Child of Lilith
"Get on. You've got a lot you want to know, so how about we talk?"
"And what exactly am I supposed to trust about you enough to get on? Oh, I appreciated yesterday, but that cancels out against the wiretapping, so we'll call it even... Wait—you're still listening in, aren't you?"
"There's no point beating around the bush. I know you're dying of curiosity about yourself. That vampire Maria isn't going to tell you straight, and now that you know I'm wiretapping, you can't call her back, can you? In other words, if you want to hear the full story clean, I'm your only option. Well? Even with that thick skull of yours, you get the situation, right?"
"……"
Seo Rin ground his teeth. It was unfair, but Se-gun was right. If it meant learning even a little more about himself, he would have to stick his head into a tiger's mouth. He had the feeling he was getting pulled into Se-gun's pace, but for now the hilt of the knife was in the other man's hand.
"Fine. Hmph! Then I'll ride."
Han Se-gun put Seo Rin on the back and rode out of Seoul. The sky that day was unusually clear and blue, and a cool breeze blew pleasantly. Sitting behind Se-gun, Seo Rin gripped the rear hold of the motorcycle and watched the scenery pass. If you set aside the fact that he had no idea what Se-gun might do to him, it could almost have been called a pleasant outing.
This isn't the time for this...
Seo Rin let out a long sigh. Just then Se-gun brought the motorcycle to a stop.
"We're here."
It was an old country church standing near farmland. Holes perforated the rusty slate roof, letting light through, and the glass windows patched with colored tape to look like stained glass had completely faded to yellow.
Inside, long benches rotting black lay scattered any which way, and dust lay thick as if the place had never been cleaned. The building looked like a complete abandoned ruin, yet a "Private Property — No Trespassing" warning was posted on it.
"...You use a strange place for a hideout."
"I bought it cheap."
"...Cheap?"
Seo Rin stared at Se-gun, floored. Se-gun wheeled the motorcycle into the garage. Besides that one, there were about three more bikes inside—most of them off-road, with only a single road model.
Every one of them gleamed from careful polishing, and judging by the dirty work clothes hanging on the wall, Se-gun put considerable effort into them. Unlike the church's exterior, the garage was very clean and well-organized, so the church interior probably hid something different from its outward appearance as well.
"...You're rich."
"Not really."
After parking the bike, Se-gun headed for the basement. The outside still looked completely like a haunted house, but the basement was cleanly swept. Soundproofing covered the walls without a gap. Leaving Seo Rin standing, he punched the code into the electronic door. It opened. Inside was a shabby warehouse with the framework fully exposed, packed with massive H-beam steel, wires, explosives and ammunition, various equipment, and generators.
Se-gun hung his racing jacket on the wall and pointed Seo Rin toward the sofa.
"Sit."
"Yes."
"I'm going to change."
Se-gun went behind an MDF partition, changed clothes, and walked back out. Then, right in front of Seo Rin, he stepped onto a scale. He checked his weight for a moment and sighed.
"Haa, lost seven kilos. Damn it. I haven't been hitting my baseline calories the past few days."
He was in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, and he pulled chocolate bars from a cardboard box. Seo Rin had wondered why the man smelled of pine-soot ink—his body was covered in unusual Chinese characters written in ink. Even as a complete layman, Seo Rin could tell they held some kind of magical meaning.
"Want one?"
Se-gun held out a chocolate bar to Seo Rin. Seo Rin shook his head.
"...I'll pass."
"Come on. You think I put poison in it?"
Han Se-gun unwrapped three chocolate bars at once and shoved them into his mouth one after another. Then, with a reluctant expression, he chewed hard and swallowed.
"Ugh... Damn, way too sweet."
"...If it's sweet, you don't have to eat it."
"Can't do that. If I don't eat over ten thousand kilocalories a day, my weight drops like crazy. And when my weight drops, my combat ability in close quarters tanks hard."
Unlike vampires or lycanthropes, Han Se-gun straddled the boundary between human and monster, so every calorie his superhuman strength burned had to be replenished entirely from food. His exceptional physical abilities demanded exceptional calories in return.
Han Se-gun pulled a canned drink from the fridge and tossed it to Seo Rin. It was hard to refuse this time, and his throat was dry anyway, so Seo Rin caught the can. Se-gun pulled eggs, soy milk, bananas, and more from the fridge, dumped them all into a blender, and pureed them.
