With the cheers of the mad octagon ring ringing behind him, Ji-hwan walked down the dark corridor—then suddenly stopped, as if something had just come to mind.
Even now, the crowd’s frenzied roar was still echoing behind him, chanting the name of the new predator, "K."
Then he remembered Mammoth’s warning from right before the match.
- Let’s talk after the fight. -
Ji-hwan quietly looked up the stairs leading to the upper floor.
Mammoth’s serious face as he asked whether Ji-hwan was planning to side with the Voodoo Boys. As Ji-hwan considered whether the man was trying to drag him into the gang’s power struggle over Pacifica’s real control, a frank, lazy sigh slipped out of his mouth.
"...Doesn’t matter, I guess."
He didn’t want to stick his head into another exhausting mess.
Anyway, it wasn’t like he had to see him today. They could talk tomorrow.
After finishing that very quick and very convenient rationalization, Ji-hwan turned his head without a shred of lingering attachment and trudged back down toward his room.
At the same time, in the VIP office.
Mammoth had sunk into a wide leather sofa, sipping hard whiskey while waiting ten minutes, then thirty, for Ji-hwan to open the door and come in. But even though a long time had passed since Ji-hwan finished the match, there was still no sign of the door opening.
Clatter.
Mammoth’s steel implant jaw twitched faintly.
Holding his whiskey glass, he muttered toward the closed door in disbelief.
"...Did that bastard seriously forget?"
Only his dumbfounded laugh drifted through the empty VIP room.
**
Several days passed after that.
After the overwhelming victory in his debut match, all kinds of sponsor offers and love calls poured in for the fighter wearing the tiger-fang mask, "K." But Ji-hwan ignored every last one of them.
He focused only on his own training. Sweating through his sessions, he sharpened the elasticity of his technique and concentrated every ounce of his attention on refining the subtleties of [Tempering] and [One-Inch Strike].
The empty octagon ring in the daytime, with no audience in sight.
Ji-hwan was sparring directly with Mammoth, the arena’s chief.
During that unforgiving fight, when Ji-hwan stumbled for a split second, Mammoth’s log-sized fist came roaring in.
Ji-hwan twisted his upper body slightly, then shifted his body into the punch’s path, trying to let the blow slide off with [Tempering].
But.
Boom!
"Ugh?!"
The strike that should have slid past carried a brutal force beyond Ji-hwan’s expectations.
No matter how tough Ji-hwan was, it was impossible to fully deflect Mammoth’s simple, utterly savage straight punch.
He managed to bleed off part of it, but the remaining impact slammed straight into his body.
Ji-hwan was shoved back a couple of heavy steps, and because he hadn’t fully dispersed the damage, a thin line of blood slipped from between his lips.
'Tch... that rattled the bones.'
While Ji-hwan inwardly marveled at the man’s raw power, Mammoth—who had expected his fist to punch clean through and smash the other man apart—stumbled off balance as the blow strangely slipped away, then stared at his own hand in confusion.
"What the hell was that? I definitely landed it clean... how the hell did you do that?"
Ji-hwan roughly wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. Even as he silently marveled at Mammoth’s crude punching power, he answered with a lazy indifference.
"You relax the body, take the opponent’s strike without resisting, and let it flow through you. But as you can see... it’s still pretty awkward."
Ji-hwan shook the blood off his hand and clicked his tongue.
"It’s still not something I can pull out easily in real fights where my life’s on the line. See? I couldn’t deflect it all and still took damage."
Ji-hwan’s calm, cool self-assessment in response to the question.
But when Mammoth heard it, his steel lower jaw clattered bizarrely.
'Hard to use in real combat? No, wait—he’s saying he can deflect my punch with a bare body that doesn’t even have a single chrome implant?'
Mammoth felt a thick vein bulge on his forehead.
'That bastard... he’s seriously not normal. Then... is this it?'
For a moment, murderous intent rose in Mammoth’s mind, but he quickly forced down the boiling fighting spirit.
Not only was it a shame to lose the eddies K brought in every night, but more importantly, if they went for a life-or-death finish right here and now, for some reason he wasn’t even sure he’d win.
In the end, Mammoth could only simmer inwardly and lower his fist.
After a few more rounds of training, they ended up in the corner of the empty ring.
Leaning against the octagon fence, Ji-hwan wiped away the sweat and the faint blood smeared around his mouth while chewing noisily on a cheap energy bar.
