MUMA

CHAPTER 1

-

I

-

The wind raced by, and it was heavy. It had weight because it bore molecules of what was termed a killing lust.

Two shadowy figures squared off on a desolate patch of earth. Whenever it passed them, the wind grew furious.

The sky was as dark as the afterworld.

Suddenly, one of the shadowy figures pounced. As he rose ten feet straight up, he swung both arms down.

Two spiteful flames erupted from the black earth, shooting straight for the figure still on the ground. Like lines drawn by a talented artist, the fiery streaks came together on the figure.

Silver flashes crossed. Two of them.

If fire is a physical phenomenon, it has mass and substance. Thus, it’s possible for a greater mass and harder substance to deflect it.

The light from the flames bouncing off the stark cutting edge became a sword rising into the air. A simple leap made the second figure a sparrow in flight.

Faster than the figure in midair could rise to greater heights, the sword came straight down on him, splitting him from the crown of his head to the base of his neck.

The wind was stained red. When it slapped bright blood against the black earth, the two figures had landed on their feet a dozen yards apart. One of them collapsed, while the other stalked across the ground.

Not even bothering to wipe his blade, the victor returned it to the sheath on his back. There wasn’t a speck of gore on it. There was nothing special about the blade, but its speed had prevailed over the cohesive powers of blood.

The wind had a flattering glow to it as it blew across the shadowy figure’s face: deep, dark eyes gleaming beneath the wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, the line of a nose that was sure to send tens of millions of artists into despair, lips that quietly brimmed with a will heavier than anyone would ever know—

The wind had a request. Tell me your name, it said.

“D . . .” a voice called out.

The figure with his head split in two had called to him. Already a death mask, his face wore a smile.

“D . . . Listen to me,” he said, even his voice that of the departed.

The heavens and earth roared, and the hem of the black coat hid D’s face, as if to shield him from the words of the dead. As if to keep him from hearing.

There was a sharp slap. A hand in a black glove had knocked his coat out of the way.

“Oh . . . so you intend to hear me out . . . One word will say it all . . . Of course . . . for you . . . that one word . . . might send you to hell.”

The figure on the ground was an old man with white hair and a white beard. The long robe he wore was woven from metallic threads in a wide range of hues, and its distinctive color scheme declared that even among the Nobility, he was a necromancer of some stature.

The beautiful figure stood there without saying a word. As if he’d heard these words ten thousand times before.

The bisected and bloodied face split to either side, and the old man raised his hands to hold it together again.

“Go to . . . ‘Muma’ . . .” he said, his voice sounding like it came straight up from hell.

And as he finished speaking, he took his hands away, and something that might’ve been blood or brains oozed from the reopened split.

A life that’d lasted who knew how long had ended.

Only the wind growled across the wilderness until a new voice was heard, saying, “Did he say ‘Muma’?”

It sounded like it came from D’s left hand, which hung at ease by his side.

“What’s that mean?” D asked.

Signs of surprise seemed to rise from his hand for a second.

“Damned if I know,” the dried, cracked voice then responded. “Just the babbling of some guy about to die. A little memento to mess with you.”

The voice then mixed with groans of pain. D had squeezed his left hand into a tight fist.

“D-don’t . . . do . . . anything . . . stupid . . .”

The fist trembled. Finger and finger pressed together, and nails broke through skin and muscle. A thin red stream had begun to drip to the ground.

“Answer me,” D said.

“About what? Ow! I don’t know . . . anything at all . . .”

“What is ‘Muma’? A person? The name of a place? Or is it . . .”

“I . . . don’t . . . know . . .” the hoarse voice said, its manner changed so that it now sounded like it might throw up.

He gave his fist one more squeeze. Silence resulted. After maintaining that fearsome tension for several seconds, D opened his fingers. The blood that covered the palm of his hand was scattered by the wind.

D squinted. He had no memories of this word Muma. And yet, his body told him of subtle changes. His blood was coursing faster—by a thousandth of a second. D’s body knew when something that small had changed.

Was it his heart or his genes? He’d felt a mysterious excitement from the second he’d heard the word Muma.

