The grotesque conversation of the researchers in their pure white hazmat suits, the ones he had just passed in the corridor, still clung to his ears and swirled there like sticky blood.
"Guess we’ll have to scrap this chimera too."
"If the Raffen bring us fresher material next month, we might finally get usable data."
Material. That disgusting word, used to describe living people as nothing more than expendable parts to be torn apart and fused with beasts.
Ji-hwan looked past the massive bunker door toward the dark end of the corridor where even the light couldn’t reach.
Down below, in the second basement level of a zone so blacked out it had been erased from the map, lurked a pure, organized evil and madness built up by a megacorp—something that couldn’t even be compared to the firefights he had endured in the back alleys of Night City.
This was the deepest, most rotten Pandora’s box in Night City.
If he turned back now, he could hand the data to Rogue, pocket a fat stack of eddies, and return to a cozy hideout in the Badlands where he could stretch out and sleep in peace.
He could stick to the edgerunner rulebook, finish the job, and keep his eyes shut to anything he wasn’t supposed to see.
But the moment he pried that box open all the way and stepped into this deranged machine, it was obvious the megacorp’s biggest, blackest darkness would come tearing at him to rip him apart.
Normally, he might have snorted and walked away with a, "Not my problem."
But the image of that grotesque corpse, blood dripping from beneath the white sheet, and the netrunner’s trembling briefing about poor people being ground up alive... it was scraping at the deepest instincts of him as a human being.
After a long, heavy silence, Ji-hwan’s eyes hardened.
If there was any hope left inside Pandora’s box, then he would have to drag it out with these two fists of his.
"This isn’t over yet."
"What?! Are you insane?! I already pulled the data!! Get your ass back here!"
Marcus’s shrill scream burst through the old earpiece at Ji-hwan’s low, icy voice echoing down the empty corridor.
Marcus, whose mental state had already been shattered by the horrors of the facility despite Ji-hwan’s reality-breaking brute strength, had completely lost even his usual whiny, drawn-out cadence.
"You said it yourself. There’s an erased zone on the facility map. We haven’t even gone down to the second basement yet."
"Hey!! That place is probably the real hell on earth, so why the hell are you going there?! I’ve got the data, so it’s done! I can’t risk my life any further, no way, no further!!"
As Marcus protested desperately and looked ready to forcibly cut the local network connection on the spot, Ji-hwan gave a faint smile and tossed out the bait.
"Think about it, Marcus. What we pulled from the main server on the first floor was just scraps of text data—paperwork someone typed up and organized. But what if I go all the way down to that erased second basement myself and pull out the real core secrets they tried to bury, the original bio-data, and every concrete result from their experiments?"
"That would...?"
The rough breathing of Marcus, who had been thrashing to run for his life, stopped for a split second as his primal instincts were stirred. Ji-hwan didn’t miss that tiny opening.
"You don’t seem to know this ecosystem very well. In Night City, the biggest Achilles’ heel of a megacorp like Biotechnica is money. If I strip the second basement’s secrets down to the soul... do you really think that fussy old Rogue from Afterlife won’t double—or hell, triple—the eddies she dumps into your account?"
The shouting on the other end of the old radio cut off dead.
For Marcus, a bottom-rung Night City edgerunner whose life without money was more terrifying than death itself, Ji-hwan’s whisper was a temptation so huge and sweet it could numb his greedy reason even with death breathing down his neck.
"Haa... fuck..."
After a long, vicious silence and a fierce internal struggle, Marcus finally groaned and surrendered.
"I really... thought you were just some muscle-brained freak... Fuck, fine! Fine, I get it... But listen to me carefully, K. I don’t know if it was because you ripped that stupid bunker door off its hinges, but the tension sensors or whatever just tripped and all the emergency lights inside the building came on! We really don’t have much time left!"
Still unable to find his rhythm, Marcus panted and fired off a frantic warning.
"If they try to pinpoint my location, or even think they’re onto my tail... I’m seriously ditching you, cutting the line, and running without looking back. Got it?"
"Yeah."
"Fuck... armed guards are already starting to flood the main elevator area. Go there and you’ll get turned into a sieve, so detour through the narrow vertical wiring shaft where the ventilation ducts and main cables are bundled together."
Ji-hwan did exactly as Marcus told him, ripping off the maintenance panel in the corner of the corridor with his bare hands and forcing his massive body into the cramped vertical wiring shaft, stained with dust and sticky machine grease.
A pitch-black passage with no light at all. Bracing himself on thick cables carrying tens of thousands of volts and hot cooling pipes, Ji-hwan moved toward the second basement like a silent spider. With every breath, the smell of ozone and stale dust stabbed at his lungs.
How long had he been descending like that? Around the middle of the shaft, Ji-hwan spotted a small vent crack leaking faint light and a foul stench, and turned his head.
What he saw through the gap made his moving body freeze.
