Scorching Pursuit
“If you say that again, I’ll really slit your throat.”
“H-How did you know?”
“Your patterns are obvious. Fine, fine. I’ll trust you for once. Let’s do it. We’ll draw Giovanni out and carve him up. But… are you prepared?”
“What?”
Seo Rin tilted his head, so caught up in the fun of teasing Se-geon that he had no idea what kind of resolve he was supposed to have ready.
“If things go wrong, we might have to kill that friend of yours—Choi Hyuk-jin.”
At Se-geon’s words, Seo Rin froze. As expected, the kid hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“I knew it. You’re really short-sighted.”
“Y-Yes. A-Amazing. As expected of hyung—your thoughts run so deep. I think I might fall for you.”
“I told you not to!”
Even in a situation like this, he was pulling that again. Se-geon drove his knee straight into Seo Rin’s gut.
“Ugh—kuh… A-Anyway, i-isn’t there some way we can do it without killing him?”
“…I don’t know whether we’ll kill him or not. Just pray the situation doesn’t force it.”
Se-geon said that and closed his eyes.
Seo Rin headed for the old neighborhood with Se-geon to find Hyuk-jin. So much had happened in the meantime that even though it hadn’t been long, the place already felt ancient.
People said a decade could change mountains and rivers, yet the buildings had transformed in far less time than that. Shops he didn’t recognize had sprung up; half-finished construction had been completed; old structures had been torn down. Looking at all those changes filled him with a strange, bittersweet feeling, but—
It was too damn hot!
The temperature had spiked that day, holding at a brutal thirty-five degrees across Seoul. The air and body heat barely differed by a single degree—and that was only in the shade. Where the sun actually struck, it climbed to forty or fifty, enough to make anyone faint on the spot.
Already, frail people who couldn’t endure the heat were collapsing from heatstroke in the city streets. From early morning the district office vans had been cruising the neighborhoods, announcing that public health centers were open for elderly people living alone who couldn’t take the heat. It would never be enough.
“At this rate we’ll get desertification,” Seo Rin muttered, clicking his tongue at the heat haze shimmering all around them. Of all days for Hyuk-jin to go on the run. He felt sorry for everyone who would have to pound the pavement looking for the guy—including himself and Se-geon.
“First… places Hyuk-jin might go… His house is probably already staked out by the cops.”
Seo Rin muttered to himself as he wandered the neighborhood. Se-geon trailed after him at an easy pace. Normally he covered himself head to toe in a bulletproof racing jacket or full suit, but today—apparently planning for daytime movement—he wore cut-off jeans that bared his thighs and a sleeveless tee. A wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses completed the look, whether to hide his hair or simply cast shade; he looked like a college student off on a national pilgrimage march.
At night he could still fight in body armor if he had to, but under this heat wave it seemed even he couldn’t manage it. With the rain gone and the weather turning savage, had Se-geon’s patience finally hit its limit?
“Wow, hyung. You look so much younger dressed like that.”
“Useless talk. I am young, so of course I look young.”
Se-geon’s reply made Seo Rin grin.
“There you go again.”
“Shut it. You’re really getting too comfortable mouthing off.”
Se-geon snapped open a folding fan as he spoke—a cheap bamboo one he’d bought on the street for a thousand won, but useful enough in weather like this. As he walked along fanning himself, Seo Rin muttered,
“You should just dress like that all the time.”
“Then I become free target practice. I’m only doing this because it’s hot and I don’t want to draw eyes.”
No matter how gifted you were, physically dodging bullets was impossible. Se-geon’s fighting style relied on body armor to stop rounds, or on body bunkers and other people’s flesh when necessary; without the armor he felt naked walking the streets.
“I manage just fine without all that,” Seo Rin shot back, since he never bothered with full-time body armor.
“Unlike you, regenerating is a massive burden for me. It’s not that I can’t—I just avoid it whenever possible.”
Talking like that, they scanned their surroundings. Naturally there was no sign of Hyuk-jin. The places he usually hung around already had police on them.
Spotting what looked like plainclothes officers, Seo Rin and Se-geon left the park and returned to the streets. Finding Hyuk-jin this time had been left entirely to Seo Rin, so Se-geon simply followed a few steps behind in silence.
