Screeech.
At the moment he checked the contents of the bag, Ji-hwan’s eyes flew wide open.
"Ha... this is..."
What was inside wasn’t just payment.
The item Ji-hwan pulled out of the bag as if under a spell was a jacket, old but reinforced with tough leather panels.
With its high collar wrapped around the neck, the rough pattern stitched across the back, and the practical bulletproof material, it was a leather jacket that looked uncannily similar to the iconic outfit worn by the protagonist of that cyberpunk world he used to enjoy in his room back in the day.
For him, with his clothes burned to ash and his body left looking like little more than rags after the firestorm, it was an unexpected gift from the fixer along with the fee. Or maybe a gesture of consideration.
Ji-hwan roughly stripped off his blood-caked shirt and slipped on the heavy leather jacket.
The rough, thick fabric and the bulletproof padding on the lining wrapped snugly around his scarred back and broad shoulders.
It fit his frame so perfectly it was almost as if it had been made for him from the start, and Ji-hwan felt a deep, private satisfaction in the mirrorless room.
Soon after, he pulled out the payment for this gig from the bottom of the bag: a [credit chip].
It was a bearer chip that even a [No-Chrome] body like his, without a neural interface socket, could use like cash at any offline terminal.
Seeing how carefully everything had been handled, Ji-hwan sat on the edge of the bed and let out a quiet snort.
"Come to think of it... right. I was so damn busy I didn’t even have time to think."
Turning the credit chip over in his hand, Ji-hwan thought back to the fixer Dakota Smith, whom he had met inside the repair shop bunker just a little while ago.
She wore a friendly smile on the surface, but her sharp eyes could read a person’s weakness and situation in an instant. She definitely had the skill of a big-time fixer who had the East Badlands’ information network and interests locked down tight.
What should he do from here? Now that he had left the Aldecaldos camp and stepped alone into the mud of Night City, he had no solid backing or base to protect him.
'For now, it’s better to work under her.'
After a short bout of thinking, Ji-hwan reached a conclusion.
For the time being, he would stay in the East Badlands and take on as many gigs as Dakota threw his way as he could handle.
If he could prove his skills as a merc and build up a reputation in this barren wasteland, it would surely become the best stepping stone for his growth before entering the giant den of monsters called Night City.
Once his basic plan was sorted out in his head, the exhaustion that had been suppressed by adrenaline finally came crashing down like a tidal wave.
His body and mind had already reached their limit after that grotesque experience of being swept up in an explosion, burned to the bone, and then regenerating from it.
"Haa..."
Ji-hwan let out a heavy sigh and rubbed the back of his stiff neck.
The acrid stench of gunpowder, blood, and greasy oil suddenly felt even more oppressive.
"Guess I should wash up."
He muttered to himself with a tired air and dragged his heavy body straight into the shabby shower room attached to the corner of the room.
The lukewarm water spraying from the rusted showerhead ran over his wounded body, washing the dried blood and Badlands dust down the drain.
Then, the next morning, with the warm sunlight of dawn faintly illuminating the shabby room, Ji-hwan shook off the intense fatigue from the day before and enjoyed a rare lazy morning on the old folding bed.
Ding-ding-ding.
At that moment, a bright alarm rang from the old device he had tossed by the head of the bed.
It was the old communications unit Saul Bright had handed him, saying he’d need it if he was going to make it in Night City. A thick metal case of a relic from another era.
The tacky electronic chime pouring out through the crude speaker was the default notification sound of an old smartphone, one that Ji-hwan had known all too well back when he had been living as an ordinary office worker in South Korea not so long ago.
Hearing the sound of home in this alien dystopia, Ji-hwan felt something strange and connected the call in a voice rough with sleep.
"Hello..."
[You sound pretty good. Then you can take the next gig right away, too.]
Across the comm line came Dakota Smith’s voice, relaxed and tinged with a smile.
"Hm?"
