And So the Possessor Found a Way (2)

Lately, a small rumor had been drifting through the labs of the Pentax Bio Korea Branch.

"Hey, Principal Kim in Lab 3... he's actually okay, right?"

"Why? You hear he got himself into something?"

At the center of the rumor stood Richard Kim, principal researcher of Lab 3.

"Come on, you see it too, don't you? The guy's gone weird!"

The reason was simple. From one day to the next, Richard Kim had started acting like a completely different person.

The Richard Kim the staff remembered was a textbook office nobody: few words, quietly grinding through whatever the higher-ups dumped on him, forever reading the faces above his own. He had begun as a human researcher, half-forced into the job, and then had the rotten luck to be bitten by a low-rank vampire and turned mongrel, and the picture of him cowed, wedged into some corner of the company, was still vivid.

And now?

"I was walking down the hall yesterday, yeah? You know what he did? He stuck an ice cream in my hand and just kept going!"

"Ice cream?"

"Yeah! Ice cream! He can't even eat the stuff, and out of nowhere he's going, 'You worked late. You need the sugar. Hang in there'..."

"Ice cream? With us he showed up carrying a whole armful of late-night snacks. Told us to eat and keep our strength up. Said if anything was hard, we should tell him."

"Whoa..."

The one telling it dropped his voice.

"Principal Researcher Kim. You don't think he's lost it?"

"What? What kind of talk is that?"

"No, think about it. A man who couldn't even meet your eyes before, and suddenly there's life pouring into them and he's doing all this. What could the reason even..."

"You know, maybe he took a hit, seeing Principal Park die. The two of them were pretty close, in their way."

"Oh. Yeah, that tracks. I mean... they do say if a shock's too big, you can come down with mania. Could be that, right?"

"Sigh. Poor guy..."

In a corner by the break-room vending machines, human researchers and low-rank vampires put their heads together.

In practice, Kim had become competent to an uncanny degree. It was as if someone had opened a vein and was pouring dopamine and adrenaline straight into him; every single day he was active to a grotesque extreme. Nor was that all. His shoulders had squared themselves like a blade, and even while that thin, constant smile stayed on his mouth, one corner of his gaze had sunk deep. This was a man who used to not spare his colleagues or his subordinates a glance. Now he left canned coffee and sandwiches on their desks, and whenever something jammed he took it over himself—one bizarre habit after another.

"Shh. He's coming!"

The staff shut their mouths. Right on cue, at the far end of the corridor, Richard Kim came walking in a white lab coat.

"Good morning, everyone!"

Richard Kim, smiling bright as a clear day, waving out of nowhere.

"Pace yourselves, all of you! If anything's difficult, come straight to me!"

The staff smiled awkwardly and nodded.

I know the rumors are going around.

I started scattering snacks and helping with people's work, so everyone assumes I snapped after watching Senior Park die. Someone even said it looked like end-stage depression. You know the kind. That habit suicides have of putting their affairs in order right before they go.

There's more than enough reason for me to look strange.

Call it a side effect. I, Richard Kim, had been living far too long as an outsider, and I needed to force my way closer to people, even by a method like this.

On top of that, the Pentax Bio Korea Branch had been run far too tight, perhaps because the director was a bastard turned back in the Yushin era. Pile Argentari's worship of results on top of Patrician strictness, and what did any of that look like from the bottom? ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The shittiest of shitty workplaces. The only reason the place moved at all was the whip of a reign of terror and the carrot of money. So in this miserable company, somebody had to be the lubricant. Even if that somebody was me.

In the land of the one-eyed, the two-eyed man is the monster, and in the land of the Blood Apes, a human being is the freak. I'd just have to live with people calling ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠me crazy.

It had already been a month since Senior Park burned down to ash and crumbled. In that time I had run, literally, until sweat broke on the soles of my feet. The first thing I did was prove, beyond argument, what I was worth. Restoring the refinement project for the Anti-Werebeast Neurotoxin, the one meant for delivery to Argentari headquarters, was not difficult. I wrung out the knowledge from my working years and a few dirty tricks lifted from the original lore, and thirty-six hours later something properly respectable had come out of it.

The result? Rave reviews. Headquarters went so far as to send the answer back as an official communiqué.

