“Why I oughta—” the man began, raising one hand, but perhaps the aftereffects of the blast to his brain still lingered, because his feet tangled and he toppled to one side.

“Oh, no!” Mia exclaimed, dashing over to him. Apparently she felt some responsibility for the effects of her spell.

D didn’t even bother to look at them. Without making a sound, he crouched down.

From the darkness ahead of him a figure leapt and struck down at him. Narrowly dodging the blow, D swept out with his leg. The body’s momentum carried it forward as it fell, bringing it skidding to Mia’s and Kuentz’s feet, where it stopped.

Taking one look at the man who quickly got back on his feet and held his short spear at the ready, Kuentz cried, “Chang? But you were—I left you outside.”

“What’ve you been doing, Kuentz?” Chang asked, staring at D as if he were his sworn foe. “I was waiting for you the whole time. But you never came back, so finally I—”

“Sorry. But you’ve gotta listen to me. These folks aren’t our enemies. Hey!”

“It’s no use,” said a voice that seemed to come from far off in the distance.

“Don’t let him trick you,” Chang said, bloodshot eyes fixed on D. “I can tell. He’s got the stink of the Nobility on him. He’s the enemy.”

D dodged to the right. The thrust came at such a precise angle that it was the only thing he could do.

Chang’s hands slid down to just below the head of the spear, and using that point as the fulcrum, he swung it at D’s legs. With its core of lead, the shaft could bend an iron bar.

Mia gave a cry of surprise. Both of D’s feet were resting on the shaft of the spear.

Releasing his spear in amazement, Chang went for the sword on his hip with his right hand. D’s blade ripped into him, slicing him from the top of his head all the way down through his ribs. A bloody fog filled the air like a sudden shower, covering the walls and floor—but not Mia or Kuentz.

“Chang?” Kuentz raced over to him, and on seeing that his friend was beyond hope, he looked down at the floor. When he turned and looked at D a short time later, his face was a mask of malice and rage.

“Why’d you kill him? With all your skill, you could’ve finished it without taking his life. So why’d you do it?”

“Have a look at his right ankle. When he came at me, I broke it. But even after that, he stood on it without any problem.” Checking his anger, Kuentz felt his friend’s right foot. He soon gave a nod, saying, “It’s just as you said. But that alone isn’t enough for me to say this wasn’t Chang. D, I’m not quite satisfied.”

Kuentz remained intransigent until Mia intervened, saying, “He’s right. Knock it off.”

“Okay. But in return, once we’re safely back on the surface, you know what’s coming, right?”

“Very well,” D said, his eyes unusually calm as they reflected the person who’d just challenged him to a duel.

Ten minutes later, Mia brought her hand to her nose, asking, “Does something smell funny?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Kuentz said, pulling his collar and sleeve over and giving them a sniff.

Twenty minutes later, the smell” the two of them had mentioned could no longer be denied, and it surrounded the group.

After another thirty minutes, amid a stench so powerful they had to wonder if their exposed skin wasn’t drenched in blood, the two of them concentrated anxious gazes on D as he walked ahead of them in deathly silence.

“The exit’s at the top of them,” a hoarse voice said. It was easy enough to sense the tension in its tone.

The figure in black seemed to grow heavy and motionless, as if he’d been transformed into a statue.

“Go on ahead,” D said. His voice had the ring to it of someone fighting for control, and the pair involuntarily looked at each other.

Mia stared into his youthful face. “Thanks,” she said, and then she kept on walking. Kuentz followed along right behind her.

As Mia was about to slip by D on his right-hand side, arms clad in black wrapped around her waist and shoulder, pulling her closer.

Before him and the wriggling Mia, D initiated a weird action. Sticking his left hand into his coat and pulling out a broad-bladed knife some sixteen inches long, he gripped it between his teeth. Twisting his exquisite countenance back as if knocked for a loop, when he swung it forward again, its target was his left arm—which was raised to the height of his chin. With a disturbing sound, his left hand fell to the floor. And then, much to Kuentz’s surprise, the hand made a great bound for the right arm the Hunter had wrapped around Mia’s waist. When the two hands touched, the fingers of the right one opened, releasing Mia.

“Why don’t you ... go ahead? You’re going backward,” D groaned in an eerie tone.

“He’s right. Hurry up and go already!” said the hoarse voice from the left hand.

While the two of them had said the same thing, for some reason it sounded like they were bickering.

The left hand flew to D’s neck, pressing his head against the opposite wall as it shouted, “Go!”

Driven by a cry that bordered on a bellow of rage, the two of them advanced down the corridor. They raced up the stairs—without looking at D. They got the feeling something unimaginably bad was happening. They must’ve climbed twenty or thirty steps, and after about that many more stairs, there loomed an iron door.

The second they put more strength into their legs, a black cyclone blew past them from below, flying over the pair’s heads and landing five or six stairs ahead of them. There stood D. But was this the same D they knew? With skin a shade paler than before, crimson light spilling from his eyes—and oh, the pair of fangs that peeked from his slender lips. Was this what their foe had arranged? Was this the purpose of the foul-smelling substance that’d been mixed in Chang’s blood? Now, between the young man and woman and their way out, a fearsome Noble stood blocking the way—and it was none other than D.

CHAPTER 1

"D," Mia said, standing in a paralyzed daze. A pair of fangs were 9 reflected in her eyes. Fangs that weren’t meant to be seen. Fangs she never wanted to see.

“This can’t be happening,” she muttered. “It can’t be! It can’t! It can’t!”

“No, it is,” Kuentz told her, climbing another step higher to shield Mia with his body. “We’ve gotta turn back, Mia.”

“We can’t. That’s the only exit up there. We’d never last long enough to find another way out.”

The two of them were already rooted to the ground like trees. “I’ll thank you to step aside, D,” Kuentz said to the Hunter. “I know I don’t have a prayer of winning if I go up against you. But even if I did, I still wouldn’t want to.”

Though the young man had abhorred D for being a dhampir, he’d since come to revere the Hunter. Even with the other half of D’s nature revealed—and the fangs of a Noble bared—it did nothing at all to change the way Kuentz felt. He showed no signs of readying his iron arrows or concealed blade.

D smoothly strode forward. His blazing crimson eyes bored through the pair.

Kuentz resolved to defend Mia. His left arm rose. The air whistled

as he shot one of his iron arrows. Though he shouldn’t have been able to stop it, D grabbed it right in front of his chest. At the same time, Kuentz leapt.

The instant he decided to fight, the only plan of attack that’d arisen in his brain was to keep D’s hands occupied. In fact, the Hunter had cut off his own left hand. That left only the right one. If he was unable to use it, Kuentz would have a few seconds when the Hunter would be open to attack before he had use of the limb again. And that was Kuentz’s only hope of victory.

From above, Kuentz drove his blade down at the nape of D’s neck. For an instant, there was a choking cry of pain, and with it, the young man’s body twisted in midair. When he thudded to the ground at D’s feet, the young man had a black arrow jutting from his left shoulder—the very same arrow he himself had launched. D hadn’t discarded the arrow he’d caught, but rather had hurled it at Kuentz.

There was no change to the beauty of the countenance that peered down at the writhing Kuentz, but the ripples of malice that rose in the Hunter’s eyes and the terrific hunger there were a sight to see. Reaching out with his right hand, he seized Kuentz by the throat. A cry of agony flowed upward as D hoisted Kuentz into the air with one arm. The concealed blade dropped from Kuentz’s hand, rattling loudly. The young man’s neck was right in front of the Hunter’s lips. They snapped open savagely.

Seeing the crimson interior of his mouth, Mia felt lightheaded. And because of this, she didn’t remember shouting, “Stop it!” or snatching up the concealed blade and driving it into D’s chest. The next thing she knew, she’d backed down a couple of stairs and was staring at the two men. Kuentz was crouched at D’s feet, coughing, while the gorgeous Hunter trained his gaze on Mia without saying a word. More than Kuentz’s blade, which she’d driven into his sternum, it was the look D gave her that shook Mia.

“Nicely done,” he said in the voice of the beautiful Vampire Hunter she knew so well.

At Mia’s feet, a hoarse voice remarked, “I’d say so,” but she only understood D.

“D—you’re better, aren’t you?” the girl said, her voice choked with relief and tears.

D didn’t reply to her, but instead grabbed Kuentz by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet, telling him to climb the staircase before him.

Having been taken off at the shoulder, D’s left arm was gripping her ankle tightly.

“Don’t worry about me. Just keep going. I’ll stick with you,” the left hand said.

“Then I guess it can’t be helped. So, you can stay alive for a long time after D cuts you off?”

“I see,” Mia said, oddly satisfied. Seeming overly conscious of her pants leg, she began climbing the stairs.

Sunlight enveloped the group. While they were fleeing through the subterranean facility, it appeared an entire day and night had passed.

Looking at the scene that surrounded them, Kuentz declared with surprise, “This—this is Mount Ziriilla!”

It was one in a cluster of mountains that rose to the west of the village, and it towered to five thousand feet above sea level. Snow capped its summit irrespective of season. Aside from the beautiful blue sky and scattered patches of black rock, the three of them were surrounded by a world of pure white.

The exit opened between boulders—most likely the underground facility spread not only beneath the “red wasteland,” but also under the village and all its surroundings.

The exquisite Hunter stood a short distance from the boulders, looking up. How beautiful his face and body appeared engulfed in the light. Her brain pleasantly numbed, Mia only thought of the danger inherent in that very same light a few seconds later. Due to the Noble blood that ran in a dhampir’s veins, sunlight could have devastating effects. However, the gorgeous Hunter showed no signs of fear as he turned his face to the light, not even using his remaining arm to brace himself as he stood on his own two feet.

As the shadowy remnants of the madness that’d come over him on the way up the stairs melted away in the light, Mia was amazed. A conversation she’d had with her mother about the Nobility rang once more in her ears.

The light sears the Nobles’ flesh, making them feel more pain than we would if burned by a flame. However, the light has a mysterious power. There’s something about it the Nobility can’t help but love. The proof of that is that of all the Nobles who’ve been destroyed by the rays of the sun, every last one of them was smiling. Perhaps something within the light burns away all the cruelty and evil that lurks in the blood of the Nobility.

“What are you talking about? You’ve got a left hand of your own, don’t you? Now hurry up and bring me over there.”

“I’ve had it with you!” Mia said, but nevertheless, she bent over and collected the left arm with visible distaste.

“Don’t bother, Mia. I’ll bring it over for you,” Kuentz told her after grasping the situation.

“Don’t stick your nose into this, punk,” the left hand sneered threateningly.

