Live On
Chang-woon hid himself in the dark. Through the side window he had leapt into, Silvester came after him. Chang-woon began to move even as he spoke.
"Thanks for taking the bait. For biting on a provocation that cheap."
"Not really. Once you're dead it's her turn anyway, so there's nothing to thank me for."
Silvester said it as he racked the slide back.
"Even so, that doesn't mean I have no chance of turning this around, does it?"
"You're talking too much. Sounds like you've spent the last of your strength."
In that instant Silvester rose. Chang-woon was tucked behind a massive iron hulk of a milling machine; even a Barrett would have had no clean way to reach him. Silvester moved in silence, fast, circling for a better angle.
But Chang-woon was a vampire as well. Even in this darkness he moved with ghostly certainty and kept just as quiet. Darkness meant nothing to either of them.
"Stop wasting time. Even if you took Juk-yo's blood, it won't become power right away."
"Ah. It takes about as long as an anaconda digesting a wild boar."
Chang-woon answered and let out a breath. If only he'd had a little more time—not even to fully bind Juk-yo's blood, just enough that he hadn't been wounded—this would have been manageable. That one of the Twenty-Four Jinma was being hunted down by a hunter like this was intolerable. Of course the man had been called a Jinma-slayer for centuries and had been a thorn in vampire society the whole time, but still—Chang-woon had been too arrogant. He'd told himself a mere hunter could never put him in real danger. And now look at him.
"Ugly."
If only he had carried proper weapons like Phantom or Hecate and the others. Kevlar thread, of all things. Chang-woon thought of how careless he had been. And yet the art of stringing lines wherever he went, then snaring a target from every direction the moment they brushed against one, was in some ways more terrifying than a gun.
"Depends on the opponent, does it?"
With the sound of Muramasa cutting the air, the Kevlar fiber—said to be tougher than steel—snapped. Silvester leapt high enough to touch the ceiling, cleared the milling machine in a single vault over the doorframe, and opened fire.
"Kh—!"
Chang-woon snatched up a can of toluene from the factory floor and flung himself out a window in one motion, escaping the barrage. To spin through the air in a soft arc and still place precise shots mid-flip was a feat most vampires couldn't manage.
"Quick little bastard."
Even with fairly serious wounds, Chang-woon was still moving like lightning. Taking the toluene—was he planning to set a fire? But now that it was certain the creature had killed Juk-yo and drunk his blood, Silvester could not let him go. Leave a monster with a VT past a million free to be born, and there was no telling what it would become later.
Silvester gripped the Desert Eagle and Muramasa and climbed the wall after Chang-woon's scent. He planted his feet on rebar as if the vertical face were level ground, a sight that left Jeong-ah, watching the fight, speechless. Silvester followed the blood-smell up the wall and stopped around the eighth floor. Kevlar threads hung across the window.
"Hah!"
He sliced the threads with one stroke of the blade and dove inside. The vampire had no grenades, no other explosives—nothing but toluene and Kevlar thread. Cutting the lines and going in should have carried no risk.
But then the severed threads, as if they were living things, lunged for Silvester. He twisted at once, carved them apart with a cross-cut, and slipped free of the snare.
A blast of hot wind slammed into him from behind.
"Kh—!"
Silvester spun with Muramasa raised. Chang-woon stood there holding the toluene can. The can itself was empty.
"Khh—"
He tried to speak, but the gale made it nearly impossible. Silvester sidestepped and swept his blade through the Kevlar threads riding the wind toward him. Then heat crashed over him all at once. Chang-woon had vaporized the toluene and hurled it at Silvester on a superheated blast. Vaporized toluene needed only a spark to become an inferno.
"Kh—!"
Silvester charged straight in, swinging Muramasa at Chang-woon. Chang-woon flicked open a Zippo and struck a flame. With a weary face he gave a thin smile and closed his eyes.
"Damn. There goes my platinum card."
"Haaah!"
