Chapter 41 :

<41>

"Strange."

Se-gun swapped out his magazine and stared at the vampires. Only two had stepped out of the Galloper sedan. They were armed with pistols, but it wasn’t exactly overwhelming firepower. Charging straight into such a wide-open warehouse—did they not realize a vampire hunter was here?

They had been monitoring Detective Sim Gu-jin the whole time. It made no sense that they wouldn’t know. By the book, they should have requisitioned an armored vehicle and stormed in with that, or deployed at least a platoon for a wave assault.

Just as that thought crossed his mind, the LCD screen changed.

"As expected!"

Behind the wooded hill, along the infiltration route Se-gun had predicted, a vampire was approaching.

"But you think I’d just let that happen?"

Muttering to himself, Se-gun finished changing the magazine and set the empty one beside him. He had planted booby traps in the wooded area behind the warehouse, so he had no choice but to monitor it through the LCD camera.

Boom!

An explosion flashed across the LCD feed, followed by a muffled blast. In South Korea, acquiring high-grade explosives wasn’t easy. Taking into account that a loud explosion in the mountains—or worse, a forest fire—would quickly draw the police, the homemade bomb had been carefully constructed: a cylindrical steel pipe packed with explosives, a detonator fixed at the rear, buried in the ground. When it detonated, the cap would rupture and send fragments forward—essentially a crude directional claymore. Since vampires could easily detect tripwire-based traps, he had designed it with a pressure trigger. And now, it had finally gone off.

"Did it get him?"

Se-gun muttered and glanced back out the window. While his attention had been on the wooded hill, the other vampires had already closed to within a hundred meters. At this rate, they’d be inside the building any moment. Worse, their pistol fire had grown astonishingly accurate. If he carelessly showed his head, he’d end up with a hole in it in an instant.

So Se-gun moved to the adjacent window and pulled a rope.

Attached to a pulley system was a military helmet. When he tugged the rope, it slowly rose as if someone were standing up.

Bang bang bang!

As expected, the vampires immediately emptied their pistols at it, blasting the helmet away. At that very moment, Se-gun sprang up and raked them with his rifle.

Drrrrrr!

Now that they were within effective range, his fire was precise and clean. No matter how powerful a vampire might be, there was no dodging bullets that traveled faster than sound.

"Kraaaagh!"

One vampire collapsed on the spot, unable to rise. The other seized the opening and dashed straight into the warehouse.

Crack!

The sound of a booby trap activating echoed from inside. For Se-gun, it was so perfectly in line with his scenario he almost wanted to applaud. He had kept up suppressive fire from above, forcing them to rush in recklessly. The moment they tripped the wire, the pre-set homemade bomb would detonate.

No matter how powerful a vampire might be, they weren’t so free in a setup like this.

"Hahahahaha. Too easy. Damn vampires, your brains really don’t work. If your head’s bad, your body pays for it."

Maybe it was the drugs in his system. As everything unfolded exactly as planned, Se-gun felt an excessive surge of exhilaration. Laughing loudly, he pressed the monitor switch to check the first floor interior. On the blue-tinted screen lay the corpse of a vampire whose upper body had been completely blown away. As expected… even a crude directional claymore couldn’t be underestimated.

"Heh heh heh. Hahaha…"

Se-gun laughed like a madman. Before, when he had fought vampires without weapons, he had been utterly crushed. The stronger ones had lifted him and hurled him aside like a pebble.

But the Se-gun of now was different. He was properly equipped, and he had anticipated their movements in advance, laying traps and waiting. Still, the fact that they had fallen for it so easily made him feel foolish for ever being tense.

Rustle.

Yet just as Se-gun laughed, certain of victory, a spider with a vivid red body descended from the ceiling on a thread of silk toward him. Like a special forces operative rappelling down, it landed lightly on the back of his neck and slipped inside his clothes.

"Ugh!"

An unbearable pain surged through him. Startled, Se-gun immediately shoved his hand inside his clothes. But the spider that had burrowed in was not easily caught. Instead, it bit into his skin and began sucking his blood at a terrifying speed. Even in the darkness, an enormous amount of blood was traveling upward along the thin strand of webbing.

"Ugh!"

Se-gun hurled himself backward, slamming his back against the wall. A dull thud sounded, and his back was stained with blood. In just that brief moment, the spider must have drained nearly as much as a carton of milk. If something like that latched onto someone for even ten seconds, collapsing from anemia would be inevitable.

"Damn it! It was alive?"

Se-gun quickly switched the camera feed, but the exterior cameras showed nothing—either the line had been cut or they had been destroyed. The vampire that had approached through the wooded hill had survived the booby trap and taken out the outdoor cameras instead.

"Son of a bitch."

Muttering, Se-gun glared upward at the spiders descending from above. They were falling like rain.

"Shit, what a bastard."

The vampires held a similar opinion of Se-gun. The vampire named Gerder, who had lost an arm to a booby trap, was cautiously crawling across the roof, generating spiders from the severed end of his arm and sending them down.

Drrrrk!

At that moment, the vampire hunter raised his gun and sprayed bullets toward the roof. Gerder immediately flung himself sideways, kicked off a pine branch beside the warehouse, then leapt again and crashed through a window. The grimy yellow glass shattered, shards embedding in his body—but it was preferable to a barrage of silver bullets.

Crash!

Inside the building was utter chaos. Instead of firearms or blades, Se-gun had grabbed a folding entrenching shovel and was furiously smashing spiders. Meanwhile, the vampire who had just burst through the window had to roll awkwardly across the ground to avoid a spring-loaded device flying at him. There had been a booby trap on the window as well—absurdly enough, it was a silver fork tied to a wooden plank and rigged to a spring mechanism.

