The driver was a werewolf, one of the monsters of the night resurrected from the dark depths of medieval legend along with the vampires. D could tell just by watching the transformation, which some might even term graceful, that the driver was not one of the genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced fakes the vampires had spread across the world.
A throaty howl blazing with the glee of slaughter split the wordless void. With both eyes glittering wildly, the inverness-wearing wolf lurched up onto his hind feet. This was exactly what made the werewolf a lycanthrope among lycanthropes, for despite its four-footed form, a werewolf’s speed and destructive power were greater when it stood erect.
Perhaps taking the fact that the youth had stood stock still and not moved a muscle since their arrival to mean he was paralyzed with fright, the black beast crouched ever so slightly. Trusting its entire weight to the powerful springs of its lower body, it leapt over fifteen feet in a single bound.
Two flashes more brilliant than the moonlight split the darkness.
D didn’t move. The werewolf, dropping down on D from above with every intention of sinking its iron-shredding claws into his skull, changed course in midair. It sailed over D’s head as if poised to make another jump, and landed in the bushes a few yards behind the Hunter.
Staged completely in midair, a jump like that was a miraculous maneuver only possible by coordinating the power of the lungs, the spine, and extremely tenacious musculature for a split second, and it was something werewolves alone could do. Even groups of seasoned Werewolf Hunters occasionally fell victim to attacks like this because the attack was far more terrible than any rumors the Hunters might have heard, and they weren’t prepared to counter the real thing. These demonic creatures could strike at their prey from angles and directions that were patently impossible as far as three-dimensional dynamics were concerned and the attack was entirely silent.
However, moans of pain spilled from the beast’s throat as it huddled low in the brush. Bright blood welled from between the fingers pressed against its right flank, soaking the grass. Its eyes, bloodshot with malice and agony, caught the blade glittering with reflected moonlight in D’s right hand as the Hunter stood facing it silently. Just as the werewolf was ready to drive its claws home, D had drawn the sword over his shoulder with ungodly speed and driven it into his opponent’s flank.
“Impressive,” one of them said. Strangely, that someone was D, who’d been under the impression that he had cleanly bisected the werewolf’s torso. “Until now, I’d never seen what a true werewolf was capable of.”
His low voice sowed the seeds of a new variety of fear in the heart of the demonic beast where it lay in the bushes. The beast’s legs could generate bursts of speed of three hundred and seventy miles per hour—almost half the speed of sound. There had been less than a fiftieth of a second between the time it jumped and its attack on D, which meant the youth had been able to swing his sword and split its belly open even more quickly. Worse yet, the werewolf’s wound wouldn’t close! That wouldn’t be so unusual when it was human, but once it assumed the beastly form, the cells of a werewolf’s flesh were like single-cell organisms, giving it the regenerative power of a hydra. Cells created more cells, closing wounds instantly. But the blade the werewolf had just tasted made regeneration impossible, though it was probably not due to the blade but rather the skill of the youth who wielded it. Skin and muscle tissue that could reject bullets weren’t showing any signs of regenerating!
“What’s wrong with you, Garou?” the young lady shouted. “In wolf form, you should be unstoppable! Do not make a game of this. I demand you tear this human apart immediately!”
Though he heard his mistress scolding him, the werewolf Garou didn’t move, partly because of the wound but also because of the youth’s divine skill with a sword. What really tapped the wellspring of horror was the lurid will to kill that gushed from every pore of the youth just before the werewolf could unleash its deadly attack. That hadn’t come from anything human!
Is he one of those? A dhampir?
Garou realized he’d finally run into a real opponent.
“Your guard is wounded,” D said softly, turning to the young lady. “If he doesn’t come at me again, he might live to a ripe old age. You might, too. Go home and tell your father a dangerous obstacle has cropped up. And that he’d be a fool to attack this farm again.”
“Silence!” the young lady screamed, her gorgeous visage becoming that of a banshee. “I am Larmica, daughter of Count Magnus Lee, the ruler of the entire Ransylva district of the Frontier. Do you think I can be bested by the likes of you and your sword?”
Before she’d finished speaking, a streak of white light shot toward her breast from D’s left hand. In fact, it was a foot-long needle he’d taken out at some point and thrown faster than the naked eye could follow. It was made of wood. As it traveled at that unfathomable speed, the needle burned from the friction of the air, and the white light was from those flames.
But something odd had happened.
