Crossfire Pursuit
He loaded Yoon Young-eun into the vehicle like a piece of cargo and climbed in after her. The waiting driver and the man in the passenger seat grinned, then turned the key.
"Shall we?"
The oversized van roared to life and rocketed forward, tires screaming against the pavement. Young-eun, who had been tossed in like luggage, was flung backward.
"Kyaa!"
She tumbled, absurdly, straight into the massive foreigner's arms. He caught her with a smirk.
Screeeech!
The heavy van took a corner hard; overloaded tires burned and shrieked. They shot past the three-way intersection in front of the apartment complex and out onto the main road. That was when Young-eun spotted a motorcycle tearing toward them from the opposite direction. Even in the summer heat the rider wore a racing jacket, weaving through traffic at a terrifying clip.
"Ah!"
Something about him looked familiar. That bike rider—she was sure she had seen him before. But where?
Han Se-gun raced toward Yoon Young-eun's home as fast as he could. Young-eun was Seo Rin's blood kin, and she had already been kidnapped once by mages. That time Se-gun had stormed in and gotten her out safely—though injecting a high-school girl with a truth serum could hardly be called "safe."
This time was worse. Giovanni was a vampire. If he wanted information, he wouldn't bother with truth serum; he could simply bite her into a trance. A woman her size carried little body weight and even less blood—there was a real chance she could die.
"Damn it. Why did I have to make that promise?"
Once he cleared this stretch of road, her luxury apartment complex would be right there. But at that moment a massive van came blasting out of the apartment access road onto the boulevard, moving far too fast.
It took the curve so hard the vehicle rocked and bounced as if dancing, the rear bumper scraping the asphalt and spraying sparks. Any ordinary driver who valued his car would have cursed and slowed down. These men didn't so much as ease off the gas. They straightened out and blew past Se-gun without braking.
"…Ugh."
In the split second they passed, Se-gun's eyes locked onto two men in sunglasses. Pale skin, heads cropped short like dice, suits that didn't fit the look—he knew them. Giovanni's subordinates: the Bernardo brothers.
Se-gun squeezed the brake, slowed, and focused. His senses amplified at once; the noise of the world dropped away from his ears. Accelerate. Accelerate again. He converted every last scrap of the vampire factor inside his body into Psychedelic Moon and floored his own nervous system. Power and magic tore along his nerves like a circuit board under lethal overload.
With his abilities cranked, he poured his senses into the van that had just raced by. Breath and heartbeat told him everything: four people aboard, including the driver. One of them was a woman, terrified or agitated. Almost certainly Yoon Young-eun.
So they had already taken her and run. Using her as bait to lure him wasn't impossible, but the timing was wrong, and splitting their forces would only get them picked off one by one. There was no other play.
Se-gun glanced at his rearview mirror, cut his speed, and laid the bike almost horizontal as he crossed the center line.
Shhhraaak!
Every car around him startled at the fearless motorcycle invading the opposite lane. But the U-turn itself was blindingly fast and clean.
"Hey!"
Drivers yelled curses, yet none of them even had to swerve. With a perfect power slide Se-gun completed the turn in one motion, then wrenched the throttle open again.
The RPM needle spiked and the bike shot forward. Still accelerating, Se-gun crooked his left arm and pulled out a length of detonating cord, ready to smash through the van's rear doors and storm inside. That was when it happened.
Thuk!
Something punched straight through Se-gun's shoulder. The bullet punched through his ballistic jacket like it wasn't there.
"Damn it!"
A silver round shattered bone on its way through. Of course. Snipers were posted all along the route.
His left arm broke and went limp. Se-gun steered with one hand and closed on the van as hard as he could—not to smash into it, but to use the vehicle as a shield, gluing himself to its rear to stay out of the snipers' lines of fire.
Even for a hardened resident of the night world, taking fire while moving at speed was pure suicide. Catch a round in the head and you went under the wheels of traffic. And if that happened… even Se-gun would die.
He hugged the van's bumper and coiled the detonating cord back up his sleeve.
"Kahahahaha! Got him!"
Royce Bernardo, at the wheel, checked his rearview and lit up with delight. There was Han Se-gun, shoulder shot, clinging to the handlebars with only his right hand. Royce stomped the brake, hoping Se-gun would pile into them and go flying. Instead—
Thung!
—the van's rear doors caved in with a heavy crunch. Se-gun had lifted the front wheel one-handed and used it to catch the doors, bleeding off speed. He delivered a clean hit without being thrown left, right, or forward, then settled back into place.
Every ounce of the impact went straight into the van's rear doors. The rebound should have kicked him free, but Se-gun soaked it through the bike's suspension forks.
