The Alley's Bloody Dance
Crash!
Se-geon’s XR-250 tore down the narrow alley with the terrifying force of a highway wreck. He bid a silent farewell to his beloved bike and rolled free into the alley once more. In that same instant Jeong-ya scooped Chang-hyun into her arms and launched herself off the ground. She never looked back as she fled at blistering speed—destroying the motorcycle had clearly been meant to stall Se-geon’s pursuit. But she was not faster than a bullet. Se-geon put a round clean through the back of her knee. No matter how potent a vampire’s regeneration, shatter the knee at the exact moment it drives off a wall and gravity still wins.
“Kyaaah!”
Jeong-ya and Chang-hyun both slammed into the pavement. The pair landed on a heap of trash bags and writhed, groaning.
“All right. The cops are coming and my bike’s scrap. Time to wrap this up.”
Se-geon closed in on her. Jeong-ya snatched a can from inside a trash bag and flung it; he simply tilted his head and let it sail past. The can struck a streetlamp hanging from a utility pole and burst with a hollow pop.
Wheee-ooo, wheee-ooo!
Sirens rose and fell in the distance, drawing nearer. The officers who had emptied the local station for the brawl at Chang-hyun’s house were racing back. Someone had clearly called in the motorcycle crash.
At least I took the plates off first. Small mercies.
Thinking that, Se-geon started toward Jeong-ya again—only for Chang-hyun to erupt from the garbage heap.
“Grrraaah!”
“Ah. So that’s it.”
Se-geon gripped the Bloodstone Pendulum and let out a long breath. At last he understood why the pendulum had been reacting.
“Poor bastard. I wondered when you blacked out earlier.”
“……You!”
Chang-hyun had no idea why the man was shaking his head, but the facts were plain enough: this stranger had beaten him senseless, and now he was gunning down a woman. Villain was the only word that fit. Even if the woman really wasn’t human—even if she could vault entire houses in a single bound—that was no reason to kill her!
“You saved me when I was out cold, so I cut you some slack. But I’m done holding back!”
“Idiot. What are you going to do about it when the guy who just got his ass kicked decides he’s ‘done holding back’?”
“This!”
Chang-hyun closed the gap and snapped a front kick. Se-geon stepped back, angling to shoot the leg—but the kick transformed mid-motion into a side kick, the supporting foot flashing out with a sharpness that had not been there before. Even for Se-geon, high on Psychedelic Moon, the attack was a genuine threat.
“Kh—!”
He pulled the trigger, but the suppressor lengthened the barrel enough to make the weapon clumsy. Chang-hyun’s kick smashed the suppressor aside and the bullet went wide. The one-legged hopping style looked less like World Taekwondo and far more like ITF.
“So you’re a vampire too!”
Se-geon spun the pistol, jammed it into his collar, and threw a punch meant to seat his knuckles flush. The gun clipped Chang-hyun’s ear and blood welled bright red, but Chang-hyun dropped into a duck, closed the distance, and slipped past the fist.
Thud!
Se-geon’s knee smashed into Chang-hyun’s face. Plenty of fighters ducked after a left jab knowing a right cross was coming next; that was exactly why Se-geon had drilled a jab-to-knee combination of his own. Even so, trading pure flesh against a vampire was still suicide.
True to form, Chang-hyun took the knee square in the face—nose bone cracked or not—and rose through it, firing a one-two. Se-geon sprang back with practiced ease, drew a knife from his belt, and slashed horizontally. The leap and cut flowed together like a dance. A dance that left blood in its wake.
“Kh—!”
Chang-hyun bit down hard on his lower lip. Swaying back from the one-two only to have his wrist carved open—the kid’s skill was absurd. Chang-hyun had never been the one taking the beating until now. What the hell was this guy? Some North Korean operative? The one small mercy was that his ragged arm guard had kept the blade from drawing blood—though looking at the fight, that wasn’t going to last much longer.
I have to stick to him!
Distance against a knife was death. Chang-hyun immediately whipped a low kick and closed. High feint, low strike—he sold the upper body and then scythed the legs. Se-geon met the high line with the blade and lifted a shin to check the low one.
Crack!
The power was no joke. Chang-hyun’s transformation was still incomplete, so the impact was something a human body could theoretically endure—but dumping that much damage through a guard was ridiculous. Odder still was the striking surface: not the instep standard to taekwondo, but the blade of the foot. He spun and drove that edge into the muscle along the side of the leg like planting a pickaxe. The technique put murderous strain on the ankle; a lesser man would have rolled a toe or the joint itself. Chang-hyun had clearly tempered himself past the point of caring.
So that’s how it is!
