Autobahn Checkpoint, A-UK 6, South of Stoke-On-Trent
It stood at about the same height as an average sized human male, around six feet; it was well built, with solid shoulders but an almost un-naturally thin waist. Walter couldn't discern exact details in relation to its physique; however, as the coat it wore obscured most of the details. Tight around the chest, but splayed out below the waist – it resembled an old nineteenth century frock coat, but with a military twist and greater length. Coloured field grey, and with a double line of gold buttons to match the minimal braiding on the breast and shoulders.
The face was, however, entirely visible. It had skin but, evidently, not its own. A covering of old brown leather, sewn together from various individual patches, enclosed a perfectly shaped skull that, Walter thought, from the odd glints where it poked through the 'flesh', was made from burnished brass. It even had eyes, which were an odd, cold blue. As it approached in slow, smooth, efficient steps, he saw that they were glass, and the leather eye lids were stitched permanently open. Its creator had clearly not been economical with details, as not only did it have eyes, but also lips, a nose and even hair – a long pony tail of platinum blond swept back from its forehead.
In what appeared to be softer, suppler leather gloves it carried a basket hilted Scottish claymore and a long, vicious dirk.
It advanced, slowly, out from between the small iron buildings, and into the puddle of light which shone out from a half dozen spots around the two of them. Walter moved lithely to his feet, and slipped around to the left, circling warily. The clockwork man matched his steps identically, putting one foot next to the other in exact mimicry of its opponent, moving to the right.
'Вынеп ройдете Полыньд авалакоманд унапровед ениеее', it rasped at Walter.
Its voice was like dragging steel across concrete and was almost painfully artificial. He could see that, as it spoke, neither its jaw nor throat moved. The harsh, alien sounds were clearly Russian, yet they seemed to originate from a brass mesh set some way into the mouth, some sort of synthetic voice box, almost.
With a sharp twitch of his wrist Walter flicked a single monofilament wire out at it, only to see the automaton neatly sidestep it with a sudden jerk of movement. He sent another, and another, once, twice, thrice and each time it dodged effortlessly with the same lightning fast flashes of motion, whether he sent the wire low or high, it jinked aside, pulling its upper body almost horizontal at one point to allow a single line to flick over its head, before it snapped upright once more. After each jink it returned to its eerie mechanical mimicry of Walter, when he continued to his left, it moved right, if he switched the direction of his circle to his right, it switched to its left, he lunged it backpedalled, he retreated it advanced.
'Я имеюв асангли чанин'.
With the same artificial suddenness, conspicuously lacking those telltale movements that accompany any sudden shift in direction in an organic creature, it lunged at Walter. He brought his wires up in a whirling metal shield instantaneously, a shield that could cut bullets out of the air and shred flesh, and yet, almost unbelievably, with sudden jinks and twists it stepped through the metal screen and slammed the dirk, up to the hilt, into Walter's exposed belly.
The Butler staggered backwards, as the clockwork automaton twisted the dagger in his gut to break the suction with his dead flesh, and withdrew it in a single smooth motion. Walter went down on one knee, leaking vital fluids across the asphalt. The automaton took a single step closer and brought up its sword to deliver a second blow.
Still stunned at the abruptness of his unexpected outmatching, Walter managed to twist narrowly aside to avoid the descending claymore, so that the blade sank not through the top of his skull, but deep into his shoulder instead, juddering to a stop in his chest cavity as he lashed out with one hand to clutch his foes wrist in an iron grip. He could feel brass bones, beneath the grey coat and the leather skin, and even the slow turn of tiny gears and the tug of artificial steel tendons as the clockwork simulacra exerted pressure on its blade, driving it gradually deeper into the beleaguered Butler.
He spat blood up into the automaton's face, but it ignored the sticky red mess that coated its unblinking glass eyes. In the blue of the iris, Walter could see further miniscule cogs rotating lazily.
Then, with grim finality, he saw it pull back the dirk for a third, almost certainly fatal, stroke.
A bullet struck from the side of it head, in a fine spatter of sparks.
It twisted its head with a sudden jerk, almost seventy degrees, far further than any human could have done so, to look at Andrew, who had emerged from the Land Rover with revolver outstretched.
