Throng of Heretics

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  As the wind picked up it carried the stench, leaving both Pikk and Hiryuu covering their mouths. While D was another matter altogether, it was strange how Annette—just a regular person like them—kept holding her reins the same as always.

  The supernatural creatures were facing their way almost in a straight row, but closer to the center of the square more and more of them were facing the opposite direction.

  “At first they all attacked en masse, and then later they tried to run,” Hiryuu murmured in a deeply impressed tone.

  A horrified look on his face, Pikk said, “Tried to run? Why?”

  “The better question is, from what?”

  “From what, then?”

  “Whatever was in the middle of the square.”

  “Huh?”

  At the very moment Pikk furrowed his brow, from somewhere in the center of the square hidden by the mound of corpses a yellowish light began to rise magnificently, trailing white smoke behind it. After rising roughly fifty yards it lost speed and, leaving a graceful arc in its wake, began to fall.

  “It’ll be close,” Pikk squeaked.

  “Real close,” Hiryuu attested.

  Suddenly, Pikk noticed something.

  “Son of a bitch, the point of impact is right here!” Tapping Annette on the shoulder, he shouted, “Run for it!”

  However, the boy didn’t try to escape. For Annette had slumped casually to one side.

  “Did you just go and faint?!” Pikk said in disbelief, leaning over in his saddle to grab Annette by the collar and pull her upright again. “Hey, snap out of it!” he said, shaking her by the shoulder, and the girl opened her eyes.

  “Head hurts . . . What’s wrong?”

  “The sky’s falling. Get going!”

  Not even leaving Annette a second to be surprised, he gave a kick to the rump of her horse and sent it after D, following along after at a gallop.

  Are we gonna make it? He thought they were too late in getting their start.

  The wind whistled overhead. It told them it’d fallen right behind them.

  Pikk closed his eyes.

  The sound of an explosion shook his eardrums. It was less spectacular than he’d expected.

  “Huh?”

  There was no rocking of the earth, no heaven-shaking boom. The explosion continued. Bang-ba-bang-bang!

  Looking back, the boy saw a prismatic light bouncing around on the ground. Halting his steed, Pikk wheeled around.

  “What the hell? Firecrackers?” he groaned.

  D was beside him.

  Did this big jerk know that’s what it was? If he did, who threw the firecrackers?

  “Hello there!” a wrinkly voice called out from the center of the corpse-littered square. It was that of a woman.

  Pikk and Hiryuu’s eyes went wide.

  “Came after all, did you, D? I’ve been waiting.”

  D said nothing in response to her friendly greeting. His dark eyes still reflected the countless dead.

  Turning toward Pikk, the Hunter said, “Our employer’s racing off at breakneck speed. Better bring her back, and fast.”

  “Well, I don’t take orders from you,” the boy grumbled, yet undoubtedly her safety was of paramount concern to him.

  However, before Pikk could comply with D’s directive, Annette seemed to have gotten the situation in hand, riding her cyborg horse back with trepidation.

  What halted her was the sharp rasp of a discharge. The wall of corpses was probably the only thing that’d kept it from spraying them.

  From the other side of the wall a little old woman in a green and brown camouflage outfit was rising straight in the air. The silver box on her back must’ve had an exhaust nozzle somewhere to the rear where the group couldn’t see. Beneath her, the air churned and eddied.

  “What the hell is this old lady?”

  Pikk bared his teeth.

  The old woman also showed her teeth as she grabbed a lever projecting out in front of her from the box.

  “Is she coming at us?”

  Though Pikk drew his firearm, the old woman still grinned as she started to climb, swiftly reaching an altitude of over a hundred yards, where she looked down at the people on the ground as if she were a glaring god.

  “What the—?”

  A tinge of turbulence shook her deeply wrinkled face. The hand grasping the lever moved feverishly.

  “What’s the problem with Grandma—can’t she get back down?”

  D raised his left hand.

  “Push the left lever forward,” a hoarse voice called out. “Then a quick shove to the right. Make it snappy!”