Ji-hwan snapped his eyes open and straightened up from his slouched posture.
The sleepiness was already long gone. Along with a brief greeting, the text of the new gig she had sent over her private network blinked onto the shabby display.
Ji-hwan got up and picked up the old leather jacket Dakota had included with the payment the day before.
Feeling the rough texture of the bulletproof-padded fabric, he slipped the jacket on and lightly rubbed the back of his neck before heading outside.
As he stepped into the repair shop yard, where the stench of exhaust and the roar of machinery hit him all at once, a familiar vehicle parked off in the distance came into view.
It was the old, rough Thornton Colby that Mitch had given him when he left the Aldecaldos camp.
But around the vehicle, three cheap street punks were hanging around suspiciously.
"Yo, see anything worth money on this junk heap?"
"Let’s strip it and sell it for scrap. Even if we just take the alloy off the door, we’ll make lunch money."
Just as one of them pulled a big wrench from his waist and reached out to grab the Colby’s bodywork roughly—
Kwaang!
"Get lost."
Ji-hwan’s silent kick slammed into the side of the wrench-wielding punk with no mercy.
"Gah! Who the hell—!"
The bastard who had been sent tumbling across the ground spat dust, then yanked a crude knife from his pocket in a rage.
The other two punks also moved to surround Ji-hwan with ugly expressions.
But Ji-hwan didn’t draw the pistol at his waist, and he didn’t reach for a knife.
He simply stood there, staring down at the knife-wielding punk with cold, dead eyes.
There was only silence. But under that crushing pressure, the punk’s face went pale as ash in an instant.
Instinct told him the man in front of him was not someone he could afford to touch.
"Tch..."
The hand gripping the knife trembled slightly, and then he swallowed hard and slowly backed away.
With a sour, terrified look, he grabbed the sleeves of the two companions beside him and yanked them away in a hurry. The three of them ran off without looking back.
"...Idiots."
Watching them flee in a panic, Ji-hwan let out a short sigh. It was enough that he hadn’t had to spill blood first thing in the morning. He opened the driver’s door of the old Thornton Colby and climbed in.
Vroooom—!
As he turned the ignition key, the crude old engine roared to life and the vehicle shuddered.
Pressing the accelerator and easing out of the repair yard, Ji-hwan checked the new gig file Dakota had just sent him over the comm.
The contents were serious.
One of the crews Dakota managed had gone out to a huge junkyard on the outskirts of the East Badlands on a job, or a recovery run, and had lost comms for days.
The dispatched group had been a team of ten. But now seven of their biomonitors were completely dead, and only three faint signals were still being picked up. It was a hopeless situation.
Attached beneath the file was a video, sent before one of the crew members died.
Ji-hwan played it with one hand on the wheel.
Aaaagh!
The small screen was a hellscape of blood and gore.
Something was brutally hunting the survivors, and the severed bodies of their comrades were scattered through the air in horrific pieces.
The enemy’s movements were so bizarre and fast that the camera could only catch a faint, chilling blur.
Then, with the cameraman’s final scream, the video cut out in a burst of crackling noise.
"Haa..."
Ji-hwan frowned deeply and froze the blurry frame from just before the feed died.
Zooming in and examining the pixels, his expression turned cold.
The silhouette of the person slaughtering the others in the blur was a woman from the Maelstrom gang, wrapped in grotesque mechanical gear and leather.
What’s more, from both her arms extended the vicious, mantis-like [Mantis Blades], and above all, that absurd movement speed was the unmistakable effect of a deadly military-grade implant he had seen countless times through a monitor back in his room.
"[Sandevistan]... damn it..."
A rough curse leaked from between Ji-hwan’s lips.
He had fallen to the bottom of the Night City Badlands and crossed more than a few lines of death, so he thought he had built up some tolerance. But he had never once faced a [Sandevistan] user in real combat.
