Shall We Dance?
"You're seriously picking a fight with that many vampires over some gear?"
"There weren't many proper vampires among them. Nothing worth fretting over. That one was pathetic, too."
From Seo Rin's perspective it hardly sounded like the product of cold-eyed force assessment, yet the corpses littering the ground made Han Se-gun's claim painfully convincing. He had always known Se-gun was strong—but this strong?
"Then stick close. Leave you alone and you'll get yourself killed for sure."
"Ah—yes!"
Seo Rin shrugged into the ballistic vest Se-gun tossed him and trailed after the man in a half-crouch. The collar was stiff with blood—pulled off a vampire whose neck had been blown clean away—but otherwise the fit was excellent. Swallowing the bile that rose in his throat, Seo Rin scrambled after Se-gun without another word.
"What? One attack and they all went down?"
"Damn it!"
"You absolute idiots!"
Inside the van serving as their command vehicle, the mages recoiled in horror at the report that their swarm of vampires and Vampire Spawn had been wiped out without so much as scratching Se-gun. A radio crackled from the vampire side.
"We've still got plenty left, you know. This isn't over! Stupid humans!"
The vampires dug into overwatch positions on the mountain slope were putting on a brave face, yet the mages could hear the panic underneath. They turned, tense, toward the broker. Another encounter with Se-gun would mean a total massacre. Yet the broker was still grinning.
"Hey. Something funny about this?"
"If Han Se-gun finds us, we all die right here."
"Well, of course."
He spoke as if the house burning down belonged to someone else. The mages' jaws went slack.
"Hm?"
"If he finds us, right? I think I'll get off here. How about it?"
"What did you say?"
A classic villain-falling-out scene straight out of a spaghetti western was unfolding in real time. Sa Jun merely smirked and formed a circle with his fingers—money.
"I've already been paid… and I've done more than enough for the fee. Those vampire friends of ours look ready to keep going, so there's no real need for the middleman to stick around, is there? Even when the Titanic sinks, some people swim. I'm getting off here."
"The hell are you—"
The mages boiled. Watching him try to bail now was galling beyond words. Yet it was the smart move. The ones who had to risk their lives to finish the job were the mages; he was just a broker. All he had done was introduce them to the vampires. They had no right to stop him from walking. Besides, this man never had felt like a simple middleman.
Paolo clapped his hands.
"Fine. Then we're leaving too."
"Huh?"
This time the broker's expression turned odd. Hadn't the mages' objective been Seo Rin's capture? These vampires were not up to a kidnapping. Most of the Spawn had been left in that state so long that beast outweighed reason, and the vampires controlling them were castoffs from proper vampire society. Their so-called leader in particular had clearly gone around the bend.
"If you pull out too, I can't guarantee that kid Seo Rin's life."
"If we stay, we can't guarantee our own. Dead or alive is fine—don't pretend to care so much."
"Fair enough. Waste of a trip, then. Gas money down the drain. That Han Se-gun fellow really scare you that badly?"
Muttering, broker Sa Jun swung the vehicle around and drove off.
The vampires and Spawn that had been heading south along the national highway left the road and swung wide. The abandoned church Se-gun had chosen for his hideout sat in a clearing inside a pine grove; approaching it along the highway would have been no different from charging naked into a machine-gun nest.
Strolling down a well-paved road into open ground? Only someone who had decided to die would try that.
So they cut through the woods. Not that "woods" meant much—scattered pines, almost no tactical value.
"…Bastards ran."
One of the three vampires leading the Spawn smashed his radio. After the first clash with Han Se-gun left the vampires bloodied without landing a single scratch, the others had apparently decided the game was over and pulled out. Watching that kind of cowardice made the remaining vampires' blood boil.
"Bunch of yellow-bellied trash. And they still swagger around calling themselves mages."
The vampire beside him muttered around a cigarette. The rain was coming down in sheets; the tip refused to catch.
With the client gone, they had no obligation to keep fighting. With this much hardware and support they could turn themselves into an armed faction and do whatever they pleased.
Yet Han Se-gun remained a tempting prize. Underrated or not, he was still a Jinma hunter. Taking him down would vault even castoffs straight into the mainstream of vampire society.
One of the few ways to climb the ladder in that feudal, closed-off world. Of course, that only mattered to vampires who still cared about status. To those who didn't, it held no charm at all. So the vampire looked to his companion.
"Owen?"
Unlike the rest, the vampire Owen had zero interest in rising through the ranks. He lived only to eat what could be eaten and kill what could be killed. Every last one of these Spawn was his handiwork—proof of how far gone he was.
"What do you think? Pull out as-is, or try for the bastard? Even if he's just some scavenger, bagging a Jinma hunter has its appeal. I'd rather take him if we can."
"Don't even think about some half-assed plan to suck up to the higher-ups if we catch him. It pisses me off. Cole."
Owen had read him clean through and delivered the warning in a freezing tone. The vampire called Cole had no excuse ready and laughed emptily.
"Hahaha—of course not."
"Still. A human who struts around calling himself a Jinma hunter? Can't just look the other way. We kill him."
Owen growled and started forward. Then the wind shifted, flipping the direction of the pouring rain. As if that had been the signal, gunfire cracked simultaneously.
Bang!
The vampires threw themselves flat. Instead, Spawn skulls burst open. Someone in the trees had opened up with an M16.
Bang-bang-bang…
The vampires and Spawn had been walking so slowly the rounds found their marks without fail. In moments five Spawn skulls were pulp.
"You son of a—!"
Spawn made from street homeless swung their muzzles in unison. Cover or no cover, the sheer number of barrels was not something to ignore. Keep the pressure on while firing and they could suppress him cleanly.
