Something grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. In the blink of an eye, the cruelest of Hunters was left rolling on the ground unceremoniously.
“You?!”
The old man looking down at him was the same person who’d met with the group to explain the terms of their employment and their remuneration in place of their actual employer.
“I imagined this might happen, but it’s a little too early to be turning on each other. You’d better show yourself too,” the old man said to the rock face behind him.
After a while, the priest appeared from behind a pile of odd-shaped stones.
Crimson Stitchwort then realized what had happened.
“Yoputz—you son of a bitch!”
As the man got up with a wrathful visage, the old man checked him, saying, “You two are it, you know.”
“Oh, then all the rest are—”
The old man shook his head at Crimson Stitchwort’s words.
“There’s one other who chooses not to come. Now, let’s get those devices ready.”
“What do you mean, get them ready? There’s no sign of them anywhere, and I’ve checked everywhere. And it looks like that asshole was probably spying on me the whole time!”
As Crimson Stitchwort’s search had ended in failure, Yoputz saw him as no longer being of any use and had utilized his powers to throw him into a nihilistic frame of mind.
The old man looked like something of a philosopher, and there wasn’t a trace of emotion on his face as he said, “They don’t appear until the appropriate number of people have assembled. That’s the way it’s set up.”
The old man gave a toss of his jaw, indicating the center of the outcropping.
It seemed impossible that they’d appear in such a manner. But what fell from the sky was a wooden box that wasn’t very large at all. As it slammed against the ground, the box was smashed to bits. Since this sent chunks of wood flying that the two assassins had to dodge but the old man didn’t, the box must’ve been thrown from quite some height.
Though Crimson Stitchwort and Yoputz both looked up, they saw no one at the top of the cliff.
“They shall be entering the canyon soon. Use these to finish them off,” the old man said as if making a declaration.
As the two Hunters looked at him, their eyes weren’t exactly filled with endearment.
“What the hell is all this?!” Crimson Stitchwort said, his gaze trained on the contents of the box. “I don’t get it at all. They’ve gotta come with some sort of directions, right?”
“If you need any sort of instruction, I’m sure each item will supply it to you itself. Now fight, and destroy the baron. That’s what you’ve been hired for, is it not?”
Completely disregarding the old man, who vanished as soon as he’d finished speaking, the two turned to one another. Having seen something so incomprehensible, the look on their faces was sheer bewilderment.
__
Before entering the canyon, D halted the carriages.
“What is it?” asked the baron. The darkness was already heavy, and he could be seen up in the driver’s seat.
“This is a perfect place for an ambush. Essentially, once we get through here, it’s less than thirty miles to Krauhausen. You could say this is the last redoubt for our foes. An attack will be coming.”
“I realize that.”
“Wait here,” said the Hunter. “I’m going to go see what the enemy is up to.”
“I see. Please do.”
On this matter, the two men were in perfect agreement.
D rode his cyborg horse into a bottleneck formed by the cliffs that jabbed up at the sky to either side.
__
Beside the road the Hunter took there flowed a wide river. Though the water was clear, it ran deep and dark. A person’s head popped up right in the middle of it, and the sturdy figure that then arose with water dripping from every inch of him was none other than the Dark Water Forces commander Galil. Needless to say, the countless blobs that surfaced from the fluid coursing slowly around him wore the faces of his subordinates. It appeared they’d been lying in wait here for D. Though the bottoms of Galil’s feet rested on the water’s surface as he stood there defiantly, there was no white spray around them, and he didn’t move a muscle.
“Our master Vlad will not tolerate another failure. This is a do-or-die situation for us. Our preparations have been made. D! Baron! This time, you shall find your opposition a bit more of a threat.”
And then he seemed to melt as he became one with the water.
If the flow of the stream was considered as a kind of network, then the water it contained could share any information with every location almost simultaneously. Galil had already passed D and was undoubtedly preparing to catch him in an attack. What’s more, Crimson Stitchwort and the weird priest Yoputz had bizarre new weapons as they lay in wait for the group. How would D and the baron fight them? How could they defend themselves?
In order to get a view of the entire canyon, one would have to go to a height of at least six thousand feet. At that altitude floated a cylindrical tube about a foot and a half long. As it manipulated a quartet of thin wings to ride the air currents and maintain its position, a “macro eye” set on the bottom surveyed the entirety of the canyon while simultaneously zooming in to capture ultra-close-up images—in other words, the device was a highly maneuverable three-dimensional camera.
As he watched the images it relayed to a thin membranelike monitor, Crimson Stitchwort knit his brow and said, “Looks like we’ve got some strange company. But I don’t care who it is, we’ll take out anyone who gets in our way. Before we go after D and the baron, should we wipe them out first?”
“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Yoputz replied, his deeply creased lips shaking as if with a palsy. “I’ll leave that part to you. After all, we’ve got all this equipment. It should be child’s play.”
“What’s that you say?!” Crimson Stitchwort snapped back.
