I Am Still a Vampire
"If we don't help, won't there be fallout?"
"I doubt it'll come to that."
"Here — this is what we've got so far. Look it over."
Silvester handed Se-gun a file. Se-gun flipped through it and nearly jumped. Flex Medical was a pharmaceutical conglomerate. Even if vampires ran the place from the inside, the vast majority of people who worked there were ordinary civilians whose only knowledge of vampires came from movies. Blowing the whole building sky-high with explosives would be nothing short of pure madness.
That was why Se-gun had been digging for a way to minimize civilian casualties while maximizing the hit — only to discover that Silvester had already finished every last scrap of that research. All those nights Silvester had spent roaming from place to place gathering intelligence had clearly been for this. Se-gun could only click his tongue in awe at the sheer volume of material.
"Don't touch the main headquarters building. The security detail is entirely vampires, so you already have a rough idea where the blast points should be, right? Hmm?"
"Yeah."
"Then go draw up a proper plan. And when it's time to move, you contact me first. Understood? That is the condition on which I'm giving you this intel."
"Got it."
Se-gun nodded at Silvester's warning. All that remained now was to wait for the explosives to come in. A real demolitions expert could do serious damage with a single brick of C-4, but Se-gun was a complete amateur — the kind of beginner who thought all you needed was a fuse and a boom.
The rest of the printouts finished just then; he punched them into the file. With this much, one or two more boxes of explosives would be enough to try. The remaining C-4 would come through Kenneth Yang next month… which meant roughly a month of breathing room before the operation went live.
"I'll be heading out, then."
Se-gun took Silvester's materials and rose from his seat. He needed to get home, rest a little, and service the Glock 18 he'd used yesterday. There were books to study, too… Somehow it felt warped — that even a vampire hunter who had thrown away his future and gone feral still had to study, maintain his gear, and train.
How much better would it be if he poured that same energy into something constructive? But he couldn't. That was what made him human.
Turning those thoughts over in his mind, Se-gun left Arjuna behind.
Night fell again. After hopping from one hospital ER to another to catch up on sleep, I got up and started moving. I'd beaten those bastards so badly yesterday that the 119 rescue team had eventually been called to haul them off. At first I'd gone to the hospital across the street without thinking, only to nearly have a heart attack when they wheeled those same guys into the ER. So I'd switched hospitals — though I still didn't know how any of this would turn out. They had done terrible things to me, sure, but if I paid them back in kind, didn't that just make me the same as them?
And yet, deep in my chest, another thought rose up: Of course it was fair. A cat doesn't owe a rat any consideration, and a rat doesn't owe a cat any either. When those guys tormented an innocent me, had they stopped to think about any of that? I'd only paid them back. And I had no reason to feel guilty about it. I was the victim.
But my personal revenge seemed to be finished. Beating them any further wouldn't accomplish a thing. Maybe it was time to do something else. Even if I was a vampire, this power clearly exceeded anything humans could imagine. Then I ought to use it for the world. That was the thought that came to me. And I would find other vampires like myself.
So I stepped back out into the night streets. A few days ago I'd watched a current-affairs program about a retired army general who'd sexually assaulted a neighborhood child and walked away without any punishment. It had been around here — but where, exactly? I tried to dredge up the memory. Back then I hadn't been paying that much attention to the TV, so the location escaped me. I only remembered it because it was near my house.
"Hmm. Maybe I should hit a PC bang and rewatch the old episode?"
I patted my pockets. Not a single coin. No money to get in, no money to eat. Drinking blood kept my strength from failing, but I still wanted actual food. Being a vampire was seriously messed up. I looked around. I needed to earn meal money. Night work, maybe? But my clothes were filthy, and I clearly looked underage — who would hire me? A gas station? Mulling it over, I trudged on.
I'd become a vampire a week ago — or rather, to explain the process properly, I had to go back much further.
My school life had been hell. Plenty of people could say that, of course, but the abuse the other kids inflicted on me was so vicious I still couldn't find words for it. Even an actual enemy wouldn't have been hated that much.
It hadn't started that way from the beginning. A bunch of half-delinquent types — not quite real delinquents, which somehow made them worse — who called themselves my friends had one day started blackmailing me. They needed money for a trip, so they were going to shake down the whole class and use the proceeds. The sheer gall of it was staggering.
