The sticky air, mixed with rainwater and exhaust, stung Ji-hwan’s nose. After wrapping up the ice-cold negotiation with Maman Brigitte, he stepped out of the Pacifica Serenity Bible Church and silently stared at the ruins spread beneath the gray sky.
As he walked the streets, his gaze naturally drifted east. A mysterious zone sealed shut behind a massive steel wall, with access strictly controlled. In the original Cyberpunk 2077 game, it had been blocked by an invisible wall and impossible to enter. A trash heap of an area that would later be illegally occupied by Kurt Hansen, a Militech man, and turned into the fortress known as Dogtown.
"So this is the restricted zone Militech locked down with some excuse about toxic gas leaks."
Ji-hwan let out a small snort. With his current physical abilities, he could smash through that wall if he really wanted to. But there was no reason to go sticking his head into an unknown blind spot even his own knowledge couldn’t penetrate. Shrugging off the brief curiosity, Ji-hwan turned back and returned to the Animal gang’s underground fight pit.
In the hallway outside the dorms, the netrunner Marcus was scrambling to pack his things.
"Marcus. You packing up?"
"Huh, wha?! K, you’re not planning to sell me off to that witch because the negotiation failed, are you?!"
Marcus stumbled backward in horror, and Ji-hwan waved him off casually.
"Maman Brigitte agreed to cancel every execution order on you. If you want, you can go back there."
"Are you crazy?! Go crawl back under those creepy bastards again?!"
Marcus shook his head wildly, his face drained of color.
"I’m heading to the Badlands and laying low with Dakota for a while! Staying near you isn’t worth ten lives! I’m outta here!"
After announcing his escape, Marcus climbed into his battered van, the thing plastered with antennas, and sped off in a racket of noise.
After Marcus left, Ji-hwan walked over to the four Voodoo Boys assassins he had tied up in the corner.
While they had been waiting for him, the Animal gang members had beaten them senseless. Their jaws were broken, their faces a mess of blood, but they were still breathing.
Ji-hwan snipped through the ropes with a dagger, and as if they had been waiting for the signal, Voodoo Boys members emerged silently from the darkness near the fight pit entrance.
They had dropped all hostility and supported their broken comrades on both sides.
Then one of them gave Ji-hwan a deep bow, as if to prove the truce they had just forged.
Ji-hwan gave a casual nod in return.
"Hey, K."
Just as things were settling down and he was about to head back inside, Mammoth, wrapped in gray synthetic hide like a rhinoceros, called out to him in a gravelly voice with a thick cigar in his mouth.
"Come by my room for a minute before you go up for your first match later."
"Got it."
With that dry reply, Ji-hwan opened the iron door and stepped into his shabby old pipe-room quarters.
Click. In the quiet room, cut off from the pounding beat outside, Ji-hwan flopped onto the worn-out sofa and pulled out the old terminal Marcus had handed him while trembling. Then he carefully slid the silver top-secret shard into the slot.
Ding. With a burst of blue static, the title of the file Marcus had risked his life to decrypt appeared in red.
[Viewing Target: Papa Sunrise]
Leaning back deep into the sofa, Ji-hwan stared at the black-box footage playing on the terminal in first-person view. On the crackling screen, someone’s field of vision shook rapidly with rough breathing. The owner of the footage, the man seeing through those eyes, was a veteran mercenary who called himself Papa Sunrise.
On the screen, he was moving stealthily through the corridor of a dark, chilly underground facility with one companion. A geometric hallway lined with pure white tiles. Ji-hwan’s eyes narrowed.
"That’s..."
It was the Biotechnica underground bio-lab where, just a few weeks ago, he had driven a knife into the forehead of the man in charge.
"We’re almost there. Just around this corner is the main server room."
As Papa Sunrise whispered to the companion behind him and was about to plug a hacking tool into the security panel, the instinct of a veteran who had survived countless death lines caught the killing intent rising coldly behind him.
Papa Sunrise stopped the hand holding the tool and twisted his body on reflex, rolling to the floor.
Tatatatang
The bullet that should have pierced his head missed its mark and sank deep into Papa Sunrise’s side instead.
"K, hhk...!!"
The pain of flesh being torn away. Spitting blood, he rolled across the floor and painfully turned his head. There, the "companion" who had just been covering his back was pointing a smoking gun barrel down at him with a chilling look.
"Oh... you dodged that?"
A sly smile curled at the traitor’s mouth.
"You son of a bitch... Why...!" "Sorry. I got a request from that Faraday guy to make sure you were eliminated. You should’ve learned to read the room and kept things moderate."
