Noble Front

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Even without the hoarse voice telling them that, the cold, sharp sensation from the soles of their feet gave them the message. That, despite the fact that the sword’s blade hadn’t yet sliced into the soles of their boots.

  “Come back when your balls drop.”

  A second later, the two of them were flying through the air, crashing into the wall by a window that was across from the sofa.

  Elsa didn’t move a muscle. The next thing she knew, the two men were floating into the air, then a heartbeat later they’d been slammed against the wall. Though she understood the phenomenon, she didn’t know the cause. For she hadn’t even seen the blade. There was only one thing she knew—that a tall figure was standing right in front of her. His lengthy sword was back in the scabbard draped across his back.

  The weapon the girl held steady with both hands was still aimed at his original location. She had to raise it higher. But she couldn’t move. Seemingly robbed of her nervous system, she’d become a stone statue.

  “Better not fire that thing, missy,” a hoarse voice said. It sounded to her like it came from the vicinity of the figure in black’s left hand. “This guy doesn’t go easy on anybody who turns a weapon on him, woman or not. If you’ve got a family that’d be heartbroken to lose you, don’t do it.”

  Even without being told all that, she knew she couldn’t do it. Just being near this Hunter drained all the strength from her—not only that, but an invisible net of eerie emanations seemed to bind her down to the very bone.

  “Don’t move, Elsa!” a voice called from behind the shadowy figure.

  “Leiden?!”

  It was the tall one.

  “Hey, I’m the one you’ve gotta tangle with. Turn and face me.”

  D responded.

  The tall one—Leiden—stood there as bold as a guardian deity. From the neck down he was covered by a black suit of some sort of armor covered with bumps and pits.

  “Oh my,” said the hoarse voice. “Got yourself one of the Nobility’s powered suits, have you? Ain’t exactly built for humans to wear, but have you learned how to work it?”

  “I’d say so. This is the same sort of reinforced armor the Nobility used. It’s more than a match for your average Hunter. See, we came here to see just how good you really are. On account of how there seems to be tons of Hunters around who are nothing but a lot of big talk. So first we’ve gotta see whether or not you might be of any use to us.”

  “Of any use to you? Oh, that’s rich!” the hoarse voice cackled. “So, I don’t suppose I need to ask you how you heard about this place, do I? What’d you do with Jacos?”

  “Relax. He wouldn’t tell us anything. We had no choice but to use drugs on him. A little something called ‘spill pills.’ We brought Jacos home high as a kite.”

  “Those drugs from the Nobility, too?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Hell, we made the stuff. Got a buddy who’s real smart, you see. He whipped these night-vision goggles up based on something the Nobles used.”

  “A regular genius languishing out in the boondocks, eh?” the hoarse voice said, its laughter becoming even shriller.

  “You son of a bitch!” Leiden snarled, kicking off the floor.

  “Don’t!” Habaki said, trying to stop him, but it only gave him an extra push.

  The Noble combat suit could fly and leap at Mach 10, and dash at speeds up to Mach 8, and a shoulder hit from it would shatter a block of granite. If it got its fingers into a fire dragon, they could tear right through its armored hide. However, it was intended for a Noble’s muscles, and when used by a human it performed at much lower levels. But more to the point, merely operating it was difficult enough. If power was misapplied even slightly—

  Going straight into high-speed mode, Leiden intended to barrel into D. It didn’t go well. His left and right sides thrown out of balance, he pitched forward just in front of D, angling off to the right and slamming into a wall. Bursting through the plaster as if it were paper, he tumbled into the corridor beyond.

  “Leiden?!” Elsa cried out, stiffening.

  “Shit!” the young man growled, getting to his feet and bursting his way back through the same wall. A split second before he broke through, a helmet and face shield had emerged to cover his head, then returned to the spot in his armor that housed them.

  This time he decided not to count on his speed, but to try to land a punch to D’s head.

  “Don’t let that make you cocky,” Leiden growled menacingly. “Sure, I still make some mistakes, but scrapping I’ve got down to an art. I learned how to fight from a former warrior who was in the village.”

