Wheeeeeeeeng-!!
At maximum [Sandevistan] output, the red coolant vapor blasting from Alpha’s artificial spine hung frozen in the air.
In the middle of that grotesquely distorted slice of space-time, where every sound and movement stretched like it had sunk into a sticky swamp and one second was split into an hour, Ji-hwan’s fist driving toward him was etched into Alpha’s blood-red eye lenses frame by frame, like a slow-motion feed.
Alpha thrust out the hybrid weapon mounted in his right arm at full output and started thinking leisurely in the stretched-out time.
And the director’s flimsy order from a moment ago—to take Ji-hwan alive—was already out of his mind.
"First, I’m going to carve up every limb on that arrogant bastard. This time I won’t go easy on him. I’ll grind him down from his skull to his chest and leave not a drop of blood behind."
As Alpha sharpened his murderous intent toward Ji-hwan, his thought process began to drift sideways in the slowed-down world.
"Come to think of it, did that spineless director make it off the rooftop okay? Well, not my problem. The contract ended there."
His wandering thoughts soon turned to the squad members who would be coming back down to help him.
Just a few dozen minutes ago, before this whole mess broke out, he’d exchanged some stupid jokes with them in the VIP corridor.
"My guys... yeah. That netrunner who said he’d spend a whole month enjoying full-dive VR at a luxury hotel if this mission ended clean. And that big bastard who said he’d use the bonus to chrome up his daughter with the latest gear and open a pub back home. I was planning to retire and drink free there every day..."
That was when Alpha’s machine brain, still savoring those peaceful flashes from the past, suddenly hit a snag.
"...Huh?"
In the slowed time, Alpha felt something horribly off.
"Wait. Was [Sandevistan] perception always this long?"
No matter how far he’d pushed the output, there was no way this much chatter could drag on in the blink of an eye before fist met fist. This was less than 0.01 seconds, and yet his thoughts were running wild.
His brain was overflowing with memories at a speed that far outstripped the machine’s own processing.
Watching the fist coming for him, Alpha’s "brain" screamed in desperation.
"No. This isn’t [Sandevistan] acceleration."
The phenomenon where a living thing, sensing death, squeezes its past dry in order to survive.
"It’s a flashback, you bastard."
The instant Alpha’s arrogance—his certainty that he would win—shattered to pieces.
Only one sentence remained at the end of his thought circuit.
"I’m losing?"
Kwaang-!!!
At last, the fists of the two beasts collided head-on in the middle of the narrow corridor.
Crack-crack-crack- smash!!
At the bizarre vibration bursting from the tip of Ji-hwan’s fist, the red cylinder of the [Sandevistan] driving Alpha’s spine into a frenzy shattered in an instant, forcibly cutting off the time acceleration.
As the slowed world snapped back to its proper speed in an explosive rush, a heavy, skin-crawling hum tore at Alpha’s eardrums instead of the crisp bursting sound of bone and flesh he’d expected.
"...Huh?"
A dumbfounded mechanical sound leaked from Alpha’s mouth.
His hybrid Gorilla Arms had clearly crushed Ji-hwan’s fist, and the compressed one-inch strike inside had gone off.
But that absurd penetrating force never made it past Ji-hwan’s arm.
No, it had been perfectly denied head-on and then horribly reflected back.
The sharp kinetic force bursting from a single point at the end of Ji-hwan’s fist drove in like a massive fang, piercing straight through Alpha’s steel knuckles.
The thick outer titanium armor plating was still intact.
But that grotesque vibration passed straight through the armor and slammed directly into the grenade magazine and overheated compressor cylinder loaded inside Alpha’s arm.
Kwagagagak- boom!!!
"Graaahhh-!!"
The grenades and cylinders that should have detonated inside Alpha’s right arm erupted in a horrific chain explosion.
The overwhelming shockwave meant to tear an enemy apart had lost its target and blown apart inside Alpha’s own arm.
From the steel fingers to the wrist, elbow, and shoulder, the hybrid Gorilla Arms were literally ripped to pieces from the inside out.
Wires and gears burst out like chunks of flesh, and shattered grenade-cylinder fragments sprayed everywhere.
[Tempering]
That destructive kinetic force did not stop there. It rode up Alpha’s torn shoulder and punched straight through to the core at his center.
Dark red coolant and artificial blood sprayed from the gaps in Alpha’s full-body armor like a fountain.
