WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 37: Vampire Hunt (4)

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The place the silver buckshot had swept through.

Black vapor rose from the melting flesh and the ghoul corpses crackling as they burned.

All this from a single bullet.

"How can one shot do this much...?"

I had recited a blessing prayer over it, sure, but that alone made this much of a difference?

This wasn't a movie. The rotten flesh hit by the shotgun had caught fire so fiercely it was blazing.

I didn't know how tough vampires were, but one hit from this would probably put them down for good...

"No, wait..."

When I checked the gun, I found the barrel melting. It had melted after firing just one shot?

【Devour!】

Eight-Foot Sister finally made it down.

She looked startled too after seeing the devastation in front of her.

【Devour?】

"This isn't the time. Could you deal with the remaining ghouls first?"

【Devour!】

Eight-Foot Sister strode forward.

There weren't many ghouls left.

Just as I was about to watch until she finished them off...

"..."

A smell.

The stench here was already sharp enough to sting my nose, but there was another, slightly different scent mixed in.

The moment I noticed it and rolled forward, a chilling sharpness grazed past my back.

"Tch!"

I crashed to the ground in front of me, then immediately spun around.

There was some guy standing there.

He looked ordinary, but his eyes were blood-red, and his nails were abnormally long.

I recognized him at once.

"A vampire?"

"Hehehe..."

The man gave me a bloody smile as he licked his own nails.

Those sharp nails had just slashed at my back.

If I hadn't been wearing the holy armor coat, I would've taken a serious wound.

【Devour!】

Eight-Foot Sister turned toward me in a panic.

She had noticed I was attacked and charged in with fury, swinging Benkei's Iron Staff and knocking the bastard's arm clean off.

"Aaargh!"

Eight-Foot Sister immediately brought the staff down and pinned him. The vampire struggled, but he couldn't budge beneath the iron staff's weight and Eight-Foot Sister's strength.

"Urgh! G-get this off me!"

It looked like vampires could see Eight-Foot Sister too.

Maybe vampires had a different kind of spiritual nature from humans.

"Since you speak Korean, I guess you're not that Chinese vampire... Aren't you one of the people who got bitten?"

"So what?"

"That's not the point, sir. Is it right to start attacking people just because you've become a vampire?"

Even if he had turned into a vampire, he must have been an ordinary person until recently.

Was it really normal to start attacking people overnight just because he had become a vampire?

"Hehehe. You wouldn't understand how euphoric it is to escape this unnatural human body."

Did every vampire lose their mind like this?

Maybe he had always been a bad person. Or maybe becoming a vampire had changed him.

Man, I really shouldn't become one of those vampires.

I clenched the anti-vampire Blood-Drinking Ward Bead between my teeth and continued.

"Sir. Where's that Chinese vampire?"

"Fuck! Let me go first! I'll tell you if you let me go!"

"This bastard thinks I'm an idiot because I'm speaking politely. You tried to claw up my back with those Wolverine claws, and you've got some nerve making demands."

I uncapped a bottle of holy water and poured it over the captive.

I poured it on his arm, but nothing happened.

"What the hell? What are you doing?!"

"Hm, it doesn't work."

Unlike evil spirits, demons, and sorcerers, holy water apparently didn't work on vampires.

Silver buckshot worked on them, though, so maybe it functioned differently.

It might have been an issue with the combination.

Holy water seemed closer to a tool for consecration to begin with, so it wasn't an absurd hydrochloric acid solution like the holy water I used.

Vampires smelled somewhat different from those three too.

Come to think of it, Eight-Foot Sister was an anomaly as well. Yet unlike other anomalies, she didn't have a smell, so being an anomaly didn't automatically mean holy water would work on it.

If I poured holy water over a vicious serial killer, it wouldn't make them melt, would it?

"Nice. Learned something else."

"What kind of bullshit is that?!"

"Anyway, you don't plan on telling me anything useful, right?"

"I said I'll tell you if you let me go?!"

"Shh. It's okay. You don't have to tell me."

Information would be nice, but it didn't matter if I couldn't get it.

The Gugu legion was already hard at work tracking the vampires down.

Coo!

"Okay, found another one. Stay put and──"

That was when it happened.

The vampire's body suddenly began to scatter, transforming into mist as it moved.

Only the vampire's head gathered within the mist, and he sneered at me.

"Hahaha! You stupid bastard! See you later!"

