Maohden Vol. 2 Read online

  A lot of the newbies—both the recruiters and the recruits—prattled on about non-disclosure agreements, but the Coliseum officials preferred to stick with their memory erasing technology.

  The employers waxed cautious about buying a pig in a poke. But sneak previews and test drives were out of the question.

  However mistaken it might be to state that “Nobody knows shit,” that probably was closer to the actual truth. In the end, the assassins were just another set of pawns being played on the chessboard of this city. Considering the odds of making it through another day, a man in this town might as well make his own luck.

  So their attention was drawn instead to the south end of the arena, where the “prize” lay on its makeshift altar, arms and legs bound, writhing in mortification, her body fully exposed for all to see.

  The fifteen finalists remaining after thirty bouts would draw straws. But a human being had never before been the bounty that awaited them. Any number of physically alluring women could be procured in this city. The organizers who’d designated this prize had something particularly grave and dangerous in mind.

  The eyes of the spectators turned toward the naked girl filled with dark thoughts. What exactly—who—and what—was she?

  A polite knock. The doctor flung the tabloid weekly he’d been reading into a corner of the room. “Ah, come in,” he said with forced formality. And then winced. He still hadn’t gotten used to the creaking hinges.

  But seeing the handsome young man, he set that annoyance aside. “My, my,” he murmured to himself.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” the young man said. “My name is Gento Roran. I was wondering if I could ask a favor of you.”

  The doctor wordlessly indicated a folding chair sitting a short ways off.

  “No, here is fine.”

  Gento leaned back against the wall. He scanned the room with cold eyes befitting the cool beauty of his face. Even without observing the gurneys, operating tables, and the automated therapy beds lining the back wall, this was clearly the infirmary.

  Some of the tools and instruments were the latest designs and models, while the medicine cabinets and the desk and digital office assistant were at least a decade old. The low ceilings and floor and walls were bare concrete. There were no refrigeration units.

  All the more telling were the black blotches staining the floor, most likely bloodstains, radiating a palpable aura of constrained malice and accursed loathing. Perhaps that was what kept the air unusually cool.

  Gento pointed at a body lying on one of the operating tables. “He dead?”

  This was One, the loser of the first match. The doctor shook his head. “Not dead yet.”

  “As I should have expected,” Gento said with a thin smile.

  The losers were brought here to be resuscitated, in most cases pretty much brought back from the dead.

  “What was it you wished to ask of me?” the doctor said, casting a sidelong glance at the tabloid in the corner.

  Gento nodded. “I would like to employ your services for a short while.”

  “Well. I don’t come cheap.”

  “I didn’t expect that you would. But for the time being, you will have to settle for a reward other than money.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You would behold the fate of the world.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I wish to reveal unto you the mysteries of the universe.”

  “That sounds a bit too heavy for my tastes. I think you should be looking for Doctor Frankenstein.”

  “He did nothing more than raise the dead,” Gento sniffed. “Make my wishes come true and you will see the dead spring spontaneously back to life.”

  “Sorry, but the only thing I can operate with is a scalpel.”

  “It’s enough. I wish you only to examine a single girl.”

  “Where is this girl?”

  “I will retrieve her from all that foolish commotion going on above. For reasons that will soon become apparent, this room will not do. You will accompany me to my abode. Everything you need will be waiting for you there.”

  “Interesting. But first—”

  A stampede of footsteps erupted outside the door. The door banged open. Two corpsmen carried a bloody man in on a stretcher.

  “He’s all yours.” The man wearing a baseball cap touched the brim of his visor.

  “Round three, eh? Condition?”

  “Some sleeping bug injected into his gut. After that, got busted in the head.”

  “Understood.”

  After moving the body on the stretcher to the operating table, the corpsmen bowed and left. Noting that they hadn’t cast a single glance at Gento or apparently even felt his presence, the doctor said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Seems as if they can’t see you.”

  He proceeded to the operating table. The patient they’d brought in was in his early forties. He was wearing a gray crew neck T-shirt. The top of his head was caved in. Gray matter oozed from the cracks in his skull. The kind of injury that anywhere else would receive a fatal diagnosis on the spot.

  But he was still clinging to life. His torso—the whole upper half of his body—pulsed up and down. Gento’s face reflected in the blade of the sonic scalpel in the doctor’s right hand as he addressed the patient.

  “In these games, if you lose you’re dead. But before picking up any of your appearance money, you’ll likely be spending that much on the aftercare.”

  With no warning about covering his eyes or the like, the doctor sliced him open from his throat down to his waist. The flesh practically flew apart. The innards popped out, like they’d been dying to get out.

  In the white light, a squirming worm-like creature—less a snake than a stringy sludge worm—no eyes or nose, and a red pinprick of a creepily constricted mouth that curved inwards. Twisted and folded and wounded around itself, writhing in the viscous organic fluids, with no evident awareness of the body itself—it was enough to make the most jaded medical student retch.

  The man’s innards had been thoroughly laid to waste by this creature.

  “The brain’s a goner, but the rest may come in handy,” said the doctor, cauterizing the wormy bug spilling out of the man’s innards and onto the operating table. The kind of remark that might be expected from a “doctor” who was probably the real thing, though he certainly didn’t act like it.

