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He muttered like that and looked at the vampire subordinates with a dissatisfied expression. The Sang-dong faction, which had come into contact with vampires while arranging smuggling and illegal immigration, succeeded in selecting volunteers from among its subordinates and turning them into vampires in order to control that astonishing power.
It was said that it was thanks to a special type of blood brought in from overseas, or that those foreign vampires had directly bitten them and turned them into vampires.
In any case, even Cheon Yeong-hu, who was known to be ignorant, could easily tell that these vampires were different from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They did not fear crosses or garlic, and they had neither the ability to transform into bats or mist nor the inability to appear in mirrors.
But the most surprising thing was that, for a limited time, they could endure sunlight. Even if they could endure it, once a vampire was exposed to sunlight, the conversion factor would be destroyed and they would rapidly lose VT, and during that destruction process, intense heat would be generated, causing severe burns.
It was similar to how patients with fibrin syndrome suffered burns due to metabolic failure, but the reaction was far more radical and violent, to the point that their bodies could even catch fire.
“I am Cheon Yeong-hu, executive director of Sang-dong Credit Loans.”
Cheon Yeong-hu said so and looked back at the children.
“Who is your leader?”
Cheon Yeong-hu said so and swept his sharp gaze over the biker gang. At that moment, a man stood up from among the bikers. He looked to be in his early twenties and was riding a dark-red Balkan.
“What the hell is your problem, huh? I don’t know if you’re some kind of gangster or what, but you mess up our kid without even explaining anything. Do we look like pushovers to you? Huh?”
“You’re a rude bastard. Well, this isn’t exactly the time to worry about manners. For the sake of making things easier, I suppose I should fix your attitude first.”
Cheon Yeong-hu said so and grabbed the biker leader by the hair. He was already in a bad mood after being beaten by Jeong Sang-dong. So the moment Cheon Yeong-hu seized him with his brutish hand, he drove his knee straight into the man’s face.
Kwak!
The fact that he had tensed his waist and tried to endure at the moment his head was grabbed only made him more unlucky. The biker boss, who took a direct hit to the face, was sent flying straight backward over the Balkan.
“Kuaaaagh!”
“That bastard!”
“Is he trying to get himself killed?!”
When their leader went down, all the bikers around them became agitated. But at that moment, the vampires began to move. Like true residents of the night, they darted through the darkness like arrows and knocked the bikers down with precise strikes.
One of them lifted the blood-soaked biker leader who had fallen to the ground and, making sure not to end his life, bit into his arm and began sucking his blood.
“Guaaaaaah!”
The biker leader screamed in terror at the sensation of all the blood in his body being drained. It was a pitiful sight for someone who supposedly rode alongside death, but everyone fell silent at the grotesque scene.
“You have two choices. Will you take this money and listen to what I have to say? Or will you all end up here as unidentified corpses, getting autopsied by the cops?”
“Uuugh… ah… I-I’ll do anything! Anything at all!”
At that, the vampire pulled his mouth away. The fact that he could resist the temptation of blood and stop sucking from the arm meant that this vampire was fairly powerful.
Since they were the ones who ranked right below Cheon Yeong-hu within the Sang-dong faction, it would be troublesome if they could not manage at least this much. Thinking so, Cheon Yeong-hu pulled out a thick bundle of ten-thousand-won bills from his sleeve.
“This is the down payment. Take it.”
Cheon Yeong-hu said so and flashed a business smile at the bikers. Sparks crackled out of a burning drum and flew up into the black sky.
* * *
Next to a small three-story building standing in a quiet residential area, a sign reading ‘Yeonjeong Gosiwon’ was flickering. It was not flickering because it was a neon sign, but because the fluorescent light inside the sign had reached the end of its life.
“Ah. I’m tired. Damn it.”
Se-geon headed toward the gosiwon, carrying a toolbox.
After leaving Deok-yeon’s place, Se-geon had to find a new place to live. At first, he considered renting a monthly or long-term lease apartment, but the deposit and rental conditions were complicated, and since he never knew when he might have to move again, it felt rather troublesome.
So what he settled on was a gosiwon. Since Se-geon lived alone and it was cheaper than finding a proper house, he chose it, but because it was a building shared by many people, there were still all kinds of things to be careful about.
After all, he could not openly carry around lethal weapons like guns and swords. Moreover, the people living in the gosiwon barely slept, so he could not even sneak around at night.
