The Night Belongs to the Moon | Taeyong

41 | Treachery of the Island - II

It did not take Dal-ae and Yuta long before they had trekked all the way up to the top of the island and were now stood on a narrow landing among tall rocks. The air was thin here and the winds were strong; their cloaks clung to their bodies as they made their way through the narrow passage and onto a clearing where Yuta stopped them.

'It's somewhere here,' he said, looking at an eave-like structure carved between two caves. 'They hide their prison cells behind rocks like these.'

Yuta was right and Dal-ae knew it, but she watched him silently, letting him find the seal to unlock the veneer on his own. Minutes passed as he fumbled around the rock, his hand passing over the seal several times but never pressing it. At last, when Dal-ae was just about to lose her patience and help him, his fingers brushed over the site and his palm felt the power of the seal.

'Found it,' he announced and pressed the seal open before taking a step back. The rock in front of them disappeared into thin air like mist dissolving at the touch of water and revealed behind it a huge glass wall separating them from a prison cell made of grey concrete.

'Is this the one?' Yuta asked more to himself than to her, squinting his eyes to peer inside but he didn't have to wait for an answer for long. At the first hint of light, the two prisoners inside crawled towards the glass barrier like moths to a flame. Beaten and haggard, their eyes shined at the sight of Yuta and they fell to their knees in a gleeful greeting unaware of their master's intention.

'Idiots,' Yuta remarked, then crouched down in front of the glass, tapping on it lightly. When the two prisoners looked up, they froze in place – Yuta had just produced two stakes from his suit jacket and was tumbling them between his fingers, showing them off like precious ornaments.

The prisoners broke into what would have been begs and pleas but the thick glass muffled their cries as they screamed for help. All Yuta heard was the crash of the waves a few hundred meters below him as he rose to his feet, eyes gleaming with anticipation of murdering the last link to his crime. He waved his fingers asking them to back away and with a force of a thousand thunders, he blasted the glass wall in one single blow, shattering it into a million pieces which pierced the bodies of the two vampires. With the last shards of glass falling to the ground, Yuta advanced forward with a stake in each hand. He stopped right in front of the vampires, who were now crying through the blood on their faces, pleading for mercy but before their hands could even meet his boot, Yuta staked their hearts in one swift stab.

But just then, an ear-splitting alarm rang across the island like a siren of an emergent doom and in a matter of seconds, the Neutral Force poured into the blasted prison cell. Yuta turned round, his cloak flying behind him as he did, and saw at least a hundred Neutrals dressed in white with chains of silver hanging off their gloved hands, ready to capture him.

'Yuta Nakamoto,' a Neutral standing at the very front said. 'You are being placed under arrest for your involvement in the breach of boundary in the Nakori Village. I urge you to comply with us and co–'

The Neutral wasn't even given a chance to complete his sentence when with a mere flick of his wrist, all the Neutrals burst into flames of white as the silver chains wrapped around their bodies tightly till they were sliced into half. It was so quick that they didn't even scream nor did their bodies meet the ground; they were turned into ash right away, flowing away in the ocean breeze pitifully.

'That was easy,' Yuta said with a bored sigh but when he turned to Dal-ae, his eyes were burning with rage. Suddenly, he caught her by her hair and sneered, 'You bitch, did you set off the alarm, huh?'

Dal-ae's entire body was trembling, not with fear but with her own anger. 'I didn't,' she said, looking him straight in the eyes.

'Then who did? Huh? ANSWER ME!'