The Eminence in Shadow, Vol. 3 (Light Novel) Read online

  “You certainly know your stuff.”

  As Claire listens to Mary’s explanation, she finds herself impressed by the depths of Mary’s knowledge.

  There aren’t many who are know much about vampires.

  After all, they’re largely a thing of the past, and the number of vampire-related casualties in recent years has been close to zero.

  The Lawless City is an exception. Rumor has it the Crimson Tower is the vampires’ final stronghold.

  That said, even the people running the Association’s meeting haven’t been able to confirm whether there were actually vampires there yet, and their only knowledge on the matter was academic.

  “Humanity eventually drove them out. Vampires vanished from the night altogether, and people gradually began forgetting about them. Then, a thousand years ago, there was a terrible tragedy… When the Red Moon hung in the sky, an entire country was obliterated overnight. It was a small country, and today, history has forgotten its very name… But Elisabeth the Blood Queen and her followers were the ones responsible for the deed.”

  “When you say the ‘Red Moon,’ are you talking about how the moon’s been getting a little red recently?”

  Mary nods. “It drastically increases the power of vampires and their minions. The vampires had been driven to the wall, but on that night, they mounted their rebellion. It lasted three days. A country fell the first night, and three more suffered catastrophic damages over the next two. Then, when the Red Moon ended, the Blood Queen and her followers suddenly disappeared, waiting in hiding until mankind had forgotten about them…”

  “So you mean the vampires are plotting another revolution?”

  Mary nods again. “They consider humanity livestock, and they’ve never forgotten the disgrace of having those pigs overthrow them. Right now, the Blood Queen is in a thousand-year slumber, and her close adviser, Crimson, is leading the vampires. When the Red Moon begins, Crimson plans to revive the Blood Queen. If he does, the millennia-old tragedy will happen all over again…”

  “Wait! So the sacrifice is…?” Claire’s voice trembles as her brother’s face flashes through her mind.

  “Reviving the Blood Queen requires the lifeblood of a young man blessed with a lot of magic. They’re probably planning on using your brother as that sacrifice…”

  “I won’t let them! When does the Red Moon start?!”

  Mary looks through the hole-ridden wall at the moon outside, already stained a deep crimson.

  They hear something that sounds like a scream from the distance.

  “It just did…”

  More screams echo through the night.

  “Ghoooooouls!! R-ruuuuuun!!”

  A great clamor rises, and the stench of blood fills the air.

  “The rampage just started… In other words, the Red Moon gave them tremendous amounts of power. In exchange, though, they’re being assailed with an uncontrollable urge to drink blood. And it’s only going to get worse from here…”

  “…!! What about Cid?! You said he’s in the Crimson Tower, right?!”

  “Hold your horses.”

  Mary stops Claire from rushing off.

  “To be on the safe side, Crimson will probably wait until the moment the moon is at its very reddest to revive the Blood Queen. There’s still about twelve hours left before then.”

  “Twelve hours? But it’ll be the middle of the day!!”

  “The Red Moon lasts for three full days. And during those days, the night never breaks. But don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  With that, Mary begins ripping up the weathered floorboards.

  “In preparation for this day…I dug a hole.”

  “…A hole?” Claire tilts her head to the side.

  Sure enough, there’s something there.

  Beneath the floorboards, there’s an opening just large enough for a person to crawl through.

  “Normally, the Crimson Tower is swarming with minions, so getting in is nigh impossible. But now that the Red Moon’s started, they’re all outside. That gives us a rare chance to sneak in…”

  “So you mean, this hole…”

  “Invading from aboveground is tricky. But this lets us go in from below.”

  “…Clever.”

  “Let’s go over this one last time. My goal is killing Elisabeth the Blood Queen, and yours is saving your brother. Are you ready to work together?”

  “Absolutely. Glad to have you in my corner, Mary.”

  “Right back at you, Claire.”

  The two exchange a handshake.

  “Now, if that’s decided, let’s go. I’m coming, Cid.” Claire slips into the hole without a shred of hesitation.

  Mary lets Claire go on ahead, then turns around and looks back up at the scarlet moon.

  There’s a pained look in her eyes.

  “I’m coming, Queen Elisabeth…”

  And with that, she follows after Claire.

  When I get back to the Dark Knight Association’s base, my sister is gone.

  I guess she must have gone for a walk, too.

  I don’t have anything to do, so I decide to turn in for the night.

  —When I wake up, the Lawless City is trashed.

  “Wait…”

  It should be morning by now, but it’s still dark out, a crimson moon is hanging in the sky, and ghouls are running wild through the streets.

  “Is this the ‘rampage’…?”

  That Mary chick mentioned an important key word.

  Apparently, everyone at the base is holding an emergency meeting to decide how to respond.

  I woke up immediately when I sensed a flurry of activity, so it looks like I didn’t miss the party. I think. I slip out of the base, find a tall building, and stand on top of it clad in black.

  “Ah, the time has finally come…!”

  This is it. This is the real deal.

  The big vampire event is finally upon us!

  I grin thoughtfully beneath my mask as my black longcoat flutters behind me.

