I don’t have a surname either, so I’m “just” Kanya, and you’re “just” Ruslan.
Twenty years ago, a great famine swept over Frükan, and a quarter of the southern population starved to death.
Ruslan’s family also wandered from place to place looking for food, but eventually, unable to withstand the hunger and cold, they huddled at the foot of a mountain and breathed their last.
It was Kanya, an old wandering herbalist without children, who pulled out the crying golden-haired infant from the arms of his frozen parents.
It was she who held him in her arms instead of taking him to the already overflowing temple orphanage, who gave him the name “Ruslan,” and who raised him like her own child for eight years, feeding and clothing him.
During the great famine when even biological children were abandoned, they sometimes starved together and sometimes bickered and quarreled, but no one doubted that Ruslan was what Kanya loved most in the world.
She was mischievous and foul-mouthed, forgot unimportant things quickly so Ruslan had to remember them for her, but she never forgot to place a walnut in the very center of the pie Ruslan liked.
This morning too, saying goodbye as he headed to school and sticking his tongue out at her nagging to not wander around uselessly and come straight back—it was all ordinary.
It wasn’t particularly affectionate, nor particularly curt. It was just an insignificant, ordinary morning that passed by as if it were nothing.
If only he had known it would be the last, he would have known that ordinariness would end today.
Like Viktor, Kanya struggled as a black pill was shoved down her throat. The forest keeper who held back Ruslan as he tried to rush to Kanya with a pale face said this was an “official vampire trial.”
He said that when blood pudding made from the congealed blood of the dead is swallowed, a vampire’s entire body becomes paralyzed and their eyes turn red.
If you’re human, like Viktor, nothing happens. It’ll be fine. Just wait a little.
Ruslan waited.
The scent of fang flowers now vibrated so intensely it gave him a headache. His arms trembled as he watched Kanya struggle desperately, but Ruslan held back his tears and waited.
Hoping that the forest keeper’s hand gripping his shoulder would disappear quickly, so he could rush over and hold the blood-covered Kanya tightly.
But Kanya was not fine.
Kanya’s entire body, having swallowed the blood of the dead, stiffened rigidly like a corpse, and bloody foam spilled from her lips.
The hunters grabbed Kanya’s hair as she tried not to open her eyes and forcibly pulled back her eyelids.
The villagers gasped. The priest’s face turned white as a sheet. The children’s eyes widened.
Kanya’s pupils were red as blood.
No one opened their mouth while the hunters severed Kanya’s tendons, cut out her tongue, and gouged out her eyes.
When the eyeball with the bright red pupil rolled out, people swallowed and stepped back as if they had seen a disgusting insect.
The shocked sheriff seemed to barely understand the hunters’ words to prepare a pyre.
But everyone understood the next sentence.
“…Does this woman have any blood relatives?”
Everyone’s heads turned.
The forest keeper slowly released Ruslan’s arm. He could feel the hand trembling.
Ruslan, left alone in the middle of the square, was deathly pale.
All the villagers were looking at Ruslan with corpse-like expressions. As if looking at someone about to die.
“…As you know, every single blood relative of a vampire must be burned together without exception. Is this child the only blood relative of that woman?”
Ruslan stupidly looked up at the hunter speaking calmly.
His brain seemed to refuse to think about what was happening. Inside Ruslan’s head, Kanya’s red pupils rolling around on the ground were still spinning round and round. That was all he could think about.
“Gueok…! Kwaak!”
Suddenly, Kanya cried out with a strange sound and struggled. Ruslan flinched and looked back at Kanya.
Flailing her limbs with severed tendons, Kanya continued to make strange gurgling sounds. The sound Kanya made with her cut tongue was terrible. People shuddered. Ruslan opened his mouth like an idiot.
But as if suddenly coming to his senses at that sound, the priest rushed out urgently and grabbed Ruslan’s shoulder with trembling hands.
“This child… is not that woman’s biological child! This child’s real parents were different. They begged in the village a few years ago, and when they gained nothing, they left and froze to death halfway up the mountain before the night was over. I personally buried them at the village entrance. That woman… just took the surviving child and raised him.”
