mode, connected to nearby network access points, and performed a real-time signal comparison on Heavy Hearts.

It took Baize about two minutes to complete the first round of comparison, and the results fed back onto that 3D model—the labels on the structural diagram were basically consistent with the actual signal distribution.

Wall thickness, pipe routing, and the locations of power distribution nodes all matched up.

"Although it's a scalper's goods, the stuff is real," he said.

V nodded. "At least that scalper took the money and did the job, didn't give us fakes." She turned her head to look at Lin Yi's expression—from the moment the communication hung up until now, there had been a faint vertical line between his brows.

V reached out and placed her hand on his arm, pressing gently.

She didn't speak, nor did she use much force, just left it there. "Let's go, let's get something to eat first. You haven't eaten since this morning."

Lin Yi only then realized that he was indeed hungry.

The streetlights came on.

They were those cheap LED tubes, mounted on rusted metal lamp posts, emitting a ghastly white light that made people's complexions look like the dead.

The nights in Dogtown were noisier than the days—in the distance, someone was playing music with heavy drum beats; nearby, two people were standing at the alley entrance arguing in some dialect Lin Yi couldn't understand; the second-hand cyberware stall across the way hadn't closed yet, and the owner was packing his goods one by one into a tin box, with that still-powered-on cyberoptic eye tossed casually on top, its pupil still following the passersby.

At the entrance of Heart-to-Heart, Lin Yi, V, and Jackie stood under the eaves.

From here, they could see the silhouette of Heavy Hearts—that dark glass curtain wall building looked out of place in the low, chaotic skyline of Dogtown.

The top floor was lit up, the light color leaning warm, forming a stark contrast with the ghastly white LEDs around it.

Occasionally, shadows moved past the windows, but it was too far away to see clearly.

Jackie spoke first. "The cocktail party on that invitation is next Wednesday. We have five days."

"Five days," V repeated, her tone steady. "Scouting, figuring out security deployments, finding the entrance to the Little Beidou facility, formulating an extraction plan. Time is enough."

"Assuming nothing goes wrong in the meantime," Lin Yi said.

No one replied to that.

In Night City, "nothing going wrong" is a luxury; in Dogtown, the density of things going wrong would only be higher.

There was no NCPD here, no corporate legal department complaint hotline, no buffer layer of any civilized society.

If something happened, either you solved it yourself, or you became the "thing" that someone else had to solve.

A gunshot rang out in the distance.

Then came shouting, then a burst of laughter—it wasn't a fight, someone was shooting into the air for fun.

Further away, there were the sirens of the Wraiths; the sirens in Dogtown were different from the ones outside, the sound sharper, like they were howling.

Jackie looked up toward the direction of Heavy Hearts. "These two days, we can scout around Heavy Hearts and the vicinity." His tone returned to his usual confidence—at the execution level, Jackie never shied away.

V nodded.

Lin Yi took one last look at Heavy Hearts.

Baize's structural diagram was superimposed over the reality in his cyberoptic vision, every floor, every corridor, every marked security node clearly visible.

But those were just things on paper.

That blank area on the third basement level, Baize's signal scan hadn't been able to penetrate it either—the network in that area was physically isolated, with no accessible nodes to scan from the outside.

What it was really like inside, only by going in would they know.

"Let's go, we're VIPs after all," he said. "Let's check into the hotel first and trade barbs with Hansen."