But the priest didn’t even seem to catch the venom in his voice, saying, “Lend me your ear. I’ve got an idea of my own. It came to me back in that village when I got cut in half. It goes something like this—”
Bringing his mouth closer, he whispered for a while.
“I like it!” Crimson Stitchwort said, readily consenting.
But what kind of bizarre plan could Yoputz have that would unify this acrimonious pair in the blink of an eye?
__
After the Hunter had followed the river for over a mile, his attention was drawn to the cliffs ahead and a strange item hanging from them. It was an iron chain covered with rust. Formed from metal four inches thick, each link was a good three feet long. Like the summit of the cliff, the end of the chain couldn’t be seen.
For D on his mount’s back, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to catch hold of the lowest iron link. Raising his arm just a bit, he easily reached the link, and a second later, he was sailing through the air. When he landed smartly without making a sound, it was on the nearly vertical face. He was standing perpendicular to the cliff and parallel to the flowing water.
What was he trying to do?
Grabbing the link with both hands, he gave it a powerful tug. What resulted was a sound wave that rippled out like its more liquid kin. On striking jagged rocks much taller than D that rose like little hills, the sound wave then came bouncing back up with tremendous force.
What was the chain? And what did D want to do with it?
From far, far up in the sky there came a dull roar like thunder. This somewhat subsonic wave fell like rain on the ground, on the surface of the water, beating down, creeping into caves and filling the space between stones like a gas. And while this was happening, D clung to the chain with his left hand, motionless. For the sound waves would bounce off every living thing in the valley, coming back to the chain like some kind of sonar. D could hear the buzz of a drifting insect the size of a molecule of air. The breathing of massive armored beasts that
lay all over the canyon, the beating of a butterfly’s prismatic wings, and the whispers of lovely poisonous mushrooms that were a pale shade of purple all reached his eardrums. And that wasn’t all.
“The main threats are a pair and one other—and that one’s got followers with him. Like, thirty of them,” D’s left hand explained. “The pair would probably be the surviving Hunters, while the other would be Galil with his Dark Water Forces flunkies. From what I’ve seen, these jerks aren’t in cahoots. Well, I can hardly wait to see who tries what!”
D said nothing as he reached his left hand around to his back.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing?!”
The instant that panicked cry was heard, the left hand was severed at the wrist, left clinging to the link of the chain in true agitation.
“What’ve you done to me?!”
“Deal with it,” the Hunter replied, the blade his right hand had held already back in its sheath. Pulling what looked like a ball of woolly black thread from an inner pocket of his coat, D took hold of one end of it. There was a sharp fishhook tied to it.
“Hey, you’d better knock this off!” his left hand cried, still protesting vehemently as the hook sank ruthlessly into its open wound.
__
IV
__
Where the team of D and the baron differed from the normal employer/bodyguard relationship was that both of them were highly capable—the one being protected was every bit as powerful as his defender. Due to this, there was no reason for the bodyguard to constantly stick to the baron; instead, he was free to leave his employer when he wished to seek out his foes and destroy them. No bodyguard in the world did a better job of embodying the expression, “A strong offense is the best defense.”
After letting go of the chain that stretched up to the heavens, D rode his horse up onto a steep stone staircase that was another six hundred feet away. While it was unclear who had fashioned these stone stairs in the distant past, the cyborg horse finished climbing the ten thousand steps in about twenty minutes.
They came to an open space that seemed to have been carved from the side of the mountain. It was with good reason that the first human explorers to discover this place were so awestruck that they couldn’t move for three days or three nights, until they ultimately dried out like mummies.
At the far side of the carved-out mountainside, more than a hundred stone statues over three hundred feet high had been sculpted. Was it gods the mason had tried to carve with his chisel in days of yore, or something else? Some of them glared down at the earth, others scowled at the sky, their hands with fingers curled as if to seize something, or balled in fists, or laid flat to deliver a chop. Their looks were fearsome. The impact they had was far beyond the scope of good and evil, robbing those who saw them of their will and tearing away their minds.
At the feet of the foremost sculpture D could make out the form of Crimson Stitchwort.
“Glad you could make it, D!” the most atrocious of Hunters said as he blinked his eyes.
As intimidating as D was, his beauty was almost enough to make the other man utterly collapse.
Mustering his strength, the assassin said, “However, don’t delude yourself that you made it all this way without being noticed. I’ve got an eye in the sky.”
The brief upward glimpse made by D’s eyes left Crimson Stitchwort satisfied.
“One of the Nobility’s toys?” D muttered. “Where did the other guy go?”
Crimson Stitchwort was shaken.
“How did you know about Yoputz? Well, I don’t suppose it matters. It’s only fitting that you take on the toys. You can go to your grave being happy to have made it this far. The baron and the woman should be joining you shortly.”
He had a strange object by his side—rolled-up parchment scrolls etched with some unknown designs. Drawing one of them from the bunch with his right hand, he shook it up in front of his face. There was a crisp snap, and the parchment unrolled like a wall hanging. Veinlike lines ran across its surface. Suddenly, one of the squiggles glowed with a blue light.
