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Badlands, a barren junkyard where exhaust fumes and acidic dust whipped through the air.
Above this abandoned wasteland, where mountains of industrial waste and scrap metal dumped by megacorps loomed everywhere, a stranger's scream echoed across the sky.
"Aaaaaaah-!!"
But the scream did not last long.
The man's body came crashing down from the far-off heavens and slammed mercilessly into a massive rock in the wasteland with a sickening crack of meat and bone turning to powder.
Then his body, smashed beyond recognition by the impact, collapsed into a mangled lump of flesh and rolled to the ground.
Kraack-!!
Thud!
And just like that, another unidentified corpse was added to the dry wastes of the Badlands today.
That was an utterly ordinary occurrence in Night City, where life was treated as less than garbage. Or rather, it should have been.
The body that should have been a dead lump of meat twitched faintly. For an ordinary human, the pain and shock alone would have killed him dozens of times over, but strangely enough, a faint red mist began to rise from between the man's crushed flesh, and the unconscious body started rejecting death, slowly repairing itself as if a videotape were being played backward.
Crack!Crack!Kraack-!!
Bits of shattered bone wriggled as they forced their way back into place, locking together with a series of ghastly sounds. It was like rusted gears being crushed and dragged into motion, while misaligned bones scraped against each other and stitched themselves back together with a hideous grinding noise.
Then, as the shattered skull and ribs re-formed and hardened with dull thuds and the skeleton was forcibly set upright, flesh began to grow back over it, restoring the man's body.
Even though he was still covered in blood and the clothes he had been wearing were torn to rags, his crushed body had somehow returned to a normal shape, as if time itself had been rewound.
How much time passed after that? In the middle of the blood-soaked wasteland, the body that had been writhing with grotesque, sealing flesh suddenly jolted.
"Aaaaaaah-!!"
Ji-hwan, who had been lying on his back staring up at the sky, shot upright with a scream like someone waking from a nightmare.
"My body!! What the hell!! My body, my body!!"
Panicking, he frantically groped at his chest and limbs.
The horrific pain of bones turning to powder and his organs bursting was still burned vividly into his mind, but what his fingertips found was only smooth, solid muscle without a single wound.
"Huh...? I... I'm fine...?"
Ji-hwan's eyes widened in disbelief.
Even the memory of the bizarre, unidentifiable [Eye] that had seemed to pierce through him from high in the sky just before the fall had been crushed under the overwhelming shock his body endured and wiped clean away.
More than the pressure of that incomprehensible, transcendent gaze, his instinctive relief that his body was still alive right now had buried the memory completely.
"Haa... What... was that really a dream...?"
Breathing hard, Ji-hwan let out a long sigh of "Phew..." and looked around with dazed eyes.
But that flimsy sense of relief lasted less than a second.
"......!"
The massive rock where his gaze had landed bore the grotesque proof that the fall he had just suffered was no nightmare at all.
Ji-hwan's blood was splattered across the rock's surface in a huge, vivid stain, like some bizarre crimson tattoo had been carved into it.
That wasn't all. Pieces of his flesh and fragments of organs that had not yet been restored by his regeneration were scattered everywhere, and thick, dark blood was still dripping down the rock in steady drops.
"Urk...!"
His body was perfectly fine now, but the blood-soaked clothes hanging off him like rags, the sickening crack of impact when he had slammed face-first into the ground, and the searing pain hit Ji-hwan's brain only belatedly, flooding over him through his vision with the horrifying reality that he had been crushed into a lump of meat on that awful rock and somehow lived again.
"Hh... Ahhh..."
Overcome by extreme fear and confusion, Ji-hwan wrapped his trembling arms tightly around himself.
It was a crazy situation for an ordinary twenty-first-century guy who had been sitting in his room browsing game mods just a little while ago.
In the end, the thread of reason snapped. Beastlike tears burst out, and a miserable wave of nausea, as if his entire stomach had twisted inside out, surged up his throat.
"Uweeeek-!!"
Ji-hwan lay face-down on the blood-soaked ground, squeezing his empty stomach and vomiting up sour bile like a madman.
After wrenching his stomach dry and spewing out the sour mess, Ji-hwan soon clutched his blood-covered face with both hands.
