The Legend IV
Siren Song
Vampire Hunter D Fan Fiction
# Hi, I'm finally back!! Omg I'm ALIIIIVE!!!11! To those who are amazing enough to still be waiting, sorry for the long wait, and thank you for having such faith in me. How shall I explain away the latest million-year-long writer's block? Let's just say my life hasn't exactly been rosy the past few months, and I really didn't have the inclination to write, being busy sitting around drowning in emo, and all. Well, whatever. That's in the past! Allow me to present Siren Song, the fourth instalment of The Legend!
Chapter 1: Bon Voyage
"Bon voyage."
Vianne frowned slightly. The uncharacteristic phrase was delivered in the same steely, cool tone that its speaker always used, whether being faced by life or death, sorrow or joy. Her eyes were closed—there was no point in opening them since she had been blind for two years now—but she thought she could see, in her mind's eye, his impassive visage.
"Let's see if I have my facts right," she answered in a sceptical tone. "I'm going to back to the mainland by ship. You're going to stay here and finish the job, and then magically appear at the harbour to meet me, and if all goes well we'll make it just in time for the deadline?"
"That is the general idea."
"Why don't I get to try your secret amazing way of travelling across the sea faster than an express ship?"
"Like you said, it's…" D hesitated, "…secret and amazing."
"Ah," Vianne said, not quite knowing how to respond to a humorous-seeming line delivered in a voice that was anything but cheery, by a person who existed on a different plane of reality from any form of comedy.
The pair was currently standing on a pier in the harbour of Zeiss, a small island colony managed by the mayor of the port city Cyrelaide. They had undertaken a three-day journey by ship to the island at the behest of that same mayor, who had hired D to dispatch some nasty sea serpents plaguing the colony. Being a bossy, overhearing man who liked to flaunt his authority, he had imposed a rather tight time limit on the completion of the assignment. At the same time, he had severely understated the number, strength and breeding ability of the abovementioned serpents.
"Well then," Vianne said as she heard her ship's bell ring urgently. "Good luck with the extermination of…baby serpents. Bring me one to cuddle if they turn out to be cute. Surely you can reveal your amazing secret ways of travel to a dumb beast? See you, figuratively, in three days!"
With that, she turned and ran with surprising dexterity, considering her blindness, up the broad plank that facilitated the boarding of the passenger ship moored at the end of the pier. She turned upon reaching the deck, waving in what she had calculated to be D's general direction.
He smiled, just a little, and raised a pale, slim hand in response before turning and heading back along the pier. She, of course, saw none of this.
"Sirens? What are those?" Vianne asked, her voice brimming with fascination.
"Some say they're beautiful sea maidens," the good-natured sailor assigned to assist her due to her disability, who had taken to amusing her with seamen's tales, replied in a suitably dramatic voice. "Beautiful, but very dangerous. They feed on men's souls, you see. On stormy nights, they will sing their bewitching song, and ships will be lured onto the rocks. Then the Sirens will come, and pick their prey out of the shipwreck."
"What kind of songs do they sing?"
"Haunting songs of dark magic, made to ensnare men's minds and lure them to their doom," the storytelling sailor declared grandly. "But their song is said to have a greater power, should they choose to use it. If one can persuade them, they can sing a different melody, a melody so beautiful that it cures the listener of any ailment or disability, no matter how irreversible."
Vianne's voice dimmed a little as she asked, "Will it cure my eyes?"
"I reckon it will," the sailor answered. "But any Sirens we meet will more likely try to kill us all than to sing for your eyes, eh? They might be beautiful, but even they would be driven to jealous anger by a pretty girl like you."
Vianne laughed, and thanked him for the compliment. "Have you ever seen a Siren?"
"What's with the Siren talk?" another, less good-humoured voice chimed in. The storyteller's grumpy, slightly drunk colleague swaggered over, plastering himself onto the railing beside Vianne. "It's bad luck to talk about Sirens at sea. They say the Siren Song will come to those who talk incessantly of Sirens."
"The siren song?" Vianne echoed, sounding more curious than ever. "The one that lures sailors to their doom?"
"Nay, not that old wives' tale!" the grumpy sailor said disdainfully. "Don't listen to everything Jack tells you. The Siren Song is a ship, a pirate ship, so named because it's inescapable and deadly as the siren's song. No ship that it decides to pursue ever escapes from it, and it frequently plunders ships sailing through these parts. The mayor and his cocky 'coast guards' have been trying to catch those bloody pirates for years, to no avail."
"Don't scare passengers with your drunken raving!" Jack protested. "The Siren Song rarely attacks passenger ships; it goes for cargo carriers."
"It does when the crew craves some women," his colleague pointed out obtusely. "Girlie, you should hide. They might really come if they spot a pretty thing like you standing around on deck through their telescopes."
Vianne laughed again at that, and merely said, "Well if they come, we'll just have to fight them all off, won't we?"
"I know this is no longer the age to scoff at woman warriors and all, but I wasn't expecting that to come from you, girlie. How do you fight off something you can't see?"
Before he even finished, there was a soft click, and he found the barrel of a pistol hovering a bare inch from his forehead. Vianne smiled and said, "Like this, if they all make as much noise as you do."
"That's what you get for trying to scare a tough little missy, Hugh," Jack laughed.
"For one," Vianne said as she lowered her pistol and slipped it back into the holster hidden under her long jacket, "pirates aren't scary."
Not compared to what she had seen. Leaving Jack to jeer at Hugh for his humiliation, she took the latter's advice, and went below deck.
Vianne was flung out of her bunk as the ship shook violently from the impact of something large hitting its side. Obviously wide awake now, she could hear people screaming and running all around—along the corridor outside her cabin, in the hold below, and on the deck above.
