A Miserable End Alone
Burning yourself out fast as you die. Whichever way it went, it was still a wretched end. But dying alone in a dank semi-basement hovel like this was already the absolute peak of misery. He didn’t especially want to go to his grave surrounded by a throng of children and family, listening to them call him a beloved father, yet looking at this place thick with musty reek already darkened his heart.
And it only got worse the moment he opened Deok-yeon’s door. Empty cup-ramen containers were stacked into a mountain, and perched on top of that mountain was an ashtray filled to the brim with cigarette butts—cigarettes the man had never smoked before. Was it because he was dying? Photo albums lay scattered here and there. Beneath them, Deok-yeon himself lay bandaged over a body that had lost every trace of its former strength, nothing left but the flesh of an old man.
“…….”
He had steeled himself to some degree, yet he was still shocked at how thoroughly ruined a person could become. Se-gun clicked his tongue and checked Deok-yeon’s condition. The wounds looked self-inflicted with a knife. He could not begin to imagine what would drive the once-formidable Deok-yeon to cut himself. Of course, that only meant the damage from Psychedelic Moon was that severe.
“Uuugh…….”
Sensing a presence, Deok-yeon stirred awake. Se-gun stayed ready in case the man flew into a psychotic rage and attacked—sad as it was, he could not afford not to be cautious—while carefully assessing his state.
“Se-gun?”
Deok-yeon looked at him with dimmed eyes. The man who had always been pure muscle, brash and fiery, now resembled a frail old man living alone, scraping by on cup ramen in this room. It wasn’t poverty. Se-gun knew perfectly well that Deok-yeon was fairly well-off. But rich or poor, a human left alone inevitably grew weak. Especially when his body was steeped in narcotics the way Deok-yeon’s was.
Not like I’m one to talk.
Judging purely by short-term usage, Deok-yeon couldn’t hold a candle to Se-gun. In fact, Se-gun had killed far more vampires than Deok-yeon ever had.
“How’d you end up like this?”
Se-gun asked bluntly. Deok-yeon scratched his head, looking sheepish.
“What else? Plenty of bastards shoot up and then go straight to the grave.”
“True enough.”
Se-gun had nothing left to say and simply stared at him. Because he himself was one of those bastards headed for the grave after shooting up, the way he kept overlapping with Deok-yeon was hard to bear.
“You should retire.”
“Retire and do what? A guy with no family and nothing left—what, sit around like this forever?”
It felt like something he shouldn’t say, but Se-gun spoke quietly anyway.
“I don’t know how much life you’ve got left, but eating whatever you want, watching TV, renting videos and cackling at them till you go—that doesn’t sound so bad. Live the loser’s life long enough and maybe Harlem hip-hop spirit’ll rub off and you’ll start humming a rap verse or two.”
“You son of a bitch. The shit that comes out of that open hole you call a mouth sounds like a village dog that’s spent three years around a schoolhouse crushing mess tins.”
“…….”
That was a good one. Se-gun wasn’t sure it would land with foreign vampires who’d never done military service, but he filed it away for later use. A village dog three years around the schoolhouse crushing mess tins, huh…
“You can still sit and shoot a rifle out a window, right? If you don’t want to retire, I could give you a job as the guard dog for my hideout.”
“Hrrk. That a job listing?”
“Yeah.”
“Hrrk, hrrk!”
Deok-yeon coughed, then collapsed back onto the floor. With effort he raised a hand and flipped Se-gun the middle finger.
“Eat shit, you bastard. Like you said, I’ll retire and spend whatever’s left watching porn videos.”
“That so? Not bad.”
Se-gun said it, but he knew better than anyone that actually enjoying what the man described was impossible. Haunting was a curse in the truest sense—possession by ghosts. Night after night the evil spirits would become visible. Peering through the darkness others couldn’t see, it wouldn’t be strange if he eventually crossed over completely into that world. If the vampire oracles of the Tetra Anax line used their exceptional spirituality to see ghosts and spirits and exercise foresight, then a human who had drawn out vampire power through Psychedelic Moon made from their blood might gain foresight as well. Not that anyone wanted that particular outcome.
“Just go. A resident of the Moonlit Night only belongs in the Moonlit Night. Don’t waste time on a washout like me!”
Deok-yeon tried to drive him out. Se-gun shook his head hard.
“I’ve been hunting so much lately my whole body’s about to fall off from exhaustion. Let’s rest today.”
“You little shit. Don’t make me laugh. Ghk. Juyda is…”
“Juyda?”
Se-gun’s ears pricked instantly. Juyda? Don’t tell me—the Sinsayer? The heretic who ate vampires?
