The Call of the Beasts
The Jinma Phantom was cruising through the heart of Seoul in his beloved Viper GTS. Even with the gear ratios dropped significantly, the miserable road conditions kept him from pushing past 150 km/h. Yet somehow it was a strangely exhilarating night. His heart pounded and blood rushed to his head—if he had to put a name to it, it felt almost like lust. A night that made him want to drink blood.
“But… that isn’t my way.”
Phantom sank deeper into the seat and watched the nightscape roll by. Thanks to Tetra Anax, he already knew the Sinsayer Juyda had begun to move. The vampire oracles under Tetra Anax’s control used their foresight to prophesy everything. Their prophecies were like the Norns of northern myth spinning the threads of fate—strand upon tangled strand, they read the future without ever missing their mark.
Of course, like all prophecies they offered only limited information, but that was more than enough to forecast the periods when Sinsayer Juyda would become active.
Sinsayer Juyda. Opinions differed wildly on exactly when he had first appeared in vampire society. What no one disputed was that he was a being destined to inherit one of the twenty-four bloodlines.
Whether a creature who wandered alone slaughtering his own kind truly belonged in any vampire lineage was another question entirely—yet there was no argument that he was one of the twenty-four Jinma. Nor that he was an outcast, shunned by vampire society. The mere fact that he had survived this long while being rejected by the most powerful vampires was proof of just how formidable he was. The worst of their kind: a vampire who vanished between active periods, whose absence alone had kept even Tetra Anax from feeling truly threatened. And of all times and places, he had chosen to resume his activities here—the very land where the Jinma Jeong-ya and Chang-young had been born.
Tetra Anax is going to lose its mind.
When he returned to the hotel there would be a mountain of official dispatches from Tetra Anax waiting for him. That Phantom had created the Beast used by Sinsayer Juyda was public knowledge; no one pretended otherwise. Phantom’s own beloved revolver, the Beast Double, and Juyda’s Beasts differed only in size—same design, same naming sensibility. Everyone also knew that Phantom harbored ambitions against Tetra Anax. Then again, every Jinma harbored ambitions against Tetra Anax.
Vrrrrm.
The Beast Double resting on the passenger seat had been trembling nonstop since yesterday. Was it answering the call of its siblings? Every time the pair of Beasts in Sinsayer Juyda’s hands spat their nitro-flames, the Beast Double shuddered violently.
“Haaah.”
He covered his mouth with his left hand without thinking, but blood sprayed between his fingers. The expelled blood returned to him under the force of his own binding, yet the instant he saw it his vision flooded red and his emotions surged beyond control. He had lived for years suppressing the thirst with transfusion packs, but in the end he was still a vampire. Should he answer the summons of the Sinsayer who was deliberately provoking him?
“…Leave me… alone.”
Yet contrary to his words, he too answered the sound and drove onward. Of course a being of Phantom’s caliber was not so weak-willed as to answer the Sinsayer’s call. But the residents of the moonlit night, living through endless years, often went mad from sheer, terrible boredom—and interesting diversions like this were rare indeed…
“The vampires are gathering.”
Silvester stood atop the building, long silver hair streaming in the wind. Balanced on an antenna on the roof of a ten-story mixed-use complex, he looked like a being who had simply stepped outside the pull of gravity.
From that height the minute movements of vampires writhing through the sticky darkness were easy to read. Yes—moths flocking to a flame. Did none of them consider that the fire would burn them? Or were they already so dead that even their brains had rotted? Silvester allowed himself a cold smile and turned his head. The Sinsayer—a vampire who preyed on vampires. His true purpose remained unknown. In the more than three centuries Silvester had lived, the Sinsayer had become active roughly three more times; the damage he caused, property destruction aside, had always been exclusively vampire lives.
It was not out of any sense of justice that he left humans untouched. True to his name—Sinsayer, the one who speaks of sin—he hunted the vampire race solely for the sake of atonement.
“But killing sinners cannot absolve sin!”
This was a chance to kill Zein, yet how much stronger would a Jinma become after slaying and absorbing another Jinma? The thought decided him: the Sinsayer had to be stopped now. Ironically, a Jinma hunter was about to save a Jinma.
Click.
