How many days had passed since the brutal fight with the cyberpsycho ended? The barren wasteland of the Badlands was still spitting out one incident after another, big and small.
And today, too, the vicious raider pack that had made its nest in this isolated rocky stretch—the surviving Raffen Shiv—were busy scheming up some half-baked plan to kidnap and strip down any lost civilians who wandered into their territory.
Vroooom-Screeeech!
Then, right in the middle of their dusty hideout’s open yard, an old Thornton Colby rolled to a stop. Before the engine’s exhaust had even settled, a man in a worn leather jacket opened the door and stepped out in silence. The sudden appearance of a stranger drew every eye in the gang, who had been tinkering with their weapons and shooting the shit.
"What the hell is this idiot doing here?"
"Probably some lost civilian. Look at him, poking around in a place like this."
"Heh. Looks like lunch just walked in on its own today."
Assuming he was easy prey because he wasn’t carrying any heavy firepower, the bastards started closing in, unable to hide their delight.
That man was Ji-hwan, and he only watched them approach with cold eyes, showing not the slightest trace of agitation.
Ssssshhh.
Their laughter died in their throats.
Seeing a bizarre stream of red vapor slowly leaking from Ji-hwan’s body, they frowned in confusion.
"What the hell is that? Smoke...?"
"Huh? What is that...?"
The moment those stupid questions left their mouths, Ji-hwan’s hand flashed to his waist like lightning.
Swaaaash-
Following the arc of his casual arm movement, the throwing daggers with their cold, sharpened blades sliced through the air like thunderbolts.
"Ghk!"
"Agh, what the hell is this bastard?!"
Tatatatang
As the daggers drove deep into the throats and shoulders of the men who had carelessly closed in, their comrades screamed and collapsed in spurts of blood. The remaining raiders, panicking, jerked their rifles up and squeezed the triggers.
Tatatatang! Tatatatang-
Chaotic gunfire tore harshly through the Badlands’ dusty air.
Ssssshhh.
As the short, violent exchange dragged on and his muscles took the strain, Ji-hwan’s shoulders and back began to give off a faint red haze.
It was a phenomenon where, once the body’s temperature rose in the killing zone of combat, it would rebuild and reinforce itself for survival.
The shallow cuts left by grazing bullets were stitched shut in real time along with the red smoke, and at the same time Ji-hwan’s movements had become just a little faster and heavier than when the fight had first begun.
Ji-hwan casually slipped into the blind spots between the incoming bullets and drove strikes into the startled men’s jaws and solar plexuses.
Thud-Crack!
"Ghk, huff...!"
After a few more gunshots and heavy impacts rang out, the dust storm slowly settled. On the dirt ground, only the raiders remained, one after another, sprawled out and defeated. Their once-peaceful hideout had turned into a battlefield in just a few minutes, and through the lingering dust, the only ones left in front of Ji-hwan—who was still venting faint red smoke—were the men lying face-down with their limbs pierced, groaning in pain.
"...Looks like this area’s pretty much cleaned up."
After scanning the surroundings and confirming there were no more enemies standing, Ji-hwan pulled an old, outdated communicator from his pocket and called fixer Dakota Smith.
Brrring-Click.
"Dakota. The outer sector cleanup you asked for is almost finishe—"
"Aaaah!"
Kicking his groaning underlings aside, a massive shadow burst out of the old barracks deeper inside the hideout with a thunderous crash.
A huge man with half his face cybered up and crude subdermal armor covering his body. In his thick hands was a heavy industrial hammer as big as an adult man’s torso.
Seeing that monstrous killing intent, Ji-hwan gave a short, indifferent reply to Dakota on the other end.
"Hold on a second. There’s still one left to clean up."
Lowering the communicator, Ji-hwan silently faced the brute.
After seeing his underlings butchered one-sidedly, the brute spotted Ji-hwan standing in the middle of the dust, red smoke pouring from his body, and glared with bloodshot eyes.
