Are You Even Human?
“Can’t you tell just by looking?”
Se-gun wiped the smile from his face and settled back into his usual cold expression. A moment later, though, he turned his head and snorted another laugh despite himself.
“Uh—well, thank you anyway. Whatever this is about.”
Seo Rin offered a polite greeting to the mysterious beauty standing before him. She shook her head firmly.
“I’m not the one you should be thanking. Se-gun is. He’s the one who brought you here and got you treated.”
“Ah… right.”
“Oh, I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? I’m Kim Seong-hui, the owner of this place. You’re Seo Rin, yes? I’ve heard quite a bit about you.”
She held out her hand. Seo Rin took it without thinking, then glanced past her at Se-gun, who was wearing an apron and scrubbing dishes. He rinsed and stacked them in the dryer with the practiced ease of someone who’d worked hotel kitchens before.
“Master, just throw out anything that won’t fit in the dishwasher. This is a café—drop the cooked dishes from the menu. At this rate we’re going to turn into a family restaurant.”
“A family restaurant?”
Come to think of it, the interior did have a certain family-restaurant feel. Except that nearly every object hanging on the walls was some grotesque totem mask or cursed trinket you’d rather not meet in a dream. Se-gun dried his hands on a towel, peeled off the apron, and folded it neatly over a chair.
“Th-thank you. For saving me.”
Seo Rin said it while his memories were still hazy. He clearly remembered being sniped by some strange guy and then blacking out… so if he was here now, Se-gun must have pulled him out. However hostile the man might be toward him, the fact remained that he’d saved his life.
“…Thank you?”
Han Se-gun looked genuinely puzzled by the earnest gratitude.
“Even though I’m the one who nearly cut you in half?”
“What?”
Seo Rin stared at him in shock. Nearly cut him in half—what was that supposed to mean? Then he looked down and found the hideous wound across his own waist.
It had been stitched shut with something like fishing line, but it still hadn’t regenerated properly. The angry red-and-purple seam made it clear that when the injury was fresh, his torso had been all but severed in two.
“W-what is this?”
“You started transforming and were about to jump people on the street. I had to stop you, so I got a little rough.”
“If ‘a little rough’ looks like this, I’d hate to see what ‘a lot’ does. Bones and flesh would come apart.”
“When I get rough, I get rough.”
“…”
Se-gun’s attitude was utterly unbothered. How could anyone be that shameless? Seo Rin grumbled under his breath and prodded his own forehead. The bullet wounds, at least, had all healed cleanly. Still—a bullet had punched through his skull and torn up his brain, and he was alive. Was a lycanthrope really that durable?
“Wait… where are my clothes?”
Only then did Seo Rin realize he was lying there with nothing but a few towels draped over him. He startled and scrambled to cover himself. Han Se-gun was a man, so that was one thing—but sprawled naked in front of a stunning woman was another. Embarrassment flooded him; he fidgeted and squirmed. Watching him, she smiled.
“Heh. No need to be shy. More importantly, Se-gun—what are you going to do? At this rate the attacks won’t stop.”
“It’s not like I can keep babysitting him forever. Bait only works if you leave it out. You can’t stand guard over it and still call it bait…”
Se-gun shot Seo Rin a look of pure dissatisfaction. He’d released Seo Rin—Lilith’s descendant—precisely to draw out bigger players. But if Seo Rin couldn’t protect himself and just got toyed with by the enemy, the whole plan fell apart. And Se-gun couldn’t personally bodyguard him around the clock, either.
“Hold on. Then what exactly am I supposed to do? If they’re sniping me at school—”
“Drop out.”
The answer was blunt and simple. Just like that morning—so blunt and simple that Seo Rin took it for a joke and let out a short laugh.
“Is that even realistic?”
“What’s unrealistic is you clinging to school. You think this ends after you take down a few of them? There are plenty more who’ll come after you. Keep going to class and see what happens to the people around you.”
Se-gun’s voice was ice. Only then did Seo Rin grasp that the situation was far worse than he’d imagined. Seong-chan had already been put in danger, hadn’t he?
“E-even so. Throwing away my whole life over this? That’s insane!”
Seo Rin’s protest was a fair one. If he quit school and started fighting these enemies head-on, his own ruin was as good as guaranteed.
Quitting school here wasn’t simply a matter of interrupting his studies. It was a declaration that he was abandoning a human life and stepping forward as a lycanthrope—as Lilith’s child—to face everyone hunting him. That was what Seo Rin was refusing. Se-gun only sneered at him for it.
“Your life? Are you even human?”
“Se-gun!”
Kim Seong-hui cut in, unable to watch any longer. To a man who had personally discarded his own humanity, Seo Rin’s desperate clinging to school life might well look like nauseating self-love.
“B-but… just because I’m Lilith’s child, I’m supposed to accept all this? That doesn’t make sense! Everyone has the right to pursue their own life! How can you tell me to throw that away so easily?”
“I keep hearing someone reading from a morals textbook. Is that a hallucination?”
Han Se-gun mimed digging wax out of his ear and laughed at him. The attitude was so grating Seo Rin couldn’t take it anymore.
“What’s wrong with what I said?! I haven’t done anything wrong, and I haven’t thought anything wrong!”
