"Haa..."
Ji-hwan let out a long sigh.
The crude holographic map flickered over the old, beat-up smartphone tossed onto the passenger seat, pointing him toward the route ahead.
"A light gig, my ass..."
He gave a dry snort and yanked the wheel hard in the direction the hologram indicated.
Vroooom-!
The battered Thornton Colby tore through the barren sandstorm with a ferocious roar.
How many hours had he crossed the desolate Badlands? By the time he reached the destination and killed the engine, what came into view was a shabby gas station teetering on the border between the Badlands and the city.
It was currently occupied by a vicious pack of scavengers, but geographically speaking, it was the perfect choke point—an unavoidable route for freight and vehicles alike.
It was exactly the kind of juicy spot a capable fixer like Dakota Smith would drool over.
Then he remembered the offhand remark Dakota had made before he left.
"If the owner’s still alive, tell them I sent you. If they’re dead... well, nothing we can do about that."
Ji-hwan’s fingers brushed the buckle of his cold leather bulletproof vest as a sneer rose in his chest.
'So in the end... she wants me to wipe out the gang that moved in there?'
When he got out of the car carefully, the sun was already sinking low, scattering the Badlands’ blood-red sunset across the sky.
Perfect timing. If he waited a little longer, the area would be swallowed by complete darkness, and the best tactic would be to strike at night, when their vision was limited.
Charging straight into a gang den full of guns with nothing but a meat body and no implants, like some idiot playing a game, was the fastest way to become bullet-riddled pie filling.
'Let’s wait until it’s fully dark.'
Keeping his footsteps silent, Ji-hwan moved cautiously and hid behind a large rock that gave him a clear view of the entire gas station.
He pressed the old binoculars he’d taken from the duffel bag to his eyes and began carefully studying the guard layout and the building structure.
But as he took in the gas station’s shape through the lenses, Ji-hwan’s brow slowly furrowed.
'Yeah... this place looks insanely familiar.'
From the odd placement of the rusted fuel pumps, to the shabby repair shop attached in back, to the emergency metal stairs leading up to the roof—everything looked eerily identical to a location from a game he had once wandered through hundreds of times in his room.
But there was one crucial difference.
In the 2077 setting he knew from the game, this place had been a complete ruin, with the pillars collapsed and only the bare skeleton left standing. But here, in 2067, ten years earlier, traces of a functioning facility still remained relatively intact, right up until the scavengers took over.
Ji-hwan’s grip tightened around the binoculars.
'Huh? Wait... why did this gas station turn into ruins in the game again?'
He frowned at the station, trying to pull the memory into focus, but the scene was just familiar enough to tease at the edge of recall. It had only been one of those side quests he’d breezed past in the game, so the details wouldn’t come.
By then, the sun had fully set, and the darkness he’d been waiting for finally arrived.
Their security was so sloppy it was practically nonexistent. Every camera around the place was broken, and the guards were doing nothing but chatting instead of watching their posts.
'Two guards at the front, the rest rotating in two-hour shifts. That means... twenty of them?'
"Damn it... I heard this was supposed to be easy..."
After quickly assessing the situation, Ji-hwan thought back to the days he’d been dragged through military service in Korea against his will. Using the darkness as his road, he moved swiftly and silently toward the guards.
The two men at the front had no idea he was approaching. Since nobody ever came to this godforsaken place anyway, they were only half-assing their watch.
"Damn, it’s freezing to death. Why the hell does it get this cold at night out here?"
"Hngh... no clue... thought winter was already over..."
One of them grumbled as he adjusted the rifle slung over his shoulder.
He remembered the raid they’d carried out here not long ago. He didn’t know what their leader was plotting, but standing guard all night in some backwater dump like this was miserable. Still, suggesting anything about it would be the same as begging to be killed, so he just shoved a cigarette into his mouth, lit it with irritation, and stared blankly into the dark.
And then it happened.