The moment the name Faraday slipped out, the hidden hand behind it all, Papa Sunrise’s vision burned red with fury. The traitor calmly lowered the muzzle back to his forehead. Just when it seemed he would be executed obediently on the spot—
"You’re coming with me, you piece of shit-!!"
Papa Sunrise roared like a beast, blood spraying from his mouth. Even with his side blown open and his guts about to spill out, he yanked a heavy large-caliber revolver from his waist.
The startled traitor sprayed the room with rifle fire. The incoming rounds slammed into Papa Sunrise’s shoulder and thigh. But even as the impact of shattered bone tore through him, he stubbornly raised his arm and pulled the trigger anyway.
Kwaang
The heavy armor-piercing round burst from the revolver and smashed the traitor’s face apart with perfect accuracy. The corpse, its head blown away without a trace, crashed to the floor in a spray of blood.
"Cough... haa, hhk..."
He had made a traveling companion out of trash wearing a companion’s skin, but Papa Sunrise had reached his limit too. Covered in blood, he slumped against the white tile wall and dragged in ragged breaths when—
Step, step.
Heavy combat boots echoed from around the corner of the corridor. Biotechnica’s response team, drawn by the gunfire: the Manticore Squad. The moment Ji-hwan saw the red ocular lenses on the screen, he recognized them instantly.
At the front was the squad leader, Alpha, who glanced at the sprawled traitor’s corpse and clicked his tongue.
"Tch. That Faraday fixer bastard really botched the job if the courier ended up as minced meat. We told him to bring him in alive." "Aaaagh!!"
Even in his dying moments, Papa Sunrise refused to give up. He forced himself up from the pool of blood and fired the remaining magazine.
TatatatangTatatatang
A desperate barrage at the Manticore squad. But the armor-piercing rounds only bounced off their thick tactical plating. Every time he moved violently, dark red blood gushed like a fountain from the side wound that had been torn open. In the end, his knee bent grotesquely and Papa Sunrise’s body collapsed.
"Cough, khh...!!"
Face-first on the floor, he coughed up bloody foam. Even the hand gripping his weapon was trembling, strength draining away. Alpha approached without hurry and aimed a cold pistol at his forehead.
"If you hadn’t taken that fatal hit, this might’ve been a pretty decent fight."
A flat acknowledgment from one strong man to another. Papa Sunrise, as if resigned, let out a heavy breath and swallowed his final monologue in the blurring edge of his vision.
"Faraday... you bastard..."
The muzzle touched his face. And in that instant, the only thing filling his mind was the faces of the two children he would leave behind on the street.
"Sorry, Rebe..."
Tatatatang
With a single gunshot, the first-person view shattered grotesquely. Then came complete blackout.
Click. The video stopped. Ji-hwan closed the terminal and rolled the man’s name over in his mind.
"Papa Sunrise."
A mercenary who had risked his life for his family, only to be used up as a pawn by the twisted greed of a megacorp and a fixer, and die in a miserable end. The name he had desperately called out until the very last moment, only to have it cut off.
"Re..."
For a moment, the faces of the shabby siblings who had bought him meat noodles in the rain on the street half a year ago flashed through Ji-hwan’s mind: Rebecca and Pilar.
"No way."
But Ji-hwan quickly let out a dry laugh and shook his head hard. This was Night City, where dozens of people died like trash every single day. The odds that the kids he had randomly bought a meal for would happen to be the children of the legendary mercenary in that top-secret shard were nonexistent.
"If I ever leave Pacifica later, I should look into it once."
Ji-hwan shoved the terminal deep into his bag. He couldn’t yet be certain there was any clear connection to the siblings, but after seeing with his own eyes the disgusting way this city sold people off like spare parts, a cold murderous intent was rising in his chest.
"Faraday."
The big-name fixer of Santo Domingo. Ji-hwan’s pitch-black eyes sank into the darkness of the room like a blade. A chill scraped the back of his neck as the instinct that he would inevitably get tangled up with that damned fixer someday passed through him.
Kwaang, kwaang, kwaang
Then came the rough pounding of a heavy iron door, followed by the gasping voice of the entrance guard Bison.
"Boss K! Mammoth’s looking for you!" "Yeah. I’m coming."
The shouts of the criminals filling the underground fight pit, hungry for blood and straining their veins, vibrated through the iron door. Ji-hwan tightly wrapped his fists and forearms in old blood-dried bandages. Pulling the black anti-slash mask etched with tiger fangs over his face, he opened the firmly shut iron door and stepped out.
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