Night of the Sinsayer
But just then, someone kicked out one of the building’s windows. The vampires inside, indifferent to whether anyone was watching, opened fire from within. Assault rifles hammered out 5.56mm rounds without mercy. He cloaked his entire body in darkness and stopped every bullet. In that same instant, a wet crack sounded from his shoulder, and an arm slowly emerged.
“Hiiiiiiek!”
A few of the vampires poured on the fire even harder, desperate to live, yet the Jinma simply absorbed every round and stretched out a hand. Behind that pale face, the true monstrous nature twisted the mask’s expression as the black hand moved. It clenched empty air.
Crrraaack!
In a single heartbeat the building caved inward like a clean bite taken from a block of cheese. If the structure had been a towering slice of cream cake, someone had just gouged out its entire side. The shooters still perched at the windows went white with shock. Those caught in the collapse left behind only a few spatters of blood, twitching as they died.
“That—!”
The survivors fared no better. The reason was the metal object gripped in the arm that had sprouted from the shoulder. It was the Beast.
Boom!
Muzzle flash and searing heat erupted like tank cannon fire and smashed into the wall.
“Gyaaaaah!”
Enchanted bullets that no wall could stop punched through stone and found the vampires beyond. Destruction. One shot reduced a vampire to ragged chunks and brought the masonry crashing down. The twin hands above his shoulders emptied the Beast, then cracked open the cylinder. To those who had been praying for the ammunition to run dry, it was pure misfortune: he simply dumped the spent casings and fed in fresh rounds.
“You son of a bitch!”
One vampire vaulted from a third-floor window, blade already drawn, and came down in a flashing cut. Faster still, a pitch-black sword rose to meet it, knocked the steel aside, and carved through the torso. After parrying the descending blow, the dark blade swept horizontally and split the hollow body clean in two. Wherever the black edge passed, only blood remained.
“Guaaaagh!”
The sinner among sinners who hunted vampires—Juyda the Sinsayer. Pale-faced, trailing darkness, he dragged himself forward. By the time he shuffled into the building, the corridor already greeted him soaked in blood from the gunfire outside.
“Ssss…”
He tilted his head. The corpse-pale face, utterly expressionless, listed to one side. He was puzzled. Even in Hecate’s case, the only vampires he had actually killed in this raid were the small fry. Any hunter who witnessed the scene would never call the slaughter trivial, yet the undeniable fact remained: the truly important Jinma had slipped away.
At that moment a Mercedes-Benz S500L peeled out from behind the building. Juyda could not see it, but he heard the engine clearly enough. For a Jinma to flee was almost comic, yet among vampires the Sinsayer was known as an absolute calamity—someone never to be faced. Zein’s decision to run made perfect sense.
“Hmmm.”
Instead of giving chase, Juyda expanded his Binding. The moment he amplified the blood-binding force, every drop of blood around him—the blood of every vampire he had just slain—raced into his flesh. That Binding, the blood-shackling power common to every Jinma, meant they never even needed to drink through their mouths.
“Goddamn it—out of nowhere like a bolt from the blue! Why the hell is that crazy bastard coming after me!?”
Zein cursed the sudden disaster that had found him and glanced at his driver. The vampire chauffeur, equally pale, stared back at the thoroughly demolished mansion.
“Should I call the police?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You think cops can stop that monster? Maybe if they brought an armored car. Contact Tetra Anax instead! Tell them the heretic Juyda has appeared—gather every vampire!”
Of course that was pure fantasy. Vampire clans conserved their strength and avoided bloodshed among themselves whenever possible. And facing the Sinsayer Juyda guaranteed bloodshed. He was a Jinma who made even other Jinma fear for their lives; who would willingly stand against him? Against someone soft like Jeong-ya or Chang-young, maybe—but this one, as they had just seen, could pulp dozens of vampires in the blink of an eye.
“Echidna was openly talking about killing that guy, wasn’t he? Call Arcadia too.”
Then, on the opposite side of the road from the S500L, a black sports car appeared. Of all the worst possible moments, the Jinma hunter Silvester had arrived.
“Tch!”
Silvester’s arm thrust out the window, Desert Eagle already leveled.
Bang!