Could he keep up with that kind of speed? Ji-hwan swallowed hard after a brief hesitation.
But the hesitation didn’t last long.
Once he had set foot in this city, it was a wall he would have to smash into sooner or later.
"Yeah. Let’s do this."
Ji-hwan’s eyes went cold as he slammed the accelerator down. The old Thornton Colby let out a rough howl and tore fiercely through the sandstorm.
The junkyard where the gig was taking place wasn’t far from where he was now.
Crossing the harsh Badlands, by the time it was 12:00 p.m. and the blazing noon sun was hammering down on the wasteland, Ji-hwan quietly cut the engine atop a high sand dune that gave him a clear view of the destination.
After getting out of the car, Ji-hwan fastened his old leather jacket and pulled a pair of old binoculars from his duffel bag. Pressing the cold lenses to his eyes, he began to scan the giant junkyard, the gig site far away beyond the blowing sand.
The first thing that caught his eye was a huge cargo container sitting in the middle of the junkyard.
The thick steel entrance, which should have been sealed shut, had been grotesquely torn open as if someone had hacked at it with a high-heat cutter.
And across the gap and the dirt around it, dark red bloodstains still wet enough to glisten were scattered everywhere, as if to testify to the massacre that had taken place there.
Ji-hwan narrowed his eyes and increased the binoculars’ magnification, carefully scanning even the blind spots around the area.
But not only were the three survivors nowhere to be seen, the grotesque Maelstrom woman who had decorated the video with slaughter was nowhere in sight either.
A bizarre silence, like a cemetery with the rats driven out. The cold unease of an unseen enemy brushed down Ji-hwan’s spine.
'Still... why is Maelstrom in a place like this?'
Ji-hwan suddenly had a deep suspicion. Maelstrom, that gang of chrome addicts obsessed with replacing their bodies with machinery, usually set up bases in the tucked-away industrial zones or clinic districts of Night City.
He couldn’t think of any reason they’d come all the way out to this dusty old junkyard on the outskirts of the Badlands, bringing along a vicious [Sandevistan] user and a [Mantis Blades] user to boot.
This didn’t add up as a simple raid.
'This isn’t just about scrap collection. Either they’re after something else, or someone set the board up on purpose from behind the scenes.'
Finishing his brief deduction, Ji-hwan packed the binoculars away and shoved them into his bag.
Thinking on top of the dune wasn’t going to hand him the answer right away.
And then the point of view shifted deep inside the junkyard, between towering piles of scrap wrapped in thick shadows.
The three survivors, Dakota’s subordinates and the only ones who had barely lived through the horrific hunt, were crammed into a narrow gap and shaking like leaves.
Clank. Clank.
From somewhere nearby, the sound of heavy mechanical legs stepping across rusted steel plates slapped unpleasantly at their ears.
The survivors clamped their hands over their mouths with pale faces and held their breath as hard as they could, desperate not to let even the slightest sound escape.
When the clanging footsteps finally drifted farther away, the breath they had been holding burst out in tiny, suppressed gasps.
"Haa... let’s go."
One of them whispered in a trembling voice.
"Yeah. We need to get out of this damn place fast."
"Damn it... Derek, that crazy bastard... I told him that place should never have been opened..."
With a sigh full of resentment, they checked their surroundings, carefully slipped out from the scrap pile, and began moving low to the ground.
But then, suddenly, they felt a faint presence ahead of the direction they were heading.
Ssshhk.
At that tiny scraping sound, all three hearts dropped at once.
They stopped breathing again and froze in place.
'No way... we got found?'
'Shit... is this where we die?'
When they opened their eyes after bracing for the worst, the person in front of them was nothing like what they had expected.
It wasn’t the grotesque Maelstrom ganger. It was a stranger with East Asian features.
A man wearing an old leather jacket, yet with the silhouette of solid muscle clearly visible beneath it.
Ji-hwan.
He quietly lifted a finger to his lips and signaled for them to be silent.
