Badland Hunters follows a huntsman trying to save a teenage girl, who’s trapped in an apartment complex to be experimented on by a mad scientist, who has created an army of formidable men with reptilian regenerative abilities.
Yang Gi-Su is a mad doctor who has already taken over a hundred lives for his horrific experiments as he tries to revive his dying daughter.
His test subjects either die or gain regenerative abilities akin to that of reptiles.
However, his experiments haven’t yielded 100% success yet, so the users have to frequently inject themselves with a dose of a green fluid.
The reptilian abilities
The abilities of these reptilian mutated humans are diabolical.
One can hack them, shoot them, stab them, and even crush them to a great degree, without managing to kill them for good.
They are powerful and pain doesn’t affect them as much as it does the ordinary folk.
They have regenerative abilities where they can spring back alive even after being shot repeatedly.
It is only when their heads are shot or decapitated that they truly die, as their regenerative abilities halt once that happens.
Furthermore, they can withstand the extremely harsh conditions of the wasteland because they can go days and days without drinking water or even eating.
Gi-Su’s aim with the experiments is to make a body capable of surviving dehydration and malnutrition.
However, his experiments, even after so many deaths, never yield the optimal results.
Origins
It all started three years ago before the great earthquake turned all of Seoul, South Korea into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The mad doctor Yang Gi-Su’s daughter Yo-Seon is on her deathbed, blinking in and out of consciousness. He’s scrambling to save her.
His room is littered with dead bodies, with mutated reptiles crawling all over the bloodied floor.
As Yang Gi-Su injects himself with a green liquid, the authorities arrive and stop him from injecting his daughter with the same stuff.
They tell him his horrific experiments have already claimed over 100 lives and confiscated the injections. All of this happens in the prologue of Badland Hunters.
A massive earthquake strikes just then, and almost everyone dies.
Yang Gi-Su gained regenerative abilities from that injection and he managed to use it on his daughter as well.
So not only does he survive getting crushed by all the rubble, but he also manages to keep his daughter.
She is just an upper torso at this point; alive, but bereft of consciousness.
Time passes, and he drags his daughter, encased in a glass container kept inside a trolley bag, to an apartment complex that somehow survived the earthquake.
The apartment complex
An Air Force unit joined the survivors to set up an aquifer there and get the building up and running again.
Being a doctor proves beneficial for Yang Gi-Su, who’s valued highly there. He soon familiarizes the unit with his experiments and injects them with the doses.
They help him continue his horrific experiments on the kids of the tenants of the complex.
This is where his men bring Han Su-Na, one of the protagonists in Badland Hunters whose friend later comes to rescue her and causes Gi-Su’s ultimate downfall.
Only one member of the unit, Sergeant Lee Eun-Ho, rebels against him and her colleagues, eventually escaping the complex.
The apartment complex is rife with the soldiers and the people who follow Gi-Su like a cult. Eventually, he manages to get the unit to gather a total of nineteen teenagers.
He continues his experiments while Sergeant Kwon gets restless regarding the doses that still have to be periodically administered.
He asks when they can reach the stage where taking any more doses won’t be necessary, but Gi-Su asks him to be patient.
He is killed and his experiments end with him, before Badland Hunters concludes.
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