First, the Hostage
Choi Hyuk-jin trailed off mid-sentence, then clicked his tongue as he realized just how pathetic he sounded. He had never groveled like this in his life. Of course, that was only because he had always been the one with overwhelming power—but to fold this hard the moment the strength ran out? At this point his own wretchedness was almost enough to curse himself for.
"Fine. It's okay. That kind of thing… I'm someone's kid too. That's the truth. All right, you've had your show. Back to work."
"…"
Seo Rin backed off exactly as Han Se-gun told him to. Hyuk-jin, though, still had something stored up, and he let it fly.
"I took you for a cold-blooded vampire hunter, but it turns out you love your family in your own way. I'm touched."
On paper there was nothing wrong with the words. Delivered one by one, though, they were pure needling, every syllable designed to scrape a nerve. Seo Rin stared at Hyuk-jin in open shock. Of course Hyuk-jin didn't know the full story—he had simply been beaten half to death by Se-gun's merciless assault—so a little spite was understandable.
But…
Seo Rin was no fool. Se-gun was being this brutal for two reasons: he suspected Hyuk-jin, and the victim statements from the case Hyuk-jin was mixed up in were at least partly true. Hyuk-jin clearly had a cruel side he had never shown Seo Rin, and Se-gun, knowing it, had tormented him on purpose. To talk back after that… given Se-gun's temper, he might actually kill Hyuk-jin. Unlike Seo Rin, there was no reason he had to keep Hyuk-jin alive.
Se-gun let out a long breath.
"…Huu. Anything else and I'd have snapped and beaten you to death. But with this kind of thing, I get calm instead. That's the sad part."
He walked over to Hyuk-jin. Hyuk-jin flinched into a guard, but instead of striking, Se-gun brushed the dust from his shoulder.
"This photo is my sin. Sometimes a sin is what keeps a person alive. Don't you think?"
"…Maybe."
For the first time, Hyuk-jin felt something like agreement with Se-gun. He still didn't understand why a family photo counted as a sin, but the idea that a sin could keep someone breathing—that he understood down to the bone. Because he himself was a man who had lived precisely as a sin.
A strange generosity rose in him, and he asked,
"…Can I ask what happened? You said get back to work, but it's not like we're racing the clock."
"It's a common story. Family murdered by vampires. I became a vampire hunter for revenge. Even saying that much makes the disgust rise. Feels like a third-rate movie."
"But it sounds like there's a lot more between the lines."
Hyuk-jin pressed again. Se-gun only shook his head.
"I don't want to talk about it. Or rather—I can't talk about it anymore. That's more accurate."
He closed his eyes. The self of those days and the self standing here felt like completely different people; the memories only seemed distant. Less like his own past than a documentary of someone else's life watched in a theater. Maybe living a life so soaked in adrenaline had made ordinary days feel like they no longer belonged to him. Or maybe it was a side effect of Psychedelic Moon and every other drug he had pumped into his system. Either way, they were only more proof of how broken he was—and that was bleak enough.
Then a sharp beeping cut through the quiet.
"Alarm?! In broad daylight?"
Se-gun bolted downstairs to the terminal. The warning tone meant something had gone wrong with one of the sensors, bugs, or cameras he had planted across the city.
When he checked the feed, the camera near the home of Seo Rin's stepsister, Yoon Young-eun, was being destroyed in real time.
Giovanni Vantero tugged a black beret low on his brow and shoved a knife into the sheath on his combat trousers. On ordinary days he preferred the kind of weapons villains loved—Gold Hawk, Gold Luger—but the tools he had chosen tonight were a SOCOM, a stiletto, and a semi-automatic crossbow.
Whether vampire or vampire hunter, the only real defense against projectile weapons was body armor. Even the finest vampire could not dodge a bullet; physics simply forbade it.
Precognition could make the impossible possible, but even that could be neutralized by deliberate conscious selection. Flood the attacker with powerful intent across every possible situation and each of those futures became a fragment of possibility, scrambling the foresight until it choked on noise.
In the end, the true virtue of a projectile weapon was neither portability nor accuracy—it was raw destructive power. That was why anyone who actually fought in the world of the night favored weapons that were large and brutal.
Which was exactly why Giovanni had gone with a crossbow. This one punched through body armor with ease and buried itself in flesh. The tips of its bolts were made of Cellular.
Cellular was a specialized polymer that drank moisture by the liter and swelled into gel. For a while people had tried packing it into bullets, but even a high-velocity round couldn't drive it through armor, and the absolute mass was negligible.
Loaded into a crossbow, though, it would be lethal. The only real problem was speed—crossbow bolts were glacial compared to bullets, so landing them took skill. Still, the launch velocity was more than enough for a weapon.