“Shut your hole, freak,” Kuentz said, extending his left arm—the one with the sights for the arrow launcher on it.

“Yipes!” the left arm exclaimed, flying out of Mia’s hands and falling on the snow. Scattering powder everywhere, it rushed toward D.

“You lied to me, didn’t you?” Mia said angrily, but Kuentz gave her a slap on the shoulder. He was smiling. A smile bloomed on Mia’s face as well.

The scrambling left arm bounded when it reached D’s feet, sticking to the wound on his left shoulder. The line between them faded, and the joint promptly went back to normal. Swimming in the sunlight, D didn’t so much as glance down at the limb.

“Hey! That punk kid’s some kinda homicidal maniac. Waste him!” the left hand cried as it rose quite naturally to level a finger at Kuentz.

Promptly lowering his hand again, D asked the pair, “Can you make it back down?”

“Yeah, we’ll be okay,” Kuentz replied, throwing out his chest. “I’ve climbed it a bunch of times in the past. Just leave it to me.”

“Hold on a minute. You mean you’re not coming? So, you plan on going back down there, do you?”

“D, you’d better make it back,” Mia said. D’s figure grew hazy beyond her frozen, white breath. “We’ll be waiting down below. We’d better see you there.”

Just then, each of them saw an iridescent light skim through the comer of their eye, but when they tried to focus on it, there was nothing there.

Looking back time and again, Mia made her way down the snowy slope. Beside the rocks, the form of the young man in black grew more and more distant until finally it was hidden by a gust of snow.

“Why would you say that? These slopes are pretty steep. And the snow down below is probably hard. It’d be really easy to trigger an avalanche. There’s no way anyone who doesn’t know the route could do it. But you had to—”

Mia tried to cover her mouth, but she was too late. Before she could stop herself, a tremendous sneeze exploded from her. At least she managed to stifle the second and third.

Several seconds passed—and both of them listened intently. Letting her shoulders drop, Mia said, “Looks like we’re in the clear.”

As Mia knit her brow, a deep, distant rumble reached her ears. Even if it wasn’t due to her sneeze just now, the snow certainly gave way readily enough.

“If we do, you won’t be around to complain about it,” Kuentz retorted. “But forget that. Let’s get down as quick as we can. Luckily, there’s bare rock over there all the way down to the bottom. We’ll follow that.”

The sky and the sun will protect us, she told herself. Even if we have to return to the depths of the earth at some point, the sunlight and the blue sky will banish the darkness.

And then, in a voice so small no one would hear it, she said, Isn’t that right, D?

“Well, we got them outside, at any rate,” a hoarse voice said in the darkness. “So, what do you plan to do next?”

In fact, he said it so matter-of-factly, the other voice replied with a nonplussed, “Hmm, I see.” But that was quickly followed by an agitated, “What? Y-you mean this joint?”

“Forget I asked! How could you take out such an enormous complex, anyway? By my estimates, it goes down around twenty miles, and stretches at least that far in each direction.”

The hoarse voice fell silent. A short while later, it remarked, “Hmm. If you were to do that, the backflow of energy would definitely collect in the core, and once it ran over its capacity— boom! It’s just'—”

“Honestly, it seems like an awful waste,” the voice told him. “Even for him, setting up this place must’ve taken tons of time. Yeah, I’d say roughly a thousand years.”

“Is that so? Now that you mention it, he made it. It wouldn’t be surprising for you to be able to tell that. The memories of all the years are imprinted on this place. But I was just thinking . . .” “What?”

“Have you forgotten the promise you made to the other you? If even one of Kuentz’s group made it out of here alive, you weren’t supposed to go into the facility for three days.”

The tone it took next carried such terror it would’ve frozen any who heard it. “Seriously, tell me you didn’t do that. . .”

After traveling to a spot that was about three hundred feet from the mountain’s summit as the crow flies, the pair halted. Footing was treacherous on the route along the exposed rock, and they were exhausted. More than anything, their feet ached. Their hands were also injured from where they’d grabbed the boulders every time they started to lose their balance.

“You’re pretty tough,” Kuentz said with admiration after watching Mia start to wrap a handkerchief around the palm and back of one hand. Blood instantly seeped into the white fabric.

“Those shoes are for level ground. Yet you move like a bird in them anyway.”

“I’m just used to mountain climbing from all the time I spent collecting plants and herbs to use in spells.”

“Never mind about me. If you’d be so kind as to figure a way for us to safely reach the bottom, brave sir.”

“Uh, sure,” he replied, somewhat flustered by her “brave sir” remark. Whether or not that was Mia’s intent, it’d had a special impact on Kuentz’s heart and his head. As he gazed at Mia, his eyes were feverish and his cheeks flushed. Apparently this was the first time the stalwart young man had been in love.

However, despite how hotly his youthful ardor blazed, the one who’d ignited it extinguished it in no time with her next comment. “Somehow, I’ve got a strange feeling about this.”

“Oh yeah, you’re a fortuneteller, right?” he said, having heard about Mia from folks in the village.

Mia laughed unconcernedly, saying, “Thanks. I appreciate that, even if you don’t mean it.”

The only problem with that was she didn’t look all that pleased, but Kuentz didn’t seem to mind. He’d been under a great mental strain after seeing the demonic lair deep underground and he hadn’t noticed much more about her other than that she was a cute girl, but looking at her out in the sunlight with a new sense of freedom, her lustrous hair and blushing cheeks, the dainty line of her nose, and her lips as red as roses seemed to cast a kind of golden glow over her that was like a breath of spring. For a second, Kuentz was lost in a fantasy that instead of fleeing with Mia from danger, the two of them had agreed to scale the silvery peak together.

A white wind struck his cheeks. It stabbed at him with a chill that seemed to slash at his skin. Turning to look in the direction from which the wind had blown, he saw a form that looked like an eerie statue standing in a stark white fog.

“We’d better hurry,” he said, turning back toward Mia, but the fortuneteller’s daughter was kneeling down on the black rock, in the process of pulling an iridescent bag out of her coat pocket.

No sooner had he asked that than a loud whap! resounded from his cheek. He’d been slapped without a second’s hesitation. The girl had been so close to him and the action was so beyond his imagining that he hadn’t been able to avoid it. In part, it was because Mia hadn’t broadcast her intention in any way, shape, or form.

“What was that for?” he shouted, and while his voice certainly had force to it, Mia’s reply was even more commanding.

Glaring at Kuentz, her lovely cat eyes giving off a vicious gleam of light, she said, “You could’ve asked if it was possible, but don’t make it seem like I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s so rude!”

“I see. Sorry,” Kuentz said, backing down easily. Although he didn’t completely understand, he got the feeling he was in the wrong.

From her bag she pulled a black stone that’d been cut into a polyhedron and a number of iron needles. Sunlight reflected dazzlingly off the stone.

“This stone’s been cut to have a total of sixty-two facets. They can show us just three of the main problems we might encounter next. If there are none, it’ll show that too, of course. So I take a needle and jab it into the stone. I really shouldn’t be able to do that, but it’ll go through it just once. The position of the facet will give us the route we should take—we’ll know which direction to go.”

“Sounds interesting. Go to it,” Kuentz told her, his expression filled with curiosity and expectation. The things this girl could do put a sweet, sad pounding in his chest. The magic of love.

Mia closed her eyes. Her body was shrouded in a kind of unseen force. Blindly but without hesitation, Mia took up a needle and raised it above the black jewel she’d placed on a rock. Feeling the kind of ceremonial solemnity only a true fortuneteller could inspire, Kuentz was left breathless. A second later, without uttering a sound, the girl stabbed down with the needle. Kuentz got the impression that below it, the black jewel shifted direction.

The needle had indeed pierced one of the facets clear through to the other side.

However, what should follow close on the heels of that but Mia’s stunned cry of “It cracked?”

The entire surface of the black jewel was strung with white lines like a spider’s web, with the part the needle had pierced at the very center of it all.

“How strange. That’s not supposed to happen. According to this, we don’t have any direction to go in.”

Kuentz didn’t respond to Mia’s horrifying words. He couldn’t. Because just then he felt a hellish agony, as if his torso had just been bisected below the nipples.

Due perhaps to amazement brought on by the jewel, Mia didn’t even notice. Bringing the stone closer, she stared at it so intently her eyes seemed to bore into it.

“I see something. The obstacle—it’s a face.” Just a heartbeat later, she screamed like someone who’d caught a glimpse of hell, “D?”

“Can you hear what’s happening? The sound of bolts tightening, snapped laser cables weaving together again, electronic circuits flicking open again—this facility is trying to come back to life.”

D remained staring into the darkness before him as he replied to the hoarse voice that issued from his left hand. “That’s the way he built it. Surely the need for reconstruction was taken into account.” “Well, I’m sure the destruction of this facility must’ve come as quite a shock to him. Who wrecked it? Some opposition group within the Nobility?”

“What?” the voice exclaimed with a tinge of astonishment, and then, in a lower tone, it fairly growled, “I didn’t know that.”

“Hold on. My memories of the very beginning are like those of a baby fresh from the womb. Is that the time you’re talking about? No, wait just a second! When I joined up with you was right—”

A pale light tinged D and the voice. From somewhere high in the heavens broad streaks of light were being launched down into the subterranean darkness. At some point, D had started across a walkway that spanned an enormous pit.

“This is only one trunk off the energy line. And it carries only a tiny fraction of the energy,” the hoarse voice said. “Roughly 4-5 terajoules. If released all at once, it’d probably be enough to blow up a planet or two. Really not much at all.”

“Hey! What are you doing? You planning on heading down there from here? Even for you, that’s just too—”

The way the Hunter vaulted over the handrail, it looked as though he was completely weightless. With the hem of his black coat spread like a pair of wings, the figure of unearthly beauty descended into the pitch black depths like some mystic bird. Even if hell itself awaited him, that young man would make its masters quake.

In a blue storm of light, with the wind howling by, the hoarse voice was heard to say, “I’m a little concerned about what’ll become of that young couple.”

Laying Kuentz out in the shelter of a boulder after his sudden collapse, Mia slapped his cheeks repeatedly, but there was no response from him at all. When she hurriedly checked his pulse, there was none, and his pupils were fully dilated.

“Why this, all of a sudden?” Mia asked, and to be honest, she was completely at a loss.

As she looked out, windblown snow that might be mistaken for a dense fog was flowing down the slope to her left, while to her right, she couldn’t be completely sure, but it looked like the snowpack was beginning to give way. Under these conditions, Mia wouldn’t be able to climb down alone, and she had no intention of abandoning Kuentz either. That being the case, there was nothing she could do but bivouac. She’d wait out the gusting snow. Although she couldn’t be sure the billowing snow wasn’t the harbinger of a blizzard, there was no point in dwelling on the matter.

