[Steel Sweeper] was a simple stage-clearing game.
In other words, it had no RPG-style stat/skill growth system.
[Steel Sweeper] had only the active skills that appeared when you equipped a martial arts/magic implant.
[Silent Movement (Level 1)]
‘But what is this?’
And yet a skill had appeared, just like in other games.
It seemed to be a passive skill that let him move more quietly, exactly as the skill's name suggested.
‘Is it because of first-person mode? Or [Inexplicable]?’
The skill's appearance seemed to be because of first-person mode.
As the game changed, there had been a reorganization of the growth system as well (though he couldn't tell whether this present situation should be regarded as a game or as reality).
Gaining the skill this quickly seemed to be because of [Inexplicable].
Hadn't the [Inexplicable] trait been said to grant growth potential so powerful it was inexplicable?
He had earned a skill from just a few seconds of moving quietly, so it was certainly a trait with real performance behind it.
‘Is this enough to make it worth a try……?’
Woojin decided to change his strategy.
Now that he had gained the [Silent Movement] skill, he would get a little closer to the enemy.
Even if he hit the back of the punk's head with the stone, accuracy and force would rise at a closer distance.
‘I can do this. I can do this.’
Woojin quietly took a step.
One step. Two steps…….
Away from the alley he had hidden in, closer and closer to the punk.
Now the distance to the punk was roughly seven meters.
Even then the punk was looking the opposite way from Woojin and spitting out curses.
“Come out! You fucking dog of a bastard! I know you cleaner bastards can't get more than 300 meters from your garbage truck! And that way's a dead-end alley!”
He knew the work rules of the sanitation civil servants.
Surprisingly well-informed, for a punk.
Woojin gripped the stone tight and set his stance.
At a distance of seven meters he could hit it easily enough.
He swung the arm he had drawn back taut and hurled the stone!
―You have acquired [Stone Throwing (Level 1)].
WHACK!
Almost the same instant the skill was created, the stone struck the back of the punk's head.
“Urk!”
The punk's head snapped forward.
Electricity sparked from the neural interface at the back of his head.
The sparks from the neural interface must have scorched his brain; he convulsed with his back still bent.
But the punk didn't go down.
He spread his legs wide, braced himself, and somehow pulled his wits together.
The punk turned to look at Woojin with murder in his eyes.
“There was, another one, of you……!”
Woojin accepted that things weren't going to go as easily as he had thought.
The moment he did, he instinctively gripped the dagger tight in his left hand and threw himself at the punk.
To keep the muzzle of the prosthetic-arm gun off him, he grabbed the punk's prosthetic arm and pressed his body flush against him.
Then he stabbed the punk's stomach over and over with the dagger in his left hand.
―You have acquired [Dagger Technique (Level 1)].
Of course, the punk didn't stay still either.
He shoved the prosthetic arm at Woojin however he could and fired wildly.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
Acrid gunpowder smoke brushed the tip of his nose.
The gunfire felt like it would tear his eardrums apart.
The prosthetic arm Woojin was holding grew hot from the shooting.
His skin felt like it was cooking, but he didn't let go of the arm.
“Kah! Fuck! Civil servant, bastard, dieee!”
“Bullshit!”
Woojin shoved the punk and the two of them rolled across the ground together.
He twisted the dagger buried in the stomach and churned the wound.
At that, the strength drained out of the punk's body bit by bit, and the voice spitting curses grew smaller and smaller.
―You have acquired [Dirty Brawling (Level 1)].
―You have gained experience.
―You have leveled up.
“Haah. Haah.”
Woojin pushed himself up, breathing hard.
Before his eyes lay the punk's corpse, its face screwed up like a demon's.
His left hand was sticky, and when he looked down, his hand and the man's stomach were drenched in blood.
His right hand had flushed red; it seemed to have been burned.
‘Rough, as expected.’
Having killed for the first time, Woojin felt strange.
Was this punk a real person, or a character in a game?
If he was an enemy character in a game, killing him was a matter of course, but if this was reality…….
‘Though I think I'm doing better than I expected?’
Woojin had thought he would be more shaken.
But his mood was settling faster than he would have guessed.
Was it because of the [Absolute Mind] trait he had received as a benefit?
In any case, it was fortunate.
To go on living in the world of [Steel Sweeper], in Lemming City, he would have to get used to acts like this.
Having regained his composure, Woojin walked into the alley the punk had been shouting into.
“Just as I thought…….”
A man in the same fluorescent uniform as Woojin lay collapsed there.
The punk had been shouting at this man.
