Hunting Season Begins
Crunch.
"Do we protect her? Or kill her and eat her?"
Messiah asked around a mouthful of metal plate. The girl seated on her knee laughed in a thin, silvery voice.
"Hohoho. And what do you suppose the Jinma who didn't come to this table want? If we protect her—who exactly are we protecting?"
"Who indeed."
Phantom sat in darkness so complete that not a single thread of light reached him, listening to every word. Zein drove the metal plate into the tabletop and rose from his seat.
"They say when hunting season comes, you regret not having trained your dogs, Phantom."
"There is no law that says one hunting dog must hunt another."
Phantom said it, though he knew better than anyone how idealistic the words truly were.
…Abruptly, hunting season began.
Chang-hyun lay on the cold wooden floor of the taekwondo room in the gym. Free period, nothing to do—he had stretched out here hoping to make up for lost sleep, but sleep would not come.
"Uuuugh."
A nightmare of dizziness kept crashing over his head. He still sat propped against the chill wall of the training room. The shade helped a little. Even so, the vertigo and the boneless weakness kept dragging at him from underfoot.
"Cough, cough."
While he was coughing, the door opened and the club president—a fourth-year senior—walked in. Finding Chang-hyun half-dead on the floor, he startled and ran over barefoot.
"Hey! You. What are you doing? You okay?"
"Mmm. No. Just feeling a little off. Free period, so I figured I'd sleep it off."
"Quit the nonsense and go home first. You're burning up."
"…Am I?"
Still coughing, Chang-hyun fumbled his bag together. His hair, long overdue for a cut, stuck out in every direction—the classic look of a broke student living on his own.
"Is this kid gonna be all right? Lately he hasn't had a single healthy day."
"…I'm fine. It's just a little dizziness."
"Still."
But the young man called Chang-hyun only offered a weak smile. That smile, if anything, made people worry more. He was a so-called "stale water" returnee student, yet he still hadn't shed the look of a boy—and when he smiled, it was startlingly charming.
"Once night falls, I get better."
"You little—so it's a fake illness."
"President."
"Ah, you brat. I'm joking. Don't give me that look over a joke. Go rest. Classes left?"
The president asked, then nodded to himself.
"You're in the same department as Hak-gyu, right? I'll have him take notes for you. Don't worry about it."
"Ah—yes. Thank you."
Grateful for the kindness, Chang-hyun bowed and slipped out of the taekwondo room. Lately the dizziness had only grown worse. Exhausted as he was by day, by night it vanished as if wiped clean—too strange to call a proper illness.
"Seriously. Am I turning into a vampire or something."
He dragged his worn-out body back toward his room. The boarding place was the basement of a private house on a hill. Damp enough to make living hard, but the rent was cheap, so he hadn't had a choice. His body was well trained, but on days like this even climbing the hill left him winded.
"Huh?"
He paused for breath. Even though it was still daytime, a pale moon showed its white face for an instant between the clouds.
Throb.
"Ghk—!"
A savage pain in his chest made him clutch at it. It felt as if a massive iron skewer had been driven straight through his heart.
"D-damn it."
Am I dying? For a split second the thought even crossed his mind. He'd never had heart disease! He might have been forced out of the national team by injury, but he had still been on the WTF taekwondo national reserve squad. Dying of a heart condition? Impossible.
"Ah—!"
How long did the agony last? In a single instant his body eased. The crushing pain of a moment before was gone as if it had never been, and strength flooded back into his limbs. Chang-hyun pushed himself upright, fought down the remaining dizziness, and looked up at the moon. It had been afternoon only a short while ago—yet somehow the sun had already slid west, and twilight was pouring down over the residential streets with the dusk.
Screeeech!
The black sports car that had been tearing across the city came to a spectacular stop. Sliding over the pavement, it settled exactly parallel to the parking line—a high-difficulty piece of work most people could not even attempt.
"Huu."
The man who stepped out was a pale white man with silver hair hanging loose. The priest in black was a man who had once taken holy orders and was now listed as excommunicated: Father Silvester.
Strictly speaking, he isn't Silvester either.
He shook his head. Countless human gazes turned toward him. After parking like a maniac, and looking as unusual as he did on top of it, the attention was only natural.
"Mm."
Those who had broken through the wall of indifference and stopped soon melted back into the crowd and vanished. Silvester lifted his Bible. The book was a truly excellent thing. So long as you believed in it blindly, it could shield you from good, from evil, and from human beings alike.