Zzzzt-.
The moment the gas station’s old neon sign flickered, he saw the darkness in the blind spot beyond the light seem to twitch.
At the same time, something brushed past his ear with a faint whispering sound.
"...Huh?"
The guard narrowed his eyes and stared into the dark, not realizing what had just passed by his ear.
His cheap Kiroshi eye implant kicked into low-light mode, crackling with noise, but no biological response appeared on the display.
'A coyote?'
No. There was no way an animal would be out here in this polluted wasteland. Trash blown by the wind? There wasn’t even a breeze. Then what—
"Hey, did something just move over th—?"
He was just about to call out to his partner when no answer came from behind him. A chill ran down his spine, and he turned around.
"H-Huh?!"
"Grrrkh......"
What he saw was his partner’s corpse, head bowed forward with a dagger embedded in his skull.
His comrade had died instantly without even managing a scream. The strike that pierced the brain exactly was proof in the field of Ji-hwan’s bizarre throwing talent, the same talent even Scorpion had once clicked his tongue over back at the Aldecaldos camp.
"Y-you fucking—!"
The shocked guard reflexively raised the Copperhead rifle on his shoulder and was just about to pull the trigger.
Swish-!
Even in the dark, Ji-hwan’s shadow surged straight into the guard’s face.
The movements he’d forged by breaking his own bones and tearing his own muscles apart in the scrapyard were so fast that a cheap lower-tier merc’s artificial eyes couldn’t even track the path.
"Ghk...!"
Before the guard could even open his mouth, Ji-hwan’s huge, rough hand clamped perfectly over his nose and mouth.
At the same time, Ji-hwan’s other hand seized the back of his neck and twisted it with merciless force.
Crack-!
With the sickening snap of a crushed cervical spine, the guard’s eyes rolled white and his body went limp.
Ji-hwan lowered the dead man to the ground without a sound, then carefully pulled the dagger out of the first corpse’s head and wiped the blood off on his pants.
'Two down. Eighteen left.'
Curled low in the dark, Ji-hwan glared at the gas station building with cold, settled eyes.
This was no longer the game world where he could safely sit in his room, hammering keys and clearing quests.
These guys were scavengers—human butchers who dismantled the living without anesthesia and sold off their implants and organs.
If he made even one mistake and got spotted, and eighteen muzzles opened up on him at once, then no matter how insane his regeneration was, he’d be turned into a honeycomb and reduced to a horrifying meat pie.
Ji-hwan tightened the buckles on the old leather bulletproof vest Panam had thrown him, then quietly stood up. After wiping the cold sweat from his forehead and dragging the corpses into a corner, he found himself thinking that he was no longer the same person he had been before—back when he’d hesitated to kill anyone. But he shook the thought away, then took the grenade and smoke grenade from the fallen guard’s body.
And the moment he reached for the rifle lying beside it, he suddenly felt a premonition, as if something was about to punch straight through his head. Without hesitation, he rolled sideways from the posture of grabbing the gun, and with a sharp bang, something whizzed past exactly where his head had been, tearing the hell out of his earlobe.
"Shit... the roof!"
He’d been careless. It was so obvious that he was angry at himself for not thinking of it.
'Damn it. Why the hell didn’t I think there’d be someone on the roof?'
He had only just finished cursing himself when he looked up toward where the bullet had come from. A sniper with a hood over his head and mechanical eyes—both of them apparently fitted with telescopic implants—was staring down at him, clicking his tongue as he reloaded. And the sniper’s shot seemed to act like an alarm, because movement immediately erupted inside the gas station as well.
"Who the fuck is it?!"
"Who else, idiot? It’s an enemy!"
"Grab your guns!"
