And in response, Vince’s reaction was—complete disregard.
Though his invincible flesh was another matter, the man’s mind had been ravaged beyond salvation, leaving him utterly insane. The Destroyer required of its host not only the resilient flesh of a Noble, but an equally resolute psyche as well. Only the kind that’d brought it into existence had the wisdom to govern the Destroyer. When such control became impossible, its host became ruin and slaughter incarnate. The only thing that saved the village from complete destruction was some fragment of humanity that lingered in Vince’s subconscious and remained active for a while.
And then that, too, vanished.
Vince’s eyes glowed with a blue light, and then he took a step forward as if to crush the earth beneath his foot.
Light streaked at him from all directions, with the report of the guns following after. Flesh bunched up as massive slugs ripped into him. Struck by more than a thousand rounds almost simultaneously, his body seemed to instantly swell to twice its normal size.
The shooters’ expressions were haunting. They continued pulling the triggers like men possessed—they couldn’t take any chances. This character could be blown to ribbons and he still might come back. Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! They had to blow every last bit of him away with their bullets.
As if in answer to their prayers, the writhing body of Vince on the ground was indeed growing smaller. It already lacked a head. Both arms had been blown off, neither leg had more than the thigh remaining, and more than half of his torso was missing.
“Hold your fire! Particle cannons!” the commander called out at that point, entrusting the foe’s final elimination to blasts of blistering heat.
Crimson streaks of light stabbed into the searchlight beam, ripping into the fleshy lump on the ground from all directions. Unlike lasers, particle beam cannons would also completely melt a wide area around the point where they made contact. The ground became a boiling pit of mud. And the bubbling soil swallowed Vince’s remains.
“Good enough,” a gruff voice said.
Some sixty feet above the scene, there hovered an airship the same hue as the darkness. The voice came from a loudspeaker set in its bottom.
“That takes care of that. We can look into just who he was later. For the moment, I’m more interested in the man who was headed into the forest. I wonder if he just wasted his time . . .”
And saying this, Fisher Lagoon turned his gaze in the same direction D had gone just as the subordinate who stood beside him on the observation deck exclaimed, “Boss—down there!”
“What?”
Twisting around a face that looked like a patch of rough rock, Lagoon saw the same thing his subordinate did, and his eyebrows rose.
The particle cannons had already ceased firing, and the circle of illumination thrown by the searchlight revealed the still-boiling ground, but out in the center of it something slowly rose. It had a head. And hands. It even had feet—it was clearly a human being. And all the while, flames rained down onto the baked ground from that slender form.
The second he realized that the face jerking up into the searchlight was that of the completely unscathed Vince, the commander bellowed, “Fire!”
Blue light flitted to space.
The hand of God sent the airship flying. Knocked out of shape, the light hydrogen-filled airship rose a good three hundred feet. Two things allowed it to narrowly escape destruction—it was fashioned from metal alloys using the Nobility’s “knowledge,” and it had only been struck by a plain physical shock.
“What—what the hell just happened?!” Lagoon asked angrily, gripping the handrail and barely managing to support himself.
“The street—the whole thing’s been blown away,” his subordinate said, his reply overlapping with the original question.
When Lagoon raced over to the window without another word, his eyes were greeted by nothing save the neon of the shopping district. What had happened to the searchlight? Worse yet, why was more than half the neon out?
“Get the ship’s searchlight on!” he ordered.
For the first time in decades, he was met with an objection.
“That’s too dangerous. I mean, that guy on the ground . . .”
“Damn it all, I don’t care! Light it up!”
A beam of light shot down from the heavens to the earth. What it starkly illuminated was the mortar-shaped depression that’d been scooped out of the earth and the naked figure of Vince standing at the bottom of it. Standing there in the light spearing down from heaven, he might’ve been a god who’d come down to earth. However, this was no god of good fortune. This was a god of destruction who wouldn’t leave so much as a single blade of grass. As evidence, one had but to look at how the rows of buildings around him had been obliterated without a trace and how the ground had sunk into a mortar-like depression in a three-hundred-foot radius.
Planting a foot on the smoothly sloping side, Vince began to slowly climb back up to ground level. The hole was twice the size of the one D had found. If these were to grow any larger, it seemed possible that one would be enough to wipe an entire village off the face of the earth.
“Should we attack the—” his underling began with trepidation.
“No, hold off. It’ll be here soon,” Lagoon told him.
Vince got out of the hole and looked up into the sky.
The subordinate let out a scream.
But it didn’t seem that Vince turned on account of this noise. Down the same road he’d come by, a tremendous black shape had just come around the corner—a glistening black base surrounded by countless looping rails.
“Look there, boss—it’s the Big Bang Accelerator!” the subordinate exclaimed in wonder as the airship finally regained stability.
“Looks like we don’t have any other choice,” Lagoon said, making it clear he could read a situation quickly.
To counter the power of a Destroyer who wouldn’t rest until everything had been annihilated, here was the same Big Bang that’d created all of the planets in the universe and all life on them.
“Incredible. It’s a regular showdown between God and the Devil!”
