Safety Distance Violation
“Ugh….”
If he had squeezed just a little harder, the man would have been left unable to hold chopsticks for the rest of his life.
“Use that for your medical bills. Well then—good luck!”
Chang-hyun delivered the line with deliberate menace, then vaulted down onto the platform with Jeong-ah. They stepped straight onto the approaching Euljiro Circle Line train.
“Wh-what the hell are those bastards?!”
The public-service worker spat out a string of curses that violated every regulation in the handbook and hauled his colleague upright. Passing out right at quitting time—he could only conclude his luck had completely gone to hell.
The moment they boarded, Chang-hyun and Jeong-ah dug into the plastic bag and pulled out the sandwiches. Chang-hyun tore into his without a shred of shame, but Jeong-ah could not bring herself to do the same under so many watching eyes. Imagine it—a grown young woman in already shabby clothes, eating right out in the open. Who would show that so easily?
“Honestly… how did you even survive two years like this?”
Chang-hyun said it with a mild scolding tone, then cracked open a milk carton and poured the contents down his throat so he could swallow the rest. It was not a meal for pleasure; it was pure survival. Still, hunger is the best sauce—afterward a fierce, relative satisfaction settled over him.
“Hoo… finally starting to feel human again.”
He muttered the words and swung the backpack onto his shoulders once more. Inside were spare clothes, underwear, and every other necessity he had crammed in. Buying those supplies had delayed them just long enough for the hunters to catch up.
“Um… are you all right? Where should we get off?”
“Hard to say. No idea if they’re still tailing us.”
Even a vampire’s exceptional hearing could not isolate a few voices among the thousands packed into a subway car. And if the hunters had simply boarded the train behind them… there was no way to know.
“Crazy bastards. What the hell is wrong with kids these days!”
An old man who had been staring at Chang-hyun and Jeong-ah suddenly raised his voice. At first they wondered who he was talking about; a second later it was obvious the tirade was aimed at them.
“A couple of punks pairing up without a scrap of shame! This is a public place, you hear me? That’s right! Not some damn love nest for bastards to make out in!”
He sat planted on the subway seat and began a full-throated lament of how terribly he had been wronged, utterly indifferent to the cold stares around him. His flushed face suggested he had been drinking hard; the rant had no logic left in it. Why did the simple act of two people eating and catching their breath automatically count as a breach of public order? And why did his own loud condemnation somehow not count as a nuisance to everyone else?
Chang-hyun felt his stomach twist, yet Korea was still the Eastern land of propriety; the principle that the old must be respected was rooted deep. Even when the younger party was in the right, raising one’s voice against an elder was simply not done.
“What should we do?”
“We move.”
Chang-hyun said it and started past the priority seats toward the next car. The old man sneered after them.
“Ugh, look at those manners.”
“…….”
Chang-hyun swallowed it down again, reminding himself they were already being hunted by vampire hunters. Once the connecting door closed it would be quieter. He stepped through and shut it firmly behind them.
“Honestly, I wonder if their mothers even ate the seaweed soup after giving birth to trash like that.”
The old man’s personal attacks were climbing to an unbearable pitch. The type who ground people down without reason, then the moment anyone pushed back would start screaming about how the young punk dared glare at him. He might as well have tattooed his national ID card across his forehead. Watching an elder thrash about as if age itself entitled him to every privilege, Chang-hyun felt hatred flare hot.
“Ah!”
Cool fingertips brushed his forehead. Jeong-ah was looking at him.
“Stop. What matters more is how we deal with those trackers.”
“I think we’ve shaken them for now.”
“No—we don’t show up on a Bloodstone Pendulum. So how did they know where we were and come after us?”
“W-well…?”
Chang-hyun blinked, thrown by the question she had turned back on him.
“I don’t know what it is, but they must have their own tracking method. And that method will keep following us.”
“Then just running forever won’t solve anything, will it?”
Chang-hyun had seen enough of the hunters’ cruelty to know how tenacious they could be. He still did not fully understand what vampire blood was used for, but eternal life and raw physical enhancement alone made it more than valuable enough.
“Could it be the same guy who attacked us on the motorcycle?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. There were so many of them.”
She looked straight at him.
“Really… what are we going to do?”
“We ride this line until the trains stop.”
