Let the Festival Begin
“No one here. Then shall I try killing the ones outside?”
He had come looking for the Jinma Jeong-ya, but under the circumstances, a little sport with a pack of Vampire Hunters wasn’t the worst idea. The sheer irritation of being played by a human was still boiling in him; this would make for excellent stress relief.
Engines roared in the distance. Cars were closing in. A Caliber .50 had already been fired, and that kind of noise would have carried at least a kilometer in every direction. There was no chance plainclothes police had been waiting out there—every vehicle approaching had to belong to Vampire Hunters.
“Sniping from afar isn’t really my hobby. Let’s draw them in a little, shall we?”
Agni melted into the shadows and drank in the blood. Slaughtering people in bulk and then sucking them dry meant absorbing more blood than his own body volume could comfortably handle, and digesting it all took a fair amount of time. Still, for a glutton like Agni, leaving dead humans uneaten was unthinkable. As a Jinma whose VT sat on the lower end of the scale, he needed every scrap of human blood he could gather to strengthen himself.
“They’re coming.”
He finished absorbing the blood and lifted his head. With a soft hiss, every drop of moisture that had come in with the blood vaporized at once and flooded the corridor. The name Agni had been taken from the Hindu god of fire. True to that name, he possessed pyrokinesis—the power of ignition—and whenever he fed, he burned away the water and sugars that inevitably came with the blood and expelled them from his body.
In moments the hallway was choked with steam, and a red mist laced with iron billowed out of the motel into the night.
“There!”
Shouts rose outside, followed by a hail of gunfire. Once a .50 had already been fired, the hunters seemed to figure continuous fire from lesser weapons hardly mattered; they simply opened up, blasting blindly into steam they couldn’t even see through.
“Fools.”
A few of them wore glasses fitted with infrared filters. Vampire Hunters all dosed themselves with Psychedelic Moon, so night-vision goggles were unnecessary—but if smoke grenades went off, even a vampire’s eyesight became useless. An infrared filter, relying solely on longer wavelengths, could cut through ordinary smoke. Of course, this wasn’t smoke. It was heat-laden steam, and infrared would be just as blind.
Agni stopped just inside the first-floor entrance and leveled his weapon. A security mirror by the door, meant for watching the parking lot, gave him a clear view of the hunters closing in.
“If I burn them, I can’t drink the blood. Well… nothing to be done about it.”
He focused, and fire bloomed. Rings of flame sprang up around the throats of two men watching the entrance and, in an instant, seared their necks and faces into perfect blackened circles.
“Aaaagh!”
Two men dead in a heartbeat left the hunters reeling, spinning to scan their surroundings.
“He’s in the building!”
They charged the entrance. A few of the smarter ones smashed the ground-floor windows and poured into the first-floor corridor—but to go any higher, they still had to take the stairs.
“That’s right. Come on in.”
Waiting on the stairwell that linked the first and second floors, Agni lifted the ammo belt for a cleaner feed and yanked the trigger cord in his right hand. A heavy rattle filled the air as thick brass casings sprayed across the hallway.
“Aaaagh!”
“Urgh!”
Short, broken screams, and people came apart. The weapon, known in Korea as the MG50 heavy machine gun, was not something you pointed at human beings. Agni crushed the entrance in a single burst, then vaulted from the stairs and poured fire into the hunters who had forced their way into the first-floor corridor.
These ones had enough sense to drag tables up as shields, but wooden tabletops were no barrier against a .50-caliber round. Hunters in Level III body armor dropped one after another. In a narrow hallway there was nowhere to dodge; it must have been pure hell.
“Aaaaagh!”
“Guh—!”
The Vampire Hunters coughed blood and collapsed. Agni drew their blood to himself and used what remained to turn the corpses into Ghouls. Even a blood-hungry Jinma needed Ghouls when the enemy was this numerous. No matter how much of their blood he drank, a few more bullets would put them right back where they started—raising them as Ghouls was simply better economics.
“Grrrrraaah…”
The bodies rose at once, weapons in hand, waiting for Agni’s command. He eyed the arms they still gripped and gave a short laugh.
“Hm. Fully armed Ghouls. Now that’s stylish. All right then—shall we go hunting for the rest of the hunters?”
He raised a hand, and the Ghouls began to move with the crisp order of a unit on parade.
Meanwhile, Silvester—already bound for Yangpyeong on the strength of the information he had received—tilted his head and listened. He was just about to cross Yangpyeong Dam when gunfire reached him from far off. His hearing was monstrous, of course; it could just as easily have been a nearby army base running night live-fire drills.
“Given the circumstances, though, a fight has almost certainly broken out.”
