"Home at last."
Garam worked the stiffness out of his body and lay down on the bed.
He had only just come from lying in a hospital, but a hospital bed and the bed at home were plainly different.
"Huh. The hospital bed might have been more comfortable, actually."
"This is your place?"
While he was spacing out on pointless thoughts, Carmilla spoke up beside him.
Perhaps sixteen square meters.
A cramped room holding only the barest of household necessities.
Carmilla began flying all around the room, looking it over.
"It isn't a nice place."
"I can see that."
"Why, you bastard."
Carmilla said it flatly. He was the one who had said it about his own place, but the way she answered had no manners in it at all.
He moved toward the hovering Carmilla, determined that this time he really would smack her once,
"Why are you living in a place like this?"
and at Carmilla's question, Garam's body stiffened.
"From the look of it you've been playing porter in gates. Shouldn't you be living better than this?"
"Huh, you said you'd been sealed away for ages. How do you know things like that?"
"I have a thing called perceptiveness."
As she said it, Carmilla jerked her chin at the bag hanging from his shoulder.
Certainly, just as Carmilla said, it wasn't that he couldn't earn money.
No, if anything he earned more than an ordinary office worker, and more than the other porters around him too.
He was the only one who worked as a porter while also brawling with monsters.
Even so, the reason he lived in a shabby place like this was nothing complicated.
"That's... because there's someone I have to repay a kindness to."
And that bastard of a kindness required far more money than he'd have thought.
Garam picked up the small picture frame in the corner of the room.
In it were a girl and a young Garam.
Brushing his hand over the girl in the frame, Garam spoke again.
"When I was little, back at the orphanage, monsters showed up once."
It was a horrific thing even now, thinking back on it.
An ordinary orphanage of the sort you'd find anywhere.
If that orphanage had any misfortune, it was that it stood in a remote spot where few people passed,
and that the gate formed there went undiscovered for so long that a Gate Break finally occurred.
-EEEEEK
-Everyone, evacuate this way!
-Teacher, I'm scared!
Screams that he could still hear clearly whenever he closed his eyes.
Himself, frightened stiff and left alone while everyone else fled, and the girl who stood in front of him.
Whether it was a miracle or something else, that child Awakened right there.
-I'll protect you, big brother.
Ice stretched out from her hand and swept the monsters away.
But there was no chance a child's body could withstand that much mana.
"Well, that's the story."
He shrugged, forcing an air of indifference.
It was an old story. Old enough that it was fine to leave it covered up now.
"She was a good little sister."
Perhaps she sensed that Garam's mood had turned.
Carmilla settled down onto Garam's shoulder.
"Hey, are you all rig......."
BANG!
"Big brother! Where on earth have you been and what have you been doing until now?!"
"Huh?"
Her claim to perceptiveness apparently wasn't a lie, because the moment Carmilla came close to Garam,
a young woman kicked the door open and came in.
Apart from her hair being pink, she was the spitting image of the child in the photograph.
So much so that you'd wonder whether this was what the girl in the photo would look like grown up.
And that wasn't wrong, exactly.
Because the woman in front of him really was the girl from the photograph.
"Wait, wait, wait. What? Didn't that girl die?"
"What are you talking about? Why would she be dead?"
Why on earth would she be dead?
If anything, even after an incident like that, she had trained hard and gone as far as enrolling in the Hunter Officers' Academy, one of the most renowned schools in the world.
There was no better little sister anywhere.
"The girl's body couldn't withstand the enormous mana and, like? Huh? That was the whole feel of it."
"I never said she died. Part of her mana circuit has just been broken ever since."
As if to prove Garam's words, frost clung to the fingertips of the girl who had come through the door.
A chill strong enough to affect even herself.
It was a symptom that arose because she couldn't control her mana properly.
Which was why she simply needed medicine every month to suppress it.
The medicine being filthy expensive came along with it.
[Ha, shit, I worried for nothing. Hey, I'm hiding again. Handle yourself properly.]
Carmilla hid behind Garam as though embarrassed.
At the same time, the woman strode inside.
[Whoa, what is that?]
"Yeon Ha-yeon, what's this all of a sudden? And what... is that."
A bag of fried chicken hung from her arm.
Five whole birds' worth, at that.
In a way it was the same as always. She had been a ridiculous glutton since long ago.
"I got hungry on the way. The school handed out a subsidy this time, so I bought it with that."
Ha-yeon strode further inside.
Hands on her hips, she asked Garam a question.
"Anyway, big brother, did you hurt yourself cooking? There's some kind of blood smell."