Director Jo Taesik hadn't merely saved his own neck. With a real result in front of him, he beamed.

"Hahaha! Principal Kim! This is all thanks to you! I knew it all along! That you were a man who could ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠do this from the very start! See? You only had to do it!"

"Haha... none of this would have been possible without your help, Director. It's all thanks to you!"

Yeah. All thanks to me. So do stay grateful, Director. Always.

Thanks to that, the word temporary came off my title, and it set for good as principal researcher. Lab 3, the one Senior Park had used, became my territory entire. Team Leader Go Jinwoo, who had been strutting around above me, watched his standing plunge straight into the floor. Naturally, the bastard's hysteria hit its peak. And a petty Blood Ape like that, once the stress piles up, always tries to vent it the ugly way.

Look at him. Right over there. Losing his goddamn mind.

A sharp crack split the air.

"Hey! You sick bastards!"

The waste-processing corridor, basement level three. Team Leader Go had his fangs bared, screaming until the sound grated. Across from him some researcher lay where the beating had dropped him, and as if that weren't enough, Go had a young woman by the collar—barely a year into the blood, a fresh newbie—and was shaking her like a rag. Shards of a broken reagent bottle littered the floor.

"Do it right! Your heads are rotten clean through! Do I have to pull a bowl of blood out of you before you come to your senses?! Huh?!"

The researcher was pale, sniffling, shaking. The newbie vampire with her collar in his fist... her nape had been raked open, and blood was running down in lines.

On any ordinary day, nobody would have been able to stop him.

Time to teach him a lesson.

I knocked his wrist aside with the corner of the folder I was carrying. A clean, hard tap.

"Team Leader Go. Let go. The staff can see."

"Huh? What!"

Team Leader Go glared at me, eyes bloodshot.

"Hey! Principal Kim! Where the hell are you sticking your nose? They pin a principal's title on a mongrel and suddenly you can't see a thing in front of you? You know this is insubordination, right? Huh?"

The old Richard Kim would have gone white, folded at the waist, and trembled. I didn't so much as twitch an eyebrow. He'd only banked a little more time than I had. From upstairs, he was a mongrel and so was I. So what?

"Come now, Team Leader. Insubordination? I only came to offer you some advice."

"Advice? This bastard thinks he's going to lecture—"

"Article 12 of the Pentax Bio operating bylaws."

At that, Team Leader Go stalled.

"Contract human staff are, in the full legal sense, company equipment and research supplies. When a problem occurs, it enters the designated review and the prescribed disciplinary procedure. Smash the supplies on a whim and drink their blood, and that is breach of trust in the course of your duties, plus the willful destruction of company assets. And you were about to drink, weren't you? Shall I file a statement of reasons with headquarters? Loss of human resources, cause: Team Leader Go Jinwoo's appetite?"

"Y-you, what the hell are you saying?! When did I ever drink anyone's—"

"Oh? Then what is that wound on Senior Researcher Yu's neck?"

"...This is, I mean, I was only going to give her a light talking-to. As her senior..."

"Team Leader. You do know Senior Researcher Yu is a duly registered member of the lower bloodline, don't you? You raked her nape. Shall I report an attempted Kin-Drinking to the headquarters audit team?"

The moment the words kin-drinking left my mouth, the color drained clean out of Team Leader Go's face.

In the society of the red moon, the weight of kin-drinking sits on a different order from murder in the human world, or even from cannibalism. A vampire can drink another vampire, raise his own rank, and grow stronger. Leave that unchecked and the whole order collapses into anarchy. So unless it follows procedure and principle, indiscriminate drinking is the taboo of taboos. And if it reached headquarters' ears? An Upper Bloodline and an execution squad would come down and tear the offender limb from limb where he stood.

I whispered it, mocking.

"Come to think of it, Lord Cornelius and the inspection team are still in Seongun City. Should I ask them for a consultation...?"

Pale now, Team Leader Go set the researcher down and turned sharply away. Brushing past, he ground the words into my ear.

"...You. You just wait, you bastard..."

"Yes, yes. I'll handle my friends' problem."

The two researchers left behind sat on the floor with their souls gone. Poor things. Still crying, crushed under the force of it. I fetched a first-aid kit and pressed a bandage to the newbie vampire's neck.

