With a harsh roar from its exhaust, Falco’s six-wheeled off-road truck, the Chevillon Emperor, rolled into the outskirts of Pacifica, Night City’s largest and most rotten slum and lawless zone, and came to a heavy stop beneath a collapsed overpass with a grinding screech.
Clack.
Falco got out of the driver’s seat and opened the rear cargo compartment. Inside was Ji-hwan, who had been sleeping in the passenger seat as if he’d passed out.
"Hey. Wake up, scarface. We’re here."
At Falco’s tap on his shoulder and his bitter voice, Ji-hwan’s sleeping eyes slowly opened.
After the previous battle and the fall from dozens of meters in the air had burned through every last scrap of his vitality, exhaustion had dragged him into sleep.
"...Mm."
"We’re here. The outer wall of Pacifica."
"Mm... already?"
Falco glanced around and said,
The neon signs were half-dead and flickering grotesquely, and because this was a lawless zone where corporate authority and the NCPD had no reach, the air itself reeked of acrid gunpowder and rotting blood.
Ji-hwan steadied his swaying body, braced himself against the Emperor’s frame, and barely managed to get out. Seeing that, Falco stroked his mustache and asked with genuine concern,
"Hey, Ji-hwan. You really gonna go on your own like this? You look like you could drop dead on the street any second."
Ji-hwan wiped the dried blood from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve and let out a faint laugh.
"Don’t worry. If I want to avoid Night City’s bounty hunters, this is the only place I can hide."
Knowing there was no point trying to break that stubborn streak, Falco let out a deep sigh and shook his head.
Then he pulled a crumpled map from the inner pocket of his worn leather jacket and tossed it to Ji-hwan.
"That’s the place you asked about on the way. Keep going straight, then head down into the basement of the collapsed shopping mall. You’ll find the illegal underground fight pit run by those Animals gang bastards."
Falco scratched his chin with a finger and added,
"They’re the type who worship illegal steroids and dumb muscle training above everything else. It’s a perfect madhouse if you’re trying to rehab that body of yours by fighting through it... but be careful. Nobody there gives a damn if you die in the ring."
"...Sounds exactly like what I was looking for."
Ji-hwan tucked the map away and turned back into the darkness.
"And tell Dakota I’m still alive. I don’t want to drag any trouble her way."
Falco gave a bitter smile at that ruthless cut-off and flicked his fingers in a casual salute.
"Got it, friend. Don’t die on me. See you around."
Vroooom-!!
With a rough blast from its exhaust, Falco’s Emperor tore through the rainwater pooled on the road and disappeared completely into the darkness. Left alone, Ji-hwan took heavy steps toward Pacifica and looked around.
The "Pacifica of 2077" he had once played in a game on a 21st-century monitor, and the "Pacifica of 2068" he was now walking through with his own two feet.
The Pacifica of 2077 in the game had been a place the Night City authorities had fenced off and abandoned entirely after the Unification War and the megacorps’ complete withdrawal of investment.
Even the NCPD had given up entering it. It was a ruin where luxury hotels with only their skeletons left and rusted Ferris wheels had been left behind like grotesque trash. The Pacifica Ji-hwan was walking through now, in 2068, was in the strangest, darkest transitional phase, right before it became that perfect ruin.
The enormous capital the corps had poured in, promising to build a glittering resort for billionaires, had only just begun to drain away like an outgoing tide. As the city rotted in real time, gigantic tower cranes that had not yet fully rusted pierced the cloudy night sky like steel beasts left without a master, while broken palm-tree holograms and neon signs for luxury casinos flickered in spasms under blood-red acid rain.
On the streets, beneath flashy resort billboards that had yet to be torn down, the bodies of vagrants and gang members who had nowhere else to go lay tangled together like garbage.
More vivid and chilling than the perfectly dead ghost town of 2077 was the uncanny feeling radiating from 2068 Pacifica, where corporate dreams and the despair of the poor were mixing together and rotting in real time.
As he walked through streets thick with acrid gunpowder and the stench of rotten blood, Ji-hwan’s mind went cold.
