"I have something to say to all of you."
At his words, the Animal gang members around him, who had been holding their breath, all turned their attention to him at once.
Ji-hwan slowly raised a hand and roughly grabbed the symbol he had never taken off since going into hiding in Pacifica: the black tiger-fang stab-proof mask.
For a moment, Ji-hwan was lost in a strange thought. Was it just his imagination that this felt like some enormous fate, or was it really just a coincidence?
This worn-out shell had been something he’d picked up off a pile of corpses in Pacifica, a place rotting away as corporate capital bled out of it, just so he could survive.
That accidental choice had led him to the Animal gang’s illegal arena beneath the abandoned shopping mall, and in the end, it had given birth to [K].
Ssshhk.
Ji-hwan’s hand moved, and the mask came off completely, revealing the face hidden beneath it: a fairly ordinary East Asian face, but with features that were oddly sharp.
"My name is Ji-hwan. And the name you know from the wanted posters is K."
When the alias [K] and the identity of a wanted criminal came straight from his own mouth, a heavy silence fell over the Animal gang members gathered around the octagon ring. Then one of the bigger gang members, reading the room, cautiously spoke up.
"Th-then... the rumors going around outside were true? You really are that terrorist from Biotechnica?"
Ji-hwan stared at them for a moment with heavy eyes.
"I’m not going to dress it up with grand words like assassination or terrorism."
His voice was calm, almost unnervingly so for someone who had just finished fighting.
"Those bastards were using so-called eco-friendly agricultural research as a front, while secretly kidnapping nomads in the Badlands and helpless street people from the back alleys indiscriminately. Then they were stuffing those people into disgusting human experiments as raw material."
"I saw that hell with my own eyes. So I tried to tear that rotten facility down as much as I could, and even if I couldn’t destroy all of it, I at least took the head off the executive bastard who ordered it."
Ji-hwan clenched his fist and spoke firmly to the people around him.
"I don’t have even a speck of regret about killing him. If I were in the same situation again... I’d do the exact same thing."
His pride. That cool, brutal confession finally sent rough murmurs surging through the silent Animal gang members like a dam breaking.
To them, Ji-hwan’s actions—smashing a corporate research facility and killing one of its executives—were what mattered. The grand reason he had just laid out wasn’t really important at all to the Animals, who worshiped pure physical strength and violence above everything else.
Whether he had a noble intention to save innocent victims or simply a cruel, vicious desire to destroy a corporation, moral justification like that meant absolutely nothing to these muscle-brained idiots.
"Holy shit... all those rumors were true?!"
"Damn, fuck! I knew it from the start!!!"
"You’re full of shit! You were the first one laughing when that Biotech bastard showed up, you moron!"
"What the hell are you talking about? That was ages ago!!"
The murmuring quickly swelled into uncontrollable frenzy, and those completely captivated by Ji-hwan’s raw power began baring their veins and lifting steel pipes and heavy blunt weapons into the air.
"We can’t let the boss have all the fun by himself!!"
"Yeah, let’s the rest of us step in too! We’re family!"
"Right! This is our turf! Those weak-ass punks think they can stick their heads in here? Let’s show them what happens!"
"Wooooo!"
"Woooooo!!"
But Ji-hwan, standing at the center of that frenzy, blinked in momentary confusion and couldn’t hide how thrown off he was.
"...Huh? That’s not what I meant."
A dumbfounded, flustered breath escaped him before he could stop it.
The reason he’d taken off the mask and revealed himself as a first-class wanted man was very clear.
He had planned to expose the fact that he was a target of a megacorp he couldn’t possibly handle, so they would get scared and draw a clear line between themselves and him.
But he had completely underestimated the true nature of this gang called the Animals.
To the Animal gang members, who worshiped only a strong body, wildness, and overwhelming force like an absolute religion, Ji-hwan’s violent exploits had instead become fuel poured onto a bonfire.
"No, that’s not what I’m saying... If you go up there now, you’ll all really die. So just stay put..."
Ji-hwan waved his hands, his face full of frustration, trying desperately to calm the rampaging idiots down. But their ears were already soaked in adrenaline and madness, and they couldn’t hear his urgent warning. Just as they were about to throw themselves into a full-on fight with the people outside—
"You stupid bastards!!!!"
