“What kind of person was he?” D asked after they’d ridden for about an hour.

“You mean . . . him?” said the girl, who’d introduced herself as Savena, staring at D with glassy eyes.

Though a little gasp of surprise rose from his left hand, D didn’t seem to pay any attention to it.

The girl thought for a moment. It was unclear what kind of memories might be packed in the brains of the dead, but her cloudy eyes gradually began to take on a mysterious light.

“He was . . . big. Really quite big . . . The first time I met him . . . I couldn’t say anything ... I just looked at him . . . And he looked at me ... so intently . . . with crimson eyes like burning stones . . . Oh, such passion . . . Nothing in the world can take its place ...”

D noticed that the girl’s own eyes glowed with a fiery passion. The passions of the living dead should’ve been nothing save the drinking of human blood and the kiss of the Nobility, but what filled the girl’s eyes was inconceivable: tenderness.

“He’s the one who drank your blood—don’t you hate him for forcing you into your present situation?” said a voice just like D’s, only a little hoarse.

The girl knit her brow. It took some time for her to comprehend the meaning of the question.

“Hate? What’s that? I have the feeling I felt that. . . long, long ago . . .”

“This is a surprise! Bitten or not, anyone with this much of their human consciousness left should still have some resentment toward the one who did it, but there doesn’t seem to be any at all.

That’s him in a nutshell. Ask 110 more, D. Want to know what kind of man he is? Look. The eyes of all the tens of thousands of people traveling the highway hold the same loving glow as the girl’s. Could any other Noble earn the same?”

D didn’t reply. His cool gaze was trained straight ahead. This was the way he’d lived up till now, and this was the way he’d live from here on out. If the glow in the eyes of the living dead was indeed due to their mockery of life, it was truly ironic that he—a dhampir—was the one whose eyes held the emotions of a living person.

Savena had turned to face D. How powerful were the waves from his unearthly aura, and how swift! The proof of this was that the dead around them were turning one after another to look at him.

“Yes,” someone else replied. “Yes, it’s him. Hey, everyone! He is here!”

Savena’s wagon halted. The throng to the fore and the rear, to the left and the right had brought it to a sudden stop.

A chorus of voices rose in the weirdest pleas imaginable. And with both arms extended beseechingly, the speakers began to walk toward D. A march of those who were neither living nor dead. Pale, wraithlike faces, emaciated limbs, and eyes that held death itself—could a more disturbing mob of people exist in all the world? However, their eyes were glazed with rapture at their love for D.

What would they do to D? Would they merely appeal to him, or would their surpassing love drive them to grab him in both arms, hug him tight, and suffocate him? Or would fingers with tenacious strength peel the skin from him, gouge his eyes out, and tear the flesh from his bones? Whatever the case, it didn’t seem D would have any means to prevent it.

Beneath the ashen sky, an unimaginable scene was about to unfold—and at just that moment, a figure rose majestically to his feet. It was D. A sudden gust of wind spread his inky black coat, and the features that topped his tall and powerful form were so exquisite, so alluring, and so cold that the dead walking toward him froze in amazement.

That was it. None of the others said a word. They’d been blasted in the face by too much of that incredible aura.

D slashed his right hand through the empty air. “Back,” he said. Just a single word.

As for the effect that it had—they did precisely as he said. Donning expressions of utter terror, hundreds of advancing dead winced and backed away.

“As I thought,” the left hand groaned. Its tone was a mixture of pity, surprise, and heartfelt emotion. “They really are his victims—”

Was it the overwhelming dignity unsuited to one so young that made the living dead back away? No, it was undoubtedly because they’d been struck by his beauty. The young man in black standing so tall beneath the ashen sky was such a vision, he easily gave that impression.

After a period of silence, a voice echoed down the road, saying, “That’s right.”

“Look at him. There’s a strong resemblance, but this man isn’t him. Our beloved, the great one, was bigger, blacker, stronger.”

As the feeble voices of the dead spread over the group, the murmuring figures turned forward in succession, beginning to walk again without any signal from anyone, then quickly breaking into a run. Even Savena’s wagon was caught up in the tide.

“What’s this?” the left hand said in a tone that suggested it’d made some rare discovery.

But even before it spoke, D’s eyes had turned toward the rough, arid land to the right of the highway. From up ahead, the fake D was galloping toward them. Though at first all that could be made out was a tiny speck, the horse and rider took shape before long, then the latter became the fake D and halted beside the wagon, all of which took less than a minute.

Having his horse walk alongside the wagon, he asked, “Is that what these characters are? The dead that give this highway its name?”

It came as little surprise his intuition was so good. He was the same as D, after all.

Those of the dead who noticed the arrival of this new D looked at him with surprise, but perhaps due to the earlier incident with D, they immediately looked forward again and made no move to approach him.