  The key words are “Red Moon,” “rampage,” and “Blood Queen,” huh…?

  Oh right, and there’s some lady called the “Ancient Vampire Hunter.” I gotta make sure I hit her up during the party.

  It’s gonna be hard, but I have to come up with a schedule for the event that’ll let me have the most fun.

  Given how things are going, I assume the ultimate goal is defeating the Blood Queen.

  Sounds like the best strategy for me is to head to the Crimson Tower and start looting it. That way, I can kill two birds with one stone. Once I’m there, I can just stay flexible and play it by ear.

  Wait, I just remembered. Claire isn’t back yet.

  Eh, she’s a tough cookie. She’ll be fine. Hell, given that it’s Claire we’re talking about, there’s a decent chance she’s storming the Crimson Tower right this moment.

  As for me, everyone knows that you gotta kick off events like these by hunting some ghouls.

  Marie watches her final customer of the day leave, then closes her door.

  As the moonlight streams into her room, she casts a glance at her disheveled sheets and picks up her undergarments strewn on the ground.

  After tugging them back on, she collapses onto her bed. Her comely face sinks into her pillow.

  She’s exhausted from the day’s crazy events, and her customers weren’t exactly great, either. She decides to just pass out.

  “Bluhh…”

  However, between her sheets damp with bodily secretions and the stifling smell in the air, she can’t get comfortable. She sighs and opens the window.

  The sticky smell fades, but it’s replaced by the commotion outside.

  “I wonder what’s going on…?”

  Normally, the sun would be coming up around this time, and the red-light district would be closing up and going quiet for the day.

  Today, though, dawn refuses to break, and the entire district seems to be in chaos. The bright red moon is still hanging in t
he sky.

  Off in the distance, she sees flames licking the sides of a building. There’s been a fire.

  She can faintly make out the smell of smoke on the wind.

  However, there’s a smell that assails her nose even more strongly. It’s rusty and pungent.

  The fire is off in the distance, so it shouldn’t reach her.

  Something is off. The streets are filled with people frantically running. Why are they panicking? It’s just a fire, after all.

  As Marie stands in the window, the moon casts her in a beguiling red glow, setting off her pale skin and dark panties. Her fuchsia hair and eyes burn vividly in the moonlight.

  Normally, a beautiful woman standing in the window wearing nothing but her unmentionables would cause hordes of men to stop in their tracks and stare.

  Today, though, there’s no such crowd.

  The look in Marie’s eyes seems almost cold as she gazes at the distant fire and the district as a whole.

  She’s spent five years in this town after being sold here at age thirteen. Everyone who comes to the Lawless City wants to leave at first. But as time goes on, that desire dulls, and eventually the Lawless City stains them with its colors.

  Marie hasn’t given up just yet.

  As of late, though, she’s been considering resigning herself to her fate. It’d probably make things easier on her.

  Although she’s made a name for herself among the red-light district’s sex workers, she isn’t at the top of the pack. Her madam told her, however, that she could become number one if she set her mind to it.

  That would be a perfectly reasonable way for her to live her life. All she has to do is forget everything and drown herself in the transient pleasures of the night…

  “Sigh…”

  It’s been a while since she last thought about the world outside. Little by little everyone forgets about it, and bit by bit the Lawless City paints them over and makes them part of itself. One day, that’ll include her…

  She goes to close her window, when—

  “Eek!”

  A beast leaps through it and into her room.

  No, not a beast. A humanoid carrying themselves like one—a ghoul.

  “Ah, ahh…”

  Her room is small. There’s nowhere to run.

  Marie shrinks back across her bed.

  The ghoul grins, putting its sharp fangs on full display, then pounces toward her.

  “N-no…”

  Tears roll down her cheeks.

  In that moment, she realizes she’s going to die.

  “I told you… Flee…,” booms a low voice.

  In an instant, the ghoul is torn to shreds. Corpse chunks rain down as blood sprays across the room.

  “Y-you’re…” Marie’s heart throbs upon seeing that familiar figure with his ebony blade.

  It’s a man wearing a jet-black longcoat—Shadow.

  “The rampage has begun… Behold, the town is stained with blood…”

  “The town…?” As she covers herself up with her sheets, Marie peeks outside.

  “…Oh god.”

  She doesn’t know when it happened, but the streets are wet with blood.

  There are grisly corpses and rampaging ghouls everywhere. Many of the sex workers don’t make it out in time, and they’re attacked the moment they step outside.

  “L-look out…!”

  Marie’s coworker numbers among their ranks, and Marie lets out an unthinking scream.

  The next moment, though, the ghoul attacking her is hacked to pieces.

  “The rampage has begun… And now, the storm of blood rages…”

  A man in a black longcoat is standing behind it.

  “Huh?!”

  Marie looks across her room, but there’s no one there.

  “Flee, before it’s too late…”

  Then, a scream rings out from down the street.

  In the brief moment it snatches Marie’s attention, Shadow vanishes again.

  “The rampage…blood…flee…”

  She can hear his voice, but she’s not sure where from. The bodies of dead ghouls go flying through the air.

  Now that she takes a better look, she realizes that the grisly corpses along the street are all ghouls, too.

