Adios
Sarhyuk bellowed and whipped his head around. The Prester John relic hanging from his brow screamed again and spat darkness. Silvester leapt backward; Elliot dove sideways. Both men fired, but the rounds could not pierce the black veil and the thick hide at once.
"Ugh. How is that even possible?"
"…Hotel guests, casino patrons, cops—put them all together and it still might not add up to this."
Silvester muttered the words while yanking the magazine from the Barrett. The Barrett was a monster of a rifle, yet against the Sarhyuk of this moment it could not deliver a true wound.
KWA-AANG!
A thunderclap rolled and a pillar of fire punched upward. Phantom, dropping from the sky, had smashed Sarhyuk with the Beast Double. The round tore straight through the dark barrier and, not content with that, punched a hole clean through Sarhyuk's left cheek.
"What—what the hell is this stupid gun?!"
Until that instant Sarhyuk had simply stood and taken the hits, trusting his defense. Only now did he register the Beast Double's existence and come fully alert.
"Kh!"
Phantom landed and checked the damage he had dealt. The wound at the moment of impact had been excellent—yet by the time his boots touched the ground it had already regenerated completely.
"Tch!"
Sarhyuk tried to kick Phantom the way a man kicks a tin can. In that same heartbeat Phantom split into several figures and slipped the blow with elegant ease.
"Afterimages this classical?!"
Ordinary illusion magic never worked on a Jinma. That Phantom could still deceive Sarhyuk's eyes was astonishing. Sarhyuk only snorted and called on Yuda's power again, painting a ripple of darkness. A straight-line blast left room to dodge; a ripple left none. So Phantom, instead of fleeing, raised his gun and fired—this time at the Prester John relic itself.
Puck!
One shot from the Beast Double shattered the woman's upper body. Sarhyuk's bulk was shielded by fur, but the protruding female form was protected only by the dark barrier. And the gun was the Beast Double.
"KRAAAAAH!"
Mad with pain, Sarhyuk charged Phantom. Sixteen meters of bulk rushing forward was a tidal wave no human could have escaped. The asphalt under his paws sheared away and buckled; the sheer violence of the charge was terrifying. Yet Phantom planted a hand behind himself, slid out of range at high speed, and loosed the last round left in the cylinder.
"Grrrrrgh! You bastard!"
Startled, Sarhyuk threw a forepaw across his chest. Ordinarily the dark barrier would have bloomed and bled the bullet's force, but the Prester John relic had taken a direct hit—and the darkness failed to answer.
Click-clack!
In that opening Silvester raised the Barrett and Elliot the silver rifle; both poured concentrated fire. Sarhyuk's thick hide ruptured and blood fountained out.
"KWAAAAH!"
Reflexively he swept a paw, ripping cladding from the hotel and flinging the debris at Phantom, Silvester, and Elliot with murderous force.
"A cheap counter."
Elliot read every shard's trajectory and slipped them with precise movement. Silvester and Phantom evaded just as lightly. Yet in that brief interval the Prester John relic restored itself completely—regeneration that looked like vampire and werebear fused into one.
"Whew! That recovery alone is miraculous!"
Phantom whistled, dropped to a sit, flicked the cylinder empty, and fed in fresh rounds. Enraged, Sarhyuk sank into a lower stance, more aggressive still.
"KAAA!"
He lunged at a speed no frame that size should possess. He had been fast before; now even a vampire would have been rattled.
Still, no one facing a Jinma simply sprawled on the ground with both legs stretched out. Phantom had sat only to provoke—and Sarhyuk's reaction was exactly what he wanted.
"What a temper…"
Still seated, Phantom grinned—then melted away like water. An instant later he reappeared atop a streetlamp on the far side and fired the Beast Double into Sarhyuk's temple.
KWA-AANG!
The black barrier ruptured under the blast; Silvester put a Barrett round through the exact same hole. The Beast Double's bullet opened the path; the Barrett's followed straight through.
KRWOOOOOOAR!
"…Shall we cooperate for a little while?"
Phantom smiled and glanced at Silvester. Silvester said nothing, only kept his eyes locked on Sarhyuk. The temple shot clearly hurt him, yet it had not cracked the skull. Bone and hide were simply too thick, and the regeneration too ferocious, for any lasting effect.
