Kwaang!!
A deafening roar rolled across the junkyard as a pile of scrap collapsed, and in the middle of the open lot, a bloody life-or-death struggle was underway.
On one side was a man with not a single piece of chrome in his body. On the other was a female cyberpsycho in Maelstrom gear, her whole body armed with implants, locked in a ferocious fight.
This bloodbath had picked up right where it left off, just after Ji-hwan had brutally seized the woman’s mechanical arms as the vicious scythes shot out from them and shoved her hard into a thick container wall.
"B-boring!"
The killing machine, who had been obsessed with a child’s game of hide-and-seek, let out a shrill, tearing scream with a grotesque metallic screech.
Blue sparks flew as she went berserk, then began swinging the [Mantis Blades] crossed over both arms with merciless force.
Swaaak!
Ji-hwan instinctively leaned his upper body back and barely dodged the cold blade flashing toward his throat by a hair’s breadth.
The Sandevistan’s blinding speed was said to be impossible for ordinary mercs’ cyber-eyes to track, yet somehow Ji-hwan’s gaze was already adjusting to her explosive movements, stubbornly following the blurred afterimages.
It was proof that he was becoming used to her bizarre acceleration in real time, the kind that made the world seem to slow down.
And even more terrifying was his astonishing combat sense, evolving at a ridiculous pace in live combat.
Ji-hwan twisted and slipped away from the frenzied slashes of the [Mantis Blades] from every direction with fluid ease, answering with the minimum movement possible whenever he could. Where the blades grazed him, deep red steam rose from the torn flesh and immediately began stitching the meat back together, but he was still narrowly and repeatedly avoiding anything fatal to the throat or heart.
But the situation was far from optimistic for Ji-hwan alone.
He had no decisive finisher of his own. If he made even one mistake dodging this cyberpsycho in front of him, even bone hardened to the limit would be unable to withstand it, and he’d be turned into a chopped-up meat pie corpse on the spot.
The piles of scrap scattered around him, the traces of the survivors who had fled, even the gray sandstorm swirling through the air—all of it had vanished from his awareness.
All that existed before Ji-hwan’s bloodshot eyes was the single cyberpsycho in front of him, her red cybernetic eyes flashing as she tried to tear him apart.
"Kya-hahaha! Die! Die!!"
She ruthlessly pressed him with both [Mantis Blades], and every time the blue scythes sliced through the air, the heavy wrecks and scrap structures piled around them were chopped apart like tofu and came crashing down.
Even under the storm of flying debris and rising dust, Ji-hwan kept dodging the fatal blows and answering her attacks with grim persistence.
But even in those red artificial eyes that seemed like they would rampage forever, cracks of confusion were beginning to spread.
No matter how much she butchered and drove him back, the man in front of her still wouldn’t fall.
Rather, this insane "playmate" was reacting more and more to her assault as time went on, slipping past the blades by the skin of his teeth.
And little by little, she felt it—not with the reason she had already lost, but with instinct—that the flow of the fight was turning against her.
"Kyaaaah!!"
Enraged beyond measure that her overwhelming speed was no longer working, she let out a horrifying screech like a mechanical saw grinding itself apart.
Then, from the military neural implant embedded along her spine, a massive burst of blue sparks erupted with a violence Ji-hwan had never seen before.
Ignoring the limits of her own brain and the durability of the machine, she forcibly squeezed the Sandevistan’s output past the threshold, driving it far beyond the point of no return.
Swaaaat!
"...Shit!"
A curse of pure shock burst from between Ji-hwan’s lips.
The woman’s movements, which he had just barely started to read, slipped out of his sight again and vanished like they had evaporated from the world.
At the same time, he heard the sound of something explosive kicking off the ground at high speed, and a chill like lightning stabbed down his spine.
Following the direction his survival instinct was screaming at him, Ji-hwan grit his teeth hard enough to crack them and hurled his upper body aside on pure reflex.
Screech— Kwaaaak!
The merciless blade that defied the world’s time ripped through the air, and a chilling rupture echoed across the junkyard.
"Ghk, aaagh...!"
He barely managed to twist away and avoid having his head taken clean off, but the price was horrific. The left ear that the terrifying blade wind had grazed was sliced away without a trace, and the fingers of the hand he had unconsciously thrown up to defend himself were severed without mercy, scattering into the air with blood.
"Ghk...!"
