See You on a Rainy Day
“Careful. If a Jinma spills blood carelessly, all he does is breed more vampires around him.”
Damn it. They say a reputation never lies—this bastard’s no joke!
Sarhyuk felt, down to his bones, just how foolish he had been to underestimate Phantom. His opponent attacked from a state of mist; there was simply no way to handle it. He knew the crimson points of light flying at him were Phantom’s eyes—his true body—but striking them was no different from swinging a blade at thin air.
He still trusted the darkness of the sacred relic, but even that had little effect on Phantom the Scribe. The relic’s darkness was a form of sorcery, of magical power, and Phantom, originally a Scribe of dark arts, unraveled that force with ease. Already a considerable amount of blood and True Blood had been drained; every drop of vampire blood Sarhyuk had labored so hard to gather was about to be offered up to Phantom intact.
Which left him no choice but to flee again by teleportation.
“Ugh—!”
But what was this? The moment the mist fully enclosed him, his teleportation refused to work. Astonishingly, Phantom’s Crimson Glow possessed a sealing force not unlike the sacred relic’s darkness. In truth it was not a bloodline ability but Phantom’s own heretical sealing technique woven into the Crimson Glow—though Sarhyuk had no way of knowing that much.
Of all the—! One moment of carelessness, and I’m going to die!
Sarhyuk was dumbfounded. A great deal of True Blood had already been sucked out of him. He was concentrating his binding force as hard as he could to stem the drain, but how long that would last was anyone’s guess. And then—
“Aaaagh!”
“Kyaa! Wh-what is that?!”
A couple sitting in the park collapsed in a panic, thrashing their legs. They had stood frozen, unable to believe what was unfolding before their eyes, and in that daze they had brushed against Phantom’s mist. The control of Phantom’s Crimson Glow was not so fine-tuned; blood began to spray from every pore of the man and woman who had touched the fog. The flow was gradual, but even a meager imagination could easily picture the hideous agony that followed when blood was drawn that way.
“Damn it!”
In that instant Phantom halted his assault and withdrew. The mist rose into the air above the park, putting distance between itself and both the humans and Sarhyuk. He had held a clear chance to devour a Jinma of over a million VT whole—and he discarded that chance without a second thought, solely to save the nearby humans.
“So this is how things turn out.”
Phantom reconstituted his body, stood atop a park drinking fountain, and neatly straightened his clothes. Watching him, Sarhyuk could only gape. Not only had the man thrown away a perfect opportunity—he had as good as taught Sarhyuk his own weakness! So long as Sarhyuk kept fleeing into crowded places, this fool would never be able to use Crimson Glow!
“You absolute idiot. Your soft heart for people is national-treasure grade!”
Sarhyuk could not help but marvel. In his own way he was an extreme villain, so extreme he barely deserved to exist—but wasn’t Phantom an extreme saint in equal measure? Not that Phantom himself seemed to recognize any such thing.
“If we’re speaking in the same vein, wouldn’t UNESCO World Heritage status be more accurate?”
Phantom accepted the jibe with a bored expression. He knew perfectly well that failing to finish Sarhyuk now would only hand him a chance to escape. And this was no ordinary foe—this was a Successor of Vanishing Blood who could teleport.
He’s not the type to reform just because I spare him, and killing him means I’d have to devour the sacred relic as well. What a headache.
Sarhyuk was so utterly faithful to his own desires that even if Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, and Gandhi all rose from the dead and held a joint lecture, he would never mend his ways. And Phantom had no desire to transplant a sacred relic of dubious nature into his own body either.
Crimson Glow, no matter how much he refined it, only grew coarser in precision—a crude technique. Even the attack he had just carefully narrowed against Sarhyuk had produced unintended victims. That was why Phantom had never been especially greedy for VT. Moreover, Sarhyuk was a highly unusual case among vampires; Phantom could not be sure whether devouring him would even sit well. Lycanthrope blood, as a rule, did nothing but harm a vampire.
Yet looking at Sarhyuk’s rapid regeneration, it seemed impossible to kill him by any method short of devouring him. While Phantom hesitated, Sarhyuk launched himself up with a handspring and teleported away.
“Damn it!”
Phantom leapt down from the fountain and ran toward the lingering sense of Sarhyuk’s presence. But the man was already long gone. All that reached him, echoing like a taunt, was the childish, petty threat Sarhyuk had left behind.
“……Today, I lost! You bastard! See you on a rainy day!”
“I’ve already told you—rainy days are fully booked.”
Phantom sighed and checked on the fallen couple. Crimson Glow was a relatively mild attack against vampires or lycanthropes with regeneration; against humans it was truly lethal. Fortunately, these two had only been lightly grazed by the skin and had not been drawn upon.
