The Possessor Has Completely Lost His Mind (4)
I pulled a can of coffee from the vending machine and knocked it back in one swallow.
"Hahh! That's the stuff!"
Sweet. Bitter. The bittersweet smell of cheap beans and condensed milk wrapped my tongue, and I could have cried. Back when I was human this was nothing but ordinary cut-rate canned coffee—a dollar can I wouldn't have glanced at—and now it was sweeter than any dessert in the world.
"Heh heh heh...! It's real! It's coffee! This is the taste of coffee...!"
Across from me, Senior Park sat hunched over, cradling the can in both hands as if he were handling the Buddha's own relics.
"How long has it been...? And this isn't even blood..."
"Senior, wipe your tears. Get them in the can and it'll go salty."
"That's what I'm saying, man! I'd get to taste salt! I want to taste salt, even just once. I mean it!"
We crouched in a corner of the empty emergency stairwell at dawn, sipping canned coffee. A cheap little sensation that would be over in thirty minutes—but a miracle all the same, on tongues that only a few days ago had known nothing but grains of sand and candle wax.
"I swear, those Pentax bastards really ought to be reported to the human rights commission. Look at this. A vending machine we can't even use. They say it's for the human employees, but there's a limit to how far you take hope-torture!"
Park seemed to agree. He nodded and tapped one of the machine's buttons.
"You're telling me. Nothing but a picture of a meal. Aside from this damn sparkling water—the buck-fifty bottle—there wasn't a single thing worth pulling. How bad do you think it got? Why else was I cutting soda into blood and stirring in spicy chicken sauce?"
"Come on, that was the right call. If it hadn't been for that, I'd never have thought of restoring taste. Half the credit is yours, Principal Park!"
I met his eyes, and we snickered.
"Ah, the coffee's got me hungry all of a sudden. What should we eat next? Without getting caught... how about chicken?"
"Don't even start. And what are we supposed to say about the smell? We have to think about the other researchers and the guards, not just us."
"We give them the drug and bring them in with us. Think they'd go for it?"
At that, Principal Park's face lit up, and the words came pouring out.
"Hey! That's good. See, this is why I say the junior's young—the gears just spin! And think about it. The vampires here? There's nobody but people like you and me, only a few years since we joined the bloodline. Let them taste cola and they'll lose their minds."
Hearing it laid out, it sounded like a pretty decent idea. Rope in a few people worth trusting and bring them along. I'd have to work that into the plan later.
"Anyway, congratulations, Senior! At this rate you'll get to see your wife again. Even eat a home-cooked meal."
Park snorted at the joke and waved me off.
"Oh, don't even. You'd have to actually eat my wife's cooking. It's criminally bad."
"What? Come on, you're just saying that."
"I'm serious, you punk! She grew up pampered in a good family, so she could barely handle a knife. You know what she used to pull back when we were dating, every time she decided to cook for me? Slice apples into the soybean-paste stew. Dump sugar into the seaweed soup. I'm telling you, I ate that stuff while we were going out and nearly got hauled to the ER. I don't know—maybe being a gyopo left you with some fairy tale about Korean home cooking, but it is not that. Absolutely not!"
"Then if it tastes that bad, why do you want to eat it?"
The voice that had been laughing so playfully slowly sank.
"...Yeah. That's what I keep saying. It really was criminally bad, you know?"
He turned the dented can over in his hands and stopped talking.
"And then I started missing it."
His eyes, fixed on empty air, trembled.
"Not even boiled right, buried in salt, the anchovies not even gutted—that bitter, briny soybean-paste stew... and one day I wanted it so badly I couldn't stand it. The second I said it tasted even a little bad, my wife would go on and on in that whining voice of hers, and I wanted to hear it. I really did."
Somewhere in there, he had started sniffling.
"Researcher Kim. I really... I don't want much. I just want to sit at the table with that awful stew, look at my daughter's face once, and eat a meal together. That's all."
At the sight of him I stopped the words I'd been about to say and rolled them around in my mouth. What was I supposed to offer, to comfort a baby-faced fortysomething feeling all of that?
