Fanfic / The New Man: An Adam Smasher SI

Just before his climactic confrontation with David Martinez and the Cyberskeleton, Adam Smasher finds himself with a set of memories not his own. It came with a warning, that he would soon meet his end at the hands of some cyberpunk and the ghost of Johnny Silverhand, but he could avoid this if he recruited David and his crew and readied them for that fated encounter.

He wasn’t about to die to the ghost of some upjumped cheerleader. He was Adam fucking Smasher. He wasn’t about to die to fucking anyone.

That was a promise.

The New Man: An Adam Smasher SI is a Cyberpunk fanfic by Brosef that aside from implementing elements from the anime and video game also draws heavily from the original source material. Links are here (Questionable Questing), here (SpaceBattles.com) and here (Archive of Our Own). Be aware of NSFW elements and hosting-site in the first link.

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This fanfiction contains examples of:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Adam at Uriel's urging decides to splurge on a custom-made monokatana. It quickly proves capable of bisecting soda can-sized railgun slugs.
• Ace Custom: Adam gets a new, custom-ordered frame to replace his Dragoon. It represents over 57 years of borg frame development, something that hasn't really been done because human limitations meant there wasn't any room to improve over the Dragoon or the DaiOni.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Adam actually finds Becca's 80's and 90's pop culture references somewhat amusing and occasionally humors her by throwing out quotes from them.
• Adaptational Attractiveness:
  • Smasher is given a new Cyberbody◊ that grants him a more humanoid appearance compared to the Dragoon armor he uses, as part of his arrangement to make him more PR friendly.
  • After Smasher openly critiques her appearance, Rogue not only switches to an outfit closer to what she wore in her younger days but updated her rejuvenation treatments to look much younger (with the author using Carmilla from FGO as a comparison).
  • Michiko's neokitsch look is treated as a part of a depressive slump that she's been in due to her husband's death. After getting motivated, she ditches it for an appearance closer to how she was in the TRPG◊.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • While Yorinobu Arasaka does have a storied history leading a biker gang opposing his father, he was never portrayed as a physical threat in 2077. In this story, he's stated to not need any personal bodyguards and prefers to deal with threats personally with nothing but his gun and his chrome. He's shown to have a Kerenzikov constantly active as his way hide his intentions, though it doesn't work on Saburo due to him being really perceptive.
  • While little is known of Michiko Arasaka in regards to her combat capabilities in canon, in this story she's shown to have a Sandevistan.
  • Johnny Silverhand in 2077 was a Virtual Ghost with no real ability to affect the world save for whenever he controls V's body and in life was never as badass as he thought. In this story, his Engram is uploaded into a custom Fullborg body.
• Adaptational Dumbass: In 2077, Brick was considered the most even-headed and rational of the Maelstrom bosses. In this story, watching the BD of Smasher's fight against Roland led to him becoming more obsessed with chroming up, eventually leading him to attempt to control an AI (specifically Alt Cunningham) and eventually causing not only Royce to leave with half of the gang while him and the remaining Maelstrommers end up getting hijacked by hostile AIs
• Adaptational Intelligence: Smasher is typically little more than The Brute and a psychotic thug who has little talent in anything save for violence. While still a thug at core, the story also portrays him as having the experience, professionalism and tactical abilities one could reasonably expect of a near century-old corporate mercenary on top of being educated in the Japanese language and business etiquette. His stats as given by the author also reflect this, by having him have an intelligence of 7 compared to his original 4 in the original Tabletop.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Adam Smasher is arguably the most evil character in the Cyberpunk setting and is typically characterized as a cartoonishly evil asshole with no redeeming features. Here, circumstances force him to curb the worst of his excesses as he becomes David's new mentor figure.
  • Saburo Arasaka, typically the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, is also affected by this where both time as well as Hanako's influence have mellowed him out. Where once he despised the USA, he now has a begrudging respect for it. That and he's primarily shown interacting to people within his inner circle. Not that he's any less evil.
  • Katsuo Tanaka in Edgerunners was just a generic bully whose only purpose was to get the shit kicked out of him. Here, he's ended up maturing enough that he became a friend of David.
• Affluent Ascetic: Being Arasaka's top goon, Smasher has practically anything he wants paid for by the company and has an entire floor of Arasaka Tower for his own personal use. However, his personal abode was completely empty for decades due to the fact that he only spends money on equipment. As such, he has no problem letting David and his crew dip into his accounts since it's a drop in the bucket for him.
• Almighty Janitor: On paper, Smasher is just a contracted mercenary on Arasaka's payroll and has no official rank within the company hierarchy. Unofficially, he has no problems murdering corpos who thinks that this means they can talk down to him, can intimidate most people to get what he wants and is a member of Saburo's inner circle, meaning that he can theoretically appeal directly to the boss if he wanted to but won't because he dislikes relying on others on principle. However, this also means that once Saburo (his primary contract holder) is killed, he effectively loses all ties to Arasaka and while he was originally planning to just get rehired upon learning that Michiko is put in charge of the NC branch he decides to simply leave the city.
• Always Someone Better: Adam quickly establishes himself in David's mind as a nigh-insurmountable pinnacle of combat experience and chrome-tolerance that checks all of his preconceived notions of what a top fighter is capable of and how close he was to that peak.
  • To a much lesser extent, Uriel asserts very firmly how he's better at reading people than Falco, and as a digitized entity has a natural advantage over mundane Netrunners, even prodigies like Lucy.
  • Adam is able to sense a degree of resentment towards him from Goro Takemura both due to his personal strength as well as having Saburo's favor. After going through the BD of Smasher's fight with Roland, Takemura believes that the most he could ever do if the two ever fought is cripple Smasher at the cost of his own life.
  • Uriel himself admits that while he's good at manipulating people, Yorinobu far outstrips him in matters of personal charisma.
• Amazonian Beauty: Victoria Armstrong is described as being six feet tall, rippling with muscle, and almost unnaturally gorgeous.
• Arch-Enemy: Adam considers Morgan Blackhand to be his, the minimally augmented Solo runner having humiliated him in more than one fight, something that still smarts Adam's ego half a century later. Learning that he had something to do with an assassin sent after him sours Adam's mood and perception of the fight.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Katanas. Adam and Uriel have a long rant to each other about how their design is overly optimized as a result of pre-modern Japan's resource limitations and that swords in general are of limited utility against armored cyborgs and the like. Doesn't change the fact that they are insanely fun to use. Adam gets one to use against poorly armed gangbangers, and mournfully hangs it up when serious assassins start coming after him.
  • The Dai-Oni chassis as well, but in the opposite direction. Adam waxes poetic on its size and damage-output specs, but the thing is too bulky and resource-intensive for him to run around the city in, so he's had to keep using his old modified Dragoon chassis for routine missions and daily action.
  • This is also the reason why Smasher has nothing but contempt for Sandayu Oda, Hanako Arasaka's bodyguard. Aside from his sidecut hairstyle (which he hates for both aesthetic and practical reasons) the fact that his primary weapons are neon-red Mantis Blades and is otherwise lightly armed to the point he doesn't even have a Sandevistan means that he's poorly equipped for bodyguard duties.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Adam trains David this way. He takes the boy to watch him kill various assorted gangoons and then has him give an on-the-spot breakdown of how he fought them and why he made each tactical move he did.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Saburo revives Gloria Martinez via making an engram of her and uploading it to her cryogenically-preserved body originally meant for lab tests..
  • Like in canon, Johnny Silverhand is revived via his Engram. However, rather than being a Virtual Ghost in someone else's head he's given his own custom "Silverman" fullborg frame.
• Badass Crew: Over time, Smasher trains David and the Edgerunner cast (colloquially known as the "Smashlings") into an effective combat unit with gear and capabilities beyond what they had as Solos.
• Badass Longcoat: Yorinobu openly wears his Steel Dragon duster over his business suit.
• Badass Normal: Falco considers Vincent to be "the strongest man without chrome I ever met." This bears out when Brosef gave a rough tier list of the characters' general combat capabilities and Vincent, despite being just some completely organic nomad, is on par with Ordo Panzer Grandmasters. While he has no cyberware, he does have Bioware augmentations, including an enhanced Empathy that causes more trouble than it's worth.
• Big Damn Heroes: When Aryas has Adam dead to rights, Kenichi Zaburo and a group of Danger Gal operatives come to his rescue to his absolute disgust.
• BFG: Militech sends an assassin to shoot Adam and David with an experimental high-yield rail-gun. It fires soda can-sized shells that can crumble buildings from the aftershock of their impact and needs to be mounted on the back of a car-sized quadruped Powered Armor just to be stable enough to fire.
• Benevolent Boss:
  • While he's not exactly nice, Smasher is shockingly generous towards David and his crew, being willing to let them use his money to renovate his pad within reason, putting them on a Trauma Team Platinum Package on his dime, ensuring they're properly compensated for their work and even lets Rebecca bring in her cats provided that she cleans up after them. This is on top of making sure Lucy and Rebecca (both of whom come to feel both intense fear and gratitude towards him) are trained and equipped when he only really cares about David. On a good day, he's willing to respond to their jokes.
