CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 7
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I
-
They all looked like they had bathed in blood. Even their eyes seemed to give off blood light. Braujou, Valcua, his retainers—all of them. The only one whose eyes remained crystal clear was D.
“First, relinquish that man,” Valcua said, extending one hand.
“No,” D replied, as Sue took cover behind him.
“Oh, really?”
“You’ll get your treatment after we have both the Dyalhis children.”
Their gazes met in midair, sending invisible sparks flying. The grand duke’s underlings stiffened. So intense was the killing lust between these two, it even caused androids to malfunction.
“I’d like to ask you something first,” Count Braujou said, raising his right hand.
“And what might that be?” Valcua replied.
“Who is this fellow? Why does he wear D’s face?”
“He got it from the Sacred Ancestor. I was told to bring him out in my hour of direst peril. Perhaps D’s face is more fetching than the other ones.”
“The other ones?” the count asked, his features twisting with confusion as he looked at the man in question. “You mean to say he has other faces?”
“Yep,” said the hoarse voice.
Braujou stared strangely at D’s left hand.
“Two more. Valcua’s and—”
Sue gasped. The second the Ultimate Noble’s name had been mentioned, D’s face had been transformed into Valcua’s, as if the man had just noticed the other personality that slumbered within him.
As Braujou leveled his long spear, the expression he wore was colored more with shock than alarm. Suddenly there were two of the villain. His reaction was understandable.
“What’s all this?”
“I’m Val . . . cua,” the man responded sleepily. “Just a moment . . . I’ll fix you up . . . right away.”
Naturally, this remark was directed to the real Valcua, but in an inhospitable turn of events, the grand duke had the same look in his eyes as Count Braujou as he stared at the man who wore his face.
“Who—who are you?”
Though it wouldn’t have been strange for D, Braujou, the hoarse voice, or even Sue to pose this question, it had actually come from Valcua.
Apparently the man couldn’t comprehend the query, because he stood there rather stupidly, tilting his head a little to one side and then the other before he said, “I’m Valcua.” This time his voice was steady. “I’m you. And as a result, I can’t let your wound go untreated. Let me see it.”
And having said this, the man was just about to step forward when the head of the long spear zipped through his back and jutted from his chest.
A commotion like tall grass rustling in the breeze went through Valcua’s retainers and Sue, while the man who’d been stabbed, D, and Valcua didn’t say a word. It made for an eerie scene.
“Nothing could be more trouble than having another Ultimate Noble,” Braujou said as he twisted the head of his spear from side to side.
The strange creature who could’ve been dubbed Valcua Two didn’t bleed a drop, showed no signs of pain, and didn’t seem the least bit interested in this turn of events.
“I knew all along there’d be no point in doing this. But how about this?”
Pulling the spear free with a twist of his arm, the count made a horizontal swipe at the new Valcua. The ten-foot-long head of the spear became a serpent, heavy and sharp. The decapitation made a satisfying sound.
“I’ll be damned!” Braujou exclaimed with admiration, adjusting his stance with the long spear.
Valcua Two’s head hadn’t gone flying. The instant it’d been severed, his hand had pressed it down from above—the same way Braujou had saved himself from Glencalibur’s attack. The mark from his decapitation vanished in the blink of an eye.
“This is bothersome. I could probably cut him to pieces and not fare any better. Hmm, I bet I could boil or fry him, and he still wouldn’t die,” Braujou mused, scratching the side of his nose with the butt of his spear. “D, this bastard has your face, too. Do something about him!”
While this request to “do something” probably put D in a difficult position, it would also be accurate to say he wasn’t entirely unconnected to the matter.
“There are two Valcuas. There are two of me. Does that mean Valcua is me, and I am Valcua?”
When the cryptic youth made that equally cryptic remark, Sue suddenly looked up, and her cheeks immediately flushed.
“That’s not all there are,” the Ultimate Noble said in a voice that seemed to rumble from the depths of the earth. “There’s one other. D, are you sure you don’t know why the Sacred Ancestor would give me this character?”
“Why do you think I would?”
“Didn’t you just say it yourself? That I am you. And isn’t there something else that you didn’t say? That I am the Sacred Ancestor.”
Sue was reeling. Valcua’s words had a great impact on her; her head was swimming so badly she had to shut her eyes. I am the Sacred Ancestor. Who was that I supposed to be? Was it Valcua, or was it . . .
