Already a Monster
"Ugh!"
Seo Rin flinched and threw his arms up into a guard. But Se-gun didn't attack him. He simply walked past. As he went by, a faint scent of pine-soot ink brushed Seo Rin's nose.
"……You don't seem that much like a villain for a vampire. Are you planning to wipe out every last one of them just because they drink human blood? Without even looking for a path of reconciliation and coexistence?"
Seo Rin tried to reason with him. In that same moment, Se-gun let out a short, sharp laugh.
Ever since he had stepped into this world under a mad moon, he had never heard anything so peaceful. If something like that were even possible, it would make for a lovely little story—but it never would be, and Se-gun had no wish for it to be.
"Hahahahaha. What? Reconciliation and coexistence?! That's perfect! That's the most pathetic thing I've ever heard! You idiot! Cancer and AIDS aren't evil. And killing someone because of good and evil is absurd! A life is far too heavy a thing to decide with good and evil. Well—lighter than the pull of a trigger, sure."
Han Se-gun clutched his stomach laughing, then turned on Seo Rin with a face full of madness. Seo Rin couldn't make sense of a word of it. What the hell was this guy even saying? Had what he himself said really been that funny?
"What does that mean? It's too hard. I don't get it."
"The point is, good or evil, I'm going to kill vampires without discrimination. You're no exception, lycanthrope."
A hard wind whipped up around Han Se-gun. Seo Rin stared at him, startled.
This guy's hatred was no ordinary thing. The fire of it burned so fiercely it was consuming his own flesh—and he welcomed even that with joy. The thought that someone like this might someday come for his life was something Seo Rin wanted to avoid at all costs.
"By that logic, what about you? You don't look human to me no matter how I look at you. Are you the exception? From that cancer and AIDS of yours?"
"Of course I'm no exception either."
Se-gun muttered it, then grabbed the motorcycle leaning against the wall.
"But not right now. Get on. I'll help you."
"Huh?"
"If an idiot like you goes running around and ends up looking pathetic in police custody, that would be a serious problem. Pure coincidence, but until you grow a little common sense, I'll work with you."
Se-gun said it and pointed at his rear seat.
Is this guy in his right mind?
Seo Rin stared at Han Se-gun, speechless. He says he'll kill me someday, and now he's offering to help? What kind of insane nonsense was this? But Se-gun had a point—wandering around here on his own, there was no guarantee Seo Rin would even find the place. And Hwa-young could be in any kind of danger this very second. If Se-gun's help could fix that, nothing could be better.
"……Fine. I'll learn how it's done."
Seo Rin shut his eyes tight and climbed onto Han Se-gun's rear seat. Se-gun kicked the engine to life.
"That's more like it."
"Do you know where we're going?"
"Of course I do."
Se-gun said it and opened the throttle. The machine had so much power that even with two people on it, it accelerated in a single breath—clearly no ordinary bike.
Around the time the wall clock stamped with an insurance company logo pointed to one in the morning…… the apartment's front door was yanked open hard, and two men strode in. They came in with their shoes on and shoved the woman who had opened the door for them with a face full of terror.
She was the homeowner, and yet she couldn't so much as look them in the eye, much less protest the violence they brought into her own home. She only trembled. Like a frog before a snake, she couldn't move—and that alone sketched out the food chain between them.
"P-please stop. Please."
"Damn it. What happened to that bitch? Where is she?"
"I just put her to bed. And please stop calling. What do you think my husband will think?"
"What would he think? That his wife's so fine a few lowlifes are hanging around! Out of the way!"
They kicked open the door of the back room with their shoes still on. Inside, a young woman—barely more than a girl—lay collapsed as if her mind had gone, a tattered blanket wrapped around her body.
"You little whore. You made us work for it. Get up already!"
They grabbed the fallen woman by the hair and hauled her roughly to her feet.
"Kyaaaah!"
She screamed. Every time a fistful of hair tore free she let out a shrill cry and flailed with her hands. The men didn't ease their brutal grip; they only drove their fists into her stomach and chest.
"You bitch! Do you have any idea how much trouble you put us through?"
