Taking the High Ground
Mackenly tore off his bandages, shrugged into a bulletproof vest, and grumbled the whole time. Their target, Seo Rin, was hardly a threat on his own—no exaggeration. Just a high-school kid from this country, bottom-rung economically, with neither a stellar intel network nor any real mobility of his own—no car, no motorcycle, nothing.
If someone had tracked them this fast, it had to be that recently famous Jinma hunter, the Beast.
“Didn’t think he’d find us so soon. So it was a trap after all.”
Paolo readied his sniper rifle and moved to the window. Sure enough, the growl of a motorcycle engine reached them almost at once.
“We’ve got snipers posted. No way he walks into that, right?”
Word that Han Se-gun armored his entire body in ballistic materials had already spread far and wide. That was why they had chosen rifles over handguns. Body armor thick enough to stop rifle rounds was so bulky it was impossible to wear in ordinary life; neither vampires nor hunters who needed to stay beneath society’s notice ever used the stuff.
Which made silver rounds fired from a rifle a beautiful weapon that worked equally well on vampires and hunters alike.
Moreover, their side already had snipers in place for the ambush, while the other side was racing down the main road without a clue. Wasn’t the fight already decided right there?
The weather was already turning brutal. Summer was still a long way off, yet the asphalt looked ready to melt. Even so, Se-gun stuck with the motorcycle jacket. When it came to safety, the riding armor and jacket were simply not things he could abandon.
“Damn it.”
Knowing the destination was close, he brought the bike to a stop. From here on the odds of snipers being in position climbed sharply. They had used sniper fire when they hit Seo Rin, so the mages clearly knew their way around firearms.
Se-gun drifted off the roadside and into the woods, reading the terrain as he moved and coldly calculating where he himself would set up if he were the one shooting.
First, to spot anyone approaching along the national highway, one man would be on the hill facing Seoul. Another on the roof of the house. Then the two points that completed an isosceles triangle with those—the edge of the vinyl greenhouses and the woods opposite. Those were the natural sniper seats.
In the woods the trees would block the view, so the shooter would either be tucked just inside the treeline behind a trunk or further up along the ridgeline path. The greenhouses offered a fine angle but carried too much risk of being spotted by civilians, so that position had almost certainly been scrubbed.
“I heard there were six of them total. How many did they actually put on sniper duty?”
Se-gun carefully drew out a pair of binoculars, swept the surroundings, and kept moving deeper into the trees. The glasses told him little, but the continued absence of fire suggested either no one was posted in the woods or whoever was there was dug in specifically to stop anyone climbing the ridge.
“Shit! We waited too long!”
The snipers ground their teeth. They had spotted Se-gun coming in along the highway and had kept their rifles trained on him the entire time, but the area was hardly deserted by suburban standards. It was a high-speed national road linking Seongnam and Yangjae; traffic was heavy enough that they could not simply open fire from the roadside. The distance was also considerable—one slip and the round would miss. While they hesitated over those factors, Se-gun simply vanished into the treeline.
“Should’ve just closed my eyes and taken the shot. Damn it.”
Barrey, prone on the ridge, tugged at his ghillie suit. Militia-trained and steady, he calmly radioed Se-gun’s route to the others.
“This is Alpha One. The eagle is moving toward Bravo.”
“Bravo, huh? Real fancy.”
The voice that came back over the radio was thoroughly unimpressed. Anthony hated the whole Alpha-this, Bravo-that operational theater the way Barrey loved it.
“…Just shoot him the second you see him. What’s the problem?”
“Better stay careful. The way he moves is something else. Like a mamba.”
Barrey pictured Se-gun disappearing into the forest with that serpentine fluidity and issued the warning. Anthony only snorted.
He simply could not stand this kid with the titles “Beast” and “demon.” Anthony had spent twelve years as a mage’s apprentice. In that time he had also finished his service as a lieutenant in the Brazilian airborne and run every special-forces course that existed. And yet no matter how many Jinma this “hunter” had supposedly put down, the other side was still a green brat. Watching that brat get overrated this badly grated on him.
He held his breath and settled his rifle. It was a civilian hunting model, but the M-76 Safari version might as well have been a purpose-built sniper rifle. He had picked it up easily enough through illegal channels after entering Korea. Brand-new, still zeroed only roughly, but it had a scope—he was not going to miss. And he was lying in a shallow depression under the brush. If Se-gun appeared, Anthony would see him long before Se-gun saw Anthony.
Whiiish!
A sudden sound of something cutting the air. Anthony flinched but stayed silent, watching.
Thunk.
A thick military combat knife buried itself in a tree. The matte, non-reflective blade quivered in the wood; the trunk itself shuddered with it.
“…”
Even so, Anthony did not move. The other man was clearly trying to bait him into revealing himself first. The cheap little trick almost made him laugh. Apparently the kid liked his fish raw—why else would he try to swallow the world whole?
Then the undergrowth rustled. Se-gun’s form still did not appear. Anthony waited again, but an uneasy feeling began to crawl up his spine.