The best thing I could.
"...You'll get to eat it."
"Huh?"
"The dose only lasts thirty minutes right now. Once we lock in how to stabilize it, you can hold for half a day without a problem. Senior—if this works, what about slipping over to the house after work? See your daughter's face. Eat the stew your wife makes, and come back."
"W-wait a second. You think that would work? Even the letters only go out because that director bastard barely allows them..."
"If this lycanthrope neurotoxin case just goes well, don't you think they might permit it, even once?"
The rules of the Masquerade the vampires had built were strict, but only insofar as they kept anyone from exposing what they were. Manage the bloodthirst well, and if it was a matter of the night, moving around to some degree was no real problem. Our institute was simply the strange one. Maybe it really was possible.
"Let's give it a shot! Researcher Kim! You're my savior, you really are! I'll pay you back somehow, I swear!"
"Pay me back? I don't need that. Just buy me chicken. Fried."
"Fried's going to cover it? Something expensive! The really expensive stuff! They've got all that Golden Prinkle business these days, don't they? I'll buy you every last one!"
Park cackled and crushed the empty can. We headed down the stairs, savoring the cheap coffee still lingering on our lips.
Four days later. Noon.
A frantic voice burst from the speakers in the pitch-black lab.
The researchers sorting paperwork lifted their heads, faces blank.
"What's going on? Doesn't look like a hunter raid..."
One of the staff shouted.
"An inspector from headquarters! Surprise inspection! Don't ask—just run!"
Vampire researchers and enslaved human researchers jumbled together and flooded toward the first floor. I followed Senior Park down the stairs, grumbling to myself.
An inspection, out of nowhere?
It had to be someone the Patricians had sent. But why, of all times, come crawling in with the noon sun blazing, just to raise hell...
The stray thought vanished the moment my foot hit the main lobby.
"...!"
An invisible rope cinched my throat. Every breath I drew pressed my lungs cold and flat. The other lower-vampire employees were already there, every last one of them, knees to the floor and faces down. Thud—and somewhere in the middle of it, I was on my knees too.
So this is the power of an Upper Bloodline?
A pressure I absolutely could not throw off bound me tight. Senior Park was already trembling, forehead bowed to the floor. The moment I forced my head up, I jolted a second time.
"Discipline has fallen to the floor. You babied the hybrids and turned them loose, and now you've soaked yourselves in the Argentari's vulgar tastes."
At the center of the lobby a man stood bolt upright in a tailcoat, brown hair combed into a neat slicked-back sweep. The red rose brooch on his chest flashed.
...Edward Cornelius?
Shit. Why was that monster here?
In The Bloodfall Annals he doesn't come down to Seongun City until half a year from now, playing Governor-General of Joseon and tearing the city apart. The setup was that he'd been dispatched because of the hunter protagonist's exploits. That was how it was supposed to go... A butterfly effect?
At Edward's feet, the director of Pentax Bio's Korean branch and our team lead had their foreheads ground into the marble, shaking.
"Director. Did you fail to understand Us? Answer."
Edward had opened his mouth. It was a low, soft, mid-range voice—and at that single sentence, every breath in the lobby stopped at once.
"F-forgive me, Your Excellency! If anything was lacking, I will correct it at once...!"
"Correct it? Yes. Of course it must be corrected."
Edward flicked the fingers of his leather glove. With a ding, the elevator doors opened. From the underground parking garage, maybe. Two soldiers in black body armor dragged something in.
"Hkk—!"
A shredded breath tore out of Senior Park, face-down beside me.
The soldiers flung two rope-bound figures roughly onto the floor. A middle-aged woman with a gag in her mouth. And a little girl, shaking all over with terror. I knew those two. The mother and daughter from the photograph Senior Park kept so carefully against his chest.
"H-honey...! Euna...!"
Park screamed. As if they had been waiting, soldiers behind him seized his shoulders, hauled him forward, and drove him down in front of Edward.
"Director. I have obtained something interesting. What is this?"
Edward gestured, and a subordinate behind him produced several letters. Park's face, white to begin with, lost every trace of life, like a plaster bust.
