The House Always Bleeds
Shluk!
The guard's head hit the floor and rolled, and blood sprayed across the face of the man beside him.
"Oh, sh—"
The guard's hand darted for his waistband on pure reflex — but Kang Do-seok's blade moved first. Shk. Drawn like a flash of lightning, the sword's tip drove in just beneath the man's jaw, and as he wrenched it free, froth-flecked blood came sheeting down from the ruin of his throat.
"Ghhk— khhk!"
Clutching his neck with both hands, the guard staggered, cracked his head against the glass door, and collapsed. Kang Do-seok stepped over the corpse and walked inside.
Inside, the Black Table was even more lavish than the street outside. Gold light poured down over floors of black marble. Roulette and card tables filled the wide hall, giant display boards glittered along the walls, and slot machines stood ranked in gleaming rows. Beyond a half-open inner passage, a red staircase climbed toward the VIP rooms.
Alcohol and perfume, and the bite of cigarette smoke — Kang Do-seok walked through it all. A bodyguard posted just inside the entrance was the first to react.
"Hey, you—"
He never got the rest out. Kang Do-seok's sword sheared diagonally through the man's jaw — shrrk — the sound of flesh and bone splitting threading its way in between the music. His head snapped back, and a rope of blood spilled out beneath the golden lights.
"Kyaaaaagh!"
"What the hell! What the f— where'd this lunatic come from?! Guards! What are the guards doing?!"
"He's on his own! Guns out!"
"Seal the VIP passage and get a report upstairs first!"
Guards' shouts tangled with the screams of the guests. Kang Do-seok walked slowly through the middle of it all.
"If you're just here to gamble, do yourselves a favor and keep your heads down."
Bang!
A shot cracked out from the second-floor railing, a bullet screaming straight for the bridge of Kang Do-seok's nose — and without so much as turning his head, he lifted his sword.
Clang!
The round skipped off the blade and burst a ceiling light, glass shards raining down in a shower of golden sparks.
"Fire! Keep firing!"
DRRRRT!
Submachine guns spat fire over the railing. Kang Do-seok dropped low, then hurled himself across the wide-open center of the hall.
The guard on the railing went saucer-eyed as the distance evaporated in an instant.
"What the—"
Kang Do-seok's blade sheared through the man — gun barrel and all. Clank. The severed submachine gun clattered to the floor, and the guard's half-split body slumped against the railing. Kang Do-seok kicked it off.
Splat.
The corpse fell into the center of the hall, and blood burst and bloomed across the marble floor.
Patrons who'd been scrambling to their feet collapsed right back down. Some crawled under the tables; one hugged a pile of chips and pressed himself flat against the floor. A middle-aged man in a suit backed into a chair and went over it in a heap.
From the railing, Kang Do-seok looked down over the hall. Telling staff from guest wasn't difficult — the ones groveling were customers, and the ones raising guns were staff.
He jumped down.
Thud.
"Die, you—!"
The nearest bodyguard swung his gun up. One sweep of Kang Do-seok's sword — shk! — and the man's wrist and neck hit the floor together. In the same breath, more bodyguards came pouring out from the back of the hall.
"Stop him!"
"Close the VIP entrance!"
Gunfire cracked and rolled. Kang Do-seok walked into it, flicking rounds off his blade — carving the throat out of a shooter crouched behind a table, shearing the hand off a staffer gripping a radio. The edge passed through neck after neck, and severed heads went rolling across the marble.
Big Bess, manager of the Black Table, tore down a corridor, shoe heels ripping across the carpet. Behind him the main hall was still erupting with gunfire and screaming, and the guards' roars kept flooding in without pause.
[Second floor is down!]
[Mass casualties in the center of the hall... f—! Stop that son of a bitch! Stop him with your bodies if you have to!]
[Sealing the VIP passageway! Sealing the— ghk—]
"Shut it! Shut the hell up!"