Seeking an appropriate place to camp out, Mia ran her eyes over her surroundings. As far as snowy mountains went, she’d climbed them plenty of times with her mother, and she’d camped out before. Kuentz was sure to have tools for hollowing out an area in the snow. Mia hadn’t given up yet.

Turning and looking over her left shoulder, she made out a structure with distinctly crafted lines atop a sheer rock wall quite some distance away.

“C’mon, get up already!” she told Kuentz as she shook him, but she quickly stood up again.

“It’s no use, as I might’ve guessed. No choice but to carry him myself. Lucky for me there’s snow on the ground,” she muttered.

This was no time for standing about. However, she had no spell that would carry Kuentz, and she wasn’t about to just leave him there. The billowing snow grew denser.

“What’s that?” Mia exclaimed, focusing her gaze in the direction from which the demonic whiteness gusted at her. Off in the distance, where a haze hung like silky white gauze, she’d spotted humanoid shapes.

“We’re—” she began to cry out with joy, but she stopped short of waving her arms when she saw that the cluster of shapes showed no signs of acting like a group of humans out in the snow. They had nothing in their possession that resembled mountain'climbing gear, and they didn’t even raise a hand to wave to her as they silently made their way across the snowdrifts. Strangely stocky in build, they all looked as if their necks had sunk into their chests. They stooped over terribly.

Terror clawed at Mia’s heart, for she had just recalled a legend that was told about the snow-covered mountains in this region. The legend of the Caladoma—abominable creatures that found people and brought them back to their lair in the snow to be devoured.

I’ve gotta run, and quick. Gotta make it to that building! But how am I gonna get Kuentz there?

As Mia looked down at the fallen youth, fretfulness and despair tinged her eyes for the first time.

Fifty minutes later, Mia looked out at the windblown snow covering the base of the boulders and sighed. Kuentz was lying on a simple bed. There was no change in his condition.

As expected, the building was an emergency shelter from days of old. According to the plate on the door, it dated from more than a hundred years ago, but at present, its concrete outer walls easily kept the snowy gusts at bay, while its interior walls and ceiling were utterly spotless. More than anything, the girl was glad that the heating unit, which had seen more than its share of usage over a century earlier, went into action with a single flip of a switch. Filled to the brim with freeze-proof oil, its most breakable parts had been fully reinforced and repaired. That’d probably been seen to by the last people to use the place. And though she might never meet them, Mia was deeply grateful for their thoughtfulness. Thanks to them, she and Kuentz—whom she’d grabbed by the feet and dragged there—didn’t have to freeze to death. Better still, the shelves in the back room were stocked with cold-weather gear and preserved rations. They would have everything they needed and more to get back down the mountain.

Going back over to the bed, Mia put her hand to Kuentz’s brow, and then checked his pupils. His body had grown cold, his pulse was zero, his pupils were fully dilated—he was utterly dead. However, her instincts said otherwise.

When a person died, some essential part of them left the body. Some referred to it as the soul, and without it, the corpse was nothing more than an empty husk. Because her mother the fortuneteller was often asked to officiate at funerals and Mia had helped her since she was a little girl, she had seen literally hundreds of corpses. There had never been an exception. A corpse was an empty husk.

But that wasn’t the sense she got from Kuentz. Something that made a person a person maintained the life force within his body. That was the proof he lived. Mia was determined to somehow bring him back to the village. But her feverish determination was shaken by a certain wind as if it were a tower built on a foundation of sand. A wind that was black and pale, beautiful and mysterious beyond compare—and it wore the face of a certain young man. D.

What did it mean that he was the obstacle blocking their path? Although at first she thought it might have been the face of the fake D that she saw take shape in the jewel just before it crumbled, Mia had gotten the distinct impression that the image was that of the real D. Why him? The mere thought of it threatened to crush Mia’s heart with anxiety and kill her courage to share the fate of the black jewel. What was that gorgeous Hunter?

Her field of view unexpectedly fell into shadow. Mia turned to look and was startled. While her attention was diverted, the demonic whiteness had piled up outside the window. The wind shifted direction.

If it weren’t for this shelter—feeling relief, she brought her face closer to the windowpane.

A fiendish visage was pressed against the window. Eyes that turned up at the corners, eyeballs cold and dead, a crescent gash of a mouth exposing rows of yellowed teeth. Thick with bristling white fur, its face was more atrociously cruel and cunning than any monster known to Mia.

“What in the world?” she cried. At the same time she pulled away, the face vanished and was replaced by a white fist that hammered fiercely at the pane of glass.

It was them. Monsters that traveled with the gusting snow, the Caladoma had come there when the whipping wind changed direction. Or this might be another Caladoma, though it meant the same to Mia either way.

The door rattled. As she turned to look, there were noises up on the roof. The number of foes was unclear.

Dashing into the back storeroom, Mia grabbed the bolt gun that was leaning up against the wall. This wasn’t a rifle that used bolt action to chamber a round, but rather it literally fired metal bolts propelled by highly pressurized air. There was every reason to fear that the thunderous report of a gunpowder rifle could cause an avalanche all too easily. Those who’d used this shelter—or more likely, those who’d designed it in the first place—had no doubt taken that knowledge to heart.

Taking a look at the tin bucket that sat next to it, she found that an even dozen ammo clips of fifty shots each and three gas cylinders remained. Grabbing the bucket by the handle, she returned to the combined living room/bedroom. As it was fairly heavy, Mia had trouble walking with it.

The instant she stepped into the room, the windowpane shattered. As the shock wave and the sounds of destruction struck her full on, Mia dropped the bucket and used one hand to shield her face. But she quickly opened her eyes.

The upper half of a Caladoma hung from the window—the hole it’d made was too small. It was trying to use the misshapen object in its right hand to smash the rest of the glass. Horrifying faces bared their fangs at the other three windows.

Looking up at her, the creature she sought to stop let out a single beastly howl and brought up its right hand.

Even before her finger felt the vain and hopeless click of the trigger, Mia realized the terrifying truth. The rifle wasn’t loaded with an ammo clip or a gas cylinder!

Cursing herself for an idiot, she went down on one knee, flipped over the rifle, then pulled one of the cylinders from the bucket and slapped it in the bottom of the weapon’s stock. Every girl on the Frontier was familiar with the use of a number of weapons.

The gas cylinder was good to go. Scooping up a clip, she shoved it into place in front of the trigger. There could be no sweeter sound than the click of the ammo locking in place.

When she braced the weapon against her shoulder and rose again, a mass of white landed right in front of her. With a howl that split her eardrums, the beast hurled the same weapon that’d shattered the window at Mia. She thought she’d pulled the trigger before she felt a terrific impact on her left shoulder, but she couldn’t be sure.

The thing’s face caved in like a mortar, with the base of its nose at the very center of the damage. Its head alone snapped backward, splattering against the wall behind it.

Mia’s body was slammed back against the storeroom door, where it halted. She planted her feet to stop herself from sliding down to the floor, but when she tried to raise the weapon with her left arm, the pain made an agonized groan slip from her.

Apparently they only had that one weapon for smashing windows. When the next one leapt in through the same window, Mia gripped the rifle with just her right hand. Her back was pressed against the door to steady her, and as she took a deep breath, she raised the gun. Including the clip of ammo it weighed over ten pounds, so holding it steady was next to impossible. She aimed by pure instinct. Due to the weight of the rifle, the gas had essentially no kick at all.

The bolt it spat out with a rasping whistle struck the chest of the second one at a speed of Mach 3. From the exit wound on the Caladoma’s back a tremendous amount of meat and entrails shot out, but even as they exploded from the creature, Mia experienced such agony she lost consciousness.

The impact of the rifle had been minor, but it knocked her body against the door, and from there the force traveled back through her. And her left shoulder bone had been fractured.

An extraordinary cylinder towered just before D. The strange thing about it was that although the cylinder rose more than three hundred feet, the entire form was subtly twisted in a manner that seemed to ignore three'dimensional geometry.

“Never seen one of these before. So this is a sway reactor? I’ve heard they used freaking alien technology, but they sure built a hell of a thing here.”

Even in the world of the Nobility, the energy that drove their civilization was of the utmost importance. Ironically, the nearly ideal form of energy to be had by conventional means was solar power run through an amplifier, but on ethical grounds they set about developing an energy source that was fundamentally different. Though the first approach to prove successful used mathematics and geometry to draw energy from another dimension, roughly a millennium later it was rendered useless by attacks by bizarre creatures on the other side.

At approximately the same time, the energy-development center under direct control of the Sacred Ancestor succeeded in developing a new source of energy—to be precise, the power of perpetual motion. The fact that nearly a hundred thousand ageless and immortal Nobles literally worked themselves to death during its development was a testament to the price that had to be paid to accomplish something the laws of physics vehemently declared an impossibility. So appalling were the conditions that the Sacred Ancestor himself ordered that all accounts of the great undertaking be purged, and five millennia passed before it produced any measure of success. Making something from nothing, this device made a reality of what was only a dream in physics, but even the Nobles’ civilization didn’t manage to construct more than three of them, each of which was set up in a top-secret location. The secret to producing an essentially endless supply of energy lay in certain distortions and vibrations. Choosing the optimal pattern from the nearly infinite number of combinations required five millennia of scientific endeavor on the part of the Nobility.

“So, another symbol of the Nobility vanishes, eh?” the left hand muttered—but what did D make of this?

As he walked toward it without evincing any particular emotion, a shower of gold poured down on him from above. A billion-degree heat ray that would instantly erase any living creature lost all its heat the second it touched D. The blue pendant on D’s chest glowed softly.

The supercomputer acting as guardian recognized that the intruder wasn’t just anyone. Canceling any further attacks, it set all its systems into defensive mode.

An invisible shield stretched before D. An antimatter field— anything that touched it would cease to exist. Only three steps away. Two. One.

D breezed right through it. All that remained was the last redoubt—the blood seal. A barrier that only those of the Sacred Ancestor’s line would be allowed to pass.

Suddenly, a final directive locked away deep inside the computer activated. It overrode the will of the computer, taking precedence in virtually any situation. Circuits switched, and for a millisecond, all the energy in the sway reactor was channeled into the black box set in the bottom of the reactor. A dull thrum! shook the air.

Before them lay nothing save a vast black lake. The symbol of the Nobility that had loomed there, filling all that space, had vanished without warning.

This was the point where D would’ve ordinarily squeezed his hand into a fist, but instead he let it go and turned around, saying, “Then I’ll have to ask someone else. Someone who knows more about this place than me.”

