The Bomb Demon Fan Club
Se-gun read through the post Seo Rin had written. It was loaded with insults: You people know nothing. All flash and no substance. You're clearly a bunch of idiots who got bullied out of society. That filthy personality of yours is antisocial personality disorder—a kind of mental illness. And so on, a thick slurry of abuse.
That sort of verbal thrashing usually got dumped on male idol singers, so Se-gun had been watching with a mild, detached curiosity. Then Seo Rin hit post, the page refreshed, and the full screen loaded…
Se-gun choked on a sudden cough.
“Cough—cough… ugh, what the hell is this?”
“What do you think? The Bomb Demon Han Se-gun Fan Club. Doesn't it make you furious? They set off bombs right in the middle of the city and threaten innocent people, and these kids think it's cool. Look—they're even cosplaying. Really irritating little brats. They must've gotten their home education straight out of a fantasy novel.”
The computer monitor showed photos of kids mimicking Se-gun's look, plastered across the café background. Just as Seo Rin said, this was clearly a fan café thrown together by thoughtless brats who hadn't given the matter a second thought.
Se-gun pressed the heel of his hand hard against his forehead, speechless. He was already teetering on the edge from the Psychedelic Moon; this was perfectly timed to shove him the rest of the way over.
“…Yeah. Real crazy bastards. That said…”
Se-gun crooked a finger at Seo Rin.
“First, take a beating.”
“Huh?”
“Follow me, you little shit. Today we're going to snap that slender white waist with a clean crack, fold it neatly, and do a little Navillera.”
A modern-day reinterpretation of Jo Ji-hoon's Seungmu, maybe? The joke ran long enough to lose its punch, but Se-gun wasn't joking. Seo Rin looked at the enraged Se-gun and burst out laughing.
“Oh come on. Making a big deal over something like that. Hyung, you're such a hothead. That's why you draw blood every morning, right?”
“Shut up.”
Se-gun seized Seo Rin by the nape of the neck and dragged him downstairs to the training room.
Shaaaaaaaa…
It had been threatening since last night; by dawn the rain was coming down in sheets. The clouds blanketing the sky and the weather reports both promised rain all day long.
Morning had turned into night without warning, and they moved through the downpour.
“…Do we really have to go this far?”
Tito watched the procession trudging through the rain with a vacant look. A hundred-odd spawns mid-conversion into vampires—homeless and vagrants—led by four actual vampires. At that scale, people were going to notice no matter how much you hated the attention.
On top of that, every last one of them wore a bulletproof vest and carried an M-16A1. They had already drawn more than a few strange stares on the way here; each time, someone had cast a dazing spell on the onlookers.
“Maybe we should've rented a tour bus. That would've looked even more like a gang of thugs.”
Beside Tito, a Korean man sat chewing gum with a wet, deliberate smack and a mocking grin. He had both hands on the van's wheel and checked the rearview mirror for the other mages sitting in back. Their bored expressions made it clear none of them liked this method of attack very much.
“Hey. If you want to back out now, go ahead. But the money doesn't come with you, so figure it out yourselves. Do you have any idea how hard I worked sweet-talking those lunatics into this?”
The broker behind the wheel spoke, and the mages bristled. If this same broker hadn't sold information to Se-gun in the first place, their safe house would never have been compromised and they wouldn't have been raided. And now he had the nerve to act this shameless.
Still—Se-gun had already gotten the information before they ever dealt with the man, so there wasn't much to be done about it. Killing the broker now for the satisfaction of it would only leave them stuck in a foreign country without a visa and with no one left to rely on.
Then this same broker had suddenly proposed using the vampires to hit Se-gun. The mages had refused at first, but once they saw the sheer number of vampires, their minds changed.
With this many vampires, even a vampire hunter as skilled as Han Se-gun couldn't possibly hold them off.
And every one of them was armored in a vest and carrying an M-16A1. Silver rounds from those rifles would punch straight through the ballistic racing jacket Se-gun wore like it was nothing.
The price the broker had quoted for fielding a fully equipped vampire unit this size was absurdly low. They quickly realized he was double-dipping—collecting fees from other clients while fleecing them as well. In the underworld, that kind of double contract usually cost a man more lives than he had to spare. But the mages were in no position to be picky about cold rice or hot, so they took the deal.
