LUI, the Retrieval Unit

Chapter 6

I

Astonishingly enough, all of the passengers except one were only slightly injured. Dorleac was holding his left shoulder and groaning, and on examining him Harman immediately declared, “Yeah, it’s broken, all right.”

The whole group was in the vehicle, which D had righted.

“All the cyborg horses got pinned under the stagecoach and killed. What are we gonna do?” Al asked, gazing at the sheriff anxiously.

Each face wore a few bruises, and any scrapes that were bleeding had been treated with the first-aid kit. It was a miracle they’d gotten off so lightly, being in a stagecoach that’d rolled three times.

For the time being, Harman and Claire had stabilized Dorleac’s arm and shoulder with bandages.

“Timewise, we should be about an hour from Gasburke. Nothing to do but wait for the rain to let up, then walk it,” Louise said, making her decision clear. “There’s just one problem.”

Without even needing to follow her gaze, the attention of all was focused on JJ where he lay on the floor in front of the cage. He was sleeping.

JJ could no longer remember just how long it’d been raining. It’d been two days since he’d entered the forest. For a second time, JJ was heading into twilight.

It was back in the village of Sacrell that he’d learned he wasn’t the only one after this quarry. Another rival calling themselves the Wolfman gang got too big for their britches and made a move against his main competitor, who’d then buried every last one of them; that was all well and good, but next it would be JJ’s turn. At the very least, he wanted to avoid running into the other guy in front of their quarry—that was one thought he had, but on the other hand, JJ couldn’t stop the hot red thrill of battle no Hunter could hide as it rose up through him from his ankles.

I’d like to try fighting him.

JJ shook his head to change his train of thought. He had to find his quarry as soon as he could—before sundown, if at all possible.

Apparently his luck hadn’t run out yet, something JJ knew the second he saw that the moon-watching tree growing on the slope twisted to the right, true to the map he’d memorized.

Thirty feet up ahead lay the vast stone ruins. There were stone walls and watchtowers that’d had their crystal facings pried off, while the arrow slit–riddled stone parapets had all crumbled and were beaten with rain. More than the hollowness of millennia of decay, they left themselves open to the brutal elements. Easily covering more than ten acres, this sprawling expanse of rubble also did nothing to dampen JJ’s joy at arriving there. It was all just like the map. So the rest should be, too.

Passing through a bulkhead where moss and weeds were king, he'd advanced on his steed for about five minutes when he came to a great pair of gates adorned with a crest at what had to be the graveyard. The set of gates opened down the middle, but the one on his right had fallen, while the one on the left was barely still attached to the frame. Beyond the gates, a crystal path ran straight for about a hundred feet, and at the end of it there towered an exquisite mausoleum that had proudly weathered five thousand years.

JJ’s eyes were drawn to the marble door. Beyond it, his quarry’s coffin should’ve lain, weathering the ages.

“Sorry, I know you’ve been sleeping here peacefully for forty-seven centuries, but so long as your grave’s here, the village says the Capital won’t grant them an expansion budget. I don’t know if you Nobles have a heaven or not, but head off to your reward in peace.”

When JJ finished saying that, he got off his steed at the door to the resting place. Taking his protection canceler off his saddle, he set it to disarm any kind of mechanical defenses and waited for the OK light to flash. Though it usually finished with even high-ranking Nobility in ten seconds, this time it was over thirty seconds before the blue light lit up. That was proof the grave and its occupant had been safeguarded by a terribly advanced defense system.

JJ let out a deep breath and switched his head into battle mode. Somewhere in his mind, his long string of victories always inspired overconfidence and inattentiveness, and he had to wait until those were gone again completely.

And while he was doing that, his opponent attacked. He was dressed in the resplendent garb of the typical Nobleman. However, he had dozens of tiny spheres circling him at a dizzying pace. As the energy to drive any machinery should’ve been cut, the spheres were undoubtedly operating on some unknown power source that wasn’t bound by the natural laws of our world.

