The Letter from Colombia
"Well, those bastards did take a chainsaw to your arms and legs. No wonder it hurts."
"Th-they did?"
Seo Rin listened to Se-geon and examined his own limbs. Sure enough, there were traces of where they had been severed. A wave of horror rolled through him, and he shuddered hard.
"Ugh… that's just too much."
Se-geon looked a little guilty, cleared his throat, and asked the real question.
"Ahem. Ahem. Anyway—anything else happen? Looked like they pumped you full of drugs."
If the Tetra Anax side had tortured Seo Rin, exactly how much information had they dragged out of him? Se-geon needed to know. Otherwise, even after going to all the trouble of securing Seo Rin, he would still be a step behind—and worse, the Tetra Anax might simply lose interest. To them, Seo Rin himself mattered less than the knowledge locked inside his head.
"Ah, that… actually, something did sort of come back to me."
Seo Rin pressed his throbbing temples. Heat surged up inside him. To be captured by the enemy again and have to rely on Se-geon's help—his own pathetic helplessness made him feel like throwing up. So he forced his muddled mind open and clawed the memory free.
"What was it?"
"Irkutsk."
"Irkutsk? Hmm. Looks like a scrap of childhood memory woke up. But do you have any idea how big Irkutsk is? And it's been years… Lilith isn't going to be sitting in the same spot waiting."
Se-geon assessed the information with cold precision. "Lilith was once in Irkutsk" was next to useless. Privately he felt a flicker of relief. The Tetra Anax still hadn't gotten anything solid.
"I figured as much."
"And anything else…?"
"Just a name, I think."
Seo Rin fidgeted as he spoke. Se-geon was always terrifying when he started digging for information. Se-geon's eyes flared blue as he pressed.
"A name?"
"Yes. Rossini Isaka Bergenev. I think… it might be mine."
"Hmm. Your name? If it comes with a proper surname, it might still be sitting in an Orthodox parish register… There aren't many churches in Irkutsk, so it wouldn't take long to check. Don't tell me you gave them that too."
"Yes."
"Oh, for God's sake. We got well and truly screwed."
Se-geon bit his lip. Of course, even that wouldn't lead them straight to Lilith. Seo Rin still carried plenty of hidden knowledge and sealed memories that only he possessed. If parish records alone could find Lilith, mages and vampires would have tracked her down ages ago.
"All right. First priority is getting home somehow. I can't walk around in this racing suit—traffic cops will stop me for sure. Shall we head to Arjuna?"
With that, Se-geon stripped off the racing jacket, yanked out the gear inside, and tossed the whole lot into a trash can.
The television was running a detailed report on the Ritz-Carlton Hotel attack. The main thrust of the news was that Giovanni Vantero, a promising foreign businessman, had been assaulted by mysterious armed assailants, yet fortunately there had been no casualties. Se-geon picked up a slice of toast, buttered it, and snorted at the screen.
"…A drug lord is a 'businessman'? South Korea really is something else."
Maybe the media genuinely didn't know, or maybe someone was pulling strings behind the scenes. Either way, hearing Giovanni Vantero painted as an innocent victim made Se-geon's guts twist hard enough to stand up and walk out of his body.
"So, did you find anything?"
He asked his master, Kim Seong-hui. She only shrugged.
"You think the Russian Orthodox Church has everything digitized? You think records just pop up that easily? And trying to dig anything up from a single name is basically impossible."
"Fair enough."
Se-geon brought the toast to his mouth and glanced at Seo Rin, still collapsed and asleep on the bed. The part where he'd carried the kid last night and then slammed him into the ground from a five-story building still sat a little heavy on his conscience. Good thing the full moon had passed without Seo Rin transforming; otherwise he would have shifted all over again.
"Then maybe I should just take him to Irkutsk myself…"
"Isn't that a bit much under the current circumstances?"
Kim Seong-hui cleared her throat and asked. Se-geon still had plenty of enemies, and the police were on high alert hunting him. Slipping out cleanly right now would be extremely difficult.
"I'll wait until things quiet down a little. In the meantime the Tetra Anax bastards will already be there laying every trap they can think of."
"Either way, Seo Rin is a very important card. Looking at how everyone's going crazy over him. If we don't turn him into a proper hunter of his own soon, he's only going to get harder to manage."
