The Hammer of War, Chapter 57

Name: Amir Azad
Title: War-Summoner
War Points: 0

STR – 87(300)
DEX – 80(300)
VIT – 201(300)

—

Park Ha-joon’s office looked like a furniture catalog had declared victory. Low lighting. Quiet colors. A couch that cost more than most cars I’d owned. Thick carpet that ate footsteps. Bookshelves lined wall to wall with hardcovers that had never been opened past the first twenty pages. A glass desk sat to one side with a pen stand and nothing else. He had a diploma on the wall. Yale. Probably fake. Or real, which somehow made it worse.

The door clicked behind me. The lock slid into place. He had soundproofing stitched into the walls and ceiling. Thin acoustic panels beneath a tasteful veneer. I knew it because Alexandra’s file said so, and because when I spoke, the room didn’t give anything back.

“Doctor,” I said.

He stood there in his pressed suit and glasses like he was about to step into a TV interview. Middle-aged on the surface. Older underneath. Vampire old. Not ancient, but well past that cocky middle tier that made stupid mistakes out of habit. He watched my hands. Good instinct. I didn’t reach for a weapon.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“I really should,” I said. “Scheduling conflict.”

He moved first. Fast. Good line. He came off the line with a short step, right hand up, left hand low. Open palm for the throat. If I’d been human, maybe I would’ve eaten carpet. I caught his wrist and turned my hip. CQC-19. Alexandra’s notes called it “constraint-first doctrine.” Elbow desynchronization as a default. I planted his hand on his own chest and took the elbow hard against my forearm. Bone popped. He hissed and pulled back but I kept the arm and drove him into the couch.

The couch made a soft noise. He made a louder one.

He came up with speed a human body didn’t have. He tried a knee to the gut. I pivoted. He hit thigh instead. I hooked his ankle with mine and twisted his foot ninety degrees past respectable. Ligaments snapped. He went down. I let the arm go and took his head in both hands, not to break the neck, but to bounce it off the armrest. He stunned. I straightened and breathed.

He healed fast. His elbow snapped itself back. The ankle screamed for a moment and then stopped. The soundproofing swallowed both noises.

He bared his fangs then, as if the psychology act had run its course. 

“You’ve made a mistake,” he said.

“I get that a lot,” I said.

He reached for the air above his head with two fingers, drew a pattern I recognized from too many bad nights. The beginning of a charm. I didn’t let it live. I rolled the [Blank] aura up from nothing to a steady pressure. The room lost warmth. Not temperature. Warmth. The light from the ceiling softened by a fraction. Park’s hand froze mid-gesture. The rune collapsed like a cheap tent. I also had enough control over it now to make sure it didn’t turn the vampire into a vegetable with just a blast of it. I wanted to savor the fun, after all.

“No magic tonight,” I said.

He lunged again. Claws this time. He had them hidden under his nails. They clicked when they met my wrist. He aimed for an artery. I rotated his forearm, pushed the claw line outside, and cut into the meat of his bicep with my thumb. The muscle tore. He tried to wrench back. I pushed in and took the tendon with two fingers. The arm died from the elbow down. He tried the other hand. I met it with an elbow to the inside of his forearm and then a step forward that took his base. His heel slid on the carpet. I kicked the side of his knee. The patella shifted. He dropped to one knee and grabbed at my leg, still trying to drag me down by sheer insistence.

I let him have the pant leg and drove my palm into his face. The nose flattened. Not enough to kill. Enough to change his plan. He fell backward, hit the couch, and rebounded. I followed and set my hand on his shoulder. Not heavy. Just firm. The Custodian upgrade made the touch feel like a clamp. He tried to shrug me off, and didn’t. I took his shoulder joint through a range it didn’t like and ground the humeral head until the ligaments gave up and the arm came loose.

He screamed. The walls ate that too.

The shoulder socket bled and then simmered as his body tried to fix it. The repair crawled, then stalled. He pushed air through his teeth in careful bursts and tried to stand again. I pinned his foot with mine and stepped down until the bones under his shoe shifted and then failed. He swung his head up, jaws open. I caught his lower jaw with my left hand and pushed up and forward until the mouth closed on nothing and the temporomandibular joint snapped. His eyes went wide.

He went for a throat bite and found a broken hinge instead.

“No,” I said. “Bad idea.”

He slapped both hands into my chest with a vampire’s strength. A month ago it would’ve put me through the wall. Now it rocked me a half step. I set the foot back and took his wrist. Thumb under the bones. Twist. CQC-23 this time. He came forward because I made him. I met him with a short headbutt. Forehead to nose. He rolled sideways and I let the wrist go. He landed on the carpet, pushed up to a knee, and came at me again.

We repeated that for a while.

He tried new entries. I broke the entries. He tried to circle and got his ankle stepped on. He tried to clinch and got his rib cage opened, one by one, with short shots that didn’t move the room. He healed and I broke the repair work. He went for magic again, hunting a line that might slip under the [Blank]. I twisted the knob higher. The room went dull around the edges. He gagged once like something in him had lost power.