JJ suddenly stoked the rapidly dwindling urge to fight within himself. This will be over in a moment, instinct told him.

Before his foe could be engulfed in murderous intent, JJ kicked off the ground. Pulling out his sword, sheath and all, in midair, he held it lengthwise up by his eyes, his hands grasping both the hilt and the end of the sheath. Just as his right hand drew the blade, his left swung around. The blade that sped at his foe’s heart was one that’d been concealed at the bottom of the sheath.

One of the spheres circling his foe intercepted JJ’s blade in midair. The instant the two made contact, the blade was vaporized in a flash of light, and three more spheres went after JJ.

A split second before they could hit him, JJ made his landing. A visor covered his face, and he used his left hand to shield his chest and his right to cover his abdomen. He wasn’t in a position where he could dodge. All he could do now was trust in the merchant who’d sold him this armor.

Blistering heat scalded his arm. Making a great leap backward, JJ desperately tore off the gauntlets. Throwing them to the ground with flames still spouting from them, he poised himself for action. His will to fight wasn’t shaken, but his thoughts settled on escape. He wasn’t at all confident he could elude the spheres, however.

As if he’d just read the Hunter’s mind, the enemy’s lips twisted into a smile. The spheres raced forward. But they halted midway between JJ and his foe.

His opponent turned to the right.

In a stand of trees that’d been reduced to shadows, there stood a figure in a black coat. More than the eldritch aura that billowed from him, it might’ve been his evident beauty despite all the shadows that’d frozen the Nobleman.

“D,” JJ murmured.

The shadowy figure stepped forward. The spheres glided into action.

D swung his right arm. Undoubtedly it was the hem of his coat that’d whipped up the wind. JJ bent backward from it, and his foe reeled as well.

A flash of light bleached the Noble’s form white. Spheres blown into confusion by the wind had collided. The ring of light spread everywhere. And from its center leapt the figure in black. Trailing smoke, D landed right in front of the Nobleman, and then carved him from the top of his head all the way to his crotch with a single stroke.

Having picked himself up again, JJ opened his eyes just in time to see D pull his blade out of his opponent’s chest and return it to its scabbard. Though he turned in JJ’s direction, it was unclear whether or not his eyes even registered the man.

The figure of unearthly beauty returned in silence to the spot where he’d first appeared, and there he mounted the waiting cyborg horse. Darkness began to cover the forest. While horse and rider melted into that darkness as if returning to their lair, JJ said nothing but merely watched them go.

There goes a whole other form of life, he thought. Something was leaving that had the same shape as him, but was something else entirely. A sense of loss he’d never once felt on encountering any enemy, no matter how great, now filled the man from head to toe. Shaking his head, he crouched down and retrieved the gauntlets for his arms.

“You look to be in pain,” a clearly mocking voice said, rising from the ground. The location was that of his foe—who was only dust. Before JJ’s astonished eyes, his foe slowly got up. He was back in his original state.

“Nothing is so painful as learning that confidence and pride as tough as iron are but castles built on sand. How will you live now? No matter how you spend your days, you shall carry the feeling of defeat now branded on your heart until the day you die!”

“Who . . . who are you?”

“I am the master of this world. This is a dream that comes to me,” said his foe, not a single wound or speck of blood on him.

“A dream?”

“I see. This is a blow severe enough to make you want to quit being a Hunter.”

“Shut up,” JJ said, his right hand tightening its grip on his sword.

“I believe I just told you this is my dream—if you don’t believe me, try throwing that here.” His foe tapped the left side of his chest with one hand.

An intense hatred rose in the man’s throat. JJ’s blade flew with peerless accuracy, piercing his foe’s heart. Grabbing the hilt that protruded from his chest, the enemy threw the weapon back at JJ. His body wouldn’t move. A blistering-hot pain passed through his chest and out his back.