Kim Seong-hui pointed out the exact thing that had been worrying Se-geon lately. Seo Rin was far too weak and pathetic to survive the world of the night as he was. Even ordinary hunters or mages could take him, and the people gunning for him were all heavyweights. They needed to train him up to at least the level of Se-geon's younger self—and yet even that looked impossible.
"Yeah. I'm not exactly gifted at teaching…"
Se-geon let the sentence trail off. Silvester hadn't been any good at teaching either; that was why he had farmed Se-geon's education out to Deok-yeon. And compared to the burning drive Se-geon had felt back then, Seo Rin remained absurdly carefree even while his life was under constant threat.
"Heh heh heh. Our Se-geon has finally met his match."
"You seem awfully happy about that."
"Of course I am. Watching you groan while you carry around a walking disaster is pure entertainment. You used to be far too inhuman."
"…I was already carrying one walking disaster. Now I've got two."
Se-geon looked straight at Kim Seong-hui and sucked on his finger—meaning she herself counted as one of those disasters.
"So what now? Want me to book you a boat to Russia?"
"Not yet. If we can drag Lilith out, great, but I'd rather wipe out every vampire I can get my hands on first. While the police cool off…"
Se-geon grabbed the remote and shut the television off. Listening to Giovanni Vantero being called a victim was more than he could stomach.
"Looks like I'll have to meet Sa Jun."
"Sa Jun? Sa Hyuk's little brother?"
"Yeah. I need to lean on him a bit if anything useful is going to come out. Honestly, right now… it's getting a little heavy."
Se-geon used the word "heavy" deliberately. Ever since becoming a Jinma hunter, he had always been the one slaughtering vampires; he had never fought them on equal footing like this. Whether he lured them into his own territory or stormed theirs, the result had always been the same.
Vampires who had grown fat for centuries without any real threat were no better than toothless lions. They lacked hatred. Se-geon had it in abundance.
What he had lacked were fangs and claws—and those had been given to him the moment he began turning into a vampire himself. That was how he had become a true Jinma hunter who could reliably put vampires down for good.
But Giovanni was a different breed entirely. A new-generation vampire engineered by the Tetra Anax both to fight lycanthropes and to test their own capabilities. The successors of the ancient bloodlines had been raised from the start as fighting dogs.
If Se-geon was a wilderness wolf who had sworn to live by devouring lions, then Giovanni was a hunting hound carefully bred over generations by hunters for the sole purpose of killing tigers—a purebred fighting dog. The fact that six of those things existed, including Giovanni, sat heavy in Se-geon's chest.
"Then while we're on the subject, let's yank the horn out in one pull. I'm going."
"What about Seo Rin?"
"Let him sleep as long as he wants today. He's got to be exhausted. Rest is training too, at times like this."
With those words Se-geon walked out.
When Seo Rin woke, it was already nearly noon. He stretched, sat up in bed, and looked around. This definitely wasn't the place he'd been sleeping lately. A Bart Simpson poster on the wall yelled "Whoa!" while riding a skateboard; the pillow was a Winnie-the-Pooh that lay on its back with its belly exposed.
It felt like a child's room, yet the bed was adult-sized. The rest of the décor carried the same faintly suspicious vibe.
"…Weird place."
Seo Rin yawned and turned on the television. An entertainment show came on first, reporting that Zen's lead singer, Cho Seong-chan, had been hospitalized with fractured ribs.
Some bizarre VJ with a ridiculous beeper-style haircut shoved past hospital staff who were telling her not to enter, all so she could film Cho Seong-chan lying in bed groaning. The whole scene was being broadcast nationwide.
"Yikes… making a living off other people's money really isn't easy, is it?"
Seo Rin felt a pang of sympathy for Seong-chan and changed the channel. Still, seeing him alive was a relief.
In any case, if he didn't clean up Giovanni and the mages soon, the people around him would keep getting hurt. His little sister could easily become a target again. Of course, ever since that day Se-geon had locked down every scrap of information about her with iron control. Reviewing wiretaps, surveillance cameras, and every other tool available meant that if Yeong-eun were ever taken, they would know within fifteen minutes at most.
"Mmm… maybe I should shower."
