The Wolf Hunters Arrive
The night wind off the East Sea still held a chill. Even that, though, could do nothing to cool the heat of the fishermen hard at work. Between pollution and whatever else had been throwing the currents off, they had come up empty three days running—and only now, at last, had they found a school of fish. Even if the nets tore to shreds, they had to fill the hold this time.
"Hey!"
A small craft was cutting toward their boat. Startled, they swung their lights around. The approaching vessel was painted black from stem to stern, low and flat enough that no one had spotted it until it was nearly on them. Out on open water, a boat painted solid black could mean only one thing—a North Korean infiltration craft, a high-speed special-ops boat slipping down from the North.
"G-God almighty. Why now of all times?"
The crew went pale. Then men climbed out of the black craft. In a single bound they kicked off their own gunwales and vaulted onto the fishing boat as easily as a man stepping over a soju bottle on a floor. Even a working tub like this one had a high freeboard; clearing it in one leap made the fishermen think the same thing at once—North Korean special forces really were something else.
"Stay still and no one gets hurt. We're just borrowing the boat for a moment."
They subdued the fishermen and hauled a large crate up onto the deck. A few of the crew glanced into it and went weak in the knees—rocket launchers, machine guns, the works. Armed infiltrators. No question.
A short while later, though, the fishermen went back to work as if nothing had happened. The men who had boarded their vessel returned to their own black craft and vanished without a word into the open sea.
Once the catch was in, the fishing boat made for shore. A truck was already waiting on land. Its crew loaded the wooden crates from the boat, left the fishermen behind, and drove off.
"Yeah! I'm the king of the world!"
Ever since Titanic, so many people had started doing that arms-wide stunt at the bow of a ferry that a chain now hung across the prow. Tonight, though, a man and a woman stood right at the front of the ferry with their arms flung wide, performing the ritual all the same. It was night and there was almost nothing to see, but they did not care.
"Hahaha. I've always wanted to do this the moment I got on a ship. Thank you so much for helping me."
The man adjusted his sunglasses and bowed to the young woman. Every motion was so exaggerated he might have been an actor on a stage. He wore an outrageous coat of leopard print thick with white mane-like fur, and under it a light beige suit—the whole look of a newly minted tycoon trying a little too hard.
"Ah… you, uh, speak Korean really well."
The woman seemed to be a complete stranger; she stared at the foreigner in mild confusion. His hair was a deep, saturated yellow, and he had the heavy musculature and massive frame of a fighter stepping into a mixed-martial-arts cage. His skin was the rich shade of milk coffee—almost certainly mixed Black and White, the kind of full blend common in South America.
He laughed brightly and touched his thick lower lip. A small gold ring was pierced through it, and he seemed to have a habit of fingering the jewelry.
"Ahaha. I speak Japanese, Chinese, and Russian too. When you've lived as long as I have, you run out of things to do. Studying ends up being fun."
He kept laughing. Two men who looked like attendants closed in at his sides. In Korea, wealth of that scale was a rare sight.
"Ah, hmm. Is that so? Not until tomorrow? Doesn't matter. I'm in no hurry to wrap this up. A man has to enjoy himself properly, doesn't he?"
He spoke cheerfully into the phone his attendants had brought him, then grinned and lifted his trunk. They were nearly at Incheon International Ferry Terminal.
He resettled his sunglasses and shrugged his shoulders. His attendants peeled the tiger-skin coat from his back.
"…Well then. Let's go."
He took a comb from one of them and swept his hair back from his face.
In the dim training room, Han Se-gun stood with his arms crossed, steadying his breath. With every exhale and inhale, the veins standing out against his skin writhed.
Screeeee—
From the darkness a massive I-beam swung toward him, wires fixed at both ends so that the steel rode like a pendulum. Roughly five hundred kilograms of iron barreled in with terrifying force. A hit like that would punch through a reinforced concrete wall.
"Hup!"
Han Se-gun drew a thick iron bar with his left hand and thrust it straight at the center of the oncoming beam, the motion as clean as a Western gunslinger drawing and firing. Even a slight loss of balance would snap or bend the bar and leave him crushed. Yet somehow he not only braced the beam with that single bar—he brought the swinging mass to a complete stop.