"Hm? A blood smell?"
It was hardly a cooking injury; he'd been turned into a rag by a monster.
But he had washed off all the blood he shed then at the hospital yesterday.
There shouldn't be any blood smell left.
[Sweat, now, that I could believe.]
'Shut it.'
Did being invisible to other people boost her confidence or something?
Carmilla was hovering around beside him snickering again.
"And, big brother."
"Yeah?"
Ha-yeon came close with her usual affection, and the instant she stood in front of Garam,
"What are you?"
the mood flipped.
"Huh?"
CRRRACK
It happened in an instant.
The ice sword formed in Ha-yeon's hand came flying at Garam.
The chicken bag went sailing through the air.
CLANG—!
[Sub-skill: Hardening is used.]
At the same time, a sword of blood formed in Garam's hand and blocked Ha-yeon's ice sword.
"Hoo."
Merely forming an ice sword was enough to make Ha-yeon's breath leak out white.
A symptom that arose because mana was leaking steadily through her broken mana circuit.
She might be fine for the moment, but if the fight dragged on she could be in danger.
[What's with her all of a sudden? You said she was a good little sister. Play good little sister twice more and you'll be frozen meat.]
'I don't know either!'
Asking a man who has just had a blade shoved at his throat gets you nothing.
"I'll ask one more time. Where did my brother go, and why is there a Vampir in this house?"
Ha-yeon's eyes as she said it were as cold as the sheet of ice she had produced.
A sharp gaze that said she would cut him down that instant if he didn't speak.
Completely unlike her usual self.
But what surprised Garam even more than that was,
"Yeon Ha-yeon, you... were a Vampir?"
[Sub-skill: Domination is used.]
[Target: Domination is applied to Yeon Ha-yeon.]
[The skill's Grade is lower than the opponent's.]
[Domination applies only partially.]
'Skip the status window!'
There was no time to check a status window line by line.
What mattered was that Domination had been used on Ha-yeon.
Domination was a trait that triggered on Vampirs alone.
And it had triggered on Ha-yeon.
And one more thing.
Ha-yeon's ice, adding a degree of chill at a time.
From that ice, which had by now laid frost all the way up Ha-yeon's arm, came the same smell of blood as his own.
Only the tiniest trace of it, but it was the same power over blood that he had.
It was a fact he had known nothing about until he became the True Progenitor.
And this after knowing Yeon Ha-yeon for fifteen years.
"So you know about Vampirs on top of it all. Then you're definitely not the brother I knew."
The ice sword forming in her hand was leveled at Garam's throat.
"Hold on, calm down. I Awakened. It just turned out a bit strange, that's all."
It was the truth.
He had Awakened, and it was also true that the Awakening had turned out strange.
Unfairly strange, at that.
Search the whole world and he'd be the only case where Awakening changed a person's race.
"Ha, is that so? Then give me proof."
"Proof? What proof. That you wet the bed when you were six?"
"Pfft, what?"
Having judged that hiding was meaningless now that she'd been noticed, Carmilla was talking the way she normally did again.
That must have been the detonator, because Ha-yeon hid her flushed red face and backed away.
'Now!'
FWOOSH—!
Flames bloomed in Garam's hand.
Crimson Flame.
The skill he had obtained after striking Gallos down.
He reached out with his flame-wrapped hand and grabbed Ha-yeon's ice sword.
TSSSSS—!
Ha-yeon's ice sword melted little by little.
He had used it blindly, thinking only that he had to melt the ice, but the effect was immediate.
Watching Ha-yeon gradually warm up, Garam went on.
"Want me to say more if that isn't enough?"
"M-more of what?"
"How you threw a fit about wanting to write a letter to Santa so I wrote it for you? And then cried because no present came?"
"W-wait, seriously? You really are my brother?"
"That's what I've been telling you, how many times do I have to say it. I just Awakened a little strangely."
Was even this not enough?
As Garam opened his mouth to offer a bit more proof, Ha-yeon's hand clamped over it.
A hand cold with the frost clinging to it.
But whether from Crimson Flame or from Domination, the frost that had climbed up to Ha-yeon's elbow was slowly disappearing.
"This is unbelievable. What kind of Awakening turns a human into a Vampir?"
Ha-yeon looked at him as though she couldn't believe it.
And Garam felt exactly the same.
The little sister he had known for fifteen years had actually been a Vampir.
Whatever else was true, Garam was surely feeling the same shock she was.
"Explain everything from beginning to end, without leaving out a single thing."
Ha-yeon let out a sigh and perched on the bed at the back of the room.
