Chapter 3.2

Ben got out of the taxi and entered the yard building. As Aidan said, he was going to find out about Miller O’Donoghue on the police DB. He didn’t expect anything special, but he might find something he missed.

Most of the seats were empty when he opened the door to the headquarters on the fourth floor. Ben thought it went well, so he headed to his seat quickly.

“Huh? Ben, what’s up?”

Roxy smiled and said, “It’s amazing to see you for two days in a row because you only used to come when the inspector called you.”.

“Ah, I have something to look into.”

“Really? That’s great.”

As Roxy stepped aside, a small man with brown hair and brown eyes appeared.

“Say hello, Joseph Ballack, who has been appointed to our team starting from next week.”

Ben glanced at the man Roxy introduced. Ben didn’t care about newcomers coming in and out, so he just glanced briefly and headed back to his seat with a quick step.

“Is it true that you can kill them ?”

Because of the tension, he didn’t control properly and a noise of opening the door was heard loudly in the open office.

Ben frowned at the sound he heard. When he stopped walking to his seat and turned around, the brown-haired man was looking at me with his eyes wide open.

Ben took a deep breath. The eyes full of pure curiosity were facing Ben.

“Why don’t you try it yourself if you’re curious? You know how? Cut off their neck and set them on fire.”

Joseph approached Ben regardless of what he said in a blunt tone.

It would usually be embarrassing to say it, but he was the opposite. He felt different now that he wasn’t standing shyly behind Roxy.

Joseph followed Ben at a rapid pace, perhaps encouraged by his answer.

“Are they really going to die if I do that?”

Ben was stunned by Joseph’s behavior. He was really going to do the experiment.

“Hey, you.”

“You can call me Joseph.”

Joseph smiled loudly and responded friendly to Ben, who stopped walking and sighed. He seemed happy that he was interested in him.

Ben waved his hand to tell him to stop and leave, but he showed no sign of doing so at all. Ben winked at Roxy to get rid of Joseph, but Roxy seemed to have no sign of doing so.

“I applied to London because I missed you.”

Roxy’s words were full of teasing. Looking somewhat amused, Ben glanced at her and turned on the computer. He was just going to ignore him, but Joseph talked to him again.

“Can they die if I do what you said earlier?”

Ben turned his chair and looked at Joseph in an act that seemed unlikely to back down unless he told him directly. Joseph Ballack. It was an aristocratic name that seemed to originate in the Middle Ages.

“Where have you been before?”

“Ah, I was in Liverpool. It hasn’t been long since I started.”

Ben slowly looked at Joseph in front of him from head to toe because he thought they were trying to make a real army or where else would they scout these people? but unfortunately he was just a human being.

“If it’s just for fun, you’d better quit right away. It’s no use regretting it after being bitten.”

“It’s not like that.”

Rather, Ben flinched at Joseph’s stern response. Looking determined, Ben stared at Joseph’s face. Roxy approached Ben when he felt irritated by the challenging gaze.

“It’s Ben’s fault. Joseph was the only survivor of his family extermination.”

Roxy lightly tapped Ben’s back of the neck with the palm of her hand, looked at Joseph, talked to him, and went to his seat.

Ben looked at Roxy as if asking her to let him know in advance, but Roxy left without looking at Ben.

“I was on my way home from my college dormitory for spring vacation, and when I arrived there was a lot of food on the table, but I didn’t see anyone there. I felt strange, and I found my mother under the table, my father and my brother in my room, and they hadn’t left a single drop. It’s even embarrassing to call that a corpse.”

Ben stared at Joseph’s face, pretending to be calm. It must have taken a very long time to say something like this as if it were nothing.

“I apologize if I offended you.”

“It’s okay, you didn’t know.”

Joseph reached out his hand and asked for a handshake. Joseph added one more thing when Ben didn’t grab it right away and stared at it.

“I look forward to working with you.”

Ben reluctantly held his hand out.

“But they really won’t die?”

