Twin-Shadowed Knight Part Two
FLEEING THROUGH THE SNOW
CHAPTER 1
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I
-
"D," Mia said, standing in a paralyzed daze. A pair of fangs were reflected in her eyes. Fangs that weren’t meant to be seen. Fangs she never wanted to see.
“This can’t be happening,” she muttered. “It can’t be! It can’t! It can’t!”
“No, it is,” Kuentz told her, climbing another step higher to shield Mia with his body. “We’ve gotta turn back, Mia.”
“We can’t. That’s the only exit up there. We’d never last long enough to find another way out.”
The two of them were already rooted to the ground like trees.
“I’ll thank you to step aside, D,” Kuentz said to the Hunter. “I know I don’t have a prayer of winning if I go up against you. But even if I did, I still wouldn’t want to.”
Though the young man had abhorred D for being a dhampir, he’d since come to revere the Hunter. Even with the other half of D’s nature revealed—and the fangs of a Noble bared—it did nothing at all to change the way Kuentz felt. He showed no signs of readying his iron arrows or concealed blade.
D smoothly strode forward. His blazing crimson eyes bored through the pair.
Kuentz resolved to defend Mia. His left arm rose. The air whistled as he shot one of his iron arrows. Though he shouldn’t have been able to stop it, D grabbed it right in front of his chest. At the same time, Kuentz leapt.
The instant he decided to fight, the only plan of attack that’d arisen in his brain was to keep D’s hands occupied. In fact, the Hunter had cut off his own left hand. That left only the right one. If he was unable to use it, Kuentz would have a few seconds when the Hunter would be open to attack before he had use of the limb again. And that was Kuentz’s only hope of victory.
D discarded the iron arrow.
From above, Kuentz drove his blade down at the nape of D’s neck. For an instant, there was a choking cry of pain, and with it, the young man’s body twisted in midair. When he thudded to the ground at D’s feet, the young man had a black arrow jutting from his left shoulder—the very same arrow he himself had launched. D hadn’t discarded the arrow he’d caught, but rather had hurled it at Kuentz.
There was no change to the beauty of the countenance that peered down at the writhing Kuentz, but the ripples of malice that rose in the Hunter’s eyes and the terrific hunger there were a sight to see. Reaching out with his right hand, he seized Kuentz by the throat. A cry of agony flowed upward as D hoisted Kuentz into the air with one arm. The concealed blade dropped from Kuentz’s hand, rattling loudly. The young man’s neck was right in front of the Hunter’s lips. They snapped open savagely.
Seeing the crimson interior of his mouth, Mia felt lightheaded. And because of this, she didn’t remember shouting, “Stop it!” or snatching up the concealed blade and driving it into D’s chest. The next thing she knew, she’d backed down a couple of stairs and was staring at the two men. Kuentz was crouched at D’s feet, coughing, while the gorgeous Hunter trained his gaze on Mia without saying a word. More than Kuentz’s blade, which she’d driven into his sternum, it was the look D gave her that shook Mia.
“Nicely done,” he said in the voice of the beautiful Vampire Hunter she knew so well.
At Mia’s feet, a hoarse voice remarked, “I’d say so,” but she only understood D.
“D—you’re better, aren’t you?” the girl said, her voice choked with relief and tears.
D didn’t reply to her, but instead grabbed Kuentz by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet, telling him to climb the staircase before him.
As Mia was just about to follow Kuentz up, a hand latched onto her ankle.
“Good lord!” Mia shouted, and looking down, she was left breathless.
Having been taken off at the shoulder, D’s left arm was gripping her ankle tightly.
“W-what are you doing?”
“Don’t worry about me. Just keep going. I’ll stick with you,” the left hand said.
Though she knew it could talk, the situation was somewhat uncanny.
“Can’t you walk yourself?”
“Nope.”
“Then I guess it can’t be helped. So, you can stay alive for a long time after D cuts you off?”
“Well, I manage.”
“I see,” Mia said, oddly satisfied. Seeming overly conscious of her pants leg, she began climbing the stairs.
Sunlight enveloped the group. While they were fleeing through the subterranean facility, it appeared an entire day and night had passed.
Looking at the scene that surrounded them, Kuentz declared with surprise, “This—this is Mount Ziriilla!”
