Beast Crossfire
Beast and Beast Double spat incendiary rounds that crossed in midair, scattering a rain of vicious sparks.
Hisssss!
Juyda paid the barrage no mind. He charged straight through it, drawing steel as he came. Two arms kept firing; the other two ripped free a blade and began to swing.
"Kh—!"
Phantom flung himself backward at once, trying to open the distance. But a man retreating is always slower than the one who charges. And Juyda's speed, in particular, belonged to a category no ordinary vampire could touch.
Whsssh!
A jet-black edge punched through the mist and belched a thick, viscous darkness. Phantom felt the danger and vaulted upward—but at that exact instant Juyda moved the pair of arms grafted to his shoulders, as if he had been waiting for precisely this.
Slowly… the fingers closed on the triggers. The cylinders spun with a metallic click-click-click, hammers drawing back. Back, and farther back… until the hammers, stretched to their limit, slammed home without so much as a breath of mercy, as if to make up for every sluggish motion that had come before. Nitrocellulose ignited. Primers flared from the chambers. The colossal gas pressure overwhelmed the chrome-plated frames and drove the bullets free.
All of it unspooled before Phantom's eyes in slow motion.
To see a bullet coming and still be unable to dodge it is a special kind of torment. But between a 666-grain slug and a seventy-kilogram body, which one is harder to move? The answer was obvious.
"Kh—!"
As a stopgap, Phantom dissolved into mist and tried to let the rounds slip through him. But a revolver that fired incendiary shells—a monster of a handgun that might as well have been a handheld cannon—dealt serious damage even to a Phantom turned to fog.
Hssssss!
Juyda kicked off the ground at once, launching himself upward, and swept that jet-black sword—Noctis D. Spatha—through the mist. Phantom snapped from fog back into flesh in a violent conversion, slipped the cut, and landed on the scaffolding of a three-story building still under construction. From the zinc-steel framework ringing the site, he steadied himself and looked down.
"Huh?"
Juyda was not where he should have been. In the same breath Phantom dove into the building—and sure enough, the steel pipe where he had just been standing sheared clean through. The vampire with the black sword alighted as lightly as a black-winged eagle, every motion raw and savage, then came straight at him. Phantom dropped low and fired Beast Double.
BOOM!
Beast Double punched through Juyda's torso. The round slipped the veil of darkness as if it were nothing, tore through bare flesh unprotected by chains, and burst from his back. Blood and meat sprayed from between his shoulder blades like a blizzard.
"Kh—!"
Even with his organs shredded and flying out of him, Juyda only raised his sword higher. He had not used his telekinetic barrier to stop the bullet—he had shaped it, instead, to increase the round's penetration. A detonation would have blown his torso apart; a clean through-and-through merely reduced the wound. If having your organ fragments spat out your back counted as "reduced," the original injury was something better left unimagined.
"Ah—!"
Phantom watched as Juyda stripped the darkness from his own body and poured it into the blade.
A jet-black Corvette Coupe came screaming in, tires shrieking as it fishtailed and stopped inches from the building. Hard on its heels, a black motorcycle laid itself sideways and locked its brakes.
"Kh—!"
The young man on the bike peeled off the frame and flattened himself against the Corvette's flank. Not a moment too soon. With a sound like the world tearing, a crescent of pure black darkness came scything out of the construction site.
Shhk!
Can you picture concrete parting like tofu? Rebar falling in clean chocolate slices? Destruction beyond that imagination was unfolding inside the building.
KRRRRRUMBLE!
The structure collapsed. Se-geon saw it and yanked the bag off the motorcycle's rear seat. Silvester, for his part, pulled out the Barrett and ducked behind a food cart lashed down with rope.
"They're coming out."
Two figures burst from the crumbling building. Phantom vaulted toward the opposite structure, ran along the wall as if it were a floor, and leveled Beast Double. Emptying a three-cylinder revolver built for one-shot kills while sprinting is the kind of thing you only see in movies made by people who know nothing about guns—or who are deliberately ignoring what they know. In real life it is the same as begging to die.
