Vampire Hunter D Volume 18- Fortress of the Elder God Read online

  Other Vampire Hunter D books published by

  Dark Horse Books and Digital Manga Publishing

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  vol. 1: Vampire Hunter D

  vol. 2: Raiser of Gales

  vol. 3: Demon Deathchase

  vol. 4: Tale of the Dead Town

  vol. 5: The Stuff of Dreams

  vol. 6: Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane

  vol. 7: Mysterious Journey to the North Sea part one

  vol. 8: Mysterious Journey to the North Sea part two

  vol. 9: The Rose Princess

  vol. 10: Dark Nocturne

  vol. 11: Pale Fallen Angel parts one and two

  vol. 12: Pale Fallen Angel parts three and four

  vol. 13: Twin-Shadowed Knight parts one and two

  vol. 14: Dark Road parts one and two

  vol. 15: Dark Road part three

  vol. 16: Tyrant's Stars parts one and two

  vol. 17: Tyrant's Stars parts three and four

  VAMPIRE HUNTER D VOLUME 18: FORTRESS OF THE ELDER GOD

  © Hideyuki Kikuchi 2012. Originally published in Japan in 2001 by ASAHI SONORAMA Co. English translation copyright © 2012 by Dark Horse Books and Digital Manga Publishing.

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  No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. All rights reserved.

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  Cover art by Yoshitaka Amano

  English translation by Kevin Leahy

  Book design by Krystal Hennes

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  Published by

  Dark Horse Books

  A division of Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

  10956 SE Main Street

  Milwaukie, OR 97222

  DarkHorse.com

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  Digital Manga Publishing

  1487 West 178th Street, Suite 300

  Gardena, CA 90248

  DMPBooks.com

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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  Kikuchi, Hideyuki, 1949-

  [D--Jajin Toride. English]

  Fortress of the elder god / written by Hideyuki Kikuchi ; illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano ; English translation by Kevin Leahy. -- 1st Dark Horse Books ed.

  p. cm. -- (Vampire hunter D ; v. 18)

  ISBN 978-1-59582-976-4

  I. Amano, Yoshitaka. II. Leahy, Kevin. III. Title.

  PL832.I37J3513 2012

  895.6'36--dc23

  2012006292

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  First Dark Horse Books edition: September 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed at Lake Book Manufacturing, Inc., Melrose Park, IL, USA

  TRAVELERS ON A SKYBUS

  CHAPTER 1

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  I

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  Apparently the waiting room was poorly maintained, and biting

  drafts crisscrossed its not particularly spacious interior. You might even say the wind seemed to be showing off. It was better than being outside, however, as the warmth from a battered atomic heater offset the cold, and there was no howl from the wind. If the roar of the engines had been audible, it actually would’ve completed the picture.

  There were ten passengers in the waiting room. For an airport situated in a hick town in the eastern Frontier, it certainly had drawn a mixed bunch. There wasn’t even a single example of those whom it served the most—farmers.

  A young woman draped in a metallic stole walked over to the window, hair as golden as the fibers swaying as she did so.

  “Looks like they’re done loading the baggage. Guess we’ll be boarding pretty soon,” she said. Her remarks weren’t addressed to anyone in particular.

  A man with a crew cut who’d been fidgeting with a deck of playing cards and an old man and woman who appeared to be husband and wife looked at her, but all three held their silence. The man with the crew cut was young—undoubtedly under thirty—and he had a crescent-shaped scar running down his right cheek. Judging by the way he’d repeatedly tried to strike up a conversation with the young woman, he seemed pleasant enough, but he was clearly a mobster. The front of his synthetic-leather jacket was open, revealing his gun belt and the broadsword tucked through it.

  “Any time now. Being able to get to the Capital in six hours is handy,” the mobster began, and wiping the smile from his face, he ran his eyes over the group until they bored through a trio seated in the opposite corner. “The only drawback is you don’t get to pick who you fly with.”

  The object of this frank remark was an individual who remained completely motionless, an opaque black-canvas hood covering his eyes, and a pair of hands bound by handcuffs resting in his lap. Instead, it was the men to either side of him that shot the mobster vicious looks—one of them a big, bearded man with a sheriff’s badge pinned to the chest of his shirt, the other a much younger man wearing the uniform of a police officer from the Capital. The younger one had a metal cylinder strapped to his back, and a gold badge glittered on the chest of his leather coat.

  A policeman from the Capital had come to take custody of a criminal captured in the Frontier, and a sheriff had joined him in that task as part of his duty—the situation would be clear to anyone at a glance. There was one other obvious assumption to be made—most of the criminals who wore hoods to protect themselves from the sun weren’t human.

  Turning to the elderly couple, the mobster said, “You folks drew the short straw. You’re out enjoying a nice family trip, only to have a suckling spoil it all. Ain’t that right, kid?”

