****
“So. You’re saying you want to become an exorcist?”
Sylvester sank into the sofa, lifted his chin, and asked. As for Se-gun, he couldn't give a definite answer yet.
But if he didn't have such a reason or purpose, he wouldn't have wanted to hear an explanation for this incident while getting beaten by Sylvester for no reason. So Se-gun nodded his head.
“Yes.”
“How pathetic.”
Sylvester immediately started with criticism. At that, the woman who had identified herself as Kim Sung-hee cleared away the teacups and smiled.
“You have to explain the situation first, Silvy.”
“Silvy?”
As Se-gun muttered that name, she smiled and patted Se-gun's 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-gun said that and was surprised at himself. Was it because that had offended him? Sylvester swept his hair up and answered with a cold expression.
“Don't worry about that. It's been quite a while since I was excommunicated. By the way, if I explain the situation, then I'll need to erase your memory. Will you agree to that?”
“Yes?”
Se-gun, surprised by the words about erasing his memory, asked back like that. But as if that was taken as a sign of agreement, Sylvester looked at the middle-aged man next to him and grabbed his arm.
“Then look carefully, you bastard. At what a human who fights against the forces of darkness must give up.”
“But!”
The middle-aged man looked furtively at Se-gun and became flustered. It was obvious that he was trying to hide something, but Sylvester dismissed his worries and pulled up the clothes covering his arm. At that, a thick, muscularly trained, but covered in countless needle marks forearm was revealed.
Se-gun was startled and stared at the forearm. Although Se-gun didn't know anything, he knew what those bruises meant through movies and the like. They were precisely the marks of a syringe.
“Do you have any idea why he got so many injections?”
“N-no, I don't.”
“Drugs.”
Sylvester said that and shrugged his shoulders.
“Fighting monsters is not something a human should do. You've experienced it too, right? In a flash, a vampire can break a person's bones and tear their muscles. How are you going to fight against something like that?”
“……”
“Pain makes a human flinch. And in close-quarters combat, pain is death itself. Anesthetics commonly used to eliminate pain relax the muscles, making it impossible to use strength. In that case, the only method left is drugs. Right?”
Sylvester looked back at the middle-aged man in the black beret and asked. For the man who was a former Special Forces member, it must have been a very shameful thing, but it was an undeniable fact.
“Yes. That is certainly true.”
“It's a crazy act of fighting monsters while on drugs. If you make a slight mistake, you become one of them. Does that look so good to you? Once you enter this world, you can never go back to that side again. Once you step into the darkness of the night, you can never return to reality. Is there any need for a young kid like you to do something like that?”
He said that and got up from his seat. Se-gun couldn't say anything and hung his head. Fighting monsters while taking drugs was something that was hard to accept for Se-gun's common sense, having grown up in Korea where drugs were strictly controlled.
His hostility toward the monsters was still boiling, but Sylvester's persuasion was powerful enough to pour cold water on that hostility.
“C-could you give me some time to think, for now?”
“As much as you want. But if you carelessly blabber about this to others, you'd better be prepared to see your family. The only things you can get from blabbing about what you've found out from us are the title of a deranged person, and a bullet in your head.”
<><><>
Vrooooom!
Se-gun eventually decided to think about it and disappeared on his motorcycle. The middle-aged man was watching Se-gun's retreating figure through the show window.
“It's about time for customers to start coming, so why don't you two just, get out of the way or something?”
Kim Sung-hee looked at Sylvester and the retired soldier and requested their departure. As the owner of this shop, she needed to be concerned about sales. As if he had decided to comply with her request, Sylvester walked toward the entrance, still wearing the shirt with Snoopy on it.
“We'll do that.”
“Um, Sylvester.”
Just then, the middle-aged man called out to stop Sylvester. He was trembling with great anxiety, perhaps because he had shown his drug-using forearm to Se-gun.
Even if Se-gun was treated as a mental patient for talking about vampires and monsters, it was a separate story from being a habitual drug user. Yet Sylvester had left the boy alone without even erasing his memory.
“Why did you just let that child go? Even if you're fine, it's quite a headache for me, a habitual user.”
“Well. You're doing this 'vampire business' too, so there's no rule saying that child can't. It's just that. If you're really that anxious, you can take care of it yourself. Of course, the kid still has a place to settle down in reality.”
“What if that disappears. So what will you do if the kid comes looking for you?”
The middle-aged retired soldier asked the silver-haired foreigner, who looked to be in his early 20s. The silver-haired foreigner, Sylvester, was lost in thought for a moment and then said readily.
