Ssshhhh—.
After rinsing the dark red blood and sticky machine oil off himself in the cramped old motel, Ji-hwan roughly dried off with a towel.
His body in the mirror was, quite literally, optimized for combat.
That sculpted frame vanished beneath a worn T-shirt and a baggy flight jacket, the monstrous physique hidden cleanly under scraps of cloth. On the surface, he looked like nothing more than an ordinary, tired East Asian man with a slightly solid build, the kind you could find anywhere in Night City. In fact, with not a single visible cyberware seam or socket line on his face or neck, he almost looked like some unfashionable baseline civilian.
"Guess I should eat first."
To recover the energy he’d burned through last night, Ji-hwan left the motel.
The meeting with Rogue, queen of Afterlife, was at night. Until then, the time was entirely his.
Not that he cared whether she was a queen or a king.
Enjoying the rare downtime, he headed toward the noisy market streets on the border between Watson and Japantown.
From morning on, Night City’s streets were disgusting and lively.
"Give me back my eddies, you bastard!!"
'Yeah, it really is lively.'
Tatatatang!Tatatatang!
Down an alley, some gang members were already in a full-on territorial shootout at the crack of dawn, while above the elevated roadway, NCPD patrol sirens screamed past like maniacs. Along the curb, there were guys sprawled out under illegal braindance wreaths, drooling and humping away inside virtual reality, and others chugging cheap high-proof vodka straight from the bottle in broad daylight before vomiting their guts out.
A crazy city where trouble never stopped. But Ji-hwan watched all the chaos with relaxed eyes, bought cheap synthetic meat skewers and mystery noodles from street vendors, and chewed his way through them.
"This one tastes like rubber tires, and this one tastes like wet cardboard. Still, it should fill me up."
Ji-hwan was chewing on a skewer while walking through the narrow, crowded market alley when a lanky young man on the opposite side, loudly chatting as he walked, glanced at Ji-hwan, lifted his chin arrogantly, and deliberately slammed his shoulder into him.
It was Pilar, running an errand for Wakako.
Thud.
He’d put some force into it, trying to put a little pressure on what he thought was a cheap-looking civilian, but the moment his shoulder hit Ji-hwan, Pilar nearly let out a yelp.
Ji-hwan’s torso, hidden beneath ordinary clothes, didn’t budge at all, like a steel pillar firmly sunk into the ground.
But Ji-hwan didn’t want to make a scene on his day off, so at the moment of impact he smoothly shifted his weight and killed the force.
"Ah, sorry."
With a flat apology, Ji-hwan didn’t even slow down. He drifted past Pilar and disappeared into the crowd.
Pilar rubbed his shoulder, then immediately puffed up with pride when Ji-hwan apologized so meekly and walked off. He started cackling and bragging to his little sister, Rebecca, who was walking beside him.
"Hah! You see that, Rebecca? Your brother’s got serious charisma! Look at that punk—one shoulder check from me and he apologized and ran off. Told you, I’m merc material!"
Rebecca’s eyes twisted into a look of utter disgust and contempt, like she was staring at a cockroach.
"What a load of shit, you idiot giraffe."
Clicking her tongue, Rebecca casually turned her head toward the direction the man had gone.
For a moment, a strange sense of unease brushed past her street-hardened instincts. She was only twelve, but she’d grown up enough in the back alleys to have a decent eye for things. The face of that East Asian man she’d seen for an instant as he passed by—his skin was so clean there wasn’t a single visible cyberware implant seam or socket, the kind of hardware you’d expect even some stray dog in this insane city to be carrying.
'He didn’t have any implant traces at all? And...'
When Rebecca turned back to look for him, the man had already melted into the crowd and vanished without a trace. Like a ghost that had never been there in the first place. He’d moved with the flow of people and erased his presence completely.
"Whoa there, little sister. You’re totally falling for your brother’s overwhelming manly charm..."
Pow—!!
"Ghk?!"
The moment Pilar leaned in beside her, acting all smug, Rebecca’s small fist drove straight into the center of his solar plexus without an ounce of mercy.
Pilar let out a frog-like scream and collapsed, rolling on the ground like he was about to puke up stomach acid. Rebecca looked down at her wheezing brother with cold eyes and spat on the pavement.
