"Grrr..."
"M-my leg... Aagh...!"
In a dingy, reeking temporary hideout in Pacifica, Logan’s men, who had barely escaped with their lives, lay on the floor groaning in pain, covered in blood and mud.
At the center of that chaos, Logan Garcia, an executive of the Animals, kept chewing at his nails in restless panic.
"Fuck... Shit...!"
He didn’t even notice the blood seeping from beneath his nails. Logan’s pupils trembled wildly with anxiety.
In his head, the horrific massacre that had just unfolded at the abandoned factory kept replaying over and over.
Mammoth. Every time the man’s fist sliced through the air, Logan’s once-reliable subordinates were turned into minced meat, torn apart and crushed like paper.
Then, suddenly, another image flashed through Logan’s mind: the bloodied face of the former executive he had personally killed to take that Animals seat for himself.
It was the curse the man had left him with, a blood-soaked sneer on his lips as he drew his last breath.
"Do you really think your cheap little schemes can handle Mammoth? You’re going to get stomped into the ground in the most pathetic way possible."
Back then, Logan had laughed it off as the rambling of a loser and put a bullet in him. Only now was the horrifying weight of those words sinking in.
What would have happened if he hadn’t used that girl, Dorio, Gunnar’s own daughter, as bait to keep Mammoth on a leash?
What if Mammoth had come at him with no restraints, at full force?
The thought sent a chill crawling up Logan’s spine.
It was obvious. By now, his own body would have been split in half like his men’s, dumped into Pacifica’s dust as nothing more than a pile of meat.
Ding-.
Just as he was trembling under the weight of sheer terror and nervous thoughts, the quiet hideout was split by the ring of Logan’s holo-call.
The caller ID floating in the air belonged to the fixer Faraday.
Logan flinched and quickly dropped the fingers he’d been gnawing on.
He had to smooth over this miserable failure somehow and salvage the situation.
He swallowed hard, forcing down his shaking voice, and answered the call with as much composure as he could fake.
In a luxury penthouse office in Santo Domingo, only the eerie blue glow of a hologram lit the room out of the deep darkness.
Faraday, his four implanted artificial eyes shifting, listened with a face like carved ice.
To him, what had happened in Pacifica was an unforgivable disaster.
[F-Faraday! Listen to me! The trap was perfect! I swear my plan was flawless!!]
Logan Garcia’s frantic, pathetic excuses spilled out over the line.
[If that stupid rhino bastard hadn’t turned my men into ground meat and escaped... Y-you were the one who said Mammoth was weak in the first place!]
Unable to face the brutal truth that he had been powerless to do anything but watch Mammoth tear through the trap he’d laid, Logan tried to cover his shame by shouting, veins bulging, and dumping the blame onto Mammoth’s strength and even onto Faraday, the man who had hired him.
For a man who treated perfect control and calculation like religion, what had happened in Pacifica was an intolerable failure.
But even more disgusting was Logan’s shameless attitude on the other end of the line.
[A-anyway! That stupid Mammoth bastard died protecting him in the end, didn’t he? I didn’t kill him with my own hands, but the result is the same... So you’ll keep your promise, right? You said you’d give me Mammoth’s old base, that ruined shopping mall in Pacifica. If I take over as boss there, then I can give you...]
"...You incompetent fool."
There was no agitation or anger in Faraday’s red lenses as he listened to the excuses.
Only a deep, loathsome contempt, like he was looking down at a cockroach.
"Time is money, Logan. And you failed."
Logan’s sharp inhale of panic came through the line at Faraday’s low, final voice.
"I don’t need excuses."
Faraday continued coldly.
"My order to you was clear. Eliminate Mammoth for good, and you would fill the vacancy and become the ruler of that ruined mall. But you failed. That is all."
[B-but Faraday! Send me a little more backup!! I can definitely finish that bastard off...! A-and besides! We had a contract!]
At Logan’s desperate begging, the corners of Faraday’s mouth curled into a chilling, oily smile.
"You’re not as irreplaceable as you think. The streets are full of trash like you."
Faraday delivered the verdict lightly and mercilessly, as if discarding a broken part.
"You’re all the same. You think you’re something special, but in the end you’re just worthless garbage that can’t even prove its own value."
[W-what?! Hey, Faraday!! You son of a bitch, I’ll—!!]
Click.
Faraday cut off Logan’s rage-filled scream without a second thought.
In the dark room, silence settled back in. Faraday picked up a glass of top-shelf whiskey and clicked his tongue irritably.
"Tch... useless vermin."
His perfect chessboard, the one where he’d planned to trap Mammoth, erase him, and then use Logan to swallow Pacifica’s underground fight scene and all its interests whole, had been shattered by Logan’s incompetence.
For Faraday, who had always treated every variable like a piece to be moved at will, this was his first bitter failure and a disgusting humiliation.
He swallowed the unpleasant taste of that first defeat and switched the hologram screen.
On the display, combat data from another camera on the outskirts of Pacifica played back: K’s overwhelming battle performance as he butchered gang members and mercs.
'But... I’m not about to walk away with a loss.'
Faraday’s four red lenses flashed greedily. Even if Pacifica’s filthy little turf war was a bust, if he could get his hands on the astronomical bounty and the top-secret data tied to that beast’s leash—data Biotechnica was hunting—then this failure could still become the stepping stone to something far bigger.
Ding-.
As Faraday sank into thought, his holo-call rang again, cautiously this time.
It was the call from a low-level Biotechnica employee he had quietly contacted not long ago to sell off information about Ji-hwan.
He accepted, and the employee’s blunt voice snapped out from beyond the flashing Biotechnica logo in the air.
