Kabonesa Wu jacked in, laser-bright strings pulling her back into the brilliant world of Netspace. Armed with nothing but a delicate Mayfly installed on a rapidly overheating drive, she stared down the ice before her. A brilliant red sun, its heat threatening to sear away her nerves - if only she got closer.

"Kakugo," she said. "We meet again! What's up my guy?"

The sun did not reply.

"You know, you did a real number on me last time we met," Wu continued. "I was so out of it I forgot about my AR therapy appointment. Do you know how much that sucked? Therapy is supposed to help me cope with asshats like you!" She grinned, raising an eyebrow.

When the smoldering ball of code-born flame still did not respond, Wu shrugged. Purple clouds swirled around her, denying egress. Kakugo had the power to stop her run if she opted not to use Mayfly. Even if she did use it, she was still getting burned.

But something else stalked the net, its gnarled roots emerging from the fog like shark fins. Something big. Dangerous.

Hungry.

Wu released Mayfly. The program crackled to life, an AI born to die, burning bright and short as it shed erratic light into the purple fog.

It illuminated the way forward, and in doing so, revealed the monster hiding in the dark.

"I figure," Wu said, smirking, "This'll make us even. Okay?"

The roots sprung forth, twisting around the burning star. Their sheer volume overwhelmed the ICE, crushing and consuming the code behind it. Kabonesa stood back and watched, eyes bright.

"So long Kakugo! See you never!" She skipped forward, past the tangle of sentient code. She clapped one of the tendrils as though it were her best bro.

"And I owe you one. Actually, here, take this for your trouble. Who's my favorite destruction-hungry AI?"

She grabbed Mayfly out of the air and tossed it into the writhing mass, where it too was consumed. Kabonesa flew into the now unprotected R&D server, grinning like a madwoman as she uncovered her prize.

An Explanation

I have this headcannon that Wu and Apex are buddies. I think it came from the Harbinger + Spec Work + Aesop's combo, as well as the parallels between Apex always wanting to trash its own installed cards and Wu purposely trashing programs to prevent them from being removed. To that end, I wanted to play around with adding more Apex cards into a Wu deck.

So:

We have economy in the aforementioned Harbinger combo, as well as in Flameout and all the regular Events. Reaver is just good with Mayfly and Aesops.

Our only breakers are Engolo and Mayfly; we plan on mostly using Mayfly + Flameout and recycling with Simulchip and Harmony.

Hunting Grounds is a surprisingly good card (see: Tollbooth, IP Block, Turnpike, Funhouse, Oduduwa, Brainstorm, Data Ward, to name a few), and it acts as fuel for Aesop's and Prey.

Prey mostly sucks against strong ice, but against annoying stuff like Kakugo, pre-advancement token Akhet, Thimblerig, or even Border Control (forcing the corp to use it or lose it), it's nice, and it can act as a 0 cost threat against unrezzed ice. And yeah, you can feed it a lightly-used Mayfly and/or the Flameout it's hosted on for free trashable installed cards.

The win condition is Khusyuk, which allows you to pick from 3-5 cards depending on your board state. There's a lot of 1 and 2 cost installables in this deck. The win condition is also the intense early pressure from Mayfly + Flameout that can catch some corps by surprise.

In its final form this deck has a 50% win rate (12 games), which for the level of jank is not bad. I've had a lot of fun with this, I hope you do too! Big thanks to Jakuza and Acatalepsy for helping make it less terrible!