His artificial spine snapped, throwing bizarre sparks in every direction, and the hound’s body crashed miserably to the floor.
He was completely wrecked. A body that was still barely breathing, nothing more.
"Haa, haa... cough!"
But Ji-hwan was not unscathed either.
The horrifying recoil of slamming an incompletely mastered technique against the enemy’s maximum output. Half of that impact surged straight back through Ji-hwan’s right arm.
With the sound of muscles tearing in bundles and bones cracking horribly, Ji-hwan spat out a mouthful of blood and leaned back against the pitch-black wall.
Agony so sharp it felt like he’d stepped to the edge of death again.
Alpha, slumped against the wall, looked up at Ji-hwan with unfocused blood-red lenses.
The loser’s final curiosity. Ji-hwan, gasping against the wall, looked down at his bloodied fist as if thinking for a moment, then moved his lips.
"What... was that technique just now?"
It was the loser’s final curiosity before the breath left his body. A pure question about how a weak, ordinary human body could keep up with machine output—or even surpass it completely.
Ji-hwan, still leaning against the wall and gasping, looked down at his bloodied fist as if thinking for a moment, then moved his lips.
"[Instant Strike]."
At that word, Alpha’s mechanical jaw trembled faintly.
Fragments of old martial arts novels and cheap action movies flashed through his mind. A miraculous, fictional technique that was supposed to exist only in stories.
"Ha... So that’s the kind of thing you see in some third-rate martial arts trash... Nice."
Alpha let out a dry laugh.
"Hoo... hoo..."
Ji-hwan braced himself against the wall and staggered upright.
In his left hand, still held toward the dying Alpha, was a combat knife that retained a cold, blood-red sheen.
The instant Ji-hwan raised his arm to drive the knife into Alpha’s throat—
Wheeeeeeng- clank!!
Behind him, the private elevator leading to the rooftop burst open as if it might break apart.
"Boss-!!!"
A hulking brute with a new set of hideous chrome slammed into view. The Butcher.
When the Butcher saw Alpha lying there in a wreck, his eye lenses flared red and he charged straight at Ji-hwan.
Ji-hwan’s blood-red eye lenses flashed as he looked at the charging brute and remembered, in a split second, the one thing he had almost forgotten.
"Right. That giant idiot was here too."
The Butcher’s insane toughness and stamina from the previous fight were burned into Ji-hwan’s memory. But by then, he had already found the bastard’s fatal weakness in movement.
The Butcher, blinded by rage, swung his two-handed hammer with brute force.
Whoooom-!!
But Ji-hwan’s movement was on a completely different level now.
His right arm was shattered and his stamina had long since hit bottom, but Ji-hwan’s sharp instinct had only become clearer in this extreme situation.
Like a veteran bullfighter facing a raging bull, Ji-hwan slipped away from the hammer’s path with the ease of a hair’s breadth.
Shhhk! Ssak!
The instant the hammer sliced through empty air, the knife in Ji-hwan’s left hand flashed like lightning.
The blade’s tip cleanly split the gap in the Butcher’s reinforced alloy armor where the inner thigh femoral artery was left exposed.
"Ghk...!"
A groan burst from the Butcher’s mouth.
With a pale, deathly face, he swallowed the pain and swung again, but Ji-hwan was already reading the next move.
Ssak! Crack!
Dodging the incoming hook by the width of a head, Ji-hwan carved into the seam of the armor plating at the bastard’s side.
It was the same strike point that had broken his ribs in the previous fight. No amount of brute toughness, no newly swapped thick armor, could matter against Ji-hwan’s precise knife work that refused to even allow a valid target.
The Butcher’s massive body was slashed and ripped apart in dozens of places in an instant beneath Ji-hwan’s dance-like blade work, spilling blood and coolant.
Realizing he could no longer attack Ji-hwan, the bastard made one last desperate move: he threw the heavy hammer to the floor and hurled his own massive body over Alpha’s fallen form.
Instead of blocking Ji-hwan’s blade, he willingly offered his back as a meat shield and covered his boss with his whole body.
"Haa, haa... You’re... not touching him any further, bastard."
On that pale face, a vicious, loyal glare flashed.
Ji-hwan stopped midair with the knife in hand and clicked his tongue.
"Tch. That loyalty is honestly kind of heartbreaking."
That kind of stupid devotion was rare in the merc world. He could have pierced both of them right then and there, but before Ji-hwan could make the call, the situation turned urgent first.
