An Obvious Trap
Looking at him now, there was no room for excuses — he looked every bit the pervert. Even Han Se-gun, the man who had once sunk an entire building in the middle of a city, seemed to have no immunity to this sort of thing; he fiddled with his earlobe and pretended to look elsewhere. A moment later, though, he lowered the binoculars.
"Damn it."
He clicked his tongue the instant he confirmed that Yoon Young-eun's desk was empty. From everything he had observed of her habits, she always came to school by private car. There was no chance of her slipping off somewhere along the way. And she hadn't left early, either.
The wiretap feed he was listening to right now still carried her conversation with her friends. The girls had been chatting about the drama they'd watched the night before — then, just before class started, they fell silent all at once. And then… Yoon Young-eun's voice vanished. Someone had suppressed the humans with psychic force and casually kidnapped a high-school girl right out of her school. There was no other explanation.
"I have no idea what these bastards think they're doing."
These mages had only just entered the country. They couldn't possibly have a proper base of operations yet. For people like that to snatch a rich family's daughter and lock her up was reckless beyond belief. No matter how thoroughly magic could deceive the public eye, there was always a limit.
Se-gun ran through what he knew about the enemy once more.
The ones who had entered Korea and approached Seo Rin first were mages of the Isaac Faction, with bases in Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the like.
Descended from the Knights Templar, they had joined the assault on Jerusalem and, absorbing the influence of every heretical faith they encountered — Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism — transformed themselves into mages. In recent years they had thrown open their doors even further, greedily taking in esoteric Buddhism, Taoism, and more. An open, radical order of mages.
Among them were plenty who had become vampires of their own free will, chasing esoteric secrets or immortality. To Se-gun, they were nothing short of repulsive — a nauseating lot.
But his master, Kim Seong-hui, was a mage herself. Until now he had held back and left the matter for Seo Rin to handle.
"Family, huh. If I tell that kid, all hell is going to break loose."
Se-gun swapped out the memory card on the listening device, turned his back on the building, and headed down.
For centuries the Church had received and commissioned works of art, and bought up land and rights. Now, ages later, those artworks had become masterpieces of the greats, carrying astronomical price tags, while the land and rights had soared in value as well. A textbook example of time creating wealth.
Hadn't Manhattan itself been bought for a handful of glass beads? Never mind that the Native Americans had never even possessed the concept of selling land…
Even if time creates wealth, an ordinary human life rarely lasts more than a century. So people can generate wealth, but they never live long enough to enjoy the harvest. Only organizations and institutions grow fat; their individual members never get to share in the fortune.
Vampires, however, were a different story. Across long centuries they could create wealth, manage it, and personally savor every privilege that wealth conferred.
"Put like that, it sounds as if I just sat around rolling money and got rich for free."
Row Gibson — financier, investor — murmured the words as he looked down over New York City from his penthouse. The glittering lights of the city painted his healthy skin an even deeper red.
Soft blond hair, a solid build, long lean legs — he wore a pure-white denim suit.
A young businessman who used his vast fortune to exploit Third World corporations and rake in capital, while simultaneously ranking among the top five donors to various welfare foundations. Praised and condemned in the same breath for that dual nature, he rested an elbow against the glass and let out a sigh.
His other name was Phantom, Jinma — one of the twenty-four True Vampires. His origins lay with a mage who had pursued power and esoteric knowledge. To complete his own mysteries, that formidable mage had deliberately inherited the blood of an ancient vampire strain and become one himself.
At first the other vampires under the feudal order had resisted him. But with astonishing ability he crushed them and proved himself a Jinma in his own right.
"It's true, to a point. If these interest rates hold, bond yields alone would let me scoop up every dollar the mint ever printed within a hundred years."
Beside him, a blond boy who still looked young sorted through documents with a cool, clipped manner, glasses perched on his nose. Young-looking or not, the boy vampire had already lived more than a century — turned by Phantom himself.
His role was that of a secretary of sorts, gathering and organizing every kind of information for his master. Even now he was buried under a mountain of paperwork.
"What are you going to do this time, Master? Looks like quite a few idiots are heading back to Korea."
The blond boy — Wilhelm — frowned. Ever since two Jinma had clashed and been annihilated, Korea had abruptly become a battlefield for demonkind.
There had been suspicions that Tetra Anax had deliberately staged the fight to flaunt their influence, but Phantom had gone to that battlefield without hesitation. In the end, though, the one who suppressed the chaos had been a new Jinma hunter: Han Se-gun.
Phantom had wandered the country as nothing more than a spectator, run into his old enemy Silvester, and afterward returned to the life of a businessman. What had passed between him and Silvester, Wilhelm did not know — and Phantom never spoke of it again.
"Mm. What do you think, Bill?"
Row Gibson gave a short laugh and perched on the edge of his desk. With no lights on, the glow of the nightscape spilled straight into the penthouse. Wilhelm looked at his master, smiling with the light at his back, and shook his head hard.
"It's an obvious trap. The original source of the information is Tetra Anax. That means they knew about this at least two years ago — and yet they did nothing in all that time. That's not like them at all, is it? And why would the Beast leak the information in the first place? That man is crazy, sure — but the ugly kind of crazy."
Wilhelm made no secret of his deep distrust of the vampire overlords symbolized by the four serpents. The purpose of Tetra Anax — children of Lilith, the primordial vampires who had seized the throne from even Juk-yo — was, by this point, unknown to anyone.
