Was Miska trying to get out, or was it something else? Whatever the case, something was clearly out of the ordinary. Unlike the baron, the woman was supposed to sleep by day.
“What is it?” D asked.
I can’t tell. I’m trying to talk to her, but she’s in a frenzy. Surely she must’ve had some portent of danger.
Something that would prevent a Noble from sleeping by day.
The ground rocked again.
D asked, “Is it actually Miska that’s responding?”
Silence descended.
After a short time, the baron replied, No, it’s whatever is inside her. I thought she was acting strangely after she got back last night, but whatever didn’t awaken while she was with us might be active now—the Destroyer, perhaps?
“Do you think she’s up to controlling it?”
The baron fell silent once more. Not that he didn’t know the answer to the question. It was D’s mindset that left him at a loss.
I don’t know.
“Well, if she can’t keep it in check, the best thing to do is dispose of her right now. If whatever’s coming out of the ruins is another one of the Nobility’s creations, there’s a chance it might join forces with the Destroyer.”
Then they’d face twice as many foes . . . and foes of the most extreme nature at that.
The far reaches of the plain had a bluish glow that came from a spot where there was some sort of facility. Never fading, the light spread further, becoming an impossibly large canopy of cerulean.
“Something just bought it. It’s started now,” D said as he hit his mount’s flanks.
Perhaps already having caught something with its animal senses, the cyborg horse instantly started to gallop at full speed.
As he raced along, D looked back.
From the distant reaches of the road, a pair of glittering spheres headed in the Hunter’s direction. The air was swiftly ionizing. The spheres were glowing balls of plasma.
Grabbing hold of the lead horse’s harness, D gave a hard pull to the right. The madly dashing team turned out onto the plain. As Miska’s horses followed suit, one of the spheres was absorbed by the road. It looked as if light were gushing up from the bowels of the earth. A section of terrain roughly one hundred fifty feet in diameter sank into the ground.
D jumped over to the driver’s seat. His eyes had an intense light to them, and the horses’ speed quickly exceeded all their limits, as if the animals were possessed.
“I’m scared,” May said, gnawing her lip inside the carriage.
“It’s okay,” was all Taki could say. But she wasn’t the only one.
“It’s okay,” a crisp, clear voice declared as the two girls saw the coffin’s lid open.
A pure-blooded Noble couldn’t possibly be coming out in broad daylight.
“Look after the girl.”
All Taki saw then was a figure in blue being sucked out through the ceiling.
“I’m heading over to Miska’s carriage!”
And saying this, the baron launched himself from the roof of his vehicle toward the carriage behind his.
Such recklessness! Though his arms were clad in long blue gloves and they in turn shielded his face, the Noble experienced white-hot pain merely by exposing himself to sunlight. The flesh beneath his clothes would’ve already started to melt.
Not even looking at the other glowing sphere that was closing in on them, the baron took a silver sphere from the lining of his cape and hurled it to the rear.
The earth was tinted blue.
The ring of light closed in on the back end of the carriage . . . and was intercepted by an unseen wall! The light rebounded, pressing forward once more, but by the time it finally shattered the force field, nothing could be seen of the two carriages but a distant blur through a cloud of dust.
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II
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Up ahead, the ruins were like a shadowy blur, and D aimed the carriage straight for them. Though incredibly vast, the ruins were less than thirty feet high. This facility had surely been meant to accommodate some device that covered a large area. Inside, both the ceiling and the floor had the gleam of crystal. The holes that had been blown in various spots actually ended up looking like minor accents.
Climbing down from the driver’s seat, D called out to the baron, “Get back in your coffin.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. This time, I think it would be best if both of us were around.”
Jumping down from the other carriage, the baron staggered. A chop from D’s hand had raced down at the base of his neck, but it bounced back again with a heavy thud. The baron had raised one hand to easily fend off the blow.
“You needn’t show any undue concern for me,” the Nobleman said. “If it becomes absolutely necessary, I’ll get back into my coffin on my own. You should try to act the part of the employee a bit more.”
“In that case, hold down the fort here,” D said, now having taken the exact opposite tack. His flexibility was a frightful thing.
“And where will you be?”
“Up top,” said D.
The building had no higher levels. However, D’s gaze was indeed turned toward the sky.
The baron began setting out cylinders in a row some distance from the carriages. The alacrity was gone from his movements.
Climbing out of the carriage, Taki covered her mouth with her hand and let out a cry of surprise. It looked as if the baron’s body was shrouded in a white mist. Actually it was white smoke pouring out of his cuffs and collar.
“You should stay in the carriage,” the baron turned and said.
“But your body’s . . .”
“I can still handle it,” he told her before he called out, “The enemy is coming, D!”
When the baron twisted around, there was no sign of the Vampire Hunter. Not even bothering to ask where he might’ve gone, the baron turned instead toward the entrance as the wind buffeted his face. His blue cape spread, and his hair fluttered out.
Taki was lying flat on the ground.
