At Least It Wasn't Boring
Hyuk-jin could no longer be sure he was still in his right mind. Who was supposed to guarantee that, anyway? From the time he was a kid, everything in the world had looked trivial to him, and he had never been able to resist a fight. He treated life itself like a dull chore—and yet the moment he stood before a real threat like Giovanni Vantero, he had folded without a second thought. A walking contradiction like that could not possibly be sane.
But then… what now?
He hadn't even been able to lay a hand on a transformed Seo Rin. There was no way he could take on Giovanni, who was toying with Seo Rin like a plaything. Not without a proper weapon, at least…
"Ah!"
The Japanese swords suddenly flashed through his mind. Inside Se-gun's house, cheap practice blades and decorative katanas were lined up in rows. Most of them were too shabby to even call real Japanese swords—but they were more than enough to kill a man.
Better a blade I've trained with than some half-assed gun, right? The quality's questionable, but Se-gun hyung wouldn't have kept them around if they were completely useless. Ah, screw it.
The thought was enough. He bolted for the forest. Make it look like he was running, then loop around along the highway, slip back into the house, and grab a weapon. Whether Seo Rin could hold out that long was another question entirely—but he had to hold out. There was no way Hyuk-jin was going to stand by and let someone else kill his precious friend.
As Hyuk-jin tore off into the pine woods, Giovanni watched him go and smiled faintly. Running was pointless. No one escaped a man who could teleport at will. Besides, Giovanni's own blood had been injected into Choi Hyuk-jin's body—for at least a month, he could track the boy wherever he went.
By administering the blood of a Jinma-class vampire—blood that could be recovered even after being diluted in water—he could hunt his target down. It was a method no ordinary mage or sorcerer could hope to block.
That was precisely why Giovanni had sent Hyuk-jin to Seo Rin and Se-gun in the first place: to use him as a living marker. Of course Hyuk-jin didn't know any of that, so his thin little plan to run away was only natural.
"Run all you want. You'll only die."
Giovanni smiled again and loosed another bolt at Seo Rin. Six or seven bolts already jutted from the boy's body, dulling his movements. Special celluloid absorbents packed into the tips made them far worse than ordinary bullets.
"Hah… hah…"
The bolts drank the moisture from his blood and gelled it, clogging his veins. That he was still alive at all was remarkable. A human-sized vampire would have been unconscious after two of these. Seo Rin had taken seven and somehow kept breathing—but that was all he could manage. Survival, and nothing more.
"Grrrrrrr."
He snarled like a wounded beast stripped of reason, but the gelled blood inside him was steadily stealing his bodily functions. Giovanni had expected as much, and still it was almost too easy. All that effort, just to separate this boy from Han Se-gun—and this was the creature he'd been after?
"Did I really have to kill them… for a worthless animal like this…?"
The Bernardo brothers had never been mere Ghouls to him. They had been partners in his drug empire and, as vampires, trusted advisors. To sacrifice men like that for nothing more than this pathetic beast hunt…
He hadn't meant to sacrifice them at all. He had only ordered them to pin Han Se-gun down, to keep him racing through the streets of Seoul. He never imagined both of them would be slaughtered without even managing a real fight—just buying time until they died. Han Se-gun really was something else.
Then again, if the mages working with him hadn't been so careful with their own skins, the Bernardo brothers might not have gone down so pitifully. If they had all coordinated against Han Se-gun, he wouldn't have lost the brothers so easily. He never should have partnered with mages in the first place.
"And what the hell is this one doing?"
Seo Rin was as good as caught. The problem was Hyuk-jin. At first it had looked like he was fleeing—then the boy had taken a long detour and come right back.
Giovanni had pretended not to notice while dealing with Seo Rin, but the kid made no sense. Going for a weapon? Even if he came back with a bomb or something worse, he had to know he couldn't touch a teleporter like Giovanni.
Then the window shattered and Hyuk-jin came flying out. He seemed to think he was launching a surprise attack—but Giovanni's blood already ran beneath his skin, and the approach was impossible to miss. Giovanni drew a stiletto and caught the Japanese sword as Hyuk-jin lunged.
"Urgh! What are you doing?! Seo Rin! Run! Now! Get on the bike and gun it toward Seoul! Go to Se-gun hyung!"
Hyuk-jin shoved against Giovanni with raw strength, shouting at the fallen Seo Rin. But Seo Rin lay sprawled on the ground as if already dead.