Not knowing what someone who had already reached the peak still wanted, or why they continued to rule, was an intensely unpleasant thing.
Perhaps Tetra Anax intended to force a generational purge of every vampire but themselves. Jinma who might die once in seven centuries were dropping one after another in some tiny far-eastern country. For Tetra Anax, gifted with foresight, to have failed to predict such an outcome was simply impossible.
"Right? Too obvious a trap, isn't it? But from what I hear, quite a few have already taken the bait."
"After the last incident, most of them got burned pretty badly, so there aren't many vampires. Just Maria picking a fight with the Beast out of personal grudge. That, Tetra Anax's hitmen… and the incompetents who still haven't managed to leave Korea. Or else the spawns those fools who couldn't control their desires scattered across the country. That's most of it."
"And the mages?"
If the previous affair had been a vampire revolt over Jinma blood, this one was far broader. Lilith was an extremely valuable research subject for Kabbalists, Gnostics, and mages of every stripe; there was no chance they would sit still. Sure enough, Wilhelm pulled the relevant files without difficulty.
"Six of the eighth generation of the Isaac Faction have entered Korea. No notable reaction from the other factions. Well, the source of the information is so suspicious. The only ones who would bite something like this are idiots, fools, and morons."
Wilhelm slid the pressure onto his master with casual precision. He was as good as saying that anyone who fell into a trap this blatant was a fool. Phantom smacked his lips, looking faintly regretful.
"Korea, you know… it's crawling with companies ripe for hostile M&A. Looks like they've slid into a long recession, so if I go over and shake things up a little, the profits would be—"
"I've already sent the proxies. Handle it through them. And if you're that interested in business, why don't you take a little pity on your poor apprentice and do some of it yourself? If I printed out every document that needs your signature, the stack would hit the ceiling of this penthouse right now."
Wilhelm glared at him with cold eyes.
So he still wanted to go. People said even human old men turned into children when they got old enough — and Phantom was the perfect specimen. He had lived so long he was bored out of his mind; the moment anything happened, he couldn't tell a fireworks show from a fire and went charging straight in.
Thankfully his abilities were extraordinary. Without them, he would have been annihilated long ago.
"…Fine. Fine, I get it."
Phantom shook his head as if fed up. Then a thought struck him, and he looked at Wilhelm.
"But tell me. If they come looking for us here, we'd have to fight them then, right?"
"Of course. A Jinma has his pride. Anyone who invades your territory deserves to taste something bitter."
Wilhelm answered — then suddenly realized Phantom was smiling. What on earth was he thinking?
"You're not seriously—"
"No, no. This is purely a hypothetical. Mm. A hypothetical. Just a hypothetical."
Phantom said it lightly, then turned back to the nightscape and grinned from ear to ear.
Lilith — the primordial demon who, through her dealings with humanity, had given birth to every darkness — still rarely showed herself, even now that human civilization had advanced so far.
Mages who researched the mysteries, and Tetra Anax, who as her descendants had become the overlords of the vampires, had hunted for Lilith. No one ever found a trace of her. Just as her existence was beginning to fade from memory, Tetra Anax learned that one of her children had appeared in Korea.
Unable to bear the overall decline in the lycanthrope population, Lilith had at last borne a new child. Yet Tetra Anax, who controlled information through the Eye of Foresight, simply buried that knowledge for reasons of their own and never moved.
And then a single human had dared to challenge them, stolen that information, and walked away with it. That human was Han Se-gun.
"In short, everything you're facing right now is our fault."
Kim Seong-hui stated the fact plainly and offered a sincere apology. Perhaps her attitude caught him off guard; Seo Rin looked startled and thoroughly flustered.
In truth he had suspected as much to some degree. And Han Se-gun had never denied those suspicions. But he had never confirmed them either, meeting them instead with a flat indifference that said, Believe it if you want, don't if you don't.
Kim Seong-hui, unlike Se-gun, spoke the truth outright and asked for forgiveness. Seo Rin was angry, of course — but she was being this clear about it, and he was already in her debt. The timing was far too poor for him to simply lash out.
"W-wait a second. So you're saying everything that's happening right now is all because of you people?"
"Well, not all of it, exactly. We got the information from Tetra Anax in the first place. If Tetra Anax had truly decided to act, you would have been dead long before you ever learned who — or what — you were."
Kim Seong-hui had roasted the beans herself in the kitchen and brought out freshly made coffee. She held a cup out to Seo Rin, who was seated. He took it, but the instant he lifted his arm a jolt of pain shot through his side and he nearly dropped the cup. Kim Seong-hui sat across from him and crossed her legs.
"How's the wound? Healed up?"
"Not yet. Really… a wound this bad was never going to heal overnight."
Even so, it was closing far more slowly than usual. Seo Rin pressed a hand over the injury and frowned. He knew from experience that severe wounds could temporarily suppress his regeneration. But the damage Se-gun had dealt him went well beyond that.
"You took a hit from Noctis. Nothing to be done about it."
Kim Seong-hui gave a small shrug.
"Noctis?"
"The sword Se-gun uses. The cursed blade of the Templar Knights."
While she was explaining, a phone suddenly rang.
"It's Se-gun."
She checked the number and answered. A moment later her expression twisted.