It was one in a cluster of mountains that rose to the west of the village, and it towered to five thousand feet above sea level. Snow capped its summit irrespective of season. Aside from the beautiful blue sky and scattered patches of black rock, the three of them were surrounded by a world of pure white.
The exit opened between boulders—most likely the underground facility spread not only beneath the “red wasteland,” but also under the village and all its surroundings.
“It’s cold,” Mia said, hugging her own arms as she turned toward D.
The exquisite Hunter stood a short distance from the boulders, looking up. How beautiful his face and body appeared engulfed in the light. Her brain pleasantly numbed, Mia only thought of the danger inherent in that very same light a few seconds later. Due to the Noble blood that ran in a dhampir’s veins, sunlight could have devastating effects. However, the gorgeous Hunter showed no signs of fear as he turned his face to the light, not even using his remaining arm to brace himself as he stood on his own two feet.
As the shadowy remnants of the madness that’d come over him on the way up the stairs melted away in the light, Mia was amazed. A conversation she’d had with her mother about the Nobility rang once more in her ears.
The light sears the Nobles’ flesh, making them feel more pain than we would if burned by a flame. However, the light has a mysterious power. There’s something about it the Nobility can’t help but love. The proof of that is that of all the Nobles who’ve been destroyed by the rays of the sun, every last one of them was smiling. Perhaps something within the light burns away all the cruelty and evil that lurks in the blood of the Nobility.
“D,” she muttered, but just then there was a tug at her ankle.
“What is it?”
“Bring me over to him.”
“Go over there yourself. You’re giving me the creeps.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve got a left hand of your own, don’t you? Now hurry up and bring me over there.”
“I’ve had it with you!” Mia said, but nevertheless, she bent over and collected the left arm with visible distaste.
“Don’t bother, Mia. I’ll bring it over for you,” Kuentz told her after grasping the situation.
“Don’t stick your nose into this, punk,” the left hand sneered threateningly.
“Shut your hole, freak,” Kuentz said, extending his left arm—the one with the sights for the arrow launcher on it.
“Yipes!” the left arm exclaimed, flying out of Mia’s hands and falling on the snow. Scattering powder everywhere, it rushed toward D.
“You lied to me, didn’t you?” Mia said angrily, but Kuentz gave her a slap on the shoulder. He was smiling. A smile bloomed on Mia’s face as well.
The scrambling left arm bounded when it reached D’s feet, sticking to the wound on his left shoulder. The line between them faded, and the joint promptly went back to normal. Swimming in the sunlight, D didn’t so much as glance down at the limb.
“Hey! That punk kid’s some kinda homicidal maniac. Waste him!” the left hand cried as it rose quite naturally to level a finger at Kuentz.
Promptly lowering his hand again, D asked the pair, “Can you make it back down?”
“Yeah, we’ll be okay,” Kuentz replied, throwing out his chest. “I’ve climbed it a bunch of times in the past. Just leave it to me.”
“In that case, get going.”
“Hold on a minute. You mean you’re not coming? So, you plan on going back down there, do you?”
“You’d better go.”
Though D’s words were soft, they had the knife edge of the wind to them.
The pair nodded.
“D, you’d better make it back,” Mia said. D’s figure grew hazy beyond her frozen, white breath. “We’ll be waiting down below. We’d better see you there.”
There was no reply.
“Let’s go, Mia,” Kuentz said, taking her by the arm.
Just then, each of them saw an iridescent light skim through the corner of their eye, but when they tried to focus on it, there was nothing there. Looking back time and again, Mia made her way down the snowy slope. Beside the rocks, the form of the young man in black grew more and more distant until finally it was hidden by a gust of snow.
“So, how are we gonna get down from here anyway?”
Kuentz’s words left Mia stunned.
“You mean you’re not used to climbing this mountain?”
“Well—that was a lie.”
“Why would you say that? These slopes are pretty steep. And the snow down below is probably hard. It’d be really easy to trigger an avalanche. There’s no way anyone who doesn’t know the route could do it. But you had to—”
Mia tried to cover her mouth, but she was too late. Before she could stop herself, a tremendous sneeze exploded from her. At least she managed to stifle the second and third.
Several seconds passed—and both of them listened intently.
Letting her shoulders drop, Mia said, “Looks like we’re in the clear.”
Kuentz shook his head. “No, it’s coming.”
As Mia knit her brow, a deep, distant rumble reached her ears. Even if it wasn’t due to her sneeze just now, the snow certainly gave way readily enough.