"You little shit...! You’re the bastard who’s been tearing through our turf lately, aren’t you?!"
With a murderous roar, the man didn’t even wait for an answer before hoisting the massive hammer over his head.
"Die!!"
Thud, thud, KWAANG-
The earth of the Badlands shook dully beneath the charge of that enormous mass as the bastard rushed in like a madman to crush Ji-hwan flat.
Thud-KWAANG-
Ji-hwan didn’t dodge. He threw a fist at the falling hammer.
The collision of a brute iron mass and a bare fist. It should have been a situation where bones turned to powder, but with a dull sonic burst, the shockwave from the clash sent both the hammer and Ji-hwan’s fist bouncing backward.
"W-What?!"
The brute was stunned that a hammer loaded with his full body weight had been blocked by bare hands, let alone knocked back.
But Ji-hwan didn’t care about the man’s shock. He immediately reset his stance and charged again.
Over the past few days of nonstop live combat, Ji-hwan had come to understand the direction of his ability.
The warm-up phase as he entered battle. The faint red smoke rising from his entire body did more than simply mend wounds; it explosively boosted his regeneration, and for reasons tied to recovery, his flesh was also adapting—evolving—just a little to match it.
Without hesitation, Ji-hwan swung his hands and feet, meeting the hammer’s repeated assaults head-on. The bones and muscles he had packed past their limits by hammering rocks in the scrapyard did not break or buckle even under direct impact with the iron mass.
However, unlike his hardened skeleton, there was no easy way to train the softness of the skin wrapping it. Every time hammer met fist, Ji-hwan’s flesh split open and bright red blood splattered everywhere, while the bastard’s vicious hammerhead was soon stained dark with Ji-hwan’s blood.
But even as blood dripped from him, Ji-hwan didn’t retreat a single step. Even when his skin tore, red smoke rose and instantly stitched the wounds shut, and his body kept adapting more and more firmly to the brute force of the bastard’s attacks.
"You crazy bastard!!"
Seeing that he still wouldn’t give ground, the brute’s eyes bulged red as he struggled in desperation. Then, squeezing out every last bit of strength he had left, he swung the hammer wide, aiming to smash Ji-hwan’s skull.
Watching the full-force arc with both eyes, the faint red smoke pouring from Ji-hwan’s body suddenly condensed thickly into one place.
It was an application of the momentary [Body Reinforcement] he had realized before—first when he concentrated output into his thigh for a vertical leap at the scavenger gas station, and later when he had crossed the threshold of death in his fight with the cyberpsycho.
Red smoke burst from his body as Ji-hwan threw a fist straight at the hammer coming down like a boulder.
KWAANG!!
The heavy industrial hammer, clashing head-on with Ji-hwan’s fist, couldn’t withstand the impact and flew out of the brute’s hands, sent spinning far off into the dust.
"...!"
At the same time, Ji-hwan’s brow furrowed and his face twisted.
Crack.
Because the price of forcing out that burst of output beyond his limit was a small tearing sound from the muscle fibers and bones linking his fist and wrist.
A searing pain shot up his arm, but Ji-hwan swallowed it in silence.
Meanwhile, the brute who had poured his whole being into that hammer blow could only stare blankly at his empty hands, his mind gone completely slack after seeing his attack knocked aside by a single bare fist.
Looking at the idiot’s dazed expression, Ji-hwan said coldly, "What are you doing?"
Smack!!
At the same dry question, Ji-hwan’s thick palm slapped the brute across the face without mercy.
"Graaah...!"
With a brutal grinding sound that seemed to shake his skull, the huge man’s eyes rolled white and he collapsed face-first into the dirt, passing out cold. Before the dust kicked up by his falling body had even settled, Ji-hwan turned away from him with an indifferent look.
At the same time, Ji-hwan’s brow twitched faintly.