CHAPTER 2

When D reached the end of the dark corridor and slipped through the open door, he found another D leaning back against an enormous rectifier.

“You called?” the D who’d just come in said perfunctorily, and the other one nodded. He had summoned his other self using a communication system only the two of them knew about.

“I didn’t think you’d be in here. Get out of here at once,” the fake D snarled.

“Where’s the assassin?” D asked. His comment didn’t seem to have anything at all to do with the topic at hand, but anyone who guessed what he was driving at would’ve been terrified.

“Oh, him?” the fake D said, an implacable grin spreading across his lips. “What do you intend to do when you catch him?”

“Ask him the way to Muma.”

“Muma?”

“You mean you don’t know what it is either?”

“Nope. But the second I heard you say that word, it sent a chill down my spine. What’s there?”

“A secret about me, it would seem.”

“Then it’s a secret about me, too,” the fake D said, growing thoughtful. “I’d also like to know what the word means. The

assassin is still in the facility. No one’s made it out except for that couple.”

And then, peering at D, he continued, “I thought you promised to leave here if anyone else managed to escape. It would seem I am just a great big liar.”

After a short time, the fake D put one hand across his belly. Though it looked as if his body doubled over from a sudden stomachache, it was laughter that spilled from his mouth. “Ha ha ha . . . You’ve seen through me, have you? Indeed, I’ve had them brought back here. But it was you that made it necessary. Don’t try to shift the blame.”

“Well, there’s no point in keeping up the act—come with me.” Tossing his chin down the corridor, the fake D turned around and walked out.

After a walk of five or six minutes, a door opened. Lying on a bed set in the center of a room filled with light were Mia and Kuentz. A number of white shapes milled around the bed, growling in a base tone. Caladoma snowmen.

Before the fake D could finish speaking, Mia began to stir, and she immediately opened her eyes. Bringing her hand to her left shoulder, she grimaced, and then donned a stunned expression.

“I healed the bone for you,” the fake D called to her, at which point she finally noticed him and snapped up in bed.

“How ...” Mia muttered, but then she noticed the snowmen all around her. “So these things do your ...”

Extending his index finger, the fake D waved it in front of his face, saying, “Tsk, tsk, tsk. It isn’t my doing. To be precise, it’s the work of my father.”

“The man who built this place. Incredible, isn’t it? These things were also created by my father and given a duty.”

The fake D smiled wryly at her blunt question. “Yes, I suppose so.” “And what did you plan on doing to us now that we’ve been brought here?”

“What, indeed. However, it’s not their fault the two of you are back here. If that young man was in proper shape, I’m sure you would’ve made it safely down the mountain.”

That was certainly true. Even alone, Mia had managed to hurt the Caladoma badly.

As the look she trained on him changed from one of anger to loathing, the fake D winced.

“You’re trying to tell me D did something? Don’t try to shift your blame off on him!”

That was exactly what the fake D had told the other D only a short time earlier.

The fake D’s grin grew broader, but getting it back under control, he tossed his chin in Kuentz’s direction and said, “Your boyfriend there wasn’t overcome by pain on the way down by any chance, was he?” Without waiting for Mia’s reply, he said something astonishing: “That was his doing. I saw it all on the monitors. Without leaving a mark, without drawing even a drop of blood, he slashed clean through the guy’s torso.”

Mia gazed at D, dumbfounded. She couldn’t even speak. D—was that young man honestly the real D? Mia got the feeling that both of them were impostors.

“Oh, don’t give him that look,” the fake D said with much pretense. “If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to get back in here. You two came back. In other words, you didn’t make it out, so he gets to stay too. An unavoidable turn of events, if I do say so myself. However, it would seem that even that wasn’t enough to satisfy him, was it now?”

“D, is what he just said true?” Mia asked, still clinging to her desperate thoughts. She knew the answer.

If D had tried to stop him at that point, Kuentz would’ve undoubtedly resisted him to the death. And all for Mia. That was the sort of young man he was.

“You can say that again,” a hoarse voice remarked from the vicinity of D’s left hand, but Mia ignored it.

“So tell me, what’s going to happen to us now for your own convenience? I beg of you, don’t ever tell me you’re going to save us if it’s just a lie that serves your purposes.”

Her tone might well be described as icily stern, and it was met by what could only be termed the frozen beauty of D’s handsome visage. As she glared at him, Mia got the feeling her fit of rage was clearing from her head.

“Someone will be coming soon. Once I’ve met with him, you can be on your way.”

As she stared at D, out of the corner of her eye she caught the fake D pretending to pull a hair from his head.

Somewhere in the wall there was a faint electronic sound. Essentially in unison the eyes of all three of them saw a picture form in a section of the wall they hadn’t noticed up until now—a map of the facility. It couldn’t possibly have been any more detailed. A red point of light was moving through it.

“Monitor,” the fake D called out, and the antiseptic schematic faded to show them an image of a man on a horse silently making his way down a dark corridor. It was the assassin in blue—Yuma. A scaled-down version of the previous map showed in the upper right corner of the screen.

“That’s the number two passageway in the northeast quadrant. Wonder where he thinks he’s going?”

“I take it he noticed he was being monitored. Just the sort of thing you’d expect from someone sent to fight us, eh? Now there’s no way of knowing where he’s headed.”

“I have business with him, but you don’t. Why invite me along?” “You just don’t get it, do you? Because I’m you. If you want to see him, then I need to do the same. Baby—”

“Pardon me. You’d better come with us too, Mia baby. You needn’t worry about this young fella. All our friend here has to do is make the same cut in reverse and he’ll be back to normal.”

“If he did that, I’d need him to leave,” the fake- interjected, drawing a glare from Mia.

“You’ll have to wait a while,” D told Mia, and then he turned to the fake.

“No, I’m going too. I’ve had it with being left in dangerous situations.”

“We’ll bring him with us. He won’t be your problem. I’ll carry him on my back,” the girl replied.

The fake one said, “Of all die nonsense. Oh, okay, you can come with us. And I will be so good as to carry that fellow on my back.”

“This really stinks. I’m supposed to be the leader here,” the fake D grumbled several minutes later. On his back he bore Kuentz in his breathless sleep.

At Mia’s suggestion, the three of them had settled matters via rock-paper-scissors. This was the result.

Perhaps tied to the massive installation by some sixth sense, the fake D walked on for ten minutes without losing his way, and then a huge black pit appeared before them. It was so wide they couldn’t see to the far side. And their path cut straight across it.

“This part’s a tad dangerous,” the fake D said, halting. “The floor is damaged out in the middle. If things don’t go right, we could fall.

I suppose we could go the long way around, but that would take a lot of time. Of course, it’s not like we’re foaming at the mouth to get there, so let’s do that.”

“Since you’ve got a guardian angel, you might as well make the most of him,” D countered, tossing his chin in the fake D’s direction.

The instant they set foot on the span, their dangerous foreboding manifested in a slight creak. There was a noise like glass grinding on glass.

“The molecular bonds have been really weakened. The two of us might manage it, but there’s no way baby here could pull it off.”

“No, she’ll be fine,” D said, reaching out to take Mia’s hand. The second he touched her, presumably to lead her across, Mia’s body went sailing through the air and landed on Kuentz’s back.

Though the fake bared his teeth at that, he ultimately walked on without saying another word. Apparently he was the type who would at least honor an agreement. And in that, it came as little surprise he was just like D.

“I’m sorry,” Mia apologized from behind him. “Uh, 111 walk on my own.”

“Just try getting down now. Your feet would go right through the floor as soon as they touched it. Don’t worry about it. Carrying the two of you isn’t a big deal.”

“Thank you,” Mia said, bowing her head, and then she glared at the D behind her.

“Not a problem. Not a problem at all,” the fake said, waving his right hand before his chest as he did so. In his fist he held a single strand of hair.

And saying that, he ducked, and a gentle wind passed over his head without a sound.

Catching the hair that came flying at him with his left hand, D then struck out with lightning speed. A new onslaught of hair was met by it, wrapping around the limb.

“He was just testing the waters with that one. He’ll mean business with the next one,” the fake D shouted. “If he shoots through this span, we’ll be in trouble. Let’s get across here quick!”

His words alone were left there as he sprinted. With two young people on his back—Kuentz and Mia—it was miraculous how he could move without even making the floor creak again.

Even though the fake might’ve been termed the master of this facility, no matter how he stared into the darkness before him, he couldn’t make out anything. The pit was the better part of a mile wide.

Though he dodged or cut down two strands of hair that came flying at him, there was nothing he could do about the third strand that pierced the floor at his feet. A thirty-foot section crumbled away, and the fake D and the young couple were swallowed by pitch blackness without a sound.

As Mia looked up instinctively, the image of D leaping from the front edge of the collapsing walkway was burned into her retinas.

D cleared the thirty-foot gap in a single bound. When he landed, the walkway turned to silvery dust and fell away. As he launched himself into another leap, a flying strand of hair pierced the left side of his chest. Falling head over heels to hit the walkway, his body was enveloped in a death shroud of glittering fragments that drifted down wildly until they, too, were swallowed by the darkness.

It was about five minutes after that that the darkness at the far end of the walkway took human form. As for who the assassin astride the black mount was, it went without saying. Although the fake D had crossed the walkway fragile as a piece of spun glass in a normal stride with two people on his back, this rider had the added weight of his steed. Yet what kind of skill did he have that the path beneath the animal’s hooves didn’t let out so much as a single squeak?

Halting at the edge of the walkway, he peered down into the pitch black pit that had swallowed the two Ds and said in a doleful tone, “All who learn of Muma must die.”

Though it seemed like the voice of some malevolent deity echoing up from hell, Yuma merely backed his horse up a few steps and launched three more strands of hair at the point where the voice had originated. Fired off with ungodly skill in less than half a second’s time, they met nothing before being swallowed by the darkness.

When that mocking remark reached him, he wheeled his steed around. Naturally, he hadn’t been scared off. He simply realized that on this narrow, fragile walkway, he’d be at a disadvantage battling an unseen foe. It would be a complete reversal, putting him on the defensive.

However, just as the assassin was about to gallop into action, his horse got cold feet. It had caught sight of the figure of unearthly beauty standing on the walkway some sixty feet ahead. The way he stood there completely at ease, not even reaching for the longsword on his back, sent a gale of unspeakable horror tearing through Yuma’s soul.

Now he was surprised, turning to find the fake D standing there with one hand raised. The two young people who’d been on his back were nowhere to be seen.

“How did you survive?” Yuma asked from the back of his horse. He no longer seemed at all disturbed. With fearsome opponents blocking him on both sides, he was quite composed.