"Good."
Giovanni Vantero looked over his men. The Bernardo brothers had loaded their SPAS-12s with frechette rounds whose cores were aluminum-oxide ceramic darts, and they carried body bunkers as well.
Those ceramic darts punched through any armor on the market. Even Se-gun's favorite trick—using an armored body as a human shield for body-bunker tactics—was useless against something this crude and overpowered.
The downside was that extreme penetration also made regeneration easy. Worse, the penetrators were ceramic. Against the residents of the night, who lost almost nothing when regenerating anything that wasn't silver, the rounds were not especially deadly. Pure penetration, zero stopping power.
In the thick of a real fight, though, even non-silver still mattered. Wound the enemy for even a second, steal their bodily function, and take the head while the window was open.
In every sense, the weapons they had chosen were made to kill. And they had brought body bunkers too—vampire-grade ones, free of human weight limits, built solely for impact resistance and ballistic protection.
"Shall we do this properly, then? Are you ready?"
Giovanni turned to the mages. They had all chosen sniper rifles, clearly planning to fire from safe positions. For mages, that might actually suit them better. With this roster and this plan, it should be enough for now.
"First, let's secure the hostage!"
They walked toward the van waiting in the parking lot.
Jinma Argon slung a bandolier across his chest and hung the rifle at a slant. Roughly a hundred and twenty centimeters long, the handmade bolt-action rifle was pure rough-hewn function; he had commissioned it from Maria's gunsmith. The only thing that set it apart from a normal rifle was the ammunition: thirty-millimeter Oerlikon rounds.
In the world of the night, most people who used guns stopped at .50 caliber. This thing was absurd. The Harrier's Aden cannon and the tank-killer Avenger both fired thirty-millimeter—which made this rifle a genuine freak. Oerlikon guns were shipboard defense weapons.
"Seriously, though, if you've got a talent like X-ray vision you should've been using it already. You can read the back of an instant lottery ticket!"
Rat Gunip stepped out wearing a Beretta and a ballistic vest. Silver knuckle-guard gloves on his hands, studs in the soles of his boots—apparently this was his idea of arming up.
At least Rat was a combatant and had come with him. Karen, who was not, had stayed behind to watch the house. Two members of Esprit total, and one of them was himself—Argon gave a wry smile.
"A Jinma can't keep living like that forever. Pride, you know?"
"Still. Money's drying up by the day. If you didn't have the ability, fine—but you do and you just refuse to cash in? You don't have to go that far."
Rat's face turned serious. Argon nodded.
"I cash enough not to get noticed."
"Then wait—don't tell me Esprit's operating funds are—? Oh my God. Argon, we're out here scraping by day to day like janitors, cutting back on cigarettes so we can maybe afford a kid's school fees someday, and you've been snatching the lottery luck right out of our hands."
A moment ago Rat had been scolding him for not cashing tickets; now the leap had gone in a completely different direction. Peak Rat emotional whiplash. Still, Argon couldn't exactly blame him. What kind of vampire clan funded itself with lottery winnings?
Argon shook his head hard.
"It's not that bad. What do you take me for? Esprit's operating funds have nothing to do with that money! Although…"
"Although?"
"For myself? Yeah, I'm a full-time lottery lifestyle."
A Jinma living off scratch-offs. Rat was speechless. A second ago the man had been talking about Jinma dignity, and this was the truth? Then again, he didn't own a company, didn't hold down a steady job, and still traveled the entire world—where else would the cash come from?
Seeing Rat's face, Argon added a footnote.
"Not completely. Thinking about it, there's some gambling too. Cards are a guaranteed win with X-ray vision. Roulette—I just freeze the ball where I want it and give it a little stick, and everything's fine. But if you keep hitting jackpots in short windows you stand out, so everything in moderation. That's how I've lived."
"What an unwholesome clan. I might have to quit."
Rat grumbled while Argon broke the rifle down into a guitar case and packed his long blade as well.
"Shall we go?"
Argon said it and strode off with purpose. Fully armed, rolling in a top-tier van—the complete opposite of Giovanni's crew.
Young-eun always commuted by car. With violent crimes against women and children rising lately, her family had simply ordered her to take the car, and the household was rich enough that the school never made an issue of it.
In truth, after several students went missing or turned up as corpses, the school had started actively encouraging carpools and group travel.
Twenty-first-century Seoul was a dangerous place.
She returned to the apartment. From the outside it looked like a fortress. An inner courtyard had been built into the complex; the nearby wooded hill and roads had been folded into private grounds, and young, sturdy security men patrolled them. Theft alarms were everywhere, and the police made regular rounds. Young-eun had learned from friends that ordinary apartments couldn't install fountains, mini waterfalls, or home aquariums in their courtyards the way this place did.
