Drink, This Is My Blood
A blade split the air and sheared a lock from Se-gun's hair. But he was already throwing himself backward, flinging his body onto a wheeled cart. The wheels skidded and the cart shot away with him aboard. In the same motion he dropped the USAS-12, drew a Glock, and emptied it into the vampire's skull. The creature's reaction speed was monstrous; it flung an arm up and turned the shots aside.
"Gah!"
"Not bad! Did your master love you enough to grant you that kind of power?"
The thing's reflexes were nearly a match for Se-gun's own, even with Psychedelic Moon and cocaine burning through his system. A vampire with at least four-digit VT, then. A different breed entirely from the VT 40–300 trash Tetra Anax had been throwing at him by the dozen. Probably what vampires would call a fine specimen. A vampire that prized purity over breeding endless offspring could almost be proud of its progeny. To Se-gun, who hated the entire race, that care was just another nauseating farce.
He rolled off the cart, came up on his feet, and stomped one end of it. The wheeled cart—over a hundred kilos of dead weight—flipped upright under his boot alone and took the vampire's lunging blade. Wood, of course, couldn't hold. Indonesian lauan shattered into splinters; a razor edge of bone-blade erupted from the vampire's forearm and carved the dark.
Kang!
Se-gun caught the stroke meant for his throat on the USAS-12, then drove his left fist into the creature's face. Bone crunched like wet gravel under the blow.
"Bye-bye!"
His knuckle blaster roared. The vampire's head vanished. Headless, it still lunged.
"Hmph!"
Se-gun ripped Noctis free and brought the black blade down in a vertical cut, splitting the foul carcass clean in two. Ordinary men might freeze when a headless vampire kept coming. Se-gun was not ordinary men.
Aaaeeeng!
The bisected corpse collapsed. Sirens wailed. Harbor security would be on the move. He needed to move now—but the sweet, intimate feel of bone and flesh parting under his hands held him rooted, drunk on the sensation.
"Damn it!"
He hated vampires so completely that killing them flooded him with a joy he could barely contain. After the high faded, only self-loathing remained. A man who produced nothing, who only destroyed—worse than the vampires themselves—yet who, simply because he had once been a victim, now claimed the seat of the perpetrator and rained violence on them.
He despised the way he grew aroused by it. Despised the pleasure.
But that revulsion was not morality. If it had been morality, he would never have detonated claymores across a city. No one had been in the direct path of the bearings, but the blast wave and flying façade debris could easily have torn into the innocent. God, how ugly it looked when he let himself remember. Rage flared through him.
That near-obsessive cleanliness of feeling was something different from moral conscience… and Se-gun's short educational leash gave him no theory with which to explain it.
Anyone who treats murder as a sin is a dog.
If a killing feels sinful, it's only because the hatred wasn't deep enough. Hate with every last shred of your soul and killing becomes the purest joy. Kill without that hatred and you're garbage of the lowest kind.
But anyone who enjoys slaughter is worse than a dog.
Because that kind of creature has already broken the ability to tell right from wrong. A thing that can't judge good from evil is just a monster wearing a human face. In human society it exists only to hurt everyone around it.
After tonight, that too would end.
When the hours granted him ran out, Se-gun would finish becoming a vampire and receive the sun's merciless judgment. He slipped between shipping containers, dodging searchlights, and checked his watch. The hour hand was crawling toward one in the morning.
"Plenty of time left."
Vampires like the last one were a pain, but nothing he couldn't handle. Ten seconds or thirty—that was the only real difference. High-VT vampires had sharper senses and faster reactions, but raw strength and explosiveness still scaled with muscle mass; nothing miraculous there. What made them dangerous was experience, sorcery, death-arts, bloodline powers.
Against the Se-gun of this moment, they would never get the time to use any of it.
Gooooong!
While he crouched in the gap and sorted his options, the vampires came on, riding the smell of blood and meat across the night.
