Leaping Across Rooftops
Seo Rin pulled on the bulletproof suit Maria had handed him and zipped it snug to his throat. The full-body design trapped heat, yet the coolant packed inside made the exchange rapid. Padding along his spine, joints, and legs gently compressed every limb; the sensation was electric. Sleep fled at once and his mind snapped razor-sharp.
Pshhh!
He thumbed the switch at his neck. Coolant expanded and began to circulate. The English manual explained that a lithium-ion battery drove the flow while a gel layer inside the padding hardened on impact, blunting a bullet’s penetration. The suit was heavy, but for Seo Rin—who was no longer merely human—that weight meant nothing.
“She talks a big game and then dumps something like this on me. Completely shoving me into it.”
He clenched a fist while he grumbled. Cut to the grain of bone and muscle, the full-body suit still moved with him as if it were a second skin. Strength itself seemed to rise, proof that fabricating the thing had cost a fortune.
“…Somehow I get the feeling this outfit is worth more than everything my family ever owned.”
In Seo Rin’s memory Han Se-gun had worn something similar. Only the color scheme differed, so the same hands had almost certainly made both. Whoever manufactured and supplied these suits was selling weapons to vampires and vampire hunters alike without distinction.
“Just what kind of bastard is that?”
He muttered the question as he stepped outside. Walking the street in what looked like a racing suit was mortifying. At least it was a racing suit—if it had been full-body tights he would have died of shame on the spot.
“Han Se-gun has a motorcycle. What am I supposed to do—just run around dressed like this?”
Still grumbling, he scanned Maria’s notes. Phone numbers, shop names, and carefully sketched maps of every location filled the pages. The information was far denser than anything that could live in a phone memo; she must have used magic to pull residual thoughts straight out of the device.
“Pretty far.”
A taxi fare alone would sting, and boarding a cab in this getup was out of the question. After a moment’s hesitation he yanked a raincoat from the shoe cabinet and layered it over the suit. Living in Korea taught you to hate standing out. He almost wished for a Quick Service logo he could slap across his chest.
“That Han Se-gun guy is brave in every possible way.”
Seo Rin burst from the house and dropped into the alley. From roughly second-floor height he landed lightly, checked his surroundings, then drove off the pavement with everything he had. Narrow lanes blurred past until he exploded into the open street.
Shiiing!
Wind sheared against his ears. When a sharp turn revealed a steep stairway he kept his speed and simply leapt, clearing entire buildings. He jumped from a hillside four stories high. The instant his feet left the ground he thought oh crap, and the wide-open space ahead sent a jolt of fear through him—yet the pure liberation of being flung into the air outran the terror.
Zzzt!
“Damn it!”
The vinyl raincoat shredded under air pressure alone. In mid-flight Seo Rin twisted and kicked off the side of a water tank on a three-story roof. He had jumped so far that impact should have been thunderous—yet the moment his sole touched metal his body lightened and wind flowed smoothly around him. The sensation was so alien he startled.
“Huh?”
As if running on flat ground he kicked off the tank and vaulted to the next roof. He caught an outdoor air-conditioning unit, inverted into a handstand, then settled onto the rooftop with feline grace. His passage was so silent that the family watching television inside the rooftop room never stopped arguing about the drama.
“…Incredible. Just like a cat.”
He looked down at himself. Aside from the whisper of cut wind there was almost no sound; his own flesh swallowed every impact. Muscles stronger and more elastic than any human’s made it possible. With a body like this he could outrun any car forced to stay on roads.
“Nice!”
He clenched a fist and lifted his head.
“Huh?”
Inside the rooftop room a little boy moving his spoon suddenly turned toward the window. Sensing motion he peered out, but only the air-conditioning unit creaked and swayed; no human shape remained.
“Chang-su? What are you doing in the middle of dinner? Your good luck’s gonna run away!”
“Ah—nothing.”
The child tilted his head, then returned to the table.
Shin Hwa-young finished her shower and dinner, then followed Jang unni’s gentle urging into the tiny back room and collapsed onto the bedding. Endless tension and withdrawal symptoms had wrecked her body. Earlier there had only been a mild fever; now her skull felt ready to boil.
“I… I have to sleep soon…”
I’ll only be a burden to unni. The words refused to leave her mouth. Taking in a sudden visitor was no small kindness. There were few places that would shelter a young woman who appeared out of nowhere. One night as a friend, perhaps—but tomorrow she would have to leave.
This household was far from wealthy. A twenty-year-old public apartment that looked ready to collapse, secondhand furniture everywhere—it all reminded her of the home she had fled.
“….”
The heat made her body feel as though it floated on water. That strange weightlessness warped her vision, and old shapes and memories rose across her retinas.
“Old… home.”
Home. For other people the word called up fond memories. For Shin Hwa-young it had always meant only cruelty.
A mother aged far beyond her years by poverty, an older brother who caused trouble everywhere trying to become a thug, and a father who never worked an honest day, lost in alcohol and vanity… The house was hell.
Mother always took side jobs, assembling tiny electrical sockets that paid five or ten won apiece. No matter how hard she labored from dawn to dark the money was pocket change. Yet she worked as if her life depended on it. In truth the entire family’s survival rested on that meager work.
After Mother’s liver failed and the factory fired her, the household sank beyond recovery. Father remained a loser who blamed every failure on “bad business” and drank; under his shadow the brother twisted further. Even then Mother dragged her ailing body into the grueling piecework just to scrape together rent and rice.
On the day she died she was found cold, face buried in the basket of unfinished sockets. A woman who lived day to day never held life insurance, so her death became pure expense.
