An empty warehouse somewhere in the eastern Badlands.
In the quiet space, where acrid dust drifted through the air, only the dull thud of something being struck echoed at steady intervals.
Thud. Thud.
With his shirt tossed aside and dressed in almost nothing, Ji-hwan kept hammering away at a thick steel pillar, tempering himself through sheer repetition while calculating the microsecond timing in his head. After a while, he finally caught the rhythm and stopped.
He stood still, frozen in the posture just before extending his fist, waiting for something.
Then, inside Ji-hwan’s motionless body, [Body Enhancement] began and ended in rapid succession, over and over without pause.
A strange process repeated itself: muscle fibers swelling, then shrinking back down.
Then Ji-hwan’s tightly closed eyes snapped open, and for a brief instant, his body visibly swelled with the surge of [Body Enhancement].
And the moment the red smoke was about to burst from his expanded torso—
Ji-hwan’s fist, which had been poised to strike, vanished from sight in an instant.
Tatatatang!!
The massive metallic crash of that invisible fist slamming hard into the steel pillar shook the warehouse. The thick pillar lurched violently from the impact, leaving a deep mark behind.
By then, Ji-hwan’s body had already returned to its normal state.
Even the red smoke that had been about to pour from his torso had vanished without a trace.
Only a faint wisp of smoke still trailed from the fist that had just struck the steel.
His punch had already completed its blow and, in the blink of an eye, returned to its original guard position after colliding with the pillar.
The strike and withdrawal were so fleeting they were almost impossible to follow with the eye.
But.
Crack!
Before the aftershock of the impact had even faded, a sharp rupture sound rang out and the skin on Ji-hwan’s forearm and the back of his hand tore apart mercilessly.
"Ghk..."
Red blood dripped through the ripped flesh and soaked into the floor.
Ji-hwan looked down at his numb arm and clicked his tongue bitterly.
The tiny gap between 0.1 seconds and 0.05 seconds—the moment when his fist made contact. When his control over [Body Enhancement] slipped even slightly in that microscopic window and failed, his body was forced to bear the full burden of that monstrous output and tore itself apart.
His regeneration ability began sealing the wounds, red smoke curling up from the torn skin, but that didn’t erase the physical pain of being shredded and ruptured.
Watching the blood drip down, Ji-hwan muttered to himself.
"Yeah... it’s not gonna be easy."
The reason he had been enduring this much pain and holed up alone in the warehouse, throwing himself into training, was something that had happened several days ago.
After the merciless attack by the remnants of Maelstrom, Dakota Smith had lost precious subordinates and comrades. Ji-hwan, who had attended the funeral held in a corner of the wasteland under the harsh desert wind and sat there in silence, had spent the days since then shut away in the narrow room Dakota had given him.
No one knew exactly what he was doing in there.
All that Dakota’s people could hear, now and then as they passed by the door, was a sudden pop- from inside the room, followed by Ji-hwan’s stifled groans.
But at mealtimes, he would come out looking perfectly normal, eat with everyone, and chat about everyday things. So, in the middle of their busy lives, even the folks at the garage gradually forgot about his strange seclusion.
Then, a few more days passed after the funeral.
One afternoon, inside Dakota Smith’s private room in the back of the garage, she sat at her desk, buried under an endless flood of paperwork and hologram data.
As a fixer, she was swamped, trying to patch up the holes left by the dead and rebuild the broken defenses.
Krrrreeeek-.
Just then, the tightly shut iron door opened with a heavy scrape, and Ji-hwan appeared in his light training clothes.
"You look busy."
His sudden appearance, after disappearing into his room and showing his face so rarely, made Dakota feel oddly pleased.
But the mountain of documents on her desk was still towering, so she set down her pen with a clack and snapped at him.
"You didn’t come all the way here just to say hello. Get to the point."
At her bluntness, Ji-hwan let out a snort. "That’s Dakota for you."
Then he shrugged lightly.
"I need a place to myself for a few days. Somewhere to train."
"Train?"
Dakota raised one eyebrow, looking incredulous.
"What is this, some old-school training? Just grab a tactical data shard like mercs use, plug it into the back of your neck, and run a simulation. Your brain and body’ll remember everything on their own. No need to sweat yourself stupid... oh."
