Chapter 52: Irregular
Chapter 52: Irregular
Chae Seorin, the Discipline Knight in charge of Korea.
She was one of the strongest among the Discipline Knights.
Normally, she quietly pursued her targets through psychometry, but when a major battle broke out where life and death hung in the balance, her true worth showed.
With her strong willpower, mental attacks from blood fiends posed no real threat to her, and Chae Seorin’s offensive power—wielding bloodline abilities better than anyone—was something even bloodkin who specialized in physical enhancement couldn’t withstand.
That was why Mark, whose specialties were hypnosis and poison, was clearly several moves beneath her in raw combat power.
But he thought that if he joined forces with Yago, a user of shadows and bewitchment, they could handle Chae Seorin.
To break Seorin’s mental barrier, Mark used a confusion poison rather than a corruption poison or neurotoxin that affected the body.
It was an addictive toxin that could cloud even an elephant’s mind in an instant.
After hearing that her enemy was an insider within the organization, Chae Seorin wavered emotionally.
The mental barrier she had built shook violently, and poison and bewitchment skills bored into the gaps.
Then Chae Seorin, who had been about to rush in with her sword, flinched, quietly sat down, closed her eyes, and focused her mind.
Yago’s shadow beasts charged in, but blood mist extending from Seorin’s pores blocked them. She fought desperately to resist the enemy attacks that were burrowing into her consciousness, trying to seize her deep unconscious.
Failing to block the addictive poison Mark had scattered just now was a major mistake.
A toxin that blurred the mind was a substance that addicted the psyche, so it couldn’t be driven out easily. Because of that, it was hard for her to stop the bewitchment and hypnosis attacks from digging deeper and deeper into her unconscious.
Seorin desperately searched for a solution, but it was bleak.
“Kekeke, it’s over!”
Yago prodded Seorin here and there with shadow beasts, disrupting her focus.
Chae Seorin collapsing was only a matter of time.
“Is she really second-generation? Oh, I’m truly excited. Just imagining that I can take her powerful combat strength makes my whole body tremble!”
The huge black man spoke while literally trembling with excitement.
“Of course. That kind of power is impossible unless she’s second-generation. Even now, if the poison hadn’t landed through an ambush, the two of us wouldn’t have been able to catch that bitch. We would’ve needed at least one more. Think about it! With that level of power, doesn’t that mean she’s second-generation?”
The first-generation descendants created by the progenitor blood fiend were the Twelve Elders.
Each of them possessed a unique innate ability in a different field.
But from the second generation onward, awakening an innate ability was probabilistic.
Roughly fifty percent.
For third-generation blood fiends, the probability dropped further—only around ten percent awakened abilities.
Awakened abilities were diverse, but broadly they were categorized into mental-type, body-type, dark-type, blood-type, poison-type, transformation-type, and irregular-type.
Most Discipline Knights possessed two or more innate abilities. The Japanese Discipline Knight Abe Yago had a mental-type bewitchment ability and a dark-type shadow ability, while the American Discipline Knight Mark had a mental-type hypnosis ability and a poison-type ability.
Even having just one innate ability made you unmatched among your peers of the same generation, and those who awakened two or more abilities were treated as the highest tier even among blood fiends.
That was why it was only natural that those with two or more innate abilities became the Discipline Knights of the Elders’ Council, feared by all blood fiends.
Once you reached the fourth generation, the probability of awakening an innate ability approached nearly zero.
Most ordinary blood fiends, without innate abilities, were only superior to humans in their heightened physical capabilities.
Some young bloodkin who weren’t even a hundred years old often didn’t even know such a thing as innate abilities existed.
Among the bloodkin, there was a legend passed down for generations.
If you seized the blood of a bloodkin with an innate ability, you could inherit that power.
“Per our agreement, I drink her blood first! Yago! You remember, right?”
Mark said slyly, and Yago gave a bitter smile.
“I remember. I don’t care about that bitch’s blood—I only wish to see her get torn apart in misery!”
“Just why do you hate her so much, Mr. Yago?”