"Butcher!!"
"Boss!!"
"Shoot! Turn that bastard into a sieve right now!!"
Tatatatang-!!!
The female netrunner and the squad members who spilled out of the elevator behind him all opened fire on Ji-hwan with assault rifles.
"Tch!"
Ji-hwan threw himself behind the broken doorframe in a hurry.
Bullets grazed his calf and side, tearing flesh away.
His right arm was shattered, and his stamina had been at its limit for a long time. In this narrow corridor, breaking through the fire of elite mercs, carving up that meat shield, and then finishing Alpha was physically impossible.
"No time to play around. I need to take the bastard who ran off earlier."
Ji-hwan shot a cold look at Alpha, hidden behind the Butcher’s back, then turned without hesitation.
Tatatang!!Kwakang!!
Dodging the rain of bullets like a beast, Ji-hwan kicked open the iron door to the emergency stairs leading to the rooftop as if he meant to smash it apart.
Creeeak- boom!!
As the blood-soaked Ji-hwan leaped toward the dark stairwell, the gunfire of the mercs screaming around their boss echoed miserably through the corridor.
Tatatatang-!!Kang! Kaang-!
Bullets pouring toward the back of his head slammed into the metal stairs and railing, throwing off grotesque sparks.
Ignoring the heat of the rounds brushing past his back, Ji-hwan sprinted like a madman, drawing a blood-red line straight for the rooftop.
Every time his still-unrecovered right arm swung loose, horrible pain battered his whole body, but Ji-hwan’s mind was colder and sharper than ever.
"That bastard saw my data."
In this world, the value of his body. More specifically, that bizarre flesh with its miraculous regenerative power. The moment the megacorps got wind of it, Ji-hwan knew his life would become a nightmare.
It didn’t matter which corporation it was. Arasaka, Militech, Biotechnica... they would hunt him with everything they had, and the moment they caught him, he’d spend the rest of his life on a cold dissection table while they tore out his organs and cells.
"I have to kill him. If I don’t shut that bastard’s mouth forever here, I’m the one who dies."
It wasn’t just revenge. It was the most instinctive, ruthless calculation for survival.
Kwaang-!!!
At last, Ji-hwan kicked through the final iron door leading to the rooftop and burst out.
The harsh sandstorm of the Badlands slammed into Ji-hwan’s blood-soaked face.
"...Tch!"
An instinctive curse slipped from Ji-hwan’s mouth.
In the middle of the rooftop, the Manticore Squad’s top-of-the-line armed AV was already hovering more than ten meters above the ground.
Wooooong-!
Through the AV’s reinforced glass, he could see the director’s white face.
The bastard was screaming at the pilot to get moving, his face twisted with panic.
The distance was about twenty meters. The altitude kept climbing.
At this rate, in ten seconds the AV would leave the Badlands at a speed he could never catch.
Ji-hwan adjusted his grip on the knife and calculated the throw.
But the odds of punching through the armored glass of a top-tier AV with a single knife were hopeless.
The risk was too high for a gamble.
"I need to put it in his head for sure."
Ji-hwan abandoned the throwing stance and started running like a madman toward the AV taking off through the violent wind.
In that instant of sprinting, Ji-hwan fully unshackled his body’s limiter to its absolute maximum.
Crk-! Kraaaack!!
The horrifying sounds of bones breaking and muscles tearing rang out clearly inside Ji-hwan’s body.
The agony of ripping apart the built-in safety mechanism meant to keep him alive.
But at the cost of that battered flesh, Ji-hwan achieved his goal.
"Graaahhh-!!"
Kwaang-!!
With a beastlike roar, Ji-hwan tore through his ruined leg muscles and leaped like a madman.
The rooftop floor caved in, and Ji-hwan’s body cut through the air.
His left hand, stretched toward the AV’s rapidly rising landing gear, somehow managed to clamp onto the edge of the armor plating.
Wheeeeeeng-!!
"Huh...?!"
Inside the AV, the director’s heart dropped as he looked down out the window.
How had that insane monster, who had been on the rooftop just a moment ago, leaped this high and was now hanging from the outer hull right outside the window?
Ji-hwan’s bloodshot black eyes locked onto the director through the glass.
"You crazy bastard! Get away! Let go!!"
The director staggered back in panic.
But then he let out a sigh of relief.