"Come on, you bastards! Final movement!"
Ah, look—the deeper the dark, the closer the dawn. Sun! Burn this sinful soul to ash! Se-gun fought as if he were singing. No—dancing.
Bang!
Beast howled and spat white-hot flame.
Shhhk!
Noctis carved the moonlight itself.
Would it look like this if someone smeared thick oil paint straight onto canvas? Madness so absolute it rode the moonlight, rode the dark, rode the pale mercury glare trapped between them. A man dancing toward death, singing the song of frenzy.
A manta-ray-like demon beast knifed toward Se-gun at terrifying speed. The detonating cord he had cast earlier snared it midair like an invisible spiderweb.
"Kiiiii!"
The creature shrieked, lost balance, and shot past him. Se-gun ducked, ignited the cord, and swept Noctis through a vampire's legs. Then he drove the black blade into the fallen creature's chest. The desperate blood-duel—like something out of an ancient arena—was finally winding down.
"Damn it. What kind of spectacle is this for a human?"
Atop a container, the Vampire Messiah revealed herself. Lord of Clan Adonai, she had been entrusted with the energy conglomerates' shares so Tetra Anax could dodge antitrust law—proof of how deep the supreme clan's favor ran. Among the Jinma, she was as pro-Tetra Anax as they came.
Krrk…
She spat out the scrap of metal she'd been chewing and looked down at Se-gun. Every vampire that had escorted her here was already dead. She had known it would end this way, but not this fast.
"I'd heard Psychedelic Moon was impressive, but this much?"
She sighed and rose to her feet.
Se-gun wrenched Noctis free of the last corpse, breathing hard, and stared up at her. Somewhere in the slaughter the wound on his left arm had torn open again; the arm had been severed once more. Pain that would have driven a normal man mad. He picked the arm up as if it were a spare tool, dipped the stump in vampire blood, and stuck it back on.
Messiah watched the whole performance, then raked a hand through her hair. The stiff, multicolored dye job lifted away and left her gaunt, high-strung face looking even more grotesque.
"Trash like you… other lunatic vampires would go wild for the type, but you just piss me off. Do that in front of me one more time and I'll forget every scrap of noble dignity and end you first."
She muttered it and dropped from the container. Every human in the watchtowers was already asleep under her power; the abandoned searchlights hung limp, spilling light into the dirt.
"…I piss you off? Feeling's mutual, vampire."
"Yeah. You piss me off."
Messiah settled to the ground like a phantom and fixed her eyes on him. Unlike the others, she studied him with cool, measured calm.
"I'm a perfectionist, you see. Watching some nobody who believes in nothing except 'try hard enough and you can overturn an overwhelming gap'… it just irritates me. I'll crush you with everything I have."
Se-gun broke for the gap between containers, buying distance. A deep thrum answered him; the ground shuddered.
"What the—?!"
Stacked container boxes rose into the air. Five tons each at minimum, some over ten—floating as lightly as empty matchboxes.
Krrrrrrrrng!
The containers collapsed toward him. Se-gun launched himself, landed on a falling box, and used the momentum to sprint upward.
"Hmph!"
At the top, the gaunt woman was already waiting like a ghost. Se-gun drew Beast with his right hand, the left still hanging in tatters.
Pak!
Beast tore free of his grip and sailed into the sky. One strike—Messiah had slapped the revolver from his hand and was smiling.
"So. Besides that magic gun, what do you have that can hurt a Jinma?"
"…"
The smile was so ugly, so wrong, that Se-gun's lips peeled back from his teeth. Without Beast, nothing else in his personal arsenal would even scratch her.
Chiiik!
He drew Noctis as a stopgap and swung.
"Hmph!"
She bit her finger, flicked a spray of blood across the black blade.
Tang!
Metal rang. Se-gun's palm split open; Noctis went flying.
"What—?!"
He ducked under her follow-up on pure reflex and threw himself backward.