Neighbors who knew the family’s misery collected money through the neighborhood treasurer. They barely managed a funeral. Father, drunk, never appeared.
After that day Hwa-young rarely went home. When she finally could not enter high school and slipped back only for a change of clothes, the rough hands of men her father himself had brought seized her.
“A bitch like you should go out and earn money!”
He spoke with complete certainty. Without the slightest doubt about his own morality, the man who had worked Mother to death while earning nothing, who had ignored her dying, lectured his daughter as if he were righteous and spat those words.
Truly magnificent. The arrogance of a man who sold his own child yet believed to the end he was not wrong! Disgust and spite rose so hard she did not even resist the men dragging her away.
And for a while it was almost good. When she learned Father had sold her for a cheap twenty million won and that the entire sum had become her debt, hatred boiled—but the people who handled her were generous. To a girl who had never lived like a human being they gave gifts as if bestowing favors, and soothed her as though she were their own daughter.
“Work hard and twenty million is nothing.”
“Stupid women ruin their lives, but there aren’t many jobs where a woman can earn this easily.”
The madam drilled that lesson into Hwa-young and the other new girls, then sent them out. On her first night, when she received tips, the whole world seemed to belong to her.
The money her mother had earned only after stabbing a wire with an awl hundreds of times came in from a single hour of being groped by men in a karaoke room.
Being touched didn’t wear anything out. If she could earn like this, the money Father had taken to bind her would be paid off in no time.
That was pure illusion. She soon learned every “gift” had been added to her debt. Lateness meant fines; borrowing to pay the fines made the interest snowball. Once the interest piled up there was no hope of escape. Even when she ran ten-plus shifts a day the money vanished into daily interest; she finally understood that no amount of work would ever free her. That night she cursed herself—her foolishness, her stupidity—and she cursed the world.
The world was never kind.
In the lodging where the girls slept there was always a stock of sleeping pills. Women tormented by customers and drugs kept them so they could force themselves under. She stole them one by one until she had nearly sixty.
Hanging or a knife was too frightening, so she chose the pills—but swallowing sixty tablets was its own torture. Around forty-five she could not fight the sudden nausea and vomited everything.
Tears poured out with the vomit. She could not cut her throat, could not hang herself… she could not even swallow pills properly, and the pathetic weakness made her want to scream. She emptied her stomach onto the filthy floor of that tiny room and buried her face in the mess.
After that shameful excuse for a suicide attempt, Shin Hwa-young simply gave up. In a world that bared its teeth to tear the weak, a clueless child thrashing only bled more. If she quietly submitted… they would leave her alone. As long as she showed up for work the collectors did not hound her. In the end she was a loser exactly like her father.
If she had not run into Seo Rin on the street a week ago she could have continued living as a loser without question.
But the moment she met his eyes she found herself so pathetic she could not bear it. He too came from a broken home, a mixed-blood child who carried beverage boxes for pay—yet he still smiled.
Unlike her, who had surrendered after failing even to swallow sleeping pills, he looked radiant, and that radiance made her sadder still. She fled down an alley to escape his gaze. After the suicide attempt she had come to despise herself so completely she could not stand it, and that day she steeled her resolve once more.
If her heart was too weak even to die, then she would try escaping altogether. So she escaped.
But this was the result. She already had nowhere left to go. Nowhere in the world would take her in. She lay trembling, imagining what would happen when they caught her again.
The truly ridiculous part was that even now, rather than mourning the loss of freedom she feared more the retaliation—the pain that would be inflicted on her body. In the fever she despised and hated herself.
“Around here, I think?”
Seo Rin muttered while comparing Maria’s sketch map to the streets. With her whereabouts unknown and nowhere else to go, Hwa-young might already have been recaptured. In that case she would have been dragged back to the lodging drawn on the map. Even if she still walked free, he needed to know this place.
“Still… it’s weirdly deserted.”
He glanced up at the leaden sky and sighed. A residential block without shops, quiet enough that not even a cat stirred. At least no one was around to stare at his strange suit. Yet an inexplicable sense of unease prickled the back of his neck.
Shiiiiing.
The wind shifted. Night air rose hard, peeling the clouds apart, and a brilliant full moon stepped into the open sky.
“…Ah!”
Moonlight poured down and, on the wall between buildings where nothing had stood a heartbeat earlier, a human silhouette appeared. A young man with partially dyed green hair, body wrapped in the same functional bulletproof material as Seo Rin’s, arms folded. The only difference was that Seo Rin wore a full-body suit while Se-gun wore an air-foam jacket.
“What’s with that getup?”
Han Se-gun looked down with a puzzled frown. The legendary bomb maniac regarded Seo Rin the way one might look at a cosplayer who had stolen his face—pure contempt.
“…I didn’t put it on for that reason.”
Seo Rin could not help the fear that rose. This madman had half-killed him on sight and smashed him twice in a single day. There had been no mercy in those hands; would he attack again?
“I know. It’s a joke.”
Yet Se-gun dropped from the wall with an expressionless face. In every previous meeting he had been pure aggression, a fighting dog; now the reaction felt almost reformed. Thinking that, Seo Rin muttered without meaning to.
“That’s not a funny joke at all…”
“Of course it wouldn’t be funny. It’s proof you not only stretched out your hand to a vampire but joined hands with them without the slightest suspicion, isn’t it?”
With every word blue flames kindled in Se-gun’s eyes. His tone roughened; breath and pulse became so clear they seemed tangible, as if the steep contour lines of rising rage could be seen with each syllable.
Amazingly, Han Se-gun had realized in an instant that Seo Rin had taken Maria’s hand. He glared as if ready to devour him and strode forward.