Crack. Crrrack—
The sound of muscle fibers tearing rang through the silent dark. Even a body half-turned vampire could not stop a five-hundred-kilo steel pendulum with one hand without paying a price. Han Se-gun lifted his ruined left hand. In moments the wounds had closed completely.
"…Kh."
A look of raw disgust twisted across his face. He shifted the bar into his right hand, kicked the beam away again, and—without a tremor in his form—stopped the pendulum once more.
Boom!
Shock beyond the limits of explosive strength slammed through him again. This was how Han Se-gun forged himself—by wrecking his own body. Ordinary training could never load a frame that possessed his strength and regeneration. So he trained the way other people would call pure self-harm.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap…
Applause cut through the dark. Han Se-gun turned. A woman in a light, flowing ivory dress stood there—refined, intelligent features touched with mischief. She crossed to the wall switch and flipped the lights on.
"Impressive, Se-gun. What kind of training is that?"
She watched him and let out a soft, pitying sigh. Once, to fight vampires as a human, Han Se-gun had used drugs refined from their blood. Impure narcotics—or vampire blood taken in combat—had begun turning him into one of them.
A man whose hatred of vampires bordered on obsession had been unable to forgive the monster he was becoming, and that hatred had nearly driven him to destroy himself.
Kim Seong-hui had saved him and halted the transformation. No one before him had endured the procedure that stopped a vampire change; Se-gun had borne the aftermath with terrifying will.
What he gained was a heart that hammered past four hundred beats a minute and perception accelerated roughly eightfold—gifts that placed an enormous burden on his flesh. Even ordinary life was nearly impossible, and no one knew how long the state would last. He lived on the edge of death.
That edge, though, only drove him closer to a demon. Like a priest sworn to a holy war, he bound himself to a merciless mission and, in carrying it out, fed his hatred of vampires and of himself.
Even now he was grinding a body as fragile as shattered glass.
"It's training for reaction speed. Anyway—what brings you here, Master? All the way out for this?"
He called her Master. From a vampire hunter living on borrowed time, he had risen into a mid-rank fighter—no, a sudden rising star—and was studying sorcery and magic under Kim Seong-hui. For the paranoid master–disciple bonds common among mages, the arrangement was astonishingly generous to him.
Perhaps that was why Kim Seong-hui sat on his sofa without asking.
"The wolf hunters are gathering, Se-gun."
"After we spread that much information, this is the least we should get. Otherwise where's the payoff?"
Han Se-gun took hold of the wires and, starting from his fingers, slowly poured power into them until he was lifting both five-hundred-kilo beams. Kim Seong-hui sighed as she watched.
Every pull made his muscles leap so clearly she could see them under the skin. Body fat under three percent had stripped him until every fiber stood out. Training like this, even ten thousand calories a day left him gaunt.
"I don't like a body that defined, Se-gun. A lean frame is fine, but… maybe a few less veins showing?"
"I'm not building this body for Master's tastes. And just holding this is hard enough. I've never been much of an eater—forcing down ten thousand calories a day is torture."
He grumbled and shifted. He leaned back as if doing the limbo toward the cables and, from that angle, began cable flyes. The exercise made no human sense—and yet the body cranking out one-ton butterfly presses was something else.
Most vampires and lycanthropes trusted the strength they were born with and never trained. Se-gun deliberately overloaded himself to the point of fiber damage, so of course his flesh was denser and harder than theirs.
His body constantly produced narcotic compounds; simply living like an ordinary human already demanded iron will. And instead of resting, he was still sharpening himself to kill vampires…
There was no stopping him now. The only thing holding Han Se-gun's body together was duty—his vow to hate vampires and lycanthropes, to destroy the moonlit night. That oath was the lifeline keeping him alive.
What held back the vampire change and the runaway body was pure will, and that will was the engine of his life. Asking him to abandon revenge and hatred was the same as telling him to die.
Kim Seong-hui still would not give up on him.
"Come on, don't say that… You train every single day, don't you? Rest a little. Play a little. You don't even sleep. Entertain me for once."
"Seriously… what are you, a kid? If you came here to whine, go home."
