An Ordinary High School Student
“……Do I really have to kill him?”
Even as he hated himself for his own soft-heartedness, Seo Rin found himself torn again. From a human point of view, maybe he was the monster, and the man on the other side was nothing more than a decent hunter who had come to put that monster down.
While he was still thinking that, the stench of gunpowder surged into the sky. The enemy had predicted that Seo Rin would be waiting beyond the wall—and had leapt onto the building pressed right up against it.
“Tch!”
Seo Rin grabbed a stone and flung it, praying it would hit somewhere that wouldn’t kill the man.
BRRRRT!
Gunfire and thrown stone landed almost at the same instant. Even under these conditions, the enemy’s shooting was precise and blisteringly fast.
“Aagh!”
Seo Rin toppled backward, soaked in blood. Silver rounds punched into the torso that had only just begun to close. The impact this time was on a completely different level from before—five bullets, or more, riddling his body in a rain of fire.
He couldn’t breathe. His guts felt as if they had been ripped clean through. No—that wasn’t a feeling. The bullets had gone into his belly and shredded his intestines. That much was simple fact. With his guts torn open, strength refused to enter his limbs.
“Uuugh…!”
Seo Rin writhed on the ground. Lightning seemed to keep striking right in front of his eyes. Like camera flashes going off one after another, his vision flared white; the sky lurched away and slammed close again, pitching and rolling.
His whole body refused to coordinate. He had an enemy right there—he needed to move—but his body simply would not obey. Every time he tried to force strength into his limbs, the arms and legs stayed where they were, and instead blood fountained from the wounds.
The sight of it made Seo Rin want to faint on the spot. His intestines had been completely severed; most of his organs hung in shreds. He was fairly sure bullets had lodged in his liver and pancreas as well. How could a person lose this much blood? An ordinary human would already have died of massive hemorrhage—no, would have gone into shock and died the moment the rounds punched through the torso.
If he just lay there, he would make a perfect target for the mage. Worrying about exactly that, Seo Rin turned his eyes toward the direction of the gunpowder stench. Strangely, though, the mage did not press the attack. Startled, Seo Rin simply sprawled there, staring stupidly up at the sky.
“…Huh? Wait…”
The space around him began to regain its grip on reality. Compared to the two hits he had taken earlier, his regeneration was far faster this time. Feeling his body come back under his control, Seo Rin rolled himself into the factory’s shadow and hid. Still the mage made no move to attack.
Apparently the mage had taken a serious wound from Seo Rin’s throw as well.
“…That’s a relief, at least.”
He would have preferred the man not die—but the thought also crossed his mind that, by now, it wouldn’t matter if he did. The human heart was a shameless thing. A moment ago he had been fretting over how he could possibly commit murder; a few bullets later, his mind had already changed. Then again, if someone could take a beating like that and not get angry, that would be even stranger. Seo Rin was still just a high school student. He was no saint.
“Haaah…”
Leaning against the building wall, Seo Rin dragged in ragged breaths. The pain was still savage enough to make the back of his skull throb, but oddly enough, his wounds were knitting faster and faster. And at the same time, a savage hunger began to boil up from inside him.
A short while later, once he had recovered enough to move, Seo Rin vaulted the wall and slipped back into the alley. The place had never seen much traffic; even with the illusion magic broken, no one was around. The only thing waiting for him was the mage sprawled across a heap of garbage.
Just as he had thought—the mage had been hit by Seo Rin’s stone and fallen off the building. The right shoulder looked shattered; broken bone showed through the wound. He must have slammed into the building’s sign on the way down. The acrylic signboard lay in fragments, still shedding shards.
“Urgh… damn it.”
Seo Rin was in no perfect shape himself. Whatever foreign matter was still inside him was silver, and the throbbing ache and itch were unbearable—as if hives had erupted under his skin. He extended his claws and dug into his own flesh. The mage, crumpled on the ground, watched the performance with a look of pure disbelief.
“You monster. Taking that many hits and still standing… a Ririm really is a Ririm.”
“Shut up before I snap your neck.”
Muttering, Seo Rin dug the rounds out of his body. A few had lodged in his back where his hands couldn’t reach, but his regenerating flesh soon pushed them out on its own—like a thorn that works its way free of the skin after long enough, if the metaphor weren’t quite so grotesque.
Even specially consecrated silver rounds, designed to put down vampires and lycanthropes, were not enough to suppress a life force like Seo Rin’s.