"Aigoo. You've had a rough time of it. This is hard, isn't it?"

"Y-yes? I... um... I'm okay..."

Looking at them now, the air was dead quiet, still as a mouse, and every eye was only on me. Hardly a surprise. The higher-ups spent every ordinary day grinding people down and taking bites out of them, and not long ago that Blood Ape Edward had even come through and wrecked the place. If I was going to call myself a person, I ought to do what a person does. Strictly from a personnel-management perspective.

"Everyone, listen carefully."

"...?"

I set my stance and turned on my heel, crisp.

Khh... was that line all right?

I'd turned the words over and over in my mouth, and even I had to admit it was so fucking cool. At this rate my image ought to have improved, right? Savoring the clean hit I'd landed on the team leader, I went back to my room.

Watching what happened after, I regretted it a little. What rumor had even gotten out?

Damn it. Had I stepped up for nothing?

"Principal Kim... it's, um, Team Leader keeps rejecting the equipment checklist form..."

"Bring it here. I'll route around the approval line and send it straight through to the director."

"Thank you! Oh, and this... I brought it because you drink it a lot!"

What landed on my desk with a thunk was three bottles of grapefruit Chojeong, the ordinary Korean sparkling water. They knew that, being a vampire, I couldn't eat a meal, and they'd seen me mix blood-and-soda often enough with Senior Park. In their own way, this was a sincere gift.

I've got a sense of taste anyway...

Apparently they hadn't caught me secretly running frozen meals through the microwave at night and drinking actual beverages. But this was only the beginning.

"Principal! The lime sparkling water was buy-one-get-one, so I bought some!"

"Principal Kim, have you tried this sparkling water? It's French! I ordered it once, and..."

"Um... I... I miss my parents... hhh... I'm sorry! There's nowhere else I can say it..."

Somewhere along the way, Lab 3 had become the Pentax Bio Korea Branch's bamboo forest—its anonymous confession wall—and its walk-in counseling office in one. Whenever something snagged, the human staff came scurrying in with approval papers and snacks, and the newbie mongrel vampires welled up over thirst they couldn't control, or seniors throwing their weight around. In the corner of the desk, cans of sparkling water from every brand there was stacked themselves into a pyramid.

Since when did I become your counselor...

Privately, it wasn't so bad. They weren't simply treating me like a gofer. At some point, when I offered a greeting, people returned it. A few, if I was in the break room, would even have blood drawn ahead of time and pass it over. Little by little, little by little, I was getting closer than before.

The strange reputation seemed to have reached the other departments too.

"Word's thick around the institute these days. They say Principal Kim's going around appointing himself a windbreak for the people under him."

Two in the morning, on the underground emergency stair. Chief Choi, who ran security, let out a long ribbon of cigarette smoke.

A few months back he had cleared away the ashes of Senior Park and his family with his own hands, and he still hadn't climbed out of that shock, so starting a conversation had been awkward. Getting closer, though, had been easy.

"A windbreak? The way this lab runs is a mess, so I straightened a few things out."

I let out a short laugh and held out a blood-and-soda.

"Here, have a glass. The staff keep bringing the stuff like tribute. I'm drowning in sparkling water."

Chief Choi took the tumbler, swallowed a mouthful, sighed, and stared at the ceiling.

"...Hah. It bites. Principal Park taught you this, didn't he? That man had more heart than was any use to him. Always looking after other people."

"He did. He was a good man."

A silence passed.

Chief Choi turned the tumbler in his hands and stole a look at me.

"...Why'd you ask about the Sector 3 sensor sensitivity?"

"Ah, that spot's a blind angle, but the sensor's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠too touchy. I was thinking of quietly dropping that zone's sensitivity by twenty percent from the Lab 3 terminal. Then if you sneak a cigarette on the emergency stair during patrol, the alarm won't go off."

Chief Choi let out a short bark of a laugh and tapped my shoulder.

"Your sense for this is something else... thanks, Principal Kim."

He ground the cigarette butt out on the floor and added, low.

"I've got eyes too. I can roughly guess that while you're looking after the staff these days, you're quietly getting something ready. I won't ask."

"...Hahaha. I don't know what you mean."

