Chapter 15 :

<15>

Se-geon did not welcome this match from the very beginning. There was nothing to gain from winning, and if he lost, he would have to lose everything.

Of course, even if he lost, he had no intention of handing over everything obediently, but to do that, he would have to kill them. Even if the bastard was undergoing vampirification, Yong-jin was still human.

Not only Yong-jin, but all of them—the biker gang—were human, and people he knew. If you didn’t hate someone enough to kill them, how difficult was it to kill someone you were acquainted with?

‘Kill them. If killing people is a prerequisite, then there’s nothing to think about. I don’t know in what situation killing people becomes necessary, though.’

Deok-yeon’s voice tore through the roar of the motorcycle engines and shook Se-geon’s head. But there was no need to kill all these people.

‘Because I’m going to win!’

Se-geon clenched his teeth and focused on controlling the rampaging motorcycle. The two-stroke racer V2 had its cylinders bored out to reach a displacement of 2000cc, but its output was unstable, making it extremely difficult to handle. Even so, Se-geon rode the motorcycle with precise control.

“Damn it! An MX stronger than a Vulcan?!”

Yong-jin shouted as he sped forward. In broad daylight, with so many cars on the road, weaving through traffic was pure insanity. Yet Se-geon slipped through the vehicles speeding along the urban expressway.

Sliding between massive seated buses and bulky ready-mix concrete trucks while tearing down the road was both thrilling and terrifying. Back when he didn’t know death, Se-geon could do this without a second thought.

But now… after facing his family’s death and learning the stench of death, fear surged up and made his body feel as though it might freeze solid.

Still, Se-geon steadied his mind in order to win. Speed flowed through his veins, driving away the fear of death.

Wiiiiing!

The outlines of objects stabbed at his vision like needles. The wind brushed past his entire body.

In an instant, the world changed.

As if time had stopped, everything around him seemed slow. Massive dump trucks, buses, and the like completely lost their outlines, turning into nothing more than black shadows and green shadows.

“Ahhh…”

Se-geon looked back through the side mirror. Yong-jin was barely keeping up behind him, while the other bikers didn’t even dare try.

‘If there’s a need to kill… If it’s just one person, killing them wouldn’t be such a burden.’

Thinking that, Se-geon leaned his body to the left.

* * *

The call came to Cheon Yeong-hu and his gang two minutes after Se-geon and Yong-jin began their cannonball run.

“Yes. This is Sang-dong credit loans.”

Cheon Yeong-hu spoke in a heavy, trustworthy voice. Recently, the economy had recovered somewhat, and private finance wasn’t running all that well. No matter how much of a thug he was, one had to be polite to customers. However, what came through the phone was the voice of young men who didn’t sound like they wanted to borrow money at all.

Cheon Yeong-hu was briefly flustered by how much sooner the call came than expected, and only then did he rise from his seat.

“What? You’re chasing him right now?”

“It’s not so much a chase as it is a race. The destination is the entrance to the Gyeongin Expressway, so if you come there, that should do it.”

“Alright! I’m heading there right now! Keep him there!”

Saying that, Cheon Yeong-hu stood up. At first, he tried to call his vampire subordinates, but the sun was still up outside.

“Damn it. This is a headache! If I bring those guys out during the day, it’ll be a disaster!”

Thinking that, he decided to call the other guys instead. The Sang-dong group had done plenty of things, but there weren’t that many people who belonged directly to the core of the organization. And could they really fight someone with a gun without spilling blood?

“Would it be better to just report this to the police?”

But Cheon Yeong-hu quickly changed his mind. If that bastard really had a gun, and he got caught by the police and said anything about the Sang-dong group, that would be the day their sign came down for good.

“Damn it. This is really a headache! He probably only has two bullets—should I just ram him?”

He considered that too, but the entrance to the Gyeongin Expressway was crowded with cars and full of prying eyes. It wasn’t a good place to start trouble. More than anything, if he didn’t go right now, he wouldn’t even get to see Se-geon.

‘Damn biker punks! Why did it have to be a match, a match!’

* * *

Without thinking about anything else, Se-geon kept twisting the accelerator and ran at full speed. The engine greedily gulped down air and produced a terrifying velocity.

At the extreme of speed, the mind transcends the body.

At that moment, Se-geon’s mind was clearly feeling a sense of liberation from his physical body. It was the liberation brought on by adrenaline, but the feeling was undeniably exhilarating.

But where does a liberated mind go?

For Se-geon, that wasn’t even a question worth asking. His mind already had a destination.