“I can do this all night,” I said. “Can you?”

He roared then, a frustrated, angry sound that would have put a hole through a window if he’d still lived like a man. It hit the acoustic padding and died there like everything else.

He went low and tried to pull me off center with a leg reap. I widened the base by a fraction and let his weight fail, then took his head at the ear and peeled him backward onto the couch. I mounted his hips and set my knees into his upper arms. He bucked hard. I let him buck. I rode it. When he settled, I took one hand and pressed it to his sternum. His chest caved a little. Not enough to puncture anything. Enough to tell his heart who was in charge.

He stared up at me and showed his teeth. 

“Who sent you?” he managed.

“Your mom,” I said. 

His eyes were steady in that practiced therapist way. It had worked on a lot of people. It didn’t work on me. He tried to talk again. I put my hand over his mouth and pushed down. Teeth creaked against each other. I took two fingers and hooked them under his cheek and pulled the cheek aside until the mouth opened and then I pushed my other hand in and gripped his tongue. He bit down and lost a tooth. He shouted around my hand. I pulled the tongue up and forward and felt the root protest. I kept pulling. He thrashed. The hand on his sternum went heavier. Bones in his back pressed into the couch frame. I let the tongue go before it tore free and set both hands on his chest.

He spat blood sideways and made a sound that might’ve been a word. Or a prayer. Hard to tell with the jaw hanging wrong.

We kept going.

I cut his other bicep. I took his elbow apart and then put it back and then took it apart again. He kicked at my head and I moved my head two inches and let his heel hit the arm of the couch. I grabbed that foot and bent it until the tendons gave. He flailed, found my throat with his fingers, and squeezed with everything he had. I let him. I breathed through my nose and watched his face as his hands trembled from fatigue. He stared like the world had gone slightly out of alignment and didn’t know why. I took his fingers one by one and bent them back. Knuckles popped. He screamed again.

His regeneration ran hot at first. Then it turned sluggish. Then it stuttered the way engines do when someone pulls the fuel line. He felt it too. His eyes cut down to his arms, then to his legs, like he could will them to work by looking at them. They didn’t.

When he ran dry, it didn’t come back.

The arms stayed wrong. The legs stayed wrong. The chest didn’t rise as easily. I kept the [Blank] steady and waited a minute just to be sure. He tried a charm again as a reflex. Nothing answered him. He sagged against the couch and stared at the ceiling like it had betrayed him.

“Ready?” I asked him.

“For what?” He sounded smaller now.

“For the part where you stop existing.”

He tried to laugh and swallowed blood instead. 

“You think that’s wise?” he said. “You think there won’t be others?”

“There are always others,” I said. “If they come after me then they’ve done half of my job already.”

He started to say something else and I didn’t wait to hear it. 

I stepped back and called ten Hormagaunts.

They arrived without noise. Ten shadows peeling up from the carpet with six legs each and claws that fit their bodies like they had been born with knives. They didn’t posture. They didn’t hiss. They waited for me to point.

“Eat,” I said.

They moved as one. They didn’t pull him off the couch or drag him around. They made a circle and went to work. They cut in and cut out, fast motions that left tear lines and then new tear lines. They pulled flesh free in measured bites and fed that to the mouths they kept hidden until they needed them. Park tried to crawl. One of them stepped on his calf and pinned it without ceremony while another took the thigh and then the joint. There was blood for a few seconds. Then less. They were efficient. They worked in layers. Skin. Muscle. Then the bones. The bones didn’t last long. He didn’t last much longer than the bones. When his core failed, he became what vampires become when enough bad things touch them. Ash. It tried to hold shape and then it fell in on itself. The air moved. The ash settled. A couch sat where a body had been. The Hormagaunts stood still with their heads tilted a little, waiting for permission to do anything else. I waved them off.

They faded back into the space they came from. The room went quiet.

I stood there a moment and watched the dust settle. It made a faint gray smear across the seat cushion. His glasses sat on the floor near the table leg. One lens had a crack in it.

I knelt and pressed my palm into the ash and reached for [Soul Siphon]. A line pulled taut between us and then snapped into me. Cool, thin, gone before I had a word for it. The System blinked once.

+1 STR
+1 VIT

Not much for an elder. Maybe all that clinic work had made him soft.

I stood and looked around. No cameras. No recording gear. He kept the room clean. It would save me some effort. I turned the [Blank] down to almost nothing. The light felt like it returned, even though the bulb didn’t change. I wiped my hands on a cloth from his desk and set it on the table. If anyone came knocking tomorrow, they would find a locked door and a missing therapist. Not a bad outcome.

I left the way I came. The hallway was empty. The elevator watched me with a dead little eye and did nothing. I took the stairs. Three flights later I pushed through a fire door and out into the night.

Seoul let the cold settle low in the streets. Headlights drifted past. Neon hummed. Someone laughed on the corner, a tired sound that had run out of good jokes. I walked without aim. The air tasted clean and sharp. My blood pressure had barely moved in there and it stayed level now.

