The Black Sword
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
Se-geon glanced around. There weren’t many people, and only Lee Jin-hye stood nearby, staring at the case with open curiosity. He carefully laid a hand on it.
“Ah!”
That alone made the phantom whispers of the wraiths recede. Were they afraid? Se-geon opened the case.
Whiiiiiing!
Inside, nestled in a leather scabbard, lay a single sword. Even in the brief glimpse he had once caught of it, its presence had burned itself permanently into his mind. Until a few days ago it had been the black blade wielded by the Jinma Yuda—Noctis D. Spatha.
In truth this was the finest of the magic swords the Eastern Church had unearthed during the search for Prester John. Forged by sorcery beyond imagination, the black sword possessed the power to strike down even mighty ancient evil spirits. Yet they were handing something this precious over to him? And that was not all.
“And this…?”
Beneath the sword lay a revolver. It was the three-cylinder revolver Yuda had used—Beast. Se-geon lifted the heavy pistol; it weighed as much as a dumbbell.
“…This as well?”
“Yeah.”
“….”
Se-geon returned both items to the case. What on earth was the man thinking? Beast was one thing, but this sword was a priceless treasure and a work of art. During the boom years, when Japan’s bubble economy was at its most feverish and was driving art prices around the world up more than tenfold, if this piece had gone to auction it would not have been strange to see it fetch an absurd sum in the hundreds of billions of won. After all, was it not a mysterious magic sword discovered in Prester John?
“Whoa, what is that right now?”
“Ah. A sword. An antique, I suppose.”
Se-geon answered the astonished Lee Jin-hye. She looked straight at him.
“It sure didn’t look like a toy. An antique? How much is it worth?”
“Trying to put a price on it is pretty meaningless, but…”
He muttered the words while turning his gaze toward Kim Seong-hui. She smiled.
“It’s a recession these days, so the value has probably dropped a lot. Converted to market price, maybe around ten million dollars?”
“…You’re joking, right? Ten million dollars—how much is that?”
Lee Jin-hye was stunned. No matter that Arjuna dealt in that sort of trade, there was no way something so expensive would sit inside a little shop like this. And the two of them were chatting about it so casually that it only made the claim harder to believe. Yet the sword itself was so magnificent—so overwhelmingly magnificent—that even an outsider could not simply dismiss it as a joke.
“Then please tell him I’ll put it to good use. Anyway, these days… I’ve been seeing strange things. Do you have anything useful?”
Se-geon said it as if it were the most ordinary remark in the world—the sort of admission that would get anyone else branded a madman. For a vampire hunter, the closer one drew to ruin, the thinner the boundary between reality and illusion became, until the hunter himself was an existence out of step with the world. To admit that was to announce that one’s life was nearly spent. Knowing full well what the words meant, Kim Seong-hui only smiled. That was what he liked about this woman. She never offered pity. She could watch a man die right in front of her without so much as a blink, yet she was beautiful, charming, and mature all at once. Seductive, one might say.
“It’s not as if there aren’t quite a few high-grade items. But most of them can only be sold to association members. I handle consignment sales, so I can’t just hand those out.”
She said that, yet he could not recall ever seeing many people who looked like Taoist masters or exorcists come here to buy. Of course not. Seoul was currently crawling with vampires, and the vampire hunters had been wiped out, so the Finders who once supplied them with information had withdrawn as well. To fight the demonic in a place like this was little better than suicide; aside from those who ground their own souls away in the struggle, no one would attempt it. Or else they were already all dead.
“Is that so? That’s a bit of a shame.”
Still, rather than clumsily trying to learn magic at this late stage, relying on tools would be better. That was probably why Silvester had given him the black sword.
Se-geon leaned back in the chair.
Thinking of what lay ahead made his chest feel tight. Even a man who had long disregarded death found himself too frustrated to maintain that indifference any longer. The vampires’ power was so overwhelming that most of the hunters were already dead. Moreover, Sarhyuk knew the hunters well. Kenneth Yang would know as well… he might even kill the man simply to choke off the smooth supply of weapons.
“One way or another, this place might become a target too.”
If only Silvester and Se-geon remained in Korea, the vampires would no longer grant any special consideration here. They would destroy Arjuna and eliminate their long-time enemy, the Jinma hunter Silvester. After all, they seemed to have a great many perfectionists among them. Having wiped out the other hunters, they would naturally want to erase the last two as well, wouldn’t they?
“I suppose so?”
Kim Seong-hui looked at Se-geon with a worried expression. Come to think of it, this shop called Arjuna, even after becoming a café, had been engaged in work it had no business doing. A teahouse where ordinary people came and went freely while illegal goods changed hands—it was strange.
“Anyway… if we don’t want to drag unrelated people into this, it might be best to start wrapping this shop up soon.”
“Huh? What do you mean by that?”
Lee Jin-hye, who had been clearing empty tables, spun around and glared at Se-geon the moment she heard talk of closing the shop. The work was hard, but the hourly wage was high enough that it was a satisfying place to work. Business wasn’t struggling, yet he was talking about shutting it down… it was only natural that Se-geon suddenly looked like some ruthless real-estate shark.
