"I came to help."
As soon as the polite greeting landed, the Maelstrom lieutenant decided there was no time left to waste, and his face twisted into something vicious.
"Kill that bastard!!"
At his command, dozens of Maelstrom goons raised their guns and rushed in at once. Victor, bleeding and slumped on the floor, shouted in a panic.
"Watch out!"
Before the warning could even echo through the cramped basement, Ji-hwan’s figure shot forward like it had scattered into the air.
Under the storm of crossfire, Ji-hwan slipped through the bullet curtain using nothing but his own flesh and the reflexes that had now peeled away another layer of human limitation.
There was no blue-sparking afterimage from a Sandevistan, no mechanical whine of cybernetic joints.
In the Maelstrom rear line, where they were spraying bullets without caring whether they hit allies or not, the front-liners with their blue Mantis Blades and rusty knives raised their weapons and charged Ji-hwan.
Exposed in the middle of the melee, Ji-hwan perceived every enemy closing in from every direction and moved as his body led him. It wasn’t the overwhelming speed of a Sandevistan, but every motion was so stripped down it was almost eerie, with not a single wasted step.
The arc of a Mantis Blade coming from behind for his spine. The line of a knife stabbing straight for his brow from the front. Even with the threat of losing a hand if he so much as touched the blades wrong, Ji-hwan didn’t hesitate.
As if he had eyes in the back of his head, he twisted his body half a step, and his two hands sliced smoothly through the air.
Thud-!Crack!
Their attacks collided with each other’s openings, and a chilling scraping sound rang out.
In the split second their strikes crossed, one bastard foaming at the mouth clutched his neck and collapsed, the knife blade still lodged there with only the broken tip left behind. Another, the one who had swung the knife, dropped to the floor unconscious, already grabbing at the Mantis Blade buried in his side.
Leaving the men rolling on the ground behind him, Ji-hwan kept advancing through the hail of bullets and dealt with the remaining Maelstrom trash.
Victor’s face, watching that overwhelming combat power, was painted with naked shock.
At first, he had assumed the mysterious scavenger with the young voice must be decked out in some absurd high-end implants. But what was happening in front of him couldn’t be explained by that logic alone. It was something else entirely.
'Implants? What the hell...?'
Victor’s eyes shook violently.
'...I don’t know what chrome he’s running, but... that movement... no one moves like that unless they’ve stared death in the face dozens of times.'
Who exactly was this scavenger in front of him? Victor himself had survived countless brushes with death over decades and was proud to call himself a veteran, but he had never seen anything like this.
And while the remaining Maelstrom goons kept dropping before Ji-hwan’s overwhelming violence, one Maelstrom lieutenant was crouched behind a pile of shattered concrete in a blind spot of Ji-hwan’s vision, silently watching the slaughter.
'You piece of... damn it... they said this would be a simple job!'
The bastard’s red optical eyes trembled.
Some unknown man in a shabby scavenger coat was tearing through his men like they were toys.
He wanted to run, but there was nowhere to flee in this cramped space.
So he held his breath and waited for the one opening he needed: a moment when Ji-hwan would let his guard slip and expose a blind spot.
Then, the instant Ji-hwan finished off the last of the goons and turned his back while flicking blood from his hand, the lieutenant hiding behind the rubble decided it was time to use his trump card.
He cranked the output of the mobility implant mounted in his legs to the maximum.
Fwoosh-!
With blue Mantis Blades deployed from both arms, the bastard lunged for Ji-hwan’s back with enough force to punch through it.
His body drew a straight explosive line, as if he had activated a Sandevistan, and in less than a breath he was right behind Ji-hwan.
'There’s no way he can dodge this!'
Confident, the bastard bared his killing intent and struck.
Slash!
"Die!!"
Thump!
Just before the Mantis Blade touched his back, the inside of Ji-hwan’s scavenger mask with the goblin pattern flashed red in his eyes, and at the same time a massive heartbeat reverberated from deep inside his body.