“See to his wound,” D said.
“Hey!” Braujou shouted, making his objection known.
“We get Sue and Matthew. That’s the price.”
“Come here. Heal me.”
Seemingly guided by Valcua’s request, the stranger with his face went over to the genuine article and put his hand against the grand duke’s chest. Valcua treating Valcua—the sight was both strange and disturbing, but no one there was amused or frightened.
And then everyone heard an unexpected remark: “I can’t fix this.”
“What?” Valcua exclaimed, raising an eyebrow, while Count Braujou’s lips twisted into a grin.
“This wound was dealt by someone with skill equal to my own. He cut through not only flesh and bone, but through the fount of life. No one, god or demon, can help you now.”
The count laughed. One Valcua had declared that the other Valcua was untreatable. Undeniably, there was a strange kind of humor to that.
“So, what are we supposed to do? Could D heal it?” Valcua asked, his voice charged with pain. It sounded like he was cross-examining his other self.
“He’s the same as me. He can’t heal you.”
“What then?”
“The other me—he might be able to.”
Though that answer was perfectly ordinary, it turned Sue’s spine to ice.
“Then bring him out!”
“I’m not in control of him. There’s no telling what he might do.”
“What’s all this talk about another you and not being in control of someone?” the count said. “D, I can’t wait any longer. Valcua’s lying right there. This is the perfect opportunity. I’m going to dispose of him.”
“Hey, don’t do that!” the hoarse voice called out to stop Braujou, but its request wasn’t heeded.
The Nobleman swung his great spear around and made a lightning-swift thrust at Valcua. When a silvery flash from below sent the head of the spear flying, the count growled, “What are you doing?” Flames fairly shot from his eyes as he glared at D.
“He’ll pay his way,” D answered.
“You son of a bitch—”
Rage filled his face and his weapon. The count swung his spear at D.
Holding his sword upright to parry the blow, D felt the terrific impact all the way up to his shoulder. As the Hunter leaped, his blade limned a blue arc.
Barely managing to parry a blow that looked like it was going to split both his head and his spear, Braujou raised his weapon directly overhead and whipped it toward the floor.
The hall shook. Sue let out a scream.
When D landed, along with a section of the falling ceiling, a fat crack opened at his feet. The marble floor he stepped on to avoid it crumbled, throwing D badly off balance. The long spear moved in a merciless streak toward his chest, and though D barely managed to knock it away, he couldn’t assume a posture that would allow him to attack. Braujou continued his jabs, determined to keep the Hunter from having any breathing room. Dodging and parrying, D slid across the floor, his feet tormented with brief snatches of stability. The second he was on stable footing, the long spear would probably pierce his chest.
D’s feet stopped moving. Braujou hauled back his spear. The moment of truth seared itself into Sue’s retinas in slow motion.
The dance of life and death came to a sudden halt. Both men turned in the same direction simultaneously. And Sue followed their eyes as well.
Dressed in silvery raiment, a man she’d never seen before stood before them. A man whose mere presence was enough to put an end to D and Count Braujou’s deadly battle.
“O Sacred Ancestor!”
Sue didn’t know who said this, but she gave herself over to the feelings the ring of the words stirred in her. Scalding heat scorched her heart, and bitter cold froze her organs. A million thoughts crowded her mind, and every time she managed to focus it again, chaos ensued, just from those words.
“So, the other one—that was the great one?” Count Braujou said, his tone one of piety. “In that case, he can do anything. Even save Valcua.”
“It’s you . . . milord.” Valcua’s tone was also stuporous. He’d said milord. His nemesis had banished him to outer space, but the grand duke couldn’t help but address him with respect. Out in the universe, colossal nebulae were born, absorbing whole constellations—and this was akin to that.
From nowhere in particular, something like fog began to flood the room.
“It’s a fragment of the akashic record,” the Sacred Ancestor said. “Someone has managed to get a peek at it, though its contents are difficult to decipher even for me. But that which isn’t meant to be seen truly shouldn’t be seen. Having broken that taboo, the person’s existence is erased from history. And now look! The akashic record seeps from the vault, and the universe as we know it may end. The history carved into that space-time is vanishing. Because history is made of time.”
