Chapter 5 :

<5>

"So. You’re saying you want to become an exorcist?"

Sylvester asked that, sinking his body into the sofa and lifting his chin. As for Se-geon, he still could not give a definite answer.

But if there had been no such reason or purpose, he would not have wanted to listen to an explanation about this incident while getting beaten by Sylvester for no reason. So Se-geon nodded.

"Yes."

"Pathetic."

Sylvester immediately started with criticism. At that, the woman who introduced herself as Kim Seong-hee smiled as she cleared away the teacups.

"You should explain the circumstances first, Sylvie."

"Sylvie?"

When Se-geon muttered the name after her, she laughed and lightly patted his shoulder.

"The name Sylvester is too long and I don’t like it. Besides, that’s his baptismal name."

"So you really were a Catholic priest?"

Se-geon said that and surprised himself. Perhaps because it rubbed him the wrong way, Sylvester brushed his hair back and answered with a cold expression.

"Don’t worry about that. I was excommunicated a long time ago. More importantly, if I explain the situation, I’ll need to erase your memories afterward. Will you agree?"

"What?"

Se-geon asked back in surprise at the words about erasing his memories. But perhaps it was taken as consent, because Sylvester looked at the middle-aged man beside him and grabbed his arm.

"Then watch carefully, you bastard. See what a human has to give up in order to stand against the power of darkness."

"But!"

The middle-aged man looked at Se-geon and grew flustered. It was obvious that he was trying to hide something, but Sylvester brushed aside his concern and rolled up the sleeve that was covering his arm. Then a thick, heavily trained, muscular arm was revealed, covered with countless injection marks.

Se-geon stared at the arm in shock. Although he knew nothing about such things, he knew from movies what those marks meant. They were traces of syringes.

"Do you know why I had to get so many injections?"

"I… I don’t know."

"Drugs."

Sylvester said that and shrugged his shoulders.

"Fighting monsters isn’t something humans are meant to do. You experienced it too, right? A vampire can shatter a person’s bones and tear muscles apart in an instant. How are you supposed to fight something like that?"

"……."

"Pain makes humans shrink back. And pain in close combat means death. Anesthetics, which are commonly used to remove pain, relax the muscles and make you unable to use your strength. So what’s left is drugs. Right?"

Sylvester turned to the middle-aged man in the black beret and asked. For a man who had served in the special forces, it must have been extremely shameful, but it was a fact he could not deny.

"Yes. That’s absolutely right."

"It’s insane to fight monsters while injecting drugs into yourself. If you make even a small mistake, you’ll end up becoming one of them. Does that really look appealing to you? Once you step into this world, you can never go back to the other side. Once you tread on the darkness of the night, you can never return to reality. Do you think a kid like you really needs to do something like that?"

He said that and stood up from his seat. Se-geon lowered his head, unable to say anything. Fighting monsters while injecting drugs was something Se-geon, who had grown up in Korea where drugs were strictly condemned, found extremely hard to accept.

His hostility toward monsters was still boiling, but Sylvester’s persuasion was powerful enough to pour cold water over that hostility.

"Th- then… could you give me some time to think about it?"

"As much as you want. But if you go around carelessly telling other people about this, be prepared to see your family. The only things you’ll gain by spreading what you’ve learned about us are the title of a lunatic, and a bullet lodged in your head."

Vroooom!

In the end, Se-geon decided to think about it and disappeared on his motorcycle. The middle-aged man watched Se-geon’s back through the shop window.

"It’s about time customers start coming in. Could you two move out of the way?"

Kim Seong-hee asked Sylvester and the retired soldier to leave. As the owner of this shop, she needed to care about her sales. Sylvester, seemingly willing to comply, walked toward the entrance wearing a shirt with Snoopy on it.

"Let’s do that."

"Hey, Sylvester."

At that moment, the middle-aged man stopped Sylvester. Perhaps because he had shown Se-geon the arm he had been injecting drugs into, he was trembling with anxiety.

Even if Se-geon talked about vampires and monsters and got treated like a madman, that was a different matter from being a habitual drug user. And yet Sylvester had let the boy go without erasing his memories.

"Why did you just let that kid go? You might be fine, but as a habitual user, I’m going to have quite a headache."

"Well. You’re running a ‘vampire business’ like this yourself, so there’s no reason the kid can’t do the same. That’s all. If you’re really worried, handle it on your own. Besides, that kid still has a place to settle down in reality."

"And if that disappears? If he comes looking for us, what will you do then?"

