The Hideout in Bongcheon-dong
On the ridge of Bongcheon-dong, where redevelopment had already finished and high-rise apartments now stood in orderly rows, one old building still remained.
Everything around it had been freshly dressed in gleaming towers, yet this place alone clung to its ugly, peeling tiles. To make matters worse, the entrance faced away from the main road, ensuring almost no one would ever want to move in. Song Deok-yeon’s hideout was in its basement.
“Come on in.”
“Ah—yes.”
Se-geon stepped inside and his eyes went wide.
Near the entrance, piles of stuffed dolls and spools of thread had made him think it must be some kind of workshop. Further in, though, the space was neatly arranged. Japanese and Korean swords of every kind were packed tight along the walls. Above them hung a vajra so ancient it looked more like an antique than a weapon. On either side sat suspicious-looking machines—Se-geon didn’t know what they were for, but they were devices for swapping and repairing gun barrels.
“Well?”
“If the cops ever walk in here, you’ll be in handcuffs on the spot.”
That was Se-geon’s honest first impression. Even a gang office would have looked more respectable than this.
“Why would the cops come into my house? No search warrant, no entry.”
Deok-yeon said it as he stepped inside and kicked off his shoes, then pointed to the room on the right.
“That’s your room from now on. Assuming you clean it first.”
“Got it. So how do you find vampires, and how do you actually catch them?”
“A brat who can’t even crawl already wants to fly. A vampire’s more likely to catch you than the other way around.”
Deok-yeon shut down Se-geon’s impatience with a single line. He had been needling the boy with almost no explanation since they arrived, but Se-geon found everything so new and strange that the attitude barely registered.
“No talismans or anything. Do vampire hunters only use illegal weapons like these?”
“Our enemies keep twitching even after you put a bullet in them. Holy water barely works either. Talismans are even more useless.”
Deok-yeon delivered the words with deliberate weight and looked Se-geon over.
“You pack your stuff?”
“I left the bike. There wasn’t much to bring anyway, so I can grab it quick.”
“That so? Bring it tomorrow. Day after tomorrow we start real training.”
Deok-yeon started toward his own bedroom, then stopped as if something had just occurred to him and turned back.
“Clean your room first. Otherwise you’ll be sleeping on the street tonight.”
Se-geon opened the door. Deok-yeon hadn’t been bluffing. The main floor was relatively clean only because what sat there were weapons, not furniture or luggage—not because Deok-yeon was a tidy man. The room Se-geon stepped into was such a mess he couldn’t tell whether it was a bedroom or a storage closet.
He let out a quiet sigh and started clearing it.
Se-geon had handed both his father’s house and the factory over to his uncle in exchange for living expenses. Han Gyu-il felt some guilt toward his nephew, but he was a businessman first; he hadn’t been able to refuse the offer.
Even though Se-geon had been hurt by him, he held no real resentment. Yet when he reached the house and saw that most of the belongings had already been packed away, tears suddenly welled up and spilled over. He might ride a motorcycle and have more guts than most, but Se-geon was still only a high-schooler.
For a Korean teenager raised gently in a good home, this whole ordeal was simply too cruel.
“Se-geon?”
Se-jin approached with a bag in her hand and looked at him. Se-geon quickly wiped his eyes and turned his face away.
“Noona?”
“Ugh, why didn’t you listen to me?”
“……”
Se-jin’s relationship with her own father was abysmal, so she clearly hated that Se-geon had signed the house over. But to lecture him without a single word of comfort first—Se-geon found his cousin’s callousness utterly repulsive.
“I came to get my things. What about you?”
“Well… I came to talk you out of it. You haven’t finished the formal paperwork yet, right? Then it’s not too late!”
Se-geon stopped listening. He went to the garage and rolled out the RX-125. It was an off-road bike, not ideal for hauling cargo, but a single off-road touring bag that had belonged to his brother was enough to carry everything he needed.
Truthfully he wanted to leave every last object in that house behind, but he didn’t believe doing so would let him forget what had happened.
“Se-geon! I’m doing this for you! You’re being used by my dad right now!”
She kept trailing after him, convinced she was giving loving advice to her dear cousin and standing up to a greedy father who would swallow even his own nephew. To Se-geon she was the last person he wanted to see.
“Stop it. Right now I hate you more than anyone. You hate your father that much? He’s going to die before you do, and you still hate him enough to trash-talk him to your cousin and sabotage things behind the scenes? Don’t make me laugh. For my sake? You know exactly how I feel and you’re still spouting that garbage!”