Ruslan was still stupidly looking down at Kanya. He didn’t even know what to do. He couldn’t understand what was happening. Ruslan still couldn’t take his eyes off Kanya’s bright red eyeballs rolling on the ground.
When the hunters approached, grabbed his chin and forced his mouth open, Ruslan convulsed as if burned.
Thick fingers shoved the black pill down his throat. Ruslan struggled and resisted like Kanya. He coughed and scratched at the leather-gloved wrists and arms, but the hunters didn’t budge.
He felt the pill dissolve instantly inside his throat. Ruslan thought he was going to die. Now the hunters would gouge out Ruslan’s eyeballs and sever his tendons. Just like they did to Kanya.
As Ruslan struggled desperately with his eyes closed, the hunters easily subdued his body as if handling a straw doll. Thick fingers flipped back his eyelids.
Ruslan tried desperately not to open his eyes, but he could see people’s faces hazily. Their eyes met.
The young hunter with tattoos on both cheeks nodded and released Ruslan’s body.
“What that priest said seems to be correct. He’s not a biological child.”
As soon as the hands disappeared, Ruslan collapsed. No one approached Ruslan as he sat on the ground trembling violently.
Kanya was still on the ground, hissing and making strange breathing sounds. Blood tears and bloody saliva flowed down from her empty eyes and lips, staining her entire face.
Kanya hadn’t hidden from the villagers that she had picked up Ruslan. Instead of having him call her mom or grandmother, she made him call her by her name consistently, and every year she took Ruslan to the grave at the village entrance to leave flowers.
She always introduced herself as “just” Kanya, saying she had no surname to pass down. As if she was worried people would try to pass it down to Ruslan if her surname was known.
As if she had known and prepared for the possibility of dying like this her entire life.
The people who brought firewood built a pyre and tied Kanya to it. Her blood-soaked face was pale and twisted like a monster. She looked exactly like a stranger.
Ruslan still sat stupidly, watching the scene of the hunters standing before the pyre, holding torches and reciting the “Oath of the True God.”
Before he knew it, the sun was setting. In the dim darkness, the hunters recited in dry voices the oath that Ruslan and his friends had always wanted to see.
In the name of the True God.
Until the last vampire’s blood falls to the earth, we shall not stop.
We shall stay nowhere, nor rest even for a moment.
We shall desire neither honor nor wealth.
Under the protection of the True God, may humanity on the continent be forever at peace.
The old hunter threw the torch. The firewood began to crackle and burn. Blood tears silently flowed down Kanya’s cheeks and dripped between the branches. The villagers said nothing.
Until Kanya, that herbalist grandmother everyone loved, burned away to nothing.
After that, eight years passed.
Ruslan threw open all the doors on the fourth floor of Esteban School’s attached library and searched every corner of each room thoroughly.
Each room was just piled with old books and unused furniture, with no trace of people.
Ruslan ran up to the upper floor again. Since he’d come up from the lower floors, unless they’d evaporated, they had to be in this building.
Ruslan went up to the top floor, and finding no one, came back down searching each room. Every room was completely empty, and the occasional librarians he saw were naturally not wearing school uniforms. He felt like he was going crazy.
At the end of the third-floor corridor, Ruslan discovered an aerial passage and, gritting his teeth in frustration, rushed into it. The end of the passage connected to another building.
When he ran in, there was an empty staircase, and going down half a floor, it was an excessively crowded student lounge.
All the boys were wearing school uniforms, but finding the student who had just passed by in this bustling place was impossible.
The boy on the fourth floor must have controlled the dog to chase away Bruce’s gang, then gone down to the third floor and escaped the building through the aerial passage.
Missing Ruslan who had been running up frantically from the opposite staircase.
Ruslan, who had been panting with his hands on his knees, looked at the students filling the lounge with a frustrated expression, then turned around again.
Running back to the Fifth Library, Ruslan returned to the rare book storage room and looked around the empty room. Ruslan swallowed, trying to find even the slightest clue.
Who was it?
How on earth.
How had they survived until now
and were at this school?
His head felt like it would burst. Ruslan recalled the vampire books he had frantically read over the past eight years.