Muramasa fell in the same instant the firestorm erupted. A concussion rolled out and black smoke billowed upward. Old grease clinging to the structure sloughed free and hammered the ground; every window in the surrounding buildings shattered at once.
Still the greedy tongues of flame refused to die. They climbed and blackened the building through its windows.
With the blast, a rain of debris poured down from the sky. Dark crimson blood came flying through the air, gathering and coiling in front of her. The runes Chang-woon had written were a targeting mark meant to pass his blood to another vampire; he had meant to take Silvester with him, ready to die. In the instant of the explosion Jeong-ah knew by instinct that Chang-woon was already gone.
"Y-you fool."
That was all she could say. Under a dark red sky, through bitter smog, the fire kept eating the building. She still did not fully understand what it meant—that a Jinma who had endured for thousands of years would perish together with a human hunter, and how hard he had worked to keep her human, and why, when her wounds finally forced her transformation—not a natural one; she might have caught it from the air after being attacked while with a Jinma and seeing blood, or the attack itself might have shattered the enigma—he had sent her both Juk-yo's blood and his own through the runes…
No. She understood the reason, at least. He was telling her to live. He had wanted her to live as a human, but living as a vampire was not so terrible either. Yes. Even if she had to become a vampire—live. That was why he had given her his blood and Juk-yo's.
Wailing sirens began to rise. She drew in the blood of Juk-yo and Chang-woon still hanging in the air, then vanished into the dark.
In the end she became the Jinma Jeong-ya and disappeared from Seoul. On a moonless night of the new moon she settled what little property she had and left her home behind. It was almost a mercy that she had nothing left worth keeping.
She had family and friends, of course, but none of it felt urgent. Still, cutting herself off from the past and becoming a resident of the moonlit night, living in that world of the mad moon—even she felt a faint regret. It had been only two days. In truth, barely a single day of knowing him.
Had she loved him? Absolutely not. Had he loved her? That wasn't it either. He had lived and died for pure self-satisfaction, thoroughly and completely, and the woman he had truly loved was almost certainly Tachihara Ayako, who had loved him back with equal sincerity. Even so, Jeong-ah decided to accept Chang-woon's will.
Vampire or human—she would live.
"Mmm…"
When Jeong-ah opened her eyes, the clock showed seven. Right—she had slept in a PC bang. She couldn't tell if it was seven at night or seven in the morning, but no sunlight reached this place, and that was good. She scrubbed at her face and glanced at the seat beside her. Chang-hyun was gone—bathroom, maybe—and a cup of instant noodles and a couple of drinks sat in his place.
For a ridiculous second she wondered if he had abandoned her, then she heard the sound of him from the restroom. The PC bang had the absurd luxury of shower facilities, yet the bathrooms were unisex. She walked carefully toward the door.
"…"
She didn't know why, but Chang-hyun was inside, weeping quietly. The man who always seemed so bright in front of her, who looked as if he would never give in to despair, was somehow crying. Of course no tears would fall. But still…
Did the absence of tears mean he felt no grief?
I am a hero.
Stronger than anyone, just, and brave.
Of course I wasn't always so splendid. At first I was the one everyone kicked around and looked down on. Yes—I'll say it plainly: I studied a little too well and moved a little too slowly, and I became the other kids' favorite target.
But something happened, and I changed completely. Every last thing those bastards had done to me—the abuse, the mockery, the humiliation—I paid back in full.
Ah, human beings are such ugly, fragile things. Everyone crawls for anyone stronger and does whatever they please to anyone weaker, as if the weak will stay weak forever. Even in those few short school years, people torment others for no better reason than a bad mood or a bad vibe. But when the tables turn, the catharsis is so intense there are no words for it. Yes. This reversal is pure joy.
Even knowing how childish it is, giving them back exactly the abuse they dealt out is a pleasure. The rightful thrill of rightful revenge. Petty and base, but that much more instinctive. Watching creatures who, only days ago, looked at me like vermin now bleed at my feet and beg for mercy—it's the same catharsis as the ugly duckling. That filthy little feeling: You bastards looked down on me. Just wait. I'll change so hard I'll make every one of you choke on it.