"Not bad—for a human."
Listening to her sneer, Se-gun sprinted for the fallen sword and reached. Noctis whined pitifully, stuck to the container like a magnet. Messiah's blood clung to the blade like tape, locking it in place.
"Damn it!"
He fell back, racing through the wreckage of containers. On the run he seized the USAS-12 one-handed. The left arm was attached again, but barely holding; try to shoulder a shotgun with that and it would tear free.
"Heh-heh-heh-heh. How's it taste, little boy?"
Jinma Messiah walked toward him with deliberate slowness, turning every step into psychological weight. He had vanished from her sight, but the scent of his blood and meat was enough; she could track him anywhere.
Even so, centuries of life had made her too leisurely for a real fight.
"Well then. What clever little trick will it be this time? Skill like yours doesn't earn the name of a Jinma hunter."
She followed the thickening reek of blood.
Shiiik!
Something came flying. Se-gun's old trick from the fight with Sarhyuk—the TNT half-volley shot—was back.
"Ugh!"
Even for her, explosives were dangerous. The electronic timer had less than a second left—0.32! The precision of the fuse was almost absurd. She leapt backward on instinct, but no vampire outruns a bomb already in the air.
KWAANG!
The blast sheared both her arms off. She had thrown them up to shield head and heart.
"Kh!"
Blue eyes erupted from between the containers. Se-gun poured fire from the USAS-12 into the armless Messiah.
Wooooong!
The air itself shuddered; every shot-shell stopped dead. Even without arms, her death-art barrier still had the power to turn buckshot. Messiah's VT sat at five hundred thousand—numerically far beyond even Phantom.
"Haaah!"
Se-gun kept firing and closed the distance anyway. Armless or not, a vampire was a vampire. Was he seriously planning close combat?
"Kh!"
Messiah bit her lip until it bled, humiliation flooding her. Beaten by a human at this range! Three thousand years of life and she had never tasted this disgrace.
Kwak!
Se-gun's jumping knee—kaoroi—smashed her jaw upward. He loaded his whole body into an aerial spin, drove a rotating elbow—tisok—into her throat, followed with a left low kick, then a right straight like a thrown spear. Messiah went over hard.
Whoosh!
Se-gun flung himself onto his back, hooked a foot through the USAS-12's sling, and finished the aim with right hand and legs.
"Go to hell!"
The shotgun roared.
Pointless! Shot won't touch me!
She regenerated her arms and slammed a death-art barrier into place. And then—
Puk!
Something punched clean through her shoulder. Not just the shoulder. Chest. Knee. Belly. Slugs tore through her body without mercy.
The magazine Se-gun had loaded held shot-shells on top and slugs underneath. Whether he had planned it from the start or not, Messiah had walked straight into the trap.
"Kh… Me? To a human…?"
With her legs ruined, she raked the scraps of her flesh together with telekinesis. Once the pieces were close enough, binding force would kick in and regeneration would surge. Se-gun rose, set a bar of TNT on the concrete, and armed the timer.
"You're insane—!"
Messiah lashed out with telekinesis in pure panic. Se-gun tilted his head a fraction; his shoulder exploded in a wet crunch. A wound that should have dropped any normal man into shock. High on Psychedelic Moon, he only smiled with something demonic in it.
"Bullshit!"
A slug had already torn through her face; her vision was a mess. Distorted eyes kept throwing her telekinetic aim wide. Without that, she would have squeezed the human called Se-gun like an orange long ago.
She forced her body upright with telekinesis and fled. For a proud, mighty vampire lord, the act was almost unbearable humiliation. Se-gun grinned and prepared to throw the bomb. But then—
GROOOOOOOOAR!
A colossal beast dropped from the sky with a sound that shook the world. Startled, Messiah poured every scrap of telekinetic force into crushing the newcomer.
This was the same power that tossed multi-ton containers like cardboard. No monster, however vast, should have survived that pressure. The creature did not care if its body broke. It simply kept falling.