With those curses flying around, the situation around Ji-hwan changed in an instant. He cursed himself for his shallow assumption that he’d checked everything carefully enough, but there was no time for regret. The sniper had finished reloading, and the figures inside the station were starting to emerge from the entrance. As the crisis closed in, Ji-hwan’s brain went colder even as his body burned hotter. In the same instant, he slammed a smoke grenade to the ground at his feet and hurled the dagger in his hand toward the fire extinguisher mounted at the gas station entrance.
Bang-! Fshhhhh---!!!
"What the hell is this?!"
"Shit! I can’t see!"
"Cough... which bastard—!"
"Damn it!"
Ignoring the curses from the men inside the station, Ji-hwan decided to deal with the sniper on the roof first.
'The stairs are out. There’s definitely a trap like a mine waiting there. Then...'
Suddenly, he remembered something Amy and Rachel, the mother and daughter, and the rest of the family had told him not long ago.
How, at the Raffen Shiv detention camp, when he’d blocked an armored vehicle with his bare body, a strange red vapor had poured out of him every time his shattered flesh was stitched back together.
'Come to think of it... I did feel something back then too...'
He vividly remembered the bizarre force that had boiled up from inside him when he’d forced back the armored vehicle during that earlier attack.
Even through the awful pain of bones breaking and muscles tearing, it had been that explosive, alien energy that his body, pushed to the edge, had unleashed by lifting its own limiter and flooding his whole frame.
Thinking of that, Ji-hwan decided without another second of hesitation to deliberately draw out that power and use it right now.
He lowered his body and, before the thick smoke could clear, bent his knees deeply in place, taking a stance that looked ready to launch him straight upward.
One second, one heartbeat—the moment that split the blood-red line between life and death. Once the smoke cleared, his whole body would be shredded by rifle fire from every direction, but Ji-hwan trusted the hardened flesh he’d pushed to its limit.
As he widened his eyes and concentrated, a faint red vapor began to rise from every pore in his body.
Instead of wasting power across his whole frame, Ji-hwan compressed that overwhelming output only into the thighs, calves, and lower back needed for a vertical leap, tightening them like a coiled spring.
It was a miracle of [partial reinforcement], an extreme-efficiency survival instinct forged by a living body under absolute pressure.
And the moment the expanded muscle fibers were about to scream, Ji-hwan detonated that compressed force all at once for his own purpose.
Kwaang-!!
With a brutal blast that hammered his eardrums, Ji-hwan kicked off the ground. The hard concrete beneath his feet couldn’t withstand the catastrophic load; it split like a spiderweb and caved in deeply.
Using that horrifying recoil as propulsion, Ji-hwan’s massive body shot straight up like a missile, tearing through the choking white smoke.
The airborne launch was so fast and violent it shocked even him. In the instant he burst above the roof, Ji-hwan’s cold, settled gaze met the mechanical eyes of the sniper, who was aiming his rifle through the smoke to find the intruder.
Before the sniper’s telescopic pupils could even contract in shock at the giant shadow that had suddenly erupted from nowhere, Ji-hwan, still frozen in mid-leap, reached into his coat without hesitation and wrapped his fingers around the cold hilt of the dagger.
The sniper on the roof, finding him, snapped the sniper rifle up reflexively and aimed at Ji-hwan hanging in the air before he could even process the surprise.
Bang-!
The moment the sniper pulled the trigger, the dagger in Ji-hwan’s hand also left his fingertips and sliced through the air with lethal speed.
Kwojik-!
The bullet punched through the sniper rifle and tore brutally through Ji-hwan’s shoulder.
But at the same time, the dagger Ji-hwan had thrown traced a perfect line and buried itself deep in the center of the sniper’s forehead.
The impact of the shoulder wound sent Ji-hwan’s massive body dropping straight down.
Even as he surrendered himself to gravity and fell toward the ground, he saw with his own eyes the sniper’s end—the man toppling backward off the roof with the knife buried in his forehead.
"Kgh...!"
Ji-hwan landed on the ground with a heavy thud and let out a short groan.
He’d tried to roll and disperse the impact, but he wasn’t in perfect shape.