By this point, the existence of the man called Kima had been wiped from Valcua’s brain, and also from the memories of every living creature that knew him.
“How horrible!” Count Braujou said, his expression growing pale.
“That can’t happen,” Valcua said, squeezing his hand into a fist.
“What can I do, Sacred Ancestor?” Braujou asked.
“You can’t do anything.”
“Excuse me?”
“For that matter, it’s probably beyond Valcua too. The only one here who might be able to help is the man called D. Even I can’t tell how great his power might be. Valcua, do you wish to possess the same power as D?”
The grand duke was at a loss for words.
“D fought you, and he was able to heal the wound you dealt him. However, nothing save destruction awaits you now. And when that comes, you will have lost to D.”
A voice that seemed to drag the psyches of any who heard it into a pit of darkness—was this the voice of the Sacred Ancestor?
However, Valcua laughed in a low voice, “Me lose? My defeat will come when someone reduces me to dust and scatters that dust in the wind. This isn’t finished yet. D and I both still draw breath.”
The Sacred Ancestor’s right hand made a movement that looked like he was snatching something out of the air: a piece of the fog. Running his eyes over it, the Sacred Ancestor said, “It’s recorded right here. It says quite clearly that you lose.”
-
II
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“Ridiculous!” Valcua boomed. Still, the Ultimate Noble’s confidence seemed shaken. “I don’t believe that. Not as long as I can still stand on my own two feet.”
“The pronouncements of the akashic record are fate itself,” said the Sacred Ancestor. “No one can escape his fate . . . With the exception of one method, that is.”
For a second, Valcua’s eyes gave off a fierce gleam.
“Ah . . . and what’s that?” the hoarse voice asked.
“Rewriting the akashic record,” the Sacred Ancestor replied without hesitation.
“Rewrite it? Something already written in the akashic record?”
The cries of the hoarse voice, Braujou, and Valcua all sounded as one.
“But . . . who could do that?”
Their gazes focused on the face of the Sacred Ancestor.
“I alone. However, you could do it as we ll, Valcua—if I were to do this.”
No one knew when he’d moved to Valcua’s side. Or perhaps it was Valcua who’d gone over to him without even realizing it.
The two bodies overlapped.
“What in the—” Braujou shouted, his cry a showcase of overwhelming surprise and despair. The body of the Sacred Ancestor had slipped right into Valcua’s.
“That damn Valcua—is he getting the power of the Sacred Ancestor?”
It was Count Braujou who responded to the hoarse voice. His long spear leaped into action, but then a crimson streak pierced the count’s body. Valcua’s retainers had fired their beam cannons on the count, and every blast sank into his skin or clothes.
As the fusillade continued, Braujou’s long spear limned an arc. The flashes reversed direction. The retainers they penetrated were instantly reduced to ions—all of the deadly flashes had been deflected back at them by the head of Count Braujou’s spear.
“He must be slain now!” the count exclaimed, the words spilling from him like a gout of blood as fierce determination clung to his face. The count knew exactly what this weird unification would mean.
Though he was well within striking distance, he simply couldn’t follow through. Adjusting his grip on the spear, he prepared to hurl it.
Valcua balled his right hand into a fist and raised it. His fingers opened just in front of his chest. A crimson sphere less than two inches in diameter floated there.
The long spear flew. It could have penetrated Valcua’s heart, but it scored a direct hit on the sphere instead. As it did so, the great twenty-foot spear never slowed down, and the crimson sphere swallowed it up.
“This is the Sacred Ancestor’s—I mean my—blood sphere,” Valcua told them in a tone of wonder. His wounded abdomen had ceased bleeding. “In days long past, the Sacred Ancestor was my sworn foe. The reason for that you wouldn’t know. I wasn’t simply some bloodthirsty fiend. Everything I did was in rebellion against the Sacred Ancestor—but I don’t expect you to believe that.”
His eyes turned to D, and then bored through Braujou. They weren’t the eyes of the old Valcua.
“I—” he began to say, and then he squinted. His gaze was focused on the doorway far to the rear of Braujou.
Braujou turned around.
A pair of figures was standing there.
“Miranda?” he said with a sort of nostalgia.
“Matthew!” Sue said, barely squeezing his name out. “Matt—I’m so glad you’re here!”
