Original Sin
"Ghhhk!"
The severed arm reclaimed its blood-bound grip and snapped back onto his body—but restoring bone was never a simple matter, even for a Jinma. What Zein could not endure, however, was not the wound. It was the humiliation. That he, a Jinma, had surrendered an arm so easily—
"Then I'll take your arm as well!"
With Zein's savage cry, a spatial leap unfolded. The farther his body moved from the target, the harder the ability became to control—but for a Jinma like Zein, that was no real obstacle. Judas sensed the danger and dropped low at once, yet one of the two arms still fixed to his shoulders—the left—was already gone. Calling it a left arm felt wrong; it had leapt through space and dropped straight into Zein's grasp.
Even Judas can't project his binding force at this range, can he?
Grinning, Zein tore the gun free of the arm and pressed his mouth to the thick, severed cross-section. Drinking a Jinma's blood was splendid compensation for the ruin of his shoulder. More than enough.
But perhaps greed for blood had clouded his eyes. Zein failed to read Judas's next move. Judas unspooled the darkness coiled around his body and drew the Zweihander from its leather scabbard. The blade steamed with black dark, as if boiling water were venting vapor. By the time Zein noticed, the pitch-black dark had already climbed up from beneath the streetlamp and bitten into his flesh.
"Damn it—!"
A spatial leap would get him clear! Had that thought been too careless? The dark paralyzed him, fouling the leap.
Clatter-clatter-clatter!
Worse—Judas's chains moved by hijacking Zein's own spatial leap. The chains wound about Judas's body sank into the ground, leapt through the dark, and erupted from empty air to crash down on Zein. Could he truly seize another's ability through mere contact? A Jinma's ability, no less? Under the chain assault that threatened to crush his body flat, Zein could not even scream. Even so, that alone could not strip a Jinma of his life.
Click.
The jet-black Zweihander laid its edge level with the ground. On that pale face, for the first time, a heat rose—murderous intent aimed at Zein—and Judas charged.
BOOM!
The killing intent was thwarted. With a thunderclap, Judas's arm was wrenched backward. Something ferocious had struck his blade and thrown sparks. The impact was so savage that every finger still locked on the hilt broke and twisted at grotesque angles.
"Never heard you shouldn't eat at night? Mealtime isn't here yet."
A black-clad priest delivered the sardonic rebuke from the shoulder of a peripheral city road, his car parked, a Barrett in his hands. The muzzle still tracked Judas, and the gravity of his expression suggested the warning about late-night meals was no mere joke.
"Guh—!"
In that interval Zein hastily restored his body and fled by spatial leap. Moments earlier he had been in genuine peril—and, ironically, it was that Jinma-hunting priest who had saved his life.
"Tonight really is one humiliation after another!"
He kept leaping through space, fleeing in the purest sense—to live. Each leap crushed him under exhaustion and shame at once, but tonight he was the loser. Having accepted the loser's role, he would tuck his tail and run as far as he could. Courtesy toward the victor was an old tradition in vampire society.
"Hmph."
Silvester watched Zein flee and felt relief and contempt in the same breath. By rights he should kill the creature here and now… and yet, to keep from feeding Judas's threat, he had to obstruct the man's vampire-hunting as much as possible. Irony of ironies.
But Judas—the one who actually needed eliminating—simply reeled in his chains and darkness, spared Silvester a single glance, and sprinted onward again.
"He doesn't attack humans, is that it?"
Silvester trained the Barrett on the figure who was ignoring him and running. Judas was moving at a speed no human should manage—but Silvester's aim was no more human than that.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
With successive blasts the rounds flew and struck. The Barrett's monstrous .50-caliber shells shattered the chains wound around Judas's body and sprayed blood. Still charging at full tilt, Judas pitched forward, tumbled, and skidded across the ground.
Sssssshhhk!
Chain links kissed the asphalt and spat sparks. To refuse counterattack after a beating like that, simply because the attacker was human—that would make a man a saint.
Then it came.
"…Isn't that enough?"
In a voice that sounded ready to choke out under pain, Judas spoke. There was no sneer, no mockery—only a desperate urgency more chilling than any ghost-wail. The terror was not in the speaker. It was in the despair that voice inhabited, and the dread that despair brought with it.
