The Hunt Race Begins
The engine howled.
Se-gun wrenched the throttle wide open and shot forward. The acceleration was so savage the rear wheel surged up under the front and the XR-250 reared into a wheelie—yet he kept accelerating, front wheel still in the air, carving down the road with practiced ease.
A dry metallic clang rang out as the coffee can he’d been drinking from hit the asphalt. Watching it, Silvester let out a low chuckle. Looking at what that brat was doing now, saving the kid back then had clearly been the right call.
“We should go after him!”
Deok-yeon’s blood was up; he pressed Silvester hard. But Silvester only leaned against the Corvette, unmoving, lost in some private thought.
“Huh?”
Even the vampires could feel it. The silver-haired priest stood with his head bowed against the car, eyes closed, ignoring every vampire that rushed past him.
“S-Silvester! The vampires are going by—”
“Quiet. What you came to catch wasn’t the vampires or Se-gun. It was Sarhyuk, wasn’t it?”
He said it with his eyes still shut, a snort of contempt under his breath. The vampires streamed past him without understanding. A few glanced back to check, but Silvester simply opened the car door and settled into the driver’s seat.
“I’ll look the other way for today, you sluts. Hunter’s closed for business. Still… maybe I’ll try my hand at being a chauffeur.”
The Corvette Coupe’s heart roared to life the instant Silvester sat down. Its five-liter V8 held a force no XR-250 could ever match. Even if the Hummer boasted a gas-turbine engine, it could never catch the Corvette on pure speed.
“Tch. Joining mid-race is cheating.”
Sarhyuk gunned the Hummer out onto the road and tore after Se-gun and the vampires. He’d clearly been lying in wait nearby this whole time, biding his moment.
“Boss! Those guys were waiting for us—”
“Shut it! You just keep your mouths shut and get the guns ready! From here on out, the hunt race starts!”
Sarhyuk shouted it as he floored the accelerator. Tire rubber screamed against asphalt and the Hummer rolled. With tires it merely scraped the road; had it been on tracks, it might have peeled the asphalt clean off.
“There he is—urk!”
Deok-yeon brightened at the sight of Sarhyuk bursting out—then his head snapped back into the seat. The Corvette had lunged forward with terrifying force. And so the race began.
The engine screamed.
Se-gun’s XR-250 tore down the road at a blistering pace. Because of Yeongjong International Airport, the route that branched from the southern end of Hangju Bridge toward Gimpo Airport—and the stretch through Gimpo town itself—carried little traffic. Even so, pushing past 140 km/h on that road was dangerous enough.
A one-ton Porter truck came lunging straight at him. Se-gun shaved past it by a hair’s breadth and plunged onto the long straight that cut across the Gimpo plain.
Brakes shrieked.
One of the vampires, unable to match Se-gun’s speed, swerved to avoid the Porter and slammed into a streetlight. The crash was deafening, but Se-gun never looked back.
He gasped, ragged and harsh, inside the helmet. The winter wind was sharp as a razor’s edge; the slightest gap let it slice into flesh and steal the heat from his bones. The faster he rode, the more viciously the wind clawed at him, stripping away his body heat.
His ragged breathing vanished under the bike’s roar. His soul hung from the motorcycle as if it were a second heart, and for a moment his body was left behind. Racing through the blood-dark night with the headlight blazing, the glare of oncoming cars, neon signs, and streetlights stabbed at his eyes like blades. Even high on the drugs, Se-gun handled the bike with cool precision and swung left at the intersection.
On a three-lane road the corner looked wide enough—but taking it at 150 km/h was pure recklessness. Se-gun locked both brakes in the outermost lane and leaned hard into the turn. Even with the brakes on, the tires kept sliding across the pavement with a hideous screech.
He was about to be flung off the road. Se-gun waited, calm as ice. At that speed the bike simply skidded sideways and, in an instant, rode up onto the sidewalk.
The engine howled.
In that same heartbeat he released the brakes. The bike, already at full throttle, found its power again and clawed at the ground—a thrashing beast screaming in protest as it fought the slide.
Impact.
The instant the rear wheel slammed into the curb, Se-gun snapped his body upright, hauled the bike itself back onto its wheels, and launched forward. He’d used the sidewalk blocks like a fence—hit them and rebound out the other side. A racing car could never have managed it, but a motorcycle’s rear suspension made it possible. The catch was that the rider had to treat his own life as optional. It was circus-level stunt work.
Another crash exploded behind him the moment he cleared the corner. The vampires who’d failed to match his insane speed were smashing into streetlights and coming apart.
“If the cops show up, this gets messy.”