  “Oh, nice stance. But I don’t care how hard you punch, it won’t knock anybody out if it doesn’t land!”

  The hoarse voice fueled Leiden’s humiliation and his urge to fight. His punch came at Mach 10—ten times the speed of sound. But in the split second before it became an exquisite hook aimed at D’s jaw, no one saw the flash of light that sank into the man’s armpit.

  His punch sliced through the air. D moved the slightest bit to the left.

  “Damn it!”

  His left whooshed around in an uppercut—or so he made it seem, and then he lashed out with another right hook. His upper body twisted around from the speed. His lower half managed to support him, quickly turning him back—at least, it should’ve, but Leiden did a remarkable full turn. Not just one turn, but two—and then yet another.

  “Wh-what the hell is this?” he cried out in spite of himself. His body continued to spin. “Make it stop!” he screamed as he kept throwing the same perfect punch in exactly the same spot.

  In a tone of disgust, the hoarse voice suggested, “What do you say we stop him? It’s not like you could sleep with him going like that. He’d twirl the rest of his life away.”

  A steely voice replied, “You should worry less about learning what I can do and more about learning how to handle yourselves.”

  Elsa and Habaki’s expressions changed. A kind of madness had occupied their minds. For the hoarse voice really hadn’t suited the gorgeous young man before them. That gap had pushed their minds out of whack, driving them toward the watery depths of insanity. Now, D stood before them as himself.

  “I apologize for our rudeness,” said Habaki. “You’re clearly someone we could never handle. So I’m begging you. Please help Leiden out.” He bowed his head.

  At the same time, D’s right hand flashed out. The Hunter had known that the combat armor had a weakness in the armpit—where it met the shoulder joint. His earlier strike had not only hit the joint with matchless precision, but had also severed part of the mechanical nerve fibers that ran through it, forcing the mechanized armor to repeat the same action for all eternity.

  What had his latest strike cut, or what had it connected?

  Leiden was frozen in the midst of throwing a hook.

  “What are you doing? Get out of there,” Habaki said, pantomiming the act of removing the armor.

  There was the sound of switches being thrown repeatedly. Looking like he was about to cry, Leiden said, “It’s gone haywire. I can’t get outta it!”

  “Couldn’t be helped. That’s what you get for trying to knock somebody’s block off. We’re gonna leave you there for the time being.”

  Once the hoarse voice had finished saying that, D gave the other two a silent look. That was enough to extinguish the fire in their eyes.

  “Did you say something about using me?”

  Habaki shook his head frantically. “Don’t be absurd. We were a bit full of ourselves. Please, forget we said that. But by all means, we’d like you to aid us.”

  “I don’t come cheap.”

  “We know that. We’ll reward you as best we can. But the fate of the village hangs on our actions.”

  “So, you want me to do something like eliminating Grand Duke Bergenzy?”

  “Exactly,” Habaki said, hope swelling in his voice.

  “In that case, stop screwing things up,” D
replied, crushing those hopes with his words. “I’ll get rid of him. If the lot of you are hanging around, you’ll only get in my way.”

  “Don’t say that,” Elsa interjected. “Our skills are nothing compared to yours, but I think we could cooperate on some of the finer points. The Noble’s castle might look antiquated, but inside it’s full of technology it’d take the human race tens of thousands of years to comprehend. If we could get our hands on just the tiniest scraps of it and get it to work, the world of man would expand by leaps and bounds!”

  “And I told you, you can’t understand it.”

  “No, maybe not all of it. But we could manage with some of it.”

  “The Nobles’ things were made for the Nobility. Not one of them is intended for human beings. You’re dreaming if you think you’ll manage to use them.”

  “But just look at these,” Habaki said, thrusting a pair of night-vision goggles against D’s chest. “They were based on a broken pair from the Nobility. We all worked together to collect the parts for them. I don’t know what the old kind could do, but what we’ve got works fine for us.”