“Just so you know, if we die out here, it’ll be all your fault.”
“If we do, you won’t be around to complain about it,” Kuentz retorted. “But forget that. Let’s get down as quick as we can. Luckily, there’s bare rock over there all the way down to the bottom. We’ll follow that.”
“Okay.”
Mia turned her head to look up. The blue sky stretched on forever.
The sky and the sun will protect us, she told herself. Even if we have to return to the depths of the earth at some point, the sunlight and the blue sky will banish the darkness.
And then, in a voice so small no one would hear it, she said, Isn’t that right, D?
“Well, we got them outside, at any rate,” a hoarse voice said in the darkness. “So, what do you plan to do next?”
“Destroy it,” D responded casually.
In fact, he said it so matter-of-factly, the other voice replied with a nonplussed, “Hmm, I see.” But that was quickly followed by an agitated, “What? Y-you mean this joint?”
“Where else?”
“Forget I asked! How could you take out such an enormous complex, anyway? By my estimates, it goes down around twenty miles, and stretches at least that far in each direction.”
“I’ll reverse the flow of the energy line.”
The hoarse voice fell silent. A short while later, it remarked, “Hmm. If you were to do that, the backflow of energy would definitely collect in the core, and once it ran over its capacity—boom! It’s just—”
“Just what?” D said, asking a rare question.
“Honestly, it seems like an awful waste,” the voice told him. “Even for him, setting up this place must’ve taken tons of time. Yeah, I’d say roughly a thousand years.”
“Sixty days.”
“What?”
“From the start of construction, it was completed in exactly sixty days.”
“You are such a liar! Who said so?”
“This place.”
“Is that so? Now that you mention it, he made it. It wouldn’t be surprising for you to be able to tell that. The memories of all the years are imprinted on this place. But I was just thinking . . .”
“What?”
“Have you forgotten the promise you made to the other you? If even one of Kuentz’s group made it out of here alive, you weren’t supposed to go into the facility for three days.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“But—” the voice began, and then it broke off.
The tone it took next carried such terror it would’ve frozen any who heard it. “Seriously, tell me you didn’t do that . . .”
-
II
-
After traveling to a spot that was about three hundred feet from the mountain’s summit as the crow flies, the pair halted. Footing was treacherous on the route along the exposed rock, and they were exhausted. More than anything, their feet ached. Their hands were also injured from where they’d grabbed the boulders every time they started to lose their balance.
“You’re pretty tough,” Kuentz said with admiration after watching Mia start to wrap a handkerchief around the palm and back of one hand. Blood instantly seeped into the white fabric.
“No, not really.”
“Those shoes are for level ground. Yet you move like a bird in them anyway.”
“I’m just used to mountain climbing from all the time I spent collecting plants and herbs to use in spells.”
“Just the same—”
“Never mind about me. If you’d be so kind as to figure a way for us to safely reach the bottom, brave sir.”
“Uh, sure,” he replied, somewhat flustered by her “brave sir” remark. Whether or not that was Mia’s intent, it’d had a special impact on Kuentz’s heart and his head. As he gazed at Mia, his eyes were feverish and his cheeks flushed. Apparently this was the first time the stalwart young man had been in love.
However, despite how hotly his youthful ardor blazed, the one who’d ignited it extinguished it in no time with her next comment. “Somehow, I’ve got a strange feeling about this.”
“Oh yeah, you’re a fortuneteller, right?” he said, having heard about Mia from folks in the village.
“My mother’s the fortuneteller. I’m more like the reserves.”
“I bet she must’ve been beautiful.”
Mia laughed unconcernedly, saying, “Thanks. I appreciate that, even if you don’t mean it.”
The only problem with that was she didn’t look all that pleased, but Kuentz didn’t seem to mind. He’d been under a great mental strain after seeing the demonic lair deep underground and he hadn’t noticed much more about her other than that she was a cute girl, but looking at her out in the sunlight with a new sense of freedom, her lustrous hair and blushing cheeks, the dainty line of her nose, and her lips as red as roses seemed to cast a kind of golden glow over her that was like a breath of spring. For a second, Kuentz was lost in a fantasy that instead of fleeing with Mia from danger, the two of them had agreed to scale the silvery peak together.
