"Since you became the arena manager, have you ever once gotten your own hands bloody? A coward who just hides in the back because he hates fighting. You’re nothing but a slab of meat pretending to be a boss just because you’re big. It’s probably been years since you last sparred in the ring."
Even after Logan’s taunt, Mammoth said nothing, just chewing on the cigar in his mouth.
Logan was exactly half right and half wrong.
Mammoth had always despised conflict. As a child, he kept away from the smell of blood and tried to avoid pointless violence.
But the underbelly of Night City never allowed him peace, and fate kept shoving him toward blood-soaked battlefields.
And every time he stood on the line, he grew stronger. Opposite the reason that hated violence, the beast coiled deep in his body, the one that only craved battle, would roar in delight.
"Turn him into a sieve."
Logan waved a hand dismissively and turned away as he spoke, and the dozens of ambushed underlings opened fire all at once with assault rifles and heavy machine guns.
Tatatatang!!
As the deafening gunfire shook the abandoned factory, Logan calmly opened his personal link and placed a holo call to Faraday, the big fixer in Santo Domingo.
A hologram of Faraday appeared in the air, four red artificial eyes glinting.
[How’s the situation, Logan?]
"That Mammoth bastard just crawled into his own grave. My boys are mincing him into meat right now, so wait a little and I’ll have his head packed in a box and sent over."
[Heh... I’m looking forward to it.]
It was the exact moment the two heavyweights were already raising an early toast to their greedy victory.
"W-What the hell!!!!"
"B-Boss!!... Ghk!"
Kwaang-! Krak!!
Between their leisurely conversation, the shrill screams of their underlings and the explosive crack of metal being smashed apart cut in mercilessly, as if tearing through eardrums.
[What was that noise, Logan? Doesn’t sound like the hunt is going smoothly.]
"Ah, shit. Those small fry are making way too much damn noise."
At Faraday’s question, Logan’s face twisted as he snapped back irritably.
Still on the call, he jerked his head around with a sour expression and looked down beneath the catwalk.
"...Huh?"
For a moment, Logan’s irritated face froze in shock.
In the stinging smoke of gunpowder, Mammoth—the man who should have been reduced to a hole-riddled pile of meat—was still standing and tearing through his underlings.
Mammoth was advancing while taking the hail of bullets straight on with his thick bulletproof hide.
And every time his steel knuckles connected after a dash, the sternums and armor of Logan’s men were crushed like tin cans and sent flying through the air.
Pwoooak!
After brutally caving in another skull, Mammoth threw a cold, heavy metallic voice up at Logan, who had gone rigid above him.
"You know why I haven’t fought once since I became a senior and took over this place?"
Mammoth slammed the steel knuckles on both fists together, blood dripping from them.
"Because I’m strong. The Animals and the gang punks around here just never dared to mess with me."
Like a beast, Mammoth crouched his upper body again and locked his feral gaze on Logan.
"Still, it’s been a long time. A brat who doesn’t know his place charging at me like this."
Logan’s face, twisted with irritation, froze in shock once more.
"What the fuck is that!"
Cursing, Logan reflexively raised the large-caliber hand cannon in his grip and aimed beneath the catwalk.
Bullets struck flesh and armor plates, throwing sparks nonstop, but Mammoth did not stop walking.
The step driven by 400 kilograms of mass, supported by a high-strength titanium endoskeleton, crushed the ground, and the fierce rotational force from his waist shot into his pneumatic steel knuckles.
Krak!
"Ghk!"
Every punch brought another dying scream from Logan’s men. Mammoth chewed through the machine-gun fire and mercilessly broke their formation apart.
But his limits were just as clear.
Every time he drove his heavy frame forward at full force, the concrete floor of the old factory couldn’t bear the 400-kilogram load and sank in with dull thuds. His feet tangled in the broken ground, and terrifying strain piled onto the bones, artificial muscles, and heart supporting that massive body, forcing rough breaths from his chest.
And Logan’s eyes, watching the melee from above, narrowed like a snake’s.
A few underlings who had let their guard down against Mammoth’s brute-force charge had been crushed in an instant, but Logan didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, he was dissecting Mammoth’s movements themselves.
"Ah, I see."
Logan let out a thin, nasty smile and slung the hand cannon over his shoulder.
The destructive power of that 400-kilogram slab of steel was threatening, but because of the collapsing ground and the sheer weight, the bastard’s actual mobility wasn’t as fast as expected.