The retired middle-aged soldier asked that to the silver-haired foreigner who looked to be in his early twenties. The silver-haired foreigner, Sylvester, fell into thought for a moment and then answered cheerfully.

"That’s something to think about when the time comes."

* * *

Se-geon wandered through nightmares.

In the darkness of the night, blood dripped down in scattered drops, and a vampire walking the streets was suffering from an immense thirst.

The remaining part of the truth that Se-geon had not seen was rising up in his dreams. He wandered through the darkness and entered an alley.

The uphill road Se-geon knew well, and above it, the luxurious detached residential area where Se-geon’s house stood. The pain of having his vital organs torn and his torso pierced was burning his throat with a thirst equal to that pain. He felt like he would collapse at any moment, but the powerful vitality brought by the curse was prolonging his suffering.

Perhaps this pain and thirst were the very essence of the curse, a rather abstract thought brushed past the vampire’s mind.

"Huff… huff…"

He breathed roughly and looked around.

All that was reflected in his rolling eyes as he searched for a victim were tightly closed buildings. There were hardly any living beings around. Fortunately, many homes were empty. Perhaps it was because of the economic downturn.

But then, his eyes searching for a victim caught the warmth of a human body. A temperature glowing red, warm blood flowing within it, even the beating of the heart felt as if it were within reach.

It revived the monster’s heart. Squeezing out every last bit of strength he had left, the monster climbed over the wall. Even the iron bars installed to prevent thieves were useless before that monstrous strength.

The vampire leapt over the wall and bit the dog that was growling at him. As the blood flowed in, vitality began to return to his body.

The blood of a dog, the blood of a beast, was not enough. The vampire quenched his burning thirst for the moment and immediately grew sick of the animal’s blood. He blew his poison into the dog’s corpse and then entered the house.

The door was open, and from inside came the smell of something being fried. Had someone been making fried food? The vampire casually opened the door and headed for the kitchen. At the place led by the smell, there was indeed a middle-aged woman.

Bloodsucking. A horrific act of bloodsucking and cannibalism, unimaginable to civilized people, unfolded.

It was so grotesque that it looked closer to a ‘ritual’ than a simple ‘meal’. The more blood the vampire sucked, the more his wounds recovered.

"Damn true-demon hunters, you bastards!"

The vampire cursed like that. And true-demon hunter? Se-geon realized that it was simply another name used to refer to Sylvester.

"Krrrrrrr."

After that, things went exactly as Se-geon already knew. The vampire murdered his father, Han Seung-il, in his father’s room, and then killed his older brother, Han Se-hyeon, who had run to the study and taken out a shotgun after witnessing the massacre. The wounds had healed considerably, but the body pierced by fragments of silver was rotting away like poisoned flesh.

While the vampire wandered around looking for tools to remove the silver, Se-geon returned to the house that had become the scene of the massacre, fought the vampire, fell down to the lower floor, and collapsed.

Shuak!

And then, just at that moment, Sylvester burst in. Swinging a huge ceremonial claymore, he overwhelmed the vampire and finally killed it.

The fear of that ‘true-demon hunter’ who surpassed even a vampire in physical ability was powerful enough to be clearly transmitted even to Se-geon as he dreamed.

The massive greatsword that pierced the Adam’s apple allowed not even a dying scream, and the merciless kick crushed the skull.

But the dream did not end there.

"What is this."

Sylvester looked down at Se-geon with his usual indifferent tone.

Looking down at Se-geon, who was covered in blood and gasping, he lifted the claymore and spoke.

"It is written, there is no righteous one, not even one, and all of you on this earth are sinners."

As he shouted that and was about to bring the sword down, his blade stopped right in front of Se-geon’s neck. It seemed that, deep down, he intended to put Se-geon out of his misery. His gaze shifted to the hunting shotgun in Se-geon’s hands.

"Ah."

Sylvester stopped and fell briefly into thought.

"It would be a waste to kill you."

Then he pulled out a small syringe from inside his coat.

Although it was called a syringe, it was not an ordinary push-type injector, but a special syringe called a steam pack. Using it, he drew blood from the corpse of the vampire he had just killed. Then he injected it into Se-geon’s body.

It was truly a strange sight. The blood-soaked body began to heal, and even the arm that had been severed quickly knit back together after Sylvester picked it up and reattached it. Still, perhaps one injection was not enough, because Sylvester drew the vampire’s blood two or three more times and injected it into Se-geon.

"Aaaaaaagh!"

