Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts Three and Four (16 page)

“If you're going to relocate May, you'd better be quick about it,” the Hunter said.

D realized what had caused the explosion that he alone had heard. It was the same boom he'd heard on the outskirts of a certain town on the way to Krauhausen, when Miska—possessed by the Destroyer—had wiped the puppet master, Mario, out of existence.

-

II

-

The first reports on what threatened the ordinarily peaceful nights of Krauhausen came about ten minutes after the sound of the bizarre explosion. A farming family that lived out by the mansion of the aged scientist, de Carriole, got in their wagon and raced to the sheriff's office, foaming at the mouth as they relayed how nearby farms and sections of forest were disappearing one after another. Sheriff in name alone, the lawman immediately contacted Lagoon to request the mobilization of his private peacekeeping forces; and, once the sheriff had seen they were on the case, his men followed along after them. Although it wasn't really their fault, they had failed to pass along one very important piece of information obtained from the bloodless and nearly crazed farming family. As the family was on their way there, they'd encountered a young man of unearthly beauty astride a cyborg horse, and he'd gotten them to tell him about the mysterious disappearances.

D halted his horse in the midst of the ionized air. The scene spread before his eyes.

A section of earth roughly one hundred and fifty feet in diameter had sunken into a bowl-like depression. No. Seeing as there wasn't a single thing resembling a rock or tree to be found within the depression, perhaps it was more accurate to say it'd been scooped out; but the way the surface had been fused into a glassy substance made it clear that that wasn't correct either. A good thirty feet deep, it glowed bewitchingly in the moonlight, like particles of light that had coalesced. From the look of the rail fences, stepping stones, and wooden gates that remained beyond the rim of the mortar, what had been obliterated was undoubtedly a central house, an outbuilding, and a pen for animals. Near the brink of the hole, a two-story building that looked to be a barn was perfectly fine.

Advancing further on his horse, he saw that out in the moonlight, the eerie tableau went on. The glittering of the ground that'd melted down into a beehive shape challenged the light of the moon.

Who would do such a thing?

There was a crash. D's ultra-keen senses told him it came from a great distance away. From the direction of the village.

D wheeled his horse around. The sound of the first explosion had definitely come from whoever had left this hole. Was he on the move?

The conclusion D reached was a simple one.

“Why, there's two of them,” a voice remarked from the vicinity of his left hand, but D raced off without even glancing down at it.

Having received orders from Lagoon to stop the intruder before he entered the village, the peacekeeping force formed a dragnet around the main road from the farm to the village as well as all side roads, but they soon realized it was too late. A roar was drawing closer from the dark forest where even they feared to tread by night. What's more, it was moving at an unusual speed. A number of men who ran out into the trees with the intention of establishing surveillance were obliterated, trees and all, leaving only a glittering mortar-shaped hole in the ground. Though it was clear some sort of energy was being released, not the slightest wind blew, and they didn't feel any heat on their skin. The survivors beat a hasty retreat, and though they peered hard into the night, they saw no sign of anyone moving around the hole. A second later, they too were reduced to nothingness. This was only about half a mile from the village.

On orders from the peacekeepers who'd remained in the village, all residents who lived in the direction from which the unknown being approached had been evacuated with naught save the clothes on their backs. But once the devastation had spread to within a few hundred yards of town, the explosions stopped dead.

Peacekeepers and members of the vigilance committee had crept into position with their weapons, and as they focused their fear-choked eyes, a tall, thin figure appeared from the darkness at the far end of the main road. Even by the moonlight, they could tell at a glance that it was an ordinary human being. But the bartender from the all-night watering hole in the hotel recalled the face that had been etched into his memory and let out a low cry. When that man had called on his bar at dusk, getting some information and easily dispatching the enforcers that came at him before leaving, the only way to describe the way he'd dominated his opponents was to say he was invincible.
Vince
—the bartender repeated the name.