"You idiots!! Don’t get close! Put some distance between you and him!!"
Logan’s furious barking thundered through the abandoned factory.
"Can’t you see that old man’s feet are stuck and he’s crawling like a damn slug?! Scatter! Get out of his range! Don’t go near him—just grind him down with firepower!"
At their leader’s order, the underlings who had been rushing in blindly finally came to their senses and fell back like a receding tide. Mammoth tried to close the gap in a hurry, but they had already pulled completely out of his close-quarters range and scattered to all sides of the open floor, opening fire in unison.
"Hngh!!"
With the distance widened, Mammoth’s step, which had been trying to crash into the enemy’s chest, cut through empty air.
Ppupupuk-Kagang!
Heavy armor-piercing rounds and machine-gun fire rained in from all directions. His gray synthetic hide and matte-black heavy armor vest were deflecting the bullets, but his limits were obvious.
He might have stopped the kinetic force of the endless hail of rounds, but the merciless shockwaves were punching through the armor and piling up layer by layer inside Mammoth’s organs and artificial ones.
"Khh..."
A suppressed groan scraped out of Mammoth’s throat like metal under the pain of the damage accumulating inside him.
His vision shook, and the artificial muscles holding up his massive frame screamed.
'Sure enough... after a few years without real combat, my body’s gotten damn stiff.'
Mammoth spat blood-tinged saliva through his split lips and grumbled harshly.
Years spent withdrawn as an arena manager, not even sparring properly. But instead of collapsing on the broken ground, he pulled both blood-dripping fists up to his face and began moving again, a heavy, slow step into the storm of bullets.
Even under the barrage from every direction, Mammoth kept his thick arms over his face and advanced slowly, relentlessly, closing the distance to Logan.
Watching that brutish advance from the catwalk, Logan’s eyes twisted like a viper’s.
He was a tank, shrugging off heavy armor-piercing rounds and still coming. If they let the distance collapse, his men would all get crushed.
"You useless pieces of shit! Where the hell are you shooting?!"
Logan kicked the railing and shouted at the top of his lungs, voice raw with rage.
"The legs!! Shoot the legs and break his knees first!!"
"Y-Yes, sir!"
The moment the order came down, the muzzles of the scattered underlings all swung toward Mammoth’s lower body.
Kagang!Ppupupuk-!
In an instant, heavy impacts concentrated around his knee joints, and Mammoth’s legs sank and swayed hard.
'...This won’t do.'
With concentrated fire targeting his joints and the ground collapsing beneath him, forcing his way through head-on was impossible with his mobility pinned down.
Mammoth clenched his steel jaw and changed direction, lowering his heavy body beside Dorio, who was lying on the floor covered in blood.
His huge shadow shielded her from the falling bullets, and Dorio, breathing faintly, slowly opened her eyes.
What entered her blurred vision was a towering gray giant, the kind she had only seen in hazy memories from when she was very young.
"...Who?"
At Dorio’s hoarse, blood-soaked voice, Mammoth’s rough hand, which had been reaching out, hesitated for a brief moment.
His brother Gunnar, whom he had lost because he had stood by helplessly in the past. That bone-deep guilt pressed heavily on Mammoth’s chest.
"...You probably won’t remember, but... I’m sorry about your father."
Mammoth spat out a brief apology, then wrapped one huge arm tightly around Dorio and lifted her up.
"For now, let’s get out of here."
The moment he finished speaking, Mammoth turned his back with Dorio in his arms and faced the enemy’s line of fire.
Tatatatang!! Ppupupupuk!
"Kgh..."
Hundreds of bullets poured down over his back and shoulders like a torrential rain.
The rounds couldn’t pierce his hide, but the heavy shockwaves of their impact piled up along his spine and deep into his organs.
Dark red blood dripped from between Mammoth’s lips, but he didn’t loosen the arm around Dorio as he charged stupidly toward the factory entrance.
"Stop him! Block the entrance! Don’t let him out!!"
At Logan’s shout, one of the gang members guarding the entrance stepped in front with a pale face, blocking the way.
Mammoth didn’t slow down. He tightened the steel knuckles on the hand not holding Dorio and raised his fist toward the bastard’s face.
Just as that giant iron fist was about to crush his skull.
"Don’t come any closer, you fucking monster!!"
The gang member, driven mad by fear of death, squeezed his eyes shut and spat out a curse while wildly swinging the bright blue logging axe in his hands.
Searrhk!