Mixed in with all the commotion were the cries of some sort of wild beast, along with a great deal of creaking, cracking and groaning from the ship's structure. A sea creature was attacking the vessel.
There was the sound of shattering glass, and then a series of squishing noises as something slimy squeezed into the porthole it had broken through. Vianne scrambled back across the floor, avoiding the wriggling tentacle that had invaded her cabin by listening to it swish through the air.
Vianne's hand landed on something flat and made of leather—her belt. Attached to it were her twin pistols and a long dagger. Yanking the dagger out of its sheath, she slashed out blindly in the general direction of the swishing noises. The sharp blade encountered resistance, and something foul-smelling sprayed into the air as something soft, heavy and wet landed on the floor nearby with a horrid squelch.
The mystery monster attacking the ship let out a screech, and the rocking of the ship reached new heights of vigour. Snatching up her belt and buckling it on, Vianne groped around for the door, found it, and twisted the knob.
The door shot open as the ship pitched to one side, and Vianne was hurled through into the opposite wall in the corridor outside. Cursing under her breath as she staggered to her feet, covered in her second set of fresh bruises for the night, Vianne grabbed the open door of her cabin and slammed it shut, blocking the progress of the maimed tentacle still wriggling deeper in through the porthole.
The corridor was empty—the passengers who had survived the tentacle invasion had already fled to the hold or the deck. The swishing and wet thumping nearby told Vianne that several tentacles were flailing around in the corridor as well, having infiltrated it through the open doors of vacated cabins.
Vianne started down the corridor, heading for the stairs that would lead her up to the deck level. She kept her pace slow, steady and deliberate, neither rushing nor making any apparent effort to skirt the tentacles in her way. As she approached the closest one, it shrank back into the cabin out of which it was sprouting, writhing reluctantly. The next tentacle in her way followed suit. After she passed, the tentacles surged back out of the cabins, once again groping around in vain for living creatures to strangle.
Before long, Vianne arrived at the foot of the stairs, with a trail of blood droplets marking the floor behind her. It had been left by the two puncture wounds on her left wrist, out of which blood was leaking in fairly copious amounts. She also felt like she was about to collapse; the creature assaulting the ship was gargantuan and powerful, and causing a few of its numerous appendages to move involuntarily had been no easy feat, even with that power.
Nonetheless, Vianne disregarded her fatigue and started up the stairway, gripping the metal rail tightly to keep from being thrown off by the tremors the ship was experiencing. She reached the top and stumbled through the door that led outside—into utter chaos.
The deck was a mass of slimy tentacles, broken equipment and panicking—or dead—people. Those who could not fight to save their lives were huddled in corners or behind bits of debris, shrieking their heads off, shoving others to get at safer spots, and otherwise exhibiting behaviour typical of helpless, terrified humans. Those who could fight, including most of the sailors, were scattered about the deck hewing desperately at oncoming tentacles with weapons.
The tentacles were too numerous to count—the creature seemed to have an unlimited supply of them. The main body, out of which the tentacles ensnaring the ship were sprouting, poked out above the dark water some distance away from the ship. At least, the top five percent of it was. That tiny visible portion of the creature's body was vermillion, mottled, and obviously slimy like the tentacles, which were the same colour but with whitish undersides. And pink suckers. Huge pink suckers.
Fresh screams rose over those of the unharmed but hysterical. Several of the fighters had been overpowered by the endless onslaught of abovementioned sucker-covered tentacles, and were being dragged under the sea into, presumably, the waiting beak-like mouth of the sea creature.
There was too much noise coming from all directions; Vianne could not distinguish one sound from another, extra sensitive though her hearing was. As a result, she had no way of noticing the tentacle snaking purposefully her way.
She let out a scream of her own as a tentacle wrapped around her waist and lifted her from the deck. Reacting quickly, she reached out mentally for the power of the Moon Bracelet around her still-bleeding left wrist. There was a loud crackle of energy as a blue force field materialised and expanded outwards around her, repelling the otherwise unbreakable grip of the tentacle. Vianne landed with a loud thump on the deck, bleeding badly from the large circular wounds that the powerful suckers had left on the skin of her midriff—the lower half of her blouse had been ripped away, along with most of the skin under the fabric.
It hurt like hell, but she did not have the luxury of rolling around wailing in agony. Besides, she knew that non-life-threatening wounds like these would heal in no time. Keeping the barrier up, Vianne staggered to her feet. How far could she expand this thing? Could she possibly cover the whole ship and repel the monster clinging to it?
She was not given the chance to discover the answer. At that moment, there was a horrible crunching sound as the pressure exerted by the tentacles crushed the hull of the ship. The sea monster had grown tired of picking off tiny preys one by one and getting its tentacles mangled for its trouble. It now pulled with all the might of its seven billion and one tentacles, dragging the damaged ship, which was taking in water and losing buoyancy, down into the dark, cold water where it could feast at its leisure on drowned, unresisting corpses.
The creature did not bother with symmetry, of course. One side of the ship went down first—the side closer to the partially visible head of the monster. The nice, horizontal deck had suddenly become an almost vertical wall, and people, being subject to the force of gravity, naturally started falling off it. Those who were unlucky got snatched out of the air by waiting tentacles, while the others plunged into the freezing black seawater, fated to survive a bit longer until they drown.
Vianne was among the latter. She was knocked senseless as she crashed headfirst into the raging waves, which had been ignored by her barrier. Apparently, the Moon Bracelet did not classify The Sea as an offensive force.
On the bright side, falling debris did bounce off the barrier, preventing her from being bludgeoned to death at least.