Those More Fortunate
The students, terrified, snatched up weapons. Armed with steel pipes and whatever else they had scraped together from the warehouse, they clearly outnumbered the three foreigners. And yet something about the air around those men left them cowed and overwhelmed. Instinct, no doubt. You cannot win against these people. Run. That was the warning clawing up through their guts.
“Graaah!”
One of them charged in a burst of desperate courage—though “courage” was generous. It was only the stress of terror finally snapping. The man in the long coat smirked at the sight and reached out.
Shraaak!
Blood sprayed. From fingers hooked like talons, pure white nails sprouted, sheared straight through the steel pipe, and split open the face of the boy swinging it. Skin parted as cleanly as paper under a razor; muscle and bone flashed white underneath. Everyone froze at the spatter of blood.
“A… aaaagh!”
The boy whose face had been carved open clutched at it and screamed. The man who had swung the nails simply brought his hands together, set a knife-edge with his palm, and cut him down as if he were swinging a blade.
Crack!
A cervical vertebra twisted; blood flew. No human strength could do that. A knife-hand might break a neck, sure—but to tear the flesh open and spray blood like that? It looked less like a strike and more like an axe biting home.
“No way—!”
Hyuk-jin jolted, but his body would not obey. He groaned like a sick chicken and forced his head up, trying to see. That was when the massive man stomped on his skull.
“So. How does it feel meeting people who’ll kill you just because they don’t like your face? New flavor, is it? Life grows the more new things you taste. You’ve grown, thanks to this. Lucky you. Feeling grateful yet?”
He muttered it while stretching out a hand. The two men who looked like his subordinates tossed corpses toward him.
“Kyaaaaah!”
The girl and the boy Hyuk-jin’s crew had dragged in screamed as if their throats would tear. The giant bit into the lolling-necked body without the slightest change of expression and drank.
Gulp. Gulp…
He guzzled like a soft-drink commercial, the big man making it look almost appetizing. Now that Hyuk-jin looked, the guy could have passed for an athlete. His suit was practically screaming under the strain of all that muscle.
How much training does a body like that take? The thought flickered and died the moment Hyuk-jin registered the “container” the man was drinking from. His mind went pure white. This bastard was draining blood from a human corpse.
“Kah!”
He lifted the remains—nothing left but skin and meat, shredded and limp. When even wringing them would not have produced a drop of moisture, he flung the body aside.
“Nothing beats biting down yourself.”
“…Kh… w-who the hell are you…?”
Hyuk-jin sagged on the floor and groaned, whining and clawing at the concrete like a sick dog or pig. Strength would not come. That last blow had been deliberate—meant to leave him exactly like this. The thought struck him: so he would have a front-row seat for this slaughter.
In the meantime the kids kept dying. One begged for his life; they seized his throat and twisted with casual cruelty. The neck bones parted; the body went limp as a doll with its strings cut. Then they bit into the corpses’ necks.
Hearts that had not quite stopped pumping still forced blood upward; the three men sucked it down greedily. This was no longer anything that could be called a fight.
“Kyaaaaaaah!”
The girl screamed herself into a faint. The boy they had strung up was already out cold. How many people could keep their minds intact in front of monsters reveling like this?
“Well, little man. Not going to try begging for your life?”
The giant asked it with his foot still planted on Hyuk-jin. Hyuk-jin already knew how pointless that would be. After butchering everyone else, why leave him breathing?
“…Please… let me live.”
His mouth said it anyway, against every thought in his head. The man grinned and bent down.
“At times like this you say, ‘Please spare me,’ don’t you? Hm? Did you think a foreigner wouldn’t know honorifics?”
“…Please spare me.”
Hyuk-jin recited it like a line from a textbook. Even with his life on the line, there was no sincerity in it. But if the man truly meant to kill him, he would have finished the other kids in a blink and never wasted breath lecturing.
“Then let’s relocate. First we deal with the witnesses.”
They approached the unconscious girl and boy and bit their necks. Going to kill them too? After saying they would handle the witnesses, it seemed likely.
This time, though, they did not guzzle the blood with the same crude greed. When the mouths pulled away, both victims’ eyes snapped open at once—unfocused, ghost-like. The giant whispered something into their ears, then reached out and closed their lids for them. They slumped back to the floor and did not rise.
Finished, he looked down at Hyuk-jin.
“These two are a lot luckier than you lot, kid. So we won’t kill them. You understand? Just how unlucky you are?”
Choi Hyuk-jin said nothing. The man was tyrant and absolute ruler of this place. Pointless talk would only get him crushed, and he had no excuse worth offering anyway.
“I don’t usually spare people who beg… but since you’re Seo Rin’s friend, I suppose I have no choice.”
“What?!”
Hyuk-jin jerked. He had never imagined that foreigner’s mouth would spit out Seo Rin’s name.
Then the world tilted. Vertigo slammed into him; holding on to consciousness felt impossible. The force of that fist was still stacking up inside his body, and the thread of awareness frayed.
“Kh—!”
The dark closed over Hyuk-jin’s eyes, and he let go.
After the clash with the Jinma Argon, Se-gun could not leave the bathtub for a long while. The places Argon had struck in their final exchange kept freezing over; without constant hot water he could not keep his body warm.
Fortunately the effect faded after forty-eight hours. It had been a powerful curse of perpetual freezing, and he had half-feared it might last a lifetime—so vanishing in two days was a relief. Still, forty-eight hours in a tub was enough to drive a man slightly insane.
Meals in the bath. Sleep in the bath. Those two days had not been pretty.
“Huu…”
Jinma Argon—one of the twenty-four ancient bloodlines, counted among the absolute strongest of the True Vampires alongside Phantom. Rumors claimed he was even stronger than Phantom, though Se-gun had no way to judge that. What was certain: settling things with Argon meant accepting the real possibility of death. The man was that strong.