As she rambled on, Dakota suddenly seemed to realize something and clamped her mouth shut.
Her gaze drifted to Ji-hwan’s smooth nape and bare arms, with not a single mechanical part in sight, and her expression turned deeply, profoundly sympathetic.
"Ah... right. You’re one of those bodies that can’t even take a neural socket."
Dakota clicked her tongue and shook her head, genuinely pitying him.
"Well, if you can’t use chips, then I guess you’ve got to grind it out the old-fashioned way like people used to. Tsk, tsk. Poor guy. Must be rough, having to suffer with that body."
Her openly pitying stare, as if he were some relic from a bygone age, made Ji-hwan’s brow crease hard.
"...That’s harsh."
He pouted a little, looking wronged, then cleared his throat and hurriedly changed the subject.
"Anyway, I want to review what I learned from the last fight with those Maelstrom bastards. There are a few things I want to test quietly, on my own."
Seeing him answer calmly while still looking a little embarrassed, Dakota burst out laughing.
She found it endearing that he could take her teasing in stride without giving up on his stubbornness, and she rubbed her chin while operating the hologram monitor.
"A while back, I picked up an empty warehouse for dirt cheap. Practically got it for free. I haven’t found a use for it yet, so it’s just been sitting there empty."
As her fingers tapped the keyboard, Ji-hwan’s old terminal in his pocket gave a short vibration.
"It’s a bit far from the garage, but it won’t be too bad by car. Since it’s empty anyway, smash whatever you want in there, do whatever you want."
Dakota waved a hand dismissively and turned back to her paperwork.
"Now go. I’m insanely busy."
At her gruff kindness, Ji-hwan grinned and nodded.
The mercenary who had been radiating a heavy mood just moments ago was gone, replaced by a voice bright with excitement, like a kid who’d just been handed a new toy.
"Thanks, Dakota!!"
Dakota watched him head out with a light swing of the iron door, then snorted in disbelief and went back to work.
Clank. The door shut, and once outside, Ji-hwan stopped and slowly looked over the open yard of the garage.
The garage had already healed the scars left by Maelstrom’s brutal raid and was once again full of Nomads going through another busy day.
Having learned a hard lesson from their painful losses, the people were reinforcing collapsed structures with thick alloy plates so that a vehicle couldn’t just plow straight through them.
Mechanics in work clothes were busily repairing old vehicles that had been pushed aside for repairs, or dismantling the bizarre rides Maelstrom had abandoned while fleeing—or that had been taken as trophies—and modifying them to suit their own tastes.
Ji-hwan silently watched the people of the Badlands, who had taken the pain of loss and started turning the gears of life again. Then he turned on his heel and climbed into his old Thornton Colby parked at the edge of the yard.
Vroooom-!
After that, once Ji-hwan arrived at the warehouse and made a few preparations, he spent day and night training without pause.
Crack!
"Ghk..."
With another chilling rupture, the skin on his forearm and the back of his hand tore apart again, and red blood pattered down to the floor.
And Ji-hwan revisited the strange system of abilities he had defined for himself after days of struggle.
He had broadly divided his uncontrollable bodily mechanism into two stages: [0 Stage] and [1 Stage].
[0 Stage: Regeneration and Body Adaptation]
Whenever red smoke rose from between his torn skin as his [super regeneration] manifested, Ji-hwan studied the changes taking place inside him.
It wasn’t just a matter of damaged cells being stitched back together. The moment regeneration began, his overall physical abilities—muscle strength, senses, and more—rose a little, but undeniably, tightening his whole body.
And behind that painful regenerative power came tiny, almost imperceptible changes in his body as it adapted to the surrounding environment and conditions at a glacial pace.
When he repeatedly punched heavy steel or forcibly endured crushing loads like this, every time his bones and muscles tore under the strain and regenerated, his body would adapt into something just a little tougher, a little more resilient, a little stronger than before.
It wasn’t some dramatic transformation like bulletproof skin or strength multiplied dozens of times over. But through repeated actions, through training like this, and through the activation of his ability, if he failed to control that microscopic switch and ended up taking the full burden of a heavy blow, tearing his bones and muscles apart, then the recovered bones and muscle fibers would be rebuilt denser and harder than before, adapting to the same impact that would come again.