  It was a few seconds later that the old woman began a slow descent. Until she vanished behind the pile of corpses, her face was etched with a glum expression.

  To the rear of the mountain of corpses a fairly wide path had been left, possibly as a means of escape. As for why it was so wide—in the center of a thirty-foot clearing was parked a metallic wagon. It wasn’t horse-drawn. There was a cylinder as long as two horses hitched end to end that had wheels attached to it, while the top—what would’ve been the horses’ backs—had white vapor rising from it. The holes in its top were arranged in two rows of six each, which discharged surplus steam generated within the cylinder.

  This was something many a Frontier farmer coveted—a steam-driven wagon. As the vehicle to the rear was a covered wagon, they couldn’t see inside, but from the size of it, it seemed it could haul quite a bit of cargo and still have room to bed down inside it.

  Having set down the jetpack she’d had on her back, the old woman flexed her shoulders and looked up at the four riders. “Welcome,” she said, holding the hem of her long, flowery skirt as she curtseyed.

  “Why the big show and dance?” Annette asked D in a hushed tone.

  “That’s how she greets customers.”

  “Customers?”

  “That’s right, and a good one at that—isn’t that right, D?”As she looked at him, her face, covered with wrinkles and age spots, melted with rapture. “And what business have you today? Why call Granny Gerheit all the way out to this dangerous place? If you’re looking for something cheap, you’ll feel my wrath!”

  At her feet fell a single glittering disk. It made a hard metallic ching!

  “A-ha, generous as always, I see.”

  Bracing one hand on the small of her back, Granny Gerheit made a great production of picking up the gold coin. After a glance at it, she grinned and said, “A thousand dalas Aristocrat Coin—what were you planning on doing, starting a war or something?”

  Hers was a daring smile.

  D said, “First, I’d like you to implant a tracking chip in the girl.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “The rest we’ll discuss in private.”

  D got off his horse. He must’ve had plans he wasn’t going to share with the rest of his traveling companions.

  “Damn, that’s cold of him,” Pikk spat venomously.

  Hiryuu clapped him on the shoulder. “We should dismount, too. My ass is killing me.”

  As soon as he was down off the horse, Pikk asked the old woman headed to the covered wagon with D, “Say, Granny, did you take down all these monsters?”

  “Must’ve been pretty hungry, eh?” she replied. “Came at me from all sides just to eat an old woman who’s nothing but skin and bones. Only they bit off more than they could chew.”

  “How’d you swing it?” the boy inquired, his voice trembling with anticipation.

  The old woman said nothing, but pointed down by the boy’s feet.

  A weapon that looked to be an old-fashioned firearm had been unceremoniously dumped there. A tin box sat to its right, and a belt of ammunition was feeding into the top of the weapon. Pikk’s eyes went wide at the unusually large barrel of the gun.

  “The safety’s on. Have a look at it if you like,” she told him magnanimously, and then the old woman ducked behind the covered wagon.

  “An odd litt
le group you’ve got there.”

  “Hired on as a bodyguard,” said the hoarse voice.

  Plainly knitting her brow, the old woman remarked, “Still got that thing stuck on you? Just go ahead and lop it off and throw it in the volcano up on Mount Ring, why don’t you?” she spat.

  “One of these days,” D replied, seeming a bit amused.

  “Hmph!” the left hand groaned, perhaps having decided that the Hunter wasn’t necessarily joking.

  II

  Throwing the cover back, the old woman invited the Hunter to clamber into the wagon.

  “Go on, pick out whatever you like,” Granny Gerheit said as she pulled off the cloth covering a mound of cargo as if she were a robber stealing the very clothes off someone’s back. The smell of gun oil that already permeated the wagon’s interior assailed their nostrils with renewed strength. Most of the weapons revealed had a bluish sheen.

  “You’re traveling in a hurry, no doubt. Tell me the itch you’ve got that needs scratching. I’ll pick something out for you,” Granny Gerheit said, slapping the palm of her hand against the barrel of a rifle.

