Original Sin
Se-geon bit down on the scabbard hanging from his mouth and drew his sword. A pitch-black blade of steel sprang free of its sheath. It wasn't a particularly expensive piece, but its edge was keen enough to slice the night fog. Gripping that blade, Se-geon charged into the vampires with his bike.
"Kraagh!"
He cut one down as he swept past astride the machine. The recoil from the impact was so severe that for an instant he wondered if his arm might tear clean off. And if the striker was that bad off, how much worse was the one struck? The vampire's upper body was half torn open; it collapsed, spilling blood and guts thick across the asphalt. A creature with strong binding force—anything past about VT 50,000—might have revived somehow, but a weak lower-rank vampire had no chance of recovering from an attack like that.
"You bastard!"
"Waaaaagh!"
With a cry that was half scream and half battle shout, Se-geon heaved the bike up and slammed it down on the vampire in front of him.
"Urgh—!"
But this vampire had power enough to lift Se-geon's bike clear off the ground. Se-geon had once been hurled with his bike by a vampire and taken a serious injury that way. Believing that a thinking person does not fall for the same trick twice, he immediately bounced his body upward and drove the rear wheel down into the ground with everything he had. Then he opened the throttle full and rammed the vampire straight into a wall.
Crack!
Skull shattered and neck twisted into a grotesque angle, the vampire slammed into the wall and stuck. Se-geon took the kickback from the impact, springing off the bike as if flung, and drove his Japanese sword down into the vampire coming up behind.
"Kwaaaargh!"
Impaled deep from the collarbone, the vampire shrieked a hideous cry and swung a fist at Se-geon. Se-geon settled into a proper fighting stance, slipped the blow, spun behind the creature, and heaved it up in a single motion.
Brrrrrt!
Other vampires opened fire, but Se-geon used the one he'd lifted as a shield and ducked into a side alley. Then he drew his Japanese sword across the throat of the vampire already ruined by the bullets.
"Hah… hah… haah…"
He'd skipped the Psychedelic Moon to spare his body as much as he could, and even a little movement left him gasping. Of course, calling the slaughter of this many vampires in the blink of an eye "a little movement" was absurd—but for now he could only hope his flesh would keep working a little longer.
That he could still see the vampires' attacks with the naked eye, though, told him how far the side effects had already progressed. Ordinary humans could not keep up with a vampire's speed.
"Haah… haah…"
Se-geon cut through the thick night fog with his Japanese sword and ran forward. Rounding the alleys, he wrung every ability he had to move without sound and seize advantageous ground. As long as he was a creature of blood and meat, he could never truly shake the vampires—but he could create favorable moments.
"Kraa!"
The vampires chased him without thought. In a narrow alley shaped like a pitcher's bullpen, even someone who'd never held a gun before could put a bullet in a man without much trouble.
Pfft-pfft-pfft!
Se-geon's Glock 18 spat a sound like escaping air, and the head of the first one into the alley dropped in a spray of blood. So—where next? Back? Up? But those escape routes would already have been mapped by the vampires. Se-geon stepped over the corpse of the vampire he'd downed and slipped back the way he'd come.
"Here!"
At that moment a vampire dropped from above. Why anyone would shout while pouncing on a person was beyond him, but the shout was followed by gunfire. Se-geon's Glock 18 and the creature's Ingram spat fire at the same time. In the thick night fog, two muzzles flared and two figures went down.
"Urgh!"
The Japanese sword fell from Se-geon's hand. Even a tough customer like him couldn't keep hold of a blade after taking a bullet in the arm. At least he'd wrapped himself head to toe in ballistic material—otherwise he'd be dead by now. Hell, if he hadn't covered his face with his arm, there'd be a hole through his skull.
"Damn. Almost bought it."
Cursing, Se-geon forced himself upright. The injury felt like it might have cracked bone, but the vampire wasn't about to die from a small-caliber Glock 18 either—not even with more than half its face blown away. With a hand that trembled, Se-geon picked up the Japanese sword. The vampire still clung to life—it was scrabbling on the ground, gathering the scattered pieces of its own body so it could fit an eyeball back into its ruined face.
"Chahat!"
Like a golfer driving a ball with everything he had, Se-geon swung full force at the vampire's neck. Sticky blood sprayed across the dense fog as the head flew free.
"Ugh!"
Even that little motion made his arm scream. The bone might not be broken, but the injury was clearly severe. At least the other side had been using a 9mm Ingram; his cheap body armor had been enough to stop it.
"Tch."
Se-geon lifted the USAS-12. Without the drug, pain sharp enough to grind his teeth white-hot scorched through his brain—but not yet. Pour water suddenly into a cracked jar and the jar only breaks.
When will it be?
Se-geon could feel the current of "change" flowing through his body as well. That phenomenon of perception expanding alone until it slipped the vessel of flesh—power that felt like it was draining every last scrap of life force. What would happen if he administered Psychedelic Moon on top of that?
"Come on!"
Blue light flared in Se-geon's eyes, more vampiric than any vampire's, as he melted into the fog.
"Kyaaaaah!"
The vampires were in panic—the terror of a Jinma's call colliding with the mental restraints their clan lord had laid on them. Jinma Juyda had surely thrown them in as obstacles knowing exactly that.
"You bastards!"
Se-geon smashed a fist into the skull of a vampire charging him. Fist was a generous word; it was fitted with a firing pin and barrel that could discharge 12-gauge shotgun shells. In practical terms it hit like a sledgehammer. No matter how powerful a vampire's strength, it was still bone and flesh—and one blow put the creature down.
"Kraaagh!"