In other words, Ji-hwan’s body was tempering itself, changing little by little without ever stopping, shaped by brutal training and by whatever situation was put in front of him.
Without this ability, he would have died long ago. And if there was a downside, it was that he had to endure the searing pain that burned where his body recovered.
Once the wound had mostly healed and his forearm, now a little more tightly wound from adapting to the heavy impact, had been flexed open and closed a few times, Ji-hwan stood before the steel pillar again.
This time, he consciously tightened every muscle in his body and forcibly released the limiter with his own will.
Krrrk
With a sound like bones grinding, his joints screamed and his muscle fibers began swelling past their limit.
If [0 Stage] was instinct for survival, then [1 Stage] was the ability to consciously squeeze out 100 percent of his adrenaline and muscle fibers and detonate them.
It unleashed terrifying speed and destructive power, enough to outrun an enemy’s sight, but immediately after activation, his body couldn’t bear the output on its own, causing severe internal damage: the muscle fibers in the enhanced areas, especially the fists and wrists, would rupture grotesquely and the joints would slip out of alignment.
Ji-hwan wiped away the beads of sweat dripping down his face and thought back to the desperate fight he’d had days ago against the three Maelstrom executives and the Raffen Shiv group.
In that edge-of-the-cliff crisis, where one wrong move would have cost him his life, his body had found a way to survive and pulled out a clue to overcoming the weakness of this [Body Enhancement].
That was the technique Ji-hwan had named [Instant Strike].
Ji-hwan let the tension in his whole body go and allowed himself to hang loose again, then calmly extended his fist toward the empty air.
The fist shot out and recoiled so fast it seemed to vanish from sight. Right before it touched the cold steel pillar—
'Now.'
Tatatatang!!
With a scream-tearing metallic crash that slammed into the eardrums, the heavy steel pillar shuddered, and a deep, clear dent caved into its surface.
And this time, Ji-hwan’s fist did not tear apart, nor did his veins burst in a brutal backlash.
His body, which had swollen dramatically, was already back to normal, and only a faint thread of smoke drifted from the point of impact.
[Derived Technique of 1 Stage: [Instant Strike]] Put simply, it was a blow unleashed only in that split second when the body was enhanced.
Between 0.1 and 0.05 seconds before a fist or foot made contact with the target, he would ignite [Body Enhancement] for only that microscopic instant—like a light clap of hands—and then shut the power off immediately.
But unlike the explanation made it sound, catching that tiny gap of 0.1 to 0.05 seconds in real combat was anything but simple.
Honestly, rather than agonizing over timing, it was often far more stable and more powerful to just keep [Body Enhancement] active and land the strike the brute-force way, even if he had to pay the penalty.
Above all, if he missed the timing by even a hair and failed to switch it off, the horrific rupture penalty of [1 Stage] would all hit his body at once, instantly tearing it apart.
Even so, the reason Ji-hwan stubbornly insisted on carving this technique into his bones while bleeding all over the place was obvious.
If he could succeed in that microscopic switch control, then because there would be no backlash damaging his body, he could keep unleashing limit-breaking strikes over and over, effectively without limit.
"Haa... still not exactly infinite, though..."
Ji-hwan flexed his numb fist open and shut, letting out a rough breath.
Thanks to days of relentless repetition, he had at least reached the point where he could catch the timing against a motionless steel pillar and raise his success rate.
But real combat was different.
Enemies didn’t stand still and let him hit them, and if he wanted to fully internalize this sense against moving targets, punching metal had its limits.
"Anything beyond this is pointless..."
Ji-hwan roughly wiped the blood from his hand and picked up the worn leather jacket he’d tossed on the floor.
For the month while he and Dakota had been away, the Badlands were surely crawling with remnants who’d slipped past Dakota’s eyes, along with other gang trash.
To sharpen the rest of his techniques and recover his sense for real combat, he turned his heavy steps and started walking out into the rough desert wind outside the warehouse.
The heavy engine of the old Thornton Colby cut across the wasteland of the eastern Badlands.
Leaving the steel pillar behind and heading out to find a living, breathing opponent, Ji-hwan drove through the barren sandstorm without hesitation.
