The First Snow
Flex Medical’s history was not particularly long, yet the multinational medical conglomerate had rocketed to giant status by poaching elite researchers from prestigious pharmaceutical houses. It was an enormous enterprise that bundled pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and insurance under one roof—though Korea’s conservative medical policies had so far kept it limited to the drug business alone.
When Westerners sized up a small Eastern nation like Korea, the assessment almost always fell short of its actual economic scale. A conglomerate of this size lost nothing by merely selling medicine here. To most Westerners, “the East” meant Japan or China; Korea, whatever its economic worth, remained an unappealing stretch of land.
Lately, however, Flex Pharma’s major shareholder R. Gordon had grown extremely sensitive about Korea’s reluctance to open its medical market. He was preparing a WTO complaint and constantly shaking the U.S. senators and representatives under his influence until the President of the United States himself began demanding medical liberalization.
People had started whispering that a second gold rush might be under way in Korea. With M&A kingpin Row Gibson and heavyweights like Tetra-drone pouring into the country from every corner of the globe, the rumor hardly seemed far-fetched.
Flex Medical’s Korean branch had established a vast research complex in Pyeongchang and built its headquarters there. Of course they first erected warehouse-style shopping centers, schools, and massive parking lots so employees would suffer no inconvenience—then raised the main building. That the company’s hiring competition rivaled the bar exam was no surprise at all.
Pyeongchang suddenly felt as if an entire new city had sprung up. With a giant of this scale moving in, every hospital and medical insurer in the Republic of Korea tensed up, and rightly so. Looking at Korea’s diplomatic history, even a feint of pressure was treated as an irresistible force; once medical liberalization began in earnest, it was crystal clear that Flex Medical would end up responsible for every patient in the nation.
Even so, no matter how inevitable a foreign corporation’s victory might be, the Korean branch’s executive always had to be Korean. Flex Medical’s president was Kim Young-ha, a professional manager who had been cast out when a certain chaebol turned fully into a family dynasty. Right now, however, the people occupying the president’s office were not Kim Young-ha but a pair of mysterious foreigners.
“Yes, Boss. Most of the cleanup seems finished. Even if Tetra Anax tries to pin the blame on us… we did everything we could.”
They were busily explaining themselves to the man they called Boss. Shutters had been lowered to create a complete blackout; they sat in the darkened office without turning on a single light, speaking into a telephone. The instrument looked like an antique desk phone befitting a presidential suite, yet in the gloom there was no way to tell it was actually a key-phone system.
Perhaps the empty office simply announced that presidents never stayed past evening. What mattered more than the president’s working hours, though, was the identity of the men who sat so calmly in pitch darkness, making their call as if nothing were amiss.
“Huu.”
The man who hung up the receiver let out a short sigh and picked up the file in front of him. It contained Sim Gu-jin’s biography and a thick stack of internal police documents.
“Tetra Anax really overdoes it. Pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes and steering people like this… What’s amazing is that the humans in this country actually believe it.”
Across from him, a boy perched on the edge of the table nodded. He looked nothing like someone who belonged in a corporate president’s office, yet every gesture carried an air of absolute self-assurance.
“That’s their specialty. Still, for so few people to take an interest… this country is almost depressingly empty. Normally cheap tabloids and reporters hunting for a scoop would be swarming like bees.”
To foreign eyes it might seem strange, but the image of a Korean reporter racing around barefoot for a scoop was simply unimaginable. The press system here was a peculiar structure in which longevity, not achievement or talent, automatically brought promotion. Measuring ability among journalists was little more than comparing acorn sizes; the media lorded over everyone else, so scoops were less something a reporter dug up and more something whistleblowers delivered on a platter.
The police organization was just as absurd. Korea’s public safety record was decent, yet officers’ working conditions were so wretched that no one stuck his neck into another man’s jurisdiction. Understaffed, overstretched, fragile security. To bury a case quietly you first needed clear lines of responsibility; once a case was assigned and ownership fixed, the investigation tended to shrink of its own accord.
“Still, shouldn’t we worry about the broadcasters? They run a lot of exposé programs every now and then.”
“That’s Tetra Anax’s job.”
The man clamped a cigar between his teeth with casual unconcern.
Tetra Anax. The bloodline that ruled every vampire faction, bearing a crest of three serpents coiled into a single circle, possessed the power to dominate the human mind. Vampires had survived for centuries without discovery partly because they lived quietly in human guise—but more because Tetra Anax rewrote human thoughts while the other clans amassed wealth and power to rule mankind.
Ordinary people trusted the information that reached them, convinced their eyes and ears were intact. What mattered was that they rarely sought information themselves; they remained passive, accepting whatever flowed their way—and even then they lacked the capacity to analyze it properly.
That was Tetra Anax’s creed, and because it was true, vampires had endured inside human society for thousands of years. The system perfected over those millennia was absolute; humans could not even glimpse the tip of the serpent’s tail.
Occasionally, however, a naturally occurring vampire or one who had grown resentful of long clan rule would abruptly expose their existence. The recent incident had been exactly that. Perhaps the Corrupted had wanted to reveal the hidden world he belonged to—the eternal war between Vampire Hunters and vampires—to the daylight world.
Detective Sim Gu-jin left the hospital building wearing an expression as if he had just chewed pure shit. Every remaining record inside the hospital had burned to ash, and the bodies themselves had been reduced to nothing but bone; not a scrap of usable evidence survived. He had raged about why precious materials had been piled together in one place, but the hospital staff only stared at him the way one stares at a rabid dog—“What kind of lunatic detective is this?”—and offered zero help with the investigation.
Arguing with them would produce nothing, and the hospital was already working hard to determine the cause of the fire, so there was little left to say. After all, spontaneous human combustion inside a hospital would be a comedy of the blackest sort; the staff were just as cornered as he was.