Deok-yeon kept coughing, gasping for breath.
“Hah… hah… Juyda’s moved. Wipe out the vampires while you’ve got the chance and even if you don’t want it… you’ll get to rest nice and soft for a while.”
“Huh?”
“And watch out for Sarhyuk.”
“I’m always watching out for that bastard. You, Deok-yeon—don’t go stabbing your arms and legs with a knife just because you see ghosts. I’ll clear out all the metal so you know.”
“Then how am I supposed to do kitchen work, you punk?”
“Pretty sure you don’t need a knife to boil cup ramen.”
Se-gun eyed the cup-ramen containers piled in the corner, then for some reason began gathering the trash and stuffing it into garbage bags. He filled four or five bags tight, knotted them (why a rich man was pinching pennies on trash bags was beyond him), and set them outside.
“Hey… what the hell are you doing?”
“Cleaning a room that looks like it’ll start spawning ghosts that weren’t even there.”
“You little… I was collecting those cup-ramen containers to stack them up to the ceiling.”
“Pointless.”
Se-gun clicked his tongue at Deok-yeon’s childish complaint. Lecturing the man on the futility of cup ramen here would probably get him run over by a truck plastered with Shin Ramyun ads, so he let it go. He had work to do anyway. He stood.
“All right. Don’t kill yourself in a place like this—live properly. Later… yeah. I’ll bring you a few boxes of cup ramen.”
“You just told me not to eat cup ramen.”
“Seolleongtang-myeon.”
Having declared his preference for a specific product, Se-gun stepped out of Deok-yeon’s place. Looking at the man’s condition, Deok-yeon seemed relatively fine. His personality was so slippery that even if he saw ghosts, it would be the ghosts whose privacy was being invaded—Deok-yeon himself wouldn’t really be the victim.
Thinking back to something Deok-yeon had said long ago about sleep paralysis made it even more ridiculous. When the “scissors” pinned him down, he claimed, you just had to think of it as the cowgirl position and try rocking your hips; once you actually started rocking, the paralysis would break. And then, shamelessly, he insisted, “It was a virgin ghost!”
No idea why that was past tense.
With that thought, Se-gun swung onto his bike.
In lit a cigarette and stuck it between his lips—hardly vampire-like behavior. For a vampire who had no need to worry about health, cigarettes were neither here nor there. They weren’t even particularly good as a vice, yet once you started, addiction hit vampires the same as humans.
“Think of it as paying taxes to the Korean Monopoly Bureau. Cheap enough, too.”
He exhaled smoke. This Plus delivered a clean flavor that cheap Hongtashan Chinese smokes couldn’t touch. Considering most of the price of cigarettes was tax, the Monopoly Bureau had set Korean prices remarkably low—some brands even cheaper than Chinese ones. Expensive liquor taxes and cheap tobacco almost made it seem like the country was encouraging smoking, though that wasn’t quite true either.
“Problem is how to find the bastard who keeps racing around every corner of Seoul.”
In glared at Se-gun’s photograph. A young human who had slaughtered every useful member of his bloodline. Why had this human become a resident of the Moonlit Night?
“Obviously some trivial reason.”
And vampires had no reason to care about a vampire hunter’s circumstances. From the moment they ignored human circumstances and drank their blood, hunters and vampires were enemies. They had no choice but to be enemies.
The sky was gradually turning gray. Thick yellow dust, clouds heavy with it, were preparing to rain. In knew perfectly well how nightmarish yellow dust could be. And when it fell as yellow-dust rain, the unpleasantness reached true extremes…
“Huu.”
In stubbed out the cigarette and walked to his car. How to find the one prowling every corner of Seoul, and how to kill him once found? He decided to set the headache aside for a moment and sit in the car to watch the rain. Soon enough, yellow-brown rain would fall from the sky.
Jinma Agni had kept a low profile for a while because the police were making such a fuss. In truth he was a pragmatist who preferred catching and eating humans over difficult-to-hunt vampires. Of course, if it was a wandering fledgling vampire outside any clan, he considered ending such a wretched life a mercy and occasionally killed them; even clan members he would eat if it seemed unlikely to cause major trouble. He had strong opportunistic tendencies.
But the feast appeared to be over. The Jinma hunter was formidable, and with the Sinsayer Juyda having surfaced as well, this place was no longer particularly safe. Vampires might be thick on the ground and therefore good hunting, yet the danger level had grown too high. He no longer wanted to place large bets; he wanted to take the pot and leave the table.
“Korea’s public safety is just too good. You need a place with worse security and more open land if you’re going to kill and eat in comfort.”
