On the broken asphalt, Ji-hwan and the blood-soaked Viper Crew were locked in a tense standoff, each trying to end the others' lives.
Viper's smart submachine gun and Dozer's massive tech shotgun had Ji-hwan's heart dead-locked, while Kenshi stood there with a red high-frequency katana in both hands, radiating killing intent.
Ji-hwan, too, had drawn a cold combat knife from his waist and gripped it in reverse, crouched low like a beast ready to spring, glaring at them.
It was a hair-trigger standoff, like it could explode any second.
Red neon light reflected grotesquely in the puddles, while the stench of gunpowder and thick blood hung heavy in the air.
Then, as if to break that suffocating silence, the sharp wail of sirens began to echo faintly from the center of Night City, accompanied by red and blue flashing lights.
"Waaah- waaah- waaah-!"
"...NCPD already...?"
Looks like civilians in the nearby blocks, unable to take the grenade blasts and wild gunfight anymore, had finally called it in.
Hearing the sirens, Viper, the leader of the five-man bounty hunter crew, twisted his face in irritation.
His mind started racing through the possibilities.
They had no time. If they let that top-tier wanted man, K, slip away here, or if NCPD got involved and widened the scope, the whole situation would spiral out of control.
Their information on that massive bounty, the kind that could change a merc's life overnight and make even ordinary people go insane, would leak. By tomorrow morning, every corporate hound in the city and every hyena pack from Afterlife would come swarming in like mad to snatch the prize.
"No matter what it takes, we have to kill him before NCPD gets here."
On the other side, Ji-hwan, standing there and breathing out faint red smoke, was also looking toward the direction of the sirens.
He wasn't any different from Viper.
If he let these guys live, they'd sell every trace of him to a corpo or some other outfit, one way or another.
"If that happens, it'll be back to running again."
It was a situation where neither side could let the other walk away alive.
A one-way bridge.
And the one who snapped that suffocating tension first was Ji-hwan.
His body burst forward, flinging off raindrops as it vanished from sight, forcibly unleashing the limiter he'd been holding back for so long.
But this burst was different from before.
Ji-hwan sharply controlled the sensation of his body's limiter opening and shot forward with ferocious precision.
Back when he had faced overwhelming monsters like Alexei, the Hound leader from Zetatech, or Alpha, the Manticore Squad commander from Biotechnica, his [Thought Acceleration] had been a ticking time bomb and a nuisance, something that would tear his bones and muscles apart the moment he turned it on.
Those battles had been desperate struggles where he had to go all out, gamble his life, and even then only hope for a draw or barely scrape through by the skin of his teeth.
Because the price of burning through his life force was that his miraculous super regeneration would hit rock bottom, and he had to agonize over every detail.
In that worst possible condition, with his body not even healing properly, how could he use that self-destructive bomb of an ability efficiently in real combat?
What he had built from that was a system that finely divided output into six stages and controlled it with precision.
The difference in power between stages one and six was enormous, but the higher the stage, the shorter the time his body could endure it.
Ji-hwan only raised the stage for the exact instant a strike had to land, then cooled it down slowly afterward.
That pushed back the time before his body collapsed exponentially and massively extended how long he could keep fighting.
This wasn't like the old days, when he had survived only by relying on luck and his own life.
"Come to think of it, the guys I fought were real monsters too."
As he thought that, Ji-hwan cranked his ability up to Stage 3. The spot where he launched himself from was left behind only as a warped afterimage with boiling red vapor, and before anyone knew it, his body had reached Kenshi at the center of the enemy formation. At that speed, even their leader Viper lost track of his movement for a split second.
And the price of losing sight of Ji-hwan for even a moment was horrific.
"W-what...!"
Kenshi, seeing Ji-hwan suddenly appear in front of him, panicked and reflexively tried to raise his katana into a guard, but Ji-hwan's strike came faster.
Kwaang!!!
The katana, already cracked from blocking Ji-hwan's heavy attack in the previous exchange, shattered cleanly in half the instant Ji-hwan's fist landed. His punch then slammed directly into Kenshi's chest.