In truth, though, he was only mimicking the posture of blind faith, wrapping armor around his mind. If he had been a true believer, the Silvester who existed now would never have been born.
For the past three hundred years humanity had left the Bible behind and advanced. Society, science—both had progressed only by shedding an ocean of blood. Extreme naturalists seemed to regard human beings themselves as little more than parasites on the earth, but that was a baseless devaluation. When God cast humanity out of Eden, had He imagined they would survive this long? By devouring every other living thing?
"Eternal life is nowhere to be seen, and death is spreading."
Looking at the hospital, Silvester passed that judgment on the air that had turned the color of ash. XX Holy Mother Hospital, where Jack O'Lantern had been taken… In a single day the place had filled with death. Inside, the police investigation was still underway; outside, the bereaved had already raised tents. A sign clearly forbade entry, yet people kept rushing in and arguing with the officers.
"…"
Bible in hand, Silvester walked among them. The excommunication lay so far in the past he could barely remember it—but for reasons like this, a priest could never quite take off the cloth.
He moved through the crowd, breathing in the smell of death. This incident had almost certainly been the work of a vampire. The same one who had sent him that signal, no doubt. But why? Why seize Jack O'Lantern only after the man became known? Judging by the information he had sent first, the vampire could have caught and killed Jack O'Lantern on his own. All Se-geon had done after capturing him was beat him. Being a vampire did not make that impossible.
Forcing Jack O'Lantern to turn himself in would also have been trivial for a vampire capable of mental manipulation. So why do something like this?
"Oh, Father! Oh, Father!"
"Ah—F-Father. What happened to our child? Our children!"
"…"
The way they boldly spoke even to a foreign priest suggested he would make an excellent advertising model. More than enough for an English academy commercial. Of course advertising models did not usually cry. They wore those cheap little smiles that suggested learning English would solve every problem in the world.
He had no intention of belittling the grief of those who had lost family. For reasons that were different and yet somehow the same, there were those who became vampire hunters. Silvester sighed inwardly.
"Ah, I'm sorry. I need to check a few things myself, so…"
Wearing a softness of expression he would never have shown under ordinary circumstances, Silvester slipped past them.
The case had thrown the police into deep confusion. The crime itself was a grotesque rarity never seen in Korea—and even the officers standing guard had been murdered.
The Jack O'Lantern case alone had claimed victims easily numbering in the double digits. If the perpetrator had been carelessly left unattended and then killed by someone with a grudge, what would that do to the police's dignity? So they had specially posted two officers at the hospital entrance as watchmen.
And this was the result. Officers assigned to twenty-four-hour personal security had all died without drawing their guns even once. Drained of every drop of blood in their bodies, no less. They were not special-forces veterans or men with glittering records, but they were properly trained police. Could any ordinary thug, thief, or murderer kill two armed officers without taking a scratch?
"This is the kind of thing you usually only see in horror movies."
Detective Park was built like a mountain and yet so frightened he could barely look at the corpses. Detective Jo ignored him completely and turned the bodies over. The case was so monstrous—worst since the founding of the Republic of Korea—that personnel from neighboring stations had been summoned en masse, leaving police gaps across all of Seoul.
"Damn. This many dead in a single night. Worst mass murder since the founding. Just when it looked like the Jack O'Lantern case was getting solved, this gets worse by the minute."
"M-maybe it's a vampire?"
Detective Park forced the words out while fighting the urge to vomit. Of course, what followed was as inevitable as sunrise: fists and feet flew in from every side.
"Have you lost your mind?!"
"You absolute idiot! Quit the force while I'm still being nice, you son of a bitch."
"Ow! Where the hell did this moron even come from!"
While the officers cheerfully beat their colleague, a foreign priest stepped in through the entrance. From lobby to wards the place was thick with control personnel; how he had gotten this far was a mystery, but the priest raised an eyebrow at the sight of the police thrashing a detective the size of a bear.
"Hold it! This is a restricted area! The families are already in agony—Father, you can't just walk in!"
Detective Jo, who until a second ago had been punching his junior, blocked Silvester's path. Foreigners usually made people soft, but most clergy who came to Korea were fluent in Korean. So Detective Jo spoke Korean from the first word and shoved the priest back. Even if the man didn't understand the language, he would get the tone.
Still—what a strange priest.