“Well, you get what you pay for.”
He said so and entered his room. In a tiny room where it would be full if even two people lay down, there was no decent furniture at all. Perhaps because of that, despite how small it was, the room felt wider to Se-geon than a vast desert.
Se-geon locked the door three times and even drew the curtains. After finishing all this concealment work, he took an ammunition case out of the wardrobe. The case containing Tokarev rounds made in Hungary was a farewell gift from Deok-yeon.
Of course, leaving it in the middle of a gosiwon would look extremely suspicious, but the case itself was an ammunition box for 5.56-millimeter rifle rounds, commonly seen even in the South Korean military.
Since there were people who actually used such cases as small storage boxes, he simply put a padlock on it and kept it inside the wardrobe. Of course, if it were discovered, it would not end lightly.
“What a headache.”
After taking the bullets out of the case, Se-geon began filing down the tips of the projectiles. Like other Western firearms, Tokarev 7.62-millimeter rounds used bullets made of lead encased in a copper alloy.
Se-geon ground away the copper alloy at the tip of each bullet and placed the rounds into a mold he had made using five two-thousand-won electric soldering irons.
He embedded silver into the joints where the soldering irons connected, and by melting the lead inside the bullet and bonding it with the silver in this way, filling the tip of the bullet with silver, a fine silver round could be made.
If the entire bullet were made of pure silver, a soft metal like silver would damage the barrel, and besides, even without silver bullets, vampires could be killed well enough, so he only filled the tip with silver.
Even this alone made a perfectly good hollow-point round, and since silver could not be melted with a soldering iron, this was the limit of the process.
“Ah, damn it. This feels like some kind of side job.”
It was not a line that suited Se-geon, who had once been the young master of a wealthy family. He had never actually done any side jobs before. But even without experience, making each bullet by hand was unbearably tedious work.
Click.
Se-geon disassembled the Tokarev and maintained it as well. It was an old gun, and since the thugs had not taken care of it, it was tricky to handle, but using the skills he had learned from Deok-yeon, Se-geon cleaned and serviced the gun thoroughly. Instead of test-firing to adjust the zero, he used a cheap laser pointer to align it.
He could have made a laser sight using this, but he refrained, because a laser sight could be detected by the sensitive vampires.
“More importantly, a suppressor would be better… should I have asked Kim Seong-hee about a suppressor as well?”
Se-geon muttered to himself and ran his hand over the slide of the Tokarev. This Tokarev, which had no safety and was single-action, could easily go off by accident if handled carelessly, so he had to be cautious.
“……”
Se-geon absentmindedly raised the Tokarev and pressed it against his own temple. Although it should have been warm from being handled so much, the cold sensation of the metal was transmitted through his scalp to his temple. The sharp feeling was enough to clear his mind.
But… for some reason, he thought that pulling the trigger just like this might not be such a bad idea.
“……”
Buaaaang.
As a truck passed in front of the gosiwon, its headlights invaded the room through the window. It was only a momentary flash of light, but the family photo caught in that light entered Se-geon’s eyes. A family photo in which everyone wore uncomfortable expressions, something that could never be called a happy family. Yet to the present Se-geon, it was undeniable evidence of an inescapable fate.
“Kuh! Damn it. What am I supposed to do?”
Se-geon, like a deranged person, leaned against the wall and laughed without even turning on the light.
“Hahahahahaha.”
* * *
“Yes. Uh, this one is an RX-125.”
The biker who was standing beside a hospital bed with a motorcycle catalog in his hand said so after looking at the motorcycle the patient lying in the bed had photographed. Then Cheon Yeong-hu, who was standing beside him, asked,
“Really? So what is it, then?”
“Well… this is a problem. The RX-125 is a domestic model, so it’s extremely common. Of course, at least it’s not something that’s spread all over the streets like the VF or the Axive, but still, it’s like looking for a grain of sand on the beach.”
As he spoke, the biker deliberately glanced at Cheon Yeong-hu. Cheon Yeong-hu then took out about ten ten-thousand-won bills and handed them to him.
“You son of a bitch. Try pulling a stunt like that one more time and I’ll hang your head at Gwanghwamun, hunt down your relatives up to the eighth degree of kinship, cut every man into separate head and body, and sell every woman off to a brothel.”
“……”
Frightened by Cheon Yeong-hu’s murderous tone, the biker shut his mouth. Cheon Yeong-hu then cleared his throat and said,
“Consider what you just ate the end of it. Got it, you fucking bastard?”