“Does it hurt?”

The question left JJ astonished. Looking down, he saw that the hilt had stopped against his chest. The tip of the blade was jutting from his back. And yet, there was no pain.

When his foe waved his right hand, the blade vanished.

“In dreams, we can disregard all the laws of the world. Like so.”

The enemy walked toward him. With his first stride, his form became that of D.

“Emotions, however—hatred and anger—they are no different than normal. Set yourself free. You have a sword in your hand!”

Even before being told that, JJ had felt the weapon in his right hand.

“How about it? This man has taken everything from you. Are you going to say some empty compliment, like ‘I’m no match for you,’ and run off with your tail between your legs? Then again, that might suit a loser just fine.”

“Shut up.”

“Why don’t you try to make me? Do it yourself.”

“Shut up!”

He was already within striking distance. JJ’s blade slashed D from the base of the neck down through the right lung, and the rival Hunter toppled, gushing bright blood.

“How was that? How does it feel to have a dream within a dream?”

The source of the voice had returned to dust, and JJ stood alone in the resting place without a sign of another living creature. Only the voice could be heard. In JJ’s ears, it wasn’t the voice of a dream; it was one of reality.

“In dreams, it’s easy for one to open the heavy doors to their heart. You have what it takes to live here. What do you say? Will you try slaying D here?”

Before the voice urged him, JJ had found his heart whirling in a terrible conflict.

Slay D? How could I do such a thing? I should be ashamed.

However, the conflict was short lived. It only went on until the moment JJ realized, This is a dream. I’m just dreaming, after all. No matter what I do, or what happens, it has no bearing on reality. I have a right to dream. Or to live in a dream.

“I’ll slay D,” JJ murmured.

Laughter could be heard somewhere.

“I’ll be coming to your world again. Lead me back here, dream master!”

And then he woke up in the stagecoach.

II

It came as no surprise at all that JJ was subjected to a barrage of questions.

“What sort of dream did you have?” Louise asked, leading the assault.

“I don’t remember.”

“Is that always the case?”

“Generally, yeah.”

“What do you think, D?”

“Hey, don’t you trust me?”

“Sorry, but from what D’s said, I don’t think Sinistre’s about to leave us be.”

Eyes carrying malice reflected D, but the former Hunter quickly averted his gaze.

“If he says he doesn’t remember, we have no choice but to believe him.”

D’s answer was exactly right.

“In that case, untie me.”

Before JJ woke up, his hands and feet had been bound with a thin cord.

“We can’t do that, for the reason I explained. All that aside, is there any problem with staying here for the night?”

“Not really, if it’s on this road,” Al replied. “But the Frontier is still the Frontier. There are bound to be some strange things prowling around. A long time ago, I drove a wagon right through the night, and I saw a bunch of little fires moving along the horizon.”

“There is one problem.”

Everyone looked at D’s handsome visage, turning that way even as they tried not to look directly at him.

“What’s that?” Claire asked, taking a belt from her liquor bottle.

“Subterranean creatures called underworms. A little over a month ago, they wreaked havoc in the eastern Frontier. Given their migration patterns, it’ll be the western Frontier next.”

“It fits the timing, too,” Louise conceded with a nod.

“Could we maybe not have everything working together to drive us crazy?!” Harman shouted, looking like he was about to burst into tears.

At that point, JJ, who was sitting in the rearmost row of seats, looked out the windows to either side, then suddenly pointed toward the front window and said, “They’re gone.”

Everyone but Dorleac focused their attention in that direction.

“What’s gone?” Claire asked, furrowing her brow. “The cyborg horses?!” she then exclaimed.

The corpses of the six animals were nowhere to be seen.

Harman looked around on either side, finally pointing to the left window and saying, “Nope, there’s two of them over yonder!”

All eyes focused on them.

“What the hell—they’re moving?!” Claire exclaimed, the finger she’d aimed so forcefully bending back against the glass.

