It had already been a week since Ji-hwan took refuge in the underground fight pit beneath the dark, damp abandoned shopping mall in Pacifica.
As the price for burning through every last drop of his vitality in that fall from dozens of meters in the air, his regenerative ability had plunged to a miserable 5 percent. But with brutal training and rest running side by side, his body was quietly recovering at a steady pace of 1 percent a day. At this rate, he’d be fully healed in three months. A pretty damn good pace.
Now, a week later, the wounds that had once kept bursting open and bleeding at random had already healed cleanly. Of course, grotesque scars remained, like rippling patterns carved into the hide of some great beast, but if anything, they only made Ji-hwan’s predator-like aura even more intense.
Unlike his debut match, when he’d been shirtless with nothing but blood-soaked bandages wrapped around him, Ji-hwan now roamed the pit in a dark, muted short-sleeve T-shirt and worn jeans that let him move freely. A black anti-slash mask etched with tiger fangs was fitted firmly over his face.
"Hey, K! Your movement’s insane today too!"
The Animal gang members who had looked down on Ji-hwan as a skinny little corpse just a few days ago were now maintaining a bizarre sort of friendship with him, sparring casually and helping him train.
After finishing a sparring session in one corner of the pit, Ji-hwan started his own absurdly brutal conditioning. Repeated drills of releasing all tension from the body, and heavy-object strikes that far surpassed the limits of ordinary humans. The Animal gang members gathered around him, trying awkwardly to imitate the movements of this chrome-free freak who was showing off such astonishing skill with nothing but flesh and bone.
"Jesus, what the hell. My bones are gonna snap. Are your bones made of steel or something? How do you do that every day?"
Before long, even the Animals were shaking their heads in disbelief and backing off in the face of Ji-hwan’s insane training volume and the impossible finesse of his relaxation technique.
The Animal gang relied on illegal steroids, "juice," and worshipped nothing but muscle mass and overwhelming brute force. Ji-hwan, on the other hand, emptied his strength and prioritized precise control. The paths they pursued to become strong were completely different. But after sweating and bleeding together in the ring and fully acknowledging each other’s overwhelming violence, they had somehow become comrades in struggle.
After finishing his morning training, Ji-hwan stepped outside the pit to satisfy his hunger. He headed to an old street stall on the outskirts of Pacifica, where smoke drifted up beneath a half-dead neon sign. It was the old man’s stall, the same one he had saved from thugs when he first arrived in Pacifica a week ago.
"Oh, K! You’re here again today!"
Ji-hwan gave the old man a slight nod through his mask and bit into the warm, oversized synthetic meat skewer he was handed as usual. A small, humble connection blooming at the bottom of brutal Night City. After filling his stomach with the skewer, Ji-hwan turned back toward the underground pit with a faint sense of satisfaction.
He had just finished eating and returned to the room that served as both lodging and a utility space, about to settle back into his stance, when—
"Hey, K!"
Bison, the huge guard at the pit entrance, hurriedly shifted his massive body and banged roughly on the utility room door.
"Some skinny bastard’s looking for you outside! He’s crawling around on the floor asking for K, so what should we do?"
Who would come looking for him this deep in dangerous Pacifica, when he had a corporate-level warrant on his head? Ji-hwan frowned and grabbed his weapon before heading outside.
When he reached the entrance, he saw a tall Black man trembling under an old coat among the hulking Animal gang members. It was Marcus, the netrunner from the Voodoo Boys who had once helped him infiltrate a Biotechnica underground facility before vanishing without a trace.
"Yaa, K!!"
The moment Marcus spotted Ji-hwan, he threw dignity to the wind and lunged at his pant leg, crying and sniffling all over the place.
"Save me! Please, just save me and hide me here...!"
A grown man, and a fairly skilled netrunner at that, bawling his eyes out while crawling on the floor in a den of beasts. The surrounding Animal gang members snickered and mocked him, but Ji-hwan looked down at Marcus with calm eyes and asked flatly, "What the hell happened? Why are you crawling all the way out here looking like that?"
"T-this... that damn military shard you gave me!"
Marcus shoved a trembling hand into his coat pocket and hurriedly pulled out a silver data chip, pressing it into Ji-hwan’s hand. The top-secret trophy Ji-hwan had taken after killing Maelstrom boss Royce.
"I... I risked my life and secretly used an old Voodoo Boys subnet backdoor to crack the whole thing open...!"
Marcus’s voice was soaked in terror.
"But I think they caught on! If the Voodoo Boys get me, my brain’s gonna fry on the spot! Please, you have to protect me here...!"
Ji-hwan idly rolled the silver military shard between his fingers while looking down at Marcus, who was clinging to his pant leg and sobbing. A netrunner who’d used the Voodoo Boys’ subnet and gotten traced. Letting Marcus’s desperate cries wash over him, Ji-hwan quietly assessed his own condition.
His wounds themselves had all healed.
His regenerative ability was still scraping the bottom, but thanks to the nonstop training he’d forced through over the past week, the strength and density of his body had become taut and ready to burst.