Even through the agony of flesh being torn away, Ji-hwan kept fighting desperately.
But the situation was being driven to the edge of a cliff. Thick red steam rose from the wounds that kept getting cut open and ripped apart, yet unlike before, the speed at which his super-regeneration stitched his ruined body back together was clearly slowing.
'No time.'
Ji-hwan, who could feel his own body hitting its limit, sensed the cold sweat running down his spine and knew with painful certainty that he had to gamble everything now.
'But how? How the hell do I get inside?'
Those scythe arcs whipping madly through the air, that super-acceleration too fast for the eye to follow—there was no opening to break through.
"Kya-hahaha! Die! Die... huh?"
The [Sandevistan] that had been spewing blue sparks while pushing far beyond its limit suddenly locked up with a grotesque crack.
It was the side effect of forcing it past its threshold, an awful overload.
Chiiiiiik!!
Heat blasted out from the mechanically reinforced spine that had been forcibly shut down, and the sound of coolant boiling filled the open lot.
At the same time, the backlash of her brain nerves burning out slammed into her.
"K-kh... aah... it hurts!! My head!!"
She froze the [Mantis Blades] she had been swinging mercilessly in midair, then staggered as she grabbed her own head with both hands twisted at bizarre angles.
'Now!'
Ji-hwan flung blood dripping from his severed fingers and poured every last bit of strength from his remaining thigh muscles into a sprint, kicking off the dirt.
But as if she had sensed his desperate charge, the Maelstrom woman staggering in pain let out a grotesque sound that was half scream, half battle cry.
"Kyaaaah!!"
Crackle, crackle!
Blue sparks burst violently again from the spine that had already been pushed beyond its limit and overloaded.
Ignoring the pain of her burning brain nerves, she forcibly restarted the [Sandevistan].
In less than a tenth of a second, her form vanished from sight again as if it had evaporated.
But in that instant, with the world stretching into a sticky crawl, Ji-hwan caught her afterimage.
He felt the cold edge of the vicious [Mantis Blades] slashing down at him like lightning, but unlike his mind, his body couldn’t keep up with the tempo of that super-acceleration.
His own body moved absurdly slowly, as if sunk deep in thick mud. In that state of extreme focus, Ji-hwan knew that if he tried to dodge half-heartedly now, his neck would be taken clean off or his waist would be split in two.
As the blue scythe came pouring down toward his torso, Ji-hwan stopped trying to evade and clenched his teeth.
Saaak— Kwaaak!
"Hk...!"
With a sickening burst of flesh tearing and hardened bone grinding apart, her blade sank into Ji-hwan’s body, and—
"Ahahaha! It’s... over!! It’s o— huh?"
—just as she screamed in triumph and was about to swing her mechanical arm sideways to split his upper body in half,
Kigigigik—!
a dull grinding noise like a broken gear rang out, and her mechanical arm froze in midair, unable to move an inch.
At some point, Ji-hwan’s thick hands had clamped down on the mechanical joint of the vicious blade that had pierced straight through his body, gripping it with iron-like force.
Dark red blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. And through the torn wound, severed nerves writhed and spewed thick red steam, bringing a searing agony.
But Ji-hwan ignored that brutal pain completely and stared straight down into her red cybernetic eyes, which were shaking wildly with shock right in front of him.
Then, with dark blood dribbling from between his lips, Ji-hwan curled one corner of his mouth into a cruel smile.
Because she had ignored the horrific side effects and tried to restart the [Sandevistan] by force, the machine had already hit its limit and could no longer perform properly.
And with the survival instinct of a cornered organic body combined with Ji-hwan’s focus pushed to the extreme, he had pulled off the miracle of catching her trajectory as she ran through time with his own eyes.
Even with both blades impaled through his chest and neither of them able to move a single step, Ji-hwan laughed.
She was in an absolute panic now that her weapon had been pinned in place, and she twisted violently, thrashing like a madwoman to pull the blade out of Ji-hwan’s body.
"L-let go!! Let go of me!!"
Grrrk.
With an unpleasant metallic screech, the flesh and bone in his chest twisted, but Ji-hwan’s thick grip held her joint like a steel vise and would not let go.
"Go to hell."
That short, dry line was all he said. Then Ji-hwan used the muscles in his neck to throw his head back hard and rammed it straight into her face with no mercy.
Pow!!
"Kheh...!"
With a horrific crack as skull met mechanical face armor, a scream of pain burst from between the cyberpsycho’s split lips.