BANG!
The report still rang out. Juyda answered with Beast of his own, racing along the wall, then reversed direction and vanished at a speed the eye could not follow. Only the traffic light within range, rocking violently on its pole, gave any hint that he had kicked off it and flown.
"Damn it!"
BANG!
While Se-geon swore and scrambled for his gear at the sight of those lightning-fast Jinma, Silvester had already opened fire with the Barrett. Sniping through a concrete jungle from street level is not something a sane human does—but then…
"Kh—!"
Phantom screamed as he fell, snagging on a streetlamp.
H-he hit him?
Se-geon found himself freshly astonished by Silvester. To snipe a target moving that fast—almost invisible—with a rifle that was anything but light was not a feat a human should be capable of.
"What are you standing around for? You think a Jinma dies from one of those? Move!"
Silvester kicked off from cover and sprinted. Like a cameraman and his assistant chasing a scoop, the two of them fell into step and ran through the night streets.
Juyda glanced back over his pale shoulder. Phantom, who should have been right behind him, had been sniped and gone sprawling. The one with the rifle was almost certainly Silvester—once a hunter of the Vatican. Nothing short of a Barrett-class round could punch through a Jinma's defenses from behind and actually hurt him.
"But still…"
He watched the scenery rush past beneath his feet, spotted an aging overpass, and kicked the pier of its upper deck. The rebound flipped him cleanly; he landed on the ground as lightly as a leaf.
"Nngh…"
Juyda clamped a hand over his mouth and groaned. Cold. His body was cold. A corpse-cold body—so cold he could no longer tell whether he was moving or merely dreaming, a dislocation so complete that the only truth left in this unreal flesh was the hunger that never stopped coming.
A hunger that would not be filled even if he ate everything that existed on this earth.
A pain that seemed to gnaw his body from the inside out.
An ordinary human would already have gone mad and died, or else fallen on the nearest people and fed. He stood here enduring that. But what, exactly, had he been protecting by fighting the pain?
The extermination of all vampires? The preservation of the human race? Or something purely personal? Whatever the reason, it could only end in irony—because he himself was a vampire.
"Ahh…"
He knew perfectly well what vampires valued most. The preservation of the twenty-four bloodlines, intact. The reason they hunted him was not to erase his line, but to use his blood to strengthen another vampire and raise a new Jinma. Of course there were selfish Jinma who cared nothing for lineage, but the will of Tetra Anax, who ruled every vampire, was absolute.
Hiss.
Juyda drew Noctis D. Spatha and began to walk slowly back along the road he had come. Phantom, and the Jinma-hunters who had come for him. One way or another, that relationship had to be settled. But until then—could he still remain himself?
"Heh heh heh. Figured as much."
Shane set down the comic magazine he had been reading and stood.
"In the end, Tetra Anax's bloodline never produces anyone fit for a real fight. Looks like I've got a reason to be here after all."
Of course, the ones Agni had just wiped out were fourth-rate even by the standards of Tetra Anax's execution squads. Even a first-rate unit would have ended the same way against a Jinma like Agni—that much was obvious—but for the slaughter to finish this fast…
"Be careful. The streets are crawling with Jinma. Everyone knows you belong to Tetra Anax. A Jinma who doesn't care about preserving the bloodlines might kill you just to erase the evidence after he eats Juyda."
Elliot said it flatly as he handed over the weapons. A pair of massive silver kukris gleamed with a pale light even in the dark. Geometric patterns ran along the blades—too deliberate to be mere decoration.
"Hahaha. You worry too much, brother. I'll be back."
Shane licked the edge of a blade and grinned with deliberate slyness. Facing Jinma and barely flinching. And no—unlike other vampires, he was not under any mental compulsion.
"What—that doesn't even make sense!"
Rat Gunip—self-proclaimed warrior of love, peace, and justice, dispatched from Esprit—clawed at his scalp and roared into his newly issued phone as if he meant to chew it to pieces.