“Nothing special—but there’s nothing at all up ahead,” the fake D said, wrinkling his brow as he gazed forward. A shadowy fatigue or distress—or perhaps both—flowed across his features. “No matter how far we rode, the highway just went on forever. I can tell no matter how far you go, there won’t be anything. It’s all in vain. Nevertheless, I intended to go on, but my horse dropped to the ground and wasn’t having any of it. It wasn’t exhausted. As you can see now, it’s in perfectly good shape. It’d been caught in the nihilistic mood, you see. Now, cyborg horses are more intelligent and sensitive than ordinary horses, but they still don’t turn into nihilists. It’s just that it didn’t want to go any further. It knows there’s nothing out there. So I had no choice but to turn back. These characters have been gathering from all over since the highway was made, but there’s no point. There’s nothing out there. Of course, the dead don’t get tired, so that’s not a problem.”

“Zip it,” the fake D sneered, quickly pulling out of the column. “I don’t care to make a pointless trip. I’m heading off. Good luck.”

“Sheesh,” the fake D snorted, and he was wheeling his mount around when it happened.

Up ahead, even beyond the vanguard of the ominous horde—in a spot at least three miles away, there loomed an enormous citadel. Surrounded by ramparts over three hundred feet high and a trio of moats each sixty feet across, the structure that towered at the center bristled with hornlike radar and parabolic antennae, gravity cannons, destroyers, G-time curvature guns, and more, making it look as if the fortress itself were some vicious, loathsome creature.

D gave the fake D a long look. Naturally, the fake was staring forward in a daze. Then, noticing D’s gaze, he shouted irritably, “Hey, what’s that look supposed to mean? That’s a lousy habit I have. That thing wasn’t out there, not anywhere—I swear!”

“It looks like he’s right,” the left hand said, oddly enough offering the fake his support. “That castle—there’s something funny about it. It sure looks real enough, but it also kinda seems like an illusion, too.”

Indeed, there was among all the monsters infesting the southern Frontier a creature that could read the thoughts of approaching human beings and give substance to whatever they most desired through the sheer power of its mind. The illusions were perfectly fitting given the creature’s nonambulatory and cowardly nature, and the scale of them was simply incredible. For example, a traveler fondly remembering the seaside to the far north would find the vast expanse of icy waters spreading before them exactly as they pictured it, reproduced in just the same grand scale. It wasn’t a hallucination. If they touched the ice, it would be cold and stick to the palm of their hand, and if they plunged their hand into the freezing waters, they’d soon be suffering from exposure. The more developed forms of hypnotism could transform an ordinary stick into a branding iron, with blisters forming on any hand that touched it; what this monster created was the real thing. The proof of this was provided by records that described a traveler who was swallowed by a monstrous fish that rose from the icy sea and was never seen again.

However, the eyes that surfaced in the palm of D’s left hand turned a gaze that suggested rather philosophical musings toward the stronghold they were rapidly approaching. “But it’s not an illusion,” it remarked dolefully. “At least, I think it’s not, but even I don’t know for sure.”

The fake D said it hadn’t been out there. If they were to believe that, then this castle had just now suddenly appeared to occupy this three-dimensional space. All ten million tons of it. That wasn’t to say that the Nobility couldn’t produce something from nothing with their science. Especially not when it was a massive and mysterious gathering place for the throng of the half-dead who’d been summoned from the surrounding area once the mountain range that’d sealed off the Highway of the Dead for thousands of years had been removed. To be perfectly honest, no matter what happened at this point, it should’ve come as no surprise.

Yet the left hand persisted, eyes spinning as it said, “Still, it’s strange. From what I can see, it’s real enough, but something’s funny about the way it’s built.”

The opportunity to inspect its construction soon presented itself. Having caught sight of Muma, the group quickened its pace, finally breaking into a run, and in less than an hour they’d reached its outer borders. Unable to fight the impetus of those pressing from the rear, a few score of those in the front plunged straight into the moat—although it didn’t actually have water in it, and was in fact a sheer drop into an abyss thousands of yards deep. The rest somehow managed to stay on their feet, and the mob swiftly fanned out along the moat, spilling off the highway.

Standing before it, they found the building truly vast. Both the moat and ramparts stretched endlessly to either side, eventually vanishing from sight. There was a veritable forest of structures within ranging from six hundred to a thousand feet high, and when it came to the towers, they seemed as if they must be at least three thousand feet tall with their tapering, rocketlike shapes challenging the heavens. But though this place seemed to have appeared solely for this throng, even after their arrival it remained entirely silent, and there was no sign of anyone there.

“Looks like we’re not getting in,” the fake D groused. But it came as little surprise that his eyes were filled with reckless laughter. “Actually, that stone wall over there doesn’t seem to have any gates or doors in it anyway. How do they intend to let their visitors in?” This was a perfectly reasonable query, and D and his left hand said nothing. At that point, cries of surprise suddenly went up.

The fake D was infected by them as well, saying, “Wow! This is incredible. The highway’s stretching straight out across the moat!”

The highway crossed the outer, middle, and inner moats, then reached the castle wall. At this point, a hole with the same thirty-foot width as the highway unexpectedly appeared in the wall, which hadn’t had a mark or line on it.

There was no way that couldn’t be taken as an invitation. The mob of the half-dead became a torrent that surged off the highway and into the fortress. Even D in the wagon and the fake D on his horse were a part of it.