“I got him out of prison,” Miranda informed them, shooting a scornful glance at Matthew to her left. He carried a large crossbow.
“I snuck into the castle through the basement. Fooling the defense systems was child’s play. And in one of those subterranean cells I found this boy. I’ve had nothing but trouble every time I meet this man—I mean, this child. I was going to leave him to his fate, but since that seemed too cruel I brought him with me. I even armed him with a weapon from one of the guards. So stay right there, and don’t make a move.”
Given the duchess’s keen senses, it must have been quite easy for her to find the group here.
Her pale visage turned toward Braujou. Her face had a red line running between the eyes to the tip of her chin. Her favorite white dress was stained red.
“I heard what you were talking about. Braujou, there’s no longer any way to stop this bastard Valcua. Now that he has the power of the Sacred Ancestor, not even D could do that. As a result, we must combine our powers now.”
She was so lovely, and her words so shocking. This beauty had been bisected from the crotch to the top of her head. Just look. Step by step she moved toward Valcua, but at her feet she left a vivid trail of blood. As she walked, her right hand reached down the neck of her dress. When Braujou saw what it held when it came out again, he let out an astonished groan.
It was a blood-smeared but still beating heart.
“I shall go first—Braujou, you follow after.”
And saying this, Miranda poised herself to throw. A great shudder ran through her body. The sounds of a spring discharging and an arrow knifing through the air came after. Deep red spread from the spot where an iron arrow jutted from the left side of her chest.
“Matt?” Sue said, staring in disbelief at her brother as he stood with the crossbow leveled.
“No . . . I can’t let you throw that . . . at the great Valcua.”
The possessed look in Matthew’s eyes told of the influence the Ultimate Noble still had over him. However, shooting an arrow into a Noble who was trying to save him for the sake of another Noble who wanted him dead was simply too great an act of treachery.
Still clutching the arrow, Miranda took one step forward, then another. Her gait was steady. Turning to Matthew, she laughed.
“You can’t slay me without running me through the heart. And my heart is right here,” she said, and as she did, she swung her right arm.
Her heart collided with Valcua’s tiny sphere, disappearing in a terrific burst of white light.
“Braujou, I leave the rest to you!”
And then she tumbled forward in her red dress and moved no more. The instant her heart was gone, her immortal life reached its conclusion.
After watching her meet this unnatural end, Braujou turned a terrible gaze on Matthew. “Am I to defend this wretched human?” he said, spitting the words like so much gore.
The count bit his lips. His teeth tore through them, spilling bright blood.
“As a Noble I shall keep my word. D, I leave the two of them in your care!”
His massive form kicked off the ground.
Matthew, who undoubtedly remained out of his mind, took aim at the count and fired an arrow at the speed of sound.
A silvery flash intercepted the missile in midair, becoming D’s blade as he landed in front of Matthew and struck the boy over the head with the flat of his sword.
As Braujou bounded, his hand raised a longsword with a ten-foot blade. He must’ve had it under his robe. He brought the blade straight down on Valcua’s head, but the second the Ultimate Noble blocked it with his left hand, the weapon vanished. That was the work of the other little ball that floated in front of Valcua’s left hand—another blood sphere.
“So, I’m really no match for him? Well, my blood has a few tricks of its own!”
Braujou did an about-face. Turning his back on the Ultimate Noble, he reached his left hand out toward D.
“Lend me your sword!”
D threw him the same longsword that had laid out Matthew. Catching it, the count used both hands to take it in a reverse grip.
“Valcua, this is from Miranda and me!”
With a shout that shook heaven and earth, the count stabbed the blade into his own body. Its tip went through him and stretched toward Valcua’s heart with calculated precision.
The Ultimate Noble seemed to be waiting for this, moving his blood sphere up to meet it as if it were a force field. The tip of the sword was stained with gore—there was a sound like a pop as the blood sphere vanished, and the deadly blade proceeded right on target to pierce Valcua’s heart, the same blade that had pierced Braujou’s heart and absorbed his blood.
A shout that was nothing shy of a death rattle flew from Valcua’s throat, and then he fell flat on his back. Grabbing the blade with both hands, he tried to extract it. Given the girth of Braujou’s chest and the distance between the two men, the grand duke couldn’t have had more than eight inches of the blade in him. But it didn’t come out. Not only that—
“Well, I’ll be! It’s still sinking into him, isn’t it?”
