The Price of Curiosity
Seo Rin sat in the passenger seat beside her, unable to sit still. To think his little sister had been kidnapped because of him! If anything happened to Young-eun, what on earth was he supposed to do?
“Uuuugh.”
He had worked himself into such a state that his stomach burned. Seo Rin chewed on his nails and tried to force himself calm.
“Don’t worry too much, Seo Rin. It’ll be fine.”
Kim Seong-hui offered the comfort, but even she could not believe her own lie. The moment those mages had taken the girl, they would have tried something to extract information. She might even have been raped.
Seo Rin was old enough to know exactly what that meant; the thought made him shudder.
Should he have just killed the enemies after all?
Killing intent welled hot in his chest. Seo Rin was no saint. He possessed ordinary morals and ordinary values, yet he himself had no idea what he might do if holding to those lines cost him something precious. If his own carelessness harmed an innocent sister, he would never be able to forgive himself.
Kim Seong-hui watched the restless boy and let out a quiet sigh. She had seen enough hunters to know precisely how they abandoned human lives and stepped onto the path of the inhuman. She had watched others break for the same reason Seo Rin might, and so she prayed nothing terrible had happened. If the sister were ruined, another blood-and-vengeance-starved vampire hunter would simply be born.
“Trust Se-gun. Only half a day has passed. That’s enough.”
Kim Seong-hui depressed the clutch and shifted higher. The Corvette coupe’s engine answered with a rising roar.
“What the hell is going on?”
Gunshots and explosions cracked one after another, yet the radio stayed dead silent. Paolo grew uneasy and fidgeted with the handset. If those sounds meant they had beaten Se-gun, triumphant voices should have flooded the channel by now… yet even after several more bursts of fire, the radio remained quiet.
“They got hit.”
Tito spoke with a gloomy face and pulled a crossbow from the closet. The sports model was fitted with a reloader for rapid fire and cost far more than any cheap gun. It was large and heavy, but it punched through body armor better than bullets and made almost no sound; special forces loved the weapon for that reason.
“We’d better prepare to die.”
Paolo finally grasped the gravity of the situation and clicked his tongue. The snipers they had arranged like a net around the perimeter had been dropped in an instant. The man truly deserved the title of Jinma hunter.
To think men trained by militias and armies could fall so easily. At that moment the girl, Yoon Young-eun, lifted her head. Until a moment ago she had been lost in the haze of drugs; now she was finally waking.
“Ah, you’re awake?”
Tito tried for a gentle tone, but the gun in his hand ruined the effect. A Korean high-school girl kidnapped by foreign men who were bristling with firearms? Anyone who did not scream in that situation ought to have her heart welded onto a K-1 tank in place of armor plate.
“Kyaaaaaaaah!”
“Oh, a textbook scream.”
Paolo applauded the shrieking girl, then casually lifted his foot and kicked her. Clapping one second and booting a slender girl like a soccer ball the next? Startled, Tito dragged him back.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Keeping her quiet. You know exactly what kind of mess we’re in. At a time like this, silence is—”
Sure enough, the single blow had knocked Yoon Young-eun out cold again.
“Even if you shut her up now, the enemy already knows our base and has already wiped out every sniper covering the area!”
Tito snapped at Paolo. He knew perfectly well that the priority should be surviving the crisis together rather than scolding a comrade, yet he could not become a cold rationalist so easily. Treating a girl like baggage was something a soft-hearted, mama’s-boy Latin youth simply could not forgive.
Then a sound like the wailing of the damned of hell rolled in.
“I agree.”
The window exploded inward. Shards flew like a storm. The startled mages threw up defensive postures against the glass. A violent gale and a rain of fragments filled the room with noise.
Through that chaos something came flying, tearing the wind.
Whirrrrr!
Jet-black wire cracked like a whip and coiled around their arms, necks, and torsos. Caught mid-defense against the glass, they were helplessly bound.
Moments later an East Asian youth in black clothes with green-dyed hair slipped through the shattered window. He moved with the eerie presence of a ghost, gliding soundlessly left and right, overwhelming them.
“Freeze! Don’t move!”
The young man warned them. Paolo answered by drawing a knife instead—a slim assassin’s blade hidden in his sleeve, practiced until the motion was lightning-fast. But before he could throw it, the wire in Se-gun’s grip spun.
“What—!?”
To their shock Se-gun actually loosened the wire. The loops that had bound Paolo’s neck and torso uncoiled and snared his arm instead, stopping the throw. That was when it happened.
BOOM!
The wire wrapped around Paolo detonated. Both arms and his left leg sheared clean off as if crushed under a press. The severed limbs shot into the air; arterial blood sprayed like rain across the room.
Only then did they understand: the wire was detonating cord. And Se-gun had loosened it deliberately so that Paolo’s torso and neck would not be cut as well…
“Guhhhh!”
Paolo toppled backward, balance gone. Arms and leg fell to the floorboards like butcher’s meat while blood fountained in every direction. The sight was so grotesque the other two mages could not even think of resisting.
“Do you really have to test my patience every single time? Curiosity comes with a pretty steep price.”
“Ugh…”
As if on cue the mages dropped their guns and crossbows and kicked them toward Se-gun. Han Se-gun secured the weapons under his feet, then released the wire still coiled around their necks and torsos.
The detonating cord writhed like a living thing, coiling neatly before sliding with a soft hiss into the gaps of his sleeves and collar, vanishing without a trace.
“Hurry up and treat that guy.”
After the threat, Se-gun turned his gaze to Yoon Young-eun, still bound with cable ties. Half a day in the mages’ hands, and they had already worked her over; the unconscious girl’s face bore clear marks of beating. On top of that, the blood from the freshly severed limbs had soaked her school uniform crimson. Going home looking like this would turn her entire household upside down.