“……Se-Se-geon?”
“Shut up! Don’t ever act like you know me again! We won’t have any reason to see each other anyway!”
He spat the words at her, then kicked the RX-125 to life. The tragedy that had struck him was anything but ordinary, yet Se-geon was not completely alone in the world. In that moment, though, he severed every last tie that still held him to ordinary life.
By the time Se-geon returned to Bongcheon-dong and Deok-yeon’s hideout, it was still before lunch. He went into the room he had cleaned the day before and unpacked.
Everything he had brought fit into a pocket-sized 3×4 family photo and its negative, plus a few changes of clothes. He put the clothes in the wardrobe, set the photo on top, and let out a long breath.
In the picture the family stood together with blank, uninterested faces, the East Sea behind them. It had been last summer’s vacation; they had suffered for hours on a jammed highway with a broken air conditioner before finally arriving, so no one looked cheerful. Only his easygoing older brother Se-hyeon was smiling at the camera.
“This is the only family photo I even brought…”
Se-geon muttered it because he felt pathetic. Standing alone in the dim semi-basement room, he froze like a doll. If Deok-yeon hadn’t gotten up and come looking for him, he might have stared at that photo until he went mad.
“You’re back, Se-geon?”
“Ah—yes.”
Se-geon snapped out of it and looked at Deok-yeon. The former Special Forces sergeant slept like a vampire the moment the sun rose; he still had the half-lidded eyes of a man who had just woken up.
“Training can wait till tomorrow. If you’ve got anywhere else you need to go, take care of it now.”
With that, Deok-yeon went back to his room.
“Anywhere else?”
Se-geon repeated the words and sighed. There was nowhere. He had never thought of himself as especially short on friends, but when something like this happened, there was no one he could lean on. Still, he suddenly wanted to ride. He turned the unsmiling family photo face-down and left his room behind.
The reason Deok-yeon had left Se-geon alone the day before was not laziness. It was consideration for a kid who had just lost his entire family. But consideration did not need to last more than a day.
A vampire hunter’s job was to hunt enemies far stronger than himself. In a modern world without open war, almost no one lived closer to death. That was why hunters had to forge themselves without mercy.
Training began in the morning. Uncharacteristically, Deok-yeon rose with the sun and prepared breakfast. Because it was the first day of real work, the meal he put together was a concentrated mass of protein, calcium, and pure calories.
Anyone who could digest that much at breakfast had to be in excellent health. Se-geon forced every bite down anyway.
“Impressive.”
The word could have meant several things; Se-geon used it in place of open admiration. Deok-yeon merely offered a short piece of advice.
“Today I’ll handle all the chores. Starting tomorrow that’s your job. And the menu doesn’t change, so choke it down and memorize it.”
After breakfast Deok-yeon took Se-geon to the Bongcheon-dong YMCA gym. Some prior arrangement must have been in place; neither the staff nor anyone else stopped them. After a light warm-up they went straight into the program.
“Jump rope. Double-unders for five minutes, triples for one minute, doubles again for one. That pattern for thirty minutes total. You can handle a jump rope, right?”
Deok-yeon handed him the rope. Se-geon took it and began following the instructions.
At first it seemed manageable. Before long his heart was hammering. The workload Deok-yeon had ordered would make even a trained athlete surrender almost immediately.
Se-geon had conditioned himself for a motocross license, but he still couldn’t keep up.
“Hah! You’re already falling apart at this level? Chin up, you little bastard! Here comes a fist!”
Deok-yeon meant it; he cracked Se-geon across the jaw. After that, no matter how close to dying he felt, Se-geon had no choice but to keep jumping. Suffering until he wished he were dead was still better than actually dying.
He gasped and ran in place like a madman. Breath burned his throat, his heart slammed against his ribs, and he felt as if he might spit blood. Deok-yeon, whose body was not the one being destroyed, only drove him harder.
“Stop gasping just because you’re jumping. Use your legs when you hit the ground. And straighten your back—want me to put rebar in your spine?”
Deok-yeon kept barking impossible demands. Whenever Se-geon failed and collapsed, fists and feet immediately followed.
“A vampire would laugh at you, you little shit! The floor asking for a hug? Huh? You like the dirt that much, maybe I should just bury you!”