"Sir, wait...!"

The vampire shot up through the manhole passage and burst outside.

The problem was...

Chomp!

Snap?

Gari had been waiting at the manhole entrance with its mouth stretched wide open.

"Huh?"

The vampire had walked right into Gari's mouth, and Gari immediately began chewing him without mercy.

"Aaaaargh! Stop! Save me! Save meeee!!"

Splash!

His dying scream cut off in an instant.

The next moment, blood poured down like a waterfall.

"..."

That's why I told you to wait...

* * *

The Great Unification Church hunters quickly tracked the ghouls' path of travel with their large numbers.

"Evangelist! Over here!"

"Oh, rotten flesh."

The ghouls' trail led to a manhole.

It was incredibly faint in the darkness of the back alley, but with enough people, even small details like this could be found.

"Then this must be the manhole."

"Should we enter immediately?"

"Open the cover first."

Several strong men lifted the heavy cover.

"We're going in right away. Turn on the lights."

"Yes!"

The Great Unification Church hunters, armed with silver buckshot, descended one by one and caught the horrible smell.

"Ugh... The stench of rot is overwhelming."

"It's certain there are ghouls here. Everyone, be ready to fight the moment you get down there."

The Great Unification Church hunters went down the manhole passage, tense and alert.

Modern exorcists did not often have a reason to fight vampiric creatures.

Unless they belonged to an unusual group like Gangnam Holy Temple Church, which worked with overseas forces to eradicate anomalies, they would never even encounter them.

Facing an unknown enemy was always nerve-racking.

But what united them was faith.

When the day of the end finally came, Jesus of the Second Coming would lead 144,000 true believers to Heaven.

To be among those 144,000, they had to step forward more boldly than anyone else and prove their loyalty and faith.

That was the true nature of the exorcist force operated by the Great Unification Church.

Fanatics willing to give even their lives for Heaven.

What they witnessed, though, was not a battle that would lead them there.

"What is this...?"

"What? Why are you all standing around? Where are the ghouls...?!"

Evangelist Park, who arrived last, was stunned by the sight before him.

Corpses.

Traces of battle.

Rotten chunks of flesh lay scattered everywhere like fragments, with flames rising between them.

The flames felt numinous and mysterious, almost like holy fire.

It was a blasphemous thought.

Holiness was something permitted only to the leader, Jesus of the Second Coming.

"What is this?! What the hell happened here?!"

"I-it appears someone got here before us!"

"Tch... Were we one step too late?"

Evangelist Park could tell the battle before him had been a one-sided slaughter.

"What about the vampires? Aren't there any vampire corpses?"

"No! There are only ghouls here!"

"Hmph! They must have dealt with them quickly because there were only ghouls and no vampires."

If there had been vampires, even if someone collected their blood, they would have left the corpses behind.

Since they had cleared the place so quickly and disappeared, there must not have been any vampires here.

"Uh... There's an enormous amount of blood spilled here."

Right beneath the manhole passage.

There was an excessive amount of blood, as if someone had put a person through a strainer and squeezed them dry.

"It isn't ghoul blood..."

Then was it human blood?

At that moment, a message came over Evangelist Park's radio.

[Evangelist! We've found a new ghoul nest!]

"Really? Where? ...Good, it's close to us. We're heading there now!"

There was no time to examine the blood soaking the manhole passage.

The nearby ghoul nest was inside a commercial building with an underground karaoke bar.

"Evangelist!"

"What? Why haven't you gone in? Don't tell me you're scared. I should make a note of that in this round's performance reviews."

He tried to needle the Great Unification Church believers waiting in front of the building, but their reaction was strange.

"W-we went inside too!"

"The underground karaoke bar... It was a gambling den disguised as a karaoke bar, but..."

"They're all dead. No, the ghouls had all been hunted already!"

"What?"

At those words, Evangelist Park hurried into the karaoke bar.

The stench of rotten meat and blood filled the air.

The scene there was even more horrible than the sewers.

"Were they eaten?"

"There are corpses that were completely smashed apart."

There were traces of one-sided violence, massive violence, having been unleashed without mercy.

One ghoul had been cut in half at the torso, but its upper body was nowhere to be seen.

"What the hell happened here?"

The battle in the sewers had at least left signs that a person was responsible.

The ghoul corpses were burning, but there were traces of silver buckshot being used.