Just as the hoarse voice had indicated, Valcua’s struggles were in vain as D’s sword—covered with Braujou’s blood—slowly but surely sank into the men’s overlapped forms.
His strength perhaps spent, Valcua took his right hand away from the blade and reached up into the air. It snatched at the drifting fog. A second passed, then two—and the hand fell limply.
Sue raced over to D. Before showing any concern for Matthew, she said, “I wonder if he’s dead.”
The first words out of her mouth were what concerned her the most: Valcua.
“Nope,” the left hand said curtly. “He’s still clenching his fist.”
When Sue’s eyes finally focused on Valcua’s hand and the bit of white that spilled from it, the Ultimate Noble’s eyes opened and gave off a golden light. The light shot up into the void. Like a magnificent but vain attempt to contact extraterrestrial life, it connected the dark heavens with the earth.
“Take Matthew and go outside,” D told her, pulling out needles of plain wood and hurling them at Valcua’s heart. They struck him, or at least they appeared to for a second, and then they reversed direction and were stopped by the left arm D held up. The five needles stuck in him from the wrist to the elbow, and bright blood coursed out.
When D lowered his arm, he looked over at Valcua. He stood like an angry deity with Braujou’s longsword-skewered corpse at his feet and his face turned up to the void.
In a tone that carried true astonishment, the hoarse voice said, “This clown took the part of the akashic record that shows his death and squashed it in his hand.”
“Precisely,” Valcua responded. His voice was transmitted directly to D’s brain without his lips ever moving. “I’ve acquired telepathy. Do you know how? It was given to me by creatures in another galaxy using a hyperlight communications system faster than a laser. Oh, here comes another one! It seems they simply can’t restrain their desire to make their existence known and share their knowledge and power.”
D ran. The Ultimate Noble was getting powers from extraterrestrial civilizations. He had to be destroyed before he truly became the ultimate form of life!
As the Hunter dashed, his right hand reached down. Getting a grip on the longsword with his fingertips, he made what was literally a do-or-die strike—driving the sword hilt-deep into Valcua’s heart.
For a second, the hyperlight communication ceased.
“Ah, the power’s leaving me. So, this is how Glencalibur feels?”
Valcua’s magic sword pierced its own master.
“Destroyed,” Valcua said, staggering. “I am destroyed . . . No, I would’ve been destroyed . . . once upon a time. D, I’ve received the power of immortality from countless millions of miles away.”
Without a sound, Glencalibur flew straight at D. The instant that D got a grip on its hilt to stop it, Valcua slowly opened the eyes he’d had shut. His eyes had no pupils, just a golden glow.
-
III
-
“I can manipulate the akashic record as I choose, tapping the knowledge of the universe—I’m more than just a living being now, D,” Valcua said, his voice clear and resounding.
In the depths of the white fog a golden light glowed. The leak from the record was growing stronger.
“What are you, then?” D asked. Valcua’s declaration should’ve been shocking, but neither it nor the mysterious vigor that accompanied it seemed to shake the young man’s psyche in the least.
“What you see before you—call me an entity.”
“Are you trying to say you’re the pinnacle of evolution?” the hoarse voice said, adding in a sneering tone, “Another name for that might be has-been.”
Valcua’s eyes stared at the Hunter’s left hand.
“Gaaaaah!” it screamed, its tiny face sinking back into the palm at the same time D made a horizontal swipe with Glencalibur at Valcua’s neck. Though the Hunter felt it make contact, the grand duke didn’t fall. A minor spasm passed through D’s right hand. It was a very bizarre reaction. Searing pain burned in his brain.
As the young man in black fell backward without a word, Valcua said, “Ah, the death throes of one so beautiful are an entertaining sight. However, that’s just proof that I haven’t yet become the Ultimate Noble. The fact that something like beauty can still affect me . . .”
While D was down on one knee mastering his pain, Sue ran over to him, saying, “D—hang on!”
When she turned to look at Valcua, her eyes glistened with tears.
“Stop it already! Count Braujou and Ms. Miranda are both gone now, all to protect us. Just quit it. I don’t care what happens to me! Once I go to see my mother, it’ll all be over. Just let him live!”
