House of Angels
Rat Gunip had been talking into his phone when he suddenly hung up.
"Oops! Out of range. Bye-bye!"
"Hey! Hey!"
Voices still came from the other end, but he immediately yanked the battery from his phone.
"Well then… You were listening, weren't you, kid?"
"……."
"Ah, damn. No English? It's the world language. You really ought to learn at least a little…"
"Sucks… Vamp crap has a good ass on face."
Se-gun muttered the words, flabbergasted. Rat Gunip clicked his tongue.
"You can dare Vampire by bare hands? WOW~ I make it! I got a superman!"
Fight a vampire bare-handed? Of course that was impossible. And once night fell, it became even more so. Se-gun rose from the bed. At that moment the door burst open. He had expected a vampire—instead, a girl stood there.
"Ah, you're awake?"
A girl with a plain, makeup-free face smiled gently as she stepped inside. Judging by the work apron and the arm covers on her sleeves, she had been working until moments ago.
"Where is this?"
"Ah, this is the House of Angels."
So that was it. He had suspected from the start that it was some kind of facility. Se-gun nodded.
"Why am I here?"
"Well, your friend brought you. Ah, you were in a coma for two whole days—we were so worried. Aren't you hungry?"
"Two days?"
Se-gun was stunned. By "friend" she almost certainly meant the vampire in the next room—and that creature had kept him alive for two days? He laughed in sheer disbelief. Well, the fierce wind and rain that night had been the trail of a typhoon. There was no way the sky would clear in a single day.
"Haha. This is absurd. Ah, um…"
He looked at her, started to speak, then closed his mouth. He could hardly ask where his gun was. The vampire had almost certainly disposed of every firearm and blade. Still, something was strange. How had a guy who couldn't even speak Korean known about this Protestant welfare facility out in the middle of nowhere?
In the end, he would have to talk to him directly. Se-gun walked past her toward the next room.
"Alright—conversation time, vampire. What happened after that?"
Two days earlier, two Jinma had been forced into a generation change under external pressure. Shane had taken Venom; Sarhyuk had taken Juyda… Those two had consumed True Vampires and become new Jinma themselves. The vampire world rose up in unified outrage.
A vampire with high VT developed their bloodline abilities—and any number of other powers—until they became a Jinma. Vampires of the Astate line possessed powerful toxin-materialization abilities; Juyda's line held the power of Dark Night.
And no matter how high a vampire's VT climbed, if they could not properly wield those lineage abilities, they could not truly be called a Jinma. Wasn't that the very reason Jeong-ya and Chang-young were being hunted by other vampires?
Worse still, someone like Sarhyuk had been a traditional enemy of vampires—a Lycanthrope and a vampire hunter. That such a creature would flip his allegiance overnight for the massive privileges of a Jinma seat…
No—thinking about it, the bastard may have wanted to become a vampire from the very beginning.
But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that Sarhyuk had been accepted by Tetra Anax. It was an unpleasant development for humans and vampires alike, yet from Tetra Anax's perspective it meant a new Jinma who acknowledged their authority and knew how to bow and scrape—replacing the uncontrollable Juyda. There was no reason to refuse him. Besides, Juyda had been a vampire without a single retainer.
In that sense, the far greater problem was Shane, who had consumed Venom. After Sepia's death left him wandering, Tetra Anax had taken him in—and the ungrateful wretch had drunk the fallen Venom's blood and become a Jinma. He still hadn't developed the high-level toxin-granting techniques of the Ireland Astate bloodline, such as Scar or Eshel, but as Sepia's former Esquire his rate of development was blisteringly fast. Only two days had passed, and he had already acquired most of the powers a Jinma was expected to possess.
"So the guy got a Lamborghini Miura for free! Along with countless Ireland Astate vampires!"
Rat Gunip said it with theatrical flair. Across from him, Se-gun sipped his ramyeon broth and shot him a sideways look. This vampire knew Se-gun was helpless and still refused to kill him. Instead, he chattered away as if he were having the time of his life. Once Se-gun recovered his strength and reclaimed his weapons, he would kill the creature without a second thought—but as a conversation partner, he wasn't half bad.
Not speaking Korean was a flaw, sure, but he was still a cheerful storyteller!
"Nobody has a problem with it? Their master changing like that?"
"How could they not? But what are they gonna do? Without a Jinma, they're the ones who look like idiots in a foreign land. Didn't you see what happened when Juk-yo's faction got dismantled? Wow! It was fire. A once-great house gets smashed to pieces real quick!"