In the same instant, Ji-hwan’s body, which had been showing its back so carelessly, spun like a blade.
Before the bastard’s scream could even reach him, Ji-hwan had turned half a circle, read the movement, and slapped the flat of the incoming Mantis Blade away with his palm.
Clang-!
"Hup!"
And then Ji-hwan’s fist, driven by a deep breath, drove mercilessly into the center of the bastard’s chest.
Crack-!
Thick subdermal armor and metal bones collapsed. A strangled gasp burst from the lieutenant’s mouth as his chest was punched through.
"Ghk...!"
The bastard’s trembling body spat blood and went limp. Ji-hwan yanked his arm free from the ruined rib cage and hurled the dead Maelstrom member into a wall.
For a moment, standing in the center of the room, a thin line of red blood dripped from Ji-hwan’s fingertips.
It was from the shallow cut he’d taken while batting away the Mantis Blade just now.
The technique that fused his reflexes with total relaxation, letting him absorb and redirect an enemy’s trajectory.
In that exchange, he realized there were still plenty of things to refine if he wanted to deflect a storm of blades without taking so much as a scratch.
Besides, that last desperate strike from a man fighting for his life had been dangerous enough to threaten him too.
Ji-hwan looked down at the Maelstrom lieutenant’s corpse sprawled on the floor and let out a faint laugh.
"Not a bad final strike."
With a short word of thanks, he shook the blood from his hand and turned around.
Then he began walking slowly toward Victor, who was slumped against the wall.
When he reached him, Ji-hwan politely held out a hand to the battered ripperdoc.
"I’m K. You’re Victor Vektor, right?"
The overly courteous greeting from the mouth of the man who had just butchered gangsters like a monster was a sight you didn’t often see in Night City.
Victor hesitated for a moment at the strangely dual yet natural way Ji-hwan carried himself, then reached out his blood-soaked hand and gripped Ji-hwan’s rough one firmly.
"Victor Vektor. You saved my life. I owe you one."
As Victor looked around, his gaze drifted to one corner of the collapsed basement.
There, four Trauma Team turncoats lay strewn about, riddled by the Maelstrom crossfire.
Victor scanned their condition.
Two were dead on the spot. But the chests of the remaining two were still rising faintly; they were barely hanging on.
The moment he confirmed that, Victor forced his trembling body upright, swallowing even the horrific pain of the gunshot wound that had pierced his thigh.
He limped over to them without hesitation.
Rifling through his own pockets and their tactical vests, he roughly pulled out the high-end Trauma Team medical gear.
He tore open their shredded armor and poured nanogel generously over the ruptured blood vessels to stop the bleeding.
Ssssshhk-!
"...I’ll send the bill later."
Over the nanogel that foamed and hardened, he drove MaxDoc injectors, the concentrated recovery stimulant, deep into the backs of their necks one by one.
Crude, but precise to the last millimeter. Under his hands, the men’s fading breathing began to return like a miracle.
Ji-hwan’s eyes shook at that incomprehensible sight.
"You’re trying to save them?"
"...."
Even after Ji-hwan’s question, Victor kept treating them in silence.
Watching his stubborn, almost maddeningly devoted attitude, Ji-hwan couldn’t help voicing his curiosity.
"They were trying to kill you just now."
He was saving the traitors who had tried to shoot him in the back with his own hands.
From the perspective of anyone in Night City, it was an incomprehensible thing to do.
"Kuhk..."
Not long after, one of the teammates whose bleeding had been miraculously stopped by the MaxDoc coughed up a clot of blood and regained consciousness in a haze.
The first thing that came into his unfocused vision was Victor’s face, drenched in sweat and worn down to the bone because he had saved them.
"Victor..."
Victor kept staring down at them in silence, and once he confirmed the two were safe for now, his strength gave out. He slumped back against the blood-smeared concrete wall.
Now that the tension had finally left him, the pain in his thigh made him grit his teeth.