[Faraday. That wanted man, K, that you said you had in your hands. Did you capture him? I need to confirm whether he was taken alive, immediately.]
The moment he heard that direct question, Faraday’s facial muscles stiffened ever so slightly.
The painful failure of having Ji-hwan slip through his fingers in Pacifica just moments ago. He bitterly regretted not being able to snatch him, but forced himself to sound calm and tossed out a dry excuse.
"Well. One of the hounds I let loose couldn’t keep a proper grip on the leash. Some incompetent bottom-feeders screwed things up, and the target slipped out of the trap. For now, he’s gone to ground somewhere."
But after that pathetic answer, a brief silence hung on the line, and then the employee let out an openly mocking click of the tongue.
[Tch. The fixer of Santo Domingo is making excuses with a mercenary? You claim to control everything perfectly, and yet you’re just the same after all?]
The taunt struck straight at his catastrophic failure. Faraday’s four red lenses flashed bright with rage, and thick veins bulged on his forehead.
"Watch your mouth."
Faraday scowled and growled coldly.
"So you opened this expensive encrypted line just to laugh at my failure? Get to the point. Why did you call?"
[Don’t misunderstand. I didn’t call to laugh. I called to tell you that the value of the prey you lost just skyrocketed. The black box data locked away in the main server has been confirmed. The executives on the committee at headquarters practically flipped out when they saw it.]
The employee took a breath and added,
[The bounty from headquarters is going to be updated soon. I’m telling you first as a courtesy, since we did business. Check it.]
Ding-.
No sooner had the employee finished speaking than Biotechnica’s top-secret wanted poster updated on Faraday’s hologram screen.
[Wanted: K] [Maximum Bounty: €2,500,000 (paid in full for live capture)]
[Special Condition 1: If the target is killed, bounty reduced to €1,250,000.]
[Special Condition 2: Additional percentage deductions will be applied depending on the degree of damage to the target’s body and biological tissue.]
Faraday’s four eyes widened so far they looked ready to split with shock.
The bounty, which had previously been 500,000 eddies, had jumped fivefold to a mad 2.5 million eurodollars.
"Is that... for real?"
A metallic, disbelieving voice slipped from Faraday’s mouth, stripped of his usual composure.
Seeing his stunned reaction, the employee gave a greasy laugh over the line.
[Heh. Sounds like you definitely failed to catch Ji-hwan. What a shame to lose that expensive golden egg... Well, if you manage to pin down his location later, give me a call.]
Click.
With that painful jab at Faraday’s pride, the employee cut the line unilaterally.
In the silent, dark penthouse, the reality that he had let an astronomical sum of 2.5 million eurodollars and massive power slip through his fingers began to choke Faraday.
"You fucking piece of shit...!!"
Consumed by humiliation and rage, Faraday hurled a vicious curse into the air.
Even as he glared at the newly updated wanted poster for K flashing red on the hologram screen, he kept chewing over the bitter humiliation of failure.
**
In the heart of Night City, at Corpo Plaza, in the top-tier crisis room of Biotechnica’s towering headquarters, a giant hologram screen covering the wall flashed with K’s newly updated first-class wanted poster, now marked at 2.5 million eurodollars.
In front of the screen, the low-level Biotechnica employee who had just cut the holo-call with Faraday swallowed hard and slowly turned around.
At the end of his gaze sat Biotechnica’s top researcher, Joanne Koch, lounging arrogantly in a premium leather chair, one leg crossed over the other as she flipped through holographic charts with cold eyes.
"...Reporting in. The fixer from Santo Domingo, Faraday... failed in the end. He lost the target, K."
At the employee’s cautious report, Joanne clicked her tongue irritably.
"Tch. I guess I expected too much from a street fixer. In the end, the limits of street trash are obvious. Well, Faraday’s incompetence was always one of the variables we had already accounted for."
She tapped the table lightly with her fingers and fixed the employee with a frosty stare.
"Then what about contact with Aguila?"
The name that left Joanne’s mouth was the name of Havana’s legendary reaper, enough to make anyone in Night City’s knees go weak.
Though it was technically a proxy in the form of an [action engram chip], with Biotechnica having poured massive capital into perfectly copying the reaper’s combat data and personality, it was still a weapon that fully reproduced the original’s cruelty.
"Is the target being pursued right now?"
At the executive’s confident question,
"W-well... ma’am."
The employee’s hands shook violently around the data pad he was holding.
"Our retrieval team is currently moving quickly toward the abandoned factory in Pacifica where they clashed, but... we still haven’t received any contact from Aguila."
"What?"
"Comms are completely down. The on-site camera feed is also fully blacked out..."
BANG-!!
Joanne slammed her fist down on the desk and shot to her feet.
Her once-calm, arrogant face twisted grotesquely with shock and fury.
"What did you just say?! Don’t tell me... Aguila failed?!"
Her voice thundered through the crisis room.
"Even if it’s a proxy implanted into a mechanical frame, it still contains Aguila’s algorithm—the one that made big shots all over the world tremble in fear! And some chrome-free lump of meat caught it?!"
The result was so far beyond common sense that Joanne bared thick veins on her forehead and screamed in rage before Ji-hwan’s overwhelming power.
"This is not a simple failure!!"
Breathing hard, she pointed the baton at the employee as if it might snap in her grip.
"Contact the field team immediately! Send in additional armed personnel and scour Pacifica’s ashes if you have to—find Aguila’s whereabouts first! And recover the last combat data still left in the chip!!"
As the executive’s mad shout came down, the terrified employee bowed his head in a panic and began frantically working the system to open the comms line.
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