Fuzzy consciousness. The dull scrape of something being dragged across the floor.
When Deadzone finally came to after being knocked out while rummaging through a stinking junkyard in Night City, both of his arms were firmly held by corporate agents wearing dark, featureless masks.
"Ugh... ngh..."
His limp legs dragged across the cold metal floor.
Through his blurred vision, cold lights flashed past nonstop. Deadzone instinctively realized he had been dragged into some hidden underground facility.
"L-let go! Let go of me!!"
Only then did Deadzone understand what was happening, and he thrashed around, but with a body stripped bare after selling off every last implant, he couldn’t even budge the iron grip of the agents armed with military gear.
Before long, a heavy steel door opened, and the room the agents hauled Deadzone into was nothing short of hell.
Under the blinding white lights, the stench of disinfectant and thick blood seeped into his nostrils.
In the center of the room sat a cold operating table caked with red stains, surrounded by a chaotic spread of bizarre surgical tools, including saws and drills.
And around that table stood people in surgical gowns, their eyes unfocused, waiting for Deadzone in silence like butchers in a slaughterhouse.
"No... no! Please!!"
Deadzone’s face went white as he realized exactly what was about to happen to him. The agents holding him lifted his body up and threw him onto the operating table like a sack of garbage.
"Please, spare me! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll do whatever you want! Just don’t kill me!!"
Clack, clack.
Despite his desperate pleas and struggles, the people in surgical gowns said nothing. With indifferent hands, they strapped Deadzone’s limbs down tightly to the table.
Bound by cruel restraints, Deadzone couldn’t even twitch a finger. When he saw the sharp scalpel and power drill coming toward him, he screamed like a man possessed.
"Aaaagh! Pleeeease!!"
Then the thick alloy door shut with a heavy thud, and his shrieking was buried without a trace deep in Zetatech’s underground.
*
How much time passed after that?
"Ugh, heehee... s-save me... hee..."
Thick saliva dribbled from the corner of Deadzone’s mouth as he lay strapped to the operating table.
The multi-eye lens covering his face had lost focus and was flickering grotesquely, and the transparent glass cover on the top of his skull had long since been torn away.
Dozens of sharp metal pins were brutally driven into the exposed gray-white mass of his brain.
Merciless data extraction, physically tearing through the brain to force information out.
Through the thick cables attached to the pins, the overwhelming combat trajectory Ji-hwan had displayed at the abandoned power plant a month ago, along with every memory record Deadzone had witnessed, was being extracted in real time and streamed onto a large monitor.
And watching this horrific scene in silence from beyond the huge soundproof glass wall of the operating room were several others.
The comfortable, luxurious observation room on the other side of the glass.
A middle-aged man leaned back in a leather chair, watching the combat data of Ji-hwan displayed on a hologram monitor with obvious interest. He was Carlyle, Zetatech’s executive director.
Wiiing-
Then the automatic door to the observation room opened, and the head surgeon, who had come in removing bloodstained surgical gloves, bowed politely toward Carlyle, who was still lounging deep in the leather chair.
When Carlyle nodded, the neat-suited female secretary standing stiffly beside him like a wax doll stepped forward, took the data chip the surgeon offered, and handed it to Carlyle with proper deference.
Tapping the heavy data chip with his fingers, Carlyle looked casually through the soundproof glass.
On the other side, sprawled on the operating table, was Deadzone’s hideous wreck of a body, reduced to a drooling husk after having every last memory forcibly ripped from him.
As soon as Carlyle inserted the chip into the terminal, a huge holographic screen rose into the air before the window. It showed Deadzone’s visual data, the raw record of that brutal memory extraction.
The screen vividly replayed the situation from several days ago, when the remnants of Maelstrom had attacked Dakota’s garage.
The fierce firefight, with the garage’s fortress-like auto turrets spitting fire and smart mines exploding. But to Carlyle, a man who held the power of Zetatech, that kind of crude mercenary gunfight was nothing more than a boring little game.
"Tch. Pathetic."
Clearly losing interest, Carlyle clicked his tongue and flicked the hologram forward with a dismissive motion of his finger, fast-forwarding through the footage.
Whoosh, whoosh. As the screen sped ahead past meaningless escapes and the explosion at the abandoned power plant, Carlyle’s finger suddenly stopped in midair.
His sharp gaze locked onto the figure of a man who had abruptly appeared on the screen.
