A Temporary Farewell
“That’s right. Sa Jun’s a lycanthrope, so his regeneration’s fast. Leaving him like this is a problem. He’ll probably be fully healed by the day after tomorrow.”
Han Se-gun couldn’t begin to guess what would happen even then. Seo Rin, listening to her, looked flustered.
“Hmm. But… ah, what if we locked him in a prison?”
As far as Seo Rin was concerned, he simply couldn’t bring himself to suggest killing the man right now. Finishing someone off in the heat of a fight was one thing — but how was he supposed to murder a defenseless human lying there snoring away?
“Lock him where?”
Kim Seong-hui shook her head as well. A prison that could hold a lycanthrope — a werebear, no less — was not something they could simply throw together. A Federal Reserve vault might do the trick, but what ordinary person had access to one of those?
“Killing him now would still be best, but…”
“Kill him?”
“Well… if we wipe out both brothers and end the bloodline like this… the Sa family will pile up a grudge against us.”
Any grudge that would accumulate that way had almost certainly started the moment they killed the eldest son. Even so, Kim Seong-hui hesitated, reluctant to kill a man lying there breathing quietly in his sleep.
“It’s a fine family, after all. They even appear in The Nine-Cloud Dream.”
“I don’t think that’s right. You never studied properly, did you?”
“Heh heh. Just kidding. Anyway, he seems to be a member of some organization. Couldn’t we at least hear him out? I don’t know if the information would be useful to us, but I think it’s worth listening.”
Kim Seong-hui nodded at Seo Rin’s words. Sa Jun had claimed to be a mage from the Knights Templar, but when they inquired with the Order, they learned he had been excommunicated more than twenty years ago. On top of that, looking at the funds he managed, the goods he moved, and the mercenaries he had gathered, he was clearly plotting something else entirely.
Judging by his various activities, he seemed to hold nothing more than a manager’s post.
“Ah?”
And then it happened. Sa Jun suddenly shot upright and roughly seized Kim Seong-hui by the hair. Startled, Seo Rin scrambled up with his crossbow, but Sa Jun thrust Kim Seong-hui forward as a human shield.
“Kh… kreeaagh… khaaaagh.”
Clutching Kim Seong-hui, Sa Jun screamed. Even for a lycanthrope, he shouldn’t have been able to rise in this condition today — the fact that he had was bizarre.
“Wh—what are you doing?! Let her go!”
Seo Rin gritted his teeth and trained the crossbow on Sa Jun. Then something moved inside Sa Jun’s body.
Crrrk—crrrk—crack!
It crawled all the way up to his neck, thrashing beneath the skin like some hideous insect.
Cough!
Blood burst from Sa Jun’s ears and nose. Even Kim Seong-hui cried out in shock.
“Ugh!”
Unable to watch any longer, Seo Rin pulled the trigger.
Thwip!
A bolt at a hundred-thirty-pound draw punched into Sa Jun’s face, and his body flew backward into the wall.
Crunch!
In that instant his throat tore open, and a violet worm burst free. Roughly fifteen centimeters long, the thing glistened with an oily sheen like a wet earthworm and began crawling toward Se-gun, who lay collapsed nearby.
“No!”
Seo Rin flung himself forward and caught the worm in his bare hand — but the creature immediately drove its head into his skin. In a heartbeat his palm was ripped open as the worm tried to burrow into his flesh!
“Damn it!”
Should he just cut the hand off? The thought flashed through Seo Rin’s mind — and then the door behind him shattered as a crimson sphere streaked through the air and smashed into the violet worm’s body. The creature exploded into fragments and fell away from Seo Rin’s hand.
“Hah… hah… Damn it, what the hell was that?”
Seo Rin wiped cold sweat from his brow and examined his hand. A blonde girl who had retrieved the red sphere approached and inspected it as well.
“Are you all right? Seo Rin?”
“M-Maria?!”
“If even a scrap of it remains, it’s dangerous!”
Saying so, Maria examined the scattered remains of the worm, checking carefully in case any fragment had lodged in Seo Rin’s body. Fortunately, none seemed to have entered him. Only then did she let out a breath of relief.
“Thank goodness.”
“Ah…!”
Only then did Seo Rin start and stare at Maria. He had been so shocked by the worm a moment ago that it hadn’t registered — Maria and Se-gun were mortal enemies, weren’t they? And here she was, looking at Se-gun lying utterly defenseless. The thought hit him, and Seo Rin immediately seized Maria’s shoulders and pulled her away from Se-gun.