He only had a few seconds left before the smoke cleared. In that split second, he quickly checked his body.
From the shoulder wound, where the sniper’s last desperate shot had punched through, dark red blood was pouring out.
And because of the reckless leap, one of his thighs had apparently twisted out of balance; from inside it came a grotesque grinding sound, followed by the noise of muscle fibers tearing apart.
Ssssss-.
Faint red vapor rose between the gunshot wound and the torn thigh, bringing with it a searing pain as his flesh stubbornly stitched itself back together.
Ji-hwan confirmed that his body was still holding together despite the fatal-looking injuries, clenched his teeth, and quickly snatched up the rifle from the guard lying at his feet before the smoke cleared.
Then he opened fire without hesitation into the front of the gas station, where the powder from the extinguisher and the smoke still hung thick, toward the gangsters flailing in confusion inside.
Tatatatang-! Tatang! Tatatatang-!!
Merciless bursts poured into the choking smoke like rain.
"Aaaagh!"
"Fuck, augh!"
Screams of pain and curses spewing blood burst out one after another from inside the gas station.
Sensing that the blind bullets he was firing through the blocked vision were ripping into their torsos without mercy, Ji-hwan emptied every round he had in the rifle.
The instant he spat out the last bullet in the magazine.
Click- click-.
A cold metallic sound rang out, signaling the chamber was empty.
With that sound, the gray smoke and extinguisher powder covering the battlefield finally began to disperse, and visibility slowly returned.
In the open lot in front of the gas station, the groans of those cut down by his blind fire rolled across the dirt as five or six gang members who had somehow survived cautiously emerged through the choking air.
Seeing that the rifle in Ji-hwan’s hand was empty, they twisted their mouths into grins and began striding toward him with swagger.
"Out of ammo, huh? Huh? Drop the gun and put your hands on your head right now!"
"Heh... you bastard. We’re not gonna let you die easy."
With crude cybernetic arms and vision-boosting lenses, the men closed in, radiating murderous intent.
But even in this hopeless situation with his weapon spent, Ji-hwan didn’t panic in the slightest. He just sneered back at them.
"The one who’s not gonna let you die easy is me."
With that cold murmur, Ji-hwan’s hand flashed at his waist like lightning.
Swish-!
He flung the remaining training knives into the air with vicious force.
The cold blades, launched like bolts of lightning from the snap of his wrist, buried themselves without the slightest error into the foreheads and throats of the three gangsters leading the charge.
"Ghk...!"
Without even a single scream, all three collapsed at once, fountains of blood spraying from their bodies.
"T-this is insane...! Knives! Take cover!"
At the horrifying sight of their three comrades dying in an instant before their eyes, the remaining men panicked and threw themselves behind wrecked cars and chunks of concrete.
Tatatatang-! Bang! Kwaaang-!
Terrified, they began spraying rifle fire wildly from behind cover toward Ji-hwan’s position.
Bullets rained down from every direction, smashing the concrete floor and old pillars and kicking up clouds of dust.
"Tch."
Ji-hwan clicked his tongue and rolled quickly to hide behind the solid wall at the corner of the gas station building.
Cornered by the crossfire, he steadied his rough breathing and quickly scanned his surroundings.
Red vapor still rose faintly from the gunshot wound in his shoulder and the torn thigh, stubbornly stitching the injuries back together, but the distance was too great to break through the hail of bullets and take them down barehanded right now.
'My remaining weapon... huh?'
His hand groped at his jacket as he wondered if he should just pick up a rock from the ground, and his fingers caught on one heavy, cold piece of metal.
It was the fragmentation grenade he’d taken from the dead guard at the front gate.
As he toyed with the grenade’s cold surface, Ji-hwan’s gaze drifted, almost absentmindedly, to the massive fuel storage tank sitting just behind the gangsters’ cover.
It was covered in rusted steel plating, but in his mind he could already picture the huge volume of flammable fuel sloshing inside it.