"Falling for you? In your dreams. You’re blind and your head’s empty, you useless bastard. Didn’t you even notice that guy was going easy on you?"
Leaving her fallen brother on the street, Rebecca hurried through the crowd to get to Wakako’s job.
"Cough... cough... Hey, Rebecca! Wait for me...!"
With tears in his eyes and his stomach clutched tight, Pilar staggered back to his feet and ran after her, afraid she’d disappear from sight.
Meanwhile, Ji-hwan, having passed the siblings, was already on the other side of the market, eating another vendor’s skewer and asking the seller,
"What kind of meat is this?"
"Synthetic rat meat with spicy sauce! Two eddies!"
"Ptooey— Holy shiiiiit—"
'I already ate more than half of it.'
What the hell kind of food is this? Ji-hwan spat out what was left in his mouth, cursed, and paid the eddies.
A little while later, leaving the noisy market behind, the siblings Pilar and Rebecca headed briskly into a tucked-away pachinko parlor in the center of Japantown.
In the smoke-filled back room, Wakako Okada, Westbrook’s fixer, sat in a gorgeous kimono with a pipe in her mouth, scanning documents.
After a moment, Wakako looked up at the siblings and got to the point.
"You’re here. I’ve got a job that should suit you."
She tossed a data shard onto the table.
"Some low-level Tyger Claws holed up in a nearby alley stole a bag from one of my regular clients. Nothing important inside, but the client’s pride is on the line. No bloodshed. Quietly. Just recover the bag and return it to its owner. Pay is 300 eddies. No advance."
"Leave it to me, Wakako grandma... no, ma’am! I’ll show you the skills of this newly born legend, Pilar!"
With exaggerated gestures, Pilar grabbed the shard and left the pachinko parlor. Rebecca clicked her tongue at her brother’s pathetic act, but 300 eddies was a lot of money—enough to eat synthetic meat for days.
Then, when the siblings reached a shadowy alley near the Tyger Claws’ hideout to check their gear, Rebecca exploded.
"Hey, you crazy bastard. What happened to my shotgun? And where’s your rifle?!"
"Uh, about that... I pawned everything yesterday. Heh-heh."
"What?! You sold our weapons?! What the hell is a merc supposed to do without guns?!"
As Rebecca raged and kicked Pilar in the shin, he shouted back, indignant.
"Hey! We can’t just starve to death! We can’t keep living in a car and chewing synthetic rat meat every day! I had to do something to earn my keep!"
"Then what the hell is that on your face?! If that was for food, how did you buy those brand-new smart shades, you asshole!!"
Seeing the flashy neon cyberware sunglasses on Pilar’s face, Rebecca lost it completely, grabbed him by the collar, and shook him hard. He’d used the excuse that they needed to eat, then sold off all their weapons just to buy himself some style.
"Ow, ow! Let go! Looking cool is how you get jobs!"
"I’m the idiot for trusting a brother like you!"
Rebecca drove a satisfying punch into Pilar’s solar plexus, then angrily pulled out an old Militech Lexington pistol she’d hidden inside her worn boot.
It was an emergency weapon she’d kept hidden until the very end, just in case.
"Listen carefully. Wakako said to handle it quietly, so we’re going in stealthy, grabbing the bag, and getting out. You watch the back."
Pulling back the slide, Rebecca crept toward the rear door of the dark building. Pilar pouted and followed awkwardly behind her.
On the first floor of the abandoned building where the Tyger Claws were hanging around, the leather bag Wakako had mentioned sat alone on top of a sofa covered in empty liquor bottles. Security was sloppy. If they moved quietly, they could just snatch the bag and run. It was a simple job.
But as Rebecca crawled toward the bag, she heard a disgusting laugh and a woman’s scream from the far corner behind the sofa.
"Please, I’ll pay it back next week with interest..."
"Shut up, bitch. If you don’t have money, you pay with your body, right? Heh heh."
"You’re not bad either."
Two Tyger Claw members covered in grotesque tattoos had cornered a terrified civilian woman and were tearing at her clothes, harassing her.
The instant Rebecca saw that, her steps stopped. Her face began to harden.
Her own miserable past flashed through her mind—being crushed in alleys, surviving in a world that treated the weak like insects, this rotten Night City ecosystem. Her patience hit zero.