One of the survivors, about to let out a relieved breath now that they were alive, had his mouth covered in a flash by Ji-hwan’s large hand, silent as a shadow.
Then Ji-hwan jerked his chin, telling them to look up above their heads.
The moment the survivors cautiously raised their heads and looked up at the old crane’s steel framework in the ceiling, they nearly screamed.
There, the Maelstrom woman who had been butchering their comrades was hanging like a spider.
From the [Mantis Blades] extending grotesquely from both her arms, dark blood from their comrades was still dripping steadily down,
and she was twisting her unnaturally bent neck this way and that, searching every corner for the prey hiding below.
Ji-hwan made a firm gesture for the gasping survivors to follow him quietly.
They nodded desperately, faces blue with fear, and began stepping soundlessly, staying close behind Ji-hwan’s broad back.
Above their heads, while they kept their breathing pinned down, a creepy laugh rang out along with bizarre mechanical noises.
"Heeheehee... Mommy? Daddy...? Where are you hiding? Good kids don’t like hide-and-seek..."
The Maelstrom woman, crawling like a spider along the old steel frame of the crane overhead, dripped blood from the [Mantis Blades] on both arms and muttered grotesque nonsense like a child looking for her parents.
Her brain had been burned out by extreme chrome implantation, and [cyberpsychosis] had fully taken hold.
The group successfully slipped out of her field of view, just barely evading the deranged woman as she wandered around babbling creepy nonsense.
But there was no time to feel relieved. The path they had to cross was a miniature version of hell itself.
Bright red bloodstains covered the floor and walls, and chunks of flesh and organs from their comrades, butchered beyond recognition by something impossible to identify, lay strewn about with a nauseating metallic stench.
The survivors fought down the urge to vomit and followed only Ji-hwan’s footsteps, eyes half-closed.
Not long after, they reached the prefab lodging container set up deeper inside the junkyard, where the workers normally gathered in shifts to rest.
It was a space that had been partially soundproofed with thick panels for some measure of rest.
Clack.
When the heavy door shut and the blood-red scene outside was cut off, the three survivors finally lost the strength in their legs and collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath.
"Haa... haaah..."
Leaving them behind in their relief, Ji-hwan sharply watched the situation outside through the small gap in the lodging’s window.
It was obvious that, with the mobility of a madman using [Sandevistan], it wouldn’t take long to search this entire junkyard thoroughly.
"We’ll be found here soon enough, too."
Ji-hwan muttered coldly as he closed the old blinds.
Then he turned to the three people sitting on the floor and trembling, and asked in a low, heavy voice,
"What the hell happened?"
The three of them only exchanged looks and kept their mouths shut like they had honey stuffed in them.
It was a silence thick with guilt and fear, as if their own mistake was deeply tangled up in the source of this nightmare.
"It’s fine. Just tell me."
Ji-hwan continued calmly, brushing his knife at his waist.
"If I know the cause, I can figure out how to punch our way out of here."
Maybe his steady, solid attitude, with not even a hint of wavering in a life-or-death crisis, moved them a little. In the end, one of the group lowered his head heavily and let out a shallow, resigned sigh.
"Haa... fine. We’re all gonna die here anyway, so what’s the point of hiding it? This whole mess started because of that crazy bastard named Derek we were talking about earlier."
He roughly wiped his face with a bloodstained hand and rewound his memory to the moment the tragedy began.
"Actually..."
******
"Foreman! Over here! We found something buried deep in the corner of the East Junkyard, and the lock on it is no joke!"
At the frantic call, the subcontractors swarmed over to the spot. Half-buried under dust and scrap was a huge military-grade steel container.
Across its surface were the remains of a corporate logo someone had deliberately scrubbed off, along with an overwhelming multi-lock sealing system plastered all over it.
And in one corner of the container, a huge skull mark painted in blood-red, along with the chilling warning [Do Not Open Under Any Circumstances], stood out clearly.