"You ate Zein!"
Elliot muttered the words while dodging. Sarhyuk had already consumed Zein. Even allowing for losses, his estimated VT now exceeded one million. A vampire past that threshold could, the stories claimed, be burned to ash or lashed to a tower and hit with a nuclear blast and still rise from the cinders like the ancient legends.
The tales were half bluster—yet they were about to learn how much truth the bluster held. Completely destroying something this huge still looked impossible.
Shhhhhhh!
Rain hammered down and the world drowned in black. Out of that darkness the vast beast, cloaked in shadow, hurtled forward, swinging its paws and vomiting darkness.
OOOOOOOH!
"Damn it! What the hell are the reinforcements doing?!"
The vampires still inside the trailer hauled out LAW rockets. Light Antitank Weapon—ordinarily insufficient against armored vehicles, but against flesh-and-blood vampires the firepower was more than enough.
"The question is whether it works on Sarhyuk!"
Tetra Anax's vampire soldiers fired. The rockets never even reached him; they detonated short. He might look like a bear, but Sarhyuk's mind was sharp. He expanded the dark barrier and forced the warheads to explode at a distance, then rode the veil itself, slipping free of flame and shock.
"Ha! Fine—leave the hard ones and start with the easy meat!"
Ignoring the too-elusive Phantom, Silvester, and Elliot, he hurled himself at the trailer.
KWAACK!
The entire truck took flight. It tumbled down the hotel's hillside approach road and smashed into a scrap heap at the lower entrance.
"Damn!"
Elliot immediately pulled a grenade. Sarhyuk only snorted and stamped the ground with a forepaw.
KOOONG!
A jet-black ripple of darkness spread in a perfect circle from the paw. The wave caught Elliot and paralyzed him for a heartbeat—more than enough time for Sarhyuk.
"You little gnat! You've danced long enough!"
He put everything into a paw-swipe meant to paste Elliot. Elliot's body recovered in the same instant; he planted both feet on the pad as though mounting it and kicked off.
"Ha!"
The disparity in kinetic energy was simply too vast. Sarhyuk's power launched Elliot skyward in one blow.
"Uwaaaagh!"
Elliot screamed as he vanished into the black rain. The triangle of attackers that had divided Sarhyuk's attention had just lost its weakest point. Phantom felt his chest clench. Sarhyuk knew how much the field had tilted; even in bear form the smile that twisted his muzzle was unmistakable and ugly.
"Well, Heretic Phantom? Odds just dropped, didn't they? Hmm? Don't look down on a child's friend—Teddy Bear."
"Well… child molesters seem to believe they're children's friends too."
Phantom made a rueful face and slowly gave ground. Without the rain a sixteen-meter monster would hardly have been frightening. With the rain pouring like this, it was fatal.
Then, far off through the downpour, searchlights flared and vehicles came racing. Tetra Anax's second wave of vampire trailers had finally arrived. If Se-gun had not wrecked the lead truck they would have been here far sooner—but against Sarhyuk's present power, their arrival hardly seemed to matter.
"Hah?! What the hell is that?"
"Whoa. Giant teddy bear."
Rat and Monty jumped from a trailer and muttered at the sight of Sarhyuk guarding the hotel entrance. The other vampires went deathly pale.
"Wh-what is that thing?"
"Crazy!"
They checked the small arms they had been issued. How were rifles like these supposed to drop a monster that size? And among those already fighting it stood Father Silvester, the Jinma hunter.
"That's the Jinma hunter—Silvester!"
Monty, the brains of the pair, pointed him out for Rat. Rat went "Heh" and looked, then tracked the white blur racing beside him.
"And that's Jinma Phantom?"
"…Look, Rat. Let's go back. This isn't an enemy we can handle."
"Mmm. Tempting as hell, but… vetoed, my friend."
Rat said it while pulling a grenade—though even he knew the gesture was reckless. A few grenades would never stop that thing. Worse, it was Jinma Yuda.
"Jinma Yuda's darkness is a sealing dark that forces every existence into a Non-active state. Shield and weapon at once. Weapons like ours won't even scratch it."