He drove one-handed and fired with the other—impossible for a human, perfectly natural for Silvester. Hitting the target was just as natural.
The S500L, suddenly missing a tire, shrieked and slewed sideways before rolling. Just like that, their means of escape was gone.
“Tch!”
Zein flung the door open and leapt out. Silvester ignored him completely, racing ahead to stop in front of Zein’s mansion. Inside that mansion right now there was only the Sinsayer Juyda. Silvester stepped from his own car and immediately brought out the Barrett.
Boom!
The moment the rifle was assembled he chambered a round and fired backward. Out of the darkness a terrifying report cracked and a bullet screamed in.
“Tch!”
Zein clicked his tongue and slipped the shot. In the next instant his body vanished from the spot as though snuffed out, reappearing clear of the bullet’s path. Even a consecrated Barrett round meant nothing if it never struck.
“Guaak!”
The driver, lacking any such ability, was obliterated by a single hit and scattered across the asphalt. Silvester fired several more times in rapid succession, snorted a cold laugh, and charged straight into the building.
Krrraaash!
Vampire blood was racing across the floor. When Binding was being used to absorb blood, the flow itself became a road leading to the vampire. Silvester, Barrett in hand, sprinted forward, boots slapping through the wet trail, and burst inside. In the wide third-floor living room, grand piano gleaming, stood the Sinsayer Juyda, still drawing blood into himself.
Click-clack!
No words were needed. Silvester raised the Barrett and opened fire on full auto. Juyda gathered darkness around his sword and deflected the rounds, yet even he could not simply tank fifty-caliber BMG with his flesh.
Thud!
Chains thick as a man’s thumb knocked a few bullets aside, but others snapped the links and punched through; some never even touched the metal. Juyda possessed a psychokinetic force field that let him seize approaching projectiles with telekinesis—yet the rounds tore through that as well.
Clatter-rattle-rattle!
Before Silvester had even emptied a full magazine the chains began to move. He vaulted across the cramped room, casually dodging the strike, swapped magazines, and resumed fire.
Juyda split the floor open and dropped beneath it. The black two-handed sword whirled darkness and shattered the boards while the twin arms holding the Beast opened fire on Silvester.
“Tch!”
Silvester snatched up a sofa for cover, but the rounds punched straight through, detonated, and sprayed the room with shrapnel. His face was instantly a mask of blood. Only Silvester could have walked away from that with mere cuts; even after fragmenting, Beast rounds retained more than enough power to kill. A grazing hit was the only reason he was still standing.
With the Binding released, the blood painting the floor slowed and stopped. The stream that had been flowing toward the Jinma pooled into a thick, stagnant swamp. Looking at the congealed blood, Silvester knew Juyda had already left.
“Mmm.”
He raised a hand and felt the long gash across his face. The wound would close soon enough, yet concern for Juyda—the vampire who hunted vampires—gnawed at him. Just how much stronger would a vampire grow by drinking the blood of his own kind?
“The vampires are going to have one hell of a time.”
Silvester muttered the honest assessment under his breath. The night of Jinma Juyda was nowhere near finished.
Se-gun was monitoring police radio chatter while sharpening the edge of a Japanese sword. His body was still too wrecked for him to want to step out if he could help it, yet everything reaching his ears was talk of incidents. The report that Zein’s mansion had been attacked and set ablaze was especially fresh.
So there’s someone else out there just as unhinged as me?
He thought that while rubbing maintenance polish onto the blade. He would never keep the thing long enough for it to rust anyway. He had already discarded stainless steel; this ordinary steel bent the moment it bit into bone. Cheap material, too.
“So the vampires are fighting among themselves?”
Se-gun had a vague sense that pressure would start building against the Vanishing Blood clan. Even a casual scroll through the internet turned up photos of Jeong-ah these days. A Japanese no-rules fighter named Kato Haruhiko had come to Korea claiming he wanted to meet someone—pure nonsense—but of course people paid attention. And since the woman herself was a beauty, her pictures kept popping up everywhere. Searching for a person had become an excuse to trample portrait rights.
That would make it far harder for Chang-hyun and Jeong-ah to stay hidden.
“Good. Not bad at all.”