  “The girl needs an automatic weapon she can maneuver with one hand and fire without worrying about the kick. Plus a pair of little pistols she can hide up her sleeves, and the rubber belts to hold them in place.”

  “Roger that.”

  Slipping between two oversized pieces of merchandise, Granny Gerheit pulled out a slender gun. The foot-long barrel was attached to another eight inches or so of weapon, with an iron rectangular box set just in front of the grip.

  “Oh, this is a good one. Way back when, I hear they called these submachine guns. Weighs roughly three and a half pounds, fires one hundred twenty rounds of 1.2 mm ammo. The muzzle’s small, and you can’t aim it long range like a rifle, but it’ll hit any target within fifty yards, no matter how small. Might take you a hundred rounds to do it, is all. As long as you’re pulling the trigger, bullets come out. I don’t care if you’re the worst shot in the world, you can probably kill thirty people before you empty the magazine.”

  Seeing D’s nod, she lowered the gun, then held out a pair of pistols she’d pulled out at the same time, placing one on either palm of the Hunter’s hands.

  “These two are the same model, only loaded with different types of ammo. The one in your right hand has armor-piercing rounds like the gun I just showed you, and the one in your left has explosive rounds. Thirty rounds in each. The armor-piercing one could cut through five normal people, or two people in the sort of class A armor your garden-variety warrior favors. On the explosive rounds, first you’ve got the outer layer—they’re covered with a ceramic coating which could get about four inches deep going through the armored hide of something like a mid-sized fire dragon. Once inside, how do I put this, they go off with as much bang as a large Merovingian grenade. That’ll put said mid-sized fire dragon out of commission, and a person—well, it’ll probably blow the sucker into four separate pieces.”

  “Fine,” said D.

  The hoarse voice shouted, “Watch yourself, the old lady’s a homicidal maniac!”

  “Hush, you miserable squatter,” Granny Gerheit shot back. “Now, for the other two. Which one’s next?” she asked, giving the Hunter a smile.

  D shook his head.

  “Oh, don’t want anything, then?”

  “That’s right,” D replied.

  Weapons in hand, D was just about to get out of the wagon when it rocked violently.

  “That’s gunfire! The enemy?” the old woman said, crouching down and reaching for a nearby gun, but D shook his head. The old woman nodded back. She’d figured out what’d happened.

  The two of them got out of the wagon.

  With the gun Granny Gerheit had shown him in hand, Pikk wore a perplexed expression.

  “What’s going on here?” Granny Gerheit inquired with feigned anger, having already grasped the situation.

  “I don’t know. I was just messing around with it, and all of a sudden bullets are coming outta it. What’s with this gun? It doesn’t make any noise at all when it goes off!”

  The boy was the very picture of befuddlement.

  “That’s a weapon I found in an armory in ruins so ancient they go back to before the Nobility. See, the barrel’s got this tube on it that kills the sound. Apparently in the ancient language it was called a ‘mufflerizer’ or ‘super-essor’ or something like that. Just the weapon for taking out multiple targets at range before they even notice you. Only this time, it proved a little dangerous,” said the old woman, seeming somewhat embarrassed as she looked around at the monster corpses.

  “What was dangerous about it?” Pikk asked, intrigued.

  “Well, a lot of monsters are pretty big cowards, and most are likely to run at so much as the sound of a gun going off. But this one’s silent, so even though their buddies were getting picked off, they didn’t realize what was happening. The attacks just kept coming and coming. It was only after two-thirds of them had been slain that the rest finally turned tail. And by that point, I’d got a taste for blood, you see. Damned if I was gonna let them monsters get away, and all that.”

  Pikk didn’t say a word as he gazed at the agitated old woman. Ol’ Granny’s lost her mind, his eyes said.

  Suddenly someone said what he was thinking.

  “What a lot of savages you are. I can’t stand it any longer.”