Was the bastard actually going to show here, or had he already circled past? To know for certain he would need to call his partners, yet if the enemy was waiting nearby a radio transmission would be pure suicide.
Sitting still, cold sweat started to bead and his fingertips went numb. He had always believed nothing much rattled him, but with real combat breathing down his neck his heart hammered so hard he could barely stand it.
The knife had flown and stuck in a tree—proof the man was close—so why wasn’t he moving? Finally Anthony could take no more. He lifted a small mirror and carefully angled it above the rim of the depression. Their base house was visible. Se-gun was nowhere in sight.
“Huh?”
That was when gunfire cracked from the ridge above.
“Oh, hell—!”
He jerked his head up, and only then did Se-gun’s movements make sense.
The knife throw had been pure distraction—something to freeze Anthony in place. In that same breath the man had simply written him off and driven straight for the ridgeline. In terrain like this, ringed by hills, once the high point was taken every other position became compromised. In go terms, the big dragon was already dead.
“Damn it!”
Anthony finally admitted he had been far too arrogant. His entire reason for being here was to stop anyone climbing the ridge and to protect the house that served as their base. Instead he had flinched from a single thrown knife, tucked his head in, and let the enemy blow past him at impossible speed. Completely played by the green kid he had dismissed.
“Hey—you okay?”
He keyed the radio and called Barrey. Only static answered.
Barrey clutched the stump of his arm and gasped for air. It had happened so fast the pain had not yet arrived, but the sight of the missing limb was still pure horror.
The instant the enemy appeared on the ridge and Barrey swung his muzzle around, an unidentifiable black cord had whipped out and coiled around his arm. The same moment he squeezed the trigger the cord detonated and the arm was gone.
“Ghhhk—”
Only then did he realize it was detonating cord. To wield something that thin as if it were an extra limb… Barrey clenched his teeth, drew the derringer from his boot with his remaining left hand, and brought it up. Only two rounds, weak ones at that, but better than nothing. The second his attention locked on the little gun, the same jet-black cord looped around his throat.
“That’s far enough.”
“Urgh…”
He had just seen what the cord could do. Earlier it had only cost him an arm; around his neck a detonation would kill him instantly. Barrey dropped the derringer.
“Smart enough not to need it explained. Good.”
Han Se-gun touched his own cheek and exhaled. Barrey’s round had grazed him; blood was already running down the side of his face. He kicked the fallen rifle up into his free hand, then braced the weapon against his shoulder with that single arm and aimed at the private house the mages were using as their base.
Bang!
Amazingly, he fired the rifle one-handed and hit the sniper lying prone on the roof six hundred meters away. The man on the rooftop was not completely taken out of the fight; he returned fire almost at once, but the hit to the shoulder destroyed any accuracy he had left.
Se-gun answered with several more rounds until the enemy was fully neutralized, then tossed the rifle skyward. When it fell he caught it the way a man might casually snatch something from the air.
Crunch.
Simply catching the descending weapon was enough to shear the barrel clean off and shatter the rest into pieces. He let out a satisfied breath, picked up the derringer Barrey had dropped, and finally reeled in the detonating cord still looped around the sniper’s neck.
Every time Se-gun cracked the cord—plugged into a power source—like a whip, Barrey’s heart lurched. One spark from that plug and his own head would leave his shoulders.
Yet even after taking the arm, the man seemed to have no intention of finishing the mages off. An ordinary person would have died from a wound like that, or worse. These were mages. Leave them alone with an injury of this level and they would simply use vampire blood—or whatever else they had—and be whole again in no time.
“Hah… hah… You’re not going to kill me?”
Barrey asked it while watching Se-gun prepare to move. Even he knew it was a stupid question, the kind that almost begged for death, but the Beast’s behavior was so unexpected he could not keep silent.
Han Se-gun, the Beast, was famous for his cruelty whether the target was vampire or human.
“Shut it. You that desperate to die?”
Se-gun answered flatly, then tore the radio from Barrey. He checked the frequency, punched it into a small remote-like device clipped to his chest, and crushed the radio to scrap with nothing but grip strength.
“How many snipers are still outside?”
“…Think I’ll tell you?”
Barrey bit down on his lower lip as the delayed pain from the severed arm finally hit. Blood flooded his mouth and spattered the ground. Bleeding from arm and mouth at once made the world tilt.
“Doesn’t matter. Guess I’ll just go finish off that other one from earlier.”
Han Se-gun launched himself down the slope, sliding and vanishing into the forest in seconds. A short while later another comrade’s scream tore out of the trees.
“What a ridiculous monster…!”
With his one remaining arm Barrey fumbled a syringe from inside his coat and jammed it into his own side.
The Corvette coupe Kim Seong-hui was driving knifed down the national highway at a terrifying clip. She used the navigator to pinpoint every speed camera and only eased off in those brief stretches; everywhere else she held a steady 120 kilometers per hour or higher.