After driving for a while, a noisy scrape of metal and screams reached his ears from beyond a low hill far ahead, where dust was rising.
It was a pack of the vicious raider gang called Wraiths, formed in the Badlands by those who had broken the Nomad code and been cast out from their families—the Raffen Shiv.
Their formation was impossible to miss.
Their armored modified vehicles, built for brutal off-road travel, were painted in a signature scheme of mint-tinted fluorescent cyan and dark monochrome, with cyan skull-ghost decals scattered all over the bodies.
They were in the middle of robbing and mocking a helpless civilian traveler they had forced to kneel in front of their armed vehicles.
As the civilian, stripped of all belongings, clutched his head and trembled, one of the Wraiths wearing a cold, mechanical smile raised his gun to finish him off.
Krrk-krrk-!
Ji-hwan’s old vehicle came to a stop not far away. As if he’d just found excellent targets to test his new technique on, Ji-hwan calmly opened the door and stepped out.
He looked strange and out of place in a way anyone could see. For someone who had appeared on a battlefield crawling with armed gangsters, he was still dressed in the same light training gear he’d been wearing while pounding on steel pillars in the warehouse. His shirt was off, leaving his solid upper-body muscles fully exposed, but Ji-hwan didn’t care at all about the Badlands wind stinging his skin. He simply walked toward them with an indifferent stride.
Step. Step.
At the confident footsteps, with no attempt at concealment, the Wraiths who had been about to shoot the civilian all flinched and turned at once.
"W-who the hell are you!!"
The sudden intrusion of a stranger. The gang reflexively raised their rifles and tensed up. The countless scars across the man’s exposed upper body, and the heavy, tightly packed muscle that radiated menace, carried a weight that was hard to ignore.
But the moment their cheap cyber-eyes scanned Ji-hwan from head to toe, their taut caution instantly turned into mindless laughter.
"Hahahaha!! What the hell is this guy?"
"Hey, run a scan! This idiot’s a chrome-free meat sack with no neural socket at all!"
"Walking around the middle of the Badlands with no weapon? What, did he eat something and go completely insane?"
A body with zero machine compatibility, not a single implant or piece of chrome like the ones common in the gutters of Night City. And on top of that, he was unarmed, not even carrying a pistol. Realizing this, the Wraiths started openly dismissing him, snickering all the while.
Through the mocking laughter, one Wraith with half his face hidden behind a grotesque gas mask stepped forward from the group.
"What, did you take a wrong turn while out for a workout?"
The Wraith spat out his taunt in a voice laced with metallic static through the gas mask, certain that this bare-bodied man with no neural socket would never react in time.
He grinned viciously, shoved a pistol straight at Ji-hwan’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.
Taaang-!
As the acrid smell of gunpowder spread through the air, the other Wraiths assumed the idiot stranger would naturally be rolling on the ground by now.
They were just about to lose interest and swing their rifles back toward the kneeling civilians when—
Crack-!
A rupture exploded behind them. Then, with a heavy whoom right after, something sliced through the air and flew violently into the middle of their group.
"Huh...?"
What they saw when they turned was the very comrade who had just been holding the pistol and laughing.
The gas mask covering his face had split open and been crushed beyond recognition, and the comrade whose facial bones had been shattered lay limp on the dirt, dead as a stone.
That was the first successful hit of [Instant Strike] against a living target.
Even Ji-hwan, who had just driven the technique into a breathing person for the first time, blinked in surprise at the sheer power of it.
He stood frozen in the exact posture of the fist he’d thrown, staring dumbly at his own hand still extended into the air.
Only then did the Wraiths realize that the scarred man in front of them was anything but ordinary, and they panicked, all of them swinging their guns toward Ji-hwan.
"Shoot him! Shoot him!!"
Tatatatatang-!!
The moment dozens of rounds of lead came pouring down like rain, a strange red light flashed deep in Ji-hwan’s black eyes, and the world he saw began to slow as if it had sunk into mud.
Standing in place, Ji-hwan twisted his shoulders and bent his waist by the tiniest amount, clearly watching the trajectories of the bullets flying toward him and letting them slip past with fluid ease.