Ben’s head was pounding at the persistent question and pressed down his temple.

“ They ’re just like people. They ‘ll die if they fall from a high place or hit by a car. I’ve never tried it before, but they probably will. But if you want to deal with them without leaving a trace, do as I said in a certain place. No more questions.”

“Oh, one more thing.”

Ben shook his chin slightly to tell him about his child-like pestering behavior.

“Bullets. Do you really make them?”

“Who the hell-”

He closed his mouth when he tried to say ‘who even said such nonsense’ , but everyone knew it anyway.

“Wouldn’t a knife work better? Than a gun.”

“I just don’t want to get close. Guns can be shot from afar.”

Before he knew it, ¡ Ben answered him, and Roxy laughed behind as she saw it.

Basically, Ben wasn’t so hot-tempered, and he couldn’t help but answer questions from good ordinary human beings. He rather liked people. However, he always kept a certain distance from them for fear of betrayal or to prevent being hurt.

“Can you teach me how to make them?”

He was determined not to back down if he didn’t answer.

“Alright. If I have a chance later.”

Casually responding, Ben reached out his arm and grabbed Joseph’s shoulder and pushed him toward Roxy. Joseph’s sad steps were heard.

Feeling exhausted as Joseph left, Ben sat down and stroked the weapon that he still had on one side. Then, as if he had come back to where he was, the noise from a while ago became distant and he felt relieved.

He made the bullets he used, but his mother told him the materials. Of course, most of his knowledge was learnt like that, but this was one of those that he was still using.

In fact, she made him hold a knife, but Ben hated it as he grew up. To use a knife, he had to get close, and being close to them was never what he wanted. The smell was more intense up close. In addition, blood splattered when they had just drunk blood. Most of all, the worst thing was the sense when the knife pierced the flesh. Well, it was natural that he wouldn’t cut gently, but he didn’t like it.

So, he found a way to kill at a distance as wide as possible. Throwing garlic or using a cross didn’t really work like in cartoons or movies.

He found literature on werewolves while looking for a way to really widen the distance.

When he first saw the book, Ben thought he would rather be a werewolf than a Dhampir. Vampires existed, so it wouldn’t be surprising if there were a couple of werewolves around. So he went up to the rooftop on a full moon night, but nothing special happened.

A werewolf died when he was hit by a silver bullet in his head or heart. They had, as vampires, a ridiculous way to die: a silver bullet.

Was there really nothing like a silver bullet for vampires? While thinking, his mother told Ben about holy water. Ben didn’t tell anybody where the holy water his mother told him was. He didn’t mean to keep it a secret, but there was no one who needed it.

No matter how much he belonged to MKV, he usually prioritized running away rather than fighting with them . Since he had no intention of fighting, he could not have been interested in bullets or holy water, but holy water could be fatal for them, so Ben decided to use holy water as much as he could.

How he killed them with bullets containing holy water was simple.

When a bullet was fired with holy water inside it and dug into the skin, the bullet exploded and the holy water inside flowed out. That way, holy water would go into their blood vessels, where they didn’t have blood.

Ben designed bullets that bursted into the skin and at the same time it was possible that they held holy water. After several failures, Ben made bullets that contained holy water.

However, the problem with these bullets was that if the person was one of them , they would die because of holy water, and if they were humans, they would have the same effect as being shot by an ordinary gun, so Ben had to be more careful with the gun than when he used a knife.

When he touched the weapon with his fingertips for some time, he felt distracted. Ben fixed his posture while looking at the monitor.

He had to check Miller out on the National Police Agency DB as Aidan O’Donoughue said. When Ben entered his name and waited, the monitor screen changed after a while.

Ben frowned on the rising screen. Miller’s data was classified as off-limits. Well, it could be because he belonged to MI6.

Benjamin touched his chin and began to press the keyboard again. This time, he realized that he was doing that in vain. He then tried with the family members, so he looked into Aidan’s history.

His data was full of rubbish, including the country of origin. On paper, he was a prodigal man with no job. When he scrolled down a little more, he found family relationships.

