Chapter 45 – 045. Vampire Detective
045. Vampire Detective
“Superpowers…! A True Ancestor!”
It wasn’t surprising. There were quite a few True Ancestor vampires.
A vampire becomes a True Ancestor when they drink the blood of five other vampires. This is called a wild True Ancestor, but because it’s ultimately an awakening through cannibalism, they are hated and targeted even by other vampires. This is because if a regular vampire drinks the blood of a True Ancestor, they immediately awaken as one.
“Right. But are you really human? How can you deflect all my attacks? That’s not human reflexes.”
The whip-knife that had been lying limp on the floor contracted again.
Extending and retracting it. It seemed to be able to do it freely.
The guy swung the knife at me again. The blade of the knife extended like a whip. He was handling two knives at once, and his skill was no joke.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
It wasn’t difficult to deflect the knife-whip by positioning my sword this way and that. The problem was that it was hard to get close. If I tried to get closer, the curved knife would wrap around me like a lasso.
‘Damn it. Annoying. Should I just take a gamble? …No. Let’s go the easy and fast route.’
I stepped back for now. It wouldn’t have been easy if I hadn’t been in acceleration mode.
“…Running away?”
“Who’s running away?”
I took out my smartphone from my pocket. I ended the game to return to reality and took out the item I had put in my inventory. There was a slight gap in this process, but thankfully, he was also getting ready, so it was okay.
“……A revolver? You took it out of your smartphone? What kind of trick is that?”
“There’s no trick. It’s as you see it.”
I aimed the revolver at him. It was a vampire hunter’s weapon. The bullets in the revolver were silver bullets, a vampire’s weakness. No matter how much physical ability and superpowers a True Ancestor had, silver was still their weakness.
Bang bang bang bang bang bang!
I fired all six bullets from the revolver.
Just one shot. If just one shot hit him properly, he would be like a mosquito hit head-on with bug spray.
He moved his body and dodged all the bullets. Then, he frowned as he looked at the bullets that had fallen on the floor.
“Silver bullets… I see.”
“……You little shit, you dodge really well.”
“If you shoot straight at me, there’s nothing I can’t dodge. And you’re just bad at it. Even if I didn’t dodge, only about two would have hit. How can you be so bad at aiming from this distance?”
“It’s my first time shooting a gun…”
“Even if it’s your first time, that’s a hopeless level. You have no talent for shooting compared to your high-level swordsmanship.”
“Ah. Yeah. That’s right.”
I answered casually and threw a grenade with the pin pulled towards him.
“A holy grenade!”
It was a specially made fragmentation grenade filled with small silver beads inside. It was extremely deadly to vampires. I quickly went up the stairs behind me and got out of the blast radius.
Boom!
The grenade exploded. I went back down to the basement. No matter who he was, this place was narrow. There was nowhere to avoid, so he had no choice but to get hit by the grenade.
‘It’s not just a regular grenade, it’s an anti-vampire grenade. Even if he’s a True Ancestor, he’ll be at least seriously injured.’
But, contrary to my expectations, he was fine.
He had made the blade of his knife large like a wall and blocked the explosion of the grenade.
“You could control not only the length but also the width freely…!”
“Yeah.”
He took a stance. His momentum was different from before. He had changed from passive to active.
“I was going to gather information while fighting you… but you’re more dangerous than I thought. I’ll stop holding back and kill you with all my power.”
He rushed towards me. He was slightly slower than me with acceleration. The remaining duration of acceleration was four minutes. That was enough.
I used the Azure Stream on him.
Clang!
His knife deflected my sword. About half of it got through. However, his combat sense and reflexes were more outstanding than I had thought.
“What is that? A superpower… no, swordsmanship. To shake my sense of distance… I didn’t know such swordsmanship existed. Interesting.”
He smiled. He was enjoying the fight itself.
And so was I. It wasn’t to the point of laughing, but it was kind of fun.
‘The guys upstairs were too easy.’
He wasn’t weaker or stronger than me. It was more accurate to say we were similar. His physical abilities were slightly better, but I had acceleration and the Yeongcheon Style.