It was a horrifying warning sign that looked like it had sealed hell itself inside.
But to the hillbilly Badlands workers, only the strong smell of [eddies] was hanging in the air.
"That’s just some corpo scare tactic to keep people from stealing top-secret gear! If we haul this one thing out properly, our whole team can live it up in a Night City penthouse! Bring the plasma cutter now and burn through the door!"
Not a trace of even the bare minimum of chivalry for survival or safety protocols could be found in foreman Derek’s mouth.
Cheap greed had completely paralyzed even the primal fear inspired by the red skull mark.
At the order, three or four workers piled on and began forcibly melting through the seal on the massive container with blue-white cutting flames.
Ssshhh— THUNK! KWAANG—!
At last, the thick steel door opened with a thunderous roar.
Then, along with a cloud of acrid smoke, a chill draft rushed out from inside. As the dust cleared and the dim beam of a flashlight illuminated the interior, there, in the middle of the pitch-black darkness and the broken remains of thick restraints, a gaunt woman was crouched with her knees pulled to her chest.
"What the hell? It’s a person, not some money-making gear..."
The moment foreman Derek took one step toward the container, his face full of disappointment and deep suspicion—
The workers, drunk on dreams of money, all had their breath stolen away.
It was the desperate warning the brain sends the body when an organism senses overwhelming killing intent.
The woman staring up at them had the corners of her mouth twisted up grotesquely, as if they were about to split all the way to her ears, and her unfocused red eyes were filled only with a terrible madness.
And what burst from between her torn lips was not human speech.
"Grrrrr... Kyaaaah-!!"
It was a scream that froze the bones, a hideous howl where the growl of a starving demon and the shriek of a broken chainsaw had been disgustingly mixed together.
At the same time as the scream, blue sparks burst violently from the vicious implant running along the woman’s spine and bare back.
The instant it seemed as though the darkness had been torn apart and her figure had vanished, Derek’s head shot up into the air, and blood sprayed like a fountain from the severed neck below.
"Aaaagh! It’s a monster!!"
After that, there was no time to run. The moment the sealed container opened, the place they had been standing in turned into a blood-red slaughterhouse.
Every time an invisible wind of blades swept through, the limbs of the coworkers standing at the container entrance were cut away like dead leaves in autumn.
Chunks of flesh and a nauseating stench of blood poured through the air like a storm, and only the three of them, lucky enough to be standing in the blind spot behind the container, scrambled madly across the floor and hid under a large cargo truck. For three full days, they had to hold their breath and listen to the monster outside chewing and swallowing the corpses of their comrades.
After pouring out the full story of those horrific three days, the man suddenly began shaking violently, as if the hellscape from back then had come vividly back to life in his head.
"Aaaah... aaah!!"
He was swallowed by severe PTSD and started screaming and howling out of his mind.
The scream that burst out inside the narrow, sealed lodging container was far too loud and far too dangerous.
"No, shit! We haven’t even gotten out of here yet—!"
Just as Ji-hwan was freaking out and moving to clamp a hand over the man’s mouth—
Thud-thud! THUD—!! KWAANG—!!
The vicious metallic sound of something trampling and tearing through the scrap pile slammed into their eardrums as it closed in at insane speed.
"...Damn it."
A brutal curse leaked from between Ji-hwan’s lips. Instinctively, he turned and shot a grim look out through the window.
And there, far off in the distance, a Maelstrom woman came tearing through the sandstorm at terrifying speed, leaving a blurry afterimage and blue sparks in her wake. Her grotesquely flashing red cybernetic eyes locked precisely onto Ji-hwan’s gaze in midair.
"We’re fucked...."
Being trapped in this narrow container against a madwoman running [Sandevistan] was nothing more than waiting to be carved up like a rat in a trap.
Leaving the trembling survivors behind, Ji-hwan kicked the lodging door open without hesitation and stepped outside.