A dull tearing crack rang out as Mammoth’s gray synthetic hide, which had been deflecting bullets, was ripped open.
As the blind axe swing cut into Mammoth’s living flesh, even the man swinging it widened his eyes.
"Huh...? I cut..."
But before the joy could even fully spill from his open mouth.
Kwaang-!
Mammoth’s huge pneumatic steel knuckle split the air like lightning and smashed straight into his face.
With a heavy sound of a skull caving in, the corpse blocking the entrance was flung far away into a pile of scrap.
Holding Dorio with one arm, Mammoth hurriedly pressed a huge palm against the wound on his other arm, the one that had been cut open.
It was an instinctive move to clamp the wound, stop the bleeding, and avoid exposing a fatal weakness to the enemy.
But the wound wasn’t shallow.
Even though Mammoth pressed down hard to cover it, dark red blood kept forcing its way through the gaps between his thick fingers and streaming down his forearm like a snake.
Before long, drops of blood began to patter onto the cold concrete floor.
And Logan, who alone had the safe vantage point above the fight, wasn’t about to miss that red trail.
"...Huh?"
The sight of blood running from the hide of the rhinoceros that had been shrugging off bullets. Logan’s mouth split into a thin, vicious grin, and he burst into beastlike laughter that echoed through the abandoned factory.
"Kwahahaha! See that?! Bullets won’t go in, but flesh still slices!"
Logan kicked the catwalk railing and shouted with a voice full of rage.
"Everyone, ditch the guns and grab tools! Axes, knives, whatever you’ve got—shred that old rhino’s hide to pieces!!"
At Logan’s command, the enemies scattered around the room all threw down their rifles at once.
They drew gleaming close-combat weapons with razor-sharp edges and began tightening the encirclement again with murderous intent.
Mammoth glanced down at his own forearm, blood dripping through his fingers.
At this rate, breaking through the wall of blades while carrying Dorio was impossible. He carefully lowered the woman in his arms onto a safe spot on the floor.
"Could it be... Ma...mmoth...?"
To the half-conscious Dorio, Mammoth spat blood onto the floor and whispered briefly.
"...Wait here for a second."
Mammoth cracked his thick neck left and right, then stepped forward.
"This is even better."
He slammed the pneumatic steel knuckles on both hands together and crouched low.
The eerie noise of blue high-frequency machetes, logging axes, and electric saw motors filled the abandoned factory from every direction.
The dozens of enemies who had thrown away their guns raised their sharp tools with murderous eyes and began closing in, tightening the semicircle around Mammoth.
And as Mammoth faced the battle surrounding him, Ji-hwan’s situation was no different.
He heard the footsteps carefully closing in over the muddy ground, and Ji-hwan lowered his center of gravity, bending his knees against the floor. Then he clenched both blood-dripping fists and once again met the enemies charging in like beasts.
Blue Mantis Blades and heavy Gorilla Arms cut through the rain from all sides, and Ji-hwan twisted his torso to slip past the blades before driving heavy straight punches into the enemy’s empty solar plexus and jaw joints.
With the sound of ribs breaking and artificial jaws caving in, the hounds who had entered a life-or-death war of attrition were no less ferocious.
Mercs and gang members who were knocked back and sent sprawling didn’t drop their weapons. Instead, they pulled red MaxDoc injectors from their chests.
Thuk-
Those who jammed the syringes roughly into their chests and torn wounds, numbing the pain as the drugs spread through their veins, rolled their eyes back and screamed like beasts before throwing themselves back into the slaughter.
Under the smart rifle’s guided rounds raining down from all sides and the fierce close-range strikes of elite solos, wounds kept stacking up across Ji-hwan’s body.
His old coat had become a rag, and dark red blood flowed down from the slashed and gouged wounds with the rainwater.
But the longer the melee dragged on, the more Ji-hwan could feel the strange changes happening inside his body every time he threw a punch or took a step.
The [super regeneration] that had been crawling along the floor from the recoil of overload was now blazing hot again.
What had only been a trickle of recovery had climbed to one-third, forcibly waking his cells in the middle of a life-or-death brawl.
Right after an enemy blade tore through his side and shoulder, blood-colored steam rose from between the sliced flesh as muscle fibers knitted themselves back together in real time, sealing the wound.
A grotesque cycle of taking damage and bleeding out while bone and flesh were forced back into place. Ji-hwan’s legs, which had been trembling at their limit, only grew heavier and more stable against the ground as time went on, steadily regaining their strength.