Motorcycles are fragile against hits from the front, sides, or rear—but strong against force from below. By lifting the front wheel, Se-gun had converted the crash into a bottom-up load. The bike bounced, but not enough to lose balance.
"Tch!"
"What the hell are you doing?! Drive!"
Giovanni snapped at Royce. If you could take a hit and send the other guy flying, fine. Han Se-gun was not that kind of opponent. The collision had cracked the rear glass so badly the mirror showed nothing behind them.
Most large vehicles carried a second under-mirror to check for children, cats, dogs under the chassis. Se-gun's impact had ripped that off too.
"Damn it!"
Royce clenched his teeth and floored it forward. Even under fire, the man had dented their glass and blinded them. Han Se-gun really was something. Still—snipers staged along the route, a hostage in hand, Se-gun already wounded—every advantage was theirs. Stick to the planned escape route, pick him off with rifle fire, and the win was theirs.
"Come on then! Keep up if you can!"
Royce grinned and shifted, ready to open the throttle for real. The faster they went, the harder the kickback through the bike's bars. With a broken arm, Se-gun would barely be able to hang on.
Vroooooom!
The massive van surged again.
"Kh—!"
Se-gun wrestled his shattered arm back up onto the handlebars. The bone was broken, but the nerves weren't severed; his fingers still worked. He clamped the left arm in place by grip strength alone and kept the chase.
Vroooooom!
The road opened wide. Se-gun stayed low, glued to the van, managing the gap. Royce kept changing speeds just to toy with him, and matching that rhythm was pure hell.
How long did he stay on their tail? Se-gun lifted his head. He'd been pressed flat to the bike to dodge sniper fire, so he couldn't see far ahead—but he knew every inch of Seoul's streets by body memory. An intersection was waiting up ahead.
"Damn it!"
He gritted his teeth. A crossroads—perfect for a sniper. Even if you went straight through, a shot from the side would find you. And if the van took the turn, Se-gun, who had been hugging its blind side, would be exposed all over again. So what the hell was he supposed to do?
He scanned the building heights. Most were roughly the same, but the ones fronting the sidewalk ran three stories or higher. Hug the curb and the buildings would at least screen him from snipers on the right.
Along the road's long axis, though, he was wide open. To chase and still survive the rifles, he had no choice but to keep the van as his moving wall.
And that only worked if the snipers were ahead. Someone could just as easily shoot him from behind. The whole situation was a mess. He was perfectly trapped.
"Thinking hard, are we?"
Royce's laugh rang out as the van drifted hard right. In the same instant, a bullet came screaming in from dead ahead.
Pak!
It grazed the side of Se-gun's helmet. "Grazed" was a generous word for a sniper-rifle round—the outer shell tore open. He'd only survived because he'd followed the van's curve and thrown the shot off by a fraction.
A trained sniper could put a round on target whether the mark was running, sprinting, riding in a car, or riding a train. From enough distance, speed barely mattered; you were still inside the glass.
Se-gun power-slid immediately, tracking the van's arc.
"You bastards!"
Grazed or not, a rifle round had hit him in the head. The impact through the helmet made his skull throb and his body sway. An ordinary person would have lost balance from the shock to the neck and gone down. Se-gun bit his lip and opened the throttle.
Being toyed with on the road—his specialty—stung his pride. His raw riding and driving skill still far outclassed Royce's. Royce was a strong driver, sure, but among vampires that level was common.
What was really tormenting Se-gun were the snipers who could fire from anywhere—and Giovanni's scheme that had laid this entire trap and then called him into it.
"Ohhh! Look at him, he's pissed!"
Royce laughed, checked Se-gun's position in the side mirror, and swung the van sideways. Se-gun, just starting to cut out to the flank, had to veer onto the sidewalk edge. Royce smirked and shoved the van all the way into the lane beside the curb.
"Die already!"
If the bike got pinched between the sidewalk and the van, it was over. But Han Se-gun lifted the front wheel and, using only the rear shock's spring, jumped the motorcycle clean onto the sidewalk.
"Kyaaaaah!"
Pedestrians screamed. He rode a single line along the curb stones finishing the walkway, shot past the van, and dropped back onto the road in front of it.
"You're begging to die!"
Bikes were weak against rear impacts. Royce charged to ram Se-gun from behind and finally launch him. Se-gun lifted the rear wheel instead.
Kraash!
The hood crumpled backward and spiderweb cracks exploded across the windshield. The van had lunged to ram him; Se-gun's rear tire stamped the hood flat. After planting that kick, he released the rear brake and whipped the bike into a rocket-start spin.
The lightning-quick V2 racing engine bellowed. The tire spun up to a scream, chewing the front of the hood like a grinder, and the explosive traction catapulted Se-gun past the van in a heartbeat.
Thung!
