Tatatatang!!
At the outskirts of the barren Badlands, in a deserted village long abandoned by people.
The silence was torn apart as countless gunshots rang out, scattering wildly through the dark.
Ji-hwan’s battle against Zetatech’s hounds, Hound Team, with nothing but his own body.
At the moment he faced twelve special operatives covered head to toe in military-grade implants, along with their captain, Alexei, who had stepped onto the battlefield.
Ji-hwan read the killing intent rolling off them and immediately knew it.
One tiny mistake here, and his head would be gone without a second thought. He had no room to gauge their full strength or conserve his stamina.
Whoosh-! Bang-!
From all directions, Hound operatives unleashed barrages from smart rifles.
Homing rounds curved through the air on their own, tracking their targets as they came in deadly arcs.
Ji-hwan rolled across the ground and barely dodged the storm of fire, only to realize he was boxed in from every side and had nowhere left to retreat.
Then, as he threw off his coat, dozens of throwing daggers were revealed, packed tightly along the belt inside the bulletproof-padded vest he had been wearing since leaving Dakota’s garage.
"Hah!"
Ji-hwan’s [Thought Acceleration] kicked in, his eyes flashing red. At the same time, [Body Enhancement] activated.
Swish-!
Ji-hwan’s hands flashed at his waist like lightning.
In the slowed-down flow of time, he clearly saw the trajectories of the smart rounds pouring toward him, and with the two daggers he had drawn, he began an unnatural feat of skill, crossing the blades through the air to bat every single one aside.
Clang-! Clang-!
Sparks flew as bullets ricocheted wildly.
But in that instant, Ji-hwan’s heightened senses caught the vicious killing intent of a sniper aiming at him from far away.
Sensing exactly when the sniper would pull the trigger, Ji-hwan stopped defending and immediately poured [Body Enhancement] into his lower body, launching himself forward in a brutal burst.
Crack-!
Right as he stacked [Thought Acceleration] and [Body Enhancement] and tried to force even more power into his legs for a leap beyond their limit.
A sickening tearing sound hit his eardrums as his knees and thigh muscles gave out under the strain.
It was a horrific pain, the kind that made his muscles scream as they tore apart, but Ji-hwan ignored the sweat dripping from him and kept charging in a violent burst.
Blocking that ferocious line of attack, Alexei, the squad leader of Hound, stepped in.
From his waist, a monomolecular cutter katana so thin it was almost impossible to see with the naked eye snapped out and was drawn in a slash meant to take Ji-hwan’s head clean off.
"...!"
But instead of taking that cold blade head-on, Ji-hwan twisted his upper body and dropped low, almost clinging to the dirt.
Swish-!
Alexei’s katana sliced through the air and clipped off a lock of Ji-hwan’s hair, but Ji-hwan felt the chill of the blade pass by and slipped under Alexei, barely clearing the attack.
Right behind Alexei, where Ji-hwan had just passed, stood a netrunner operative in a military optical camo suit, hood pulled low, manipulating data while sharing tactical feeds with the others.
"Captain! Behind you...!!"
At the same time as his teammates shouted in panic, the netrunner sensed something and jerked his head up in shock, "!!?"
But what entered his vision was Ji-hwan’s massive hand, already surging right up to his face.
Thud-!
"Mmph...?"
Ji-hwan’s huge hand clamped down hard over the netrunner’s face.
Before the startled man could even struggle, Ji-hwan kept the momentum of his charge going and drove it even harder.
Then, using the netrunner as a meat shield, he barreled like a bulldozer straight into the old concrete wall behind him.
"No!!"
Alexei and the Hound operatives shouted in alarm as they finally realized what was happening, but it was already too late to turn things around.
Kwaang!!
With a shriek of destruction loud enough to bring down a building, Ji-hwan and the netrunner he had dragged along with him smashed through the thick wall and vanished completely into the dust beyond.
"Netrunner!"