What came out was something no one in their right mind would want to drink, but Se-gun gulped it down in long pulls.
"Haa, damn. This is only, what, two thousand kilocalories? I'm going to die from eating. Whew."
Han Se-gun sat on the old sofa and looked at Seo Rin. Seo Rin was a little appalled watching him. How to put it? Even eating felt like a job for the man.
He realized that while anger and hatred drove Han Se-gun, the foundation beneath them was a sense of duty. Otherwise he could never treat even eating like a mission objective and pursue it with such obsessive persistence. Even for a binge-eating human, consuming and digesting ten thousand kilocalories a day was hard labor of the first order.
So why was Han Se-gun doing this? To kill vampires? To abandon his own life fighting so he could grind his teeth and slaughter even seemingly good vampires like Maria, regardless of good or evil?
"You're really dedicated. Honestly... Is this work worth going that far? Worth grinding your teeth and killing any vampire, good or evil?"
"Thanks for the compliment. Now then, shall we get to the point, child of Lilith?"
Han Se-gun went to the faucet, wet his toothbrush with water and toothpaste, stuck it in his mouth, and without finishing his brushing came back and threw himself onto the sofa.
"Lilith? What the hell is that?"
"It's a story that comes up a lot these days. Adam's first wife, said to be a witch. Since vampires have been around since the Scythian era, I don't really think she's the Lilith from Hebrew myth—but still."
Han Se-gun muttered something incomprehensible, spun his legs around on the sofa, and sat directly across from Seo Rin.
"Would it be better to turn on the lights?"
"...Yes, brighter is better. At home I keep them off because of the electric bill, though."
Se-gun crumpled a chocolate-bar wrapper and threw it at the wall. The wrapper hit the light switch dead-on and dropped into the trash can beneath it, and the fluorescent lights came on.
"...Nice trick."
"I'll take that as a compliment. Now then—first off, you're curious who you are, right, Seo Rin?"
"Yeah, yeah."
Seo Rin answered halfheartedly. Se-gun pulled a laptop from a pile of newspapers under the table and set it on the tabletop.
"To put it bluntly, you are the direct child of the mighty witch who pulls the strings of every denizen of the moonlit night from behind the scenes. The implications of that are enormous."
Turning on the laptop and showing the screen, Se-gun spoke in a serious tone.
"Denizens of the moonlit night?"
"Vampires, beastfolk, mages and demons, and things like me—everyone."
The laptop Se-gun had turned on held various reference photos. A giant werewolf hunted and hung on a wall. A vampire with severed limbs revealing its monstrous form...
There was a considerable amount either way, but the images were so grotesque that they lacked realism. Even if something like this aired on network television, it would be treated as some "believe it or not" curiosity segment.
"So... my mother is a witch?"
"If you put it directly, yes."
"...You're not joking, right?"
Seo Rin asked that, then realized he had said something silly. This was already an established fact. He was a werewolf, and the man across from him was a monster hunter, wasn't he? What was unrealistic about even more extreme stories at this point?
"I wish I were joking too. But your appearance was already foreseen... and the Lilith story isn't a joke either."
Han Se-gun glared at Seo Rin and laced his fingers.
"Just what is this Lilith?"
"Her true identity is a secret. I don't even know if she's really Adam's first wife from the myths. But one thing is clear: she is the one holding this world stagnant right now. When vampires dwindle, she couples with humans to birth more vampires. When lycanthropes dwindle, she seduces humans to birth more lycanthropes! The first-generation Ririm born that way use their immense power to sufficiently increase their offspring, compensate for the reduced numbers, and rebuild their position with overwhelming strength. Witch hunts. The Inquisition. The Industrial Revolution. Radio communication. Every time human intellect advances and the darkness is threatened, Lilith appears to strengthen the children of the dark, and the progress of darkness catches up to the progress of civilization—so the mad denizens of the moon can inhabit the world's shadows."
The monster hunter Han Se-gun explained the most powerful piece of information he had uncovered. The lords of the vampires, the Tetra Anax who stood at the absolute peak even among all Jinma—the bombing of their headquarters had been the building explosion incident that made Han Se-gun famous as a legendary bomber. Ready to expose himself to the media and society, he had attacked the corporations the vampire lords had set up for efficient world domination and obtained information on Lilith.
