Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, Part 1

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  —

  “Well, well. Are we gonna do this?” the armored warrior said, his right hand reaching for the grip of his sword.

  “Lemme go!” the boy cried.

  The furry warrior looked down at the kid scornfully, and then shifted his eyes to the young man before him. “Aren’t you gonna do anything, pretty boy? You’re a lot colder than I thought.”

  The young man didn’t answer him. Even as his field of view was occupied by the innocent face of the boy wriggling against those hairy arms, neither his eyes nor his gorgeous face betrayed the slightest glimmer of human emotion.

  Behind the young man were the boy’s mother and father.

  “Please, you’ve got to do something!” said one.

  “Save him! I beg of you!” the other shouted.

  Both parents sounded like they were on the brink of tears. But another voice came on top of their pleas. “I specifically told you not to pick a fight with me.”

  “Oh, the stud speaks at last!”

  “When you get to the next world, be sure to tell the gatekeeper exactly how I killed you,” said the other warrior.

  With a whine from their scabbards, both thugs drew their blades.

  “The kid is in the way,” the young man said casually.

  The hirsute warrior shook his head. “No, he ain’t in the way at all. At least, not for me.”

  “Stop it!” the mother shouted, her shrill cry shaking the chilly air.

  “Have it your way then,” the young man said, his right hand reaching for his own longsword. While his opponents were thugs, it was also clear they must’ve lived through countless battles. The fact that he was willing to not only make enemies of the two of them but also to let them draw first had to be due to more than mere self-confidence. “You don’t have to let him go if you don’t want to. But don’t let my blade get away from you, either.”

  What the young man had stated was really quite obvious. No one could defend himself from an enemy’s blade without seeing it, and the pair of thugs weren’t taking their eyes off the end of his sword.

  His longsword came down with a swoosh! The movement looked gentle enough, but slashed fiercely through the air. Just as it was about to reach the planks of the deck, the blade stopped. The two warriors stood staring at it.

  There was a whistle. Following the very same path, the young man’s blade began to rise. And then—

  Watching, the thugs raised their swords again, too. They raised them high. As if following the lead of the young man, who was poised with his blade high over his head, they both took the very same stance. The gesture was in perfect synchronization. The only difference was they didn’t take the same step forward that the young man had.

  The young man’s sword dropped coolly. The blades that the two thugs brought down at exactly the same time met nothing but thin air, and bright blood shot up from the head of the hairy warrior like a pillar of smoke. Without a sound, he dropped backward.

  “Mommy!” the boy shouted, breaking free from the hairy arm and dashing away. The tiny figure bumped into the young man’s leg.

  A horizontal slash buzzed through the air toward the young man’s cheek. It was the armored warrior’s second attack. Oddly enough, his first blow had come from above—just like that of his furry compatriot.

  Pale sparks flew off the blade harshly. The young man had parried the blow with his peerless skill.

  “Shit!” the man in armor shouted as he pulled his blade back again, but he then made a strange move. Holding his blade at eye-level, he moved both hands to the right as quickly as he could and kicked off the ship’s deck in a mighty bound. A second later, his chest was pierced cleanly by a thrust from the blade the young man held exactly the same way. Falling face-first without a sound, by the time the body finally thudded against the deck, the young man’s blade was back in the scabbard at his waist.

  As the young man’s hand came away from his weapon’s hilt, the boy shouted with joy, “You did it, mister! You did it!” His previous fears were now completely forgotten as he rushed over to the young man from behind. Blushing, the boy leapt for the young man’s back.

  A second later, two silvery flashes shot past each other.

  The back of the young man he was about to cling to was no longer there, and after the boy flipped head over heels and hit the floor, his right arm was missing from the shoulder-down.

  A bloody mist hung in the air.

  Strangely enough, the boy immediately leapt up again. Pressing down on his shoulder as blood gushed from it, he was rapidly losing the color from his face, where not a fragment of his earlier innocence remained. Filled with the sly villainy of an old man, his eyes were trained on his own right arm, which had fallen at the young man’s feet—an arm that held a sharp needle in its plump little hand.

  “A poison needle, eh?” the young man muttered. “You may have thought you had me fooled, but I’m sorry to disappoint you. Still, it’s a strange sort of talent you have—the parents and the bar girl aren’t real people. Of course, these thugs aren’t either. State your name!”

  There was a sword dripping with blood stuck right under the boy’s nose, but he only laughed in a low voice. It wasn’t the voice of a child. Rather, it was the tone of a man untold centuries old and heavy with wrinkles. “How long have you known?” he asked.

  “From the very beginning, when the farmer pulled out his money back at the landing. The coins were fine, but the bills mixed in with them were blank slips of paper. Next, there was the bar girl. At a distance she would’ve passed, but she got too close. You probably wanted her to get in good with me in case these two thugs screwed up, but you were sloppy. That was the first time I ever touched a woman’s hand and couldn’t feel a pulse,” said the young man.