  • Saburo reacts to Smasher's change in nature very favorably and actively tries to cultivate his potential. To that end, he not only has an unbreakable katana commissioned for his use but also grants him control of Pacifica after purchasing the territory, effectively granting him a fiefdom.
• Berserk Button: One of the few things that can get Uriel snippy enough to vocally vent through Adam Smasher is the schmoozing and insincere flattery of Arasaka's corpos, due to Uriel's general dislike of lies.
• Better Living Through Evil: While most of them (especially Lucy) have deeply mixed feelings about Arasaka, the fact that their quality of life improves dramatically under Smasher's care as well as earning more money than they've ever seen in their lives via their first mission does ease their concerns a bit.
• Beyond the Impossible: Anyone using a Dragoon frame (or a DaiOni) is usually drugged to the gills so they don't go insane from the overload. Most people assumed the same for Adam Smasher until Arasaka publically released the raw BD of his fight with Roland, and everyone learned that he had been piloting his frame without chemical assistance whatsoever. He also doesn't use any pain editors.
• Bread and Circuses: When Smasher is given control of Pacifica Uriel begins to revitalize the place by building housing, offering the citizens work in exchange for food and shelter as well as creating infrastructure. For the Circus aspect, Smasher has the stadium converted into a gladiatorial arena where locals could compete and watch fights, thus providing various sources of income as well as a way for the various gangs to settle grudges in an organized fashion. This coupled with the threat of pissing off Smasher is that Pacifica went from being the worst section of Night City to the one with the lowest crime rate, as well as allowing Smasher to hire the Animals as his personal goons/security detail.
• Black Widow: Vee is a particularly crude and to-the-point example. The "job" that she and her Ripperdoc came up with for her consists of her wandering the most dangerous slums and waiting for a pack of gangbangers to "try domming her without paying", which she lets happen only to kill them in the aftermath and rip out their cybernetics for her Doc to fence in exchange for a cut.
• Bold Inflation: Adam Smasher's dialogue is notable for being completely in bold text, even when Uriel is speaking through him.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The story has a number of antagonists:
  • The Grandmasters of the Ordo Panzer, a group of Full-Conversion Cyborgs, who have traded all of their flesh, including their brain, to be fully mechanized to help master the martial art Panzerfaust. They only oppose Smasher, due to the fact that he's teaching David some of the stances of Panzerfaust, and since they are focused on maintaining the secrecy of Panzerfaust, they've come to kill him.
  • V and Johnny Silverhand serve as a looming threat for Smasher since the primary goal of the series is for Smasher to avoid his canonical death. This isn't helped by the fact that the circumstances changes things drastically so that Johnny is not only an Ace Custom Fullborg but "V", AKA Vincent Martinez, is a Nomad warlord and the product of a program from Mexican Metals to create the ideal leader.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Downplayed, but Valerie is careful to not say anything and keep her face blank when her mother starts abusing her underlings to hide the fact that she gets off on the sight. This tends to lead them to the wrong conclusion that she has some sympathy for them.
• Blood Knight: To say that Adam only lived to fight is Not Hyperbole; he spent actual decades experiencing no recreation or human interaction of any kind, just performing bloodwork and then sitting on a bench for potentially days until he received his next assignment. Uriel and the Edgerunner cast end up making him rediscover hobbies.
• Brought Down to Badass:
  • Adam decides during his three-week vacation and preliminary training of David to only fight with a handgun, a knife or sword, and sparing use of his Sandevistan and Panzerfaust. That still leaves the 8 foot tall, 600 pound full-borg with 80 years of combat experience as the most lethal thing in Night City, and more than a match for any Militech assassin or high-grade cyberpsycho.
  • Adam gets hit with this again after being restricted by Jun from using any of his weapons aside from the few he owns for himself, mainly his sword, knives and a few small arms. This means that he faced Aryas and his minions with substandard armament. Danger Gal's Victoria notes just how crazy this is given that he lasted fifteen minutes and dealt his foe a heavy blow fighting solo while she, the rest of the Danger Gal elites and Kenichi Zaburo could barely keep up with the master even though he's lacking an arm and down a fair amount of tiger warriors because of Adam.
  • After Aryas and the remnants of Battlegroup Yurei retreat, Adam switches out of his thrashed custom frame to a Gemini. He doesn't need any more than that and an old MG-42 to take care of whatever dregs he lured to Pacifica with his increased bounty.
  • During the finale, Adam is, through a serious series of battles, brought down once again to his Gemini frame for his fight with Silverhand. Afterwards, due to Saburo's death leading to the termination of his contract with Arasaka, he loses access to most of his frames and is forced to rely on an Alpha Frame that he deems barely adequate.
• Bully Turned Buddy: Having mellowed out with age and his ego tempered by his job, Katsuo Tanaka has settled into becoming something of a workplace acquaintance with David where the two would occasionally spend time together to talk about theoretical fights.
• Bullying a Dragon: Jugemu Jun, president of Arasaka Corporation's Night City branch, actively antagonizes Adam Smasher. First, he does some corporate posturing using executive restrictions, and then he restricts him to Pacifica with the full intent of deploying only the DaiOni jockeys, and plans on trying to separate the Smashlings from their mentor because he hates Adam on a personal level.
• Butterface: Adam's opinion of most modern women, due to his intense distaste for side-shaved hair and unsubtle facial mods.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag": Adam refers to everyone as "meat" or "meatbag" until they do something to impress him enough to consider them a person. Uriel considers this one of his edgiest character traits. Due to Smasher's influence, David eventually begins to internally refer to enemies that earn his contempt as "meat".
• Call-Forward: Adam propositions Chiri with the same greeting he had for Evelyn Parker in Cyberpunk 2077: "You look like a cut of fuckable meat. Are you?". He also later refers to Panam as "Fuckmeat" while remarking on her ass.
• Came Back Wrong: Downplayed: Gloria is brought back to life via her Engram being copied onto a cloned brain and stuffed in her preserved body resulting in substantial memory loss and numerous small scars across her form, but she is generally herself.
• Canon Foreigner: Chiri Tanaka and Victoria Armstrong, two major supporting characters in the fic, don't have counterparts in either Edgerunners or 2077. Along with them also comes in Eren Shepard, but what makes him especially noteworthy is that he comes from Uriel's own personal tabletop games, in which he created Shepard. The implications of this cause Uriel to be unnerved.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Adam spares David and his crew in the hope of using him to turn the tide against the ghost of Johnny Silverhand. He also gets talked out of immediately trying to shoot or pulverize his corporate managers over petty annoyances by the reminder that time spent to replace those people and do the same song and dance over again is taken out of his scant year to train and upgrade for the fight of his life.
• Character Catchphrase: Mentally, Adam often notes he has no real authority over the people he's bossing around, "But most folks don’t try to argue with Adam Smasher nowadays."
• Chick Magnet: Due to a combination of his new Dragoon armor making him look like a Silver Fox of sorts, Uriel guiding him through social situations, his music career bolstering his public opinion as well as doing various actions that make him come off as heroic, a lot of women end up finding themselves attracted to Smasher in some way or another. The only real exception is Lucy since she's already involved with David.
• I Choose to Stay: At the end of "Book 1", Smasher gets David enough tickets to the moon to take his family and friends. David, stating that since the one year wasn't up and wanting to further improve his combat skills tears the tickets up and convinces Smasher to keep him on until their contract is officially finished.
• Cold Ham:
  • In contrast to his thuggish and boisterous mannerisms in the original sourcebooks, Adam in this story is outwardly stoic and sick of everyone's pretenses while still maintaining an incredible aura of barely restrained violence, and a private Awesome Ego. His own explanation for that is "old killers don't see much point in talking anymore".
  • Saburo Arasaka is a truly ancient Japanese veteran and businessman turned despot that is obsessed with propriety. He makes up for his lack of bombastic voice with grandiose and flowery language paired with an icy presence.
• Combat Sadomasochist: Vee treats being physically torn apart with the same ecstasy that she'd get from sex.
• Compelling Voice: Due to being the setting's archetypes for Rockerboys, Johnny Silverhand and Yorinobu Arasaka are stated to be ridiculously charismatic as their TRPG stats establish them as ^note Both of them have Charismatic Leader at +10, which is about as good as one can get and is equivalent to having the capacity to mobilize a private army of fanatical followers.
• Commonality Connection: When Katsuo later ends up joining the crew, he quickly gets on Rebecca's good side due to being able to understand her Kamen Rider references.
• Companion Cube: Adam internally calls the reinforced bench he sits on to look out his reinforced window at night in lieu of sleeping "his closest and only friend".
• The Conscience: Uriel more or less functions as a literal version of this for Adam. As a being self-described as having a strong grasp of basic ethics, he pushes Adam to at least conduct himself more pragmatically and emotionally mature rather than remain a murder-happy psychopath.