“That's something to think about when the time comes.”
<><><>
Se-gun wandered through a nightmare.
In the darkness of the night, blood fell in shimmering patterns, and the vampire walking the streets suffered from a great thirst.
The rest of the truth, which Se-gun had not seen, was rising up as a dream. He wandered in the darkness and then entered an alleyway.
The uphill road that Se-gun knew well, the luxurious single-family housing area located on top of it, was Se-gun's home. The pain of having his lungs torn and his torso pierced was burning his throat with a thirst corresponding to the pain. It felt like he would collapse at any moment, but the powerful life force brought by the curse was prolonging the pain.
A rather abstract thought, that perhaps this pain and thirst were the essence of the curse, flashed through the vampire's mind.
“Heok…… heok……”
He let out a rough breath and looked around.
All that was reflected in his glaring eyes as he searched for a sacrifice were firmly closed buildings; there were almost no living creatures. Fortunately, many of the houses were empty, and he thought it might be because of the economic recession.
<><><>
But just then, a person's body heat was caught in his eyes that were searching for a victim. The redly glowing body heat, the warm blood flowing within it, he could feel it as if he could grasp even the throbbing of the heart in his hand.
That revived the monster's heart. Squeezing out all of its remaining strength, the monster jumped over the wall. The iron bars installed to stop thieves were of no use in front of its monstrous strength.
The vampire went over the wall as it was and bit the dog that was growling at it. As the blood flowed in, vitality began to revive inside its body.
The dog's blood, the beast's blood, was not enough. As soon as the vampire had quenched its burning thirst, it quickly grew tired of the beast's blood. He blew his own toxin into the dog's corpse and soon entered the house.
The door was open, and from inside, there was a smell of something being fried. Were they perhaps making fried food? The vampire opened the door nonchalantly and headed for the kitchen. In the place where the smell led, there was indeed a middle-aged woman.
Blood-sucking. A horrific act of blood-sucking and cannibalism, which a civilized person could not even imagine, took place.
It was so grotesque that it looked more like a 'ritual' than a simple 'meal'. The more the vampire sucked blood, the more it recovered from its wounds.
“Damn True Demon (眞魔) Hunter. Son of a bitch!”
The vampire cursed like that. True Demon Hunter? Se-gun knew that it was another name for Sylvester.
“Krrrrgh.”
The rest was as Se-gun was well aware. The vampire murdered his father, Han Seung-il, in his father's room, and killed his hyung, Han Se-hyeon, who had seen the tragedy and run to the study to get the gun. His wounds had healed considerably, but the flesh into which the silver fragments had entered was rotting away like poisoned meat.
While the vampire was looking around for a tool to remove the silver, Se-gun returned to the house that had become the scene of the tragedy and, after fighting with the vampire, fell to the lower floor and was knocked out.
Shwack!
And just then, Sylvester burst in. He wielded a large ceremonial claymore, overwhelmed the vampire, and finally killed it.
The fear of that 'True Demon Hunter', who surpassed even the vampire in physical ability, was so intense that it was clearly transmitted even to Se-gun, who was dreaming.
The heavy greatsword that pierced his Adam's apple did not even allow a death rattle, and a fierce kick shattered his skull.
But the dream did not end there.
“What is this?”
Sylvester looked down at Se-gun with his characteristic indifferent tone.
Seeing Se-gun, who was covered in blood and panting, he lifted his claymore, looked down at Se-gun, and spoke.
“It is said, there is no one righteous, not even one; on the earth, you are all sinners.”
He shouted that and was about to bring down his sword. It seemed his intention was to relieve Se-gun's pain, but just then, his sword stopped in front of Se-gun's neck. He looked at the shotgun held in Se-gun's hand.
“Ah.”
Sylvester stopped his hand and was lost in thought for a moment.
“He's a waste to kill.”
Then he took out a small syringe from his clothes.
<><><>
Even though it was called a syringe, it was not a typical plunger-type syringe but a special syringe called a steam pack. With it, he drew blood from the corpse of the vampire that had just been killed by him. And he injected that into Se-gun's body.
<><><>
It was a truly strange thing. The blood-soaked body began to heal, and even the severed arm, when Sylvester picked it up and attached it, healed quickly and eventually stuck. Of course, as if one shot was a bit insufficient, Sylvester drew the vampire's blood a couple more times and injected it into Se-gun.
“Uwaaaaaak!”