The flames had come to a stop in front of D’s chest. Not that the needle he’d thrown had simply stopped there. The instant it was about to sink into Larmica’s breast, it had turned around and come back, and D had stopped it with his bare hand. Or to be more accurate, Larmica had caught the needle with superhuman speed and thrown it back just as quickly. The average person wouldn’t even have seen her hand move.
“If the servant is no more than a servant, still the master is a master. Well done,” D murmured, heedless of the flaming needle in his hand or the way it steadily scorched his naked flesh. “For that display of skill you get my name. I’m the Vampire Hunter D. Remember that, should you live.” As he spoke, D sprinted for the young lady without making a sound.
Terror stole into Larmica’s expression. In a twinkling, the distance between them closed to where she was within sword’s length of him, and then—
“Awoooooooooh!”
A ferocious howl shook the night air, and an indigo flash of light shot from the coachman’s perch on the carriage. D dove to the side to dodge it, only able to escape the beam because his superhuman hearing had discerned the sound of the laser cannon on the perch swiveling to bear on him. The beam pierced the hem of his overcoat, igniting it in pale blue flames. Presumably, the cannon was equipped with voice recognition circuits and an electronic targeting system that responded to Garou’s howls. Avoiding the flashes of blue that flew with unerring accuracy to wherever he’d gone to dodge the last, D had no choice but to keep twisting through the air.
“Milady, this way!”
He heard Garou’s voice up in the driver’s seat. There was the sound of a door closing. As D attempted to give chase, another blast from the laser cannon checked his advance, and the carriage swung around and was swallowed by the darkness.
“I’ll settle with you another day, wretch, mark my words!”
“You’ll not soon forget the wrath of Nobility!”
Whether he was pleased at having staved off the enemy or perturbed he hadn’t managed to put an end to the vampiress, D wore no emotion on his face as he rose expressionless from the bushes, the malice-choked parting words of the pair circling him endlessly.
.
The year is A.D. 12,090.
The human race dwells in a world of darkness.
Or perhaps it might be more accurate to call it a dark age propped up by science. All seven continents are crisscrossed by a web of super-speed highways, and at the center of the system sits a fully automated “cyber-city” known as the Capital, the product of cutting-edge scientific technology. The dozen weather controllers manipulate the climate freely. Interstellar travel is no longer a far-fetched dream. In vast spaceports, hulking matter-conversion rockets and ships propelled by galactic energy stare up at the empyrean vault, and exploration parties have actually left their footprints on a number of planets outside our solar system—Altair and Spica, to name just two.
However, all of that is a dream now.
Take a peek at the grand Capital. A fine dust coats the walls of buildings and minarets constructed from translucent metal crystal; in places you’ll find recent craters large and small from explosives and ultraheat rays. The majority of automated roads and maglev highways are in shambles, and not a single car remains to zip from place to place like a shooting star.
There are people. Tremendous mobs of them. Flooding down the streets in endless numbers. Laughing, shouting, weeping, paying their respects to the Capital, the melting pot of existence, with a vitality that borders on complete chaos. But their garb isn’t what you’d expect for the masters of a once-proud metropolis. Men don shabby trousers and tunics redolent of the distant Middle Ages, and threadbare cassocks like a member of a religious order might wear. Women dress in dim shades and wear fabric rough to the touch, completely devoid of flamboyance.
Through the milling crowd of men armed with longswords or bows and arrows comes a gasoline-powered car most likely taken from some museum. Trailing black smoke and popping with the firecrackers of backfires the vehicle carries along a group of laser-gun toting lawmen.
A dreadful scream rises from one of the buildings and a woman staggers out. From her inhuman cry people instinctively know the cause of her terror, and call out for the sheriff and his men. Before long, they race to the scene, ask the wailing woman where the terror is located, and enter the building in question with faces paler than the bloodless countenance of the witness herself. They ride an independently powered elevator down five hundred stories.
In one of the subterranean passageways—all of which had supposedly been destroyed ages ago—there’s a concealed door, and beyond it a vast graveyard where the Nobility, blood-craving creatures of the night, slumber as in days gone by in wooden coffins filled with damp soil.
The sheriff and his men soon go into action. Fortunately, it seems there are no curses or vicious beasts here, no defense system of lasers or electronic cannons. These Nobles were probably resigned to their fate. The lawmen hold rough wooden stakes and gleaming metal hammers in their hands. Their expressions are a pallid blend of fear and sinfulness. The mob of black silhouettes encircles a coffin, someone’s arm rises toward the heavens then knifes back down. There’s a dull thud. A horrifying scream and the stench of blood fill the graveyard. The anguished cry grows thinner and dies out, and the group moves on to the next coffin.