With corporate netrunners and bounty hunters after him, he couldn’t show his bare face like this.
As he passed the collapsed buildings, his gaze landed on the corpse of a gang member dumped in a pile of trash in an alley.
Ji-hwan picked up the heavy, vicious special anti-slash mask that had been covering the corpse’s face and roughly rinsed the blood off it with rainwater.
Then, to hide his own scarred face, he put on that plain black mask without hesitation.
The moment the name "Kim Ji-hwan," a wanted man in Night City, was erased into the darkness, K was born—the man who would operate in Pacifica.
After walking on, he paused for a moment near an old street stall where acrid smoke was rising beneath a half-dead neon sign flickering grotesquely.
"Hey, old man! Didn’t I tell you I’d burn the whole shop down if you didn’t pay the stall fee by today?!"
In one corner of a slick alley full of puddled rainwater, three lowlifes from Pacifica were grabbing an old street vendor by the collar and shaking him around, causing a scene.
'...Annoying.'
Ji-hwan let out a short sigh inside.
If this had been before, he would have walked right up and shattered their jawbones on the spot. But now he was a fugitive who had to hide both his identity and his pitifully low vitality.
Ji-hwan tried to avert his eyes and pass them by without a care.
But then, at that very moment—
Thwack!
"Ah, shit! Where the hell are you looking?!"
"...."
The leader of the punks harassing the old vendor deliberately bumped Ji-hwan’s shoulder hard as he passed, picking a fight.
He was trying to vent his frustration and shake him down, thinking he was just some easy local mark.
Ji-hwan stopped walking and slowly turned his head. Through the mask, his eyes stared straight down at the punk.
He considered it for a moment, but just as he was about to ignore them and keep going to avoid making a scene—
"Where do you think you’re going without apologizing after bumping into me?!"
The punk’s pride, wounded by Ji-hwan’s indifference, pushed him over the line. He yanked a blue jackknife from his pocket and lunged at Ji-hwan’s back.
Slaaap-!!
"Ghk...!"
A horrible, oddly crisp cracking sound rang through the alley. Without even fully turning his head, Ji-hwan simply let the recoil from his waist carry his hand backward, and his palm slapped the guy’s cheek dead on.
The knife-wielding punk didn’t even get a chance to scream. He spun half a turn in the air like a top and crashed upside down into the trash pile, passing out instantly.
"W-What the hell?! This bastard!"
"Kill him!!"
Seeing their leader knocked out by a single slap, the remaining two roared and charged at him together with steel pipes in their hands. Ji-hwan clicked his tongue in annoyance, slipped past their rough swings by a hair, and then sent his palm slicing through the air again with clean, precise swing and snap.
Smack! Slaaap-!!
"Aaaagh!"
Nothing but a vicious, merciless slap. Every time they rushed him, their cheeks exploded under Ji-hwan’s palm, sending the punks rolling into the muddy ground with their eyes white and rolled back.
Less than ten seconds had passed.
"...Tch."
Ji-hwan looked down at the unconscious punks and clicked his tongue very softly.
It had been a light move, but in that brief instant when he twisted his waist and thrust out his palm to subdue them, the overworked motion had caused faint dark-red blood to seep through the half-healed scars.
He had no idea when his recovery would fully return. He was healing little by little, and it felt like his recovery had come back by less than half of one-tenth, but the more he pushed himself, the worse the wounds would get.
"The wounds split open again..."
Ji-hwan wiped the spreading bloodstain on his clothes with his sleeve and was about to turn away, looking annoyed.
"H-Hey!"
Just then, the old vendor, who had been sitting on the ground trembling, hurriedly called out to him.
When Ji-hwan looked back, the old man thrust out two steaming skewers of large synthetic meat from his stall with trembling hands.
"Th-thank you. I never expected anyone to help me around here... I don’t have much, but please, take this."
Ji-hwan looked back and forth between the old man’s wrinkled hands and the steaming skewers for a moment.
Then the eyes behind his mask curved very gently.
No matter how blood-soaked this dystopia was, small acts of kindness could change people.
He wanted to believe that.
"...Thanks. Get inside early. It’s raining."