D turned his gaze to the far reaches of the gloom-shrouded plain.

Something roiled like smoke all along the horizon. A mob of countless figures shaken by the wind. Their vile forms were evident to D’s eyes alone. Arms like withered branches, fingers tapering into claws, skin that seemed born of corruption, cloudy eyes reminiscent of a dead fish, bodies covered with pustules—all of these creatures had been summoned from their graves deep in the earth by the necromancer who’d just been slain. Even D didn’t know what they actually were. Nor did he know what they were supposed to accomplish. Their overlord had just been reduced to a blood-soaked cadaver.

D gave a brief whistle. Somewhere, the sound of iron-shod hooves approaching rang out. Before the white cyborg horse could come to a stop, D was in the saddle. As he took up the reins, the horse went right into a gallop—in the opposite direction from the mob of misbegotten dead. And most likely toward the hell the necromancer had mentioned.

-

It was after midnight when the white horse and black rider blew into the village of Gilhagen like a monochrome cyclone. Street lamps glowed through the weighty darkness of the wee hours.

Atop a hill that was rather high even for a village in the rolling terrain at the foot of a mountain, the house with roof and walls painted black squatted like the darkness. It didn’t have windows, either. It was impossible to tell if it had a door or not, but D stood in front of the house and brought his fist down just once.

A thin crack of light spread through the dark. The door that’d opened in response to that single knock couldn’t even be seen.

Standing there with a soot-stained lamp in hand was a gray-haired crone. She had a face that looked like leather pasted on a skull. The black leaf that covered her left eye must’ve served as an eye patch.

Opening a crack of a mouth, she said, “To be calling on the home of Origa, the greatest sorceress in the southern Frontier, at this hour, you must be prepared to sacrifice your life . . .if not your very soul.”

Her voice was like a chill wind gusting from a dark grotto.

“I will, if that’s your wish,” D said.

Just then the sorceress’s eyes snapped wide open.

“That voice—” the crone said, blinking vigorously behind the light. “Yes, and that beautiful face—It can’t be . . . You’re—”

“I’ve come because there’s something I’d like to ask Origa the Sorceress.”

Before D had even finished speaking, the door opened wide.

A few minutes later, D sat at a heavy table and the sorceress brought him a hot cup of tea. As she turned a mysterious look at a countenance so gorgeous it seemed to drink up darkness and light and even sound, she asked, “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve heard Origa the Sorceress specializes in memory regression.”

“That’s right. Humans, horses, birds, flame beasts, shadow-eaters—hell, I can slip into the memories of any supernatural creature and make ’em recall the past. But—”

After stopping there, Origa had the expression wiped right off her face, as if she’d just committed some unpardonable sin. A face of unearthly beauty was right before her. The woman’s next words would be a betrayal—a betrayal of a beauty that couldn’t possibly be human.

“But . . .” the old woman sputtered, trying desperately to retain her pride, “but . . . I won’t for you. Be on your way. I didn’t meet anyone tonight. Didn’t see anyone, no matter how gorgeous. I’ll believe that to my dying day.”

“Why are you afraid?” D asked from the other side of the little round table.

“I’m not afraid of anything, I’ll have you know.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met before. Or have we—”

“Hell, I’ve never laid eyes on you before. At any rate, kindly be on your way now. Or if you won’t leave, I will!”

“Please, restore my memory.”

The crone quaked at D’s words as if struck with palsy.

“I already told you . . . No more of this foolishness!”

“I’ll pay you ten times your normal rate. And I’ll do you a favor as well.”

“A favor?”

“I’ll give you a look into your own past.”

“You’re talking nonsense!” the crone said with a low laugh.

The laws of nature had decreed that sorcerers who could restore the memories of others couldn’t go back through their own.

D wasn’t smiling.

The crone stopped smiling, too. Licking her puckered mouth, she said in a parched, cracked voice, “You mean to tell me . . . you could do that? No, you could . . . I believe you could . . . you of all people. Nearly thirty bandits were cut down before my very eyes . . . back when I was five—and that’s the only thing I remember from my past.”

