Scenes from an Unholy War Page 17
“That little bastard,” the man growled, ignoring Rust. With the arrow still sticking out of his head, he dashed off toward the old man, who’d wounded him first.
“Oh, shit!” the old man exclaimed, sprinting for the gate to the field. His body—the entire night, for that matter—had been covered with something.
“I was a fool to offer to take you in. Now I’ll dispose of the lot of you. To have even considered letting you idiots join the wise, I must still have some of the old me to contend with,” the leader howled toward the sky, something dark effacing him completely. It was deeper than even the darkness of night. “I’ll show you how a Noble does battle. And then you’ll die slowly.”
Rust could no longer see anything. He could only hear the man’s voice.
—
Billy had finally found a prey worthy of all his murderous skill. Though the darkness that imprisoned the world had startled him, it would also conceal his presence. The method was simple. As always, he merely needed to sneak up behind his prey and hack into him with his butcher knife.
The man in black chasing that old-timer—ah, here he comes. I’ll hide right behind the gate.
The old man shot by. A few seconds later, so did the other one. Going after them, Billy raised his blade with all his might—and just then, his prey turned around. Fangs gleamed in his mouth.
He’s a Noble? Before Billy could strike with his butcher knife, the man bit into his throat. Even as he let out a scream, Billy was surprised that there wasn’t much pain at all. It came to him in a flash. This big idiot’s gone and changed me. With one bite to my throat. I’m not wild about the wounds, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Now, I can fight this freak on equal terms.
Billy struck with his blade.
—
III
—
The darkness swallowed the people who stood in front of the school’s main entrance. It enveloped the group who’d gathered in the auditorium, as well. A baby began crying so loud it seemed like it would shatter the windows. Pet dogs were growling in a low tone.
Rust could sense innumerable things moving around in the darkness. He heard the howls of beasts. Ravenous wolves. Somewhere, there was a woman’s scream—followed by the sound of tearing flesh. The fluttering of wings filled the air. Children were crying. Rust felt something against the scruff of his neck. Fangs like slivers of glass gouged his flesh, and the blood that spilled out was devoured. He killed one with his bare hands, but two or three more bit into him and drank. Men and women alike were screaming. They’re drinking my blood! they cried to the heavens.
Rust leapt for the man he knew should be there. Getting only an armful of air, he landed on his stomach, and then crawled forward. There was the flapping of wings again, and fangs assailed him once more. It’s no use, he thought. One man can’t win against these fake Nobles.
Suddenly, things changed. The flapping wings and howling wolves receded like an outgoing tide. Rust saw a new darkness. As did the villagers, male and female, young and old. Darkness swirled with darkness, vying for supremacy, taking on a new form. It was chaotic. The world was chaos.
Then, everyone saw it. There, at the main gates. An inhumanly beautiful figure in black astride a cyborg horse. D.
The man in the darkness was Toma.
Two assassins from the world of night—and here they came face to face.
“Did you make it in time, D?” Toma asked with amusement. “Surely the Great One told you I’m not the same as when you slew me. I’ve been chosen, given the power only he possesses. Know that before you come at me.” He said this in a voice of iron, his tone one of firmly rooted confidence.
And what was D’s response? There was only muffled laughter.
“If this babe born just two or three hours ago is the chosen one, he’s the only success,” said a hoarse voice. “This fella here is what you get after taking the chosen ones and doing hundreds of millions of experiments. So, you think as a brat still in diapers, you’re fit to face off against someone so far beyond your level? You’ve already died once, Mister. Have you forgotten so quickly what death’s supposed to mean after your allotted span?”
Toma poised himself for battle, staff in hand. Around him, beasts howled.
D’s eyes glittered weirdly. “Since you’ve been given his blood, I can’t let you leave here alive.”
The horse’s hooves tore up the ground.
Lowering his center of gravity a bit, Toma prepared to counter.
Up on his steed, D drew his blade. “Have at you!”