Of course, since he still had to make them work, it could not end with threats alone. Cheon Yeong-hu knew that well. The biker then spoke with a serious expression,
“No. If the motorcycle was thrown, it must have been badly damaged… and if the frame is bent, there really aren’t many places that can fix it. At the very least, a neighborhood motorcycle shop wouldn’t be able to handle it, so if we just call around and ask whether an RX-125 was recently brought in, finding it should be easy.”
“What if the guy ditched it and bought a new one?”
“Well… that would be a problem, but… let’s check first. And it wasn’t even a wheelie, it was a tail pop up (Tail pop up: lifting the rear). With that level of skill, there should be some kind of rumor about him somewhere.”
He said that to reassure Cheon Yeong-hu. In the meantime, the bikers waiting in front of the hospital room looked back at their leader again, trying to make sense of the rather confusing situation they were in now.
The biker leader Jeong Yong-jin, whose blood had been sucked by Cheon Yeong-hu and by the vampires, thoroughly hated this situation. However, there was nothing to gain by going against Cheon Yeong-hu.
“Then get going. And if you find that bastard, contact me. I’ll give you two million won if you report him, and four times that—eight million—if you catch him.”
The amount offered by Cheon Yeong-hu was much less than the money Jeong Sang-dong had paid out, but for the bikers, it was still undoubtedly a considerable sum.
No matter how much Yong-jin disliked Cheon Yeong-hu, eight million won was not an amount he could easily ignore.
Besides, if it was someone who could ride around on a motorcycle and send that many members of the Sang-dong faction to the hospital, he could not help but be interested.
“All right then. You know the phone number, right? Contact me there. I said eight million if you catch him, but that guy has a gun. If you don’t want to die, call me first.”
After giving that warning, Cheon Yeong-hu left the hospital. Only then did the bikers look at one another and finally begin to talk freely among themselves.
“An RX-125? And someone who rides insanely well?”
“Could it be Han Se-geon?”
They all thought of Han Se-geon at the same time.
For some time now, rumors had been spreading about a rider with astonishing skill appearing on the streets.
He rode an unremarkable domestic RX-125, but stories of him casually pulling off unbelievable feats—descending slopes steeper than seventy degrees in camber riding, and popping up onto stones no bigger than beer cans—eventually even moved the normally unmotivated Yong-jin into action.
That was how Yong-jin and his biker gang, Speedway, found Han Se-geon practicing riding up onto railroad tracks near Sinchon Station.
“You little punk whose head still smells of milk! Who gave you permission to ride a bike around here, huh? Don’t you know this whole area belongs to us, Speedway?”
The bikers threatened him like that while sizing Se-geon up. Han Se-geon, who had just graduated middle school and become a high school student, looked young even with his helmet on.
But his guts were bigger than those of most adults.
“Speedway? That’s a pretty tacky name.”
Even while facing far more bikers than himself, Se-geon openly mocked their group name.
That became the spark that lit the fuse.
“You little bastard! Fine. Then follow me! Let’s settle this with a chicken race!”
Yong-jin challenged Se-geon to a duel. A chicken race was a contest meant to decide who was the coward, and there were many different variations of it.
But the method most commonly used by motorcyclists was simple: ride at full throttle straight toward a wall, and the one who hit the brakes first lost.
Countless bikers had ended up as dead men after imitating this contest that was so popular in movies and comics.
However, Han Se-geon accepted the challenge without hesitation.
“Fine. But if I win, I want Speedway to leave me alone from now on. You can promise that, right?”
Se-geon said so and started riding his motorcycle.
His attitude was so insolent that Yong-jin could not stand it.
So he led Se-geon into their hideout, an abandoned construction site. It was a permanently stalled site left behind after the construction company went bankrupt, and its surrounding walls were all made of thick rebar and concrete.
“Crashing one motorcycle into it shouldn’t do anything, right?”
He said that while looking at Se-geon.
But Se-geon did not look particularly afraid.
“A chicken race, huh. Something you can do even without any real skill.”
He said that and put on his helmet.
Seeing that, Yong-jin ground his teeth. It was because Se-geon had just dismissed the very concept of a chicken race.
“Let’s see how good you really are!”
Yong-jin mounted his motorcycle and twisted the throttle. The Kawasaki Vulcan 800 shook the construction site with its rough roar.