‘I remember. This is Senior Paul.’
He was the senior of the sanitation civil servant Woojin had been transmigrated into.
His name was Paul Ford.
A common member of Lemming City's underclass.
A life spent soaked in drugs, getting through one day at a time with no hope at all for the future.
The kind of guy who swaggered around just because he had become a sanitation civil servant a measly three months earlier.
‘We were cleaning up around the garbage bin.’
Then a punk had suddenly shown up with a gun and threatened them to hand over his things.
Paul was shot and ran, and Woojin ran the opposite way from Paul and hid.
And that led to now.
‘Is he dead……?’
Woojin put his fingers to Paul's neck.
He felt no pulse.
He put his ear to the chest, but again no sound came.
‘But it doesn't look like the gunshot killed him.’
Paul's trousers were stained red.
But there hadn't been much bleeding.
The bullet seemed to have grazed his thigh.
‘Cause of death looks like drugs?’
Paul was foaming at the mouth.
A pill bottle with its cap open was wedged in the folds of the clothing at his chest.
White tablets were rolling around the filthy alley.
Paul had probably been terrified.
When the punk shot him, his mind became unstable, and he swallowed the drug he usually depended on all the way to a lethal dose.
―You have acquired [Observation (Level 1)].
‘This is about average for Lemming City.’
A stupid punk who left his own things beside a garbage bin and then demanded compensation from sanitation civil servants.
A sanitation civil servant so scared of that punk that he took drugs and died.
Play [Steel Sweeper] long enough and you saw gutter lives like this fairly often.
From outside the monitor it had just felt fun and quirky.
Seen up close, it was a tragedy.
WHIRRRRRRR!
At that moment a strange sound came.
***
Woojin turned his head.
‘That man…….’
A man wearing a black suit cut close to his frame came into the alley.
Sunglasses hid his eyes, and in one hand he held a handgun polished to a new-looking shine.
WHIRRRRRRR!
A drone was floating beside him.
Not the toy-grade little drone you commonly saw in Korea, but a drone with a heavy body the size of a small carry-on case.
The drone gleamed like the black suit's handgun, and it had two gun barrels mounted underneath.
‘That's an elite office worker!’
The elite office worker was a mob that popped out in the mid-to-late stages of the game.
They were B1~B3 grade citizens, the city's elite class, and though they looked like ordinary office workers they were in fact quite dangerous.
Laser weapons would spring out of their high-grade prosthetics, or they would use a martial art that stunned you with a single hit, or magic that leveled everything around them.
They were an enemy on a completely different level from the punk Woojin had faced a moment ago.
‘Why is a bastard like that here?’
Doubt and wariness rose up, but Woojin calmly waited for the man in the suit.
Woojin was an undeniable city civil servant.
Sanitation civil servants were treated as consumables that could be swapped out at any time, but a civil servant was still a civil servant.
The elite class did not kill civil servants without justification.
There had been reasons why elite office workers appeared as enemies in the game.
In the first place, he couldn't even run.
How was he supposed to escape a flying drone with guns on it?
Step.
Before he knew it, the man in the suit had come right up in front of Woojin.
He wore a salesman's smile that looked drawn on, and spoke in a voice dripping with courtesy.
“Good day to you. I am Zodiac, a prosthetic recovery agent from Sacheondang Prosthetic Leasing. Might you be a colleague of our client, the sanitation civil servant Paul Ford?”
Sacheondang Prosthetic Leasing.
It was a subsidiary of Lemming City's megacorp, the Sacheondang Group, a company that leased prosthetics to customers.
It was similar to a car leasing company.
In exchange for lending a customer expensive prosthetics and performing the prosthetic surgery, the customer had to pay a lease fee for a set period; that was the contract structure.
Paul had apparently leased prosthetics as well.
Right on cue, the memory that Paul's left arm and right leg were prosthetics surfaced in Woojin's head.
Looking again, Paul's left hand was a smoothly polished metal hand.
‘So he didn't come here for me.’
The elite office worker wasn't an enemy after all.
Woojin relaxed somewhat and dealt with Zodiac.
“I am Senior Paul's coworker, yes.”
“Might I trouble you for a moment? I would like to hear the circumstances of our client Paul Ford's death.”
“If it's short, sure.”
“A simple explanation will do.”
Woojin pointed at the punk's corpse sprawled on the ground.
“That punk attacked us during work. Senior Paul was shot and hid here. After that I killed the punk, and I came into this alley to check on Senior Paul. And he was dead.”
“Thank you for informing me.”
