Vampire Hunter D: Raiser of Gales

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  “Stop it!” Struggle as she might, the arm pressing against her body had the strength of steel.

  “It’s okay, isn’t it, Papa?” The hunger and passion was now laid bare in Bess’s voice.

  Fern considered for a bit, then nodded. “The others will probably have a fit, but a mouthful or two should be okay. After all, even if we leave her be, you know what’ll happen sooner or later.”

  These weighty words hammered Lina with a strong primal fear.

  What would happen to her sooner or later?

  When those raw, warm lips brushed the nape of her neck, Lina’s reason utterly collapsed. Madness battered its way through the wall of fear, and something burning hot gushed out all at once.

  Bess was thrown against the far wall, screaming awfully, her body spinning like a dervish. Regardless of how Fern felt at the sound of those thick boards snapping, not even a trace remained of the faint smile of a vampire watching his prey.

  “Well, now . . . we should’ve expected no less,” he groaned. Lina began to run. He pursed his lips, and eerie syllables flowed throughout the barn, calling to his guard beasts.

  Lina slowly returned toward Fern, walking backwards now.

  A few yards ahead of her, grotesque figures began filing through the door one after another—a giant spider, a colossal snail, a mucus-dripping creature shaped like a sea anemone, a mass of writhing purple tentacles. There was an army of guard beasts.

  The mob of shapes closed around Lina as she backed away, her color completely fading.

  “We won’t let you get away again,” Bess laughed, as she leisurely got to her feet. “So, come to me. At any rate, you’re already . . . ”

  Lina covered her ears, her whole being recoiling against whatever Bess was about to say.

  The ring of foul-smelling beasts squeezed tight around her.

  “Okay, all set,” came the voice from D’s left hand.

  D nodded.

  With the exception of a smattering of bloody mud and a fistful of ashes giving off a thin wisp of smoke, the outlandish materials had disappeared. Who would’ve believed all of that could be consumed by a little mouth no bigger than the tip of a pinky finger?

  Without a sound, D sailed up onto his mount.

  Giving his cyborg horse a pained glance for just the merest instant, he lashed it hard.

  But, in this eternally sealed dimension, what was the point of this dash on horseback?

  “Where’s it been fused?” he asked, training his piercing gaze straight ahead. The wind rang in his ears.

  “Three hundred yards from here. It’ll start warping back around any time now, so you’d better watch yourself,” the left fist said teasingly.

  And what did it mean by that? The dimension was onto them.

  Watch. See how the stands of trees lining the road, the bushes, even the sky and the road itself twist like a veritable mirage, dissolving like paints in water and surging after D as he gallops by?

  It was a wondrous sight, as the gale raised by this gorgeous youth melted the world and pulled it after him.

  “One hundred and fifty to go,” the voice said with pleasure. “One twenty . . . One hundred . . . Almost there.”

  D’s pupils reflected only the landscape before him. No fear, no anger, no sorrow there. It seemed he was always that way. Increasing his speed even more, the moans of the wind became a maddened scream.

  “Fifty . . . Thirty . . . Ten . . . Now!”

  With this word, the whole melted and the crumbled universe touched D’s back and reversed direction. It was as if the dimension had been turned inside out.

  The next instant, however, up in the laboratory in the ruins, fire spouted from a small device.

  A millisecond later, the auto-repair circuits went into operation, but the speed of the destruction wreaked by the extreme energy force that had broken through the sealed dimension far exceeded that of the countermeasures.

  Destruction pitted against reconstruction.

  Losing the ability to make proper assessments, the repair circuits adjusted the programs to draw on all the energy in the ruins. The rip in the sealed dimension overlapped with dimensions in other completely different locations.

  D’s body flew through the air, sailing up into a space that held nothing. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed his cyborg horse being broken back down to its constituent atoms.

  1945. It was unfortunate, to say the least, that five Avenger torpedo bombers happened to be flying over the seas around Bermuda when the sealed dimension made contact with the area.