  She can’t see Shadow himself, but she can tell that the creatures being eviscerated are starting to get farther away.

  “Is he…protecting us?”

  Marie is certain her intuition was on the mark. She knew Shadow had come to save them.

  She quickly gets dressed, packs her things, and leaps out the second-floor window.

  “Thank you, Mr. Shadow…”

  She gazes in the direction he vanished with passion in her eyes.

  She vows to repay him someday…then takes advantage of the confusion to make her escape.

  The Dark Knight Association is overwhelmed.

  They rounded up their finest to mount a counteroffensive against the ghouls, but between the creatures’ enhanced powers and overwhelming numbers, the Association was forced to retreat.

  “Graine the Strong is wounded, too!! We have to fall back!”

  “Stop talkin’ nonsense! That’s your post!! If you don’t hold it, who will?!”

  “Not my problem!! We’ve got men down! You want me to just let them die?!”

  A group of dark knights is surrounded on the main road. They’re trying to mount a resistance, but the seemingly endless throng of ghouls is wearing them down.

  “Everyone! Please, follow your orders!”

  Claudia, the elite Association member in charge of commanding the anti–Blood Queen operation, desperately strains her voice, but it’s only a matter of time before morale crumbles.

  The road is overflowing with ghoul corpses.

  Expert dark knights are nothing but impressive, and everyone present can handily outmatch a ghoul.

  However, nobody expected they’d be attacked by quite so many.

  This evil plot must have taken years to plan.

  Even with all the dark knights they’ve assembled, they can’t so much as reach the Crimson Tower’s base. So this is what the Blood Queen, the woman who controls a third of the Lawless City, is capable of…

  Even the Dark Knight Association has had a long-standing “Don’t get involved with the Lawless City” policy. Claudia fully understands why, and she curses her superiors for having gone against it.

  “Those worthless geezers.”

  Normally, she would never refer to them so harshly in public. That dirty geezer who squeezes her butt, that nasty one with eyes always locked on her chest, that horndog who won’t stop trying to make advances on her, that…oh, she can go on and on.

  She makes up her mind to ignore her orders and issue the command to retreat. If those geezers demote her for it, she’ll just hand in her resignation straight to their solar plexuses.

  The only problem is that she and the others are currently stuck in a throng of ghouls.

  Evacuating is easier said than done.

  “I was too late, huh…?” she mutters in self-derision. If only she’d made her choice earlier.

  She’d put off making a decision to protect her own status, and now she was reaping the rewards of her foolishness.

  Claudia draws the sword from her back and steels herself.

  She has no intention of putting her life on the line for those geezers, and to be totally honest, she doesn’t much care what happens to the egotistical meatheads under her command, either.

  Still, she’s the one who put off the decision, so she needs to be the one to take responsibility.

  “We’re retreating! I’ll cover our rear!”

  She started as a normal dark knight and worked her way up the ranks herself. Contrary to appearances, she’s confident in her sword arm.

  “Hell yeah, she said we’re retreating!!”

  “Hah, the rear’s all yours! I’m outta here!”

  The dark knights stream past her, fleeing the scene.

>   At least one of you could have stayed behind to help! she shouts silently in her heart as she starts slicing through the ghouls.

  Ghouls rush forward. Dark knights sprint back. And then there’s Claudia, fighting for her life as she tries desperately to stay between the two groups.

  However, manning the rear alone is far too great a task for Claudia, and she quickly hits her limit.

  When she slips on a puddle of blood, the ghouls descend upon her.

  “Rgh…!” Claudia closes her eyes—

  A black swordsman descends from the night.

  “Huh, aren’t you…?”

  In a single swing of his sword, he sweeps away the ghouls straddling her prone body. She’s captivated by his superb form.

  The swordsman in black stoops down low and draws his sword back.

  Then—

  “Now fall…Ebony Swirl.”

  The black swordsman’s blade extends until it’s several times as long as he is tall.

  Then, a jet-black whirlwind bursts forth.

  It slices through the ghouls like they’re slips of paper, decimating their ranks in the blink of an eye.

  “You’re kidding…”

  Still collapsed on her rump, Claudia gazes up at the black swordsman.

  Seeing the beautiful arc his sword cast and the density of the magic packed into it has set her heart aflutter. She’s a respectable dark knight in her own right, so she can tell how abnormal his strength is.

  The fleeing dark knights stop in their tracks and gaze at the black swordsman in astonishment. A clamor spreads through their ranks.

  “Wh-who is that guy…?”

  “He wiped out all the ghouls like it was nothing…”

  Seemingly indifferent to the ruckus he’s caused, the swordsman speaks in a voice that sounds like it’s echoing from the abyss itself. “The rampage has begun… This is beyond you people…”

  “The rampage…?”

  “The moon is red, which means time is short…”

  A red moon hangs in the dark sky.

  Claudia can’t think of a time she’s ever seen it that color before. She’d thought it a little creepy, but she had no idea why it was like that.

  “The moon is red… Wait…”

  At that moment, Claudia connects the dots between everything that’s going on in the Lawless City and an old legend she heard as a child.