It was a completely different level of sound and power compared to Se-geon’s mere 125cc bike.
But a chicken race was decided more by guts than by horsepower, and Se-geon’s guts were anything but ordinary, as could already be seen from the way he treated these bikers.
Still, Yong-jin had a sense of responsibility as the leader of a biker gang.
Even if he crashed into the wall, wasn’t it unacceptable to lose to a kid like that?
That sense of responsibility was nothing more than useless bravado when it came to staying alive, but in a chicken race, bravado was the key to victory.
“You know the rules of a chicken race, right, kid? Full throttle. If you hesitate on the accelerator even a little, you’re dead for sure!”
Yong-jin threatened Se-geon like that.
But Se-geon pulled the throttle without saying a word.
Buaaaang!
At the signal, the two of them took off at the same time.
Se-geon had looked down on the chicken race, but there was, in fact, real technique involved in it.
That technique was reducing braking distance.
To delay braking while still avoiding crashing into the wall, you either had to shorten your stopping distance or escape with a turn.
It was also crucial to know your exact braking distance.
Buaaaang!
As expected, the more powerful Vulcan surged ahead.
Since the race distance was set at four hundred meters, the Vulcan could gain far more speed and time than the RX-125.
On top of that, the RX-125, being an off-road type, had weaker braking performance in its tires.
By this point, it was already a decided match.
But Yong-jin deliberately hit the brakes first and cut in front of Se-geon with a turn.
It was an intentional act of intimidation meant to shake Se-geon.
However, Se-geon merely snorted and kept charging forward with the throttle wide open.
“What the hell is wrong with that guy?”
“Is he really trying to kill himself?!”
The other bikers stared at Se-geon in shock.
At this rate, Se-geon would slam straight into the wall and be shattered to pieces.
The people who had wanted to beat Se-geon to death only moments ago finally felt the weight of a human life and shuddered.
Of course, the most shocked person of all was Yong-jin, the one who had started the whole fight.
“Haah!”
With a shout, Se-geon hit the brakes and twisted his body to the side.
With both brakes engaged, he leaned out and initiated a slide.
But a motorcycle that had been charging at full speed until just a moment ago could not stop so easily.
Kiiiiiiik!
At that moment, something unbelievable happened.
The motorcycle, which had been sliding sideways down the slanted surface, suddenly spun around on the spot.
Se-geon shifted into a low gear while holding both brakes, stepped on the engine, and released only the rear brake.
This allowed an extremely tight-radius turn around the front wheel, but in most cases it would cause the bike to flip over.
Yet Se-geon, with such a violent lean in that it looked like his waist might snap, kicked the ground with his foot and lifted the bike back up as if by magic.
The rear wheel of the RX-125, which had just been grinding the ground after the brakes were released, traced a circular arc and completed the turn.
It was so close that the rear tire brushed against the exposed rebar, leaving a long tire mark on the wall.
But Se-geon came to a safe stop.
“Tail touch.”
Se-geon muttered quietly.
Touching the wall with the rear wheel—at that point, the match was already over.
Se-geon had achieved an overwhelmingly impressive victory over the biker gang, Speedway.
“Wooooaaaah!”
“Waaaaaah!”
All the bikers jumped to their feet in shock, cheering loudly and blaring their horns.
They could hardly believe what had just happened right in front of their eyes.
That was how exceptional Se-geon’s skill and nerve were. With that level of ability, they even felt that his arrogance was only natural.
Se-geon had instantly won over even those who had been hostile toward him. He had even captivated Yong-jin, the very man who had raced against him.
“You monster! That was incredible!”
And so, by unanimous decision, they accepted Se-geon as one of their members.
Se-geon did not particularly want to ride together with them, but joining a biker gang did not seem so bad either, so he raced through the night roads with them.
Thinking about it, despite his young age and insolent attitude, Se-geon was a strangely appealing guy.
If only he had been a little gentler in his manner, he might even have become the kind of friend you could share a can of beer with.
But a year passed after that.
With faces he could barely remember anymore, and eight million won placed in front of him, there was no room left for friendship or old bonds.
In that sense, Yong-jin’s decision was only natural.
“Call every repair shop and ask if an RX-125 was brought in. And if that guy bought a new bike, it’d obviously be a better off-road model than an RX-125, right?”
“He liked the Yamaha YZ, so he probably switched to that.”
The bikers said so and left the hospital.
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