“I hate that arrogant bitch! Every time I see that expression—like she’s the best in the world all by herself—I boil over until I feel like I’m going insane!”
Bald Yago spoke with eyes glinting, and his face also gleamed with greasy shine.
Mark wondered if bloodkin could get facial oil like that, but he didn’t pursue the curiosity further.
At the motel, I burned away the narcotics and psychoactive drugs spread across all of Korea.
Among them were substances needed medically by severe patients, and I carefully distinguished those and kept them.
All drug components inside the bodies of addicts showing withdrawal evaporated completely.
I discovered that the long-term guest in Room 103 in Daejeon had a strange psychoactive substance in her body. Its molecular formula was very different from typical narcotics, but it was an extremely harmful substance that damaged the mind, so while I was at it, I burned that away too, leaving nothing behind.
I was curious what she was doing all the way in Daejeon, but I had to respect a guest’s privacy, so I cut it off.
It was when Seorin felt she couldn’t hold out any longer.
Mark’s poison that had spread throughout her body suddenly vanished, as if it had evaporated in an instant. At the same time, her mental barrier hardened in a flash, blocking the bewitchment and hypnosis attacks that had been invading her unconscious.
Seorin let her eyes go unfocused and slowly rose from her seat.
“Yes! It worked! The attack landed!”
Yago shouted in delight.
Chae Seorin, having even thrown away her sword, began shuffling toward them like a zombie.
“This is strange! My hypnosis didn’t take!”
Mark’s hypnosis could directly connect to the opponent’s consciousness, but Seorin’s consciousness didn’t link.
“Looks like the technique didn’t fully take yet! Even so, in that state, it’s over!”
Yago cackled and wrapped Seorin’s entire body with shadow beasts.
“Oh, no! Keep the promise! Her blood is mine!”
When Mark yelled, the beasts that had been about to devour Seorin’s body retreated slightly.
Mark’s mouth split wide, and two huge fangs dropped to his jaw. He hurriedly grabbed Seorin and brought his mouth to her neck.
Thunk.
Along with the sound of flesh tearing, Mark’s upper body split nearly in half.
The blood sword in Seorin’s hand had struck like lightning.
“You tricked us!”
Startled, Yago sprang backward and moved the shadow beasts surrounding Seorin.
The surrounding darkness rippled, and with snarling sounds, rushed at Seorin.
Seorin pulled her body back, picked up the sword lying on the ground, and swung.
Her blade cleaved through the shadow beasts that chased her like thick slime.
“How… did you drive out my poison? Even if the Elders become addicted to confusion poison, they can’t detox it!”
Mark asked as he restored his split upper body.
Then, green fog burst from Mark’s body and surged toward Seorin.
Seorin spun the blood streams extending from her hand and pushed Mark’s poison fog back.
With wind pressure as strong as a typhoon, the poison fog—approaching while corroding the rooftop floor—scattered into the air.
With one hand scattering Mark’s poison fog, and the other cutting through shadow beasts, Seorin charged straight at Yago.
Mark and Yago were ability users; their inherent physical abilities were ordinary—only the level of blood fiends a few hundred years old.
But in the middle of Mark’s poison fog as it dispersed, a black mist didn’t scatter and instead lunged at Seorin.
Seorin twisted her charging body, reshaped her whip-like blood cords into a sword form, and struck the black mist.
Ting!
The black mist that should have split instead deflected Seorin’s attack and transformed into a human shape that rushed in.
When Seorin confirmed the identity of the third attacker who had barged in, her expression hardened.
It was the child—the one who had called himself the nephew of the tracksuit man Seorin had killed earlier.
He had only become bloodkin a few days ago, yet he was impossibly strong.
The power to deflect Seorin’s blood sword was an innate physical-enhancement ability.
And turning into black mist was a dark-type innate ability.
A bloodkin with two or more innate abilities had combat power on the level of a Discipline Knight.
The boy sprayed a blood glow from his eyes and charged like a wild beast with both claws raised. The boy’s claws, grown to dozens of centimeters long, were sharp enough to cut through anything they caught.
