The tactical boots crushed shattered neon tubes, their glass shards refracting an icy blue glow in the radioactive dust 💙. Kerry’s palms were already slick with sweat as she gripped the short blade she’d scrounged from the black market. As one of Night City’s top intelligence brokers, she’d seen plenty of objects carrying secrets—but this Frostedge Pulse Armor-Piercing Short Blade, exclusive to Galactic Federation Special Operations, was different: tiny sensors embedded in the blade’s ribbed surface emitted a pulse only she could hear at midnight. Three days ago, a hooded figure paid triple the market price for half of a classified Federation file she was holding and slipped this blade to her as a “bonus,” leaving only the cryptic note, “It will help you find the answer.”

She’d used this blade to slice through gangster bulletproof vests and even freeze the joints of pursuit droids when its pulse activated ❄️—but when she plugged the blade’s chip into an abandoned data center, the screen suddenly displayed the execution log of her brother, who had been missing for three years. Her brother had once been a Federation agent, and his final mission had been to destroy this very batch of blades; the last line of the log read: “They’re not weapons—they’re keys.”

The data center alarm blared, red warning lights sweeping across her face, while the metallic clatter of mechanized infantry echoed behind her. Strangely, the blade’s pulse frequency synced perfectly with the alarm, and a faint blue energy stream began seeping out of the hollow grooves along the blade’s body 🌀.