Ji-hwan lifted his head and glanced toward the center of the pit, where the octagon ring stood. Originally, tonight was supposed to be the day he made his official ring debut for Mammoth. But Marcus’s situation at his feet had turned far more urgent than expected. It was obvious that within ten minutes at the latest, an assassination team from the Voodoo Boys would storm this underground place.
Well, since his body had already healed anyway, maybe he could use this as a light rehab session and loosen up before getting in the ring.
After a brief moment of thought, Ji-hwan grabbed Marcus by the back of the neck and hauled him upright.
"Marcus. Don’t block the trace signal. In fact, open the door wide and kindly leak your exact coordinates to them. Draw them straight to me." "Yaaah, K!! Are you insane?! You’re sticking your head into a lion’s mouth on purpose?!" "If they’re coming after you anyway, it’s cleaner to wipe them out here in one go. Good enough for a little rehab before I get in the ring." "Re... rehab?!"
Marcus wasn’t the only one shocked by that cold, absurd declaration. The Animal gang members who had been watching from the side also froze stupidly for a moment.
"Hey, K. Did you just say rehab?"
The huge Bison asked in disbelief, stammering.
"Then what the hell was all that shit you’ve been doing? Squatting with a one-ton pile of scrap on your back, sparring with guys our size until flesh was flying, breaking bones every day? That wasn’t rehab?!"
It was a murderous training volume that would make even the muscle-obsessed Animals flinch. But Ji-hwan only gave a small laugh and answered with complete calm.
"Oh. That was just morning calisthenics." "You crazy monster..."
The gang members clicked their tongues and stared at him, exhausted. Then one of the bigger ones muttered with genuine, oddly heartfelt kinship, "You really do fit the Animals."
Ji-hwan’s cold gaze shot straight at him.
"You wanna die?"
"N-no, sir!"
The big gang member hurriedly looked away under that savage fact-based violence. Ji-hwan let out a light sigh and waved the group off.
"The Voodoo Boys are going to come storming in here soon. With your size, all you’ll do is get your brains fried by their quickhacks, so don’t get involved for no reason. Go wait inside for a bit. I’ll handle this place."
If it had been usual, the Animals would have bristled at being told to back off while enemies had invaded their turf. But after seeing Ji-hwan’s overwhelming violence with their own eyes, they began to retreat without a word.
As the hulking men cleared the corridor, Ji-hwan’s gaze drifted up to the VIP railing on the second floor of the pit. There, Mammoth, the man in charge of the whole place, was leaning heavily on the rail and looking down.
Mammoth didn’t stop Ji-hwan from pulling a major stunt by luring the Voodoo Boys into his territory. He only nodded his thick steel-implanted jaw and exhaled a long plume of gray cigar smoke. If anything, there was a deep, feral delight in his eyes, as if he were eager to see what kind of violence his chosen ace would unleash before stepping into the ring. It was the boss’s silent approval, a deliberate turning of the other way.
"Good."
Ji-hwan looked away and sat down casually on the worn leather sofa, crossing one leg over the other.
"If they’re going to keep chasing me anyway, it’s a lot cleaner to wipe them out here than to waste time running. Open it now."
Crushed by Ji-hwan’s blazing eyes, Marcus finally gave in and, with tears in his eyes, forced the pad firewall open with trembling hands.
Just ten minutes later, the air around the lodging space, tangled with huge pipes, began to distort strangely. Ji-hwan, lounging on the sofa with his eyes closed, twitched his ears slightly.
Whiiing—, ssshhk.
The sound of air refracting in space, accompanied by a faint electromagnetic hum. Through the racket of metal echoing through the pit, four strange sets of footsteps, skimming across the floor, stabbed clearly into Ji-hwan’s ears.
The bastards probably thought they had slipped in under full optical camo, invisible and undetectable. But to Ji-hwan, that stealthy presence was as obvious as someone walking around in a quiet room with bells strapped to their ankles.
"There you are."
Ji-hwan snapped open the eyes he’d had closed. The cold gleam of a predator facing its prey.
Ssshhk—. The iron door to the utility room opened soundlessly, and four transparent ripples rushed into the room. Their optical lenses caught Marcus crouched in the corner and Ji-hwan staring straight at the exact point where they were entering.
"Target confirmed. Traitor and... an unidentified masked man. Kill them both."
The moment the leader issued the kill order, Ji-hwan’s outline on the sofa vanished like heat haze before the command had even finished. Then, in an instant, Ji-hwan slipped behind them and flashed a soft, precise fist strike.
A silent blow without even a cutting wind. At that touch, the rear-most assassin collapsed like a felled log and slammed into the floor.
Thud. A meat sack dropping in absurd defeat.
When the three elite agents in front finally noticed something was wrong and turned around, Ji-hwan had already seized their complete blind spot.
"W-when the hell did he get behind us...!"
Two startled agents immediately deployed blue monowires and combat knives from both arms and lunged at him. Ji-hwan twisted his upper body by half a beat and let the blade that came at his face slip past by a hair’s breadth. Then, using the spring of his lower body as he dodged, he slipped like a ghost into the empty space created by their missed swing.
Puhhht-!!