"You’ve got to be kidding me!"

Gerder touched his face in disbelief after the silver fork grazed him. A shallow cut bled lightly. At this point, he didn’t even have the energy to be angry.

"Damn it!"

Ignoring the spiders for the moment, Se-gun aimed his rifle at the vampire. Kill the vampire first, and the spider familiars wouldn’t matter. But just then, countless spiders began crawling down the corridor. Even one could drain blood at a speed that defied physics—what would happen if that many latched on at once? Seized by fear, Se-gun immediately vaulted over the railing and jumped to the lower floor.

"You bastards!"

He rushed to where he had installed the booby traps and pulled out the homemade claymores. With elongated launch tubes that helped avoid backblast, they could serve as excellent shotguns so long as the tubes didn’t rupture. Hoisting the launch tube onto his shoulder like an RPG-7, Se-gun fired the improvised explosive at the descending spiders.

Bang!

With a cheerful pop almost like a birthday sparkler, silver fragments blasted outward, shredding the spiders into pieces. The backblast struck the ground and echoed, but since it wasn’t packed with C4 like a real claymore and the angle was limited, Se-gun suffered no serious harm.

Whoosh!

But while Se-gun was occupied with the spiders, Gerder charged at him.

"Using dangerous toys, are we?"

With a clean rising kick, the vampire sent Se-gun’s AUG-Steyr flying. The rifle blasted upward like a rocket, punching through the roof. Made of reinforced plastic tough enough to survive being run over by a military truck on gravel, the AUG-Steyr was nevertheless snapped clean in two.

Tsssk—

The moment his rifle was gone, Se-gun drew the Japanese sword strapped to his back and slashed at the vampire. But Gerder twisted midair, kicked off the wall, and evaded the strike.

"No—!"

Smack!

A powerful blow struck Se-gun from behind, sending him crashing forward. Gerder’s kick had detonated against his back. The impact was so violent that his neck creaked as his body flew. But he had no time to lie stunned. As he sprawled onto the dust-covered floor, spiders swarmed toward him.

"Tch!"

Se-gun rolled up and swung his sword low across the ground. The spiders rushing greedily at him were cut down—but Gerder hoisted a heavy wooden crate from a pile in the warehouse and hurled it at Se-gun. The massive box flew like a cannonball.

"Ghk!"

Se-gun leapt onto a stack of crates to avoid it, then jumped up to the second-floor railing. A vampire who commanded blood-sucking spiders—this wasn’t an enemy you could handle with ordinary weapons. Unless it was a flamethrower.

"Come on, you bastard!"

Shouting, Se-gun dashed toward the room where Detective Sim Gu-jin was hiding. The spiders and the vampire followed, unaware.

"Here we go!"

Se-gun yanked the door open and pressed himself flat against the wall. They had agreed that if the door opened without the password "Permanent Member State", the flamethrower would immediately fire.

But no flames came. Startled by the door suddenly flying open, Detective Sim Gu-jin had dropped the flamethrower.

"Ugh! What kind of policeman are you—"

Thud!

Before Se-gun could finish shouting, Gerder’s spiders latched onto him. Se-gun hurled himself sideways and crushed them against the floor—but then red eyes filled his vision.

"Die."

Gerder brought his hand down in a razor-sharp chop. Se-gun rolled aside—and the steel floor was pierced clean through by the vampire’s strike. If that had connected, he would have died instantly.

"Use the flamethrower!"

Screaming, Se-gun aimed his left hand at the vampire. They were less than a meter apart, but the instant he pulled the trigger, Gerder was already outside effective range.

Bang!

The shotgun blast struck the ceiling uselessly.

But then flames erupted, engulfing Gerder mid-leap.

Whoooosh!

"Kraaaagh!"

No matter how powerful a vampire might be, fire was its weakness. The flamethrower’s fuel—a viscous mixture of engine oil and gasoline—clung stubbornly once it caught. Gerder writhed wildly, unable to endure the flames engulfing his body, ripping spiders free in frenzy. But they too were already ablaze, burning to ash.

"Why didn’t you fire the moment the door opened?!"

Reprimanding Detective Sim, Se-gun gripped his Japanese sword with both hands and brought it down hard on Gerder. Perhaps it was because he struck the skull—the blade snapped halfway through, and brain matter spilled out. But Se-gun did not stop there.

"Hah!"

He drove the broken blade into Gerder’s torso. From the opposite side of the burning body, the dark red blade burst out.

"Kraaaagh!"

Gerder staggered, screaming. An ordinary human would have died of shock before being completely consumed—but this vampire, with its monstrous vitality, continued to thrash even while burning. It was a horrific sight.

But Se-gun felt no mercy. For a human to pity a vampire that killed and dominated humans was like a mouse sympathizing with a cat.

"Haaat!"

Tilting his body sideways, Se-gun delivered a downward kicking strike as if chopping from above. With a dreadful cracking sound, Gerder’s head shattered completely. After splitting the skull with a blade and then stomping it, the outcome was inevitable.

"……"

Detective Sim Gu-jin stood speechless at the gruesome carnage before him. So this was how he fought. No wonder there had been gunfire in the middle of Seoul.

But would this really be okay? They had won this time—but wouldn’t that only provoke the organization called Tetra Anax? If the vampires intended to conceal their existence, they would never leave a police officer who had lured and killed one of their members alive.

"…The future worries me."