Meanwhile, the enemies who had been holding on by repeatedly jabbing MaxDoc into themselves were in just as miserable a state.
The drugs could erase pain, but they couldn’t erase the accumulating physical damage.
Under Ji-hwan’s heavy blows, military armor plates caved in like tin cans, and blue sparks and black oil kept bursting from shattered artificial joints.
But the longer the melee dragged on, the more Ji-hwan could feel the strange changes happening inside his body every time he threw a punch or took a step.
'What is this?'
Ji-hwan himself couldn’t clearly understand the principle behind this grotesque recovery.
There was no way the life force he had burned away completely when he fell from dozens of meters in the air could simply be refilled for no reason.
All that flashed through his mind was the intuition that the excruciating pain of this death line, where bones broke and flesh was torn away, was forcibly stimulating sleeping cells and evolving his body.
The closer his body was pushed to the edge of death, the more fiercely it boiled in order to survive.
So even after inflicting dozens of fatal wounds and carving away flesh, the ones who had never once forced him to his knees and were instead mending their own wounds while tightening the noose around him finally began to break under the weight of the slaughter.
"T-That insane monster... why the hell won’t he go down?!"
Ji-hwan’s momentum, still unbroken after being cut and pierced dozens of times without ever kneeling. Faced with that stubborn vitality, the hounds’ ferocity finally cracked, and they began backing away with their weapons still in hand.
Ji-hwan looked down at the blood-colored steam rising from between his torn muscles with indifference.
'Think about the changes in my body later.'
He didn’t have time to figure out the principle.
Ji-hwan clenched his teeth and spat out the bitter blood running down his jaw.
'First, I’m going to clean up every last one of these bastards in front of me.'
Ji-hwan tightened both blood-soaked fists again.
A dense killing intent poured from the body he planted firmly on the ground.
As he raised his momentum and took one step forward, the dozen mercs and gang members who had held the numerical advantage all flinched and retreated as if by agreement.
The tide had completely turned.
Just as Ji-hwan was about to kick off the ground and finish off the remaining bastards,
"You’re much stronger than the rumors said."
Ripping through the silence of the square, which had been filled only with rain and ragged breathing, a leisurely, old-fashioned voice rang out.
It was a lazy tone with not a trace of tension, as if the speaker had simply stepped out for a casual walk.
Ji-hwan and the gang members all turned toward the deep darkness where the voice had come from.
A figure slowly walked out from there.
Clothing that had no place in the ruins of Pacifica, where dust and blood stank in the air. He was dressed like a mafia man from a bygone era.
"W-Wait, that’s..."
"N-No way?!"
"A-Aguila...?"
One of the retreating mercs muttered the name in a daze.
The legendary contract killer from Havana, said to snuff out other people’s lives every time he lit a cigar in Havana.
The moment the name was spoken, Ji-hwan stared quietly at the uninvited guest.
From Ji-hwan’s body, which had been worn down to the limit, a faint red mist from [super regeneration] was still rising.
Suppressing the pain of broken bones snapping back into place and flesh knitting together, Ji-hwan faced the legend and sharply analyzed the other man’s stride and breathing.
'He’s strong.'
He was different from the chrome-plated machines he had fought so far.
There wasn’t a single wasted motion in his posture, and not even the sound of his feet stepping into the rain puddles could be heard.
"For my employer’s benefit, I’ll have to take your life."
Aguila, his fedora pulled low, quietly delivered the sentence.
Ji-hwan said nothing back. Instead, he raised his bloodied fists and lowered his center of gravity.
And then, in that instant.
Ji-hwan was definitely staring straight ahead with both eyes open, watching the bastard’s entire body.
But in the blink of an eye.
In the tiny gap when a raindrop slipped past his vision, Aguila’s fedora-clad form vanished from sight with a sudden whoosh.
'?!'
Chills ran down Ji-hwan’s spine.
There was no blue spark from a [Sandevistan], no mechanical crackle at all.
Only an extreme assassination step that perfectly exploited the physical blind spot. The moment Ji-hwan instinctively twisted his head and shifted to a defensive stance,
"You did well."
A very cold, dry whisper touched his ear.
When Ji-hwan looked down, Aguila was already standing completely inside his guard.
And the muzzle of the cold pistol in the legendary assassin’s hand was already pressing dead-center against Ji-hwan’s heart, with not even a hair’s breadth of error.
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