Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Part Three (17 page)

As he got his breathing under control, the leader lay flat on his back on the ground again.

“I can't help it. See, that's the job. Back in the village, everyone's scared stiff, waiting for our return. I can't very well be the only one to come moping back. For starters, it'd mean all the rest of these guys died for nothing.”

At this point, he finally realized something.

“Oh, I can't force you to go along with me, Pops. You're lucky to have survived. You don't just turn around and throw all that away. I'll continue on alone from here on out—Godspeed to you.”

“At any rate, let's get everyone buried,” the old man said, gazing at where light hung in the eastern sky. “Then we'll set out. Get as far inland as we can while we've got daylight. I'll go along with you.”

—

After burying eight corpses and taking a short rest, they ended up embarking just past noon. Before they'd walked an hour, the pair found their surroundings had begun to take on a weirder aspect. With the gradual thinning of the fog they could see quite far into the distance, but all that greeted their eyes was a wasteland. Perhaps it would've been better to call it desolation. Black soil spread as far as the eye could see. There was no sign of any living creatures, and the pair was surrounded by such a vast expanse that the glowing red lights of those cylindrical things would've almost been a welcome sight. With provisions and weapons on their backs, the two men sank ankle deep into the miry ground, and steam hid the blue vault of the heavens, although it also occasionally filled the pair's field of view with rainbows, as if to atone for its sins.

Two hours passed, and then two became four. Just as they were about to enter their fifth hour, there was a change in their environment. The boots they pulled up out of the mud met the one thing the pair presently desired more than anything—solid ground.

“Huh?”

After glancing down at their feet, the pair looked across the earth stretching into the distance. It could've been described as a silvery land.

“What the hell is this?” the leader asked, sounding unnerved.

Here was a man who'd been chosen to lead a survey party in exploring the unknown, and he burned with such a sense of duty he still pressed forward even after watching most of his men get killed. He certainly wasn't a coward. But his voice was quaking.

“Damned if I know,” the huntsman said, shaking his head. “I don't know what it is, but it's sure as hell gonna be like this all the way to where that meteorite fell. We've gone and stepped into a whole other world.”

“What kind of
other world
are we talking about here?”

“Good question.”

“You mean like the world of the Nobility?”

“Probably.”

Something about the huntsman's tone bothered the leader.

“Is it or isn't it? Spell it out for me, man!”

“It's just a hunch.”

“Oh.”

Halting, the old huntsman adjusted the pack strapped to his back. He soon started walking again.

“Nobles are Nobles—but this is some different kind of Noble, or so I think,” the old man said.

“Different? You mean to tell me there are other kinds of Nobility?”

“I don't know. That's why I said it's just a hunch.”

“Well, I trust your hunch,” the leader said, looking all around with a chilled expression.

There was only fog and silvery terrain. No hills, no trees, no tundra locked away under eternal ice. Even after twilight fell, the pair continued walking in the darkness. They were afraid to stop. From time to time the leader pulled out his map and survey records and checked their position, but he did so while they were still on the move. The further they advanced, the more a terror and despair that had nothing to do with their exhaustion spread through their hearts, now heavy and dark.

We'll never make it back. We're gonna die out here.

Despite this, however, both pairs of eyes gleamed with a resolute determination to fight. Even if they were going to die, they had to see what lay out there. And without fail, they'd get word of what they discovered to those who waited.

In the middle of the night, they took a rest. The leader had collapsed. When he awoke, it was past noon. The fog and the featureless silver land stretched on forever. For quite some time, both men had held in their hearts a certain conviction:
This land is man made.
But who could've made something so incredible? Who'd packed it away in an eight-inch meteorite?

After having something to eat, they started walking again. And the old huntsman ended up telling a story about a giant he'd seen in the western Frontier sectors when he was young.

“You know, Pops, you're a good-enough shot to hit an angel worm from a mile away. You've got nerve enough to take on a Sanki dragon with no more than a machete, so no one can fault you there. You shouldn't be rotting away on some lousy little mountain bagging birds and beasts to sell their meat when you could go to the Capital and find a better job. So, why don't you?” the leader asked, and that's how the tale got started.

“It was quite a ways back,” the old man said, starting the story.

Like so many other young men with boundless confidence in their own strength, he
'
d wandered through various parts of the Frontier looking for an opportunity to make a name for himself. At the time, he heard about a legendary creature that would eat every beast off a mountain in a year's time, then move onto the next mountain to sate its appetite, and that sparked a desire for honor and combat that burned like a flame in the young huntsman. When he headed up the same kind of mountain where he lived even now with no more than his trusty rifle, it wasn't out of rashness at all. Rather, it was merely a manifestation of his youthful fervor. For a whole month he moved among the colossal boles and weirdly shaped rock as if he were the lord of the mountain, but he'd abandoned the search and was on his way back down when he was swallowed by a thick fog. As soon as he decided to bivouac there, the fog grew even denser, and it showed no sign of clearing any time soon. Not even the wind blew.