The defenders were perplexed. Even on the demon- and monster-dominated Frontier, it seemed utterly unimaginable that the devastation the farmer had described could've been wrought by this man, who looked so dazed the very soul might've been sucked out of him.

And while that was going on, Vince reached the entrance to the pleasure quarter—the kingdom under Fisher Lagoon's direct control. The neon glared and music echoed because Lagoon swore this place would never be swayed by some unnamed threat. Halting, Vince was tinged with white from head-to-toe as he stood in a daze staring up at the glow.

A light a hundred times brighter than the midday sun hit his body with an almost palpable weight. It came from a searchlight the public peacekeepers had set up.

“Freeze,” an amplified voice shouted down from the sky. “Who are you? You the one who blew the holy hell out of that farmhouse?”

As unbelievable as that seemed, it was still a possibility. One of the rules of the Frontier was that before trying to take anyone down, you asked your questions from a safe distance.

Vince didn't reply.

“Don't you have ears? I'm gonna give you to the count of three. Then we start shooting. Okay—one . . .”

It may have seemed a rough way to do things, but now that they knew the person they were dealing with wasn't a resident of the village, they owed him no mercy—that was also part of the Frontier code. From under cover, from behind the searchlights, from roofs and porches, the weapons aimed at Vince backed every potential bullet and laser beam with deadly determination.

And in response, Vince's reaction was—complete disregard.

Though his invincible flesh was another matter, the man's mind had been ravaged beyond salvation, leaving him utterly insane. The Destroyer required of its host not only the resilient flesh of a Noble, but an equally resolute psyche as well. Only the kind that'd brought it into existence had the wisdom to govern the Destroyer. When such control became impossible, its host became ruin and slaughter incarnate. The only thing that saved the village from complete destruction was some fragment of humanity that lingered in Vince's subconscious and remained active for a while.

And then that, too, vanished.

Vince's eyes glowed with a blue light, and then he took a step forward as if to crush the earth beneath his foot.

Light streaked at him from all directions, with the report of the guns following after. Flesh bunched up as massive slugs ripped into him. Struck by more than a thousand rounds almost simultaneously, his body seemed to instantly swell to twice its normal size.

The shooters' expressions were haunting. They continued pulling the triggers like men possessed—they couldn't take any chances. This character could be blown to ribbons and he still might come back.
Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!
They had to blow every last bit of him away with their bullets.

As if in answer to their prayers, the writhing body of Vince on the ground was indeed growing smaller. It already lacked a head. Both arms had been blown off, neither leg had more than the thigh remaining, and more than half of his torso was missing.

“Hold your fire! Particle cannons!” the commander called out at that point, entrusting the foe's final elimination to blasts of blistering heat.

Crimson streaks of light stabbed into the searchlight beam, ripping into the fleshy lump on the ground from all directions. Unlike lasers, particle beam cannons would also completely melt a wide area around the point where they made contact. The ground became a boiling pit of mud. And the bubbling soil swallowed Vince's remains.

“Good enough,” a gruff voice said.

Some sixty feet above the scene, there hovered an airship the same hue as the darkness. The voice came from a loudspeaker set in its bottom.

“That takes care of that. We can look into just who he was later. For the moment, I'm more interested in the man who was headed into the forest. I wonder if he just wasted his time . . .”

And saying this, Fisher Lagoon turned his gaze in the same direction D had gone just as the subordinate who stood beside him on the observation deck exclaimed, “Boss—down there!”

“What?”

Twisting around a face that looked like a patch of rough rock, Lagoon saw the same thing his subordinate did, and his eyebrows rose.

The particle cannons had already ceased firing, and the circle of illumination thrown by the searchlight revealed the still-boiling ground, but out in the center of it something slowly rose. It had a head. And hands. It even had feet—it was clearly a human being. And all the while, flames rained down onto the baked ground from that slender form.

The second he realized that the face jerking up into the searchlight was that of the completely unscathed Vince, the commander bellowed, “Fire!”