Crack, crunch-
From the area where the bones linking his fist and wrist had slipped out of alignment and the muscle fibers had torn, a grotesque series of bone-setting sounds rang out, and soon faint red vapor began seeping through the ripped flesh, stubbornly stitching the ruined body back together in real time.
Shaking off the blood dripping from his knuckles, Ji-hwan thought to himself.
The fact that his bones and muscles couldn’t withstand a single full-power localized compression and burst apart was proof that his body was still far too lacking a vessel to contain this power properly.
Still not nearly enough training.
Then Ji-hwan raised his unharmed other hand and pressed the button on the old communicator attached to his wrist, reconnecting the holocall with Dakota Smith.
Szzzt- A blue hologram flickered into the air, and Dakota’s face appeared.
[Is it done?]
"Yes. This whole area is cleared."
At Ji-hwan’s dry report, Dakota gave a small nod through the screen.
[Good work. Thanks to you stomping them flat like that, the rest of the bastards around here will keep their heads down for a while. Sure, trash like this never disappears for good... but this should be enough to keep the area quiet for now. Come back already.]
At her indifferent but satisfied assessment, Ji-hwan answered briefly, "Understood. Then I’ll see you in a bit."
[Ah, right. There was something I forgot to mention.]
Just before the hologram screen went dark, Dakota suddenly called him back as if something had just occurred to her.
Ji-hwan stopped walking toward his vehicle and silently looked at the screen. Dakota, having wiped away all trace of her usual easygoing air, continued in a much more serious, heavy voice.
[That military data shard you brought back from the scrapyard last time. The firewall decryption’s finished.]
At that, Ji-hwan’s eyes widened slightly.
Just a few days ago, she had warned that the shard was locked behind vicious double-layer security from a megacorp and a gang, and that breaking through it would take quite some time.
"Already?"
Ji-hwan asked in brief surprise, and Dakota nodded faintly through the screen, though her brow was deeply furrowed with something like disgust.
[Yeah. We managed to bypass the firewall. But... ]
She swallowed the rest and clicked her tongue.
[The data inside is a little strange. No, maybe disgusting is the better word. What the hell those bastards were planning to do... it’s too complicated to go over on a holocall, so come to the garage first. See it with your own eyes.]
"Understood. I’ll head over right away."
With Ji-hwan’s dry reply, the blue hologram pouring from the old communicator vanished in a hiss. Ji-hwan lowered his dusty hand and lightly brushed the pocket of his jacket.
The cold touch of that metal fragment he had pulled from the cyberpsycho woman’s neural socket at the back of her neck in that frozen container with not a single ray of light flashed through his mind again.
Strange, huh...
Ji-hwan opened the driver’s side door of the old Thornton Colby and climbed in. Leaving the blood-soaked Raffen Shiv hideout behind, the vehicle set off toward Dakota’s garage.
Later, the old Thornton Colby rolled into the open yard of Dakota’s garage and came to a stop with a heavy brake. Ji-hwan got out and headed straight into Dakota’s private room.
The air in the room had sunk into something far heavier and colder than before.
In front of a forest of holomonitors, Dakota was chewing on a cigarette with obvious irritation, hammering away at her keyboard nonstop.
Feeling Ji-hwan’s presence, she didn’t look away from the monitors and instead jerked her chin toward the cold metal shard sitting on the desk.
It was the same old data shard Ji-hwan had brought from the scrapyard.
"You’re here... then take a look at this."
"What exactly is this shard?"
At Ji-hwan’s question, Dakota projected the data on the monitor into the air.
Red and blue code twisted together in a chaotic mess, and grotesque human experiment data spilled down like a waterfall.
"The ones gathering this data were Maelstrom after all... and..."
What followed from Dakota was a grim explanation.
A military prototype Sandevistan with side effects so severe that legal clinical trials were impossible.
Maelstrom had been kidnapping helpless civilians at random to get real-world data on the hardware.
Then they’d jam the prototype into their spines and push the machine beyond its limits.
