After the heavy iron door shut, Mammoth let out a long stream of cigar smoke and asked in the cool, dim silence where the light barely reached.
"I’ll ask you straight."
"That wanted notice Biotechnica put out a while back... was that really you?"
Pacifica might be a lawless zone where even corporate authority couldn’t reach, but there was tension in Mammoth’s question.
Ji-hwan sat on the worn-out sofa and kept quiet for a moment.
He could have made excuses or lied, but he didn’t feel like explaining himself to the man who had given him a place to rest.
After the brief silence, Ji-hwan simply met Mammoth’s gaze with calm, steady eyes and gave a quiet nod.
"Yeah."
Mammoth didn’t look shocked or start barking at him after hearing that.
He just put the cigar back in his mouth and let out a deep, heavy sigh, like the floor had dropped out from under him.
"...I see."
That was all.
As if he had no more questions, Mammoth turned and walked casually toward the iron door.
Watching that dry, unhesitating back, Ji-hwan, with one hand in the pocket of his old coat, asked in a slightly hesitant voice,
"...You’re not going to ask why?"
Why he had assassinated a corporate executive. Why he had become the target of a first-class murder warrant that had turned all of Night City against him.
At Ji-hwan’s voice, Mammoth’s massive steps stopped dead with his hand on the doorknob.
Without turning around, he tossed out a reply over his broad back.
"You must’ve had a reason for it."
In this insane city, everybody had their own rotten story.
"Forget it."
With that short answer, Mammoth opened the heavy iron door and left the pipe room without a trace of hesitation.
Ji-hwan stared quietly at the tightly shut door and gave a bitter smile at the man’s trust in him.
But apart from Mammoth’s silence, the air in Pacifica began to turn ugly starting the very next day.
It was because of the anonymous gigs and rumors Faraday had so cleverly spread. Drawn by the bounty and blinded by greed, low-rent mercs, scavengers, and even rival gangs started sniffing out the money trail and gathering in Pacifica one by one.
The afternoon after Ji-hwan’s conversation with Mammoth, in front of the main entrance to the underground arena at Grand Imperial Mall, rain drizzled through the air as rough, discordant shouts rang out.
"We know there’s a rat in there with a five-hundred-thousand-eddie bounty on his head! Open the door now!!"
A group of low-level mercs armed with cheap chrome were jabbing rifles upward and arguing at the entrance, veins bulging in their necks.
Blocking their way, however, were the huge men of the Animals gang, their muscles pumped to the limit with the illegal steroid Juice.
Among them, the gatekeeper Bison, who stood well over two meters tall, and dozens of Animal gang members armed with heavy machine guns and massive combat hammers glared down at the mercs with murderous eyes.
"Get the hell out of here before I put a bullet hole through your throat, you trash. This is Animal territory."
Facing the Animals’ intimidating mass, the merc leader realized their crude firepower would never punch through those slabs of meat and the heavily armed defensive line head-on. In the end, he ground his teeth and spat harshly onto the floor.
"Tch! Fucking hell, just you wait."
The mercs, cowed by the Animals’ overwhelming firepower, turned around for now, but greed still burned in their murky eyes.
"..."
From the dark shadows inside the arena building, Ji-hwan watched the whole commotion.
Even though the bastards had tucked their tails and backed off in the face of the Animals’ force, he knew with certainty that this wasn’t over.
"They’re still coming. Things are getting worse by the minute."
Watching the chaos outside from the darkness inside the arena, Ji-hwan soon turned away, his old coat flaring behind him as he took a heavy step forward.
He headed for the VIP balcony on the second floor, where Mammoth, the arena’s chief boss, was waiting.
"Mammoth."
Ji-hwan spoke flatly toward Mammoth’s huge back as he stood there chewing on his cigar.
"I’ll go out there. They’re after the bounty on my head in the end, so if I leave, they won’t bother this place anymore."
Just as Ji-hwan turned to go down the stairs, Mammoth twisted his heavy body and blocked his path.
"Don’t talk nonsense."