As horse and rider charged forward, the darkness pounced on them. It clearly took the form of wolves and bats. D swung his blade twice. It gleamed amidst the pitch blackness. The beastly forms of the darkness were easily cleft in two, and D barreled straight for Toma. With a graceful motion, his silvery blade sank into Toma’s head.
Making no attempt to raise his staff, Toma merely took the blow. The line that ran from the top of his head to his jaw vanished as if it’d never been.
“Such is the power of the Great One!” Toma exclaimed, his smile revealing pearly teeth. Making a great leap back, he struck his staff against the earth. The instant the ground quaked, the Hunter’s cyborg horse fell to pieces.
D was in the air. His whole body was bathed in white. The night had been split open. Stark, radiant sunlight—the light that drives back the darkness, warms the earth, and gives life to all things—challenged D. Challenged one with the blood of a prince of darkness.
Thrown horribly off balance, he was falling back to earth when the oak staff hurled at him pierced his heart as if he were made of paper. Lying flat on his back, the young man became a gorgeous sculpture of death.
Light, O light! Rain down! For the sake of the deceased, ill suited to thy warmth.
Had such an exquisite corpse been created in a summery light that made everything melt away in a white blur? Ah! And then night once more closed its black velvet canopy.
Toma was down on one knee. The vacant look on his face and the way his shoulders heaved violently spoke volumes about how the strain of this deadly conflict had been more than just physical. After a few seconds he got up again, went over to D, and extracted the oak staff that stuck out of the Hunter like a grave marker.
“This is the conclusion the Great One reached. D, I’ll probably be you someday.” Turning around, he began to walk away. Not toward the school building, but to the main gates.
Behind him laughter trailed like the thread of his fate. “You’ll never be him. Not in a million years!”
Spinning around in amazement, Toma saw it: A darkness spreading before his eyes. A darkness far deeper than what he’d spawned. That darkness was named D.
One darkness swirled around the other, resisting, forming a new darkness. A glowing darkness. A light.
Toma held his staff up over his head. A silvery streak went through it, slicing him from the top of his head all the way down to the crotch. A bloody mist eddied from the cut. It resembled an explosion. Within that bloody mist, Toma wrapped his arms around himself.
“How can this be?” he asked. “Tell me. Did you not choose me? Or was I just some stupid stone to whet D’s blade? Save me, O darkness! Save me!”
No sooner had he finished intoning the words like a prayer than he split in two lengthwise. But all this was shrouded by darkness. Rust didn’t see anything. Nor did Lyra or the people at the entrance to the school.
“It’s finished,” said a voice. A beautiful voice of iron. And if he said it, then it had to be so—it was all over.
A murmur ran through the crowd. Looking down at their feet, people were seeing their own shadows. There was light. The darkness was receding.
There was no sign of D.
Presently, a group led by the sheriff and a blood-soaked Lyra—who leaned on the lawman for support—walked to the entrance to the field, where they discovered the doubled-over corpse of Old Man Roskingpan and a cadaver in the process of decaying. Th
e cadaver had a butcher’s knife running through its back and out its chest; the hilt was gripped in the old man’s hand. None of the villagers had known the murderer named Billy, but they all knew the old man had been so overwhelmed by losing his wife and child to disaster years earlier that he’d consoled himself by conversing with an unnamed imaginary friend. Whenever he got drunk, he had always blamed the deaths of his wife and child on the villagers who’d been there with them but had run off, thinking only of their own safety.
Pushing aside the rotting remains, someone laid a coat over the old man, saying, “Amazing! This old drunk took down a Noble.”
Those words were to become the old man’s epitaph.
—
On reaching the main gates to the village, the group was greeted by the mayor, Sheryl, and Odama. It was nearly dusk. It seemed to have come a little early, likely the result of some debate on the parts of day and night.
“We owe you our thanks,” the mayor said, although it was unclear to whom he directed his remark. “Have those wounds tended to right away.”
Sheryl’s eyes danced with joy. “Tomorrow, life will be back to normal. Let’s forget all about what happened today.”