  “This is something you made for yourselves, so it has nothing to do with the Nobility,” D said after just a glance at them. “Is this the first time you’ve used those suits?”

  “Yeah. But we’ve tested ’em a few times.”

  “If you’d screwed up when you did, the suit might’ve gone on destroying whatever was in front of you until the end of time. Like you saw it do just now. What do you think would happen if it got stuck like that while it was moving forward? You’d smash your way through forests and mountains on a path of endless destruction. And it’d still be going a hundred years later when you were nothing but bones.”

  The three of them fell silent.

  D said, “Go ahead and destroy the Nobility if you like. But for your own sake, don’t ever get it into your head to try and understand them. Not even their accessories.”

  “But . . .” Habaki started to say, and then he relented.

  “Get going. I’m heading out.”

  After a moment’s pause, the three of them exchanged looks.

  “Don’t tell me you’re headed off to Castle Bergenzy? You going there to get rid of the grand duke?” asked Leiden. Only his face was left exposed by the combat suit. As he looked at D, his eyes were aglow with envy and worship. Not even waiting for the Hunter to answer, he continued, “Um, could you please get me outta this thing? I’ll go with you. I swear I won’t get in your way. Just to watch. C’mon, I’m begging you!”

  “Get going.”

  “No!” a voice countered sharply.

  “Elsa?!”

  Before the very eyes of her two compatriots, and D, the girl took the weapon she’d lowered and pointed it straight at the Hunter’s heart.

  “D-don’t do it!” Leiden stammered, his face gone pale, but there was nothing he could do trapped in that armor.

  “That little speech of yours didn’t leave me convinced,” said Elsa. “This is one of the Nobles’ weapons, isn’t it? And I can use it just fine.”

  “There’s a difference between using something and understanding it.”

  His cold tone only served to make the spirited girl’s blood boil.

  “We can worry about how it’s made and what it does later. At any rate, a blast from this will destroy a Noble, too. See, I can use this weapon that was intended for Nobles. I think it all starts with this.”

  “A weapon intended for Nobles,” D said softly.

  “Overconfidence is a scary thing, missy,” the hoarse voice said, making the three of them flinch. “That weapon was intended for Nobles, eh? Ha ha ha. If that’s really the case, why don’t you try blasting this guy with it?”

  A puzzled “Huh?” escaped Elsa’s lips.

  “No need to be shy. We’ll see with one shot what that pea-sized brain of yours is good for. Go on, fire away.”

  “One blast can burn right through eight inches of iron plating!” Elsa said, looking by turns at D and the weapon in her own hand. “It’ll melt an eighteen-inch-thick iron beam in ten seconds flat. There’s no way he could take that.”

  “I don’t care—fire away.”

  “No. Wha—?!” Elsa screamed because D had taken a step forward and grabbed hold of her right wrist. He pressed down on her index finger.

  A crimson beam of light pierced D’s heart.

  III

  The six-thousand-degree beam fulfilled its purpose. The youthful trio saw it bore through the wall behind D.

  It was the hoarse voice that freed Elsa from the tension. “How was that? Not even a full-blown Noble, and he can laugh off a weapon intended for Nobles. Or to put it another way, that weapon ain’t intended to be used on Nobles.”

  “It was meant for shooting our kind?” Habaki asked, his expression growing bitter.

  “Of course so. To keep the humans scared outta their wits, it’s a lot more effective to roast a hundred in one go instead of draining the blood from ’em one by one.”

  “That’s it? Doesn’t it have any other uses? What about cutting iron or something?”

  “Can you picture a Noble working as a blacksmith? If it were you, what would you use it for?”

  Though the three of them looked at each other, no words were forthcoming.

  “You’ve got nothing, do you? Well, considering what the weapon’s made for, murder, extortion, robbery, safecracking, knocking over stage coaches—that’s about the size of it. Think about something like digging a ditch for irrigation or burning down a forest to clear room for more farmland or houses. If you’re looking for a tool to do that, there are more options than you could shake a stick at, and they work about a thousand times better. If you wanna destroy Nobles, the old ways are the best. Namely, drive a stake of ash through their hearts.”