Alexei rushed into the dust beyond the collapsed concrete wall.
But what emerged through the thick haze was the pitiful sight of his subordinate, sprawled out after being used as a meat shield.
The man was rolling on the ground, one arm torn off completely, screaming in agony.
"Aaaagh! My arm!"
Alexei’s gray cybernetic eye twitched violently.
The subordinate’s miserable state was bad enough, but what really caught his attention was the fact that the netrunner’s prized [military optical camo cloak] had vanished without a trace.
"Forget taking him alive..."
After ordering his men, Alexei suppressed his rage and gripped with brutal force through the hand fitted with military-grade [Gorilla Arms].
With a chilling metallic creak, he tightened his hold on the monomolecular cutter katana at his waist, ready to sever the enemy’s head at any moment, and kept a sharp watch on the dust-choked surroundings.
Then the netrunner, writhing in pain, gasped out, "C-Captain! That bastard... ripped off my cloak!"
"So what? It wouldn’t have worked with recognition registration anyway."
"That’s true, but... even without full invisibility, the cloak’s special fibers can interfere with thermal sensors and block their line of sight!"
That frantic report sent a chill down Alexei’s spine.
Ji-hwan had physically stolen the cloak and thrown it on to defeat the thermal sensors Zetatech’s operatives were relying on to find him in the dust.
"Damn it...?! It’s a decoy!!"
Alexei roared like thunder and urgently called to the others outside.
But it was already too late. While the operatives kept their thermal sensors trained on the collapsed wall, Ji-hwan, hidden beneath the cloak and masking his body heat, had already slipped out of their encirclement and was charging ferociously in another direction.
"Shit...!!"
Alexei spotted Ji-hwan’s path cutting through the darkness and spat out a vicious curse.
Ji-hwan was heading straight for the sniper operative lying in ambush on the outer edge of the perimeter.
Alexei immediately opened the comms.
"Sniper! The target’s coming your way! Shoot him!"
The moment that order came through, the sniper’s bizarre multi-zoom lenses flashed from his ambush point atop the ruins of a tall building in the deserted village.
Through the scope, he saw Ji-hwan kicking off the ground and charging straight toward him.
The sniper braced his smart sniper rifle with a mechanical arm reinforced in heavy steel from shoulder to fingertips and pulled the trigger.
Bang-! Bang-!
But the powerful rounds only grazed Ji-hwan’s cheek and shoulder, punching useless holes into the dirt.
As Ji-hwan kept closing the distance, the sniper’s face twisted in shock.
"What the hell... how is he dodging all of it?!"
His arms trembling with tension, the sniper kept firing, but it still wasn’t enough to create space between them.
Before long, Ji-hwan’s massive silhouette was right on top of the sniper’s position.
At a distance where the sniper rifle was useless, the sniper hastily tossed the long gun aside and drew the sharp dagger and pistol at his waist at the same time.
He opened comms and shouted desperately at Alexei, "He’s in close!! I’m switching to close-quarters manual response!"
With a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other, the sniper prepared himself as a man with no mechanical enhancements at all charged at him in full force.
"Bring it on!"
Bang-! Clang-!
For a sniper, he was absurdly skilled in close combat.
It was a CQC style that pressed in from the blind spots, pistol in one hand and monomolecular dagger in the other.
It was a suffocating, point-blank exchange that lasted only seconds, with the muzzle flashing and the thin blade tearing through the air.
But the sniper did not back down.
As if confident in his own close-range ability despite being a long-range shooter, he hunched his lean frame and stepped forward, lunging at Ji-hwan with ferocity.
Ji-hwan also kept moving, gripping a throwing steel dagger and meeting the man’s charge head-on.
Just as the two blades were about to cross in the air, the sniper’s mouth curled into a grotesque smile of victory.
What he had drawn was no ordinary knife. It was a vicious monomolecular dagger forged from the same material as Alexei’s katana, sharp enough to slice through even thick armored plating.