"So what you're saying is, the other clans aren't hunting a new Jinma at all… they're hunting Juyda."
"Crazy! Juyda? Not some random nobody—Juyda? Listen, to young vampires, Juyda is the damn boogeyman. You do something bad, he jumps out of the closet, drags the kids off, then it's the whip, the ropes, the chains, the rape, and he films the porn and sells it… that's the kind of guy we're talking about."
"There are several rather irrational elements in what you just said."
On the other end of the line, Karen Monty spoke in a carefully measured voice. The calm tone suggested he was unmoved—but he had to be rattled. The news that Juyda, the most deranged of the twenty-four Jinma, was nearing the end of his life was, no matter who you asked, information worth being shocked by.
"At the point Sepia died, calling them twenty-three Jinma would be more accurate… but what happens if Juyda dies too?"
"Hey hey—a day has twenty-four hours. There are twenty-four Jinma. That's the deal from way back. You don't keep the deal, and next thing you know you can't even do it without a condom, you feel me?"
"…"
The line went silent in the face of Rat's garbage joke. Why a vampire who couldn't even feel orgasm when he had sex would make a joke like that was beyond anyone. At any rate, Monty was reminded once again that these lower-class types remained incomprehensible even after becoming vampires.
"But at least give me a decent car. What is this thing? Hyondai? Some knockoff Honda?"
"Hyundai. One of this country's car companies. You came on assignment without knowing that?"
"Yeah? Model name's Excel, though?"
"Means floor it and die."
"Wish it had enough speed to actually kill me. Huh? Yo, that one was actually decent. Keep it up. That joke was funny."
The line went dead. Rat snorted, shoved the phone into his pocket, and climbed into the car.
"Right… if Tetra Anax said so, then it has to be true."
He muttered it to himself and turned the key.
From the moment they first recognized their own power, vampires had secured their place as the true lords of human society. Overwhelming physical ability, the wisdom of long life, and the wealth that came with both—every advance of civilization only added to their strength. Most of the vampires who had arisen in the primitive age, whether by nature or by sorcery, had been erased by sunlight. But the more civilization advanced—the more the daylight hours of human life shrank—the stronger the vampires became.
Humans, however, were not ignorant of the dark. No—this darkness had been born from them in the first place. Vampires born of humans who fed on humans, and the countless similar monsters that walked beside them: heretics gathered to hunt them all. The Vatican officially denied the existence of such creatures. And the medieval Vatican had always hungered more for worldly power than for its place as a universal faith.
But by the time the world's consciousness had advanced far enough to matter, the vampires already occupied a position too entrenched to dislodge. The more civilization flourished and the human population swelled, the more the parasites that fed on them became chronic—malignant.
A crack of thunder dragged consciousness back into place. The fog had grown so thick that the sky finally answered with lightning, and the rain came down.
Shhhhhh!
A relentless downpour, and with it a rising haze of mist. In a storm where you could barely see a hand's breadth ahead, Juyda walked at an unhurried pace. Zein the Jinma seemed to have fled in terror; the one facing him now was Phantom. A powerful black mage and judicial sorcerer, Phantom was a Jinma of exceptionally pure twenty-four-line blood. To kill him would be to kill a vampire of considerable value. He was not the strongest among the Jinma, but he was brilliant and resourceful—someone who needed to die early. Still, Phantom alone would not be enough. Juyda had little time left. He needed to kill as many of them as he could, or else…
"Khahahahaha."
Juyda covered his pale face with one hand and laughed. Lips drained to a violet pallor, deep shadows pooled under his eyes, a deathly chill that belonged on a corpse—how long had it been since he last laughed like this?
"Not much of a night for laughing!"
Phantom burst out of the rain. The Barrett had clearly hurt him, but for Phantom, Juyda remained the absolute priority. Juyda swung his sword on pure reflex at the figure charging in. A clean note rang out as a streetlamp sheared through and toppled, hanging by its wires. Sparks flew; the cables writhed like snakes—but Phantom was already mist, slipping past the cut to solidify behind him.
⟨ Take Back ⟩