It was Ji-hwan, who had pursued Deadzone’s group alone after they fled to the abandoned power plant on the outskirts of the Badlands following the failed garage raid.
The man on the screen had a strange red light burning fiercely in the depths of his dark eyes. And over that bare body, with no visible machine parts or cyberware, a thick red vapor or mist-like aura was slowly seeping out and wrapping around him in a grotesque shroud.
Ji-hwan, exuding that unreal aura as he looked down coldly at Deadzone.
The moment Carlyle saw that fleeting image, his perpetually bored, arrogant eyes widened just slightly and flashed with greedy hunger.
"...Well, now?"
As if possessed, he rewound the playback bar and started the combat scene over from the beginning, this time at a very slow speed, where Ji-hwan appeared while pouring out that red aura.
The visuals on the screen moved at a crawl.
Keeping his eyes fixed on the hologram like a snake, Carlyle watched in silence as Ji-hwan fought a merciless bloodbath against three Maelstrom executives.
At first, the battle looked evenly matched.
Specter, using a [Sandevistan] to slip into blind spots, Slash swinging a hydraulic hammer with brute force, and Deadzone sniping from afar for a lethal hit—their coordination was certainly dangerous.
But as the fight dragged on, the situation on screen began to warp into something grotesque.
Even under that vicious assault, Ji-hwan started reading the enemies’ trajectories with animal instinct and astonishing combat sense.
Before long, he had gone beyond parity and seized control of the battlefield, cutting down the three monsters one by one while holding overwhelming advantage.
What drew Carlyle’s attention most of all was Ji-hwan’s body.
Even when the enemies’ blades tore his skin and left him grievously wounded, exposing bone, he would vent thick red vapor through the open wounds and heal in real time.
Watching that unreal battle, Carlyle narrowed his brow and snapped irritably at the surgeon standing beside him.
"Hey. What the hell kind of implant is that bastard using? Is there some secret military chrome even our Zetatech intel net can’t pick up?"
At the executive’s question, laced with suspicion and irritation, the surgeon hurriedly bowed his head.
He quickly lifted the tablet in his arms and began tapping the screen.
It was a process of syncing the visual data ripped from Deadzone’s brain with the biometric scan records to analyze Ji-hwan’s physical stats in detail.
Tap, tap.
As the surgeon hurriedly flipped through screens and adjusted settings, his finger suddenly froze in midair.
His eyes, staring at the tablet’s analysis results, shook violently in disbelief.
"...There isn’t any."
The words came out in a trembling voice. Carlyle’s eyebrow twitched as he turned his head.
"What?"
"There are no implants at all... not even a basic neural socket. There’s zero chrome. He’s a hundred percent organic."
The moment that report landed.
Bang—! Crash!!
As if he had just heard the most ridiculous nonsense in the world, Carlyle shot to his feet.
With that violent motion, the expensive leather chair he had been sitting in toppled backward with a loud clatter and rolled across the floor.
The composed mask of the ever-elegant, perpetually bored corporate executive shattered in an instant. Carlyle’s eyes bloodshot, he stormed up to the surgeon’s face and barked at him.
"What insane crap are you spouting!! You’re telling me that impossible movement!! That healing where torn flesh reattaches in real time!! That overwhelming combat power came from a plain flesh-and-blood body with no machine parts at all?!"
His face flushed red with anger as Carlyle pressed the issue, but the surgeon only shrank back in fear and kept his head deeply bowed.
"That’s what the analysis says... There’s no error in the data, Director."
At that firm answer, rough breaths hissed out of Carlyle’s mouth.
His eyes twisted with rage, burning as if he wanted to drag the man in front of him straight to that horrific operating table and open his skull himself to rummage through his brain.
The surgeon trembled, shoulders hunched under that terrifying pressure.
Then the neat-suited secretary, who had been waiting beside Carlyle like a wax doll, stepped forward quietly and spoke.
"Director."
At that flat call, with no trace of emotion, Carlyle finally forced himself to suppress his boiling anger and recover his reason. He roughly straightened his crumpled tie and waved a hand at the surgeon.
"...Fine. You did well. You can go now."
"Yes, sir. Understood."
Just as the surgeon was hurriedly bowing and about to leave the observation room, he seemed to remember something and cautiously turned back to ask.
"About those Maelstrom remnants... how should we handle them?"
At that, Carlyle glanced lazily through the glass at Deadzone, who had already been stripped of every memory and left as nothing but an empty shell, and answered without interest.