Big Bess crushed the radio dead. He was the manager of the Black Table — the man who decided who was let in, who was thrown out, and whose limbs left this place as collateral. Just now, though, he was nothing more than a man gulping air and running for his life.
The bodyguard posted in front of the VIP room went wide-eyed at the sight of him.
"Manager?"
"Move!"
Big Bess shoved the man aside and flung the door open.
CRASH!
The world beyond that door was nothing like the hall. Thick soundproofed walls. Red light. Gilded tables. Rare bottles ranked along the walls. And at the center, chips stacked in mountains on the poker table.
Seated before that mountain of chips was a man. Late forties, hair cropped short and neat, chrome cyberware running up along his collarbone to the edge of his jawline. There wasn't a trace of drink in him, nor the flush of a man bleeding money. Out of that utterly blank face, dry, unremarkable eyes swept the table.
"Chief."
"Raise."
The man pushed chips forward with the tips of his metal fingers. The dealer's hands froze. Across the table, the other players swallowed hard — the chips riding on this hand alone ran into nine figures.
Big Bess shouted, his face gone the color of paper.
"Chief — sir — there's something you need to hear, right now—"
The man's eyes came around slowly. He gave Big Bess a single flat look, then turned back to the cards on the table.
"You're being loud."
He clamped a cigarette between his teeth.
"Can't you see I'm playing poker?"
"That's not it, sir, but there's a problem with the floor. Right now the staff are—"
"Call."
The man said it flatly, without a care in the world. Across from him, a player's eyebrow shifted a fraction.
"Call accepted."
The dealer laid out the next card. Big Bess hurried around to the edge of the table and bent low.
"Chief! This is no time to be playing cards!"
The man didn't answer. He studied his cards for a moment... then shoved the last of his chips in with a single push. The dealer laid down the final card.
Every gaze at the table pinned itself on him at once. Unhurried, the man turned over his hand.
A full house.
The player opposite went rigid. He swallowed, dry-mouthed, and flipped over his own cards.
Four of a kind.
The VIP room went dead silent. Dealer, players, bodyguards — nobody could manage a word. Only the winner let a single bead of cold sweat run down and a faint smile cross his face. The man across the table, who'd just stripped him of his money, spoke up.
"My, my. Looks like our Chief is taking quite a loss tonight. Haha. Though, speaking of trouble — I hear there's a problem with the floor... perhaps we ought to be calling it a night ourselves."
The man — the Police Chief of F-Sector's Tenth District — ignored him and looked down at his cards for a long moment. Then he muttered, low:
"Damn it all."
A metal finger tapped the end of the cards.
"Two billion. Bled dry in a single night."
The Police Chief leaned back against his chair, cigarette smoke drifting slowly from the corner of his mouth. It was at that exact moment that Kang Do-seok stepped into the VIP room.
KRA-BOOM!
The door exploded inward. The thick slab tore away whole and rolled across the floor, and over its wreckage walked Kang Do-seok — blood spattered across his black coat, blood still dripping from the point of the sword in his hand.
Big Bess let out a scream like a man being butchered.
"Oh, you motherf—! Shoot him! Shoot that bastard! Shoot him to pieces!!"
RATATATAT!
Every bodyguard in the room pulled the trigger at once. Muzzles flared, and a flood of rounds converged on Kang Do-seok.
He didn't so much as turn his head.
The sword moved.
KRA-KA-KA-KANG!
Bullets ricocheted off the blade. A few shattered the ceiling or buried themselves in the walls — and the rest turned around and went straight back the way they'd come.
Whump-whump-whump!
The gunners were flung backward one after another. Forehead, throat, chest — the rounds they had fired punched clean through their own bodies. The bodyguards dropped to the floor.
Big Bess, white as a corpse, staggered around toward the Police Chief.
"F— fucking hell, damn it! Chief! You need to get out of—"
Kang Do-seok punching this deep into the casino was one problem. The Black Table turning into a sea of blood over its dead guards was another.
But there was a bigger problem than either of them.