From behind Ji-hwan, a thunderous metallic roar echoed through the entire building, and the gang members’ cheers stopped dead.
It was Mammoth. Veins bulging, he roughly snatched the steel pipe from the gang member at the front and hurled it to the floor.
"Put those weapons down right now! Are your heads full of juice and nothing else? The second you kick this door open and charge outside, you’ll just be handing those bastards a reason to call this a war!"
Then his gaze moved to Ji-hwan’s bare face, the one standing quietly with the bloodstained mask in his hand.
"Ji-hwan."
Mammoth called him by his real name instead of the alias [K], the steel implants in his shattered jaw rattling.
"I’ll acknowledge the guts you showed for the sake of our people. But... I’m the boss of the Animals in this Pacifica district. The most important thing to me is the survival of my kids and their families."
Mammoth’s red optics slammed head-on into Ji-hwan’s eyes.
"This is a fight drawing in mercs and gangs from all over. If the battle keeps going outside like this, the tight rope we’re barely holding onto will snap, and this underground place won’t be safe anymore either."
He clenched his fist and shot a hard glare at his subordinates.
"In the end, our own people will get dragged in and die pointless deaths, and before long the corporate main force will start piling in like lunatics. So we are not getting involved in this fight. Ever."
Faced with that cold reality, the Animal gang members lowered their heads in frustration. But Ji-hwan, as if he hadn’t been hit at all, let out a faint snort of laughter instead.
"I know."
He casually answered, flicking blood off his leather gloves.
"This was never your fight to begin with. It’s mine."
Ji-hwan touched the tiger scar on the back of his neck and stared coldly into the darkness beyond the octagon ring.
"As boss, just make sure your people don’t get dragged into it, Mammoth. I’ll handle the bastards coming in from outside by myself."
Even the Animal gang members who had been raging a moment ago, and Mammoth too, all fell silent as if they had agreed beforehand.
Because once Ji-hwan had drawn that line himself, this was a war he would have to bear alone.
In the heavy silence, one low-ranking underling who had been peeking through the gap in the iron door to check the situation outside suddenly widened his eyes grotesquely.
"B-boss...!! Outside...!"
The pale-faced underling stumbled backward and fell on his ass, and his shocked voice followed with the report.
"They’re coming again!"
Ssshhk.
Ji-hwan’s hand came down on the underling’s shoulder as if to calm him.
"That’s enough."
"You guys lock down the entrance."
The moment those calm words fell, everyone’s eyes widened in surprise.
Because from Ji-hwan’s hand on his shoulder, a pulsing heat and terrifying heartbeat that could not possibly belong to a human were pouring out.
Thud. Thud.
Ji-hwan consciously drove his heartbeat into a frenzy and began violently accelerating the blood flow through his entire body.
His whole musculature finished preparing to contract explosively at any moment, and a faint blood-red haze, like the breath of a beast, began rising from the surface of his skin.
"A-ah...! R-right!!"
The underling blurted out an answer without thinking and scrambled away on all fours to lower the entrance shutter.
Ji-hwan absently brushed away the red haze drifting off his body, then picked up the old coat Dakota had given him and the black tiger-fang stab-proof mask he’d thrown on the floor near the octagon ring.
Just before he pulled the mask over the lower half of his face, Ji-hwan’s bare features twisted into something grotesque and vicious.
Kreeeeak, BANG!
The heavy iron door slammed shut, and in the quiet darkness outside the abandoned shopping mall, under the glow of vehicle headlights and streetlamps, dozens and then hundreds of red laser pointers stabbed wildly across Ji-hwan’s body like eerie drops of blood as he walked forward to meet them.
"He actually walked out on his own. Brave little bastard."
"No need to waste time clearing out that place now."
"Tighten the net! Don’t let a single hair get away!"
"..."
Behind the mask, Ji-hwan’s eyes slowly began scanning the faces of the people surrounding him.
His sharp gaze coldly analyzed their clothes, their weapons, and the level of chrome they’d installed in the darkness.