Though the darkness was like a hardened coat of black lacquer, by the light from the windows the passengers could manage to see some fifteen to twenty feet. At the very periphery of that area, the bodies of the white horses were indeed jolting out into the dark’s domain.

“What’s dragging ’em?” Al asked, completely riveted.

“An underworm,” Harman replied, his grip on the stake launcher tightening.

Someone let out a gasp.

The pair of corpses had been swallowed up by the ground in less than a blink of an eye. It seemed the work of nothing shy of a sudden cave-in.

“The underworm—that’s its supper,” Harman said, sweat rolling down his forehead.

“A half dozen horses—but then, each of them is half mechanical innards. I doubt they’ll fill it up very much,” Louise remarked. Turning to D, she continued, “Underworms are tremendous food hoarders. One can take ten tons of meat one day, eat it over the next week and a half, and then go to sleep for six months. I hope it’s got today’s ten tons now.”

Only stillness hung beyond the windows. A minute passed. No doubt that seemed like an eternity to those in the stagecoach.

Suddenly there was a terrific crash, and a crack shot across the windowpane. It was the half-dissolved remains of a cyborg horse. It seemed to have been partially digested, as the polymer-alloy skeleton and artificial organs gave off wisps of white smoke, while there wasn’t a trace of any sinew left. Though the remains dropped to the ground soon enough, they must’ve left some digestive acid as a parting gift, and the windowpane had begun to dissolve.

“What are we gonna do, D?”

It wasn’t the sheriff’s help Al sought. When the shit hits the fan, people choose the ones they can really count on over the chain of command.

“Do we just stay here like this and wait to get dragged under? Wouldn’t we be better off making a run for it?”

“Running would just get us the same,” Claire said in a low voice. “Underworms are said to be more than a mile long. They can move through the ground at speeds of sixty miles per hour. You’d be caught before you got five paces.”

“What’ll we do, then?” Al shoved his fist into his mouth. His chattering teeth broke the skin. Blood began to trickle out. “I’ve got a wife and kids. I only signed on for guard duty because I wanted the money to buy ’em one of those cleaning machines. I heard that even if I died they’d still get paid, so I was at peace with that. But now I’m real scared. Say, Sheriff, if I get killed by something that’s got nothing to do with Duke Sinistre, do they still pay out?”

“There’s no stipulation as such, but I’ll see to it they do. If I make it back alive, that is.”

Al groaned and dropped weakly to his knees on the floor. It was a reasonable reaction to impending death.

“D, you know how to slay an underworm?” JJ inquired.

“I’ve heard of a way. Though the body can be thousands of feet underground, apparently it keeps part of itself exposed on the surface as an observation sensor. If I can take care of that, the worm will die deep in the earth. However, its skill at camouflaging the sensor is said to border on the miraculous.”

“That’s right. The sensor might only be a foot to a foot and a quarter high, but supposedly they can even make it look like a mountain chain. But if you don’t find it, all of us will wind up crapped out by an underworm!”

D started walking—or so it appeared for the briefest of moments to eyes viewing the world through a haze—and then he reached for the lever to open the vehicle’s rear door.

“I’m going, too,” said JJ.

“I don’t trust you.”

Leaving those words like a powerful shove against the other man’s chest, the vision of beauty in black climbed down from the stagecoach. The light from the windows made the rain glisten like silvery needles.

“This is crazy. It’ll spot him with the first step!” Harman murmured.

“That’s why he’s gone out there. To get its attention on himself,” Claire said, hugging her bottle close.

D immediately crouched down and pressed his left hand to the ground.

“Hmm, can’t find it,” the hoarse voice said, its words mixing with the sound of the rain. “The bastard’s dug down more than fifteen hundred feet. Still, it can move around free as you please. Must use acid or something to bore its tunnels.”

“What about cave-ins?”

“Looks like it also secretes a hardening agent. It might even be mixed in with the acid. So the cloud has a silver lining, as they say.”

