Larmica moved into the vehicle like a mystic wind.
The buggy took off.
“Rather fetching for a human, isn’t she,” Larmica mumbled, peering at the face of the unconscious Doris.
“That she is. When I was human, she was like a daughter to me, and I never had occasion to view her in any other light. But when I look at her now, she’s so beautiful it’s a wonder I never tried anything with her. To be quite frank, I intend to ask a favor of my lord the Count and see if he won’t allow me to partake of a drop or two of her sweet, red blood in return for all my hard work—although I would not be so bold as to seek it from her throat.”
These were the words of the kind and faithful old physician? Now he was lost in fantasies of slowly sucking the blood from the very girl who two days earlier he’d risked his life to protect. His teeth ground together greedily.
He heard Larmica’s cheery voice behind him. “For the time being, allow me to give you my reward.” Without even allowing him time to turn, she took the steel arrow she’d kept concealed and thrust it through the elderly physician’s heart, killing him instantly. Tossing his body to the ground, Larmica sailed gracefully through the air, landed in the driver’s seat, and quickly brought the horses to a halt. Taking a furtive glance at the woods, she said, “I dare say Father will be furious, but I simply cannot allow a lowly human worm to be made a member of the glorious Lee family—and I most certainly won’t welcome one as his bride.” When she turned her eyes on the still-sleeping Doris, they had the most lurid light to them. A wolf could be heard howling out on the distant plains.
“Human, I shall show you your place now—as I rip you limb from limb before delivering you to Father.” She reached for Doris’ throat with both hands. Her nails shone like razors.
In the middle of the wilderness, with no one to protect her, hemmed in by the darkness, the girl remained in her stupor, oblivious to the very real danger she was in.
That was the moment.
A weird sensation shot through every inch of Larmica’s body. All her nerves were being pulled out and burned off, each and every cell was decaying with incredible speed. Black ichor squirted out through holes in her melting flesh, and she felt her intestines twist with the urge to vomit, as if the entire contents of her stomach had started to flow in reverse. That’s what the sensation felt like.
It was almost as if the night that had just begun had suddenly become midday. A familiar scent struck Larmica’s nose.
She had no idea how long it had been there, but a tiny speck of light burned in the darkness to her back. Apparently someone had heard Larmica’s anguished cries, and there was the sound of cautious footsteps coming closer through the grass. In its hand, the figure held Time-Bewitching Incense.
..
Having dodged a third horizontal slash of the machete, D once again took to the air.
To anyone watching, it would have looked like the act of a beaten man. Every time D went on the offensive, the bronze giant kept his eyes—clearly his only weakness—well covered with his massive club of a forearm.
“Give ’em hell, D!”
Golem dismissed Dan’s feverish support with a laugh. “Look, you’re making the little baby cry—” The sentence went no further.
The four pairs of eyes on the two combatants bulged in their sockets. None of the spectators had any idea what had happened.
D had his right leg out behind him for balance, and his sword ready and pointing down at the ground. The way his blade moved was like a jump cut in a film. The part where it slashed through the air was missing, and it skipped straight to where it went into Golem’s mouth, wide with laughter.
Though this freak could control the density of his musculature on the surface, an inch below, his body remained as soft as any other living creature’s. D’s sword slipped in through the only real opening in his defense aside from his eyes, and drove up to the top of his skull in one smooth thrust.
D must’ve been aiming for that ever since he discovered the giant’s flesh couldn’t be cut, but the way he found an opening at the end of the giant’s chatter, and made the thrust literally faster than the eye could follow, was nothing short of miraculous.
“Gaaah—”
It was actually rather humorous the way the scream didn’t escape the impaled giant until several seconds later. As his massive form dropped backwards, its toughness fading rapidly, D stepped closer and split the giant’s skull with one emotionless slash of his sword. This time the giant didn’t make a sound. The sight of their staunch friend falling—sending up a bloody mist a shade more crimson than the setting sun—snapped his spellbound compatriots back to their senses.
“Looks like you did it, punk. I’m up next,” Chullah said in a voice that sounded crushed to death, but as he stepped forward he was checked by a human awl—Gimlet.