In the darkness, Ji-hwan’s soft palm and fist flashed in rapid succession. Not brute force squeezed out by muscle, but the ultimate technique of [Thought Acceleration], [Body Enhancement], and [Instant Strike]—concentrating all energy into a single point only at the instant of impact.
Ji-hwan controlled the force so he could capture them alive. Though the touch was subtle, the vibration passed cleanly through their subdermal armor without damaging it and twisted only their internal nervous systems with exact, merciless precision.
"Ghk...!"
In just three seconds, the two agents rolled their eyes white and collapsed unconscious without even managing a scream.
"......W-what the hell?!"
In the blink of an eye, three of his subordinates had gone down without shedding a single drop of blood. The lone remaining leader’s optical lenses shook violently. Instinctively, he leaped backward to open distance and activated his strongest weapon: netrunning. A quickhack that could turn a target’s brain into charcoal in an instant. His artificial eyes flashed blue as they scanned Ji-hwan’s entire body with frantic intensity.
But the targeting system floating in his vision only flashed red warning windows like mad.
[ No data. ] [ Pure biological signals detected only. ]
"W-what? It won’t scan! There isn’t a single piece of chrome?!"
A breath of stunned disbelief escaped the leader’s mouth. A completely organic body, not even a common neural socket in sight. It was a horrifying sense of wrongness, facing a total digital blind spot that gave a netrunner no opening to hack.
"Y-you unbelievable... What the hell are you?!"
Driven out of his mind by fear and confusion, the leader screamed and drew his smart gun, squeezing the trigger at Ji-hwan.
Tatatatang-!!
A storm of sharp live rounds poured toward Ji-hwan’s forehead inside the cramped utility room. Swish, ping, peep-ping!
With only his developed dynamic vision, Ji-hwan read the direction of every incoming bullet. A tiny tilt of the head, a half-inch drop of the shoulder, a fluid twist of the waist. The bullets grazed his cheeks by a hair and buried themselves in the pipes behind him, throwing off sparks.
Step. Step. Ji-hwan walked leisurely through the rain of bullets, all the way up to the leader’s face as he panicked and kept firing.
At last, when the magazine ran dry and only the hollow metallic clicks of an empty gun rang out, Ji-hwan was already right under the leader’s chin. Looking down at the terrified man with cold eyes, he said flatly, "Your shooting form is garbage." "A-ahhh!!"
As the leader screamed and tried to throw the empty gun away, Ji-hwan’s palm lifted his chin with a light, gentle motion.
Puhk-!
A clean hit. The assassin leader crumpled without even finishing his dying breath and slammed into the floor.
"Those bastards really did show up in ten minutes."
Ji-hwan brushed his hands off and looked down at the sprawled bodies with indifference. Marcus, who had been squeezing his eyes shut in the corner, finally looked up and gaped.
Ji-hwan roughly grabbed the unconscious leader by the collar and slapped his cheeks three or four times to force him awake.
"K-kh...!"
The Voodoo Boys agent, waking with foam at the corners of his mouth, met Ji-hwan’s eyes as he crouched in front of him and stared down coldly. He spat out a metallic voice.
"You... outsider bastard... do you think you can touch the Voodoo Boys and walk away unharmed... Our leader, Mama Bridget, will burn your brain to ash...!"
A grand threat. But Ji-hwan’s reaction was utterly indifferent. Without saying a word, he let go of the collar and turned his head away as if bothered.
"Hey."
Ji-hwan jerked his chin toward the Animal gang members waiting outside.
"Tie these rat bastards up tight and dump them in the corner. If they try to run, rough them up a bit. Don’t kill them." "Kwahaha! Understood, K! We’ll separate the bones from the flesh real nice and clean!"
Unable to hide his shock at Ji-hwan treating him like he was invisible, the leader looked completely thrown off. If you captured an enemy, the usual move was to start torturing them for organization intel or the location of their hideout. But this guy hadn’t asked a single question and was already picking up his old coat, ready to leave.
"Y-you... where the hell are you going?!"
Unable to contain his anxiety, the leader shouted. Ji-hwan, just about to pull his mask back on, stopped walking and gave a small grin.
"Where else? To that woman you just kept yammering about. Mama Bridget or whatever her name is." "What...? Kwahahaha! You crazy bastard."
The leader burst into a bloodied laugh of disbelief.
"You think a foreign merc like you knows where Mama Bridget’s sanctuary is...? You’ll never even set foot in the entrance... w-wait... no way...?"
The taunting in the leader’s voice cut off abruptly. His red optical lenses began to shake. Going straight for the boss without even asking a question meant the man already knew the Voodoo Boys’ deepest, most hidden hideout perfectly from the start.
"You... you know it already...!"
The leader’s gaze, now soaked in dread, locked onto Ji-hwan’s face. Ji-hwan didn’t bother saying out loud that he had memorized the structure of the game map inside and out.
He only smiled through the tiger-fang mask, dark and cold like a predator facing prey. That eerie, silent smile was the most certain and horrifying answer to the leader’s question.
"Hiiik...!"
As the leader froze in despair, having seen through every card in his hand, Ji-hwan let his old coat flare behind him and opened the heavy iron door to the utility room, stepping out.
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