episode_0013

“If you become a branch manager, can you live in a house like this? Wow… . But why do I have to walk so much?”

“I’m sorry my house is small.”

Despite her grumbling voice, Sonagi was steadily climbing up the stairs.

Ji-hoon and So-na-gi arrived at the huge apartment where the branch manager of Incheon Central Bank lived and were walking up the stairs, sweating profusely.

The apartment building, which was aptly named ‘skyscraper’, had an astonishing 40 floors, but there was no elevator.

“No.. I thought about it. Couldn’t I just hack the camera in the elevator?”

“There’s also a camera filming the elevator entrance, so it can’t be done. You said there’s no camera on the stairs either.”

“I didn’t know it was this high…Fuck…”

After swearing for an unknown number of times, I finally reached the 40th floor.

Ji-hoon’s thighs were so sore that he felt like sitting down for a while, but So-na-gi didn’t look tired at all, perhaps because she had an implant inserted into her leg.

Rather, she was stretching her body by raising both arms up, doing a big stretch, and then exhaling with a whoosh.

“I explained that if you open the front door and go inside, you never know what will happen.”

“Hey.. Even so, would you hire a security guard at your house? It’s an apartment.”

“You can’t understand the minds of those bastards who live off of corporate money. They even sell out the country, so how vicious must the branch manager be who protects the money.”

Sonagi’s hand grabbed the zipper on her stomach and pulled it up. Her ample breasts were bouncing up and down, but Jihoon couldn’t afford to get an erection just by looking at it.

Ji-hoon had a pistol in his hand, just like last time. I wanted to ask seriously if he had a K2, but Sonagi’s small arsenal didn’t seem to have any such weapons.

All of the guns had a strange futuristic feel that you would expect to see in any game, and even if they gave me an automatic rifle, I honestly didn’t have the confidence to shoot it properly.

Ji-hoon takes a deep breath and nods his head to signal, believing that she, as a troubleshooter, will be able to handle the fighting herself, as long as he can.

“From now on. I’m going to open this emergency exit and go to room 4004. You know you have to open the front door right away, right?”

“Of course. When I open the door, you go inside the house, knock the branch manager unconscious, and come out, right?”

“That’s right, then you’ll get on a brand-new white AV. It’ll roughly recognize the branch manager’s fingerprint and drive itself, so don’t even think about hacking it.”

“You can’t do it anyway,” Sonagi says, shrugging his shoulders.

“But why do you call it AV? It’s the same abbreviation as Adult Video.”

“Oh my god… Who would see something like that these days? It’s an abbreviation for Air Vehicle. It’s too long to express in Korean. Something like a hovercraft would be a bit tacky.”

Ji-hoon was taken aback by the comment that he was rustic, but he didn’t argue because he had long ago stopped understanding the aesthetic sense of this world.

Sonagi thought he had had enough of the small talk and put his hand on the emergency exit and opened it gently.

“Start hacking!”

Ji-hoon puts his hand on the smartphone. Unlike the name ‘hypnosis app’, the ‘hacking’ function was clear. The smartphone was so active that it seemed like it was originally made for hacking.

“Good..!”

Hacking is easy. Sometimes there is no ICE rating at all, so when it asks you “Do you want to hack?”, just press Y and a small puzzle will appear.

It was such an easy puzzle that even an elementary school student could solve it, so I was able to unlock the front door with a few moves of my index finger.

“Park Ji-hye!!! Where are you!”

Sonagi opened the front door with a shout, and at that moment Jihoon noticed something. There was something else besides the front door that could be scanned.

“Hey! It’s raining! Get down!!”

Sonagi’s body was faster than Jihoon could scream. The moment he opened the door, he saw a huge turret hanging from the ceiling, and its gun was pointed at him.

Sonagi, the problem solver who had handled numerous requests, quickly hid her body behind a pillar, gathered her saliva, and swallowed deeply!

“Ugh..Fuck..”

Bullets poured out of the turret with a loud noise that hurt my ears. It was foolish to storm the front door.

“Hey.. Sonagi, what should I do? Isn’t this fucked up?”

“Can’t hack it?”

“The ICE rating is ‘perfect’ so I can’t even eat the seeds”

“Oh my… Seriously, I should catch him alive…”

Sonagi clicks his tongue and takes out a small, cute lump of metal from his belt pocket. The little guy has the power to destroy any nearby electronic devices when he explodes.

Unlike an EMP, this bomb only emits a single powerful electric blast, so there was no need to worry about the cyberware and implants of the person throwing it malfunctioning.

“This is really expensive… Ugh, I can’t help it. I’ll have to get one from Grandma Ha later.”

Sonagi swallows his saliva and throws the bomb at 4004.

-Phase support support!!!

Flash! The bomb blasted electricity in all directions with a flash of light. A small scream was heard from inside the room, but the turret did not work anymore.

“Go to AV and leave the door open!”

Sonagi shouted and pointed his finger to the end of the hallway, where there was an AV parked in midair.

The pure white body with its curves was quite beautiful, and where the wheels would have been if it had been an ordinary car, there was an engine elegantly emitting blue flames.

“This… If a drunk kid gets on it, he’ll fall off and die…”

Even if you get close to the AV, you can’t open the door, and hacking is also impossible because ICE’s rating is ridiculously high.

There was a barbed wire between Ji-hoon and AV, but luckily it was able to be removed because when you press the red button next to it, it moves to the side with a rattling sound.

“I can’t even hack this, so how am I supposed to open the door? I didn’t even give you the car keys…”

“You still haven’t opened the door?!”

