Not Bad, Baby
On the road back from Chuncheon toward Seoul, Se-gun noticed a familiar car keeping pace beside him. He was already pushing past a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour—if something could still catch him, it meant that car had a serious competitive streak. And sure enough, it was a blazing-red sports car. Figuring the driver had money to burn, he glanced over again and—
Good God. It was a Viper.
And of the people who drove Vipers like that, only a handful would ever bother taking an interest in Han Se-gun.
"Tch!"
Se-gun wrenched the throttle open at once. If a bike had one clear edge over a sports car, it was mass—lighter body, explosive acceleration even from a smaller engine. But once the road straightened out, it became a pure contest of displacement, and a Viper with its stronger engine and superior transmission owned the straight-line speed. This stretch, though, had other cars for obstacles.
"Come on, then—try and keep up!"
He threaded past a truck ahead of him, scraping through a gap barely wide enough to exist. The approach into Seoul past Chuncheon Lake was wide open; without police, you could run whatever top speed you wanted. Se-gun poured everything he had into the road ahead. The problem was that even a fully tuned YZ-125—bored engine, new plugs, new cap, new cooling nozzles, shaved cylinder head—topped out shy of two hundred kilometers an hour. It could never match the Viper GTS's V10 gasoline engine when that machine was cracking three hundred.
KRAAAANG!
With a murderous roar, the sound of a lunatic who seemed to be spraying oil all over the pavement, the Viper punched past. On a straight, machine power was absolute. Watching it in his side mirror, Se-gun immediately swung his body into the car's path, blocking the lane. When you couldn't win on power, you improvised.
Screeeech!
The other driver dropped the clutch, kicked from fourth to third, and wrenched the wheel hard left. The instant the spin started, he threw it into neutral, clutched again, feathered the brake, climbed back into fourth while hauling the wheel right—twisting outward through the spin—then shifted once more into third. Lightning-fast gearwork, and he had skipped clean across two lanes of road in a short straight cut. Holding RPM as high as possible, he released brake and clutch, and the Viper blasted past Se-gun and the truck beside him at a terrifying speed.
On a four-lane straight, Se-gun had boldly sealed off an entire lane; the Titan truck loaded with lumber had blocked another. From a one-car gap of free distance, moving at constant speed, the Viper had flicked across two lanes in the space of a blink. Who the hell did that on a Korean four-lane one-way road? Startled, Se-gun cut past the truck and surged ahead—but the Viper's roar from the side only grew more ferocious.
"Not bad, baby!"
The Viper's window rolled down. A man's arm came out, thumb raised high. Then the engine howled and the car tore forward again. What Se-gun felt wasn't so much defeat or rage as sheer absurdity.
Okay, fine—you won. So why are you just leaving?
That, as it happened, was exactly what Phantom—already rocketing ahead—was also thinking, with a slight pang of whoops.
But Phantom's policy was simple: when you land a clean hit with fine skill and a fine machine, you say nothing and ride beautifully into the sunset.
Then a place that doubled as a gas station and rest stop came into view, and he pulled in. Moments later the YZ-125 that had been chasing him rolled into the parking lot. The young man on it flung his helmet onto the bike and strode toward the car. From the length of those strides, he looked pretty pissed. Phantom opened the door and stepped out to meet him.
"Hi."
"The hell is 'hi'!"
Se-gun knew perfectly well that Jinma weakened in daylight. Their raw power let them endure the sun vampires feared—but the cost drained them, and they came out weaker for it. In Phantom's case, "weaker" still meant tanking a PSG-1 round with his bare body. Pulling a Glock on him wasn't going to inspire much fear.
"Jesus."
Still, the sheer nerve of drawing a gun in front of people left Phantom stunned. And right behind them was a gas station. One unlucky spark and the whole area would go up. So he seized Se-gun's wrist in a flash, twisted the shoulder with a hapkido technique, and flipped him with a basic four-direction throw.
"Kh—!"
But Se-gun twisted free of the arm, rolled across the ground, and was on his feet again at once. Fast. A human who hadn't even taken Psychedelic Moon showing that kind of reaction—if a single year of training had produced this, the man was genuinely remarkable.