With a thick finger hooked around the grenade pin, Ji-hwan wiped the sweat running down his chin and fell into a short, hard calculation.
'...Should I?'
It was a dangerous gamble. One wrong move, and before he could wipe out the enemy, he might be swallowed by a giant fireball himself and leave nothing behind but bone ash.
Tatatatang-! Tatang!
As Ji-hwan stayed hidden in the corner, thinking and giving no response, the gunfire gradually died down.
Realizing he no longer had any means to fight back, the men stopped shooting and started stepping out from cover again, their faces greedy and vicious once more.
"Heh heh... little rat. Out of knives already?"
"Go tear him apart alive!"
As the killing intent rolled toward him, Ji-hwan suddenly raised both hands high in the air in a gesture of surrender.
At that unexpected show of weakness, the men flinched and stopped for a moment.
But once they confirmed that Ji-hwan really wasn’t holding any weapon, they grinned smugly and closed the distance again.
One particularly huge brute among them strode right up to Ji-hwan’s face and let out a greasy sneer.
Ji-hwan faced that disgusting mug with both hands still raised and spat out coldly, "What the hell are you staring at, you piece of shit?"
Before the words had even finished, the fist Ji-hwan had been holding up like a surrender flag slammed into the brute’s jaw like a thunderbolt.
Pwooom-!
One blow. One merciless strike that shook the skull, and the massive gangster rolled his eyes white and passed out cold.
Ji-hwan grabbed the back of the collapsing man’s neck and shoved him up as a meat shield in front of himself.
The others seeing that burst out laughing in disbelief.
"You stupid bastard! You think one meat shield’s gonna block our bullets?"
The moment they raised their rifle sights again, Ji-hwan’s other hand pulled out the heavy piece of metal he’d been holding in his jacket.
"Y-you crazy bastard!"
Their eyes sharpened with caution when they recognized the fragmentation grenade in Ji-hwan’s hand.
But it was only one grenade. Even if he threw it from that far away, they could just dodge it; they didn’t think it would be enough to turn the situation around.
Then, the instant their eyes landed on where Ji-hwan’s gaze had gone—right beside them, where the giant fuel storage tanker loomed—every last face went gray.
"N-no way..."
"Hey, you crazy bastard! If that blows, you’ll die too!!"
"W-wait, let’s talk this out!!!"
Ji-hwan smiled faintly at the men frantically waving their hands in terror and murmured, "Go fuck yourselves."
His finger flicked the safety pin from the grenade at his waist with a sharp, cheerful ting.
With a cold metallic ring, the grenade left Ji-hwan’s fingertips.
Their desperate eyes followed its parabolic arc.
Ji-hwan hadn’t thrown it at the gangsters. He’d thrown it at the massive fuel tank sitting right beside them, packed full of highly flammable fuel.
"W-wha...?"
"Run!!"
"Let’s go together, you bastards."
With Ji-hwan’s dry farewell and a flash of white teeth, a catastrophic explosion that tore at the eardrums slammed into the Badlands night sky.
Kwaaaang---!!!!
Scarlet flames surged upward like a colossal tidal wave, swallowing the screaming gangsters and the entire gas station in an instant.
Fwoooosh
How much time passed after that? The place the firestorm had swept through was nothing short of hell itself.
At the site of the blast, flames still writhed and announced their presence, and around them lay the charred corpses of gangsters and piles of collapsed concrete debris.
Fortunately, the gas station building itself seemed to have been built sturdily enough that the frame hadn’t collapsed, but the exterior was burned black as charcoal and smoke still hung thick inside from the fire that had spread.
And at the center of that destruction, Ji-hwan woke up and roughly shoved aside the giant corpse covering him before pushing himself upright.
But he was far from normal too. His entire body was blackened by fire, and beneath that, fresh flesh was stubbornly rising as his body forced itself to recover.