“Should we? Hmm… In the end it was just a daydream. Still, things like this were nice. I do like brewing coffee.”
Despite Lee Jin-hye’s reaction, Kim Seong-hui laughed and made a little gesture of rapping her own head. Se-geon snorted a quiet laugh at the sight.
“Well then, I’d better be going. I’ve got an irritating human to deal with. Ah—and tell Silvester I’ll use it gratefully.”
Se-geon left the shop. He had originally come hoping for something like a talisman to ward off the evil spirits, but he had walked away with something far more useful than any charm.
On a moonless night, a large Airbus settled onto the heliport of Flex Medical. The heavy aircraft touched down, and its door opened. Out stepped a long-haired blonde woman and the young girl who accompanied her.
“Oh my. You came out to meet us?”
The girl called out in a bright, lively voice to Elliot and his retinue waiting at the edge of the heliport. Elliot had recently found his position awkward after his younger brother Shane became a Jinma, yet he still held the post of Tetra Anax’s Korean branch director, overseeing the vampires of the country. Whether that meant Tetra Anax favored him so highly, or whether the generational upheaval now underway was exactly what Tetra Anax desired, no one could say for certain.
“Hmm. Thank you for making the long journey.”
“Oh my, don’t be ridiculous.”
A vampire king never troubled himself with travel. Least of all when he arrived by Airbus. Maria smiled.
“Everyone looks like they’ve been chewing on bugs.”
The vampire Messiah, who stayed close beside her, surveyed the assembled vampires. The generational shift of the past few days had been a seismic upheaval in the rigidly fixed vampire society. Naturally many vampires were discontented. It was the same feeling one got when a friend suddenly won the lottery, rolled up in a limousine, smirked “Hmph!” at you waiting at the bus stop, and then drove past.
“Where are the others?”
“Ah, running a little late!”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than another figure appeared on the heliport. He was a handsome young man with golden hair, dressed in a white coat over an Italian suit—Row Gibson. By night he was the Jinma Phantom, the judicial mage who had developed most of the magic vampires used today.
“True enough, yet you’ve been playing around quite a bit lately. I hear you got dragged into a fight and lost about forty thousand VT.”
“The rumor’s already out?”
Phantom asked, looking at Messiah, who had spoken to him first. Messiah clicked her pierced tongue.
“Our blabbermouth prophet told us everything.”
“What a headache that mouth of his is. Can’t exactly glue it shut.”
Phantom gave a dry laugh and glanced at Elliot. The other vampires were all seething over the recent events, yet this one—whose own younger brother had become a Jinma—showed almost no agitation. Whether that meant the brothers shared an unusually strong bond or simply that Elliot was the sort who never let such things ruffle him… either way, the man was impressive in his own right. There was a reason someone who was not even a Jinma had been entrusted as Tetra Anax’s proxy to keep the other Jinma in line.
“And the rest?”
“Please come inside first. The night wind is still cold—especially up on a heliport.”
“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I’ll humor you. Where’s Hecate?”
“She arrived earlier.”
Elliot pointed toward the top of the antenna. There, indeed, stood a beautiful woman with scarlet hair streaming in the wind.
“You came early and waited? Even though we’re more than twenty minutes past the appointed time?”
“…Hmph. The ones who know and just stand there are even worse.”
She jumped down from the antenna with a petulant air. Elliot sighed and adjusted his glasses. These Jinma had a tiresome habit of measuring influence by who could arrive latest to a meeting; their pride was simply too fierce. Perhaps after living so long they had run out of better things to do and clung to trivial contests. In its own way it was almost cute.
Of course, for a mere servant of the Jinma to find a Jinma cute was a grave sin.
“So what is it this time? I was under the impression we didn’t get a choice. Did Zein manage to run away cleanly?”
“About that…”
Elliot let the sentence trail off. Amusingly enough, Zein had gone missing afterward. Yuda was a blockbuster; a third-rate romantic comedy like Zein getting crushed by him was nothing to be ashamed of.
Well, it was a little shameful—but the weak getting crushed was only natural. Still, vanishing completely afterward…
“Killed by another vampire, perhaps?”
Hecate tilted her head and studied Elliot. He shrugged and sighed.
“His destruction has not yet been confirmed.”
“Then… those other Jinma? Jeong-ya and Chang-young?”
“…They are still in this country.”
They moved to the sky lounge on the top floor of the building. Originally it had been a café-restaurant open to employees; tonight it was empty. More than four hundred seats had been cleared to serve as a conference hall. Then again, the moment one started traveling by Airbus one had already announced to the world that money was rotting away faster than it could be spent.
“So why call us this time? You unilaterally announced that a bunch of brats would be recognized as Jinma, and now… hm?”
Messiah planted a foot on the table and fixed Elliot with a dangerous glare. The grievance properly belonged to Tetra Anax, but since Tetra Anax refused even to deal with fellow Jinma, the anger had nowhere to go but the proxy.