A massive underground holding facility packed with rusted iron cages like a chicken coop. On the cold concrete floor, crusted with filth and dried blood, dozens of people had been crammed in like cargo waiting to be butchered.
Homeless people hunted like animals by the Raffen Shiv out in the wasteland, alley drifters, and helpless children who had lost their parents and wandered the streets. They banged on the bars and screamed for help, or didn’t even resist. Maybe they had already been exposed to days of horrific torture and drugs, because not a single shred of hope or rage remained in their hollow eyes.
Only vacant stares, waiting helplessly for the horrible death that was coming for them. Stares waiting to be slaughtered.
'......'
Ji-hwan’s jaw clenched so hard it looked ready to shatter.
The horrific scene burned into his vision dragged up a memory buried in the deepest part of his mind.
A year ago, when he first appeared in this goddamn cyberpunk world as if dropped from the sky. Back when he didn’t know the rules, didn’t know the language, and was still powerless. Ji-hwan had been captured by some crazy gang bastards in the middle of a junkyard and locked in a narrow, awful holding cell with no light at all.
"...Hey, K. What’s wrong...? Why did you stop all of a sudden? Get moving!"
At Marcus’s urgent urging, Ji-hwan closed his eyes, swallowed a breath, and turned away. He wanted to rip those bars apart and save them right now, but he couldn’t do it yet.
Ji-hwan slid down to the very bottom of the wiring shaft, grabbed the thick steel grille blocking the entrance with both hands, and pulled.
Rrrrk— grrk.
His trained, feral strength rippled up his forearms like a snake. A moment later, the specially welded steel bent grotesquely like soft taffy and tore free.
After carefully setting the ripped-out steel grille on the floor, he could finally see the area Biotechnica had erased from the map: the second basement level.
"This... isn’t just a basement."
Ji-hwan’s eyes widened slightly as he emerged from the vent.
The second basement, which should have been about the same size as the first floor on paper, was actually a giant, hollowed-out dome—a miniature city or, more accurately, a massive slaughterhouse.
Ji-hwan began moving silently along the outer shadow of this enormous hell, beyond even Marcus’s camera backup range.
Passing the huge detention zone where the broken humans he had just seen through the vent were being kept, he pushed deeper toward the perimeter, and this time a wave of scorching heat and a disgusting stench hit his face and stopped him in his tracks.
It was a waste incineration plant, with massive conveyor belts and furnaces spinning like mad and spewing pillars of red-hot flame.
Cleanup crews in hazmat suits kept tossing corpses from the detention block and failed experimental meat onto the conveyor belts, while the stench of burning protein—human hair and animal fur mixed together in the fire—blanketed the entire basement like a gray blizzard of ash.
Ji-hwan frowned and worked his way through the gray smoke along the innermost wall of the dome, and there he found pitch-black darkness standing in perfect contrast to the blood-red incinerator.
A gigantic, black unknown tunnel—big enough for a freight train to pass through—had been bored deep into the earth, opening into an abyss with no visible end.
Inside that bizarre tunnel, where even light couldn’t reach, a cold underground wind howled like some beast’s cry, and he couldn’t even tell what it was carrying into that enormous hole or hauling back out.
Leaving that unknowable abyss behind, he walked toward the center of the dome.
Through the darkness and gray dust, what appeared there was a dazzling glass structure in the shape of a dome, standing like a sacred altar in the middle of hell’s blood. It was the workshop and lab where human and animal genes were forcibly fused—the main chimera laboratory.
At the same time, on the second floor aboveground, in the Biotechnica research center’s top-level command office.
A natural wolf-hide rug covered the floor, and a real oak desk sat there—something so rare in this smoke-choked Night City that even tens of thousands of eddies couldn’t easily buy it.
Leaning back arrogantly in the luxurious leather chair, Lowell, the facility’s chief administrator, wore a greasy, superior smile as he looked at the hologram floating in the air. On the holographic screen he was watching, Carlyle, a high-ranking Zetatech executive notorious for vicious corporate infighting, glared at him with a deeply crumpled expression.
"That’s quite the face you’re making, Carlyle. So, the rumors were true? You really did throw your entire so-called shadow unit at a rat in the middle of the city, chew through your manpower, and rack up losses in the millions of credits?"
Lowell sneered openly, slowly swirling the 50-year synthetic whiskey in the crystal glass he held.
"Why in the world would you do something that stupid just to capture one merc? I can practically hear your investors screaming from here."
"Watch your mouth, Lowell..."
At Lowell’s mocking words, Carlyle ground his teeth and snapped back. Under normal circumstances, he should have been cursing and cutting the connection immediately, but instead he let out a deep sigh and brought up an encrypted confidential file on the hologram.
"I don’t like it either, but... our people upstairs don’t believe this combat footage. They’re treating that monster as nothing more than a lucky chrome-jacked nobody, or some exaggerated rumor. The higher-ups are shutting everything down and ordering us to bury it, so I can’t move any more troops with my authority."
