A Hunter's Journey

Chapter 2: People Of The World

The year is 12,090 A.D.

The human race dwells in a world of darkness.

Or perhaps it might be more accurate to call it a dark age made by science. All seven continents are crisscrossed by a web of super-speed highways, and at the center of the system sits a fully automated "cyber-city" known as the Capital, the product of cutting edge scientific technology. The dozen weather controllers manipulate the climate freely. The interstellar travel is no longer a far fetched dream. In vast spaceports, massive rockets and ships are propelled by galactic energy. Exploration parties have left footprints on a number of planets outside our solar system, Altair and Spica to name just two.

However, all of that is a dream now.

Take a peek at the Grand Capital. A fine dust coats the walls of buildings constructed from the translucent metal crystal; in places you'll find recent craters large and small from explosives and ultraheat rays. The majority of the automated roads and highways are in shambles, and not a single car remains to zip from place to place like a shooting star.

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(FLASHBACK) There are people, tremendous mobs of them. Flooding down the streets in endless numbers. Laughing, shouting, weeping, and paying their respects to the Capital. The melting pot of existence, with a vitality that borders on complete chaos. But their garb isn't you'd expect for the masters of a once proud metropolis. Men in shabby trousers and tunics like that of the distant Middle Ages. Women dress in dim shades and wear fabric rough to the touch completely devoid of color or life.

Through the milling crowd of men armed with longswords or bows and arrows come a gasoline powered car most likely taken from some museum. Trailing black smoke and popping with the firecrackers of backfires the vehicle carries along a group of laser toting lawmen.

A dreadful scream rises from one of the buildings and a woman staggers out. From her inhuman cry people instinctively know the cause of her terror, and call out for the sheriff and his men. Before long, they race to the scene, ask the wailing woman where the terror is located, and enter the building in question with faces paler than the bloodless witnesses watching them. They ride an independently powered elevator down five hundred stories.

In one of the subterranean passageways--all of which had supposedly been destroyed years ago--there's a concealed door, and beyond it a vast graveyard where the Hollow, soul craving creatures, sleep as in days long past.

The sheriff and his men soon go into action. Fortunately, it seems there are no curses or vicious beasts here, no defense system or electric cannons. The creatures were probably resigned to their fate. The lawmen hold whatever they could find, along with modern weapons like, Mercy blades, Laito, Murakumo. Their expressions are a pallid blend of fear and sinfulness. The mob of black silhouettes encircle every sleeping beats. There's a dull thud. A horrifying scream and the stench of blood fill the graveyard. The anguished cries grow thinner and the group move on.

When the lawmen leave the graveyard not long after that, their faces covered in beads of blood and a shade of sinfulness much deeper than the one they wore before this mission.

Though the Hollow's were nearly extinct, the feeling of pride brought on by the awe humanity held toward them had seeped into their very blood over the course of ten long millennia and would not be shaken so easily. Because they had indeed reigned supreme over the human race with the other dark creatures. And because the automated city--now populated by people who couldn't fathom its machinery or receive the tiniest fraction of the benefits it might provide--and everything else in the world that could be called civilization was something they had left behind. They--the Hollows