At the same time, the vanguard of the stone statues threw its chest out powerfully. Its stony biceps swelled, and its abdominal muscles rippled. What manner of technology had been used to give it such flexibility? The earth shook as if from a thunderclap. The stone statue had taken a step forward.
At its feet, the figure in black was replaced by the sound of iron-shod hooves at a gallop. Hadn’t the Hunter been at all surprised by this?
“Holy shit!” Crimson Stitchwort shouted as he leapt out of the way.
Whether he was just fast or had intended to do so from the very start, D made a horizontal swipe of his blade that was accompanied by the harsh sound of breaking stone.
The stone statue staggered. A colossus three hundred feet high, its ankle had been split by that one blow from D. And at that point, all of its weight had been resting on that leg. Both hands clutching at thin air, the colossus bowed to the laws of physics.
As its body was falling back against the ground, D galloped right under the statue to close on Crimson Stitchwort.
“Hey, keep away from me!” the assassin shouted as another light sparked to life on the surface of a parchment he held.
The second D bounded into the air, something that could only be described as titanic pierced his cyborg horse through the back and out through the belly. The beast was pinned to the ground by a stone arrow more than a hundred and twenty feet in length. It was also more than three feet thick. The power born of the projectile’s size and velocity instantly tore the cyborg horse to pieces.
At the far edge of the clearing, a stone statue was readying a second arrow. From midair, D lobbed a silvery cylinder at its feet. It emitted a ruby red light that enveloped the lower half of the statue—it was a Stein atomic grenade the baron had given him. In the crimson flames, the statue’s ankles, knees, and thighs all collapsed like feeble clay, and then the upper body was consumed as well, bow and arrow still in hand.
Part of the flames landed on the ground midway between the airborne D and the earthbound Crimson Stitchwort. D came down in the midst of the flaming mass, but a second later, it was Crimson Stitchwort who cried out. As D was hemmed in by the fire, his sword had taken the other Hunter’s right arm off at the elbow. One more swipe of his blade and the number of pursuers would most definitely be decreased.
However, at that point, D audibly heard a hoarse voice tell him, “I sense someone moving toward where the carriages are parked. Someone tough.”
Crimson Stitchwort narrowly managed to leap out of the path of the sword while his opponent’s concentration was broken.
Instead of giving chase, D spun around. The words “someone tough” prompted him to dash to the edge of the cliff. Now without a horse, he couldn’t spare the time it would take to run back down the stairs. But he couldn’t possibly be thinking of throwing himself from a height of nearly fifteen hundred feet. Below, the river flowed like a thread.
His coat billowing out around him, the figure in black dropped toward the water’s surface like a magical bird.
__
As D confronted Crimson Stitchwort, the baron was checking on Miska. Her coffin had been transformed into a stylish bed, and the beauty that lay on it in a white dress stared off into space. In the process of coming to the surface, the Destroyer entity within Miska had forced her ego deep into her subconscious. The shock of that still lingered.
As the baron turned his back to her without offering any words of solace, Miska called out, “What—what do you think I am? I know now,” she continued. “Inside my body, nay, inside my psyche there is this entity called the Destroyer.”
“That’s—”
“It shall take control of my body again at some point, and there is nothing I can do to stop it! It will rain destruction on every last thing in this world. Even on you.”
“There is a way to deal with this.”
The baron’s reply made Miska knit her bro
w.
“Is there truly?”
“In the village of Krauhausen is a physician who served the Frontier’s Central Controller. His name is Jean de Carriole. I’m sure he of all people could cure you.”
Miska was at a loss for words.
“This man received his instruction in the field of magical surgery directly from the Sacred Ancestor. And he delivered me when my mother was pregnant.”
“He delivered you, Baron?”
Miska had never seen this tragic cast to the baron’s features. She was moved.
A strong hand touched her cheek.
“It may be that I am no longer a Noble. Can you understand what that means?”
“And is it to learn this that you go to Krauhausen?”
“The night is passing swiftly. If you’re feeling up to it, why don’t you step outside for a bit? The canyon is brimming with moonlight and life.”
And leaving her with that, the baron stepped out of the carriage. Above him, the moon glowed. The sharp look he gave to the far reaches of the valley was the complete opposite of the gaze that had rested on Miska. Even back here, the ultra-keen senses of the Nobility had allowed him to catch the sound made by the chain. He alone knew of D’s deadly battle.
A scent utterly unbecoming the stillness assailed his nostrils. Covering his mouth and nose with his cape, the baron turned his eyes toward a spot in the darkness. He couldn’t sense anyone. Suddenly all the strength left his body. More accurately, he’d actually lost the very will from which that strength sprang. A feeling of ineffable futility filled his being. His cape came down.
The next thing the baron knew, he was a slave to a desire that made his flesh tremble. He wanted to drink. To suck the warm blood from a human. The baron fought desperately to restrain the longing that swelled within him. But the vortex quickly pulled him in, sucking him down. Putting one hand to his forehead, the baron sat up. And as he was doing so, the scent of blood that hung in the air only grew that much heavier.
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two Page 26