Cicadas screamed in time with the heat wave. The asphalt looked ready to melt, and cicadas that had fallen onto it were scattered here and there. Seo Rin suddenly asked,
“Hyung, if you had to go on the run—from the police and everyone else—where would you hide?”
“Where I’d hide is meaningless. And the answer depends entirely on how smart the guy is.”
Se-geon crossed his arms as he answered. Seo Rin snorted. Intelligence for something like this?
“Well, I don’t really know how smart he is. Just give me the general theory.”
“Fine. In a case like this, the school already made the news, so the teachers will be out looking too. That means most places kids can enter—PC bangs, comic book shops, pool halls—will have patrols circulating. Cheap places to kill time, sure, but going there means you’ll get caught eventually.”
Se-geon kept walking as he spoke. The sun hammered down so hard it felt like they’d stepped into a desert. No—maybe a real desert would be better, being dry. This was a tropical jungle. He almost missed the torrential rain.
They walked beneath the awnings of the shops lining the street. A few stores had shut their shutters completely, papers taped up announcing vacation closures. Seo Rin wiped sweat and glanced at them with a long sigh.
“I want to go swimming.”
“Not the life either of us gets, is it?”
At that, Seo Rin let out another heavy breath. He knew perfectly well that a body hunted by vampires and a body hunted by police had no business showing up in crowded places. Still—being stuck in a room all summer…
“Hyung, what about the Han River swimming pools? I worked hard for this body—I should show it off—”
“Quiet. Showing Master is enough. We’ve got the AC on, so drop the vacation talk.”
“Kim Seong-hui would be thrilled to hear that.”
Seo Rin snickered; Se-geon just shrugged as if it were only natural.
“Call it service from a disciple.”
“Then how would Hyuk-jin hide?”
“I don’t know the guy well enough to say for sure, so general rules only. For about a week after something like this breaks, teachers will comb the area hard. After that they have classes. Korea always works the same way—once the initial frenzy dies down, backlog piles up and pressure builds to return to routine. So until then you live in the bathrooms near funeral halls. Funeral homes stay open twenty-four hours and cops rarely bother them. Food shows up too. After a week of funeral homes and hospital toilets, honestly, any normal money for running dries up. Even if you try day labor for room and board, nobody takes a kid without ID; factories are the same. In a recession with jobs scarce, selling labor for a place to sleep gets hard. After a week you could crash in comic shops, but that still costs money, so it’s rough.”
Se-geon laid it out. Without friends willing to ignore the law and hide you, long-term flight alone was never easy for a guy. Extortion as a lifestyle existed as a grotesque option, but once you were wanted by police that door closed too. Most of the time it ended with a trip to juvenile detention.
Listening to the long explanation, Seo Rin stopped at a roadside supermarket and plunged his hand into the ice-cream freezer. He’d already picked one, but he kept rummaging on purpose, cooling the heat from his body; another few centimeters and he looked ready to crawl inside entirely.
“Haa… so eventually you have to come back. That’s a pretty depressing conclusion for someone who’s spent his whole life dodging the law like you, hyung.”
“Without the absolute resolve to have everything snap clean off, living outside the net isn’t something you do. You need a guardian of some kind too.”
Se-geon rummaged through the freezer right alongside him. Rain then heat—this year’s weather was clearly insane. Digging through a freezer while discussing this felt thoroughly undignified either way.
He adjusted his sunglasses and went back to searching. Seo Rin asked from beside him,
“Not just ‘resolve’—the kind that snaps clean off? And a guardian means… a godfather? The Godfather?”
“In your case, like me—you need someone who can help with connections and show you how to handle things.”
While they both dug through the freezer, a clerk came out and cleared his throat pointedly. Seo Rin and Se-geon each took an ice cream and reluctantly extracted themselves.
“It’s really hot, haha.”
“The weather is pretty fierce, isn’t it? We’ve got the AC on inside—why not rest a bit?”
The clerk spoke kindly. Even after they’d been pawing through the freezer, the fact that they were buying changed his attitude; he looked more like family of the owner than a hired worker.
“No, we have to get going soon.”
They paid and stepped back out into the street. Both of them had chosen the same thing without discussing it—sherbet with almost no milk fat. On days this hot, rich ice cream never felt cooling enough.
“Hmm. Learning a lot today. So where do we catch Hyuk-jin?”