“…Ugh. Damn it!”
Seo Rin shuddered under a hunger so violent it made him flinch. The more his wounds healed, the sharper the starvation became—and with it, the beast-nature inside him began to wake. That savage hunger, the kind that made him feel he could devour a human raw, forced him to confront what he was. Honestly, the mage lying in front of him looked good enough to eat as he was.
“Nnngh…”
Even with his body wrecked, the mage still seemed intent on fighting; he crawled toward his submachine gun. The shattered acrylic signboard had driven its steel frame into his chest and cracked half a dozen ribs, and still the man meant to keep going.
The sight of it left Seo Rin appalled. Apparently the residents of the night all treated injuries like that as nothing. Then again—if they didn’t, no human body would ever dare challenge a monster like him.
“Crazy bastard.”
Seo Rin picked up the submachine gun that had fallen onto the trash bin, yanked out the magazine, pocketed it, and bent the weapon in half. As the cast-metal frame crumpled and folded, the mage, still crawling, gave a choked grunt and smashed his face into the ground.
That settled it.
“…Kill me.”
Face-down on the pavement, the mage said it. And he wasn’t wrong—he didn’t look like a man who would survive. One thrown stone to the shoulder had shattered the joint; falling from the roof, he had smashed through a signboard with his body. Fluorescent tubes and shards from the sign had shredded him, and when he hit the ground those fragments were still embedded all over him.
In that condition, he was clearly in danger. He was still losing enough blood to make a bystander faint. And yet—had he taken some drug?—he was still alive, and still urging Seo Rin to finish him.
But the man’s words rang through Seo Rin’s skull as if they were a spell of their own. If he didn’t kill him now, the mage would come after him again. And if attacks like this kept coming, Seo Rin would never be able to handle it. Better to kill him here than risk being ambushed at school or at home—that was the honest truth. And if he had to kill him, better not to leave a body behind.
So… eat him? The hunger surged even harder the moment the thought crossed his mind. Just the fleeting idea of eating a human made his mouth water.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake… Sorry, but no.”
Seo Rin jerked his head hard from side to side, startled at himself. If he simply gave in the moment a sudden craving for human flesh rose up, what was the point of every scrap of character and personality he had built over the years of living as a person?
No matter how monstrous his nature might be, as long as he still had his pride as a human being, he would not fall that easily. The mage, Han Se-gun, even Lilith herself—they were all underestimating him. Seo Rin would never become the monster Lilith wanted, the one who would multiply the lycanthropes. Holding to that resolve, he walked over to the mage.
“Telling an ordinary high school kid to commit murder—are you out of your mind? If you want to die that badly, do it yourself. These days even little kids take care of their own business—‘Do it yourself, little kids, do it yourself!’ What kind of grown adult needs someone else to finish the job?”
Grumbling the whole way, Seo Rin rifled through the mage’s coat. He soon turned up a wallet, a phone, a knife. He opened the wallet, took the US dollars and Korean won inside, then used the phone to call an ambulance.
“…Hey! You! Cheeky bastard! What the hell do you think you’re doing!?”
The mage, watching Seo Rin clean out his wallet, was so flabbergasted he actually got angry. A few bills were a joke next to his life—but in all the time he had spent facing vampires, monsters, and vampire hunters obsessed with money, no one had ever pulled something like this on him.
The residents of the night all had serious reasons for being what they were—without those reasons, how could anyone stay sane in a place like this? Sarhyuk the mad dog excepted, of course—and for that very reason, none of them stooped to cheap little thefts. To be treated so shabbily by such a shabby opponent was a humiliation beyond measure.
“Eh, I figure this much is fair game.”
Seo Rin magnanimously forgave himself, put the emptied wallet back where he’d found it with a perfectly straight face, and walked out of the alley.
The mage was so stunned he could only stare blankly after Seo Rin’s retreating back.
Humankind builds civilization and lights fires in the dark—and still cannot erase the shadows. The stronger human power grows, the stronger the backlash becomes.
The savagery hidden behind the civilized face has grown far more foul than anything from the primitive age. In those ancient, barbaric times, humans had to fight natural disasters greater than themselves. Violence was a virtue then—a shield for survival. But what is violence now?
“H-help! Is anyone there?”
A woman’s voice, begging to be saved. But there is no one to help her. The hour hand is leaning lazily toward three in the morning; no one answers a cry for rescue at this hour.
