The Night of Sinners
"Gyaaaaah!"
Venom crumpled under the crushing blow. Killing a Jinma was never easy — but if he was going to die, it had to be now. What better opportunity could there possibly be?
Yet Silvester's thoughts snagged on Judas, who had already bolted outside. When the consciousness of that female vampire known as Prester John's Holy Relic had seized control of Judas, what solution would it choose to escape Venom's poison?
The answer was simple.
It would change bodies.
But it would need a well-trained male physique of exceptional quality. No matter how abnormally vampire blood amplified strength, that power still originated in the flesh. The sturdier the frame that supported it, the greater the efficiency.
A trained body…
Even if drugs were driving him down a road of ruin, there was still a magnificently tempered body lying outside right now, helpless and abandoned in the rain. That body — Han Se-gun's — had slaughtered vampires with a fervor no one could believe of a pure human hunter. The skill and power he had honed over the years exceeded an ordinary man's several times over; it was a quality that might even have reached the absolute limit of the human species. At the very least, a combat strength of that caliber could never have taken shape in a man of his height and build under normal circumstances.
Silvester hesitated — if only for a moment.
And the fact that he had hesitated startled him all over again.
It was a sensation he had not felt in a very long time. He set the edge of his blade against Venom's throat and raised his foot.
Crack!
Silvester snapped Venom's neck vertebrae and turned, heading outside. Poison seared through his whole body, but that was no concern. In a manner of speaking, the man called Se-gun was a work of art Silvester himself had created, and he had no intention of letting anyone else defile it. No artist would permit another to destroy what he had made. The only two things that could destroy a masterpiece in its creator's grasp were destiny — and the work itself.
Sentimental logic aside, the birth of another Judas was hardly a desirable development. But when he burst outside, what awaited him there was…
"Kaaaaaaahahahahahahahaha!"
Was this what people meant by a fisherman's windfall? Sarhyuk was laughing atop Judas's fallen corpse.
"Ahahahahahahahahahahahat!"
He was howling with laughter. Venom's venom still clung to the corners of his mouth, continuously burning his flesh, regeneration and toxin locked in a brutal tug-of-war — and still the bastard laughed. Se-gun was nowhere in sight. But one thing was certain: the worst possible outcome had come to pass.
"……"
Come to think of it, something was still making wet, devouring sounds inside the building as well. Severing Venom's neck bones would not kill a vampire — but it was a meal already laid out on the table. Not a bad development, all told. When vampires consumed one another, the process of canceling out their binding forces inflicted enormous VT losses. Developing bloodline abilities was never a smooth process either; simply raising VT without substance only produced a monster unqualified to be a Jinma.
"A lycanthrope becoming a vampire is almost without precedent… but in this case, it may not be impossible."
With Prester John's Holy Relic, such a thing could be done. Two becoming one. And yet that Sarhyuk was laughing with such vulgar glee.
"Hahahahaha! Thank you! Jinma hunter! Thanks to you, I flipped my whole life in a single stroke. Hahahahaha! From this day forward, I too am an immortal!"
"……"
Silvester resolved never again to use the word pure lightly. The ugliness this creature displayed — a being that moved on pure desire alone — shredded the boundaries of patience and soiled everything it touched. Judas, though an enemy, had been a soul suffering for his sins, pure and beautiful.
What had destroyed that beautiful existence and taken its place was a lump of pure desire — pure evil, if the word meant anything at all. Regardless, in his present body it was impossible to defeat a Jinma. Silvester clicked his tongue and limped toward his car.
"……Well, the sun's about to rise. Maybe I should pull out too? Doesn't matter to me, but the lady needs her beauty sleep or her skin goes to hell!"
The bastard spoke with swagger, but Venom's venom was no ordinary poison. It was the life's work of a creature that had fought a rampaging Judas to a standstill and even inflicted mortal wounds. On top of that, if he had only just fused with a vampire, the process would be incomplete… odds of victory were roughly even.
"……"
Even so, Silvester was only one man, and many Jinma still remained. Exchanging pieces one-for-one was a strategy to choose when you held the numerical advantage. Now was the time to withdraw. But before vanishing into the dark, Silvester paused for a moment.
"Ah… if you're looking for Se-gun, I haven't seen him. Don't worry."