“How about it?”

As that question was put to her, the crone suddenly turned her gaze to the vicinity of D’s left hip. She’d gotten the feeling the hoarse query she’d just heard had come from there.

After a bit of consideration, the crone nodded and said, “Okay, my beautiful demon. My normal fee will suffice . . . that and the return of my past. Not that I doubt you or anything, but would you be so kind as to show me a little proof you can really do it?”

D’s left hand rose before the crone’s eyes, which were rocked by puzzlement. There was no glove on it.

At the moment he reached across the table and touched that hand to her right temple, the crone’s body arched in her chair. Her expression changed. The changes came at intervals of a fraction of a second. Anger, hatred, fear, joy, and finally sadness skimmed ruthlessly across her deeply wrinkled face, hammering her, teasing her, and then leaving.

Somewhere, the lid of a pot rattled quietly. Apparently she was boiling medicinal herbs. Before it rattled a second time, the crone sat back in her chair normally. Her whole body was suffused by a mysterious kind of peace unconnected to the relaxation of her muscles, and tears rolled from her eyes.

What had she seen?

Blinking repeatedly to stem the flow of tears, the crone then focused her gaze on D.

“You pass muster, D,” she said in a perfectly clear tone. “I remembered all manner of things. But instead of thanking you, I’ll see to it I give you what you want for certain. Come this way.”

Rising with the lamp in one hand, the crone began to walk toward the doorway, and then stumbled. Falling to the right before she could even regain her balance, she was caught by the figure in black. D.

“You’re a surprisingly good person at heart, D. Right this way.”

Stepping through the doorway and walking down the dark corridor a bit, the crone opened a door at the end.

The room was a dreary affair, with nothing but a metal bed and a chair.

“Lie down,” the crone told D, gesturing to the bed.

She then took a bamboo flute out of a niche in the wall.

“This is called the returning flute. It has a unique construction that allows it to extract memories from the brain. To date, I’ve used it on nearly twenty thousand people and supernatural critters, and not once has it failed.”

And yet, she hadn’t wanted to use it on D. The incredible swordsman the crone had seen when she was five must’ve been him after all. But what was it she feared she might glimpse in his past?

“Lie back,” Origa said, pointing to the bed and readying the flute.

In no time at all, the thin strains of a melody echoed from the instrument, moving to the ceiling and walls as it flowed through the room.

“First layer of the subconscious—passed,” Origa muttered in a low tone, although how she managed that with the flute still to her lips was a mystery.

The melody changed.

The secret of the famed flute that could restore lost memories was inner mechanisms that made memories replay and this tune known only to the sorceress’s clan.

D didn’t move. Was he sleeping? Was he even breathing, for that matter?

As if entranced by his handsome visage, the crone said, “Second layer—no, let’s just dive straight down to the mystic layer.”

There was a ghastly ring to the voice of Origa the Sorceress, like she was sick with the smell of blood.

The mystic layer—that was a mysterious zone of the human mind only those of her line could reach.

Adjusting her grip on the instrument, Origa began to pipe a short, strange rhythm wholly unlike what she’d played up to this point. Accompanied by light, the arrows of sound slipped into the ears of the gorgeous Hunter—no, they battered his brain directly.

Origa’s features grew indistinct. They’d been blurred by the sweat that covered every inch of her in a split second.

Look what kind of misery had to be endured to call back lost memories! The body of the sorceress contorted and grew dehydrated, and she might shed as much as a tenth of her weight. And in exchange for that fearsome price, the notes produced by the magic flute seemed enough to make even a rock shudder, echoing an eerie melody like the marching tune of a demonic army, orderly and awe-inspiring.

The first thing that could be called emotion suddenly raced across the face of the sleeping D. His right hand reached for the sword by his side.

“Don’t!”

Whose shout was that?

The woman’s screams exploding from the little black house were swallowed by a far deeper darkness. The sounds dragged long, long tails after them—then vanished unexpectedly.

Aside from that, the night had been particularly quiet.