Ben’s finger movement, which was meaninglessly scrolling, stopped. Both parents were alive, and Ben’s eyes opened wide in the residence shown. Romania. It was suspicious that he was purely British and their residence was Romania.

Ben looked at the bottom row. He cursed when he saw the information about Miller O’Donoughue saying “brother”.

“Shit.”

The police DB wasn’t helpful at all. Miller’s job was marked as an ordinary district tax official. He wasn’t the director of MI6, but a tax official. Ben was stunned. Though he thought there was nothing worthy, Ben didn’t stop scrolling with the mouse repeatedly. Ben’s hand stopped looking at the screen with his chin on his hand and blank eyes.

Again.

As Ben slowly raised his head in a direction similar to the scent of mint, Miller was right in front of his desk.

Until now, there had been no one he couldn’t feel their presence before coming this far. He was surprised at the fact that this person had no presence.

“You look busy.”

Miller’s eyes were narrowed as he looked at Ben. Ben turned off the window where he was moving the mouse. There was no way he could see the monitor from where he was standing, but somehow it was uncomfortable as if he had something stuck in his throat.

As he rolled his eyes and looked around, he noticed that the employees in the office were glancing at Miller while pretending to be working.

“What’s going on?”

“Have you forgotten?”

Miller put the file he was holding on Ben’s desk. Ben opened the file and began to flip through it one by one. The files were all data on cases of sexual assault and murder. There was also a case that MKV was paying attention to because the incident was a serial one.

Ben’s hand stopped completely at the back of the file, which seemed to have nothing else.

“Are you sure?”

In the last chapter, there was a picture of a handsome, golden-haired man who just looked like a teenager.

“According to our information, yes.”

“A total of three crimes over the course of a month, and he’s responsible for this?”

Miller licked his lips as he looked at Ben talking as if he was about to go kill him.

“It’s important to catch the criminal right in front of us, but we’re going to aim for something bigger.”

“What if there’s another victim?”

Since there were already three victims, it was a natural question for Ben because he could not guarantee that there would be no next time.

Miller responded calmly to the question, raising one eyebrow.

“Sometimes sacrifices are needed.”

“As I expected, you are not suitable for the job.”

After hearing the answer, without hesitation, Ben fired. In the first place, when Ben didn’t hunt vampires was because he was protecting humans, so he couldn’t pretend not to know something he did.

That was because Ben liked to think of himself as a human being rather than a Dhampir.

“Don’t be silly, Lieutenant, we already know that the y’re getting more and more organized. MKV isn’t going all the way to MI6 to catch just a small one.”

Listening to Miller’s cold words, Ben came up with another idea that would sound furious without a slight change of tone.

“Since it’s decided that we’ll work together, don’t do anything arbitrarily. I’ll tell you this today.”

Miller stared at Ben without saying a word, showing signs of displeasure. There seemed to be more to say, but he was patient because it was an open office.

While watching each other without saying anything, Miller sighed as if he had calm down first, took his phone out and handed it out to Ben.

“What?”

Ben replied as he saw the metal object twinkling under the fluorescent light in front of his eyes.

“Now that we’re working together, we’ll have to contact each other. Write your number.”

Even if it were ordinary and simple words to tell him the number, it sounded like a command. Ben pushed Miller’s hand holding the phone and said.

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

Miller giggled again as if he was stunned by the words. With that laugh, Ben’s pride was somehow hurt, but he had lived just fine without it so far, and he had never felt the need to have one. It wasn’t something to be embarrassed about.

Seeing Ben turning his head with his mouth shut and looking elsewhere, Miller pressed several buttons and put the phone noisily on Ben’s desk.

“You may not need the details, but I do, so have it while I’m working with you.”

Miller finally left silently, as if he didn’t want to talk anymore.

While looking at Miller’s back with his eyes squinted, Ben opened the desk drawer and threw the phone in. He didn’t mean to behave as he was told.