In the end, it was all a matter of death and more death. [i]Possibly[/i] die now, or [i]definitely[/i] die later. The simplicity of that realization did absolutely nothing to help quell Tracy's tremulous nerves as he rocked forward from where he was sitting, pushing himself back upright with both hands, one awkwardly clutching at the replica uzi still. He did not even wince when the first of the thug's bursts started firing down the overpass. He had known they were coming.

But he winced perceptibly when he heard the distinctive return-fire from the poser who had been coming on up. Then Tracy's eyes widened as he took a moment to realize that he could actually [i]hear[/i] and place the shots from the overpass. Which mean the second firefight that had kicked off after Tracy had shot at the poser had either come to a close or was settling down. Managing to completely push the thought of the poser on the overpass out of his mind, Tracy rushed out of the back alley, across the street, and peered down at the lower street from over the lip of the high road's safety rail. He was struck at once by the peculiar fact that not only was the scene entirely too quiet, but that there was entirely too much ambient noise. Too much of the sounds of people ambling and moving around normally, of distant voices in close proximity. He could not really see where Golemeth should have been standing as the area was obstructed by a condemned three-story complex, but he could [i]swear[/i] he heard multiple voices down there.

Taking a moment to think, Tracy then remembered the posse he had seen heading down the street, doubtlessly to flank Golemeth. He supposed that could be them down there, having come down around on the high road's short exit ramp onto the street below. But that was ridiculous. Even if they had caught him by surprise, the idea of Golemeth getting geeked by a bunch of random two-bit street roughs was laughable.

...Which prompted Tracy to begin swearing viciously up and down as he trailed along the safety rail for the high road to peer around the edge of the complex only to see the colossal heap of scrap metal and munitions platform that had been Golemeth collapsed in the middle of the street, the barrel for the machine gun still visibly smoking lightly. How?!? Golemeth had been tanking hits for the last few hours without showing any signs of wear, how could some idiots with shoddy [i]replica[/i] guns have possibly felled him-

Which was when Tracy noticed the distinct lack of blood, viscera, or even of scattered circuitry. Golemeth was collapsed and motionless on the ground, unmoving, but also apparently uninjured despite that. It was then when Tracy's attention was drawn to the figure standing [i]over[/i] Golemeth, and Tracy mentally breathed a sigh of relief. It was a Hardware Spider.

The figure was disturbing to look at, or at least would have been if Night City had not already been filled to the brim with much stranger and more alien sights. Wearing ratty, baggy pants over a skin-tight one-piece polysuit with silver tracers along the limbs, the distinguishing feature of this and every other Hardware Spider was the hunch-backed configuration of gleaming gunmetal-grey hardware chassis protruding out from and along their spine, with multiple cables running from the top and into the back of their shaved head. Composite-armored casing for their Spider's hackware was actually the least intrusive of the augmentations made to their body despite being fused directly with their spine and hooked into multiple cerebral datajacks - the silver tracers along their one-piece polysuit were not for show, as they were the external motivators for the Spider's wireframed body, and near the end of their arms was a pair of wrist-mounted, high-velocity, subsonic, precision flechette-launchers. Now that Tracy had a better look at the street, he saw that the gangers who had been cruising to flank Golemeth from behind had held up and were circling around the Spider and his prize warily, and rightly so. Everyone in Night City knew that trying to mess with a Spider was dicey, even when you outnumbered and outgunned them. Their sophisticated neural-linked hardware, almost always coupled with omnidirectional monitors, could let them see a bullet moving past as though it were as slow as a lazily drifting leaf. The wireframe augs surgically installed in their limbs were powered, which meant they could also react and move nearly as fast as they could think, which meant trying to standoff with one was almost always suicide.

Surrounding the Hardware Spider as they were, outnumbering him and outgunning him, it was not a question of whether the gangers could take the Spider on - they could see everything and were as fast as bad news, but they were not invincible - there was just the sticky problem that, whichever of them decided to start hostilities would invariably die instantly when the Spider reacted to them [i]beginning[/i] to move to attack. None of the thugs wanted to be the first one to shoot, and so for the moment a fragile detente existed between the Spider and them. What had happened here was apparent - Golemeth had been rampaging through the streets for hours, laying waste to any poser and solo that got in his way. It only made sense that either somebody higher up in the local food chain would have sent a heavy-hitter after him in response, or else the Spider had come out of their lair of their own volition. Likely because they knew what Tracy did about Golemeth and their connection to Davidson. They had tracked Golemeth via some kind of netrun, and then had just shut down everything in Golemeth's body, turning them into an oversized paperweight. The towering monster was still alive, but probably entirely immobilized and unconscious.

The Spider's presence was both a blessing and extremely bad news. Tracy immediately knew that the situation was preferable to the previous arrangement - the only drugs the Spider might conceivably be hopped up on were opioids instead of steroids, and they were unlikely to be drunk, outraged, and inclined to shoot absolutely anything that so much as twitched or looked at them funny. A Spider Tracy could doubtlessly negotiate with or outmaneuver with a bit of acting and quick thinking. It was also preferable to trying to do the same with a large group of posers who would instantly know Tracy was not one of them and who would be too stupid to trick. The downside, of course, was that the Hardware Spider's mere presence meant that the squall that had been Golemeth's shooting spree might shortly turn into a hurricane if there were any more heavy-ordinance solos like the Spider closing in. Which meant Tracy had to get down there a minute ago. But it was not like he could just haul up Golemeth and drag him off, so what was the goal here...?

No sooner had Tracy begun to think as much, when a small disc-port popped up from a small concealed ridged set in the behemoth's back, and the Hardware Spider reached down to retrieve the now-exposed laser disc protruding from Golemeth's body. [i]That[/i] was it. Tracy immediately forgot about trying to interrogate Golemeth, which had frankly always been an awful proposition to begin with. Chances were, if he had the information Tracy needed, it was now on that disc - and that would be far more pliant.

Even as Tracy started to turn towards the exit ramp down towards the lower street, starting to plan how to work the scene to his advantage, he got the niggling feeling he had forgotten something important...

Like the fact that Theron had been barreling down the overpass when Tracy had left the back-alley, and that the shots from that direction had stopped several moments ago.

[@The Harbinger of Ferocity]