“From an ordinary standpoint, sure. But different situations call for different standards. In your case, you’re extremely wrong.”
“Why?”
“You refuse to kill your enemies, you let them walk away, and you still want to live a normal human life. That level of complacency is useless.”
Seo Rin flinched.
“Huh?”
“If you truly want to live as a human, wipe out the enemies threatening that human life. Kill them. Get blood on your hands if you have to—and protect what matters. But you refuse to kill at all. All that does is put the people around you in harm’s way. You won’t dirty your own hands, yet you want to float above the situation and lecture everyone about principles? Do you seriously think the world is that soft?”
“…”
Seo Rin stared at him, speechless. Was this extremist seriously arguing that murder was justified if it protected your own life? And yet there was a grim logic to it. Until Seo Rin was captured and their goals were achieved—or until he grew strong enough that no one dared touch him—the threats would keep coming.
“But… I can’t kill people and still hold my head up. All I want is to live happily with my family. Why do I have to get my hands dirty for that?!”
“…”
Seo Rin saw Se-gun’s expression go blank and immediately regretted it. Whining like a child would only earn him more mockery.
But it was also the most honest thing he could say. If he killed someone, he was afraid he’d truly become a monster—and then he could never stay with his family. That was why, no matter how threatened he was, he couldn’t bring himself to take a life.
Then Se-gun seemed to remember something. He scratched his head abruptly.
“Damn. I almost made another mistake.”
“Huh? What’s wrong, Se-gun?”
“Nothing. Just remembered somewhere I need to go.”
Han Se-gun shrugged on his jacket and picked up his helmet. From the counter by the door he grabbed a protein chocolate bar, shoved it into his jacket, then pointed a finger at Seo Rin.
“Stay put while I’m gone. Your wounds are severe and your regeneration’s shot. Step outside Arjuna and this time you really will die.”
“Haa?”
While Seo Rin was still blinking in confusion, Se-gun walked out. Kim Seong-hui exhaled in relief and pressed a hand to her chest.
“That was close, Rin.”
“What? Wh-what was that about?”
“Oh, nothing, just… More importantly, Seo Rin—how’s your body?”
She clearly found the subject awkward and glossed over it. Not that Seo Rin had any right to press her. He looked down at his side again. Seeing the crude stitching that ran from the center of his belly all the way to his back… in the moment the wound was made, his waist really must have been cut clean through.
Seo Rin stared at it and let out a long, defeated sigh.
“Why does this keep happening to me? All I want is to live quietly without hurting anyone. Why won’t anyone just leave me alone? And that Han Se-gun—he talks like being soft is my fault, but living as a human isn’t exactly easy either! Who said making a living in this world is simple?”
“Even so, this is an emergency. Honestly, I think Se-gun’s right. There’s always the GED, you know? Once things settle down, you can go back to studying. Could you just hang on until then?”
She said it to reassure him. But for things to “settle down,” either he would need overwhelming power so he stopped being a target, or every force hunting him would have to be crushed, or he would have to vanish somewhere completely. Realizing that, Kim Seong-hui covered her mouth with her hand.
“What exactly are you people after?”
What he’d heard from Se-gun wasn’t enough; Seo Rin asked her directly. At least she didn’t seem the type to rant about exterminating every vampire and lycanthrope the way Han Se-gun did.
“Hmm… me? I just thought something fun might happen.”
That’s even worse! Seo Rin screamed inwardly, staring at Kim Seong-hui with a look of pure exhaustion. Of course—she ran with Han Se-gun. No matter how beautiful she looked on the outside, her insides were clearly rotten straight through to the marrow.
Han Se-gun headed straight for Seongran Girls’ High. Seo Rin’s younger sister, Yoon Young-eun, was still in class. But now that the mages had shown their true colors, there was no guarantee she was safe.
“Hope nothing’s gone wrong.”
Se-gun murmured it without thinking, Seo Rin’s face rising unbidden in his mind. The kid had clearly grown up drowning in family love—a rare type these days. Nothing else would explain that level of attachment.
Family? Se-gun rolled the word around and grimaced. The taste in his mouth was bitter beyond measure.
Han Se-gun had become a vampire hunter because vampires had slaughtered his entire family. But that was only the conclusion. On the surface it sounded like something out of a B-grade action movie—yet for Se-gun it had been different.
He had merely performed the role of a hunter burning with vengeance. He had never truly felt that his family was dead. Being a student in Korea could mean going an entire day without exchanging a single word with your family. That had been Se-gun’s case, so when they were wiped out, he simply couldn’t grasp that they were gone.
And because of that, the guilt had driven him to abuse himself all the harder… or so Kim Seong-hui’s interpretation went.
Se-gun had never agreed with her reading. But watching Seo Rin’s obsession with his family, old thoughts surfaced whether he wanted them to or not. Am I still that sentimental after all? He asked himself the question and twisted his mouth into a bitter smile.
“Let’s see.”
He climbed the building next to Seongran Girls’ High and made for the rooftop. Between the air-conditioning units he found the directional listening device. He pulled the memory card, slotted it into the MP3 player clipped to his armband, set it to high-speed playback, and raised his binoculars toward the school.