Se-geon struggled to avoid the injections. But… his arm was already bruised, and something began to sprout from the injection marks. The seed of the monster that had annihilated Se-geon’s family spread throughout his entire body along his blood vessels through his arm.

Unable to endure the fear that he might become a vampire if anything went wrong, and the disgust toward the blood itself, Se-geon writhed in agony. But after injecting him with the vampire’s blood, Sylvester showed not the slightest interest and simply left.

"Aaaaaaagh!"

Se-geon woke up screaming. His whole body was drenched in sweat, as if he had just come out of a sauna, yet the surroundings were dark and cold.

Se-geon looked around his room. The PC, video player, and mini component system that had once been used often when his family was still alive came into view. Se-geon turned on the mini component and began clearing away the scattered cup-ramen containers on the floor.

After finishing cleaning at least his own room, Se-geon walked to the bathroom and took a cold shower. The weather was still chilly, and pouring cold water over his body was painful, but even that pain felt like a luxury to him.

With his brother and parents murdered, being unable to endure something as trivial as cold water felt like nothing more than the whining of someone who had lived too comfortably.

Beep.

While Se-geon was showering, the phone’s answering machine activated and played a recorded message.

"Ah, Se-geon, it’s me. Your uncle. I’m calling about that thing I asked you to think over. Have you thought about it? You can’t keep living there alone forever, can you? Make a decision quickly and come on over. I’ll hang up now."

Listening to his uncle’s voice, Se-geon leaned his head against the tiled wall. For him, there was simply no reason to hunt vampires if it meant becoming a drug addict.

Although he had lost his family, neither his parents nor his brother would have wanted him to live on meaninglessly while turning into a wreck. Thinking that way eased his heart somewhat.

After finishing his shower, Se-geon came out into the living room. Judging from his usual routine, he should have eaten breakfast after showering, but his feet would not easily carry him toward the kitchen. The bloodstains were still left in the kitchen where his mother had been brutally murdered. Just looking at those stains, he felt no need to go to the refrigerator to take out food, since his nutritional condition was still fine.

"It’s already ten? Looks like I’ve completely missed school again today."

Se-geon sighed as he tossed his clothes into the laundry basket. A huge pile of laundry had already accumulated inside. Having never once used the washing machine himself, even that became something that reminded him of his mother.

The fact that such mundane chores made him recall his mother tormented him again. But he could not continue living like this forever.

Se-geon changed his clothes and went out to the garage.

* * *

In the very front seat of the M University audiovisual room, a female student’s cellphone rang loudly. Worse still, the ringtone was Arirang Shepherd Boy. If the owner of the phone had not looked flustered, it would not have been strange to take it as a protest against the professor, as it severely disrupted the atmosphere of the lecture.

"Oh no. What do I do. What do I do."

The girl named Han Se-jin, panicking, went so far as to pull out the phone’s battery altogether. She was so used to the action that it took less than a second to turn it off and remove the battery. In the end, the class ended five minutes later when the bell rang, but for her, it was no exaggeration to call it the worst day ever.

"I ate spoiled food for breakfast, I lost my contact lenses, my transit card broke, and now this at school too—this is driving me crazy!"

She said that while helping the teaching assistant roll up the screen after class. There was originally a device for rolling up the projector screen, but as was always the case with school facilities, it was easily broken, so it had to be rolled up by hand.

The sociology professor at M University was famous for being extremely strict—so much so that even the teaching assistants were said to lose weight—so she had truly gotten unlucky.

"Um, then, I’ll be going now."

After finishing up, Se-jin greeted the teaching assistant and rushed out of the audiovisual room as if fleeing. Then she put the phone battery back in.

"There’s nobody who would call me this early. Who could it be?"

Just then, a motorcycle came into view at the main gate of the university. Sitting on it was a man wearing a flight jacket and jeans.

"Oh. That’s Se-geon, isn’t it?"

She muttered as she recognized her cousin, Se-geon. Come to think of it, a few days earlier, she had attended the funeral after hearing that a family had been wiped out when a mad dog went on a rampage.

But Se-geon himself, the chief mourner, had been unable to attend the funeral because the shock was too great and because he was suspected of having fired a shotgun.

So why had Se-geon come to see her only now?

"Hey, noona!"

Se-geon somehow managed to recognize Se-jin among the many people. Riding up on his motorcycle, he made a smooth turn in front of her. Supporting his body by planting his foot on the ground, he revved the accelerator and spun only the motorcycle—a kind of gentle accelerator turn.