"...If you've got a door to open at night, or you need to slip out the emergency gate quiet, tell me ahead of time. I'll handle the duty log and the CCTV myself."

Good. This one's cracked.

Next, IT.

I went to Supervisor Han, hollow-eyed from running the backups by hand every night. The director's conviction that a vampire's manual labor was more accurate than an Excel function had infected the computing room as well.

"Oh? Principal Researcher Kim. What brings you here?"

"You've looked tired lately. Why don't you try this?"

The supervisor checked what was inside, and his eyes went round. It was a twenty-line automation macro, written in Python.

"P-Principal Kim...! You can write code too?"

"Haha. Picked up a little."

Funny thing. Turned out I could. I even put the lab's local LLM to work on it, and it was doable.

I, Richard Kim, could do anything!

"I'd heard you were helping the other researchers, but I didn't think you'd look after me as well..."

"Ah, come on. We're all one family. We help each other and live. More to the point..."

I made the request simply. Supervisor Han glanced around, then spoke quietly, into my ear.

"Oh? That's nothing difficult. The research logs, then—I'll take a look at those later. And..."

Supervisor Han raised his head.

"I... I think what happened to Researcher Park Jinseok was wrong, too. You're doing this because of him, aren't you?"

"What?"

This guy had just come in on a completely different beat.

"Honestly... I feel ashamed that I had a hand in erasing the research Principal Researcher Park was doing. I don't even know what was so terrible about it, and they ordered us to wipe every bit of it, no questions..."

Awkward as he was, Supervisor Han kept going.

"It isn't much, but if you tell me when you need something later, I'll help however I can!"

"That suits me just fine!"

This man had swallowed the rumor whole. He thought I'd gone off the rails because Senior Park died? Well. Half of that was true. I'd just opened my eyes—to reality.

Anyway, the institute's working lines were drawing closer to me, bit by bit.

Aside from a few obstacles.

Why the hell is that Blood Ape Edward still in Korea?

The lunatic noble who called himself pureblood—he wasn't—still hadn't left the country. For over two months he had been shut up in a hotel penthouse facing Central Park in Seongun City, his personal guard and the inspection team with him.

Had he suddenly gotten a craving to drink some Korean idol's blood? Khh. Glorious K-Blood! The pride of Korea, enough to drive even a British-made vampire out of his mind!

A normal inspection wrapped in three days, and the rule was that you went back to headquarters. So why wasn't he going?

From what I hear, he's stirring up every Patrician branch while he's at it...

Come all this way, might as well tighten the discipline? But so long as he stayed, I couldn't have been more uneasy. If he walked into the institute without warning, laid Blood Domination on me, and ordered me to cough up everything I knew, I'd be finished. No way around it.

There was a bigger obstacle, too.

"Hahaha! Principal Researcher Kim! Why would you ask me a thing that specialized?"

That was the reaction I got when I went to Senior Researcher Kang, the institute's only specialist in Blood Art, and a mongrel vampire himself.

"If I'd been a mudang back when I was human, maybe. Magic? Ha—does a Korean shaman even count as a shaman?"

Senior Researcher Kang laughed at his own joke, a big rolling laugh.

"They bit me, a Stigma manifested, and of course they dumped me here. I can sift the dregs of folk ritual, stick a few needles in to help the blood move... the Sunlight Curse? Don't really know that one. Nobody taught me, either."

Senior Researcher Kang smiled, bitter, sorry he hadn't been any help.

I'm gonna lose it.

The only ritual specialist inside Pentax was a back-alley quack.

That was where my research stalled. What good was it to build a perfect protein structure on the Gamma Band, if I couldn't spoof the Sunlight Curse nailed into the soul? Vampire treatment had to proceed as cocktail therapy. The way you throw every liquor into one shaker and dump the lot, you had to strike every symptom and every cause at once.

Inside these walls, there was no mage who could join that curse to the science.

What do I do?

I paged through the setting bible in my head—the notebook itself I had destroyed, in case that bastard Edward came again.

Let's see. A mage in Korea I could contact right away...

Ah. There was one. And very close by.

Hecate.

Ally to the hunter protagonist, and the witch who joined the research into overcoming sunlight in the latter half of the novel, only to be caught in a bombing. And the shop she ran was in Seongun City, right now.

Looked like I was going to have to step outside.