-

Past noon on the following day—when the Hunter in black was more than one hundred and twenty miles from the village—a villager who called on the home of Origa the Sorceress was left standing frozen and speechless on discovering the crone’s body in pieces in the blood-spattered living room.

-

II

-

Surprisingly, there were many types of travelers that one could expect to see on the highway: medicine peddlers dressed in white with drug cases of the same hue slung from their shoulders and tri-colored pennants of red, white, and blue flying high off the poles on their backs; contract fighters in old-fashioned armored cars with heavy machine guns and the barrels of rivet guns protruding from their sides and the words “warriors available” written in large letters on their coats; traveling performers who did flips on top of their carriage, disgorging flowers from their mouths, then striking them down with knives or gouts of flame; and so on, and so forth. And the eyes of all of them bulged in their sockets.

What some saw from the front and others from the rear was a cyborg horse galloping at terrific speed. But even those who recognized it as a horse still didn’t believe it. Cyborg horses couldn’t keep that kind of pace, and what’s more, as it was passing them, a number of people saw a figure of unearthly beauty, and to some it looked as if said figure was actually running right alongside the horse. Whatever the case, by the time they could focus their eyes, both the cyborg horse and the human figure were dwindling in the distance.

Not even the bands of warriors astride their vaunted steeds or the riders of the Pony Express—who were said to have the fastest horses on the road—felt like challenging that pair. They literally galloped along as if possessed by the dark lord of the winds.

It was D. However, the gorgeous young man had never raced like this in the past. When he commanded his mount to run at full speed, the cyborg horse entered a mad gallop, as if in the grip of some unearthly aura. His horse moved as swiftly as a swallow in flight. But it couldn’t continue like that forever. When he saw that his horse had grown exhausted, D got down off his mount and ran alongside it to lighten its load. Needless to say, those times were few and his horse slowed down a bit, but keeping pace with a wildly galloping horse was something no human—or even Noble, for that matter—could do.

Nevertheless, the horse had been ruined.

Beside the towns and villages, there were rest stops along the highway where travelers might obtain cyborg horses or energy bikes. The proprietor glanced at the cyborg horse that’d collapsed after it galloped in, but by the time he realized it’d died of excessive exhaustion, D had already selected a new mount and left a pile of coins that would also cover the burial costs of the horse, and disappeared into the distance in a cloud of dust.

In the past three days, he’d ridden twelve hundred miles without a moment’s rest, and he was on his third cyborg horse—he truly was riding at an insane pace. D’s unearthly aura took hold of the steed. But what was the purpose of that aura, and what was it directed at? Where are you going, D? And what is waiting there?

The far end of the desolate night plains had begun to take on a watery hue.

Wherever this young man went, people always met their fate. But whose will it be this time? Will it be yours, D?

-

In the village of Sedoc—or to be precise, on the outskirts of the village—an incredible change took place on the twenty-sixth day of the third month of season A. A group of elderly women on a pilgrimage from the east were staying at Sedoc House, the village inn, when all twenty of them suddenly suffered heart attacks that night and died. After the sheriff’s department wrote up a perfunctory report, they were carted off to the morgue.

In the middle of the night, the janitor from the morgue rode to the sheriff’s office with bizarre news. One after another, the corpses in the morgue had gotten up, smashed through a stone wall, and begun to march off in single file toward “the red wasteland” on the village outskirts, by his account.

The sheriff railed about how they’d been bitten by a Noble and grilled the janitor on what the hell he’d been doing, but the poor janitor insisted there was absolutely no way a Noble could’ve gotten near them.

At any rate, talk turned to forming a search team and rounding up the corpses, but just then, the caretaker from a cemetery near the sheriff’s office bolted in with a face as pale as a dead man. He told them that every corpse in the entire cemetery had risen from its grave. Clawing up through ten feet of heavy dirt, they reached the surface and started walking.

The sheriff asked him where they were headed. But he already knew the answer.

“The red wasteland,” the cemetery caretaker replied.