‘If he was so strong that I couldn’t even touch him, I would have run away immediately… but I can handle this much.’
He didn’t engage in close combat and kept a certain distance, swinging his knife like a whip. It was proof that he was afraid of my swordsmanship, the Yeongcheon Style.
‘…That ability. It’s really annoying.’
It suddenly extended or suddenly retracted. I couldn’t let my guard down. The moment I lost sight of his knife, the extended blade would surely wrap around my body.
‘Should I use that? I didn’t think I’d ever have to use this.’
Yeongcheon Style Practical Technique: Swallow Dance.
My movements changed. Before, I was so focused on approaching him at top speed that my body was a bit hunched, but now my back was proudly straightened.
I moved as if I were dancing. There was no longer the sharp momentum from before, but sharpness was hidden within the softness.
Clang! Clang! Clang clang!
I deflected his knife while slowly approaching him.
“…Hmm?”
He seemed flustered and swung his knife again. The speed of the knife increased, but I dodged or deflected all of it.
The Swallow Dance was a technique focused on evasion and defense. It used footwork and body techniques to the fullest. Because of that, it looked like I was dancing.
Jin Se-yeong might be able to use the Swallow Dance for offense as well, but I didn’t have that level of skill yet.
I was already right in front of him.
“This is ridiculous…”
My sword cut through his body. He staggered but still swung his knife at me. I ducked to avoid the knife that had grown large like a club and swung my sword again.
The sword cut his leg, then his shoulder, and then pierced his heart.
“Kuh-uck!”
He fell to the floor. Even so, he tried to swing his arm, so I stepped on his wrist with my sneaker.
“Just asking in case. Do you know the safe’s password?”
“49685817361.”
“……Oh. I didn’t think you’d actually tell me. That’s a lie, right?”
“The password is real. You just need fingerprint and iris recognition in addition. It’s impossible for you to move the safe alone, and even if you try to destroy the safe here, it will take time. By then, reinforcements will have arrived and turned you into a pincushion.”
“Heh heh.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the guy who was seriously spouting such words even as he was dying.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s like the heavens are helping me.”
[Hacking successful.]
[You can hack the safe for 2 minutes.]
Click.
The door of the huge safe opened.
“What?!”
“It didn’t matter if it was fingerprint or password. I just asked once.”
I swung my sword. The guy’s head was cut off. He seemed to have been planning to counterattack by extending the length of the blade he had hidden in his pants pocket. I had anticipated it early on, seeing him subtly moving.
I kicked his corpse aside and looked at the safe.
It was about half the size of my studio apartment in reality.
It was impossible to put the entire safe into my inventory. The condition for the inventory was limited to items I could carry. No matter how big it was, if I couldn’t lift it, it wouldn’t go into the inventory. I had confirmed that before. On the other hand, even if it was big, if I could lift it, it would go into the inventory.
I was quite amazed when I put a huge styrofoam box that was over 5 meters into my inventory.
“Whoa…”
I let out an exclamation as I stepped inside the safe.
The inside of the safe wasn’t just filled with cash. There were artworks like paintings and ceramics, as well as jewels and gold bars. The stacked bills were both won and dollars.
“Wow, how many 1kg gold bars are there? More than 200.”
I didn’t know the exact price, but I remembered seeing on TV that the price of a 1kg gold bar was around 60 million won.
“I should sell the gold bars in reality. I should escape my studio apartment soon too.”
I thought about where to use the items as I collected them.
First, the place I would move to was a luxury officetel. I had gotten used to Hera’s house, so I kept being drawn to luxury officetels.
I would keep the jewels for now, and I would exchange the dollars for won. I had no intention of going to the United States.
‘I should go see Kang Wook-sung about the artworks.’
Since these were ultimately stolen goods, it was difficult to handle them openly. It was safer and more convenient to entrust them to a professional broker, even if I lost some money.
After collecting all the items in the safe, I got into the Benz that was parked in front of the village hall. The car keys were near the front door, so I didn’t have to search the corpse.
