Ronin Born: A Cyberpunk Superhero Novel

Erika Kuroki is hafu—half-Japanese, half-American, and treated as neither. In the future, Japan has been reshaped by rearmament and cybernetic warfare, and mixed blood buys you nothing. Military service does. So Erika fought her way through the Jietai, earned her citizenship in blood, and clawed her way into the Tokkei—Japan's elite corps of cybernetically augmented agents, protected by war-armor and government secrecy alike.

Her first real assignment should have been the mission that finally proved she belonged. Instead, it's the one that shows her exactly what she's serving.

Sent to track down a vanished weapons scientist rumored to be dealing black-market cybernetics, Erika follows the trail to a hidden facility off the coast—and finds foreign nationals imprisoned, dissected, and rebuilt into monstrous, cyborg weapons. Disposable people, disposed of. The technology traces straight back to Yoshida Technologies, the contractor that built the very armor on Erika's back. The order traces straight back to men she salutes every day.

Now she has to choose: Trust the system to punish itself, or become something the system has no name for.

Erika steals her own armor, teams up with an underground hacker and the fugitive scientist she was sent to capture, and takes the fight to the men who built her a cage and called it a career. Hunted by the agency that trained her, marked as a traitor by the country she bled for, she becomes a masterless warrior in a Tokyo of biometric checkpoints, demon-masked riot police, and secrets buried under decades of "progress."

Ronin Born is a fast-moving cyberpunk pulp thriller drawing on postwar Japanese history, corporate conspiracy, and the samurai classics of Japanese cinema—perfect for fans of Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Dive into a terrifyingly prescient vision of the future from Percival Constantine, author of the Vanguard series.