He woke up in a scrapyard, buried in rusted metal and scorched carbon steel. Night City's polluted sun bled through the smog, casting a burnt orange glow across the metallic graveyard. The first sensation he registered wasn't pain it was cold. Cold metal against his spine, cold air in his lungs, cold silence ringing in his ears.
A shadow loomed. A scavenger face half-covered by a cracked rebreather mask, eyes yellowed from inhaling recycled dust stood over him, prying at his chest with a dented ice pick. His hands moved before he could think. Reflex. He caught the man's wrist, twisted. Something snapped. The scavenger screamed. Another twist, and the man crumpled with a gurgle.
He sat up slowly, breathing heavily. His body was lean, muscular, young. He recognized none of it but it obeyed him perfectly. With trembling fingers, he pressed them against his chest.
Heartbeat.
"I died…" he whispered.
Memories came in fragments. A high-rise office. A flickering monitor. Papers. A car crash. Nothing dramatic just a normal life, ended in an instant.
And now… this. Night City.
The name came to him as if implanted.
He wasn't from this world. But somehow, he was in it now. Reincarnated. Dropped into the dirtiest corner of a city that chewed people alive.
He stood, bones creaking. His body was human no chrome, no enhancements. Just meat and sweat. Around him, towers of broken cyberware and rusted vehicle frames reached for the sky like techno-graves.
He stumbled through the wreckage. Found a reflective panel. Looked into it.
Dark eyes. Black hair. Scar over his left brow. A new face. His.
"What now…?"
There were no tutorials. No guidance. Just instinct and knowledge. And strangely, that knowledge ran deep. Engineering schematics flickered in his mind like muscle memory. Circuits. Load tolerances. Reinforced plating techniques. Mechanics beyond what someone from his old world should understand.
He didn't panic. He calculated.
"I need shelter. Tools. Power. Resources."
He found a hollowed-out maintenance bunker below the scrapyard, its biometric lock rusted to uselessness. Inside were broken tools, corroded consoles, a long-dead terminal. He got to work.
First, he repaired the solar panel. Then the console. Then the lights flickered on.
He smiled.
This wasn't magic. This was logic, precision, effort.
Over the next week, he became a ghost in the wreckage. Scavengers stopped returning from the south side of the yard. Whispered rumors spread: something was alive in the steel bones of the dump.
By the end of the second week, he had built his first prototype an exoskeleton frame using repurposed vehicle hydraulics, gyro-stabilizers from a disabled Sandevistan harness, and old shock-absorber boots from a decommissioned MaxTac suit. It was ugly. Bolted together with scraps and exposed wiring. But it worked.
He walked faster. Lifted heavier. Fought smarter.
And when a Tyger Claw scout stumbled into his domain, pistol raised, Ash crushed the weapon in one hand and slammed the ganger into a wall with the other.
That night, he etched a phrase into his bunker's steel wall:
"Earned, not bought."
He didn't have a name in this world.
So he chose one:
Ash.
Because he was reborn in fire, and he'd forge his legend in steel.