“I respect the effort, so you don't need to keep taking credit for it now.”
Paolo spoke while still rubbing the throbbing stumps of his arm and leg. He had managed, barely, to reattach the severed limbs with vampire blood, but the newly grown sections were stark white with visible seams—impossible to miss at a glance.
They had kidnapped Yoon Young-eun to lure Seo Rin out and ended up drinking the bitter cup of defeat at Han Se-gun's hands. But they couldn't simply withdraw. Retreat now and the upper ranks would hand down a brutal punishment.
Still, charging in blindly again was impossible. Last time Se-gun had, by pure luck, let them live. There was no guarantee he would do it twice.
The one bright spot—if you could call it that—was the armed vampire force currently numbered over a hundred. That so many vampires still remained was both a relief and a shock.
“Think it'll be all right?”
They eyed the vampire leading the column and felt a private unease.
Plenty of vampires were unhinged to begin with. The sheer length of their lives made mental illness almost inevitable. But that one was a premium specimen of madness.
To casually devour people in a dense metropolis and spawn a hundred-odd thralls… He hadn't done it alone, of course, but even so, vampires this reckless about multiplying were rare.
Vampires sat at the absolute top of the food chain; without a sufficient human population to support them, they could not survive. If vampires ever outnumbered humans, the resulting famine would destroy both species. That was why vampire society enforced strict population control. Breaking that rule was proof a creature had already fallen past the point of being called a vampire—straight into the abyss as a pure monster.
“You're worrying about nothing. If we can't control them, then Han Se-gun can just deal with it. Or are you planning to go home empty-handed?”
The Korean broker in the driver's seat needled them while he drove. His words were correct. It was already too late for second thoughts. Returning home with nothing to show would mean only ruin waiting for them.
“So whose job is this, really? Moving this many bodies—who hired you, Mr. Sa?”
They turned to the broker who had provided the location. He gave a sly grin and tapped a finger against his own lips.
“That's a secret. I've got a pretty tight mouth, you know?”
A solemn silence filled the van. The mages all thought, Sure you do, but the thick-skinned broker still had plenty of use left in him. They swallowed their anger and let him talk as much as he liked.
As if someone had punched a hole in the sky, a thick curtain of rain poured down. Except for the occasional flash of lightning, the world was black as pitch. Television stations issued hourly warnings about flash-flood alerts and typhoon landfall.
Han Se-gun sat leaning against the window frame, staring out. The familiar blood-draw machine was still fixed in his arm, steadily pulling blood.
“The weather really is vicious. Is the drying rack you built outside going to be all right?”
Seo Rin came in soaked to the bone and peeled off his raincoat. Raincoat or umbrella—neither made a difference in a downpour like this.
“It's fine. I built it solid enough that it won't come apart easily. Drainage channels and everything are already cleaned out.”
Se-gun pulled out his earphones. He had been reviewing the wiretap recordings that had piled up; most of them were useless. Even so, he slotted in the next memory card.
“Weather like today's good for vampires. No sun.”
“Hmm. What about lycanthropes?”
Seo Rin towel-dried his hair while watching Se-gun. Lightning slid down the lines of Se-gun's body as he sat in the window. The frame was a little lean, but the contours alone made it clear how thoroughly that body had been forged.
Seo Rin had been dragged into sparring with him often enough to know exactly how much power that flesh could generate.
How could someone who claimed to be human train himself to this degree? And did he truly intend to wipe out every single resident of Wolya with nothing but his own two hands? Seo Rin never stopped being astonished by Se-gun.
The man slept less than two hours a day, rested his body by reading academic texts, and rested his mind by training that same body. He ran both tracks without pause—training, gathering intelligence, maintaining gear. If he had poured that same fanatic energy into anything constructive, he would already be a master of that field. Such a wasteful kind of effort.
“Lycanthropes don't have a central power structure—just individuals acting on their own. If one of them takes an interest in a child of Lilith like you, he's either a real freak or ambitious enough to have built his own pack. Either way, if they're enemies, you'd better be ready to fight. Did you practice shooting?”
“Uh… not at all.”
