The year following the Arasaka Tower raid was a bloody vacuum. With Arasaka's power shattered and Militech consolidating its hold, the delicate ecosystem of Night City's fixers collapsed into open warfare. The Fixer War of 2078 was a brutal, clandestine conflict fought in the backrooms of the Afterlife, on encrypted channels, and on rain-slicked rooftops. It was a war over territory, contracts, and the very soul of the mercenary underworld. Rogue, still the Queen of the Afterlife, was a prime target—a symbol of the old, independent way.
The legend is half-right. Rogue was bitter that V didn't take her on the Arasaka run, but not out of pride. She saw in V a reflection of her younger self with Johnny—a doomed, glorious charge at a tower. She'd already lived that story. Her bitterness was the resentment of a survivor forced to watch a reckless new generation play with the same fire that nearly consumed her. But secretly, as the dust settled and the legend of V grew, that bitterness calcified into a grim respect. V had done what she and Johnny couldn't: they'd broken the tower for good. And in doing so, they'd made Rogue's world, the world of shadows and deals, more dangerous than ever.
In late 2078, Rogue took one last, monumental contract. The client was a shell corporation, but the intel was undeniable: Adam Smasher was back.
Not in body, but in spirit. During the chaos of the 2077 raid, a fragment of Smasher's combat engram had been caught in a data-burst and survived, festering in the black sites of the old net. It had been found, corrupted, and evolved. It was no longer just Smasher; it was a pure, undiluted engine of annihilation, a digital ghost haunting the cyberscape, seeking a new body—any body—to continue its singular purpose: destruction.
The client wanted it deleted. Permanently. The payday was enough to buy out the Afterlife and disappear forever. Rogue took it.
The hunt led Rogue to an abandoned Biotechnica server farm on the edge of the Badlands. It was a perfect nest for a data-ghost. She went in with a handpicked crew of the best netrunners and solos left in the city.
It was a trap, but not set by Smasher.
The client was Michiko Arasaka's nascent Kage no Kiri. For the Reformists, the Smasher-engram was two-fold: an unacceptable loose end from the old, barbaric Arasaka, and the perfect bait. Eliminating Rogue Amendiares, the living icon of Night City's rebellious spirit and a direct link to the 2023 and 2077 tower attacks, would be their inaugural operation—a statement that the new Arasaka was just as lethal, but far more subtle.
Rogue found the Smasher-engram, a screaming, monolithic presence in the server core. The fight was brutal, a battle across both the physical and net space. In a climax that mirrored a lifetime of violence, Rogue unleashed everything she had. With a combination of ancient ICE-breakers and raw, cynical fury, she didn't just delete the engram—she shattered it, scattering the last echoes of Adam Smasher into the meaningless void of corrupted data. She killed him again, finally.
As her systems registered the kill, the Kage no Kiri struck. Not with brute force, but with perfect, surgical betrayal. The extraction AV was a Trojan horse. Her own netrunner, bought and turned weeks prior, locked down her cyberware. The Kage no Kiri operatives emerged from the shadows—not as corporate samurai, but as silent, efficient ghosts in sleek black armor.
Rogue fought. Of course she fought. She took a dozen of them with her in the dark of that server farm, her movements a deadly dance honed over five decades. But she was trapped, betrayed, and outmaneuvered by a new kind of enemy that fought with contracts and corruption instead of chrome and courage.
Rogue Amendiares died in the dark, not in a blaze of glory at the foot of a tower, but in a silent server farm, sold out by a client. It was the death she'd always feared: a fixer's death.
The Kage no Kiri erased the scene. To the world, Rogue simply vanished during the Fixer War, another legend swallowed by Night City. A fitting, mysterious end.
But in the Afterlife, and in the hearts of every solo who knew the score, the truth whispered. The Queen was gone, killed by the very corporate game she mastered. Her death marked the end of an era—the era of the legendary solo icon. It ushered in the age of the corporate shadow war, where the enemy wears a suit and your death warrant is a clause in a contract.
Her legacy is a warning etched into the Afterlife's bar: Trust the deed, never the deal. And her seat? It remains empty. Not out of respect, but because in 2097, no one is fool enough to think they can fill it. The only thing sitting there now is the ghost of the old city, and the bitter knowledge that even legends can be outbid.