The enemy's retreat hits hard.
Under Ascension's lead, the smaller garrison stops holding and starts pushing. Reinforcements break, fall back, and keep bleeding people with every block they try to retake. Above the plaza, AVs circle and make another attempt at fire support.
Single-operator tracking rockets from Ascension robots stitch the sky and swat them down one by one.
On his own, Yorinobu Arasaka might've barely held Arasaka Tower. With Ascension in the fight, the whole field flips. Fresh waves of reinforcements are wiped fast, and the defenders look less like an army and more like a problem that's getting solved.
Scenes like this start echoing across Arasaka sites worldwide.
Tokyo. Arasaka headquarters.
It's Saburo Arasaka's strongest ground, and the one place Yorinobu's reach is still thin. The fight flips here: the loyalists hold the tower, calm and dug in; Yorinobu's units grind forward and look for a seam, any seam.
Numbers don't favor them. The line at the base of the tower has been locked for a long time. They hit, pull back, reset, and it still won't crack.
The field commander under Yorinobu watches the stalemate and feels the pressure build.
"There are too many of Saburo's troops, and they own the terrain. Taking this won't be easy."
"What are our next orders?" the adjutant asks.
"No new orders. We were told to deploy the device at a critical moment and call for Support."
"The device from Night City?"
"Yeah. Get logistics to bring it up. It's time."
Curiosity flickers across the adjutant's face. Where could support come from here? In Tokyo, most of Arasaka's force is still loyal to Saburo; they know precisely how thin their own bench is.
Questions or not, orders are orders. The logistics team sets a compact unit on the pavement. The casing carries the Ascension Technology insignia.
"Ascension Technology…"
So that's the source of the promised help.
Tokyo isn't Night City. Ascension's reputation here is tiny, and skepticism comes easy. But elite soldiers execute before they judge. They wire the unit, twist the safety, and power it up. The receiver fins begin to rotate.
[Ascension Technology Coordinate Locator Type-1 initializing]
[Ascension Network connecting … connected]
[Transmission coordinates generating … success]
The display chatters the status lines. When the last line hits green, a low ripple moves through the rear line like the air itself took a breath.
Above, out in orbit.
Black Star.
The moment the Tokyo device comes online, Atlas registers the handshake—a hardened link, base-grade stable. Atlas resolves the unit's exact physical location and converts it into a valid jump target for the interstellar landmark system.
On Black Star's landmark square, ranks of armed robots wait in formation. The portal ignites. They step forward in cadence and vanish into the threshold.
Space folds and writes a new paragraph in front of Tokyo's Arasaka Tower. A wall of Ascension robots marches out of nowhere and locks shields on command.
Yorinobu's field commander blinks once, then twice.
This tech wrecks his priors. No transport queue, no long wait, no warning. A briefcase-sized node and a full robot company appear on the street. He doesn't need a white paper to know what this will do to future wars.
"Support is here. Prepare to assault!"
Orders roll, teams move. The robots advance and punch into the lobby.
"What's going on? Where did those robots come from?"
Panic kicks upstairs. Saburo's loyalists try to make sense of it and fail. Ascension has no base in Japan, and transport control shows no entries: no trains, no trucks, no flights. Nothing to track, and yet the machines are here.
They reach for command, for the old safety lines, and find another problem: the Mikoshi uplink on their side of the tower was blown during the earlier strikes. Their calls go nowhere.
Leaderless and pressured from two sides, the tower garrison can't hold. With Ascension reinforcements pouring through the portal on a steady cadence, Tokyo's Arasaka Tower, the hardest bone in the mouthful, gets chewed and swallowed.
And that same pivot point repeats worldwide.
At other bases, the fights had been balanced. The moment Ascension drops in, the scale tilts. Yorinobu's units roll their fronts and clear the resistance sector by sector.
Interstellar portals plus the universe-spanning network. It's an ugly combo for anybody on the wrong side of it. Ascension uses both to finish a global rapid-support operation on schedule.
By the end of the push, Yorinobu doesn't just sit in the CEO's chair. He actually controls Arasaka, the way Saburo once did. No dissent. No board to slow him down. A new emperor stands where the old one did, and the building knows it.