Locke was jolted awake by the blaring alarm bell, his eyes snapping open as his body moved before conscious thought fully caught up. He rolled off the bed in a single motion, landing lightly despite the lingering pain from his earlier fight. The strange warning rising in his chest kept him from going anywhere near the window, instinct screaming that exposing himself even for a second would be a mistake.
As the siren continued outside, his sharpened hearing reached far beyond the walls of the hotel. Beneath the noise, he caught the rapid rhythm of footsteps spreading out and drawing closer, measured and coordinated in a way that made the truth obvious. His eyes narrowed as he stood still for one brief moment, listening carefully and piecing together the pattern.
Because he knew how this city really worked, he understood what was coming. The police might still wear human faces, but most of the force was already under vampire control. That meant this wasn't a routine sweep, and it definitely wasn't a coincidence.
Locke's gaze swept across the room with cold efficiency, searching for the fastest way out. He moved toward the door, muscles tense and ready, intending to break through before they could fully lock the place down. But the next instant, a violent explosion tore through the room.
The door was blown inward in a storm of splintered wood, fire, and shattered plaster.
Locke hadn't expected them to escalate straight to a rocket launcher, and the blast caught him in the middle of movement. The shockwave hurled him backward hard enough to slam him into the window frame before he was thrown clear and sent crashing down. Before he could fully recover, gunfire erupted from outside.
Several bullets struck his body in quick succession.
"Fuck!"
The curse burst from his mouth as he hit the ground. Pain flared across his frame, but he forced it down immediately, twisting his body the instant he landed. A second later, afterimages flickered across the street as his speed exploded outward, and he vanished from the stunned officers' sight before they could adjust their aim.
The ambush failed in the most humiliating way possible.
At the same time, far from the shattered hotel, Blade was being brought back to the hunters' hidden base by Albert and Hannibal. The abandoned dock looked dead from the outside, swallowed by darkness and disuse, but hidden inside it was the closest thing they had to a functioning war room. Blade walked in silence as the others led him deeper inside, taking in every detail without wasting words.
"So, you're Whistler's daughter?" Blade asked at last, his eyes landing on the woman beside him.
Albert had a striking face, sharp and controlled, but there was a toughness in her posture that made it obvious whose blood ran in her veins. She didn't answer immediately, and before the moment could settle, Hannibal jumped in like he physically couldn't allow silence to survive.
"Haha, brother, yeah, she is," he said with a grin that never seemed to know when to quit. "Hello, my name's Hannibal King. Nice to meet you."
His mouth barely stopped moving after that. Ever since they'd rescued Blade, he'd been talking almost nonstop, throwing out jokes, introductions, and half-relevant stories with the same restless energy.
A trace of helplessness crossed Blade's otherwise hard expression. He already knew the answer to his question, and after getting it, he simply turned his head to the side, clearly having no desire to entertain the increasingly noisy man next to him.
Hannibal, naturally, treated the lack of response as encouragement.
He kept talking as they walked, enthusiastically explaining how he had managed to turn himself into a vampire and how Albert and the others had later saved him. The way he said it made the whole disaster sound halfway between a confession and a comedy routine, and even Albert's expression shifted with faint embarrassment at how casually he was putting all of it out there.
Soon, the three of them entered the laboratory area buried inside the dock. The space looked more organized than the exterior suggested, filled with computer equipment, testing stations, and improvised research tools. A woman in gold-rimmed glasses stood in front of a monitor, staring at the flashing images on-screen with complete concentration.
"Doctor, mission accomplished," Albert said first, breaking the silence.
But the geneticist didn't respond right away. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen, her expression unusually grave, and that alone was enough to make Albert pause. Even Hannibal, who usually spoke first and thought later, followed her gaze with curiosity.
"Oh, my God!"
This time it was Hannibal who shouted, the sudden outburst pulling Blade's attention to the computer. The geneticist rewound the footage and played it back for all of them to see.
The camera angle showed the front of a street-side shop. Glass shattered outward first, followed by a man being thrown from inside with enough force to send him crashing into the street. Not long after, a woman was also thrown out. Because of the camera's limited angle, the fight itself was hard to make out clearly, but the chaos inside was obvious—shelves collapsing, debris flying, and the entire store being ripped apart by something far more violent than an ordinary brawl.
Then another figure appeared.
Blade's eyes narrowed immediately. The clothing, the build, the way the man moved—he recognized him at once. It was Locke, the same man who had already left a very deep impression on him.
When Locke hit the ground in the footage, Blade's expression tightened. He already had a rough estimate of that man's strength, and that estimate was not low. Yet here he was being sent flying by something inside that store, something powerful enough that even he couldn't simply overpower it.