Naturally I refused, and when that didn't work I told the homeroom teacher. People call that snitching, but I've never believed snitching is wrong. Isn't it better to report something unjust than to cover it up? And did the teacher handle it properly after that? Absolutely not.
He stopped the collection drive, sure — but he also told those bastards that I was the one who'd ratted them out. From that day on, they cursed me with a special kind of hatred.
The abuse that followed was so extreme that the fact I only stopped at tearing their faces and breaking their bones feels almost pathetic. And after thrashing them these past few days, I've realized something: academic-track delinquents are basically tame compared to the kids from vocational high schools or specialized schools. The gall of them, being that sadistic toward anyone weaker than themselves. Just thinking about it again makes my blood boil.
Anyway, I took a lot of serious injuries. When I told my family, all I got was "let's go to church and pray" and other suggestions that had nothing to do with reality. Completely isolated from school and home, I was simply abandoned.
It wasn't even classic bullying. The price of standing firmly on right and wrong was total neglect — from teachers, from family, from the other kids. What had I done wrong? Refusing to look the other way at injustice? Or should I have suddenly awakened to superpowers like some comic-book hero, beaten them all fair and square in a straight fight?
In the end, two weeks ago, they shoved me out a window. I was badly hurt. My mother called in someone from the church we'd attended back before we moved from Incheon, and had him perform a laying-on-of-hands prayer. That deacon fed me some strange blood. He kept saying it was precious stuff you couldn't obtain anymore.
I had to admit he was right about how hard it was to come by. The next day my wounds had vanished as if washed clean, and a bizarre sensation thrummed through my entire body. My consciousness expanded; my senses raced to catch up. My vision sharpened until I could see every pinhole in the foam-styrofoam wallpaper on the ceiling, and every approaching sound arrived in full three-dimensional detail. I could hear a cat's footsteps — that should tell you enough.
At first I was overjoyed. So I got up, meaning to air out the room for the first time in ages, and opened the heavy blinds—
The sunlight that poured in stabbed my hand like needles. If I hadn't stupidly left a bookcase next to the window — if the room had been bright with unfiltered light — I would have died on the spot. I twisted away from the sun at once, cradling my searing, boiling hand and groaning. The word that flashed through my mind was vampire. Yes. Nothing else explained this.
You already know what came next. I used a vampire's power to wipe out that entire circle of thugs. Not enough to kill them — they weren't even worth killing. Revenge isn't about snuffing someone out in one stroke and cutting off their future. It's about making them suffer for a long, long time.
"So what do I do now?"
Should I go after the teacher who made me an outcast and then abandoned me? But they used to say you shouldn't even step on a teacher's shadow. I didn't want to lay hands on a teacher. Then who? The best targets would be vicious corporate predators, politicians, and the like — people the law never managed to judge. If I was a vampire who couldn't live without blood, then draining and punishing monsters like that was at least more righteous than feeding on decent people.
Which brought me to the retired general who'd raped a little girl and walked away scot-free. Did anyone around here know where he lived? It wasn't as if the nameplate on his front gate would say "Child Rapist's House."
"Ugh."
I was wrong about that. There was a decent-looking two-story Western-style house with graffiti all over the walls and filth dumped in front of it. The scrawls started with things like You dog of a child rapist! Think money and power make you untouchable? and went on from there in every flavor of rage. Maybe that was why they kept a Doberman inside, and why surveillance cameras watched from the corners of the wall.
"So this is what they mean by 'where there's a will, there's a way.'"
I went looking for a rock. Found a brick, but it was too big, so I split it in half like tearing bread and hurled one piece at the CCTV. One shot — the camera shattered.
"Hup!"
I kicked off the wall, vaulted up, and landed easily on top of the fence. Then I dropped into the yard and stood before the front door. It was a common frosted-glass door with an aluminum frame. I gave the handle a brief struggle; it tore free and the door swung open.
Beep!
Damn it. An alarm was wired to the door. Seco? I thought, and hurried inside. A middle-aged woman who looked like a housekeeper had been dozing on the sofa; she shot to her feet in shock when she saw me.
"Wh-what — what is this?!"
"If you don't want to get hurt, get out of the way!"