Irritatingly, Sarhyuk had read his mind. Silvester snorted once and walked toward his car. Ah… was there something he was supposed to take with him?
Silvester picked up the black blade and the Beast from where they lay on the ground. The black sword unearthed by the Eastern Church was a magical armament powerful enough to surpass even archangel-class magic swords. Judas was dead, but the darkness that clung to the blade still had not faded; it continued to coil around the steel.
"……I just saw something incredible."
Rat Gunip could not stop his body from shaking as he stared at everything that had just unfolded before his eyes. Two Jinma had died, and two new Jinma had been born. One of them was a vampire hunter with the ugly nickname Midas's Hand, the Alchemist — and the other was an Esquire of Sepia, a clan that had already been wiped out! Tonight had truly been a night of debauchery.
"Uuuuuugh…"
Separate from his own trembling, the human beside him was groaning. This human named Han Se-gun — Rat had dragged him over because leaving him sprawled in the middle of the road would have meant death, but now he had no idea what to do.
"……And the car's wrecked."
Karen Monty, who looked every bit the salaryman, was going to lose it when he found out the car had been smashed. This was a problem. A real problem. Still, first things first — he needed to catch a taxi, assuming any taxi was crazy enough to be running through a storm like this.
But as if it had read his mind, a taxi came racing into view. It was the mid-size cab driven by the same taxi driver Se-gun had punched and driven off earlier; the man was coming back this way now, looking thoroughly uneasy.
"Oh! Taxi! Taxi!"
Rat ran out into the road and flagged it down. He dumped Se-gun's stiff, rigid body into the back seat, climbed into the front, and spoke in the kind of everyday English anyone could understand.
"Go ahead!"
The night of debauchery, the night of sinners, thus drew its curtain.
And so idealists fall into despair and corruption with ease. That itself is the original sin given to humanity. The gulf between ideal and reality. The contradiction between the ideal self and the real self. Ruler and ruled…
The original sin called contradiction, born the moment they refused to be raised on the animal farm named Eden.
……So Dante really was a shameless bastard. If you need an example, think of a pervert who approaches a woman on the subway. Nah, maybe not quite that bad. Everyone's free to stretch their imagination, right? There's a little satire mixed in, sure. The problem is people interpret it as religious fervor. And he's neither Isaiah nor Muhammad. Well, a comedy is a comedy. It was funny at the time, this thing. Boring to read now, though. Ah, right. Modern people have TV and games and all that, so sitting still and reading through the boredom must be hard. If Borges had been born in Korea, he'd be broke for sure. No doubt about it.
Human conversation… when you lay it out like this, it's damn hard to follow. A conversation without gaps can never be the true subject of information transfer. Thinking that, Se-gun opened his eyes.
"Huh?"
It was an unfamiliar place, so he was startled at first. But if he thought about it, everywhere was bound to feel unfamiliar to Se-gun.
Even so, this was strange. He had woken in some attic room with a crucifix hanging on the wall.
"……"
Se-gun looked around. The room was better called a closet than anything else — bleak enough that without furniture and clothes it could have passed for a pen for livestock. Checking his body, he found his clothes had been changed. Which meant the firearms he'd been carrying inside them had vanished somewhere as well.
Wait — the USAS-12? That shotgun was so devastating it made you wonder whether the Vatican had commissioned Daewoo Precision specifically to kill vampires; he really didn't want to lose it. Of course, just finding that thing abandoned on a roadside would fill a newspaper column, so he had to worry about that angle too. But where was this place?
Se-gun pulled his awareness back and surveyed the room again. A second-floor room steeped in the smell of Protestantism, perched on a wooded hill on the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province… a shoddy structure that had almost certainly been built without a permit. Anyone who could throw up a building like this without authorization had to be handy with their hands, but looking at the cinder-block walls and the slate roof, it was clearly homemade. Only the household goods marked it as a dwelling; in truth it was barely different from a farm shed.
Then what had that sound been a moment ago?
"Tch."
The sound came again. Nonsense noise. Something like a Buddhist chant. Something like a curse leveled at someone… the sound reached him with a clear boundary drawn between itself and the real world. Ah. Yes. He understood perfectly well that it wasn't real. But understanding didn't stop it from coming. A sound that was not of reality was still arriving.