But someone said, “Not if I have anything to say about it!”
Everyone turned and looked at the watchtower. Codo stood by the base of it. Though he was stained with blood where Rust’s arrow had punctured his lung, he pointed his left hand toward the sheriff. In his right hand he held one of his deadly disks.
“Don’t forget that Nobles, real or fake, are the enemy of every village on the Frontier. I know what I saw, Sheriff. You’re a pseudo—”
The back of his head splattered like an overripe persimmon before the crack of the gunshot reached them.
Rust looked up at the watchtower window, where Miriam was adjusting her grip on her smoking rifle. Out of the corner of his eye, the lawman caught a silvery streak. Codo’s weapon. Rust, still supporting Lyra, was in no position to parry it. The blade bisected his chest. While Codo slumped to the ground, Rust’s body sank slowly. Including Lyra, three bodies hit the earth.
“What in blazes?” the mayor murmured, barely squeaking out the words that said what everyone was thinking.
“A traitor . . . killed the sheriff,” Lyra said as she got up again. “He was a . . . good sheriff, right? Rust Novell . . . That’s the name to carve on his headstone.”
Out of all the people frozen in their tracks like ghosts, only one farmer recalled ever hearing that name. He was a long-retired mercenary.
In a little village in the eastern Frontier, legend had it that the community’s youthful leader had come under the pernicious fangs of the Nobility and been turned into a pseudo vampire. Miraculously, he was able to go on living just as he’d done before. However, when he could no longer bear the stares of the villagers and decided to leave, his parents sent an exceptional warrior woman with him, under contract to slaughter him without mercy when the Noble in him awakened. Or so the story went.
Of course, the farmer said nothing. He knew that the figure of that tale would feature in a new legend as a remarkable sheriff.
The village flag that flew from a pole by the main gates rustled faintly in the wind. The people realized that D had arrived on a cyborg horse.
“Did he get what he wanted?” D asked.
“It was a glorious way to go,” Lyra replied.
“Not yet.”
The people noticed that D was staring at Rust’s corpse. Impossible! The bisected body had fused back together again when they weren’t looking. How could this be? The sheriff who’d died so honorably was getting back up. No! Fangs poked from his mouth, and his eyes burned with a crimson glow.
“This is what I am,” Rust said in a voice that seemed to flow up from the bowels of the earth. “Somebody, stop me. I never knew my own blood . . . could smell so sweet!”
D got off his horse. A pale hand kept him from going any further.
“We have a contract,” Lyra said, slowly moving forward. “Rust,” she called to him. Her tone was so cold it gave chills to those around her, but also so sorrowful they found themselves weeping in spite of themselves.
The sheriff dove to one side. As he fell, he nocked an arrow, and he let it fly as he splayed across the ground. The instant his shot pierced the bloodied Lyra through the right shoulder, the lawman’s body split lengthwise. It was pseudo-Noble instinct that made him reflexively wrap his arms around himself.
Lyra leapt at his chest. When she pushed herself off him, the people saw a black arrow in Rust’s heart. After pulling his arrow out, the warrior woman had used it to fulfill her promise.
Without a word, D got back on his steed. “Took that hit on purpose, I think,” he said. But it was unclear whether he was referring to the arrow in her shoulder. The dusk breeze tossed his hair.
“It’s kind of chilly,” someone said.
D rode his horse toward the gates. No one tried to stop him.
“Will I ever see you again?” Lyra asked.
Naturally, there was no reply.
When the hoofbeats from the cyborg horse began to fade in the distance, Sheryl started weeping in the twilight.
—
THE END
POSTSCRIPT
—
In this postscript I’d like to talk not about D or my own writing, but to discuss a certain Japanese author. His name is Futarou Yamada. And in the history of Japanese entertainment novels, he stands at the very peak. In my books I’ve used all kinds of superhumans and supernatural beings, but no matter how dramatic the characters or powers I created, I’ve never once been entirely satisfied. Once I’m done writing about them, I always think the same thing: I’m still no match for Futarou Yamada. I’ve long since given up hope of ever beating him. Though the desire to at least write something that matches his work drives my pen every day, all that I’m left with is a feeling of defeat with an affectionate smile on my face.