An urgent appeal went out, and more than thirty men responded immediately, taking up their inevitable task as residents of the Frontier. They came with sharpened stakes, spears, and bows in hand, quickly proceeding toward the outskirts of the village.

They were a third of the way to their destination when the massive earthquake struck. Heaven and earth rumbled. The ground undulated like waves across fabric, rapidly pitching from side to side. It was a miracle that no one in the search party was harmed. Not even the horses had been able to flee; they’d fallen to the ground and rolled around on their sides for what’d seemed like an eternity, though it was later learned that the trembling of the earth hadn’t lasted five seconds.

Still, the sheriff and a number of other brave souls were to be lauded for the way they decided to press on less than five minutes after the great quake had passed. Driving their cyborg horses as fast as they could, they arrived at the edge of a red plain, where the composition of the soil made it look like blood, and were struck by a terror that effaced all other thoughts of strangeness in their minds as they froze on their mounts—or rather, along with their mounts.

The red ground was missing.

What they saw was an outer ring that seemed to go on forever, dropping at a sharp angle into a great mortar-shaped depression. But from the standpoint of natural phenomena, such an occurrence wasn’t inconceivable. What terrified the group was that along that vast brink—later the hole would be found to be a mile and a quarter in diameter—there was a mob of shadowy figures. Some clad in rags, others fairly well dressed, and still others nearly completely naked, they stood peering down at the bottom of that subsidence without moving a muscle. Irrespective of age or sex, there was nothing about them that had the slightest semblance of human life—eyes as cloudy as those of dead fish, sunken cheeks with bones laid bare, and pale shapes wriggling in holes through their chests and bellies that could only be maggots.

All their dead.

No, the caretaker said in a flat tone. That’s not right. They aren’t just from our village cemetery. There are too many of them.

It was at that point that the sheriff sensed the presence of countless people behind him and heard their footsteps.

Corpses, someone shouted. The moonlight drank up his voice.

Behind them, dead beyond numbering were coming down the highway. And although the sheriff and his men didn’t notice it, they must’ve traveled quite some distance, since each was stark-white with dust from the ankles down.

“What are they up to? What the hell are these things?”

Ignoring the sheriff’s muttered remarks, the walking dead marched on, trudging right past the living. And then, as if they’d been given a push from behind, all the dead who stood at the brink of the mortar-like depression leapt in at once. The row behind them followed suit. As did the one after that, and another, and another.

Their brains assailed by egregious horror and the foul stench, most of the search party passed out. They were brought back to the village by the remaining members of their group.

And for two full days after that, the sheriff watched the procession of the dead to their mass grave.

Were there really that many bodies buried around the area? How much longer would this go on?

These concerns ate at every brain, leaving the townsfolk on the edge of madness that dusk. The next thing they knew, the procession of the dead had ended, but the villagers were left in a state of shock, roaming the streets like the new dead.

A young man in black with heavenly beauty and an exhausted horse had come into town with the wind whirling in his wake. Halting his horse in front of Sedoc House, the rider grabbed one of the unsteady villagers and asked, “What happened?”

The young man’s tone and his handsome features returned the stupefied villager to his senses. He told the young man everything he knew, from start to finish.

“Am I too late?” D muttered in a tone devoid of emotion—a voice of iron—and he prepared to get back on his horse.

“Wait!” a voice called out to him. Though it was low, the voice had a faint tinge of something to it.

Not even looking, D put his heels to his horse’s flanks.

As the gorgeous rider and his mount tore up the ground, the voice called out once more.

“Wait, D!”

-

III

-

The girl introduced herself as Mia. She also said she was the daughter of a fortune-teller who lived about sixty miles to the north. Her smock and the skirt she wore below it were both embroidered with a mysterious crest representing where she came from, and her numerous necklaces and bracelets were set with stones that possessed a deep luster that seemed to hold a dark history. She knew D’s name because when her mother predicted a strange occurrence in this region, she’d told the girl that that would be the name of the man who’d race there from afar.

“From what Mother says, the key to solving this mysterious occurrence is held by a man who comes from far away,” Mia said in a hard tone. “This case is something no one can handle. No one except the man named D. D—if that’s the name that you go by—what in the world are you?”