'Fuck, those piece-of-shit bastards.'
"Hey, hey! Kid! No! Please, just hold it in...!"
"Grrr... no... I can’t!"
"Ah... damn it!!"
Bang
From behind, Pilar panicked and kept trying to stop her, but Rebecca was already so furious that emotion had long since swallowed reason.
She sprang out from cover and, without hesitation, sent a round from the Lexington straight into the head of the gang member harassing the woman.
"You glowing-bulb ballbags! Get the hell away from that woman if you want to keep your junk attached!!"
Bang-bang—bang
With her sharp battle cry, Rebecca’s finger kept hammering the trigger. The pistol spat fire, grazing one gang member’s shoulder and blowing another’s ear clean off. The wounded thug screamed and dropped, while the others yanked out their guns in shock. In an instant, the abandoned building turned into a hellish firefight.
"What the hell are these punks?!"
"In our turf?!"
Tatatatang!Tududududuk—!
With bullets raining from every direction, Rebecca used her small frame to roll between cover like a squirrel, firing back as she went.
"Brother! Don’t just stand there watching—throw a bottle or something!!"
At the same time, across the street from the abandoned building, Ji-hwan was leaning against the back of an old plastic chair, eating something and letting out an impressed sound as he watched their performance.
"Oh...?"
He sipped from a canned drink he’d bought earlier from a street vendor—the kind with the absurdly emphasized female chest on the label, Nicola—and calmly watched the fierce shootout across the street.
He’d even settled in like he was watching a movie, after spotting the siblings he’d happened to run into on the street that morning and seeing their clumsy attempt at infiltration. The job that was supposed to end quietly had turned into a mess because of the kid’s meddling, which was kind of funny. And even though he knew full well it was a fight with no profit in it, that hot-blooded habit of throwing themselves into danger anyway felt weirdly familiar.
As he watched the fight, a deep interest began to settle in Ji-hwan’s eyes.
Bang!Tatatang!
"That kid’s got a good feel for shooting."
Ji-hwan rested his chin on his hand and sharply analyzed Rebecca’s movements. For a child who looked barely twelve, the trajectory of the Lexington in her hands was absurdly precise. She was perfectly killing the recoil of a powder weapon that would be hard for adults to handle, using nothing but her small shoulders and the snap of her wrists while firing in bursts. Her talent for predicting where the target would move and spraying rounds there felt less like cyberware assistance and more like a sense similar to his own, yet different.
'Man, I wish I could shoot that well.'
As Ji-hwan clicked his tongue, a bitter memory from long ago flashed through his mind—back when he was serving in the military in South Korea.
He’d scored well on physical tests and the like, but when it came to shooting, he was hopelessly untalented. He’d always screwed up on the range and never once earned the coveted "special forces" title. Even with a body strong enough to tear apart tons of steel with his bare hands, he still had to swallow his envy in silence in front of a twelve-year-old kid’s godlike marksmanship.
"Tch. Weirdly unfair."
Mixed with a strange pull toward his own kind and self-loathing over his lousy shooting skills, Ji-hwan kept watching Rebecca’s pistol work with jealous eyes.
"Do these assholes think women are their toys?!"
Down below, Rebecca was hammering the Tyger Claws with vicious curses, while the frightened Pilar trembled behind cover and tossed empty bottles one by one.
Ji-hwan snorted and held up the empty Nicola can. It looked like he didn’t need to step in at all; that feral little kid would probably finish this on her own.
Then it happened.
"You little bitch!!"
"Oh, this should be good."
A Tyger Claw thug burst out from behind cover and charged straight at Rebecca with murder in his eyes. Ji-hwan wondered what would happen next, but Rebecca didn’t panic. Instead, she met him head-on, lunged like a beast, and drove a powerful dropkick into his face with both feet together.
Pow—!
"Aaaagh!"
With a crisp impact, the thug was launched backward. The trajectory was perfect. Pushed by the recoil of Rebecca’s kick, he flew through the air and came straight toward Ji-hwan’s seat on the roof of the old abandoned building.
"Shit."
Ji-hwan jerked aside in alarm, throwing himself out of the way.
Crash—!!