This place, though... It was believable that some enormous predator had swept through.

There was no way a human had left these traces.

[Evangelist, this is the Gwanak District team! The flock of birds you told us to watch has come here too...]

A flock of birds?

Don't tell me!

"It's moving!"

Evangelist Park led his team as they continued to chase nothing but someone's trail.

Wiped out. Wiped out. Wiped out.

In that short time, they found only scenes where overwhelming violence had swept through.

"This place was wiped out too..."

"There are still no vampire corpses. At this point, we should have seen at least one vampire..."

That too, but there was something even harder to understand.

How was this person finding and exterminating ghouls faster than them?

There were hundreds of hunters spread throughout this area right now.

A third of them were Great Unification Church hunters.

More people meant a higher chance of finding something. So how was this person always ahead of them?

Flap!

"Pigeons?"

Then he saw a flock of pigeons flying through the sky.

They were flying in formation as if searching for something, moving in a way that was far too unnatural.

"That's it!"

Someone who commanded hundreds of birds as familiars.

If this person was using familiars to find vampires, they might be faster than them, who could only get around in vehicles.

"Everyone, follow me! Chase that person's familiars!"

* * *

After that, I hunted around thirty more ghouls and two more vampires.

I had heard vampire blood had plenty of uses, so I put it inside Gari's mouth for now. Neither of them seemed to be the vampire I was looking for, though.

"They were all Korean too."

There were three vampires who had come over from China.

One was the culprit behind this incident, who had stolen the Clan Lord's blood and fled.

The other two were trackers who had come after that person, as well as the clan's heirs.

They wouldn't be easy opponents.

After hunting three vampires, I had learned that these guys were fast and strong.

In a pure contest of physical ability, humans couldn't compete with them.

They also had unusual abilities.

Mist form, bat form, and regeneration.

It might vary depending on the vampire's level, but they were pretty troublesome abilities.

"That regeneration is especially shocking. It's not like they're King Piccolo... Now I understand why silver buckshot is essential."

I had been seriously startled when a severed arm regenerated in an instant.

Fortunately, silver was the counter to it.

Silver interfered with a vampire's regeneration and inflicted lasting wounds.

Silver buckshot would be essential if I had to face high-ranking vampires later.

"I still have the automatic rifle and machine gun, but... A shotgun would probably be more convenient."

I looked at the Remington 870 I had used in the sewers.

The barrel had melted. More precisely, the area around the muzzle had melted, but if I fired it in this state, it might explode.

"Gari, open your mouth."

Chomp?

When Gari opened its mouth, I wedged the melted section of the barrel between its teeth.

"Bite down hard and cut it off right there."

Chomp! Crunch!

The front end of the Remington 870 snapped off.

Once the melted section had been cleanly removed, I had myself a short sawed-off shotgun.

This... should still work like this, right?

I had seen people on Hutube saw off the barrel, change the stock a little, and use one just fine.

Still, it had to be better than using the barrel while it was melted.

"I won't use the blessing sacrament. It's too strong."

Who would have thought the barrel would melt after one shot?

The holy water was the same, and so was the holy oil. Nothing had any moderation.

Later, I should just buy some silver buckshot from Myeongdong Cathedral.

Maybe it would work if I used much better equipment too.

"All right, this is the place."

Chirp!

The last place we reached was a hospital building in Gwanak District.

It was a general hospital about five stories tall.

Jjaekjjaeki had found a vampire here.

"...A hospital."

The people inside... had already fallen prey, right?

It was tragic, but if I just went in, I didn't think I could handle it.

The smell here was on a whole different level from before.

It wasn't like a dream demon nest or a place where sorcerers had performed a ritual.

Instead of that distinct demon-related shit smell, a bloody and unpleasant stench filled the air.

I was certain.

A high-ranking vampire was here.

And that bastard must have attacked this hospital to make new victims.

The patients and security guards inside had probably all become ghouls. It was too dangerous, so I should ask for backup instead...

Screeeech!

Vehicles poured toward the hospital entrance.

An army of heavily armed men in suits spilled out of them.

"Huh?"

"As expected... You can pinpoint them with incredible accuracy. It's remarkable."

A middle-aged man approached with a bloody smile.

"I am Evangelist Park Minhong of the Great Unification Church. We had dibs on this place, so back off."

"..."

Backup... had arrived?

Footnotes:

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