He intended to cut Ji-hwan’s crude hunk of metal in half like tofu, and then, in the same motion, split Ji-hwan’s torso open.
Swish-!
But in that tiny instant when the blades met, Ji-hwan’s senses caught the strange vibration of his own dagger being cut apart far too easily, far too softly.
Instinctively recognizing that cold threat, Ji-hwan let go of the dagger’s hilt without hesitation instead of forcing the weapons together.
He abandoned the weapon in his hand and crouched his upper body so deeply it seemed like he was about to touch the dirt, letting the knife wind pass him by.
Then, using the power stored in his lower body, he drove a heavy bare fist upward in a vicious rising blow.
Clang-!
The sniper’s monomolecular dagger sliced through only the abandoned steel dagger, cutting it in half and nothing more.
When it sliced through empty air where flesh should have been, the multi-zoom lenses over the sniper’s right side flashed wildly in shock.
The sniper raised his pistol with the heavy steel mechanical arm running from shoulder to fingertips and fired point-blank at Ji-hwan’s face, while at the same time stabbing the sharp monomolecular dagger in his other hand like a snake toward Ji-hwan’s abdomen.
Bang-! Bang-! Swish-!
"Die, you monster bastard-!!"
Ji-hwan inwardly clicked his tongue at the brutal pressure of the pistol and dagger pouring out from the sniper’s grotesque lenses.
Whoosh-!
The bullet fired at point-blank range grazed Ji-hwan’s cheek and shoulder, spraying red blood, and the man’s monomolecular blade then shot toward Ji-hwan’s throat. But before Ji-hwan, who could see the trajectory clearly, it could do its job, it lost its edge.
Ji-hwan knocked aside the rushing muzzle and dagger, then smashed the sniper’s pistol wrist aside. The sniper groaned and dropped the gun.
"Ghk!"
Instead of panicking, the sniper drove the monomolecular dagger viciously into Ji-hwan’s side.
The dagger could slice through armored plating like tofu, and it was coming so fast it seemed too late to dodge. But Ji-hwan reached out and blocked the incoming monomolecular blade with his own hand.
Thud-!
With a chilling friction sound, the sharp monomolecular blade punched through Ji-hwan’s palm mercilessly. The dagger that should have sunk deep into his side and ripped through his organs was stopped dead by Ji-hwan’s iron grip, pinned through his palm and unable to move.
"What...?!"
The sniper’s bizarre lenses flashed wildly in shock.
Ji-hwan ignored the blade buried in his own hand and, with his other hand, seized the sniper’s wrist around the dagger with brutal force.
Crack-!
"Aaaagh!!"
With a horrifying snap of bones shattering in an unnatural way, a scream burst from the sniper’s mouth.
Unable to endure the pain of his hand bones being crushed, he wrenched the weapon hand free and staggered backward.
Having lost the weapon because his hand was wrecked, the sniper hurriedly drew a backup pistol with his remaining intact arm and aimed the trembling muzzle at Ji-hwan. But Ji-hwan only looked down at the monomolecular dagger still piercing his palm.
Swish.
He grabbed the hilt and pulled it free. Red blood gushed out between the torn flesh, but almost immediately his punctured hand began to close.
Then Ji-hwan held the monomolecular dagger he had taken from the man and gave it a few light swings in the air, smiling at the feel of it.
"Not bad. You use pretty good gear."
At that casual remark, tossed out as if he genuinely liked it, the sniper ground his teeth while cold sweat poured down his face from the pain.
"You... bastard...!!"
Spitting out the curse, the sniper abandoned his ruined hand, which was too shattered to grip properly, and with his remaining mechanical arm he raised the pistol and fired furiously at Ji-hwan as he charged in.
Bang-! Bang-!
And then, just a few seconds later.
"Hoo..."