  Though he was looking for agreement from the boy who sat next to the elderly couple, the child didn’t nod at this, or move a muscle, or even glance in the mobster’s direction. Apparently he was being transferred from one orphanage to another, and though he’d had a nun with him earlier, at some point she’d disappeared. Since entering the waiting room, the boy hadn’t uttered a single word. Maybe the nun had given up, because she’d held her tongue as well, and a coldness had hung between the two of them that suggested they were glad to be rid of each other. The fox-faced nun seemed to have her own issues, but from the look of the boy’s threadbare navy-blue overcoat, tightly wrapped muffler, drooping head, and nice-looking but pale face, anyone could see why someone would give up on him.

  The rest of the people there glanced his way from time to time out of concern for his quasi-autistic condition and because his vacant, half-shut blue eyes would suddenly start gleaming. Most of them thought the same thing: People would pay money to see a boy with beautiful eyes like that. No point putting him on a skybus that flies over the Playground.

  Unable to get any validation from the boy, the mobster clucked his tongue. There was one other person present, but he didn’t even look at him, let alone say anything. The man seemed to have something unearthly about him. With a crimson cape and a scarf of the same hue, he seemed to be ablaze. He had a hard face, like sculpted bronze, and despite his wardrobe he didn’t seem the frivolous type. When he’d entered the waiting room, he hadn’t taken one of the many empty seats; rather, he stood by the door, his left hand resting lightly on the hilt of his longsword. One didn’t need to see that his blade was longer and heavier than those usually used for self-defense to know that he wa
s a combat professional—he carried himself like a warrior. The strangest thing about him was the quiver he had on his back—it was stuffed full of arrows, but he didn’t have a bow. Ordinarily, everyone else would’ve eyed him with suspicion, but it was completely the opposite. Whenever the elderly couple looked at him, they exchanged looks of relief and nodded to each other. Because there was a suckling there.

  “Here comes the pilot!” the woman said, and this time everyone—except the warrior—looked out the window.

  From the fat, cigar-shaped craft parked on the distant runway, a man in a flight suit was approaching. The pilot looked at his wristwatch as he told them, “Get onboard, please. Well, I’ll be damned. We’re only thirty minutes behind schedule.”

  Before the passengers headed out, their eyes focused on the hooded man in handcuffs. However, when the sheriff tugged on the thin line attached to those cuffs, the suckling got up without any resistance and proceeded outside where only wintry sunlight and bare trees waited, with one lawman before him and the other behind.

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  To either side of the cramped central aisle there were ten rows of seats, three to a row. First aboard, the woman took an aisle seat in the foremost row, and was sipping the contents of a small liquor bottle when along came the same mobster from earlier.

  “Sorry, baby, but could you scoot over a bit?”

  When that well-tanned face bared its pearly white teeth to her, the woman responded with a wry look of undisguised annoyance.

  “There are plenty of other empty seats. I don’t want you crowding me.”

  “Oh, don’t be that way. To make a long story short, we’re taking our lives in our hands during this flight. If I’m gonna die, I wanna be beside a lovely lady. Humor me, okay?”

  More than his forceful approach, it was probably his carefree smile that changed the woman’s mind. Swinging her legs into the aisle, she said, “Take the window seat.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you. I’m Jan.”

  “And I’m not giving you my name,” the woman said, downing the contents of her little silver cup.

  The man—Jan—quickly made his way to the window seat and was fastening the rubber seat belt when he gave her a funny look and a smile and said, “No problem, Maria, baby!”

  The woman’s expression changed.

  “Your stole. It’s embroidered there.”

  “Oh, this thing?” the woman replied, looking down at one end where the metallic threads were coming loose. “That’s not my name. It belongs to the woman who lost it to me at the gaming tables. She was a fat farmer’s wife.”

  “Well, that’s okay. If it doesn’t bother you none, I’ll still call you that.”

  “Suit yourself. Whether you know my name or not won’t make a bit of difference.”

  The engine began to growl.

  Peeking back between the seats, Jan said to Maria, “Strange mix we got here. Don’t you think?”

  Apparently he made a habit of soliciting agreement from other people. As the woman made no reply but rather kept drinking as if in a foul mood, he went on talking.

  “That kid’s keeper never did come back. For a nun, of all people, to pull something so irresponsible, either the kid’s got his act together so well there’s no need to worry, or it’s the complete opposite. My take on it is, he’s a major problem child. When no one sees you off, it’s because they just want you gone. I don’t know if he’s got someone waiting for him on the other end, but he’d be a handful for anyone, that’s for sure. I mean, that nun was from the freaking Shillonget Monastery. To get tossed out of there, you’d have to be a real piece of work. There’s a medallion around his neck. It’s probably got all the details carved into it, and I wouldn’t mind a peek at that.”

  While the mobster was blithering, the skybus had slowly started to glide down the runway. The scenery—a mossy old landing strip, decaying hangars, and a distant mountain range—began to race past the windows faster and faster.

  While Jan gave his tongue a rest, the aircraft made expert use of rising air currents to climb to sixteen thousand feet and enter the jet stream.

  “It looks like we’re in, all right,” the old man looking out the window said softly to his wife, who sat beside him with her hands pressed to her chest. “Now it’s just a straight shot to the Capital. Pare should be meeting us at the airport. Are you in pain, dear?”