“What speed. Kid, I’m willing to put my life on the line to see which is faster—my legs or that freaking sword of yours.” He was in front of D in a flash, like he’d ridden the wind over there, and he had a world-beating grin on his lips. Was it due to self-confidence, or was it the thrill in his bandit blood at meeting his worthiest opponent ever?
D held his sword at chest level, pointed straight at Gimlet’s heart.
In an instant, his opponent vanished.
Dan gasped.
Looking in the brush to D’s left, at the feet of a statue diagonally behind him, right behind his back—there was now a circle of countless Gimlets fifteen feet from him in any direction.
Gimlet—the man was as streamlined as the tool he was named for. As a result of a mutation, he was capable of superhuman bursts of speed in the vicinity of three hundred miles per hour. His body didn’t sport a single hair, and his face was relatively free from sharp features; it was nature’s way of reducing wind resistance during his superhuman sprints.
However, moving at super speed wasn’t his only talent. He would run a few yards, pause for an instant, and then run some more. By doing this over and over, he could leave afterimages of himself hanging in midair.
The foe right before you would multiply and be to your left one second, to your right the next—what warrior wouldn’t be distracted by that? Show him an opening for even an instant, and all the Gimlets to the front and to the rear, to the left and to the right, would brandish their bowie knives and move in for the kill. Taking on Gimlet was the same as engaging dozens of opponents at the same time.
It came then as little surprise that quick-draw master O’Reilly hadn’t even freed his precious pistol before he was dropped from behind.
D’s gonna get himself killed!
Tears glistened in Dan’s eyes. Not so much tears of fear as of parting.
As he raced around doing his special technique, it was actually Gimlet who was horrified.
It’s not that this bastard can’t move, it’s just that he won’t let himself be moved!
That’s right. Eyes half closed, D stood without making the slightest movement. Gimlet knew better than anyone that D’s tactic was the only way to negate his disorienting movement.
His powers could be used to their best advantage when his countless other selves made his enemy change their stance, forcing them to leave themselves open. Nevertheless, the gorgeous young man before him didn’t look at him or change his stance. Gimlet was little more than a clown prancing around in circles.
“What, aren’t you coming for me? Only three seconds left.”
When that icy voice pushed him over the brink, was it despair or impatience that launched Gimlet at D’s back? His murderous dash at three hundred miles per hour was met by the blade of Vampire Hunter D—who’d taken down a werewolf running at half the speed of sound. A flash of steel shot out, cutting Gimlet from the collarbone on his left side to the thoracic vertebrae on the right. Sending bloody blossoms of crimson into the air, the streamlined body of the runner hit the ground with incredible force.
The next battle was truly decided in a heartbeat.
“Look out behind you!”
D turned even faster than Dan could shout the words, and found a black cloud eclipsing his field of view. A massive swarm of minute poisonous spiders was pouring out of Chullah’s back, riding the wind to attack him. No matter how ungodly his skill, D’s sword couldn’t possibly stop this.
However, Dan saw something as the wind roared.
D’s left hand rose high above his head, and the black cloud that covered half the depression became a single line that was sucked into the palm of his hand. The roar was not the sound of a wind blowing out, but rather of air being sucked back in.
The cloud was gone like
that
.
D raced like a gale-force wind.
His head split by a silvery flash of light, Chullah fell backwards—but from the moment his beloved spiders had been lost, he’d been nothing more than an empty husk with the shape of a man.
“Forty-three seconds all told—nicely done.” Rei-Ginsei watched D with fascination as the Hunter walked toward him, holding his bloody sword and not even breathing hard. Taking a shrike-blade from his belt, for some reason Rei-Ginsei slashed through the bonds that held Dan.
“D!”
Dan ran over to D without even bothering to rub his bruised arms and legs, and the Hunter gently put the boy behind a statue for safety’s sake before squaring off against the last of his foes.
“I’m in a hurry. Let’s do this!” Moving faster than his words, D’s longsword made a horizontal slash that reflected the red sunset.
Barely leaping out of the way, Rei-Ginsei stood at the bottom of the depression that until now had served as an arena.
“Please, wait—” he said, unable to conceal the quavering of his voice. His shirt had a straight cut running from the right side of his chest to the left, the result of D’s attack. D was ready to pounce on him.