'Shit'.
He opened fire again, sending three more rounds hurtling towards the clockwork man. Its dirk, pulled back to strike at Walter already, flicked out in three sudden spirals and deflected each projectile harmlessly, for it at least, not so for Andrew, who went down in a heap, apparently caught by his own deflected bullets.
The brief distraction gave Walter the moment he needed, however, and scrabbling around on the ground behind him with his one free hand, limp wires still attached, he latched onto the helmet of one of the deceased guards and swung it like a club at his foes head. He struck it three times; with each blow he pushed himself upwards, until he was back on his feet and level with the lethal contraption. His strikes had not, however, served to do any more than dislodge a great swathe of leather skin from the left side of its face, which peeled away like the flesh of a corpse to reveal the lustrous bronze skull beneath. He jammed his foot into its chest, and pushed backwards, managing to free himself from his cruel impalement whilst maintaining a firm grip on the automaton's sword hand. Then, as it dropped its dirk and snapped a hand up to grip Walter's other wrist, currently engaged in beating his foe across his brass head with the discarded helmet, Walter snapped his own head forward in a vicious head butt, knocking the clockwork man back a pace and a half, but breaking his own nose in the process.
With a grunt, he tore away from the simulacra, leaving strips of bloody fabric from his shirt and a significant amount of skin in its left hand, where it had been clutching his wrist.
Walter whipped his wires back into the air and sent them whirling round his head once again, pushing the clockwork man back a few more, crucial, steps. It resumed its jinking motions soon enough, however, and he knew that it would move in for the kill, wires or no, soon enough.
It was still mimicking his footwork, left and right, backwards and forwards.
And then it struck him.
The automaton was reading his actions, using those slight signals of motion that he had been unable to find in it, against him. It was following his movements, predicting his attacks, his defences, everything, it was calculating patterns – and adjusting to suit.
Walter flexed his wounded left hand, minutely, as if about to send a wire out to the clockwork man's right. But, then, dipping his right shoulder and lashing out with a wire from his other hand. His foe moved an instant too slowly, and the monofilament line whipped across his arm, splitting the coat open and sending a ragged scrap of leather skin and grey fabric twisting away on the breeze.
Whatever alloy the clockwork man's bones were made of, Walter reflected, it was certainly not brass. He could see where his wires had left long thin scars along the burnished bronze ulna and radius, whilst it should have severed the forearm neatly. He moved his right hand with a similar miniscule motion as he had with his left previously, and then sent out a pair of wires from his opposite hand.
The clockwork man stepped neatly aside.
'Кактол ькостыд намне Дважд ыстыд навас'.
Walter took the mechanical grating from between its immobile jaws as some imperfect replication of laughter.
The automaton dropped suddenly into a predators crouch, like some terrible stalking beast, and sprang forwards, low to the ground, claymore trailing behind it from one hand and striking sparks in a long line from the asphalt. Once more it swept effortlessly between the individual lines of the wire shield and closed the gap between the two combatants in an instant. Rather than swing with its sword, however, it raised its empty left hand and jabbed it towards the Butler.
Halfway through the strike, though, its empty hand suddenly snapped into motion – all five the leather fingers ripping off and spinning in all directions, leaving a ragged hole in the end of the glove – from which flicked a single ten inch blade.
It had swept gracefully across Walter's throat before he had even a hope of moving.
A heavy square toed boot then made connection with the Butler's chest, and he was thrown backwards, crashing through a wooden door, and then a thin metal table as he came to a halt, in a bloody heap, inside one of the guard buildings.
H e looked up at the ceiling with dimming vision; blood was trickling freely from the perfectly horizontal wound in his neck. He clasped his good hand to it, realising with a slowly dawning horror that the gash was stubbornly refusing to close. Whilst the deeper rents in his body, at his shoulder and stomach, were almost healed already, this smaller wound refused to mend.
Silver.
The blade must have been silver, probably blessed by a holy man or the like.