There was no garden beyond the castle wall. Where the half-dead went there was nothing save a deep darkness. Even the light was cut off at the door through which they’d entered. Considering this castle belonged to the Nobility—to vampires—it was only natural.

“Now we’re playing hide-and-seek, and we’re all it,” the fake D remarked with admiration. While he should have been able to see in the dark as clearly as at midday, this darkness alone he couldn’t pierce. And the same went for D.

They knew they were in a vast room. Or perhaps it would be better to call it simply a space, for they couldn’t sense so much as a single pillar. They couldn’t even tell whether or not this place had walls and a ceiling.

But about this time a certain phenomenon began to occur that, on consideration, made perfect sense. More people were constantly flowing in, but the number in the space had decreased. In the darkness, one person here—or rather, a few dozen—and then more over there went off in all directions. But even though they dispersed, there was clearly some intention behind the way they left, and from the way they moved, that intent didn’t seem to be their own.

“They’re being selected, eh? Or perhaps I should make that being sorted?” the left hand muttered. Their destinations were being chosen based on some inscrutable criteria.

After all, there were more than ten thousand people pouring into the place. Vast or not, the space should’ve been packed almost instantly, yet it didn’t feel the least bit cramped. One after another, people and wagons alike disappeared. The speed and orderliness with which it happened was beyond the pale.

Less than ten minutes after entering the castle, the two Ds realized they were the only ones left. D was astride an unsaddled horse. He’d taken one of the animals that drew Savena’s wagon.

The last footsteps and creaking wagon wheels went off in a certain direction, and then the room was silent.

And that’s when it happened. The air stirred to D’s right. A cavern had formed.

“Is this it?” the fake D said excitedly as he brought his steed around. Then he threw a quick look over at D, but it was unclear whether or not D noticed the mysterious shadows that came and went in the fake’s eyes.

“Hyah!” they cried, the two riders kicking their cyborg horses’ flanks in unison as they began to gallop off into the depths of the darkness.

The two of them were in a blue room. When and where they’d dismounted they couldn’t say. There was a blue light shining down, the source of which was unknown. Even the shadows of the pair were tinged blue.

“Seems to me we’re being told to do whatever we like from here on out,” the fake D muttered to himself as he surveyed their surroundings. “I think I’ll be heading out now. See you.”

Once his back had melded with the blue light, a hoarse voice remarked with relief, “He’s finally gone, has he?” “Were you worried about him?” D asked.

“Yeah, I had a bad feeling. You and him—even if the two of you have to have it out at some point, it’s better to put some space between you for the time being.”

D’s tone made the tiny eyes in the palm of his left hand bug out as they looked up at him.

“Both of us are me. And both of us came to Muma.” Breaking off there, D said, “What am I?”

It wasn’t really a question. However, his steely tone carried an extreme sadness as thin as a piece of silk, and it would’ve taken Mia’s breath away if the girl had been there.

“At any rate, let him go. If he’s going that way, we should take this way.”

Before the left hand had even made the suggestion, D had started off on foot. Up ahead, something shaped like a black box began to come into view. No one of Noble blood could mistake the sight of it. It was a coffin. Bending down, he reached for the lid and opened it. The desiccated corpse had vivid remnants of anguish left on its face.

“Roughly five thousand years,” the left hand replied. “The cause of death was rampant DNA damage brought about by abnormal hormonal secretions. See how almost all the skin has been mummified, but a spot on the right hand and the lungs alone are still normal? Look! The lungs are still functioning five thousand years later. In other words, just those two parts turned into Nobility.”

“Sure enough—this is what he’d like to call a failure. Loan me your left hand.”

The fingers of D’s left hand tugged on the wooden stake that protruded from the corpse’s chest.

“And that’s why it was disposed of. Oh, my, there are rows and rows of’em!”

There wasn’t just one coffin. Behind it was another, and another beyond that, wooden boxes beyond numbering laid in a crazy confusion like some sort of modern sculpture. Further and further still they stretched on, endless as the images in an infinite series of mirrors . . .

There was no need to open the lid of the next coffin. The hinges had rotted off, and from the gap that was left, a right hand that was also mummified could be seen. Surely the frilly white shirt cuff was that of a woman. A tiny glint of gold spilled from between her fingers. In the palm of her hand she clutched a small pendant. Had she intended to hand it to someone? Someone outside the coffin? The one who’d sealed her in it?

D opened the lid of the tiny shell-like locket. There was a little photograph inside. Though its hues had faded to sepia, the split second burned into it still captured a pleasant memory that’d resisted the flow of time. Backed by snow-capped mountains and rich fields of barley, a young man and woman smiled as if enchanted by a spell that would last for all time.

Closing the locket, D wound its chain around the girl’s wrist. There was nothing else to do.

“All of these were failures, then?” he muttered in a coffin-filled section of what could safely be called a cemetery.

