Iriya the Berserker by Hideyuki Kikuchi

ruined factory. It was Iriya they were after.
    Still on horseback, he passed through the entranceway. Death filled the sprawling institution. Enormous blast furnaces and conveyor belts for carrying ore had long since stopped operating, and Death, in the guise of Time, had nestled the whole place under its black wings. D searched for a sign of life. Less than two seconds later, he found it.
    Beneath a skylight in the great ceiling hung a room that seemed to serve as some kind of surveillance center, and before it stood figures in green fatigues. There were two of them. And between them were Iriya and Meeker!
    “We’ve got ’em both!” the figure on the right called out. “The name’s Gathlin Rhoda, bounty hunter. And this here’s my partner Rin Shikou—‘Woody Deathspark’ to his friends.”
    He pointed to the man on the opposite side of the hostages.
    “To be perfectly frank, we’ve got no beef with you, but if we grabbed the girl, you were sure to follow. So, that being the case, we decided to take you out quick. Now be a good boy and die for us!”
    “I’m sorry, D,” Iriya apologized in a dejected tone. “As soon as you left, they showed up with Meeker. They grabbed him from the teacher’s place on the way here.”
    “We’d been waiting in town since yesterday. So we borrowed ourselves a spybird and kept an eye on you with a high-def camera from an altitude of about thirty thousand feet. We saw you call at the teacher’s house and had a real good idea what you were jawing about. Hell, I knew using the brat probably wouldn’t stop you, but it’d work on the girl. And I reckoned the girl would work on you.”
    Drawing a dagger from his belt, Gathlin put it to Iriya’s throat.
    “I’m right, ain’t I? If you value their lives, throw down your sword.”
    D was gazing at Iriya.
    The body of the man so sure of his victory jolted faintly. Gathlin looked down at the left side of his chest and the stark needle protruding from it. From the spot on the ground where D stood to his own position was a distance of roughly two hundred yards as the crow flies. The seasoned bounty hunter hadn’t sensed anything as he was run right through the heart—a testament to the skill of the young man known as D.
    Still, the man that Gathlin had called Rin was a veteran bounty hunter, too. He’d been pinning Meeker with one hand, but now he drew the boy nearer, wrapping his arm around Meeker’s neck as he should’ve done from the very start. Or maybe he should have put a knife to his hostage the way his partner had.
    Before the boy’s little face turned purple from the constricted flow of blood, Iriya’s form sailed into the air above the pair. When she landed without a sound, the bounty hunter’s body collapsed at her feet. The dagger buried in the top of his head was one Iriya had taken from Gathlin.
    As Iriya raced over, Meeker leapt into her open arms.
    “You’re okay, aren’t you?”
    Meeker nodded.
    At the time of the ceremony at the school, the boy had suddenly grown sleepy in one of the rooms at Lazlo’s house. When he woke up, he was being held prisoner in the factory.
    “Let’s go.”
    Taking Meeker by the hand, Iriya was just about to walk away when a murderous intent of the fiercest kind prickled the back of her neck. Pushing Meeker down and leaping off to the right, Iriya executed a flip before straightening up, at which point the ash-gray figure that’d sailed over her head was standing right in front of her.
    “It can’t be . . .”
    Iriya was gripped by a shock akin to terror.
    Still expressionless, Rin Shikou seized the dagger stuck in his head and pulled it free. As if a switch had been thrown, his head sank down into his torso, while at the same time a lump of approximately the same shape jutted from between his thighs. It was the face that’d just vanished. No, not just the face but the entire head, now free from injury.
    “This is the real me,” he said. “What you stabbed was just a