Zodiac smiled with satisfaction and crouched down in front of Paul's corpse.
Then he picked up one of the white tablets rolling on the ground, put it in his mouth, and crunched it between his teeth.
Zodiac rolled the drug around in his mouth, tasting it, then spat it onto the ground.
Ptooey.
“Cheap narcotics. It does appear that our client Paul Ford died from an overdose rather than from the gunshot wound.”
The same diagnosis as Woojin's.
But rather than that, Woojin's attention went to the saliva Zodiac had just spat out.
However true it was that he hadn't swallowed the drug, there was no way an ordinary human could roll narcotics around in his mouth and be that fine.
‘This bastard really is a monster.’
On the outside he looked like an ordinary human, but peel back the skin and machinery would be turning underneath.
That smooth skin might be top-grade artificial skin.
In the meantime, Zodiac began the prosthetic recovery work in earnest.
First the drone rotated in the air and filmed Paul's corpse.
Then Zodiac laid the body out straight, and the drone landed in front of it.
The drone's lid opened and four robotic arms sprang out.
At the ends of the arms were sharp scalpels and pointed shears.
The arms' grippers seized Paul's clothes and the scalpels shredded them apart.
Paul's filthy naked body was laid bare to the world.
Only the prosthetic left arm and right leg gleamed and shone.
Next Zodiac stepped in.
He pulled a cable from his own neural interface and connected it to the prosthetic arm.
He seemed to be checking the arm's condition.
DRRRRRRR.
The five fingers of the prosthetic arm Paul had equipped writhed like tentacles.
At the end, the top surface of the arm flew open and a gun barrel and a blade sprang out.
“Hmm……. It appears client Paul never used the prosthetic arm's weapon systems at all.”
Zodiac examined the barrel and the blade closely, then smiled unpleasantly.
“Heh heh heh. Isn't it pathetic? He had a far better weapon than his opponent, and yet he hid in a place like this and died from overdosing on cheap narcotics.”
Woojin agreed that Paul was pathetic, but hearing it from Zodiac's mouth soured his mood.
It was like being looked down on from above.
“Ahem! I appear to have misspoken. That was not directed at you, of course, sir. You carried out your duty admirably, did you not?”
Zodiac saw Woojin's face harden and quickly changed the subject.
He piloted the drone and started the recovery of the prosthetics.
ZING. ZING. ZING.
The drone's robotic arms moved busily.
With perfectly coordinated motions they released the fastening devices at the prosthetic joints and put the arm and the leg into the drone's container.
CLUNK.
But the drone didn't stop there.
The robotic arms mounted surgical scalpels and lasers, and began dismantling Paul's corpse.
“I will say this in advance in case of any misunderstanding, but this is the contract made with our client Paul Ford. Upon client Paul's death, client Paul's body becomes the property of our company in its entirety. He received a discount to match, so I am certain client Paul was satisfied as well.”
Zodiac explained with a bright smile.
All the while, the drone was separating Paul's organs and loading them into the container.
Nausea rose in Woojin.
Dismantling a person like a pig?
And that was the result of a contract?
No matter the contract, was it acceptable for a human being to do that to another human being?
But in Lemming City that was normal.
If anyone else had seen this sight, they would have said, “He got a discount? Then nothing to be done,” and lost interest.
“Ah, sir. I will place the remaining waste in the garbage bin. Collecting this sort of thing doesn't pay, you see.”
Zodiac spoke politely, and the drone put Paul's corpse, its major organs removed, into the garbage bin.
The very image of a model citizen, tidying up the work site out of consideration for the sanitation civil servant.
Finally Zodiac bowed deeply at the waist and held out a business card with both hands.
“Should you ever need a prosthetic lease, please contact me. I will see that you are given the best terms in the industry.”
Woojin took the card without a word.
His mouth was drying out, and no matter how he swallowed, his throat stayed parched.
Honestly, the card wasn't even registering in his eyes.
It wasn't only because of the human-dismantling-and-garbage-disposal show that had unfolded in front of him.
That sight had been shocking, of course, but something more serious had surfaced, a memory that dug into bone and flesh and struck him in the back of the mind.
‘My heart…….’
Woojin put a hand to his chest.
Thump-thump.
It was beating like an ordinary heart, but when Woojin spoke the keyword…….
“Heart status.”
The neural interface stimulated his brain's visual cortex and showed fluorescent text in Woojin's field of view.
<Artificial Heart Status : Good>
<Warning. The regular inspection period for your artificial heart has passed. Inspection at the earliest opportunity is recommended.>