"Ah. That trash? Dispose of it."
The moment he said it, the heavy automatic door slid shut, and the surgeon disappeared.
A moment later, when the surgeon stepped into the operating room beyond the glass, he had a large, sharp saw in his hands.
As if venting the pressure he had just received from Carlyle, the surgeon approached the drooling Deadzone with the vicious tool in hand. At that moment, with a mechanical whir, the once-transparent soundproof glass turned a deep opaque shade and completely blocked out the horrific scene inside.
Heavy silence returned to the soundproof observation room.
Carlyle and the secretary stared wordlessly at the hologram floating in the air.
On the screen, Ji-hwan’s grotesque battle scene kept replaying endlessly, showing him ravaging Maelstrom executives with a body that was completely organic yet still venting red vapor.
After a quiet stretch of time, Carlyle, still not taking his eyes off the hologram, suddenly spoke.
"You know that Hound team that came back from an overseas operation recently?"
At the mention of the elite intelligence recovery unit that symbolized Zetatech’s force in Night City—really a legal murder squad that kept cyberpsychos on a leash with suppressants—the secretary answered at once.
"Yes. But because of their fatigue from the overseas mission and their suppressant schedule, they’ve been ordered to stand by until the next deployment order."
"Doesn’t matter. Deploy them."
At Carlyle’s reckless order, the secretary’s neat eyebrow twitched ever so slightly.
"If you move the unit on your own and violate internal regulations, the higher-ups will definitely have something to say."
"That’s why you’re standing next to me. Figure out how to package it so the people above will accept it."
It was the usual corporate bullying, dumping troublesome excuses and responsibility onto the people below.
As if this sort of thing were now just another ordinary part of life, the secretary let out a very short, resigned sigh and nodded.
"...Understood. Then for this operation, we’ll frame it as ‘securing a mutant sample born from an astronomical probability.’"
At the secretary’s smooth, rational proposal, Carlyle finally nodded with satisfaction and smiled.
But the secretary wasn’t done. He carefully added the next concern.
"However, Director, if faction executives from other companies like Biotechnica or Militech also catch wind of this organic monster’s existence, they won’t sit still. Other members of the board may also object to us monopolizing the information."
A warning about the dangers of corporate infighting and internal politics. But Carlyle leaned back deeper into the leather chair and let out a confident laugh.
"Yes, yes. I’ll deal with those annoying rats myself. You just release the Hound team and get ready to drag that bastard to my feet alive."
At his arrogant command, the secretary standing stiffly behind him answered in a mechanical voice.
"Understood."
With the situation settled, Carlyle took his eyes off the hologram monitor at last and let out a lazy remark.
"Then today as well..."
He didn’t even get to finish.
The secretary, who had been standing still like a wax doll, remained silent for a brief moment before beginning to unbutton his neat suit with a blank face that showed not the slightest emotional disturbance.
Swish, swish.
Only the sound of expensive fabric sliding to the cold floor filled the heavy silence of the soundproof observation room.
In front of a corporate executive standing at the summit of Night City, human dignity and personal feelings were nothing more than business assets to be consumed whenever convenient.
*
And so, while the preparations for a vicious hunt against Ji-hwan began in Zetatech’s dark underground, the scene shifted to the eastern Badlands and fixer Dakota Smith’s old garage.
After spending a month holed up in the warehouse Dakota had provided and finishing brutal training, Ji-hwan had returned to the now-clean garage interior.
The wreckage of the broken barricades left behind by Maelstrom’s ruthless raid was gone, and on this quiet night the fortress was being guarded solidly by thick steel plating and tightly arranged medium-caliber turrets.
Inside the shabby room where he had been staying, Ji-hwan packed a heavy Overture pistol and several cold, razor-sharp throwing knives into a duffel bag. Then, after fastening on the old leather jacket lined with bulletproof padding that the fixer had once given him, he shouldered his gear and headed out without hesitation.
As he crossed the silent garage yard toward the exit, Ji-hwan suddenly stopped.
In front of the garage’s massive closed door, someone was smoking a cigar while silently watching the sand drift through the night sky, and it was a face Ji-hwan knew well.
Dakota Smith. As if she had already known he would be leaving for Night City at this hour, she was waiting for him, exhaling smoke in a long stream.
"Heading out?"
Hearing footsteps behind her, Dakota turned her head casually and asked.
At that dry question, Ji-hwan nodded once against the sharp night wind.
"Yeah."
