| Storyline: | Shadow Site Raid |
| A merc comes forward to tell you they've uncovered or previously knew about a Shadow Site. | |
| Type of Storyline: | Mercenary |
| Repeatable: | Repeatable |
| Era of Storyline: | Any |
| Minimum PL: | 5 |
This Storyline has the following additional prerequisites:
- merc with bad history with a Megacorporation and Loyalty 60%+
The following jobs may be part of this Storyline:
- Shadow Site Raid (Look for unique loot in an extremely secure shadow site)
- unique high-level loot - weapons, armor, mods, blueprints
Any merc with entanglements with a Megacorporation can initiate this Storyline. It requires team Power Level 5+ and merc Loyalty 60%+.
The merc reveals a secret, probably illegal facility where a Megacorporation keep the things they don't want any of their rivals (or remaining governments) to know about. This opens a high-risk, high-reward raid against that Faction's shadow site.
To protect these shadow sites, the Corporations have modified and removed intelligence-level safety protocols from the regular UltraTek-developed Sigma security AIs. The gloves are off; these specialized Sec AI are the worst of the worst opponents - pushing the boundary in every way. They drop more reinforcements, they are relentless about keeping their security device network up, they push Tally per Turn to the max. At Security Level 4 and up, reinforcements will be doubled - each reinforcement Escalation will bring in two sets of three Enemies, at two different exits.
Once the mission is completed - win or lose - the merc's backstory tag will switch to a "Divulged Shadow Site" tag which removes them from the running of coming up with another such storyline.
The Shadow Site Raid is semi-procgen. The target Faction is the Faction that the merc was previously involved with. The rewards, prompts and Dialog are hand-crafted, but the Map is random.
The Objectives in the raid are five powerful items, selected from a loot pool unique to the Shadow Site Raid for that specific Faction. The Power Level of the special loot is Team PL +2 or +3. This may include unique Blueprints, unique Items, unique Weapons, etc. depending on the Faction.
This Storyline can trigger on multiple mercs, but only once on any specific merc. There are two ways a merc can trigger this: either because it is specifically mentioned as an option when you recruit them from the Underworld Hub, or because they have a tag such as "hates" for a faction. For specific options, any number of mercs may trigger it; for general tag triggers, there is a limit of three per playthrough. With updates this number is expected to expand.
Currently (November 2025) the following mercs have this background option; if they do not start with the tag, they can get it later due because of tags:
- Black Soup'd Hacker (against undetermined corp)
- Ex-Jupiter Bodyguard (against Jupiter) (this option is mutually exclusive with Deltaware Activation)
- Revenge Rekindled (against Brave Star) (this option is mutually exclusive with Deltaware Activation)
- Street Smart Climber (against Rook)
- Under Shadow of Fame (against WB) (this option is mutually exclusive with Deltaware Activation)
The following mercs are known to allow triggering it because of the exact tags Faction Traitor, Faction Exiled, Wanted by Faction, Faction Deserter:
- Battletank: the Sixth (against Rook)
- Emille (against Matsumoto)
- Escaped Experiment (against Brave Star)
- Molly (against WB)
- Sören (against McKellen)
- Unknown Bio-Weapon (against WB)
The following mercs may also trigger this due to tags but this is not confirmed:
- Assessed: Total Loss (against Matsumoto)
- Bondai (against Jupiter)
- Counter-Intel Turned Warden (against McKellen)
- Cult of the Final Form (against Arrowhead)
- Fireteam: Shadow Wolf (against UltraTek)
- Remi (against Rook)