On the right shoulder of the approaching Sonagi, who was making a noise, lay a woman who had fainted.

“How do I open the door without my car keys?”

At Ji-hoon’s obvious question, Sonagi clicks his tongue and takes the hand of the branch manager named Park Ji-hye to the car door.

Beep- The car door opens upwards with a light sound. A pure white staircase appears inside the car, so contrary to Ji-hoon’s worries, he does not fall to the ground while riding the AV.

“Killing tea…”

The AV, which was made to be a four-seater, was completely different from what Ji-hoon had in mind for a car.

Although there was a driver’s seat, it was in ‘autonomous driving mode’, so Sonagi didn’t sit there and sat with Jihoon in the back seat with their butts pressed together.

The overall feel of the car was more like a limousine. It was a four-seater and had a futuristic design, so it didn’t feel exactly like a limousine, but…

At least that’s what Ji-hoon felt. This AV felt even more luxurious because there was a large hole between the back seats for drinks and a space in front of it for snacks and other food.

“This is your first time seeing something like this? If you were in Seoul, there would be a ton of them.”

“Hey.. You’ve seen it a lot down there, but have you ridden it yourself?”

Now I’m used to lying.

Ji-hoon shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s going to rain,” so he agreed and made the woman he was carrying on his shoulders sit in the passenger seat in front of him.

The passenger seat was not looking forward, but rather at the back seat where Sonagi and Jihoon were sitting.

Thanks to that, Ji-hoon was able to see the face of Park Ji-hye, a bank branch manager with black hair and a pretty face that made it hard to believe she was in her 30s.

“I’m bleeding from my nose. Is this okay?”

“Of course. It’s just that the brain chip overloaded due to the electricity from the bomb I threw earlier. There’s no danger to your life.”

“Really? What if the electronic circuit board breaks down and your brain gets burned?”

“If that were the case, would I have just had a nosebleed and peed myself?”

Only after hearing Sonagi’s words did Jihoon realize that the woman’s legs in front of him were really wet.

Park Ji-hye, who wore the typical office lady’s attire, had a pretty pretty face and body, but she couldn’t compete with Sonagi.

She was wearing a black H-skirt that gave off a sophisticated vibe, coffee-colored stockings, and a light pink blouse over it. Just above the blouse, she was wearing a black jacket with a large logo on it, but it was completely different from the Lucky Venus logo I had seen at the convenience store.

‘It’s a Chinese character…’

I don’t know. Looking at complicated Chinese characters just gave me a headache, and I didn’t think knowing what they were saying would help.

“Where are you going from now on?”

“We need to go to a place where we can torture this woman all day without any problems.”

“Torture? Why torture?”

Whether Ji-hoon was surprised or not, So-na-gi didn’t care at all and grabbed Park Ji-hye’s thumb and rubbed it against the driver’s seat.

[Hello, Ms. Park Ji-hye. Where should I take you?]

A clean and pretty woman’s voice was heard from inside the car. Ji-hoon was a little surprised, but not enough to scream. He could hear this level of voice even through the navigation system.

“Let’s go to Incheon Port… Oh, the location is here. There will be a container prepared by Grandma.”

As Sonagi speaks, she taps the screen a few times and the AV finally starts to move with a humming sound.

“Okay, once we get into the container, I’m going to take all the clothes off this woman and have her sit on a chair.”

“I’m good, but is there a reason why I should do that?”

“I’m not taking it off just to look at you, right? I’m just trying to access the access port on the back of your neck to extract your memories. ”

“If you do that, you won’t die, right? It’s either my mistake or you intentionally killing someone.”

“Of course not! If you put it in a bathtub full of ice, the heat won’t rise and your brain won’t burn!”

The rain was a bit stuffy, so she reached out to drink the beverage that had just come out. The refreshing feeling eased her mind a little, but Jihoon was the opposite.

“Sonagi, extracting memories from that head. Is there no other way? Anyway, it means you can die.”

“That’s the fastest. You…. Are you feeling sorry for this woman because she peed and her nose was bleeding?”

“No, that’s not it. It’s dangerous. Hey. What if there’s something… a safety device in this woman’s head?”

Ji-hoon tries his best, really, to recall stories he’s seen in his games and movies and tell his story.

“You said the bank blueprints were really important. You said you only showed a part of them when repairing them? Hey, if it’s really important, should I just let them take it while they’re kidnapped like this?”

“… Hmm…”

“If I were this woman, I would definitely set a trap. If we were to forcibly take something from her brain chip, there would probably be a program that would automatically delete the blueprint or erase her memories. What do you think?”

“I’m not a netrunner, so I don’t know. But… definitely, it’s happened before. There was a netrunner I worked with, and he said he was caught in a trap, and then he died from a fever.”

Sonagi looks at Jihoon with serious eyes for a moment. He was Sonagi’s lover and a precious person, so she didn’t want to expose him to such a dangerous situation.

The problem is that in order to make money, you need the data in Park Ji-hye’s chip…”

“I have an idea. Sonagi. When we get to the container, leave me and this woman alone.”

“Why?”

“You have to concentrate.”

Ji-hoon smiles and touches his smartphone. If only he could hack it, it wouldn’t be a problem to get this woman’s cooperation.

I could have created a situation where I was desperate to eat the food, but handing over the data in my head to save my own life felt as easy as eating cold porridge.

“Okay… If you say so, I’ll give you plenty of time. But, if it’s more than an hour late, there’s no soup!”