404: Doom Not Found

- 10 years before canon -

Six weeks passed, and chatter spread fast. 

The street never spoke directly, but rumours were anything but simple. 

They called it a miracle.

A woman, half-dead, crawling from a pile of corpses. Her bar still flickering with low-power neon. Blood dried along the walls like murals. Nineteen gangers dead. Two more have gone missing. Four mercenaries shredded trying to keep the wolves at bay. No one understood how she'd survived.

No one except her—and the man in the mask.

Lizzie didn't speak of him. Not to her employees, not to the NCPD, not even to the handful of old friends who crept in from out of town once word started to spread.

She only said, "He fixed the lights," and left it at that.

People came anyway.

First were the regulars—hard drinkers, joytoys on downtime, BD heads who couldn't afford full burns anymore. Then came the new faces. Girls with busted lips and boys with implant scars.

Quiet ones.

Scared ones.

A few tried to carry iron but set it down quickly. Nobody made them. It was just the way the air felt. Like sacred ground. Tired and defiant.

The rumours did the rest.

Some said she made a deal with the Devil. Others claimed she was ex-Maelstrom, too dangerous to die. A few even believed it was a rogue Maxtac agent who had saved her, one gone off the reservation.

But Lizzie knew better. She'd seen him. Or it, if she was being honest. That kind of man doesn't breathe the same air as the rest of them.

The mask had no emotion. The voice even less. A figure cloaked in shadow and steel who stepped into the fire like he'd been born there.

No name. No thanks asked.

Just work done and gone.

She kept the bar open, mostly. A few days a week. One entrance at a time. Only trusted clients. Girls worked upstairs under tight watch. They weren't a gang—not yet. Just a group trying to hold a wall against the tide.

But the whispers spread. And when they did, the people came.

Victor had made sure not to come back.

He didn't need thanks. He didn't need credit. He needed quiet.

Night City had a way of stretching silence, but not keeping it. So he kept to the alleys and low contracts. Tech jobs. Wiring feedback loops in custom chrome. Repairing recoil compensators on polymer rifles. Replacing the cooling gel in neural accelerators that ran too hot for civilian brains.

Victor's workspace was a rented backroom in the shell of a gutted mechanic's shop in Rancho Coronado. Paid for in six-month blocks, cash up front, no contract. He blacked out the windows and installed his own filtration. No cameras. 

Every day was the same: wake up, calibrate equipment, weld something smarter than the last thing, and sleep.

In the corner of his workshop, his armour sat on a metal rack,a masked face watching him in the dark. A reminder. Of limits. Of power. Of debt yet unpaid.

He didn't see it as penance.

This was an investment.

The chaos of Night City was the perfect crucible.

Gangs burned through each other faster than the city could count the corpses. Fixers rose and fell with the seasons. Corpos played their silent wars behind closed doors, while street rats bled in gutters to pay for micro-repairs.

Victor? He built. He watched. He prepared.

But preparation couldn't stop curiosity.

The encrypted ping came mid-evening. A tight-beam message bounces through seven proxy nodes. No metadata. Just a name in the header:

Wakako Okada.

Victor didn't reply right away.

Instead, he stood in his bunker, walked to the armour rack, and reached for the datapad he rarely used. The kind of tool meant for business he usually avoided. He slid a shard into the port and opened the call.

Wakako appeared instantly. Her image was crisp. Not a single pixel was wasted. Behind her, a paper lantern glowed, casting half-light on the ancient lacquered walls of her private den. The kind of quiet power only the old guard knew how to wield.

"Mister Doom," she said with that ever-smiling voice. "Or do you prefer something else?"

Victor did not answer. Just waited.

Wakako tilted her head. "You were seen. Not clearly. But enough. Nineteen were confirmed dead. Three of them with confirmed enhancements. You wore no optics. No chrome. You used… what? Gas? Traps? And a sword."

Victor waited.

"Interesting," she said. "Your methods remind me of an old friend. He killed like a surgeon. But he smiled too much. You do not strike me as the smiling kind."

Still, he said nothing.

"I represent interests in Watson. You've heard of the Tyger Claws, of course. Their command structure is… fragmented. Four heads. Eight underbosses. Twenty captains. Hundreds of lieutenants and 'affiliated' soldiers. Nearly five thousand members."

Victor's eyes flicked once. He knew this. She was stating the obvious.