Rat compensated for his limited vocabulary with exaggerated gestures. He was frustrated that Se-gun couldn't follow English very well. (In truth, for a high-school dropout, Se-gun was understanding far more than he had any right to.) And yet this guy was supposedly ranked second among the vampire hunters currently active in Korea… Se-gun couldn't believe it.
"…What about Sarhyuk?"
Se-gun set down the empty ramyeon bowl and replaced the lid on the kimchi container. The facility's children had gathered around, staring at them with endless curiosity; he did his best to ignore them.
"Ah, the Alchemist. Looks like that friend became a new Jinma too. Killed every last hunter who'd been his comrade, drained every drop of vampire blood he'd stockpiled in his warehouse, then skipped off singing to pledge loyalty to Tetra Anax."
"…That son of a bitch Sarhyuk!"
In that instant Se-gun slammed his fist into the floor. The wooden boards took the full force of the blow, and the entire building shuddered.
"Waaaaaah!"
Even that was enough to terrify the children. Most of the kids in this marketplace of a place had already endured abuse and scorn from the people around them because of their unfortunate circumstances. If a mere violent gesture was enough to make them cry, the situation was serious indeed.
"Could you please keep it down? You're being so rough you're scaring the children. Please be more careful."
Even the old woman's request was cautious. She treated people younger than herself—strictly speaking, trespassers—with careful deference. It wasn't so much breeding as the simple fact that they were the weak ones.
This floor, packed exclusively with society's vulnerable, carried the same tension as walking barefoot across broken glass. One wrong step and you wounded someone—or were wounded yourself—on the cracks of every complex.
"……."
But separate from that tension, Se-gun was furious. He had told himself he could tolerate Sarhyuk raping vampires or murdering innocent humans for his own ends… because, in the end, the man killed vampires. He hadn't actually endured it, of course, but he had been able to think of those vile acts as a kind of tax attached to the complete plunder of life itself.
But that had never been the case.
Those who hunted vampires could never be morally upright. What they wielded was illegal violence; with that violence they plundered vampire blood and used the money to buy the bread they shoved into their mouths.
If people like that had any indulgence—or rather, any punishment that followed their sins—it was their own self-destruction. They carved away at themselves fighting vampires and, in the end, they died. Committing evil through such sacrifice never added nobility to the nature of that evil, yet a minimum of conscience drove them to accelerate their own ruin.
To put it another way, Se-gun was a white blood cell—a leukocyte that consumed the disease called vampires and then died. But Sarhyuk was a virus that consumed that same disease and used it to multiply. He was a far more malignant existence than any vampire.
"This is no time to sit around! What happened to my weapons?"
Se-gun shot to his feet and glared at Rat—then suddenly realized how ridiculous the question was. A vampire had no reason to return a vampire hunter's weapons. No vampire hunter ever compromised with a vampire. If they had imposed the punishment of self-destruction upon themselves as white blood cells… that had become a law of steel supporting the foundation of their consciousness. In architectural terms, it was the foundation—the unchanging foundation of a life.
"Buried 'em on the hill out back. But don't go looking till I'm at least a hundred kilometers away, yeah?"
Yet this dreadlocked Black vampire named Rat Gunip possessed a mental structure Se-gun simply could not comprehend. Casually telling a vampire hunter—someone who could never be his friend—where the weapons were buried? Having gotten the answer he wanted, Se-gun asked again anyway.
"Why tell me that?"
"Hmm. Why indeed?"
Rat said it and rose from his seat. At that moment the door opened and a middle-aged man entered. Se-gun stared at him in shock. The taxi driver's uniform, the yellow dress shirt—this was unmistakably the man Se-gun had knocked unconscious with a punch and driven off earlier.
"Ah, you've come to. I heard over the phone earlier, but I'm truly glad."
"Ah, yes. I'm in your debt."
Se-gun offered a polite greeting. Receiving this kind of care from a man he had beaten down with his own fists was deeply awkward. Perhaps that was why silence settled between them.
Silence, of course, never truly erased sound. This was a shelter where many people lived; the voices of countless children and elderly people mixed and drifted in. But Se-gun and the taxi driver simply looked at each other without speaking. Then the girl in the apron approached.
"Dad! You're home?"
"Ah, yes. Everything alright?"
"Yes."
She brought over a set of black clothes and held them out. The taxi driver took them.
"Huh?"
It was the plain black attire favored by clergy. Even among Protestant pastors, some denominations wore something like that. The sects were so numerous he couldn't place which one, but he knew it wasn't the kind of thing a taxi driver would wear as a hobby. In other words, this taxi driver's real profession was pastor.
