The Young Man Who Was a Hunter (4)
Ian recalled the vampires' tireless diligence. Among the Night Kin, they were the most troublesome breed to face, and the problem began with the kinship they carried.
A high-ranking vampire called the pack it led its Blood Kin — a family bound not by the seed of vulgar lust, but by pure blood. Later generations believed in and obeyed the predecessors who had granted them that blood and raised them into noble Blood Kin as though those elders were their true parents.
In truth, the words as though were already a mistake. From a vampire's point of view, the parents who had borne them were false, and the predecessor who bestowed true blood was the only real parent.
Armed with cunning intellect and that clinging sense of kin, vampires prepared with meticulous care what human society would have called an emergency network. Espionage and instantaneous exchange of will, carried out through familiars such as the bats they commanded — until well into the early modern age, their intelligence assets held an overwhelming advantage over humanity's. Communications technology later narrowed the gap somewhat. Vampires, however, were hardly incapable of using technology themselves, so no matter how thoroughly the human side prepared, matching the vampires' intelligence capacity — or falling just short of it — was the limit.
Ian had taken all of that into account and laid his plans from the moment he filed his return as a missing person with the Hunter Support Bureau. If the blood of ordinary gate monsters could not charge the jade necklace, then he would simply make the vampires come to him. Vampire blood would let him charge it at once, with no need to worry about compatibility.
And now the plan had come apart completely. With the intelligence capacity he remembered — and with the pettiness that never forgot a grudge centuries old, and would spite even an enemy's descendants — he had expected an attack within a week at the latest.
Strange.
Turn it over as he might, he could not find the cause.
Don't tell me that since the Age of Constellations began, every last vampire has grown so overwhelmingly strong that an old-generation hunter like me isn't even worth treating as an enemy.
The Night Kin, vampires included, had always handled mana far more freely than ordinary humans. In an age so thick with it that the rise in atmospheric density could be felt on the skin...
No. That doesn't hold.
Vampires had grown stronger, but so had hunters. He had only to look at his old comrades, who had raised the standing of hunters so high that a grotesque phrase like hunter great house now passed for common sense.
A hypothesis running the other way is more convincing.
His comrades, the ones called the Six Founders of the Beginning — what if they had driven the vampires to extinction in the age of the Cataclysm? According to materials released by the Hunter Support Bureau, the first confirmed contractor with a Constellation had been Elric, so the hunters of that time, backed by the Constellations, might well have been able to overwhelm the vampires...
Ian cut the inference short before it could keep sprawling. Whatever life the vampires led in the Age of Constellations, he could only guess at it for now. To analyze the present with any certainty, he still had to charge the jade necklace and find the Vampire Princess.
Tsk. Do I have to prepare a way to build mana the traditional way...?
With that thought, he closed the book. The library's closing hour was drawing near. He checked out a few volumes of history and left.
For the past several days Ian had been in and out of the library for the sake of luring vampires, but that did not mean he had skimmed. If he meant to learn what had happened while he was gone, he had to work diligently through the records of the past.
Yet there was no book that addressed what he actually wanted: what had occurred from 1999 until the age of the Cataclysm came to an end. All he found were superficial remarks — that there had once been a time when humanity counted its years in four digits, and that even then a few hunters had existed.
Books treating the period after the Common Era, the age of the Cataclysm itself, did exist, if only barely. Their contents were uniformly simple: hunters had driven out the forces of evil that tried to seize the Earth amid the chaos of the upheaval, a tale that felt uncomfortably like propaganda. Even so, that heavily propagandistic tradition stirred a sense of déjà vu in him. He tried to stitch the tatters of time together from what he had known and what he had since learned.
First, sort out the eras.
Following the scheme offered by several general histories, he divided time into three: the Common Era, the age of the Cataclysm, and the present Age of Constellations.
He already had a fair guess at the Cataclysm's cause. Among the hunters of the Common Era, three eschatologies had circulated — though calling them -ologies was embarrassing, since there had been no scientific evidence to speak of. The more accurate name was the Three Prophecies of Doom.
