Too Damn Easy
"Strange," Se-geon muttered as he swapped magazines, eyeing the vampires. Only two had climbed out of the Galloper sedan. They carried pistols, but nothing worth calling serious firepower. Charging straight into a wide-open warehouse like this—had they really failed to notice a Vampire Hunter was here?
They had been watching Detective Sim Gu-jin the whole time. Not knowing he was present felt wrong. By the book they should have requisitioned an armored car for the assault, or thrown an entire platoon at them in waves.
While he was still turning that over, the LCD screen changed.
"Knew it!"
Behind the wooded hill, exactly along the approach route Se-geon had predicted, a single vampire was closing in.
"But you think I'm going to just take it?"
He muttered the words while seating a fresh magazine and setting the empty one aside. He had planted booby traps on the reverse slope of the hill, which meant the only way to watch that sector was through the LCD feed.
BOOM!
An explosion bloomed inside the camera frame at the same instant a muffled detonation reached his ears. High-grade explosives were hard to come by in South Korea, and any blast loud enough to start a forest fire would bring the police running. So he had built these improvised bombs the hard way: steel pipe cylinders packed with explosive, detonators at the rear, buried in the earth so that when they went off the end caps ruptured and the fragments sprayed forward—crude claymores. Vampires could spot tripwire traps with ease, which was why he had made them pressure-triggered. And one of them had finally gone off.
"Dead?"
He glanced back out the window. While his attention had been on the hill, the two vampires had already closed to a hundred meters. At this rate they would be inside the building in moments. Worse, their pistol fire had grown unnervingly accurate; stick his head out at the wrong second and he would wear a hole between the eyes. Se-geon shifted to the adjacent window and yanked the rope.
The pulley rig carried a military helmet. When he pulled, the helmet rose slowly, exactly as if a man were standing up.
TAT-TAT-TAT!
The vampires immediately hosed the helmet with pistol fire and sent it flying. In that same heartbeat Se-geon rose and raked them with the assault rifle.
BRRRRT!
Inside effective range the shots were clean and precise. Even a vampire could not dodge bullets that outran sound.
"GAAAAAH!"
One vampire collapsed where he stood and did not get up. The other used the opening to dive straight into the warehouse.
CRACK!
The interior booby trap fired. Se-geon could have applauded—everything was unfolding exactly according to the script. Keep them under fire from above so they charged without thinking, then let them trip the pre-set charges.
Even a powerful vampire was not free to rewrite a scenario like this.
"Hahahahaha! Too damn easy. You brain-dead vampire bastards. When the head doesn't work, the body pays the price."
Maybe it was the drugs kicking in, but everything going his way had him in high spirits. Still laughing, he flipped the monitor switch to the first-floor interior. On the blue-tinted screen floated the corpse of a vampire whose entire upper body had been blown away. Even a crude directional claymore packed that kind of punch.
"Heh-heh-heh. Khkhkhkh. Hahahahahaha."
Se-geon laughed like a madman, half in disbelief. The last time he had faced vampires bare-handed he had been thrown around like a pebble. The strong ones had picked him up and hurled him like a toy.
He was not that man anymore. He had proper gear, he had predicted their moves, and he had dug the traps and waited. The fact that they walked into every one of them made the earlier tension feel almost embarrassing.
Ssssss.
While he was still savoring the taste of victory, a spider the color of fresh blood rappelled down a thread from the ceiling—light as a special-forces operator on a fast-rope—and landed on the back of his neck before burrowing under his clothes.
"Ugh!"
Unbearable pain spiked through him. He jammed a hand under his shirt, but the spider refused to be caught. Instead it bit into his skin and began draining blood at a terrifying rate. Even in the darkness he could see a thick stream of blood climbing the thread toward the ceiling.
"Ugh!"
He threw himself backward, slamming his spine against the wall. A wet smack, and his back was soaked. In those few seconds the spider had taken something like a full milk-carton of blood. Ten more seconds of that and he would have been flat from anemia.
"Son of a bitch! You're still alive?"
He switched cameras at once, but the exterior feed was dead—lines cut. The vampire who had come over the hill had survived the claymore and destroyed the outdoor cameras for good measure.
"Bastard."
He glared upward. Spiders were dropping like rain.
"Shit. Real piece of work, this guy."
The vampires' opinion of Se-geon was roughly the same. Gerder, the one who had lost an arm to the booby trap, was carefully crawling across the roof, spawning spiders from the stump and sending them down.
BRRRRT!
The Vampire Hunter suddenly swung his rifle skyward and hosed the roof. Gerder flung himself sideways, kicked off a pine branch beside the warehouse, and vaulted through a window. The filthy yellow glass shattered and shards punched into his flesh, but compared to a silver-round barrage it was almost merciful.
CRASH!
Inside was pure chaos. Se-geon had abandoned gun and blade for a shovel and was frantically smashing spiders. The vampire who had just come through the window had to roll undignified across the floor to dodge a spring-loaded trap. Even the windows had been booby-trapped—and the trap was nothing more than a silver fork lashed to a wooden bar on a spring.