Se-geon lined up an elbow for the second strike streaking toward his torso—an attack meant to snap the leg bone. But Chang-hyun kept the leg folded, stepped in, and circled to Se-geon’s flank. From below came a rising heel whip. Se-geon carried the momentum of the thrown elbow into a full spin, dropped his stance, and fired a back kick. He expected the heel whip to land mid-spin—only for Chang-hyun to stamp off the ground with his base foot and vault clean over the kick.
“What?!”
In the space of a heartbeat the narrow alley whipped up a gale of pure violence. Chang-hyun caught Se-geon’s thrusting blade on his arm guard and drove an elbow home; Se-geon rolled the knife in his grip into a reverse hold and raked Chang-hyun’s side. The elbow still cracked Se-geon’s helmet and sent him tumbling backward.
“Damn it!”
“Kh!”
A half-turned vampire and a man dosed on Psychedelic Moon were both monsters; neither went down from a hit like that. Se-geon tore off the helmet—its front caved in and blocking his vision—and hurled it away.
“Like hell you decide!”
But before the helmet cleared his head, Chang-hyun’s spinning kick was already carving in under the jawline. A clean hit could have dropped him cold. Se-geon felt the trajectory, buried the knife in Chang-hyun’s calf, and took the kick full force.
Boom!
Se-geon flew into the wall, helmet-first, and only stopped when the impact finally killed his momentum. His head swam; the world spun. He still managed to fling the ruined helmet aside.
“Damn it! You’re a real pain in my ass!”
“You’re one to talk! In my entire life I’ve never met a bastard as vicious as you!”
Chang-hyun yanked the knife from his calf and held it. Adrenaline must have been flooding him—strangely, it barely hurt. Or maybe he really was turning into a vampire. The thought flickered and died; it didn’t matter. The hunter looked far more inhuman than any vampire. Sentimental, sure—but so what? You only got one life. If you couldn’t live it the way you wanted, what was the point of enduring something this galling right in front of your face?
“Tahat!”
Chang-hyun charged with the knife. Se-geon, instead of meeting him, drew the pistol again and leveled it.
Whoooosh!
A gale of wind Jeong-ya summoned slammed into Se-geon. Chang-hyun seized the opening, clamped a hand on the Tokarev’s slide just as it was about to fire, and rammed it back—pinning the hammer so the gun could not discharge. He didn’t stop there. The instant Se-geon tried to yank his arm free, Chang-hyun twisted the weapon sideways and tore it free.
“Jackie Chan?”
“Nailed it!”
Even mid-brawl Se-geon had recognized the move from a Jackie Chan film, and Chang-hyun owned it without shame. All those hours of practice after the military police escort unit put the movie on the rec-room TV had finally paid off. Ordinarily he would have field-stripped the gun on the spot; instead he simply turned it on Se-geon.
“All right. That’s enough—”
Thwack!
There was a second gun. Se-geon blew Chang-hyun’s hand open with the spare, ripped the first pistol free, and gripped both weapons again.
“Nothing personal, but die—”
He fired one-handed at Jeong-ya as she whipped up another gale, the other pistol locked on Chang-hyun. High VT alone didn’t make a strong vampire, it seemed; he was getting far cleaner results than he ever had against the other bloodsuckers of Juk-yo’s line. Of course, back then Se-geon had been a true greenhorn and hadn’t been on Psychedelic Moon—but even allowing for that, this was a quantum leap. If he wanted to be poetic he might have called it a moment that swelled the chest with pride. He felt no such thing.
Whoosh!
Instead of firing, Se-geon flung himself forward. Razor-edged metal plates punched up through the asphalt where he had been standing and buried themselves in the ground.
“There you are.”
Se-geon raised a pistol with a calm face and aimed behind him. The vampire who had planted a transmitter on his bike had finally made a move—waiting, no doubt, for Se-geon and the Jinma to annihilate each other, then striking the moment the balance tipped.
“Kh. What are you doing?! Run!”
Chang-hyun used the opening to leap at Se-geon with a spinning kick. A human aerial spinning kick would have been easy to ignore; a vampire’s was another matter. Se-geon flattened himself to the ground and slipped under it. Chang-hyun carried the spin through, twisted, and bolted down the alley with Jeong-ya. They ran a jagged path, using parked cars and utility poles for cover, and Se-geon couldn’t get a clean shot to stop them.
“Damn it.”
What a ridiculous kid. A few minutes ago he’d still been human—why throw himself this hard into protecting a vampire woman? Se-geon turned back into the alley, half-disgusted.
No. Maybe that’s the natural reaction.
In every age, the man pointing a gun at a young, beautiful woman was the villain. Even if she was a vampire, a gentle, lovely bloodsucker still beat a demon who would butcher women and children for cash.
“Damn it.”
Se-geon pivoted and scanned the surroundings. No sign of the vampire who had just attacked him. That alone told him this one was far more polished than the idiot Jinma.