The black Barrett produced a dull metallic sound. Sniping was an attack that could neutralize even the most powerful vampire. A large-caliber rifle like the Barrett, especially, was something no vampire could block. Hadn’t the Sinsayer himself failed to stop one before?
Bang!
A thunderous report, and the bullet streaked away. Sparks flared from the torso of the Sinsayer as he sprinted; the impact sent him tumbling forward. Silvester had wondered whether the thick chains wrapping the man’s body would stop a shot from this distance, but by some fortune the round seemed to have taken. The damage, however, was slight. At this range it was impossible to tell whether the man had actually been hit or merely shoved off balance.
Even if the chains had thrown sparks, that was no proof the bullet had bitten into the Sinsayer’s flesh.
Full armor-piercing rounds, though.
Silvester moved at once. Against an opponent like this, lingering in one sniping position was suicide. He leapt from the tenth-floor roof, kicking off the wall face as he fell.
“Kyaaaaaah!”
Ghoulified birds came wheeling in. Silvester abandoned the Barrett and seized the saber at his waist with his left hand. Vaulting from building to building, he drew the meter-long blade with that single hand and swept it through the air. The pure white edge, white as first snow, carved the darkness; what remained were only the severed remains of ghouls.
Thud!
He landed heavily. Before him stood vampires who had lost all reason. Under ordinary circumstances they would never have dared oppose him; fear alone would have held them back. Now, driven mad by Juyda’s power, they charged him with reckless courage.
“Die!”
A massive LPG gas cylinder came flying. Silvester was not the sort of man to be struck by such a thing. Using the rebound of his landing, he swept back the hair that had fallen across his face with one hand and raised the Barrett. Minimal movement—just the slightest tilt of his head—and the cylinder sailed past. He put a round into the vampire who had been foolish enough to attack him. The bullet struck the torso, shredded the creature in an instant, and wrecked the parked car behind it.
“Kraaak!”
A pistol-wielding vampire charged. Another kicked off a wall and dropped from overhead. A third roared in on a battered LPG delivery motorcycle from the flank. And behind them all, a hulking vampire clad in a crude armor of rolled steel plate…
Kiiing!
Silvester’s smile was cold as he pressed the blade of the saber—now gripped in his right hand—flat against the ground. The steel bowed so deeply it looked ready to snap.
Shiiiing!
A razor-sharp whistle of parting air as he released every ounce of gathered power at once. Sword-light danced—and Silvester was already outside their encirclement. The vampires toppled like sheaves of cut straw, cleanly bisected. The motorcycle tipped onto its side and careened into the giant whose neck had also been severed. There was no cinematic explosion—only the horrific wet sounds of rending flesh as vampire bodies tumbled across the asphalt.
“Hmph.”
The long-haired silver priest made the sign of the cross with the saber still in hand, left the mountain of corpses behind him, and walked on.
The Sinsayer was pursuing Zein at astonishing speed. Even the most powerful vampires—even Jinma Phantom himself—could not exceed sixty kilometers an hour in human form. Of course, if Phantom transformed into mist and flew the story changed, but the Sinsayer simply ran, still wearing a human shape, at one hundred twenty kilometers an hour.
He kept his body so low it nearly skimmed the ground, moving in a way that shattered every limit of bipedal locomotion. The chains wrapping him lifted high on the wind like a flailing brush, trailing behind him as a long, thrashing tail. At every corner the inertia-driven chains whipped streetlamps in half and smashed buildings and fixtures. Yet the city remained quiet.
This sticky darkness was concealing the destruction from every human who was not a resident of the moonlit night.
“Impressive…”
Zein, the one being chased, could not help admiring the sight. His life was in danger, but to a vampire a life was something that could be discarded at any moment without particular burden. As the heir to one of the traditional twenty-four bloodlines, Zein carried the sacred duty of preserving the potential locked inside that blood—yet how many vampires actually cared about such missions?
Still, if he treated this as a life-or-death game… as a Jinma he could not simply refuse the contest.
Even if it means handing someone a free lunch.
Just as it had been when Chang-woon and Juk-yo destroyed each other. The priest now on his trail—Silvester—was only a clumsy three-hundred-year-old monster, yet he was armed with weapons terrifying enough to threaten any vampire. Fighting a powerful enemy while that man aimed at his back was pure folly. But Sinsayer Juyda, regarded as the strongest among the anti-Tetra Anax faction, had appeared in this far-eastern land and was personally challenging him.