"Kgh..."
Victor crushed down the groan trying to escape his throat, picked up the remaining nanogel tube rolling on the floor, and roughly poured it over the torn wound in his thigh.
Ssssshhk-!
Without even taking time to wipe the cold sweat beading on his forehead, Victor used his rough hands to wrap the remaining pressure bandage tightly around his thigh.
Then, after catching his breath for a moment, he staggered back to his feet.
Silently enduring the pain gnawing at his torn thigh, he forced himself to haul the two bloodied Trauma Team survivors onto his shoulders.
But with his body already wrecked, it was too much to bear the heavy weight of two grown men on his own.
As his thigh muscles screamed and Victor started to sway,
"Haa."
Ji-hwan let out a short sigh, stepped in, and casually lifted one of the survivors from Victor’s shoulder onto his own.
"I’ll help."
At that, Victor let out a dry chuckle and adjusted the remaining man more securely on his back.
So the two of them carried the survivors one by one and headed for the armed AV parked outside the ruined building, when Ji-hwan asked,
"Aren’t you supposed to stay away from home?"
At the question, Victor stopped walking and looked at Ji-hwan’s masked face.
As if he knew nothing about the way corporations worked in Night City, Ji-hwan’s question was answered kindly.
"You don’t know corpos very well."
"Huh...?"
"They’re not some small-time gang running on emotion or blind revenge. They’re people who calculate everything down to the last Eddie and the last data point."
Victor turned his head and swept his gaze over the wrecked Maelstrom corpses and the blood-soaked scene.
"The op already failed, and now there’s a witness too—an overwhelming, undeniable one at that. Once they’ve done the math, they won’t do something stupid like come after me again right away. They’ll investigate what happened first."
Victor, who had seen through the cold nature of Night City megacorps, lowered his eyes to the pool of blood on the floor and moved his lips quietly.
"Well... maybe it’s time I quit too..."
His mutter never reached Ji-hwan’s ears. By the time Victor reached the AV’s boarding ramp, he took the last survivor from Ji-hwan’s shoulder and laid him inside the aircraft.
Whirrr-.
The surveillance camera mounted on the armed AV’s outer shell rotated as it prepared for takeoff, focusing on Ji-hwan and Victor.
Victor turned back, looked straight into the camera lens filming him, and gave a bitter smile.
Then he took his eyes off the lens and tossed Ji-hwan a casual farewell.
"That’s enough for now. See you next time."
With that brief goodbye, Victor climbed into the AV.
Kwoooom-!
The powerful jet engines shoved aside the gray smog, and the heavy aircraft slowly lifted into the sky over Night City.
Watching the AV grow smaller beyond the smog, Ji-hwan muttered lazily,
"He’s gone..."
At his mutter, Sasha’s voice came through the small earpiece in his ear with a crackle.
[So you got his holo-call contact, right?]
For a second, Ji-hwan’s shoulders stiffened.
He had sent Victor off looking cool and composed, and he really had been happy to see the Victor Vektor he knew only from the game. But in all that excitement, he had completely forgotten the most important thing: exchanging contact info for later.
As Ji-hwan opened and closed his mouth, unable to even make an excuse, a long sigh came through the earpiece from the monitor on Sasha’s side.
[Haa. I knew it. I scanned and pulled the encrypted comms data before he got on the AV, so I’ll set up a separate channel for you later.]
Sasha’s voice relaxed a little.
[I’m tired, so I’m going to sleep. I marked the vehicle you’re taking back on your terminal.]
A short electronic tone sounded, and the coordinates for the vehicle Sasha had sent were received on Ji-hwan’s terminal screen.
Then Sasha’s transmission cut off completely.
Ji-hwan nodded on his own at her backup.
"Yeah, you really do need a netrunner."
At that moment, Sasha, having cut the line, shivered her shoulders slightly.
"Brrr... what was that? Did I catch a cold?"
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register