He set the cables aside and pulled out two boxes of thumbtacks. He dumped one box into the air and snatched the pins back into the container before they hit the floor, again and again. He used to sharpen lungs and reflexes by playing squash with six or seven balls at once; even that no longer seemed enough.
"So cold. Listen—even now, when I walk down the street, men hit on me left and right. When a woman like me asks you to hang out, the normal reaction is to say yes, isn't it?"
"Then go hang out with those guys."
He sidestepped and reached into the cloud of falling pins. Shadows of countless hands flickered through the dark, and the tacks stacked neatly into the plastic box.
"Really, so heartless. Fine. Let's talk, then. Do you think that Seo Rin kid can actually handle wolf hunters? Being a child of Lilith, he should have some serious power, right?"
At last something like interest stopped Se-gun's hands.
"His physical ability casually exceeds a Jinma-class vampire. He's still short of me at my peak, but in a long fight he'd be dangerous."
Han Se-gun said it while running image drills of subduing Seo Rin. Coming from him, the assessment meant Seo Rin's power was genuinely exceptional.
"But he's badly short on experience."
"That's a problem, then. He'll die."
Kim Seong-hui worried over Seo Rin. They had seeded the information about him themselves, but you only had one piece of bait—if some small fry snapped it up before the big fish arrived, the whole play was a loss.
Se-gun looked at her concern and frowned. How many enemies had shown up for even the unflappable Kim Seong-hui to sound this worried?
"Who exactly showed up as hunters?"
"The drug king Giovanni came in through Incheon Ferry Terminal, and the Jinma Argon is expected to appear in Korea as well…"
"Giovanni?"
"One of the six Successors designated by Tetra Anax."
Successors were the new-generation vampires Tetra Anax had cloned with magic and biotechnology to restore bloodlines that kept being lost.
They had not appeared even when two ancient Jinma rivals, Juk-yo and Chang-woon, annihilated each other on Korean soil. Deploying them now—whether by Tetra Anax order or on the Successor Giovanni's own initiative—was anyone's guess.
"Hmm. Not stronger than a Jinma, though?"
"Well… Giovanni's specialty seems to be work as a hitman against lycanthropes. In short, he's Tetra Anax's personal assassin."
"Oh?"
Vampire-kind was not specialized for combat. Their supernatural gifts and raw power gave them absolute superiority over humans, which left them brittle against equals.
As predators they were comfortable; in a dogfight they were not. So they selected combat-focused vampires to hunt lycanthropes. Those hitmen were seasoned fighters whose ability far outstripped ordinary vampires. Seo Rin, drunk on lycanthrope physique and barely self-trained, would not be able to handle Giovanni.
"That's genuinely dangerous."
Se-gun rested his chin in his hand and thought. He could not afford to lose Seo Rin here. So what, then?
"So I had an idea—"
"Denied."
He cut her off without even hearing it. Kim Seong-hui stared at him, startled.
"Why?"
"I already know what you're thinking. Stick me in a school uniform and sneak me into a high school, right?"
"…"
Apparently he had hit the mark; she closed her mouth. A moment later she smiled at him, mischief back in her eyes.
"How did you know?"
"I can tell from how you treat Silvester. You've got a habit of dressing people up in weird clothes for fun, Master."
Kim Seong-hui put on an injured look. He was not wrong that she enjoyed changing other people's clothes—but with Silvester it worked because he went along with it.
"Then what are you going to do? Just stand there and watch the bait get torn apart by minnows?"
She said it, and Se-gun turned to face her. Blue fire burned behind his eyes.
"My goal is to clear every fish out of the river. If a minnow comes to take the bait, I kill the minnow. That's all."
"I know that, Se-gun. But even so…"
"Even so?"
"Doesn't it piss you off to just leave the bait sitting around doing nothing?"
She flicked her fingers with the sly smile of a villain hatching something wicked. Se-gun shrugged as if to say she was hopeless.
She meant to test Seo Rin. Se-gun agreed. Even a lycanthrope born of Lilith was worthless as bait if he could not stand on his own power. Only if Seo Rin showed real ability and a will to survive would they draw out the bigger game.