He could not refuse. He could not avoid the most dangerous, most enormous gamble a being could enjoy with a cheap life spanning thousands of years merely because he disliked the idea of losing.
Reason demanded flight. Vampire honor demanded the fight.
Bang!
At this point, running was no longer an option anyway. A Beast round punched through the Mercedes’s window and completely obliterated the vampire who had been driving hard. In the next instant the chains engulfed the car.
Kwadudeuk!
The massive chassis crumpled like paper and was reduced to scrap in thirty seconds. Hadn’t David Copperfield been given three minutes to escape a building mid-demolition?
The pale-faced vampire raised his left hand and slowly looked up at the sky. The thick iron chains that had left his body to crush the Mercedes returned like living serpents, coiling tightly around him once more.
“Impressive!”
Somehow already free of the wrecked car, Zein stood atop the sign of a rundown commercial building and watched. The man wrapped in dense darkness and those heavy chains looked more like a corpse than anything living. More vampiric than the vampires themselves, one might say. His features were alluring enough to suit the bloodsucking motif, yet what truly left an impression were the chains. One hardly needed to cite Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; linked to the name “Sinsayer,” they were the image of bondage for sin—punishment itself made solid.
Whatever sin he carried…
“Don’t drag me into this!”
Zein leapt from the sign and charged the Sinsayer. Reckless. An attack from above was—
True to form, Juyda simply raised his left arm. Merely by clenching his fist he destroyed the entire area. The sign Zein had been standing on an instant earlier crumpled inward and shattered. But Zein was already behind him. Vanishing—this spatial-transfer ability belonged solely to Zein’s bloodline among the twenty-four.
It was how he had dodged Silvester’s sniper fire earlier, and how he had escaped the car just now. His other abilities were somewhat lacking, but a Jinma’s physical power was already a weapon in its own right.
Zein circled to Juyda’s flank, already in attack stance. Claws raked for the throat; a fist that could shatter stone slammed into the face of the turning Sinsayer.
Thud!
A Jinma’s punch fractured bone in a single blow and turned the brain inside into concussion jelly. A surprise strike to the head like that should have been fatal.
“…Hmm.”
For the first time Juyda made a sound that almost belonged to a human. Yet his eyes held only mild curiosity; there was no sensation of impact at all. No blood welled from the wound across his neck.
“What!?”
What kind of monstrous binding force was this? If the blood’s restraint was this absolute, proper damage was impossible without silver. But a vampire needing silver to fight another vampire?
“Keuk!”
Zein immediately kicked him away. Juyda flew at terrifying speed, smashed into a wall, and the heavy chains used the momentum to demolish the structure. Through the crumbling gaps in the outer wall the chains poured slowly to the ground like the frustrated claws of a demon that had failed to climb out of the abyss.
But a few blows would never kill that creature. He was the worst of the Jinma—Sinsayer Juyda. Zein drew a knife from inside his coat.
“Kaaaaaaaaah!”
Zein swung the knife madly at empty air. Each time the blackened blade changed angle, streetlight reflections carved strange arcs through the darkness. Blade-light flashed at terrifying speed. Anyone watching him flail at nothing would have called it a madman’s fit—except that the same blade-light appeared on the wall where Juyda had been embedded and began slicing concrete. A cut that applied spatial transfer possessed enough force to overcome even a powerful vampire’s binding. At least, that was what Zein believed.
Charrrrrrk!
Yet even beneath that relentless assault the chains wrapped around Juyda’s body unwound themselves. Rising like some unkillable monster, they writhed in the manner of a Sidewinder missile and shot toward Zein. He vanished again and reappeared standing atop a streetlamp.
Tang!
Juyda predicted Zein’s next move with the same certainty as Tetra Anax itself and fired the Beast. Zein instantly threw up a barrier to stop the round, but the Beast was a large-caliber rifle wearing the shape of a pistol. Better to call it a cannon. The hideous bullet punched straight through the barrier and struck Zein’s shoulder.
Crack.
The shoulder bone disintegrated and the arm was half-severed. A wound that would have killed a human instantly—yet Zein focused his mind and used Vanishing once more.