"…"
But Silvester's face only grew colder. What he secretly admired in Han Se-gun was not only a near-infinite hostility toward vampires, but also a blind, absolute enmity. The Sinsayer, Judas. Judging by his actions, he was a cursed soul hunting vampires for reasons that were not, in themselves, evil.
Yet if one weighed right and wrong vampire by vampire, reforming a world ruled by Tetra Anax would be impossible. No one starts a war by carefully sorting good from evil. In the end, someone has to shoulder sin and walk into hell…
"Yes. Sinsayer. I think I know what original sin is."
Silvester set the Barrett down and drew instead a blade white as snow, along with a Desert Eagle. A chill killing intent sliced through the air like a knife cutting sticky dark.
Night fog rolled in like a rising tide. Dense dark without a single point of light mingled with the mist until it became a sea. Like some drowned megacity, the hideous buildings draped in black shadow, the black clouds smothering the moon above them—everything was swept into the turbid current of fog and dark and blurred. A world where nothing was certain.
The black-clad priest walked that murky road. Slowly entering an alley lined with buildings that looked decades old, he resembled a deep-sea fish threading this indistinct ocean of night.
"Hooo…"
Silence on every side. Humans who never slept at night should have been swarming—yet this hush was hard to understand. Thick fog cast grotesque shadows everywhere, and the quiet was so absolute it felt as if his ears had gone deaf. A space strangely stripped of reality. Was this the power of the Jinma Judas? Or one of the mad moon's countless graces?
Whatever the case, he still had to watch for the police. Humans witnessing this darkness would be good for neither him nor the vampires.
But he could not simply let the Jinma Judas go for the sake of containing the incident. And Judas, for his part, would not leave this place easily.
"Nothing looks uglier than a man who talks of original sin and then runs."
Silvester spun the Desert Eagle in his grip like a Western hero. But what, exactly, was original sin? Even Silvester, once a man of the cloth, could not affirm it easily. Because his original sin and Judas's would not be the same.
"Shall we learn it now?"
Judas sat on a heap of trash in the alley's gloom. The massive Zweihander planted in the ground, his body leaning on it—the posture transmitted fatigue and pain that hardly suited a powerful vampire. Pale as a corpse from the start, this Jinma carried a presence wholly unlike other vampires. But a vampire he remained. Silvester approached him slowly.
Without a word, Judas lifted the arm Zein had severed and set it back on his shoulder. Viscous blood became muscle and flesh; the arm reconnected, and every function recovered at terrifying speed. Seeing how little damage he had taken even against Zein, his VT was at least seven hundred thousand—no, with binding force like this, it might already exceed a million.
"Two seconds to reattach an arm… at least seven hundred thousand, then."
Silvester drew his sabre. The distance was awkward—too far to close cleanly with a blade, too close for a clean gunfight. And his opponent sat beyond this dense fog with an overwhelming presence.
Clink!
In that instant the chains moved. The Jinma Judas launched from his seat at a speed the eye could not follow and sprang onto the wall. Silvester immediately poured predictive fire from the Desert Eagle, but the creature clung to the wall like a spider, vaulted upward, and was out of the alley in a single bound. Silvester stamped a gas pipe and rocketed up after him onto the rooftops.
Clatter-rattle!
Anticipating the pursuit, Judas flung his chains. But Silvester spun midair, planted a foot on the links, and charged along them. The motion was so unreal he might have been a ghost. Then again, a black-clad priest coming on like that looked like a nightmare.
With practiced skill Judas cracked the chain into a massive sine wave, shook him free, and landed atop a church steeple. Silvester launched from the chain and came down on the intercity-bus-stop signboard across from the church.
"Looks like there will be a few interruptions."
Judas muttered it while surveying the surroundings. On this night of thick fog, red eyes glowed from every direction like those of predators.
"Does it matter, Sinsayer?"
"True enough."
It did not matter at all. Judas raised the Beast and crossed his arms as if folding them.
Clatter-clatter-clatter!