I shoved her aside, spotted a telephone, and smashed it with my fist. It shattered with a wet crunch. Right — she had a cellphone, so that was pointless. I sprinted ahead and kicked open the largest door I could find. Empty. The house was irritatingly nice. That a man who lived this well could molest a little girl and then brazenly crush the case with power and influence only made me angrier. And every door I opened was empty, as if he were dodging me, shutting me out.
Next door? I went upstairs and opened another. A study. A gray-haired old man sat in a chair. He seemed to have been reading and closed the book — on his knee lay a script for the drama Turbulent Thirty Years. He looked thoroughly rattled by the noise outside, yet he still hadn't risen from the chair; the posture was more composed than most men his age. Because he'd been a soldier?
"Wh-who the hell are you?!"
"Tch."
Even facing a villain who deserved heaven's wrath, harming an old man didn't come easily. But… I had worked hard to get here. The alarm was already screaming; the housekeeper would be calling the police. Circumstance after circumstance was pressing hard against my back, shoving me forward.
And yet the old man sitting in this neatly ordered study with a book looked like the most peaceful elderly gentleman imaginable. Had he really molested a girl? Was he even the right man? Even if he had, to what degree? What right did I have to barge in knowing nothing and play the hero of justice, the champion who punished him?
Then it hit me: that thought was exactly the same as the thinking of everyone who had watched me with indifference — or pity. Because it didn't concern them, because they didn't know the full story, they didn't care who got hurt or how things turned out; they passively abetted evil. That was the world. Simply walking past without caring was enough to make a person complicit in evil!
Thud!
I drove my fist into the old man's right shoulder — the retired general's shoulder. I hadn't been able to bring myself to hit his face… and I felt the bone break with a wet crack. An old man's bones snap easily, don't they? And once broken, they don't heal well either.
For a single instant, an image flashed through my mind: this old man — this old gentleman — living out the rest of his days with a shoulder fracture that would never fully mend, still reading his books. He cried out and toppled forward; the book tumbled to the floor. He wasn't dead, but watching that composed old man collapse and sprawl was genuinely shocking.
It felt like becoming an executioner myself — knocking away the trapdoor beneath a condemned man on the gallows. In that moment I roared.
"Aaaaaaargh!"
I flung open the window and leapt outside. Then I ran into the night streets. The cheap, filthy thrill I'd felt when I first found his house — the fantasy of being some justice hero, a comic-book protagonist toppling society's injustices and defeating evil — had been completely stripped away. I was just a washout. A washout who was a coward on top of it.
"Aaaaaaargh!"
I ran and screamed through the streets. I ran and ran, trying to vomit up every ugly thing in my gut. And yet one thing remained absolutely clear—
I was still a vampire!
The vampires were still hunting Jinma Jeong-ya and Chang-young. But out of nowhere, an order came down for them to eliminate a single vampire hunter. His name was Han Se-gun — relatively young among hunters, and someone who had yet to pull off anything particularly spectacular.
What was certain, however, was that he was a terrifying newcomer who had slain double-digit numbers of vampires in the past year alone — and that he was planning to blow Tetra Anax sky-high with explosives.
"Thanks to that, my life is on the line!"
Kenneth Yang, pale at the intelligence that had spread in an instant, was laying into Se-gun. Se-gun set a kettle to boil, dropped two brown-rice green tea bags into it, and eyed Kenneth Yang grumbling behind him.
"You the one who leaked the info?"
"Are you insane? Anyone with a brain would take me out to cut off your bomb supply!"
"Bill Murray said he'd introduce me to some Western Trading guy. Apparently that one can get me military-grade TNT?"
Se-gun looked at Kenneth Yang, who had shown up at his hideout, and said it without the slightest hesitation — as if to say, You can die for all I care. Kenneth stared at him, appalled.
"You cold-blooded bastard. A guy like you is someone you should never do business with, not even for hundreds of millions."
"Coming from a man who used to sell to vampires. In that case, no tea for you."
"Don't get stingy over a cup of brown-rice green tea."
Despite the words, he held out a cup. Se-gun poured the tea and sat at the table. The house was far larger than before — more psychologically grounding — but that also made it more vulnerable to attack. A private residence wasn't easy to defend when vampires came calling. Still, it beat a chicken-coop of a place where you just lay down and waited to die.
"You know how far Tetra Anax's intelligence network reaches, right? They might hit this place."
"Hard to say. Tetra Anax's network is solid enough, but apart from the Juk-yo faction vampires, everyone else seemed to have their own agendas."