"Ghk...!!"
Unable even to scream properly, Kenshi was blasted backward, flying past his stunned teammates and slamming into the concrete ruins behind them.
A cloud of dust billowed up, and Kenshi vanished miserably beyond the wall. After that brutal impact, no one could even tell whether he was alive or dead.
"Ken, Kenshi!!"
The leader stared at the broken katana falling from the spot where Kenshi had stood and then at the teammate who had disappeared beyond the wall. The unexpected brutality of Ji-hwan's strength sent a chill down his spine.
Then, through the thick dust cloud, Ji-hwan stood alone in the middle of the empty alley.
"Huuuu..."
As he settled into his stance, hot steam poured long and slow from between Ji-hwan's lips, like the exhaust from an overheated engine.
To smash Kenshi with a single blow just now, Ji-hwan had pushed his output all the way up to Stage 3.
He exhaled a rough breath and, like applying engine braking in a vehicle, slowly and smoothly lowered the gear from 3... to 2... and then to 1, the minimum sustain state, carefully cooling the heat and pressure that had erupted through his muscles.
The proof of that perfect control was plain to see on his body.
The "clear red smoke" that had burst from his entire body at the moment of impact gradually settled into "thin red smoke" with each breath he took, and finally stabilized into a "hazy red mist" at Stage 1.
Thanks to this method of slowly bleeding off heat and stabilizing afterward, Ji-hwan had dramatically reduced the risk of his body collapsing and greatly extended how long he could keep fighting.
But only for a moment, because the leader Viper, scanning Ji-hwan's condition through his tactical optics, caught sight of it.
Drip. Drip.
Ji-hwan's right hand, the one that had launched Kenshi away, was lightly split open between the knuckles where fragments of the broken katana had lodged. Dark red blood dripped down with the rain.
His rough breathing, the blood running from his fist, and the thin red vapor rising from his whole body.
"He suddenly got absurdly strong. How?"
Viper's mind moved fast as he assessed the situation.
If he had that kind of power, he should have used it from the start and wiped them out already. The fact that he had hidden it and only pulled it out when a teammate was in danger meant that power was a double-edged sword that could destroy the user too.
"I don't know what that guy is, but that ability... there's no way it's easy to use."
But Viper's calculation was wrong.
The truth he never could have guessed was that Ji-hwan still hadn't used another one of his abilities: [Thought Acceleration].
Unaware of that, Viper finished his thought with a smile.
The longer the fight dragged on, the more that bastard's body would collapse on its own, he believed that with absolute certainty. If they just kept him breathing hard and dragged the fight out, they would win no matter what.
The only thing he had misjudged was that the fight's duration had now become very, very long.
"All units, spread out!! Don't force your way in!!"
"If we stall long enough, that bastard will self-destruct! Keep baiting him into using that awful technique one or two more times! Pin his feet down with suppressive fire and drag this out, and we win for sure!!"
As Viper gave his confident order, he raised the muzzle of his smart submachine gun, the G-58 Dian, and began pouring a relentless stream of vicious homing rounds toward Ji-hwan.
Dozer, wanting revenge for his teammate, also yanked his body back at the leader's command, creating distance and hammering away with the tech shotgun Satara, thoroughly covering Ji-hwan's approach and retreat.
Tatatatang!! Kwaang!
As the merciless crossfire of smart rounds and the terrifying destructive force of the tech shotgun blanketed Ji-hwan's position, he dodged through the hail of bullets and took cover behind a shattered barricade.
Viper, hearing the gunfire rain down and seeing Ji-hwan pinned behind cover, was certain of victory.
With the sniper Ghost still lying in ambush on a rooftop far away, ready to deliver a lethal shot, the bastard was a rat in a trap.
But then.
As Viper fired in the rush of victory, his gaze suddenly dropped to the concrete wall where Kenshi had just been blasted through.
"...Huh?"
Something felt off.
The broken katana Kenshi had dropped when he was blown back was nowhere on the ground.