While he poured out abuse, Deok-yeon cheerfully beat Se-geon black and blue. Somehow that was enough to make the boy complete a volume of work that would have broken most athletes. It bordered on a miracle of the human body—yet to a former Special Forces man it was only natural.
“Not done yet. Next are burpees—a hundred of them. From now on, one set of anything is a hundred. No hundred-fifty nonsense. If we raise it from a hundred it goes to two hundred. From two hundred it goes to three.”
“……”
Se-geon could say nothing. After the jump rope he was already finished; a hundred burpees sounded like an order to die. Yet Deok-yeon’s face held the kind of zeal that would have made even an actual death order sound reasonable.
They trained hard for four straight hours, returned to the hideout, ate another meal almost identical to breakfast, and slept.
Sleeping through the day was, for a vampire hunter, a kind of virtue—aligning one’s life to the enemy’s active hours. But Deok-yeon had another reason for the schedule.
Se-geon was still growing. The growth hormone released by hard exercise worked best while he slept. The protein and testosterone from the meals triggered anabolic processes that built muscle; the growth plates of each bone divided and lengthened. That was the point of the midday rest.
The day’s work did not end there. After four hours of sleep meant for cellular repair they rose again and headed to the next training ground. Se-geon creaked along like an unoiled machine, moaning about muscle pain, but Deok-yeon’s creed was “Make the impossible possible,” so the complaining never mattered.
“Damn it. He’s still a kid—can’t even put him on steroids.”
Muttering, Deok-yeon dragged the screaming Se-geon into the white Pride and drove to a live-fire range.
“Ahh… we’re using guns?”
Collapsed in the passenger seat, Se-geon saw the range sign and exhaled in relief. Shooting, at least, would not wreck his body further. Deok-yeon hauled him upright.
“Follow me. First we order a ballistic-and-stab vest.”
At the entrance he spoke with a staff member, measured Se-geon, and returned with a vest of blended Kevlar and Dyneema. Se-geon put it on and thumped his chest once. Moving felt a little restricted, but the protection more than justified the inconvenience.
Deok-yeon shrugged into his own vest.
“Three hundred eighty thousand won. Dirt cheap for the performance.”
“What? We’re buying them?”
“I’m training you and Father Silvester’s covering most of the expenses, but this kind of gear gets billed separately. Fair?”
He walked into the range. Se-geon sighed, pulled out his debit card, paid for the vest, and followed.
“Start with .22.”
“Yes.”
A range officer handed Se-geon a CZ-75 chambered in .22 and coached him through basic pistol stance. He had expected vicious recoil; even the .357 Magnum he tried later kicked far less than movies and comics had led him to believe. Still, even the softest .22 cartridge produced enough jump to destroy accuracy.
“Ugh. I’m not hitting anything.”
Se-geon stared at the target and sighed. The pistol was zeroed poorly, but the complete lack of a group was entirely his fault. Even a hard man like Deok-yeon did not expect much from a high-school dropout who had never held a gun before.
“All right… follow me again.”
Deok-yeon led him back through the lobby and out to the parking lot. Se-geon trailed after him, already worrying. He had somehow survived today’s training, but if every day was going to be like this, would he last?
The training continued without pause after that: urban combat drills in abandoned factory zones, instruction on improvised explosives and every kind of tool, martial arts of all styles, and long sessions on the nature and habits of their vampire enemies. Only around dawn did they finally crawl into bed.
“Get some sleep. You’ll be up again in the morning, so you’ll only get about four hours. That’s enough.”
Deok-yeon dumped the utterly spent Se-geon into his room. Se-geon didn’t even manage to spread a blanket; he simply sprawled on the floor and stared at the ceiling. He genuinely wondered whether he would die here. Today’s workload alone would have broken any ordinary person.
Throwing an unfinished body into that kind of forced march from day one—could he really endure it?
But then he pictured his family. Most people, remembering relatives slaughtered by a vampire, would burn with the need for revenge. Se-geon’s case was different. The vampire who had done it was already dead. Only he remained.
He needed to be angry, yet the proper target of that anger was gone. So he turned the fury on himself.
Every time he thought of the dead, the fact that he still breathed felt like an obscenity. Every time the brutal exercise made him groan, the suffering itself felt like gluttony. He moved his body with those thoughts as fuel.
People often claim mind can transcend flesh. Few ever fit the saying better than Se-geon.
“……”
Quietly, he slipped into sleep.