“Hm?”
“Hahaha. Ah, Maria. W-what’s going on?”
“What do you mean, what’s going on? I turned on the TV and Arjuna was a sea of flames! Han Se-gun’s hideout was burning too. How could I not worry? So I came looking… hm?”
She had only just noticed Han Se-gun lying there as if dead. Seo Rin stepped in front of her.
“Ah, um, Maria.”
“Hmm.”
Maria’s eyes narrowed. Seo Rin panicked and tried to stop her.
“Ah, I—I mean.”
Seo Rin was fretting and fidgeting. Seeing him go this far, it was clear Han Se-gun truly meant a great deal to him. Maria sighed and asked,
“I’ve been curious for a while. Why is Han Se-gun ‘hyung’ to you, Seo Rin?”
“Huh?”
“It’s not like you’re actually blood-related, right? If you were, Han Se-gun would have to be a Lilim too.”
Seo Rin stared at her in shock. The quick-witted Kim Seong-hui cleared her throat and shook her head.
“Ah, well… Se-gun hyung is like a real older brother to me.”
“I thought so.”
Maria nodded as if that confirmed what she had expected.
“In that case, if I killed Han Se-gun, Seo Rin would lose his hyung the same way I lost my sister. I can’t do that. Ah… why am I always the tragic heroine?”
“Huh? Are you serious?”
Seo Rin asked her in astonishment. Maria frowned.
“What exactly are you asking if I’m serious about? Depending on how you take it, that’s extremely rude.”
“N-no. I mean about not attacking Se-gun hyung.”
Seo Rin shrank back as he said it. Watching them from behind, Kim Seong-hui had to fight down a laugh. Looking at Seo Rin and Maria, it seemed Seo Rin was going to be under her thumb for the rest of his life.
Maria spoke as if completely swept up in the drama of it.
“Honestly, if I don’t kill him now, I don’t think I’ll ever get another chance. But oh well, it can’t be helped. I’m sorry to Messiah unni, but there’s a rumor that she died because of Sa Hyuk, not Se-gun — and attacking under these circumstances wouldn’t be fair, would it? Besides, I can’t put Seo Rin through the same pain I went through. Aah, I’ll just have to hold back through my tears.”
“Th-thank you.”
Seo Rin was so moved that tears prickled at his eyes. Maria was willing to abandon even her revenge out of consideration for him! How could he not be touched? Kim Seong-hui, however, privately recalled the old lament that began with blood is thicker than water, but raise a daughter and she goes to the son-in-law… Seeing Maria go this far, she seemed completely smitten with Seo Rin. What on earth had he done to make her like this?
“So you’re Maria. Hello.”
“Hello.”
Maria bowed politely to Kim Seong-hui, who returned the greeting with a smile.
“By the way, that thing just now was…”
“Yes. A Red Worm.”
“Red? It was purple.”
“That’s because it lives in the veins. The Red Worm is a very old form of magic — a curse-parasite that nests inside blood vessels.”
“……Meaning?”
“They planted it so a subordinate who got captured wouldn’t blab under interrogation. They just killed him.”
Maria’s expression twisted with distaste as she spoke. An ordinary Red Worm only killed its host — but the one their enemy had used tried to enter the bodies of other people lying nearby. It was a far more vicious method, one that had strayed from traditional magic. Judging by that alone, their opponent was a Heretic — and a particularly vicious, powerful one at that.
“Ah, then… I didn’t kill him, right?”
Seo Rin asked, looking at Sa Jun’s corpse with a crossbow bolt through its head. Kim Seong-hui sighed.
“No. I don’t think a lycanthrope would die from a worm.”
“Huk.”
The color drained from Seo Rin’s face. He had pulled the trigger in the heat of the moment, but still… the thought that he had killed someone seemed to prick his conscience. Seeing that, Kim Seong-hui quickly shook her head.
“I’m joking, joking. They wouldn’t have planted something that couldn’t completely kill even a lycanthrope. And don’t beat yourself up too much. The situation you were in was one where you couldn’t survive without killing someone else.”
Kim Seong-hui sighed as she spoke. She had gone to so much trouble cleaning the basement, and now a corpse was pinned to the wall by a crossbow bolt through the skull — hardly a place for a patient to rest. On top of that, the neighbors would soon see this bloodbath and panic, and even with her magic that would be hard to clean up.