Ji-hwan gave a slight bow and accepted the skewers.
He lifted the bottom of the mask just enough to take a big bite, savoring the warm meat filling his mouth and the sound of the rain as he started walking again toward the Animals gang’s underground fight pit that would hide him.
Before long, he reached the entrance to the abandoned Pacifica shopping mall basement, where a heavy bass beat that shook the ground and the sound of concrete breaking were echoing out.
At the entrance stood two Animal gang guards, both well over two meters tall and packed with muscle pumped up by illegal steroids, firmly blocking the way.
Then, when they saw Ji-hwan’s strange appearance—arriving with no chrome at all, only old, bloodstained bandages wrapped around him—they snorted openly.
Ji-hwan told them to move aside without much interest, but one of the guards tapped his vicious steel pipe and roughly blocked his path.
"What’s this skinny little rat? This ain’t the place for trash like you to be snooping around. Get lost before I bust your head open!"
But before the guy’s mockery had even finished—
Tap.
Ji-hwan’s hand lightly stabbed into the guard’s jawline pressure point, and the two-meter brute couldn’t even scream before his knees buckled and he slumped to the ground as if he’d fallen into a deep sleep, passing out on the spot.
It was a precise and subtle strike.
"...Tch."
Ji-hwan clicked his tongue very softly.
Because he had twisted his waist too hard, dark-red blood was seeping again through the scars on his upper body that had not fully healed.
Ji-hwan wiped the bloodstain spreading over his clothes with his sleeve and turned his cold eyes on the one remaining guard, who stood frozen in a daze.
Seeing his partner collapse as if falling into a deep sleep from a single subtle, gentle touch, the Animal gang guard—despite his massive body, more than two meters tall and swollen with illegal steroids—was shaken enough that the pressure radiating from Ji-hwan’s plain black mask crushed his momentum.
"H-Huh...!"
The guard dropped the steel pipe in his hand with a loud clatter, raised both hands slowly into the air, and then, without realizing it, stumbled backward until his back hit the cold concrete wall. Only then did he drag in a rough breath and try desperately to steady himself.
If he angered the masked man in front of him even a little, he would end up on the ground like his partner.
"O-Okay! I get it, so calm down, man!"
The guard swallowed hard and continued awkwardly, doing his best to sound defensive yet conciliatory.
His voice was still shaking badly, but whether he really was just a guard or not, he slowly tried to talk Ji-hwan down.
"L-Look... if you make more trouble here, it’s gonna get messy for you too, right?! There’s nothing good about causing a scene outside...! Y-You said you wanted to register as a fighter, right?!"
With a stiff smile forced onto his face as sweat poured down like rain, the guard tried to smooth things over carefully, as if calming Ji-hwan down.
Ji-hwan glanced at the bastard sleeping peacefully on the ground, then turned his gaze back to the remaining guard and jerked his chin once, indifferently.
"Take me to the boss."
The moment Ji-hwan’s short, dry words fell, the guard hurriedly nodded.
"Yeah... follow me."
Following the guard, who was leading the way in terror, Ji-hwan stepped into the fight pit interior, where the stench of blood and sweat hung thick in the air.
As Ji-hwan crossed the corridor of the underground arena, the gazes of low-level gangsters and criminals, drunk on gambling, all turned toward him at once.
Bare body with not a single piece of cyberware. Old bandages and a shirt stained with blood, looking like he might collapse any second. The crowd pointed openly and sneered.
"What’s with that corpse?"
"He crawled into Animal territory without a single chrome implant? Another suicide candidate."
The taunts and contempt slapped at his ears. But Ji-hwan ignored them and kept walking without hesitation to face the boss of this place, Mammoth.
The guard didn’t even dare check on his partner on the floor, and hurriedly cleared the way with trembling hands.
Then, glancing back over and over to avoid offending Ji-hwan, he quickly led him through the dark corridor of the abandoned shopping mall, where the heavy bass beat shook the ground, and up to the upper floor where the arena’s chief was waiting.
In the VIP seats, where thick cigar smoke and the stench of illegal steroids were tangled together, the locked door behind the big-shot boss Mammoth, who was looking down arrogantly at the octagon ring, opened.
