Daylight Raid
Sa Jun suddenly pulled a credit card from his wallet.
“That’s the thing about a credit society. People will hand over expensive merchandise just because they trust a little plastic card. That’s why…”
“Deadbeats are everywhere.”
Se-gun cut him off. One way or another, Seo Rin’s kidnapping was now an established fact. Sa Jun, determined to take credit for it, puffed himself up. When it came to childishness, the bastard was the spitting image of his older brother.
“Well? Feeling a little grateful yet?”
“To a guy who was cooperating with Giovanni Vantero? Don’t make me laugh. When you get right down to it, the mages and the vampires both—wasn’t this whole mess your doing?”
“Always blaming someone else. No wonder this country never managed to reunify.”
Sa Jun grumbled as he walked between the parking spaces, then abruptly spotted a young man collapsed by the roadside. The youth had a baseball cap jammed low over his face and was gasping for breath. Sa Jun hurried over in alarm.
“Hey, stay with me. What happened?”
“Ugh…”
Se-gun approached, half expecting Seo Rin, but it wasn’t him. Still, the face looked vaguely familiar.
“Help me. You have to call the police right away. Ugh.”
“Huh? What’s going on?”
The thief’s own feet burning, as the saying went—both Sa Jun and Se-gun flinched at the word “police.” The young man, oblivious to their subtle reaction, pressed on with his story.
“My friend got kidnapped by foreigners.”
“Foreigners? What nonsense is that?”
Se-gun played dumb even though he knew perfectly well. Vampires and mages tended to be of foreign stock; to an outsider it would look like some international human-trafficking ring.
“Ugh…”
Ribs probably broken, the youth clutched his chest. Se-gun looked down at him and shook his head. Of all the rotten luck—creating a witness now, of all times.
Se-gun still lacked the ability to cloud someone’s memory with mere suggestion, so silencing the man would mean killing him. How much had the kid actually seen? Of course, if he started spouting nonsense about monsters, people would just write him off as crazy, so there was no real need to act.
As long as he wasn’t Seo Rin’s friend… But if a friend or acquaintance discovered their true natures, that was a different story entirely.
“Calling the police won’t do any good. This isn’t something you can stick your nose into. Get yourself to a hospital and get treated.”
“…Ah, you’re…?”
“Shut up. I’ve got nothing more to say. Got it? If you want to live a long life, go home and rest up.”
Se-gun left him there and headed back to Sa Jun’s car. At least he now had confirmation that Seo Rin had been taken. And that Sa Jun’s information was somewhat reliable…
“Do you finally believe me?”
Sa Jun asked, eyes narrowing into a sly grin as if something delighted him.
“Shut it. You spineless bastard. How can you hand over solid intel to the guy who killed your own brother?”
“You’re holding a pretty weird grudge, you know that?”
He muttered as he turned the ignition.
Seo Rin was wracked by high fever and hallucinations. With his arms and legs severed and drugs flooding his system, he drifted through old memories, following a voice that whispered straight into his mind.
“Hurry it up.”
As the sun sank, the mages grew restless. Tonight the full moon would rise, and under a full moon a lycanthrope became nearly invincible. Of course, night was also the vampires’ domain.
Given Giovanni’s overwhelming advantage over Seo Rin, even the full moon wouldn’t let the boy stand a chance. But for the mages it meant losing their precious window to extract information. The drugs would only keep Seo Rin pliable until sunset.
Shiiiiing!
Suddenly light blazed from Seo Rin. As expected, a powerful anti-demon seal had been laid over his mind; addressing that mind directly would have shattered it. But the Adamantine Nine Realms Array Barei had erected dispersed the seal’s force, letting him weather the trap unscathed. The flash raced along the barrier and wrapped around Barei’s body in a glowing sphere.
“Whew. Finally broke the seal.”
Barei wiped cold sweat and carefully refocused. There was always the chance of a double or triple seal. Yet this seemed to have been the first and only one on Seo Rin. Still concentrating, Barei questioned the vacant-eyed boy.
