"So tell me. Up until now, when the people you killed begged you to let them live... did you ever spare even one of them?"
The cold, merciless verdict that spilled from Ji-hwan’s lips as he leaned in right up to Vice’s face echoed through the bunker like a curse, then scattered away in the chill air.
That one bone-deep sentence lodged itself in Vice’s mind and snapped the last thread of reason still hanging on.
Shaking in terror and agony, foaming at the mouth as he convulsed, Vice rolled his bloodshot eyes white and completely lost his mind, passing out cold.
Ji-hwan looked down in silence at Vice’s ruined body sprawled on the floor. With his arms and legs gone, the man was nothing more than a massive lump of meat now.
Shards of machinery, torn flesh, and a pool of blood. Inside the bunker, which had only moments ago been boiling like the bottom of hell, the only sounds left were the crackle of sparks leaking from the wrecked Centaur frame and the slow drip of blue hydraulic fluid.
And then something very strange happened.
Was it just his imagination?
Ji-hwan had the odd feeling that the air inside the bunker, which had been suffocating under the stench of blood, gunpowder, and machine smoke, had somehow turned cleaner.
Hoo—.
As Ji-hwan slowly drew in a deep breath, he felt the heavy weight that had been crushing his shoulders throughout the fight grow lighter.
It was almost as if Vice, whose limbs had been brutally torn away by Ji-hwan’s hands, and the countless spirits who had once fallen victim to this bastard’s greed and cyberpsychosis—dying on cold operating tables or in dark back alleys without even the chance to scream—were drifting around him, quietly thanking him for settling their grudge at last before fading away.
"Well... not bad."
It was a sentimental thought that had no place in a giant trash heap like Night City, where betrayal and slaughter were everywhere, but Ji-hwan casually wiped the sticky blood from his cheek with the back of his hand and let himself enjoy that superstitious feeling.
His gaze returned to Vice’s unconscious, gasping body.
The detonator and bombs the man had supposedly hidden somewhere in the factory. If he found and disabled those, the danger of blowing this whole district sky-high would be over for good.
That was when it happened. The adrenaline that had been pushed to its limit, along with the pulsing blood in his veins, slammed into Ji-hwan’s brain and sent a chilling, seductive impulse flickering through his mind.
'Maybe I should just take care of the bombs now and kill the rest of them too—every last Maelstrom bastard, Royce, Brick, whoever else is up there tearing into each other... wipe them all out.'
Some verbal promise made to a bunch of back-alley punks was something he could keep or break as he pleased anyway.
That Royce or Brick or whatever they were called were no different from Vice at their core—hopeless trash who would one day poison this city and trample innocent people underfoot.
If he went upstairs now, it wouldn’t be impossible to butcher every gang member in the area and do a real cleanup job. A strange killing intent began to rise from his blood-soaked hands.
But Ji-hwan quickly raised both palms, still smeared with blood, and slapped his own cheeks hard enough to make the bunker ring with the sound. Smack! Smack! The stinging pain snapped his wavering reason back into place.
"Don’t think crazy thoughts, Ji-hwan. I’m not one of those bastards."
If he got drunk on slaughter and lost his humanity while swinging blind killing intent around, how would he be any different from Vice, whom he had just despised so much and torn limb from limb? To survive in this insane dystopia as a pure human being with not a single chrome implant in his body, he had to cling viciously to the minimum line and reason he had drawn for himself. Paradoxically, that was the only way.
Ji-hwan steadied his rough breathing and let the killing intent drain away.
"Might as well wrap this up and head back."
Ji-hwan grabbed Vice by the blood-soaked nape of his neck with a crushing grip.
Then, dragging the giant mass of a body behind him like butchered meat, blood and oil dripping all the way, he began to trudge toward the open bunker exit.
At the same time, on the factory’s upper level, the main battlefield.
"Die, you motherfuckers!!"
In the middle of the factory’s blood-soaked firefight, one of Vice’s lieutenants, both arms unfolded into vicious [Mantis Blades], charged at Royce with his eyes rolled back and a savage scream tearing out of him.
The cold blades, sharp as a mantis’s scythes, sliced through the air and aimed for Royce’s throat.
But Royce only snorted at the obvious, braindead rush.
Without the slightest hint of panic, he drew a heavy power revolver from his hip in one smooth, lazy motion, leveled it at the man’s face, and pulled the trigger without mercy.
Kwaang!!
The single deafening blast of a power weapon, far heavier than an ordinary pistol, ripped through the factory and rang in everyone’s ears.