A white wind struck his cheeks. It stabbed at him with a chill that seemed to slash at his skin. Turning to look in the direction from which the wind had blown, he saw a form that looked like an eerie statue standing in a stark white fog.
“We’d better hurry,” he said, turning back toward Mia, but the fortuneteller’s daughter was kneeling down on the black rock, in the process of pulling an iridescent bag out of her coat pocket.
“Hey!”
“Hold on. I’m trying to divine if there’s anything blocking our way.”
“You think you could do that?”
No sooner had he asked that than a loud whap! resounded from his cheek. He’d been slapped without a second’s hesitation. The girl had been so close to him and the action was so beyond his imagining that he hadn’t been able to avoid it. In part, it was because Mia hadn’t broadcast her intention in any way, shape, or form.
“What was that for?” he shouted, and while his voice certainly had force to it, Mia’s reply was even more commanding.
Glaring at Kuentz, her lovely cat eyes giving off a vicious gleam of light, she said, “You could’ve asked if it was possible, but don’t make it seem like I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s so rude!”
Her words were thrust at him like a stake she’d drive into his heart.
“I see. Sorry,” Kuentz said, backing down easily. Although he didn’t completely understand, he got the feeling he was in the wrong.
Mia suddenly smiled again, saying, “It’s okay. Look at this.”
From her bag she pulled a black stone that’d been cut into a polyhedron and a number of iron needles. Sunlight reflected dazzlingly off the stone.
“What does it do?”
“This stone’s been cut to have a total of sixty-two facets. They can show us just three of the main problems we might encounter next. If there are none, it’ll show that too, of course. So I take a needle and jab it into the stone. I really shouldn’t be able to do that, but it’ll go through it just once. The position of the facet will give us the route we should take—we’ll know which direction to go.”
“Sounds interesting. Go to it,” Kuentz told her, his expression filled with curiosity and expectation. The things this girl could do put a sweet, sad pounding in his chest. The magic of love.
Mia closed her eyes. Her body was shrouded in a kind of unseen force. Blindly but without hesitation, Mia took up a needle and raised it above the black jewel she’d placed on a rock. Feeling the kind of ceremonial solemnity only a true fortuneteller could inspire, Kuentz was left breathless. A second later, without uttering a sound, the girl stabbed down with the needle. Kuentz got the impression that below it, the black jewel shifted direction.
“You did it!” he gasped in spite of himself.
The needle had indeed pierced one of the facets clear through to the other side.
However, what should follow close on the heels of that but Mia’s stunned cry of “It cracked?”
The entire surface of the black jewel was strung with white lines like a spider’s web, with the part the needle had pierced at the very center of it all.
“How strange. That’s not supposed to happen. According to this, we don’t have any direction to go in.”
Kuentz didn’t respond to Mia’s horrifying words. He couldn’t. Because just then he felt a hellish agony, as if his torso had just been bisected below the nipples.
Due perhaps to amazement brought on by the jewel, Mia didn’t even notice. Bringing the stone closer, she stared at it so intently her eyes seemed to bore into it.
“I see something. The obstacle—it’s a face.” Just a heartbeat later, she screamed like someone who’d caught a glimpse of hell, “D?”
-
The hard clangs that rolled from far off like waves broke in the vast space.
“Can you hear what’s happening? The sound of bolts tightening, snapped laser cables weaving together again, electronic circuits flicking open again—this facility is trying to come back to life.”
D remained staring into the darkness before him as he replied to the hoarse voice that issued from his left hand. “That’s the way he built it. Surely the need for reconstruction was taken into account.”
“Well, I’m sure the destruction of this facility must’ve come as quite a shock to him. Who wrecked it? Some opposition group within the Nobility?”
“Me.”
“What?” the voice exclaimed with a tinge of astonishment, and then, in a lower tone, it fairly growled, “I didn’t know that.”
“And you knew something I didn’t. That makes us even.”
“Hold on. My memories of the very beginning are like those of a baby fresh from the womb. Is that the time you’re talking about? No, wait just a second! When I joined up with you was right—”
A pale light tinged D and the voice. From somewhere high in the heavens broad streaks of light were being launched down into the subterranean darkness. At some point, D had started across a walkway that spanned an enormous pit.
“This is only one trunk off the energy line. And it carries only a tiny fraction of the energy,” the hoarse voice said. “Roughly 4.5 terajoules. If released all at once, it’d probably be enough to blow up a planet or two. Really not much at all.”