Blue light flitted to space.

The hand of God sent the airship flying. Knocked out of shape, the light hydrogen-filled airship rose a good three hundred feet. Two things allowed it to narrowly escape destruction—it was fashioned from metal alloys using the Nobility's “knowledge,” and it had only been struck by a plain physical shock.

“What—what the hell just happened?!” Lagoon asked angrily, gripping the handrail and barely managing to support himself.

“The street—the whole thing's been blown away,” his subordinate said, his reply overlapping with the original question.

When Lagoon raced over to the window without another word, his eyes were greeted by nothing save the neon of the shopping district. What had happened to the searchlight? Worse yet, why was more than half the neon out?

“Get the ship's searchlight on!” he ordered.

For the first time in decades, he was met with an objection.

“That's too dangerous. I mean, that guy on the ground . . .”

“Damn it all, I don't care! Light it up!”

A beam of light shot down from the heavens to the earth. What it starkly illuminated was the mortar-shaped depression that'd been scooped out of the earth and the naked figure of Vince standing at the bottom of it. Standing there in the light spearing down from heaven, he might've been a god who'd come down to earth. However, this was no god of good fortune. This was a god of destruction who wouldn't leave so much as a single blade of grass. As evidence, one had but to look at how the rows of buildings around him had been obliterated without a trace and how the ground had sunk into a mortar-like depression in a three-hundred-foot radius.

Planting a foot on the smoothly sloping side, Vince began to slowly climb back up to ground level. The hole was twice the size of the one D had found. If these were to grow any larger, it seemed possible that one would be enough to wipe an entire village off the face of the earth.

“Should we attack the—” his underling began with trepidation.

“No, hold off. It'll be here soon,” Lagoon told him.

Vince got out of the hole and looked up into the sky.

The subordinate let out a scream.

But it didn't seem that Vince turned on account of this noise. Down the same road he'd come by, a tremendous black shape had just come around the corner—a glistening black base surrounded by countless looping rails.

“Look there, boss—it's the Big Bang Accelerator!” the subordinate exclaimed in wonder as the airship finally regained stability.

“Looks like we don't have any other choice,” Lagoon said, making it clear he could read a situation quickly.

To counter the power of a Destroyer who wouldn't rest until everything had been annihilated, here was the same Big Bang that'd created all of the planets in the universe and all life on them.

“Incredible. It's a regular showdown between God and the Devil!”

As if vouching for what Lagoon had said, the accelerator that'd halted thirty feet away began to let out a momentous groan, and the rails positioned themselves in sacrosanct angles that couldn't err by even a picometer. Ahead of it stood a god of destruction by the name of Vince, waiting to unleash more violence.

-

III

-

The moon hid behind a cloud. It was a second later that a golden light winked on somewhere on the accelerator. The light traveled down one of the rails, and there was a metallic
ting!
Once accelerated by electromagnetic waves, it took only one ten-millionth of a second for the minute charged particles the Nobility's science alone could've discovered to shift into hyper-acceleration. When Lagoon realized the golden glow clinging to all those rails was the afterimage of the accelerated body, it was already moving faster than the speed of light, and it slammed right into Vince's face.

It almost seemed a mirage, the way the blue light opened like the petals of a flower. If God's eyes had been trained on it, they would've seen that a split second before the accelerated mass scored a direct hit on Vince, the light enveloped his entire body—or rather, his body actually became that blue glow. And the bullet that was supposed to give life to the universe was swallowed by it.

Vince staggered. Just before it was annihilated, the shock wave from the accelerated mass's explosion had knifed through the wall of light, barely managing to strike him in the face. Clutching his eyes, he extended his right hand. What flew from his fingertips was a particle of light of exactly the same size. Once it had adhered to the base of the accelerator, it immediately expanded. Base and rails alike were tinged with blue, and then the color faded as if it were destiny, leaving no trace of the accelerator behind. The air danced with heat shimmers.