What had entered the room was a black iron statue encapsulated in a glowing sphere—it was easy enough to make out Lord Johann’s features on its face. Within the sphere, iridescent bands of light eddied. One such streak shot at the baron. Deflected a foot shy of him, the streak changed its target to the ceiling. Without making a sound, it opened a gaping hole there roughly thirty feet across. Not even a speck of dust remained. The material had been broken down to its constituent atoms.
The baron took one of the cylinders that sat at his feet and knocked it toward the magician. From the end of it, green flecks of light sped at the magician’s brow. The second they struck him right between the eyes, countless points of light winked on in every pore on his body.
The magician’s iron face formed a toothy grin.
In the blink of an eye, the points of light vanished. Only two remained—one between his eyes and the other in the vicinity of his heart—and when the light on his chest went out, the one on his forehead began to drift aimlessly across the surface of his body.
In a manner of speaking, the cylinder was a sensor for detecting vital points. The luminous dot was a scanning device that traveled across a target’s body in search of weaknesses and crucial areas, which it would then relay back to the assault components in the cylinder itself. However, this time it had failed to find any vital points, or even any defenseless spots. In response to this lack of communication from the scanning system, the main computer elected to engage free attack mode, selecting the most likely vulnerabilities from its existing store of humanoid data and connecting to extradimensional power circuits.
A particle beam surged out at the speed of light, and the green spot that had formed between Lord Johann’s eyes took on a blinding glow. Lord Johann’s smile grew wider as the luminous point quickly faded in hue, and then unexpectedly vanished. Not a single mark was left on the glossy blackness of the magician’s brow.
With Taki taking
shelter behind him, the baron backed away. To his rear, he heard a scream.
Having turned to face the carriages, Taki had found a woman in white standing right in front of her. Though Miska was out in the sunlight, nothing at all had changed about her pale skin. There was only a piercing golden light to her eyes.
This was what D had been talking about—they might have made foes of two threats created by the ancient Nobility.
Miska opened her mouth. The sigh that spilled from that maw called to mind the chill of some frozen hell.
There was no sign of D, and formidable as Baron Balazs was, it didn’t seem the least bit possible that he could take on these two horsemen of the apocalypse and win. And yet as the baron kept Taki safely behind himself, his eyes were so tranquil they would’ve taken the breath from any who saw them.
The upper portion of the sphere surrounding the magician glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. Its bands of light were sinking into Miska.
As she reeled backward with them piercing her chest, Miska opened her mouth. With a loud gurgle a semitransparent sphere rose from her. It was an enormous bubble filled with water.
It wasn’t until the iridescent band pierced the bubble that a look of terror spread across Lord Johann’s black countenance. Giving off a tremendous amount of steam all the while, the watery bubble went on to envelop the magician’s entire body without slowing in the least.
Lord Johann shouted something. But the words weren’t from any human language.
“So, he was an OSB?” the baron said, finally realizing the truth.
Lord Johann’s transformation hadn’t been effected by the ancient Nobility—it was the work of OSB machinery meant to make warriors to combat the Nobility. It had probably remained there in the ruins as something the Nobility had confiscated from the OSB. D had also mentioned something—the malice alone would live on eternally. The enmity that remained in that device had been enough to take Lord Johann and make him one of their own.
However, that same malicious aura had also been sensed by the Nobility’s ultimate tool of death and destruction—the Destroyer. And that was why the baron muttered as he watched the pair’s eerie battle, “It’s just as we thought, then.”
Inside the bubble, the sphere protecting Lord Johann’s form melted away pitifully, leaving the magician trapped in the water. And water was the very thing he feared.
The OSB had no concept of fluids. Their species’ fatal flaw was the relative ease with which their minds succumbed to “the fear of the unknown.” The Nobility had been able to hold the high ground for quite a long time once they managed to discover a number of the aliens’ fears.
Lord Johann went mad.
The iridescent band that surrounded the magician spun wildly in the bubble of water, losing more and more of its color all the time. Then it shone. A sizzle rang out like a drop of water falling on a hot skillet, and the watery mass vanished.
As the magician glared at Miska and the baron, his eyes were all white and his whole body trembled. Every hair on him stood on end, and his muscles and veins bulged. Leaning back wildly and pitching forward again, he disgorged phlegm. His target was the baron.
The figure in the blue cape dodged, the phlegm sailing over his head to fall at Miska’s feet. With his cape shielding his face, the baron collapsed. Light had bleached his form white. Miska had both hands out in front of her face.
Now this was truly one of the OSB’s deadliest weapons. There could be no disputing that what the phlegm on the floor gave off was sunlight.
The vampiric Nobility could move about freely under artificial sunlight. What they feared was natural light alone. So what would happen if they were to be exposed to sunlight on another celestial body—say, the surface of the moon? They would have no problem at all with it there. Whether there was some psychological or even spiritual force at work in that regard remained unclear even now. Even with all of the scientific might they possessed, the Nobility didn’t understand why exposure to sunlight would reduce them to dust only on Earth. But the OSB’s unusual science had solved that riddle. They had more or less artificially manufactured natural light. The phlegm that’d fallen to the ground had given birth to a sun.
The baron had already lost consciousness, and Miska was driven to her knees. And the light that fell on them continued to shine remorselessly.