Only the empty crack of gunfire rang out as the Wraiths’ faces went ashen.
"W-what... what the hell... how did he... dodge..."
"No way! Don’t tell me that’s a Sandevistan?!"
The gangsters, who had mocked him as a bare-bodied man with no cyberware, were thrown into shock and sucked in breath after breath.
Ji-hwan’s eyes, which had been blazing red a moment ago, returned to their original dark color. As if laughing at their confusion, he slowly, deliberately walked straight into the middle of the Wraiths.
Ji-hwan stood alone in the center of dozens of enemies, and their shallow little circuits started running fast.
'Unless he’s got eyes in the back of his head, if we just shoot him from behind, even this bastard won’t be able to react, Sandevistan or not!'
But unlike their calculations, the pressure crushing them left the gangsters too scared to pull the trigger. They only hovered with their fingers on the safeties, trembling.
Ji-hwan swept his gaze over the men losing their nerve and snorted.
"What’s wrong? You just gonna die standing there?"
The cold, heavy mockery sliced through the wasteland air. At that blatant taunt, one of them finally snapped.
"You motherfucker!! Kill him!!"
With the enraged shout, the others also went all in, raising their guns and trying to fire together—
At that instant, Ji-hwan’s eyes flared red again, and thick crimson smoke burst violently from his body.
He unleashed [Thought Acceleration] to open the lock on the world and [Body Enhancement] to squeeze every ounce of output from his entire body at the same time.
Taaang-!
The moment their triggers were pulled, Ji-hwan’s figure standing in the center vanished from sight, leaving behind only a red afterimage.
And before the blind bullets they fired could even cut through the air—
Crack! Bang!*
Horrific rupture sounds exploded in rapid succession from the Wraiths’ torsos.
Before they could even realize something had pierced and shattered their bodies, the ones who had been firing the guns lost their lives one after another and crumpled to the ground like puppets with their strings cut.
And far away, on a lonely hill behind a wrecked vehicle, the last remaining Wraith from the outskirts of this massacre—the sniper—was staring through his scope with trembling hands.
Through the lens, he saw Ji-hwan, who had just been tracing merciless red arcs a moment ago, now standing with his back turned, his ability released and his body returned to normal.
'Die!!'
Taaang-!!
Just before the sniper round tore through the sandstorm and flew toward Ji-hwan’s back, a chilling sensation stabbed into his skin like lightning.
Before his brain could even register the gunshot and recognize the danger, his body felt the enemy’s murderous intent first. Instinctively, he twisted his head and turned his upper body just a fraction.
Whoooosh-!
The powerful sniper round sliced past Ji-hwan’s cheek by a hair and ripped through the air. At the same time as the dodge, Ji-hwan, still facing away, slowly twisted his head and stared directly toward the hill where the sniper was hidden, as if pinpointing the exact location of the ambush.
Then, starting from the cheek where the bullet had grazed him, a thick red aura began to seep and flare across Ji-hwan’s entire body.
"W-what...?"
The sniper’s cyber-eye trembled in shock as he witnessed that unreal dodge through the scope.
'What was that? What the hell was that just now... No, it was a fluke. He just happened to turn his body at the right time!'
Desperately denying his fear, the man hurriedly worked the chamber with trembling hands and reloaded the next round.
Then, just as he told himself it had been a coincidence and looked back through the scope to fire—Ji-hwan’s scarred figure had vanished without a trace.
'...?'
At that moment, a chilling sensation hit the sniper like his heart had dropped straight through the floor.
With a cold prickle stabbing the back of his head, he sucked in a breath and spun around reflexively.
He hurriedly tried to swing his rifle and fire blindly, but before the muzzle could spit flame, something solid caught it.
Ji-hwan, who had somehow climbed silently up the hill where the sniper was lying in ambush, was gripping the front barrel shroud of the rifle with one thick hand.
"Eek...!"
At that startled reaction, Ji-hwan said flatly, "Your reflexes are pretty good."
Along with the dry praise, Ji-hwan’s other hand clenched into a heavy fist.
Krrrk-.
The horrifying grind of bones compressing and locking together. Before the sniper could even drop the gun and run, Ji-hwan’s thick fist filled his entire field of vision and came crashing down with ferocity.