Shrouded in fog, Valcua listened to her admirable plea, coming like a cry from her very soul. He nodded.
“That’s a good attitude to have. And my aim was the two of you. Very well, I shall spare D. However, D, you have to drink the girl’s blood. If you do, I’ll guarantee your survival.”
Tears spilled from Sue’s eyes as if forced out of her. And the light that shone through those tears was one of pure anger.
What a heartless demand, to have the person who wanted to defend Sue drink the blood of the very girl he should’ve saved!
“No, no, no!” Sue cried, shaking her head madly. The Noble before her eyes was someone she absolutely could not accept. The moment Matthew had raised his hand against Miranda, she’d been freed of his brainwashing. “Aren’t you supposed to be the ultimate? You’re just—just a monster that got more power than it deserved. Why, you can’t even control your power properly.”
“I can’t? You say Valcua can’t control his own power? This is most bizarre . . .”
Golden eyes with no pupils glared at Sue, and a part of the fog drifted in front of them.
“Ah, the akashic record informs me that something interesting is about to occur. Humans don’t give up easily either, I guess.”
The grand duke raised his right foot.
-
At that moment, somewhere, a certain button was pushed. The megaquake generator located six miles beneath the Capital sent a transmission of a massive earthquake to the northern Frontier at light speed, and said message was opened directly beneath the center of that sector—at a depth of a scant hundred yards. One trillion joules of energy was considered sufficient power to level not only Valcua’s kingdom, but also the entirety of the northern Frontier.
Lowering his foot gently, Valcua said, “This brings to a conclusion my relations with the human race.”
At that instant, the megaquake energy vanished without a trace.
Here was a Noble who could make an asteroid disappear or negate vast subterranean energies—he even had the power to rewrite the history of the universe as he saw fit. Who could slay him? Who could even fight him?
“Dear me, at some point I’ve become inured to the Hunter’s beauty. Very good. D, drink her blood. Then you may leave this land as if nothing ever happened and continue hunting Nobility. I’ll have nothing further to do with the humans now. Here in my castle I shall explore the wisdom of the universe for all eternity.”
Sue felt something clamp down on her shoulders with substantial strength. She didn’t want to know how the face of the young man behind her appeared as he looked at her.
“It’s okay, D,” the girl said, and then she glared at Valcua. “You still have something against me. Until you move beyond those feelings, you’ll never be the ultimate anything!”
“D,” Valcua said, prodding the Hunter. “It’s written in the akashic record. Your fate is to do exactly as I told you. Go ahead and drink.”
Sue shut her eyes.
A white fog drifted through their world.
Hot breath fell on the nape of Sue’s neck.
I knew his breath would be warm, she thought.
A mysterious peace of mind enveloped Sue.
Her right shoulder grew lighter unexpectedly. Reaching his hand out before him, D had caught hold of something.
“No! You—” Valcua cried out in shock.
He saw two points of light blazing from the depths of the fog, so red they froze his blood—they were D’s eyes.
“You—you son of a bitch,” the grand duke stammered. “You can change the akashic record?”
Sue felt the warmth of the hand that rested on her left shoulder. There was no mistaking the strong palm of the hand of the man who’d kept her safe.
“You’ve played me false!” Valcua shouted, although whom that was directed at was unclear.
Crouching down, he grabbed D’s sword from where it lay in the ashes of Braujou’s chest. Above him, the vision of beauty in black was descending. In the eyes of both Valcua and Sue, he looked for all the world like some gorgeous supernatural bird. Then there was a gleam of silver—and the sharp clang of steel meeting steel.
Valcua held his blade horizontally overhead, while D stood poised as if chopping wood. The fog split vertically, and in exactly the same fashion Valcua’s head opened down the middle all the way to the throat.
Discarding his blade, Valcua used his hands to press his head back together again. His flesh closed. When he opened his mouth, a number of red spheres spilled out, drifting toward D.
In D’s hands, Glencalibur zipped out and the blood spheres fell to the ground, where they scattered in ordinary splashes of red.
“You must hear me out,” Valcua said.
Splitting open from the top of his head to between the eyes, the grand duke had a vermilion line from the bridge of his nose down to his lips that would no longer fade away. With every word Valcua spoke, the gap grew wider and blood bubbled out. His robe was no longer golden.
