The feel of a cold wind slapping against her cheek made Dorio slowly lift her heavy eyelids.
Every joint in her body was screaming from the horrific torture and beating Logan Garcia’s crew had put her through.
Through her fading consciousness, Dorio struggled to piece together the fragments of the incomprehensible situation that had happened to her just a few dozen minutes ago.
At the moment her limbs had been bound and she had been waiting for death under the boot pressing down on her head, the one who appeared was Mammoth, an Animals executive from Pacifica and the very man she believed had betrayed her father, Gunnar.
The enemy of the father she had hated all her life. And yet Mammoth had silently shrugged off the hail of bullets, walked straight in, and with monstrous strength tore apart the chains binding Dorio.
Then, with his rough, massive hands, he carefully lifted the bloodied Dorio and set her down in a safe corner outside the factory.
"...Sorry."
And then, as he turned toward the armed men and raised his fist, that one line he left behind her back kept echoing stubbornly in Dorio’s ears.
"Sorry... Why?"
In that terrible confusion and cognitive dissonance, Dorio lost consciousness again and fainted.
And when she next woke, after some time had passed, what she witnessed amid the earth-shaking roar was a battle she would never forget for the rest of her life.
A "man" fighting while red steam poured from every pore in his body, Mammoth charging in to help him, and the man’s overwhelming power even against the two of them.
Dorio’s own eyes clearly saw the instant when Mammoth took a fatal blow in his place and his chest was completely pierced through.
Kwaang
Afterward, the man was killed by Mammoth’s hand, and Mammoth’s huge body collapsed heavily onto the rainwater-soaked ground.
"Ah..."
A breathless groan slipped from between Dorio’s torn lips. She could hardly breathe.
It should have been the death of an enemy she ought to rejoice over, yet the grotesque sense of loss, as if an entire chunk of her chest had been carved away, scrambled her reason.
**
Deep in Pacifica’s darkness.
"Huff... huff..."
Bison, the newly crowned boss of the Animals gang at the ruined Pacifica shopping mall, had Mammoth’s already eternal sleeping body slung awkwardly over his shoulder, while the Animals under him helped carry the corpse as they walked along the outer edge of the abandoned factory.
His knee cartilage was screaming under the horrific load, but he and the remaining Animals were still shedding tears as they forced one step after another forward.
That was when it happened.
Bison’s stumbling, near-collapsing steps suddenly came to a dead stop.
At the mouth of a dark alley, a bloodied woman stood blocking the way, drenched head to toe in the pouring acid rain. It was Dorio.
Right after witnessing Mammoth’s death, she had dragged her broken body after Bison’s group with desperate determination.
"You... could it be, Dorio?"
Bison, breathing hard with Mammoth’s massive body on his shoulder, asked with bloodshot eyes.
But Dorio did not answer his call.
In her mind, the vicious misunderstanding that Mammoth had sold her father to his death was still deeply rooted, and Bison, who had been under him, looked to her like nothing more than an accomplice in that betrayal.
With her silver hair soaked through and whipping in the rain, Dorio brushed past Bison and approached the ash-gray rhino’s corpse slumped over his shoulder.
"Why..."
A choked groan squeezed out through Dorio’s torn lips.
"Why did you save me! After betraying my father! Why the hell did you come to save me!!"
Both her fists were trembling.
The horrifying contradiction that the enemy she should have hated for life had willingly thrown himself in front of her as a meat shield and given his life was brutally tearing at Dorio’s heart.
Bison stood in the acid rain and silently watched Dorio sob for a moment.
The heavy shoulders carrying Mammoth’s will trembled faintly.
"I think you’ve got something badly wrong. Your father..."
"Wrong?! Mammoth sold our father out!!"
Dorio cut Bison off with a furious cry through her tears.
He instinctively realized that no matter what he said to her while she was this worked up, this rotten knot in her chest would not easily come undone.
He took a breath.
"I don’t know what that rat Logan told you after he dragged you off, or what kind of situation you went through... but..."
Bison’s voice sank low and heavy through the sound of rain.
"Mammoth hyung suddenly threw everything away and ran out without hesitation because... in the end, it was to save you."
"...What are you talking about?"
Dorio’s eyes shook wide.
Instead of excuses or anger, Bison’s incomprehensible words made Dorio freeze as if she had lost her breath.
Seeing confusion cross her face, Bison adjusted the cold body of his boss on his shoulder.
Then he told her the truth he and Mammoth had hidden for so long.
"The truth is..."
**
Somewhere in Pacifica, inside a suite.
Mr. Hands lightly swirled a glass of top-shelf synthetic wine as he listened to the elegant strains of a classical symphony playing from the turntable.
A deep, impossible-to-hide smile spread across his lips.
Just moments ago, he had received a report that his personal cleanup crew had discreetly recovered a very expensive trophy from the outskirts of the abandoned factory in Pacifica.
It was the fake Aguila shell that had just been smashed to pieces by the wanted man K (Ji-hwan), who carried a 2.5 million eddie bounty, along with the legendary assassination algorithm from Havana inside it: the [Action Engram Chip].
"For an investment that was a bit of a stretch... this is a better return than expected."
Unlike back-alley fixers, Hands treated mercs properly, and the chaos Ji-hwan had created was, in the truest sense, a gamble.
Just then, as he was about to take a satisfied sip of wine—
Ding-ding
Amid the classical melody, a highly unusual, covert-frequency communication request flashed.
It was the signal from the encrypted comm chip he had handed to Mammoth, the boss of the Animals gang, a few days ago.
Hands already knew through his intelligence network spread across Pacifica that Mammoth was dead.
Then the only person on the other side of this line, the one holding the dead Mammoth’s chip and calling him now, could be only one person.
"...Well, this is unexpected."
Hands’ eyes gleamed with interest as he pressed the accept button.
The hologram screen that floated into the air obscured his face with deliberate digital noise and shadow. On the other side of the screen, through Pacifica’s deep darkness, there appeared the beast Ji-hwan (K), red haze steaming from every pore in his body.
Ji-hwan sat quietly, simply staring at the hologram in front of him, but Mr. Hands did not waver.
He opened his mouth to introduce himself, carefully hiding the fact that he had just had Ji-hwan retrieve Aguila’s action chip and corpse.
"It’s not every day you get to see a celebrity like this. A pleasure, K."
"My name is Mr. Hands. I’m an "investor" who’d like to discuss business with you."
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