"You take a loan and then you run? Piece of shit. It's just you and your old man going to jail! You get that? You get that? Want to do this by the book? Huh?!"
They beat Hwa-young while spouting nonsense that didn't even hold together. It seemed they were taking out the thrashing they'd gotten from Hyuk-jin on her. After they finished beating her, they dragged her toward the front door.
"……Don't make us work this hard next time. Got it?"
"I'm begging you—please don't treat Hwa-young any worse than this."
Jang Yeong-sun, perhaps pricked by something like conscience, asked them for mercy for Hwa-young. They only snorted.
"Jesus Christ. Listen to this cock-sucking bullshit. You in any position to say that to us right now?"
"……Fine. Just take her and get out!"
"Don't worry about it! Once we take this one, we've got nothing more to do with you."
The men grumbled and hauled the woman out. A few apartment doors opened because of the noise at that hour, and a few people stuck their heads out—but they only glared at Hwa-young and the two men with irritated eyes and said nothing. They had no interest in what was actually happening; they just wanted the quiet back.
But when people gather, there is usually at least one among them with a working sense of right and wrong.
Sure enough, a young man in a tank top with thick glasses came up to the men.
"What do you think you're doing? Is this a kidnapping?"
He was a little frightened, but he forced himself to sound firm. The men looked at each other. Some silent understanding passed between them, and one of them let go of Shin Hwa-young and pulled a plastic card from inside his jacket.
"Kidnapping? We're staff from a psychiatric hospital. An alcoholic patient ran off and we came to pick her up."
"What?"
The plastic card was clearly a hospital pass. It was too dark to examine closely, and after a claim like that it would have felt strange to check again. The young man backed off, awkward.
"Ah—then please keep it down. And you're not even in an ambulance……"
"You think we drag an ambulance out to catch someone who ran off? Yeah, sorry about the noise. Hahaha. We'll be going, then."
"Right."
The young man scratched his head, still uneasy, and gave a little bow. The other residents seemed to lose interest and went back inside.
"What, she was a psych patient?"
"Hmm. Figures."
They had never been all that interested to begin with, so they bought the excuse completely. Hwa-young thrashed and fought, but she had no chance against two rough men. Having soothed the apartment residents, they forced her into a van.
"Here."
Se-gun pulled the motorcycle to the curb and got off. Seo Rin dismounted after him and looked around. It was nothing but an ordinary residential neighborhood. A road climbed the hill, and single-family houses lined both sides of it—perfectly unremarkable. Most of the houses were multi-unit dwellings with attached garages, but the neighborhood didn't look particularly well-off.
"A place like this?"
"When the guys who supply women to room salons, tea rooms, and the rest need a safe house, a residential area is best. Patrols will already have passed through here on their route. It's safe."
"Patrol route?"
"Cops walk the same fixed routes every hour. Sometimes they change, but that's rare. That much is common sense, isn't it? You can map every neighborhood's patrol times and routes with a single day of quiet observation."
Se-gun said it, then pulled gear from the military-style pack on his back. Seo Rin couldn't tell what it was at first—an endoscope camera and a high-performance condenser mic wired into a surveillance rig.
Han Se-gun scaled the wall beside the target house and, in moments, planted listening devices and cameras all through the place before coming back. The work was so quick and quiet that Seo Rin's mouth fell open watching him.
"Now we can just sit back and watch. We'll know how things are going."
"……Have you done this near our place too?"
Seo Rin asked suddenly, a little afraid. Wasn't Han Se-gun's detailed knowledge of him and Maria the result of exactly this kind of spying? And the man had no resistance to it at all—none. Then again, he was already so far past the law that wiretaps and cameras would hardly register as a crime.
In a country with the death penalty he would draw a death sentence without fail; without one he would spend five or six hundred years staring at prison walls. Next to that, eavesdropping and surveillance were everyday stuff. Why would he hesitate?
Sure enough, Han Se-gun admitted it without a fight.
"I only did audio. It's hard enough getting close while fooling a lycanthrope's hearing and smell, and planting gear on top of that takes time. Long-range sound pickup, so it's not that……"
"I knew it! Do you even know what invasion of privacy is?"
