Chapter 108
A tiny village on the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province.
In a place with more old people than young people, more rice paddies than asphalt roads, and where bird calls were heard more often than car engines, Camilla sat in a pavilion and peeled and ate the tangerines handed to her by the elderly.
“It’s delicious!”
“Oh my, is that so? Eat up, sweetheart. There’s still plenty left.”
“Yes!”
The little girl with ghost-pale skin, black hair, and red eyes nodded with a bright smile.
Between her slightly parted lips, sharp fangs showed just a little. The tips of those awl-sharp fangs were stained with a faint trace of blood.
“Sweetheart, you’ve got some chili powder stuck in your teeth. Want me to take it out?”
An old man with gray hair checked and reached out a hand. Camilla went, “Ah,” and wiped the blood from her teeth herself.
“I’m fine! I can do it myself!”
“Goodness, you’ve grown up. Back when you first came here, you couldn’t do anything on your own... and now you even speak Korean so well.”
“It’s all thanks to Grandma and Grandpa!”
“You speak so sweetly, too.”
An old man with a kindly look reached out his wrinkled hand and patted Camilla on the head.
For a moment, Camilla felt an unbearable urge to kill them, but she endured it with all the patience she could muster and suppressed it. It wasn’t time to bare her fangs openly yet.
To begin with, old people’s blood didn’t taste very good. It was like blood diluted with water, then mixed with lime and alcohol, and finally topped off with vinegar. In short, it was disgusting.
If she absolutely had nothing to drink, she’d have no choice but to kill them, but for now she still had plenty of leeway. At dawn, she’d killed a young woman and made her into a blood bag, so she planned to get by on that for a while. Once all the blood was drained and she turned into a ghoul, she’d throw a fit, but that wasn’t Camilla’s problem. Let her handle it herself.
‘What are the others up to, I wonder.’
She chewed on a tangerine and looked up at the darkening sky.
An evening when the moon had shown itself.
The time of day when vampires were most active. Camilla looked up at the moon, which seemed especially bright these days, and swung her short legs back and forth.
‘Well, they’re probably all hiding somewhere and drinking blood anyway. Doesn’t really concern me.’
There were three vampires who had come to Korea with Camilla. But they had only entered the country together; they barely knew one another, so the moment they set foot in Korea, they scattered in all directions. Besides, they had all come from different countries to begin with. There was no need to get along.
‘Practically all rivals, really. This is my territory. I’m not sharing even a little of it with the other vampires.’
Thinking that, Camilla finished off all the tangerines. Then, after chatting with the old folks for a while, she said goodbye and, as soon as they parted ways, went alone into the dark mountain and threw up.
“Uweeeek!”
By sticking a finger down her throat, the tangerines she’d eaten came rushing back up with stomach acid.
A vampire’s stomach couldn’t accept anything but blood, so whenever she ate something, she had to go through this stomach-emptying routine. If she missed the timing and it got digested, her whole intestines would melt away, so there was nothing she could do. They’d regenerate later, but until then she’d just have to writhe in pain.
If that was how it was going to be, it was better to just taste it and spit it out. Wiping the saliva and stomach acid from the corners of her mouth with her hand, Camilla slowly made her way deeper into the mountain.
Before long, a cave came into view.
Inside the tiny cave, where even moonlight couldn’t reach, ghouls were sleeping. Camilla clicked her tongue and stomped on the ghoul family lying there with her foot.
Krrrkk……!
Along with that savage sound, one of the ghoul’s arms flew through the air. Startled by the sudden pain, the ghoul that had been lying there with its eyes open jumped up and bared its fangs. But upon seeing Camilla standing there with a cold expression, it quickly lowered its gaze.
“Pathetic bastards.”
Fluent Spanish flowed from her mouth.
“Didn’t I tell you to hunt at night? Go down to that village over there, or kidnap someone from the city. You should at least do something before I can forgive you.”
[Grrk, grrrk……]
“Shut up. I don’t want to hear excuses. Looks like you bastards don’t want to evolve from ghouls into vampires after all.”
Camilla clicked her tongue and placed a foot on the back of the ghoul’s head as it lay face-down on the floor.
“I’m not warning you twice. This is an example.”
Krrrkk……!
As Camilla put more force into her foot, the ghoul’s head slowly began to cave in. Its broken nose and teeth dropped onto the floor with pattering taps, and its skin and skull cracked apart, spraying blood everywhere.
Crunch!
Before long, the head was smashed to pieces. Clear brain matter mixed with blood and trickled down into the cave.
Camilla roughly wiped the blood from her shoes and said to the other ghouls, who were trembling all over,
“Eat it. And when morning comes, take only the heart out and throw it outside. Understood?”
The ghouls nodded. Camilla slapped each of them once on the cheek and turned away.
“Let’s do better, kids. Who do you think is doing this for my own sake?”
[……]
“It’s all to turn you into vampires, so why do you still want to be mindless monsters?”
Camilla let out the words with a sigh. Naturally, no answer came back.
“...you stupid bastards.”
She left the ghouls behind and stepped out of the cave.
The mountain after the sun went down was steeped in yin energy by nature itself. And Korea was a country that had long liked burying corpses in the soil. Naturally, there were corpses beneath the ground Camilla was stepping on as well, and the body’s original owner was running around the mountain with only its soul left behind, treating it like a playground.
But Camilla didn’t pay it much mind.
For vampires, ghosts were as familiar as blood. Bats, wolves, and dogs were familiar enough, too.