  1872 and 1888. The crew of the ocean liner Marie Celeste, sailing the Atlantic bound for Genoa, Italy, and Jack the Ripper, out prowling the East End slums of foggy London, were simultaneously sucked into the sealed dimension, vanishing from the pages of history. The repair circuits should probably be praised for the part they played in the latter of those disappearances.

  3046. An alpha-class black hole moving at 1250 miles per second, with a perigee of 170 million miles suddenly disappeared an instant after swallowing Pluto. Because of this incident, scientists among the Nobility, who were in the process of constructing interstellar rockets to escape to other planets, were subjected to great criticism, and the senior staff on the project, from the director down, were reassigned.

  The overlap took zero real time to occur.

  1901. Visiting the Palace of Versailles in Paris, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain both ran into one Marie Antoinette as she was sketching in an arbor in the garden. Under pseudonyms, they penned a faithful account of their experiences, publishing it in 1911 under the title An Adventure. Needless to say, that Marie Antoinette was none other than the French queen who, along with her husband Louis XVI, was dispatched into the mists of time by the revolution’s guillotine in 1793.

  4018. While eating dinner in his home, the human artist Vernon Berry witnessed a certain Noble attacking a beautiful woman in her bedroom in London, 1878. Though it took Berry three months, he managed to complete a portrait of the attacker. And thus the painting that for nearly six thousand years stood as the crowning masterpiece of all the images of the Sacred Ancestor came into being.

  All the shortest effective distances between two points had overlapped.

  An intense gale knocked Lina and the others to the ground, and, as she tried desperately to get up, Lina saw the most gorgeous figure in the world standing between her and Fern, as if to shield her.

  “D!”

  Comprehending the situation at a glance, the Vampire Hunter advanced without a sound. In this terrific gale that made it hard to even raise one’s face, this daring figure actually looked like he was enjoying it. The monstrous beasts retreated with groans.

  “So, it was you after all,” D said softly, gazing at Fern and his daughter. “Tell me something before you meet your end. Where’s your master, the figure in gray? How do you get in?”

  Even crushed as he was by the otherwordly aura emanating from the Hunter’s physique—beautiful as darkness crystallized—Fern bared his fangs. “They’re all in the ruins. But there’s no way to get to them anymore. Anyway, you’re gonna die right here.”

  D was in motion before he heard the arcane call to arms, moving of his own volition right into the heart of the pack of savage beasts that surged forward.

  His naked blade snarled. A head with compound eyes flew off, tentacles like those of a cephalopod rained down. Fresh blood gushed out, and the flames issuing from one of the monsters were truncated by a flash of silvery light.

  It was battle beyond compare, and a quiet one.

  There was neither whoosh of slashing blade nor scream of severed bone. The wind even blasted away each and every cry from the monstrous beasts. Finally, the guard beasts lay at D’s feet, without having scored a single hit with their pernicious claws or beaks or fangs.

  A flash of light flew.

  About to pounce on Lina, Fern tumbled to the floor with wooden needles piercing both knees. Making a desperate grab for
the compressor-powered gun on his hip, his hand was nailed to the ground. Bess had her back up off the ground, but couldn’t move any further. The gaze she trained on D was strangely feverish.

  The bare blade was shoved in front of Fern’s face.

  “Answer me—where’s the way into the ruins?”

  His soft words, devoid of threats or coercion, froze the blood of a fearless vampire. For the first time, it dawned on Fern that the dashing youth before him was no ordinary dhampir.

  “What . . . what the hell are you?” he asked in the midst of a crushing fear that made him oblivious to the pain in his shattered knees and his now two-fingered right hand. “Someone who’s been made one of the Nobility ought to be more than a match for a human half-breed bastard. And yet, you’re . . . ”

  The naked blade swished through the air, and one of Fern’s ears went flying.