Phantom simply rewrote the pair’s memories and laid them gently together in the bushes.
Wailing sirens approached in the distance. Because of Sarhyuk’s rampage, the number of innocent victims had climbed again. Thinking of that, Phantom wondered whether it might have been better, risk and all, to seize Prester John’s sacred relic and kill Sarhyuk on the spot.
If Sarhyuk decided to replenish the losses from this fight by preying on people, then just as he had threatened, Seoul’s population might truly shrink toward nine million.
“……I’m not a god, and I can never become one. I don’t know what consequences today’s choice will bring. Isn’t that enough?”
He ran toward the alley where he had parked his car. The night wind, steeped in the smell of blood, was thoroughly unpleasant.
Time waits for no one, and so, as announced, July 21st arrived. The networks had kept vehicles on standby near Flex Medical headquarters for a full week, filming the building whenever they got bored. The police, too, had finished posting personnel at every point a week earlier. Truly airtight security blanketed the entire district.
“All civilians and company employees have already been evacuated.”
Superintendent Hwang Seok-yeong clicked his tongue as he took the report from his subordinate. If this building went down, every last head in the Special Investigation Unit would roll. It was an intelligence building no insurance would cover. If it vanished, the damages would run into the tens of billions.
But more worrying than the loss of his own neck was the simple question: just what kind of bastard would destroy something like this? What possible story could drive a man to an act so reckless?
“I hear Flex Medical’s stock has crashed hard.”
Flex Medical headquarters had originally been a privately held company. With such a rock-solid asset structure, they had never needed to raise capital through a public offering. Questions lingered about their finances precisely because the firm was not public, but according to IRS investigations they were a blue-chip enterprise whose operating profits exceeded twenty percent of annual revenue. For the owners, monopolizing those profits rather than diluting them through a public listing was clearly the better deal.
Still, to become a true international conglomerate, they could not remain indefinitely private. Very few countries allowed foreign firms to stay unlisted, and those that did were usually underdeveloped economies not worth entering in the first place.
That was why Flex Medical’s Korean branch operated as an independent legal entity and had gone public with full transparency. The holding company owned by Tetra Anax remained private, but the Korean branch of Flex Medical was a fully listed corporation. And the stock of that Korean branch had plummeted on the strength of the terror threat alone.
“If he doesn’t actually blow the building, someone could make a killing on the rebound.”
If no explosion occurred today, the share price would snap right back—which would make this, if it paid off, a spectacular short-term scam for enormous money.
“So you’re saying it might even be a Flex Medical false-flag.”
“Exactly.”
Detective Jo told his colleagues as much while reviewing the trading records he’d pulled from the stock exchange. Every time a buy order appeared, it was Flex Medical Korea’s own executives snatching up the shares. They would claim they were defending their management rights—but sixty-eight percent of Flex Medical Korea’s stock already belonged to the Flex Foundation. Management would never change hands, not even if they died and came back to life.
“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out.”
Detective Jo sighed and looked up at the imposing Flex Medical building. Beside it, a new tower for some domestic conglomerate was still under construction. Ordering that site shut down for the day had set off a tremendous fuss.
He could understand the opposition—every idle day on a construction schedule burned serious money. But when he considered the potential human cost of a bomb attack, there had been no choice but to halt the work.
“By the way, what time is this guy even planning to set it off? Huh?”
The police held their posts and waited for the bomber to appear. And in places the officers could not see, the vampires lurking nearby were waiting for Han Se-gun as well. There were no bombs planted in the headquarters building itself. Bomb-disposal experts had scoured the place for a full week and confirmed that much beyond doubt.
“These damn cops are just rushing their own funerals.”
Han Se-gun sighed as he eavesdropped on police radio. Every preparation for the attack was already complete. But with that many officers on site, there was no way to guarantee their lives separately. He had known for a week where they were posted, so he knew every point. Sniper positions, once chosen, were almost always rooftops in the city center—hard to change on short notice.
And the truly good points were, in the end, a limited set.
“They hand a terrorist half their internal intel and still expect to walk away alive. The Korean police really are lazy. Then again, they’ve never faced a real terror attack in their lives. Well—I did warn them. Die on duty and it’s a two-rank posthumous promotion and a plot in the National Cemetery. Not the worst deal.”
Se-gun convinced himself with that absurd reasoning, pulled out detonating cord, and wound it in a circle around the entrance. With a blast the alloy door flew free, and outside light poured in. From inside, he opened the truck’s rear doors and swung astride the bike.
“All right. Let’s go.”
Elliot had sent every human employee home and blanketed the area with vampires. He himself refused to yield to the bomb threat and remained seated in the executive office. A lone human had issued a challenge; for more than a hundred vampires to turn tail in fear simply would not do.