"Y-yeah. And once it's that huge, close combat's useless too."
Rat stared up at Sarhyuk—who only looked bigger the closer they came—and went slack-jawed. Even Juk-yo, with his mutation powers, could never have become a beast this size. Sarhyuk must have swallowed humans whole and absorbed every scrap into his flesh. Without vaporization like Agni's, no amount of killing would let you drink that much blood. Hence the extreme method of fusion.
"He buried a vessel inside a human body and used the binding force to fuse. A man barely turned vampire already using that kind of heretical art… being a former Taoist really counts for something."
Monty shouted it while raking rain-soaked hair back from his forehead.
"Tch!"
Silvester and Phantom had already abandoned useless attacks. The Beast Double's power was absolute, but if a single shot could not kill, it was not enough against the Sarhyuk of now. The stronger the body, the less a fighter relied on weapons—and therefore the less likely he was to carry truly devastating ones. Phantom and Silvester were relative exceptions, yet even they considered twenty rounds for the Beast Double a generous load. Those rounds had finally run dry.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Sarhyuk pressed the attack without pause, intent on crushing the now-helpless Phantom and Silvester. The wounds he had taken so far were severe, yet he was both werebear and vampire. Lycanthrope regeneration already outstripped a vampire's; taken together, no monster in history could match it.
Silvester and Phantom had to devote every scrap of attention to pure evasion. The vampire soldiers who saw it could not even bring themselves to approach.
"So that pitch-black stuff is sealing power, huh?"
"According to the intel we have, yes."
"Sealing? Then what's sealed inside the relic?"
Rat muttered it while staring up at Sarhyuk. Monty started. Of course—that endless outpouring of sealing force would affect the relic itself. What, then, was sealed inside?
"…We can worry about that later. Right now—how do we deal with the monster?"
Monty muttered and ran forward, gathering every unused antitank rocket launcher he could find. Massed fire from a pile of M72 LAWs might still put a serious dent even in a Sarhyuk that size.
Se-gun looked over the guest room that held not a single trace of blood and let out a long breath. Something had swallowed everything—bones and all. Fresh claw marks scored the walls in every direction, recent enough to raise the hair on his neck. Fortunately Se-gun already belonged to this world; he knew exactly what the enemy was, and so he felt no fear.
Truthfully, the moment he had faced the wraiths any residual terror of the supernatural had already burned away.
"…Son of a bitch."
He felt a dull throb in his chest and moved slowly toward the outer wall.
KRAAAA!
Soundproof glass muffled the roar. Through the pane, Sarhyuk's form was pure nightmare. Se-gun finally understood why people in old monster movies fled screaming at nothing more than a shadow. Just looking at it made the head spin.
"But the size is too big."
He kicked the window out and stood in the opening. Silvester and Phantom seemed to have lost every effective means of attack and were being driven hard. Against something that huge, nothing seemed to work.
"Looks like I have no choice but to step in."
Se-gun fixed Claymores to the wall and attached FM wireless detonators. The hotel was prefabricated; once part of the outer shell cracked, the rest might peel away like kernels from a cob.
When the Claymores blew, the blast wave alone might strip every scrap of façade from the front. Tetra Anax might try to write the whole affair off as a simple bombing—and, knowing how they operated, might even pin the blame on Se-gun.
"But… a 5.56 mm round only carries four or five hundred joules. One kilo of TNT is at least four million. Trust those bullet-stopping tricks while you swagger around with that bulk and you're going to bleed, bear."
He finished arming the Claymores, then pulled a TNT bar from the sheath at his leg. He set the Chinese quartz-oscillator time fuse, watched the timer spin down to a razor-thin margin, and flung the charge out the window.
KWA-AANG!
The remaining glass shuddered; several panes shattered. Wondering whether it had even landed, Se-gun grabbed another TNT bar and peered out.
"KRAAAAH!"
Sarhyuk, still locked in combat with Silvester a moment before, took a heavy blow when the TNT detonated against the back of his head. Hide split, hotel wall crumbled, and flying fragments embedded themselves in his back like arrows. Even those wounds closed at visible speed.