“Making money is this easy! Hahahaha!”
As I left the village, I stuck my hand out the window and gave the middle finger to the CCTV camera. I hoped Kim Chun-seok would be very angry when he saw this.
‘Wow. So this is why people talk about foreign cars, foreign cars.’
Having driven a bit, I realized that every aspect of it was superior to domestic cars.
‘Heh. This is fun.’
The mountain road was winding, but I maintained a speed of 70 km/h and barely saw the road ahead with the headlights. Even if it was a dangerous mountain road, my reflexes made it possible for me to drive.
With just a small mistake, the car would flip over or crash into a tree. Or maybe it would roll down below.
‘That’s what makes it thrilling.’
I was as focused as when I was fighting the vampire True Ancestor with swords earlier.
Screech! Thud!
As I was turning a curve, something jumped out and hit the car. It was unavoidable. It was a dark night. And since something suddenly jumped out while I was turning a curve on a mountain road, I couldn’t react at all.
“You crazy bastard!”
I was startled and immediately stopped the car and got out.
“Damn it. You deer bastard!”
A deer with its legs and neck broken was dead with its tongue sticking out. I grimaced.
They said the deer in Gangwon-do were particularly troublesome.
‘This is beyond troublesome. Damn it.’
The front of the car was badly dented. I clicked my tongue loudly and went back to the driver’s seat. I was going to slow down my driving speed because of the deer.
The car went for about 30 seconds and then suddenly stalled.
“Huh? What’s wrong?”
I turned the car key to try to start it again. But the car remained silent. It must have gone bad somewhere because of the deer earlier.
After trying a few more times, I eventually got out of the car. Hacking was also on cooldown, so I couldn’t use it.
‘It’s too late to go back up… I have no choice but to walk down.’
Fortunately, the mountain road wasn’t that long, so if I went down a little, I would reach the car I had come in.
“Damn mosquitoes. I want to catch them all and burn them to death. I want to catch all those deer and tear them to pieces. …You damn bastards.”
I got so pissed off along the way that I bought a bicycle in reality and brought it to ride down.
I was originally going to buy a motorcycle, but I didn’t have a license.
As I was pedaling down the road, I found a deer.
I took out a pistol from my inventory and pulled the trigger towards the deer.
Bang bang bang bang!
The muzzle flashed, and the empty cartridges fell to the ground. I fired 17 shots at once, but I didn’t hit a single one.
“……Tch.”
The deer was dodging this way and that, but my shooting skills were also terrible. It was as the vampire guy had said earlier. I had no talent for shooting.
“Sigh. What am I doing? This is.”
I had a strong moment of clarity, so I was just going to ignore the deer and leave. Today was a good day. I could be generous and let the deer go.
But this damn deer didn’t run away and smiled at me.
It wasn’t my paranoia. It really smiled. It really smirked and sneered.
“You little shit!”
In the end, I took out the K-2 assault rifle, steeped in Korea’s long tradition.
It was night now, and this was a forest full of trees. And the deer was surprisingly fast. I was only able to catch it after using up five magazines.
I sighed deeply at my truly hopeless shooting skills and took out my smartphone to put the gun back into my inventory.
[Condition met.]
[You can unlock the ‘Shooting’ trait.]
[Do you want to unlock the ‘Shooting’ trait by spending 30 points?]
[Yes / No / Hold]
“Of course, I need this!”
I was about to unlock the trait, but then I saw that I only had 12 points, so I selected hold.
‘It needs three times more than the Yeongcheon Style.’
If I thought about it for a moment, the answer came to me.
The Yeongcheon Style trait was limited to the martial art, Yeongcheon Style. But shooting included not only guns but also the entire act of firing or shooting something. The range of application for shooting was greater than that of the Yeongcheon Style.
‘I need to quickly gather points and unlock the trait.’
I felt good. I had made money, caught the deer, and I could unlock the shooting trait as soon as I gathered enough points.
I couldn’t help but hum a tune. The mosquitoes were annoying, but I could be generous.
Until I met another damn deer bastard.