Looking at her home—complete with an inner garden and a massive home aquarium where tropical fish drifted among coral reefs—it was obvious they lived well.
"But it's too big."
And almost empty of people. She unlocked the electronic lock and stepped inside. A housekeeper who had been watching a recorded daily soap scrambled for the remote and killed the TV the moment Young-eun appeared.
A little set in a bedroom would have been one thing; using the living-room PDP for soaps was another. The sheer nerve of treating the place like her own living room suggested that once again, the only person home was the help.
"Ah, it's fine."
Young-eun left the housekeeper alone and walked to her room. For a house that supposedly held a large family, the emptiness felt strangely hollow.
Between lessons and tutoring she rarely had the space to feel anything like loneliness. If the feeling had ambushed her now, it was almost certainly because of last night's dream.
Then a low rumble shook the building. Startled, she looked at the aquarium—it was definitely swaying. The windows trembled.
What on earth? An earthquake?
"Kyaaaaah!"
The quake surged without warning. Glass cracked, then shattered. The aquarium burst and dumped its water into the courtyard. The floor rolled under her feet.
Dear God, what was happening? She dropped flat, not knowing what else to do. A bookcase toppled. The television smashed off its stand. A short circuit bloomed into open flame.
"Ah! No!"
Staying here would kill her. She scrambled up and ran for the front door. When she opened it, the elevator she had ridden up was still waiting, doors closed.
Without thinking she stepped inside. Amazingly, even with the earthquake, the elevator ran normally. A quake violent enough to shatter windows, yet the elevator worked? The thought was wrong, but working was better than not.
She forced the unease down and rode to the ground floor, then bolted straight outside.
"…Ah?"
She had come home at dusk. Outside, full dark had already fallen; mercury lamps hummed with that electric insect-noise and flickered overhead. Everything was a peaceful evening. Not a single trace of earthquake damage anywhere.
She spun and stared at the apartment. No broken windows. No fire. Nowhere.
"What…?"
She froze where she stood. It had to have been some kind of waking dream. Nothing else made sense. Suddenly something like that—?
She turned to go back inside. And standing in front of her, as if he had always been there, was a massive foreign man.
"Hi!"
"…Kyaaaaah!"
The sudden appearance of the foreigner sent her sprawling onto her backside. He grinned like a ghost that had just stepped out of the air, and every time he smiled the gold teeth set into his mouth flashed. His clothes, though, looked like special forces—beret, ballistic vest, and in his hands a crossbow that was definitely not a toy.
The huge man beamed and asked,
"Yoon Young-eun, right?"
"What? Uh… I-I think you have the wrong person?"
She denied it on pure reflex. The big man only grinned wider.
"Tsk, tsk. Lying little girls are bad little girls. There's already too many people—no one needs bad little girls. Shall we thin the sixty billion down a bit and remove the bad ones?"
He leveled the crossbow. Young-eun collapsed in pure terror. Pointing a weapon at a person without warning—her legs simply gave out.
"I'll ask once more. You're Young-eun, right?"
"Yes!"
Yoon Young-eun answered while shaking like a leaf. He smirked.
"See? Honesty from the start would have been easier. Now stand up."
He held out a hand the size of a pot lid. When she took it, he hauled her effortlessly to her feet.
Terrified, she let herself be pulled along. But this was a nation of laws, an exclusive apartment complex crawling with security. How had someone just walked in? What were the guards even doing?
"…Ah!"
She spotted them a moment later—sitting in the guard post, smiling like idiots. If their minds had been hijacked the same way her daydream had been, it was more than possible. Meaning these people could twist a human heart as easily as they had faked an earthquake.
"Who the hell are you—!"
"Come on, hurry. A very scary criminal is on his way. I'm only doing this to keep Miss Young-eun safe."
"A-a scary criminal?!"
Is there anyone scarier than you? She wanted to say it, but the courage wouldn't come. He dragged her toward a massive black van parked in the visitor lot.
It felt exactly like being herded into a human-trafficking vehicle. For a trafficker van, the satellite dish on the roof was a little unusual.
"All right, get inside. Even Han Se-gun won't want to fight in a place like this."
"What?"
"Get in, Miss Young-eun. Unless you want to get hurt."
A radio crackled. The big man grabbed the handset and a frantic voice poured out—a language Young-eun couldn't follow. Not English. Portuguese? Spanish? Fear tightened around her throat.
"We've spotted him. He's coming now! Insane speed—!"
"He's fast."