"You sent letters, did you? My, my. You accepted the bloodline's grace and received eternal life... and still you could not cut the ties of the past, playing house with livestock? Director. Why did you leave this be? Is it not a violation of the Masquerade's rules? Why did you neglect it?"
The director, forehead planted on the floor, jerked his head up, the color gone from his face.
"Y-Your Excellency! I know nothing of this! I only told him to pass along a greeting now and then, and he abused my goodwill behind my back..."
"D-Director! What is this?! You gave permission! Sending living expenses, looking from a distance once a year—you allowed it! You said this much was permitted under the rules! I—I..."
"The bug talks too much."
Edward did not so much as twitch an eyebrow. A moment later his eyes went red. A crimson force rose off the floor, wound around Senior Park's body, and crushed him harder still.
"I am the rules. Therefore, from this moment, this is a violation. Hybrid."
Damn it. Blood Domination. The binding an Upper Bloodline lays upon a lower vampire, absolute, with no refusing it.
"But, hybrid. From what I hear, you occupy a rather important post in this institute. So. I shall grant you a chance to repent."
"Repent... yes! I will! I'll do anything! So please..."
"Anything, you say? How devoted."
Edward smiled. In that instant, I understood.
That—that son of a bitch! Don't tell me—!
Senior Park's body creaked and rose. The vacant look on his face said the movement had nothing to do with his will.
"Come. Dispose of the past with your own hands."
Edward pointed at Park's family as he declared it.
"...What? I—what do you mean by that... that's..."
To the senior who still had not grasped it, Edward smiled, wicked.
"...Repent the sin of staining the bloodline's honor, and be reborn a true subject of the night."
Only then did Park understand, and he screamed.
"No! Please! I was wrong! Anything but this!"
Even as he wailed, he dragged legs corded with standing veins and, against his own will, took one step after another toward his bound wife and daughter.
"H-honey...? Is that you...?"
The woman spoke. The little girl lifted her head. Kindergarten age, she looked at Senior Park with an innocent face.
"Uh... Dad?"
"Ah—Euna. No. No! Please—"
Park's scream corked itself back down his throat. His pupils lost their focus. Veins flooded the whole of his eyes, his lips peeled back, and sharp fangs flashed.
Edward whispered.
I clenched my teeth and lowered my head. I didn't have it in me to watch any more.
A tearing noise rang through the center of the lobby. Screams, sobbing, shrieks. Why was it taking so long. God damn it. The sound thinned until only a choking wheeze went on, and soon that stopped too. For a while nothing but a grotesque wet sucking, the sound of something being chewed, bored into my ears—and then that, too, went quiet.
God.
I opened my eyes.
Principal Researcher Park Jinseok sat collapsed, blood soaking him from the corner of his mouth down over his whole body.
"At last the useless residue has been cleared away. The tidying is finished, so return to your duties."
Edward was turning away, indifferent—when a blade-cold killing intent flashed in the eyes of the senior who had been sprawled there like a corpse.
"Uu—aaaaaaaah!!"
Park kicked off the floor and launched himself. At Edward? Surely not.
Are you insane?! Senior! Stop!
No. Where Senior Park was headed was right there beside them: the window, its thick blackout blinds holding the sunlight back.
"Stop him!"
The guards shouted, but they were too late. Park ripped the blinds down and hammered the black-painted glass with his fists. Shards sprayed in every direction, and with a shattering crash, murderous noon sunlight poured into the lobby.
"Run!"
"Get clear! Fall back!"
Dozens of vampires in the hall screamed and flung themselves into the shadows—and in that same instant, the moment the light touched him, Senior Park ignited as if he had exploded. Not a single scream. A mass of fire, he came staggering forward. The burning mass gathered the two corpses off the floor into arms that were already coming apart, and clutched them tight. Flame swallowed the family whole.
How long passed, I couldn't say. The fire died down, and wind through the broken glass scattered the ash. In all that chaos, one man alone stood without a twitch.
"Tsk. I gave him a chance to repent... A hybrid is a hybrid, after all."