Between Ji-hwan and him was top-grade titanium-coated armored glass that could stop even a military APC shell.
No matter how monstrous he was, hanging in midair like that, there was no way he could break the glass. Physically impossible.
"Hah, hahahaha...! Idiot! What are you going to do, flailing around down there?!"
Fear gave way to arrogant laughter.
The director pointed at Ji-hwan and mocked him.
"So you’re going to cling there and chase me all the way to the end? Fine, keep hanging on! Once the altitude climbs, you’ll just lose your grip and turn into a lump of meat! Stupid monster!"
But Ji-hwan’s gaze, staring back through the glass at the man mocking him, did not waver in the slightest.
Hanging there in the air, Ji-hwan clenched the fist of his remaining left hand.
Kwaang!!
The brutal impact slammed into the reinforced glass.
The director flinched, but the glass did not even scratch.
Kwaang! Kwaaaang-!!
But Ji-hwan’s punches did not stop.
As if determined to crush the director’s jaw, he kept hammering the same point with a dead, inhuman stare.
Even as skin tore and blood splattered across the glass, Ji-hwan’s violence never stopped.
"Y-you crazy bastard..."
The sneer on the director’s lips slowly turned into shock.
It was supposed to be top-tier armored glass without so much as a scratch. And yet, from that single exact point where Ji-hwan’s fist had slammed down dozens of times, a bizarre grinding sound began to emerge.
Crack...
This wasn’t just brute force.
In that mindless, repetitive motion of hanging in the air and pounding away nonstop, Ji-hwan had instinctively mixed the essence of [Instant Strike] into his blows.
The tiny but lethal vibration that struck not the surface, but what lay beyond it. It burrowed into the grain of the glass, finally collapsing the durability of the top-grade armored panel from the inside out.
Horrible spiderweb cracks bloomed across the center of the window.
"H-hey?! Go higher, faster! Shake that bastard off!!"
The craft lurched, and the AV’s altitude shot past several dozen meters in an instant.
The cold, cloud-churned turbulence of the Badlands slammed into Ji-hwan’s hanging body as if it meant to rip him apart.
His finger muscles were at the brink of snapping, but Ji-hwan glanced between the cracked armored glass and the director’s face, now frozen in terror once again, and smiled with a thin, bloodthirsty edge.
"Enough."
Ji-hwan let go of the craft without hesitation.
Dozens of meters above the ground, gravity seized his body and the horrific fall began.
But in that instant of free fall, Ji-hwan’s thought acceleration pushed beyond its limits.
The roar of the storm tearing at his ears faded into the distant sound of a cave, and a silent space-time where thousands of calculations were made per second opened up.
For a split second, as the falling raindrops seemed to freeze in the air, Ji-hwan’s body flipped upside down and found a strange stability.
The monstrous kinetic energy of the fall. Rather than resisting that inertia, Ji-hwan guided the flow of that immense force with nothing but a beast’s instinct, channeling it into the end of his remaining left arm.
In the stillness of accelerated thought, Ji-hwan saw the combat knife leave his hand and shoot forward with ferocious speed, leaving a red afterimage even in the slowed space-time.
Paaang-!!
Faster and sharper than a bullet, the knife sliced through the tiny crack in the armored glass that Ji-hwan’s fist had created and shattered the window into pieces.
"Wh...?!"
Thud-!!
At the same time as the glass burst apart, the director’s stupid sneer froze in midair.
Ji-hwan’s combat knife, having pierced the armored glass, was buried to the hilt right in the center of the director’s forehead.
"..."
A breathy sound leaked from the director’s mouth.
His pupils rolled back, and his body collapsed onto the leather seat inside the craft. Ji-hwan saw it clearly through the shattered window.
Whoooooosh-!!
Falling to the ground while cutting through the fierce wind, Ji-hwan watched the director collapse in the AV with the knife embedded in his head, and a beastlike grin split his bloodied face.
"Goodbye. Never see you again."
There was no fear of death.
Only the overwhelming catharsis of having torn the throat out of the prey that had been hunting him.
But the joy lasted only a moment before the terrifying wind pressure at his ears dragged him back to reality.
Free fall from dozens of meters up. Even for Ji-hwan, if he hit the ground headfirst, his brains would really end up splattered out at that height.
In Ji-hwan’s falling field of vision, the rear structures of a massive Biotechnica research facility were rapidly drawing near.
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