“Wait—Miss Lang’s life hangs in the balance!”
Those words left Dan paler than D. Satisfied at the hint of unrest showing in D’s eyes, Rei-Ginsei felt his cheeks rise at last with his trademark angelic smile.
“What are you talking about?” Surprisingly, D’s tone was as calm as ever.
“Miss Lang is with Dr. Ferringo, is she not?”
“So what if she is?” D said.
“Right about now, the girl is being delivered to the Count. The poor thing had no way of knowing the good doctor she trusts more than anyone became a servant of the Count last night.”
“What?!”
Rei-Ginsei was shocked to see the look of naked surprise and remorse that came over D. He didn’t know that D had personally escorted Doris to the doctor’s house. “Come now. Relax, relax. I shall tell you exactly where they’re to meet the Count. That is, if you agree to what I propose.”
“And what proposition would that be?”
“That the two of us replace the Nobles,” Rei-Ginsei said, his voice brimming with confidence. “I have an arrangement with Count Lee. If he can take possession of the girl as a result of me slaying you, I shall be made one of the Nobility. To be perfectly honest, if I decided to kill you, there’s still a very good chance I would succeed. However, having seen you in action for myself, I’ve had a change of heart. Even if I were to be made a Noble, as the good doctor was, I’m certain that, as a former human, I would be treated as a servant. I would prefer to become the Count instead.” Having rattled all that off in a single breath, Rei-Ginsei paused. Tinged with a hint of blue, the glow of sunset left delicate shadows on his beautiful profile. The shadows made his visage so indescribably weird that Dan trembled in the safety of the statue.
“In the world today, what keeps the Count in that position, aside from his immortality as a vampire? It’s his castle, and the fear that’s been fostered in the hearts and minds of the populace since ancient times. It’s that and that alone. They had their time once. But now they lie shrouded in the afterglow of destruction, vanishing into the depths of legend. If you and I should join forces, we could do so much—kill the Count and all his followers, claim their fortune and their throne as the new Nobility. We might even bring the majesty of true Nobles into the world with no destruction.”
D watched Rei-Ginsei’s face. Rei-Ginsei watched D’s.
“You are already a dhampir—half Nobility. Let me pretend I have killed you and have the Count drink my blood. And then ...” Rei-Ginsei laughed, “Surely there has never been such an exquisite couple in the entire history of the Nobility.”
Rei-Ginsei’s laughter was cut short by what D said next. “You like to kill, don’t you?”
“Huh?”
“It’s only fitting the Nobility be destroyed.”
In a flash, Rei-Ginsei was leaping away for the second time. In midair he shouted, “You fool!”
Count Lee’s daughter had called D exactly the same thing once.
Three flashes of black shot from his right hip. One flew over D’s head, arced, and came at him from the rear. One zipped right along the ground, clipping every blade of grass it touched until it turned up at his feet and shot toward his armpit. And one came straight at the Hunter as a distraction. Each was a shrike-blade unleashed on a different course with breathtaking speed.
However …
All of Rei-Ginsei’s murderous implements were knocked out of the air with a beautiful sound.
A pained cry of “Ah” could be heard from the bushes, as Rei-Ginsei’s left hand was severed at the elbow. It flew through the air, a candle still held tight in its fist. D, who’d rushed to where Rei-Ginsei had landed the moment he’d fended off the three attacks, had chopped it off.
As blood spilled from Rei-Ginsei—just as it had from his three companions—his expression said less about his pain than it did of his disbelief. At the same time he was hurling his shrike-blades, he shook the Time-Bewitching Incense, but it hadn’t given off its beguiling scent. In fact, the candle hadn’t even lit. It’s a fake!
But when was it switched, and who could’ve done it?!
As agony and suspicion churned together in his gorgeous face, a naked blade was thrust under his nose.
“Where is Miss Lang?”
“How foolish,” Rei-Ginsei groaned as he pressed down on his bloody, dripping wound. “Out of some duty you feel for no more than a human girl, you would cut me down—me, a human who told you of my contempt for the Noble, and that I would take his life. Accursed one, thy name is dhampir ... You share the Noble’s world by night and the mortal’s by day, but are accepted by neither. You shall spend all the days of your life a resident of the land of twilight.”