The large-caliber armor-piercing round tore through the air and slammed straight into the charging Maelstrom lieutenant’s head.
Puhk!
Like a flashbang going off inside a ripe watermelon, the man’s head exploded without leaving anything recognizable behind.
Brain matter, bone fragments, and bright red blood sprayed everywhere in a fountain, and the headless body stumbled forward a few more steps before collapsing and twitching on the floor.
Royce angrily kicked the horrible corpse lying there and clicked his tongue.
"Ah, fuck! That bastard Vice is supposed to be mine to slice into thin little pieces with my own hands. Where the hell is that rat hiding?"
He was brushing blood droplets off the red-hot muzzle of his power revolver with his sleeve when it happened.
Kwaaaang!!!!
From deep underground, from the bottom of the abyss, a tremendous shockwave and a horrifying boom shook the entire factory building.
It was the impact from the moment Ji-hwan, riding the acceleration of his [Sandevistan], brought down the several-ton Centaur with his bare hands and smashed the bunker’s reinforced concrete floor to pieces.
"W-what the fuck?! An earthquake?!"
At the massive jolt and thunderous blast, as if the building might collapse at any second, the gang members on both Royce’s side and Vice’s side froze with their fingers on the triggers.
A brief, heavy silence swept across the gunpowder-choked battlefield.
"Hey, Royce! Don’t just stand there like an idiot and get scared—push through! I don’t give a shit whether a bomb went off downstairs or a monster crawled out! Kill them now!"
At Brick’s fierce shout from behind cover, Royce snapped out of it and grinned like a madman, raising his power revolver once more.
"Wipe them all out! Don’t leave a single one alive!!"
Right after that unknown boom that had rattled the depths, the remaining Vice faction’s comms went dead silent in a way that was almost eerie.
It meant Vice’s orders had been cut off completely. With their command structure shattered and their morale crushed to the floor by the mysterious explosion from below, slaughtering the rabble became child’s play for the bloodthirsty elites led by Royce and Brick.
As a little more time passed, even the scattered gunfire and isolated explosions began to die down.
The outcome of the main battle had already been decided beyond any hope of reversal. Royce and Brick, now with some room to breathe, led their surviving men—every one of them drenched in enemy blood—deeper into the factory to search every corner.
And soon enough, they found the real bomb Vice had carefully prepared for his last-ditch, take-everyone-down-with-me gamble: blunt C4 charges slapped all over the core structure of the main building’s pillar, leading down to the factory’s lowest level, along with a detonator tangled up in a mess of wires.
Vice’s true bomb.
"That cowardly piece of shit Vice. Figured he’d get crushed by brute force and decided to drag everyone down to hell with him."
Royce glanced at the explosives attached to the pillar and spat on the floor in disgust.
Brick frowned and clicked his tongue before immediately bringing his personal radio up to his mouth.
"Hey, bomb squad. Get over here right now and disarm every last one of these charges. Touch the wrong wire and your heads are going first. And the rest of you, seal off every entrance to this area. Lock it down tight so not even a rat can get out alive."
Just as he finished giving the order and turned to walk around the pillar,
Clunk.
From a dark corridor where no light reached, something heavy like a lump of meat struck metal with a dull thud.
Brick immediately swung the muzzle of his assault rifle toward the sound and approached cautiously, like a predator.
When the tactical light cut through the darkness and revealed the shape, a dumbfounded breath slipped from Brick’s mouth.
"Hah... what the hell is this?"
In the shadows sat a single rusted metal chair.
And on it, bound tightly with thick industrial tape and wires, was a grotesque lump of meat: both arms and both legs had been perfectly, brutally removed at the root, leaving only a blood-soaked torso and head.
It was Vice.
Only a short while ago, he had been riding atop the giant Centaur, pretending to be the sole ruler of this district and flaunting his arrogance. Now he lay there like a broken doll whose limbs had all been torn off, utterly pathetic. The main switch of the detonator he had tried to hold over everyone’s heads had already been smashed to pieces by someone’s brute grip and was rolling uselessly on the floor.
Then Royce, who had just finished cutting down the remaining stragglers and was now drenched in dark red blood and brains, came striding over while breathing hard.
"Fuck, those little trash rats were hiding to the very end. So damn annoying... huh?"
Royce’s irritated gaze landed on the pitiful sight of Vice tied to the chair at the end of Brick’s light.
Royce and Brick stared blankly at each other’s faces for a moment without saying a word. The whole situation felt too unreal.