‘Haaak, haaak!’

Even with his eyes wide open as he raced along, Se-geon was wandering through a dream. Events he had clearly experienced himself appeared as though seen from someone else’s perspective, like a third-rate horror movie in a theater—predictable plot, predictable direction, and crudely splattered blood, blood, blood, blood…

That was the first time he had ever seen so much blood in person. The movies he’d watched had been so realistic that real blood looked cheap by comparison.

‘Aaaaargh!’

Se-geon screamed. But at that tremendous speed, all that could be heard was the roar of the motorcycle; even his own scream was completely swallowed up. Only his remaining senses remained vividly fixed on the approach of death.

The fishy stench of death stabbed at his nostrils. But each time Se-geon twisted the accelerator and surged forward, that stench retreated, and the road opened up.

‘Right. The soul transcends the body!’

Se-geon laughed. Racing along the urban expressway, he checked the oncoming traffic and immediately curved toward the median barrier.

“Crazy!”

Not only Yong-jin, who was chasing him, but everyone driving on the road spat out the same shallow exclamation in unison.

As Se-geon slipped through the narrow gap in the median barrier, he lifted his body up. He placed both legs on the seat so they wouldn’t get caught, a sight reminiscent of Mongolian nomads performing acrobatics.

Baaaang!

Cars coming from the opposite direction blared their horns in shock, but Se-geon’s crossing of the road was over in an instant. He continued cutting through road after road, eventually leaving the urban expressway.

“What’s wrong with that guy?”

Thinking that, Yong-jin pressed forward, and soon discovered the reason. At the entrance ramp to the Gyeongin Expressway, cars were already packed tightly together.

“Damn it!”

Yong-jin sensed defeat, but stubbornly forced his Vulcan through the traffic. The Vulcan, a typically American-style bike, was quite wide, so it took a lot of time to slip between cars.

“Damn it! Like hell I’ll lose to a brat like that again!”

Yong-jin shouted and shoved past the cars. Whether by luck or misfortune, even though Se-geon had crossed the road and overtaken him, he wasn’t more than 400 meters ahead. Was it because he slowed down too much on the curves? Or was it…

Keeping one hand on the accelerator, Se-geon pulled a Tokarev from his chest with his left arm. Carrying a gun loaded entirely with silver bullets and no safety was extremely nerve-wracking.

You never knew when it might misfire. Of course, no matter how single-action it was, it wouldn’t easily go off by accident. Se-geon lightly drew the pistol with one hand and gripped it.

Then he deliberately steered toward a sparsely populated road. An afternoon in Seoul was usually crowded, but once he passed through the city center, both cars and pedestrians decreased dramatically. In his heart, Se-geon hoped there wouldn’t be a place with no people where he’d have to use the gun—but in the end, he managed to find a quiet apartment complex with hardly anyone around.

The silent side road between the apartment complexes looked like a scene frozen in time, as if lifted straight out of a landscape painting. Of course, there were residents living in the buildings and security guards at the parking lots, but along the narrow road running between the complexes, not a single window faced outward. Once you made up your mind, carrying it out wasn’t all that difficult.

Screeeech!

Se-geon immediately slammed on the brakes and brought his body to a halt. It was a gentle curve, a place where even a motorcycle had to slow down. All he had to do was fire a single shot at Yong-jin as he came in along the same path Se-geon had taken. Se-geon stopped the bike and turned his body around.

Yong-jin, who had been following without knowing anything, appeared in the rearview mirror. He couldn’t shoot the helmet. If a silver bullet left fragments behind, then unless the police were all blind, a full-scale investigation would inevitably follow. But if the bullet pierced cleanly through and Yong-jin collapsed, then nothing would come after that.

South Korea had a severe shortage of medical examiners. Because of that, unless it was a particularly major case, bodies weren’t even autopsied, and everything ended neatly as an accident.

Unlike in detective novels, where criminals are caught in the end despite enormous effort, reality allowed people to be killed cleanly with simple methods.

Yong-jin was a dropout from society anyway. The world wouldn’t change just because one dropout died.

Bang!

Se-geon fired the gun, mixing the shot with the sound of brakes and horns. Yong-jin, rounding the corner, stared at Se-geon—who was standing there waiting—with wide, startled eyes. Plane tree leaves filling the space between the apartment buildings scattered into the air. And through those leaves, something flew in.

An instant!

A single instant so slow it felt as if the bullet itself might be visible……

The 7.62mm pistol round flew at high speed and pierced straight through Yong-jin’s neck.

