Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts Three and Four Read Online Free PDF Page A

waves of flesh were once again ready to consume D when a band of light mowed through them. The fleshy tongues that even D’s blade hadn’t been able to sever were easily sliced into four pieces, and ignoring the death throes of the tips flopping around on the ground, the main portions were drawn back into the abyss.
    The shadowy form of a carriage appeared in front of D. Beside it stood the baron, but once he’d seen D, the Nobleman quickly opened the door and climbed into the vehicle.
    â€œLooks like he was waiting for you. So, was that flash of light just now his too? For a full-blooded Noble, he sure holds up well in the sunlight,” a hoarse voice remarked.
    Without replying, D raced over to the carriage and swiftly climbed into the driver’s seat. The second he took up the reins, the whole world tilted violently. Fifteen feet to the right of them, another maw had opened in the earth. The vehicle’s wheels tore into the ground and the carriage raced forward. The crevice was right behind it, instantly swallowing the same ground the vehicle had just covered.
    â€œWha—what the hell is all this?!” the Hunter’s left hand bellowed.
    â€œAn earthwyrm,” D replied. Apparently his interest had been piqued as well.
    The left hand muttered pensively, “An earthwyrm? Then there’s nothing we can do.”
    Inhabiting regions more than fifteen hundred feet below the planet’s surface and reaching lengths of up to thirty miles, these enormous creatures had been considered mere legend until a scant four thousand years earlier. When certain circumstances forced the Nobility to construct a subterranean city, a team of their scientists came into contact with an earthwyrm in a spot ten thousand feet under the northern Frontier, and as soon as they struck part of its enormous body, they were simultaneously writing new pages in the histories of both biology and biological warfare. The titanic earthwormlike creatures dubbed “earthwyrms” were endowed with what was an ideal system for an organism to remain alive—they drew the very soil into their bodies and converted it to energy. In a manner of speaking, they were like holy men who were said to live off the dew.
    Already ageless and undying and hindered only by their inability to operate by daylight, the Nobility harnessed the creatures’ energy, creating soldiers that were not only as immortal as their creators, but that could also continue to fight outside any time restrictions. The Greater Nobility who controlled the Frontier and the polar regions worked on making their own personal armies of the creatures without notifying the central division, while others among them were more overt about raising the flag of rebellion. After three centuries of fighting, the central executives who’d somehow managed to kill or contain the Greater Nobility prohibited for all time the production of immortal soldiers and sealed all information about their life-sustaining processes in the core of a superdense star far out in the Milky Way. In order to keep their secrets completely safe, the rest of these earthwyrms would need to be exterminated, but where that was physically impossible, a special concrete material they couldn’t penetrate was poured from the surface of the earth almost all the way down to the magma in regions where they were suspected of dwelling. The one that’d been prodded into activity by the waves of heat now scorching the surface world had either broken out of whatever had sealed it away, or else it had managed to remain free from the very beginning.
    This was just
one?
The body of each individual earthwyrm had innumerable energy intakes—in other words, mouths and tongues. If they moved their body, they could destroy everything on the surface and send it all falling into the depths of the earth. They were like a kind of living Armageddon.
    â€œWe’re not gonna make it. We’ll be