At just about the midpoint of the walkway, D halted.
“It’s under here, isn’t it?”
“Right you are. The reactor’s online.”
Saying nothing, D walked over to the handrail on the left side.
“Hey! What are you doing? You planning on heading down there from here? Even for you, that’s just too—”
The way the Hunter vaulted over the handrail, it looked as though he was completely weightless. With the hem of his black coat spread like a pair of wings, the figure of unearthly beauty descended into the pitch black depths like some mystic bird. Even if hell itself awaited him, that young man would make its masters quake.
In a blue storm of light, with the wind howling by, the hoarse voice was heard to say, “I’m a little concerned about what’ll become of that young couple.”
There was no reply.
-
Laying Kuentz out in the shelter of a boulder after his sudden collapse, Mia slapped his cheeks repeatedly, but there was no response from him at all. When she hurriedly checked his pulse, there was none, and his pupils were fully dilated.
Was he dead? He couldn’t be. Yet all Kuentz’s signs suggested nothing else.
“Why this, all of a sudden?” Mia asked, and to be honest, she was completely at a loss.
As she looked out, windblown snow that might be mistaken for a dense fog was flowing down the slope to her left, while to her right, she couldn’t be completely sure, but it looked like the snowpack was beginning to give way. Under these conditions, Mia wouldn’t be able to climb down alone, and she had no intention of abandoning Kuentz either. That being the case, there was nothing she could do but bivouac. She’d wait out the gusting snow. Although she couldn’t be sure the billowing snow wasn’t the harbinger of a blizzard, there was no point in dwelling on the matter.
Seeking an appropriate place to camp out, Mia ran her eyes over her surroundings. As far as snowy mountains went, she’d climbed them plenty of times with her mother, and she’d camped out before. Kuentz was sure to have tools for hollowing out an area in the snow. Mia hadn’t given up yet.
Turning and looking over her left shoulder, she made out a structure with distinctly crafted lines atop a sheer rock wall quite some distance away.
“Excellent!” Mia said, snapping her fingers.
“C’mon, get up already!” she told Kuentz as she shook him, but she quickly stood up again.
“It’s no use, as I might’ve guessed. No choice but to carry him myself. Lucky for me there’s snow on the ground,” she muttered.
The mistlike cloud of white slapped her cheeks.
“Here it comes!”
This was no time for standing about. However, she had no spell that would carry Kuentz, and she wasn’t about to just leave him there. The billowing snow grew denser.
“What’s that?” Mia exclaimed, focusing her gaze in the direction from which the demonic whiteness gusted at her. Off in the distance, where a haze hung like silky white gauze, she’d spotted humanoid shapes.
“We’re—” she began to cry out with joy, but she stopped short of waving her arms when she saw that the cluster of shapes showed no signs of acting like a group of humans out in the snow. They had nothing in their possession that resembled mountain-climbing gear, and they didn’t even raise a hand to wave to her as they silently made their way across the snowdrifts. Strangely stocky in build, they all looked as if their necks had sunk into their chests. They stooped over terribly.
Terror clawed at Mia’s heart, for she had just recalled a legend that was told about the snow-covered mountains in this region. The legend of the Caladoma—abominable creatures that found people and brought them back to their lair in the snow to be devoured.
I’ve gotta run, and quick. Gotta make it to that building! But how am I gonna get Kuentz there?
As Mia looked down at the fallen youth, fretfulness and despair tinged her eyes for the first time.
-
III
-
Fifty minutes later, Mia looked out at the windblown snow covering the base of the boulders and sighed. Kuentz was lying on a simple bed. There was no change in his condition.
As expected, the building was an emergency shelter from days of old. According to the plate on the door, it dated from more than a hundred years ago, but at present, its concrete outer walls easily kept the snowy gusts at bay, while its interior walls and ceiling were utterly spotless. More than anything, the girl was glad that the heating unit, which had seen more than its share of usage over a century earlier, went into action with a single flip of a switch. Filled to the brim with freeze-proof oil, its most breakable parts had been fully reinforced and repaired. That’d probably been seen to by the last people to use the place. And though she might never meet them, Mia was deeply grateful for their thoughtfulness. Thanks to them, she and Kuentz—whom she’d grabbed by the feet and dragged there—didn’t have to freeze to death. Better still, the shelves in the back room were stocked with cold-weather gear and preserved rations. They would have everything they needed and more to get back down the mountain.