“It’s a secret,” the fake D said with a smirk. His eyes had begun to give off an intense light. “In my stead, those two kids fell. They were a heavy load, but they didn’t deserve to go out like that. I’m not about to let you get out of here now.”

“That wasn’t my intent,” Yuma laughed from horseback. He had the air of a king sneering down at his lackeys on the ground. “Since you didn’t die, I’ll simply have to kill you. I wasn’t the one cornered here.”

And saying that, he gave a kick to his horse’s flanks. Just as the hooves struck the walkway it was reduced to powder, and the fake D went sailing through the air. In an instant, the assailant on horseback underwent a bizarre change. From the waist up he rotated 180 degrees as if he were some sort of automaton, and then he launched a wave of hair at the heart of the leaping fake D. That aerial assault was countered by the bird in flight. The way the fake D swung his blade around fresh from the draw and parried all the hair was nothing less than incredible, but his skill in deflecting one of those strands so it struck the galloping steed in its right flank was truly ungodly.

As the horse and rider seemed to collapse under their own weight, D charged at them. But an enormous form rose before him—the horse and Yuma. And as the steed rose, from its sides a gigantic pair of wings popped out noisily. His horse was a Pegasus.

D was a second too late getting out a wooden needle, and by the time he’d whirled around to throw it, the man and his flying horse had vanished into the depths of the darkness without any further response.

“You let him get away, you dolt,” the fake D sneered as he landed behind D. “And to make matters worse, you let him nail you right through the chest. Where’s that hair?”

Turning his gaze toward its source—D’s left hand—the fake D bugged his eyes. About half the hair was sticking out of the Hunter’s palm. And under his watchful eye, that hair was neatly extracted from D’s palm, and then dropped to the floor, where it curled up.

When it’d looked like D had been pierced through the heart by the hair, he’d actually stopped it with his left hand.

“Hey!” the fake D shouted, but by that time, the Hunter was already dashing toward the far end of the corridor. His black raiment soon became one with the darkness.

After seeing this, the fake cursed, “Damn it all. He gets all the sweet jobs.”

He then went back to the edge of the walkway, his right arm swinging out casually. The thousandth-of-a-micron thin, nigh-invisible steel wire from the launcher concealed in his sleeve shot straight off into the darkness. It found something. One flick of his wrist and the motor went into reverse, hauling back whatever the line had snagged. From the depths of the darkness rose Mia, and both her arms were wrapped around Kuentz. Though they looked to be floating in thin air, their bodies were actually supported by a steel wire the fake D had launched at the ceiling as they were plummeting from the walkway. Undoubtedly it had caught on a pipe or something else. After setting them back down on the walkway, the fake D undid the wire and stared into the darkness, saying, “He went on ahead.”

“I figured as much,” Mia replied, nodding. Peering at the fake’s face, she then asked, “So, what are you doing then?”

“You said you were the same as Mr. D, didn’t you? In that case, why aren’t you giving chase, too, and trying to help out?”

“It’s dangerous around here. The place is crawling with monsters who won’t obey my commands.”

“I don’t care if it was decided by rock-paper-scissors, I still have to protect you, you know,” he said, his soft tone underpinned by an immovable will.

D had no idea how well Yuma knew the layout of the facility. From what Mia had told him, the assassin seemed quite well informed, knowing more about it than the Hunter at the very least. If so, it would be easy for the assassin to lay a trap.

Suddenly the walls to either side of him vanished. Feeling the space broaden, D halted. He was in an absolutely barren clearing. The circular floor was more than three hundred feet in diameter. Countless doors and windows riddled the surrounding walls, and lying here and there were what looked to be bones. The stains that spread like shadows on the floor were most likely remnants of blood. Before he could even consider what this place had been used for, he was given the answer.

“How good of you to come. You, the seeker of Muma. However, this is as far as you go.” The voice seemed to reverberate from the heavens and the earth and the very walls.

“What is Muma?” D asked. “Is it the name of a place, or a person, or is it—”

“Who told you that, and who ordered you to kill all those who learned of it?”

“It would do no good to tell you that. My mission is one of death alone. And that, too, is Muma.”

“I want to know where the sway reactor teleported off to. I suppose that’s Muma, too.”

“Indeed it is,” Yuma said, his tone deepening the darkness. “Do you know what this place is called? Of course you don’t. I shall give you its name as a parting gift from this life.”

D surveyed his surroundings in silence. He then said, “It’s the Battlefield of Shadows, isn’t it?”

Signs of shock traveled through the air from behind the Hunter and to his right.

D didn’t turn around, but his right hand shot out. The needle of rough wood that knifed through the gloom drew a low groan off in the distance. Though D turned in that direction, he wasn’t able to advance—the doors on all sides of him had unexpectedly vanished, and from the elliptical black gaps they left, tall silhouettes had made an entrance.

One after another, the shadowy figures that’d stepped into the clearing fluttered through the air like mystic birds, their black wings spread as they came down all around the Hunter. On closer inspection, all of these figures were similar in appearance. They wore wide-brimmed hats and long coats, and had elegantly curved longswords draped across their backs. Actually, they were exactly the same—to the point where any ordinary person would undoubtedly question first their eyesight, and then their sanity. They were identical. Every figure there was the exact same person. Their forms and handsome features seemed to shine through the gloom. They were D. Each and every one of them was D.

Those in the front never halted their advance, while those following behind them quickly came to stand shoulder to shoulder with them, making the mob of Ds into an army that advanced on the lone D standing in the center of the place.

Ordinarily, this would be a nightmare. A dozen people dressed like you, with the same face as you but devoid of expression, closing in all around, would make you desperate with terror, driving you over the brink. If there had been any bystanders, it wouldn’t have been surprising if they’d fainted away from fear and confusion. A mob made up entirely of people who were the same was simply that disturbing. Only at a time like this did a person realize the truth that one’s value comes from being a unique being. However, this time was different. What a beautiful sight, to have one glittering star in the center, and all around it more stars of the same hue and shape! Even the air of nihilism that filled the distance between them and its severity seemed likely to leave the spirit of anyone else in their presence frozen in rapture. This must’ve been what beauty was. It was death itself.

When they came within ten paces of the true D, the figures that’d formed a ring of Ds around him drew their swords in unison. Streaks of light arced off their backs, some going into the high position, some to the center, still others flowing down to a low position, taking up stances both flawless and utterly still.

And then, like gorgeous petals closing on the blossom’s center, they stabbed a multitude of gleaming stamens right at D.

Descending light, light, and more light—and at its center, the figure in black made a graceful flash that snapped off a number of the glittering stamens raised in this flower, while the petals in human form swiftly fell to the ground, stabbed through the neck or shoulder or chest.

They mirrored D not merely in form alone. Their skill with a blade, their strength and speed should all have been the same as his. In truth, a number of the blades bit through the black cloth into his shoulder and belly, and bright blood spouted from him. And yet, this didn’t even slow D down, his coat whirling out madly like something from a nightmare, not only blinding his beautiful assailants but also deflecting their vicious attacks, while the glittering weapon in his right hand slew his identical brothers one after another. In the gloomy clearing, which seemed to lie at the border between darkness and light, a bloody mist danced out.

That cry, tinged not only with anguish but also with amazement, rang out not five seconds after the deadly battle had begun.

“The shadows are fading!” the assassin in blue shouted, showing an interesting choice of words.

Those five seconds of life-or-death battle had changed the Ds who challenged D. The corners of their eyes slid downward, their noses twisted, and their lips swelled sickeningly so that they no longer retained the slightest resemblance to the D who was their prototype. Now it had become a battle between beauty and hideousness, with the dance of beauty’s cold steel laying all the hideous ones low. The beautiful and the hideous were no longer equals. Not their faces alone but their very limbs were strangely out of balance, and when the last of the misshapen figures hit the ground, D whipped his sword around and raced toward where he’d heard the voice.

It had come from three stories above—-a door looming in a spot more than thirty feet up.

Bending his knees only a bit, D made a great leap. Like a black and mystic bird he whistled more than twenty feet up in the air, clinging to the wall, a moving shadow whose speed rivaled that of the light as he slipped into an opening.

D expected to find the assassin in blue, Yuma, lying on the floor. But there was no sign of him. Well, actually there was. In a horrible puddle of blood on the floor there lay a single eyeball that’d been skewered by a rough wooden needle. Retrieving it from the middle of that ghastly smelling ring of gore, D said, “The left one, I take it.”

The wall across from him had an exit in it. Spots of blood trailed from the puddle of gore, ending about three feet away. At that point, Yuma had undoubtedly done something to stanch the bleeding. He had to have prodigious presence of mind.

“He can’t have gone far yet,” his left hand called out in a hoarse voice. “You could go after him. Your opponent’s wounded, and seriously at that.”

D, who was of the same opinion, had begun to walk toward the exit before the voice had finished speaking. But a cry that reached him from far below stopped him. Looking down, he found his other self standing there. The fake D.

Quickly noticing him, he called up to the Hunter, “Let him get away, didn’t you? You don’t have to say a word. I can tell just by the look on your face. After all, you’re me. But don’t bother chasing him further. From here on out it’s a danger zone even I don’t know too well. It’s crawling with monsters spawned by the twisted machinery underground here. Better come up with a new plan.” “That does sound like a good idea,” the hoarse voice said, but before it could finish, D was sailing through the air.

When he landed, the fake D stood before him pensively surveying his surroundings.

“Well, I’m certainly surprised you could kill so many of yourselves, ” he remarked in an equally pensive tone. “They were clones. Data on you and me remains here somewhere. But your—I mean our good looks they just couldn’t do anything about. It wouldn’t do to have that copied so easily.”

“Still, there’s something I don’t get. Even when their faces went to hell, their skill shouldn’t have changed, so how did you slaughter them so easily? If I had to fight this many of myself, I could wipe them out, but I don’t think I’d be able to stand on my own two feet like you. See, I know my own limitations. What are you hiding?” “What did you do with Mia?” D said, cutting off what was shaping up to be a lengthy discourse by the fake.

“I left her at the entrance to this clearing. Wait a second. Now that you mention it, I don’t sense—” Turning, he squinted his eyes. “She’s gone.”

Having ridden the fake’s back all the way to the clearing, she noticed what looked to be corpses lying all over the place. Telling her to wait there, the fake D had set her down, and then vanished into the gloom. As she watched him go, her consciousness had rapidly slipped away. When she came to, she was here, in a spacious chamber reminiscent of a warehouse. Filled with a stench powerful enough to wake her back up, it had a low ceiling and narrow, blocked'off corridors. Forty or fifty feet away glowed the light of what was apparently the exit, with a figure she’d never seen before standing in front of it. Though he was about the same height as Mia, the beard on his chin and the way his back was stooped made it clear he was quite advanced in years—a very, very old man.