“……Then we’ll end up at the depot.”
“Hmm… then we get off at Samsung Station.”
If the enemy understood their pattern, they might already be waiting in ambush at the depot. Of course that only held if the hunters truly possessed a reliable way to track Jinma.
“Ugh…….”
Even standing still, his heart hammered. Chang-hyun had just stormed a gangsters’ office, yet this was an entirely different scale. Gangsters still had enough sense not to open fire in the middle of Seoul; these people did not. The moment the crowd thinned, they would use any weapon without hesitation. Facing even one of those monsters had been hard enough—now they were coming in double digits.
Chang-hyun thought of Han Se-gun and shuddered. Becoming a vampire had given him a powerful body, yet if four or five men like Han Se-gun showed up, the headache would be the least of his worries. His life would be on the line.
Jinma Phantom, returning to his hotel after settling matters with Zein, noticed a string of suspicious vehicles. A Humvee that looked like a lead car raced ahead; the rest packed tightly behind it, denying any other traffic the chance to approach.
“Safety distance violation, no question.”
He muttered the observation and pulled his own car forward. Then the scent of firearms hit him. Smell was a sense Phantom preferred to keep dormant—activating it meant drowning in every foul odor the city produced. Right now he had no choice. Even without trying, the reek of vampire blood was already stabbing his nose.
“Damn. Alchemists?”
Jinma rarely bothered to remember the names of hunters. In that respect Sarhyuk could take some pride. Phantom continued along Olympic Boulevard, then cut off onto a side route. Even if they were hunters, there was no need for him to confront them personally. Yet Sarhyuk’s convoy, as if by prior arrangement, swung in behind Phantom’s Viper.
“Huh? What’s this? Looking for a fight?”
In that instant Phantom’s irritation overshot disbelief and turned into genuine anger. He had politely given way because they were still human, and instead they were picking a fight with him. Even a Jinma of his relatively mild temperament could not swallow that level of disrespect. Rumors about the alchemists had always been ugly; if the other side was offering a free slap while he was already in a foul mood, so much the better.
Meanwhile Sarhyuk was burning through his own stamina, continuously working the blood-location tracking rite through his feng shui board. The problem was that he himself had forgotten far too much of Seoul’s subway map. In the years he had been away from Korea, countless new sections had opened, and there were any number of other ways to move around the city. Factor in the inability to simply shove firearms in people’s faces, and there was no clean way to catch their quarry until the crowds thinned and the trains stopped for the night.
“How long until the last train?”
“About forty minutes left.”
“Should we just wait at the depot?”
“No way. They’re not that stupid.”
The moment the words left the subordinate’s mouth, Sarhyuk punched the seat beside him. It had sounded exactly like the man was calling him an idiot for even suggesting it. Of course the speaker had not meant it that way…
“Damn it. Forget this. You drive. These bastards keep moving, and now something else is tailing us.”
“Ugh… yes, sir. But what do you mean, something else?”
“That, for example.”
He pointed at the red Viper reflected in the side mirror. Everyone in the car went rigid. From the information already on the finder it was easy to know who owned it. A red Viper GTS—the personal car Jinma Phantom used while staying in Korea.
“W-what do we do?”
“Phantom wouldn’t just attack us out of nowhere. Even if ordinary humans can’t register the sound of Jinma gunfire, this is still the middle of the road.”
At that exact moment the road curved. Phantom accelerated ahead and took a right; they had no choice but to follow.
“Shit.”
He hated being misunderstood, but he was going after him anyway. Sarhyuk floored it. The rest of the convoy followed in a hesitant, nervous pack. Hunting Jinma Jeong-ya was one thing; Jinma Phantom was another level of frightening.
“If Phantom actually steps in, we’re in real trouble. Nothing says he doesn’t want Jeong-ya for himself either.”
“You think I’m handing food over to a vampire? We’re going!”
A right turn at the southern end of Dongho Bridge… Seolleung Station? Yeoksam? Or maybe they were transferring to another line entirely. But with only forty minutes until the trains stopped, the quarry would have to head somewhere that stayed crowded even at night. The problem was that this whole district was nothing but places like that. This was Gangnam—there was a reason the annual sales of a single Gangnam room salon hit thirty billion won.