There was a presence. He got the feeling it was at the ceiling, and beneath his feet, and right next to him as well. Endless rows of coffins spread all around him. He knew that each of them contained a corpse with a stake through its heart. When he’d muttered, “So, they were all failures?” that voice had heard him.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” he said to the voice. “When you say ‘you,’ is that singular or plural? Don’t you mean ‘you two’?” My only success was you alone.

“Great!” the fake D exclaimed, thumping his chest. His eyes held a ghastly tinge that hadn’t been seen until now. “So it’s just me? In that case, that other me is in the way.”

D moved silently through a sea of coffins. Did he have some goal? No. At least, it didn’t seem that he did. He was as cold and beautiful as ever but shrouded in a terrific aura that seemed as if it could raise the dead. An aura of anger. Though the young man appeared to be an icy machine right to the marrow of his bones, his body now burned with the one emotion that seemed to suit him the least. Perhaps it was due to compassion for the innocent people who’d been summoned here to meet a horrible end, or maybe he saw something that had a direct bearing on his own fate. He shouldn’t have had any set goal, yet his gait called to mind a ferocious tiger stalking its prey.

“I did some rough calculations,” the hoarse voice said. “Based on the number of coffins we’ve passed and they way they’re laid out, the total would be approximately—”

So many called here only to have their life snuffed out with one thrust of a stake. For what purpose? For whose sake? Which was the success—D or the fake D?

Suddenly the color of the light changed. Gloom descended. The whole world was altered. The machinery that towered to either side of him seemed to be made of shadows. In order to conduct experiments impossible in this world, the very substance of the machines had been transformed. They lived.

The next thing D knew, he was looking down from a platform set partway up the wall. The walls dropped straight down for several hundred yards, and countless black specks moved around at the bottom. D knew at a glance it was those who’d taken the Highway of the Dead.

There was a cacophony of flapping black wings near the ceiling. A cloud of bats. A few seconds later, it became clear they weren’t just harmless creatures. The black mammals attached themselves to the necks of the survivors who stood motionless below, driving their fangs into the carotid arteries. The half-dead simply stood there, making no attempt to shoo them away, and one after another the people fell. Every last bit of color had drained from their pale faces. As the last one dropped, the bats rose en masse, flying to the upper reaches one after another and disappearing.

The thousands of human forms that lay at the bottom were reflected in D’s cold eyes. It wasn’t the sort of look he gave the dead.

These bodies had been drained of every last drop of blood by the bats—vampire bats. Now they were true corpses, but a number of them rose unsteadily to their feet. Half dead or truly dead, they were souls that’d returned from hell.

They aren’t dead yet, the voice said. Even with the blood completely drained from their bodies, they live. Even if a person has received the kiss of the Nobility, so long as part of their human nature remains, indestructibility won’t come into play in this situation. They should be one hundred percent completely and utterly dead. Since they survive, it means the power I gave them went to work just as they were about to die. In the other examination areas, surely other candidates survived in the same manner. Roughly one percent.

Of the twenty thousand half-dead people who’d entered the castle with D, that would leave approximately two hundred.

The scene changed again. Next for the survivors was an incredible baptism of death. Walking on wobbly legs, they were blasted head on by high-powered laser cannons, machine guns, and ultrasonic projectors. Hearts shot through by crimson beams of light, bodies ripped open by steel slugs flying at the speed of sound, cells hammered by ultrasonic waves, every one of them dropped, and then a number of them got up again.

These physical attacks should also more than suffice to kill them in their present form. And so more wheat is separated from the chaff.

The unwatchable process of “sorting” continued. The elite were torn apart by the claws of ravenous beasts, devoured, or wrapped in powerful tentacles until every bone in their bodies was broken and they’d suffocated. At this point, they finally demonstrated the special Noble abilities they’d acquired. The shredded bodies of the dead mended themselves with unbelievable speed. While that wasn’t such an amazing occurrence in this world, the way shattered bones re-formed, flesh that’d been ripped free reattached itself, and ruptured eyeballs grew new retinas and scleras from nothing was still a miraculous paranormal phenomenon.

Here a number of different groups were pooled, and though there were a dozen or so survivors, most of the dead had obvious madness in their eyes as they began to wander about.

Their minds don’t come back, you see. Might it be due to fear or the pain of repeated deaths?

Five remained. Among them D spotted a face he recognized. It was Savena. Because she was in another group, she hadn’t shown up here until now.

With that declaration ringing in his ears, D drew his sword and struck out in front of himself. He knew that before him lay an unseen wall that blocked his way. At first, his blade moved without meeting any resistance. But when D tried to advance, he was checked by the invisible wall.

Those who’ve received the kiss of the Nobility, while still human, have gained the characteristics of a Noble. However, there are fundamental issues to be resolved. In the end, those people remain our subjects—the master/slave relationship persists. If even a single Noble were to appear in their midst, the shock would probably drive them half mad.

Was the voice—the master of Muma—trying to say he thought it best for humans and Nobility to be treated as equals?

This is not what I sought. I’m looking for something else. D, you must know what that is, the voice said, a crushing weight added to its tone.

CHAPTER 7

Did the quintet that included Savena realize their fate? All that could be discerned was the great contentment that colored their faces. For there stood five men and women who, for all the rapture and uncertainty of being the chosen ones, were melting, body and soul, in flames of love.