He had underestimated his foe. That much he was certain of. He had tricked it, once, and tried to do the same again. That had been a mistake – he had been thinking of it too much like a machine, like some walking clockwork abacus, to be outfoxed by the living brain. But he was wrong; its mocking laugh at his assumptions was proof enough of that. Somewhere, under the brass fixtures, beneath the infinite gears, cogs and tiny motors – was a real man, and that brass skull contained the complete consciousness of a living human.
Walter dragged himself painfully to his feet, his assailant was not the type to gloat in its victory, however, and it was already advancing from the darkness outside, into the fluorescent brightness of the hut. It slammed another boot into Walter's stomach, sending him bouncing off the corrugated iron wall.
The Butler struggled to remain standing, propping himself up, by a small window.
The automaton stopped.
'You should have listened to him, vampire, free the beast and we will all die – your Hellsing has been wise to keep him confined'.
Walter just grinned back at him, through broken teeth.
The clockwork man drew back his silver hand-knife.
There was a dull 'thunk' behind him, of something metal bouncing from the concrete floor, and Walter just kept on grinning. Right before he twisted, and, with every ounce of strength he could muster, one hand still clutched tightly to his bleeding throat, he dived through the window.
The automaton whirled, coat splaying out in a circle around him, to see Andrew Victoria hobbling away in the other direction.
Three small, black cylinders lay on the ground in front of him.
Grenades.
'дурачки!' it screamed after them, a high, mechanical whine.
An instant later the whole flimsy construct erupted outwards in a flash of white hot fire, retina searing light and scalding heat.
Andrew propped himself up against the side of the Land Rover, clutching the bullet hole in his shoulder. He had been lucky, he knew that. Very lucky.
That was twice in two nights.
Walter came staggering over to him, swaying violently from left to right, trailing a smattering of crimson behind him. He tried to speak, but gave up after only managing to produce a series of wet gurgles, and began waving frantically at the vehicle.
The two of them scrambled in, and Andrew gunned the engine, crashing through the wooden barrier, past the inferno that had formerly been the guard post, and onto the road beyond. Walter fumbled desperately under his jacket as they drove, and managed to draw out a half a dozen fist sized blood packets. Three had been burst in the fighting, but he savagely tore through the others with his teeth, draining them dry and then licking the plastic for any stray drops. He continued coughed wildly and drew his hand away from his throat, to reveal a very slowly closing gash.
He nodded his thanks at the other Hellsing agent.
'Yuh' Andrew grunted, his shoulder wound was not particularly serious, but it was painful.
'Incendiary grenades – not bad, eh?'
Walter nodded his assent again.
'Full of surprises, me'. He changed the subject abruptly. 'So that was Millennium then, like with the Gorilla and the Wolfman?'
'Yes' Walter lied, still weakly gurgling through blood in his throat. He knew that thing was nothing to do with Millennium. It was not their style, for a start. Too…mechanical. And then there was what it said, of course, and the man in his dream. Some other, third faction, he thought, working against him, against them. The Russian government, maybe. Did they have their own Millennium or Hellsing clone? He had no idea.
They were scared of the power Hellsing held, though, it was obvious.
Just another enemy.
Just another debt to be paid.
'You see how dangerous they are now?' he continued. 'Do you see why we need every weapon at our disposal?'
Andrew just nodded, pale and gaunt.
Hermann Schmeisser watched silently from a nearby copse of bracken as the Land Rover sped away.
That had certainly been an interesting encounter, he smiled to himself. Even from this distance; his sharp eyes had easily picked out the details of the confrontation. The Hellsing Butler was no slouch in a fight, he knew, but that thing had had him for certain when they disappeared into the little building.
It had been easy work, tracking them this far, perhaps they would be more cautious in the future. He had followed partisans before, in a hundred places; he knew how they thought, so it was straightforward. He had been one, once, after all.
When men had come to his Tyrol, with their eagles and their muskets.
But that had been a long time ago.
He was not entirely surprised a few moments later, when a figure jerked its way out of the rapidly cooling inferno, beating the odd lick of flame out on his coat and, apparently, his skin. He was charred and black, lumps of what appeared to flesh joining swathes of burnt cloth on the ground as he flexed his limbs, and then began moving away from the fire, for all the world apparently unconcerned.
Schmeisser reached for his short ranged radio, the Major would be eager for news, he was sure.