“Can you see the future?” D asked.

“A little,” Mia replied, her tone carrying very restrained pride and self-confidence.

“In that case, do you know how this all ends?”

“No, not even Mother knows that. But it’s not because she’s not powerful enough to see it. Something interfered.” After a short pause, the girl continued, “As far as what happened, I asked the villagers before you got here. Mother had pointed to a spot on the map and said that an incredibly evil power was at work. It was the same area where there was that massive subsidence. That’s probably the center of it.”

“What kind of power?”

“An evil one is all she said.”

“It probably would’ve been better if your mother came.”

“I think so too,” Mia conceded, not seeming the least bit angry. “But unfortunately, she can’t do that. Right after predicting this incident, Mother coughed up blood and collapsed. She’s probably passed away by now.”

“And you came here instead of tending to her?”

“Mother’s orders were explicit,” Mia replied with her eyes still focused straight ahead.

Her age had to be sixteen or seventeen. Some childish innocence still remained, but a strength of will that hardly suited her had also spread across her face.

“She doesn’t view this incident as merely another great catastrophe. Mother said it’s a major event that could have repercussions on a global scale. Ordinarily, she’d have gone herself. Even though going might not accomplish anything, as someone with the power to catch a glimpse of people’s future—society’s future—she has to try and do whatever she can. But since she couldn’t possibly move, she told me to go.”

A mother had sent her own daughter into an incident that might shake the very world.

A girl had raced here even though she knew her mother was fated to die.

D tugged back on the reins.

A split second before her face was about to hit his back, Mia swiftly turned it away, so that only her right cheek took the impact. She could feel the swell of his muscles through the fabric. For just a second, she grew dizzy.

“We’re there,” D said.

“Okay.”

Taking away the hands she’d had wrapped around his waist, Mia put them on the saddle’s cantle and braced her body. Before D could dismount, the girl flew into action.

Not bothering to call out to the girl who’d hit the ground before him, D began to walk.

Their entire conversation up to this point had taken place on the back of his horse.

His left arm rose naturally and from the vicinity of its wrist a hoarse voice humans wouldn’t hear squeaked, “She’s a hell of a girl. For one thing, you’ve got a little slip of a lass like her racing into a place like this. For another, she didn’t even bother to wait for you to offer her a hand getting down from the horse. She’s been schooled in how to live on her own. If you ever take a wife, one like that’ll—”

The voice broke off there. D had made his hand into a tight fist.

As he walked quietly but gravely, ahead of him yawned the great subsidence that’d swallowed so many dead.

“This place is incredible, isn’t it?” Mia remarked pensively as she peered down from D’s right side.

Compared to the diameter of the depression, its depth wasn’t great at all. Only about a thousand feet. Blending with the sloping sides, the bottom was a chaotic mix of boulders and sand, with the red soil filling in the spaces between them.

“It’s like a sea of blood,” Mia remarked as she rubbed her cheek with her right hand.

“You saying the dead can bleed, too?”

Mia looked at D’s hip out of the corner of her eye, and then stared at his face. Perhaps aware of the rosy glow suffusing her cheeks, she swiftly averted her gaze, saying, “You do a weird little voice, don’t you? Are you teasing me?”

Making no reply, D planted one foot at the edge of the incline.

“No, I’m serious,” Mia continued. “And I’ll thank you to answer me.”

Saying nothing, D stared downward.

Piqued at being ignored, Mia undertook a reckless course of action. With unexpected speed she came up behind D and told him, “You’re rude!”

She’d aimed a kick at his ass. But it met nothing. Nothing but the empty space over the pit.

“Wha—?!”

As she reflexively put her strength into the leg that still supported her, the supposedly firm ground gave way.

The second she heard her own cry above her and felt the sensation of falling, her body suddenly stopped dead. On realizing that D’s left hand had caught her by the collar, she madly reached around with her hands to latch onto him. Just as it dawned on her that she was floating through the air, and her feet came down on solid ground. No sooner had a feeling of relief flooded through her than the hand came away from her collar and Mia staggered.