The ones he’d fought before in the Badlands or around the octagon ring had mostly been trash with secondhand junk chrome that was one or two generations old at best, or meat shields with cheap subdermal armor who rushed in thinking that was enough.
But the enemies lined up in front of him now were different.
There were some low-tier and bottom-tier types mixed in, sure, but the majority making up the backbone of the formation were seasoned mid-tier veteran teams who knew how to combine one or two solid combat implants into perfect tactical synergy.
And above all, what scratched at Ji-hwan’s nerves most sharply were the solo mercs positioned independently between those formations.
They were the kind who had overinvested in rare-grade high-end chrome purely for survival and slaughter—monsters who wouldn’t lose even if they fought Ji-hwan head-on right now.
'Clever bastards.'
At last, Ji-hwan spoke in a lazy voice to the enemies standing around him like a taut bowstring.
"So the assholes who’ve been hiding in the corner and chewing popcorn for days are finally crawling out?"
At that indifferent remark, a strange, abrupt silence fell among the people aiming red laser pointers at him.
"So you’ve finished analyzing my combat power? You cowards who’ve just been watching the small fry die around here?"
At the mockery, one of the mid-tier veteran merc leaders commanding a flank of the formation flinched and widened his eyes behind his helmet.
"How did you know?"
The leader’s voice stayed calm, but inside he was already full of shock.
For several days, they had been hiding near a nearby base on the outskirts of Pacifica, watching Ji-hwan from a distance with tactical scopes so he wouldn’t notice them.
And yet the man in the tiger-fang mask standing before them had seen through all of it.
'Did we misread the timing?'
Suspicion swelled like a snowball in an instant.
Primitive fear that the prey they had believed they understood perfectly might actually be a bottomless abyss they couldn’t even begin to measure. The fingers of the people with their hands on the triggers were already slick with cold sweat.
But while the enemies were getting scared and stumbling into the trap they had made for themselves, Ji-hwan’s thoughts behind the mask were completely different from their grand misunderstanding.
'Of course, I didn’t know the exact coordinates or the exact numbers, not a damn thing.'
Ji-hwan clicked his tongue inwardly and grumbled.
There was no way he could pinpoint the exact positions of people watching him from several kilometers away with advanced tactical scopes and stealth gear using nothing but pure flesh-and-blood eyesight and no mechanical parts at all.
The only reason he knew they were there was the sticky, unpleasant sense of being watched that had crawled up his spine every time he left the underground arena base over the past few days.
'I couldn’t see where they were hiding, but every time I stepped outside, that creepy stare kept sticking to my back. It was disgusting and annoying as hell. I was already fed up with those rat bastards hiding and spying like this...'
Ji-hwan, whose instincts had been sharpened to the limit by constantly walking the line between life and death, had simply felt that someone was tailing him. And now that the bastards had crawled out on their own, he felt deep satisfaction.
But the real reason he hadn’t rushed out recklessly and instead kept every nerve on edge was something else entirely.
'...The real piece of shit isn’t them.'
Ji-hwan’s pitch-black eyes slipped past the dozens of red laser pointers surrounding him and glanced sideways into the black ruins beyond the pouring acid rain.
Among the dozens and hundreds of shallow killing intents and tension, there was one single gaze mixed into the darkness—an alien, overwhelming sense of crisis on an entirely different level.
It was nothing like the rat-like, sneaky stares he had felt for days.
It was the kind of chilling killing intent that felt like the cold blade of an invisible guillotine resting against the back of his neck, or like a faceless reaper had locked onto his heart without even breathing.
Ji-hwan’s beastlike senses, evolved through repeated brushes with death, were screaming warnings in his skull, but he still couldn’t identify the exact location of the owner of that gaze, or even what kind of bastard it was.
'This is seriously fucking annoying. But I can’t ignore the guys in front of me either—they’re strong.'
Ji-hwan frowned and muttered harshly to himself.
'Hiding behind the trash and watching from the sidelines... damn, that’s enough to make my skin crawl.'
The taut bowstring of the standoff finally snapped with one irritated shout from a high-tier solo merc.
"Fuck, how long are we just going to sit here and watch? Kill him!!"
That single line became the trigger, and the dozens of gun barrels lined up in the darkness all around them spat fire at once.