"What a pain…"
Irritated, Giovanni blocked Hyuk-jin's blade with one arm, leveled his crossbow, and pulled the trigger. The bolt struck dead-center in Hyuk-jin's chest—but it didn't sink in. At some point the boy had thrown on anti-stab, bulletproof gear as well.
"Huh?"
While Giovanni blinked in surprise, Hyuk-jin shoved the sword aside, dropped back, and whipped his blade at Giovanni's wrist. Giovanni simply moved his arm and slipped the cut with ease.
"Yaaaaah!"
Hyuk-jin roared and drove a thrust straight in. This time he'd pierce the throat—! But Giovanni teleported backward out of reach.
Hyuk-jin didn't care that the attack had gone nowhere. He charged again and swung for the torso. He never believed he could beat Giovanni. But if he could buy Seo Rin even a few seconds to escape, that was enough.
"Get up, you idiot!"
Crack!
The Japanese sword snapped and spun into the air. Giovanni had shattered it with a partial spatial transfer, as casually as breathing.
"I truly cannot understand you. Why throw your own life away trying to save someone you killed with your own hands?"
"Shut up! Whatever else he is, that guy is my friend! I won't let him die at the hands of someone like you without even knowing why!"
Hyuk-jin's hand closed on the hilt of the spare Japanese sword he had brought.
"Even with no chance of winning?"
"Of course! That's what friendship is!"
Shing!
He drew and swung in the same motion, a vicious arc of steel. Giovanni teleported roughly eight meters back to avoid it, landing beneath a bug zapper—but a thin line of blood was already running down his cheek. Somewhere in that exchange, the blade had grazed him.
"That's… friendship? You really are insane."
In that same breath Hyuk-jin sprinted to Seo Rin and hauled him upright.
"Get up! Get up right now! If you stay here you'll die! You'll die, Seo Rin!"
He slapped Seo Rin's face hard. Seo Rin didn't stir. Why? Seo Rin had regenerative power too, didn't he?
Then Hyuk-jin's eyes locked on the bolts still buried in Seo Rin's body. Why would a vampire who casually fired rocket launchers suddenly switch to a weapon this old-fashioned?
"Is it because of these?"
He grabbed a bolt. The tip was already clotted with blood gelled by the special celluloid. If he didn't pull them out, something terrible was going to happen. Gritting his teeth, Hyuk-jin started yanking the bolts free of Seo Rin's body.
Click-clack.
The sound of Giovanni reloading the crossbow carried across the yard. From the distance he had teleported to, he was already aiming at Hyuk-jin. He had seen the armor stop a bolt once—so this time he would go for the head, or the hands, arms, and legs the gear didn't cover. Looking at the clotted blood pouring from Seo Rin's wounds, taking one of those bolts would be genuinely dangerous. But abandoning the unconscious Seo Rin was not an option either.
"Damn it!"
Hyuk-jin kept pulling bolts from Seo Rin's body. One left—just one more—
Thuk!
Something punched straight through Hyuk-jin's chest.
"Ah…?!"
Startled, he stared at the bolt still clutched in his hand. His vision darkened in a rush and the bolt vanished from sight. At least he had gotten every last one out of Seo Rin. But while he was absorbed in that, something had stabbed him while he was completely exposed.
"That vampire's c-crossbow…? Ha… hahahahaha."
Hyuk-jin clenched his teeth. Blood suddenly spilled from his lips. His breath seized hard in his throat. This was bad. Regeneration or not, that last strike had driven clean through his heart. And it wasn't finished—something inside him was thrashing as if alive, shredding heart and lungs to ribbons in an instant.
This was really bad. At this rate, he was going to d-die.
"I-it's no good. You bastard… Run… Run, you idiot…!"
Hyuk-jin toppled forward and smashed his head against the bare ground. Consciousness was slipping away. Ah… so this was what dying felt like. It didn't seem all that bad.
And it was a death he never could have imagined for himself, was it? He never thought he, of all people, would die protecting a friend. Especially not someone he had already killed once with his own hands…
"Yeah. Th-this isn't so bad. At least it wasn't a boring d-death…"
Hyuk-jin's body slowly dyed itself red with the blood pouring out of him.
Shluk!