The pale-faced guard at the entrance entered trembling, and behind him came Ji-hwan, wearing a plain black anti-slash mask with no decoration, walking in with calm, indifferent steps.
.
"Boss... uh, this guy came looking to register as a fighter..."
At Bison’s trembling voice, Mammoth, who had been looking down at the ring, hauled his massive body up and slowly turned around.
The Mammoth Ji-hwan faced was a grotesque beast beyond the bounds of humanity.
Over three meters tall, and with a body to match, his muscles were like a mountain of stone, and his skin was covered in thick gray bio-leather like a rhinoceros’s hide.
Especially the thickness of his neck, running from his trapezius to under his jaw, was thicker than his head, making the boundary between shoulder and neck almost impossible to tell.
"Bison. Why are you shaking like a leaf when you’re built like that? And what’s that half-dead thing you dragged in behind you?"
Because of the crude steel implant embedded in the shattered jaw he’d once completely crushed, his voice came out with a horrifying metallic rasp every time he opened his mouth.
With a thick cigar clenched between his blunt jaws, Mammoth started walking toward Ji-hwan.
He approached at a steady pace, like a warrior who had survived countless battles.
"What is this lump of meat? A corpse that should’ve dropped dead on the street somehow crawled all the way here?"
Mammoth chewed on his cigar and blatantly mocked Ji-hwan’s blood-soaked, bare body.
Even under that overwhelming mockery, Ji-hwan didn’t flinch even a little. He lifted his head and met the glow in the man’s eyes directly.
Ji-hwan felt a faint shock at the savage pressure that seemed to pierce through his entire body.
Exploding muscle mass, bio-tattoos, and a ferocious glint shining through the thick cigar smoke.
'...Why the hell is Tyson here?'
The legend he had seen on the ring through a monitor.
He had torn through the Centaur chassis, but the monster in front of him was on another level, and even if his body fully recovered, he couldn’t guarantee victory head-on.
As Ji-hwan kept that terrifyingly cold stare, Bison, crushed between Mammoth’s killing intent and Ji-hwan’s overwhelming pressure, hurriedly continued his report.
"Th-That’s not it, boss! My partner guarding the door outside... he passed out before he could even react!!"
Bison had personally witnessed his partner collapse without a sound from a single subtle, gentle touch, and his voice was soaked in a primal fear of an unknown force.
It was a bizarre little scene: a beastlike gang member over two meters tall trembling as he defended Ji-hwan.
At that desperate report, a spark of interest flashed in Mammoth’s eyes.
He despised those who relied only on chrome and drugs, treating training and combat as nothing special, and Mammoth only acknowledged the "real skill" he saw with his own eyes. Bison’s report stirred his curiosity hard.
Mammoth stopped pacing and came right up to Ji-hwan’s face.
The distance between them was only a fist’s width. The size difference was overwhelming.
Mammoth also gnawed on his cigar, sharpening his nerves inwardly.
A half-dead man wrapped in bloodstained bandages. But the glow behind that black mask, the muscle fibers compressed like metal wire, and the scars visible beneath the shirt were perfect proof that this man was a predator who had crossed battle lines no one could imagine.
'At this level, this body doesn’t come from dying once or twice...'
After briefly sizing up Ji-hwan’s physical ability, Mammoth glared at him, and the two men’s murderous pressure and overwhelming presence clashed in the air.
The surrounding atmosphere grew heavy as if it were being crushed, and the suffocating tension reached its peak.
In the instant before fists could fly,
"I don’t care who the opponent is. Just put me in the ring."
Ji-hwan lifted his chin and coldly provoked him.
In the end, Mammoth’s curiosity about the man’s real worth won out. He crushed his cigar between his teeth and let out a metallic chuckle.
"...Heh."
Then he blew out a long stream of cigar smoke and turned around sharply. The savage tension that had been pulled taut instantly scattered.
"Might as well run a test. Let’s see whether you’re a corpse that’ll drop dead in the ring, or someone worth keeping."
Mammoth jerked his chin, looking intrigued.
"Put him in."
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