"But," she continued, "some structures rot from the inside. There are cracks if you know where to stand."

She leaned forward, tea steaming gently in her cup.

"I offer access. Protection. Resources. In return, I expect results. You are not like other mercenaries. You don't want money. You want something else. Whatever it is… I believe I can help."

Victor finally spoke. One word.

"No."

Wakako's smile didn't falter. "That was not a rejection. It was an invitation to make a better offer."

She ended the call without another word.

Victor stared at the blank screen.

Then, he turned back to his workbench and resumed soldering.

There was still a chip to fix. A rig to stabilize. A system to optimize.

And a world to conquer—quietly.

Wakako Okada's call hadn't surprised Victor. What surprised him was the timing.

He assumed the fixers would wait longer—let the myth settle, let the underworld whisper itself dry before trying to tether it to coin.

But Wakako? She had always moved faster than rumour. She didn't believe in superstition or fear, only leverage. That was something most fixers missed.

Time had given Wakako the insight to strike when the iron was hot. It would allow her to be distinct and to Victor that was initiative. 

After their brief exchange, Victor did what he always did.

He returned to the work.

The commission he'd taken was simple: a malfunctioning gyro-harness inside a lightweight carbon-titanium frame. Built for a solo who thought he needed speed but lacked balance. The kind of man who took gigs without understanding his own limitations.

"A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations" - Clint Eastwood. 

Victor repaired the calibration rig in ten minutes. Rewrote the firmware in twenty. Reinforced the interior lining with a shock dispersion mesh of his own design, then threw in a small stabilizer patch. Not because he cared—but because every rig he touched was, in its own way, a prototype.

Every client was an experiment.

And every step forward was Doom's alone.

He didn't speak of Wakako's offer.

Not to Padre. Not to Vik. Not even in the solitude of his neural logs.

Because it lingered. Not in weight, but in possibility.

Wakako saw him for what he was—or thought she did. She mistook his precision for ruthlessness, his detachment for efficiency. That was fine. Let her believe what she needed.

Her words still echoed, though.

You don't want money. You want something else.

She wasn't wrong.

Victor wanted power. Not the kind that faded with headlines or backroom deals. Not notoriety. Power, in its purest form: mastery over self, over reality. The ability to bend this world—as he once bent his own—to his will.

And that required resources.

Which meant calculated alliances. Temporary tolerances.

He had no intention of working for Wakako. But he might, one day, work through her.

The apartment he currently occupied was little more than a bunker disguised as a storage unit.

Buried beneath a redundant shipping hub in Santo Domingo, it had no plumbing, no real ventilation, and barely any signal reception. But it had power. And it was quiet.

Still, Victor knew he would have to move soon.

Word was spreading. The masked figure at Lizzie's. The name "El Silencio" passed between hushed voices in clubs, fixer bars, and encrypted chatterrooms. It wasn't a moniker he chose—Padre had coined it, offhandedly, and it stuck.

Victor found it... tolerable.

Silence. The pause before the strike. The void between certainty and collapse.

He embodied it more than he cared to admit.

Still, something gnawed at the edges of his focus. Something unresolved.

Not Wakako. Not even the memory of Lizzie dragging herself across the club floor.

It was the lingering question beneath her offer.

How long could he stay invisible?

He had spent decades navigating empire and war, orchestrating diplomatic traps and technological revolutions. In Latveria, he had been feared—not for his name, but for what he represented. Here, he was still a ghost without a flag.

That couldn't last.

Power required a face.

A movement. A structure.

He was building, yes—but still in fragments. Still in the shadows.

Perhaps it was time to test what the light would bring.

The message from Padre arrived not long after.

Encrypted.

"I have received your message... V, eh? She appears young, brash and reckless. She lacks your finesse and strategic mind... But if you're willing to vet her, perhaps you see something I cannot. The Lord blesses others with wisdom and insight. Perhaps he has gifted you with such... Until next time, Doctor." 

He took to time to ponder on his words. 

He was correct, the current V lacked the finesse and skill he required. 

Victor had decided to vet the young edge runner to a more esteemed fixer, finding her antics and reckless behaviour a risk to his dominion. 

Through Kirk, it proved that she lacked insight and patience.

Padre would allow her to test her might. 

Night City played games where those who struck first won with Those who survived the first strike either did so through luck or power. 

Victor wished to see if V could do the latter.