A second one rushed him. Se-geon drew the Japanese sword—already dulled with blood and meat—with one arm alone and swung. The result of a terrifying training that burned through his own life: with a single arm he severed the vampire's head.
Whoosh!
He carried that momentum straight into a spin, whipping the USAS-12 slung on its strap around into both hands as if twirling a streamer. The bloodied Japanese sword hit the ground at the same instant gunfire tore the silence and shredded the vampires. Passing vampires whose upper bodies had been blown away, Se-geon stepped over the corpses with the murderous grin of a man already broken.
"What are you doing in a place like this?"
From the sea of dense fog, a priest in black stood casting a sharp shadow. He was smiling at Se-geon. That the brat who'd once been a clueless child had grown this far… pulling him into the life of a vampire hunter might have been the right choice after all.
"I could ask you the same. You know you don't have the skill to stand in front of the Jinma."
Silvester laughed as he said it and climbed into his car.
"Well then—let's move. The police will be on the move soon enough."
"Right. Even the types who use buttonholes for eyes will figure it out once this magic dissipates."
Se-geon swung onto his bike and kicked the engine to life. The engines of the coupe and the YZ pulsed together in a strange harmony.
These days it was no exaggeration to say the South Korean police were living through a continuous ordeal. Things that would have counted as disasters if they'd happened once were breaking one after another. A detective wiping out his own family and killing himself; a still-unexplained massacre at a hospital; and beyond those, large and small deaths and firefights in the city center, one after the next. Inside the force, case files vanishing and other deeply suspicious incidents never seemed to stop.
The real problem was that no one yet knew clearly what any of it was. Everyone and their grandmother knew something was happening—and yet no one knew what. How were you supposed to form a countermeasures committee like that? The half-baked bureaucratic habit of dispersing responsibility into a "committee" without even understanding what you were countering… Detective Jo took some small comfort that at least this phenomenon wouldn't bend to that.
"Detective Jo. They say the fire's nearly under control."
His junior smirked at the sight of Jo fretting over a district that wasn't even his. In police movies, maybe, but real detectives didn't stick their noses into every little thing. Was that why the kid was laughing? Jo grumbled to muddy the point.
"But this isn't even happening here. Pulling all-nighters every time something blows up is no way for a detective to live. If this keeps up we won't even get home. Right?"
He muttered as he sorted case files. The unexplained death he'd been assigned remained completely unsolved, and upper management showed no sign of wanting to dig deeper. People lived in an age when men walked on the moon and still, every so often, treated science like a chain around their necks. That was how, at the end of a century, strange faiths about rapture and the like could so easily find a following. That particular farce had ended as comedy—but this time public opinion was fixated on the mystery of the murders, as if some force science couldn't explain had killed them. Cheap mysticism trampling the dead for entertainment was a bitter thing for the bereaved—and yet some of them still went along with it.
"The police mobile unit is always on standby, so no matter what happens there's nothing to worry about. Even if something breaks, it won't be us, right?"
"Shut up."
Jo said it—but he was privately glad this wasn't his responsibility. If he'd been the one who had to answer for something like this, he might have wanted to kill himself.
"…I'm telling you. Police movies set kids up for disappointment. Who joins the force out of a sense of justice? You do it because it's a civil-service iron rice bowl and easy to get into. The work's hard and the pay's crap."
"Even if someone starts with ideals, that's just a kid's crush. In the end they get disappointed and face reality. Everything's like that. Idealists are bound to be disappointed."
Voices drifted from the next room. Some elite from the police academy had been assigned there, or so he'd heard…
"What about this vampire?"
Se-geon asked as he tore along at a terrifying speed on the bike. The roar was so loud he could barely hear his own voice—could human hearing even separate noise from information in that din? But when the other party wasn't human, the story changed. Silvester spoke loud enough for Se-geon to hear.
"He's Jinma Juyda! The Sinsayer! You know that much, don't you?"
"Just the name!"
"That's enough!"
Silvester clicked his tongue inwardly at the bike matching the speed of his Corvette Coupe with terrifying ease. A motorcycle with a power-to-weight ratio of only about 10 kg per unit of power, and it was catching a sports car. On a bike, a tire slip in a curve meant immediate catastrophe; the higher the speed, the less grip the tires had, and control got harder. You couldn't mount a rear wing like a car and press the chassis down with air pressure to increase grip, and an off-road bike wasn't about to run wide tires to buy traction either. Sliding into a drift to take a corner was pure suicide. That alone told him how good Se-geon's bike technique was.
Not bad, kid.
Silvester thought it as he watched Se-geon in the rearview. When the boy had first said he wanted to be a vampire hunter, Silvester had dismissed it as nonsense… looking at him now, no one fit the role better. If Se-geon had even ten more years of life left, he'd become a legend among vampire hunters and then some. If only a little more time remained.
Which is exactly why I should have stopped him all the harder.
But human free will was sacred. When God created paradise He did not restrict man's free will, and so man ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. That was original sin, as Christianity told it. In that sense Se-geon was one of Silvester's original sins. His ledger was so heavy already that one more entry wouldn't change much at this point.
"But you know."
Original sin is something everyone understands without being told. Sinsayer. Listen to the cold laughter of idealists who have fallen into despair. Righteousness cast to the ground, purity defiled—that is the original sin of the world, and of man. That violence used as a means to eradicate evil is itself evil—a contradiction… a dilemma that follows life wherever it goes.
This dilemma is humanity's original sin. So then, Sinsayer—what sin did you commit that you hunt your own kind, the vampires, like this? What unforgivable crime…?
The pitch-black sports car and the bike punched through the fog and rolled into Guri.