  The boy—who was most likely a bizarre old man in flesh and spirit and every other regard aside from that youthful visage—listened without saying a word. But at this point, he leaned back and laughed out loud. “Oh, so that’s what happened? Up against someone like you, I should’ve had every possible angle covered. I see my preparations were inadequate. But I should expect no less from the Vampire Hunter D. Well, at least I did away with that impudent little wench while I was here.”

  “You’re in for a disappointment there,” a mirthful voice laughed from the stern.

  The boy turned around.

  The woman was standing there. Behind her well-rounded figure was the most gorgeous young man in black.

  “You mean—you?!” the boy screamed, his words directed not at the woman, but rather at this new, beautiful figure.

  “My name is Glen,” the first young man said, as if nothing at all had transpired. “Over there’s the man you’re looking for. So damn handsome, I can’t even begin to compare. What, would you prefer it was his blade that dispatched you to the next world?”

  “Oh, so that’s what happened. It’s just been one screwup after another today,” the boy said, laughing loudly once again. His face was pale, but nothing could extinguish the malevolent flames that burned in his eyes. “I figured there was no sense running myself ragged getting out here, so I came on my own. But then when I saw a guy at the harbor that was just far too good-looking, well, I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Well, if you’ve come this far, D, we must be headed to the same place.”

  Lips that made women and men alike swoon moved as D said, “You work for Gilligan?”

  “I suppose I do, at that. I’m not surprised you’ve heard as much. ‘Shin the Manipulator’ is the name. Just so I don’t give the rest of them an edge on me, I suppose I should tell you there’re four others headed for the village. They’re all enforcers hand-picked by Gilligan, and each and every one of them has some sort of weird ability. But interestingly enough, none of us knows what any of the others looks like. I’ll give you their names, though. There’s Egbert, Samon, the ‘dawn demon’ Gyohki, and Twin. And I can’t tell you how much I’d appreciate it if you could knock some of them off before the next time we
meet. Of course, they might just take your life first, which would also work for me.”

  The ship must’ve hit rough seas, because the deck then pitched to starboard—the side to Shin’s back.

  D raised his right hand to fend off a breaking wave.

  Exhausted perhaps, the boy with the hoarse voice pulled away the hand that’d been pressed to his oozing wound and slumped against the deck. But as the little body then sailed into the air, the only things that could’ve kept Glen from catching him in flight when the young man slashed up from below with his blade were the desperation of the boy or the young man’s own inattentiveness. The boy’s body cleared the deck and was headed for the waves—but he never touched the surface of the water, instead sailing up along the side of the ship and into the air.

  Upon spying the mass of black clouds floating high above them, the woman not surprisingly muttered, “That’s impossible!”

  Rapidly dwindling in the sky, the figure let his sneering words rain down to the trio on deck along with the gore from his wound. “This cloud is another of my puppets,” he said with a laugh. “Never even saw the strings, did you? We’ll meet again. And when we do, I’ll see to it you pay for what you did to my arm.”

  “Not too shabby,” Glen muttered, sheathing his blade. He didn’t even glance at Shin, who’d dwindled to a mere speck.

  The scattered bodies of thugs at his feet had changed into wooden dolls. Eight inches tall, the arms and legs attached to each were complete with joints. The roughly hewn faces and ragged clothes certainly bore some resemblance to the living men, with a sword made from a strip of wood. But what sort of sorcery had lent them their false life? Here was an almost incomprehensible foe.

  “Wow—this one even has little veins filled with blood. That’s some detailed craftsmanship. He’s cut in exactly the same place that the live version was.”

  “So are these two . . .” the woman said with distaste as she looked down at her feet, where the boy’s parents lay. They’d changed into dolls before her very eyes.

  What Shin manipulated was puppets.

  In the Capital and out on the Frontier, there were more than a few puppeteers who moved their creations with strings, magnets, or mechanical devices. Taking painted casings of tin or hollowed-out wood, they would construct large workings to move life-size human or monster models, while those fitted with other mechanisms could not only make comedic faces, but could spit fire or climb trees as well. But none of these techniques could begin to compare to the manipulations that’d played out on the ferry, which could almost be called a sort of sorcery.

  Quietly crushing the doll of the hirsute warrior under foot, Glen turned in D’s direction.

  It would’ve been nice to say Glen was every bit as handsome as the Hunter, but ultimately his good looks were still of this world. They were a far cry from the inhuman beauty that radiated from D. Around him alone the dusky sky and sea seemed tinged with an unearthly glow.

  “Did you think you’d shaken me?” asked Glen. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve been following you for a week. And once you’d come this far, it was pretty obvious where you were going. I wanted to let you think I’d given up so I could actually go on ahead of you, and it looks like you fell for it.”

  “Why are you following me?” D asked.

  “Because you made me flinch,” Glen replied, a bitter smile rising on his lips.

  “Flinch?”

  “That night. That was the first time I was ever afraid of anyone. I couldn’t even cross swords with you. And that’s why I’m here.”

  “What do you plan on doing?” asked D.

  “Cutting you down,” Glen said matter-of-factly. And yet, there was a certain repulsiveness to his declaration that sent an involuntary shudder down the woman’s spine.

  Suddenly, the wind whistled. The waves broke, one after another.