  “I’m a Vampire Hunter. Now answer me.” His tone was as just as soft as before, but with an underlying force that was overwhelming.

  “I . . . I know,” Bess fairly moaned. Slowly, she approached the site of her father’s bloody battle with the youth.

  “Don’t you dare tell him—arrrgh!”

  Fern’s threat was cut off together with his other ear, which went sailing through the air.

  “I’ll tell you . . . Just let me taste your blood, O gorgeous one . . . ” Bess’s voice quivered with longing and delight.

  Clutching the arms she extended to him like withered branches in his left hand, D asked just one thing. “Where?”

  “It’s . . . ”

  “Watch out, D!”

  With Lina’s cry, D made a backward leap of some ten feet. While still in midair, a mass of energy that defied imagination struck his beautiful face.

  The air rang twice, with a bang like an air-filled paper bag suddenly popped.

  Bess and Fern’s bodies had swollen from the inside, then blown apart in an explosion of blood and chunks of flesh. With gory spray and scraps of meat raining down on her, Lina let out a scream.

  The wind, which had just died down, rattled the barn on a completely different scale. Beams of heavy steel alloy bent, and screws shot loose.

  D realized that the energy mass that had annihilated the bodies of Fern and Bess was the same life-form that he’d encountered three times before. The laws of physics stated that two things couldn’t occupy the same place at the same time.

  So, I was right—this is a foe after all, he thought. But someone’s consciousness summoned this thing. And, whoever that is, even they can’t completely control it.

  He had an idea who that someone was.

  The invisible being raised its voice.

  Lina covered her ears.

  It was then that the fragments of red and pink started moving toward the energy mass. The blood and bits of flesh that had once been Fern and his daughter were sucked toward the thing, briefly coming to rest against its indiscernible form, before being almost instantly absorbed.

  It wasn’t that this manifestation of mental energy desired them. Rather, it used them as sustenance for its creator.

  Someone or something was just beyond the door.

  Leaping, D was struck once again by a massive invisible fist of energy. He fell back to earth. He shook his stinging head lightly and put his left hand to the ground to support his body. This concentration of energy surpassed imagination.

  There were many supernatural powers that could create something from nothing. The spirit beasts spawned by conjuration were one example. However, the energy beings were subject to the same laws of nature as everything else, so naturally there were limits to their power. It would have been a different matter if they were nothing but raw energy, but these energy forms also had intelligence.

  In light of that, the energy mass that hindered D’s actions must have been created by a being of unearthly power. D had only survived the first hit because of his own powers, and because some of the energy from shattering the sealed dimension remained with him. But he might not be able to stand another hit.

  The energy form turned and headed for D. The wall creaked, then snapped with an awful sound.

  “D!”

  D’s face, which had been turned toward the floor, looked up now.

  Did the death bearing down on him catch a glimpse of the eyes radiating beams of crimson light, or the pair of jutting fangs? The left hand resting on the ground gripped the hilt of his sword.

  As she watched, Lina got the impression she could clearly see the arc as D swung his blade and the “shape” of the hulking thing as it relentlessly advanced.

  When the two met, sparks devoid of color or sound flew throughout the barn. Lina’s brain burned.

  The energy vanished.

  D dropped to one knee in exhaustion.

  Rubbing her head all the while, Lina ran to him. “D, are you okay?”

  “Nothing to worry about it. But could you take a look outside the door for me? See if there isn’t someone lying out there.”

  “I’ll be back in a flash.”

  Lina went to the door, looked around a bit, then returned. “There’s no one out there. You think maybe they got away?”

  D thought for a moment, then laid back on the ground.

  “Are you okay? Should I go get a doctor?”

  “You needn’t be concerned. I’ll heal soon enough. What I’d like to know is, what brings you here?”

  “I came out looking for Cuore. Just a sec, I’ll go get you some water.”

  Before D could stop her, the girl had disappeared through the doorway.