"You've got to be kidding me!"
Gerder touched his cheek where the silver fork had grazed him. A thin line of blood welled up. At this point even anger felt pointless.
"Damn it!"
Se-geon ignored the spiders and swung the rifle toward the vampire. Kill the master and the spider puppets would not matter. But in that instant a living carpet of spiders came surging down the corridor. One of them already drank blood at speeds that seemed to violate fluid dynamics; what would a whole swarm do? Panic seized him. He vaulted the railing and dropped to the floor below.
"You bastards!"
He sprinted to the prepared charges and yanked free the improvised claymores. He had built the launch tubes long enough to keep the backblast clear; as long as the tube itself did not rupture they made excellent shotguns. He planted one on his shoulder like an RPG-7 and fired at the vampires dropping from above.
CRACK!
A bright, almost festive bang—like a party popper off a birthday cake—and a cloud of silver fragments shredded the spiders into paste. The backblast rebounded off the floor, but these were not real C4 claymores and the angle was shallow; Se-geon took almost no damage.
WHOOSH!
While he was dealing with the spiders, Gerder closed the distance.
"Playing with dangerous toys, are we?"
A clean rising kick sent Se-geon's AUG Steyr flying. The rifle punched through the roof like a rocket and vanished into the sky—reinforced polymer tough enough to survive a military truck rolling over it on gravel, snapped clean in two.
Hiss.
The instant the gun left his hands Se-geon drew the Japanese sword from his back and slashed. Gerder twisted in midair, kicked off the wall, and slipped the cut.
"No—!"
WHAM!
A brutal impact slammed into his spine and drove him forward. Gerder's kick had landed square on his back. The force was so savage his neck cracked as his body was flung. He had no time to stay down. Spiders swarmed the dusty floor toward him.
"Kh!"
He came up swinging the Japanese sword low, scything through the greedy rush of spiders. Gerder simply picked up a heavy wooden crate stacked against the wall and hurled it. The crate streaked toward him like a cannonball.
"Kh!"
Se-geon leapt onto the neighboring stack of crates, cleared the throw, and jumped for the second-floor railing. A vampire who commanded blood-draining spiders was not something you fought with steel alone. A flamethrower, maybe.
"Come on then, you son of a bitch!"
He shouted and ran for the room where Detective Sim Gu-jin was hiding. Spider and vampire followed without a second thought.
"Going in!"
Se-geon yanked the door open and flattened himself against the wall. The agreement had been simple: if the door opened without the code phrase "Security Council permanent member," open up with the flamethrower. No flame came. The sudden opening had startled Sim Gu-jin so badly he dropped the weapon.
"Ugh! What the hell is a cop—"
THUD!
Before Se-geon could finish the curse, Gerder's spiders latched onto him. He threw himself sideways, crushing them against the floor as he fell, only to find a pair of crimson eyes filling his vision.
"Die."
Gerder drove a razor-sharp spear-hand strike straight down. Se-geon rolled clear; the steel floor plate punched clean through where he had been. One hit from that and it would be over.
"Use the flamethrower!"
He screamed the words while bringing his left hand up. They were less than a meter apart, yet the moment the shotgun trigger broke, Gerder was already outside the cone.
BOOM!
The buckshot chewed uselessly into the ceiling. Then a roaring tongue of flame leapt out and wrapped the airborne vampire.
WHOOOOSH!
"GAAAAAH!"
Even the strongest vampire feared fire. The flamethrower mix of engine oil and gasoline clung with vicious viscosity; once it stuck, the flames refused to die. Gerder thrashed, tearing spiders free in a frenzy, but every spider was already burning.
"Why didn't you fire the second the door opened?!"
Se-geon snarled at the detective, then gripped the Japanese sword in both hands and brought it down with everything he had. The blade cracked the skull and snapped halfway, spraying brain matter. He did not stop.
"Hah!"
He drove the broken blade into Gerder's torso. The dark steel punched clean through the burning body and jutted out the far side.
"GAAAAAH!"
Gerder reeled, still screaming. A normal human would have gone into shock and died long before the flesh finished cooking; this vampire's monstrous vitality kept him thrashing even while he burned. It was a horrific sight, but Se-geon felt no mercy. Feeling pity for a vampire that murdered and ruled humans was no different from a mouse fretting over a cat.
"HAAH!"
He shifted his weight and drove an axe-kick down onto Gerder's head. A sickening crack, and the skull caved completely. After the sword and then the heel, it was only natural.
"…"
Detective Sim Gu-jin could only stare at the atrocity unfolding in front of him, speechless. So this was how the man had been able to go berserk with automatic weapons in the middle of Seoul. But was it really all right? They had won this round—yet that very victory might only earn them the hatred of Tetra Anax. If the vampires wanted their existence kept secret, they would never leave a police officer who had lured and slaughtered their people alone.
"…This doesn't look good for the future."