Edward brushed the ash from his sleeve. He stood at the very edge of the sunlight spilling from the broken window, and he was comparatively intact. His skin had flushed a little red, and a faint smoke was rising off his body. That was all. Damn it. So this was the weight class of an Upper Bloodline.
Edward wrinkled his nose and walked into the shadow. An alarm rang, and a shutter dropped over the broken window, cutting off the sun.
"Clean this up at once. Then guide me to that hybrid's station. I intend to comb through every contaminated notion he was harboring."
"Y-yes! Your Excellency, this way!"
The director rose as if crawling and led the way. A short while later, researchers stood lined along the laboratory wall, backs pressed flat to it. Not one of them could so much as breathe aloud. Every head hung.
Edward's subordinate struck the keyboard.
"Your Excellency... there was a deleted log. When we restored it, we found unauthenticated research data. Concerning 'restoration of taste nerves and sensory bypass.'"
Edward's brow creased.
"Taste?"
"Yes. It appears to be compound modeling meant to let one taste food as in one's human days. It seems to have been conducted as an independent study..."
My name didn't come up. Gamma Band access had belonged to the senior.
"Taste? A subject of the Red Moon, remodeling his body because he wishes to swallow livestock feed?"
Edward let out an empty laugh, as if he could not believe it.
"Delete all of it. A noble of the Red Moon has no need of impure notions of that sort."
The director bastard carried out the order. I stared, eyes wide.
It was disappearing. The effort Senior Park had stacked up across years.
All that long, long time of ours.
Every hope we had completed, only days ago. One press of the enter key, and it was erased without a trace.
Edward left the lab without a backward glance, as if the fun had been spoiled.
Half a day later, the institute had gone back to the way it was, as if nothing had happened. The broken window was restored. The ash and what remained of them had long since been cleared away by the cleaning staff.
I used a gap when no one was around and went to a corner of the lobby. It was nothing but clean marble—and still, to me, it felt as if a family were standing there.
"Ha ha ha..."
I laughed. I learned that when the shock is great enough, a person can laugh. All at once, the questions scattered through my head snapped into place, sharp and clear.
Now I understood.
Why the hunters in the original novel had gone around with their eyes rolled back, cutting vampires' throats. Why the protagonist had made his own body into a demon on a countdown and fought while burning himself down on a hatred that vicious—and why so many orders and secret organizations had refused even to talk, and tried to burn these monsters. Why the elders and the noble vampires in the novel were, every one of them, called psychopaths.
Only now did I understand it perfectly, down to the bone. Those things are not living beings you can reason with. They have only pulled on human skin. Loathsome parasites that keep themselves alive by feeding on someone else's pain!
And then it clicked. Why, late in the novel, the elders had erased the attempt at a Sunlight Drug by blowing up the institute along with it. And why, even with annihilation at their throats, they had screamed about the purity of blood and chosen nuclear war—mutual ruin with all of humanity.
Those bastards don't want the world to get any better.
Because they have to be the center of the world, they'll stamp out every change that steps even a little outside their frame. I had been too naive. Escape being a eunuch and eat some chicken? In a world with things like these, a modest happiness like that was never going to be allowed in the first place.
Suddenly I remembered a game from my previous life. Malignant users who refused any change and frothed at the mouth to protect their own rice bowl, whether the game died or not. People called them monkeys. No different from those users—so these bastards were monkeys too.
No. Blood Apes, mad on blood!
I stared at the marble floor.
"Park Jinseok... I'll remember all of it."
That bastard Edward must have thought deleting the data would be the end of it. But too bad. Every last one of those molecular structures—the truth of this whole world—was carved into my head, vivid as a scar.
This sickening world of medieval fascists. A rotten world that looks at humans as livestock, works its own kind as slaves, and demands that everyone live locked inside eternal dark. Stay still, and those monsters will choose annihilation right alongside humanity anyway. They'll see to it.
Fine. If dying where I sit and dying on my feet come out the same...
Then let's see this through. All the way.
You insane Blood Ape bastards.
This fucked-up world of the Red Moon.
I will set all of it right.