"Kh—!"
Se-gun raised the Glock—and Phantom's hand-blade cracked across his hand, knocking the pistol free. Se-gun drew a knife with his left and drove it at the back of Phantom's hand. Phantom simply turned his hand over and caught the blade.
"Ugh—!"
The edge, trapped between two fingers, didn't so much as quiver. Se-gun immediately threw a low side kick at the kneecap—but Phantom, still holding the knife, casually kicked Se-gun in the gut, and Se-gun went into a full midair flip so clean a spectator would have whistled.
"Kh—!"
Se-gun managed to block the blow, but the shock still slammed straight into his head.
"Huh?"
Against his will, he landed hard on his rear. Phantom settled lightly onto the ground, picked up the fallen Glock, field-stripped it with practiced ease, and pressed the pieces back into Se-gun's hands.
"I'll just hang on to the firing pin for a bit. Now—shall we talk?"
"I've got nothing to say to a vampire!"
"Then listen to the vampire talk. Since this won't be a conversation, it shouldn't do much damage to that fragile pride of yours. Or does fragile pride only feel better once you've thrown your life away for it?"
Se-gun looked at Phantom with a puzzled expression.
"One question."
"What?"
"When you blew past me earlier and just left—you thought whoops for a second, didn't you?"
"…"
Sharp about the stupidest things. Phantom forced his scowl back into a neutral face and shook his head.
"Hardly. What do you take me for?"
"A clown vampire."
"…"
Phantom scanned the area carefully, confirmed there were no passersby or vampires nearby, and smacked Se-gun once. There were people at the rest stop, sure—but between parked cars, no one was going to see.
Thwack!
"W-wait—my bad."
"Glad you understand. Now let's have a serious conversation. Are you planning to blow up Tetra Anax?"
"Why the hell would I tell you? And doesn't everyone already know?"
Se-gun shuddered at how thoroughly that information had spread. If it was this well known, the road ahead was only going to get harder. And if a Jinma like this one decided to get involved, no amount of stubborn survival instinct would keep him alive. Phantom gave him a soft smile, helped him up, and brushed off his clothes.
"Now, now. The idea of hitting Tetra Anax directly isn't bad—but have you thought about the people who have nothing to do with this getting caught in the crossfire?"
"If that's your angle, go try talking Al-Qaeda into something. Yank."
"I'm not Anglo-Saxon. By blood I'm Celtic, so I fall outside your average Yankee profile."
Phantom said it and let out a sigh. This kid was twisted far worse than Silvester. Out of the blue comes indigo, they said—was this the living proof?
"You were an innocent who got hurt because of vampires yourself, weren't you? The current system isn't so worthless that you have to mass-produce people like that, that you have to tear it all down with no alternative and leave that many victims behind. I'd like you to understand that."
"…"
Se-gun couldn't understand why this vampire was trying to persuade him. Phantom had him completely under control. If he wanted, a single finger would be enough to kill him. So why persuade instead of kill? Of course, every word of what he said was true.
In the present society, the conservative powers who suck the system dry love to brand the young as destroyers without alternatives—that was their idea of social justice. But Phantom's version was different. He wasn't defending the current order to protect his own vested interests; he was defending it by pointing at the means. How much better a world was Se-gun demanding that people bleed for, that people sacrifice for, just so he could spill the blood of revolution?
"For the record, I'm already choosing methods that hurt as few civilians as possible. But none of that is any of you vampires' business."
He snapped it out and turned his back on Phantom. That was when the firing pin came flying over his shoulder. By the time Se-gun caught it, Phantom was already settled into his Viper.
"Well then—do your best. Personally, I support it. Landing a hit on Tetra Anax. In three thousand years, no human's ever managed it, so having one around isn't so bad."
"That so?"
Phantom fired the engine and pulled out in style—then suddenly screeched to a halt in front of the rest stop.
"Gas! High-octane gas!"