“I don’t want to spout nonsense like ‘don’t hit a girl in the face,’ but did you have any intention of treating the hostage gently?”
Talking too much only handed the enemy more information. A true professional could read an opponent from tone, wording, every tiny gesture. Even so, this demanded a few words.
“I-I tried to stop them…”
Tito said, only to receive a cold glare from his comrade and a look of pure contempt from Se-gun at the same time. Han Se-gun cut the cable ties on her wrists and checked them. Because they had been looped over a doorknob, her own weight had stripped the skin raw.
Se-gun lifted a foot and stamped on the guns and crossbow. The crossbow was one thing, but even the steel firearms crumpled like paper under his sole. The mages flinched. If he suddenly changed his mind and attacked them now, they would die completely unarmed. Yet Se-gun only stared down at them with open scorn.
“Pathetic bastards. Kidnapping a girl and pumping her full of truth serum just to pick up scraps of information. And you still call yourselves mages?”
“Tch, look at you playing the saint. Are you some kind of moral paragon? A bloodthirsty hunter lecturing us—”
Mackenly could not hold his tongue. A vampire hunter scolding them for attacking a civilian? Ridiculous. Of course he was not completely thoughtless; Se-gun’s decision not to kill Paolo had already told him the man had no intention of taking their lives.
Thud!
A kick answered instead of words—mild compared with detonating cord. Se-gun looked down at them and snorted.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t come here out of any sense of justice. You just lack the basics, so I’m correcting you a little.”
“Ugh… what the hell are you talking about?”
“You sneak into a foreign country and just deal with whoever approaches you? Korea’s security is tight; the lines for people who do business with criminals are obvious. You set up a base without even basic recon, then kidnap a worthless civilian… not a single thing done right. Tetra Anax isn’t even here, and you expect me to clean up after you, you sons of bitches?”
Se-gun looked down on them with icy eyes and snorted again. Prideful mages found the humiliation galling, yet even they could not deny the overwhelming gap in power. The man standing before them was someone they could never defeat no matter how they challenged him. The reckless demon who had felled vampire lords—Jinma—and issued open challenges to every king of the dark; his renown was no empty boast.
“Still… you lot are about the right level.”
Han Se-gun left the mages behind and walked out across the carpet of glass. The soft crunch of shards underfoot grated on the ear.
As the target area drew near, Kim Seong-hui eased off the speed. Even she could not ignore the possibility of enemy snipers.
“Around here?”
Seeing her slow down, Seo Rin unbuckled his seatbelt, ready to leap from the car the moment anything came into view.
“Careful. There might be ambushes nearby.”
“I’m prepared for that.”
Seo Rin clenched his teeth. No one knew better than he how wrecked his own body was. But this was no time to protect himself. Even now his little sister might be suffering as a hostage.
Unspeakable, hideous images crawled through his mind; if he had a hammer he would have wanted to smash his own skull just to silence them.
Then a motorcycle appeared ahead, racing toward them. A man in a familiar style of clothing wore a helmet and carried a schoolgirl behind him. In any ordinary city scene it would have looked like some biker with a reckless girl hanging on without a helmet.
But Seo Rin recognized the girl at once—his sister, Yoon Young-eun. He and Kim Seong-hui slammed the car to a halt in shock.
“Why’d you come? I already cleaned those guys up.”
Han Se-gun, astride the bike, unfastened the wire and the belt around his waist and carefully lowered the girl he had been carrying on his back. He had used the wire and belt to keep the unconscious girl from falling off.
A motorcycle was dangerous enough with two people; hauling an unconscious girl on top of that—and the wire binding her to him was detonating cord! Kim Seong-hui frowned at him.
“Did you kill them?”
“No? I cut off a few arms and legs, but they didn’t seem like the type to die from that. Pretty well trained, actually.”
Se-gun shrugged, recalling the mages’ ambush and sniper positions. He rewound the wire and drew it back into his clothes. Watching the detonating cord vanish with a soft frictional hiss like a living snake, Kim Seong-hui pulled the ballpoint pen from her breast pocket and pressed the butt against her temple.
“I told you not to use detonating cord like that. You did the same thing with Seo Rin. If it ever goes off, the gore-porn freaks will have pictures to enjoy for years.”
“It’s something I carry around, so I might as well use it to the fullest. Detonating cord doesn’t just explode on its own.”
“Even so. Using it whenever you feel like it, like nylon clothesline…”
Kim Seong-hui spoke while climbing out of the car. Seo Rin was already rocketing out the door ahead of her, checking his sister’s condition.
“Oh my God!”
One look told him Yoon Young-eun’s state was serious. Marks of assault, her uniform painted in blood, and bruises from intravenous injections visible past her sleeves. Her wrists were scraped raw and scabbed where something had bound them.
“Looks like she took a kick to the stomach and blacked out. And… they dosed her with truth serum and interrogated her, but only once, so there shouldn’t be any major aftereffects. She’s okay.”
“Truth serum? There’s no way anyone would be okay after that!”
Seo Rin flared at Se-gun’s casual tone, as though Se-gun himself had beaten and drugged Young-eun.
“Of course she’s not okay. I’m sorry about that. When I said ‘okay,’ I meant the other thing…”
Se-gun apologized honestly. Seo Rin bristled and glared.
“Then which ‘other thing’?”
“You know… that… whatever.”
“What kind of ridiculous thoughts are you having about my little sister right now?! You don’t look it on the outside, but inside you’re a total wolf!”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll apologize for that. I just figured, since she’s a girl, maybe you’d be worried about that side of things.”