[Steel Sweeper] was a simple stage-clearing game.
There was a main story, but it was thin.
You could infer the setting and the worldbuilding from the short lines the characters exchanged, but there was no need to go out of your way to remember them.
You could just kill, upgrade, and kill again on repeat, and it made no difference to playing the game.
Because of that, characters with definite names were rare.
Most characters had their names set randomly, or were called by a randomly generated title.
For example, the school-dropout punk who lost his parents, or the office worker who obtained the strongest prosthetics after his divorce, or the drug-soaked retired-soldier mercenary.
The player character's name was random as well.
Just among the ones he could remember: Pepperoni Hamus, George Yamashita, Jackson Chang…….
Every time the game started, the player character was given a random name.
As if a cleaner were generated fresh each time.
So let's not ask whether that means Jinwoo Martinez is a randomly generated being as well.
It makes your head complicated.
In any case, among all of them there were characters with fixed names.
Fixed NPCs, so to speak. Named characters.
Tall Man.
Of all the fixed NPCs, he was the one most familiar to the player.
A broker who first appeared in the very first stage and, right up to the game's final stage, came to sell items wherever the player happened to be.
At a glance he looked like an ordinary shop/quest NPC placed there for play convenience, but think about it carefully and this broker was an incredibly formidable guy.
You could tell just from the fact that he showed up in the final stage to sell expensive items.
The final stage was a place crawling with the setting's strongest enemies, which meant Tall Man had the ability to do business at leisure in a place like that.
In fact, before he took up broker work, Tall Man was supposedly a fairly famous mercenary.
The type with no hesitation about replacing his own body with prosthetics.
Tall Man grew steadily stronger by swapping his body out for better prosthetics.
Then one day Tall Man was caught up in a certain incident.
His brain, which he had left to the last without prosthetizing, was replaced with a machine brain, in other words a cyberbrain.
What kind of incident it was, not even Tall Man knew.
Because the memories from before and after that incident had been wiped clean away.
Woojin didn't know either.
Because it was never revealed in the game.
Tall Man took that blank in his memory seriously.
The brain was the last piece of humanity he had left unprosthetized to the very end.
Was he, with even his brain turned entirely to machine, a robot, or a human?
Inside a labyrinth of identity that yielded no answer at all, Tall Man wanted to remain human.
And so Tall Man loved things that were “human.”
<We have arrived, Officer Woojin.>
Today too, the garbage truck came to a stop in front of a filthy garbage bin.
When Woojin blinked, the time came up on his neural display.
7:08 a.m.
“I'm a little early for the appointment.”
Tall Man was a broker who came to wherever his client was.
A service that fit perfectly for people like sanitation civil servants, tied to their work all day and hard-pressed to make time.
Contact Tall Man and you would agree on a place and a time to meet, and then meet there.
Woojin had contacted Tall Man's number yesterday and set up the appointment as well.
How had he gotten Tall Man's contact information?
It was in the inside pocket of the fluorescent sanitation civil servant work coat.
On the day Jinwoo Martinez started his first shift, a drone had come by and left a business card.
That alone told you what formidable information capability Tall Man had.
“I might as well clean until he gets here.”
He couldn't waste even a moment.
Only by cutting his work time could he earn rating points.
And only by earning rating points could he wring 2,000,000 credits out of Victor!
TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP!
Woojin picked up a garbage bag and tossed it lightly into the garbage bin.
CLUNK.
A clean goal.
Just then, a strange sound suddenly came.
“Grrrrrrrr. ROAR!”
The sort of onomatopoeia a middle-aged man who is terrible at acting spits out to play along with a small child.
And in fact, across the alley, a man in a gray suit who looked to be in his fifties was crooking his fingers like a tiger and glaring at Woojin.
Seeing it, Woojin held his breath and raised his guard.
‘Fuck……. That's a Tech Junkie.’
Tech Junkie.
The term for bastards whose brains had gone bad from using electronic narcotics, commonly known as tech-meth.
Tech-meth was a program that projected extremely stimulating experiential information directly into the cyberbrain, making you feel as if you were living another life.
Something like a viciously vivid dream, or a virtual reality game, you might say.
The problem was when errors occurred in that process.
The brain region governing self-identity broke down, the original self disappeared, and the person was reprogrammed into a new 'something' mixed together with the tech-meth's fabricated data.
It wasn't even a proper scrap of data.
Just a hash made of brain and program tangled together.
‘Not good.’
They were dangerous bastards for Woojin as he was now.
Tech-meth was mainly used by the city's elite class, people with money to handle, and men like that equipped themselves with basic combat ability for self-defense.
That combat ability was at a level that could massacre the ordinary back-alley punks and gangs.
Put bluntly, Tech Junkies were enemies that appeared from the middle of the game onward.
‘Why did a bastard like that pop out in a place like this?’
Woojin chewed his lip and complained inwardly, but in truth there was no rule saying one couldn't pop out.
This was the real world, not a game with stage difficulty thoroughly partitioned off.
“Swish. Thump.”
The Tech Junkie made a strange movement.
With both arms raised, he moved his upper body left and right like a praying mantis.
And while doing it, he spat out mimetic words that meant nothing.
“Swish. Thump.”
You mustn't try to find meaning in it.
Because it was the behavior of a man who had lost his self, just a lunatic.
“ROAR!”
The bastard made the tiger cry again.
In that instant, Woojin instinctively threw his body to the side.
―You have acquired [Danger Sense (Level 1)].
SHING-SHING-SHINGG—!
A gale of blades swept the alley.
Blades sprang out from the Tech Junkie's legs and collided with the asphalt, the building wall, and the garbage bin, throwing up sparks.