When the lawmen leave the graveyard not long after that, their faces are adorned with crimson beads of blood and a shade of sinfulness much deeper than the one they wore before this mission.
Though the Nobility was nearly extinct, the feelings of pride brought on by the awe humanity held toward them had seeped into their very blood over the course of ten long millennia and would not be shaken off so easily. Because they had indeed reigned supreme over the human race. And because the automated city—now populated by people who couldn’t fathom its machinery or receive the tiniest fraction of the benefits it might provide—and everything else in the world that could be called civilization was something they had left behind. They—the vampires.
.
This strict stratification of vampires and humanity came about when one day in 1999 mankind’s history as lords of the earth came to an abrupt end. Someone pushed the button and launched the full-scale nuclear war that the human race had been warned about for so long. Thousands of ICBMs and MIRVs flew in disarray, reducing one major city after another to a white-hot inferno, but the immediate fatalities were far outstripped by the wholesale death dealt by radiation more potent than tens of thousands of x-rays.
The theory of a limited nuclear war, where sensible battles would be fought so the winners might later rebuild and rule, was obliterated in a split second by a million degrees of heat and flame.
The survivors barely made it. Their numbers totally insignificant, they shunned the surface world and its toxic atmosphere and were left with no choice but to live in underground shelters for the next few years.
When they finally returned to the surface, their mechanized civilization was in ruins. With no way of contacting survivors in other countries, any thoughts these isolated pockets of humanity might have had of things returning to the way they’d been before the destruction, or even of rebuilding to the point where it could be called a civilization, were flights of fantasy, and nothing more.
The regression began.
With generation after generation striving merely to survive, memories of the past grew dim. The population increased somewhat after a thousand years, but civilization itself plunged back to the level of the Middle Ages. Dreading the mutant creatures spawned by radiation and cosmic rays, the humans formed small groups and moved into plains and forests that over the years had gradually returned to verdure. In their struggles with the cruel environment, at times they had to kill their newborn babies to keep what little food they had. Other times the infants went toward filling their parents’ empty bellies.
That was the time. In that pitch-black, superstitious world they appeared. How they—the vampires—kept themselves hidden from the eyes of man and lived on in the luxuriant shadows was unclear. However, their life form was almost exactly as described in legend and they seemed the best suited to fill the role of the new masters of history.
Ageless and undying so long as they partook of the blood of other creatures, the vampires remembered a civilization the human race could not, and they knew exactly how to rebuild it. Before the nuclear war, the vampires had contacted others of their kind who lurked in dark places around the globe. They had a hidden super-power source that they’d secretly developed in fallout shelters of their own design, along with the absolute minimum machinery required to reconstruct civilization after the absolute worst came to pass.
But that’s not to say they were the ones who caused the nuclear war. Through cryptesthesia, the black arts, and psychic abilities mankind never guessed they’d cultivated, the vampires simply knew when the human race would destroy itself and how they, the vampires, could restore order to the world.
Civilization was rebuilt and the tables were turned for vampires and humans.
How much friction and discord that course created between the two sides was soon apparent. Within two thousand years of stepping onto history’s great stage, the vampires gave the world a sprawling civilization driven by super-science and sorcery, dubbed themselves the “Nobility,” and subjugated humanity. The automated city with its electronic brain and ghostly will, interstellar spaceships, weather controllers, methods of creating endless quantities of materials through matter-conversion—all this came into being through the thoughts and deeds of them and them alone.
However, who could have imagined that within five short millennia of this golden age they would be treading the road to extinction? History didn’t belong to them after all.
As a species, the vampires possessed an underlying spark to live that was far less tenacious than that of humans. Or perhaps it would be better to say that their life held an element that ensured their future destruction. From the end of the fourth millennia A.D., the vampire civilization as a whole started to show a phenomenal decline in energy, and that brought on the start of mankind’s great rebellion. Though they had an expertise in the physiology of the human brain, and had developed the science of psychology to such extremes they could manipulate the human mind in any way they chose, in the end they found it impossible to eradicate the innate urge to rebel that lurked in the depths of the human soul.