Carlyle continued, grinding his teeth in frustration.
"So I had no choice but to call you. I’ll hand over the profiling data and combat records we originally intended to secure for cheap. And don’t worry—you won’t be the only one making out here."
"Exaggerated rumor? What kind of trash merc data are you trying to sell me that it’s worth wasting my precious time on..."
Snorting as he opened the hologram file, Lowell’s eyes widened so much a moment later they looked ready to pop out of his skull.
The footage showed the massacre that had taken place in the city center days ago in brutal detail.
Somehow obtained, the video contained combat footage of Ji-hwan fighting against Zetatech’s heavily armored Centaur and the shadow unit.
But what clenched Lowell’s throat and seized his attention most of all was the insane regeneration scene: Ji-hwan’s body, with flesh blown away by explosions until bone showed through, was fusing and healing in real time as if time itself were running backward.
"Th-this... Don’t tell me this isn’t some cheap, computer-edited XBD crap like Zetatech’s higher-ups said?!"
"...Who knows. Our idiot bosses want to believe it’s fake, but my information network doesn’t lie."
Carlyle swirled the glass of greasy whiskey and curled his lips into a deep grin, enjoying Lowell’s reaction through the hologram. But Lowell, whose eyes had gone slack with greed, had no interest in Carlyle’s face. He shoved his flushed, excited face closer to the hologram and shouted in a trembling voice.
"Name your price, Carlyle! Let’s deal right now. Send me his current location and biometric scan data, immediately!!"
A being capable of such overwhelming regeneration and violence with nothing but a pure organic body—without a single implant.
The Chimera Project, which had been grinding up thousands of civilians as expendable material. A living sample that could break through the biological limits and immune rejection that project had repeatedly slammed into was breathing right there on the screen, and the instant Lowell’s eyes gleamed with filthy greed, he finished the secret deal with Carlyle.
Bang—!!
"Chief Administrator!!"
The heavy office door flew open roughly, and the head of security, clad in heavy body armor, rushed in with a face drained of color.
"Are you insane, barging in here without a report?! Do you have any idea how important a deal I’m in the middle of right now?!"
"S-sorry! But an unidentified intruder has breached the main server room on the first basement level!!"
"What? An intrusion?"
The excited heat on Lowell’s face cooled in an instant, but then he waved a hand as if it were nothing more than an annoying joke.
"Haa... Let me guess, some trash experimental reject from the second basement holding cells crawled up through a rat hole again. So what if the door got a little damaged? Don’t make a scene over it. Shut them up."
Lowell cut off the head of security with a sharp, irritated voice.
"Even if some outside rat got in, once they’ve gone down to the erased second basement, they’re not walking out alive on two feet. We needed field tests for today’s newly completed chimera units anyway, so throw the intruder or any escaped test subjects straight into the feeding trough and toss whatever’s left into the incinerator. Do I really need to keep hearing this kind of garbage in the middle of my precious time?"
Lowell waved the trembling security chief out of the room and reached into his desk drawer for the expensive illegal XBD gear he loved most, then slipped it over his head.
The arrogant, greedy executive who judged human lives only by yield and material had no idea what kind of disaster was walking down into the bottom of their hollow sanctuary right now.
And so the scene shifted again to the second basement, where the horrifying zones were all linked together.
In front of the reinforced glass wall of the brilliantly lit laboratory at the center, Ji-hwan, hidden in the deep shadows, slowly began fitting together the structure of this enormous underground dome in his head.
The people trapped in the holding cells were cattle waiting for slaughter. They were dragged into this central lab, used as material to be fused with beasts, then discarded into the incinerator ash like failed toys. And that unknown giant hole was probably the demons’ passageway, constantly hauling in the wild creatures of the Badlands—or something even stranger—to keep this entire hell machine running.
'When the hell did... this kind of facility... exist? This wasn’t even in the game...'
Ji-hwan’s heart had always been cold and still.
But now, having pieced together the puzzle of this horrific truth, his chest was pounding so violently it felt like his heart might smash straight through his ribs.
"......"
His eyes fell on the operating room beyond the transparent glass wall.
Inside, a dust-covered child who looked like he had just been dragged in from the holding cells Ji-hwan had passed earlier was tied down on all fours, trembling in terror.
And beside him, a hulking cybernetic surgeon stood with a machine arm fitted with a cold metal saw blade, the thing whining as it moved in to split the boy’s brain open while he was still alive.
Ji-hwan’s steps came to a dead stop.
The muscles in his face, usually indifferent to the world, twisted into a hideous shape he had never once made in his life, and thick veins bulged up in his neck like snakes ready to burst.
This was not fear. Not despair. It was a vast, pure rage so intense it could burn away every shred of reason in the world, right before it exploded.
Between Ji-hwan’s tightly clenched teeth, a rough, hot breath slipped out like the growl of a beast.
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