“Running low on smokes, too.”
Elliot drew the last cigar from his case and regarded his rifle. It was a custom piece built on a .303 Winchester platform with a silver barrel. He laid it on the desk and loaded a round. It had done nothing against that monster Sarhyuk, but against ordinary vampires it still packed more than enough power to stop one in a single shot.
“Hnh—!”
Then Elliot jolted upright, rifle in hand. His precognition had flagged an enemy attack.
“Damn it! It’s starting! Ah, hell—who put these windows in?!”
The glass was ballistic, which meant that even knowing the enemy was about to come flying, he could not fire through it. Anticipating the catastrophe to come, Elliot stood his desk on end as a barricade toward the window and retreated as far from the glass as he could.
Thup-thup-thup-thup-thup!
The sound of helicopter rotors reached them. Police and civilians had crowded in so thickly, yet everyone was holding their breath, so no one could miss it.
“Something this old-school?!”
Detective Jo jerked his head toward the sky. What appeared beyond the buildings was an RC helicopter with a pipe mounted underneath. Fixed to that pipe were four claymores of truly terrifying size. A weapon whose backblast alone reached sixteen meters and that could turn every human within a hundred and two meters of its front into ground meat—and four of them were hanging there. Everyone watching felt their guts shrink to the size of peas.
“Take cover!”
Superintendent Hwang Seok-yeong went white. If it had been an ordinary bomb, the police would have had a job to do; an artillery-style bombardment from outside left them with no countermeasures at all.
“You can’t fly an RC from too far away! Find the operator!”
“……There’s no time to look! Run!”
In the chaotic instant the officers began to fall back, the claymores hanging from the helicopter detonated.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWANG!
With a monstrous roar, bearings exploded outward and slammed into the entire Flex Medical headquarters building.
Rrrrrumble—!
Window glass shattered into powder, and the shockwave alone blew out the glass and cladding of neighboring towers. Everything around them shuddered as if in an earthquake; a hard wind tore down the street lined with high-rises. Exterior panels rained from above onto the vehicles and people clustered below.
“Aaaaaaaaaagh!”
Pandemonium filled the boulevard. The damage to Flex Medical from the concentrated claymore fire was so severe that several of the humans still inside were torn to shreds.
“Wh-what? Why were there still people left in that building?!”
Detective Jo watched through binoculars and cursed. Either way, the enemy’s attack had begun.
“Damn it! He’s near here! Fan out across the whole area, now! Grab anyone even slightly suspicious! Get the broadcast trucks out of the way—are you trying to block the ambulances?!”
Superintendent Hwang roared and set his men moving. At that moment Detective Jo, struck by a thought, lifted his radio.
“Sniper teams! Sound off by unit!”
“Goose, all clear!”
“Butterfly, all clear!”
“Bamboo, all clear!”
“…….”
Only three snipers answered; a brief silence followed. Detective Jo immediately looked up at the construction site where the fourth sniper had been posted.
“There!”
Sure enough, atop the construction crane, a young man in a black racing suit stood on the steel frame, facing the wind. His long green hair streamed in the gust as he raised his left hand toward the half-warped moon.
“Goddamn it—that’s him!”
Superintendent Hwang tried to rally his men at once, but the place the terrorist occupied was not somewhere ordinary humans could climb. At that height the wind had to exceed twenty meters per second; a single misstep would leave nothing to bury.
“Aaaah!”
The press, even in the midst of this chaos, pressed in with cameras in a frenzy. And then—
Flutter-flutter-flutter!
Birds appeared from somewhere and rose toward him. Black-feathered, they dove at the young man with unmistakable hostility.
“Ah—!”
Everyone squeezed their eyes shut. Not one or two—hundreds of them all at once. Stretch the truth a little and that many birds could have lifted a man off his feet. Standing on an unstable foothold and colliding with that swarm meant certain death.
“Ooooh!”
But the cameraman who kept his eyes open out of professional instinct witnessed an astonishing sight.
“What is that?!”
The young man clenched the left hand he had raised and flung something like black thread among the birds.
Shiiiiing—!
The dark lines lashed through the flock like a whip. And in that instant—explosion. Every bird diving at the young man was blown to pieces.
“In-incredible!”
Black feathers rode the updraft into the sky. Clad in the jet-black racing suit, he walked slowly along the steel beam, reached out, and caught one of those feathers. He brought it to his face. Even through a telephoto lens it was hard to be sure, but the young man was unmistakably smiling.
“Damn it! Stop him by any means necessary! Open fire!”
“Yes, sir!”
The police snipers lifted their rifles from their bipods and trained them on the young man standing on the crane with the moon at his back. Feathers swirling on the wind gave the uncanny impression that wings had sprouted from his shoulders.
