The concealed passage opens onto Night City’s emergency relay junction. Sealed conduits ring a dry platform, while the access terminal wakes beneath a faded municipal dispatch marker.
The terminal recognizes the recovered dispatch signature and projects a fractured map: a submerged infrastructure district, a quarantine boundary, and a recipient path keyed to Jostan’s biological and cybernetic continuity.
A damaged emergency record reconstructs itself in clipped text. The relay summoned him because its original operators disappeared during a systems breach, leaving the network unable to authorize evacuation or choose a successor.
The final log identifies the breach as an attempted forced inheritance. It warns that exposing the relay will alert the submerged district, while severing it will preserve his autonomy and strand whatever remains below.
Jostan Ordomo
The choice is real, and the system cannot make it for me.
The terminal offers two unselected controls: publish the relay’s existence through Leonidas’s municipal network, or cut every external link and leave the Night City system isolated. The bypass remains open behind him.
− Story Quest Removed
Identify the sender of the Night City capsule
“Stuck in place jostan sits down, calming his breathing and clearing his mind, seeing europa and flashbacks of his past childhood, he remebers something but its to blurry to make out, I wont take a life or there freedom to survive I publish the relay through leonidas municpla network”
SUCCESS (Legendary Hacking, rolled -2)
Jostan sits on the dry platform and steadies his breathing. The relay’s blue light softens as Europa’s immense trees and fragments of childhood surface behind his eyes.
Jostan Ordomo
I remember something, but it is too blurred to make out.
He places one hand against the terminal and clears the inherited routing prompts from his buffer. A childhood image breaks apart before he can identify the faces or place.
Jostan Ordomo
I will not take a life or their freedom to survive. I publish the relay through Leonidas’s municipal network.
Jostan bridges the emergency relay to Leonidas’s municipal network, publishing its existence, quarantine boundary, and evacuation request without accepting inheritance authority. The network confirms public receipt.
The cost is concrete: the terminal’s municipal access wafer burns out during the transfer, leaving the local controls unusable. The relay remains visible, and its operators can no longer be silently erased.
The fractured map settles into a public emergency notice across Leonidas. Beneath it, the Night City system continues waiting, isolated from Jostan’s identity and no longer asking him to become its successor.
The terminal dimmed around Jostan, its last warnings dissolving into static. The municipal wafer cracked hot between his fingers.
Jostan Ordomo
Not theirs. Not mine. Let them choose.
Across Night City, the relay’s quarantine boundary and evacuation request entered the public grid. No crown followed, only a signal no one could quietly bury.
Jostan Ordomo
You’re visible now. That has to be enough.
Jostan left the junction with the relay exposed and its controls dead, carrying no inherited command, only the cost of making the truth public. Below, the stranded survivors remained beyond his authority, but no longer beyond the city’s notice. The chapter ended in the hard, narrow space between rescue and freedom, where Jostan had finally chosen neither ownership nor erasure.