If the test subject died or went insane from the side effects, they’d strip the parts they wanted from the meat and shove them into the next kidnapped civilian, repeating the process over and over.
Inside the shard was the horrifying biological data of countless human beings ground to pieces along the way.
"That...?"
Even as Ji-hwan reacted in shock, Dakota crushed out her cigarette with an irritated twist and went on.
"There’s no way a bunch of chrome-addicted bastards like Maelstrom had the tech or capital to develop a military prototype at this level on their own. They were probably just hired muscle handling a huge pile of eddies."
She pointed at the massive blacked-out encrypted code buried deep in the holonet data stream.
"My guess is... there’s definitely a corpo—or a megacorp—behind this."
Muttering that it was obvious even without looking, Dakota’s expression darkened, and Ji-hwan suppressed the rage boiling inside him as he stared at the shard on the table.
"I see. Anyway, now that their experimental data is in our hands..."
"No. That’s exactly the problem."
Dakota turned to Ji-hwan with sharp eyes.
"This shard wasn’t just a storage medium. It was a kind of black box and transmitter the bastards planted."
"...What?"
"The moment my netrunner punched through the firewall on the computer just now, that damned chip started sending out encrypted location data."
"The netrunner managed to notice the packet flow and force the connection shut down right away, but... it was already too late. The location data had already gone out..."
She roughly dragged both hands down her face.
"I can’t tell where the location data was sent... but one thing’s certain."
Dakota cut the monitor’s power and stood up.
"Those bastards now know their test subject is dead, and that the core data shard for that precious prototype is sitting right in the middle of my garage."
It was obvious they would come to recover it by any means necessary, no matter how brutal.
"That means..."
Ji-hwan slowly flexed his blood-speckled fist and murmured under his breath, "their troops are already on the way here."
"Yeah. It’s only a matter of time."
**
At the same time, in the northern industrial district of Night City’s Watson.
This place had originally been an NUSA food and beverage factory, the so-called All Foods plant, where protein slurry sold as “meat” or imitation meat was mass-produced.
But for one reason or another, the Night City branch had been unexpectedly shut down and abandoned, and the Maelstrom gang—fanatically obsessed with replacing every part of the body with machine—had quickly seized the empty shell and been using it as their core base ever since.
Inside the factory, where red neon lights and the stench of hot machine lubricant hung thick in the air, one of Maelstrom’s lieutenants was staring intently at his personal terminal, waiting anxiously.
He had been expecting the woman they’d locked in that remote Badlands container to finally go completely insane after the agony of grotesque augmentation and the implantation of the Sandevistan prototype.
He was waiting for the location data and real-world kill records that would come once she had fallen into cyberpsychosis and started slaughtering everything around her.
Beep.
Then, with a short reception tone, encrypted location data arrived on the terminal.
But when the lieutenant checked the coordinates on the screen and saw that the biometric signal data had been completely severed, his cybernetic eyes flickered wildly with alarm.
"What the fuck...!"
In shock, he spun around and broke into a frantic run deeper into the maze-like All Foods factory.
Clattering up the heavy iron stairs, he reached a shabby, dim break room tucked away inside the plant.
In front of the monitor room, where the stench of rotten blood and the acrid ozone of cheap chrome burning had fused into a sticky miasma, he could hear someone’s ragged breathing beyond the thick steel door.
Kreeeek-
"Boss... hey... this is bad..."
Inside the silent room, where even the sound of swallowing saliva echoed like thunder, the underling’s pupils shook wildly.
"Th-that ‘Test Subject No. 4’... the one from the Badlands earlier... her biometric signal just... completely, completely cut out...!"
At that moment, the huge silhouette in the center of the room, lazily floating through a holoprojection with dozens of thick data cables plugged directly into its spine like a spiderweb, suddenly went still.
The boss’s relaxed atmosphere, which had been pressing down on the room, froze over in an instant.
Whirrrr-Click. Click.