Tatatatang!! Kakang!Piiiing!
Homing rounds from smart rifles, heavy armor-piercing bullets, and even the trajectories of tech weapons punching through walls. The merciless storm of fire tearing in from every direction ripped through the black acid rain and locked Ji-hwan into a perfect crossfire.
These were on a completely different level from the low-tier mercs he’d faced before—forces that would never allow even a single moment of carelessness.
In the middle of that line of fire, Ji-hwan’s heart, pounding like it was about to burst inside his chest, slammed an enormous volume of blood straight into his brain.
The sensation was like forcibly prying open a biological limiter.
Thud-thud-thud
[Thought Acceleration].
As he squeezed his synapses’ processing speed to the limit, the world’s time stretched out grotesquely, as if it had sunk into a sticky swamp.
Between raindrops that seemed frozen in midair, the trajectories of hundreds of bullets flying toward him were clearly drawn as lines in his vision.
But just as Ji-hwan was about to cut through those trajectories and slip into the gaps—
Veeeeeeeng—shhhk!
"...!"
Part of the formation that should have been completely frozen in this accelerated time-space twisted ominously with a bizarre tearing sound.
Military-grade [Sandevistan] units mounted in the spines of the [High-tier] solos stationed independently throughout the formation activated, throwing blue sparks.
Even among the mid-tier veterans, a few with reflex tuners and [Kerenzikov] pushed to the limit managed to barely perceive Ji-hwan’s [Thought Acceleration] and began mechanically twisting their gun barrels toward the path of his dodge.
'Yeah, I fucking knew it wouldn’t be that simple.'
Ji-hwan clicked his tongue at the veterans’ sharp reactions as they tracked his movement with machine precision.
Shuuuk!
One high-tier solo left a blur behind him as he deployed [Mantis Blades] and charged at Ji-hwan’s throat within the same accelerated frame of time.
Ji-hwan immediately opened [Gear 3] toward the approaching solo, a deep red vapor spilling off his body.
Serrrk!
The razor-sharp monomolecular blade tore through the air and barely skimmed Ji-hwan’s cheek instead of his neck. In that tiny instant, with red blood droplets spraying outward, Ji-hwan’s fist drove mercilessly toward the chest of the shocked bastard whose attack had missed.
But his opponent was a high-tier solo merc who had survived every kind of hell. At the exact 0.1-second moment when Ji-hwan’s fist was about to hit the chest armor, the man’s survival instincts sensed death and he snapped his whole body backward in the opposite direction of his charge.
KWAANG!!
The hit landed.
But because the bastard had reflexively pulled away and created distance, the shock Ji-hwan had meant to detonate couldn’t fully drive deep inside.
Half the shockwave scattered into the air, and the other half only managed to shake the outside of his armor and his shallow internal organs.
"Khh, hheh...!"
As the high-tier solo coughed up bright red synthetic blood and was shoved back several meters in a miserable heap, Ji-hwan wiped the blood running down his cheek with his thumb and clicked his tongue.
'What the hell... he let the shock through?'
He hadn’t been able to finish the guy in one shot. Normally, he would have just closed the distance and crushed the bastard’s skull before he could recover. But the mid-tier veteran mercs, having regrouped, were once again raining smart rifle fire down on him like a downpour.
Tatatatang!Kakang!Piiing!
"Ghk?!"
A heavy pain, like sharp shards of glass scraping through Ji-hwan’s heart and blood vessels, flashed through him.
'...I pushed a little too hard.'
Ji-hwan coldly assessed his own condition in the pouring rain.
Normally, [Gear 1] and [Gear 2] were stable stages that could amplify his senses and maintain evasion without putting too much strain on his body.
But the problem was [Gear 3], right now.
From this point on, [Gear 2] was no longer something he could use freely like before. The moment he used [Gear 3], the burden piled up, and Ji-hwan’s body fell into a vicious swamp where it was being worn down in real time.
'I can’t keep acting like I’ve got room to spare in this state... If this keeps up, my body will break first.'
There was only one answer.
Finish off the people in front of him before his body gave out.
"Let’s end this fast."
Ji-hwan bit down on his lip and leaped toward the dozens of red laser pointers tightening around him.
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