"The trash outside only wants the wanted man. If they think you’re not here, they’re just a bunch of dayflies who’ll get tired and disappear on their own."
With a rough hand, Mammoth grabbed Ji-hwan by the shoulder and tried to talk him out of it.
It might have started as a business relationship built on the arena’s draw, but handing over someone he had accepted as family to a pack of punks who’d come sniffing around for money wasn’t his way.
But the battlefield didn’t go the way Mammoth expected.
The Grand Imperial Mall in Pacifica that they were occupying was originally a massive mixed-use ruin that had been slated to hold more than seventy shops and facilities.
No matter how firmly the Animals’ brutes sealed off the entrance and main corridors with heavy weapons and crushed the front with brute force, they couldn’t control every crack and hole in the building.
In the end, that night, mercs with their eyes turned white over the bounty slipped in through broken outer walls and collapsed ventilation shafts like rats, and trouble broke loose.
The next morning, in the underground arena corridor, the stench of blood hung thick in the air. One Animal gang member was clutching the corpse of a dead comrade and sobbing in agony.
"No!!! Mark! You bastard, open your eyes!!!"
And scattered around the concrete floor nearby were four or five mercs who had been caught after sneaking in the night before.
But not a single one of the captives was in one piece.
Their faces had been horribly caved in from the merciless beatings of the enraged Animals after losing one of their own, and some of them had entire cybernetic limbs torn off, leaving them mangled beyond recognition, their bodies reduced to bloody wreckage.
"Fuck! Our own people got taken out by these bastards!"
"Boss! Open the door right now!!"
"Let’s wipe out the trash hanging around outside!!"
"That’s right! We should tear apart every last one of those maggots who look down on the Animals!"
The eyes of the Animals gang members who had seen blood were burning red with fury and killing intent.
Already worn down by days of suffocating siege warfare, and now with the unjust death of a comrade on top of it, the bastards looked ready to grab their weapons and rush outside for a slaughter at any second.
The atmosphere was savage, on the verge of riot. Then Mammoth strode heavily into the middle of the blood-soaked corridor.
"Calm the hell down, you idiots!!"
When Mammoth’s voice thundered through the hall, the boiling excitement of the Animals gang members stopped as if cold water had been dumped over them.
Mammoth looked back and forth between the mercs sprawled on the floor and the corpse of his dead subordinate, grinding his steel jaw.
"I’d like nothing more than to go out there right now and smash every one of those bastards’ heads in."
"But if we open this door and go to full war, turning this place into a real battlefield, it won’t just end with the lives of the armed men here getting wiped out."
Behind Mammoth’s ferocious glare was the heavy burden of a gang boss.
"Your old parents, your brothers and sisters, your little kids hiding in every rotten corner of Pacifica’s slums will all get caught in the crossfire and turned into minced meat!"
"Do you really think those dayfly mercs blinded by eddies, or the corpo dogs, will show any mercy to civilians or your families?!"
At that gutting rebuke, the gang members who had been raging like mad all froze, their bloodshot eyes trembling.
They had realized the cruel truth that their shallow anger could drag their precious families into hellfire too.
"Going out there now would be the stupid thing to do, because it would shove our whole family straight into the attrition trap those bastards set for us."
In the solemn silence of the corridor, Mammoth placed a heavy hand on the shoulder of the subordinate clutching the dead man.
"Blood for blood. We’ll get our revenge for this, for sure. I, Mammoth, swear it. I’ll make those trash bastards who looked down on the Animals and dared to set foot in our turf pay so dearly they’ll never forget the price."
The boss’s firm, weighty vow. Faced with that overwhelming charisma and leadership that embraced the entire family, the gang members clenched their teeth and forced down their boiling killing intent.
Hidden in the shadows at the end of the dark corridor, Ji-hwan watched the whole scene, his heart sinking like the deep sea.
"This is because of me."
The corpse of the gang member gone cold, the mercs left in tatters. The clear root of all this was the bounty hanging over his own head.
Mammoth had tried to protect him to the end, but because of that loyalty, Mammoth’s real family was now bleeding and dying unjustly.
