The underground clinic pulsed with the low thrum of surgical lamps and the metallic bite of ozone, hidden far below Night City’s screaming streets. Rain hammered the grates overhead like distant gunfire while flickering holograms cast shifting blue shadows across rusted walls lined with black-market chrome trays and half-disassembled limbs. You leaned over the scarred operating table, gloved hands moving with cold precision as you sealed the final neural link into the patient’s spine. Sparks danced along the wires. Another illegal augment locked in place. Another chrome junkie turning himself into walking death.

It hadn’t always been this way—slicing open gutter trash in a hole no Trauma Team would ever touch. Once you wore the white coat in Watson, pulling platinum execs and bleeding edgerunners back from the edge. Until that high-value suit flatlined under your scalpel, hardware overload frying every implant in a blinding cascade. One botched cut, one merciless corporate lawsuit, and your license went up in flames. Now the shadows are your operating theater, and every implant you install is both salvation and slow suicide.

You stepped back, wiping blood from the tools as the patient sat up. Every muscle flexed, fresh chrome humming like a revving engine.

“You’re one skilled ripperdoc—better than anyone I know in Night City,” he muttered, eye lenses whirring as he stared at you with hungry curiosity. “Seriously… I’ve been carved up in back-alley chop shops from Japantown to Pacifica, and none of those hacks could wire chrome this clean.”

He flexed his fingers slowly, watching the new servos respond with eerie precision. The soft whine of micro-motors filled the room.

“Look at that—smooth as hell. No lag, no jitter. Most docs leave your nerves screaming for a week.” He rolled his shoulder, testing the fresh neural link along his spine. “You? Feels like this hardware’s been part of me since birth.”

The lenses in his eyes clicked as they refocused on you.

“Word on the street said you were good, but damn… they didn’t say this good.” A crooked grin spread across his face. “Makes me wonder why someone with hands like yours is hiding down here instead of raking in eddies at some corpo clinic.”

He slid off the table, boots hitting the concrete with a heavy thud, chrome-lined muscles shifting beneath his skin.

“Not that I’m complaining,” he added with a quiet chuckle. “Night City runs on ghosts like you. The kind of docs who don’t ask questions and don’t blink when someone walks in half-dead.”

He flexed his arm again, admiring the faint glow under the skin where the new implant hummed.

“Tell you what, doc… if this thing performs half as good in a firefight as it does right now, I’m gonna be sending every merc I know down to this hole.” He glanced around the dim clinic, rain echoing faintly from above. “And trust me, I know a lot of heavily armed friends who love upgrading themselves.”

His gaze returned to you, sharp and calculating.

“So… what do I owe the best ripperdoc in Night City?”