Rain Out of Season
Jack O'Lantern was clearly enjoying himself. Killing people with a single word was, without question, a pleasure. But watching an entire society shout his name—that was a pleasure of another order entirely. Yes. If he could stir even a flicker of feeling in those numb, unmoved humans—whether the feeling was good or bad hardly mattered—if he could deliver not a vector but a scalar of impact, then that, truly, was cause for joy. The media's clamor, branding him a murderer and a villain, reached his ears as nothing but hymns of praise. How many people in this society ever drew this much attention as a single human being? Conglomerate heirs? Politicians? Celebrities?
I don't need any of that. Heh heh heh.
It was fun. Was this what people called happiness? Was this sense of accomplishment happiness? Either way… his life right now was fulfillment itself. A colorful world, unfolding before a man who had once drifted between gray buildings. And how real it was.
"Right, then. Jack O'Lantern makes his entrance."
Jack O'Lantern surfaced once more into the sea of the internet—to mock the police who cast their feeble nets for him, and to swallow another follower whole.
When the police grew active, the vampires went quiet in turn. Once they abandoned the field, hunting them became nearly impossible—even for a hunter of exceptional skill, even for a Jinma hunter.
Shhhhhh…
Though sunset had not yet arrived, the city had begun to stretch and light its streetlamps. The Jinma hunter Father Silvester walked the streets at an unhurried pace in his priest's cassock. Long silver hair, black clothes, skin so pale it was almost bloodless—he suited the gray city far too well.
"Rain that doesn't suit the season."
Silvester caught the rainwater in his palm. An ordinary person would have recoiled, muttering about acid rain, but he seemed almost to enjoy getting soaked.
Vampire hunting was a lost cause again today, he knew. The Jinma would not show themselves unless someone stormed Flex Medical, the stronghold of Tetra Anax. They had pride enough, but they also had the wisdom not to hand their reins over to that pride. A clumsy provocation would not move them.
And unless a Jinma surpassed Silvester himself in magical knowledge and scholarship, there was no way they could know about a vampire's tears. Not when there wasn't even a vampire left to shed them.
"Hm."
Passersby cast looks that lingered a little too long, but Father Silvester ignored every one of them. A few people looked ready to corner any foreigner they saw and practice their English, as if they'd stepped out of a language-workbook commercial—but Silvester was not a man anyone could casually approach.
Flutter.
A pigeon flew onto Silvester's shoulder. This fat bird, the kind people usually dismissed as a "chicken-pigeon," landing on a person's shoulder? Silvester seized its neck by reflex.
"Hm?"
He set the pigeon on the ground. It was a trivial thing, but a form of white magic had been cast on it all the same. White magic could not be used to harm another, so it was nothing to be wary of.
"What a cheap method. Couldn't you at least send a person?"
At Silvester's low mutter, the pigeon stepped onto the rainwater pooled on the pavement. Then, though there was nothing there, the water began to tremble, leaving letters behind in brief, flickering strokes.
Jack O'Lantern is a Korean child.
"……"
Silvester read the sentence and closed his eyes. He had no idea who had sent it, but the pigeon kept splashing water, leaving more letters.
"Hmph."
Silvester lifted his foot.
Crunch!
In a single blow the pigeon was kicked from the sidewalk into the roadway. Its life had already ended the moment he struck it, but the cars rolling past crushed its body flat all the same.
Flutter-flutter.
Its body shattered; only the wings remained on the asphalt, and for a strange moment they still beat. Only for a moment—then more vehicles rolled over them, and they were pressed completely flat.
"Whoever you are… I'm a defrocked priest. Go find yourself a proper shepherd."
Silvester pushed back his rain-soaked hair and walked on into the gray city.
An unseasonable downpour was falling hard enough that you couldn't tell whether it was spring or monsoon season. A motorcycle cut through the rain and stopped in front of a park.
"No point putting a cover on the film."
Already soaked through, the rider muttered as he climbed off the bike. He crossed the park and stepped into the occult café Arjuna on the far side. School had just let out, and students from a nearby girls' high school had crowded in, so the place was fairly packed.
"Hmm."