“Oh ho! And what is that?”
Mark had been considering fleeing, thinking today’s fight against Chae Seorin had poor odds, but seeing a helper appear right then, he brightened.
And it was a combat-specialized blood fiend of the physical-enhancement type.
Now the odds were better.
If that newly appeared young blood fiend handled the front-line combat, while Yago and Mark supported with mental attacks and poison, they could capture even Chae Seorin.
Seorin crossed her real sword and blood sword to block the boy’s razor claws.
But perhaps she’d fallen into Yago’s bewitchment—what she thought she’d blocked, the right claw, sliced Seorin’s right arm.
Seorin snatched her severed right arm out of the air as it fell and retreated.
Pressing the arm back onto the stump and accelerating regeneration, she evaded the boy’s beastlike charge.
At the same time, her left foot began to burn away with a hissing sound. When she had stepped down, it had clearly been bare ground, but looking again, Mark’s poison fog was pooled like a puddle there.
She had been hit by Yago’s bewitchment again.
Yago’s attacks, slipping in through her mental barrier in brief instants, were as threatening as a sniper’s bullets.
And yet Seorin was enjoying it.
In the last four hundred years, there hadn’t been many fights this tense and dangerous.
The dopamine and adrenaline bursting out as she danced along the line between life and death were stimulants to her colorless life.
Feeling the thrill of battle coursing through her whole body, Seorin shot up into the air and dropped back down, dodging the boy’s attacks.
Boom!
With a deafening sound, the apartment rooftop floor punched through, and the boy—who had dropped—was slammed down into the hole.
The fight that had happened earlier in the apartment complex had been a hallucination inside Mark’s hypnotic world.
But this was real.
The apartments inside the dark complex flicked on their lights in shock at the noise, and soon after, even sirens could be heard.
“You saw the message, right? That the rules are abolished on Korean soil! Even so, is it really fine to reveal yourselves this openly?”
Seorin shook the arm she’d just reattached and asked Yago.
“Kekekeke… who could’ve imagined a day like this would come! Here in Korea, this is our bloodkin territory now!”
“But by tomorrow morning, this will hit the media! Is the Elders’ Council fine with our identity being exposed?”
“Who cares? They’ll handle it themselves! Not my problem!”
When Yago shrugged, Mark also laughed, revealing his torn-open mouth.
“I like Korea! Mark is thinking of immigrating. This land is paradise!”
Ignoring their conversation, the boy sprang up from the hole in the rooftop floor and attacked Seorin again.
His face had melted and rotted in places from Mark’s poison on the floor, but as if he had lost all reason, he charged as though he meant to kill Seorin and nothing else.
Seorin blocked the boy with her sword while observing Yago and Mark.
Mark had already spread poison anywhere he could move, and Yago kept controlling shadow beasts and continuously tried to interfere with her mind.
She was pushed back briefly by the boy’s unexpectedly strong physical power, but the combat ability of a boy who had only just become bloodkin was poor.
All he had was brute strength and fast reflexes.
It was about the level of Choi Cheolmin—the one who called her Master.
Then, along with the chop of helicopter rotors, a powerful searchlight shone down on them.
“You are surrounded. Drop all weapons and surrender!”
The police special forces issuing the warning from the helicopter confirmed the figures of four terrorists revealed in the searchlight.
A woman wielding swords in both hands was fighting a child who charged like a beast.
A short distance away, black darkness kept writhing, taking the shape of wolves and rushing at the woman, but before it could reach her, it was split apart and collapsed by something like a red whip.
Off to one side, a black man stood licking his lips, staring this way.
“What are those guys? Isn’t this a movie shoot?”
A helicopter pilot, dispatched after hearing it was terrorism, was so shocked by the movie-like scene that he radioed headquarters.
At that moment, green mist flew up from the rooftop and wrapped the helicopter.
The bodies of the people inside melted, and the police helicopter, losing its pilot, quickly lurched and then slammed into the middle of an apartment building in the adjacent block.
Boom!
With flames, the building reeled as if it might collapse.