Puuuuuck-!!
The rupture split the wasteland air. Struck by [Instant Strike], the sniper’s head couldn’t withstand it and quite literally burst apart like a watermelon.
The body, now empty above the neck, toppled helplessly down the hill along with a fountain of blood spraying into the air.
Thud, roll-roll.
Only the dull sound of a shapeless lump of meat slamming into the dirt, kicking up dust, remained to fill the silence of the windblown wasteland.
Ji-hwan casually shook out the fist that still carried the aftershock of the blow, then silently sat down on the large rock where the sniper had been lying in wait just moments ago.
The harsh Badlands wind scattered his sweat- and blood-soaked hair wildly.
Ji-hwan’s heavy gaze passed over the corpses of the Wraith remnants strewn at his feet and stretched far beyond them, toward the steel forest faintly shining through the dust in the distance.
It was the brilliant neon glow spilling from the giant skyscrapers of Night City, that festering den ruled by rotten capital and violence.
Watching those dazzling lights that were both close and impossibly far away, Ji-hwan finally felt one knot inside him loosen for good.
A full month had already passed since he’d been holed up in the abandoned warehouse Dakota had given him, pounding steel and bleeding through grueling training.
And today, amid a storm of bullets and the danger of real, breathing combat, he had finally seized what he wanted.
[Instant Strike], the Stage 1 strike technique that caught the microscopic 0.05-second gap before impact and left only explosive force behind in the target, and [Hyper-senses], the ability to feel murderous intent fired from unseen places. He had gone beyond accidental survival instincts and, though still rough around the edges, finally learned to wield them by his own will.
Suddenly, as Ji-hwan sat on the rock and felt the night wind brush past him, a date on the calendar flashed through his mind.
Today was the last day of the year.
One year had passed since he’d fallen from 21st-century Korea into this incomprehensible dystopia, the past of 2067, after coming face to face with a strange eye in the void.
That year had felt like ten to Ji-hwan. He had crossed the line between life and death countless times, broken bones, endured the searing pain of torn flesh, and rolled through the mud while tempering himself in constant battles that threatened his life every single day.
Those suffocating memories sat on his broad shoulders and scar-covered back like medals.
"...So it’s 68 now."
A dry murmur slipped from between Ji-hwan’s lips. The ordinary man who had once fallen into a strange otherworldly wasteland and despaired a year ago was no longer there.
At the very same time Ji-hwan was sharpening the blade of revenge in the Badlands sandstorm—
In a dark back alley of Night City’s Watson district, the Maelstrom rat who had been the only one to escape Ji-hwan’s slaughter at the abandoned power plant a month ago, Deadzone, was trembling in fear.
For the past month since returning to Night City, Deadzone had been tormented by fear of Ji-hwan and by Vice’s brutal threats that he’d rip out every last part if the mission failed, so he’d been hiding in a filthy trash heap like a homeless bum.
There was a clear reason he’d ended up in such a miserable state, helplessly rummaging through garbage.
To escape Boss Vice’s relentless pursuit, he had personally ripped out every traceable high-end implant in his body and sold them off in the back-alley black market.
He had even sold off the most important weapon he possessed as Maelstrom’s executioner—the custom [Kerenzikov] that reversed adrenaline flow and accelerated his brain’s processing speed—without a second thought, all for survival and escape funds.
But now that he’d lost his power, he was nothing more than a helpless lump of meat with terrible reflexes, just a broken lens blinking uselessly.
"Damn it... ngh!?"
At that moment, behind Deadzone’s back as he stared fearfully into a puddle of rainwater, the air warped geometrically and three shadows in dark optical-camo suits appeared like ghosts.
They were Zetatech’s elite information-recovery agents, armed with military-grade stealth gear and total control over even their footsteps and breathing, known as the Hound Team.
"Wai... mmph! Gk...!"
They clamped a hand over Deadzone’s mouth and strangled his throat.
At the same time, they drove high-voltage current pins into his mechanical joints, paralyzing his nervous system in a single second.
His silent scream was swallowed by the rain, and Deadzone was brutally thrown into a dark corporate AV waiting covertly overhead. Once the people aboard the AV departed, only silence remained in the alley.
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