Bizarre Adventures - Stories for the Strange

No Quarter - Phantom Blood

She was a stranger in a very strange land.

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The bright sun shone down on the British countryside. It had been miserable the past few days, being cold and snowy. It was so different from the Italian summers she was used to, and the eternally dry and cold Himalayas she had trained in. It was wet, and lingering. It seeped into your bones and stayed with you for days. The sun felt so good. It was nice to not be freezing constantly.

She had been sent here on an important mission. She was searching for recent vampire activity. Vampires tended to be chaotic forces that only did harm to the people around them. They gravitated toward the helpless and the morally bankrupt. That was why Hamon users like herself were often tasked with hunting them down and ending their miserable existence. That was why she was here. She was a stranger in a very strange land.

Something had happened out here. Something strange. An incident happened over a week ago at the Joestar manor. The Lord, George Joestar had fallen ill recently. In desperation to save his father, Jonathan Joestar left for London to find a cure. After three days, he returned. There was a confrontation at the manor with his brother Dio Brando. Everything fell apart then, leaving most people involved dead. The manor itself had caught fire, half of the structure laying in crumbled ruins. The other half, nothing but a broken shell.

She stood before the manor, in front of where the front door once stood. If her intuition was right, there had been some vampiric happenings here. She just had to find it. She wrapped her dark cloak around her and stepped into the mounds of ash, of broken glass, clumps of half-melted metal ornaments, charred furniture, fallen beams, and caved in walls. So much rubble, so much lost in just one night.

She had been sent here a few months ago. Tonpetty, her master, had seen premonitions of a great vampiric evil rising and taking hold here in Britain. If it was not put to an end, great calamity may befall the world. She was his scout, getting a lay of the land before Tonpetty, along with Dire and Straizo followed behind to deal with the threat. Somehow, the birth of one vampire would need to be dealt with by three of the strongest Hamon users in the world.

She flipped a large stone over. She wondered why Tonpetty had sent her to do this. While she didn't consider herself weak or unskilled by any means. She mostly felt she was inexperienced. She hadn't traveled and explored like most of the other Hamon users she had trained under, or the many others she had heard stories about. Off all the people who had vowed to serve under Tonpetty, why had he chosen her? There were hundreds of Hamon users and monks that could carry this mission, probably better and faster than her.

Something caught her eye. Through a scorched doorway, sitting in a beam of sunlight, there was a large hole in the rubble. It was too deep to have been dug by thieves, or by past inhabitants looking for prized possessions. She walked through the door frame and knelt beside the gash. It was the size of a large man, several inches deep. From the claw marks in the ash, it looked like there were at least two people here. One person who dug down to get to something. And one person... Who dug himself out of the hole. She couldn't be reading that right. Could someone have been buried alive? Was it the vampire she was after? If there was some sort of struggle with a vampire the night the manor burned down, he was still alive and had at least one zombie helping him. If her guess was correct.

The question is, where would they go next? There was a lot of chaos in London at the moment. It would be an ideal spot, with a lot of potential victims and places to wait out the day. But that might be too obvious. England had a lot of small villages to lay low in, away from the newspapers and prying eyes. Depending on what he is planning on, it might be more advantageous to begin her search in the countryside.