Record of the Blood Battle Read online

  D’s left arm went flying, taken off at the elbow. The broken blade demonstrated sufficient strength and sharpness as it sank into the woman’s pale neck.

  Why had she charged him instead of keeping her distance?

  With no time to ponder what had been going through the girl’s mind, D squared off against his final opponent.

  “Without your left arm, it seems you can’t rise from the dead,” Mikado said. Five yards lay between the two of them. “The Great One told me so. And I didn’t order Delilah to do that.”

  “So, she chose to do it for her father?”

  Faint ripples of surprise rolled across Mikado’s face.

  “You knew about that?”

  “She looks like you around the eyes.”

  Mikado closed his eyes, then immediately opened them again.

  Both of them dismounted at the same time.

  “I’ve been powered up, so I can finally face you as an equal. But how could I ever explain to my daughter and our comrades that I faced a man with only one arm?”

  D watched as Mikado put his left hand behind his back.

  “Use this,” he said, throwing a knife down at D’s feet before putting his arm behind his back again.

  D bent over and picked it up, saying, “I’ll take you up on that.”

  Mikado nodded.

  A great calm hung between the two of them. And an invisible will to kill.

  The woods began to sing. Every last bird in them was chirping and squawking. And it wasn’t the forest alone—the angry howls of heaven and earth seemed to press in on them from all sides. Little by little it grew louder, rising in a plume to the heavens—and spreading across the sky like a supernova. Each and every bird took to the air at once. A maddening chaos of flapping wings painted the sky, blotting out the sun. It lasted a few seconds, and then the birds flew away, and the sun once again shone down starkly on the road.

  Two figures—one had fallen, the other was standing. A slim shape crept over to the latter. Picking it up, the one who remained standing reattached it to his left elbow.

  “Yep, they came after you one at a time,” said the hoarse voice.

  —

  THE END

  POSTSCRIPT

  —

  It’s always been my intent to write the Nobility as villains. Even now that remains unchanged. They’re always meant to be run through with D’s mystic blade. However, after all these years of writing, at some point I seem to have become attached to the villains, too. I say “I seem” because a Noble who appears in this volume—Baron Macula—is the spitting image of the beloved fairy tale character Humpty Dumpty. As I wrote his physical description, I realized, I don’t think I can kill this one off. Unless my memory fails me, the baron should be the only Noble in the Vampire Hunter series who’s survived. This might be a bad sign. An author can’t go getting emotional about the villain.

  However, the Nobility/vampires have been intriguing creatures from the very start. In the stony basements of ancient castles towering in forests darkened even at midday there rest gorgeous yet forlorn coffins, and with the failing light of dusk the fiends go into motion like shadows. At their center is the tall master of the castle, dressed in black and sporting strikingly elongated canine teeth. For drinking blood, he is cursed and feared by humanity. Those that he preys upon do not find an end in death, but rise again as creatures like him. As vampires.

  But what is it that’s so abhorrent about vampires? In light of the ways humans kill other humans, the act of drinking blood seems almost kind and elegant. What’s more, the dead rise again and go back to their loved ones. Granted, they’re looking for blood, but can’t we overlook that?

  Try watching Hammer Films’ Dracula A.D. 1972. In it, Dracula only bites three people. His victims don’t become vampires but are murdered instead, though that was probably the work of his disciples. But what of the cruelties Dracula’s nemesis Van Helsing inflicts on the count? At the very start he gets the spoke of a carriage wheel driven through his heart, and after his resurrection he’s stabbed with an iron knife, dropped two stories onto a stone floor, has his face burned by holy water, and the stake that deals the coup de grâce is part of the spike-lined pit he falls into—and Professor Van Helsing, with cruelty knowing no bounds, even hits the count’s back with a shovel to drive the stake in deeper! All the count does for a reprisal is to hit Van Helsing and knock him against the wall. Van Helsing is the dangerous one!

  Now, it’s not entirely due to this movie, but my attitude toward the Nobility has mellowed, and I can’t deny that I may find them more sympathetic. I suppose the pudgy little Baron Macula is the result of that. It’s possible I’m headed off in a direction I shouldn’t pursue. As the villains of the piece, make the Nobility even colder and crueler, the writer within me commands. I should probably listen to him. Nevertheless, I have one request of you. Please don’t forget the lovable Baron Macula.

  —

  November 2013

  While watching Alice in Wonderland

  Hideyuki Kikuchi