The rain-drenched man peeled off his suit jacket by the door and roughly wiped himself down with a towel hanging on the wall. Lee Jin-hye, the waitress working the floor, recognized the strange customer who had just come in.
"Oh—Se-gun. Feels like it's been a while?"
"Not really. I've been coming pretty often. What's with the big welcome?"
He said it while scanning the room. There were plenty of high school girls, but most of them were just standing around window-shopping, which suggested the café wasn't doing much actual business. The drinks were decent, the music and atmosphere were good—so why? Maybe the menu was a bit expensive for students. With that thought, Se-gun took one of the empty seats.
"What can I get you?"
"Water."
"……Can't you order something expensive once in a while?"
"Anything that comes with Prozac is fine."
"Okay. What's Prozac, though?"
"……"
Instead of answering, Se-gun set a bottle of Prozac on the table. Lee Jin-hye, whose life seemed to have little to do with clinical depression, didn't recognize it.
"You bought a whole bottle of medicine?"
"Beats me."
Se-gun cracked the bottle open and shook out the pills. Just a few tablets, and this expensive? Were they gouging people under the banner of treating depression?
"……"
While he waited for his drink, Se-gun turned a pill over and over in his fingers, lost in thought. The bastard was already disgusting enough with the hard drugs—would one more of these even change anything at this point?
"Forget it."
He gathered the pills and stuffed them back into a plastic bag. He didn't know much about depression treatment or any of that, but for Se-gun, taking Prozac was the same as taking a drug for pleasure. No—worse, maybe. Even if it wasn't addictive, a medicine that steered a person's emotions… if he took something like that, he was afraid he'd end up living a life with no grip on reality at all.
Depending on something mentally was more frightening than depending on it physically—that was the clearer way to put it.
"Damn it. Why'd I even buy this expensive crap?"
Se-gun raked back his rain-wet hair. In the end, it seemed he still had some attachment left to living. Confirming that attachment by refusing to take Prozac—a drug released to ease the suffering of depressed patients and stop them from killing themselves—was a paradox too absurd to laugh at. Right. There was nothing funny about it.
"Hmm."
From behind the counter, Lee Jin-hye looked at Han Se-gun as she picked up his drink. This young man, clearly younger than she was, still had the look of a boy about him. Not a single common pimple on his skin, fine downy hair that made him look soft—if his expression weren't so dark, he'd have been the kind of kid people fussed over as cute. But watching him slumped on the sofa now, scowling like a man about to die… it was hard to think of him as a kid.
"What is this. You look completely half-dead."
How hard could it really be for someone like him? For a woman juggling a part-time job, a theater troupe, and school, a little resentment crept in. And what irritated her even more was the way he sighed so hard he made everyone curious—then never properly explained a single thing to her. The owner of this place, Kim Seong-hui, was the same. It felt as if Arjuna's owner, Se-gun, and that foreign priest Silvester were all shutting her out together.
"Here. Aren't you going to take the pills?"
"I changed my mind."
Without even looking at her, Se-gun picked up the iced tea she'd set on the table. Bringing iced tea in this weather was a pretty twisted taste, he thought, but he made no protest.
"Ooh, sour. You put lemon in it."
"It's good for you."
Lee Jin-hye said it as she sat on the sofa across from him. Se-gun looked at her and gave a short snort of a laugh.
"Healthy, huh?"
If she cared about health, the first thing to cut would be the hard drugs. But Se-gun only muttered that inwardly and kept it off his tongue. This woman was an outsider in the end. Outsiders who didn't know the world of vampire hunters were best left as outsiders.
Come to think of it, he remembered the time he'd begged Silvester to make him a vampire hunter. He understood a little better now why Silvester had gotten so angry, why he'd dismissed him and tried so hard to stop him. But even if he'd stayed in ordinary society back then, he never would have lived happily.
The moment that Jack O'Lantern so much as crooked a finger at him, he would have climbed onto some concrete rooftop. And dived into the surface of the asphalt. Bang—!
"Snap out of it. If someone eggs you on like that while you're zoning out—go on, kill yourself—you'd be gone in a second. You."
