Friday Night Firefight - A Cyberpunk 2077 Isekai

Friday Night Firefight - Chapter 11

When Haru and the Tyger Claws were finished with us, Deng and Fred walked me back to Patrick Street. As soon as we got to Fred's camp Deng pushed me down onto Fred's mattress and told me I needed to get some sleep. I tried to bargain with him and explain that I could find a place of my own to sleep and I didn't want to kick Fred out of his camp, but Deng was adamant that I get some rest and kept pushing me down onto the mattress every time I tried to get up.

Fred wandered off to Lizzie's to check in on Tomas. Something in my brain shouted that I should have joined in and made sure that Tomas was doing okay. But the stern looks Deng was giving me made me give up on the idea and instead I laid back and shut my eyes. I felt bad about displacing Fred from his camp. I never built a camp of my own, instead sleeping wherever I could find a quiet spot. And now, since I never put in the time or effort to build a place of my own, I had kicked Fred out of his camp when he should have been spending his time healing.

I slept for 16 hours. I guess I needed the rest. When I woke up the memory of Deng telling Fred that my odd behavior last night was a defense mechanism popped into my head. I guess that was over now because I felt fine. I realized I needed to check on Tomas, something I probably should have done yesterday, so I got up and headed out to Lizzie's in hopes that someone there would know where he was.

On my way to the alcove, I passed tons of people going about their day. If my internal calendar was correct, and I wasn't entirely certain it was, today was a workday. People would be at their jobs, dealing with customers, hawking their wares. They'd be going about their lives, with the one notable exception being the lookout that I had killed yesterday. His face popped into my memories and I was deep in thought about the whole situation as I walked down the street. I didn't want to keep referring to him as Steve. That felt...wrong somehow.

When I reached the alcove I was hit by frosty greetings people sent my way. Maybe it was all in my head, but it felt like nobody wanted anything to do with me. Was it because I had killed someone? That didn't seem like the right answer. I hadn't really thought about it before, but Night City was a much more dangerous place than any other city I had ever lived in.

Sure, there was crime in the cities I had lived in in my past life, but we didn't have cyberpsychos sporting bullet-proof skin and rocket launchers hidden in their arms. We didn't have cults – because how else would you describe Maelstrom – with stolen military hardware who roamed the streets and got pulled into rolling gun battles with cops. All that meant it probably wasn't the fact that I had killed someone yesterday that turned people away from me. Everyone at the alcove had been exposed to much more violence in their everyday life than I could even imagine. They had all grown up in a city that was only a single step up from a war zone.

There were two possibilities for the frosty reception I was getting. The first was that I had committed violence at the basketball court. The people in the alcove probably didn't care that I had killed the lookout. But they would care that I did it only a block or so away from Lizzie's.

No one wanted to be the person who brought problems to Lizzie's doorstep. It was the one place in Night City that let us forget our worries, set down our daily burdens, and hang out without anyone judging us. The Mox never chased us away because we kept all of our problems far away from the area. My misadventure with Dennis' crew had threatened the peace of the alcove. I had killed someone barely a block away, and then the Tyger Claws came sniffing around the area to deal with the rest of Dennis' crew. That had to have brought a bunch of heat to the area.

The second possibility for the muted reaction to my presence was that I had left Tomas alone and he'd been caught and tortured by Dennis' people. If everyone knew that we had been working together and that I had freaked out and let him get caught, that wouldn't earn me a lot of friends. What kind of person ran away when a buddy was in need?