As if vouching for what Lagoon had said, the accelerator that’d halted thirty feet away began to let out a momentous groan, and the rails positioned themselves in sacrosanct angles that couldn’t err by even a picometer. Ahead of it stood a god of destruction by the name of Vince, waiting to unleash more violence.
-
III
-
The moon hid behind a cloud. It was a second later that a golden light winked on somewhere on the accelerator. The light traveled down one of the rails, and there was a metallic ting! Once accelerated by electromagnetic waves, it took only one ten-millionth of a second for the minute charged particles the Nobility’s science alone could’ve discovered to shift into hyper-acceleration. When Lagoon realized the golden glow clinging to all those rails was the afterimage of the accelerated body, it was already moving faster than the speed of light, and it slammed right into Vince’s face.
It almost seemed a mirage, the way the blue light opened like the petals of a flower. If God’s eyes had been trained on it, they would’ve seen that a split second before the accelerated mass scored a direct hit on Vince, the light enveloped his entire body—or rather, his body actually became that blue glow. And the bullet that was supposed to give life to the universe was swallowed by it.
Vince staggered. Just before it was annihilated, the shock wave from the accelerated mass’s explosion had knifed through the wall of light, barely managing to strike him in the face. Clutching his eyes, he extended his right hand. What flew from his fingertips was a particle of light of exactly the same size. Once it had adhered to the base of the accelerator, it immediately expanded. Base and rails alike were tinged with blue, and then the color faded as if it were destiny, leaving no trace of the accelerator behind. The air danced with heat shimmers.
Not turning, Vince stared off in the direction f
rom which the accelerator had come.
It’s difficult to explain what happened next. Rows of houses in a three-hundred-foot radius vanished, and a huge hole was created in the ground. That’s the only way to describe it. When and how the houses had been erased and the hole had been made remained a mystery. Perhaps the homes and soil had never existed in the first place.
“Boss, at this rate, the whole village—” the subordinate screamed, his voice ringing out even louder than Lagoon’s, “no, the whole world could be finished!”
Vince began to advance. Far ahead of him towered Lagoon’s place. The inhabitants of the village would’ve gone there when they were evacuated.
Then Vince turned around. The thunder of shod hooves was approaching from his rear.
At that point, moonlight spilled through a gap in the clouds to shine down on the figure who halted his cyborg horse at the rim of the great hole. Perhaps it was his good looks that made Vince stop. Though his face possessed the kind of beauty humans didn’t even encounter in dreams, a fiercely eerie aura radiated from him as he glared at Vince. It was D! But could any Vampire Hunter, no matter how great, have the skill to stand against a fiend who could negate the very energy that’d created the universe?
Wrath filled Vince’s face. Though his psyche had been ravaged, some final remaining fragment of his subconscious had recalled the connection between D and himself. And his eyes blazed with the pale and deadly light.
D didn’t move.
In the airship in the sky, Lagoon was left breathless, and when May raced out of the warehouse, she paled at what was on the rim of the great hole. The instant that separated life and death required an appropriate ceremony.
WAIT! boomed a voice that called to mind the god of some evil domain.
The eyes of both D and Vince whipped around and focused for a second on a point in the huge hole.
While it was unclear how long he’d been there or how he’d appeared in the first place, the figure who suddenly stood there with a golden scepter in hand was none other than Lord Vlad Balazs.
Staring intently at D, Vlad told him, “Leave this to me, Hunter.”
He seemed neither surprised nor angry that D remained alive. And there was no sign that he was afraid of Vince making an unexpected move against him. It seemed that this figure steeped in an overwhelming self-confidence and forcefulness left even Vince at a loss.
“Lowly worms though they may be, I have a duty as a Noble to protect the residents of my dominion. There’s no point in you getting involved in this. What’s more, at some point I shall have to do battle with you, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to kill some time while demonstrating my power to you.”
The wind snarled. The scepter he’d held pointed straight at Vince.
D didn’t move.
“I don’t know how great your power is or who’s given it to you—no, I actually have a fairly good idea regarding the latter—but the Nobility were born of accursed earth where everything else died off. And now you will feel in your bones how different that is from some upstart Destroyer!”
“This is unbelievable!” Lagoon’s subordinate exclaimed up in the airship as he balled his hands into fists.
“Interesting,” muttered a voice from the vicinity of D’s left hand.
“Watch well, D. Witness the true power that we Nobility possess!”
Lord Vlad pulled back hard with his right arm. He held his scepter as if poised to hurl a javelin. Only three feet long, the scepter suddenly stretched—the part that extended was a golden spearhead. The whole scepter was probably some unknown form of coalesced energy. The lord’s surroundings grew distorted, as if glimpsed through a heat shimmer.
Vince’s right hand unleashed a blob of unholy light.
The scepter flew, too.
Changing direction, the point of light painted an arc as it zipped to the tip of the scepter. Even as it took on the pale hue, Vlad’s scepter sped forward. The pale blue light fizzled like popping soap bubbles, leaving the golden tip exposed. Right in front of Vince.
Not only did it strike Vince squarely in the middle of the face, but it even came out through the back of his head. After a few seconds, he took a couple of steps backward, and then his body sank. He was at the brink of the pit.