“What is your name?”
“Seo Rin…”
“What were you called before that?”
“Isaka Bergenev… Rossini Isaka Bergenev.”
Seo Rin answered without the slightest resistance, giving his childhood name. Having spent his early years in Russia, he naturally had another. With that opening, Barei began the hypnotic regression.
“All right, Bergenev. Where are you right now?”
“…I don’t know.”
“Look around. Still don’t know?”
“Mm. Snow everywhere… and a black forest.”
He spoke exactly like a small child. Mackenly, who knew a little Korean, translated.
“What are the people around you saying?”
“Irkutsk…”
Irkutsk—practically the heart of Siberia. Not the best place to raise a child, but businessmen traveled there often enough. If Seo Rin’s father had gone to Irkutsk on business and encountered Lilith, the story held water.
“Who is your father, Bergenev?”
“I don’t have one yet.”
“Then your mother—”
“…My mother is…”
At that moment Seo Rin’s body began to thrash violently. Neck and head stayed still while the rest of him convulsed as if staging a rebellion. The Kevlar bands tore with sharp pop-pop sounds; this was no ordinary strength.
“Damn it, what now?”
“Did we hit another trap?”
The mages recoiled from the suddenly thrashing Seo Rin. A lycanthrope could kill a man with a casual swing of an arm. Under a full moon, caution was mandatory.
“The resistance is fierce! Completely erased, is that it?”
Barei clenched his teeth and poured more focus into the spell. Just then the window shattered and the still-setting crimson sun flooded the room with daylight.
“Ghk!”
Giovanni and the Bernardo brothers scrambled into the shade in shock. The expensive panel blinds shattered as bullets punched through.
“Crazy bastard…”
On the roof of the building opposite stood a young man in a black racing suit, USAS-12 in hand, staring straight at them. The lean, panther-like musculature, the trademark green-bleached hair, the arrogant stance that dared them to shoot—everything announced that this was Han Se-gun.
“That son of a bitch!”
Giovanni rose. He gripped a pair of gold-plated .50-caliber Magnum revolvers and flashed a grin.
“Well, well. Looks like we have a rather impatient guest.”
The Bernardo brothers slipped on sunglasses and let their long, pale hair fall free. Even before sunset they seemed ready for a real fight.
“Have you lost your minds?”
Vampires exposed to sunlight rapidly lost power and eventually died. Vampire Tension was destroyed by daylight, generating searing heat said to be unspeakably agonizing. Giovanni, however, seemed unconcerned as he barked at the mages.
“You lot keep digging for information. I’ll handle this one in the meantime.”
He slipped on large sunglasses with amber frames and clamped a cigar between his teeth. Then he pointed a finger into the sunlight.
Fwoosh!
Skin ignited; he touched the flame to the cigar, drew deeply, then rubbed the fire out on his clothes and savored a long, satisfied drag.
Sa Jun guided Se-gun as far as the hotel, then left him to handle the rest alone. Having sold out his own client, Giovanni, he could hardly continue cooperating with Se-gun beyond this point.
After sending Sa Jun off, Se-gun rode his motorcycle to a nearby building and climbed the emergency stairs. High-rises rarely used those stairs, so he reached the rooftop without trouble.
He didn’t know which room Giovanni occupied, but once he surveyed the hotel it became obvious. Which suite would keep every scrap of light out with tightly sealed panel blinds?
“…Hope nothing’s gone wrong.”
Se-gun loaded slug rounds into a drum magazine and chambered the USAS. Then he fired at once, blowing the blinds to pieces.
“As expected…”
Blinds and glass exploded inward, revealing the hotel room beyond. Seo Rin lay bloodied and dazed on the floor. The mages and vampires around him stared back with startled rabbit eyes. But Se-gun’s position made return fire impossible without stepping into full daylight.
“Time to go, then.”