"Hah... This is a dream. What is this... what is this supposed to be..."
A deranged laugh dripped from his chin, mixed with blood falling from his jaw in drops.
He had definitely felt the horrific pain of every bone in his body turning to powder and his organs bursting out.
"I died... My head exploded... How am I still alive... hah..."
Tears driven by fear and confusion streamed nonstop down Ji-hwan's cheeks.
Breathing like a cornered animal, he stayed sprawled on the ground and stared blankly at the horizon for a moment.
Beyond the barren junkyard and the haze of exhaust, something huge was wavering like a mirage.
"Huh...?"
Ji-hwan rubbed his eyes hard with the back of his bloodied hand.
He thought it was a hallucination born from extreme shock.
But as the smog cleared, the grand and grotesque skyline that emerged was far too clear, far too vivid.
Massive skyscrapers piercing through gray clouds, a forest of steel and concrete with neon signs tangled through it like veins.
Ji-hwan's jaw dropped so far it looked like it might fall off, and a stupid sound leaked from between his lips.
"N-no... Night City?? Huh!?"
He muttered in disbelief, sucking in a shaky breath.
"No way..."
But as if mocking his denial, fragments of memory that had been severed like lightning flashed through Ji-hwan's brain.
The cramped studio apartment, the strange mod called [No-Chrome], the abnormal download size, and the pitch-black rift that had torn open the air and swallowed him whole.
'Right, and then from the sky...'
Ji-hwan remembered the bizarre, unidentifiable [Eye] that had looked down on him from the far-off heavens as he fell.
As the sensation of that soul-crushing gaze returned, Ji-hwan jerked his head up to stare at the sky like he was having a seizure.
But the sky over the outskirts of Night City, the Badlands, was as always choked with murky acidic smog and ash-gray clouds.
Through the filthy light pouring down, he could only barely tell that the sun was up; there was no trace left of the overwhelming eye that had been watching him.
Taking his eyes off the sky, Ji-hwan looked again at the distant skyscrapers with renewed shock.
"Night City...? Why am I... here?"
The unreal reality of falling from his room through a bizarre rift and straight into the gutter had Ji-hwan sitting frozen on the blood-soaked rock, trying to force this horrifying fact into his brain while holding his breath.
At last, his head slowly drooped.
"Phew..."
A deep, heavy sigh slipped out between his bloodstained lips, and the next instant Ji-hwan sucked in a lungful of the Badlands' exhaust as though his lungs were being torn apart.
"Fuck!!!"
The silence of the Badlands was ripped apart by a desperate stream of profanity loud enough to burst eardrums.
"Fuck, why?! Send me back, you bastards!! Where the hell am I!! Aaaaaaah-!!"
Veins bulging in his neck as if they might burst, Ji-hwan screamed into the air like a madman.
To anyone else, it would have sounded like nothing more than a lunatic's fit, and Ji-hwan himself didn't have the slightest shred of hope that someone would hear him and rescue him back to his original world.
But in the middle of this insane, unreal hell, in this horrific situation where the blood in his entire body felt like it was boiling, if he didn't at least howl and vent his rage like a beast, he felt like he would go mad on the spot.
How many times had he raged into the empty air like a lunatic, hurling curses until his throat was raw? By the time he could no longer even force out a metallic rasp, something caught at the edge of Ji-hwan's blurred vision as he sat panting on the blood-soaked rock.
In the middle of the desert, far beyond the dry horizon, a cloud of pale dust was wavering.
"......"
Ji-hwan went still and stared at it.
Beyond the shimmering heat haze, something approaching with the rough roar of an engine was unmistakably a human vehicle.
He had no time to decide whether it was a rope lowered into this hell from above or a rotten rope that would drag him into yet another hell.
"Huh! People!? Hey!!"
Relief lit up Ji-hwan's bloodied face. He staggered to his feet on the rock and started waving both arms wildly.
"Over here!! Help me!! There's someone here!!"
He shouted for rescue until the veins in his neck looked ready to burst, but the truth was that the vehicles approaching him were the vicious armored cars of the Badlands' infamous raider gang, the Raffen Shiv. With sharp steel spikes driven into every part of their bodies and bloodstains clinging to their hoods, those vehicles were not racing in to rescue a stranded victim.