“Get back!” Lord Vlad shouted as he leapt to the rear.
The explosion this time was terribly small.
As he felt a slight tremor pass through the airship three hundred feet in the air, Lagoon gazed at the scene that filled the windows of the observation deck. At the bottom of the opening yawned another hole, perhaps a third its size. And that was Vince’s grave, plain and simple.
“Cut the searchlight. We’re going home,” Lagoon ordered.
Though he questioned the wisdom of not checking out the bottom of the hole, the subordinate realized he had no choice but to follow his boss’s command and grabbed hold of the wheel.
Looking up at the departing craft with its tail fins gleaming in the moonlight, Lord Vlad spat, “Ha! That incompetent Lagoon’s run off with his tail between his legs.”
He then turned to D.
“How’s that, Hunter? You can come at me if you like. If your nerve hasn’t shrunk down to nothing, that is. See? I don’t even have my scepter any longer!”
His challenge gave way to laughter, but then that stopped. Vlad was paralyzed by a ghastly aura that radiated from D.
“This . . . it’s even more intense . . . than the Destroyer. You really are . . . the great one’s—”
The lord was looking at D. Looking at the black horse and rider that’d raced forward sixty feet without giving any indication beforehand.
The lord’s robe fluttered and a flash of white light shot from one sleeve to mow through the barrel of the horse.
Success! A feeling of relief the likes of which he’d never experienced with any foe in the past tempted the lord to drop his guard.
D was above his head. Coming straight down from above, his sword had incredible force behind it.
The lord held up his left arm to block it.
The second the Nobleman’s armored limb was taken off at the elbow and blood spilled from his forehead like black ink, D reversed his sword so he could carve out his foe’s heart, but the blade snapped off at the hilt and was lost in the darkness. As Lord Vlad leapt to a new location, D’s coat spread like a supernatural bird and he flew back.
Now D had no sword, while Vlad had lost an arm and had a merciless torrent of black blood gushing from his brow. Given the situation, was D to be admired for the horrible force of his blow, or was the lord to be praised for his strength in stopping said blow?
“Well done,” Vlad said, tearing the hem of his robe with one hand and pressing it to his brow. “You’re everything I expected, I should say. However, this is hardly the full extent of my abilities. We shall meet again.”
Although Vlad didn’t appear to move his feet, he receded a good sixty feet in one fell swoop. D alone could see that beside him a horse and black-lacquered carriage waited. D didn’t pursue him because he could see that even with his great speed, he’d never catch the Nobleman on foot.
As the black form of the driver cracked his whip and wheeled the horse around, a sharp line glittered through the moonlight. Though the needle of rough wood pierced the outer wall of the carriage and dropped the driver, the rattle of the vehicle’s wheels rang out without respite as the carriage raced off into the darkness.
Walking over to where the driver had been left in the road, D pulled him up by his purple topcoat. Decaying bones rained noisily to the ground. Looking down at the figure that’d been reduced to dust as he’d fallen, D then turned his gaze to the darkness where the carriage had departed.
A small figure came out of the distance. May.
Just as she was about to call out to D, the girl became a statue. He was out in the moonlight. Though the tremendous aura that gushed from the young man in black was directed at the darkness before him, the
girl was completely immobilized. What stood before her wasn’t the handsome, unsociable and secretly kind man she looked up to like an older brother. It was a darkness-prowling killer who would sink his teeth into his prey and not let go through all its death throes. May saw only a Vampire Hunter.
THE PLAIN OF SLAUGHTER
CHAPTER 2
-
I
-
Bringing the airship down at the airport to the north of his establishment, Lagoon had the contents of his bald head working ceaselessly as he headed for his bedroom. Losses to the village and his peacekeeping forces, compensation, plans for reconstruction—there were a million matters to consider. And yet another problem—one of the highest possible level—awaited his attention.
Luxurious was the only word to describe his bedroom, which was equipped with a gigantic circular bed. If the countless farmers who still slept on straw ever saw the beauty of that bed, riots would ensue. When Lagoon’s troubled countenance turned toward it, a figure rose gracefully from its center. Lagoon froze in place, astonished.
“Surprised? For all your size, you’re still only human,” said the shadowy voice that rolled toward him. It wasn’t until the next day that it came to light that the iron bars over the windows, proof against even the monstrous strength of the Nobility, had been melted.
“You—what do you want with me?” Lagoon asked, frozen stupidly in the process of taking a step forward.
“I came to ask you for something,” the body in white replied.
-
A figure in a purplish-blue robe crossed the vast water-filled space without the use of a boat. From the elbow down, his left arm had been replaced with an electronic artificial limb.
As soon as Vlad halted, a woman’s voice resounded in his ears like the rustling of a garment, saying, “Your arm and the wound on your brow—they’re the work of the one as gorgeous as the very darkness, are they not?”
In spite of himself, Vlad put his hand to the deep gash that remained. Although the injury was obvious enough, she shouldn’t have known about the arm, and yet she’d been entirely correct. And the wound on his brow—with his regenerative abilities, one ten times this deep should’ve long since healed over.
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts Three and Four Page 16