“Excuse me,” she called out, and he turned in her direction and came hobbling over. He was dragging his right leg.

“You’ve awakened, have you?” the old man said, standing in front of Mia and gazing at her face.

Although she couldn’t tell in this darkness, his skin had a black luster to it. It hadn’t been baked by the sun, but rather seemed to be simply filthy. As for his age—nothing could be gathered from his eyes, which were as intrepid as could be, but he had to be a lot more than seventy. He was completely covered in wrinkles.

“How clumsy you are. What’ve you come here to do? Oh, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Regardless, you’re going to die.”

“What an amusing girl you are,” he chuckled. “Too precious to use as an offering. However, the situation is unavoidable. This underground prison is worse than any hell, but thanks to my offerings, I’ve survived here five thousand years past my allotted span.”

“That’s incredible!” Mia said, genuinely amazed. But she could see how living that long might make anyone superstitious and put the same look in their eyes. “Who in the world are you?”

“My name? I had one, but I’ve forgotten it. Oh, I know—long ago, I was called Neer, so let’s make it that.”

“No, not really,” Mia replied, feigning a smile. His eyes had a gleam to them that was beyond the pale. Realizing there’d be no use reasoning with him, Mia decided to escape under her own steam. Fortunately her hands and feet were unfettered, and her magical accouterments were still safe in her waist pouch. She had to run off as soon as possible to D, or the fake D, so they could ascertain where the sway reactor had gone. Under no circumstances did she want to hinder their actions.

Mia felt mildly surprised at her new resolve. At some point, she’d come to view D and the fake D in the same way. Though identical in appearance, inside they were as different as heaven and earth. Mia also felt a shudder closely resembling fear deep in her heart.

“Girl,” Neer called to her. Without her realizing it, he’d moved back over by the exit.

Checking the contents of her pouch with her fingers, Mia went over to him with an innocent expression on her face. The glow was increasing. On reaching Neer, she saw that what she’d taken to be an open exit was in fact filled by a massive plate of glass. It was a window.

“Five thousand years ago, this observation chamber was used exclusively by a certain being. Though no trace of them remains now, there were rows of the Nobility’s mysterious devices, and pale Nobles and android servants scurried about in the service of said being. Here he stood, gazing at the god below. He probably didn’t consider it a god, though. Because he himself had made it, you see.”

She could tell that the light was coming from down below. Pressing her face to the glass—which actually seemed to be a material far more permeable to light—she turned narrowed eyes toward the glow. Within that intense light, which she could somehow withstand, something with color and shape squirmed.

But even as the essence of an ineffable terror stabbed into every inch of her, Mia couldn’t look away. Chaos began to give way to form. Just like when the universe was created. It was coming. Out of the light—and drawing closer. Heading toward Mia.

A scream gushed from the mouth of the fortuneteller’s daughter. Steeped far too deeply in the colors of fear, it carried echoes of horror.

A sound rang out from the glass. Something had struck it—Mia’s greatest fear.

Jumping in surprise without uttering another sound, Mia then began to slowly back away. She didn’t even notice that she’d gone right past Neer. When the enormous window had shrunk to about the size of her face, her back struck something solid. Turning, she stared hard at it. An enormous thing towered blackly there. At first she thought it might be some kind of offertory shrine. But it wasn’t.

But even though she understood what it was, she couldn’t accept it. Its true nature had become clear, but the staggering size of it made the recognition of that fact impossible. A seat loomed over Mia’s head, while to either side of it, much further up, armrests ran parallel to the floor like elegant avalanches, and to the rear the backrest rose high into the darkness of the air—it was a chair. Devoid of ornamentation, the pitch black throne couldn’t help but convey the incredible dignity of its owner.

“That is the chair of the master of this chamber—the being of whom I spoke.” Neer’s tone was wan and shuddering, but at the same time full of pride. “He would sit in that chair and gaze through the window. Actually, from that position, there’s no way he would be able to see down below. He did not look, but rather he must’ve sensed. Sensed what? You wouldn’t understand. No one would. No one but me. His thoughts focused, working the blue nerve cells of the Nobility to their utmost to feel—and I alone know what he glimpsed with his mind’s eye. Because I—”

“Oh—he comes!” he shouted, turning and looking at Mia as he extended a bony finger. “My word. He’s coming. The great one comes. Can you hear the sound of his footsteps? Oh, there is but one—it is unquestionably the sound of the great one’s footsteps. The squeak of the stone floors he treads, the echoes off the rock walls, the sound of footsteps that send cracks through the ceiling.”

Mia didn’t hear a single thing. She was looking not at Neer, but at the window behind him. The light was creeping higher. Coming up from below. The thing that she’d seen.

And from behind them came something that terrified Neer. His Adam’s apple trembling, Neer shouted. The end of his finger twitched as if all the vitality in his body was crammed into it.

A suction-cup-covered tentacle in a horrifying shade wrapped smartly around Mia’s waist. In a position that made resistance difficult, she was dragged toward the window.

Shapes rushed forward. Two figures. Both wore the same clothes. Closing on Mia with unbelievable speed, one wrapped an arm around the girl’s neck. A second later a silvery gleam flashed in Mia’s eyes, and she was thrown to the floor. Forgetting the pain in her derrière, she pulled back with a frightened squeal. The severed tentacle was flopping around by her feet.

“Who are you two?” Neer asked, stomping his foot with vexation as he faced them. “You’re not him. But I was sure those were his footsteps. The great one came. Came alone. But you two aren’t him. Who are you?”

“You were only talking about one person, right? You said that he had come,” one of them said as if posing the question to himself.

What the other D said froze not only Mia, but the wholly uninformed Neer as well.

"Good thing the motion detectors still work,” that D continued. Not knowing which was which, Mia looked from one to the other. Not only did they look exactly the same, it seemed as if there was one D existing in two places simultaneously. Mia’s cheeks flushed red. There was twice as much beauty.

“I knew there was someone else wandering around this underground facility besides me, but it looks like we’ve finally caught him now.”

“Neer,” the old man answered weakly. Like Mia, he was mad from the gorgeous features of the pair.

“Given your age, you’ve probably got seniority over me. How long have you been here?”

“Five thousand years?” the fake D said. As he knit his brow, his right hand unleashed a flash of light.

The old man’s shirt split open from the base of his throat to the solar plexus, revealing iron-brown skin. It was a flexible metallic epidermis that looked and moved like genuine skin. With it, he might well last another five millennia.

Gazing at his bloodshot eyes and the foam that spilled from his lips, the fake D once again lashed out with his blade. This time the old man’s helmet was split in two, falling to the floor. Once Neer’s hairless pate was exposed, the fake D stared at him intently and pointed to his right temple.

I see. So that’s why your brain-support system malfunctioned. But the support systems the Nobility put into their cyborg servants are supposed to be made of an indestructible metal. Even I couldn’t cut through it."

Touching one hand to his temple, the old man said, “I’m not funny in the head. Leave the girl with me and get right on out of here.”

Neer’s eyes were drawn to the other D, who stood over by the throne. It was he who’d posed the question. Once she’d determined which was the fake D, Mia had gone to the other D’s side.

“No way,” the girl said, clinging to D’s arm. It felt like she was touching steel. She automatically let go of him not only due to her shock at that, but even more because the very act of latching onto D filled her with an almost religious feeling, like she was committing a sin. She was as shaken as a person who’d just heard the voice of the gods.

“There’s something down there below the window—but it’s no god,” Mia said, pointing a trembling finger at the devastated glass, then at the tentacle that’d finally stopped moving.

The breath caught in Mia’s throat—the old man had bugged his eyes and shook his head vehemently. He was the picture of complete insanity.

“Don’t be absurd. My god isn’t a repulsive creature like this. It is a being of rare beauty. Because I myself created it.” “Created it? You made a god?”

For the first time, Mia truly felt how insane the old man was. All that was down at the bottom of that light was this monster.

“This god you say you created—I’d like to see it,” D said softly. Neer scoffed, “Surely you jest. My god belongs to me alone. It is a god precisely because only those who are worthy can see it. And that means me and him.”

“This whole spread—you made it?” Mia said, her eyes wide. “Indeed. I was an engineer who worked exclusively for him—that is, the great one.”

“Look at us,” the fake D said, grinning broadly as he gave a toss of his chin to Neer. “Take a good long look at this face. Doesn’t it bring back anything?”

Not a word from the old man. Crazed though they were, his eyes managed to focus intently for a few seconds—and unexpectedly opened as wide as they’d go. Hues of fear and astonishment had taken hold of them.

“It ... it can’t be . . .” he mumbled, his lips barely letting the words out. “It can’t be ... It’s simply not possible. He ... The two of you . . . are his? Are you the great one’s?”

“The light!” Mia exclaimed in a shrill voice, pointing toward the window. “The light’s coming up!”

“Old-timer, what was this room for?” the fake D asked as he watched the window out of the corner of his eye.

“You fool. That’s just what you’ve been doing here. I mean originally. What was it in the beginning?”

“In the beginning?” Turbulent clouds closed in Neer’s eyes. He knew. But terror rooted in some deep psychological level guarded him from understanding and confessing.

The color drained from Mia’s face, leaving her pale as a waxwork. Light filled the room. The source of the light shone beyond the window, and in its depths, a form familiar to them all flickered, trying to take shape.

“I’ve got it!” the fake D exclaimed, nodding. “What are you thinking about now, old-timer? That thing? Him?”

There was a succession of strident sounds. Neer’s teeth were chattering out of fear. “I... I was . . .”

Seizing him by the chest, the fake asked, “You were what? Who were you thinking about? That—”

As he pointed toward the face beyond the window, his own expression was a ghastly sight.

“No, it was him, wasn’t it? The master of this chamber, right? That is your god. A sick god created by a sick old man—yes, I do believe it was you who made that thing. In this room, the light beyond the window takes the form of your thoughts.”

“It was whatever you were thinking about at that moment. Weren’t you scared, utterly terrified, thinking that the thing in the light would be your worst fear? Well, that’s what appeared.”

“Stand back,” D said, taking Mia by the shoulder and pulling her back by the throne. The light also enveloped the chair.

The gorgeous form launched himself at the waves of light. His whole body quivered.

Light is made of particles and waves—photons and light waves. A single wave of that light or a single photon contained a ruinous amount of energy. Some passed through D’s body; others sank into his muscles, his organs, his bones, discharging their fatal power. Imagine a human being exposed to a powerful dose of radiation.