Going back over to the bed, Mia put her hand to Kuentz’s brow, and then checked his pupils. His body had grown cold, his pulse was zero, his pupils were fully dilated—he was utterly dead. However, her instincts said otherwise.
When a person died, some essential part of them left the body. Some referred to it as the soul, and without it, the corpse was nothing more than an empty husk. Because her mother the fortuneteller was often asked to officiate at funerals and Mia had helped her since she was a little girl, she had seen literally hundreds of corpses. There had never been an exception. A corpse was an empty husk.
But that wasn’t the sense she got from Kuentz. Something that made a person a person maintained the life force within his body. That was the proof he lived. Mia was determined to somehow bring him back to the village. But her feverish determination was shaken by a certain wind as if it were a tower built on a foundation of sand. A wind that was black and pale, beautiful and mysterious beyond compare—and it wore the face of a certain young man. D.
What did it mean that he was the obstacle blocking their path? Although at first she thought it might have been the face of the fake D that she saw take shape in the jewel just before it crumbled, Mia had gotten the distinct impression that the image was that of the real D. Why him? The mere thought of it threatened to crush Mia’s heart with anxiety and kill her courage to share the fate of the black jewel. What was that gorgeous Hunter?
Her field of view unexpectedly fell into shadow. Mia turned to look and was startled. While her attention was diverted, the demonic whiteness had piled up outside the window. The wind shifted direction.
If it weren’t for this shelter—feeling relief, she brought her face closer to the windowpane.
A fiendish visage was pressed against the window. Eyes that turned up at the corners, eyeballs cold and dead, a crescent gash of a mouth exposing rows of yellowed teeth. Thick with bristling white fur, its face was more atrociously cruel and cunning than any monster known to Mia.
“What in the world?” she cried. At the same time she pulled away, the face vanished and was replaced by a white fist that hammered fiercely at the pane of glass.
It was them. Monsters that traveled with the gusting snow, the Caladoma had come there when the whipping wind changed direction. Or this might be another Caladoma, though it meant the same to Mia either way.
The door rattled. As she turned to look, there were noises up on the roof. The number of foes was unclear.
Dashing into the back storeroom, Mia grabbed the bolt gun that was leaning up against the wall. This wasn’t a rifle that used bolt action to chamber a round, but rather it literally fired metal bolts propelled by highly pressurized air. There was every reason to fear that the thunderous report of a gunpowder rifle could cause an avalanche all too easily. Those who’d used this shelter—or more likely, those who’d designed it in the first place—had no doubt taken that knowledge to heart.
Taking a look at the tin bucket that sat next to it, she found that an even dozen ammo clips of fifty shots each and three gas cylinders remained. Grabbing the bucket by the handle, she returned to the combined living room/bedroom. As it was fairly heavy, Mia had trouble walking with it.
The instant she stepped into the room, the windowpane shattered. As the shock wave and the sounds of destruction struck her full on, Mia dropped the bucket and used one hand to shield her face. But she quickly opened her eyes.
The upper half of a Caladoma hung from the window—the hole it’d made was too small. It was trying to use the misshapen object in its right hand to smash the rest of the glass. Horrifying faces bared their fangs at the other three windows.
Mia raised the gas-powered rifle. “Stay back! I’ll shoot!” she shouted.
Looking up at her, the creature she sought to stop let out a single beastly howl and brought up its right hand.
“Stop it!” Mia screamed, pulling the trigger.
Even before her finger felt the vain and hopeless click of the trigger, Mia realized the terrifying truth. The rifle wasn’t loaded with an ammo clip or a gas cylinder!
“Hold it!”
Cursing herself for an idiot, she went down on one knee, flipped over the rifle, then pulled one of the cylinders from the bucket and slapped it in the bottom of the weapon’s stock. Every girl on the Frontier was familiar with the use of a number of weapons.
The voice of the beast was near.
The gas cylinder was good to go. Scooping up a clip, she shoved it into place in front of the trigger. There could be no sweeter sound than the click of the ammo locking in place.
When she braced the weapon against her shoulder and rose again, a mass of white landed right in front of her. With a howl that split her eardrums, the beast hurled the same weapon that’d shattered the window at Mia. She thought she’d pulled the trigger before she felt a terrific impact on her left shoulder, but she couldn’t be sure.
