Vampire Hunter D Read Online Free PDF

matter-conversion rockets and ships propelled by galactic energy stare up at the empyrean vault, and exploration parties have actually left their footprints on a number of planets outside our solar system—Altair and Spica, to name just two.
    However, all of that is a dream now.
    Take a peek at the grand Capital. A fine dust coats the walls of buildings and minarets constructed from translucent metal crystal; in places you’ll find recent craters large and small from explosives and ultraheat rays. The majority of automated roads and maglev highways are in shambles, and not a single car remains to zip from place to place like a shooting star.
    There are people. Tremendous mobs of them. Flooding down the streets in endless numbers. Laughing, shouting, weeping, paying their respects to the Capital, the melting pot of existence, with a vitality that borders on complete chaos. But their garb isn’t what you’d expect for the masters of a once-proud metropolis. Men don shabby trousers and tunics redolent of the distant Middle Ages, and threadbare cassocks like a member of a religious order might wear. Women dress in dim shades and wear fabric rough to the touch, completely devoid of flamboyance.
    Through the milling crowd of men armed with longswords or bows and arrows comes a gasoline-powered car most likely taken from some museum. Trailing black smoke and popping with the firecrackers of backfires the vehicle carries along a group of laser-gun toting lawmen.
    A dreadful scream rises from one of the buildings and a woman staggers out. From her inhuman cry people instinctively know the cause of her terror, and call out for the sheriff and his men. Before long, they race to the scene, ask the wailing woman where the terror is located, and enter the building in question with faces paler than the bloodless countenance of the witness herself. They ride an independently powered elevator down five hundred stories.
    In one of the subterranean passageways—all of which had supposedly been destroyed ages ago—there’s a concealed door, and beyond it a vast graveyard where the Nobility, blood-craving creatures of the night, slumber as in days gone by in wooden coffins filled with damp soil.
    The sheriff and his men soon go into action. Fortunately, it seems there are no curses or vicious beasts here, no defense system of lasers or electronic cannons. These Nobles were probably resigned to their fate. The lawmen hold rough wooden stakes and gleaming metal hammers in their hands. Their expressions are a pallid blend of fear and sinfulness. The mob of black silhouettes encircles a coffin, someone’s arm rises toward the heavens then knifes back down. There’s a dull thud. A horrifying scream and the stench of blood fill the graveyard. The anguished cry grows thinner and dies out, and the group moves on to the next coffin.
    When the lawmen leave the graveyard not long after that, their faces are adorned with crimson beads of blood and a shade of sinfulness much deeper than the one they wore before this mission.
    Though the Nobility was nearly extinct, the feelings of pride brought on by the awe humanity held toward them had seeped into their very blood over the course of ten long millennia and would not be shaken off so easily. Because they had indeed reigned supreme over the human race. And because the automated city—now populated by people who couldn’t fathom its machinery or receive the tiniest fraction of the benefits it might provide—and everything else in the world that could be called civilization was something they had left behind. They—the vampires.
    .
    This strict stratification of vampires and humanity came about when one day in 1999 mankind’s history as lords of the earth came to an abrupt end. Someone pushed the button and launched the full-scale nuclear war that the human race had been warned about for so long. Thousands of ICBMs and MIRVs flew in disarray, reducing one major city after another to a white-hot