He finished tending the blade and wrapped it, scabbard and all, in cloth. The police were already on edge from the rising number of vampire clashes; Se-gun could feel it. But the most efficient time to land a decisive blow was precisely when everything was chaotic. He stood up to seize that efficiency. While he was at it he grabbed several of the C-4 charges he still had. Five pounds of C-4 could deal catastrophic damage even to a sizable building.
“I’d rather not use this kind of thing if I can help it.”
He muttered the words while looking at the family photograph. He almost wanted to throw a childish tantrum: Mom, I’ve turned into a bomb terrorist. But Se-gun had already severed every last thread of that weakness. He had burned every possible retreat and driven himself forward by sheer self-abuse. To step back now would mean only death.
“First I’ll see Old Man Ju, then go land a few hits of my own.”
Remembering the old man’s earlier request that they meet once, Se-gun headed outside.
Old Man Ju was a vampire dealer who had once made a tidy living trading vampire blood for narcotics. Vampire blood was useful as medicine, as drugs, and more, so its price rivaled gold. That had been back when hunters were plentiful. These days most hunters had either been captured and killed or rotted into junkies on the product itself; business was dead.
Demand still existed, but supply could not keep up, and Bill Murray had stolen his territory. The fact that Han Se-gun himself had driven Bill Murray’s explosive growth only made the world feel more twisted.
“So how much are you offering?”
Se-gun looked around Old Man Ju’s warehouse, a place he had not visited in a long while. The last time Deok-yeon had dragged him here he had been a complete greenhorn; now he was being treated like an honored guest. The world truly made no sense.
“Check the price catalog. I’ll add a ten-percent premium on top.”
“Not exactly a groundbreaking deal. Nobody pays better than Bill Murray.”
“Still, a ten-percent edge on purchases is pretty impressive, don’t you think?”
“Well, if you put it that way… By the way, I’ve got a question. What happened to Deok-yeon?”
Se-gun asked because he genuinely wanted to know the man’s condition. Old Man Ju’s face darkened.
“Ah, that friend of yours?”
“……Is something wrong?”
“It’s not exactly a situation you could call ‘nothing’s wrong,’ but…”
The old man trailed off. Se-gun rested both hands on the table and pressed.
“I think I have more right to know than anyone.”
“What good would it do if I told you? Go see for yourself.”
Old Man Ju shook his head slowly as he spoke.
In the end Se-gun swung a leg over his bike and rode out to find Deok-yeon, the man who had once trained him.
There had been nothing nostalgic about those days—only endless, brutal training. It had been an experiment, a challenge: how roughly could you carve a human being down, how quickly could you turn him into something that could kill vampires? The test subject’s personality had never been a concern.
Even so, once the eyes grew used to a place it became memory. Riding up the familiar alleys stirred unexpected feeling. Se-gun parked the bike at the curb and looked at Deok-yeon’s old hideout. A yellowed paper with a rental consultation number was taped in the first-floor parking space; the place must have been empty for quite a while.
“Still, a lot has changed.”
They said rivers and mountains changed every ten years, so maybe this was ten percent of that change. After a full year away he descended the steps and knocked. Once, twice, three times—no answer. Without hesitation Se-gun pulled out a lock pick. No booby traps on the door.
He picked the lock and stepped inside. You could not hide the presence of a person. The residual warmth, the lingering sense of occupancy, told him that until yesterday this had still been a place where someone lived. “Person,” of course, only in the genetic sense, not the humanistic one. A place where anything that walked upright could scrape by.
“Let’s see.”
Se-gun checked Deok-yeon’s room. He could hear breathing. From the moment Old Man Ju had spoken that way, Se-gun had steeled himself. When a man who sold blood for a living talked like that, it meant Deok-yeon was starting down the classic end of a vampire hunter. There were three usual endings. The most famous was becoming a vampire yourself. Using Psychedelic Moon to hunt vampires only to turn into one—what greater irony existed? The second was Haunting: suddenly developing mediumistic sensitivity, seeing ghosts, drowning in hallucinations and endless terror until you simply died.
Vampires existed, so ghosts existing was not strange—but Se-gun never wanted to see either. Real spirits or just residual memory fragments drifting in the air, it made no difference. Psychedelic Moon carried exactly that level of danger.
“And the last one was Consume, wasn’t it?”