“Where’s the sensor?”

“That I don’t know. Probably got itself disguised real good. We’ll have to trick it into revealing itself!”

D advanced about twenty yards in silence. Somewhere on the surface, the sensor would be watching him and relaying that information to its body underground. But out on the barren plain, how was he supposed to defend himself from a fiend that could drag him down from the surface, and how was he to slay it?

D stuck his right hand into his coat. Rain bounced off him from head to foot. What he pulled out he then launched straight into the air. What sort of trick was this? Dozens of rough wooden needles flew straight up, forgetting entirely about coming back down again.

Once again D crouched down and pressed his left hand against the muddy ground. The enemy was coming. Coming to sate its hunger to devour everything that walked the earth. Rain lashed every inch of the Hunter.

“Here it comes!”

Even before the hoarse voice spoke, the ground beneath the Hunter’s feet gave way.

“I don’t see him. I wonder—” Claire murmured, her face pressed against the glass. From the neighboring row of seats Louise heard her. “What happened to D?”

Louise hastily pulled her face away from the windowpane. She was just about to rub her eyes, but on realizing that, she halted.

Just for a moment, she thought. That’s all.

Nearly an hour had passed since she’d entered the rocky region. Louise felt her body had reached its limits. The moment she’d first stepped among the boulders she’d been shot in the side, and now the wound was hot as fire, and she’d long since finished the water in her cooler box. Every step her cyborg horse took was like a thumb in her wound.

There was no way she could turn back. Her opponent was a killer who’d slaughtered four entire peace-loving families, seventeen people all told. She was going to bring him in if it killed her—or shoot him dead.

The gait of her cyborg steed became uncertain. Apparently it was unable to deal with all the sudden ups and downs of this mountainous path. As Louise slouched forward with a low groan, something buzzed right over her head. It was after that she heard the gunshot. Louise practically rolled out of the saddle and to the ground. And she let out another cry.

Pulling her rifle from its case, she drove away her horse, then dashed behind a boulder to her rear. Twice puffs of dust erupted down at her feet, but that didn’t concern her. Atop a pile of rocks to her right, she could see the head and shoulders of a man armed with a pneumatic gun. He looked surprisingly close, and surprisingly large.

Louise braced her rifle against her shoulder. She peered through its high-powered scope. Her opponent had no way of knowing about her secret weapon.

It was easy enough to get the man’s head centered in the crosshairs. Due to the pain in her side, she couldn’t aim for anyplace else. The weapon’s kick traveled all the way down to her wound. Confirming that the man’s head had snapped backward, Louise then curled up where she was.

Her rest was over in a few seconds. Somehow making it back to her feet, she looked up at the pile of rocks. There was no sign of the man. He must’ve fallen down the other side.

Louise started walking. Only when a figure appeared from behind the rocks did her pain leave her. Before the man could raise his weapon, Louise quickly fired from the hip. She put three rounds into him before he dropped, then after checking that he wasn’t moving, she moved closer with her rifle over her shoulder. She couldn’t let her guard down yet.

Crouching beside the supine body to grab him by the hair and raise his head, she forgot her pain again in that instant.

It was somebody else.

Going around the rocks, Louise found his horse there. Just beyond it was another—the killer’s steed. His corpse lay beside it with a bullet hole right between the eyes.

A traveler who just happened to be passing by had heard the gunshot and dismounted just as the corpse dropped there. The traveler had gotten off his horse—when he really should’ve fled—because he wanted to find out who’d shot that man dead. And he’d been slain by the sheriff’s gunfire, since her pain had left her without enough time or presence of mind to check his face or build.

Louise remembered well the actions she’d taken next. Removing all the baggage and tack from the traveler’s horse, she’d buried them along with the man’s corpse—which had been a painful endeavor that made hell pale by comparison—set the horse free, and pretended none of it had ever happened. Fortunately, she could tell at a glance that the traveler was a drifter, and in his medical kit there’d been a painkiller so powerful it bordered on recreational.