Only then did the hand that had been gouging through his chest pull free. The hand—tipped with razor claws sharp as a paper knife—was painted red with the blood from when it had punched through Hyuk-jin's heart.
"Woooooooooooooooo!"
He threw his head back and howled at the night sky. A wolf's cry, unbearably mournful, rolled out across the darkness without end.
A small truck was rolling down the highway. The bed was stacked high with LPG gas canisters—clearly far over the legal load limit. But a hitchhiker was in no position to point that out.
"But your Korean is really good. What country are you from?"
The driver glanced over, clearly enjoying the company. The young man in the passenger seat spun a baseball cap around one finger and answered.
"Iceland. Danish descent."
"Ah, right. Northern European, then. You a student?"
"Hm? Well… something like that."
The white-haired young man with the ponytail answered halfheartedly, the way foreigners always did when Korean drivers insisted on being friendly. Then a strange wolf's howl reached his ears.
"Howling?"
"Sorry?"
"Ah—no. Nothing."
He brushed it off at once and gripped the handle of his guitar case. While he had been lost and wandering, something had clearly gone wrong.
Damn it. Am I too late…?
He bit his lip. He had seen through Giovanni's scheme long before this. The moment they deliberately smashed Han Se-gun's mics and cameras—the man was obsessive about gathering intel—their aim had been obvious.
But Argon had trusted his map-reading skills without a shred of doubt. He had opened a national road atlas and boldly decided to walk the whole way. He didn't own a car, so it had seemed like the natural choice.
The result: he had gotten completely lost. Trying to find a specific place in a foreign country he had never visited, armed with nothing but a single map, had been absurd from the start.
So he had hitchhiked—and now this was already happening. Fortunately the sound seemed spiritual, inaudible to ordinary humans, but a howl like that meant Seo Rin had already transformed.
"Ah, we're almost there. Follow that road and you'll hit a hill thick with pine trees, and there's an old church tucked in among them. Some young guy lives there—said something about running a venture business or whatever…"
"Got it. Thanks."
The white-haired foreigner said it and jumped straight out the door. Then, as if remembering something, he dug a piece of bubble gum from his pocket and handed it to the driver.
"Appreciate the ride."
"Don't mention it. Welcome to Korea!"
Welcome to Korea, all of a sudden… and in front of a foreigner who spoke the language this well. Whether the man was just warmhearted or simply had no sense of embarrassment was hard to say. The white-haired vampire—Jinma Argon—adjusted his baseball cap and headed straight for Han Se-gun's house.
The path through the pine woods was blocked by a large gate and a warning sign forbidding entry onto private property. Argon decided it wasn't worth looking at and vaulted the gate in a single bound.
Inside, a leveled building foundation sat in front of a dilapidated church that had never seen a repair, and behind that stood a slate-roofed structure like a warehouse. The smell of blood was drifting from behind the slate building.
"Damn it. I bragged to Rat about this. If I fail for a reason this pathetic…"
Muttering, Argon headed for the rear courtyard. The mingled scents of pine resin and blood stung his nose, and the pine shadows swayed with a cold unease.
"Here, is it?!"
The moment he reached the backyard, Argon swept the area with his eyes.
There stood Seo Rin, already transformed into a hybrid form—halfway between human and wolf—and the human youth he had clearly just killed, and Giovanni Vantero, clapping and roaring with laughter at the whole tragedy.
Argon took in the situation at a glance and blew a bubble with his gum. His already cold-colored eyes flared with a frigid light.
"Ah, today really is not my day. I go to all the trouble of emptying the house, and suddenly every burglar in the country shows up…"
Giovanni stared at him, floored. The Jinma Argon, head of Esprit, coming here in person? For Argon—who didn't even own a car—to arrive faster than Han Se-gun, who rode a motorcycle like a pro, could only mean he had seen through Giovanni's plan before any of this began.
"Comparing me to the likes of you… is genuinely offensive."
Argon popped his bubble gum and drew a longsword from the guitar case on his back. Seeing that he had clearly come to fight, Giovanni kicked a Japanese sword up off Hyuk-jin's fallen body, caught it in his teeth, holstered the gun in his right hand, and settled the blade into a proper grip.
Under normal circumstances, clashing with a Jinma alone and without subordinates was something to avoid. But handing Seo Rin over to this man now would be like cooking a feast and feeding it to a dog—and that, at least, he refused to do. Who in their right mind surrendered a treasure they had already seized?