The impact of bone slamming into metal caved in her nose, and dark red blood gushed out. Tears even welled up around her grotesque artificial eyes.
But Ji-hwan’s attack didn’t end there.
He threw his blood-soaked head back once more and drove his forehead into her face again and again in rapid succession.
Bang— Kwaang!! Bang!!
This wasn’t the form of any refined martial art, nor a polished exchange of sharp blades.
It was a straight-up dogfight—demons who had smelled blood locked together in the mud, tearing at each other like they meant to kill.
"Aaaagh!!"
As she thrashed in desperation, the blade buried in Ji-hwan’s torso was pulled out a fraction, brutally gouging through his internal organs.
She seized that split-second opening and tried to swing the blade again, intending to chop him into pieces and finish him off.
But even through the horrific pain pouring out of his pierced chest, Ji-hwan refused to let her go any further and tightened his grip on her mechanical arm even harder.
Then, with a savage will to crush the enemy in front of him no matter how many times his own skull shattered and his brain spilled out, he kept flashing bloodshot eyes and slamming his forehead into her bloodied face without pause.
Bang— Kwaang!!
How many times had he done it? The junkyard lot rang nonstop with the chilling bursts of metal armor and bone being crushed.
Ji-hwan’s own head, hammering down without mercy, had split open and burst into a mess of dark red blood, and the Maelstrom woman who had taken that brutal headbutting head-on had by now been reduced to a mangled ruin, her face so smashed that her original features were impossible to recognize, turned into a horrific mass of scrap and blood.
But Ji-hwan still couldn’t relax.
Because the moment he loosened his grip and let her go, this cyberpsycho in the grip of madness would probably swing that vicious scythe and take his head off.
So even as the searing pain of his own skull cracking slammed into his brain, Ji-hwan kept his bloodshot eyes wide and drove his forehead in again and again with desperate force.
"Haa... haa..."
Only when her thrashing finally stopped completely and the power in her mechanical arm went limp did Ji-hwan at last loosen his iron grip, panting hard for breath.
Saaak!
Ji-hwan yanked the vicious [Mantis Blades] blade out of his chest.
"Kgh..."
Dark red blood poured from the pierced wound, but soon thick red steam rose violently and began slowly stitching together the shredded muscles and organs.
The speed had clearly slowed from the strain of overusing his regeneration, but the stubborn vitality of a body forcing death back still remained.
Staggering back a step, Ji-hwan quietly looked down at her, lying on the ground and breathing only in shallow gasps.
She had already crossed the point of no return, beyond the threshold of death. There was no need for Ji-hwan to go over and finish her off.
As an organic body, and as an old machine, the time allowed to her life had run out completely.
Forced [Sandevistan] activation pushed far beyond its limits, reckless output overload, and the brutal fight against Ji-hwan that followed in quick succession—despite the machine’s durability and her biological nervous system having long since blown past the critical point and burned out, she had kept trying to kill Ji-hwan like a madwoman, never even realizing her own body was collapsing from the inside out.
Chiiiiik.
As Ji-hwan stood there feeling the heat of the wounds slowly sealing shut, a faint metallic sound reached his ear from the woman lying on the ground.
Through the completely crushed face, her fingers twitched faintly as if she still had some lingering regret, and then she let out a hollow laugh with a breathless sound.
"Hehe... fun..."
The sight of her, covered in blood and grinning like a child enjoying the end of hide-and-seek. That was the final end of the most tragic and brutal victim created by Night City’s chrome-at-all-costs madness.
At that eerie, yet somehow forlorn, madwoman’s laughter, Ji-hwan slowly lifted the corners of his usual indifferent, dry mouth into a smile of his own.
"Was it fun?"
There was no unnecessary profanity, no grandstanding taunt from the victor. Just a short, rough line thrown at someone he had fought with his life on the line.
Thud.
Then Ji-hwan let the strength leave his legs and sat down heavily beside her, whose breathing was growing shallower by the second.
The red haze rising from Ji-hwan’s torn chest and the acrid coolant smoke leaking from her ruined spine mixed together wildly in the air.
Just before her fading mechanical breathing stopped completely, perhaps in a final flash before death, an unnaturally clear trace of human reason flickered through her dull artificial eyes for a split second.
She weakly reached a bloodied hand toward the air and moved her shattered lips.
"Th... th... ank... m... ma..."