“…Wonder if the kid’s all right.”
Finally free of the tub, Se-gun toweled off and stepped into the living room. He started toward his room for clothes—and stopped cold.
“What the hell…?”
The house looked like a disaster zone. Empty snack bags and crumbs from Seo Rin lay everywhere. The computer still hummed, screensaver cycling. Music he would never have chosen leaked from half a dozen directions. And the culprit who had wrecked the place was nowhere in sight.
“That little—?”
Se-gun tossed the towel into the laundry basket and headed for the basement in search of Seo Rin. Then an unfamiliar sound reached his ears: steel cable whispering through chains and rings. The exact noise he made when he trained. He had heard it countless times from his own work—but hearing someone else do it was strangely new.
“What’s gotten into him all of a sudden?”
He went down. Sure enough, Seo Rin was working out. The boy grunted and strained under more than a ton of weight; when Se-gun entered he looked glad and lowered it carefully.
“Huu! Man, that’s rough. Hyung, you all better now?”
He wiped sweat with a towel and looked at Se-gun.
“…Yeah, more or less. Now answer my question. What sudden wind blew you into doing something you never do?”
Se-gun leaned against the basement wall and studied him. Following the training plan was fine—but why was a kid who never lifted a finger suddenly doing this? Had seeing vampires murder people really lit a fire to fight?
He stuck out his tongue at the thought. Watching people die and suddenly sprouting enough justice to start killing vampires you never would have touched before… that was more disgusting than the vampires themselves. Getting high on righteousness so you can justify murder—that was basically proof you were trash.
“Well… you’re always nagging me to train, so I’m training. When I don’t, you yell. When I do, you yell. Kind of unfair, don’t you think?”
Seo Rin planted a hand on his side and glared.
“It’s because you never do it. Since when did you turn into a model kid, huh?”
Se-gun dropped onto the sofa and reached for a protein chocolate bar. He kept complaining it was too sweet and kept eating them anyway; they had grown on him. Habit now, more than anything.
“So what actually happened to leave you hurt like that? Wounds that keep freezing… Argon’s power?”
Seo Rin asked. That white-haired young man had done this to Se-gun? He could barely picture it.
“Argon… Everyone already knows his bloodline ability steals heat and freezes matter solid. But that isn’t all of it.”
Se-gun ran the fight back through his mind. Argon’s lineage power did seem to be heat-theft—and yet the man had other abilities Se-gun still could not name.
His close combat was excellent too; in their exchanges Argon had held a slight edge. Argon, like Se-gun, was a serious slander—so maybe the extra height and weight made the difference?
One thing was clear: to beat that man, Se-gun needed more mass. If he could not match strength when blades locked, he would never seize the advantage in a pure brawl.
Eating ten thousand kilocalories a day barely maintained weight—or even lost it. He needed at least twelve thousand.
“Anyway, Seo Rin—training’s good, but you clean up the mess upstairs.”
Se-gun said it and switched on the basement TV. Seo Rin frowned.
“I’m the one who always cleans anyway. As a roommate, don’t you feel even a little guilty?”
“That’s why I pay you a salary. Roommate, my ass. I’m your employer. Who said you could talk like equals?”
Se-gun answered flatly. Seo Rin stuck out his tongue, disappointed.
“Ah. I see. Chet.”
“If you hate it that much, I can stop paying. Go get a part-time job, shake down elementary kids at the PC bang, lift wallets off drunks—whatever productive work you like.”
“Everything after the first option is the opposite of productive, you know?”
Seo Rin muttered it—then locked onto the news. Se-gun heard the same broadcast and could not help stiffening. The report was showing the horrific corpses found in a certain warehouse. The picture cut to the school the victims had attended.
“That’s my school.”
Seo Rin stared at the screen, expression blank.
People around Seo Rin were starting to be targeted. Vampires had been circling for a while; Se-gun had never wiped them all out, so he had known something like this would come. He just had not expected it this soon.
He stood at once and fetched his laptop. Sure enough, an email from Sa Jun glittered in the inbox. The subject line read like pure spam—
—but the sender was Sa Jun, so it was definitely an intel drop.
“Came while I was stuck in the tub recovering.”
If he had checked earlier he might have prevented this. Impossible, though. The wounds from Argon had needed proper rest or they would have turned dangerous, and at the time Se-gun had had no other choice.
Seo Rin watched the interviews with a dull look. A mosaic-blurred teacher spoke about the missing students; Hyuk-jin’s name came up.
In Hyuk-jin’s case, at least, no clothes had been left behind, so the police were guessing he might still be alive.
“Hyuk-jin got kidnapped.”
Seo Rin took it with surprising calm, as if he had already steeled himself. There was no way Hyuk-jin had simply vanished by coincidence right now. He was not a toddler. Vampires or mages had their hands in this for certain.
“Giovanni’s side, I’d bet. So. What are you going to do, Seo Rin?”
Se-gun finished reviewing the mail and started to stand—then clutched at his chest. The wounds from Argon had healed, but the aftereffects lingered. His body still refused to listen, the way it did after a long, brutal illness.
“Let’s wait a little longer.”
Seo Rin said it with a worried glance at Se-gun’s condition. Giovanni Vantero and his subordinates were serious opponents. At full strength Se-gun could handle them; right now they were a trap waiting to spring.
“Surprisingly level-headed. I agree.”
Ordinarily Se-gun never sat back and watched vampire-related disasters unfold—but this time he sided with Seo Rin. With Choi Hyuk-jin taken, anything could happen, yet charging in blind without reading the enemy’s next move was worse. And after a scene like that, the police would be on high alert; moving too soon would only make things messier.