"Covering fire! You lot swing around the flank and hit him from the side!"
Cole barked orders from the slope where he lay prone.
"Damn it, I got careless. They said there were only two of them—how the hell is he already here?"
Cole's fellow vampire, Jeoljung, grumbled while swapping magazines. Radio traffic had told them the flanking party that tried the mountain route had been wiped out first, so they had relaxed. The flankers might have fallen, but the enemy was only two men. That meant the main base should be empty, right?
Seize the base and the enemy would have to face this overwhelming swarm of vampires and Spawn with almost no weapons left. Yet less than five minutes after that radio call, the enemy was already in front of them. And only one man…
So one of them had crushed the flanking party alone while the other prepared to receive them here?
"Damn it—I'll kill him!"
Owen, furious at the sudden ambush, snatched up a grenade. At that exact moment Han Se-gun burst from the trees. Standing still would have been bad enough—why throw himself straight into this many muzzles? The vampires stared, aghast.
"What—?"
They could not help the second shock. In his hands he already held a Vampire Spawn whose breath had long since stopped. Using the corpse as a body bunker, he closed the distance at a dead run.
"Crazy bastard!"
"Fire!"
The vampires poured everything they had into Han Se-gun. M16A1 rounds were not something ordinary body armor stopped. Jinma hunter or mage, nothing should survive that kind of lead storm.
Dudududududuk!
Yet Han Se-gun charged through the rain of bullets with the Spawn corpse held in front of him. His stance was so low that almost his entire body stayed behind the shield.
At that point even rifle rounds became useless. To reach Se-gun a bullet had to punch through body armor twice and a body once; after the first plate the kinetic energy dropped dramatically. That was why a rifle round that struck a man wearing armor almost never exited his back.
"Shit—damn it!"
Before the startled vampires could react, Se-gun had closed the gap completely. Before they could issue another order his hands crossed. The neck of the lead Spawn snapped and its jaw shot skyward.
Crack!
The vertebrae broke but the skin still held, so the head did not come free even as the jaw pointed at the clouds. Expressionless, Se-gun hooked an arm around the vampire and spun him sideways as if dancing a tango, seizing the M16 in the creature's hands at the same time.
"Shall we dance?"
Cold hatred and mockery rode the same breath. The green-bleached hunter looked at the vampires with pure contempt—and lightning flashed at the same instant.
"…"
For a heartbeat the vampires felt a chill race up their spines. The World of the Mad Moon truly lived up to its name: a gathering of lunatics who would take second place to no one in sheer insanity.
But this one was on another level. That cold hatred and contempt, all of it packed inside a human body, made even vampires flinch.
"Waaaaaah!"
Vampires and Spawn opened fire as one. Han Se-gun flung his body sideways, still perfectly shielded by the Spawn corpse, and returned fire.
Ddududduk!
Rainwater exploded into spray; blood soaked the ground. In the downpour, bullets danced and every crack of gunfire cut the air.
Han Se-gun used the shattered Spawn as a shield and fired with his arm bent at a bizarre angle. A gun shot from around a shield like that should never hit anything. There was no sight picture, no proper stance, no line of sight at all.
Yet every time Se-gun's muzzle flashed, Spawn dropped one after another. Hauling M16s and body armor just to catch him had backfired spectacularly. Se-gun was using their own gear and their own bodies to protect himself and cut them down; the most efficient user of their ballistic vests turned out to be Se-gun himself.
"Damn it! Close combat! Smother him with bodies!"
The vampires finally changed orders. Prolonged firefights offered no path to victory here. Han Se-gun was the kind of man who could hit eight grenades with a pair of Glocks in a single breath—a trick-shot artist who had polished his craft to a razor edge.
Vampires who coasted on natural talent and never bothered to train had no chance against a trickster like Han Se-gun in a close-range gunfight. In Western terms it was the difference between the best gunslinger alive and a pack of extras.
No—comparing Spawn to Han Se-gun was not even that close. The gap between a horde of zombies in a splatter film and the hero who mows them down? That was more accurate. The Spawn, already half-stripped of intellect, fell before him with no defense at all.
"For fuck's sake—can you not hear me? Close combat!"
The vampires hurled every Spawn at Se-gun in a mass charge. Swarmed from all sides, even an outstanding hunter would be crushed by sheer weight. When numbers were the deciding factor, melee was better.
But… they were laboring under a misconception. If Se-gun could be brought down by something like this, he never would have survived fighting Jinma. And the Se-gun of now possessed physical power incomparable to what he once had.
Shiiing—!
The instant he shoved the shield-Spawn away, Noctis appeared behind his back. The black blade swept horizontal and called up a curtain of spray. The dark sword-shadow and the rainwater together smashed through the necks of the Spawn charging him.
Slash!
Arterial spray collided with the curtain of rain. It was an almost impossible sight: the blood jetting from the severed stumps was literally blocked and scattered by the downpour itself.
The Spawn never even reached him; Noctis took their heads and they crumpled. The way they collapsed in unison looked like a scene from an old martial-arts film. The only difference was that this time the heads really came off—no cheap special effects. Se-gun's movement itself was unreal.
"Is that all? Pathetic. You lot… you're the dropouts, aren't you? Hell. Have I really been underestimated this badly?"
Han Se-gun stared at the vampires as if he could not believe what he was seeing. Rainwater flashed into white steam around him. Overwhelmed, the vampires edged backward.
"Coming after me with this many Spawn all of a sudden—and gear like yours. Logistics on that scale shouldn't have slipped past me. Who the hell moved it for you?"
Something about the whole situation was wrong. This was the Republic of Korea, where firearms were strictly controlled and even gangsters hesitated to touch guns.