Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four (31 page)

nothing she could say would make any difference. His opponent was Duchess Miranda—and he knew better than anyone how merciless the Nobility were with their foes.

“Valcua’s seven—are you the last?” Miranda asked, licking her lips. “You needn’t say a word now. You shall learn there is a Noble greater than Valcua when you die.”

The wind whistled against her face as Seurat’s club ripped through the air. The shadowy figure took to the sky.

Sue instinctively looked up. With the moon’s corona glowing around the duchess like a light she herself radiated, the beauteous woman wore a funeral shroud that was an even starker white. Watching her absentmindedly, Sue lay down like a slain Noble, while Seurat waved his club as if to break the Noblewoman’s gaze.

Like a flower petal dancing on a wind sent by an angry season, Duchess Miranda sailed through the air to suddenly stand on the giant’s shoulder. Seurat flailed his arms and twisted his body, but he couldn’t knock her off. Miranda reached out with both hands, her fists gobbling up Seurat’s hair as if they were alive, and then she tugged from side to side as if she gripped a pair of reins. She was like an accomplished rider breaking a wild bronco—but it became clear this rider was too rough with the reins as she relentlessly jerked his hair on one side and then the other, making Seurat’s features contort with agony. What’s more, a kind of ichor filled the air, raining down on Sue’s face: blood, gushing from the roots of his hair.

He was one of Valcua’s seven, an assassin among assassins, yet he seemed powerless against one of his master’s fellow Nobles, with no opportunity to use his strange power to make things vanish. A moment later, the duchess’s pale hands took two bunches of the giant’s hair and tore them out by the roots. Dark blood covered the giant’s head as he cradled it, writhing and screaming. When his back hit the ground she was on his shoulder, when his shoulder turned she shifted to his chest, and as Duchess Miranda relocated effortlessly, a glittering thread

hung from her lips—saliva. The elegant beauty was now completely famished.

Her right hand struck the nape of Seurat’s neck, at which point his body pitched backward and stopped moving. This Noble must’ve had incredible power to do such a thing to the same man who’d once fought off D. Her eyes giving off a red glow, her fangs gnashing, even her nails extending like the claws of a beast, the seductress grabbed the giant’s remaining hair and yanked his head back. She could definitely make out the blue vein running through the nape of his neck. Letting out an inhuman howl of joy, the woman bit into the base of the giant’s throat.

At that instant, a scream to split the heavens rang out. It streamed across the sky like a comet, coming back to earth some fifteen feet away.

“Wh—when did you learn to do that?” the Noblewoman snarled, her wide-open eyes bloodshot with madness, fear, and despair. “I can’t allow you to live—even if I’ve sworn a blood oath, I can’t let you survive with that knowledge. Little girl, from this moment forward I, Duchess Miranda, am your true foe!”

Shouted curses of a sort that threatened to drive her mad reverberated in Sue’s brain as she covered her face with her hands, but aside from that the girl didn’t move. Suddenly the shouts sounded a million miles away, and the form of the duchess seemed to become a blur, and then Sue saw a white mist moving off to the west. It was quite some time afterward that she managed to pull her arms apart. Of course, Sue didn’t realize that when she’d shielded her face out of surpassing fear, her arms had formed a cross.

When the girl had stepped between the two of them, she had shielded Seurat behind her, and she now walked over to the giant and told him, “Hold on.”

But by this point his body had already begun to quake violently.

From nowhere in particular, what sounded like weeping had begun to drift through the area. But it then became a sound that would make an impressionable young girl blush and cover her ears, even if she couldn’t help but lift her hands a little to listen—moans of ecstasy. Feverishly twisting around each other like invisible flames, the moans quickly became the unmistakable sounds of women panting.

“Wonderful. . . No, this is so intense ... I feel like I’m going to melt away!"

“Oh ... I’m losing my mind ... Going mad ... I don’t want your blood ... Just take me .. . all the way!”

“Who .. . who in the world ... made a man like this?”

“Help . . . Someone, help me ... I can’t take ... any more ... If he were to kill me ... I wouldn’t even mind it..

All the voices came from within the prone form of D. With all the lust and rapture they conveyed, the speakers must’ve wanted to die.

Like evils freed from Pandora’s box, four pale figures floated into the sky. Three of these resembled white ghosts wrapped in something like black hair as they fell to the ground and moved no more. One remained. But the raven-haired woman’s face and body were halfmelted, and she trailed strings of mucus in vomitous hues as she madly tried to get closer to D.