He was used to pain that shattered bones and tore open organs, but the searing agony of having his whole body burned seemed to be something he still couldn’t endure easily. With a deep scowl, he clenched his teeth and waited for the recovery to finish.
The first thing that stabbed into his lungs the moment he opened his eyes was the disgusting stench of meat burning.
Of course, the source wasn’t just the corpses strewn around him; the reek was also rising from his own body, which had been roasted nearly crisp. Ji-hwan pushed the burned corpse aside and silently looked himself over.
"Hah, seriously..."
The state he saw when he sat up and checked himself was a complete mess.
The clothes he’d been wearing had already burned into shapeless rags long ago, and only the bulletproof vest and pants were barely holding together.
His exposed forearms and skin were charred black like charcoal and cracked dry.
But Ji-hwan wasn’t surprised or panicked. He had already gone through this countless times; it was just another thing he’d grown used to through the pain of having bones reduced to powder and organs ruptured.
Crk-- crack-
Then came the grotesque snapping sounds of bones and flesh twisting back into place under force, and from beneath the blackened skin, bright red new flesh began to sprout at a frightening speed.
It was like an insect shedding an old shell, or a zombie refusing death.
As his body repaired the cells it had destroyed itself, a thick red vapor poured out and wrapped around his massive frame.
Ssssss-!
As his body repaired the cells it had destroyed itself, that same dense red vapor poured out and wrapped around his massive frame.
"Grrr..."
A suppressed groan slipped through his clenched teeth.
He’d thought he’d built up some resistance to the pain of broken bones and torn organs, but the searing agony of blackened flesh being ripped open and forced back together was still a vile, unbearable thing.
"Haa... I really almost died there."
A long, heavy sigh escaped him along with the smoke.
This was a crisis that the phrase "that was close" didn’t even begin to cover.
No matter how monstrous his regenerative ability was, there was no way he could have survived the explosive heat that had nearly vaporized his bones and flesh in an instant.
A body scattered into black ash doesn’t come back. That wouldn’t be [regeneration]—that would be the domain of God, [resurrection].
He had wondered, in the back of his mind, how far this twisted body he’d gained after falling into Night City’s gutter could really go, but the one thing he couldn’t do was use his own life to test that horrifying limit.
That brief instant between flicking the grenade pin and the firestorm swallowing him whole—right before the explosion consumed his body, Ji-hwan had moved before his thoughts did.
The big bastard who’d stood there sneering right in front of him. Ji-hwan had crushed the man’s jaw, knocked him out, then dragged the collapsing body directly in front of himself and used him as a shield.
From the moment the firestorm hit, that man was no longer human.
He was just the one piece of cover keeping Ji-hwan alive, the one solid lifeline between him and death. That instinctive decision to hoist up the brute’s huge body and use it to block the flames and shrapnel had drawn the line between life and death perfectly.
Ji-hwan looked down at the blackened lump of charcoal that had saved his life and now was so ruined it was impossible to tell what it had once been, and clicked his tongue bitterly.
He’d been lucky. Really, disgustingly lucky.
He gave the corpse-like meat shield that had saved his life and now was beyond recognition a short, silent thank-you.
'Thanks. You saved my life.'
His mouth tasted bitter. He staggered through the burning wreckage and barely managed to get back on his feet.
His body had recovered safely thanks to its grotesque regeneration, but the mental exhaustion carved into his brain by that brush with death couldn’t be wiped away so easily.
The sensation of bones being forcibly reset and fresh flesh growing back was a sticky, unpleasant discomfort that never got any easier, no matter how many times he experienced it.
"Ah... come to think of it."
As the faint crackling of flesh still regenerating under his skin echoed in his ears, a memory suddenly flashed through Ji-hwan’s mind.
It was the last warning Dakota Smith had tossed off casually before ending the call.
[And if the client’s alive, bring them back.]
"Bring them back if they’re alive...?"
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