He had plenty he wanted to ask her too, but it seemed his explanation had to come first.
***
"So you went into an unregistered gate, met that Carmilla thing there, and were chosen as the True Progenitor?"
"That's right."
"And you killed a Vampir there and got scouted by an S-Grade hunter?"
"That's right too."
Garam nodded. They were tremendous events, hard to believe had all happened in a single day.
But summarized, that was all of it.
Ha-yeon looked at him as though dumbfounded.
It wasn't as if he couldn't understand.
Hadn't he been told that to Vampirs, the True Progenitor was the savior of the prophecy?
Ha-yeon was probably a Vampir too, so the meaning might carry a weight for her that it didn't for others.
"What in the world are you thinking? The Holy Knights? Didn't that thing tell you? Those bastards are lunatics dying to kill us."
Ah, so that was where she was going.
Admittedly it was a choice stupid enough that even Carmilla couldn't understand it.
He didn't regret it, though.
"If I join, they'll give you a scholarship."
The Hunter Officers' Academy she attended was prestigious enough to be counted among the finest in the world.
Tuition at a school like that was no small change, and if it could be saved, it should be.
And with more money coming in than before, getting her medicine would be easier too.
"No! Even so—"
"There's no 'even so.' I'm just doing what I have to do."
He owed her his life, and he was only repaying it.
Taking responsibility for a mana circuit that had broken because of him was only natural.
If only he hadn't behaved like an idiot back then.
Yeon Ha-yeon had been a genius who might have risen to S-Grade.
Not a half-thing whose arm froze over from making a single ice sword.
"More than that, I'm more shocked that you were a Vampir."
An orphan having a secret about some special birth isn't much of a big deal.
At least not at our orphanage.
I once heard that a friend I'd been running around with the day before was the youngest child of a chaebol family.
So a Vampir was hardly...
"No. It's strange after all."
Trying somehow to rationalize it, I shook my head hard.
Even so, Vampir was going quite a bit far.
"How have you gone this long without anyone finding out you're a Vampir in the first place?"
"Half-Vampir, to be precise. I didn't know myself until I was six."
Six.
The age when monsters stormed the orphanage and Ha-yeon first Awakened.
"I found out that my race was Vampir when I Awakened then. And I couldn't control the power properly, so my mana circuit broke."
[But it's precisely because she was a Vampir that she could still use mana through the broken mana circuit, or more precisely, through blood channels.]
"Blood channels?"
Even he, whose bones had thickened from his time as a porter, was hearing the term for the very first time.
[The very structure by which Vampirs use mana is different from humans. It's a kind of mana circuit unique to Vampirs.]
Ha-yeon nodded at Carmilla's words.
"For Vampirs, blood is mana."
Blood is mana.
In other words, they used the blood flowing through their own bodies to use skills.
"That's why Vampirs don't store mana separately."
That made sense.
Blood was made in the heart.
Simple common knowledge.
Which meant, in the end, that how much blood the heart could produce determined a Vampir's mana capacity.
[The reason Vampirs recover mana faster than human hunters, and have more of it to begin with, is this difference in structure.]
Garam looked down at his hand.
With a structure like that, it was true the efficiency far exceeded an ordinary human's.
Humans had to widen their mana capacity through ceaseless training in order to accumulate mana.
Vampirs only needed to be able to draw out a lot of blood.
"That means growing much faster than ordinary hunters."
"Well, my human body couldn't withstand a Vampir's power, which is how I ended up like this."
As she said it, Ha-yeon looked at her own hand.
Frost still lingered on her fingertips even though time had passed since she released her ability.
"It's all right."
Flames rose from Garam's hand and spread out to Ha-yeon.
And Ha-yeon's frost slowly began to melt.
Now he'd be able to earn a fair amount of money.
With money like that he could try the various treatments that had been out of reach until now.
There might be treatments that an ordinary porter would never learn of.
Or, being the True Progenitor of all things, perhaps he could cure her himself.
"And Hae-rang did tell me to come in today."
The pitch-black business card in his pocket.
Hae-rang had handed it over and told him to come take the exam today.
"Then I'm going to the Association with you."
"You've got school, what are you talking about?"
She wasn't a parent, and it was only a hunter Grade exam.
Even parents don't usually come along.
"That's not it, I'm going for my hunter Grade exam today too. The school assigned it this time."
The Hunter Officers' Academy really was something different.
Did they think a Grade exam was some PowerPoint certification test?
"For the record, if you're not taking me, you're not getting out of here either."
Smiling brightly, Ha-yeon boldly planted herself in Garam's way.