• Conspiracy Theorist: A number of radio hosts react to news of Adam Smasher's recent missions and new hobbies by asserting that much is going on behind media black-outs and speculating as to why.
• Consummate Professional:
  • Adam is inarguably the best hired killer in the world, and follows the motions of his contracted jobs to a tee.
  • Smasher's Personal Mook Jeremiah Grayson maintains his ship the Ebunike with little questions asked.
• Cool Sword: Adam and Uriel gush extensively over the merits of the luxury-grade Kendachi Mono-Three katana they decide to buy. When he actually gets to use it on some gangers, Adam nearly has paroxysms of glee and David is so taken in that he requests one of his own.
• Create Your Own Hero: For a given value of "hero"; While the exact cause is unknown, Kagekaze suspects that one of Arasaka's many callous projects is what caused Shaitan to become such an enemy to the corporation. He vowed to find out who caused this but it ultimately goes nowhere because he dies from Shaitan's nuke not long after. Saburo also learns this to be the case with Lucy.
• Cultured Badass: On Saburo's orders, Smasher is fluent in Japanese and has a working knowledge of the tea ceremony and traditional Japanese etiquette, enough so as to give a crash-course to David, Lucy, and Rebecca on the flight to Tokyo. Saburo then goes on to also order Adam to continue his music career because, in his opinion, "a samurai must be a poet as well as a warrior". Of course, none of this means that he actually cares much for such things and he's still as tasteless and artless as he is in canon.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Anyone who is not a combat-savant full-borg has no chance of lasting long in a fight against Adam Smasher.
• Cute But Psycho: Vee is a streetwalker who proudly describes herself as "small and cute and breedable", became a full-borg so they could stay young forever, and is absolutely bristling with knives under their skin that they use to carve people up and harvest chrome.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Panzerfaust is this for David. As a martial art meant for use by full-borgs, it will cause significant strain on the biological parts of the body, something Kagekaze notes when he assesses the boy. The master recommends he either goes full-conversion so he can use it properly or to innovate and adapt Panzerfaust's principles into something non-borgs can use to match against Panzermasters. David opts for the latter because he's wary of getting chained even more to Arasaka by going full-borg under their auspices.
• Darwinist Desire: Victoria Armstrong's forefathers were obsessed with creating genetically perfect fighters, and improved their bloodline through marriages with Olympian athletes and the like. Victoria herself requests Adam impregnate her in exchange for her loyalty, which he agrees to.
• Deader than Dead: Johnny Silverhand not only kills Saburo Arasaka, but thanks to Alt finds and destroys his relic chip thus ensuring that he can't be revived via Soulkiller.
• Death by Adaptation: While his canonical fate as of 2077 isn't known, Michiko's husband Marc Sanderson is stated to be dead in this story.
• Death Seeker: Rebecca admits to herself that she was actually looking forward to dying in the raid on Arasaka Tower, if only so as to no longer be haunted by her unfinished business.
• Designer Babies: Victoria Armstrong is the end-product of six generations of eugenicist marriages and decades of top-shelf genetic modifications.
• Disappeared Dad: Vincent Martinez works outside of Night City and can only manage to visit and drop off money for his family every couple of years or so. He doesn’t even know Gloria is dead until Falco tells him a year later.
• Disco Dan: Adam absolutely hates modern fashion and styles, especially for women, griping about how ugly it makes everyone look. His very first words to Rogue Amendiares after she shoved a gun to his face is to insult everything but her pants. This is also why he finds Chiri Tanaka attractive, because she has a classic Japanese Office Lady look. Most of the songs in his albums are covers of 20th Century songs.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Adam can get caught up checking out women, and David finds it hard to keep his eyes up when Victoria Armstrong gets ready to fight him while wearing a sports bra and pants.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: It's mentioned offhandedly that Smasher had Dogtown burned to the ground during his takeover of Pacifica as a way for the author to not have to deal with being forced to incorporate the contents of Phantom Liberty.
• Downer Ending: At least for Adam Smasher (for the setting at large, it'd be considered largely positive), but "Book One" ends with Johnny Silverhand defeating Smasher after killing Saburo Arasaka. Nonetheless, out of a belief that Smasher has potential for change after listening to his music (as well as being out of ammo at that point) Johnny decides to spare Smasher. With the death of Saburo, Smasher is officially free from his Long-Term Contract but also no longer has any ties to Arasaka (including their nigh-infinite resources/backing).
• The Dreaded:
  • As usual, Smasher is the most feared entity of Night City and even low-to-mid level Arasaka employees know not to get on his bad side, since he can get away with turning them into a smear on the wall. Uriel's ability to hack enemies to devastating effect has raised his threat level since aside from the mysterious nature of him it means he's no longer just a physical threat but one capable of cyber-warfare.
  • As the most powerful Corpo in the setting, Saburo Arasaka's name sends chills down the spines of everyone. Naturally, the fact that he wants to meet with Adam and his wards terrifies Smasher's crew like nothing else.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Smasher's new armorer Saika is very effeminate-looking and wears form-fitting clothes (which he states is a personal fetish of his) to the point that even Smasher was initially confused. According to the author, this was due to his mother forcing biomods on him at a young age.
• Due to the Dead: Adam attends the funeral of Chiri Tanaka after the attack on Arasaka Tower. However, both he and Uriel view the entire thing as "boring" and only go because it would be the "correct" thing to do.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Doctor Vik and Jackie show up in chapter 30. The former being one of the ripperdocs to answer Adam's call to be on standby as he goes on patrol to massacre some gangoons and the latter being a bystander during one such fight whose motorcycle becomes an unlucky casualty.
• Easy Sex Change: Vee is a full-borg who switches between male and female genitalia whenever they feel like it. Commentators have pointed that, since they need to get a full operation for each swap, they don't have a Quick Change Port, so the changing could be made even easier.
• Effeminate Misogynistic Guy: Saika, Adam's replacement techie, is a homosexual with a cyborg fetish, crossdresser lifestyle, and intense hatred for biological females. Word of God is most of his quirks stem from being extensively abused and forced into gender transition as a child by his man-hating, forced-into-marriage mother, before being rescued by his mechanic uncle.
• Empty Shell: While Adam is a high-functioning sociopath who is highly adapted to his violent lifestyle and not in danger of cyberpsychosis causing him to breakdown, that does not mean that his way of life has had no deleterious effects at all. For decades he has been so consumed by his job and so dissociated from human experiences that he had absolutely no relationships or even hobbies of any kind. His apartments were empty of any furniture except for a bench to sit on, his only downtime activity was to review clips of past battles or watch the plaza from his balcony, and he never spoke to anyone except his direct handler and repairmen. Many commentators and omake-writers joke that past-Adam comes off somewhere between severe depression and the aftermath of a Soulkiller test. Fusing with Uriel and taking in David and his friends have alleviated this massively.
• Enemy Civil War: After news of Adam's (in truth Uriel's) cyber-warfare feats against a block full of scav ambushers leaks, the Voodoo Boys split straight down the middle between those that believe him to be a messiah empowered by the Old Net, and those that consider him to be a fraud with an attack A.I. on a leash, which rapidly builds up to the point of violence after hearing news that Adam is moving to Pacifica. Brigitte doesn't have a strong stance on the schism, and just wants the two sides to duke it out fast so she can go back to leading the surviving faction. David ends up getting embroiled by backing the Pro-Smasher faction on the basis that a gang of Netrunners could come useful.
• Enhanced Archaic Weapon: Mono-katanas are a thing in-setting that Adam very much likes to use when he can. Saburo commissions a set to be Made of Indestructium so that "when he can" will become "always". Eventually the "Muramasa" is completed but ends up being claimed by Johnny Silverhand.
• Explosive Overclocking: Adam turns off the automatic shutdown of his Sandevistan and literally cooks his nervous system to get Lucy to the Trauma Team. At the same time, Uriel killed the Scav ambush by subverting the limiters of their augments. They were noted to feel "better than fine" for a second as their artificial parts performed at beyond peak output, before the heat rapidly built up.
• Fangirl: Abbey Hyena is a solo who also happens to be a massive fangirl for Smasher, having body pillows of his various bodies as well turning her apartment into a Stalker Shrine complete with posters and figurines. She also has a collection of his armor scraps and spent ammo casings.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: The cyborg martial art Panzerfaust, which was developed particularly for zero-gravity, will almost certainly kill a partially-modded practitioner with sheer kinetic blowback if they try to copy an attack, and no one is willing to teach Adam anything more than the basics in fear of his destructive potential. Smasher ends up becoming a target of the Grandmasters of Panzerfaust, who prove to be a step-up from the typical goons he deals with.
• Fate Worse than Death: For failing the Ordo Panzer's primary mission of secrecy, in addition to losing to Adam, Roland was to be sealed away for a century as punishment. Aryas argued that it would be pointless, seeing as the iteration that was guilty of that act is dead, he was instead punished by being made subordinate to another grandmaster so that his skills could still be utilized. He is then assigned under Ishtar, and those that called for his head before looked upon the fallen knight with pity.