When her work was finished and she’d patted the ground flat, the ground asked her, “Are you sure this is for the best, Sheriff?” The voice she heard was coming from the depths of the earth.

She watched as six feet of freshly dug dirt slowly rose. First a hand poked out, then a shoulder, the head, and finally the traveler crawled out with three bloodstains spread across his shirt. Louise stared until the very end.

“My name is LUI. I’m the final recovery unit dispatched by Duke Sinistre. And I most certainly saw what you did. Now that you’ve destroyed all your pride and honor as a sheriff, what do you have left? To live life as a recluse someplace where nobody knows you? You may pull the wool over other people’s eyes, but you can’t fool your own heart. You’re a killer, a murderer. If someday you have a child who asks you about your past, how will you answer?”

“Stop it!”

Louise wanted to cover her ears. Instead, her finger pulled the trigger.

The traveler bent backward, falling flat on his back.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Every time Louise said the word, she squeezed her finger.

III

As soon as she stopped shooting, the traveler immediately got back up. His mouth opened, and he said, “What did I do to you? I’d never even seen you before, so why gun me down? You’re a murderer.”

“It was an accident, just a mistake!”

“Then why did you bury me? Why dig a hole six feet deep? I saw it all!”

Louise felt like her eyes had turned to stone.

The traveler vanished, and in his place—

“D?!”

“The heavens saw it, too. And so did I. Louise, you’ll be a killer all your days.”

“It’s not supposed to be like this. This—this is a dream!”

“You’re right,” D said coldly. “You’re in a dream being dreamt by Sinistre’s servant. But that doesn’t change the truthfulness of what was just replayed here. I won’t forget this, Sheriff.”

“Stop it, D . . . Nothing happened. I didn’t do anything. You—you didn’t see anything.”

“No, I saw. Saw it with my own two eyes. I won’t tell anyone. But you should keep in mind that I saw it.”

D started walking. He went right past Louise, who was stiff as a board, and got on his cyborg horse. Even after the hoofbeats had faded into the distance, Louise still couldn’t move a muscle. She felt like she’d been branded a killer and driven into the ground here like a stake, there to remain for all time.

“D . . . stop it . . . Please . . . forget . . . everything . . .”

“He sure is a cold one, isn’t he?” an unfamiliar voice said from behind her, but Louise didn’t turn around. She understood that this was a dream world. But for those who lived in this world—the dreams—everything was entirely real.

“As long as he lives, you can never hold your head up high. You can’t live with that kind of humiliation. What do you think you should do to make it easy on yourself?”

The voice of the device that called itself LUI, like directionsfrom a hypnotist, began to resound with alluring heat in Louise’sbrain.

“What do you think you should do to make it easy on yourself?”

Nothing from Louise.

“What do you think you should do . . .”

If this is a dream, it doesn’t matter what you do or what you say, Louise rationalized to herself. You’re just going to wake up anyway. Forget all this foolishness back in the real world, and live in reality.

“I just need to . . . kill him.” Though it was her own voice, it had a weird ring to it, like it was somebody else’s. “Kill D.”

A moment later, Louise awoke.

“Here it comes!”

With that hoarse cry, the mud shot up, with two lumps of it flying at D. One of the two was cut apart by his blade, and D dodged the other and closed his eyes. He was searching for any sign of the enemy. The ground beneath his feet dropped away. D didn’t fall. He stood there impassively right over a pit ten feet in diameter.

“It’s probably upset with you because of your red herrings,” the hoarse voice remarked.

His two “red herrings” had been swallowed by the pit without a trace. They had been a pair of well-digested cyborg horses.

“It might pull down the whole stagecoach next. How about giving top priority to finding that sensor?”

