43 Settling in for a Good War

"You did something real here, kid." Santiago said after he took his cigarette out of his hard lipped mouth as we sat across from each other cliffside once again, "Cut the cancer out this desert. Hundreds of people each year will live because the Wraiths are gone. Shame how the only way this world ever seems to get better is when you remove many people from it at once."

"A dipshit once said, when you murder a murderer the number of murders in the world hasn't decreased, but that guy sucked at math. Kill another murderer and you're in the black, kill enough and at least in you're little corner of the world things got better for a little while." I said while thinking fondly of Batman comics, "I got a big project in its initial stages. Massive water purification, desalination, and hydroponics tower bayfront. You Aldecaldos rebuilt this city, we can shake and you'll be a part of building its future."

I put out my hand to the old man who looked at it a moment before putting his old gnarled paw into it.

"You get the plans done and we'll build it." Santiago agreed.

Terms and other fine details would come later, but that handshake got me something that litigious contracts and cold robots couldn't: a fuck load of Street Cred.

In the last week I've stomped the remnants of 6th Street, The Wraiths, a Militech Op, and an actual alien invasion. The man to man agreement on Project Purity bumped me all the way up to level 45. Obviously I had to wait just a bit longer to initiate it as the project was obviously a huge positive karma farm, and the idea of losing the level 50 perk 'Ain't Like That Now' for 'Thought You Died' or even worse 'Just Lucky I'm Alive' makes my skin crawl.

'Thought You Died' isn't bad to be fair, just ethically limiting due to the nature of how it increases Health Points for positive Karma. The problem is that in real life Health Points are blood working in the body, and between Bioplastic Blood Vessels and Supradermal Weave I barely experience internal or external bleeding, making extra Health Points worthless. The extra ten percent to outgoing damage is neat, but fucking terrible compared to the twenty percent attack speed increase from 'Ain't Like That Now'

TLDR: The good of all mankind must wait so I don't get nerfed.

With those five level ups I dumped two more points into Agility and took the 'Full Maintenance' and 'Adamantine Skeleton' perks. The latter would have always had utility in my build as it halves limb damage and Fallout classifies the torso and head as 'limbs', meaning in a real life situation where pretty much all damage is limb damage, the 'Adamantine Skeleton' pays the bills. It also blunts surgical tools like a mother fucker so getting it after I'd done all my major overhauls was pretty much a necessity until I could get the next perk.

'Full Maintenance' applies a 75 percent resistance to condition damage for anything I happen to be using, and since condition damage includes damage from outside sources if I happen to be piloting a Scorpitron, it now has three times the effective durability it had before. This same phenomenon applies to when I'm using my AutoDoc, so even though I am twice as hard to perform surgery on, my tools last three times as long as normal. Savings, amigos.

I'd take 'Stonewall' and 'Unstoppable Force' at 46 and 48 to make me the god of melee and unarmed combat, and 'Ain't Like That Now' for the capstone. I could see it now, the event that would catapult me up to the top: The Battle of Hoover Dam.

After a major retrofit in the 2050's allowed the dam to produce fifty-fold the electricity it could in the past, and service just over 70 million people in Arizona, Nevada, and California. Three states Militech happened to have beef with currently. All three Free States station military defenses on and around the dam, but not as much as gets stationed around the major nuclear plants such as Palo Verde in Arizona, which has a Scorpitron on-site.

As such, the dam is a ripe target to deny the Free States major resources. All I have to do is wait while the money piles in every week from Welles Arms currently carrying the cause of freedom in this war on its shoulders. Honestly, it was enough workload to crush even the toughest hombres, but not me. Between Endurance and Survival I needed very little rest, and thus had enough time to manage my various relationships between family and friends, and meet the obligations of my rapidly growing corporation.

It seemed like every week I was bulldozing down a new part of Santo Domingo to put up a new factory and hiring a thousand new people to man it. Sacramento was quick with the emergency requisitions bills for each new product I brought to market, usually railroaded by the politicians I spend so much time stealing from through any kind of inspections or testing. Basically, anything that came from my lab was treated like it would work as advertised and shipped straight to the troops.

On paper, the Brotherhood of Steel was the testing bed for these products including combat stims, emergency aid, performance enhancers, cyberware, personal protective equipment, you name it related to combat and I wanted to be selling it. Sacramento wanted to be buying it, which would quickly branch out to all the Free States wanting to be buying it.

With Militech on the attack and Arasaka only providing support in the shadows there was a supermassive black hole of demand for corporate military logistics and armed forces services in the western United States. I didn't have the infrastructure to do either, not at the rate the Free States needed who constantly applied pressure for more out of me and the company, and crushed through any barriers to entry I might find.

As the months ticked on with more and more work piling on my plate and more and more money getting funneled into my community and personal projects, there was a great shift in the quality of life in both Heywood and Santo Domingo. Since the two districts housed both my workforce and major facilities, there was no cap on my private security spending, and my robo-cops soon had the streets safer than they'd been since the death of Richard Night and with him the death of the utopian Night City dream.

Automated sanitation cleaned up the streets while limited automated health services cleaned up the citizens. Fallout medical tech is fairly miraculous, able to flush away radiation and cure chemical addiction with simple over the counter products. Some of the more 'advanced' facilities were capable of surgeries that put broken limbs back together in a matter of minutes and can save a person bleeding out so long as they aren't already dead when strapped onto the table.

To balance out all the good I was doing, I was collecting massive amounts of information for targeted advertising as well as bombarding both customers and employees with advertisements and content to make them more loyal to the company, often pushing us versus them narratives and basically telling people that it's okay to bash a corporate spy over the head for half an hour or so. Speech came in clutch here.

The whole time Welles Arms was ramping up and branching out, the Brotherhood of Steel was receiving advanced training and gear between running missions for the NorCal State Armed Forces. People like Maine were chroming up into real mean Borgs as I'd let them keep their cyberware after the war ended. Not everyone wanted that level of augmentation, in fact many preferred more low key chrome despite the low humanity costs of my gear.

No matter how they chose to build themselves, they all provided fantastic performance data collection. Mimicking precise action and reaction in my coding of my robots became an obsession of mine after I'd built my first set of chrome, and I wanted to do it without AI control. The less those things control the better, even if the AutoDoc and Central Intelligence are handy as hell.

Advanced combat robotics coding is a great way to pass the downtime between more vital tasks of single handedly stalling an otherwise onesided war and setting myself up as the de facto ruler of Night City. Idle hands are the Devil's playthings afterall.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've got two or three chapters planned before the big battle at Hoover Dam, and that battle will be ridiculous and over the top. Some real rule of cool stuff.

Not that this is ending any time soon, and I know I need to finish the Naruto and RWBY fics, but I do plan on hitting Game of Thrones next as it's hot from House of the Dragon actually being good. At first I was planning a more serious story with Jorah Mormormont as the SI with some really nice testicles as his superpower (I know, some really nice testicles, off to such a great start for a super serious story), but when I was going through catchy titles I thought of 'A Warhammer Dwarf in Westeros'.

Obviously that wouldn't be Jorah, but Tyrion. I don't think I've personally read a Tyrion Self Insert fic, and if I did it obviously wasn't anything that stuck in my mind the way a Warhammer Tyrion would. So what do you all think:

A Jorah with nothing special but some great testicles trying his best in Westeros?

Or a Tyrion krumping everyone that he wants to?

You can support me and my family at

ko - fi . com / jmanm