Seo Rin flared. Han Se-gun turned to look at him as if he'd said something fascinating.
"……Hahahahaha. I really didn't expect a protest that obvious. Of course it's an invasion of privacy. What else would it be?"
"You—"
Seo Rin felt anger surge at Se-gun's sheer shamelessness. Then something reached his ears.
"A van!"
Seo Rin identified the sound and bit his lower lip. A van was climbing toward them. From long tradition, human trafficking and room-salon work meant vans; he was certain this one was theirs.
"Over here."
Se-gun motioned for Seo Rin to follow, then braced both legs against the walls between two buildings and hung there. From the street the building walls made a blind spot, and from any car the roof would hide them—just the right height.
Calculating a dead angle that fast meant this guy really knew how to fight. Thinking that, Seo Rin jumped the three meters in a single bound the same way Se-gun had, braced both legs on the walls, and hung in the air.
The van stopped in front of the house where Se-gun had planted the bugs. They dragged a ruined-looking woman roughly inside. Han Se-gun watched the feed on a five-inch LCD monitor.
"Timing's almost too good. I was ready to wait a day or two. Didn't think it'd be the same day. Almost a waste of the setup."
"……The timing really is absurdly good."
Seo Rin agreed. Se-gun held the LCD out to him. On the screen, excited women crowded out and laid the battered Hwa-young on the floorboards. The endoscope camera's image quality was poor, but it was more than enough to understand the situation.
"Well then—what are you going to do, Seo Rin?"
"What do you mean, what am I going to do? Call the police, of course."
"No interest in extralegal sanctions? Hand them to the cops and they won't face any real trouble. Pimping is a business you can't run at all without police collusion. And that girl is addicted to nalbuphine. Unless she gets a good lawyer, she'll get charged under the narcotics control laws. No—nalbuphine isn't classified as a narcotic, so maybe the pharmaceutical control act? Either way, if you do it by the law, everyone gets hurt. Still want to do it by the law?"
Han Se-gun spoke as if he were tempting him. Seo Rin glared at him, clearly disgusted.
"……"
He must have overheard the conversation with Maria. There was no other way he would know the details that well.
In truth, Se-gun had a point. Report them to the police as things stood and Shin Hwa-young would not walk away clean either. But if he chose extralegal sanctions, that was the path that turned Seo Rin himself into a monster.
"I am not going to become a monster like you. Never!"
"……"
In the dark, Han Se-gun gave a short laugh. There was something so desolate in it that even Seo Rin couldn't help being startled.
"Right. That's a good way to think. But don't forget. You're already a monster. Curse the fact that your hands already hold weapons that can take whatever you want, Seo Rin."
Han Se-gun left those words and dropped to the ground. Startled, Seo Rin looked after him—but Se-gun seemed to have lost interest and was already heading for his motorcycle.
"Ah!"
Hanging beside the building and looking down after Se-gun, Seo Rin saw something black moving in his wake.
"What is that?"
But when he rubbed his eyes and looked again, Se-gun was already gone.
Of course. The world was never going to be that easy.
Betrayed by Sister Jang, Hwa-young had almost given up. Relying on pity or kindness to come here had been a mistake. She should have expected that a woman trying to protect her own life might sell her out—but the situation had been so desperate that she had treated it like a gamble and leaned on her, and that had been the error.
Once she went back, there would be a beating, a few days of starvation, and then the same old routine all over again. Prostitution and entertaining clients—that endless, sickening daily life, repeating itself.
Until now she had been able to keep doing it numb. There had been no pride or value left to protect. She was a loser and trash, just like her father. She had known that for a long time. Ever since that pathetic day that barely even counted as a suicide attempt, she had felt nothing but disgust for herself.
If she hadn't, by pure chance, run into the boy she had had a childhood crush on…… if she hadn't met him again on the street, she would have gone on living with herself abandoned, and she never would have attempted this escape. But once she had crossed paths with Seo Rin, even by accident, she couldn't keep living numb.
"……But it's over now."