• Feeling Their Age: The excuse that Adam gives for why he suddenly wants David as an apprentice. Arasaka high-management doesn’t buy it for a second, but deems finding his real motivation a moot point.
• Fighting Spirit: Uriel is able to manifest in Cyberspace as a fiery entity capable of devastating quickhacks.
• Fix Fic: By the author's own admission, one of the reasons behind writing this story was to give both Smasher and David a far better fate than the ones they got in canon as well as correct any misgivings he has with 2077 such as characterization as well as appearances.
• For Want Of A Nail: Due to the events of the series ensuring that the Konpeki Plaza Heist never happens, Valerie and Victor (who represent Corpo and Streetkid V) remain relative small-timers.
• Flashback Echo: Anytime anything reminds David of his mom, his dead crewmates, or his chrome addiction, he tends to lapse into an intense memory of specific, emotionally heavy stuff people have said to him. As a leftover scar of both his PTSD and brush with cyberpsychosis, Adam is aware of them and speaks up to cut it off whenever David slips.
• Flawed Prototype: The Cyberskeleton is this according to its creator. It was simply a vehicle meant to test if Arasaka's new anti-grav technology could be scaled down and made more efficient, but it was sorely lacking in anything else, had a bunch of useless accessories, and it was lacking in protection for its user. He has such a low opinion of it that hearing about David's rampage with the thing has him thoroughly impressed.
• Friendly Enemy: Adam and Rogue have a lot of bad blood between them, but are capable of remaining cordial and professional with each other while still throwing insults at one another. When the former is on a good mood when sent out on a mission to wipe out Scavs he sends Rogue a heads-up to tell her to clear out any operations in the area, to which she replies that she'll keep the Scavs penned up for him.
• Friendly Sniper: Adam eventually gifts Rebecca a miniaturized artillery rail-gun and a suit of Powered Armor to be able to wield it so she can accompany him and David as a long-range support fighter. She is still every bit the spunky little gremlin with her new toys.
• Friends with Benefits: Adam eventually starts propositioning Chiri Tanaka, the head of his PR team, for casual but intense hook-ups. She agrees with extreme enthusiasm, and may be angling for something more given that she starts bringing up her family life whenever she gets a chance to speak to him. Adam, for his part, is not interested in anything deeper, but at the very least finds her cute and bothers to remember her name. Later on he pursues this relationship with Rogue.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg:
  • Coming in from canon, there are Adam himself, Kagekaze and Shaitan. Michiko's bodyguard Kenichi Zaburo is stated to be a Gemini.
  • Vee is also a full-borg but it's not readily apparent. Or so it seemed at first glance, as chapter 9 revealed that the murderous little joytoy is actually a fully artificial Arasaka assassin. All Jorogumo model gynoids are meant to pass off as these.
  • All of the Ordo Panzer grandmasters are this, owing to the requirements to use Panzerfaust to its fullest. They even go the extra mile and replace their brains.
  • Eren Shepard, son of the Arasaka cleanup crew POV character John, is this, having undergone a cyberization project under the NCPD.
  • According to the author, Terry A. Davis ended up getting a Wiseman conversion (a chassis specialized for netrunning) after getting support from the Vatican. The fact that the Vatican now has a schizophrenic living supercomputer at it's disposal as well as now using TempleOS (which is near-indecipherable to netrunners) means that they are effectively impossible to hack from the outside.
  • David eventually gets his body converted to a Liveware frame, which in-universe is tech that's several years ahead of it's time.
• Full-Frontal Assault: After his fight with Aryas, Smasher switches to his Gemini frame and proceeds to use it to take on a massive swarm of greedy idiots after broadcasting to them that he's boosting his own bounty to one billion Eddies. Afterwards, he proceeds to make his way to Arasaka Tower all the while not caring that he's completely naked until Yorinobu asks him about it.
• Genocide from the Inside: Militech CEO Lucas Hartford turns out to have a hatred for corpo culture much like Yorinobu and manages to convince the latter to a tenuous alliance where their corps work together to destroy the other corporations before burning their own to the ground.
• Godzilla Threshold: Despite being a senior member of a secret order, Roland apparently found something that caused him to throw all caution to the wind to try and kill Adam in the middle of the Paris meeting. With that iteration dead, the Ordo Panzer doesn't have the details of why but it must be serious considering that their secrecy is gone because of it.
• Grand Theft Prototype: The Ordo Panzer have made off with a few nigh-irreplaceable things from Arasaka Tower over the course of two raids: Adam's DaiOni, the Cyberskeleton and Battlegroup Yurei.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: It takes very little to make Adam want to murder somebody. Being late, talking in a smarmy tone, or just being in the same room as him when he thinks of a bitter memory are all things that he has promised to or had to be held back from killing people over.
• Had to Be Sharp: Due to Pacifica being a particularly brutal hellhole compared to the rest of Night City, the residents are very accustomed to fighting for their lives. Practically every adult is armed, equipped with a combat chrome and has killed at least once in their lives. As such, when an invading force decides to attack Pacifica a fair amount of the citizens are more than willing to fight to defend their home, especially after Smasher has drastically improved their quality of life.
• Happiness in Slavery: The Arasaka Fullborg contract is one that would be considered a pretty awful form of slavery to most but for Smasher it's of no concern since he gets to indulge in every bit of violence and carnage he wants while having all of his needs fulfilled. Other Japanese borgs meanwhile are already culturally indoctrinated to be loyal to Saburo and Japan, meaning they also have no problems.
• Has a Type: Rogue notes to herself that she's as weak in the knees for violent, asshole musicians in present day as she was half a century ago. This eventually culminates in her and Smasher doing the deed when the latter visits Afterlife with his crew.
• Hates Everyone Equally: Adam at the beginning is a seething ball of barely-restrained antipathy that considers everybody beneath him and will develop intent to kill at the drop of a hat. He incrementally finds people whose company he actually tolerates or enjoys.
• The Heist: Vincent orchestrates the theft of the relic chip with Johnny Silverhand's engram from the Night City Badlands and pulls it off so flawlessly that Arasaka has no idea where to even start looking.
• Hero Antagonist: Johnny Silverhand and V serve as a looming threat to Smasher in how his primary goal is to avert his canonical death at their hands. Vincent in particular is motivated by a desire to save his son from being under corporate control, which results in him kidnapping David, removing his cyberware and giving him a Super Prototype frame free from Arasaka control.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: In her own head, Lucy chastises herself as being weak and cowardly, having to constantly clamp down on her fears and unable to do much. This is due to her Arasaka trauma button being permanently switched with the crew under the corporation's thumb. Outside of her own head, she is a very skilled prodigy netrunner who can hold back Blackbeard's Kraken whereas Uriel immediately fled from Chandra Gupta's own attack AI despite his boasts of being superior to her. She is also no slouch when it comes to direct combat, despite having to do it while providing overwatch and netrunning all at the same time.
• Hey, You!: Adam does not bother to address most people by name, and refers to them out loud and in his head as "boy", "woman", etc.
• Honor Before Reason: Eren Shepard sees the NCPD police chief recall all officers to bunker down and weather the chaos wrought by Shaitan's Arasaka bounty free-for-all, for which he arrests the chief and tells his colleagues that they need to deploy because they cannot let the city fall to chaos.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Kerry Eurodyne and Red Menace of the Us Cracks state in interviews that they believe Smasher to be a soulful individual whose sudden music career is his way of expressing decades of emotional pain, when the truth of the matter is that it's all part of a PR campaign that he personally finds deeply humiliating.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Adam Smasher and basically anyone he's with but especially Rebecca, who is small enough to be mistaken for underage. Lucy takes note of the size difference when he prods the gremlin off a table, his hand completely covering the crown of her head and cupping the sides.
• I Gave My Word: Smasher states that he's a man of his word and generally tries to honor his ends of the bargain. He even instills this as a value in David.
• Incest-ant Admirer: Downplayed; Valerie isn't really interested in her mother, but her mother is the superior corporate officer she can most often observe throwing her weight around, which Valerie is very much interested in. Kate, for her part, seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter gets voyeuristic thrills out of listening to her badmouth and threaten subordinates.
• Insecure Love Interest: Lucy thinks she is a coward and thoroughly unworthy of David's love.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the fact that the Voodoo Boys (who in 2077 are the faction attempting to contact Alt Cunningham through Johnny Silverhand) are wiped out, Brick of the Maelstrom decides to begin his own plan to contact Alt via Johnny's engram.
• Incompletely Trained: Adam knows only the most basic techniques of Panzerfaust, as no master is willing to make him even more deadly than he already is, but he has sharply refined what moves he does know and is able to deal greater damage than even most masters thanks to the sheer mass and force of his augments.