  Annette, who’d been sitting on a round rock by the steam-driven engine, got up, drawing the stares of all. D’s were emotionless. Granny Gerheit’s seemed intrigued. Pikk looked disgusted. And Hiryuu had a faint smile on his face.

  “D, why must we come to such a filthy, brutish place? And is your business concluded?”

  “It’s done.”

  “In that case, let’s hurry up and be on our way. The stink is so bad I’m fairly suffocating!”

  “Okay. But before you mount up, take these.”

  “Huh?”

  Annette dubiously eyed what D had tucked under his arm. He dropped the iron weapons at her feet.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Weapons for your own protection. I’ll show you how to use them.”

  “You must be joking. I never had to carry anything so vulgar back in the Capital!”

  “This is the Frontier.”

  The girl stalled for a few seconds, trying to turn the situation around. And in that gap, she found a course that suited her perfectly.

  “I realize that—but protecting me is your job, isn’t it? Telling me to do it myself is a dereliction of duty. It’s a violation of our contract. And you call yourself a Hunter?!”

  “Yeah, unfortunately,” said the hoarse voice.

  “Gracious. Don’t change your voice every time it suits you. Is that supposed to mean something special?”

  “No.”

  “Ohhhh,” Annette fumed, crimson with anger. You could say she practically ballooned with it. Body quaking, she shouted, “You, sir, are fired! I’m terminating you here and now—is that understood?”

  “Fine,” the hoarse voice replied with what sounded like delight. “It’s an honor. But you’ve gotta pay me my wages through today!”

  “I have to what?!”

  “I have to what?! I have to what?!” the hoarse voice mimicked shrilly.

  Granny Gerheit sputtered, and Pikk exploded with laughter.

  Annette had gone beyond red, her whole body purple with rage as the voice continued, “It’s only fair. You had us working for you up till today, didn’t you? So, we’ll say we’ve gone a third of the way—”

  “You must be joking. Who in their right mind would pay a worthless—”

  It was unclear what Annette intended to say next, and they never did find out. For she had just looked over at Granny Gerheit.

  The old woman’s face, staring at her with disbelief, was the product of fear.

  “What is it? What’s wrong, Granny?”

  It took the old woman a few seconds to respond to
the girl’s query.

  “I’ve never . . . Do you have any idea . . . exactly who . . . you just called ‘worthless’?”

  Even having said that much, the old woman’s fear hadn’t dissolved. She’d just listened to a complaint about D.

  Annette couldn’t understand the crone’s sudden, quiet madness.

  “I know. Of course I do. I said it to him.” Her finger took aim at the icy figure of beauty dressed in black.

  “Really . . . Frightening how little some folks know . . . D, sure you haven’t mellowed too much now? You’ll get into heaven when you die.”

  Silence pressed in on them from all sides. A gust of wind stirred the air, leaving everyone but D holding their nose and coughing.

  When that had finally died down, Annette declared, “At any rate, I have no intention of paying good money for lackluster work.”

  Once more sounding delighted, the hoarse voice said, “Have it your way. So, you planning on making the rest of the trip alone?”

  “No. I’ve already decided on my next bodyguard.”

  “Oh?”

  The expressions of all present said they shared this surprise.

  Annette turned in the boy’s direction.

  “Huh?” On Pikk’s face, surprise, nervousness, and expectation all intertwined.

  “I’d like to ask you to do it, Mr. Hiryuu.”

  “Me?” The drifter furrowed his brow. Looking at D, he said, “But—”

  “You’ll take the job, won’t you?” the girl continued. “I promise you’ll be compensated. If you see me home safely.”

  This wasn’t exactly a request but rather a declaration accompanied by a glare, and for a moment Hiryuu had an angry look in his eye, but he quickly came back with a smile. “I don’t know if I’ll be as reliable as our handsome friend there, but if you’re fine with me I’ll help you out.”

  “Good,” Annette said, but she didn’t even smile. “In that case—you, give him your horse,” she ordered.

  “What are you talking about?” Pikk countered. “The sheriff got this horse for me. You don’t get to order me around!”