"…"
Se-gun stared at him, momentarily blank. Ah. Right. A Viper absolutely needed high-octane gasoline. Han Se-gun, learning something useful today.
Rat Gunip was a first-class agent dispatched to Korea by Esprit, the liberal vampire collective. In a vampire world that mostly swarmed with white faces and white supremacy, he was an outlier—Black. There were East Asians too, of course, so you couldn't call it pure white supremacy, but the yellow-or-white structure still felt like the kind of textbook racism you'd find in Japanese animation. Rat Gunip, noble warrior of Esprit, could not accept that. In his view, Jinma Argon—who led free Esprit—was the free, ideal Jinma this new century deserved.
"Ooooh. Fire just lit up in my heart."
After shouting something that made absolutely no sense, he headed for Tetra Anax's Korean branch. Flex Medical had already settled into Korea and was expanding its reach with products that were more than a little shady and more than a little salable: oral abortifacients, growth promoters that definitely made you taller (and also made your head bigger), diet pills, and the like. If the pharmaceutical sector's sales in the fourth quarter of last year had grown a hundred percent year over year, you could easily guess how much money they were raking in here.
I have no idea! Why would a healthy vampire like me know what this country's pharmaceutical sales look like?!
Of course Rat Gunip didn't care about any of that. His job was to take intel from Tetra Anax and, to strengthen Esprit's position, make contact with Jeong-ya and Chang-young and pull them into the fold. Devouring them and claiming their blood the way more barbaric vampires would have—that violated Esprit's principles. Every intelligent being had the right to enjoy its own freedom so long as it did no harm to others. That was Esprit's rule.
And every member of Esprit was dead certain their clan was the best of all vampire clans. Built mostly around hippies, musicians, and artists, they believed with iron conviction that they were apostles of freedom and peace.
Rat Gunip was no exception. He had no doubt that simply preaching their ideals would be enough to bring Chang-young and Jeong-ya—those two pitiful Jinma—to add their strength and become members of Esprit.
Baby, that's just how it is. There's no clan as cool as ours anywhere. You guys get freedom. Right? Yeah?
So Esprit would gain two powerful allies, and those two would gain protectors—how perfect was that? He felt like dancing.
"But damn, Seoul's nightlife is something else."
Raised in America, his only image of Seoul had come from occasional TV clips: endless rice paddies, people who looked like Vietnamese and armed themselves like Viet Cong, the occasional department store collapsing. Seeing it in person, though, it was a real metropolis—crushing population density, too many cars, air rotten through and through.
"Heh? And the girls are pretty, too."
A solidly built Black man with dreadlocks shouting that out loud in the middle of the street drew stares. Especially from the pretty women—and he liked that. Rat grinned, cut through the crowd, and checked the memo in his hand. On it was the address of the place where he'd be crashing in Korea.
Unlike other clans, Esprit was not swimming in cash. Which meant the natural plan was to freeload at a member's place who already lived in the country, then go looking from there.
"Ohhh—this it? Looks pretty close to these letters."
Unable to read or speak Korean, Rat found an apartment building with wall lettering that looked as close as possible to what was scrawled on his note. He went to the guard booth, held out the slip, and asked how to get there. Whether the person he was meeting had already called ahead or not, the guard was on his feet before Rat could get more than a few words out and led the way.
"So you push this and go up to the eleventh floor. Got it?"
"Ye, eleven, then?"
"Eleven-oh-five."
"OK, I see. C'ya."
Rat thanked him and headed up. He knew numbers, at least! For all he looked like a breakdancer straight out of the projects, he had once held a doctoral degree—a perfectly respectable vampire. In a black T-shirt, stonewashed baggy hip-hop jeans, and a headband, he cut a pretty stylish figure. Ah, how unfortunate for the women of the world that a man like this was a vampire! Thinking as much, he knocked on the door.
"Coming!"
The door's CCTV kicked on, then the lock released automatically. Rat loaded up every joke in his head, braced himself to make a soft, funny first impression, and walked in.
"Yo!"
What met him was a scrawny white man who looked extremely particular.
"You're Rat Gunip?"
"Cheer~."