Hunters in the Snowfall
As dawn broke, snowflakes began to swirl over the sky of Seoul. From a black sky that looked as if someone had spilled a bottle of ink, the snow came down like shards of ice, whipping into the alleyways.
"Shit."
A man in a black parka spat the curse as he dragged someone deeper into the alley. The person he was hauling had crossbow bolts buried all over their body, but the way their eyes still rolled said they were alive. Strangely enough, even with the arrows stuck in them, not a single drop of blood ran from the wounds.
"Careful. We haven't fully subdued them yet."
The lookout across the alley said as much and pulled a van up to the entrance. The cargo van already held quite a few people packed inside.
"It's fine. How much strength is a cheap VT100 piece of trash going to have?"
He said it and tossed the person into the vehicle like a sack of freight. The driver inside took them in and glanced up at the sky.
"Snow, huh. We might be able to stretch the job a little longer."
"What are you talking about? Even with cloud cover, if the sun's still above the clouds, VT burns off little by little. Anyway—where's the boss?"
"One of them bolted, so he went after it himself."
The driver said it and rolled the window up. Cold sleet kissed the glass and melted on contact.
"Damn winter weather!"
He grumbled and looked back at the vampires stacked in the rear seats.
"Ghk—hff!"
A vampire with silver arrows buried in its body was sprinting like mad. It vaulted parked cars, cleared a wall, and came down on a rooftop. Any ordinary Vampire Hunter would have been shaken off just by that kind of building-hopping. The ones chasing it now, though, were nothing like ordinary hunters.
"Hup!"
A man who was unmistakably a Vampire Hunter kicked off the ground, cleared the wall in a single bound, then sprang from the top of it onto the roof and leveled a Beretta M92F.
"Damn it!"
Pfft!
The round that cracked out through the suppressor buried itself in the vampire at once. The special Teflon-coated celluloid bullet drank the moisture and sealed the wound, so even taking the hit left no bleeding. No bleeding or not, that bullet was far more lethal than silver.
"Kyaaagh!"
"Tsk, tsk. Noise is a problem."
The Vampire Hunter—Sarhyuk—watched the vampire scream and tumble from the roof toward the eaves, then closed the distance in one rush and hoisted it clean off its feet. He lifted a full-grown adult man by the hair alone.
Crack!
He twisted the vampire's neck as easily as wringing a chicken's. Of course a vampire doesn't die from a broken neck. The nerves snap and the body falls into temporary total paralysis, though—and for taking one alive, it was the cleanest method there was. The problem was that a vampire's muscle fiber ran at more than four times the efficiency of a human's, so even a weak point like the neck shouldn't have broken that easily. This Vampire Hunter, Sarhyuk, finished the thing off without the slightest effort and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.
"Hmm. That all the vampires in this stretch? Nothing but small fry."
Sarhyuk muttered it, hauled the vampire up, and dropped from the roof to the wall. A man built as large as he was moving that lightly looked frankly unreal. In truth, his physical ability had already left human limits behind.
"Grrrk."
The broken-necked vampire foamed pink. Seeing it, Sarhyuk raised a fist and drove it into the creature's gut. A dull, hammer-on-flesh impact, and the vampire went quiet.
"Don't you dare spill a single drop of blood. Every bit of it is money."
The reason he used Cellular Bullets in the first place was to keep the VT factor from dropping. Silver rounds wrecked the body and opened bleeds, spraying expensive vampire blood all over the pavement. Cellular Bullets, by contrast, bound to moisture, so they did no damage at all to the VT factor—and the blood could be harvested intact.
"This haul won't even cover the kids' allowance. We've still got time. Shall we dig around a little more?"
Saying so, he pulled out a feng shui compass. Ordinarily those were tools geomancers used to find dragon veins and divine good or ill fortune; Sarhyuk's had been made for something else. Like any other, it had a brass face with a magnetic needle at the center—but the needle had been tempered with vampire blood and sacred-wood ash, and the fractured characters of a Blood-Species Tracking Mandate were etched into it in fine lines.
"Hmm. Nothing else nearby. Better leave it at this for today. If the vampires die out entirely, that would be a problem."
Sarhyuk grabbed the broken-necked vampire by the hair and dragged it toward the Hummer parked on the street. His team already had every approach around here blanketed; there was no need to worry about eyes. Then the men waiting by the car came running up in a fluster.
"Boss!"
"What?"
Sarhyuk flung the vampire into the vehicle and blew out a plume of smoke. They arranged themselves respectfully in front of him, and the highest-ranking among them spoke.
"Looks like the Juk-yo crowd is moving in force. What do you want to do?"
"Even so, they're just orphans who lost their parents. Planning to start a mobile orphanage or something? Or what?"
Sarhyuk tapped ash from his cigarette and put it back between his lips. The subordinate hesitated a moment at the unconvinced look on his face, then pressed on.
"It seems they're after that kid. The intel's from a Finder, so it's solid."
"Hmm. Come to think of it, they did hit Kyung's people. I knew he was tied to a Jinma hunter, but is the brat himself that big a player?"
Sarhyuk scratched his head, picturing still-young Se-geon. The kid hadn't looked like much of anything—strange.
"Then following him around should pay off. Put a buy order on the Finder for anything related to him. His name was... Se-geon, right?"