  When she returned a short while later, tin cup in hand, D had already gotten up. Even when he’d been on the floor, his expression hadn’t shown that anything was wrong with him, or that he was even in pain. Lina was half-tempted to wonder if he’d just been teasing her.

  “Sorry. I had the darnedest time finding the well. Here you go.”

  D was silent as he took the cup she proffered, then drank a mouthful. Not that his body desired it. He was merely responding to Lina’s hospitality. When this girl was around him, D did things that those who knew him would never imagine. Perhaps realizing as much, Lina was beaming, but soon her brow clouded and she asked, “So, what the heck was that thing? Is it the same thing that showed up that night we found Cuore?”

  “Probably. It’s a mass of superdense energy. When they found out they’d not only failed to keep me sealed away but that I’d also broken through here, they probably came by to keep Fern and his daughter from talking.”

  When Lina asked him about it, D briefly recounted the incident with the sealed dimension. While she was only a girl of seventeen, he recognized she was intelligent enough to comprehend his story.

  “Wow. I guess you can do some pretty amazing stuff,” Lina said, her eyes wide with wonder, as they walked away from the barn.

  When all signs of the living had left the barn, two things remained: a deep depression in the ground right where D’s left hand had been until the instant he’d met the energy form with his blade, and something lying in one of the guard beasts’ cages near the doorway. Not only was the latter hidden by a metal partition, but it was also in a state that bordered on catalepsy, so it wasn’t all that surprising that D had taken no notice of it.

  It was Cuore Jorshtern.

  -

  “Another failure, it seems . . . ”

  At last, the low voice was colored by impatience. In a room in the ruins illuminated weakly by a single lamp, two silhouettes deeper than the darkness were conversing quietly, as if crushed by the density of the Stygian blackness.

  “If they’re not back by now . . . ,” another voice said, trailing off glumly.

  If one of the voices belonged to the shadowy figure in gray, who could the other be?

  “My, but that Hunter’s a tough one,” the first shadow said. “I never would’ve thought he could break out of that dimension.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “Oh, well, I�
��ve already thought of a way to beat him. Rest assured. I’m more concerned about Lina. Hasn’t she remembered yet?”

  “I did try to persuade her.” The second shadow paused thoughtfully. “Her time just hasn’t come. Remember, each of us awakened separately, didn’t we?”

  The first voice, gravely weighing the situation, didn’t immediately respond. “Only two days until the exam board arrives,” it said at last. “This has to be settled today or tomorrow. We’re left little choice. We should bring Lina out here instead of waiting for her.”

  “But that’s . . . ” The second voice was clearly shaken. “It’s by no means certain the amplifier would yield favorable results. Lina’s mental processes, in particular, are delicately complex. If it were to go poorly, the damage could be irreparable. Just look at Cuore.”

  This time it was the first voice’s turn to groan. “Hmmm . . . But in return, he gained the power to produce that thing. Very well. We’ll wait just one more day then, shall we? In the meantime, we can take care of that interloper. Good enough?”

  Saying nothing, the other shadow seemed to nod.

  After a short silence, one of the shadowy figures began to mumble, “And yet . . . ” It wasn’t clear which of them spoke. “Can’t you feel it? That there’s someone here besides us . . . ”

  “Impossible.”

  “Someone is watching us. Someone is laughing. Watching our actions and laughing at them . . . from somewhere in the long distant past.”

  “Stop talking like that.”

  The voice was silenced and the pair of shadows moved off through the murk. In their wake, only the darkness remained, almost as if to say darkness alone suited them.

  -

  Lina stopped the wagon at a fork in the road. If she continued straight ahead she would go back to town, while the path stretching to the left led to the hill with the ruins.

  “Nothing else will bother you now,” D said from horseback. The mount had been commandeered from Fern’s place. “I’m going to the ruins. And you—”

  “I’m going home. I know that part by heart by now.” Lina shrugged her shoulders and stuck out her tongue.

  “Good. Come tomorrow, this will all be over.”