Am I Not Scary?

Am I Not Scary?

At the edge of Hell's Kitchen, near the docks, JJ parked by the roadside. Not far away, several giant wolves ghosted around the dim streetlights, surrounding a warehouse.

Alvin noticed a figure in a red-and-black skintight suit on the roof of an adjacent warehouse. The figure waved in his direction.

Alvin silently mocked the guy's fashion sense. Was it really okay for an unmarried young man to wear a skintight suit?

He ignored this reserve player who insisted on joining the fun.

Alvin contacted Crow and frowned. The place was a gathering point for illegal immigrants. Quite a few people were staying there, being picked over by several targets like livestock. Those who were chosen even happily followed them upstairs.

You'd managed to sneak into Big Apple City, so why were you still staying here?

The targets were in the second-floor office. He hadn't counted carefully, but there were probably around ten of them.

He explained the situation to JJ and Frank and asked what they should do.

Frank grinned viciously. "Do you want them all taken alive, or is one live capture enough?" He looked like an experienced slaughterhouse worker asking whether you wanted tenderloin or ribs.

Alvin thought for a moment. "Catch two. Better safe than sorry."

Frank nodded. "JJ and I will go upstairs and drive a couple down. Lock the warehouse door first, so nobody inside can slip away in the crowd during the chaos." Frank said it so casually that it sounded like he was going to catch chickens.

Alvin shook his head. "I'm going up with you. Thor and the others can stay outside. I thought there were only one or two small fry, but turns out it's a whole small-fry convention. I really want to play with these things!" As he spoke, he waved the kukri in his hand, looking exactly like a gangster eager to chop someone up.

Frank had no idea how capable Alvin was in a fight. He glanced at JJ, who was obviously one of his own kind, and saw him staring at Alvin like a starstruck idiot, practically drooling over the massive kukri in Alvin's hand.

Then there probably wouldn't be a problem.

Frank pulled a U-lock from the car, quietly approached the warehouse entrance, and locked the main doors from the outside.

The three of them climbed the metal staircase outside the warehouse to the second floor. Alvin closed his eyes and connected with Crow, discovering that behind the door stood a guy dressed like a punk rock singer, leaning against the wall and smoking marijuana.

Crimson eyes, fangs peeking out from the corners of his mouth—if this wasn't a vampire, Alvin figured he had no use for his eyes.

He stopped JJ from kicking the door down. Come on, if they broke the door, how would they close it and fight vampires?

He gestured for the two of them to lie in wait beside the door while he straightened his collar. Then he lightly knocked. "Hello, your pizza delivery!"

The iron door opened a crack from within. The punk singer pursed his lips and peered outside with crimson eyes. Alvin took a look. Good, no security chain. His smile widened.

JJ reacted quickly, darting in front of the door and ramming it hard with his shoulder. The entire iron door flew open. The tremendous force slammed the unlucky vampire into the wall along with it.

Pinned between the wall and the iron door, the punk singer had only his mohawked head sticking out. With his body acting as a cushion, the door hadn't made much noise.

Looking at the unlucky bastard bleeding from every orifice and unable to even make a sound, Frank gained a whole new appreciation for JJ's strength. He was practically a human pile driver.

The three walked inside and closed the door. Alvin grabbed the fallen punk singer by the hair and motioned for the other two to watch.

The kukri lightly swept across the punk singer's throat. An orange-red glow spread from the wound. Within seconds, the punk singer burned to ash from the inside out, like a paper effigy burned at a tomb-sweeping festival—extremely eco-friendly.

JJ and Frank were a little surprised. JJ looked at Alvin's kukri, then compared it to the little dining knife on his own body. The look he gave Alvin grew even more resentful.

Frank inspected the floor and found only a tiny bit of black ash. He quietly asked, "Are they all like that? They're really not much of a fight."

Alvin looked toward the bend in the corridor ahead and said seriously, "Don't let them bite you. Ordinary weapons can't kill them. Use the weapons I gave you."

Frank and JJ didn't question him. Alvin wouldn't harm them, and they instinctively tightened their grips on their Remingtons.

They quietly approached a room lit by red light. Through a corridor window, Alvin saw a sight that filled him with rage.

Under the dim red lights, more than ten vampires each held a woman who was presumably an illegal immigrant, engaged in a wild orgy. In the corner, two vampires who had apparently finished early were feeding. The two women being drained wore strange smiles as they slowly died.

Alvin gestured, then went to the door with JJ. Frank took Alvin's Glock 17 and guarded the window.

Pulling back JJ, who wanted to kick the door down, Alvin angrily stomped on it. With a crack, the iron door flew into the room under the force of his kick, smashing a vampire who had just finished a meal hard against the wall.

The unlucky vampire's newly filled stomach burst under the immense pressure. Blood sprayed outward in all directions, staining a large section of the wall. Even then, the thing wasn't dead. Its body trapped behind the door still struggled and writhed.

The women in the room screamed in terror and retreated into the corner. With women present, the shotgun wasn't ideal. JJ simply used the Remington in his left hand like an iron bar and wielded his 1911 in his right, launching into a massacre.

Frank smashed the window and used the Glock 17 for precise shots.

Firearms inlaid with the "El" rune were devastatingly lethal to vampires. There was no need to aim carefully—so long as a shot hit a vampire, it turned to ash.

Several quick-reacting vampires didn't dare face JJ, who was like a god of slaughter. Naked, they rushed at Alvin.

Alvin raised his kukri, cast "Spirit of Thorns" on himself, and met them head-on. There were no techniques or forms. If he saw you, he chopped at you. He dodged dangerous attacks and took the harmless ones. Twenty points of strength and twenty points of agility were no joke.

Of the five vampires that pounced on him, three turned to ash. The other two realized their attacks had absolutely no effect on Alvin, while mysterious wounds kept appearing on their own bodies. They screamed in terror, trying to summon their companions to attack this frightening enemy together.

Alvin had no time for their futile resistance. He charged after them with his blade. Grabbing the hair of a vampire trying to hide among the women, he viciously drove his knife into the vampire's kidney. The guy screamed, trembling all over as fireworks erupted from his body.

While Alvin was killing his companion, one vampire seized the chance to rake its claws across Alvin's neck with all its strength. But then it felt a strange ripple pass through the air, and a huge wound appeared across its own body.

Alvin turned with a vicious bandit's grin and sliced the vampire cleanly in half, turning it to ash.

Seeing that not many vampires remained, Alvin took the net gun from his back. One shot ensnared a vampire.

He walked over to the struggling vampire and kicked the unlucky bastard in the face. Its two red eyeballs sprang out of its head as if mounted on springs, bouncing on the floor a few times before JJ, worked into a frenzy, crushed them beneath his foot.

The vampires finally realized that Alvin without a gun was the scariest one of all. The last three vampires huddled together and charged desperately toward the door.

JJ, guarding the doorway, grinned viciously and shot one dead. The remaining two vampires immediately turned toward the window.

Frank, who had been stuck doing support work the whole time, was burning with rage. What was this? He wasn't scary, was he?