Seo Rin broke out in a cold sweat. He had been too busy fooling around online to do any real training beyond the sparring Se-gun forced on him. A blue gleam filled Se-gun's eyes.
“You insane little shit! What the hell are you thinking? Didn't you say you wanted to survive and go back to the human world? With that attitude you'll be lucky to last five minutes! Why the hell should I help a lycanthrope?”
“Even so… then you shouldn't keep me here. It's obvious I'll get dragged into everything.”
Seo Rin said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Se-gun's behavior really did have a lot of hard-to-understand parts. If he intended to use Seo Rin as bait to draw something out, sticking this close was the opposite of smart. Putting cheese on a mousetrap was less obvious than this.
Of course, that was only Seo Rin's high estimation of the man. Among the vampires themselves, Se-gun's reputation was not nearly so lofty.
“I figured if I just left you alone you'd end up all over the media. I couldn't bring myself to quit. Jesus, do you even think before you act?”
Se-gun kept needling him, still clearly displeased. A man who had waved automatic weapons around in the middle of Seoul and dropped an entire building with bombs was saying this…
Apparently the sight of Seo Rin refusing to abandon human life and remaining in society grated on him that badly. Meanwhile the collection bag had filled with blood.
“Is it really okay to draw blood once a day? I thought whole-blood donation was once every two months. This isn't even plasma donation.”
“Mind your own business.”
Se-gun glared. Seo Rin flinched and turned his face toward a book. Then a sharp beep cut the air.
“Alarm. Rain, or some idiot?”
Se-gun had planted early-warning sensors along every approach route that looked usable. Even vampires with razor-sharp senses rarely spotted a properly laid booby trap without real military training.
And even if they had trained at some militia camp, a vampire's speed made it far harder to keep careful watch for traps.
Se-gun immediately switched on the CCTV covering the tripped zone. Through the rain, a group of figures was crossing the wooded hill and closing in.
Seconds later, alarms began screaming from other sectors as well.
“They're serious about this.”
Se-gun checked the locations and frowned. Some were coming down the national highway from the Seoul direction; others had looped around through the mountains. Every one of them wore a ballistic vest, and every weapon fired NATO rounds. Cheap vests would never stop that kind of firepower.
“…A lot of them. Strange. Why are this many showing up now? I thought I'd already smashed every force that size. Guests looking for a child of Lilith after all?”
Han Se-gun went straight down to the armory and geared up. The USAS-12 and Glock 18s he had favored for so long, plus the Beast—now converted to a double-barrel. He swapped the choke on the USAS-12 and tossed Seo Rin a gun and a load of ammunition.
“Get ready to fight.”
“What? But…”
Seo Rin picked up the TEC-9 with clear reluctance, the same way someone might grit their teeth and wipe a patch of mushrooms off the corner of a room with a rag. The sight of him handling a gun like it was radioactive made the blood vessels in Se-gun's skull swell.
“Don't tell me you're about to say something pathetic like you don't want to kill them. These are complete lunatics who've already eaten more humans than they can count. Showing them mercy is just another cruelty to the people they already murdered.”
“I know that. I just don't want to rationalize slaughter that way.”
Seo Rin met Se-gun's eyes without flinching.
Se-gun had beaten him enough times that any ordinary human would have died dozens of times over, yet the kid's mouth was still working. Se-gun stared at him, half in disbelief. That gaze belonged to a predator, thick with killing intent, the kind of obsessive force that crushed every nearby will. Seo Rin looked straight back. Whether the boy was simply empty-headed or genuinely brave, Se-gun couldn't tell.
“I have no intention of justifying slaughter, and I have no intention of justifying myself. I'm a villain, and I've already reserved my seat in hell. Right now I'm just looking for people to take with me. If they happen to be parasite vampires, so much the better, right?”
It was the pure expression of madness. To Seo Rin's eyes, Se-gun was every bit as far gone. This wasn't clean revenge anymore—just a vague, all-consuming hatred and rage aimed at every vampire and monster, a hatred so total he was prepared to destroy even himself.
No matter how Seo Rin looked at it, the whole thing was unbearably base. Once a man staked his own soul on the table like that, condemning his destruction became meaningless.