"No matter how high the VT climbs, inflating yourself that big… you're a dumb bear, you know that?"
Se-gun sneered and stuck his head out the window. Sarhyuk charged the hotel with terrifying force.
"Tch."
Se-gun dove for the stairwell and mashed the remote. The idiot had just thrown himself against the wall that held the Claymores.
KWAANG!
Both charges erupted, spraying hundreds of steel bearings. The dark barrier cloaking Sarhyuk's body shattered like a rain-pelted lake surface, ripples leaping and dying.
"Keok!"
Se-gun slammed the stair shutter closed against the back-blast, then flung it open again and lobbed another TNT bar. The charge detonated the instant it cleared the window; Sarhyuk had no chance to raise a defense.
KURRRRRRUMBLE!
At the same moment the hotel's outer cladding cascaded down onto him. Already shredded by the chain of explosions, Sarhyuk clenched his teeth and weathered the rain of debris.
"Kaaah. Han—Se—gun! You little shit! I was going easy on you!"
Incredulous, he shook free of the falling material and rose. Heavy marble and the like carried real kinetic energy and were dangerous, yet his bulk was simply too vast; he endured.
Kurrrrrrr…
"Huh?"
Then the absurd happened. The entire front colonnade of the hotel began to tilt outward. Prefabricated on a hillside to hide an abandoned mine, and subjected all day to catastrophic structural trauma, the foundation frames had loosened—and the building's face started to lean.
"Kh!"
Se-gun seized Noctis D. Spatha and the wire and leapt. If the whole structure was coming down, jumping outside was smarter than racing the stairs to the lobby. He dropped onto Sarhyuk's body and snatched the hair of the Prester John relic embedded in the monster's brow.
KURRRRRR!
In the same breath the hotel's façade collapsed. Sarhyuk was keenly aware of Se-gun clinging to his forehead, but dying under a building because he was distracted would have been even more humiliating. He had no choice but to spring forward and clear the falling mass. Despite the pouring rain, dust billowed as the structure came down.
KURRRRRRUMBLE!
A world-rending roar. To keep from being flung off by Sarhyuk's violent recoil, Se-gun locked both fists in the Prester John relic's hair.
"Heh. Old relic, but she's quite the beauty, isn't she?"
He said it while savagely gripping a woman's hair and hanging on for dear life. Then he planted a foot on Sarhyuk's forehead and, by pure strength, leveled himself eye-to-eye with the relic.
"…"
Without warning he brought his face close and pressed his mouth to the woman's. In the split second the onlookers gaped, jet-black darkness spun into a perfect circle.
"What—!"
Using the relic's body as a pivot, Se-gun swung himself onto Sarhyuk's brow and—with Noctis D. Spatha—took the relic's head clean off. Sarhyuk screamed a scream of pure horror.
"KRAAAAAAAH!"
The agony was so absolute that even a being of Sarhyuk's stature went berserk, claws fully extended. He raked at his own skull trying to scrape Se-gun free. Se-gun, as if he had expected exactly that, dropped lightly onto the monster's back.
"Se-gun!"
Silvester, startled by the sheer audacity, risked everything and charged forward. But Se-gun bounced elastically from the sixteen-meter head, hit the ground in a roll, and came up already flashing a signal for Silvester to stay clear.
"Ah."
Silvester saw the wire in Se-gun's hand—plugged into a fuse, the fuse wired to a detonating lead—and understood what the wire truly was.
KWAANG!
Se-gun rolled clear of Sarhyuk's thrashing and hit the switch. The detonating cord wrapped around the monster's neck and face exploded. In an instant Sarhyuk's head and face became a blood-soaked ruin; blood poured like a waterfall.
"Krrrrgh. KRAAAAAH!"
He staggered backward, tripped over wreckage from the collapsing hotel, and went down hard. Se-gun drew another TNT bar, ready for the finishing blow. With the dark veil gone, the charge would be lethal. Phantom, Silvester, every vampire present—all of them stood frozen, overwhelmed by the sight.
"Adios!"
Se-gun set the timer and volley-kicked the TNT straight at Sarhyuk.
But in that exact moment—