  Glen’s voice fit the mood perfectly. “I’ll cut you down with my own two hands. I won’t be able to live with myself until I’ve done so.”

  Saying nothing, D turned his back toward the man and his intense gaze.

  “I won’t do it here,” Glen said, his words following after the Hunter. “But someday—at the right time, in the right place. Now, don’t run off on me.”

  D’s left hand hung at ease by his side, and from it came the words, “Sounds like this guy was born to fight. Oh, what a pain.”

  But in the end, that hoarse voice never reached Glen’s ears.

  —

  III

  —

  “Hey, wait up!” the woman called out to stop D on the squalid aft deck, which was crowded with horses and wagons and all sorts of strange baggage. “I can’t believe I ran into not one but two incredibly powerful guys. So, where were you—” the woman began to ask, but then her lips formed an awkward smile. “Oh, there I go asking a traveler the stupidest question. From the look of it, I don’t suppose I could even begin to guess where you’re going. It’s just that I was sort of curious.”

  “Why is that?”

  The woman’s eyes went wide. She never could’ve imagined this young man having any interest in anyone else.

  “Because I helped you out?” the Hunter asked.

  There was that, of course. She didn’t know whether she should be elated or horrified by the skill the young man had displayed in keeping the spear-man from attacking. However, in addition to that—

  The woman shook her head from side to side, a weary look on her face. “No,” she replied. “But that reminds me—I haven’t expressed my gratitude yet. Thank you. My name’s Su-In.”

  “I’m D.”

  “That’s a great name. It’s like a sadness in the wind,” Su-In said, suddenly breaking into a smile.

  It was a strange reaction. Those who met D’s beauty face to face and felt his strange aura were shaken by an unholy emotion that went hand-in-hand with their lust. They saw the Noble in him. But this woman alone seemed to be an exception. As she gazed at the dark huntsman, her eyes seemed to hold a boundless feeling of nostalgia.

  The wind whistled.

  Shivering, Su-In clasped her collar shut with one hand. “My, but it’s cold. If you were to tell someone from down south that this is summer, I don’t think they’d ever believe it.”

  The woman turned toward the sea. The shadowy form of land was growing more substantial—but in front of it there bobbed a whitish lump—a chunk of ice. This was the northern sea, after all.

  The weather controllers set beneath all of the continents hadn’t been able to stand ten millennia without adjustments, and the humans’ destruction had extended to even those devices once thought impregnable. As a result, in certain areas the course of nature was disregarded, and even now the seasons continued to follow a bizarre pattern. For example, near the center of this seven-mile-wide waterway the air and water temperatures suddenly plunged. No ice could be seen from the dock, but halfway across the chunks quickly became more and more common. While this was completely natural for those who lived in the area, the vast majority of travelers and merchants visiting for the first time would huddle in the ship and come down with a cold.

  “Every time I travel these waters, I get the feeling summer’s never gonna come again,” Su-In said, the words rushing out like a sigh. Her breath formed white crystals.

  “There’s something I’d like to ask you,” said D.

  “Whatever it is, kindly ask away.”

  “Where did you learn to do what you did?” D asked. He must’ve seen her fighting the man with the spear.

  Not faltering in the least, Su-In replied, “When I was a kid, my village hired warriors. There was a lot of trouble back then. I guess I was a quicker study than any of the other girls.”

  “Most men couldn’t have done that, either.”

  “Stop it. You’re embarrassing me,” Su-In said, smiling wryly. There was no feminine fawning in her smile. Apparently, one of this woman’s strong points was being as guileless as a blue autumn sky. “You know, e
ven without that my reputation is bad enough, what with people always calling me a tomboy or saying I could blow away a mechanized beast just by sneezing. So I’ll thank you to choose your words with care.”

  “I will.”

  “Stop it already. Would you just drop the serious face?” Su-In said, putting her hands out before her as if disgusted. “When I look at you, I feel like I can’t say anything until I dig up some deep philosophical point to discuss. Why don’t you try lightening up a bit?”

  “Been like that since birth.”

  Su-In’s eyes bulged in their sockets. The facetious reply had come in such a hoarse tone it was hard to believe it could possibly belong to the young man before her. Scanning the surrounding area in amazement, her eyes had a dubious look in them when they came back to D. “Did you just say that?” she asked.

  “You bet—” the strangely fascinating tone replied, but it was suddenly choked out by a muffled cry of pain.

  This time Su-In was staring at D’s left hip, and after her eyes fell on his tightly clenched left hand, she looked up at the man’s lovely face and asked, “So, are you a ventriloquist or something?”

  “Well, sort of,” the same voice replied.

  “Aren’t you a man of many talents!” the woman exclaimed, her face brimming with admiration.

  Once again clenching his fist disinterestedly, D gazed toward land as he said, “We’ll be there soon.”

  The ferry dropped anchor precisely on schedule, and family members and hotel touts were there to greet the disembarking passengers. Only slightly larger than the one on the opposite shore, this dock echoed with a wild mix of voices and footsteps. Though this was the first ferry of the afternoon, the sky remained dark, and it seemed like dusk couldn’t be that far off. Even the shadows people cast on the quay were thin.