And then, without either of them leading the way, the two gang leaders clutched their stomachs and burst out laughing like lunatics.
"Hahahahaha! Hey, Brick! Look at this, fuck! We don’t even have to slice him up ourselves—he’s been packaged nice and neat and delivered right to us!"
"That crazy Asian merc... I never imagined he’d really tear through that Centaur and rip all four limbs off. What a damn monster."
Their eerie laughter rose in disbelief at Ji-hwan’s brutal, stupidly direct method, which had exceeded even their wildest expectations. At that noisy racket, Vice, who had been unconscious, groaned and snapped his eyes open.
Through his blurred, blood-streaked vision, he could clearly see the demonic faces of Royce and Brick looking down at him with delight and mockery.
Still not fully understanding what had happened, Vice instinctively tried to twitch his fingers toward the detonator switch, his last line of defense.
But there was no sensation at all.
He lowered his head and looked down at his own body.
And then he realized the horrifying truth: both of his thick arms and both legs had vanished without a trace, as if some beast had bitten them off, and the bomb switch on the floor had been smashed to bits.
The pain of his severed limbs slammed into his brain far too late. Vice gaped and let out a savage, hopeless scream like an animal.
"A... aaahhh!! No! My body!! My district...! My bodyyyy!!"
"Shut up, you useless tin can."
Royce laughed playfully and, with the huge muzzle of the power revolver still hot from firing, tapped Vice’s blood-soaked cheek twice before whispering something murderous.
The smell of scorched flesh hung in the air, but Vice couldn’t even resist.
"Listen up, Vice. You thought I didn’t know about the shit you’ve been doing in the back—snatching our people, cutting out their cyberware parts alive and without anesthesia, then selling them off? Remember this clearly. From now on, we’re going to drag your remaining shell and organs out into the middle of this factory and carve them up in front of everyone as a public disassembly show, so you’d better look forward to it."
The pathetic former boss, limbs torn away and crying tears and snot in utter despair, and the new rulers glaring down at him with madness blazing in their eyes like hungry hyenas. With the horrible trophy Ji-hwan had casually left behind after taking away even his last mercy, the name and traces of the mercenary known as Ji-hwan were completely erased that night amid their beastlike struggle for power.
Meanwhile, outside the factory, which had become a scene of bloody slaughter, the rooftop of the abandoned building was lashed by a cold, dry night wind.
Hoo…….
Ji-hwan let out a long, hot breath from deep in his chest as he stared blankly down at the glittering neon signs of Night City, where smoke and gunpowder haze kept rising without end.
His entire body was a mess, completely soaked in oil and blood from Vice’s frame.
The muscles and tendons he had pushed beyond their limit by releasing the limiter had only now begun to scream in protest, aching as the adrenaline of battle finally drained away.
His super regeneration was constantly repairing his cells, but no matter how hardened he was, it had been a long night for a pure human body with no chrome at all to bear the output of the Centaur and the acceleration of its [Sandevistan] head-on.
'Still... it’s over.'
Now it was time to leave behind the stench of gang blood and back-alley noise that had clung to him so stubbornly, return to the quiet Badlands where his place waited, wash off in hot water, and collapse into sleep. Ji-hwan rolled his tired shoulders and turned to leap over the rooftop railing when—
Bzzzt— Bzzzt—
Deep inside the pocket of his bloodstained jacket, the personal hologram phone he had shoved there buzzed heavily.
Ji-hwan stopped in his tracks. The untraceable burner line he used for merc work had already been powered on as soon as he left the bunker.
Then the only person in all of Night City who would be calling him directly on this encrypted personal line at this late hour was one and only one person.
Rubbing his brow with a face worn dark by exhaustion, Ji-hwan pulled out the phone and checked the caller name on the blue holographic display floating in the air. For a moment, he forgot to breathe.
[Caller: Unverified - Encrypted Line]
Instead of a name or number, the screen showed a rotating encrypted code that ordinary hackers couldn’t even begin to decipher.
But Ji-hwan didn’t need to decode it. His instincts told him exactly who was on the other side of the screen.
Someone who absolutely would never call him first at this time, in the dead of night—no, someone far too important to be contacting him on such a private line in the first place.
For the first time since arriving in this world, a thick wave of surprise and confusion spread across Ji-hwan’s usually cold, indifferent face—the same face that had not twitched even while he was tearing through several tons of Centaur armor barehanded and ripping the limbs off a gang boss.
Ji-hwan stared at the screen for a moment, swallowed once, and carefully pressed the button to connect the call.
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