“Listen to me, D,” the Ultimate Noble continued. “I was created by the Sacred Ancestor. And he told me something: That I was his only success. I didn’t know what that meant. It was five thousand years later that I became crazed with slaughter after the meaning of those words and the hopelessness of my fate came to me. He told me then he didn’t consider me his only success. He’d given that title to someone else, he said. And he told me what fate lay in store for me. Knowing that, I had to fight, had to kill to live. D, so long as we can be destroyed, no Noble can be the ultimate!”
His face split, and the blood that flowed out splattered on the floor. His grip had loosened. The power of Grand Duke Valcua—the Ultimate Noble—was now nearly spent.
Suddenly, he looked up. There were a hundred billion stars in the night sky.
“While I was in exile out there, I learned a great many things—about the Nobility, about humans, about their feelings . . . D, I didn’t even want to return to Earth.”
Coughing harshly, he spat up blood. In midair the blood became a tiny sphere that glided without making a sound—toward Sue.
“Who brought you back?” D asked.
“There is only one person who could’ve. The bastard intended to see me slain. I see that now. Because he’s inside of me. Perhaps he was afraid that if he left me out there in the depths of space I might come back someday. Or perhaps he feared I might become a threat to the universe itself. He brought me back after five thousand years, D, because you were here. A man who could slay the Ultimate Noble—his only success.”
It was unclear whether he noticed the blood sphere, but D didn’t move a muscle. Nor did Sue. Fresh tears filled her eyes.
Turning his right hand around, Valcua made a sweeping motion. The blood sphere burst.
“Ah, at long last,” the Ultimate Noble cried out to the void. His eyes and even his countenance glowed with superhuman joy. “I have moved beyond hate. Your wish has been granted, O Sacred Ancestor! I am finally the Ultimate Noble—”
A heartbeat later, his body split vertically, collapsing on the spot with a fountain of blood that seemed to turn the place into a sea of red.
“He was a success,” D muttered in a low voice.
“No, a failure,” a voice said.
The strange man was standing in the spot where Valcua had stood. He had the face of the Sacred Ancestor, but at the same time it also looked like Valcua’s face, and D’s.
“You were my only success,” he said. “But that’s not to say you’re perfect yet. Your spirit is strong but too soft. And that is why—”
D sensed someone to his rear.
“Matthew?”
“What’s he doing?” D asked, never taking his eyes off the man.
“Where are you going?” Sue asked, her eyes catching an image of Matthew going deeper and deeper into the fog.
“He’s headed toward the vault and the akashic record,” the man said. “The boy has part of my—which is to say, Valcua’s—nature still planted in his brain. Perpetuating my will, he’ll most likely modify the record by force. I might yet live again and change the world.”
Taking Sue under one arm, D broke into a run. Beyond the fog spraying toward him, he could make out a hazy black figure.
“D, if it comes to that, and I mean if,” Sue said, looking up in desperation, “if there’s no way to make Matthew his old self again, and he tries to mess with the akashic record . . .”
Her voice dying out, Sue bit down on her lip.
“I entered a contract to protect the two of you.”
Though fog lay on all sides of him, D could tell they were in a tremendously vast place. He couldn’t feel any weight in his left hand. And there was no trace of Sue. Human beings couldn’t enter the vault of the akashic record.
Matthew was up ahead. To the naked eye, he seemed to be thirty feet away. However, the distance was actually infinite.
Clawing with both hands, Matthew tore at the fog.
D ran without saying a word.
Matthew turned in his direction. His lips were twisted into a grin.
“Stay back, D,” he said, straightening himself up. “You understand, don’t you? I obtained part of the Sacred Ancestor’s power. And the great Valcua, too, is within me. Alone, there’s nothing you can do. Ha! I can read this. I can read the whole akashic record. Valcua is telling me to resurrect him—but what the Sacred Ancestor has to say is even more incredible. He says I should erase this world completely from the record. Interesting, isn’t it, D? Which should I do?”
Matthew grinned. He’d been warped from the very beginning, before the Sacred Ancestor or Valcua had come into his life. However, the reason they entered him and he obeyed them was because his will was weak, as anyone could see. Lusting after Sue, he’d been able to fight back his urges and pretend to be a good older brother only because his mother had been there. When that great weight had been lifted from him and his true self had been unleashed, he found that he didn’t mind being a servant of the Nobility. The Nobility had knowledge and power. And when they gave him those gifts, he’d displayed the typical weakling’s reaction by laughing haughtily.