“Yeah, more or less.” Perhaps D bothered to respond to each and every remark only from a sense of closeness from being the same.

“Oh, shut up,” the fake D replied furiously, staggering. The intense energy load had overwhelmed his body’s defenses. “Damn, it’s gotten to my legs. Okay, I’m gonna kill the old-timer. It’s his imagination that gave rise to this monstrosity.”

Neer was laid out on the floor. As D turned in that direction, his legs buckled badly. Both knees hit the floor, and then his hands followed suit.

Moving, D tried to say something, but no words came out. His body melted into the whiteness. The gigantic face had lined up with him and was blasting him with a concentration of light energy. D was expressionless as he bore the agony of being seared to the bone.

“Do it! Kill me. Do it in the name of Muma!” Neer shouted, his mouth open as far as it would go.

“Aaaah!” the old man blathered as D took care that the edge didn’t strike him, hitting him instead with the flat of the blade and knocking him out. As a product of Neer’s imagination, the titanic face should vanish once the old man lost consciousness.

“Time to move,” D said. Whether he was addressing himself or the fake D was unclear.

As D kicked off the floor in a manner suggesting he didn’t give even a thought to the ferocious attacks, the fake D sprinted after him. His hair fell out, and the skin on his face began to peel and fall off. At ten paces, D went through the face. Running another ten, he turned around. The face was closing on him.

“This thing’s gone beyond its creator,” a hoarse voice said. “It can maintain its existence through its own will, and it’s out of its mind with a savage hatred of you.”

The enormous mouth opened as wide as it could go, and D jumped back fifteen feet. Right to the base of the throne.

White flames tinged the face’s lips. It had gnashed its teeth together. A momentary delay resulted.

D flew into the air. Leaping up onto the throne, he looked like a blisteringly hot knight. The face continued to pursue him. Swirling white heat enveloped both the throne and D. Within it, there was a single blinding flash of light.

The colossal face suddenly donned an agonized expression and reeled back. Its closed eyelids were enveloped by flames, its screaming mouth split open, and muscle fell from jaws and cheeks that could take no more. White flames burst open, and from the cracks even hotter flames erupted, connecting with others and burning everything off the face. Just for a second, the face turned to the heavens and howled. It looked like a scream from a gigantic severed head that’d been set on the throne. A heartbeat later, this golden instant of death dissolved into flames. And when the last of the self-destructive flames melted into the air, all that remained standing on the throne was the young man in black.

“You did it!” the left hand said with genuine admiration to D as he silently sheathed his longsword. Perhaps it was amazed. “There was nothing you could do but counter a monster produced by a crazed mind with an even stronger force of will, though smashing it like that—wow, blood really will tell.”

But in return, D’s face was horribly melted, and his coat and traveler’s hat still had smoke and white flames coming from them. The blade of his sword was ruined.

“Even if I didn’t do anything to help you, your own regenerative abilities could handle burns like these. But you’ll have to replace your clothes and your sword, you know. So, what do you wanna do?”

“Don’t worry about that,” another D called up from the ground. Needless to say, it was the fake one. “Have you forgotten who this facility was built for? Come with me. No parent would want to leave his newborn child to lead a deprived existence, after all.”

A few minutes later, the fake D had guided them through a door, and beyond it lay thousands or even tens of thousands of splendid garments—a gorgeous palette that filled the vast hall completely. In the next room, D chose a longsword from the weapons that covered all the walls. Its elegant curve, the sturdy workmanship of its hilt and sheath—everything was exactly the same as his accustomed blade.

The next thing they had to do was to pay a call on the medical center—the two Ds weren’t the only ones who’d taken a direct hit from those high-energy waves. Mia and Neer both lay on beds with treatment systems that were barely operational. Though Mia had taken cover behind the throne, sticking her face out had given it a thorough exposure to the light energy, which left it with a condition resembling a sunburn.

“Looks like the system’s not fully operational,” the fake D said, giving the sputtering treatment equipment a kick. Its alloy body dented.

“So it won’t be possible to treat them for the light energy. They’ll need to be hospitalized in the Capital. To make matters worse,” he continued, throwing a look that could be described as both cold and sympathetic to the groaning Neer on the distant bed, “he’s too far gone. I looked at his scans, and both his organs and his brain are lousy with tumors. You know, if we’d put him down earlier, he might’ve been spared all this pain.”

The eyes of the two Ds met. Astonishingly enough, the melted flesh on their faces had almost been fully repaired, and their hair was back to normal. The metabolic functions of these two must’ve had an almost infinite amount of energy to draw upon.

Putting his hands together, the fake D cried, “Yahoo! In that case, we’d better do this while he’s still among the living. Let’s hurry up and ask him.”

But he knew that was impossible. Neer was rocked by spasms, and the words that came from his mouth were the senseless gibbering of a madman.

As the fake D folded his arms, D extended his left hand in front of him. He put the palm of that hand against Neer’s forehead. Five seconds passed . . . Ten . . . And then Neer’s tightly shut lids opened wide. Seeing that a light of unmistakable sanity shone in them, the fake D groaned, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“This ... is the medical center . . . isn’t it?” Neer inquired after looking all around.

“Come to mention it, I have this feeling . . . like I had a long dream ... or something. Are you . . . treating me?”

From the vicinity of his chest there came a little sound, like a motor spinning out of control.

“The great one . . . had the initial idea . . . and I studied the feasibility of it. And then ... I had complete authority . . . until it was built.”

Neer shook his head from side to side. At the same time, spasms rattled through every inch of his body.

As the Hunter’s left hand said, certain death was catching up with the cyborg after five thousand long years. His eyes lost their sparkle, and his expression became that of a puppet.

Mia stood there. Walking over to the aged cyborg as if she didn’t even see the other two, she squatted down by the old man’s head and took his half-melted hand between both of hers.

“In addition to fortunetelling, my mother served as a priestess at funerals. Her job was to see the dying off,” Mia said quietly. “She taught me how to do the same. I couldn’t help but hate the idea of watching people die for a living, but then I found this person who’d collapsed out in the woods and there wasn’t time for me to go get anyone else. The person died in my arms. At that point, I finally got the feeling I understood what the job was all about. No one wants to die alone. I realized that being with someone when their time comes isn’t a job, it’s my duty as a human being.”

White beads had formed on the brow of the aged cyborg. Circulatory fluid was probably seeping through his skin due to mechanical failures. Mia wiped them away.

“Go gently,” she said as if addressing the old man. Or D. Or the fake D. Or something that wasn’t here now, but which intently watched over everything. “No one is going to ask you anything. You needn’t speak. Go gently.”

Neer’s closed eyelids twitched a little. Tears spilled from them. “Muma . . . When you leave here ... go north. My niece Menda . . . should be there ...”

And having said that, he started to take a breath and stopped in the middle of it. The air caught in his throat, and he wheezed. He clutched at Mia’s fingers. A hint of pain passed across the girl’s face. But that was it. The ancient hand let go of Mia’s fingers, and then rolled off the edge of the bed.

“That old-timer was a lucky man,” the fake D said enviously. “The way things were going, his rusted old body would’ve dropped somewhere in this underworld and been a meal for the monsters, but instead he got sent off to the next life by a sweet young thing.” “Don’t put it that way!” Mia cried, glaring at him. Something glittered in her eyes.

“You needn’t apologize to me. I’d appreciate it if you’d show some respect for the feelings of the departed, however.”

“It’s—” Mia began, lightly taking hold of her right index finger. That alone made her groan. It seemed to be broken from the third joint up.

“Oh!” she gasped in surprise, but that soon gave way to fresh bewilderment. The pain had left her completely.

“Well, time to get down to the main event,” the fake D said somewhat awkwardly. “Thanks to babycakes here—”

“Thanks to Mia baby, it looks like the location of the treasure will finally be learned. North it is, my other self!” he called to D. He was positively buoyant. If that was his true character, D would have to be a huge liar putting on a great show.

“No problem. While you’re headed there, you’ll run into people coming this way. You can ask them. After all, we’re talking about this old-timer’s niece. Anyone would know about someone like that.”

“Come with me back to the surface,” D said, having halted but still facing forward. “Then you should go back to the village. And forget about everything else.” “Yeah, you do that,” the fake chimed in. In this regard, the two Ds were in complete agreement.

“This is no job for some penny-ante bone tosser from the sticks. Stay out of it. I don’t know why your mother didn’t teach you—” Surely D had let this play out intentionally.

A sharp slap rang out, and Mia stared dazedly at the right hand she’d used to land the blow while the fake D held his cheek and grinned wryly.

“Sorry. But I won’t have anyone insulting my mother,” the girl declared flatly.

As the fake D looked at her, his eyes had a chillingly malevolent glow, but it swiftly faded and he said, “No, I was at fault. Well, you just leave the rest to me. You’re a lot more likely to get results that way. But I’ll tell you one thing, baby.”

“Okay, Mia baby. As you can see, he and I are one and the same. Never forget that.”

Mia turned to face D, looking head on at his handsome features. “Please take me with you.”

“In that case, promise me something. That you’ll avert the crisis the world faces even if I’m not there. Swear that the two of you won’t go off and just fight for your own cause.”

Mia’s breath was taken away—he’d accepted her instantly. It was the rule of the Frontier that everyone lived on their own.

“Understood. I won’t be a nuisance to you at all. No matter what happens, just leave me be.”

A stunned silence from the girl. Mia’s blood froze and she wondered if the words hadn’t come from an entirely different person.

“What did I tell you? I’m a hell of a lot kinder, aren’t I?” the fake D said, his voice skimming vainly through her mind.

“Okay,” she replied, but how she had to muster the energy to say that one word! Mia desperately fought back what was rising within her.

When the three of them reached the surface, it was evening. A fourth person—Kuentz—was draped across the back of D’s cyborg steed. Mia was stupefied that the pair’s horses had been tethered outside the entrance at some point, but the apparent culprit—the fake D—didn’t say anything to her.

The begrudging manner in which the girl complied was hardly in character for her, where a spiteful remark would’ve been more in order. But she knew it wouldn’t do any good.

“Oh!” the fake D exclaimed as something went flying into the air from behind D and landed right in his lap. The slumbering Kuentz.

“Entrusting him to the one who gets results,” D said without even turning to look.

And with that, the rider in black galloped away in a cloud of dust. To the north.

While he trailed the Hunter in a daze, the fake D bared his teeth and snarled, “The nerve of that guy. The next time I see him, he’ll have to answer for this.”

Behind him, Mia added, “I’ll say. As soon as we get Kuentz to the hospital, let’s head right out after him.”