Chains coiled around him like snakes. Silvester fired the Desert Eagle in rapid succession as he ran sideways. Using building signs as footholds, he moved at high speed while shooting with accuracy that should have been impossible—but Judas still outstripped him in pure velocity. He spun on the steeple, changed direction, and leapt down onto the neighboring rooftop. Then his Beast flashed.
KRA-KOOM!
Calling it a heat blast would not have been wrong. Even with magic to keep the report from human ears, the concussion was so fierce that windows shuddered. Wherever the round struck, even concrete failed to hold. At 666 grains, the weapon deserved to be called a cannon.
"Hits harder than the Barrett, doesn't it."
Silvester clicked his tongue at the absurd revolver. One clean hit would wreck even a Jinma. Phantom's Beast Double was more savage still—but this alone was more than enough firepower.
Whoooosh—!
A vampire who hunted Jinma, and a Jinma hunter who hunted vampires. The two monsters tore through the dense night fog. Leaping power no human could match, speed, dynamic vision, and the raw force of large-caliber firearms—this fight had already left the world of human perception behind.
Right… the Beast Double had a three-round cylinder.
A gun that massive needed storage to match. Something as ridiculous as the Beast Double held only three rounds per cylinder; fire three and you had to reload. The Beast had more breathing room than the Beast Double, but it was still an absurd large-bore piece.
Then again, the Desert Eagle topped out at an eight-round magazine, and his opponent was using two pistols. Even a revolver that was hard to reload could, in the hands of someone fluent with speed loaders, reload nearly as fast as a magazine swap. Looking for a reload gap was impossible. Unwanted as it was, this was shaping into a long fight.
What about the police response?
Silvester dropped onto the road to avoid the Beast's terrifying firepower and flipped a car into a shield. One-handedly hoisting a midsize sedan and overturning it was monstrous strength—but against a Jinma, it meant little. Judas in particular was a vampire Silvester judged stronger than the Phantom he had faced before. In truth, his VT already seemed to far outstrip Phantom's.
"GRAAAAH!"
Other vampires drawn by the Jinma Judas emerged from gaps in the night fog. Reduced to pure instinct, they charged Silvester without hesitation.
"Get lost!"
Silvester took the foremost one's neck with his sabre. Between vertebrae, the blade parted cartilage with casual ease, reversed, and swept on in a flash of steel to the next. Of course, even a severed head did not drain a vampire's body of its remaining energy; the corpse still came on. Silvester kicked it, and it flew as if launched from a carrier catapult into the sea.
"Damn it—!"
Even so, small fry became a serious distraction while fighting a powerhouse like Judas. Not that these things seemed unwilling to attack Judas as well…
CRUNCH!
Judas seized a vampire that lunged at him in one hand, hoisted it overhead, and tore it apart. Then he exerted his binding force and drank every drop of its blood.
That was the decisive difference between him and Silvester. Feeble vampires like these only fed Judas and grew his power. And that was precisely why vampire hunters watched him with such caution. Anyone who, for any reason, ate vampires to increase his own strength was bound to be treated as a threat.
Clatter-rattle!
Sweeping the chains like a cloak to drive off the approaching vampires, Judas drew the arm still fixed to his shoulder back into his body and looked at Silvester. The gaze he turned on the man who had pointed a gun at him moments before was only gaunt; it held no particular emotion.
"My life possesses a false permanence—but not tonight. Exorcist Silvester. Shall we leave our fight at this?"
He murmured it low, like reciting verse, and vanished into the dark. Silvester moved to pursue—but a sudden rain of bullets pinned him in place.
BRRRRT!
Through the fog he could not tell where the fire came from, but submachine guns almost certainly meant Hecate or some similar violent vampire clan. Even Silvester could not ignore vampires who drew guns.
…What a headache. So this is when the proverb holds—two hands can't beat four.
Silvester slipped rapidly through the gap between buildings, then climbed a wall and gained a rooftop. The night fog was so thick his clothes were damp.
VROOOOM!
Through that dense fog, a motorcycle's exhaust note came faintly.
"…Looks like this side has four hands as well."
Silvester thought of another vampire hunter and let out a dry laugh.