That brief answer. Dakota slowly looked Ji-hwan over with the sharp eye of a fixer.
His bearing was completely different from when he had returned a month ago, bloodied after fighting the Maelstrom troops.
There was a clear, unwavering will in those steady eyes, the confidence of someone who had already seized the path he meant to walk.
"You kept your head down so quietly, I thought you’d bury your bones in this barren wasteland. But you’re really going after it after all..."
It was the same old jab she had given him before, when she warned him about the danger of the shard containing Zetatech military data and told him to pretend he knew nothing.
"I have to return what I got."
A declaration aimed at Maelstrom for slaughtering the weak, and a message he wanted to send to the corp behind them as well.
At that stubborn resolve, Dakota stared blankly at Ji-hwan’s face for a moment.
Then a hearty laugh burst from between her wrinkled lips.
"Ahahaha! Yeah, that’s how it works out here!"
Letting the laughter fade, Dakota patted Ji-hwan’s broad shoulder and gave him a meaningful smile.
Looking at this reckless man heading toward Night City, she didn’t bother hiding her deep awe.
"Still... Ji-hwan, I’d definitely make sure never to become your enemy."
At her words, Ji-hwan quietly turned his head and looked at her wrinkled face.
"Don’t worry about me. Watch your own back. Once you’ve caught the eye of a megacorp, it won’t be strange for your head to come off anywhere, anytime."
Ji-hwan gave a short bow and climbed into the old Thornton Colby.
Vroooom—!
As the vehicle disappeared into the dust of the wasteland with a trail of acrid exhaust, Dakota’s armed subordinates came up behind her.
"Lay low for a while. Keep the auto turrets powered on and maintain maximum alert, including the surrounding minefield. A storm’s coming."
*
Ji-hwan drove through the harsh night wind of the wasteland, his eyes fixed on the noisy neon glow of Night City, distant yet somehow close at the same time.
But the old car racing forward without hesitation suddenly slowed, then came to a stop on the dirt road with a rough krrrk of friction.
"..."
Ji-hwan rested both hands on the wheel and stared quietly into the air.
Something that ordinary senses couldn’t catch had snagged on his sharpened perception.
Something with its engine sound completely cut off was quietly following him from far, far above, watching him with obsessive patience.
Clouds hid it from naked eyes, but the cold premonition pricking his skin was unmistakable.
‘Running into this on the way to Night City would be a pain.’
Ji-hwan murmured softly and yanked the wheel hard.
The battered Thornton Colby turned its body away from the glittering lights of the city and began accelerating again, heading instead toward the deep canyons of the barren, out-of-the-way Badlands, where there wasn’t even a proper escape route.
At that same moment, high above, a dark armed AV in stealth mode glided silently through the sky, secretly tracking Ji-hwan’s route.
Inside the AV’s cold metal interior, Alexis, squad leader of Zetatech’s elite recovery unit, the Hound team, was watching Ji-hwan’s movements through a monitor.
Alexis quietly switched on his comms.
"Director. We’ve found the sample."
After finishing his report, Alexis waited for a response. A moment later, Carlyle’s cold metallic voice came through the speaker.
[Location?]
"He was heading toward Night City, then changed course. He’s moving toward a remote canyon in the Badlands."
At that report, Carlyle said nothing for a moment.
Then a voice steeped in greed vibrated through the comms.
[Even better. It’ll be a lot cleaner to quietly capture him in some corner of the wasteland with not a single ant around, rather than making a noisy game of cat and mouse in the city.]
Alexis’s eyes flashed.
"How should we handle the sample?"
Through the comms, it almost sounded as if the corner of Carlyle’s mouth had twisted upward as he leaned back in his leather chair.
[...As long as he’s alive, it doesn’t matter. Cut off a few limbs if you have to, but bring him back breathing.]
At that merciless order, a grotesque smile spread across squad leader Alexis’s face.
"Understood."
The transmission ended.
Alexis slowly turned and scanned the twelve elite agents lined up inside the dark AV.
They were vicious hunting dogs, their entire bodies covered in high-end implants, barely suppressing cyberpsychosis with military-grade sedatives while waiting only for the order to kill.
Alexis tapped the hilt of his own weapon, a monomolecular cutter katana, with one hand and murmured in a low voice.
"You heard him. Get ready."
The moment his order fell, the agents’ artificial eyes all flashed red at once. The armed AV dropped lower and began a fierce pursuit of Ji-hwan’s battered car heading deep into the wasteland.