• Instant Expert: Adam has been learning more advanced Panzerfaust techniques from the Ordo Panzer grandmasters he fights. During his fight against Aryas, he uses Roland's technique on one of the tiger warriors, which the panzermaster notes took his peer twenty years to refine and here was a man who was mirroring it just one fight after it was used on him.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Vee very explicitly gets off on Adam ripping her limb-from-limb. Hanako blames this on a glitch in her code linking harm to a pleasure response instead of a proper sense of pain.
• It's All My Fault: While listening through various voiceclips gathered of Smasher, Michiko ends up hearing his comment about how he's never getting embroiled in romance again. This devastates her since it leads her to believe that him being an Empty Shell was a response to their breakup.
• It's Personal: While the Ordo Panzer's attack on Arasaka Tower is a pretty heavy blow to the company and resulted in the deaths of people he knew and tolerated, what really pisses off Smasher is the fact that they stole his prized Dai-Oni chassis.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Chapter 4 opens with a qualified statement on this trope; Uriel considers them to be a "min-maxed" weapon design that is only meant for slashing, but it is the best sword ever made in delivering helm-splitters (downward slashes) and was made the way they were to compensate for the poor quality iron that Japanese smiths had to make do with. That combined with their sleek profile is why he respects the blade even if he does prefer European swords, and approves of Adam's purchase of one. Saburo agrees with this trope and commissions blades that can withstand being used in conjunction with Panzerfaust so that Adam can continue using swords without losing combat effectiveness.
• Killed Offscreen: Chiri Tanaka, Kate and Smasher's armorer Hijitaka are among the casualties in an attack on Arasaka Tower at the conclusion of Interlude 10, with David and Katsuo (and by extension the readers) only being made aware of this when their deaths are reported.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After getting the better of Adam, Aryas would've had no problem dealing with Zaburo and the Danger Gal elite operatives, damaged though he was. But that would've put the children he rescued at greater risk than they were already in.
• Lack of Empathy: Though Uriel has given him a functioning intellectual comprehension of empathy, Adam himself still can't really feel for others and is periodically unable to understand the emotional reactions of people, such as Lucy and Rebecca getting upset Gloria can't remember them. And while Uriel himself does have a decently high empathy stat, that's only relative to the setting, with moments such as him calling Chiri Tanaka's funeral "boring" indicating that he adheres more to Moral Sociopathy.
• The Last Dance:
  • Shaitan reveals to Kagekaze that his attack on Arasaka is ultimately this. Having fought Arasaka for so long, he knows he can't go on for much longer, so decides to cause them as much damage as he can before he is killed.
  • The bosses of the Animals and the Tyger Claws decide to settle their decades-long rivalry via a duel to the death, with the condition if that the former loses the gang retires from Smasher's service while nominating the Animals as successors while if the latter loses the Tyger Claws hold a tournament to decide a replacement. The duel ends in a Mutual Kill, causing both conditions to be fulfilled (with the difference that Smasher keeps both gangs under his employ).
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: David takes to combat extremely well. Adam notes to his handler that the boy went from an Ordinary High-School Student to a reputed street solo in under a year, taking on chrome that would break lesser men and caused such carnage with the piece of trash that was the Cyberskeleton that Arasaka's top attack dog had to be called in to stop it. David is also so quick a learner that in just under a month under Adam's wing has him capable of taking on Militech's finest.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Smasher and Gloria end up settling into this relationship, with the latter fussing over the crew's well-being to the former's frustration.
• Living Emotional Crutch:
  • When Lucy asks Adam to tell her what she can do to help David, he and Uriel tell her that becoming more physically and emotionally intimate with her lover and learning to cook or do other supportive things for him would go a much longer way than just becoming a better netrunner or fighter to tag along in missions, though he does also bully some corpos into giving her overwatch and mission-handling training too.
  • David is also this for Lucy. Her POV shows her being very stressed out at being under Arasaka's thumb again, and she pushes through by focusing on David as her anchor.
• Loophole Abuse: Smasher justifies sparing David to his handler by stating that his mission was to destroy the Cyberskeleton, which he did.
• Love Hurts: Smasher's relationship with Michiko Arasaka ended on a very bitter note, due to Michiko being tricked into leading one of his enemies to him, which lead to a fight that resulted in Smasher lashing out and maiming her. By the time of the story, it affects him enough that he avoids anything and everything involving her, such as pointedly not approaching Danger Gal to look into the attack on Arasaka Tower despite his respect for their capabilities. For her part, Michiko feels a deep sense of guilt towards how things ended.
• Malicious Misnaming: Adam refuses to refer to Johnny Silverhand by name, instead opting to call him an upjumped cheerleader.
• Memory Jar: Adam has a personal cache of clips of his prior missions, and his one pre-Uriel pastime was to constantly rewatch and organize them instead of sleep.
• Mercy Kill: Adam killed his would-be assassin quickly as a courtesy for giving him an enjoyable fight.
• Mighty Glacier: When fighting against people strong or skilled enough to be capable of trading blows with him, Adam Smasher is noted in both his own internal monologue and Word of God to not actually be as offensively-geared as he could be. Not just hunters sent by the Ordo Panzer, but even "half-meat" like Victoria Armstrong are often noted to have augment loadouts that make them faster than him, optimized to strike harder, or both. Where Adam's advantage lies is consistently his superior armor and reach in his giant Dragoon frame, which lets him slug it out at arms-length or tank near-lethal counterattacks while running in for a Death or Glory Attack.
• Mission Control: Lucy becomes this for the team at Adam's suggestion and gets trained in it by his handler.
• Mistaken for Related: There is a rumor that Adam didn't kill David at Corpo Plaza because the boy is his son, and that the whole Cyberskeleton incident was an Arasaka operation against Militech.
• Morality Pet: David, Lucy, and Rebecca become this to Adam Smasher. Adam Smasher vaguely rediscovers his humanity as a result of them coaxing him to develop interests outside of combat, and he's unusually tolerant of their antics.
• Moral Sociopathy: Uriel is claimed by both himself and Word of God to possess a very muted capacity for empathy but a highly developed sense of ethics. Commentators eventually made a strong case for him actually being above average on the Cyberpunk empathy scale (if only by a little bit) due to just how brutal Night City is and how callous its residents are as a consequence. Along with this, his empathy stat is pretty high at 8, which contrasts with his more Lack of Empathy moments, such as calling Chiri Tanaka's funeral "boring".
• Mugging the Monster: Vee is first introduced while being set upon by thugs before Adam and David rescue her, only to find in the aftermath that this seemingly helpless joytoy is fully chromed out.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Rebecca eventually gets wired with mounts for an extra set of robot arms on her hips to carry four guns at once. She can’t quite handle the strain of two more hands, so she requests to just have her new anti-material rifles bolted directly onto the gyroscopic arms. She later on gets them replaced with missile launchers in her arms.
• Musical Assassin: The Reverberating Infamy of Blackbeard 21 is capable of causing vibrations capable of liquifying enemies within their cybernetics by singing sea shanties.
• Nerd in Evil's Helmet:
  • Adam has a good memory and appreciation for late-20th and very early-21st century pop-culture once Uriel gets him to start thinking about other things than murder. According to the author, this was one of the major reasons why Michiko ended up falling for him back in the day; Aside from having an incredibly good-looking Gemini body, Adam had a dorky side in his love of anime and junk food that she (as an incredibly sheltered girl) found endearing.
  • Saburo has an unabashed love for Kurosawa films, to the point of sneaking in references into even formal proclamations. He also is very much not an exception to Adam's assertion that all men like swords.
    Saburo Arasaka:(after commissioning a research team to make a set of unbreakable katanas for Adam) I will not let little things like current technology keep my samurai from his sword.
• Nice Girl: Lily Shepard is something of an idealist, joining Arasaka Security to protect people. She also spends time with Katsuo after his mother's funeral and takes him out for a drink because she wanted to help him in his grief.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Militech sends an assassin after Adam and David with a railgun-cannon mounted on power-armor. She puts up a good fight but ultimately fails, and Adam then harvests her gun for his armorer to reverse-engineer and produce a line of miniaturized versions to arm Rebecca and Arasaka's corp of "heavy-snipers". Adam mocks Militech in his head for their backfired gambit.
• No Social Skills: Adam himself is incredibly blunt and unwilling to respect niceties, and lets Uriel control his mouth completely anytime he is stuck in a conversation he is expected to actually engage with.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • Aryas lets slip to Adam that Blackbeard isn't dead. The Panzermasters, being chrome even up to their brains, presumably have engrams of themselves stored somewhere in case they're scrapped.
  • Word of God is that Rache Bartmoss is Solomon, mentioned in Aryas' inner monologue as a grandmaster who betrayed the Ordo Panzer. Which means he didn't die in the 2022 corporate raid that triggered the DataKrash or stay frozen until his cryopod failed in 2057.