“Ha ha ha!” the old man suddenly began to laugh aloud. It was crazed, mindless laughter. But seeing the condition of the baron and Miska, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that his insane mirth came from the joy of victory.
The iridescent light stabbed into the far wall, reducing it to nothingness. This ultrawarrior created by the OSB—the same aliens who’d plagued the ancient Nobility for so long—had begun to run amok. And it seemed as if he wouldn’t stop until these ruins—or perhaps even the whole planet—had been completely destroyed.
Something suddenly blocked the light, and the sun on the floor lost its color. Though the light shining in through holes in the wall was as bright as ever, darkness had begun to slowly cover the region.
As Lord Johann looked to all sides, a heavier darkness spread above him. Or so it seemed, and then it took the shape of a gorgeous young man who split Lord Johann’s iron head in half lengthwise. Despite this, the magician raised his right hand. The iridescent band that sprang from his shoulder seemed to twine around his right arm as it assailed D.
A flash of white light bisected the magician’s torso. The glint reversed directions, making a second pass through his upper body as it slowly came free of the lower half, sending his head flying.
By the time D rose from a near squat and returned the same blade that had first split the magician’s head to its sheath, the baron had also gotten up. Miska alone had gone from being on her knees to being slumped across the floor.
“You certainly took your time,” said a voice in the darkness.
Gleaming above their heads like a silver platter was the sunlight now held at bay. D looked up without saying a word.
“Could it be that this was the control room for the entire installation?” the baron asked.
“I suppose you could say that.”
Were the control systems set in some space that couldn’t be seen from this floor? And had D entered that space and created this? Created darkness?
“The OSB’s secret weapon against the Nobility was natural light they could manufacture. So, did the ancient Nobility create natural darkness to counter it?”
“They did indeed,” the Hunter replied.
“But there’s no record of anything like this ever being used in battle.”
“That’s because it was locked away,” D said as if it didn’t mean anything at all.
“By whom?”
“Perhaps by the one your kind holds in such esteem.”
“The Sacred Ancestor? But why?”
Before the astonished young Nobleman, D looked up into the void. Darkness filled the light, while here and there the light tinted the darkness like droplets of paint spreading through the water.
“Darkness or light—which of them won the battle?”
To the baron, D’s question sounded worlds away.
After a bit, D said, “Go on out ahead. I’ll be out once I get rid of this darkness.”
“Get rid of it?”
“Don’t you see? It’s still spreading. Within a year, this whole planet will be enveloped by artificial night. If nothing were done, it would blanket the entire universe.”
“Is that a fact? So, is that why the Sacred Ancestor . . . why the exalted one was loath to use this darkness?”
The Nobleman sensed D moving away.
“Who or what are you?” the baron asked, but there was no one there to answer him. “You brought forth the great darkness sealed away by the Sacred Ancestor, and now you say you’ll get rid of it. Wouldn’t that be the work of the Sacred Ancestor’s blood? D—who are you?”
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As the pair of carriages raced down
the main road a dozen minutes later, the crystal control center behind them flickered like a mirage and was obliterated. Inside their vehicle, Taki and May couldn’t help but look out at the young horseman riding along beside them with newfound awe and fear. For they had overheard the baron’s question.
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III
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As D and the others reached the end of the great plains and the blue of twilight had begun to color the air, a lone man sat wistfully on a boulder in the Shabara Canyon. He was one of the surviving members of the group that’d already lost three of their number to D and the baron—Crimson Stitchwort. Though this man had come out of countless perilous scrapes before, he now did nothing to conceal the childlike fear and impatience that surfaced on his face. Above him, a sheer rock wall loomed like a great canopy that hid the heavens, while below, there was the incessant sound of a steady flow of water. If he were to look down, he probably would’ve even been able to make out the bits of white where water dashed against the rocks in the vast river three hundred feet or more below.
This eighteen-hundred-square-foot outcropping of rock halfway up the cliff was the very place where the disk with their employer’s voice told them they would find “interesting devices.” Ordinarily, Crimson Stitchwort would’ve been only too happy to look for the items in question. Though a good number of his colleagues had died, he undoubtedly reassured himself that his own share would be all the greater. However, he was scared . . . but not of dying. When he’d chosen this line of work, he’d basically thrown his life away. And yet, he was still scared. After attacking a woman called Miska in a white dress back in the forest, Mario had never come back, and Vince had also fallen out of contact. Yoputz the priest had made himself scarce, and there’d been no news from him. Of course, the death of his compatriots only boded well for him. That was why when he’d rushed here all alone, his spirits had been high.
But when no amount of searching had located said devices, a certain anxious feeling began to rear its ugly head. After a full hour of looking, he’d given up ten minutes earlier, and although he’d intended to take only a short break, he was so exhausted that an all-encompassing fear overtook him, leaving him with no desire to do anything. The air in the canyon grew cold faster than that on level ground. The sound of the water tempted him with sleep and a mysterious sense of relief. Suddenly, he wanted to die. For no particular reason, he thought about leaping to his death. Getting to his feet somewhat unsteadily, he walked to the edge of the cliff. Without any hesitation at all, he put one foot out into space.
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two Page 25