He muttered the words and pressed the Land Rover’s accelerator. Unlike the Corvette Coupe he usually drove, this Land Rover was a four-wheel-drive and painfully slow—though still more than fast enough for Korean roads. In the Corvette every bump had rattled through the chassis and the wheel had constantly tried to pull free; none of that here.
A fight already? A gunfight, is it?
He kept driving toward the continuing reports—then glanced into the rearview mirror. A black trailer was coming up fast behind him. There was an old rumor that trailers had been invented for vampires to travel in, and vampires certainly favored them. In this day and age no vampire moved sealed in a coffin, so if one was going to ride in a box, better a trailer-sized one.
“Hecate?”
Sensing at once that the driver was a Ghoul, Silvester eased the Land Rover aside. The black Corvette was so tightly associated with his name that the moment he yielded the road they surged past without hesitation. He had no intention of simply letting them go. Leaving a vampire alive in front of him violated every principle he lived by.
“Well then. Shall we begin the festival?”
Silvester drew a silver Desert Eagle from inside his coat. He slid the long barrel out the window, moonlight running along its length, and squeezed the trigger. The tire blew out with a thunderclap. Trailer tires were usually the run-flat kind that could keep rolling even after a puncture, but a Desert Eagle .50 AE round punched straight through the outer casing and shredded the inner tube.
The trailer lurched. In that same instant he fired again—this time at the front tire on the far side. Shooting with an arm thrust out a car window meant a bent wrist, no proper sight picture, and having to absorb the Desert Eagle’s recoil with a single hand. All of that, however, was only a problem for ordinary people.
Another shot, and the trailer slewed hard, left the highway, and smashed into a roadside lamppost. The post tore free of the ground under the impact and toppled; the trailer went over with it. The moment the truck rolled, the trailer doors burst open and vampires poured out. They shared something of Hecate’s temperament, but with a far stronger streak of white-supremacist pack mentality—the Ireland Astate. They had only recently landed in Korea and been gathering intelligence; the false report must have drawn them in.
“Hmph.”
Silvester drove straight through, ran down a vampire dumb enough to step into the road, then hurled himself clear of the vehicle through the open window. Every one of these vampires was armed with firearms; staying inside an unarmored car would only get him killed.
“Kuh—! It’s the Jinma hunter!”
“Damn it! We never should have left the driving to a Ghoul!”
The instant they recognized Silvester, the legendary Jinma hunter, they snapped into formation. Silvester, utterly without fear, charged straight at the guns.
“Shit—!”
Still busy forming ranks, they seized their submachine guns and opened fire. In that same heartbeat Silvester flung himself sideways, clearing more than seven meters in a single bound, slipped past their flank, kicked off a roadside vendor’s pavilion post, and vaulted cleanly behind the overturned trailer.
A sound like a harp string being plucked cut the air as Silvester’s claymore came spinning in a flat arc and scythed into them. The others leapt back in time, but one was caught between choices and took the blade clean through, blood pouring from the wound.
“Gaaaah!”
“Damn it!”
As the wounded vampire screamed, Silvester stepped out of the dark and emptied dual Ingrams into them.
A stuttering roar filled the night. Two full magazines of hideously expensive Cellular Bullets later, most of the vampires who had spilled from the trailer dropped like straw dummies.
Click.
Silvester hit the magazine releases and flicked both guns outward, dumping the empties. He had fired so hard that smoke still poured from the mag wells and the air reeked of burnt powder. He slapped fresh magazines up from his belt, crossed his wrists, and reloaded in a motion as smooth as juggling. The instant the magazines seated he planted a foot on the overturned trailer’s axle and vaulted onto its side.
“Kraah!”
Vampires crouched in the field ditches saw the silver-haired priest rising against the sky, black coat flaring, and tried to flee—only to go down in a single raking burst. The power of Cellular Bullets was absolute. Even the modest 9mm of an Ingram was more than enough to put a full-grown vampire down for good.
Silvester landed lightly, silver hair streaming, caught his coat hem, and gave it a casual flick toward the sky.
A soft metallic cascade.
“Hmph.”
The spent casings still raining down snagged in the fabric and, in the next breath, gathered neatly into his hand. He bound a charm on a few field mice and left the cleanup to them, then climbed back into the Land Rover.
That was when he saw them—another string of trailers rolling up the highway behind him, headlights dark.
“Oh? So it’s an all-out match, is it?”
But once he counted more than four trucks, Silvester started the engine without another word and drove. Even a Jinma hunter had no business standing against a massed force armed to the teeth. He had finished the last group in a single clean sweep without taking a bullet; that kind of luck had limits.
“Hmm. This is getting troublesome. Better to pull out first.”
He tossed the recovered claymore onto the back seat and accelerated up the highway.