The first: 1999, the End of the Century. An ill omen warning that, as the century turned and heaven and earth seemed to overturn, the balance between humanity, the Earth's ruling species, and the Night Kin would reverse. No one knew precisely which race that familiar phrase, Night Kin, was meant to indicate. The vampires, however, were convinced that if any race was superior enough to rule humanity, it could only be themselves. And so they crowned themselves the protagonists of the apocalypse. Waiting on 1999, they brought forth the Vampire Princess, the vampires' ultimate weapon, for a final battle against the hunters, and prepared a scheme to resurrect the terrible Dracula with the Princess as the catalyst.
That was when Ian vanished — in the very moment the Vampire Princess moved to resurrect the king of vampires. To halt the rite of great annihilation, he seized her and hurled himself beyond the collapse of reality.
And next.
The second: 2012, the comet. A prophecy that a meteor falling to Earth would bring a mass extinction. Just as the vampires had believed the prophecy of 1999, there were Night Kin who worshipped the prophecy of 2012.
The Reptilians.
Reptile-humans who claimed to have inherited the blood of ancient dragons. They believed that on the day the meteor fell and modern society collapsed, the starry sky would open and they would ascend as true dragons. It was an oral tradition passed down in secret among them, and the reason Ian knew of the reptile-folk's hidden wish was simple: a traitor of their race had come over to the hunters. A half-Reptilian — not a hybrid of human and vampire, but of reptilian and human — a self-styled dragon maiden.
Ian expected that the Cataclysm had arrived around 2012, the backdrop of this second doom. He recalled the rite of 1999, carried out beneath a full moon dyed red. As the ritual advanced, the landscape of reality had crumbled, and beyond the shattered sky an ominous chaos had whirled. Had the rite been completed, chaos would have poured into the world through the broken boundary.
If the Reptilians of 2012 had taken the vampires of 1999 as a cautionary lesson and laid their plans more secretly — if that meteor had truly fallen to Earth — then it was only natural that the world had become the mess it was. They had succeeded in collapsing the boundary of chaos and completed the great magic that summoned the meteor, and the star that came from the far side of the metaphysical had overturned the very shape of Earth's continents.
Ian looked down at the atlas spread before him. The continents he knew were not there. Only a single Unified Continent remained. The Earth he remembered could be found solely in the names of the great cities set here and there across it — names such as London, capital of the Mage Tower Alliance, and Sky Castle New York.
In truth, a shock great enough to plow the continents under ought to have driven every living thing extinct. But Nibiru, the meteor the Reptilians worshipped, was a celestial body summoned by magic, not by science. The repercussions of its collision would have been magical as well.
Ian set the timeline he had drawn in his head in order.
The End of the Century, 1999: he and the Vampire Princess vanished together, and the first prophecy of doom was resolved. The comet of 2012: for reasons unknown, the hunters failed to stop the Reptilians, and the second prophecy arrived. The Cataclysm erupted. In the age of the Cataclysm, a war against the Reptilian Empire, led by the six founders contracted to Constellations; victory for the hunters; and, in the course of the postwar settlement, the founding of the Hunter Support Bureau.
"And after that, the Age of Constellations opened..."
Ian brooded over what might have become of the vampires in the torrent of this tangled hunter history. It would make sense if they had been swept up in the unprecedented disaster of the Cataclysm and driven extinct. It would make just as much sense if they had used the Cataclysm to expand their power. He worried at the riddle for a while, then shook his head.
The Vampire Princess's survival was certain in any case. Find her, and he could grasp the state of the vampire race perfectly.
In fact, even without the jade necklace, Ian could determine at least whether she lived or died. He could not know her exact location or condition. But that she was alive and breathing on this same star, at this very moment, was beyond doubt. Her survival was proven by the searing heat he felt in his heart — heat leaking from the brand the Vampire Princess herself had carved there.
Sometime after their joint fall in 1999, while he lay buried in the chaos, Ian had realized that the heat engraved on his heart had subsided. Back then he had believed the Princess's soul, unable to endure a starvation without end, had guttered out. Now he knew better. She had returned to Earth one step ahead of him.
The instant he set foot on the Earth of the Age of Constellations, the brand that had lain still for so long began to pulse again. An alarm announcing that the Vampire Princess lived — and the moment Ian resolved to hunt her down.
And even now, the brand was pulsing.