In the dark, empty lot of the deserted village, red blood dripped from Ji-hwan’s side as he caught his breath, as if it had been scraped away by bullets.
In front of him lay the sniper, utterly wrecked. One of the man’s knees had bent grotesquely the wrong way, and the arm that had struggled to hold the pistol until the end had lost the wrist entirely and was now rolling on the ground.
"Cough!"
The sniper coughed up a mouthful of dark blood, then his eyes lost focus and he collapsed face-first into the dirt, completely unconscious.
Breathing hard, Ji-hwan looked down at the man on the ground with quiet surprise.
It was the first time someone had managed to keep up with such a ferocious assault from a flesh-and-blood body using nothing but trained technique and sheer viciousness, without even a high-speed implant like a [Sandevistan].
Ji-hwan picked up the sharp monomolecular dagger that had fallen to the ground.
Hissss-.
From the side wound where the bullets had hit, thick red steam rose as the destroyed flesh began to stitch itself back together in real time. Ji-hwan casually rubbed the side that had already healed and tossed out a flat remark to the unconscious sniper.
"I’ll make good use of this."
The moment he started to turn his head.
Tatatatang!!
From beyond the darkness, a storm of homing rounds from smart rifles rained down on the spot where Ji-hwan had been standing.
Ji-hwan rolled hard across the dirt and barely dodged the line of fire.
Then he immediately pulled the [military optical camo cloak] he had stolen from the netrunner out of his coat and threw it over his shoulders.
The special fibers cut off Ji-hwan’s body heat, neutralizing the thermal sensor net the enemy was using, and his silhouette vanished without a trace into the deep darkness of the deserted village.
Only a few seconds after Ji-hwan disappeared.
Alexei arrived at the sniper’s ambush point in the empty lot, leading the armed Hound Team operatives.
But what met his eyes was the pitiful sight of his subordinate lying there bloodied, limbs broken.
Of the twelve special operatives, two had already been knocked out of the fight, the netrunner and the sniper. Somehow, only ten remained.
"...Grrr."
Alexei ground his teeth, unable to contain his rage.
The fact that Zetatech’s elite strike team was being toyed with by a man with nothing but his bare body shook his reason.
With one hand gripping the katana hilt, Alexei quietly opened the comms.
"Location?"
A short, restrained question. A brief, unreadable answer came back through the radio a moment later.
[...Secured.]
After hearing that report, Alexei no longer ordered a noisy pursuit. He simply stood tall amid the broken ruins and waited in silence for something.
Meanwhile, Ji-hwan, who had put a fair distance between himself and the others and was hiding in the blind spot on the second floor of a collapsed building, kept a sharp eye on their movements beneath the cloak.
'Why did that bastard suddenly stop?'
Ji-hwan wondered as he began counting the Hound operatives one by one.
He had hidden his body heat to avoid the thermal sensors, but the glow of their gear and their silhouettes were clearly visible to the naked eye.
The original landing force, excluding Alexei, had been twelve in total.
He had taken down two, so there should have been exactly ten left.
One, two, three... eight, nine.
Ji-hwan’s brow slowly furrowed.
'Nine?'
No matter how many times he counted again, there were only nine of them. One was missing.
'One bastard’s gone. Where the hell did he...'
The moment that thought flashed through his mind.
A chill ran down his spine.
A sudden killing intent from the deep shadow in the ceiling corner directly behind him.
Ji-hwan instinctively snapped his head around at the exact moment the ambush came flying from the darkness.
Hanging like a spider in a grotesque posture from the ceiling corner was a Mantis Blades operative, who shot out at terrifying speed. He had perfectly exploited the opening created when Ji-hwan focused on the front.
Swish-!
Two vicious mantis scythes gleaming blue from both arms crossed as they were about to pierce Ji-hwan’s unguarded neck and back. Before Ji-hwan could even register the unexpected fact that the operative could turn invisible not with the optical camo cloak, but with implants grafted directly into his skin.