"No matter how hard Mammoth tries to hold it down, he can’t stop the gang from cracking."
Even if he kept hiding behind Mammoth’s back and waited for things to improve, they never would.
"Let’s protect them."
Ji-hwan had one rule that never changed, even after coming to this world.
"Let’s protect Mammoth, and those guys too."
When he finished thinking it through, Ji-hwan quietly turned around in the dark.
The acid rain that had been weighing down Pacifica’s gray night sky began to ease.
The harsh storm clouds slowly split apart, and through the gap, Night City’s pale, enormous moonlight shone quietly into the lonely outer alley beside the abandoned mall.
In that dark blind spot, in front of a collapsed industrial vent, four low-level mercs armed with crude eye lenses and cheap weapons were sneaking in while scanning the area.
They were moths drawn by the sticky greed of a five-hundred-thousand-eddie bounty, crawling straight into the jaws of death.
The man with the rifle nudged the shoulder of the netrunner merc beside him and whispered in a low voice, sounding impatient.
"Hey, keep the scanner pointed right. If we go through this vent tunnel, we really get to see the wanted man people’ve been talking about, right?"
"Ah, fuck, stop rushing me. It’s not picking up anything right now! Just wait!"
The netrunner merc muttered irritably as he tapped the handheld scanner again and again.
"What the hell? That bastard’s definitely in here, so don’t blame the machine... huh?"
The man grumbling as he stepped forward suddenly froze.
The pale moonlight that had just been clearing the alley and shining brightly was abruptly blocked by something, casting a thick, massive shadow over the top of his head.
It wasn’t the clouds again. It was a clearly defined human silhouette.
Just as the man involuntarily lifted his head in confusion and looked up into the air.
"What the...!!"
In the glow of his artificial eye lenses, a shadow dropped soundlessly from above, backlit by the moon.
The one descending with his old coat flaring like bat wings was Ji-hwan, wearing a black mask carved with a tiger fang emblem.
Sshhhk-!
The man didn’t even get a chance to scream or raise his gun.
As Ji-hwan plunged straight down through darkness and moonlight, a broken high-frequency katana in his hand flashed with a red trail.
"Ghk...!"
With his esophagus and carotid artery severed, the man coughed up blood foam and collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
"W-what?! He dropped from above...!"
The netrunner beside him, who had been tapping the scanner, looked up in shock, but before he could react, the tactical knife in Ji-hwan’s other hand, already buried into his chest, sliced upward through his jaw and pierced all the way to the top of his skull.
Thud-!
"Hk."
In just two seconds. In the blink of an eye, two comrades were thrown into pools of blood, and the remaining two mercs behind them went pale and yanked at their rifle triggers like mad.
"It’s him!!"
Tatatatang!!
Just before their muzzles could swing and spit fire, Ji-hwan’s body surged forward as he briefly accelerated his thinking.
Ping! Ping-!
The hail of lead tore uselessly through the empty air and the hem of his old coat, missing the place Ji-hwan had occupied only a split second earlier. Before the shocked breath of the bastard could even be swallowed by the rain, Ji-hwan slipped into the blind spot of the bullet storm and spun sharply, gripping the broken red katana in reverse.
"It didn’t hit?! How the hell...!"
Before the man’s stunned breath could even be swallowed by the rain, Ji-hwan slipped into the blind spot of the bullet storm and spun sharply, gripping the broken red katana in reverse.
Clang! Sshhk-!
The cheap subdermal armor and rifle barrel were sliced apart as mercilessly as if they were made of tofu, and the two men’s throats were cut off so easily they collapsed to the ground. As the moonlight and deep shadow flickered across the pile of corpses with Ji-hwan standing in the middle, the tiger fang emblem crudely etched into the black blade-proof mask covering his face flashed with a savage, eerie gleam, like the teeth of a real hungry beast come alive.
"Next."
The man’s verdict came out low, like a beast’s growl.
Leaving behind the mountain of corpses and the stench of blood, Ji-hwan kicked off the ground hard and surged toward the highest point of the crumbling outer wall of the ruined building, his old coat heavy with blood as it flared behind him.
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