Seo Rin asked around a mouthful of sherbet. One way or another, they needed to grab Choi Hyuk-jin before the police or the school did.
“In your opinion—is Hyuk-jin the kind of guy who thinks, or the kind who doesn’t?”
Se-geon walked with a Jaws bar clamped in his mouth, fanning himself. They checked the bike racks near the station to see whether Hyuk-jin’s bicycle was still locked there. It was. Seo Rin inspected the bike while answering.
“Well… I’m not sure, but free time he mostly spent exercising.”
“Hobbies?”
“Just downloading fight videos off the internet and watching them, I guess?”
“What a dry bastard.”
Se-geon clicked his tongue, deciding the info was useless. A guy like that had no reason to come back to the old neighborhood at all. He could just hole up in some random PC bang and run out the clock.
Coming back near home and school was practically begging to be caught. The only reason to risk it would be to meet Seo Rin. Not knowing where Seo Rin was, he would circle the old house looking for him.
Of course Giovanni knew Se-geon’s hideout and might have told him the location—but Hyuk-jin still wouldn’t walk straight up to Se-geon’s door. That would paint him too clearly as Giovanni’s pawn.
While Se-geon turned all this over, Seo Rin muttered,
“‘Dry bastard,’ huh? If Hyuk-jin ever finds out you called him that, he might just give up on life and kill himself. Not much joy left in the world for him.”
Watching him, Se-geon suddenly asked something else.
“Then if that guy wanted to contact you, where would he go?”
“Hmm… I told him not to leave any contact info, so there wasn’t anywhere. Maybe he’d try looking up Boss Song or people like that.”
“Let’s go.”
Se-geon said it and swung onto the motorcycle he’d parked in front of the station. Seo Rin mounted his own. Even a short stop had left the seats scorching hot enough to burn their asses, but once they got moving the wind would cool things off.
“Come to think of it, Boss Song should be out of the hospital by now. Hope he’s okay.”
“He got hurt?”
Se-geon asked while putting on his helmet, sounding genuinely clueless. Seo Rin twisted around as he kicked the starter.
“You don’t remember? He got hurt because of you.”
“Ah. The list of people who got hurt because of me is longer than one or two.”
“Wow, you really don’t remember. What a terrible person.”
Seo Rin’s exaggerated scolding left Se-geon speechless. It wasn’t as if he’d ever been a good person, yet the kid was cutting him down so cleanly it was almost funny. He shook his head a moment later.
“I remember now. Someone connected to you who got hurt because of me—and you were the one who found him. The vending-machine guy, right?”
“You know perfectly well. Don’t you feel any guilt? He didn’t do anything wrong. Just an ordinary person who got caught in the middle and hurt.”
There was a time Seo Rin had been too intimidated to speak freely; now he was actually pressing. Getting used to him, maybe? Something about this kid was different. No matter how much you hit him, cajoled him, or threatened him, he stayed completely himself. That was a relief most days—yet every so often he got so bold it made Se-geon want to crush him flat.
If only he weren’t a child of Lilith…
Even as he grumbled, Se-geon found himself remembering the incident.
He’d been tracking Maria when he happened to drop onto the roof of a moving truck—the exact truck Seo Rin and Boss Song had been using. Coincidence, maybe, but given that Maria had been approaching to meet Seo Rin, it felt almost inevitable. In that moment Seo Rin, without a second thought, had thrown himself at Se-geon just to protect the pretty girl he thought Maria was. Se-geon had beaten him back.
“Of course I feel bad. But I’m fated to die a dog’s death somewhere off the books myself, so all I can do is ask forgiveness by living this miserable life.”
He really was sorry about Boss Song. Hurting hardworking ordinary people was never something Se-geon wanted either. But Seo Rin seemed surprised by that side of him.
“You sound like a monk. What if you master yoga next and start stretching your arms and breathing fire?”
“…You said you were barely scraping by, yet you still managed to play that game? Suddenly it’s Dalshim?”
Se-geon fired up his own bike as he spoke. Seo Rin gunned it first and shot off toward Boss Song’s office-home.
“No matter how hard it is to eat, you don’t cut fun completely out of your life. Otherwise you can’t even make friends, and it just gets miserable. Same reason some kids still hit the PC bang even when they’re skipping meals.”