Se-gun struggled to avoid the injection. But…… his forearm was already bruised, and from the injection mark, a sprout began to grow. The sprout of the monster that had annihilated Se-gun's family spread through Se-gun's arm and along his blood vessels to his entire body.
Se-gun couldn't stand it because of the fear that he could become a vampire if things went wrong, and the revulsion for this blood itself. But Sylvester, after injecting Se-gun with the vampire's blood, showed not the slightest interest and left the scene.
“Uwaaaaaak!”
Se-gun woke up with a scream. His whole body was drenched in sweat as if he had just come out of a sauna, but his surroundings were dark and cold.
Se-gun looked around his room. The PC, video player, and mini component that he had used often when his family was around came into view. Se-gun turned on the power of the mini component and began to clean up the cup ramen containers and other things scattered messily on the floor.
Se-gun finished cleaning at least his own room and walked to the bathroom to take a shower with cold water. The weather was still chilly, so pouring cold water on his body was painful, but for Se-gun, even such pain was a luxury.
His hyung and parents had been murdered, so for him, the survivor, to be unable to endure something like cold water was something he could only think of as the complaint of a well-fed person.
Beep.
While Se-gun was showering, the phone turned on and played a recorded message.
“Ah, is this Se-gun. It's me. Your uncle. It's nothing else, but have you thought about what I asked you to think about? It must be desolate for you to live there alone, right? Make a decision quickly and just come over. Well then, I'm hanging up.”
Se-gun listened to his uncle's voice and leaned his head against the tiled wall. For him, there was still no reason to catch vampires while becoming a drug addict.
Although he had lost his family, neither his parents nor his hyung would want Se-gun to live meaninglessly while becoming a wreck. Thinking that, his mind felt much more at ease.
Se-gun finished his shower and came out to the living room. Considering his usual life pattern, he should have eaten breakfast after finishing his shower, but his feet did not easily turn toward the kitchen. The bloodstains were still there in the kitchen where Se-gun's mother had been brutally murdered. To take food out of the refrigerator while looking at those bloodstains, Se-gun's nutritional state was still too good.
“It's already 10 o'clock? I've missed my chance to go to school today too.”
Se-gun sighed as he threw his clothes into the laundry basket. A huge amount of laundry was already piled up in the laundry basket. For Se-gun, who had never once run a washing machine, that too became an element that made him recall his mother.
The fact that he was reminiscing about his mother because of such daily life matters tormented him again. But he couldn't stay like this forever.
Se-gun changed his clothes and went out to the garage.
<><><>
The cell phone of a female student located in the very front seat of the M University audiovisual room rang thunderously. Moreover, the tune was Arirang Mokdong. If the owner of the cell phone had not made a flustered expression, it would not have been strange to see it as a protest against the professor, as it greatly damaged the atmosphere of the class.
“Oh my. What do I do? What should I do?”
The girl named Han Se-jin was flustered and just pulled out the cell phone battery. She was so used to the action that it took less than a second to turn it off and pull it out. In the end, the class bell rang five minutes later and the class ended, but for her, it would not have been an exaggeration to say it was truly the worst day.
“I ate spoiled food for breakfast, I lost my contact lens! My transportation card burst! And to be like this at school too, I'm going crazy!”
She said that after class while helping the teaching assistant put away the screen. Originally, there was a device that rolled up the projector screen, but as school facilities often do, it broke easily, so they had to roll it up by hand like this.
The professor of the sociology department at M University was famous for being strict, so much so that even the teaching assistant was said to be losing weight, and she had gotten caught big time.
“Um, well then, I'll be going now.”
Se-jin, having finished cleaning up, said goodbye to the teaching assistant and bolted out of the audiovisual room as if she were fleeing. And she put the cell phone battery back in.
“There's no one who would call me in the morning, who could it be?”
But just then, she saw a motorcycle entering the main gate of the university. On the motorcycle sat a man wearing an aviation jacket and jeans.
“Oh my. It's Se-gun, isn't it?”
She recognized her cousin, Se-gun, and muttered so. Come to think of it, she had also participated in the funeral a few days ago because a mad dog had a seizure and the whole family was annihilated.
But the chief mourner, Se-gun himself, had been in too much shock and was also under suspicion of firing the shotgun, so he had not been able to participate in the funeral.
But why had Se-gun come to find her now?
“Ah, Noona!”
Se-gun, managing to spot Se-jin among so many people, approached on his motorcycle and did a smooth turn in front of her. It was a type of smooth accelerator turn where he supported his body by planting his foot on the ground and turned only the motorcycle by pressing the accelerator.