  “I’m fine,” his elderly wife replied, a smile gracing her paling face. “This happens every time. But will Pare really be coming?”

  “Of course. I wrote to him, and we got a reply at the hotel, didn’t we? He’s a good boy, that one is. Unlike Depp.”

  “Depp is just honest, that’s all. No one’s happy to have over a couple of old relics like us, whether they’re our sons or not.”

  “That’s not true. After everything you and I did for those boys—”

  Though the elderly man’s hoary eyebrows arched, his wife replied wearily, “Pare’s the kindest of the bunch. He won’t come out and say it—but we’re inconveniencing him. Once we’re in the Capital, let’s find a cheap hotel and stay there instead. That’d be easier on all of us.”

  “There’s no need to do that. You know how hard we worked for—”

  The old man’s eyes were bulging, but he relaxed when he saw his wife’s doleful expression. Taking a deep breath, he rolled back through his memories.

  “Inge and Pages were both happy to see us, weren’t they? Depp, well, that was another story, but Pare—”

  Suddenly he noticed that his wife had opened her eyes and was staring intently at him.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Nothing,” the old woman said with a sad shake of her head. She wanted to tell him he was wrong. “Not a thing. You’re right. They’ve all been so good to us, haven’t they?”

  “They sure have.”

  Happy that his wife had finally agreed with him, the elderly man nodded repeatedly.

  His aged wife managed to keep the hopeless smile on her face as she gazed at her husband, saying, “We pass over the Playground, don’t we?”

  It wasn’t really a question. Though the old man sensed something terribly disconsolate in her tone, he’d long since lost the desire to try to discover what that was.

  “Yes, we do,” he replied, turning his gaze to the window again.

  Their fourth son would be coming to meet them.

  With unsettling creaks here and there, the skybus continued flying smoothly at a speed of 330 miles per hour.

  A tiny whisper rose in the aircraft’s silent interior: “Soon now.” While it wasn’t loud enough that the person in the neighboring seat could hear it, almost everyone there trembled.

  At that instant, something happened—a heartbeat later, the skybus was thrown off balance, slipping from the jet stream and dropping toward the ground at an angle sharper than any dive.

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  II

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  “What in theworld? He’s kicked the bucket!”

  Though he heard Maria say this, Jan didn’t believe her, so he took the pilot’s pulse and felt for a heartbeat before letting go of his wrist again.

  “Now we don’t have anyone to fly the skybus. Or am I wrong, and one of you can pilot this thing?”

  The mobster looked over his shoulder at the survivors—all of the passengers—but naturally, there was no reply.

  Apparently the nameless pilot had been highly skilled, taking the skybus from a fall that was essentially a vertical tailspin and pulling the nose up at the last minute for a landing that would’ve been considered miraculous on level ground, let alone this rocky expanse.

  However, the miracle ended there, and the reality was that the passengers scattered across the rocks had sustained very real injuries. The old man’s left arm had been broken, and after finally pulling the first-aid kit from the somewhat-damaged skybus, Maria and the sheriff were in the process of setting it in a splint. The policeman, who was far younger than the sheriff, had suffered
some bruising to his right shoulder, but he had nothing more than a damp cloth to put on it for the pain. The impact after their fall had left the liquid contents of the jar of painkillers splattered against the bottom of the kit.

  Though both the boy and the warrior were unharmed, one had gone over to lean against a massive crag and not moved any further, while the other simply stood there scanning the area in all directions.

  “Any of you folks familiar with the local geography?” the sheriff asked, looking over the group.

  Grimacing, Jan said, “That’d have to be you.”

  “I suppose it would,” the sheriff said, a wry look coming to his face, above his triple chins, before he surveyed their surroundings. He’d already looked the scenery over a good ten times, and not a blessed thing had changed. It was a wasteland strewn with boulders as far as the eye could see. There wasn’t a speck of greenery, but there was plenty of wind to slice into them like a knife. It came across the distant yellow expanse of sand. Before them towered steep crags.

  It was just past three o’clock Afternoon. Though there was still plenty of light, once that was gone it’d be like a winter’s day in no time at all. It wouldn’t even take an hour.

  After checking the time with his wristwatch, the sheriff looked up at the sun to judge position, as was often done on the Frontier, giving a nod as he said, “We could pull the equipment out of the skybus to figure out where we are, but basically this is the center of the Playground. No matter which way we try to go, it’ll be the same distance out of here.”

  “So which direction is the safest?” asked Jan. There was hostility in his tone. Lawmen were the sworn enemy of mobsters, after all.

  “They’re all the same,” the sheriff answered off the cuff. “If the village where we boarded had a Danger Potential rating of one, this whole region would have to be over one hundred thousand DP.”

  “Then shouldn’t we hurry up and head for the Capital?” the pale-faced policeman said with urgency. “Most of us are alive, and there’s a little food and water left in the skybus. We should be trying to get out of this hellhole as fast as we can.”