A gleam came down on them from above. Mechanical arms with metallic, syringelike cylinders attached. There was one for each of them.

I shall inject you with my DNA, the voice declared.

That was when D swung his sword once more. With eyes shut he carved the air with an imagined sword purely by will—-and this time, too, it met nothing, but he felt the unseen wall had been slashed and crumbled away. D moved forward—and right before him, the five elite were assailed by a mad gale. Had it not been D, surely he would’ve covered his eyes and turned his face away.

All five of them were slammed against the floor as if they’d been struck by an invisible opponent, flying back up to do a crazed dance that crashed them into a wall, and from there they rammed into the opposite wall headfirst before once again falling to the floor. Ferocious death spasms tore through them from head to toe, and their paraffin-pale skin swiftly blackened and wrinkled.

As D approached, a black hand reached for his leg. While he might’ve leapt away, he didn’t. It caught hold of his ankle. From the mummy’s face, it was no longer possible to tell its gender.

And as soon as it said that, a flash of white light sank into the mummy’s chest in the blink of an eye.

The half'dead had been more than ten thousand strong, and every last one of them was gone now—the result of their smoldering love and millennia of waiting for the road to return.

“Come out,” D said, looking up to a position that overlooked the five corpses.

There was no sign of anyone moving around. But there was only one person he could be addressing.

“Wow!” his left hand exclaimed. Perhaps it was trying to be funny. However, never had it sounded so dazed.

He lay before him. His presence was growing stronger by the second. It actually had mass.

Terrific shock waves struck the faces of both of them from a point in thin air. Neither shut his eyes. And yet, neither of them was able to catch the instant he appeared. The next thing they knew, he was simply standing there. The hem of his black cape swayed

with an imperceptible breeze. He was over six and a half feet tall. Even colored by the gloom as he approached, his shoulders and powerful chest were evident. His face couldn’t be seen.

“It’s been quite some time now,” D said quietly. His voice was grimness itself. It wasn’t a tone of malice. There was a will to it—a cold, burning will. A will that declared that he must be destroyed. Yet he didn’t raise the sword he held in his right hand.

He recalled an ancient text; a long-forgotten tome left in a corner of a musty library. If not for that thick volume, the library itself would’ve been without meaning. Were its yellowed pages paper or parchment? There was a good chance it’d existed since before there was anything called “books.” Even if they found it, there was no one who would open its pages. They were afraid. It was too horrible. No one wanted to know the information recorded within. Ancient history not meant to be known, a history penned in the blood of the world of the night that’d since been driven from the world of light, one of cursed technology and of a truth straddling both worlds that invited madness.

Each made a leap of fifteen feet and entered the chest of the massive, shadowy form. Like a son being embraced by his father.

The voice reached their ears, saying, The two of you could slay me. But the one to succeed me must have my blessing.

D gouged more. Air rushed into the wound. The pain of the figure in black was relayed to him through the sword.

“You did it! You actually did it!” his left hand shouted. Remarkable, I must admit, said the voice carried on those spasms. The two of you could slay me. Why do you not continue?

D felt the spasms suddenly stop. The instant he put additional strength into the hand around the hilt of his sword, the shadowy figure vanished without warning. It didn’t fade away. Rather, it leapt back.

Ordinarily, D would’ve bounded with the same speed. His blade shouldn’t have come back out. However, the shadowy figure was stained black by the far reaches of the gloom, and D wasn’t poised to give pursuit. The second he kicked off the floor, the figure melted into the gloom.

“He’s not there anymore,” the left hand said. “He said something that’s got me worried. When he talked about the two of you, he meant you and the other you, but did he mean that if one of you were to pull out, the other one could never slay him?”

“He stabbed into him, too. You sensed that, didn’t you?” D said as he sheathed his blade.

“Hmm. I can’t say I don’t know how the other you might feel.” What the left hand implied was an important point to consider. “We have to find the sway reactor,” D said, looking all around. “Aren’t you gonna chase him?”

There was a brief pause. “Really? Yeah, I suppose it does at that,” his left hand remarked, sounding rather relieved.

“Good question. I’ll leave that up to you. We’re good on water, and earth is out of the question. That leaves what, fire and wind? Seems kinda sacrilegious, but what else can we do?”

Taking out a pair of wooden stakes, D held one in each hand and rubbed them together as fast as he could. Flames rose from them— the heat of the friction had started a fire. From the standpoint of physics it was an all-too-common phenomenon, but only someone with the monstrous strength of Noble blood could do it so easily.

D swept out with his hands. The flames flowed with them, shooting down into the coffin at his feet and igniting its contents, a five-thousand-year-old, desiccated mummy.

Whoooosh! Flames shot up more than ten feet. Scattering, the flames jumped from one coffin to another, cremating the remains. Tremendous heat struck D’s cheeks, and fiery tongues licked at the hem of his coat.

D didn’t move. He was cremating those who’d met such a horrible fate, but not in order to see them off—and perhaps he wished to atone for that.