Garbage bags were cut open and all manner of trash scattered.
A blade grazed past Woojin's leg.
‘Luckily it's a basic-model Tech Junkie.’
The elite class had no particular need to fight enemies.
Enough leg power to escape was sufficient.
So most of the elites replaced only their legs with prosthetics.
When men like that lost their selves doing tech-meth, they became basic-model Tech Junkies.
‘If it's a basic model, I can handle it somehow.’
Woojin's leg had been cut.
A long tear had opened in his black work trousers.
But the wound wasn't large.
His skin had been cut a little deeply, no more.
Because the Tier 4 martial art [Diamond Qigong] had hardened his skin and muscle.
On top of that, a Tech Junkie's mind was broken, so it couldn't make strategic judgments.
Even now it wasn't finishing Woojin off but repeating that strange tiger imitation, wasn't it?
“Grrrrrrrr. ROAR!”
With luck he could take the Tech Junkie down, and if not, holding out until Tall Man came would let him get past this obstacle somehow.
“Swish. Thump!”
“Swish. Thump!”
“‘Swish, thump’ — bullshit!”
Just then a man's voice came from up in the sky.
A muscular man with nothing but a fur pelt around his waist swung a crude two-handed sword as he dropped from the top of a building.
‘That isn't Tall Man. A mercenary?’
The mercenary was bizarre even at a glance.
Every other part of him was bare flesh, but his head, hands, and feet alone were metal prosthetics.
The sight brought to mind a whole chicken with the head, wingtips, and feet cut off, just before frying.
With metal hands, feet, and a head stuck onto it, you might say.
But his skill was nothing as laughable as a chicken.
The mercenary's sword fell like a meteor, aimed at the Tech Junkie.
CLANG—!
The Tech Junkie raised a leg vertically and blocked the attack.
Using the recoil of the collision, the Tech Junkie fell back and arched his spine like a cat.
The Tech Junkie and the mercenary who had suddenly appeared stood facing each other.
“ROAR!”
“Wahahaha! A Tech Junkie is no easy opponent after all!”
The mercenary spread both arms wide and burst out laughing.
The way his pectorals and abs rippled reeked of sweat just to look at.
“But a tin can is bound to lose to a human! That is the law of Mother Nature herself!”
It was the sort of talk that drove the listener out of his mind.
Wasn't that mercenary's own skull a tin-can prosthetic?
Judging by appearance alone, the Tech Junkie looked more like a person.
“Waaaaaaaaah! Drop dead!!”
The crazy barbarian mercenary let out a war cry and charged the Tech Junkie.
The Tech Junkie swung its steel legs at a speed the eye couldn't follow and did backflips, trading blows with the crazy barbarian mercenary.
CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG—!
‘First a Tech Junkie, and now a crazy barbarian mercenary.’
Unexpected beings had abruptly popped out and started a fight, but Woojin wasn't flustered.
If anything, he was relieved.
Tech Junkies often belonged to wealthy families or corporations.
Groups like that couldn't tolerate the fact that a Tech Junkie had emerged from among their own members.
So they would commission mercenaries to kill the Tech Junkie.
‘That crazy mercenary must have come here on a commission to dispose of the Tech Junkie too.’
The threat to his life passed almost disappointingly easily.
The problem was how much this mercenary would demand as the price of his life.
There was nothing free in Lemming City.
The crazy barbarian mercenary would try to squeeze a modest bit of pocket money out of him, claiming he had saved Woojin's life.
Before he knew it, the fight was over.
SHLAAK—!
The Tech Junkie's upper body, cut on a diagonal, flew over and dropped in front of Woojin.
There was no sign of the Tech Junkie feeling pain.
It only muttered “Grrr, rrrrr, roar” like a machine reciting its assigned lines.
“You all right, cleaner friend?”
The crazy barbarian mercenary came toward Woojin with a broad grin.
“Anywhere hurt?”
“Just a scrape.”
“Ah! Good! Nothing serious can happen to the cleaner friend who keeps the city looking decent! Wahahahaha!”
Had the fight with the Tech Junkie excited him?
The crazy barbarian mercenary was excessively friendly.
“If you want the price of my life, just say so. Don't expect too much. As you can see, I don't have much money.”
“The price of your life? Hmm……. I did want to squeeze some out of you at first, but hearing you say that makes me not want to.”
Like some contrary frog.
But he was a lunatic, so the behavior made sense.
You shouldn't expect logic from a lunatic.
“Besides, I like natural things. You're natural, aren't you, friend? I can tell at a glance. Machines kept to a minimum. Bare body with nothing but a neural interface? Good. Good.”
“Don't they say your body, hair, and skin are received from your parents?”
“That's it! Exactly! You must not install things like prosthetics! A cyberbrain is even worse! Your soul-GHOST flies away!”
Did a GHOST dwell in a cyberbrain as well?
This was an old chestnut of a topic in Lemming City.
Even with magi-engineering and technology as advanced as they were, the existence of the GHOST had never been proven.
But Woojin, who had cleared the game any number of times, knew.
The fact that a GHOST does dwell in a cyberbrain.
Of course, in Lemming City more people didn't know that fact.
Which was why so many agonized over the problem of the GHOST.
“Hahaha! Let us naturalists get along well!”
The crazy barbarian threw an arm around Woojin's shoulders.
At that, Woojin's face went stiff.
Had this guy installed an armpit-stink sprayer in his tin-can head in place of a GHOST?
“SHIIIIIIT! What is that FUCKING savage doing here?”
Just then, a thick string of curses mixed with electronic tones came.
Woojin checked the clock on his neural display and quickly pulled away from the barbarian.