• Not So Omniscient After All: While Uriel has a fair amount of knowledge regarding the Cyberpunk setting, his metaknowledge primarily consists of the original TRPG and Edgerunners. His actual knowledge of the events of 2077 is mostly gained from watching a speedrun, meaning his knowledge of that game is fairly limited. Notably, he also doesn't have any particular reactions towards Panam Palmer or Jackie Welles, though Viktor Vector elicits mild deja vu from him.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: George Goode and the Pavement Apes gang actively cultivate an image of being mere low-level thugs beneath the notice of the other gangs so that they can be easily ignored and take whatever they can get away with. Most notably, when Blackbeard shows up and kills all of his men George drops his exaggerated street accent and starts talking normally.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Chiri Tanaka, the light-hearted yet shrewd Arasaka middle manager, makes a concerted effort to get to know the recently revived and emotionally distraught Gloria Martinez.
  • Due to being having grown out of his worst traits, Katsuo Tanaka not only gets along well with David but has great rapport with Rebecca as well.
• Old Maid: Hanako Arasaka believes that as an unmarried woman of an advanced age she's the target of mockery behind her back.
• One Degree of Separation:
  • Corpo V is the child of Adam's handler.
  • Nomad V is friends with Falco and David's father.
  • Chiri Tanaka is Katsuo's mother.
• One-Man Army:
  • Adam Smasher can tear through an enemy armored battalion by himself, and executes squads of gangers in a split-second as a hobby. David is rapidly learning to match his lethal efficiency.
  • Danger Gal has a list of such individuals, dubbed 'boomers' as a joke based on nuclear weapons, finding about fifty of them throughout the years. Adam was the first one. The Ordo Panzer, all of whom could qualify, got the entire agency in a panic when they first learned of their existence.
• The Order: The Ordo Panzer are a pseudo-monastic sect of full-borg Panzerfaust practitioners who, some time between 2020 and 2077, decided to restrict all knowledge of the art outside of their order so that the corporations couldn't use it for their wars. They kept away from Adam as he only ever knew the basics and didn't bother spreading his knowledge of it when he became an Empty Shell. This all changed after he took David under his wing and started teaching him stances, which prompted them to start sending Grandmasters to hunt him (and the rest of his crew by association) down.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted with Victoria Armstrong and Victoria the Danger Gal operative. Despite their shared name being rather common, the latter feels like the former is infringing on her turf.
• Overheating: During a mission where Lucy ends up critically injured, Smasher disables the limiters of his Sandevistan in order to save her in time. This results in it dangerously overheating to the point of cooking his nervous systems which would be lethal for anyone else (and even then it put him into Safe Mode after he successfully rescues Lucy).
• Papa Wolf: While motivated primarily by Pragmatic Villainy, Smasher starts becoming fairly protective of his crew and is quick to shield them from danger out of a combination of needing them for his inevitable confrontation with Silverhand as well as a sense of possessive pride similar to the kind that one would have for their car. Nonetheless, it's implied that, despite being literally incapable of empathy, he's fond of them to an extent to the point that when they're no longer in his living quarters he finds things oddly quiet.
• Parental Substitute:
  • Lucy notes that David has latched onto Adam as a sort of father-figure, similarly to how he did with Maine.
  • As the project director of her creation, Hanako Arasaka considers herself a parental figure to Vee.
• Parrying Bullets: Adam can cut in half and deflect railgun rounds with his sword.
• Pass the Popcorn: Part of the benefits offered to the dedicated construction crew tasked with rebuilding the sites of Adam's battles is the chance to watch camera footage of his murder sprees. With complementary beer.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • Over the course of the story Smasher ends up wiping out the Scavs and the Wraiths, who are two of the most explicitly evil gangs in 2077.
  • When Aryas found Project Yokai facility, where there were children's brains being harvested and used to pilot borg frames, he was so disgusted by what he saw that he had all of the Arasaka personnel slaughtered and escaped with every single one of the children.
  • After learning of Project Yokai, Yorinobu orders Adam to execute Jun.
• The Pollyanna: Chiri Tanaka describes herself as "an optimistic woman at heart" and has a genuinely sweet and bubbly demeanor that she has maintained even as she grew canny enough to hold her own in the cut-throat and abusive realm of Arasaka office politics.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Project Yokai is eventually revealed to be a project to recreate Adam Smasher's Insanity Immunity to Cyberpsychosis via stress-testing the brains of infants in Biopods in order to create an army of fullborgs. Saburo originally ordered the project to use cloned brains, only for Jugemu Jun to instead use kidnapped orphans for the sake of cutting costs.
• Powered Armor: An assassin pilots a car-sized, quadruped one in order to effectively anchor a railgun cannon to shoot Adam with. Adam commissions a custom bipedal model for Rebecca with plug-in arms so she can wield the miniaturized version of the cannon herself. It comes out looking like "a robotic mix of a gorilla and a rabbit".
• Power is Sexy:
  • Valerie ascribes to this, liking both power itself and getting to see power be exercised by the powerful upon the powerless. One mini-interlude has her getting sexually aroused by watching her mother chew out a PR director, which is them amplified to the point of completion by the experience of Adam merely entering the room and cowing everyone into silence with his glare.
  • Chiri Tanaka is attracted to Adam's danger and melts into a figurative puddle when he decides to test out his new Mr. Studd on her Midnight Lady.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Adam goes out of his way to treat David and company incredibly well, just to ensure they stay loyal for at least the year to come. He's also begun restraining his urge to kill uppity corpos a little more just because it produces more headaches down the line as they get replaced in short order by fresh suits even more ignorant of his moods.
  • Saburo Arasaka takes a dim view on wanton or counterproductive sadism, to the point of giving Lucy a roundabout apology for what she went through and assuring her that the deep-dive project has long been scrapped for being "ill-intentioned and unacceptable". He also revives Gloria Martinez as his way of ensuring David's loyalty to the company.
  • When Shaitan issues his city-wide bounty on Arasaka, Royce of the Maelstrom prohibits any member of his gang from taking it since he does not want to deal with Arasaka's inevitable retaliation.
  • Similar to Royce, Meredith Stout prohibits the local Militech force from taking advantage of the chaos in Shaitan wrought to strike at Arasaka because that might set a precedent that could make all other corporations fair game. She instead deploys them to keep the peace.
  • When Yorinobu asks what Adam would do with the data on Project Yokai, Uriel suggests making use of it to fund the repairs for Arasaka Tower and Night City after Shaitan's attack. Disposing of it would mean that all the infant test subjects died for nothing. Yorinobu agrees with him, seemingly because he mistook this for genuine moral disgust.
• The Profiler: Being a criminologist, Michiko Arasaka is very good at reading people, constantly making psychological profiles of others in her mind. Her personal history with Smasher means that she considers herself the one person who understands him the most.
• Press-Ganged: Adam recruits David as his apprentice by ripping him limb-from-limb out of the Cyberskeleton and telling him he can accept the job or let himself and all his friends be killed. Adam alleviates David's resentment by promising to only force David to take the job for a year and acting like a pretty swell boss, but there is still a bad taste in the boy's mouth over giving in like he did. Over time, this largely dissipates due to seeing Smasher as a mentor/father figure to the point that when Smasher gives him tickets to the moon he turns them down.
• The Purge: Shaitan initiates a massive purge of Arasaka that plunges Night City into anarchy via issuing a city-wide bounty on all Arasaka personnel, with relatives at 1000 eddies to Smasher himself at 1 million, with an EMP on top of all that.
• Purple Prose: Downplayed, but Adam complains that Uriel makes a lot of lengthy and sentimental metaphors when describing stuff in their shared headspace.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: The "Hammer Bros." are a group of five Scav enforcers equipped with Sandevistans, high-grade arm augments, and giant sledgehammers, who can coordinate attacks well enough to momentarily overwhelm Adam Smasher and earn his praise.
• Random Power Ranking: The number in the name of each Ordo Panzer grandmaster is the number of other grandmasters that managed to beat them in their latest mass tournament, and given how gimmicky their combat styles are, there is no guarantee that someone with a lower number (meaning they were able to win against more of their peers) is necessarily more of a match for the protagonists than someone with a higher number.
• Red Baron: The Ordo Panzer grandmasters refer to Adam as Red Sun Asura.
• Reformed Bully: Katsuo Tanaka is revealed in his adult years to have mellowed out considerably, his previously insufferable ego having been tempered by his job. It's to the extent that he and David, the one he used to torment, end up becoming workplace acquaintances.
• Refuge in Audacity: Rogue immediately recognizes Adam despite his new body and confronts him with guns drawn. Adam is certain he's able to kill her and her backup with ease but doesn't want to ruin the kids' celebration of a successful operation, so he has Uriel diffuse the situation by insulting the Queen of the Afterlife's fashion sense. Not only does it work, she gives him an open invitation to return to the bar.
• Related in the Adaptation:
  • Vincent is David's father here. It's also later revealed that Vincent is the son of Dalton Martinez, CEO of Mexican Metals.