Sarhyuk said it and climbed into his Hummer. One of the men immediately started for the driver's seat.
"Forget it. I drive my own car. How would you like it if I climbed on top of your wife's belly?"
"...R-right. Only I don't have a wife."
Sarhyuk blew out a thick stream of smoke. He was pulling so hard the cigarette was already burned nearly down to the filter.
"A Vampire Hunter with a wife is a joke anyway. The belly we climb on is a female vampire's."
He turned the engine over and flicked the butt out the window.
"Heh. Just made fifty thousand won. In Singapore that'd be what, ten strokes of the cane?"
"Wouldn't know. You're not planning to go after the kid right this second, are you? We've still got to process these vampires."
"We're moving. Pulling out for today."
Sarhyuk shouted it and floored the accelerator. The powerful Hummer shoved the thin crust of sleet aside like a shovel and roared forward.
Silvester had no particular feelings about Korea. Not that it was only Korea—there was nowhere on the entire planet that gave him more of a sense than "space." Vienna, Prague, Moscow, New York... nowhere else either.
In the end, he might have been a stranger in the truest sense of the word. If he had been an alien, he might at least have been able to weep with nostalgia for a home star he could return to—but unfortunately, his home star was Earth.
Truly unfortunate.
Silvester thought it and gave a short, dry laugh.
Near dawn the sleet had become a full blizzard, thrashing Seoul. On a long winter night, with almost no one about, the city was completely sealed off by the cold storm. The cars still moving were a bit of an eyesore, but aside from that, it was a perfect night for hunting vampires.
"How many winters is this for you, vampire?"
Silvester swung his greatsword in the heart of a city imprisoned by the blizzard. The thin, keen claymore split the storm and came down with terrifying speed, severing the arm of the vampire sprawled on the ground.
"Kaaagh!"
The executive of Tetra Anax pinned under his boot screamed. Most Tetra Anax vampires were weak in direct combat, so they traveled with escorts. In front of the Jinma hunter Silvester, though, escorts were meaningless no matter how many there were. Already at least five vampire corpses lay under the snow at his feet.
"W-wait. You—you're a hunter! I'll pay you—just stop! I can give you as much as you want!"
The vampire offered a thoroughly human bargain. Making that kind of offer with an arm already gone meant it was either an incredible fool or an incredible schemer. Either type Silvester didn't particularly dislike, but—
The problem is that it's a vampire.
And a Tetra Anax vampire at that. Tetra Anax were the administrators of the vampire world; stirring them up would make even the Jinma who had so far treated Silvester like a rabid dog and stayed well clear of him refuse to stay quiet.
"Money. Now that's a tempting offer."
He swept the blade left and took the vampire's head clean off. The headless body twitched a few times on the ground, then went still. It was the worst possible method of killing—one Vampire Hunters were never supposed to use. Silvester had no intention of drawing the blood anyway, so it didn't matter to him, but vampire blood could turn nearby animals if left carelessly. He had once left a corpse unattended and ended up dealing with feral dogs and rats that had turned.
"Cut down a nobody."
Silvester spun the sword once in the air and slid it home. The thin, keen edge meeting the scabbard rang like a stringed instrument. The blood from the vampires he had just killed alone would have made him a fortune, but Silvester had no interest in that sort of thing.
Whoooosh.
The blizzard drove hard and his black coat snapped in the wind. Silvester held the claymore level and walked on slowly. Seoul, Moscow, nowhere else ever pleased him—but on a night like this, did he turn a little sentimental? He lay down on the hood of his Corvette Coupe. A fair amount of snow had piled on the cold-cooled metal, and it felt almost soft.
"Go on and cry... you sluts. Even the wind is weeping. There's no way the likes of you can't."
He muttered it and closed his eyes.
Se-geon opened his eyes slowly. He had been bleeding and still raced vampires, so his body should have been wrecked six ways from Sunday—yet somehow, waking, he felt light.
"That can't be right."
Se-geon looked at his bandaged shoulder and got up. He had only seen the place once, but the apartment was strangely familiar. The oddly burned Russian woman's place.
"Ah—"
Something under his foot made him look down. A ten-thousand-won note with his resident registration card laid on top of it brought the previous night flooding back.
"Kh... khkhkh."
Se-geon picked them up and lifted his head. The black-market doctor was apparently taking a morning shower; the sound of water hadn't stopped.
"Hmm."
Feeling like he might invite a misunderstanding, Se-geon crossed his arms, stood, and headed for the terrace. Outside, snow had fallen thick enough to turn the world into a snow country. Morning commute traffic had already churned the apartment complex into mud, but the broader view was still pure white.
"Still—I bought a place and never even properly moved in. Should I sell it?"
Se-geon muttered it, resident card in hand. A house didn't seem like something a Vampire Hunter needed much of. Especially not someone like Se-geon, who threw himself into fights almost every other day. Not so much because he was eager for it as because this small country called Korea had far too many vampires pouring into it. Unprocessed Jinma blood had spilled into Seoul, so of course they thronged here.
"Reality, huh."
He hadn't known Jin Yu-mi in the flesh for long, but she seemed to have left a rather deep wound in him. Complaining of being hurt while you were still alive and the other person was already dead was a cheap thing to say—but there was no other way to put it.
Click.
Then the bathroom door opened.