Lee Jin-hye was saying it as a joke. Say something like that to a truly foul-tempered person and you'd earn a lightning bolt for your trouble. But Se-gun only grinned. She'd put her finger exactly on what he'd been thinking. Maybe atmosphere really did spread that easily.
"Yeah. You're talking about Jack O'Lantern, right?"
"Yeah. It's a total mess these days. The serial suicide case. There are already over a hundred people impersonating Jack O'Lantern alone, and I heard even the National Police Agency got hacked."
She seemed to follow current events closely and talked with real energy. She was the chatty type by nature, and with the part-time job keeping her from gossiping enough, she latched onto Se-gun and kept going.
"How do you even talk someone into dying? Why do people who've been living their lives this hard decide to throw it all away over a single sentence?"
"Who knows."
Se-gun nodded. It felt as if she were interrogating him. Why wouldn't it? He, too, was being tormented by the urge to die—unconsciously.
Or was it conscious, not unconscious? From time to time he pressed a pistol to his own skull, licked a blade, laid it against his throat. Blame it on his family's deaths. If he'd been thrashing in the pain of losing someone he loved, that might have been better. If someone he'd loved without reservation had met an unavoidable death, Se-gun could have become the incarnation of revenge.
But the family photograph he carried didn't show some movie-perfect happy household. Just ordinary, everyday faces you could find anywhere.
A summer family photo of people who found each other tiresome and were still bound by the yoke of family. When that family was invaded and killed by the world of the mad moon, Se-gun had thrown himself into that world. For revenge? For revenge? Had it been for revenge? Was he taking revenge now?
Ah…
"……"
In the middle of her chatter, Lee Jin-hye saw Se-gun crying. The young man leaning against the sofa with an exhausted look offered a clumsy excuse.
"It's too sour… Noona. You squeezed a whole lemon into this, didn't you?"
"Yeah. Y-yeah. Right."
Agreement with what, exactly? She gave a vague answer and stood. That was when she saw the jet-black Chevrolet Corvette Coupe pulling up at the entrance.
"He's early."
Se-gun wiped his tears and brought the iced tea to his mouth again. For something he claimed was sour, he was drinking it just fine.
Jingle-jingle.
The little guide bell on Arjuna's door rang. When the door opened, the rain noise from outside rushed in with it and filled the café. Silvester's daily routine was to hunt vampire locations until nightfall and patrol the construction site where the Jinma Juk-yo and Chang-woon had died. For him to come back this early…
"Se-gun, is it?"
Father Silvester stepped through the entrance, spotted Se-gun by the window, and strode over. His cold expression and the decadent air that clung to him carried a stench of corruption that did not suit a priest. He called himself a defrocked monk, and the records even said he'd been burned at the stake—a corpse(?), so it was only natural—but he didn't spare so much as a glance for the stares around him.
"Have the vampires been leaving you alone lately?"
"Nothing much like that, no."
Se-gun answered as he put the Prozac away. But Silvester had already seen it; he sat across from him and asked,
"So now you're just swallowing whatever pills you can get your hands on?"
"As if."
Se-gun answered awkwardly. Silvester wore an expression that somehow seemed to be mocking him. His long silver hair, still holding rainwater, stood out even against the gray city—and even in the dimness of Arjuna.
"I just… wanted to blow off some steam, so I hit the Sangdong gang. Turns out they'd moved."
"Blow off steam?"
Silvester's face said he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Attacking organized crime just to improve your mood? Of course, it wasn't something Silvester himself was incapable of. His creed was that if it was necessary, he would raid not only gangsters but military bases.
But "to blow off steam" was not a proper motive. For a man who did everything out of necessity and lived a dry, arid life, that "mad" streak in Se-gun was something he almost envied.
"…Well, the Sangdong gang are my enemies too, but more than that—I guess you could say violence with a justification is fun. Something like that. No job, nothing to do, so I get bored."
This kid really was broken. A decadent creature who didn't particularly value his own life, who couldn't feel alive unless he burned through each day. And yet, in the way he refused to chase profit, he touched something in Silvester. Silvester closed his eyes. Suddenly, what had happened today came back to him.