The Tyger Claw that had flown in smashed into the old metal chair Ji-hwan had been sitting on, shattering it to pieces.
Having barely dodged him, Ji-hwan tossed the can in his hand to the ground and clicked his tongue.
'Watching other people’s fire is fun...'
"Ugh."
Just as he was about to quietly slip away before things got annoying—
"Is this bastard one of those kids’ buddies?!"
Apparently having seen him from somewhere, another Tyger Claw thug raised a gleaming katana and charged at Ji-hwan. He’d seen the man standing where his comrade had flown from and mistaken him for backup.
Ji-hwan turned with a dumbfounded expression. Then he ducked lightly under the incoming blade and, looking thoroughly annoyed, casually slapped the thug’s cheek with the back of his hand.
Smack!
With a bright friction sound, the thug’s eyes rolled white and he dropped flat to the ground, unconscious.
"Huh...?"
Another Tyger Claw, who had been rushing over with a club, flinched when he saw his ally go down from a single slap. The thug hurriedly pulled a smart gun from his waist and tried to aim it at Ji-hwan. But then—
Ji-hwan’s irritation flared up in an instant. His body spun, loading up centrifugal force, and he sent his palm flying toward the thug’s cheek.
The problem was that the annoyance of being interrupted while resting made Ji-hwan’s inhuman strength land just a little too hard.
Smaaaash—!!
"Aaaaargh!!"
"Ah..."
The moment his palm hit the gunman’s cheek, the thug’s body started spinning in midair like a top in some third-rate cartoon. Then, unable to withstand the insane rotational force, he was launched off the roof and came crashing down like a bomb into the middle of the Tyger Claws fighting Rebecca on the first floor.
Meanwhile, inside the abandoned building on the first floor—
"Die, you rat bitch!!"
One Tyger Claw thug, raising a blue steel club and charging at Rebecca as she reloaded behind the sofa, came at her like a madman. But Rebecca, who was still swapping magazines, didn’t seem interested in dodging or shooting. Instead, she just looked up at the sky with a blank expression.
The charging thug froze for a split second at her bizarre reaction, since she wasn’t even looking at him and was just staring upward.
'What? Is there something up there?'
With that instinctive doubt, he stopped his attack and reflexively looked up at the air.
At that exact moment—
Kwaang—!!
The Tyger Claw Ji-hwan had launched came spinning down like a tornado and slammed directly onto the head of the thug who had been looking up.
"Gah!"
The two men crashed to the floor and passed out with a horrifying crunch of broken bones.
"Uh... hey! You okay? What the hell just happened...?"
Pilar, who had been frantically about to throw a broken bottle to help in case his sister got killed, just blinked in confusion at the two stacked-up bodies.
But Rebecca, who had clearly seen the whole thing—from the slap that sent the man spinning through the air to the moment he came crashing down—was frozen solid.
"W-what the hell?!"
When one of their own suddenly came spiraling down from the sky like a tornado and rolled across the floor, the chaotic firefight stopped for a split second.
Rebecca, crouched behind the sofa and reloading, couldn’t close her gaping mouth.
'How can a person fly like that...?'
As Rebecca, Pilar, and every Tyger Claw on the first floor all turned their heads toward the direction the thug had flown from, stunned by the collapse of physics itself, there stood Ji-hwan, frozen in the exact same pose with his palm still extended from the slap.
When dozens of eyes from below stared up at him in horror, Ji-hwan slowly lowered his hand with an "oh, crap" expression.
Then he scratched the back of his head awkwardly and called down in a flat voice,
"Ah... he had a gun, so I... sorry. Carry on."
But that shameless, ridiculous excuse had no chance of working.
The Tyger Claws, having watched their comrade spin through the air and smash his bones to pieces, had already mistaken that East Asian man for a crazy outlaw with a monstrous-output pair of Gorilla Arms.
"Carry on, my ass! Kill that bastard!!"
"Light him up!!"
Several Tyger Claws, veins bulging, abandoned Rebecca and started charging toward Ji-hwan while screaming. The others all raised the muzzles of their assault rifles and smart guns toward him at once.
"Haa..."
Ji-hwan let out a deep sigh and rubbed his face. His peaceful afternoon of quietly watching the fireworks was apparently going to end in a blood-soaked mess after all.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register