It was only when the flames burned the edge of his coat and sparks flew at his hair that D finally raised his left hand. The flames were sucked into the mouth on his palm, the force of the suction creating such a gale that even the flames that singed him were torn asunder.

After even the smoke had been consumed, a hoarse voice said, “Fire and wind we’ve got. Next up—water.”

Raising his right arm, D pressed his left index finger to his wrist. One scratch and the skin broke open, letting bright blood flow out. And D caught it in the palm of his left hand. It was indeed water. Liquid. However, this was a shocking way to slake the hand’s thirst.

The dripping lifeblood was sucked into the tiny mouth that’d opened in his palm, and once quick work had been made of it, a blue flame burned in the depths of that tiny mouth. At the same time, vitality returned to D’s pale visage.

“So, can you tell? All your senses, not to mention your sixth sense, should be working better than mine."

D’s eyes were shut. Several seconds later he opened them, and as he began walking, he said, “It’s underground.”

Not only could his left hand give him an infusion of the incredible power from the elements of earth, water, wind, and fire to bring his body back to life, but it could also sharpen his five normal senses and special sixth sense beyond the limits of any living creature. The answer D gave was nothing more than a feeling.

D ran, leaving the wind whipping in his wake. Through numerous corridors he passed, going down staircases and taking elevators along the way. Presently, he arrived at a spot deep underground where the bizarre reactor was going through its mysterious undulations.

“Now that we’ve found it, it should be simple to operate,” the hoarse voice said. “Let me see.”

There was no way to describe the deadly energy source except to say it was a colossal silver cylinder, and D took a few steps toward it before a voice called down from up above, “Hey!”

Looking up, D saw two figures standing on top of the three -hundred-foot-tall reactor. The fake D and Mia.

“Hey, I’m coming down now, but first I want you to throw down your sword.”

Two black spots rose on the palm of D’s left hand. Eyes. D raised his hand. The eyes in it stared up intently, and a hoarse voice remarked, “He backed out of helping you destroy him. What do you suppose he got in return?” “Don’t you know?” D asked.

The fake had Mia right by his side, and drawing the sword from his back, he put its blade against the base of her neck. He didn’t seem to be joking. Though his expression and tone were both jovial, they only served to make him seem all the more dangerous.

The sheath already had a high-polymer line wound about it. This was to intimidate foes who ran around with a sheathed weapon or drawn sword in hand.

Threading the line through a hole in the sword guard, D ran it around to a loop on the scabbard and secured the blade in its sheath before dropping it at his feet.

Once the Hunter had complied, the fake finally said, “All right. I’m coming down now. Hey, stick out your left hand!”

“That son of a bitch,” the left hand muttered in a lower tone than normal, probably guessing what the fake D had in mind.

His last remark trailing behind him, he came down headfirst— the fake D had taken a dive off the reactor. And the moment he landed on the floor not three feet from D, a flash of light shot out and D’s left arm was taken off at the elbow. Watching with amusement as the limb bounced thirty feet across the floor, the fake D looked at D, who was clutching his dripping wound, and winked.

“Sorry about that. There’s been a change of plans. You must know that by now, eh?”

“Did he put you up to this?” “Bingo! I find it all pretty repulsive myself, but when I heard I was his sole heir, I had to make a move.”

“Hell yeah! ” the fake D replied, scratching the tip of his nose bashfully. “You know who he is. I mean, he’s the king of the whole world! And that’s what I’ll get to be.”

“Hell, it can be built back up again. There are still feudal lords doing well out on the Frontier. Band them all together, and I could make a drive for the Capital in short order. The humans’ balls will shrivel up as soon as they see what Nobles can really do.”

The fake D’s expression twisted at D’s query. “I refer the same question right back to you. Of course, I already know the answer. You were the top of your class.”

D smiled thinly. “If I was the top of my class, you must be too.” Laughing, the fake replied, “Well, you’ve got me there. Since it never hurts to ask, wouldn’t you like to join forces with me? The two of us could take on the Capital together! And the surviving Nobility would accompany us. Even if some of them resisted or other trouble came up, we’d be fine if there were two of us. We could solve any problem just by glaring at them. After all, we’re his—”

The fake D was about to state a certain terrifying fact. However, just then an urgent voice called out, “D!”

It was Mia. The fake D had jumped down three hundred feet with her under one arm, and she’d come through without a scrape. “There’s something wrong with the reactor!” she continued. “What?” the fake D exclaimed as he turned to look, but the sword he had leveled at D’s chest didn’t move in the slightest.

D also remained motionless. For the person pointing that sword at him was himself.

“Well, I’ll be—the core’s going out of control!” the fake said. “You know, I thought something was wrong when I was up top earlier.” “And you’re just going to let that happen?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If this thing blows, it’ll leave a crater with a seven'hundred-mile radius and half the Frontier won’t be fit for man or beast. Worse yet, it’d mean the end of us. I’m not so sure we could regenerate from being reduced to our constituent atoms. But not to worry. After all, I know how to control the reactor. There’s one other person who can do it, too, but his fate depends on the question I just asked him. So, how about it?”