“How horrible . . . Up until five thousand years ago ... we were the Succubus Squad ... feared by demon and monster alike ... free to drink the blood and seed of the lowly humans when we pleased ... but to be done in like this ... by an unconscious man, in a sleep like death...”

As she murmured this, the woman was the one who sounded like a corpse. From the waist down she’d dissolved completely, yet she was still hell bent on clinging to D, thanks to a vindictiveness that ran in the marrow of her bones—or perhaps it was because of

something her body felt that made her mouth open and close like that of a fish between incessant cries of D’s name. Her left eye dangled from the optic nerve, her nose caved in, her lips split. . . but the expression that remained on her face was the heart-wrenching joy of a woman going to the man she loved. Literally melting away in body and soul, this woman wanted nothing more than to be with D.

“My three companions . . . are dead ... I alone remain . . . You are all mine . . . The least you can do ... is take me to heaven ... with you ..

When she reached D’s chest, the woman looked down and caught her breath. Her face turned up again. Every tooth in her mouth had become a fang. As she was just about to go for D’s windpipe, a stark flash angled up to the woman’s throat. Her remaining eye flew up high, along with the rest of her head, catching a view of bright blood shooting out from the stump of her neck.

Setting the knife on the ground, D’s left hand drank the blood with its palm.

“Water and wind are covered.”

A tiny mouth opened in the bloodied palm, and then even tinier eyes joined it.

“Don’t have enough earth and fire. But we’ll have to give it a shot.”

The moment of truth passed. Moonlight made the night wind glitter on the steely plain, and after a moment of stillness the faint emotions of man and woman flared up and burned out. What remained then? Until a new drama of life and death began, only the moonlight and the wind.

“Lord Valcua!”

The Ultimate Noble, slouched in a chair, turned his head when he realized it was Kima who called him, but immediately faced forward again.

“I’m still making my preparations. I shall brook no interference,” he said in a voice like a rumbling from the earth.

“It’s the four members of the Succubus Squad sent out on reconnaissance—they’re believed dead,” Kima replied. While all the others communicated via holographic images, he alone spoke to Valcua directly.

“I know. This is
my
kingdom. It must be the work of D.”

“Indeed, milord.”

“So, he used the same trick that I used to come back from the depths of space? This man begins to worry me more and more.” “Given it’s him, that’s not surprising.”

“That’s right,” Valcua said, turning around. “After all, this is a man you once served. When he exited the labyrinth, I believed I’d taken the full measure of his power and constructed a perfect duplicate of him. We then fought.”

“I see—and how did it go?” Kima asked, his curiosity seemingly piqued. He leaned forward without realizing it.

“We were basically even. I drove Glencalibur through his chest, and his blade pierced my heart. That sensation—well, I wouldn’t call it pleasant. Were we to actually fight, the result would probably be the same. In which case, I would lose.”

Kima was speechless.

“But I can’t accept that. The Ultimate Noble is fated to be eternally victorious. Kima, there’s something I shall share with you alone.” “What is it, milord?”

“Something a man told me in a dream.
Only in a time of absolute peril will I allow you to make use of a certain weapon. It's concealed in the far reaches of an extradimensional dungeon, and only when you truly desire it will you receive the key that unlocks it."

“What is it? And who was this man in your dream?”

“I don’t know either of those things . . . All I know is that it was a man. I get the feeling I saw his face, saw his form, yet I can’t remember anything. Perhaps it was just a dream of a dream. There was just one thing ...”

“One thing?” Kima said, the words falling hard against his chest.

“Behind him stretched a wasteland—a plain so desolate that in my dream, I felt from the very bottom of my heart I should never want to set foot on it. That was where he’d come from.”

Valcua raised his right hand. A golden card trembled between his fingers.

“And that—is it the key?”

“A short time ago, I suddenly found it sitting in my lap. I don’t know where it came from or who brought it here. Not even I know, here in
my
kingdom, of all places.”

“And your time of absolute peril. .. might that refer to D?”

“I don’t know, but I assume so.”

“Why, that’s..

Taking his eyes off his master, Kima surveyed their surroundings.

Walls towered over them like a mountain range, their summit out of sight. As for the ceiling—there probably was one. The walls themselves were so far away, the place so vast that it left any who entered it feeling utterly alone. It hardly seemed right to call it a room.