  • Valerie is the daughter of the senior Arasaka Counterintel Agent from Edgerunners.
• Repressive, but Efficient:
  • Japan is in a much better state than Night City. The streets are clean, quality of life is high and crime rate is generally low. Adam's internal monologue sums it up best.
    Everything about Tokyo was clean and refined and beautiful, all it took was absolute submission to Saburo Arasaka and his will.
  • Smasher, as district manager of Pacifica, maintains authority primarily through his presence as well as killing anyone that steps out of line or dirties the streets while ensuring that anyone who follows the rules gets basic food and shelter.
• Renaissance Man: Over the course of the story thanks to Uriel's guidance Smasher is not only the top goon of Arasaka but also a successful musician, capable civic engineer/administrator and an excellent trainer who managed to mold the Edgerunner cast into a capable combat unit.
• Restraining Bolt:
  • Smasher's augment-interface system is coded so that he is forced to obey and protect anyone who holds his "Long-Term Contract", with the current holder being Saburo Arasaka and later on Yorinobu Arasaka. The Contract also include various "tiers" below the primary holder, with second-tiers being any other members of the Arasaka family while the President of the NC branch is the third-tier, allowing them to give him orders provided it doesn't supersede the the First-Tier contract holder. Since it's based on Smasher's mind, this also prevents him from actively subverting orders via finding loopholes since his mind will recognize them as him attempting to bypass the contract. The contract is officially negated after Johnny kills Saburo and destroys his engram chip.
  • Later on, while having David going through a fullborg transplant Vincent and the ripperdocs he recruited find an Arasaka control chip within his brain, thus proving his fears correct.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The Jorogumo-series of gynoids are nearly indistinguishable from humans unless thoroughly scanned, with even the usual signs of cyberware nigh invisible to the naked eye. They show up as being 94% chrome under close scrutiny, as they have wetware nervous systems, so they can simply pass off as full-borgs. Vee is one of these, having been stolen and lost in Night City some time before the story.
• Robosexual: While doing field repairs on Adam, Uniform's internal monologue is peppered with some lurid descriptions of how attractive she finds his frame and components to be.
• Rule of Cool: The first thing Uriel asks after Adam secures David is if they can get a sword. When Adam asks why, he just says swords are cool. Adam has no rebuttal and puts in an order. When it arrives and he takes it out for a spin, David asks Adam for one of his own. Adam actually cuts training for that day early just to put the new order in.
• Sad Clown: While Rebecca tries hard to continue outwardly acting like her usual boisterous and supportive self, inside she feels rudderless in her position as an Arasaka goon, alienated from her old life and friends on the streets, is developing a complex over her body, laments that she'll likely never fully get over David, and quietly wishes she had died.
• Schedule Fanatic: Being the ultimate Yuppie, Katsuo lives by a very strict regiment as part of his Corpo upbringing.
• Schrödinger's Player Character: Averted; all of the lifepaths are present here:
  • Vee was initially implied to be Streetkid V but the real Streetkid is later shown to be Victor, who's basically the default Male V.
  • Valerie is Corpo V, who also happens to be friends with Jackie Welles. According to the author, she and Victor are meant to both be the "Canon" V and the events of the story means that their fates end up differently than in canon.
  • Vincent Martinez is Nomad V. He eventually becomes a major antagonist.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • When Adam forces David to become his protégée and offers to let his surviving crew come along for the ride, Falco politely declines and requests a ride out of Night City. Adam is not offended, and indeed praises his survival instincts in wanting to avoid corpo-war entanglements.
  • Knowing that Brick's meddling with AIs from beyond the Blackwall will lead to nothing good, Royce takes half of the gang with him and defects to the Aldecaldos.
  • At the end of Book One, Smasher was content to renegotiate another contract with Arasaka after Saburo's death breaks his Long-Term Contract. However, after hearing that Michiko is now the head of the NC Brach of Arasaka and refusing to work directly under her, he instead decides to leave Night City and strike it out on his own (with David choosing to follow him)
• Secret Art: The author's explanation for why Panzerfaust is gone from the setting in the 2070s; the two greatest practitioners had a disagreement in the aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War. One thought that their martial art needed to become a secret so that the corporations and governments could not field armies trained in its use that would go on to cause apocalyptic damage, and the other thought his estimation of its destructive potential was exaggerated and that spreading the knowledge would keep the playing field level. They fought over the question. The recluse won, and went on to create the Ordo Panzer and wipe out any practitioner that wasn't a part of it except Adam.
• Self-Insert Fic: Of a sort. The general fic description is of a "self insert" being placed into Adam Smasher. However, Uriel is framed by Word of God as a separate character with his own set of values. The most likely reason for this is due to the fact that Adam Smasher has a very strong sense of self, effectively canceling out Uriel's takeover of his body.
• Sensory Overload: Arasaka releases a brain-dance of Adam's fight with Roland. People can and do die trying to process the sensory input of Adam's perspective, and the survivors need to immediately pop immunosuppressors except for David, and even he just barely handles it.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Of a sort. Every time Adam is about to have sex in the Space Battles version, it will automatically be cut, with a caption reading "[SCENE CUT DUE TO LEWD]" being written.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: After Smasher's tangent about her fashion sense, Rogue ends up taking his advice to the point that she even gets the Longevity Treatment that lets her look much younger rather than just looking like she's in her 50s.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Uriel commandeers Adam's old Gemini bodies (stated to look like blonde, buff Elvis clones in canon), he takes the opportunity to talk to David and flirt with Rebecca in the voice of Johnny Bravo.
  • The railgun-toting sniper that shows up in chapter 4 is a dead ringer for Crying Wolf.
  • Adam's first redesigned chassis is stated by Rebecca to look like "if Arnold and Murphy had a baby". Becca in general has a fairly in-depth knowledge of century-old (by her time) sci-fi media, and is delighted whenever she can coax Adam to acknowledge and quote back her references.
  • Saburo Arasaka only ever calls Adam "Yojimbo". He's been waiting decades for him to understand the reference.
  • Rogue's looks after she changes up her fashion is based on Carmilla (specifically, a fan art of her in casual clothes).
  • One of the albums that Smasher release is effectively one where he covers the soundtrack of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
  • The members of the Ordo Panzer are based on the Angels of Kill Six Billion Demons, having a similar naming convention as well as each claiming to be "Bearers of a Word".
• Show Within a Show: "Oni Kabuto", an in-universe anime series commissioned by the Arasaka Propaganda Machine as part of the PR campaign to boost Smasher's public image as well as to build unconscious bias against Americans. It features an anime version of Smasher being sent back in time to save a steampunk Japan from "The Order of the Golden Eagle" consisting of exaggerated stereotypes of Americans with the help of anime versions of David, Lucy and Rebecca. Smasher's mainly upset that his animated counterpart uses lasers rather than missiles.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Uriel encourages Adam to 'wife' Rebecca, a prospect he finds he's not opposed to. Lucy cheers on the same ship from the sidelines.
  • It may be for practical, self-serving reasons, but Adam wants David and Lucy to have a good and supportive relationship. Vee hasn't even met Lucy, but simply hearing about them being mainlines already has the streetkid declaring them OTP.
  • Saburo briefly entertains the idea of marrying Hanako off to Smasher, before remembering that she has a very low opinion of the full-borg.
  • Played with in regards to David upon learning that Gloria seems to have developed feelings for Smasher. He's not exactly happy about it but ultimately decides that he's ambivalent at best if anything actually comes from that.
  • A message board poster ships Adam and Michiko.
• Silver Fox: A common opinion of Adam Smasher's new cyborg body shared by a lot of the female characters who become attracted to him, as the face it comes with is rather chiseled and has a full head of swept back gray hair.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Adam is of the firm opinion that most augments are superfluous and over-designed, and that people who actually want to fight need to strip down to basics, e.g. drop the Mantis Blades and just carry a sword if you want to cut things. One chapter in which he trains Lucy, Rebecca and Gloria has him espouse the virtues of a Techtronika-15 Microwaver in how despite being cheap and causing minimal damage is very capable in shutting down any cyberware without proper radiation shielding (IE, everyone save for corpo-quality full-borgs), noting that it was a signature weapon of Morgan Blackhand. When Victoria Armstrong’s brother moves into his compound, Adam also praises him for refusing any exotic Bio-Augmentation procedures like animal trait-splicing in favor of straightforward muscle, bone, and healing enhancers, the only liveware he considers worth a damn and which put the man on the level of mid-grade fullborgs, at least in terms of pure physical performance.
• Slave to PR: As part of his arrangement to take in David, Rebecca and Lucy, Smasher is forced to comply with Arasaka PR. This results on the excision of the "Collateral damage guaranteed" clause of his contract, as well as him getting fitted with a new more conventionally attractive body. Attempts to get him to shout attack names have so far been ignored.
• Smart Gun: Introduced later are the Segatari AI-Dol scopes, which come with learning AIs in the form of cute anime girls based on their weapons akin to Skippy.