The thing’s face caved in like a mortar, with the base of its nose at the very center of the damage. Its head alone snapped backward, splattering against the wall behind it.
Mia’s body was slammed back against the storeroom door, where it halted. She planted her feet to stop herself from sliding down to the floor, but when she tried to raise the weapon with her left arm, the pain made an agonized groan slip from her.
Apparently they only had that one weapon for smashing windows. When the next one leapt in through the same window, Mia gripped the rifle with just her right hand. Her back was pressed against the door to steady her, and as she took a deep breath, she raised the gun. Including the clip of ammo it weighed over ten pounds, so holding it steady was next to impossible. She aimed by pure instinct. Due to the weight of the rifle, the gas had essentially no kick at all.
The bolt it spat out with a rasping whistle struck the chest of the second one at a speed of Mach 3. From the exit wound on the Caladoma’s back a tremendous amount of meat and entrails shot out, but even as they exploded from the creature, Mia experienced such agony she lost consciousness.
The impact of the rifle had been minor, but it knocked her body against the door, and from there the force traveled back through her. And her left shoulder bone had been fractured.
-
An extraordinary cylinder towered just before D. The strange thing about it was that although the cylinder rose more than three hundred feet, the entire form was subtly twisted in a manner that seemed to ignore three-dimensional geometry.
“Never seen one of these before. So this is a sway reactor? I’ve heard they used freaking alien technology, but they sure built a hell of a thing here.”
Even in the world of the Nobility, the energy that drove their civilization was of the utmost importance. Ironically, the nearly ideal form of energy to be had by conventional means was solar power run through an amplifier, but on ethical grounds they set about developing an energy source that was fundamentally different. Though the first approach to prove successful used mathematics and geometry to draw energy from another dimension, roughly a millennium later it was rendered useless by attacks by bizarre creatures on the other side.
At approximately the same time, the energy-development center under direct control of the Sacred Ancestor succeeded in developing a new source of energy—to be precise, the power of perpetual motion. The fact that nearly a hundred thousand ageless and immortal Nobles literally worked themselves to death during its development was a testament to the price that had to be paid to accomplish something the laws of physics vehemently declared an impossibility. So appalling were the conditions that the Sacred Ancestor himself ordered that all accounts of the great undertaking be purged, and five millennia passed before it produced any measure of success. Making something from nothing, this device made a reality of what was only a dream in physics, but even the Nobles’ civilization didn’t manage to construct more than three of them, each of which was set up in a top-secret location. The secret to producing an essentially endless supply of energy lay in certain distortions and vibrations. Choosing the optimal pattern from the nearly infinite number of combinations required five millennia of scientific endeavor on the part of the Nobility.
But one such combination loomed before D now.
“So, another symbol of the Nobility vanishes, eh?” the left hand muttered—but what did D make of this?
As he walked toward it without evincing any particular emotion, a shower of gold poured down on him from above. A billion-degree heat ray that would instantly erase any living creature lost all its heat the second it touched D. The blue pendant on D’s chest glowed softly.
The supercomputer acting as guardian recognized that the intruder wasn’t just anyone. Canceling any further attacks, it set all its systems into defensive mode.
An invisible shield stretched before D. An antimatter field—anything that touched it would cease to exist. Only three steps away. Two. One.
D breezed right through it. All that remained was the last redoubt—the blood seal. A barrier that only those of the Sacred Ancestor’s line would be allowed to pass.
Suddenly, a final directive locked away deep inside the computer activated. It overrode the will of the computer, taking precedence in virtually any situation. Circuits switched, and for a millisecond, all the energy in the sway reactor was channeled into the black box set in the bottom of the reactor. A dull thrum! shook the air.
“I’ll be damned,” the left hand said, its eyes bulging in their sockets.
Before them lay nothing save a vast black lake. The symbol of the Nobility that had loomed there, filling all that space, had vanished without warning.
“Teleportation? That’s a dirty trick,” the left hand grumbled.
“Where’d it go?”
D’s query was met with silence.
“To Muma?” D then asked.
“Odds are.”
“Where is that?”
“I—I don’t know.”
This was the point where D would’ve ordinarily squeezed his hand into a fist, but instead he let it go and turned around, saying, “Then I’ll have to ask someone else. Someone who knows more about this place than me.”
The Hunter’s words drew an uncanny sense of alarm from his left hand.