The grotesque multi-lens implant grafted over the entire upper half of his face shifted with a chilling mechanical sound, focusing all at once on the underling’s face as he stared at the floor.
"...What? Cut out?"
Vice, the current 2067 regional boss of Maelstrom, didn’t shout right away. Instead, he slowly stroked his chin with a massive mechanical arm.
She died out there? And MaxTac didn’t even show up. Coincidence? If not... then something damn interesting just crawled out of the dirt.
Inside the multi-lens array embedded in his face, red light flashed rapidly in geometric patterns.
To the underling standing in front of him, it would have looked like nothing more than murderous rage ready to tear someone apart on the spot.
But in Vice’s head, only greed was boiling up.
If some bastard took out the precious prototype Zetatech invested in, then they’re no ordinary player...
The fact that he had stabbed countless people in the back and clawed his way up to regional boss of Maelstrom was no pretty coincidence.
"Fuck, load up everyone crawling around nearby into trucks and send them to that goddamn coordinate right now. Find out exactly what crazy bastard dared to wreck my toy. Tear the place apart if you have to. You hear me?"
"Y-Yeah. I’ll send the guys out right now and check it."
The pale-faced underling fled the room like he was running for his life, and the heavy steel door slammed shut behind him.
After checking the room once more, Vice saw a blue shimmer in the air, and a hologram of a person in a tailored luxury suit appeared before him.
[You’re late getting back to me today. We’ve already lost contact with the data transmission from Test Subject No. 4 on our side.]
"That crazy bitch was running so out of control that I just lured her into a container and was only pulling data out of her. My original plan was to toss her at some nomad rat camp tomorrow and wipe them out, but she kicked the bucket before that."
[What? A weapon fitted with a precious prototype Sandevistan got taken down by wasteland trash? Tsk... just who the hell was it?]
At the executive’s mocking tone, Vice twisted the grotesquely split corners of his mouth and brought up a video over the hologram screen.
"See for yourself. It’s the last transmission from the communication black box."
The video was full of static, the poor image quality stuttering in and out. The first thing caught on screen was the moment the heavy steel door of the sealed container opened.
Violent combat began immediately after, but because of the Sandevistan’s rampage and the insane shockwaves, the screen was filled with heavy noise and shattered mosaic pixels.
It was such a mess that you couldn’t even tell who was fighting or how, let alone make out their shapes properly.
But in the final three seconds before the video cut off completely, when the shaking lens slammed into the floor and the noise cleared, the screen was filled with one man’s face.
Ji-hwan’s cold, downward stare. With that expression, the video blacked out completely.
[Oh...]
Deep interest flickered behind the executive’s glasses.
[That’s quite the sharp look. I like it. Bring him in alive. He’d make a fine test subject for the prototype.]
At that, Vice’s red lenses trembled.
"Yeah, I’ll find him and bring him in, so..."
He trailed off, then made his demand clear.
"Double the payment for this job."
[Double? That’s not in the contract...]
"What the fuck are you trying to talk me down for with that bullshit tongue of yours? You think because you’re holding the money hose, you’re the king of my turf?"
Vice leaned in as if he were about to swallow the screen whole and continued with a savage glare.
"If you don’t like it, I’ll just sell this toy off to the Dynalar or Militech bastards instead. Figure it out."
[Wait... ]
With that one-sided declaration, Vice cut the call off roughly. On the dark monitor screen, the coordinates of the Badlands garage where Ji-hwan was staying blinked ominously in red.
In the heart of Night City, on the top floor of a massive skyscraper punching through the clouds, a luxury penthouse office sat submerged in darkness without a single light on.
"...You maggot bastard, how dare you..."
In the dark, an executive whose face was hidden so deeply in shadow that it was hard to make out even its shape let out a low, beastlike growl.
As he slowly turned from his seat, the brilliant yet violent neon lights of downtown Night City stretched out beyond the glass wall, far below him.
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