The Police Chief of the NCPD — the Netron City Police Department. The man who held all of F-Sector's Tenth District security in the palm of his hand. The reason the Black Table could be hijacked wholesale from Celnar and never once face a serious crackdown. The reason complaint records vanished somewhere in transit, dead customers got filed as missing persons, and severed limbs could be quietly buried in the collection zone's body-processing dump.
Every bit of that came down to the Police Chief.
He wasn't a customer who spent much. He was simply a customer the Black Table could not afford to lose — the VVVIP who could make their lives very, very difficult.
Big Bess's throat went bone-dry.
The Police Chief took the cigarette slowly from his mouth.
"Hmm."
He didn't look at the fallen bodyguards. Not at the blood-flecked tables, not at the shattered bottles, not at the shell casings rolling across the floor. The Chief's eyes stayed fixed on Kang Do-seok.
"Deflect the bullet and send it back to the man who fired it... is that it," he murmured. "A hired blade with a ricochet-reflect skill — a Player, then."
A thread of interest, thin as a hairline crack, crossed the Chief's expressionless face.
"You'd be Kang Do-seok. Never thought I'd run into you like this."
As he took in the face beneath all that blood, the Chief's eyes widened by slow degrees, and the corners of his mouth eased upward.
"So what brings you here?"
Kang Do-seok looked at the Chief, letting the bloody sword hang a little lower.
"Getting paid to kill people."
"Celnar send you?"
At that, Kang Do-seok's brow shifted a fraction.
"How do you know that?"
"I know how the gutter rats of this business think. All of it."
The Chief drew on his cigarette, slow and unhurried.
"Word is Celnar's got his body back. He's a man with real resources behind him — I figured he'd try something drastic. And they say he killed Sinkella, too. By hiring you."
Kang Do-seok's eyes cooled a shade. The man knew more than he'd expected — for someone who'd been getting fleeced at a poker table until a minute ago. And in the space of that thought, the Chief asked:
"There is one thing I'm curious about, though." He inhaled, and the tip of the cigarette burned red. "Kang Do-seok. Are you going to kill every employee in here?"
"Yeah."
"The guests too?"
"No."
"Well, that's convenient. My head stays where it is, then."
The Chief gave a dry snort. Kang Do-seok asked back:
"I heard a minute ago that you're the Police Chief. Planning to get in my way because you carry a badge?"
"Get in your way, you say?"
Just as the Chief's laughter rumbled out low, Big Bess cut in.
"Chief! That one doesn't listen to reason! You have to get out of here, sir!"
"Why would I."
The Police Chief reached out toward Big Bess — and laid his palm gently on the bridge of the man's nose.
Click.
The next instant, the inside of the Chief's palm split open.
Shnk!
"Urrgh—"
SCHLUNK!
A thin blade, sixty centimeters long, punched out through the back of Big Bess's skull. His eyes flew wide open. The Chief withdrew his hand, slowly.
Splurt!
Blood sprayed across the gilded table. Big Bess's face split wide open, gushing red, and then his knees buckled and he sagged.
Thud. His body crumpled to the floor, strength gone.
The Police Chief looked down at his bloodied palm. The blade folded back into his hand.
"Well, now. Filthy blood all over me. In any case — back to the matter at hand. Did you think I'd interfere with you? Not in the slightest. Why on earth would I? The moment everyone in here is dead, my debts die along with them."
He said it with a smile — and as he spoke, he plucked a poker chip off the table and hurled it at the head of the man seated across from him. The chip tore through the air with a whistle.
KRAK!Shrrk!
The player seated opposite was snapped backward along with his chair, forehead blown clean open, shards of shattered skull scattering beneath the red lights.
He had thrown nothing more than a single chip — and a man's head had come apart entirely.
The high-grade combat cyberware embedded in the Chief's arm had just vented its monstrous strength.
"Kang Do-seok. Hurry up and run every last one of these people through. That's the only way my debts disappear. Or should I lend you a hand? Hmm?"
The Police Chief looked at Kang Do-seok — and grinned.
— End of Chapter 12 —