White Devil Mountain (2 page)

“It’s ability.” The reply came not from the mayor, but from Marquis.

“Really?” An innocent smile spread across the face of the girl, Lilia.

The blood drained from the faces of both the mayor and the archaeologist. They didn’t know why.

“In that case, why don’t we do a little comparison? If it doesn’t work out, I’ll throw in the towel, no problem. How does that strike you?”

Her rosy lips allowed a faint gasp to escape. The figure in black was just going out the door.

“Hey, wait a second—you can’t go now. If I don’t beat you, they’ll never hire me. Wait!”

The mayor and the director saw the girl’s right hand reaching over her shoulder for the longsword. A blue streak split the glow of the gaslight in the mayor’s office. A cry of agony rang out.

II

The mayor and the director craned their necks, looking upward. A heartbeat after that cry, there was a terrific thud at the pair’s feet as an enormous ocher insect landed. The creature’s segmented body resembled a caterpillar’s, but of its six bristle-covered legs, the two nearest its head were shaped like human hands, and each of them clutched something resembling a nearly three-foot-long sword. A pair of weapons were now lodged in the abdomen of the six-and-a-half-foot creature. One of them, a rough wooden needle, came from D. If the other one, an eight-inch-long throwing dart, was one of Lilia’s weapons, she must’ve hurled it with the same speed as D. And judging from the way the weapons formed a V at the single point where their tips met—right in the creature’s heart, most likely—she was just as accurate as D, too.

The mayor and the scholar both let out a scream. Without a second to spare, the two Hunters raised their hands, and the bizarre bugs that fell one after another from the ceiling began twitching in their death throes.

The mayor was left speechless, but in his stead the gray-haired scholar said, “Those look just like the western Frontier’s—”

“That’s right. They’re gladiator bugs,” Lilia replied. “Recent weather anomalies and frequent geological shifts have caused changes in the home ranges of some creatures. This must be one of them. Usually they make their nests up in attics, so we’ll have to watch out.”

As she enthusiastically explained the situation, two more of the insects flew down right in front of her. These came down differently. They weren’t wounded. Standing erect on their lowest pair of legs, they pointed the swords they held in their hands at the two Hunters.

Gladiator bugs—as the name suggested, these insects used real swords. Needless to say, they weren’t a product of the natural world. Nobles in the western Frontier had created them for their own amusement, monsters born in their laboratories to do battle with human slaves. After the fall of the Nobles’ civilization, most of them were exterminated, but it was said the less than ten percent that escaped into the Frontier gave rise to the hundreds of thousands that now lived there. As specialists in combat, the Nobles had input formidable swordsmanship skill into the bugs’ brains.

Slashing down from a high position, the blades locked together, and Lilia’s expression became one of mild surprise. One of the swords made a horizontal slash at her abdomen. As Lilia leapt back, about four inches of her coat were torn open.

“Not too shabby,” she said, her voice faltering.

The body of the insect that lunged at her from an angle to her right then pitched forward wildly. A heartbeat later her blade slipped into the crease beneath its head, removing that segment neatly from the insect’s body.

Quickly shifting her eyes from the twitching bug to D behind her, Lilia pursed her lips in apparent dismay, saying, “What’s this?”

D was just sheathing his blade. At his feet lay an insect that’d been quartered by horizontal and vertical slashes.

“Quicker than me? You’re good, stud,” Lilia said, jabbing D’s shoulder with the longsword she held. “Sorry, but I need you to draw again. We need more than bugs to settle this once and for all.”

“Perhaps this little business has changed his mind. Why don’t we negotiate?”

D turned his back to them and headed for the door.

“Just a—” Lilia caught herself. Once D had left and the door had closed, she said to no one in particular, “Great. I picked a fight with him when I shouldn’t have, and now I regret it. He cut that bug down without moving an inch from where he started.”

–

“Um, excuse me!”

Hearing the voice of the woman chasing them, the hoarse voice from the vicinity of D’s left hip remarked, “It’s her. What are you gonna do?”

“Just let it be.”

“But she sounds all fired up. I don’t think she’ll just let it be. Hell, she’d follow you into the men’s room!”

Ultimately, Lilia caught up to the Hunter where he had his cyborg horse tethered to a hitching post.

“I told you to wait, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear me—partner?”

“Partner?”

The reply caused Lilia’s eyes to go wide with a look of uncertainty. She’d heard two voices. One from D, up in the saddle, and one from his left hand gripping the reins—a hoarse one.

“That’s right. Right after you left, the mayor hired you and me both! Probably had something to do with the way we hacked apart those gladiator bugs, naturally.”

“Unfortunately, I haven’t hired on with anybody.”

Cracking the reins against the cyborg horse’s neck, D started forward on his steed.

As she looked back and forth between where she’d left her own horse and the young man riding away, Lilia said, “Let’s do this. Let’s work together. The mayor told me to get you to stay. That was his first job for me.”

“You’ll get a smaller cut,” the hoarse voice said.

“That’s not a problem. They agreed to thirty thousand dalas each, and not a dala more. But they said if it was just me, the chances of success would decrease, so it’d only be twenty thousand dalas. That’s why I can’t have you running off anywhere else!”

As Lilia walked alongside the cyborg horse, she seemed to have run out of things to say.

“What was the aircraft carrying, anyway?” the hoarse voice inquired.

“Huh? I haven’t asked yet. I’ve had all I could do just catching up to you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving,” D said in a voice like exquisite ice. As he made a move to leave the grounds of the mayor’s estate, he appeared emotionless, as if he’d already abandoned them.

“So, you mean to tell me the guy who bothered to ask what it was carrying doesn’t care anymore? Something doesn’t add up here. Stop playing me for a fool!”

Saying nothing, D left. The air seemed to be stirred with shattered ice as it took on a bluish tinge, trying to lend the same hue to the silvery chain of mountain peaks in the distance. The village was surrounded by a mountain range.

Once he’d gone through the gates, Lilia stopped.

“I haven’t given up, you know. I’ll chase you down through the very gates of Satanus’s hell!”

–

On the way down the road back to the village, the hoarse voice said, “Peace and quiet at last, but she’ll be coming again. Not that I have anything against that type. Why, before I wound up like this—well, it was quite a long time ago, but I seem to recall chasing one or two like her.”

“A long time ago?” D said, looking up at the heavens. The moon was out. The moonlight seemed to lend a white glow to his face, but that was because D’s beautiful face radiated a light of its own.

“Yep, a long time ago,” the hoarse voice replied. “But then, what’s a long time? How long have the two of us been alive? And what about you know who? Could you even call what we do or what he does living? What are life and death? I suppose only he can answer that. You know, D, I have to wonder if we aren’t chasing after him to get him to tell us that.”