"Tch!"
Red light flashed deep in Ji-hwan’s eyes as he clenched his teeth.
Clangggg-!!
In the slowed flow of time, Ji-hwan’s dagger flashed up and forcefully blocked the upper blade aimed at his neck.
Sparks flew with a heavy metallic screech, but at the same time he could not fully stop the other blade driving toward his abdomen.
Ji-hwan twisted his body with bone-grinding concentration, trying to evade the trajectory, but the cold edge of the [Mantis Blades], already pressed against his skin, still pierced straight into his thick abdominal muscles.
"Kgh...!"
Hot blood burst from between Ji-hwan’s lips.
Sensing that the strike had landed cleanly, the operative using [Mantis Blades] immediately dropped his optical camouflage and revealed himself.
He released the [Mantis Blades] on one arm and reached for the comms button, while at the same time yanking hard to pull the remaining blade free from Ji-hwan’s abdomen.
But strangely, the [Mantis Blades] embedded in Ji-hwan’s stomach did not move at all.
The operative looked up in confusion, only to meet Ji-hwan’s gaze head-on as the man, despite the severe wound piercing his organs, held back the boiling blood and stared down at him.
"Got you."
The words came out at the same time Ji-hwan’s huge hand clamped viciously around the protruding joint of the [Mantis Blades] buried in his abdomen.
In that instant, the fierce output of [Body Enhancement] and the thick red smoke of [super regeneration], stitching his ruined wound back together, burst explosively from Ji-hwan’s entire body.
Crack-!! Crunch!
The horrible grinding sound of mechanical joints being smashed to pieces. Before the [Mantis Blades] could even retract, the protruding joint snapped clean off.
"What...?!"
As the operative stared blankly at his own broken weapon, Ji-hwan’s body twisted violently, and the momentum of the blade he had just blocked on the other side came around in a brutal turn beneath the man’s chin.
Ji-hwan’s heavy kick, packed with rotational force to the limit, slammed perfectly into the man’s abdomen.
Crack-! Thud-!!
"Kraaaagh!!"
With a sound like bones breaking, blood sprayed from the man’s mouth like a fountain.
Unlike when he had lunged nimbly at Ji-hwan’s back a moment earlier, his body now flew backward through the air, crashing through the old window on the second floor of the collapsed building and falling far, far below.
Ignoring the man as he fell, Ji-hwan roughly clutched his pierced abdomen and exhaled hard, focusing little by little on healing the wound.
Hissss-.
Red steam rose from the gap in the wound as it began to heal, and countless aiming lasers from the surrounding guns settled eerily over Ji-hwan’s body.
By then, Zetatech Hound Team’s smart rifles had already surrounded him.
And when their leader Alexei gave the merciless order.
"Fire."
At that sound, Ji-hwan’s neural pathways snapped open once more, and [Thought Acceleration] activated with violent force.
At the same time, the muscles throughout his body began swelling grotesquely toward a single goal.
Ji-hwan’s move was simple.
He was neither going to charge them head-on nor hide behind cover until their bullets ran dry.
This was the brutal, overwhelming power he had reserved for the rare moments when he wanted to die, the kind that went far beyond the enhancement limits he normally set to keep himself under control.
With muscle fibers screaming and joints grinding in searing pain, Ji-hwan planted that terrifying force into his fist and brought it crashing down toward the floor beneath him.
Kwaang---!!!!
A deafening boom that felt like it would burst eardrums. The Hound operatives, just about to fire from their muzzles, lost their balance and staggered as a massive quake rolled up from the floor beneath them.
Their shock quickly became reality. The old second-floor flooring and concrete pillars could not withstand Ji-hwan’s destructive load and began cracking apart with a horrifying roar, the entire building on the verge of collapse.
At the dreadful sound of the whole structure giving way, Alexei immediately grabbed the men beside him and rushed outside.