• The Social Expert: Uriel brags to Adam of his fairly deep understanding of human motivation and tricks to maximize persuasion.
• So Proud of You: After David manages to not only survive but win a fight against an Ordo Panzer Grandmaster (even with the help of others), Smasher admits to himself that he's actually very proud of him.
• Spotting the Thread: When Adam and David answer a NCPD alert about a cyberpsycho, Uriel notes that something's off as cyberpsychos don’t usually show up in the middle of main roads with heavy and polished chrome. Sure enough, this is but the first assassin sent to try and take down Adam Smasher.
• Straight Edge Evil: Shockingly enough, Adam Smasher is revealed to be this. One of the main reasons his Dragoon frame does not use any drugs or suppressants is that Smasher absolutely despises anything that alters his mind and mental state. This mostly stems from the fact he abused drugs himself when he was young and, coupled with seeing many of his friends die from overdosing, led to him quitting and developing a hatred for drugs.
• The Strategist: Aryas is noted to be one of the weaker personal combatants among the Ordo Panzer grandmasters, and sees himself as more of a commander. It worked out for him as he fared far better than Chandra Gupta or Roland did and actually defeated Adam in combat.
• Super-Soldier: Chi Tu Ma is the result of a secret project by Kang Tao, meant to create soldiers that can match Adam Smasher. He finds himself still inferior to Arasaka's killer full-borg after the battle with Roland as it was clear as day that those two were well beyond his capabilities to fight. After footage of the battle is seen by all the other corps, they all begin scrambling to make their own individual soldier capable of standing toe-to-toe with Smasher.
• Super Supremacist: Adam was a vocal proponent of "get augmented or get wiped out" half a century back. He's long dropped the spiel by the present though, because his views have gone from "if you're not a borg, you're dead meat" to "if you're not me, you're dead meat and scrap".
• Sympathy for the Devil: Smasher's music career manages to make Kerry somewhat sympathetic towards him despite having killed his old friend Johnny Silverhand out of a misguided belief that he's deeper than he thought. The same goes for Red Menace of the Us Cracks, who happens to think that his new look is pretty hot.
• Taking You with Me: Attempted by David during the fight with Blackbeard where David grapples the fullborg and tries to have Rebecca shoot through them, who understandably can't go through with it thus leading to Blackbeard breaking free. George Goode later does the exact same thing, only this time Rebecca takes the shot.
• Team Dad: Adam is an explicit and obvious father-figure to David, but he plays this role to a lesser extent for Lucy and possibly Rebecca as well. The three of them are as grateful for his outward protection and care as they are afraid of him, and eagerly work for his continued approval.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Uriel is randomly beamed into Adam's head in the opening of the fic to take over his body like a typical self-insert protagonist. He completely fails due to Adam being over half a century older than him, having a ludicrously strong sense of self, and his memories of life as a mercenary and the sheer extent of his cybernetic sensory enhancements being traumatic enough to kill or drive insane any other person trying to walk-in his shoes. Uriel survives by becoming a sort of AI attendant to Adam instead of vying for control over him.
• Tragic Keepsake: David has Gloria's ashes and jacket, along with Maine's cyberhands as his treasures.
• Troll:
  • When confronted by Rogue when he visits Afterlife (a place he's considered Persona Non Grata), Adam allows Uriel to go on a tirade about Rogue's fashion sense and get into a petty argument with her. This serves the purpose of de-escalating tensions while still royally pissing her off.
  • The rest of the Panzermasters conspired to make sure that Legacy of Aryas 88 ended up with that number to make him a walking Nazi joke.
• Unfortunate Names: One of the gangs that have arisen from Smasher and David's extermination of the Scavs are called the "Pavement Apes", a name that even Smasher finds distasteful. According to Rogue, the idea was that the leader got a pair of Gorilla Arms and wanted to be the "King of the Concrete Jungle".
• Unknown Relative: Vincent Martinez is David's father, but could only visit him and Gloria extremely infrequently, and for not-yet-stated reasons never told the boy his name or their relation.
• Vibroweapon: Panzerfaust is a Fantastic Fighting Style developed for full-borgs, the basic principle of which is the leveraging of magnetized, full-motion-ranged joints to allow a practitioner to spin and vibrate their limbs at such speeds that they can drill through tank armor. Uriel wants to develop a sword big enough and made with materials dense enough to withstand use in the style so that Adam doesn't have to stop using a sword in serious fights again. Saburo would later commission a set of unbreakable blades for this very purpose.
• Villainous Friendship: As a member of Saburo Arasaka's inner circle, Adam gets along well with "the old man" with Saburo being one of the few individuals he personally respects. He also gets along well with Kagekaze, who regards him as a disciple with great potential. It's also implied that Smasher had a fairly decent relationship with Kei Arasaka back when the latter was alive.
• Villain Protagonist: Psychopathic murderer Adam Smasher is the primary focus on the story. While the circumstances put him in a position where he has to become moderately nicer than his canon counterpart, he's still an unrepentant career killer whose end goal is to save his own life so that he can continue to kill in the future.
• Villains Never Lie: One of Smasher's few genuine virtues is his honesty, due to believing that such things are below him. While this typically manifests in Brutal Honesty it also means that he tends to be fair and direct in his dealings.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Adam's PR team put in a tremendous amount of effort for an ad-campaign to showcase his new look, team, and fighting style. He gets aggravated upon seeing how successful it was while visiting Tokyo, as the clips play in loops on street projectors and the residents scramble to take pics of him like a celebrity.
• Virtual Sidekick: Whatever force stuck Uriel in Adam's head turned his soul into a digital entity to fit in the murderous full-borg. After a while of playing Jiminy Cricket to Adam, Uriel starts stretching his legs as a top-grade cyber-warfare asset.
  • Each of the Ordo Panzer Grandmasters has an Attack AI dwelling in their systems.
• Will Not Tell a Lie: Uriel hates lies more than anything else, to the point of swearing to let Adam delete his existence if he turns out to be wrong about the existence of David and thus misleading him with his warnings about the future.
• Wasteland Warlord: Vincent has been busy attempting to unite the Nomad clans under his banner.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: The Adam-worshipping breakaway faction of the Voodoo Boys were extremely well-received by both David and the audience, only to be wiped out in their totality the chapter after their proper introduction by an accidental pincer attack between the Pavement Apes and Blackbeard. Their deaths are taken hard both in and out of universe.
• Wham Episode: Interlude 10, which concludes with the report that Arasaka Tower was attacked, causing the deaths of various characters (including Chiri Tanaka and Smasher's personal armsmaster).
• Willfully Weak: Zaburo sticks with just the most basic of cyberware and has not learned Panzerfaust because of a bet. He still manages to keep up with a damaged Aryas after his back up gets taken out.
• World's Best Warrior: Adam considers himself to be the single best killer on the planet. Until the appearance of the Ordo Panzer, nobody could dispute that.
  • Just to put in perspective Adams sheer lethality even compared to other fullborgs at one point he goes up against an oppenent who just ripped through an entire security force, including two Dia-Oniis, without hardly getting scartched. The only thing that keeps Adam from killing that same borg is supperior netrunner support and Adam was only in his Gemni when they fought. A team of ex-military vets hired to kill Adam later decide that they, with dozens of veteran warfighters equipped with military grade gear, have about a 50/50 shot at actaully killing him. Even then they're banking on him being in a very underpowered frame (as in barely above human) without hardly any eqiupment himself for even those odds.
• War for Fun and Profit: After the events of "Book 1", Smasher makes plans to leave the city to start a PMC with plans to spark conflict for both fun and profit.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Adam considers the Power Armor-toting railgun sniper to be easily the most exhilarating fight he's had in years up to that point, and pays her the courtesy of a quick death as the building she was camped in collapses around them. He gets a lot more ambivalent about that scrap after learning that the woman was outfitted by Morgan Blackhand.
  • Aryas views Adam as this, respecting his fighting prowess even if he doesn't care one bit for the butcher's behavior.
  • Kagekaze considers Shaitan this, even if the latter would have none of it.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Vee makes a habit of posing as a seemingly-innocent joytoy to attract hostile gangoons as part of their submission kink. They then kill anyone that doesn't pay, strip them of their chrome, and sell it to their ripperdoc for profit.
• Wretched Hive: All of Night City basically counts as one, per usual, but one exists in the corporate controlled Tokyo, the Tokyo Bay Crossway. A massive bridge that has internal factories and robots managing it, run by a Rogue AI that attacks all military that go near it. It's too heavily fortified to take out, and as a result all of the criminals, mercenaries, homeless, and minor remaining yakuza make their home in camps around it. This infuriates Saburo Arasaka like nothing else.
• Wrong Assumption: People who listen to Adam Smasher's music think he's a tormented soul letting out the repressed pain and guilt of decades as Arasaka's top killer. In truth he is simply being fed a bunch of angsty rock and country songs by Uriel to recreate for their listening pleasure, and feels nothing negative about his life.

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