Ah—how ironic. In a city of ten million people, a woman asking, “Is anyone there?” And in truth, there isn’t. The night city is prowled only by beasts that have given up being human.
Wrong?
Am I supposed to say I’m wrong? Then are the people drunk on liquor, on darkness, on pleasure still human? Should creatures barely different from apes be granted the exclusive status humanity has claimed for itself—the status denied to every other living thing on this planet—just because genetics labels them Homo sapiens?
My answer is: they are not human.
Shhk!
The cold blade of a knife sinks into the hollow of her throat. The moment the edge bites in, her pupils shudder wide. Ah… that expression is truly sexy. She isn’t what anyone would call a beauty, but even so, the look on her face as she dies is pure sensuality.
Is it the eroticism that belongs to death itself? Or have I simply become addicted to the scent of blood? Either way, there is no question that I am aroused right now.
Nngh—
I open my mouth and bite into the dying woman’s throat. I drain every last drop of living blood, plunder blood and life and everything else. Internal bleeding wrecks the organs; the living thing loses its strength.
I read somewhere that the force of a human jaw—that biting through a throat with ordinary teeth to kill someone on the spot—is impossible. The structure of the mouth has its limits. And yet… when I suck the blood out of a person, they shrivel like a punctured balloon and die. What is that gap?
“You were wrong, humans.”
I pull the knife free and drag the shredded body along. Passing under a bridge where the subway runs above the city streets, I notice a trash bin and, without much thought, throw the corpse into it.
“Are humans recyclable waste, or general waste?”
I ask, but the voice only hangs in empty air. No answer comes. Fine by me. If someone answered me here, I would almost feel sorry for that woman. For someone who wouldn’t answer a woman asking “Is anyone there?” in a city of ten million to answer my question would be pure nonsense, wouldn’t it?
There is still plenty of dawn left, but I have finished tonight’s meal. Before the cursed sun rises, I have to return to my place.
Ahh… I finished eating only a moment ago, and I am still starving. But it is not a painful hunger. It is the joy of knowing I will get to have another meal this sweet, just once more.
I am glad. Night will come again tomorrow, and this city holds nothing but thoroughly isolated humans. The night of a great city is nothing less than a blessing.
The darkness was real. The more humanity flourishes, the more the darkness that feeds on humanity flourishes with it. If the faith that humankind keeps advancing is correct, then humanity’s darkness advances as well.
“So this is where you were, Bark…”
Someone’s voice called my name. Not an illusion—a living voice. I slid a blade from my sleeve and slowly turned. In the dark, a pair of glittering eyes looked back at me.
“How do you like Seoul, Bark?”
“Not at all. Any big city suits me fine. Seoul, Tokyo—doesn’t matter.”
I put the blade away. The other was one of the famous traitors who had severed the cycle of the vampire bloodline—same as me. What was his name again? Not that it mattered.
“…You know, don’t you. That Seoul has some extremely high-quality prey.”
“What? That beast whose entire bloodstream is Psychedelic Moon?”
“No. You can’t even eat that one. The name ‘Jinma hunter’ isn’t just for show. This is a much easier target. The target is none other than a child of Lilith.”
“A child of Lilith? Something like that exists in this eastern land?”
“Exactly. That’s why it has managed to deceive everyone’s eyes until now. Because the target is a lycanthrope…”
A lycanthrope. That was enough. I had drunk a lycanthrope’s blood once before, and it had been agonizing. A pain like fire igniting in my gut had lasted a full month, and during that time my VT antibodies had plummeted and a great deal of my strength had drained away.
Besides, lycanthropes are never easy prey. Six or seven vampires had thrown themselves at that one, and of all of them, I was the only one who lived long enough to taste its blood.
“But if we investigate that one, we might learn the secret of Tetra Anax’s power.”
Tetra Anax—the overlords of the vampires—had long been rumored to be children of Lilith themselves. And they had never denied the rumor. The witch called Lilith, who had borne the lords of the dark… her child, here in Korea. Curiosity stirred in me.
But investigation was never my role. I am a predator—one who eats what he has hunted.
“…Investigation. I have no interest in that sort of thing. But… a descendant of Lilith—I would force myself, if I had to, for a taste.”
Perhaps, unlike the other lycanthropes, this one would suit my palate… I returned to my den before the sun came up.