As her eyes stared fixedly at D, they began to hold hints of a bottomless terror and rage—and a gleam of admiration.

“What do you think this depression’s for?”

The voice that posed that question was tinged with trust—and even a bit of affection.

Once again there was no reply. But even though he didn’t answer, no anger bubbled up in the girl.

“You said you were the daughter of a fortune-teller, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling silly for getting so excited that he’d turned the conversation to her.

“The dead left every graveyard in the region to throw themselves from here. There would’ve been thousands of them. Why do you think that was?”

There was a short pause.

The next thing Mia knew, she had one hand to her chest. Her heart was racing. She had to do something to slow it down.

Pressing a finger gently to one part of the heart—the left ventricle—she made her breathing as shallow as possible. Her heartbeat returned to normal immediately. But then, she was a strong-willed and courageous individual to begin with.

“Is it okay if it’s pure conjecture?”

D nodded.

“I think they were a sacrifice.”

“That’s it, all right.”

The hoarse response definitely sounded like it’d come from the vicinity of D’s left hand.

Though she looked, naturally she didn’t see anything.

“That’s right.”

This time the reply came in a rusty, masculine tone—D’s voice. So, was that other one just her ears playing tricks on her?

“Last time, corpses sufficed, but next time it’ll probably be living people jumping in.”

“Thousands of them . . .” Mia muttered, her remark a question at the same time.

There was no reply, of course. You could say that was her answer.

“But . . . why in the world?”

“It’s the will of the one down below this.”

“Down below?”

Mia couldn’t help forgetting her present terror and peering down past the brink of the hole. But as she quickly recalled it again, she backed away, then stared at D.

“You know what it is?” she asked.

Not answering her, D stood there like an exquisite statue, but then he told her, “Go home.”

And then, without further ado, he dove headfirst from the rim of the hole into its interior.

“D?!” Mia called out in spite of herself, and she was paused at the very brink of the hole ready to go after him when something white got in her eyes.

Gas.

Covering her mouth, the fortune-teller’s daughter made a great leap back.

It looked like the white pillars of smoke rising from the brink of the depression numbered in the hundreds. All those geysers of gas couldn’t have suddenly erupted from the ground in unison. They’d been triggered mechanically. And the one who’d set them off was—

“D . . .”

Still unsure just what was in the gas, Mia took a deep breath and raced back to the rim of the hole. She turned her gaze downward.

He’d probably been crushed. Why was she so determined to find this young man? Because his actions were so extreme. Like what he’d done just now. She couldn’t help thinking that whatever he really was, it was tremendously unsettling and of great importance—just as he’d appeared in the fortune-telling. And the last thing that occurred to Mia was something the girl tried vehemently to ignore so it wouldn’t rise to the fore of her consciousness. Because he’s gorgeous. More than anyone has a right to be.

Mia couldn’t see D anywhere, and she had to back away again. The gas had grown thicker and jetted out even harder. Luckily for her, it was only intended as a smoke screen.

She couldn’t go after him. Should she wait, or should she go back to the village?

That decision wasn’t Mia’s to make. From behind her came the thunder of approaching hooves. There were also the echoes of what sounded like a motor.

Mia turned around.

The figures she could see down at the far end of the highway halted before Mia less than ten seconds later. It was the same group of village peacekeepers who’d discovered the depression. And they’d brought a rare item with them.

The source of the motor sounds was an armored car. With iron plates riveted to a car chassis, the strangely rough-looking vehicle was apparently an antiquated model, with the edges of some plates starting to pull free, and both the sturdy turret and the forty-millimeter cannon that jutted a foot and a half from it were flecked with rust. The scorches and countless bullet marks that covered its armor plates were undoubtedly shining proof it had been fighting off aggressors in the form of bandits and supernatural creatures for decades. And it looked as if it was still more than capable of serving as the little village’s guardian angel.