When the sidewalk cleared, I looked up at a building across the street. Six stories. No roof access sign worth reading. I bent my knees and took a slow breath and jumped. My feet left the ground. The world eased under me. I landed on the rooftop in one motion and didn’t bother to pretend I hadn’t enjoyed it. That jump would have snapped me in half last year. Now it was a step.

I moved across the roof and hopped to the next. Then the next. I kept the arcs shallow to keep my silhouette small. I didn’t spread my new wings. Not here. I moved until the city ran out of street noise and left me with a thin wind and the scrape of my boots on tar.

On the eighth roof I saw her.

White dress. Bare legs. Hair to the shoulder. Older than a student, younger than my mother. She stood with her toes half over the lip, arms at her sides, head forward. She didn’t sway. She just balanced, like she had practiced it.

“Hey,” I said.

She didn’t move at first. Then her head twitched like the word had cut the last line that held her. She took a half step back and turned. Her face was blank. She took me in—dark coat, boots, hands at my sides—and then found my eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. The word came out as a reflex.

“You don’t have to be,” I said. “Mind if I sit?”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t tell me to leave. I walked over and sat on the ledge a foot from where she had stood. The drop looked the way drops look at night. Long and quiet.

She stood there another few seconds, then sat down too. We both watched the street. Cars. A bus at the light. Steam. A dog.

“I’m Amir,” I said.

She nodded. “Jung Aera.”

“Nice to meet you, Aera,” I said.

She looked at me like that was a strange thing to say here. It was. She let it slide.

“You live nearby?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Work?” I said.

She shook again. “Not now.”

We sat in the cold a little longer. I could’ve said a dozen different things. None of them sounded like they’d do what they were supposed to do.

“Why here?” I asked. “Of all the roofs.”

She looked down at the ledge. 

“The door was open,” she said.

“Fair,” I said.

She took a breath like she was testing her lungs. 

“Do you do this a lot?” she asked.

“Jump across roofs?” I said. “Not as much as I’d like.”

She almost smiled. It didn’t make it all the way to her mouth.

She stared off to the right for a while and then said, “Do you want the long version or the short?”

“Whichever one you feel like telling,” I said.

She nodded once and pushed hair behind her ear. Her fingers shook. She clenched them and they went still.

“I was taken,” she said. The words sounded clean. She had said them to herself in the dark already. “Three nights ago. I left my friend’s place at ten. A car stopped. Two men got out. They put me in and drove and I don’t know where. A warehouse or a basement. It smelled like paint and glue. They tied me. One of them was the son of a CEO. I know because he said it twice. He did what he wanted. The other filmed. They left me on the side of the road at four. I went to the police station at six. They asked if I had been drinking. They asked what I wore. They asked if I had been with a man before. They asked if I could identify the car. I said yes. I said I could describe his voice. They told me to sit and wait while they called someone. I waited. Then they told me there was no case.”

“Did you call anyone else?” I asked.

“My sister,” she said. “She cried. Then she told me to stop saying it. She told me to think about how this would affect our parents. She said I shouldn’t have been outside.”

She shut her mouth and pressed her lips together. The streetlights painted a line of white across her legs and then took it away when a bus moved.

“I see,” I said.

I went through the checklist Alexandra’s Inquisitorial training had put in my head, the little things in the body that set apart truths from lies. It all lined up. She wasn’t lying. She wasn’t lost in a story she’d built to keep the world in the shape she wanted. She had been put through hell and then set back on the sidewalk like trash.

“You believe me,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded. 

With all the Supernatural creatures I’ve hunted and killed for preying on humanity, it was almost too easy to forget that humans were just as monstrous when they wanted to be.

“You want me to kill him?” I said.

She looked at me then. Her eyes sharpened by a fraction. “Can you?”

“I guess I could, but…” 

“I don’t kill humans,” I said.

She held my eyes for a long time. Then she nodded. 

“Okay,” she said.

“Listen,” I said. “What I can do is this. I can give you enough money to disappear. Real money. Not a few bills. If you want the United States, I’ll make that quiet and clean. New name. Housing. The rest is up to you, but you’ll get a fresh start–away from all of this.”

She stared at the ground. 

“I don’t speak English,” she said.

“You will,” I said. “It’s not that hard. You’ll hate it, and then you’ll speak it.”

She snorted once. The sound came out broken. 

“And what will I do there,” she said. “Sell coffee?”

“Whatever you want,” I said. “Then something else. Then something else again.”

“Why?” she said. “Why would you do that?”

“I have money,” I said. “And because I like helping people when I can.”

She blinked. “That’s it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked back at the street. A truck rolled through an intersection a block over. The brake lights washed the building across from us in red. The color faded and the wall went black again.

“You said your name was Amir,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Thank you, Amir,” she said. She smiled then. Small. Real. It didn’t light anything up.

She jumped off the ledge.