"Haunting?"
One of the side effects of Psychedelic Moon. Had the Haunting symptoms finally begun? He'd known this day would come eventually, but it was arriving far sooner than expected.
"Ha… what a fascinating experience."
It sounded like whispering, and sometimes like weeping. At times it was as if someone were laughing at him nonstop; at others, as if they were gasping, unable to bear the pain. An ordinary person would have been wracked by terror or neurosis, but Se-gun decided he could tolerate even this. Because the place he lived in was…
Quiet beyond belief.
An empty room. An empty living space. A space with nothing in it at all.
When loneliness sinks into your bones, even ghosts are welcome company.
Se-gun got up. His hands and feet weren't bound, so he hadn't been captured by vampires. No pain from the sunlight, so he hadn't become a vampire either. The deathly chill seemed to have faded as well… had Silvester's treatment worked?
"Christian holy water actually working on me… it's so unreal it's funny."
For a resident of the night who fought vampires, Se-gun grumbled like a man who had been hoping the holy water would fail so he could just die. But even among Christian buildings, this one smelled Protestant, and Se-gun had no connection to a place like this. Ah — come to think of it, he had tangled with a cult church not long ago.
But that church had completely collapsed and left no trace. And no matter how starved for injured bodies he might be, leaving a man's hands and feet unbound was strange enough on its own. Se-gun was healthy enough right now to thrash an entire squad of grown men if he wanted to.
"Aaaaaah!"
Children's cries rang out. Startled, Se-gun grabbed the bamboo back-scratcher hanging on the wall and looked outside. A pathetic weapon, but better than bare hands.
"Waaaaaaaah!"
"Awooooooo!"
The sounds were practically howls — shouts the children themselves were making. At a glance, they were clearly not ordinary kids; they looked as if they had polio. No — correction. They had polio. Polio and intellectual disability. Mixed among them were a few children who looked like ordinary kids. The grime soaking every one of their clothes suggested their economic circumstances were far from good. So was this a childcare facility? And if so, what on earth was he doing here?
"……At my age, they wouldn't send me to an orphanage just because I collapsed in the street, would they?"
Besides, this place didn't look like a legal orphanage. The world had its share of welfare workers who, driven by uncontainable compassion, sometimes built facilities the law did not permit. Social consensus held that among them were also trash who skimmed donations and picked young women out of the care homes to molest. Of course, it wasn't the kind of thing you said out loud. Worse than dirty jokes were words that betrayed people's faith in society. No one actually believed the reality, yet the moment someone spoke it, the whole room piled their fury onto a curse — something like that, maybe?
But even if this were a place like that, Se-gun's presence here remained inexplicable. At least until he sensed a vampire in the next room…
"This is a problem."
That was how Se-gun assessed the vampire presence he felt beyond the thin veneer plywood wall. The sun was still up — but it was starting to sink. And right now, he had no weapons.
Should I kill it?
Could he kill a vampire bare-handed? With the sun standing guard, it was possible. But he was hungry and weak. The aftermath of his injuries — even when treated with vampire blood — exacted a brutal toll on life force and did not heal quickly. He might look fine on the outside, but inside he was rotting; for a while, aching and groaning was the normal state of affairs.
On top of that, Judas's darkness… ah. Now was not the time to think about that. Se-gun returned to the present. Right now, the vampire in the next room took priority.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep~.
An absurdly outdated cellphone ringtone went off. Modern phones all boasted MP3-player sound quality, but this one was a clueless old model. The scene could have been rewound twenty years and no one would have blinked — which almost suited the place. But if that phone was ringing from the next room, that was another matter entirely.
The voice jabbering away in English was… mostly incomprehensible. Se-gun had studied languages a bit himself, but this guy talked far too fast. Fortunately, most of it was occupied by the word fuck, so the meaning wasn't hard to grasp.
"Ah, the Excel? It's wrecked. Hahaha. Don't be like that. All matter is destined to collapse under increasing entropy anyway! The thing that broke now was always going to break someday. How much worse would it have been if it died while you were driving and left you sprawled in the middle of the road? Lucky it broke while I was the one in it. Hahahahahaha."