Except for the one day each year when the corporations held their hypocritical little event, the sky over Night City was nothing but smog or acid rain, 365 days a year.
And on that night sky’s streets, there was one person moving fast: Ji-hwan.
Driving himself forward on nothing but his own two legs, sucking in the acrid air that stabbed at his lungs, his whole body was soaked in sticky sweat and his breathing had turned rough. And yet the soles of his worn combat boots devoured the street without a single misstep.
Krrrkkk-.
He looked nothing like the hulking brute he’d been back when he trained by hammering rocks in a Badlands scrapyard.
The body that had survived countless brushes with death, grueling training, and the backlash from his tech had evolved on its own. His once-enormous muscles had compressed beyond their limits, transforming him into a lean frame that could have passed for an ordinary person at a glance. But inside that body, the absurd regenerative power that had been drained in Biotechnica’s underground facility and later in his life-or-death struggle with Aguila was already surging back up to around fifty percent, rapidly boiling to the surface and tempering torn muscle fibers in real time.
'If my body’s abilities all come back...'
Feeling his heart hammer like an engine, Ji-hwan became certain.
'Maybe I could stand shoulder to shoulder with the monsters people call legends in this city...?'
At the same time, in the hideout on the outskirts of Pacifica.
The netrunner Sasha, blowing bubblegum while tracking Ji-hwan’s position on a hologram monitor, widened her eyes in disbelief.
Whiiing-.
As the red dot representing Ji-hwan crossed the map at a speed beyond common sense, a dumbfounded breath escaped her lips.
"Mister, did you put wheels on your legs or something?!"
Ji-hwan didn’t slow down, only letting out a short laugh through his mask.
Then, when he finally stopped, the entrance to a massive red-light district came into view: Jigzig Street.
Cheap red and blue neon signs smeared themselves sticky-bright through the acrid air.
Mechanical bass thudded through the pavement. Along the asphalt, joytoys dressed in nothing but leather straps or holographic outfits stood in precarious poses, continuing their calls to passersby.
Ji-hwan stepped into the middle of that muddy street, where a crowd of people had gathered to buy pleasure, all of them tangled together in a disgusting knot.
He looked no different from an ordinary person. Just another small-time scavenger you’d see rolling around the streets.
But the moment people spotted the 'scavenger mask' he wore, their faces twisted in disgust as if they’d agreed on it beforehand.
"Tch, what bad luck. It’s a scavenger."
"Why the hell is something like that crawling into this district? It stinks."
Whispers rose from all around him.
The gang members and guards who controlled the red-light district’s territory also furrowed their brows in irritation.
Wary that some nobody scavenger might spoil the neighborhood, they idly touched the weapon grips under their jackets and shot him looks that practically told him to get lost.
But Ji-hwan ignored the hostility and disgust aimed at him from every direction. His eyes, hidden behind the mask, stayed fixed only on his destination as he lazily lengthened his stride.
He’d already passed through places like this dozens, hundreds of times in the game. For what he needed now, the looks of the people around him didn’t matter.
He parted the crowd and reached the end of a dark alley deep inside Jigzig Street.
In front of the ripperdoc clinic, where cheap neon flickered on and off, three Tiger Claws punks were standing around with their weight on one leg, looking thoroughly trashy.
When Ji-hwan walked up to them with that utterly ordinary, garbage-like entrance, the punks snickered and blocked the clinic entrance outright.
"Where do you think you’re crawling off to, scavenger scum?"
"I’m here to see Fingers."
At Ji-hwan’s calm reply, the bastards let out greasy little laughs.
The one in the middle lifted his chin with a smug air.
"There’s a pretty long wait if you want Fingers to treat you here. If you want to go in first, you’d better pay the toll."
"...I’m not here to cause trouble."
"Get lost if you don’t have money!"
One of the punks, getting annoyed, reached out to shove Ji-hwan’s seemingly thin shoulder roughly. Ji-hwan let out a sigh.
"Haa."
And then his body swayed softly.
Srrrk-.
At the same time, the two punks standing beside him dropped their heads in perfect unison and crumpled to the ground.
Thud, thud.
At the sound of his companions hitting the floor, the eyes of the punk who had tried to shove Ji-hwan’s shoulder shook like an earthquake.
"W-what... huh?"
The flustered punk hurriedly reached for the weapon at his waist, but Ji-hwan’s right hand vanished from sight as if it had simply ceased to exist.
Pow-!
The three punks collapsed to the ground with their eyes rolled white. Ji-hwan stepped past the sleeping bastards and pushed open the old clinic door.