At the same time, he tore off the old leather jacket Dakota had given him, one that fit his body surprisingly well, and flung it hard toward the survivors behind him.
"Run, you bastards!!"
As the jacket hit the floor and rolled, Ji-hwan shot a fierce glare at the man who had broken down, his eyes bloodshot, and added in a savage tone,
"You. If you make it out alive, you’re dead meat to me."
With that cold warning, Ji-hwan turned again and spread his broad back wide toward the grotesque woman rushing in with a blur behind her.
Then he shouted so loudly the junkyard itself seemed to shake.
"Over here! Catch me, you crazy bitch!!"
That provocative roar definitely hooked the target’s attention.
"Kyaaaahahah!!"
With a chilling shriek that sounded like a baby’s babble mixed with the screech of a chainsaw, the Maelstrom woman crossed her [Mantis Blades] in a grotesque motion and changed course toward Ji-hwan standing in the open yard instead of the hidden survivors.
Pwooom—!
With the sound of sand exploding through the air, Ji-hwan also burst forward, his thigh muscles detonating as he darted away, luring the Maelstrom woman toward a red blind spot.
Even while running, Ji-hwan pulled throwing daggers from his coat several times and hurled them sharply to slow her [Sandevistan] acceleration. Dozens of cold blades sliced through the air and buried themselves in the junkyard’s scrap piles with dull scraping sounds, and because of the nonstop trajectories flying at her, her merciless approach had no choice but to slow by a fraction.
Before long, Ji-hwan spotted a huge open clearing deeper inside the junkyard and finally stopped his sprint, standing tall there.
This space, with no complex obstacles blocking the view, was his choice to completely cut off the enemy’s erratic movement pattern of bouncing off walls.
Behind him, the cyberpsycho who had been enjoying a deadly game of tag while swinging blood-red blades suddenly stopped and twisted her neck grotesquely when she saw Ji-hwan stand still.
"It’s... it’s... my turn...? Tag... over...? Kya-hahaha! Ahahahaha!!"
The babbling of a killing machine gone insane over a child’s game of hide-and-seek. But Ji-hwan didn’t even blink at that chilling madness.
He stared at her with cold, icy eyes, raised one hand, and casually taunted her with a curling finger.
"Yeah, come on. Crazy bitch."
The dry, blunt provocation without a single unnecessary word became the trigger.
"Ahaha... i-it’s... time to... pl-play!!"
Along with the ripping shriek, blue sparks burst violently from the vicious neural implant running along her spine.
The activation of [Sandevistan], the deadly mobility gear that had taken countless lives in Night City.
In the blink of 0.5 seconds, the woman’s grotesque body vanished from sight, leaving only a blurred afterimage as she exploded toward Ji-hwan.
A superhigh-speed charge that defied the physical time of the world. In midair, the mantis-like [Mantis Blades] deployed from both her arms came flying in with blood-red arcs, aiming for Ji-hwan’s life.
A lethal slash impossible for ordinary cyberoptics to track.
Swoosh—!
The instant the blue afterimage vanished from the front, a chill ran down Ji-hwan’s spine.
Sensing the killing intent of the [Mantis Blades] swinging unseen behind his back, Ji-hwan nearly jumped out of his skin and twisted his body aside. The sharp blade tore through the old leather jacket and sliced the air by a hair’s breadth.
Having barely survived the first crisis, Ji-hwan instinctively dropped low with one hand on the ground and used the spring of his waist to drive an upward kick into her torso.
Thud—!
With a heavy impact, the woman’s upper body was thrown high into the air.
But even after Ji-hwan’s sudden counterattack, she didn’t stagger from the hit. Instead, she burst into shrieking laughter with a crazed, delighted look.
"Kya-hahah! Fun!"
Then blue sparks erupted even more violently from her spine. She had pushed the machine’s acceleration even further, beyond the limit, compared to just moments ago.