The fake D squinted and smiled sadly. “Really? That’s how it’s gonna be, eh? Then I’ll be the only one left to control the reactor, I guess.” A second after he turned away with a hint of indignation, his face and body remained still—and his right arm alone limned an arc. As the fake’s blade seared through the air, D backed away, dodging it by the proverbial hair’s breadth. Amazingly enough, he’d only had to take a single step back to do so.

“I’m sure you already know this, but I was just sizing you up,” the fake D said, grinning as he remained poised with his sword still fully extended.

Mia drew a ragged breath. She’d finally noticed what had happened. The fake D had been quick with his sword, and D’s movement had been still quicker. But the attack hadn’t been in earnest.

“He vanished quickly when you saw him, but with me he stayed and talked awhile. He told me all kinds of things. How he controlled the Nobility and the humans, and what he was able to get out of that.”

“Yeah, I guess I did. What’s wrong with that? I have a right to it. So do you, but you turned it down.”

“Nothing. He didn’t even say I could succeed him. Nor did he tell me to cut you down. These are all things I decided to do on my own.” “Stop it!” Mia shouted. “Stop it, both of you. You said you’re the same, didn’t you? It’d be like killing yourself!”

“There’s no way around it,” the fake D replied, every inch of his body radiating a murderous intent that made Mia flinch. “Things have gone too far, and both of us being one and the same has become a problem. In the end, it’s every man for himself.”

The fake D’s expression changed in a flash, and he howled with rage as he swung his blade. Although the Hunter ducked down to avoid it, the sword reversed and made a second stroke from an unbelievable angle that sent fresh blood gushing from D’s left shoulder. D covered the wound as he backed away, while above him a shape rose like a black and ominous bird.

Confident of absolute victory, the fake brought his blade down with the crushing force of an angry wave.

D was still fifteen feet from the sword on the floor—he’d never make it in time.

Just then, vermilion spattered the fake D’s face. Fresh blood had flown from the wound on D’s left shoulder. Thanks to this, the Hunter would undoubtedly be using his right hand to cover the wound.

“What?” the fake D groaned hopelessly, amazement swimming in his eyes because the edge of his weapon had met nothing when coming down to split the Hunter like a piece of firewood, but a diagonal flash of silver shot up at his torso from below.

Cut open right between the floating ribs all the way to the spinal column, the fake D opened his eyes. In a world of vermilion, he saw D—-who had delivered the one-handed stroke—and the sword in his right hand. Down at the Hunter’s feet, the black scabbard stuck up at an angle. The line binding the blade to the sheath had been undone and coiled up again, and the end of the sheath was gripped by D’s severed left hand.

“I didn’t know ... it could walk,” the fake D said, bright blood spilling from his mouth. “Or that it’d be able ... to untie that string.

As he said that, the sword he held in his right hand flashed toward D’s waist, but he no longer had any strength or speed, and D bounded to deliver a straight vertical slash that split the fake’s skull all the way down to his chin.

D said nothing as he looked down at himself lying in a bloody mist. It was himself. Really, truly himself.

“Well made . . . Poorly made . . . Guess there was no way . . . around it,” the fake D said, his bloodied lips trembling. “But he really did . . . want to make . . . equal love ... his motto ... In the end . . . was it you ... he loved? Whatever you do . . . don’t wind up . . . like me. Have the life . . . I. . . couldn’t. . .”

Picking his left arm up off the floor, D reattached it to his elbow, and then walked over to the sway reactor.

“Well, all I can tell you is what I think happened,” the left hand muttered, not speaking to anyone in particular. “A shift in the earth’s crust or something set this thing back in motion down in that subterranean facility.”

“And that’s when the other you woke up. But that was a mistake. Both he and the facility had been sealed away. And then he took notice. Now this is just my theory—I have to wonder if the complete devastation back in that facility wasn’t something he himself had done. It wasn’t that he was afraid someone would make use of the facility, or they got the results they were looking for and pulled out, or anything warm and fuzzy like that. I think he cursed the experiments he’d conducted there. And that’s why he noticed before anyone else that the facility and your other half were active again, and he set things in motion to destroy them. It could be that the Noble who got you headed to Muma in the first place was sent by him.”

D entered the reactor’s control compartment. As he adjusted its controls, Mia stood watching him.

“Now this reactor will never work again. I’ve sent along just enough energy so the underground facility will break down on its own. Go back to the village and tell them everything’s safe again.”

Her body tumbled forward. D glimpsed the blue line jutting from her pale throat.

As soon as the girl’s body hit the floor, a blue mist billowed toward D. A split second before it could sweep over the Hunter his sword flashed out, bisecting the blue cloud, but a new wave of hair wrapped around both his body and his blade.

“While you were laying waste to the rejects where I was created, I was underground being supercharged by a device the great one built. Even you can’t cut this hair.”

As he approached, he pulled a hair from the top of his head and brought it to his lips.

“Goodbye,” said a voice that came from where Mia had fallen. He’d walked right past her.