Se-gun muttered it and shifted up. The gear he’d dropped for the corner climbed again, and speed came flooding back.
“You son of a bitch!”
Gyeong, who had barely managed to slow enough to take the corner, spat the curse. The vampires in the wrecks were badly hurt but still able to get up and move. Even so, a crash like this would not leave the Korean police idle.
“Gyeong! Forget about us—go after that bastard first!”
“I know!”
Gyeong shouted back and tore after Han Se-gun, already vanishing into the distance. From here to Gimpo Airport it was a straight shot. The road across the Gimpo plain was long enough that, in an emergency, it could almost have served as a runway.
“This bastard’s completely insane!”
He snarled it and wrenched the throttle on the R-1100. He’d known it was a trap and jumped in anyway—getting hit still left a foul taste. But this was no place to pull out just because it was a trap.
“If I don’t grind that son of a bitch into paste and drink him, I’ll put on sunscreen and take a sunbath myself!”
He ground his teeth and chased Se-gun’s tail light.
While Gyeong burned with hostility that put his very identity as a vampire on the line, the vampire hunters chasing him were racing toward the crossroads where the motorcycle wrecks lay scattered.
“Damn it!”
Sarhyuk scowled at the wreckage ahead. At 120 km/h, the vampires and their shattered machines littered the road in front of the Hummer, turning the intersection into chaos.
“Hold on tight!”
He yelled and wrenched the wheel. The Hummer crushed the wreckage of the motorcycles under its tires, mounted the sidewalk, chewed through the curb blocks with raw, terrifying power—and made the corner.
“Haaah!”
The subordinate riding beside him had been clutching his seat belt with his eyes squeezed shut; when the vehicle came through clean, he let out a long breath of relief. Sarhyuk seemed to take that as an insult to his pride and immediately launched into an explanation.
“A Hummer doesn’t slide out easy even on a corner like this! Don’t freeze on me.”
“B-but—”
“Shut up. How do you expect to be a hunter with nerves that thin? Hey! Call Seok-jun and tell him to go eat the wrecked vampires. And start tapping the police radio!”
Sarhyuk barked the orders and tore down the road, almost cheerful.
A black sports car was right on his tail as it hit the same corner.
“Are we going to be all right?”
Deok-yeon’s heart lurched at the bend ahead, but he trusted Father Silvester enough to glance over with a pale face. Silvester only smirked.
“We’re in second gear right now.”
The words were barely out before he depressed the clutch, dropped into first, and slid through the corner as smooth as silk. Engine braking and the low gear, accelerator still down—the tires gave a brief squeal of slip, and then they were through. The moment he confirmed the exit, Silvester shifted back up to second. From the drop into first to the climb out again took barely two seconds.
Of everyone who had taken that intersection, his was the simplest, cleanest line. The Chevrolet Corvette Coupe was an outstanding machine, but cornering that pure proved Silvester was an exceptional driver.
“Whew! So why stay in second? Why not just catch Sarhyuk?”
“Too impatient. I took a day off from hunting just to tag along—don’t go trying to cash in so fast.”
Even as he scolded Deok-yeon, Silvester worked the clutch and shifted up to third. On the straight the Hummer’s speed was no longer something they could ignore.
A body came flying out of the Hummer.
“Tch!”
Silvester flicked the wheel hard and swerved around the figure—almost certainly a vampire. The Hummer could afford to run one down; the Corvette could not. The vampire clipped past them and tumbled onto the road. He rolled across the asphalt at a horrific speed, then was struck again by oncoming cars.
Brakes screamed.
Metal crumpled.
“Aaaaaagh!”
Screams tore through the night. Blood sprayed into the air as the vampire was smashed apart under the vehicles. The driver who had hit him, clearly in shock, locked the brakes and stopped dead in the middle of the road—madness on a thoroughfare like this.
Moments later another car rear-ended him, and the chain reaction began.
“Crazy bastard!”
Gyeong stared at Han Se-gun and clicked his tongue. Every vampire who lived under the mad moon carried a seed of lunacy. The same was true of the humans who lived in this world. In the concrete jungle, every last creature was ruled by some private madness. But this one was something else. Even to vampires who were used to insanity, that human’s madness ran cold down the spine.
Impact.
Han Se-gun weaved left and right, then slammed his rear wheel into the rider who had finally caught up. Most motorcycles accelerate through the rear; strike the side of a front wheel with your own rear while moving laterally and the bike behind you is guaranteed to go down. Of course the attacker needed extraordinary balance as well—and Han Se-gun righted his machine like a tightrope walker on a blade’s edge. The cost, naturally, was a sharp drop in speed.