As if in response to the hoarse voice, D walked to the edge of the pit, and then took one step forward. The ground was about four inches below him. He’d stepped down from midair.

After he’d continued on for another fifteen or twenty feet, the ground opened its maw once again. This time the pit was more than thirty feet across. And D was above it. From the bottom of the pit it was a good sixty feet to the surface, and D was another four inches higher than that.

The underworm’s sensor still hadn’t discovered the secret to how D hovered in the air—that he had strung extremely thin wires in all directions just four inches off the ground. Metallic threads a thousandth of a micron thick had been wrapped around the needles D threw—and they had stuck in the ground hundreds of yards away, leaving D able to move through the air as he pleased.

“Here it comes again!” his left hand exclaimed.

D turned around.

Before his eyes, a humanoid shape erupted from the earth about six feet away, landing on the ground with a metallic clang.

“Oooh,” the hoarse voice said from the vicinity of D’s hip. “It’s one of them gladiators the Nobility used to amuse themselves. That’s a hell of a thing for it to have swallowed.”

Showered with rain, the figure was about seven feet tall. Its body could be described as slight of build, and from it came eight mechanical arms, each clutching a longsword in its five fingers. Its head was essentially just a cranium, and it rotated, stopping when it came to face D. Both its eyes gave off a red glow. That was the signal it had acquired a target.

The gladiators were fighting slaves who had existed in ancient times, an institution created, not surprisingly, by those who’d dubbed themselves nobility. Apparently they had originated simply as a diversion for the nobles, and the future Nobles re-created these battles for their own amusement. It was a game for them. The only thing elevating the new iteration from the cruel sport of the past was that the modern combatants were automatons—androids who would spill electronic components and electromagnetic waves instead of flesh and blood. However, as their inner workings were exquisitely arcane, from time to time they would deviate from their programming and turn their weapons on the Noble spectators. It was historical fact, just as those ancient gladiators had turned their swords on their masters.

It was said that in the Frontier sectors alone hundreds of thousands of gladiators had been manufactured, but after about a century had passed they had vanished like bubbles on a stream thanks to their malfunctions, though several thousand even now wandered the mountains and wilderness. Undoubtedly the underworm had preyed on one such unit.

The gladiator kicked mightily off the ground. As its enormous, nearly five-ton frame landed with earthshaking force, it simultaneously swept out with all eight arms. As eight streaks of light twisted and turned and sparks flew, the figure of beauty in black sailed through it all without a sound. It was on the heels of this that a frightening thing occurred. The giant attacker’s right leg was sliced off four inches from the ground as if it were so much paper. Two of its arms were thrust toward the ground to support its toppling form, the first being sliced cleanly through the back of the hand, the other losing all five fingers. Still, the machine tried to rise again, but D was standing right behind it.

Three of its arms made backward thrusts. The trio of blades could’ve split stone, but D parried them head on, one handed. His left hand drew a dagger, which he plunged into the base of the gladiator’s neck. The blade went in hilt deep as if it were sinking into flesh, and pale blue waves of electromagnetism played across the metallic body. It took less than two seconds for the gladiator to fall. Before its head could touch the ground, it came off its body, four inches off the surface.

“Did you use the you-know-what?” the hoarse voice inquired with amusement. It sounded as if it had all but forgotten the current battle. By “you-know-what,” did it mean the wire?

D nodded.

“You know, I forget just where and when we picked that stuff up.”

Both the hoarse voice and D’s face were tinged momentarily with an atypical emotion—and then it vanished. It might have been nostalgia.

D’s crisis came at that very instant. The gladiator on the ground had gotten up again thanks to its auxiliary systems. D barely managed to parry the horizontal swipe of its sword it made as soon as it stood, and the Hunter was greatly thrown off balance. Four blades assailed him from overhead. When he parried them, he was driven down on one knee. The gladiator let out an impossible, bloody laugh as it drove the remaining sword at D.

