Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four (45 page)

As the boy laughed uncontrollably, a silvery flash zipped to the end of his nose.

“What the—” Matthew exclaimed, reeling back and putting his hand to the tip of his nose. Something red dripped from it.

“You cut me?” he said, purple madness turning to white fear. “How could you cut me? Between you and me, there must be—”

His eye burned with red reflected from D’s eyes. Eyes narrowed with rage, fangs peeking from vermilion lips—it was clearly the face of a vampire.

“Stop, D! You really are the Sacred Ancestor’s own—”

The boy’s words were cut short by a stark flash of light.

As he heard the sound of Matthew’s body falling, D turned his gaze to where the boy’s head lay at his feet.

“He brought it on himself,” the hoarse voice was heard to comment wearily. “But that means your contract—well, that can’t be helped, can it?”

“I’ll uphold the contract,” D said.

“Excuse me?”

Around that dubious voice and the vision of beauty, the white fog eddied both lovingly and fearfully.

About a month later, the Capital dispatched yet another survey party to Valcua’s kingdom. The vast expanse of land dotted with stands of trees that they found there was the Frontier, plain and simple. However, in the rocky region in the center of that wilderness they discovered a tiny red sphere and a longsword half-buried beneath boulders, and both of these items were eerily heavy. When the combined efforts of all their trailer trucks didn’t budge them an inch, the men could only take pictures and leave them where they were. The wind that blew from the far reaches of the endless gray wilderness made the survey party tremble to the last man, and later they would question if it all hadn’t been a dream. Of course, they had no way of knowing that everything in the kingdom that had existed in that region a month earlier was packed into that sphere.

Five years later, Sue left her hometown and the farm she had made an unqualified success through impressive teamwork, traveling to the eastern Frontier to be married to the owner of a musical-instrument shop. Matthew took a red-haired girl as his wife. She was a city girl, and though she wasn’t strong, she had a warm heart.

“I don’t know if I’m good enough for you,” a bashful-looking man three years Sue’s senior told the girl.

Smiling, Sue said, “My late mother told me to marry someone like you, you know.”

And then, in her heart of hearts, she suddenly found herself asking,
But was that really what happened?

After working with Matthew to slay the Ultimate Noble, doubts occasionally rose in her mind like ripples on a pond. There was something different about all this. As if it weren’t the way her life had
really
gone. Such suspicions would undoubtedly cling to her all her life, and Sue understood that she simply had to accept it. Throughout her life with the man she loved, those doubts might be a heavy load to bear. She didn’t let that stop her.

Presently she got married, had children, raised a family, and heard that Matthew had died. And as she grew old, Sue sometimes had a strange dream. In it, an impossibly beautiful young man in black was watching her intently from the depths of a white fog. Though his gaze was stern and icy, Sue wasn’t afraid. Whenever she saw him, her heart raced like a young girl’s. And every time, without fail, she told him the same thing:
It’s okay.
I
had a happy life. Just like my mother wanted.

And with that a faint smile skimmed across the lips of that gorgeous young man, and every time she had the dream, Sue was proud to have put it there. It was just such a smile.

When I was writing the third and fourth parts of
Tyrant’s Stars,
I began to develop a new interest in D’s world. Up until then, it was a topic I’d only given halfhearted consideration, but I started to want to really flesh out what the world had been like when vampires ruled the human race. The vampires—or the Nobility—first appeared as a force greater than humanity after the nuclear war. The story line of the D series jumps forward ten thousand years from that point, omitting much about how the Nobility had controlled the human race. Not that it was boring or anything; I just hadn’t given it much thought. (
Laughs
) A nuclear war brought about the vampires’ sudden rise to power, and in those days, it seemed like such an exchange might occur at any time between the US and the Soviet Union. The difference between then and now is like night and day; the nuclear weapons remain, but we believe no such war will take place. At the time, I’d probably have had the vampires take control after the human race, nearly wiped out by nuclear war, is saved by the secretly developed technology and magical power of the vampires, to whom the radiation is no more than a light shower. But in return, the humans would have had to allow the vampires to feed on them.

At present, the Frontier inhabited by the humans is divided into northern, southern, eastern, and western sectors, each with

assorted feudal lords or controllers. Count Magnus Lee, who appears in the first novel, is one such person. In the ten thousand years leading up to the decline of the Nobility as a race, there were a few vampire rulers that even the humans lauded, the most praised among them being Lord Greylancer of the northern Frontier and Baron Mayerling of the western Frontier. The former I used in the most recent Japanese volume of the D series,
Nightmare Village,
while the latter appears in the third book,
Demon Deathchase.
Now, I’ve taken both of them and thrown them back into the world of the past. That is the crux of the
Another Vampire Hunter: The Noble Greylancer
series that I’ve just started writing in Japan. Set in the thousands of years when the Nobility were locked in heated battle with the intergalactic invaders known as the Outer Space Beings (OSB), it vividly depicts the lives of humans and Nobles on the Frontier. No plans have been made to translate it yet, but I hope those of you who understand Japanese will read it in its original form. As the author, I can highly recommend it.

Although the vampires are ageless and immortal, they aren’t indestructible. They have numerous lethal weaknesses, such as sunlight, running water, wooden stakes, and so on. Naturally, the Nobility would think of measures to guard against these things, and the humans would undoubtedly conceive of ways around those safeguards. Surely there would be individuals willing to lead rebel armies equipped with those new weapons. And while the rebels might be ruthlessly crushed, there still might be some Nobles who couldn’t help but be moved by their courage and humanity. These are the kind that can be found in
Tyrant’s
Stars. And although this has turned into a plug for my new series, I have faith that you’ve found
Tyrant’s Stars
quite interesting. I hope you enjoyed it.

February 21, 2011

While watching
Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Hideyuki Kikuchi