Considering that process, this information had to be true. There was a chance the Tetra Anax had deliberately leaked it, but the reliability of the information itself was very high. For Seo Rin, who did not know that process, it was a shocking story either way.
"...I don't get what you're saying. So my mom... deliberately seduced my father to give birth to me? To increase the monsters?"
Seo Rin's voice was trembling. He had never thought it was a wholesome relationship. As a bastard child, he had long since given up any expectations of his mother. But even so, this was too much. Being approached by a prostitute who sold herself for money was insult enough. But... a legendary witch? What the hell was that?
"That's right. You're slow on the uptake."
Se-gun answered with a cruelly blank expression.
"Damn it."
It was a story he did not want to believe. If his father had simply fallen for a prostitute and bought her services, that would be one thing—but if some vast evil had deliberately seduced his father and used him as a tool to create Seo Rin, that was a problem.
If he were just a prostitute's child, Seo Rin's future would be his own. Birth would be a burden of sorts, but he had already fully tasted that pain.
But if he had been created as a tool, it was different. As long as he was useful as a tool, someone would inevitably appear to use him.
"Ah, my poor father."
"She probably used magical means to bewitch him. It's the fastest and easiest way to achieve her goal."
Se-gun added his opinion as if he knew Seo Rin's birth background as well. So Seo Rin's father had ended up like this simply because he had caught Lilith's eye? Losing everything to his in-laws' hatred and being sold off abroad—not for love or lust, but because of a legendary witch's scheme?
"So that's why you and Maria! Why everyone is interested in me?"
Seo Rin's voice trembled with rage as he said it. The flames of hatred boiling up from his chest made his body cold instead. A chill ran through him.
"Of course. Well? Isn't this me being honest enough?"
Se-gun seemed satisfied with Seo Rin's reaction and chewed another chocolate bar. In that moment Seo Rin shot up from the sofa. But at the same time a pistol appeared in Se-gun's hand and aimed straight at Seo Rin's forehead.
"Don't make any unnecessary aggressive moves. There's a bounty on your neck, so I might kill you by accident. I get that you're angry, though."
Seo Rin stared at the muzzle of the gun yawning open toward him and gulped. His opponent was a veteran hunter who had been through everything. The warning was not wrong. No—there was even unexpected kindness in that warning, enough to tell that Se-gun did not truly want to kill Seo Rin.
"Then what about you? What the hell do you want from me?"
"What do I want?"
Han Se-gun stood up, looking at Seo Rin who was glaring at him. It was only natural for Seo Rin to be suspicious. In fact, Se-gun was approaching him in order to use him.
"What I want is your existence itself—not for you to do anything for me. Yeah. If I had to want something, it would be for you not to become what Lilith wants?"
"Huh?"
"Lilith is trying to increase the lycanthrope population through you. In other words, if you infect someone, that is an increase in lycanthropes."
"I-infect? How do I avoid that?"
Seo Rin looked at Se-gun in panic. Living among humans, he might already have unconsciously infected someone. Then werewolves would increase, and if they recklessly used their power, a string of bizarre murder cases would follow, wouldn't they?
At that thought his mind plunged into panic. Se-gun watched the restless Seo Rin and raised a finger.
"First of all, never beast-transform. Ordinary lycanthropes can infect others by wounding them after transforming, in order to increase their own kind. Unlike the old stories, it's not about water in footprints or just biting. Beyond that, I wouldn't know—I'm not a lycanthrope myself."
"Beast-transform? I don't even know how to do that."
"Then that's fortunate. Don't even think about learning it. If you spread that lowly fate among people, I will not stand by and watch."
"Hmm... oh, and now that it occurs to me—why do they call the way speech- and hearing-impaired people talk with their hands the same thing as 'beast-form'?"
"If that was meant to be a joke, hahaha. I'll laugh for you."
Se-gun said that without laughing at all.
"As payback for your hilarious joke, I'll tell you a fun joke of my own. There's an old saying: 'Who would spit on a smiling face?' I'll personally disprove that."
Indeed, a fist flew at Seo Rin's smiling face.