On his third night camping out there, the situation suddenly took a stranger turn. From the swirling white depths of the fog, a gigantic figure appeared, accompanied by a great rumbling in the earth.

“When I was a wee young'un, I'd seen the same thing in a picture book all about the Nobility. It was a giant beast that combined machinery with an artificial life form. More than a dozen feet high it stood, wearing rusty old armor and a helm and carrying an iron club with its hairy arms. As for its face, I suppose you could say it looked like a crazy person. Its eyes were vacant, and drool ran down from the corner of its mouth like a waterfall. Black drool, at that. Even now I can still recall how it reeked of oil. There was just one thing that bothered me then, and still bothers me now. According to that picture book, that type of creature had supposedly been dubbed a failure, and they were freed from computer control and destroyed by the Nobility more than five thousand years ago.”

The beast had headed straight toward the huntsman. Pure luck was the only way to describe the way the man managed to dodge the iron club the thing swung down at him—but the way he got off a shot with his rifle as he was rolling around on the ground was the work of a born huntsman. His bullet hit the giant beast right in the middle of the face, and the creature's upper body jerked back.

“Well, I thought I'd hit it dead bang. And that was the way it looked, too. But the thing didn't fall. It didn't even drop to one knee; it just spat up a wad of blood, which landed at my feet. But what I'd thought was a wad of blood turned out to be a bloodstained slug and one of that thing's fangs. Why, that freak—”

Seven hundred and fifty miles per hour—his bullet had flown nearly at the speed of sound, and the thing had stopped it with its fangs, giving a whole new meaning to the expression “biting the bullet.”

The huntsman was so stunned that he didn't get another shot off until the creature charged him. Made in desperation, his second shot hit its chest protector and ricocheted off, while his third streaked through empty space, for the giant had unexpectedly leapt to one side.

In the fog to his right there was a great forest. From it echoed the sounds of enormous trees being snapped or uprooted by something that was approaching with tremendous speed. The giant beast only had time to loose a single howl of insanity. Because what bounded from the fog was a figure every bit as titanic as itself.

“His coat and cape were in tatters—but I could tell at a glance they'd both been crafted from the finest materials. I swear, I'll never understand why Nobles would ever use anything as flimsy as all that when they could've made the same thing from indestructible metal fibers.”

The giant's weapon was a long spear. Carved with intricate designs, it was well over fifteen feet long, and the keenness of the point that ran almost half its length was just as imposing as his foe's iron club.

The giant beast struck first. Though the Nobility had created this creature for combat, those same Nobles had decided that the control DNA in this type alone hadn't functioned properly. The iron club it brought down appeared just as fast as the huntsman's bullets. But it rebounded, and then the giant beast, leaning forward from the attack, was knocked away. As it lurched, a gleam of light streaked at its neck.

After deflecting the club with its shaft, the long spear had spun around to cut through the opponent's neck, and then, in the giant's black-gloved hands, it spun in another great arc before halting.

“I watched the whole thing there from behind a tree, out of sight. Right off the bat, I knew it had to be a giant straight out of the legends. Dangling from the shoulders of that red cape of his were the corpses of greater elk and twin-headed bears. Maybe he didn't notice me—more likely he did and just wasn't worried about me. Toting the body of the giant beast like it was nothing, he headed back into the same fog he came from. I didn't go after him. Hell, I was scared. It had to be a Noble. But what kind of Noble can walk around free as you please in the light of the sun? The mere thought of what he really was makes my hair stand on end.”

And yet, about five minutes after the sound of the giant's footfalls had faded completely, he chambered a new round in his rifle and went after the enormous figure. And then, high above the ground where the giant's footprints remained so clearly, he saw an enormous head glaring down at him. The instant he realized it was the severed head of the giant beast, he turned around without a word and climbed down the mountain that very day.

—

Hideyuki
Kikuchi was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1949. He attended the prestigious Aoyama University and wrote his first novel,
Demon City Shinjuku
, in 1982. Over the past two decades, Kikuchi has written numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan's leading horror masters, working in the tradition of occidental horror writers like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there were seventeen novels in his hugely popular ongoing Vampire Hunter D series. Many live-action and anime movies of the 1980s and 1990s have been based on Kikuchi's novels.

—

—

Yoshitaka
Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He is well
known as a manga and anime artist, and is the famed designer for the
Final Fantasy
game series. Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko Productions' greatest cartoons, including
Gatchaman
(released in the U.S. as
G-Force
and
Battle of the Planets
). Amano became a freelancer at the age of thirty and has collaborated with numerous writers, creating nearly twenty illustrated books that have sold millions of copies. Since the late 1990s, Amano has worked with several American comics publishers, including DC Comics on the illustrated Sandman novel
Sandman: The Dream Hunters
with Neil Gaiman, and Marvel Comics on
Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer
with best-selling author Greg Rucka.