“This place isn’t good, then. Want to move?”
Maria asked, eyeing the Red Worm’s remains with open disgust. It was welcome news; Seo Rin looked at her.
“Hm? You have somewhere good?”
“I own a condo. The consulting firm bought it, and when one unit wouldn’t sell, I just took it. I wanted to experience what a commoner’s vacation home is like, you know?”
“A commoner’s vacation home…”
For Seo Rin, born poor, the phrase made his stomach ache. But Maria smiled and handed over a key and a card.
“My subordinates don’t even know about this place, so use it. Here’s the key. This should be the membership card. There’s a sketch map on the back — follow that.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Seo Rin accepted what Maria gave him and looked at her with gratitude. The “commoner” business still rankled, but Maria was far too kind to him. He passed the card and key to Kim Seong-hui and stood.
“Well then, I’ll be going.”
“Ah, Maria.”
“Hm?”
“I’ll walk you out.”
When Seo Rin said that, Maria’s face lit up and she latched onto his arm.
“Sa Jun getting taken out is unexpected. He was a pretty strong guy.”
The Heretic Phantom twisted the phone cord around his finger and sighed. Of all the calls to come through on the direct line to his investment firm’s office on Manhattan Island in New York, it had to be this unpleasant social club. He was privately irritated, but he had been involved with them since the old days and couldn’t simply ignore them.
“So about that… the organization wants to request funding support from you. You’re raking it in hand over fist, right?”
Phantom sighed at those words. These people he barely even liked treated him like some endlessly money-spitting magic club… it made him angry. But as a Heretic himself, he had no choice but to respond.
“Don’t say things like that. We didn’t land the gas pipeline project this time, so the losses are no joke. It’s not like I succeed at everything.”
“Is that so? You didn’t land the gas and oil pipeline project running from Siberia through Mongolia, but I hear you poured money into the investment instead. Isn’t that a success in its own right?”
It was already widely known that the Russian government treated foreign investment in energy as a drain on national wealth and attached difficult conditions. Phantom — or rather, investor and financier Row Gibson — had known that and invested through local conglomerates, securing roughly twenty-three percent of the real stake in the project. Apparently even they knew that much.
But Phantom stuck to his story. No matter how well he was doing, he had no desire to give an extra rice cake to a child he disliked.
“That place has a twenty-four percent corporate tax and a twenty percent VAT. It’s not a country where a businessman can go in and actually touch any money. The banks are a mess too.”
“Ohhh, is that so? Come on, don’t be like that. We’re not trying to bleed our rich friend dry so we can live large. It’s just that the money we poured into Sa Jun for the Korea expansion was too big.”
No matter how big it was, how could the expansion costs of a single Black Network broker compare to proper business capital?
Phantom thought that to himself and shot a look at his subordinate, Wilhelm. Wilhelm immediately slammed the door open and shut as if he had just walked in.
“Master! We’ve got a huge problem! Please take line four right away!”
“Ah, damn it!”
“What call is that?”
“None of your business. I’m hanging up.”
Phantom said it with perfect calm and cut the line. Wilhelm fixed his master with a crooked look — the kind of look a parent gives a child still hanging around with bad friends. Of course, Wilhelm’s features were so young that the adult expression never quite landed.
“Those guys again? Necropolis?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Honestly. Why don’t you just sell them out to Tetra Anax?”
“You think Tetra Anax is stupid? They already know I haven’t cut ties with those people yet.”
Row Gibson said it and sighed. For a Heretic, he was far too good-natured — and that goodness made him indecisive enough that he couldn’t easily sever old relationships.
“Anyway, it looks like things on the Korea side are pretty much wrapped up. They’re finally about to head for Russia, aren’t they? What should we do? Should we go meet them too?”
“Hmm. Good idea. We’d have to go eventually anyway. Book the flight.”
“Yes. Looks like you’ll finally get some real work done for the first time in a while.”
Wilhelm smiled and set the file folder he had been holding down in front of his master. Row Gibson broke into a cold sweat staring at it. Even at a glance, there were over a thousand pages of photocopies.
“What is this?”
“What do you think? Documents related to this investment. Come on, it’s not like this is your first or second time… You don’t seriously think investing means just dumping money and calling it a day, do you? You used backdoor investment methods this time, so there’s even more paperwork.”
“Can I not look at them?”