  “What the hell?!” Elsa cried, sounding on the verge of tears. “I thought we had something that’d help us get rid of the Nobility, and it’s really just a toy that only works on humans? And I’ve been waving that thing around?”

  “That’s it in a nutshell. And that’s why I say forget all that wasteful nonsense about understanding the Nobles’ civilization, and just go home and give your all to the real work at hand. For a girl, that might mean helping in the kitchen, sewing, baby-sitting, and having babies of your own when you’re older. For a boy, tending crops, chopping wood, hunting game—there’s a million things to do. You guys talk about destroying the Nobility—but that’s just a pipe dream. Live your lives in peace.”

  D started to walk away. The trio cleared a path for him. Not that they’d accepted what the hoarse voice had said. Rather, the Hunter’s eerie aura had pushed them out of the way. Here was a man even one of the Nobles’ weapons couldn’t slay. And the fact that it’d been intended for use on humans all along robbed their hearts of something great they felt could never be replaced.

  As the Hunter got on his cyborg horse and it began to walk away, his left hand jeered, “Snot-nosed little punks. Gonna have to find ourselves a new house. Well, I just hope I’ve straightened them out now.”

  “Think that’s the case?”

  “Eh?”

  “You think the three of them will just go back to farm work?”

  “Hmmm,” the hoarse voice replied, a laugh escaping. “More than a few people hate the Nobility and wanna see ’em destroyed. But those who stand up to do it personally are few and far between. And even then, most either can’t even find the Nobles’ resting place, or they’re so afraid of their vengeance they’ll go their separate ways the very same day. You think those guys are any different? You ain’t much of a judge of character, are you?”

  Moonlight cast the shadow of the horse and rider on the ground. D’s shadow was terribly faint.

  “Of course they harbor vulgar thoughts of catching the table scraps from their betters. Now that they understand they can’t handle anything more than a toy for the Nobility, they’ll settle down and be back to giving the farm w
ork their all tomorrow. And that’s for the best.”

  The Hunter didn’t respond, and his cyborg horse started to gallop. Castle Bergenzy was at the edge of the wilderness that stretched from the northern edge of the village, sitting atop Glasden Hill.

  Generally, the western and southern Frontier regions were considered picturesque lands with mild climates, while the eastern and northern regions were said to be desolate, ugly places. While that didn’t hold for every single locale within them, the black plateau that spread before D at present was so wild and forbidding it would negate any opinions to the contrary. There was a road. There was a forest, too. The sound of running water could be heard. Moonlight made the dark green stand out starkly. However, devoid of so much as the chirping of insects, it was a world of death.

  Knifing through the wind, the rider in black looked like a gorgeous Grim Reaper on his black steed.

  Rising like the back of an enormous dragon, Glasden Hill came to fill D’s field of view.

  “Wow, the lights are on in every stinking window in the place. They throwing a ball tonight or something? Everybody’s so focused on themselves, and screw whatever’s become of the world. Oh, those punk kids would get a laugh out of this!”

  Before long, the cyborg steed had ridden within range of the strains of an orchestra spilling from the castle.

  They galloped straight up the hill, at which point the hoarse voice remarked, “Oh, some ruffians to deal with before there’ll be any waltzing for us.”

  A moat more than thirty feet wide flowed in front of the main gate, and naturally the drawbridge wasn’t down. Three mounted figures were clustered on this side of the moat.

  D didn’t stop.

  Turbulence swept through the shadowy figures. Not making a sound, their horses pulled away.

  A heartbeat shy of passing through the newly made path, D pulled back on the reins. To the other riders, it probably looked as if he’d broken the very laws of inertia.

  “Now this is a surprise. I’m surprised you could stop,” said a cheery voice. It was that of the man dressed most inappropriately in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. The strange objects he had looped over either shoulder continued to circle his body. They were iron rings.