A dull explosion bounced off the automaton’s chest. Taking a blast of double-aught buckshot head on didn’t faze the five-ton machine, but it did turn its attention that way. Its momentary puzzlement also halted the powerful thrust of its sword. The enormous form bent backward, and D’s blade came down on its chest, spraying sparks as it cleaved the gladiator in two. This time the machine fell over, stilled forever, but D didn’t even spare it a backward glance, turning instead toward the stagecoach. There was a red streak across his left cheek. A little buckshot had grazed him.

The ground subsided with a roar. The stagecoach tilted wildly. For the underworm had changed its prey.

“We ain’t gonna make it in time!” the hoarse voice cried.

It had been born and raised underground. The light didn’t belong to it, but it had intelligence. Other subterranean creatures alone weren’t enough to maintain its colossal form, so it had no choice but to prey on what lived on the surface. For that very purpose it was born with an “eye” for observing the surface world. Stretching up to ten miles long, it was a collection of a trillion sensory cells, and it, along with the worm’s powerful acid for digesting prey and dissolving earth, could be called the key to its continued existence.

Now its “eye” was trained on the rain-lashed ground and the warrior engaged in deadly combat there, relaying that information to its brain where it lay fifteen hundred feet underground. Its foe was surprisingly formidable, and had foiled all its schemes. Changing tack, it decided that rather than confront him directly, it would target bigger game. In its “eye,” the foe turned to face it.

“This is a dream,” its foe in black whispered to it in a language it could understand.

For an instant, the stagecoach stopped tilting. That was all D needed. Bounding to the slope below the vehicle, he used his left hand to support its weight. Just as his legs were about to sink into the damp earth, he put all his might into his arm. It was said that, to human beings, the most frightening part about the Nobility wasn’t their hypnotic gaze, but rather their monstrous strength. However, if even the Nobles were to see this, their eyes would’ve bugged in disbelief. Literally one handed, D was pushing several tons of listing vehicle back from the brink of a pit. As a result of his efforts, he and the muddy earth beneath him were being drawn into the pit. However, as if entrusting his body to invisible wires, he sailed in a wide arc and landed on the roof of the stagecoach. His dark eyes, clear and deep, peered coolly down into the pit.

“That just leaves the sensor. Where’s it at?” the hoarse voice inquired.

“Right here,” D said, stepping lightly across the roof.

“You can’t seriously mean the stagecoach?!”

Not answering, D flew into the air.

“This!” he said, though it was unclear whose ears would catch it.

His blade struck right next to the stagecoach—stabbing through a certain something buried in the sloping edge of the pit: the corpse of the first cyborg horse that had hit the stagecoach.

The earth howled. Everyone in the stagecoach covered their ears, and even people hundreds of miles away looked up at the sky anxiously. In no time, the cries had been swallowed up by the ground.

As D stood there in the rain, the remains of the cyborg horse had vanished without a trace.

“Who’d have thought it was that, eh? The answer was right under our noses the whole time.” As the Hunter’s left hand went casually down by his side, from its vicinity the hoarse voice continued in a pensive tone, “But for all your speed, you shouldn’t have been fast enough to keep the stagecoach from getting sucked underground. Yet the underworm delayed—why is that?”

“It had a dream,” said D.

“A dream? It was the final retrieval unit’s doing? Why would it help us?”

“For Dorleac.”

“Oh, you mean it still intends to get him back alive. And one other thing—how’d you know that horse was the sensor?”

D put his left hand to his cheek.

“Ah, I see. You mean to tell me the buckshot that bounced off the gladiator hit the sensor, too? I can see where that’d get a scream out of it.”

On D’s back, his sword rasped as it returned to its sheath. Not even bothering to look at the enormous pits—scars of his deadly battle—D returned to the stagecoach.

A lithe form was in front of the door being pelted with rain.

“Welcome back, D,” Sheriff Louise said in a tone that carried flattery as she stood there to meet the Hunter with a smile.