He hummed words no one else could possibly understand while packing. Though he was a vampire who had lived a long time, he was still enjoying himself. If the people he had drained dry hadn’t found it very enjoyable, well, that was a shame—but since he was living life hard enough for their share as well, he was sure they would understand someday. Whether the already-dead could ever understand him was doubtful, yet Agni possessed a pure, childlike heart that believed in Santa Claus on such matters!
“Perfect timing—rain for my departure.”
Yellow-dust rain lashed the city. He opened an umbrella and walked toward the airport. His passport and visa expired next week; as someone who still held a legitimate identity, he needed to return to his mother country (?) to keep that identity intact. But yellow-dust rain was falling, taxis wouldn’t stop, and calling one would be expensive—call taxis cost a fortune—so an underprivileged vampire who, unlike the others, did not have money rotting enough to compost had no choice but to stand at a bus stop and wait.
“Like Blade Runner. Shouldn’t there be an acid-rain warning?”
He muttered, watching the downpour. Then, suddenly, a sharp premonition stabbed through him. Among vampires, only the Tetra Anax line normally possessed foresight. The bloodlines descending from the twenty-four Jinma each carried their base clan ability plus alpha, and Tetra Anax’s base abilities concentrated on mental manipulation and foresight. That was the power and engine by which Tetra Anax ruled the others. But because every Jinma carried some mix of other blood, powerful foresight occasionally flared. And this was one of those moments.
What… what is this?!
In that instant, a strange voice rang through his mind.
The night moved as if it were alive. Sounds flowed through it—sounds humans could hear and sounds they could not, all mixed together. Yes. Tonight the world of the mad moon and the real world had blended, forming a thick, viscous darkness. The boundary between concept and reality warped like distorted glass projected onto the dark.
Nothing was clear, yet the rumors were definitely spreading. With countless vampires moving for their own desires, even Tetra Anax could not suppress the talk. There was no evidence, yet the rumors carried high credibility—unscientific, supernatural rumors. Those rumors took life from people, and through them the city’s darkness became a demon, sliding stickily down the concrete jungle.
“Ah.”
Looking into the dark always felt like staring at a piece of himself, and it hurt. Facing the fact that he was gradually becoming the monster he hunted remained painful.
Because righteous violence did not exist, he had abandoned any claim to justification and simply slaughtered every vampire. Cloaking one’s own evil in righteousness was ugly, yet abandoning righteousness and claiming to be evil was no less repulsive.
If not me, then who will fall into hell… is that it?
Han Se-gun gave a bitter smile and checked his weapons. USAS-12. Glock 18 full-auto versions with thirty-round long magazines. A bag packed with ammunition and explosives. Every single item would end with more than a simple “Ah, I see” if a cop stopped him for questioning. But this level of armament was mandatory against vampires—especially on a night when sticky darkness lay so dense.
Woooom.
The sound reached his ears again. Not through the eardrums—something calling him from far away. Every time he heard it, the blood throughout his body boiled and his face flushed.
“What kind of bastard is it?”
If this auditory hallucination was not merely his own delusion, then it was sorcery of unimaginable power. Only a handful of beings possessed that kind of strength. Almost certainly a Jinma—and a terrifyingly powerful one. Se-gun smirked at the thought. A Jinma was summoning its own kind. Like an anglerfish in the deep sea luring fish with the light on its brow so it could devour them. Most likely the work of the Sinsayer Juyda, the Jinma who ate his own kind.
The rumor that the Sinsayer Juyda had made landfall had already spread widely among both vampires and humans the moment most of Hecate’s children were annihilated.
The Sinsayer Juyda, who compromised with no one, who woke only occasionally on an activity cycle of fifty to a hundred years to deliver disaster to vampires… If he had not been a kind of natural disaster that moved on a cycle, he might have wiped out the vampires long ago—a true slaughterer.
But vampires killing each other is dangerous.
A vampire who grew stronger by drinking vampire blood was the most dangerous existence possible for humans. The twenty-four Jinma, the twenty-four bloodlines, were as good as a family tree to them, yet they were also a flow of information for vampire hunters. The cracks born when the twenty-four lines bickered, the farces produced by the differences in their natures—if a single Jinma transcended all of that, who could stop him?
Could a human stop a vampire that even other vampires could not stop?
Se-gun strapped on his gear and mounted the bike. Streetlight light streamed along his body in fluid lines.
How much longer does this body have…?
He knew he was walking around with a time bomb inside him. But it wouldn’t go off tonight. Believing that, Se-gun raced out into the sticky darkness.