Beside him, Mammoth caught his breath with a towel and studied the mask covering half of Ji-hwan’s face before suddenly speaking up.
"Come to think of it, there’s been a lot of talk about you among the spectators lately."
"......?"
Munch munch
"They say you’re hiding because your face got horribly burned, or that you’ve got some ridiculous bounty on your head and you’re laying low. Either way, they’re some pretty interesting guesses."
They were guesses that hit the exact nerve of Ji-hwan, who had actually come here while fleeing Night City’s highest bounty and a first-degree murder warrant. But Ji-hwan didn’t flinch. Mammoth glanced at him and asked,
"So what’s the real reason you never take that mask off?"
Ji-hwan tossed the rest of the energy bar into his mouth, chewed it up casually, and answered in a lazy voice.
"It keeps annoying flies from swarming me."
"Flies?"
"Yeah. If I walk around with my face out..."
"There are way too many bastards who latch on and ask to borrow money."
"......"
Mammoth had expected some earth-shaking secret, so that ridiculous answer made him let out a disbelieving laugh.
"Ha. Crazy bastard."
Ji-hwan casually tossed away the wrapper from the energy bar, then braced a hand on the fence and slowly stood up. For a moment, he remembered the day a few days ago, when Mammoth had quietly called him upstairs right after his debut match.
Back then, it had clearly been some annoying proposal involving Pacifica’s power struggle or the Voodoo Boys.
'I don’t need to ask why he called me then...'
It was probably just some obvious gang politics, or one of those schemes to use him as a piece on the board. Rather than poke at it and get dragged into something annoying, Ji-hwan actually liked this precarious but comfortable symbiotic relationship they had now, where they both conveniently pretended not to know each other’s real intentions and just took the benefits.
Wiping away the last tiny smear of blood from the corner of his mouth, Ji-hwan brushed aside the unnecessary thoughts and lifted the corner of his lips coldly toward Mammoth.
"How about it? Half-serious this time?"
Mammoth understood the short challenge immediately. At that provocative offer, the mechanical lower half of his face, which had been churning with frustration over Ji-hwan’s grotesque technique just moments before, clattered in a bizarre smile.
"Good. You’d better be properly prepared this time."
As Mammoth slammed his two massive fists together and rose to his feet, the two men walked back onto the sparring ring, radiating a bloody, violent aura.
From that day on, Ji-hwan’s busy life kept grinding on in the depths of Night City, deep in Pacifica’s darkness.
By day, he sparred with Mammoth in fights that were close to slaughter, honing his technique. By night, he climbed into the octagon ring and silently proved his skill.
The second match.
His opponent was a giant who relied on monstrous toughness and mixed in the Animal gang’s beast-like joint locks with sneaky precision.
In the middle of a fierce exchange of blows, the instant Ji-hwan threw a punch, the man deliberately took it and forced his way into Ji-hwan’s guard.
Then the man’s thick arms coiled around Ji-hwan’s left arm like a snake and twisted it into a grotesque angle.
Crack-!
Ji-hwan’s left arm bone was completely dislocated, hanging grotesquely as if it might burst through the skin. And just when everyone thought they were witnessing K’s first defeat—
Instead of screaming in pain, he calmly looked at his own twisted left arm.
"Oh. I thought you were just using brute strength, but that lock you pulled just now is pretty useful."
"What the hell are you babbling about... kuhk!"
As the man leaned in to break Ji-hwan’s remaining right arm the same way, Ji-hwan didn’t miss the opening. He snapped his head back and slammed his forehead straight into the man’s face.
Crack!!
The giant’s head jerked back, blood and fragments of teeth spraying out, and the brutal grip on Ji-hwan’s body loosened for a split second.
At the exact moment he should have broken free and created distance, Ji-hwan instead drove into the opening.
He thrust out his unharmed right arm and used the opponent’s bizarre joint lock against him, wrapping it around the man’s ankle instead.
"What the—?!"
Crackling—!!
The man’s ankle was brutally broken and twisted backward by Ji-hwan’s single arm.
"Aaaagh!"
And then the third match.
This opponent was dirty.
Whoosh-!
The instant the fight began, a hidden blade inside the opponent’s arm—Mantis Blades—snapped out. Ji-hwan threw up his forearm to block, but the blade mercilessly pierced through it and blood sprayed out.