As Yuma spun around for a look, a burning-hot thrust took him through the chest and out through the back, while above the reeling assassin, D had leapt up and was bringing his sword down. Even wrapped in blue hair, it was easy enough for the blade to split Yuma lengthwise.

Not even watching the assassin fall, D walked over to where Mia stood deathly still. One after another the hairs around him came free. With Yuma’s death, the assassin’s hair had lost its unholy power.

“Don’t mention it,” Mia said, shaking her head. “I can’t very well go back to the village like this, can I? But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Mia pointed to the needle-like hair in her throat with the dagger sheath she held. Two of the teeth that poked from her lips came to sharp points.

She nodded in response to D’s question. “I was given the task of protecting whichever of the two of you survived. But I have the feeling the great one knew it’d be you. He loves you, doesn’t he?”

“I’ll stay here,” the girl replied. “I wanted to go with you, but not with these fangs. If you can, set Kuentz right again. Goodbye. Soon, this will turn back into that mountain chain. Farewell, D. I’m glad I met you. And the other you, too.”

In that murky world, they remained motionless as a pair of statues, simply staring at each other.

The morning sun colored the jagged horizon. No one who saw that grand collection of peaks would’ve ever thought they were an enormous facility. From the saddle of his cyborg horse D looked back at the mountain range.

“That was probably your home, you know,” the hoarse voice remarked, but the Hunter’s gorgeous countenance didn’t betray a hint of emotion. “But even now, we don’t know anything. So, shall we go?”

“Hey, that’s not the way to—” the hoarse voice began to protest, but it quickly added, “Oh, I get it.”

The setting of the Vampire Hunter D series sprang from my greatest love—movies. The wild Frontier through which D wanders isn’t Transylvania, but rather the Great Plains of American westerns. The sheriffs of my westerns are the lawmen, the houses are connected by elevated plank sidewalks, and the towns’ residents wear swords on their hips instead of guns. However, there is no Castle Dracula out on the Great Plains. Vampire Hunter D is a direct descendant of Hammer Films’ horror movies, so the European castles, towns, and villages depicted in those films were incorporated into the backdrop of the D series.

I didn’t intend to make D’s story a horror tale set in the future. Well, at its core, the story isn’t far from horror, but at that time, horror wasn’t the kind of product to pull in readers. The target audience of the Asahi Sonorama Library line was teenagers. But the young have the instinctive ability to evade the true fear that horror brings. At the same time, they’re interested in the future and the technology that will accompany it. The only field of literature to incorporate that is science fiction. In this manner, the Vampire Hunter D series became the half-breed child of horror and science fiction. Just as its protagonist is himself a half-breed.

The character of D came from a compilation of all the things that are commonly considered virtues in a man: he’s taciturn and strong, gentle beneath a cold exterior, handsome, and tall, plus he looks good in black. However, on further consideration, that doesn’t seem like the sort of man who’d be very good company, does it? As far as fashion was concerned, I decided to have him in a double-breasted, long coat with high boots and long gloves. I never considered giving him a cape. Putting someone with vampire blood into a black cape would be too easy. Too expected. Therefore I had him in a coat, although in that respect he’s like the handsome hero of one of my other series, Setsura Aki from “Makai Toshi.” Though lacking a longsword, a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, and a cyborg horse, the man-searcher armed with a mysterious titanium wire that can slice through steel certainly has the same superhuman blood in his veins that D does. However, as readers are no doubt aware, D can’t be mentioned without a black cape springing to mind. This is due to the power of Yoshitaka Amano’s brush. The “coat” in the text was forever altered by one of Mr. Amano’s cover illustrations. The strength of pictures is incredible. Incidentally, the most faithful illustration Mr. Amano has done is the cover to the fourth book, Tale of the Dead Town,

Thanks to the film Twilight being a big hit, the live-action version of Vampire Hunter D that’s been stalled for some time looks like it’s starting to move forward at last. As the creator of the series, my curiosity is boundless as to just how D will strike readers when he appears before them as a real actor and how those same readers will greet him. 1win-Shadowed Knight is a tale that was bom from the simple speculation of what it’d be like if there were two such Ds. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it.

Hideyuki Kikuchi was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1949. He attended the prestigious Aoyama University and wrote his first novel, Demon City Shinjuku, in 1982. Over the past two decades, Kikuchi has written numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan’s leading horror masters, working in the tradition of occidental horror writers like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. E Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there were seventeen novels in his hugely popular ongoing Vampire Hunter D series. Many live-action and anime movies of the 1980s and 1990s have been based on Kikuchi’s novels.

Yoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He is well known as a manga and anime artist, and is the famed designer for the Final Fantasy game series. Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko Productions’ greatest cartoons, including Gatchaman (released in the U.S. as G'Force and Battle of the Planets). Amano became a freelancer at the age of thirty and has collaborated with numerous writers, creating nearly twenty illustrated books that have sold millions of copies. Since the late 1990s, Amano has worked with several American comics publishers, including DC Comics on the illustrated Sandman novel Sandman: The Dream Hunters with Neil Gaiman, and Marvel Comics on Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer with best-selling author Greg Rucka.

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