Ding-a-ling-.
A cheerful chime rang out. Fingers, who had been wiping a scalpel, sucked in a breath the instant he saw the intruder’s mask. Ji-hwan calmly raised both hands to show he meant no hostility.
"The guys outside will wake up in five minutes. I’m not here to hurt anyone, so let’s just talk. Fingers."
Fingers’ gaze swept over Ji-hwan from head to toe.
A body that didn’t look all that different from an ordinary person’s, and a scavenger mask that seemed plain at first glance but carried an alien pattern. It looked almost like a tiger’s fangs.
"Hmm... well, now. Never thought a scavenger would come looking for me."
Even so, Ji-hwan got straight to the point.
"Could you do house calls for a bit? I want you to teach the guy under me some techniques for a few days."
At that, a laugh of disbelief slipped through Fingers’ lips.
He took a bottle of cheap synthetic liquor from the cabinet in the corner and poured himself a glass, then let out a deep sigh.
"Listen, scavenger. Do I look so clueless I wouldn’t know you just laid out those guys outside?"
He set the glass down with a clack and jerked his chin toward the street outside the window.
"I know your fists are strong, but this godforsaken city doesn’t run on fists alone. I’m tied up with a massive debt to those Tiger Claw bastards. The moment I step out of this street without their permission, there’ll be a hole in my neck."
Then Fingers’ eyes shifted to the joytoys huddled in a corner of the waiting room, their focus long gone.
"And if I’m away even one day, those poor things who live hand to mouth won’t even be able to get the cheapest implants. Their lives would be hanging by a thread. Debt and lives are tangled together here, so you want me to just blindly go on a house call because you’ve got one strong fist?"
As Ji-hwan listened in silence, the dark line of his eyes cooled behind the mask.
Eliminating the people controlling this place wouldn’t be difficult.
But if he made a scene like that, it was obvious his identity as a top-priority wanted man would be exposed to the world.
'I’m already drawing attention as it is. I can’t reveal myself any further.'
Having made his decision, Ji-hwan swallowed his regret, gave up on the idea, and stood up from his seat. He turned away.
"...Fine. Then I’ll be going."
Ding-a-ling. The old door closed with a polite farewell.
Back out on the smog-choked street, Ji-hwan found the three punks who had just been knocked out starting to drag themselves upright, clutching their heads.
He passed the groaning bastards and kept walking.
At the same time, on the second floor of the clinic, at a dark window.
Through the gap in the blinds, Fingers watched Ji-hwan’s retreating, utterly ordinary back with interest.
A man with that much force, and yet he’d quietly backed off. Fingers narrowed his eyes and activated the scanner in his ocular implant.
Whiiing-.
Then a cheerful voice rang out from the earpiece in Ji-hwan’s ear as he walked down the street.
- Mister! The doctor at the second-floor window just tried to scan your face and build! Want me to block it? -
"...It’ll be fine. Leave it."
Ji-hwan brushed off Sasha’s warning and walked through the street of temptations, passing by all the people trying to lure customers in.
- So, mister, what are you gonna do now? -
It was the bright, bouncing voice of the netrunner Sasha, chewing on snacks instead of eating a proper meal.
Ji-hwan stopped and leaned sideways against a stained, weathered concrete wall.
Staring at the tangled red-light district before him, he murmured softly.
"Man... are all places where people live basically the same?"
"Huh? Mister, what are you talking about all of a sudden?"
"Nothing."
He answered casually, his dark eyes drifting into the distance.
The deal with Fingers had fallen apart.
Even if he forced some third-rate trash like that to come along, there was no way he’d properly teach Boris any real technique. More than that, putting his allies and innocent slum dwellers in the hands of a guy like that was basically suicide.
He needed a new ripperdoc.
As he quickly searched his memory for someone capable of replacing Fingers and providing the skills needed to build a clinic, a piece of advice from the past flashed through his mind.
Back in a dusty tent in the Badlands, a nomad ripperdoc had once told him:
'If you want to see what that body can really do, go find Viktor Vektor in the city.'
Tap-.
As if he’d just realized something, Ji-hwan lightly slapped his own knee.
"Huh? What was that? You found a way?"
Sasha, half-chewed snack still in her mouth, asked urgently through the earpiece.
Ji-hwan lifted the collar of his old coat and stepped into the gray smog with lazy bootfalls, answering briefly.
"Viktor."
"Viktor? Who’s that?"
"There’s a guy like that."
And so Ji-hwan headed without hesitation toward Watson, where Night City’s real doctor was waiting.
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