Seo Rin headed for the bathroom. Taking a shower in someone else's house without permission was pretty shameless, but lying around reeking of blood was even more shameless.
He started peeling off his clothes and suddenly noticed a letter envelope poking out of the torn pocket of his shirt. Only then did he remember his father's letter. He tore the envelope open.
Inside was a short letter and something that looked like a bookmark—a leaf of some kind sealed in laminate.
The letter read:
My beloved son,
I know you must have worried a great deal after sending this worthless father of yours off to a faraway country.
Right now I'm working on a coffee plantation in Colombia. It's nothing special, but they treat me well here because I have military experience. On top of that I've shown some talent for accounting and office work, so they're paying me quite a bit more than the regular laborers.
The beginning is still hard, but at this rate I think good things are coming, and that makes me very happy. If you ever drink coffee, keep in mind it might have been harvested from the farm your father is protecting. Hahaha.
You're studying hard, right? Even if you ended up in a technical high school because you got into too many fights, this father still believes in his son. Thinking about how hard you always study makes the strangeness of a foreign land feel less difficult.
Oh, and I've made a new friend here. A broker named Mr. Park. He left his own children back in Korea too, so we talk often.
Lizards sometimes wander into the dorms, and the malaria mosquitoes are bad, so you always have to be careful. Luckily the plantation runs regular medical checkups, so there's not much to worry about.
The owner of this plantation is a man with a very good reputation in the area. His name is Giovanni Vantero. I sent my first paycheck—it's not much yet—to your account. Use it for rent and living expenses. They say my salary will keep rising, so look forward to that.
At this rate I should be able to pay off at least some of the debt. Get along well with Yeong-eun, and one day let's all meet again as a family and smile.
P.S. The thing I sent is a talisman a friend gave me. He said it brings happiness. I figured you need it more than I do.
— Dad
As Seo Rin read, he could not stop the tears that kept welling up. Then his eyes stopped dead on the plantation owner's name.
"…No way."
It had to be a coincidence. Coincidences like this didn't just happen. Seo Rin told himself that and tried to move on. Yet something felt stuck in his throat like a peach pit—an oppressive, choking unease.
Coincidence or not, Giovanni Vantero was a man they called a drug lord. To earn a title like that you needed a lot of plantations, didn't you? Draw the lines and the diagram practically drew itself.
At this point it wasn't coincidence anymore. It was inevitability. With that thought Seo Rin quickly finished his shower, changed clothes, and went downstairs. Behind the counter, Kim Seong-hui looked up; a part-time student working in the kitchen glanced his way as well.
"Oh my, you're already up?"
"Um, Miss Kim Seong-hui?"
"You can call me noona."
"Ah… yes. Noonim. Do you… know what this is?"
Seo Rin held out the talisman. The moment she saw it, her eyes widened. She folded it carefully so no one else could see and handed it back.
"Where did you get this?"
"My father sent it in a letter…"
"Whew. Somehow it got through. That's a coca leaf."
"…"
In that instant Seo Rin's mind bounced a rubber check and plunged straight into a Great Depression. A coca leaf as a talisman? Sure, maybe that was normal in Colombia, but if someone sent this as a gift, wasn't the "coffee plantation" actually a drug farm? And the owner was Giovanni Vantero?
"…This is seriously not funny."
Seo Rin trembled. It might have been paranoia, but right then he truly felt as if fate itself had decided to torment him. Being a descendant of Lilith had never felt so bitterly unfair.
"What am I supposed to do… Should I go pay a visit with a gift and beg them to look after my father…?"
His mental collapse had reached the point where he had fully entered "I need to bring a bribe to the boss's house" mode. Watching him, Kim Seong-hui asked with a smile,
"Well, it's common enough in Central and South America. Don't worry too much."
"No. Actually, it's…"
Seo Rin handed her the letter. A moment later Kim Seong-hui let out a long, heavy sigh.
"…This is truly unbelievable. How on earth did it end up like this?"
"I don't know either. Ah—this isn't the time…"
Seo Rin walked straight toward the café door. He needed to go demand answers from Doctor Kang about this.
"I'll be back!"
He called over his shoulder and stepped outside. Kim Seong-hui almost stopped him, but Se-geon had never told her to keep Seo Rin locked down, so she simply let him go.