Three days and three nights D kept his horse ceaselessly galloping down the road north, finally arriving at the first tiny community. There he left his exhausted cyborg steed, asking that the animal be serviced and its needs attended to. When he asked at the stables about a woman named Menda, the reply he got was, “Ah, you’re too late, you are. She passed away three years back.”

Though her home had also been demolished, he asked where it’d been located, heading out there on a horse borrowed from the stables. Sure enough, nothing but the house’s foundation remained in the hilly region spreading to the west of the village. As he was looking at the surrounding area, a wagon came along. It stopped in front of D.

“You there, pretty boy—what are you up to?” a personable-looking farmer in a battered hat called out to him from the driver’s seat. “There’s nothing left there. A witch woman who was no-one-knows-how-many centuries old used to live there, you see. Caused all kinds of trouble, and on account of that, her house was burned to the ground. Even now, the will-o’-the-wisps light up the place come nighttime and strange, shadowy characters creep around. I don’t mean to tell you your business, but you’d best be hurrying on your way.”

“Does she have a grave?” D asked in return. Although he was over thirty feet away, his low voice reached the farmer’s ears without the least bit of distortion.

“She does. The village holy man said a body with no one to see to it was just too pathetic, so he set up a grave for her. From where you’re standing, you can see that hill off to the right, can’t you? It’s at the foot of that.”

It was less than five hundred yards to the hill. In a shallow depression that’d been dug in the slope there stood a tall, slim gravestone. On it was carved Menda’s name and a date three years earlier. There was no date of birth.

Staring for some time at the humble grave, D then set his left hand on the top of the gravestone. To an observer, he might’ve looked like a dashing man wracked by deep emotion at the thought of the departed. And then, said observer would no doubt have imagined that the grave’s occupant was a woman of peerless beauty now lost to him.

“Well?” D asked. His inquiry was directed not to the gravestone but rather, as illogical as it seemed, to his left hand.

“There’s 110 hideout here. It’s a grave all right. Except it’s made of incredibly heavy stone.”

Processed stone was renowned for being essentially as dense as iron, and it was used to bind ghosts and vengeful spirits that might harm the living.

“That much I can’t tell.” Perhaps noticing that D’s right hand was reaching around to his back, the voice hurriedly added, “You—you can’t seriously be thinking of stabbing your sword into that stone, can you?”

It was more of a desperate plea than a question, but before it had even finished, D’s right hand flashed into action. Drawing the blade from his back, he made a thrust. Naturally, the sword should’ve limned an arc and then streaked straight forward in a piercing blow. But it merely looked as if D’s blade had flown straight from the sheath to the gravestone.

Stabbing into the base of the gravestone at roughly a sixty-degree angle, the blade appeared to stop for a second when it was a third of the way in, but it merely slowed a tiny bit before sinking in halfway.

For some reason, whenever a person referred to the arrival of something inhuman, they invariably said some variant of “It’s coming!” And something certainly did come. At the same time D’s blade was being pulled back out, a clearly visible miasma-like substance was rising from the gravestone, but it then dispersed in the air.

There stood a woman in a white death shroud. The scenery behind her was visible through her transparent skin.

“Surely you know the power of the soul. Everything that’s been said about you reaches my ears.”

“Where is Muraa?” D asked. Though he’d confirmed who she was, he didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Of course, he didn’t seem at all frightened, either.

Joy tinged the cheeks of the transparent woman. Her right hand rose to her chest. It stopped there for a moment, and then came away again. Within her blurry body, a black lump swelled and shrank by turns. It was obvious at a glance. That was her heart.

“The great one—oh, but then you must know of whom I speak. He put this into me. Even when I was killed, it beat on. And it prevents me from undertaking my eternal journey. If you wish to know the way to Muma, I want you to stop this.”

“You must’ve come from the subterranean realm where my uncle was. I am not uninformed as to what transpired there.”

“I was one of those who worked there. You see, the great one’s experiments required not only the science of the Nobility, but also the primitive magics of every race. As it continued, it affected my mental state—in truth, it got to the point where even the minds of the pitiless Nobles working there could bear it no longer. Weird children bom one after another—oh, I can still hear them! This heart carries the noise to me. The heartrending whimpers of the babies deemed failures. All of them were discarded in a bottomless pit. No one can know how the sight of that has tormented me. On the brink of losing my mind, I talked with a number of my associates, and then we set the subatomic reactor to overload and fled the subterranean realm. I galloped off on a horse then, riding a full year until I took up residence in a freezing village nestled between the glaciers.”

One after another, the woman’s words rang out with a despair that was denser than the dark of winter. And it was because of this that D remained silent and listened to her.

“But alas, as I feared, I wasn’t safe there. Those who’d labored at forbidden tasks in the subterranean realm would never be allowed to escape the black arms of the great one. Every day and every night, I heard his voice in my dreams whispering to me, Come back. And after living there a hundred years, I turned my back on the glacier village. For the next three centuries I walked across the Frontier, looking like some wandering wraith, and then I settled on this village. All the bizarre experiments I conducted here were done at the great one’s bidding. As a result, I wound up cursed and killed. Not that I’m resentful of that—I was painfully aware that the great one never forgave traitors when I chose to rebel. However, the fate the great one bestowed upon me was not the peace of death. My ears ring with the cries of desperately clinging babies who realized their fate just as they were about to be hurled into a dark hole. Babies who wrapped their arms around my neck. When I close my eyes, their faces appear, begging to be spared. I have been locked away with the very things I sought to flee. And for the rest of time I’ll be unable to escape them. Not so long as I have this heart—the heart the great one gave me in place of my own when he appeared to me in a dream the night before the villagers murdered me.”

The woman covered her eyes. She plugged her ears. She wrapped her arms around herself. As overly dramatic as these gestures were, they laid the woman’s misery bare.

“Stop this heart of mine,” the woman said, her words growing slurred. She was desperate. It wasn’t life she desired. The freedom of her soul hung in the balance. “No one can stop a heart made by the great one. Except for his one success, that is.”

“Oh, will you do it, then? Of course I know the way. I was a handmaiden to the great one.”

D didn’t move from that spot, but held his sword ready in his left hand, drawing it far back under his arm. Poised for a thrust. Could the same blow that’d pierced the superdense stone destroy the heart housed in her spirit—an artificial heart that’d been put into her in a dream?

D’s eyes glowed with an intense light. His eyelids slid shut, and a second later, the sword blade pierced her black heart.

Menda screamed. Though the writhing figure clutching her heart was semitransparent, she was just like a real person of flesh and blood experiencing real agony.

D lowered his sword. He knew his blade had met no resistance— it was like stabbing into thin air.

There was no change in the evil beating of the black heart. An artificial heart made of the same material as a dream, and which, when damaged, put the soul into hellish agony—what in the world was it, and how on earth could it be destroyed?

“Stop this. You’ll only torture her soul,” a hoarse voice choked with distress called out to stay his hand.

“Looks like I failed,” D said to the soul of Menda, which had finally finished twitching. “What do you want to do?” “How about you? Do you pity me? Are you loath to make me feel the same pain again? Do you wish to run away with your tail between your legs?”

She looked up at D with tears in her eyes. That single blow had left her face gaunt, but a hopeful smile gradually spread across it.

“You’re ready now, aren’t you? You’re going to do it. You really, truly intend to free me from this accursed existence. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Stop this madness,” the left hand urged them. “Her soul won’t die. But every time you fail, she’ll go into agonized convulsions. Unless you have some proof you’ll succeed next time, this is just torture. Gaaaah!”

Opening his hand again from the tight fist he’d just made, the Hunter closed his eyes. He was focusing his mind.

A chill spread through the air—a paranormal phenomenon associated with D’s intense concentration. Once more he held the sword by his side—and when it blistered through the air, it impaled the black organ again, snapping Menda backward.

At the same time, D clutched his chest and staggered forward. A steely arrow ran into him through the back and poked out of his heart. Someone had shot him from behind.

Ordinarily, the Hunter would’ve sensed the murderous intent before his opponent had even fired and gone on the offensive. However, his intense concentration hadn’t allowed him to do so.

Reaching with his right hand for the part that protruded from his chest, D yanked it forward. Pulling eight inches of gory arrow out, he then fell forward as if in keeping with the speed and angle of that tug.

“Oh, D! D! D! ” Menda cried, forgetting her own pain and clinging to him, but her face was heavily tinged with the hollowness of one who knew her own fate.

The wind blew across her grave. Aside from the fallen Vampire Hunter, there was no sign of anyone else there. For her soul wasn’t permitted to exist in the ordinary world.

To D’s rear—actually, on the road some fifty yards away—a wagon was stopped. In the driver’s seat with a twelve-pound crossbow propped against one shoulder was the same personable farmer who’d told D about this place.

“You were just so good-looking I knew you had to be up to something, so I follow you out here and sure enough, you’re getting into all kinds of weirdness. Trying to help the evil spirit of that witch after I went to all the trouble of sealing her up in that stone—that’s patently offensive. Shooting you in the back might’ve been unsporting, but heaven’s wrath shows no mercy. You can go straight to hell.”

Lowering the crossbow, he took off his hat. There wasn’t a single hair on his head. Then he took a folded-up monk’s cap from his chest pocket and put it on. The holy man who’d erected Menda’s grave was this very same man.

Fixing a cylindrical magazine of arrows to the crossbow, the monk got down from his wagon.

“The ghost of Menda is cursed. She’ll never be able to pass on. But if she lingers long in this world, she’s sure to cause harm. That’s why she was confined to this grave, until you stuck your busy little nose into this!”

Walking over to D, he kicked the Hunter’s face as hard as he could. D’s lips split and blood went flying.

“Are you trying to get smart with me, you vile spirit?” the monk cursed at her. For he could see souls.

Pointing the end of his crossbow at Menda’s heart, he pulled what looked like an earphone from one ear.

“I got this listening device from the Capital. I heard the entire conversation you two had. Now I’m going to see whether or not emptying every arrow I’ve got into your heart will send you to the hereafter,” he declared with naked loathing.

‘Don’t!” Menda pleaded, but—wearing a look on his face that JL/hardly befitted a holy man—the monk pulled the crossbow’s trigger. Driven at speeds of six hundred feet per second by compressed air, the steel arrow pierced Menda’s chest, leaving the lost soul writhing on the ground.

Her sobs were like pouring gasoline on a fire for someone of a sadistic bent, and the monk ran his tongue over his lips. “Oh, does that hurt? Are you in pain? Do even lost souls feel? I believe I could write a paper about that to send back to the main temple in the Capital. Just let me make some more observations.”

With a whuuut! a second shot scorched through the air, penetrating her heart and sticking into the ground far behind her. Menda rolled around, not even able to speak.