The hood buckled further; the cracks in the glass thickened until the road ahead vanished. Rear glass already ruined, front glass now ruined—driving was nearly impossible. Lance, in the passenger seat, punched out the windshield with his fist to clear a view.
"Kaha! You bastard! Not bad!"
The snipers opened up again the instant Se-gun pulled ahead. This time a round slammed into his right leg.
Screee—!
Man and machine shuddered together.
"Kh—!"
Charging out like an idiot while snipers were waiting had been a mistake. He wanted nothing more than to drag them into an alley for a proper gunfight, but they would never follow. The hostage was in their hands; every scrap of initiative was theirs. Se-gun was only chasing because he couldn't stand not to.
He clenched his teeth and lifted the rear wheel again. As the van scraped past, its side mirror snagged on the bike's rear tire.
Kraash!
The mirror tore free. They hadn't even gone far, and the van already looked ready for the scrapyard.
"Damn it!"
This time a shot came from behind. Whether the shooter was sloppy or simply hadn't predicted Se-gun's stunt, the first bullet missed. The second found the middle of his back without fail.
"Gaaah!"
He couldn't keep fighting on the boulevard like this.
"Goddamn it!"
Se-gun pulled a magnetic tracker and hurled it at the van. The first magnet failed to stick, fell, and was crushed under the tires of passing cars. The bullet trauma was worse than he'd thought.
Ta-tang!
Rounds sparked off the asphalt again. Another miss? He threw a second tracker, this time dead into the van's exhaust. It slid in and clamped on with a soft click. Confirmed. Se-gun cut hard to the side and peeled off the main road, ducking out of the snipers' kill box.
"…Ah!"
Inside the van, Young-eun watched him go and flinched. She didn't know who he was, but she had been sure he was coming to save her. And now he was pulling away. Had he given up on rescuing her?
"Hah… hah… goddamn it!"
Se-gun climbed a building's stairs. The silver rounds had punched through him, and the flesh had already regenerated—but forcing a non-vampire body to use vampire power exacted a brutal price.
As the concentration of Psychedelic Moon in his blood dropped, a black fog swam across his vision.
"Kh…"
He leaned into the narrow stairwell and pulled out a syringe—an odd, glue-gun-like injector. He loaded a vampire blood pack into the back of it and drove the needle into his own flesh.
Vampire blood, injected into a vein, regenerated wounds. Taken by mouth, it turned humans into vampires. That was why vampire blood sold as a healing drug, and why Psychedelic Moon—refined from the same source—sold as a narcotic. Vampires fed on humans to keep their power and youth; vampire hunters squeezed vampires dry for cash.
The moment the blood hit his system, Se-gun drew the Beast.
The Beast had originally been a magic gun forged by Phantom, a Scribe among the vampire lords. To suppress wraiths and lycanthropes, Phantom had robbed the bones of Saint John and a holy-water basin, then laid a curse into a matchlock with a magical hammer.
It had been rebuilt once as a revolver in the late nineteenth century. Se-gun had later handed it to Gunsmith and split the core hammer, converting it into a double-barreled lever-action. The Beast's heavy, high-grain loads made a revolver cylinder too huge and heavy, so the redesign had been necessary.
The instant the magical hammer struck a cartridge, the round itself was enchanted and inflicted a predetermined magical wound. Keeping that core while reshaping the gun had taken enormous effort. Now it was time to collect on that investment.
"All right. Let's do this."
Se-gun separated the Beast's barrel and drew a new one from the gun bag on his back. In its everyday form the Beast was about as long as a short lever-action shotgun. This barrel alone ran a full meter. Socketed to the receiver, it became a proper rifle in seconds. He hadn't spent the money and labor for nothing. Configured like this, the Beast could snipe.
The only answer to snipers was snipers. With Young-eun—Seo Rin's younger sister—in enemy hands, hunting the shooters down one by one first was impossible. This was the only way.
He checked the tracker's signal and tried to open a window. Smoke-vent hardware stopped it after a few inches.
"Sorry about this, building owner."
Se-gun ripped the entire window frame free, set it inside, then stepped up onto the stair railing and leaned into the empty opening. He would shoot from the rail—feet planted on the banister, body braced in the window.
Most snipers preferred rooftops. Rooftops were also easy to spot. If you could track the target's route with a transmitter, you didn't need height or a panoramic view.
"Sssss…"
Se-gun drew a quiet breath. Wraiths rose around his body. They were the same shades that had haunted him since his human days as a side effect of Psychedelic Moon, still carrying a vampire's curse. When he had mastered Juyda's lineage power—the force of darkness—he had seized command of them.
"All right then… let's see."
He exhaled and breathed the wraiths into the cartridges. With the cursed rounds chambered in the Beast, he sighted down the road visible through the empty window frame.