Ssk!

Compared to the gunshot, the sound of impact was absurdly small. The lethal bullet that punched through his neck in a single blow left almost no trace as it passed cleanly through Yong-jin’s body. At first, blood spurted from what had been nothing more than a small red dot.

Kakakakaka!

Yong-jin’s Vulcan lost its balance, toppled sideways, and slid across the ground. Yong-jin slid along the pavement together with the motorcycle. His beloved bike, the Vulcan 800, had its fuel tank shattered by friction with the asphalt, and the heat ignited the gasoline, engulfing it in flames in an instant.

If a motorcycle made of metal couldn’t endure that, there was no way a human made of flesh and blood could.

Yong-jin, having slid across the ground, was left in a truly miserable state, barely gasping for breath.

“Grrrk!”

Was it because his airway had been punctured? Yong-jin gurgled like a man drowning. More than abrasions, bruises, or fractures, the difficulty breathing seemed far more agonizing. His face was already turning bluish with signs of cyanosis.

“Does it hurt?”

Se-geon looked down at him and tore open a blood pack containing vampire blood from his chest. He didn’t know why he did it. Why did he open a pack of vampire blood that cost millions of won per bag, not to save him, but merely to ease the pain of dying?

“I’ll take the pain away. Drink. You might even live.”

Saying that, Se-geon sliced the blood pack open with a knife and let the blood flow out. Yong-jin, lying there with his mouth open, sucking in ragged breaths, accepted the blood without resistance and drank what Se-geon poured. With his airway pierced, resisting was impossible anyway.

“Kuaaaargh!”

The wound in Yong-jin’s neck closed. But at the same time, his skin dried out, and as he gradually transformed into a vampire, he was being killed by the sunlight. This was murder. Not only had Se-geon pierced his neck with a gun, he was also poisoning him with vampire blood.

“I’m sorry.”

Se-geon muttered in a voice completely devoid of emotion.

Flames engulfed Yong-jin’s body, and soon it burned away without leaving a trace. With things like this, there would be no autopsy, no investigation—nothing.

Se-geon picked up the shell casing and left Yong-jin’s remains and motorcycle behind.

There were no passersby. The apartment security guards were startled, but by the time those slow-moving guards came out, Se-geon would already have disappeared.

If Yong-jin, infamous as a biker, vanished without leaving a body and his motorcycle burned up, it would be handled as a disappearance or an accidental death.

Killing a person was this easy……

No. He wasn’t a person anymore. He was a human already undergoing vampirification. People had different constitutions—some would turn into vampires from a single bite, while others wouldn’t.

Yong-jin was simply the latter. Once vampirification progressed, there was no way to save that human by any means.

As if fleeing from his sin, Se-geon rode his bike away. Speed frees the soul? Then free me from my sin! Se-geon screamed silently. And even that scream was swallowed up by the roar of the motorcycle.

When Se-geon arrived alone at the entrance to the Gyeongin Expressway, there was no one around. That was the kind of race a cannonball run was. Those at the starting point couldn’t arrive at the finish line first and wait.

If the goal had been to sell Se-geon out, there would’ve been no reason to choose a race like this. A chicken race would’ve been better. Thinking that, Se-geon let out a sigh.

“Aaaah!”

From the beginning, Yong-jin had never intended to catch Se-geon. It was simply his tangled feelings toward Se-geon, the wavering anyone would feel when money was on the line—that alone had driven Yong-jin to move.

“Damn it!”

Se-geon pulled over to the side of the road, stopped his bike, and waited quietly. He couldn’t pull out the Tokarev in a place like this. The expressway entrance had surveillance CCTV installed, and there was a police checkpoint as well.

It wasn’t a place where fighting was possible either. Looking at all that, Se-geon suddenly felt tears welling up. He wasn’t even someone you could really call a friend. And shooting him had been the only thing Se-geon could do…… yet he couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.

Se-geon turned his bike around. If he waited here, he would be able to meet Cheon Yeong-hu and his gang. Even if not, he might run into old biker “friends” from his past and smash their mouths in. But Se-geon didn’t want to see them.

Se-geon could no longer tell what was right and what was wrong. Pulling the trigger and feeding Yong-jin vampire blood…… was that a mistake? Maybe this pendulum was defective, and Yong-jin had only been lightly injured. Maybe Se-geon hadn’t really committed murder at all.

“Aaaaargh!”

Se-geon twisted the handlebars again and began riding off madly, without a moment to think.