"What the hell, she got even faster—?!!"
Before Ji-hwan’s shocked curse could even fully leave his mouth—
Spat!
In an instant, he lost track of her grotesque afterimage. A chilling tearing sound split the air, and a thin, cold line was drawn across Ji-hwan’s side.
"Kgh...!"
His skin was ripped open and the tightly packed muscle beneath was sliced apart like tofu. The blue blade plunged deep through the muscle layer in an instant, but with a horrifying screech of friction, it was finally stopped by the firm barrier of his ribs.
If not for the dense skeleton he had reinforced to the limit through previous training, it would have been an absolutely fatal wound that would have cut straight through his organs and split his waist in two.
Ssssshhk—!
Dark red blood gushed from the opened wound in his side, and red steam rose in wisps as if trying to stitch the torn flesh back together by force.
But Ji-hwan didn’t even have time to tend to the bleeding wound at his side.
All around him, blue sparks and insane consecutive slashes from the [Mantis Blades] rained down like a storm.
Facing an enemy who had completely vanished from sight, Ji-hwan bit down on his lip and began desperately responding to her nonstop attacks.
Every time the invisible blade brushed past, his old leather jacket was torn apart, his hard muscle was carved open, and red blood sprayed into the air.
But at every instant blood burst out, thick red steam surged fiercely from his entire body, stubbornly stitching his ruined flesh back together.
Blue trails and red haze painted the junkyard clearing in chaos.
The point of view shifted again to the three survivors, crouched in a corner of the scrap pile and holding their breath.
"N-now... now’s our chance... while those two monsters are fighting, we need to get out of here."
Hearing the thunderous blasts going off one after another in the middle of the junkyard, they barely managed to steady their shaking legs and began inching toward the outside.
They had to crawl like they were dragging themselves across dirt, because if they made even the slightest sound, that horrible mantis blade would surely take their heads off.
Just as they were crawling along the massive wall of scrap and finally turning toward the junkyard exit—
KWAANG—!!
The thick scrap barrier right beside them crumpled like paper and was ripped apart in an explosive burst.
"Eeek?!"
The survivors screamed and tumbled onto the dirt, and through the hole in the wall, where acrid dust rose thickly, two figures burst out tangled together at terrifying speed.
"Kya-hahaha! Kya-hah!"
"Stop slicing me, you crazy bitch!!!! Aaaagh—!!"
It was the Maelstrom woman, laughing in shrieks, and Ji-hwan, covered head to toe in blood and roaring with fury.
Instead of blocking the cold edge of the [Mantis Blades] that were flying at him mercilessly, Ji-hwan had seized the joints of the woman’s mechanical arms, from which those vicious blades extended, with both hands and locked them down in a brutal grip.
His thick arm muscles, pushed to the limit by his regenerative ability, swelled like they were about to burst as he clamped both of her arms in a bone-crushing hold and drove her forward like a mad bulldozer.
"Ahaha... ngh?!"
An absurd, overwhelming brute force that made even the [Sandevistan]’s super-speed look meaningless. Ji-hwan’s massive body, forcibly pinning down the lunatic sparking blue, slammed her once again into the opposite wall of an old container.
KWA-GA-GANG—!
With a catastrophic impact that shook the entire junkyard, the two entangled bodies smashed through another thick steel wall and vanished into the darkness beyond.
Gulp.
The survivors, sprawled on the ground, swallowed hard in a daze before that unreal clash of brute force.
Beyond the huge hole the two had torn through, the savage sounds of battle still echoed nonstop—metal crushing, flesh bursting, and thunderous impacts.
They realized with painful clarity that what they had just witnessed was not some back-alley merc fight.
It was a fight between monsters.
"R-run! Don’t look back—run!!"
Only then did the terrified survivors snap back to their senses and, screaming, sprint toward the junkyard exit as if their legs were about to break.
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