Somewhere on the outskirts of the Badlands, in an abandoned village long since deserted and without even power running through it.
Only the cold moonlight lay pale across the silent dirt ground under the thick darkness.
Krrrk-
In the middle of the village’s empty square, Ji-hwan’s old Thornton Colby, having raced through the rough sandstorm, came to a stop with a heavy scrape.
Then the car door rattled open, and Ji-hwan stepped out. Like someone out for a casual late-night walk, he twisted his body this way and that, cracking his neck and shoulders as he loosened up with complete ease.
That was when he stood alone and looked up at the night sky.
Wooooong-
Geometric distortions rippled through the clouds high overhead where nothing had been, and a dark armed AV, having dropped stealth mode, silently revealed itself while blasting intense searchlights downward.
Tap, tap!
Riding the beams of light, the AV’s hatch opened, and several figures in dark tactical coats and military gear leaped without hesitation from more than ten meters up.
Heavy thuds rang out one after another as alloy boots crushed the dirt on landing. Once all personnel had dropped, the armed AV shut off its searchlights and vanished back into the darkness above without a trace.
As soon as the AV’s engine noise disappeared completely, a suffocating silence settled over the abandoned village once more.
Despite that dramatic entrance, Ji-hwan showed no sign of running or panicking. He simply kept standing there in the same calm posture, watching them quietly as he loosened his joints.
All over his body, faint red vapor began to rise, as if his flesh had sensed danger and was warming itself in advance for survival.
"So... you knew."
Facing that quiet, alien attitude, a slightly surprised voice slipped from Alexis, squad leader of Zetatech’s Hound team.
With pale synthetic skin and dull gray artificial eyes stripped of all emotion, he immediately erased that reaction and declared flatly, like the leader of a corporate murder squad controlled by drugs.
"I will execute the retrieval of the mutant sample. If you wish to keep your life, surrender quietly."
At that arrogant announcement, Ji-hwan snorted a laugh.
Then, very slowly and deliberately, he raised his middle finger toward Alexis.
"Go fuck yourself."
A blatant, filthy taunt slicing through the night air of the wasteland.
At that dry sneer, Alexis’s gray eyes twitched ever so slightly.
"Looks like you won’t need your fingers."
With that flat reply as the signal, Alexis tightened his grip on the handle of the monomolecular cutter katana hanging at his waist, and the cold menace of the vicious blade, ready to be drawn at any moment to cut the air itself, began to press down on the village.
Taking that tiny movement from the squad leader as the starting gun, the Zetatech Hound agents standing in the darkness also moved in perfect unison, violently activating their weapons and implants as they prepared to enter full combat.
Clack—! Whiiing—! Crackle!
The machines screamed hungrily, tearing through the silence like beasts.
The skinny sniper’s steel arm adjusted the smart rifle’s zeroing as its bizarre multi-lens optics flashed, while from the arms of the crouched, beastlike agent, blue Mantis Blades unfolded with razor-sharp precision.
The thermite hammer in the hands of the man over two meters tall began venting heat in shimmering waves, and blue high-voltage current crackled fiercely over the riot shield of the one carrying the heavy shield.
The agent with red monowire whips extending from both wrists, the one finishing the reload on a shotgun, and the rest of them activated their military optical camo suits as well, melting into the surrounding shadows while tightening the encirclement.
Just before the cyberpsycho murder squad, their leashes cut loose, could unleash overwhelming killing intent and plunge into a horrific battle.
Across from them, standing tall, the deep red light in the depths of Ji-hwan’s dark eyes flashed.
At the same time, the muscles all over his body swelled as if they were about to burst, and the thick red vapor wrapping around him began to boil violently.
And in that instant, a strange and terrifying vision crashed over Alexis and the Hound agents’ sight.
The red aura pouring from Ji-hwan’s body pressed heavily against the air, and before long its shape began to writhe like the silhouette of a huge red wolf lurking in the darkness.
A red wolf facing the mechanical hunting dogs that had surrounded him. The wild beast twisted its face viciously, baring its teeth and growling low as if it were about to tear out their throats at any second, and the hallucination sent chills through every one of the agents.
A man who had shattered the limiter of his body and was ready to unleash an explosion.
Alexis silently watched Ji-hwan, who was pouring out the overwhelming presence of that red wolf, slowly part his lips.
Alexis heard that dry, heavy voice clearly.
Ji-hwan had definitely said this.
"Try me."
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