He could read the record. The past, present, and future of everything in the universe . . .
“Ah, yes. D, let’s see who you really are.”
A fiendish look spread across Matthew’s face, and he stuck his right hand out in front of his chest, plucking a bit of fog from the air. He could pull whatever he liked from the record at any place and time.
As Matthew stared at the fog, his expression changed immediately.
“Impossible . . . It can’t be!” the boy exclaimed, his surprise so great his face wore a look of utter stupefaction as he stared at D.
The Hunter had closed to within six feet of him, but Matthew wasn’t worried. He knew although it appeared to the naked eye to be six feet, the space between them was infinite.
“What are you going to do about Sue?” D asked.
“Sue? Who’s that? All that aside, I’m surprised . . . Don’t tell me you . . . Oh, Sue? I have plans for her. I’m going to take her at my leisure. I’m changing the record to reflect that. Actually, you’re going to cut me down here, but I’ll change that too. Don’t worry. I’ll arrange it so that after I’ve had my way with her, she bites off her own tongue and dies—”
As the boy laughed uncontrollably, a silvery flash zipped to the end of his nose.
“What the—” Matthew exclaimed, reeling back and putting his hand to the tip of his nose. Something red dripped from it.
“You cut me?” he said, purple madness turning to white fear. “How could you cut me? Between you and me, there must be—”
His eye burned with red reflected from D’s eyes. Eyes narrowed with rage, fangs peeking from vermilion lips—it was clearly the face of a vampire.
“Stop, D! You really are the Sacred Ancestor’s own—”
The boy’s words were cut short by a stark flash of light.
As he heard the sound of Matthew’s body falling, D turned his gaze to where the boy’s head lay at his feet.
“He brought it on himself,” the hoarse voice was heard to comment wearily. “But that means your contract—well, that can’t be helped, can it?”
“I’ll uphold the contract,” D said.
“Excuse me?”
Around that dubious voice and the vision of beauty, the white fog eddied both lovingly and fearfully.
-
About a month later, the Capital dispatched yet another survey party to Valcua’s kingdom. The vast expanse of land dotted with stands of trees that they found there was the Frontier, plain and simple. However, in the rocky region in the center of that wilderness they discovered a tiny red sphere and a longsword half-buried beneath boulders, and both of these items were eerily heavy. When the combined efforts of all their trailer trucks didn’t budge them an inch, the men could only take pictures and leave them where they were. The wind that blew from the far reaches of the endless gray wilderness made the survey party tremble to the last man, and later they would question if it all hadn’t been a dream. Of course, they had no way of knowing that everything in the kingdom that had existed in that region a month earlier was packed into that sphere.
-
Five years later, Sue left her hometown and the farm she had made an unqualified success through impressive teamwork, traveling to the eastern Frontier to be married to the owner of a musical-instrument shop. Matthew took a red-haired girl as his wife. She was a city girl, and though she wasn’t strong, she had a warm heart.
“I don’t know if I’m good enough for you,” a bashful-looking man three years Sue’s senior told the girl.
Smiling, Sue said, “My late mother told me to marry someone like you, you know.”
And then, in her heart of hearts, she suddenly found herself asking, But was that really what happened?
After working with Matthew to slay the Ultimate Noble, doubts occasionally rose in her mind like ripples on a pond. There was something different about all this. As if it weren’t the way her life had really gone. Such suspicions would undoubtedly cling to her all her life, and Sue understood that she simply had to accept it. Throughout her life with the man she loved, those doubts might be a heavy load to bear. She didn’t let that stop her.
Presently she got married, had children, raised a family, and heard that Matthew had died. And as she grew old, Sue sometimes had a strange dream. In it, an impossibly beautiful young man in black was watching her intently from the depths of a white fog. Though his gaze was stern and icy, Sue wasn’t afraid. Whenever she saw him, her heart raced like a young girl’s. And every time, without fail, she told him the same thing: It’s okay. I had a happy life. Just like my mother wanted.
And with that a faint smile skimmed across the lips of that gorgeous young man, and every time she had the dream, Sue was proud to have put it there. It was just such a smile.
-
END