If Ji-hwan had still been the guy browsing mods behind a monitor, he should have been horrified by the vehicles' grotesque appearance and hidden himself in the cracks between the rocks.
But after the shock of falling from the sky, becoming a lump of meat, and then living again, Ji-hwan was in no condition to make normal judgments.
The knowledge and worldbuilding of the game [Cyberpunk 2077] had long since been thrown out of his head.
Those scraps of data were never going to ease the pain of this horrible reality, where his bones ached and the smog choked his lungs.
Only one thing filled his brain completely: the desperate urge to escape this situation somehow, and the most basic, primitive survival instinct screaming at him to get to where people were and out of this nightmare wasteland.
Vroooom-!!
Maybe they had heard Ji-hwan's desperate cries. The Raffen vehicles kicking up dust in the distance suddenly swerved hard.
Then, with engines growling like beasts, they charged toward the naked, blood-soaked prey cheering in the open like a pack of hungry jackals.
"I'm saved...!"
A bright smile spread across Ji-hwan's bloodied face.
At last, he had grabbed the rope. But that relief lasted only a few seconds before it turned upside down the moment the vehicles drew closer and their appearance came into sharp view.
"Huh...?"
Ji-hwan slowly lowered the arms he had been waving in the air and stared at the approaching vehicles.
The paint job on those vehicles was no ordinary rusted scrap.
Against a pitch-black base, an eye-searing neon cyan with a mint tint had been painted in a bizarre, rough pattern.
More than anything, what made Ji-hwan's breath catch was the terrifying [cyan skull specter] emblem carved across the front and sides of the armored cars.
"Th-those are...!? ...No way?!"
Only then did game knowledge flash through Ji-hwan's mind like lightning.
That cyan skull specter. A vicious symbol of the Raffen Shiv, the worst raider gang in the Badlands, something he had never seen in his own world but had shredded through countless times on the other side of the monitor.
Ji-hwan's lips, drained of all color, trembled. He realized what insane thing he had just done, how he had waved for the cannibals to come to him on their own in this wasteland.
Then he turned and ran like a man possessed.
'Why the hell did I do something that stupid? Shit, I'm fucked. That's definitely them. Fuck, fuck!!'
He kicked off the sand as if his heart would burst, but a naked human couldn't outrun a vehicle.
Vroooom-!!Kikikikikik!!
Dust exploded in all directions as three vicious vehicles cut off Ji-hwan's path and surrounded him.
Clack-!
As the raiders on top of the vehicles raised massive machine guns and took aim at Ji-hwan's bare head all at once, Ji-hwan
instinctively threw both hands up and squeezed out a voice as pitiful and submissive as he could manage.
"I-I surrender...?"
Then it happened. With a heavy clunk, the armored vehicle's door opened and a man stepped out through the dust. His appearance was rough, proof of the harsh Badlands environment.
Like the nomads they had once been, he wore a crude outfit layered with thick worn leather and tattered cloth to block the harsh sandstorms.
That wasn't all.
To survive the Badlands' vicious acidic smog and polluted sandstorms, the lower half of his face was completely covered by a dust mask.
Thick tube hoses ran from beneath the mask to the [artificial lung] crudely implanted in his chest, and every time he breathed, a sinister, unpleasant mechanical hiss of "Shhhhhh- shhk-" pierced through the sandstorm and stabbed into Ji-hwan's eardrums.
The moment Ji-hwan faced that vicious reality head-on, not as pixels on a monitor but as a real, living thing, the truth that he had truly crossed into the world of Night City stabbed into his brain like a knife.
"Fuck..."
He couldn't even think of what to say. All that came out of his lips was a defeated curse.
Then, with a loud Thwack-!, the butt of the man's rifle smashed straight into Ji-hwan's face without mercy.
With a dull crack as his nose bone shattered, the world flashed black before Ji-hwan's eyes and his knees buckled to the ground.
'So this really is...'
Feeling in every fiber of his body the cruel law of Night City, where machines trampled human beings underfoot, Ji-hwan's consciousness was severed completely into darkness at the end of that brief thought.
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