Free Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page A

from this planet and from all of space.”
    At that moment, the Count thought he’d heard a certain phrase, and his brow knit. The muttered words had clearly come from the young man before him, but he promptly dredged the same phrase from the depths of distant, half-forgotten memories. Reason denied the possibility of such a thing.



Impossible
, he thought.
Those are the very words I heard from his highness. From the great one, the Sacred Ancestor of our species. That filthy whelp couldn’t possibly know such things.
    He heard D’s voice. “Is that all you have to say?”
    “Fool!”
    The screams of both father and daughter resounded through the vast chamber. Negotiations had fallen through. The Count’s lips warped into a cold-blooded and confident grin. He gave a crisp snap of the fingers on his right hand, but a rush of consternation came into his pale visage a few seconds later when he realized the countless electronic weapons mounted throughout the hall weren’t operating.
    The pendant on D’s chest emitted a blue light.
    “I don’t know what you have up your sleeve, but the weapons of the Nobility don’t work against me.” Leaving only his words there, D kicked off the ground. Lightning fast, there would be no escaping him. Drawing his sword in midair, he pulled it to his right side. Just as he landed, his deadly thrust became a flash of silver that sank into the Count’s chest.
    There was the sound of flesh striking flesh.
    “Eh?!”
    For the first time, a look of surprise surfaced in D’s handsome but normally expressionless countenance. His longsword was stopped dead, caught between the Count’s palms about eight inches from the tip. Moreover, from their respective stances, D was in a far better position to exert more force upon the sword, but though he put all his might behind it, the blade wouldn’t budge an inch, just as if it was wedged in a wall.
    The Count bared his fangs and laughed. “What do you make of that, traitor? Unlike your vulgar swordplay, this is a skill worthy of a true Noble. When you get to hell, tell them how surprised you were!” As he said that, the figure in black made a bold move to the right. Perhaps it was some secret trick the Count employed in the timing, or the way he put his strength into the move, but for whatever reason, D was unable to take his hand off the hilt. He was thrown along with the sword into the center of the hall.
    However …
    The Count quite unexpectedly found his breath taken away. There were no crunching bones to be heard; the youth somersaulted in midair like a cat about to land feetfirst on the floor with the hem of his coat billowing out around him. Or rather, he was ready to land there. With no floor beneath his feet, D kept right on going, falling into the pitch-black maw that opened suddenly beneath him.
    As he heard the creaking of trapdoors to either side of the massive thirty by thirty-foot pit swinging back up into place, the Count turned his gaze to the darkness behind him. Larmica appeared from it. “It’s a primitive trap, but it was fortunate for us we had it put there, was it not, Father? When all your vaunted atomic armaments were useless, a pitfall of cogs and springs rid us of that nuisance.”
    At her charming laughter, the Count made a sullen face. He had reluctantly allowed this trap to be installed due to Larmica’s entreaties.
There’s no way she could have foreseen this day’s events
, the Count thought,
but this girl, daughter of mine though she may be, seems on occasion to be a creature beyond imagining.
    Shaking off his grimace, he said, “At the same instant I hurled him, you pulled the cord on the trapdoor—who but my daughter would be capable of as much? But is this for the best?”
    “Is what for the best?”
    “Last night, when you returned from the farm and spoke of the stripling we just disposed of, the tone of your voice, the manner of your complaints—even I, your own father, cannot recall ever hearing