He swung astride the motorcycle waiting on the roof and revved the engine hard. Holding the brake, he twisted the throttle and dropped into a low gear. The instant he released the brake, the stink of burning rubber filled the air as the bike shot forward.
He raced straight at the opposite wall, then power-slid into a hairpin U-turn that brought him around at the last possible second.
Vroooom!
The sudden roar of the engine made the mages look up at the facing building, half-disbelieving. What kind of lunatic would try to jump a motorcycle between buildings?
Then Se-gun reappeared in their vision. He really was flying toward the hotel on the bike. Roughly thirty meters of open air, and he had used the slope of the stairwell exit as a ramp to launch himself clean across.
“Oh, for—”
Vantero stepped into the sunlight as if he’d been waiting for exactly this and unloaded both gold revolvers at Se-gun. Se-gun answered from the airborne motorcycle, blasting slug rounds from the USAS-12. Giovanni didn’t bother dodging; he simply took every shot on his body.
Thud!
The big vampire staggered, reeling backward. Catching slug rounds with bare flesh—toughness beyond all reason. Se-gun and the motorcycle came right after him like a second strike.
Crash!
The last of the glass shattered as the bike landed spectacularly on the hotel floor. The instant the rear tire touched down, Se-gun threw the machine sideways, sliding it like a missile straight at Giovanni.
Giovanni’s gunfire hadn’t been wasted either; the fuel tank was already burning. The motorcycle could explode at any second.
Screeech!
The bike that had just screamed through empty air used its suspension rebound to flip end-over-end and hurtle toward Giovanni.
“Oh shit!”
Giovanni instantly space-shifted out of the way. Behind him, Tito stood frozen; the motorcycle slammed into him and sent him tumbling.
“Aaaargh!”
One collision shattered both legs. Tito screamed and collapsed. At least he hadn’t been dragged under the bike—that alone was a miracle. The motorcycle punched through the wall and shot out into the corridor.
If it had carried him with it, he would have been crushed between wall and machine and died on the spot.
“Damn it. This is hopeless. If I could concentrate under these conditions I’d attain nirvana and be done with it. I have no desire to become a Buddha.”
Barei tucked his ritual dagger into his robes and stood. Extracting information by suggestion was impossible in this chaos. Even in a quiet room with careful work it would have been difficult; in the middle of a war zone it was absurd.
Bang-bang-bang…
The Bernardo brothers opened fire with Berettas in both hands. Se-gun flipped a sofa over with practiced ease and launched detonating cord over it in a curving attack.
The brothers split left and right in perfect symmetry, dodging the cord. The moment they did, Se-gun rose from behind the sofa and pumped slug after slug from the USAS-12.
Thud-thud!
The accuracy was uncanny for a shotgun. Lance Bernardo took the hits, smashed through the door, and tumbled into the corridor. Moments later he simply stood up, strode back into the room, and resumed pouring fire from dual pistols. These creatures were on a completely different level from any vampires Se-gun had faced before.
“Wow! Impressive, Mr. Han!”
Even in the middle of the fight Giovanni was having fun. He teleported pockets of air, aiming them at Se-gun. Forced air injected into the body could kill instantly depending on the location.
Se-gun planted a hand on the floor, tumbled clear of the teleporting air, then—still in a handstand—fired the USAS-12 one-handed in a ridiculous trick shot.
A normal human would struggle to manage that with a pistol. Se-gun could catch a five-hundred-kilogram I-beam with one arm. He had forged his body to the absolute limit so that, no matter the stance or weapon, he could hit. The monster who surpassed humanity made trick shots more precise than any sniper’s.
The slug struck Royce Bernardo’s shoulder dead-on. Royce’s body seemed to lift, yet he merely adjusted midair, landed on both feet, and skidded across the floor.
Were these bastards Terminators or something? Se-gun kicked the bed over in sheer exasperation.
My heart shakes like a machine gun…
naive heartbeat shot its groove.