Phantom asked, overwhelmed by the sheer volume. As someone who preferred playing around, the fact that this was only a fraction of it was crushing. On top of that, half the documents were in Russian. Russia was infamous for its hellish bureaucracy — even in international transactions, nothing passed without complete documentation in their native language.
“If you don’t look, you might lose about ten billion dollars. Aah. No matter how rich you are, Master, covering clients’ losses would bankrupt us twice over. It’s not a guarantee fund so we don’t technically have to pay them back, but our reputation would tank — and we might get arrested for violating financial regulations. No, we would definitely be in violation. You did use backdoor methods.”
“……”
Wilhelm’s deadpan delivery left Phantom speechless. One of the strongest Heretics alive, a Jinma among Jinma, a vampire of overwhelming power — and a few words from his own subordinate Esquire had him breaking into a cold sweat.
Truly a masterclass in verbal assassination.
He clutched his head and sat back down at the desk.
Han Se-gun looked at the new sword Kim Seong-hui had given him with a bitter expression. This time the blade he received was a claymore forged from Damascus steel.
“This is an incredibly cult weapon, isn’t it?”
“It’s Silvester’s hobby. Even so, after Arjuna was attacked, there’s barely anything left. The Beast rounds are mostly gone too. Understand? You can’t just burn through weapons the way you used to.”
“Well, that’s true enough.”
Se-gun set the sword down. Changing his appearance with an Ectoplasm Mask meant escaping the country on a forged passport was no real problem. Getting weapons out, though, was hard. In the old days, when back channels thrived, you could smuggle things by ship — but those methods no longer worked. China and Russia, the main destinations for smuggled goods, had both undergone massive economic growth, and in the process the under-the-table trade had shrunk.
Illegal organizations in China like the bang and ban had been crushed under heavy Public Security crackdowns, and the Russian mafia had conglomeratized and no longer involved itself in trivial matters like smuggling. In the end, Han Se-gun and Seo Rin would have to go through legal channels.
“By the way, where’s Seo Rin?”
Han Se-gun sat in the condo room and looked around. Kim Seong-hui grinned.
“He said it had been ages since he’d been to the ocean and ran off to the beach.”
“That kid…”
“Well, isn’t it nice? Thanks to that, we get some quiet time together.”
“What’s so quiet about this?”
Han Se-gun picked up the Damascus-steel claymore from the floor. The magic sword that almost never broke — Noctis, the black blade — had been snapped like nothing against Sa Jun, and this was the stand-in… It was a shame, but he could already feel that this, too, was a considerable masterpiece.
“It’s been treated with magic, but the lack of history is a pity. If only it were a powerful magic sword with a story behind it, like Noctis.”
The wraiths that had been suppressed under the power of the black blade began raising their voices little by little. Vampires carried an ancient curse of blood, and the wraiths bound by that curse always followed. Han Se-gun, cursed through overuse of Psychedelic Moon, had always had wraiths clinging to him — and he had held them down with the power of Noctis, the black sword. But now that Noctis had been broken by Sa Jun, the wraiths were stirring again.
“Will you be all right?”
Kim Seong-hui looked at Se-gun with concern. Han Se-gun shook his head.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing. I’m not the little kid I used to be.”
“Ah, and this is a satellite phone. If anything happens, call me on this. Don’t worry about the bill.”
“Got it.”
“Call often.”
“Come on.”
It wasn’t like he was a kid going on a field trip. Han Se-gun grumbled as he looked at Kim Seong-hui — but when she gazed at him with that worried expression, he lost the words. He scratched his head and changed the subject.
“All right.”
“That’s better.”
Kim Seong-hui smiled and stood. The drug treatment inside Se-gun’s body was finished, and she had taught Seo Rin how to perform the ritual just in case. Han Se-gun seemed uneasy about entrusting his body to Seo Rin, but if things were settled within a month, it wouldn’t come to that.
“Well then… this is goodbye for a little while.”
Han Se-gun looked at Kim Seong-hui with an oddly emotional expression. When he first stepped into the world of the moonlit night, he had been nothing but a brat wrecking his own body out of vengeance — no, out of self-abuse. To that version of himself, she had been an incomparably fine advisor and guardian. Even now, when he could pride himself on being a Jinma hunter who fell behind no one in this world, he was still under her protection.
Kim Seong-hui smiled and pulled Se-gun into an embrace.
“You have to come back.”
“Yes.”
Se-gun simply let her hold him.