So I am a hero.
Se-geon laid the blades out across the floor and looked them over with something close to emotion. The knives he had taken from Deok-yeon's house—every last piece of 420 stainless was finally spent. What remained were all forged steel. Of course none of them were true swords; they were nothing more than factory plate cut into blade shapes and given an edge. Even so, steel was a far more trustworthy material for a cutting weapon than stainless.
That alone was not enough to move a man as emotionally arid as Se-geon. What held him for a moment was the simple fact that the clumsy vampire hunter who had bolted from Deok-yeon's house had finally become someone who could pull his own weight. A rite of passage, maybe. The feeling of having come of age. Of course a vampire hunter who washed blood with blood celebrating a rite of passage was about as seemly as a man crowing, "I've finally become a full-fledged robber!"
"The problem is who I stick these into."
Se-geon took up a Japanese sword whose edge carried a blue wave pattern and carefully set a whetstone against the blade. That pattern, called a hamon, appeared naturally on blades forged from iron sand—but most of Se-geon's knives had been cut from plate, not forged from sand iron. The hamon was artificial. A few strokes of the stone and it flaked away like cheap plating.
Factory blades, made without care—but more than enough to cut human bone and flesh, and they worked just as well on lower vampires and powerful noble vampires alike. As long as the road led to Seoul, the steel didn't care how it got there.
"Jeong-ya and Chang-young, huh."
By their human names, Lee Jeong-ah and Kim Chang-hyun; among vampires and hunters they were now called Jeong-ya—Quiet Night—and Chang-young—Azure Shadow. They had inherited Jinya and Chang-woon, but their spirits were considered too damaged, the power of transmigratory succession already lost. In other words, they were already too far gone to be called Jinya and Chang-woon in essence.
So people had measured them against the old names and given them new ones as vampires.
Why should we use names Tetra Anax handed out as common currency? Still… they do fit.
The vampire king, Tetra Anax, had the air of a scholar managing the entire vampire species. He treated the twenty-four bloodlines as something like endangered stock. Even vampire hunters he regarded as a necessary evil, or a tool for population control.
Which meant that risking your life as a vampire hunter was already factored into Tetra Anax's calculations. In that sense he truly was the king of the moonlit night. That didn't put Se-geon in any position to nod along and say, Thank you for your hard work ruling this madhouse, Your Majesty.
When a creature wiped out your whole family, shattered your life and personality and self, and finally set your soul on fire—and then watched even your life-or-death resistance like a show on the palm of its hand—that creature was an enemy that had to be brought down.
He geared up, armored himself in ballistic and stab-proof layers, then pulled motorcycle protection over the top. Two vampires far too weak to be called true Jinma were wandering the streets of Seoul; tonight the world belonged to the mad moon. Vampires had multiplied past the point of control.
Of course it wasn't so much that there were more vampires as that the hunters who could thin them out had dwindled, making the vampires look numerous by comparison.
"Come to think of it, Deok-yeon hasn't shown his face in a while."
Se-geon stepped outside and locked the door. A steel fire door, a wide basement, soundproofing layered in so thick that even gunfire underground would never reach the street—this was the new hideout Kenneth Yang had given him for a hundred million won. The basement's effective range was under ten meters, but it was serviceable enough for SOM—shooting on the move. Rolling and putting rounds into targets was essential practice for hunters who mostly fought in cities. Sandbags stacked against ricochet in the tight space went without saying.
Which meant that if the police ever raided the place—or even if a petty thief wandered in—Se-geon was finished. So he locked every bolt with care and taped the door seams against any unexpected visitor.
"All right. Shall we?"
Se-geon muttered to himself and turned. The still-cold night air cooled a body wrapped in layer after layer of ballistic material. Tonight, as every night, he would take payment for a ruined ordinary life in vampire blood. He swung onto the bike and tore away like a gale.