As the footage continued, police officers began arriving on the block one after another. Before they could fully close in, Locke's body blurred into afterimages and vanished from the camera's view so fast the recording barely caught more than a streak.
"Is this guy some new breed of vampire?" Albert asked, her voice gone serious.
She had already noticed the video wasn't sped up. That meant Locke's final movement had been real, and the speed of it was enough to make even her uneasy. The camera had captured little more than a vague dark blur.
The female geneticist slowly adjusted the glasses on the bridge of her nose, her expression still solemn. Then she lifted her head and looked directly at Blade. "Daywalker, what do you think?"
Albert and Hannibal both turned toward him.
"I know that guy," Blade said after a brief pause. His voice was low and flat, but every word carried weight. "He calls himself the ancestor of vampires, and he isn't afraid of silver or sunlight."
"Oh, my God."
Hannibal clutched his face with both hands and groaned dramatically. He looked like he wanted to launch into another stream of commentary, but the female geneticist's eyes suddenly brightened, and she cut him off before he could start.
"Is there any way to deal with him?" she asked.
"Deal with him?" Blade turned his dark gaze on the three of them. "You missing the bigger problem? That guy got knocked away by something. The thing the camera couldn't catch—that's what I think the real danger is."
As he spoke, he quickly recalled what Locke had told him earlier. Piece by piece, he laid out the truth about the real ancestor of vampires awakening, and as the explanation took shape, a hint of excitement appeared on the geneticist's face.
"Fuck. Two vampire ancestors," Hannibal said, throwing his hands up. "That's it. We're screwed. Everybody's screwed."
For all the despair in his words, there wasn't a trace of real fear on his face.
"Blood God?" the geneticist repeated, then began recounting the legend she had learned about the creature.
Her voice grew steadier as she spoke, and by the time she finished, the outline of an answer had already formed in her mind. "Now we do have a way to end this once and for all. We develop a virus that can crack the vampire gene, and I'm already close."
"Once and for all? A virus?" Blade finally looked at her properly. He hadn't expected them to have something like that in progress, much less to say it with this level of confidence.
Then his eyes shifted back to the image frozen on the monitor.
"What about that guy?"
Albert pointed toward Locke's figure on the screen, voicing the same uncertainty in his mind.
The geneticist chuckled softly and adjusted her glasses again. "Honestly, I'm not even sure he's a vampire."
That answer made the room go still.
"Didn't any of you notice the biggest problem?" she asked. "That guy can be caught on camera."
"…!!"
Everyone froze. Even Blade went silent, and for a moment, an awkward atmosphere spread through the entire group of vampire hunters.
A few nights later, Blade took Albert back out with him to continue tracking Drake's whereabouts. The city remained wrapped in darkness, its streets half-dead and half-hunting, with danger moving beneath every quiet surface. While they were away, the dock was left in the hands of the people working inside it.
As night settled more heavily over the abandoned pier, a figure appeared outside.
He stood still for a moment, looking over the silent, deserted structure with unreadable eyes. Then something about his appearance began to shift, his features changing with eerie smoothness until he perfectly resembled Whistler. Wearing the old man's face, he started toward the dock with an easy, swaggering confidence.
Inside the laboratory, the geneticist was focused on her work, carefully operating the experimental equipment as she mixed different reagents together. Nearby, Hannibal was entertaining the geneticist's young daughter, making faces and tossing out ridiculous comments until the girl laughed. Their cheerful voices echoed from time to time through the otherwise empty hall, giving the hidden base a brief illusion of normal life.
"Hello!"
The hearty greeting broke through the laughter instantly.
Hannibal's heart clenched at once. He looked up in astonishment toward the stairs above, and when he saw the man standing there, his whole face changed.
"Whistler?"
"Haha, I didn't expect my daughter to lead the team this far," "Whistler" said with a warm smile as he slowly walked down the stairs, his gaze fixed on Hannibal.
Hannibal stood there in confusion, caught between shock and relief. For a second, he looked like he might step forward to greet him.
Then a hand grabbed his arm and yanked him back.
The geneticist stepped forward, facing the old man coming down the stairs, her expression cold and sharp. "Who are you? Why are you pretending to be Whistler?"
"Fuck!"
Only then did Hannibal snap out of it. He lunged toward the nearby table, reaching for a gun, but he was already too late.
The false Whistler dropped from the stairs in a blur, casually backhanded the geneticist away with one strike, and then shot forward and grabbed Hannibal by the throat!
....
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