KUUUUUNG!
The earth heaved. The beast opened its jaws. White drool sheeted over razor fangs; the maw was large enough to swallow a man whole, and it closed on Messiah in one bite.
"Aaaaagh!"
She fought with everything she had. Hands locked on upper and lower jaws, she shoved with all her strength while flinging telekinesis in every direction—crush the jaw, crush the skull, unmake the flesh. Blood and meat fountained; the air itself turned red. The beast chewed anyway.
Udduduk!
The wet snap of breaking bone was hideous. Messiah screamed and poured still more into her telekinetic shattering. The giant body came apart again—and still the beast did not die. Like two serpents swallowing each other's tails, they were simply racing to see who would break first.
"Perfect condition for killing both of you."
Se-gun watched the brawl and readied another bomb. Then pain unlike anything he had felt before slammed through his chest. Even under Psychedelic Moon—this kind of agony?
Tuk!
The bomb slipped from his fingers and rolled across the concrete.
"Ghhhk. Ghhhhhk!"
He clawed at his chest and drove his forehead into the ground. The world flooded scarlet, then burned white-hot. The vampiric mutation that had so far only rewritten his flesh had finally reached his brain.
"Ha—so it's here! I thought I still had time!"
He smashed his head against the concrete again. Skull split; blood ran. He didn't care. It didn't hurt. If anything, his mind felt clearer.
"Ghhhhhk!"
The fire behind his eyes forced them shut. Writhing from vampiric mutation with enemies right in front of him—pathetic! The perfect chance to butcher Messiah and Sarhyuk both, thrown away like this! But underneath the practical fury… his chest felt as if it were being torn open. At last he had become the thing he hated most. Whose bloodline had he inherited? The bleeding Messiah in front of him? Sarhyuk before that? Some other vampire entirely?
"Ahahahahahaha."
The savage blood-hunger of VT starvation seized his whole body. Psychedelic Moon kept the pain muted and his reason intact, but a hollow hunger and thirst opened in the center of him like a hole punched straight through.
"If I've only got one day left, this isn't so bad!"
He opened his hands and caught the Jinma blood pouring down like a waterfall.
"…Drink. This is my blood."
He muttered it and drank Messiah's blood.
"…Eat. This is my flesh."
Then he picked up a severed arm and bit down. Meat tore with wet cracks; blood and juice flooded his mouth.
"That's right… Messiah. True to your name, you're the perfect dish for a last supper."
He felt the hunger and thirst vanish as if they had never been, and murmured it almost gently.
Even then Sarhyuk and Messiah kept ripping each other apart in a mud-wrestling slaughter. The outcome had never been in doubt. Messiah was already critically wounded by Se-gun, and her opponent's regeneration far outstripped any vampire's. Once they locked together and simply traded destruction, the less durable vampire was always going to come apart first.
Sarhyuk, the late arrival, finally reduced Messiah's body to nothing and devoured every scrap of blood and flesh freed from binding force. The crunch of bones, the wet rending of meat, the greedy gulping of blood rang out without shame.
"Grrrrrrrrr!"
The twelve-meter beast finally seemed sated. It turned toward Se-gun.
"Han Se-gun. Oh, Han Se-gun. Why are you Han Se-gun?"
"…Romeo and Juliet? A twelve-meter Juliet? Maybe try a diet."
Se-gun wiped his mouth slowly. He was a complete vampire now. He had fallen to the very bottom of the hell of gunfire and reached ruin. Then why not kiss that ruin and spend his single day of vampiric life the way it was meant to be spent? He licked vampire blood from his sleeve.
"You?"
Sarhyuk froze, staring at the human drinking blood. Ah. So that was it. The bastard had finally become a vampire. And realizing it, Sarhyuk discovered something unexpected in himself—joy. The joy, perhaps, of finding one of his own kind at last.