A priest with long silver hair? He had never heard of such a thing. On top of that the man was strikingly handsome; the clerical clothes barely registered. Whether he had understood Detective Jo or not, the priest wore a look of mild regret.
"I understand. I'll leave, then. But if there is anything unusual about the families or the remains…"
"There isn't."
Detective Jo stated it flatly and ushered him out. Everything would be on the evening news anyway—why come and interfere with the investigation?
"Huu."
In front of the hospital, Silvester gazed at a tree thick with green leaves, then returned to his car. A few young people stood clustered around his beloved vehicle, staring in fascination.
"Ah."
"…In New York they'd be car thieves. Doesn't look like that here."
At least in the Republic of Korea, it seemed there were no car thieves bold enough to steal from the parking lot of a hospital crawling with police. There was a vampire capable of slaughtering every human in a hospital under police watch, however.
"The Jinma Agni, is it?"
Silvester thought of the rumored freelance Jinma, Agni. The most radical of the True Vampires—one who refused Tetra Anax's dominion over their kind and never created offspring, so that he could keep hoarding power. His behavior was more vicious than even the worst of the malignant vampires; he had been known to devour more than a hundred humans in a single night without leaving a scrap. Until now he had operated mainly in China and India, where the populations were large and security was loose. It seemed he had finally arrived in Korea.
Which means he has already found out where Jeong-ya is?
Silvester opened the car door and got in.
Northwest Airlines rearranged its schedule at the request of an unscheduled VIP and put a Sonic Cruiser on the line. The supersonic passenger jet Boeing had built to compete with the Concorde was never assigned to unprofitable routes like Las Vegas–Korea. But once R. Gordon—who had risen after the collapse of ideology as the emperor of vulgar capitalism, and who happened to own twenty percent of Northwest stock—made the request, they had no choice but to force the change.
"Is one little brat like that really enough?"
Zein looked at Phantom and made no secret of his displeasure. The Phantasmagoria that Phantom led was a bloodline so thin it barely deserved the name of clan.
It was a lineage that existed mostly for appearance's sake, so Phantom had brought only a single subordinate on this trip: Wilhelm. Zein clearly hated that. From the perspective of a man who had packed the cabin full of yakuza, Phantom must have looked like a mere tourist.
"Forgive me, but would you be quiet? I have a few things to think about."
Phantom fixed Zein with a look and sank back into thought. For a plane flying at supersonic speed, the Sonic Cruiser was remarkably quiet. The noise-cancellation systems installed throughout the cabin were probably generating sound matched to external vibration and burying the roar. Listening to the resulting high-frequency tone, Phantom closed his eyes.
"Hmm. Phantom, Zein—you can speak Korean, can't you? Why don't you give me a little of the accent."
Messiah's voice, sharp as a shard of metal, addressed them. She had opened a book on the Sonic Cruiser and was only now learning Korean. Phantom kept his eyes shut; Zein obliged with a few phrases. After hearing them only once or twice, she had the accent locked in perfectly.
"Never thought we'd all end up on one plane. It's exactly like a school bus."
Phantom murmured, and Messiah answered.
"A rather strange curriculum for a school, don't you think?"
"…"
They sat quietly and let the Sonic Cruiser carry them on its direct flight from Las Vegas to Korea. Watching the estimated arrival time glitter on the display ahead, one could not help thinking the world had improved a great deal.
"How many Jinma do you think are already in Korea right now?"
"Hard to say. The ones who run solo are probably already there, and the clans should be gathering about now as well."
It was not Messiah who answered, but the girl sitting on her knee—Maria—in a clear, gentle voice.
"Every Jinma except Tetra Anax gathering in one small Eastern country? That is impressive."
"It certainly is. A grand hunting season the likes of which has not been seen in two thousand years."
Maria caught Phantom's words with a cynical edge. She was not empty-headed; she understood that the hunt now underway was far from desirable. Across the whole of vampirekind it was an act of folly that could never be called beneficial—and yet someone had to do it.
"In other words, the dirty work of the butcher cleaning up the mess. Whether mafia or yakuza, the ones who handle the filthy jobs are usually the disposable ones, aren't they? That's the treatment we're getting."
Messiah spoke with cold clarity. With their overwhelming abilities, Tetra Anax effectively ruled over the vampires. Being handed a direct flight from Las Vegas to Korea was something to be grateful for—but in the end it was nothing more than treating the other clans as hitmen.