Weakened by one great uprising after another, the Nobility entered dozens of armistices with the humans, each of which maintained the peace for short periods. But before long the Nobles faded away, like gallant nihilists who realized their destiny.
Some took their own lives, while others entered a sleep that would last until the end of time. Some even headed off into the depths of space, but their numbers were extremely few; in general the vampires had no wish to establish themselves in extraterrestrial environs.
At any rate, their overall numbers were on the decline; ultimately they scattered before mankind’s pursuit. By the time A.D. 12,090 arrived, the vampires served no purpose beyond terrorizing the humans on the Frontier. Yet, precisely because this was their sole purpose, the humans felt a special terror of them that shook their very souls.
To be honest, it was miraculous that mankind was able to plan and execute a rebellion no matter how utterly desperate they might have been.
The horror all felt for vampires—who slept by day and awoke at night to suck the lifeblood from humans and ensure their own eternal life—became part of the vampire mythology, right along with the ancient legends of transformations into bats and wolves, and their power to control the elements. As a result of clever psychological manipulation that continued throughout this mechanized age, the horror laid roots down into the deepest layers of the human psyche.
It is said that the first time the humans signed an armistice with the vampires—their rulers—all the representatives on the human side save one were shaking so badly their teeth chattered. Even though vampires could no longer be found in the Capital, it had still taken the humans nearly three hundred years to check every street and building.
Given how much strength the vampires had in their favor, why hadn’t they set about exterminating the human race? That is the eternal question. It couldn’t be that they were simply afraid of destroying their source of the blood, since they had mastered a method of perfectly synthesizing human blood in the first stage of their civilization. As far as manual labor went, they had more than enough robots to bear the load by the time the revolution broke out. In fact, the reason why they allowed humans to continue to exist in the first place, even in their role as subordinates, is a mystery. Most likely it was due to some sort of superiority complex, or out of pity.
Vampires were rarely seen by humans any more, but the fear remained. On very rare occasions, they appeared from the depths of the darkness and left their vile bite on the pale throats of their victims; sometimes a person would seek them out with wooden stake in hand like a man possessed, while at other times the humans would drive the victim out from their midst, earnestly praying they wouldn’t receive another visit from the vampires.
The Hunters were a product of the people’s fear.
Being nearly indestructible themselves, the vampires weren’t so eager to exterminate the mutant creatures humanity feared so much in the years just after the war. Quite the contrary, the vampires loved the vicious beasts, nurtured them, and even created others like them with their own hands.
Thanks to their unparalleled knowledge of biology and genetic engineering, the vampires unleashed one legendary monster after another into the world of man: werewolves, were-tigers, serpent men, golems, fairies, mer-creatures, goblins, raksas, ghouls, zombies, banshees, fire dragons, salamanders resistant to flames, griffins, krakens, and more. Though their creators neared extinction, the creatures still ran rampant on the plains and in the mountains.
Working the land with the scant machinery the Nobility allowed them, defending themselves with replicas of old-fashioned gunpowder weapons or homemade swords and spears, the humans studied the nature of these artificial monstrosities for generations, learning their powers and their weaknesses. In time, some people came to work exclusively on weapons and ways to kill these things.
Of those people, some specialized in producing more effective weaponry, while those of surpassing strength and agility trained themselves to use those weapons. These exceptional warriors were the first Hunters.
As time went by, Hunters became more narrowly focused, and specialists like the Were-tiger Hunter and Fairy Hunter were born. Of them all, Vampire Hunters were universally recognized as possessing strength and intellect beyond the rest, as well as an ironclad will impervious to the fear their former rulers inspired in others.
.
The next morning, Doris was awakened by the shrill whinny of a horse. White light speared in through her window, telling her it was a fresh day. She was lying on the bed dressed just as she was when D knocked her out. Actually, D had carried her to the bed when his first skirmish was over. Her nerves had been frayed with worry after her vampire attack, and she was incredibly tense from her search for a Hunter, but when the power of D’s left hand put her to sleep she was totally at peace and had slept soundly till morning.
Instinctively reaching for her throat, Doris recalled what had happened the night before.
What happened while I was asleep? He said we had company, and that had to be him
. I wonder how D made out?
As she sprung out of bed in a panic, her expression suddenly grew brighter. She was still a little lethargic, but physically nothing else seemed out of the norm. D had kept her safe. Remembering that she hadn’t even shown him where his room was, she pawed at her sleep-disheveled locks and hurried out of her bedroom.