But the moment he barely made it out, the floor where Ji-hwan had been standing and the surrounding structure caved in completely.
Rumble... Kwaang!
Amid the thick rain of cement dust and debris, the desperate screams of the remaining men who had not been rescued in time rang out.
Entangled in the collapsing wreckage of broken rebar and heavy chunks of concrete, the operatives left behind with Ji-hwan were buried in dust and plummeting into the depths below.
"Aaaagh-!"
"Ground collapse! Evade... ngh!"
"Shit... damn it!!"
With the terrifying sensation of the ground vanishing beneath their feet, the Zetatech operatives screamed in despair and fell into the abyss.
The huge man with the thermite hammer, the female operative using a monomolecular whip, the operative with micro-shotguns built into both arms, and the one carrying a superalloy riot shield—four Hound members in total—were swallowed by the collapsing ruins of the old building and vanished completely from sight.
Thud. Rumble... Kwaang!
Outside the building, Alexei watched the scene of collapse as a giant cloud of acrid cement dust surged upward, and a hollow voice slipped from between his lips.
"...Crazy bastard."
Meanwhile, deep in the darkness where the mountain of debris had settled.
Ji-hwan, who had fallen all the way to the bottom of the ruined building, into a wide, cold space that had probably once served as an underground parking garage, shoved away the heavy concrete pile crushing down over his head with his remaining left hand and stood up.
"Kgh..."
Spitting out dust with a rough breath, Ji-hwan looked down at his right arm.
The state of his right arm, unable to withstand the terrifying load he had unleashed, was nothing short of miserable.
Every thick muscle had burst apart, and even the tough ligaments had snapped, leaving the white bone fully exposed in a grievous wound.
But over that horrific sight, thick red smoke poured violently from the torn flesh, healing the destroyed muscle and nerves in real time.
'A normal person wouldn’t even be able to use this arm anymore...'
Ji-hwan stared at the visibly recovering arm with indifference, grimacing at the pain of bones grinding together and raw flesh forcefully knitting back into place.
'It’ll take at least a few minutes before it’s fully healed.'
"Kgh... you insane monster..."
Beyond the thick dust, a huge, muscular operative with a thermite hammer was rising to his feet, roughly shoving aside a concrete slab the size of a person.
With sparks crackling all over his body from the impact of the fall, the man spat a vicious curse at Ji-hwan.
And around that giant, the other three operatives buried in the debris also coughed up dust and staggered back to their feet.
They looked around and realized that this dark space was, fortunately, an underground parking garage still held up by pillars.
It was a huge relief they had not been crushed flat under the building’s debris, and that they still had at least some room to fight in.
The men glared at Ji-hwan as if they wanted to tear him apart on the spot for causing this insane disaster.
Then the female operative with the monomolecular whip froze, her gaze trembling in shock.
"H-... his arm!!"
Where she pointed was Ji-hwan’s right arm, which had been horrifically blown apart to the point that white bone was visible, and yet was now clearly, steadily recovering. The operatives’ faces turned ashen in an instant.
They remembered all too well the overwhelming destructive power that arm had unleashed just moments ago, the same arm that had brought down the entire building.
More than that, if the fight dragged on against an opponent with regeneration that bizarre, the one who would eventually run out of stamina and ammunition and die would be them.
'We can’t drag this out. We have to kill him before that arm heals.'
Sensing the danger, one of the operatives shouted urgently, splitting the air of the dark underground garage.
"Kill him before his regeneration finishes!!"
That cry was the signal. The four Zetatech operatives unfurled their weapons with murderous intent and charged at Ji-hwan.
It was a bad situation, with the bones and muscles in one arm horribly destroyed and his right arm unusable for the moment. But Ji-hwan slowly curled a cold smile at the corner of his mouth over his hardened face.
He was inwardly relieved that the most troublesome enemy captain had not fallen into the collapsed underground space with them.
"That works for me."
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