A chill ran down Viper's spine. He hurriedly searched for Ji-hwan's silhouette beyond the cover, and at that exact moment.
In the darkness with rain scattering through it, Ji-hwan's bloodied right hand was now gripping Kenshi's red katana tightly. And Ji-hwan's gaze was not aimed at Viper or Dozer firing from the front, but coldly locked onto the rooftop of the ruined building far away.
"No way... he figured out the position?!"
Before Viper could even shout a warning to the teammate on the roof who would have been aiming at Ji-hwan, Ji-hwan leaned his upper body far back and raised the katana in his hand overhead like a javelin.
In that instant, the calm haze around him boiled up again, and once more clear red vapor burst violently from every pore in Ji-hwan's body as his muscles swelled like a beast's, as if his clothes were about to tear apart.
"Get lost."
Kwaaaang!!
With a horrific tearing sonic boom, as if a cannon had been fired, the broken katana left Ji-hwan's hand and sliced through the air at supersonic speed, leaving a blood-red trail behind it.
At that same moment, on the rooftop hundreds of meters away, the sniper Ghost had held his breath behind his rifle and locked onto Ji-hwan's forehead with perfect precision. Through the scope, just as he was about to pull the trigger, something like a red lightning bolt filled his vision in an instant.
He wasn't given time to dodge, or even the briefest instant to scream.
Thud— crack!!!
The broken katana flying through the air smashed the scope lens, then drove straight through Ghost's forehead with no margin for error and buried itself deep into the back of his skull.
"Grrk..."
The sniper who had been hunting his prey through the crosshairs collapsed helplessly over his own bleeding rifle, with a blade lodged in his brain.
Viper, who had been so sure that stalling would win them the fight, saw Ghost's silhouette go limp on the rooftop and began to convulse wildly with shock and fear.
Kwaaaang!!
"...He threw a blade with raw strength alone and pierced the sniper's forehead exactly, without a single implant helping him?"
Even as the leader of the Viper Crew, this was the first time he had ever encountered something he couldn't understand.
"G-Ghost...!"
Dozer's eyes went wide as he finally saw the slaughter on the rooftop.
Kenshi, and now Ghost too, had been reduced to meat without even the slightest resistance.
"You... you bastard...!! How dare you, how dare you kill my teammates!!!"
Dozer, having lost his mind, shook the massive tech shotgun as if he were about to throw it and screamed with veins bulging in his neck.
The same guys who had been aiming for Ji-hwan's throat just moments ago were now spitting out rage and grievance like they were the victims, the moment their own teammate got butchered.
While that absurd howl echoed through the alley.
"Huuuu..."
The clear red vapor pouring from Ji-hwan's breath and pores settled again into a very thin haze and returned to its original state.
Then he slowly turned his head toward the fuming Dozer and Viper.
There wasn't a trace of pity or guilt in his eyes. Only a deep, incredulous sneer.
"How dare I?"
Ji-hwan gave a dry laugh, shaking blood from his right hand.
"This is rich. Weren't you the ones who were blinded by the bounty and tried to kill me first?"
Ji-hwan's cold, flat voice cut through the rain and struck the hunters' ears like ice.
"If you point a gun at someone in this damned city and try to take their life, you should be ready to have your own throat ripped out too."
"You... you son of a bitch...!!"
Dozer's face burned red with shame and rage at Ji-hwan's savage taunt.
"Dieeee!!"
Dozer roared like a beast and charged at Ji-hwan, all reason gone from his aim with the tech shotgun.
Behind him, their leader Viper was also drenched in cold sweat, gripping the trigger of his smart submachine gun with trembling hands.
Buying time no longer meant anything to him.
The fear that they would die unless they killed the man in front of them was squeezing their whole bodies.
"Yeah, that's more like a merc."
Even with the giant tank rushing him and gun barrels spitting fire, Ji-hwan did not dodge or give ground.
Instead, the calm red haze around him began boiling up again, this time with a denser killing intent.
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