When I was in junior high and high school, Futarou Yamada had a string of massive hits lining the bookstore shelves. It was a series of paperback novels about Japan’s unique covert operatives during the Warring States era, depicting ninja using their closely guarded abilities in battle against other ninja—a series called Futarou ninpouchou. That was the genesis of the Vampire Hunter D series—and of all my novels, actually. The first volume was Kouga ninpouchou.
Foreign readers may be familiar with the powerful leader Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the Edo period. In this novel, a total of twenty superhuman ninja are chosen to battle to the death to determine who will be the shogun’s successor, with half of them from the Kouga clan and the other half from the Iga clan. One can spit out gooey threads like a spider; another can change to any color like a veritable chameleon, disappearing from view. The leaders of the respective factions are a handsome young man and a beautiful young lady, star-crossed lovers like Romeo and Juliet. The man is able to turn any attack back against his opponent with a single glance—sending the swords swung at him slicing into his attackers. And the woman has the power to defeat the special abilities of any ninja she trains her lovely gaze on. What’s absolutely perfect is there’s a man who’s just like a vampire—only he’s not. However, vampires are represented by a wild, ageless, undying female ninja who makes an appearance. She can be killed over and over, only to rise again and finish off her opponent when they let their guard down. Another ninja that made an even stronger impression is a beautiful woman who, clearly influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” has breath that turns to poison when her passions are inflamed. In other words, one kiss from her can send the recipient to the afterlife. Sounds like an attractive yet terrifying ability.
After reading Kouga ninpouchou as a junior-high-school student, I wanted to read more like it, and it didn’t take long for that to turn into a desire to write books like this. Though the Vampire Hunter D series was directly sired by the 1958 film Horror of Dracula, the foundation for the stor
y lay in Futarou ninpouchou. This book, Scenes from an Unholy War, is proof of that.
Kouga ninpouchou has been translated into English as The Kouga Ninja Scrolls. The Futarou ninpouchou series was such a great hit in Japan that there was really no need to sell it overseas—or (perhaps) the historical setting isn’t geared toward foreigners—so only the first book has been translated. But I heartily suggest you flip through a copy at least once. No doubt you’ll find the universal spirit of entertainment laid out on each and every page. What’s more, The Kouga Ninja Scrolls has been turned into the manga and anime Basilisk, as well as the film Shinobi: Heart under Blade.
—
Hideyuki Kikuchi
June 25, 2012
while watching Shinobi: Heart under Blade
HEY, BROTHER!
chapter 1
I
—
Their swords were drawn. Glittering flecks rose into the air, collecting there, waiting for the fateful moment of blood spray. There were five of them. As for their opponent, the blade he should’ve drawn to counter them remained sheathed in a scabbard shaped like a crescent moon.
“Why don’t you draw?” a one-eyed warrior, the apparent leader of the group, asked in a voice fraught with tension. His helmet, pauldrons, gauntlets, greaves, and alloy vest all showed plenty of dings, scorch marks, cracks, and rewelds. He had a hard face that suited his battle-damaged equipment. The electronic eye in his left socket fed his brain hard data that was quite different from what his normal eye took from the figure in black who stood about five yards from him with hands empty.
Look around. The location was an outlying area of the village of Satori in Sector Nine of the northern Frontier—the ruins of Castle Macula. There was a crowd ten or twenty deep comprised of villagers from Satori, as well as the residents of the three neighboring villages of Elk, Tabi, and Fouran, folks who seemed from their style of dress to be instructors, travelers, bargirls, hookers and gigolos, performing-troupe members, gamblers, outlaws, and peddlers of everything from booze and tobacco to medicines, swords and spears, synthetic meat, and motorized equipment, ad infinitum.