Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four Read Online Free PDF Page B

other—we managed to kill some of them—but villagers got killed, too—and others were injured. There are still monsters—outside the village. I managed to slip out without them seeing me—so I could collect medicinal herbs. But now—I’m scared to go back.”
    D remained at a distance from her. The girl’s desperate cries meant no more to him now than distant baying borne on the wind. But he halted.
    “Please wait—D.”
    He turned around. The girl was hunched over, her hands resting on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath, when the Hunter asked her, “Where’d you hear my name?”
    “When whatever it was passed by—”
    The girl’s voice failed there, and she struggled to fill her lungs with oxygen. When she finally managed to speak again, her voice was hoarse, as if coming up through her throat had wrung all the moisture from it. “I heard it—then. That a Hunter named D—would be coming soon. And that we—should ask for your help.”
    “You were the only one who heard this?”
    “No—a bunch of the villagers did. But all were people—with an affinity for spirits.”
    “Did this voice identify itself?”
    The girl shook her head. After resting a little more, her voice was finally back to normal when she spoke again, saying, “No. But it was really huge and scary. Whatever it was, it was not from this world. Pm sure of that.”
    A shudder passed through the girl. Overwhelmed by the fear of the unknown being, she forgot all about her village and the injured people there. D alone knew what it really was.
    “If I were to go to your village, could I buy a horse there?”
    Waves of hope swiftly broke against the girl’s face. “If you help us, I’ll give you all the modified horses I own!”
    As she stared, enraptured, at the young man approaching her, she suddenly felt a sharp tug at her waist. Without asking for the location of her village, the young man in black took the girl under one arm and sprinted off like an exquisite wind, as if he’d known where he was going all along.
    Less than ten minutes later, the village’s palisade came into view outside the forest. Screams and inhuman howls were carried on the wind. Undoubtedly the creatures had attacked again.
    D quickened his pace.
    Just before the rear gate, a caterpillar with a red shell was engaged in deadly battle with a number of villagers. Looking like a dozen bumps fused in a row, its body was a good twenty to twenty-five feet long. The caterpillar’s weapons were the half-dozen semicircular bladed mandibles jutting from its round head. Two vermilion-stained villagers lay on the ground, and another five were also covered with blood. Proof that they weren’t completely ineffectual came from the yellow and red ichor that dripped where a number of spears had stabbed into the bellows-like membranes linking one segment of the caterpillar to the next.
    The villagers cautiously surrounded the creature and took aim at its head, but suddenly its body twisted with incomprehensible speed and assailed the men to its rear, who had let their guard down. Taking one last swipe with his longsword, a middle-aged man felt a bladelike mandible drive right through him. The shell where his longsword struck gave a hard ring. The mandibles parted, and the mouth opened, devouring the man. The crunching sounds made the other villagers cringe.
    Without warning, the caterpillar changed direction, looking down. D was by its feet. Still carrying the girl, he didn’t even reach for the hilt of his longsword with his right hand.
    A command sprang into the brain of the caterpillar, filling it with cruelty and hunger and a lust for battle. It bit through the prey in its mouth and flung down half of it, swallowing the other half, and then it launched an attack on the vision of beauty below it without hesitation. A silvery streak of lightning struck its head—splitting its armor with a vicious crack. Its great lump of a head split in two by a single blow, the