“Fucking bastards. Fine. I’ll go to the scene myself and dig up even a single shell casing if I have to.”
Muttering, Sim climbed into his car. Something about this case felt tangled beyond belief. Working juvenile crimes did not demand much instinct, yet a detective’s gut was never to be ignored—that was Sim’s personal doctrine.
He cooled his head for a moment and reviewed the case. The biggest obstacle was that he had not been assigned from the beginning; the whole mess had been dumped on him midway. He had never even visited the shoot-out site. His insistence that the projectile could not have been a Korean-issue grenade came solely from the fact that the weapon used was an RPG-7; he possessed no other evidence.
“An RPG-7 isn’t Korean standard issue, yet the round is supposedly a Korean standard round? Like hell.”
That was as far as Detective Sim’s deduction had reached.
By the time Detective Sim arrived at the scene, most of the work was already finished. Shell casings recovered from the vehicles had long since been sent to the National Forensic Service; the rest had vanished without a trace. It was like hunting for a needle dropped on a beach. Granted, spent bullets were not the sort of thing that littered Seoul streets, yet in a country where most men without money or connections still passed through the military, the absence was hard to swallow.
“Damn it. So why can’t I find a single one?”
He spun around in irritation. His Accent, parked square in the middle of the road, was blocking an appalling number of cars. Drivers could have edged past, but at rush hour the sight of a vehicle obstructing traffic drew glares so exquisite no pen could capture them.
“What are you staring at? I’m a cop, you assholes!”
The remark would almost certainly earn him a pay cut, but Sim kept scanning the surroundings.
“Well, it’s not like they’re BB pellets kids shoot. Why would casings turn up so easily?”
He tugged his hat lower and grumbled. Quick-tempered yet just as quick to give up—he was, in his own way, well suited to surviving this world.
Flutter-flutter!
That was when it happened. A pigeon on its last legs dropped beside the road. Sim, who had been drained of energy, snapped his eyes wide open. Whenever his instinct kicked in, his eyes always flared like that. Had he not been a detective, he would have collected a lot of fights.
“Has that bastard lost his mind?”
“Hey! You crazy son of a bitch! You wanna die?!”
Ignoring the torrent of curses, Sim strode straight across the street toward the fallen bird. The pigeon thrashed and flapped as if it had eaten something wrong, blood dripping from its beak.
“Look at this chicken-shit. What the hell did you swallow?”
He muttered, vaulted the guardrail, and hurried over.
Gurrrk!
The bird gave a dying croak and collapsed. Sim scooped it up the way one grabs a chicken for slaughter and tossed it onto his passenger seat.
“Maybe drop by a nearby vet clinic?”
With leisurely steps he returned to the car and turned the key.
Flutter-flutter!
Other birds perched in the trees watched Detective Sim’s every move with careful interest.
The streets had already filled with Christmas spirit. Snow had not yet fallen, but Santa Clauses with pure-white beards were busy with promotional work on every corner. The colder the weather grew, the more people seemed to brighten at the thought of the approaching holidays. Even if the joy was not entirely real, the atmosphere of the city insisted it was.
“Hah… hah…”
A young man in a tracksuit sprinted through the crowded streets. Paying no attention to the stares, he would occasionally stop and throw precise punches and kicks into empty air—movements so sharp and flawless they evoked a razor’s edge.
“Hah… hah…”
Fatigue soaked into every muscle, yet he ignored it and left the throng behind. Past the shopping district, past the traditional market, he climbed a hillside park.
“Hwaah!”
The breath he exhaled on the hilltop turned into white frost. Only then did the youth push back his hood. Unusual hair streaked with green met the cold air; steam rose in thick waves. He had sweated so hard that removing the hood felt like opening a steam room. Even he found the vapor rising from his own body amusing, and he looked down at himself and gave a short laugh.
“Heh-heh.”
Sometime recently Se-geon had fully settled into his place as a Vampire Hunter. He dropped onto a park bench overlooking part of the city. The streets below bubbled with Christmas cheer, and the forest of skyscrapers they worshipped had been redecorated with banners advertising holiday events. For this brief season at least, many people looked happy—Christian or not, Christmas and the year’s end were meant to be joyful.
“….”
Se-geon sat in silence, watching that festive street. Why did it feel like staring at merchandise locked behind a display window? Things close enough to touch yet forever out of reach. It was probably nothing more than an inferiority complex—he could walk away from this life this very moment if he chose—but the very thought already counted as sin.
He stood. Even inside Kenneth Yang’s safe house he had never neglected training, yet today’s workload still felt insufficient.
“Hup!”
The case had quieted with astonishing speed, and Vampire Hunters had regained their freedom of movement far earlier than expected. Of course the police could not simply sit still after such a massive incident, but if all they managed was to declare an “illegal weapons crackdown week,” something was seriously wrong. Calling it a crackdown while announcing that anyone who surrendered illegal weapons would face no charges—who on earth would believe that? And who, hearing “we won’t hold you responsible,” would cheerfully hand over their arsenal?
In the end the investigation continued, yet it advanced nowhere as time simply slipped past. That fact alone proved how thoroughly vampire influence had already permeated society. The mortal struggle between Jinma Juk-yo and Chang-woon, their mutual annihilation, and the countless vampires who had flocked to the lingering traces of that power—when the battlefield against those vampires finally opened, Se-geon was not confident he would survive. So he kept driving himself past the breaking point.
“Ah!”
For an instant Se-geon froze. Something pure white had brushed the fist he had just driven into the air. He lifted his head. Snowflakes were drifting down, soft and unhurried.
“….”
It was the first snow of that winter.