For that tiny instant when the strike clearly landed, a thin, sharp, modified Mantis Blade like a "mechanized awl" shot out from inside the man’s forearm, pierced Ji-hwan’s flesh, and vanished back inside in an instant.
To the crowd and the referee, it only looked like the man had landed an incredibly fast, heavy straight punch.
While everyone else failed to notice that he was using blades—
"Heh-heh!!"
With a sneer, the man immediately activated [Sandevistan]. Blue sparks burst out, his figure vanished from the ring in an instant, and then disappeared completely from the spectators’ sight as well.
But Ji-hwan was different. His body might not be able to keep up with the acceleration yet, but his eyes were tracking the opponent’s path perfectly.
Within accelerated time,
the man, tearing through the space around him and aiming for Ji-hwan’s blind spot, felt a chill run down his spine.
No matter which direction he moved, Ji-hwan’s eyes were locked onto him, staring straight through him and following every motion.
'He can see my movement?!'
Panicking, the man’s steps tangled. Unable to control the speed, his feet caught on each other and he crashed face-first into the floor all by himself.
Thud-!!
[Sandevistan] forcibly shut off, dust rising into the air. Too shocked to even realize he’d fallen, the man lay there and looked up at Ji-hwan.
Ji-hwan walked up, casually shaking the blood off the arm that had blocked the blade, and looked down at the fallen man with indifference.
"What are you doing?"
"...Huh?"
With that question, Ji-hwan’s heavy fist came crashing down on the man’s face without mercy.
Seeing the fists filling his vision, the man shouted in panic.
"Fuck!"
Thud—! Thud, thud, thud
With a series of dull impacts, the floor caved in and the man cleanly lost consciousness, collapsing into a heap.
Victory after victory.
And so, the underground fight pit in Pacifica had been boiling every night with madness, all of it chanting the masked fighter K’s name.
Thud-!
And today as well, after a few exchanges Ji-hwan had planted another Animal giant into the octagon floor. He unwound his bloodstained bandages and stepped into the corridor leading to the waiting room—only for a huge shadow to block his path.
The arena’s chief coordinator, Mammoth.
Leaning against the wall with a thick cigar in his mouth, Mammoth was slowly sweeping his eyes over Ji-hwan’s whole body with a sticky, almost "fond" look.
"......"
At that oppressive stare, Ji-hwan’s steps stopped dead. He tossed the bloodied bandages to the floor and furrowed his brow.
"Don’t do that."
"Do what?"
As Mammoth exhaled cigar smoke and asked innocently, Ji-hwan shot back with obvious disgust.
"You’re looking at me like a creep. It’s disgusting."
At that blunt answer, Mammoth’s steel implant jaw rattled as a bizarre laugh burst out of him.
"Kwahaha! Hey, you crazy bastard. What am I supposed to do when I like you this much after you keep hauling in astronomical amounts of money for my arena every night?"
As Mammoth grinned and stepped closer, Ji-hwan—already worn down by repeated training and matches—suddenly let real killing intent flash in his eyes.
Crack.
Seeing that Ji-hwan was in no mood to play around, he clenched his blood-speckled fist and raised his aura so viciously it looked like he might smash Mammoth’s steel jaw right then and there.
"Whoa, whoa! I’m kidding, I’m kidding!"
Mammoth hurriedly waved both huge hands and jumped back.
He had seen with his own eyes how the guy’s fists brought down iron-bodied giants in the ring.
He had no intention of really fighting, joke or not.
Not yet.
"Hah, what a temper."
Mammoth cleared his throat and brushed at his collar as if nothing had happened, then pulled a stiff sheet of paper from his coat and casually held it out to Ji-hwan.
In this digital age, where everything moved through holograms and data shards, it was a very rare thing indeed: a paper envelope.
"What’s this?"
Ji-hwan took the paper envelope with a puzzled look, and Mammoth flashed a gold tooth between his steel jaw with a meaningful grin.
"Open it and see."
"......"
He didn’t want to get dragged into anything annoying, but a letter on actual paper in this day and age? His curiosity stirred. Ji-hwan let out a short sigh and roughly tore open the envelope.
And the moment he checked the contents of the stiff invitation inside, Ji-hwan’s eyes turned ice-cold.
"This is..."
Faraday’s invitation.
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