Bang!
A soft report, and the police sniper went down first. The young man spun the Tokarev in his left hand. He had fired a rubber riot round. The range was only about a hundred meters, but dropping a man with a pistol was enough to drain the other snipers of any will to attack.
Bang! Bang!
Shots rang out in succession, and the snipers on every building toppled one after another. That young man—Han Se-gun—had neutralized the police and now fixed his gaze on the shattered husk of Flex Medical headquarters.
In the executive office of headquarters, Elliot had no idea how best to respond. Judging by Han Se-gun’s deft assault and tactics, the human police were already nothing but an obstacle to the free use of vampire power.
“Pull the police back.”
“Sir?”
“Pull them back—or if you can’t do that, at least blindfold them! Then we can receive him properly as vampires. The princes of the night do not take humans as hostages!”
“B-but under the circumstances, using humans as shields would be—”
“Enough. More importantly—are those vampire units of ours already inside?”
He fixed his secretary with a hard stare. She nodded, looking as if she might cry.
“Then go! Blocking him with police and military units alone is a lost cause!”
“But with this many humans still—”
“As long as that bastard doesn’t care about them—wait.”
Then Elliot felt another flash of precognition and recoiled in horror.
“That…… crazy son of a bitch!”
He had read what Se-gun was about to do, and it left him stunned.
The police clustered below, trying to seize the construction elevator. Of course the power to that elevator had been completely cut. Se-gun had already exhausted every available measure—and still, from below, came the sound of something climbing.
“Vampires, then?”
Se-gun clicked his tongue, recognizing how unnaturally light the footsteps were. At last the vampires seemed ready to start the real game.
“Wouldn’t be any fun if they didn’t come out like this.”
Facing the wind, Se-gun wore a smile steeped in emptiness.
“No point dragging this out here any longer. Time to move to the next phase.”
He muttered as much and pressed a switch. With a soft electronic chirp, an explosion bloomed behind him.
KWA-AAANG!
People stared as if unable to believe what was happening before their eyes. At the rear of the massive crane—the section weighted with huge concrete counterblocks to balance both ends—two steel supports had just been severed by the blast.
Kreeeeek!
A grotesque sound of twisting metal rode the fierce wind, eerie and cold. Unable to support its own weight, the massive concrete mass plunged downward.
“Aaaaaaagh!”
It vanished into the unfinished building with a human scream that should never have been there.
KUUUUUNG!
After several collisions with steel beams it struck the ground with a thunderous report. Dust piled thick on the construction site billowed skyward without limit, smothering a banner that read “Dust-Free Eco Method — Lotte Construction.” Everyone recoiled from him in terror. The vampires, too, were thoroughly rattled.
“We’re not done yet.”
Se-gun sighed, drew Noctis, laid the black blade across the steel frame, and stepped up onto it. And sure enough—
Kreee-kreee-kreee-kreek!
With a hair-raising screech the steel crane bent forward. Unable to bear its own weight, it bowed from the neck and lunged toward a support column of the Flex Medical building.
Bang! Bang!
Two gunshots cracked out from Flex Medical headquarters. The crane that had been hanging dead still until that moment gave a surprising little twist of its head and, by a hair’s breadth, missed the column. Someone had sniped the hydraulic joints controlling the crane with perfect precision. Even so, dodging the column could not save them from the crane as a whole.
KWA-AAAAAAANG!
“My God!”
“Oh my God!”
People stared as if turned to idiots. The colossal crane had tipped sideways and crashed down across an entire building. The spectacle of that collision was so overwhelming that the onlookers went pale.
The crowd stood cowed, watching the crane collapse amid a roar of destruction.
“D-did you see that? L-ladies and gentlemen of the nation—did you see that?!”
Even the announcer was stammering with emotion. Only after witnessing the staggering scene before their eyes did people understand—this place was a battlefield.
“R-run!”
Without waiting for anyone else, the spectators fled. Detective Jo and Superintendent Hwang looked on at the building with bitter faces. Flex Medical headquarters was, miraculously, still standing. A shoddier structure would have gone down completely under that impact, but built after 9/11 as it was, it somehow held.
“We’re really going to die on the job for this, aren’t we?”
Detective Jo knew instinctively that stepping into this now would leave no survivors even if a man had ten lives. Superintendent Hwang felt the same.
“But we don’t draw a police salary so we can walk away from this kind of thing.”
“Choi Hyeok-il’s kid turns one the day after tomorrow.”
“Then tell that bastard to sit this out. Hey—let’s go in!”
Steeling themselves for death, the police charged toward the entrance of Flex Medical headquarters—a building that might collapse at any moment.