Mia’s eyes were drawn to the wagon that rode alongside it. She could read the words High Explosives branded onto the sides of the wooden boxes piled high on it. Some kinds of munitions were often obtained from military installations and battlefields where the Nobility had fought their own kind, and it wasn’t particularly unusual for towns and villages to have them on hand. Weapons that were especially easy to use, such as rifles and various kinds of grenades, could make an impressive show of force when the situation called for it. To the north of the village were wild plains and the ruins of what had once apparently been a testing ground for the Nobility, and normally no one dared set foot there.

The sheriff got down off his horse. As he moved toward Mia, he called over to the group forming around the wagon, “Get yourselves some explosives and line up along the drop-off. We’ll be pitching them in soon.”

“Wait just a minute,” Mia called out as she dashed over to the sheriff instead of waiting for him to come to her. “What do you think you’re doing? If you throw a bunch of bombs into this weird hole, there’s no way of knowing what kind of reaction you’ll get. Plus, someone just fell in there.”

“Someone? And just who might that be?”

“A man named D. He’s a Hunter.”

Actually, Mia didn’t know for a fact that D was a Vampire Hunter. But his good looks, the way he carried himself, and the way he called to mind ice and steel made her say it on impulse.

“Why’d he fall in the hole? No, before we get to that—who are you anyway?” the sheriff asked, knitting his thick eyebrows suspiciously.

“Mia, isn’t it? You’re the daughter of a fortune-teller who lives up north. I had her tell my fortune before,” called out a young man who’d been staring at the girl all along from the driver’s seat of the wagon. He wore a heavy wool shirt and had a red scarf wound about his neck. And as befitted someone so dapper, his countenance was a good deal more attractive than the rest of the men.

“This fortune-teller up north—would that be Noa Simon? I’ve heard the name before. Seems quite a few people are in her debt,” the sheriff remarked; and, seeing a smile break on the lawman’s face, Mia was somewhat relieved. “This Hunter you mentioned, is he some friend of yours? What in blazes brings him here?”

And having said this, the sheriff then held his tongue.

In fact, everyone froze right where they were. Though white smoke poured over the brink of the great subsidence, covering everything up to three feet from the ground, they could make out a human shape on the other side of it. The hem of a coat swayed around the knees of the powerfully built form. Mia alone could tell whose silhouette it was by the longsword on its back.

“D?”

How many of them heard her say that?

As Mia reflexively started to step forward, someone behind her grabbed her right arm.

“Don’t go,” said the young man who’d been in the driver’s seat.

“But—”

“When did he fall? “

“Not five minutes ago.”

“You think after falling in there it’d be that easy to get back up again?”

“Maybe if he got hung up on something halfway down.”

“Think that’s what happened?”

“No.”

“Stand back.”

Pushing Mia out of the way, the young man put his hand to his waist. He had a gunpowder pistol in a special holster. After drawing it, he called out to the shadowy figure in the fog, “Hey, I’m from the village!”

At the same time, the color of the silhouette darkened—and a heartbeat later, it slipped out of the fog to stand face to face with the young man.

A rumble went through the crowd. Murmured exclamations of rapture. For the villagers had seen the face of the shadowy figure.

“D . . .”

That name was known to Mia alone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hideyuki Kikuchi was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1949. He attended the prestigious Aoyama University and wrote his first novel, Demon City Shinjuku, in 1982. Over the past two decades, Kikuchi has written numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan’s leading horror masters, working in the tradition of occidental horror writers like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there are seventeen novels in his hugely popular ongoing Vampire Hunter D series. Many live-action and anime movies of the 1980s and 1990s have been based on Kikuchi’s novels.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Yoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He is well known as a manga and anime artist, and is the famed designer for the Final Fantasy game series. Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko Productions’ greatest cartoons, including Gatchaman (released in the U.S. as G-Force and Battle of the Planets). Amano became a freelancer at the age of thirty and has collaborated with numerous writers, creating nearly twenty illustrated books that have sold millions of copies. Since the late 1990s, Amano has worked with several American comics publishers, including DC Comics on the illustrated Sandman novel Sandman: The Dream Hunters with Neil Gaiman, and Marvel Comics on Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer with best-selling author Greg Rucka.