They were all beings vampires knew well, and if you were nobility, controlling them wasn’t difficult at all. Camilla had already taken control of the village’s dogs long ago.
‘The Cartel, the Bureau, the Vatican. And that damned mage. One of them could show up at any moment. I need to be prepared.’
Of course, her idea of preparation—subjugating the dogs—was a little odd. But what else was she supposed to do? Camilla wasn’t built for combat, and she preferred ambushes and assassinations over direct fighting.
She also hated being entangled with the strong with a passion bordering on the pathological. A weak human she could toy with and kill, but that wasn’t possible with a strong one.
She was a hedonist and a sadist. She liked tormenting others, but she hated being tormented herself. Of all things, she hated magicians the most.
‘Those bastards are even more monstrous than the Mysteries. If a mage shows up here, I’m seriously getting the hell out without looking back.’
A Mystery’s hatred of magicians was as natural as breathing. Unlike the Vatican, which just indiscriminately purged them, or the Bureau, which at least tried to capture them alive, those bastards treated Mysteries like magical materials and went ahead with live experimentation.
Tearing off an arm while it was still alive just to observe the reaction was on the mild side. The nastier ones would eat a Mystery or turn it into a tool. None of them were sane.
‘If I let those dog bastards loose, that’ll buy me some time. In the meantime, I’ll turn into a bat and run.’
With that resolve, Camilla took out the tiny water bottle she’d tucked into her pocket.
She opened the cap on the water bottle packed with bright red blood, and slowly drank as she looked up at the sky.
Today, the moon was especially bright and huge. Staring at the pale satellite, which for some reason made her head feel hazy just by looking at it, she gulped the blood down her throat.
Then it happened.
……Swoooosh!!!
With a tremendous roar, Camilla’s vision was instantly painted black.
“……!”
An abrupt incident. Thinking a mage or psychic had launched a surprise attack, Camilla immediately threw the blood she’d been drinking to the ground and transformed into a bat. But before she could flee, her vision returned to normal.
‘What? They’re not attacking?’
Camilla felt a reflexive confusion and carefully looked up at the sky again. And there, she spotted a huge black disk skimming the edge of her vision.
“……Ah!”
A flying object in a shape she’d never seen before. But she immediately realized what it was.
There was no way she could miss it.
Camilla was 246 years old. Having lived through the era when the whole world was buzzing about UFOs, a flying saucer was an extremely familiar sight to her. This was just the first time she’d actually seen one in person.
“Wow!”
She immediately took off in bat form and flew after the UFO.
If she could catch an alien, make it into a ghoul, and then evolve it into a vampire, she might end up with an incredibly powerful fighter. It was more than worth testing.
Kwagagagagak!
And so Camilla spent a long while flying after the giant spaceship.
The UFO flew another 27 kilometers before crashing to the ground.
Halfway up an uninhabited mountain, the spaceship was wedged in among shattered trees and rocks, belching smoke and casting red light everywhere. Camilla, feeling excited, slowly approached the settling spaceship.
At that moment.
BOOM!
With a harsh roar, the spaceship door opened. And out of it stepped men in uniforms.
“Fuck, it’s Earth!”
“How many years has it been since I last stepped on Earth, damn it!”
They spat out rough German with practiced ease.
Around then, Camilla sensed something was off. Her seventh vertebra started tingling, sounding an instinctive warning.
But before she could turn around, the men who had crawled out of the spaceship spotted her first.
“A woman!”
“A witness, huh. Well, not that it matters. She looks just like one of our glorious Germanic race. How about we get a guide from her?”
“She could be Jewish!”
“Then we’ll just turn her into soap.”
The Nazi insignia on their chests glittered in the light spilling from the spaceship. Only then did Camilla notice the symbol and let out a sigh of realization.
‘A Nazi secret base on the far side of the moon……?’
The moment she thought it, more than a dozen Nazi officers came pouring out of the spaceship one after another.
“Hey, Reano! The location’s all wrong! This isn’t Germany! It’s Japan!”
“What? This is the land of the Japs?”
“To be exact, it used to be Joseon, but the Japs colonized it—”
“Shut up! Hey, pilot! You idiot, what the hell did you do with the route settings?! Why the hell did we end up in Asia?!”
“Because I detected the most powerful aura in this area. Of course, the strongest being on Earth is only our Führer.”
“But this is Asia!”
“That is a mystery to me as well.”
The cold-faced Nazi officer turned his head toward Camilla.
“Woman. Lead us to the Führer. It seems Nazi Germany won World War II and made this its capital.”
“…….”
“Why are you not answering? Are you too stupid to have learned German, the common language? Or are you looking down on us?”
“…….”
“Ah, now I see. Are you a Jew?”
At the officer’s declaration, the others immediately reacted.
“A Jew?!”
“It’s a Jew! A Jew! Our soap!”
“Rip her apart and eat her! The gas chamber! Send her to the gas chamber!”
Camilla’s face twisted at the sight.
“Goddamn it.”
The Nazis had landed in Korea.
*
At the same time.
A tiny PC bang.
“Ian, don’t go jungle. No matter how you look at it, 2 kills and 12 deaths is not okay.”
“The top laner sucked.”
“Shut up. The top lane got wrecked because of you too. Just come bot with me.”
“……I don’t take orders from someone with a lower tier than me—”
“I’m Emerald. You’re Bronze.”
“…….”
“Follow me.”
Ian clamped his mouth shut and changed his main role to support.