"Ah—so you're a pastor."
Se-gun scratched his head. The man must think of him as a villain. Of course, Se-gun was an excellent villain just as he was. He had taken countless lives and plundered their blood; what greater villain could there be? But the pastor only smiled brightly.
Phantom had steeled himself for a long stay in Korea and purchased an officetel. He had handled the transaction as frugally and discreetly as he could, but buying an entire floor of an officetel was still far more conspicuous than lying naked in the middle of the street.
"Ugh…"
There, Phantom was restoring his body. Having taken too many of Father Silvester's attacks, he had once suffered a catastrophic shock that dropped his VT as low as fifty thousand. It had recovered since, and now stood at roughly three hundred seventy thousand… meaning he had lost about forty thousand VT overnight.
"Remarkable, Silvester…"
It had been a very long time since something like this had happened to him. He had known defeat before, but only when the opponent was another Jinma. He sprawled across the long sofa and exhaled a long sigh.
His entire body felt heavy.
Tetra Anax's dominion had only grown stronger after that night's events, until there was almost nothing he could do. He had collected jokers precisely to escape Tetra Anax's control, yet in the present situation it seemed he had only amplified their power. When Jinma underwent a generation change, they naturally fawned and flattered to prove their loyalty to the current sovereign, Tetra Anax.
Had Tetra Anax known things would turn out this way and simply stood by? No—they had certainly stood by. That was how they had always ruled the vampires. They never dirtied their own hands. Always, they used the hands of others to satisfy their own desires—those wicked seers.
Was resisting Tetra Anax, with their foresight and mental domination, truly a futile endeavor after all?
No. Accepting Tetra Anax's rule meant stagnation for a vampire. The moment he acknowledged it, he would lose his purpose and begin to wander.
"Hey. Feeling any better?"
The door opened and a man in a Hawaiian shirt walked in. Taking the form of a young Southeast Asian man, he was the powerful vampire known among their kind as the Jinma Agni. Jinma rarely felt much sense of kinship or camaraderie with their own kind, but Phantom had once saved this one's life.
So Agni had rescued Phantom in return to repay the debt… That would make a charming animal-fable moral if it were true. Reality was nothing of the sort.
He had latched onto Phantom and made a nuisance of himself for two straight days without leaving. And judging by his behavior, he had no intention of leaving anytime soon.
"Master. Are you all right?"
Wilhelm, who had gone shopping with Agni, wore an openly disgusted expression as he extracted himself from the other vampire and approached Phantom. Still sprawled on the sofa, Phantom tossed an empty transfusion pack into the trash.
"…The VT loss is significant, but I'm fine for now."
A look of alarm crossed Wilhelm's face. Admitting something like that with Agni standing right there—how dangerous was that? Revealing that one's power had waned was risky even if the listener was one's own thrall. Most Jinma generation changes happened when an Esquire turned on their master and bit them.
"Tsk, tsk. That's why dieting is bad for you. How about starting now and eating a few humans?"
"I'll pass. More importantly, Agni—do you plan on staying here indefinitely?"
"Why? Am I inconveniencing you somehow?"
Agni asked the question with shameless innocence. Wilhelm immediately stepped forward, fuming.
"Of course you are! If Tetra Anax saw this, they could call us traitors and we'd have no defense! We're grateful you helped Master, but if you keep this up, we're the ones in trouble!"
"Haa. What a bold little brat. Fine, fine. You're worried I'll cause you problems?"
Agni said it while ruffling Wilhelm's hair. Treating Wilhelm—who looked like a child but was ancient inside—this way… If the other party hadn't been a Jinma, Wilhelm would already have exploded in righteous fury. Instead he swallowed his rage and spoke in a trembling voice.
"You are already causing us quite enough trouble."
"Tsk, tsk. Cold words. And in a place this big, too. I was going to ask for a room of my own, but I guess a poor vampire should just go find a closet and cook instant curry, huh?"
Agni kept up the act as he pulled several fruit puddings from the plastic bag he'd brought, stuffed them into his pockets, and rose from his seat.
"Then the nuisance will disappear for now. If anything good comes in from Tetra Anax, let me know."
"I will."
Phantom answered with a bitter smile. In the end, it seemed he had fallen into a cooperative relationship with this one as well. If that counted as some kind of personal virtue, so be it—but whether it would work out for the better, he had no idea. After all, he was not Tetra Anax.
"Foresight, is it…"