The hand groping at empty air fell limply to the ground, and at last her breathing stopped for good.
'Did I hear that wrong?'
Ji-hwan narrowed his brow and turned to stare quietly at her fallen face.
A vicious cyberpsycho who had been devoured by machines and lost her reason, slaughtering people in a frenzy. Yet on the face left behind after death, a strangely peaceful smile spread, paradoxically like a child waking from a terrible nightmare.
"Yeah... I guess you had your own story too."
Ji-hwan reached out with a rough hand and gently closed the eyes that were still staring into the air.
It was his own way of mourning the tragic end of someone crushed by the gears of this cruel Night City.
A short while later, after tending to his wounds as best he could, Ji-hwan shakily got to his feet.
The fight was over, but a thick question still lurked in his mind.
Why had a Maelstrom gang member who should have been in downtown Night City been sealed inside a military container at this junkyard on the outskirts of the Badlands? And was she even really Maelstrom to begin with? There were too many things that didn’t add up for this to be a simple gang operation.
Ji-hwan began carefully examining the dead woman’s body, searching for some clue.
As he lifted the blood-soaked leather jacket and felt around the connection point of the military [Sandevistan] implanted in her spine, his fingertips caught on something hard and small.
It was an old data shard secretly wedged deep inside her neural socket.
"This is..."
Just as Ji-hwan was about to brush his thumb over the shard’s surface and confirm the corporate logo that had been cleverly erased,
Drip.
He felt a cold, unpleasant liquid drop onto his crown and broad shoulders.
When Ji-hwan looked up and at last raised his gaze to the ash-gray sky, heavy clouds had already gathered overhead, filling the air around the outskirts of Night City.
Drip. Drip-drip!
Then the sky split open and thick raindrops began pouring down.
It was acid rain, harsh enough to sting and burn the skin the moment it touched it.
As the rain grew heavier and hammered the scrap piles in the junkyard with a racket, Ji-hwan hurriedly shoved the cold shard deep into the inner pocket of his leather jacket.
The fierce acid rain washed over the lot, pressing the thick stench of blood and the acrid smoke of gunpowder down into the ground.
Ji-hwan silently lowered his gaze through the rain and looked at the Maelstrom woman’s corpse, lying cold on the ground.
A cyberpsycho who had been devoured by machines and gone mad. Yet the strangely peaceful smile that had spread across her twisted face in her final moment flashed through his mind once more.
It was the brutal end of someone trampled by the merciless experiments of some faction or another, the kind of tragedy that happened all the time in the underbelly of Night City.
"Haa..."
A short sigh mixed with rainwater and white breath slipped from between Ji-hwan’s lips.
He bent his knees, extended both arms, and carefully lifted her body into his arms.
She had just been a killing machine trying to pierce his heart a moment ago, but now, in Ji-hwan’s arms, she was only a poor soul lost and sacrificed in this cruel city.
Clack, clack.
Stepping over dirt that had turned to mud, Ji-hwan silently carried her toward a secluded patch of exposed earth on the outskirts of the junkyard, where he could bury her.
In one corner of the vast, uninhabited graveyard of scrap, Ji-hwan found a patch of suitably soft ground and picked up a wide sheet of metal lying nearby.
Clang, klaaang.
In the bleak wasteland under the pouring acid rain, only the dull scrape of Ji-hwan silently digging into the earth echoed with a mournful ring.
He carefully laid her body down inside the deep hole he had dug.
Then, with rough hands, he gathered the rain-soaked dirt and calmly covered her mangled mechanical spine and crushed face.
Finally, he piled up chunks of scrap to make a small grave marker shaped like a cross, and
stood before it for a moment, taking the pouring rain over his whole body.
Gathering up the corpse of an enemy he had no connection to, an enemy who had even tried to take his life, and making her a grave. In this strange, cold machine city where even a merc’s life was treated like a disposable consumable, it was an absurdly old-fashioned and analog way to mourn.
But that was Ji-hwan’s own stubborn moral code, and his heavy respect for the dead.
"Sleep well."
Ji-hwan brushed back the hair plastered to his forehead by the rain and left a dry, rough farewell toward the grave.
Everything that needed doing in this blood-soaked junkyard was done now.
Ji-hwan checked once more the cold feel of the old data shard in his pocket, then turned and started trudging heavily toward the sand dune where his battered Thornton Colby was parked, to wrap things up with Dakota Smith.
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