  He took a flask from the medicine cabinet, removed the stopper, and tipped it upside down. A few drops of the tea-colored liquid fell into the undulating abdominal cavity. An acrid vapor of the same color arose. Gento furrowed his brows.

  The doctor waved his hand in front of his face and nodded as he calmly observed the discolored, twisted, festering bug.

  “What is the prognosis?” Gento asked.

  “The abdomen is a total loss. The lower extremities are worth saving. The hands and head weren’t eaten by the creature. The deal is, die in there and it’s first come, first served.”

  “Wouldn’t that encourage the grave robbers to rush the dying along?”

  “That enters into the equation. Five people need to sign off on it first.”

  “This is a frightening city,” Gento said with a wry smile.

  The doctor swept the scorched remains into a dustbin and picked up a laser cutter.

  “Incidentally, I happen to have on hand a man with skills resembling yours.”

  “You don’t say,” the doctor said, as the man’s head dropped off with a dull thud.

  “His specialty is sewing corpses back together again, a kind of mix and match operation, and breathing a facsimile of life into the results. This being a facsimile means it overflows with many times the strength of a normal human.”

  “Remarkable.”

  The doctor’s right hand flashed again. The pale arm separated at the shoulder and rolled onto the table. But why was Gento telling all this to a doctor he had never met before?

  “I’m sure he would be delighted to arm himself with talents
like yours. What do you say?”

  He spoke with a smile in his voice. If the doctor had turned around, he would have seen no smile on his face.

  A clatter of footsteps outside the door again interrupted the conversation. A pair of corpsmen rushed in bearing another “athlete” on a stretcher. The skin of this one had the rough, hard texture of a rhinoceros. It had obviously done little to dissuade his opponent.

  Rivulets of water streamed off his hair onto the stretcher and the operating table.

  “Did he drown?” Gento asked.

  The corpsmen turned and noticed him for the first time.

  “Who’s this guy?”

  “And what the hell is he doing here?”

  The surprise and outrage were hardly unreasonable. What went on behind the scenes at the Coliseum were tightly held secrets, not to mention that viewing a body and the way the man died could easily reveal the techniques of his opponent.

  The employees here were kept under lock and key, and the corpsmen had their memories erased after the competition. Even the competitors weren’t allowed out of the locker rooms. The guards had orders to shoot on sight anybody who left before their allotted time.

  Somebody with unlimited access to the infirmary, able to witness the losers who ended up there, could upset the delicate balance maintained in the black markets throughout this city.

  Not waiting for an answer, the corpsmen were already reaching for the large-caliber machine pistols on their hips. A pair of clicks rang out as their thumbs toggled the safeties—

  “Stop it,” the doctor said in an unexcited voice.

  A brief moment of hesitation, then the guns cleared the holsters. The next sound was a crisp ping, as if the air itself had turned to ice and snapped cleanly in two.

  The barrels of the two guns drew a bead on Gento’s midsection. Aiming for center mass was always the best option. Even at this range, the head was a tricky target. Without a direct hit on the heart, the odds of retaliation were high.

  The abdomen didn’t usually guarantee a quick death, but was always good for a TKO. Except their fingers couldn’t pull the triggers.

  A slanting line ran through the blue steel of the machine pistols. When it reached the grip and the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, it turned crimson. A moment later, the line reached the wrist and everything above it, hand included, slid off.

  Thumping to the floor at their feet, the fingers eerily continued to twitch, to no effect. The two corpsmen stared dumbly at their missing hands, only screaming when the blood started to spurt.

  A similar line wrapped around their necks, and their heads soon followed their hands. As if unaware of what had happened, they gazed up at their still-erect bodies. But the eyes soon dimmed, the lids fell.

  “What say you?” said Gento, looking at the headless men standing there.

  The doctor didn’t answer. Didn’t even seem to hear him. His attention at the moment was focused on the headless corpsmen, all three of them rooted in place like a trio of posts.

  “Think of them as a present, a retainer fee so to speak, to work in my exclusive employ. I’m sure you are adept at disposing of unidentifiable bodies.”

  “You are a persistent bugger. I accept. But you’ve got to be imagining things if you think there is any sort of employer/employee relationship going on here.”

  “Whatever. Once it gets out that these two are missing, there’s bound to be an uproar.”

  With that, Gento Roran opened the door and silently disappeared from view, leaving behind the doctor and the thick smell of fresh blood.

  “Hire me?” The question at last rose to his lips. “I cannot imagine what for. It should be interesting finding out. But he’s right. All hell is going to break loose.”

  Chapter 3

  A curtain of trees surrounded the circular Coliseum.

  Without disturbing a leaf, a dark form slipped through the branches and set down on the stone paving in front of the Coliseum. The young man in black stood there in the oppressive heat of the night. The countenance rising from the slicker was as pretty as the pale moon above, enough to send a shiver down the spine.

  Though when his leather boots set foot on the ground without a sound, it became clear that this was not simply another pretty boy.

  Setsura Aki.

  Eyes filled with no more emotion than the lens of a camera turned toward the Coliseum. “Hope I’m not late,” he said.

  A pair of iron rails at his feet emerged from the darkness and disappeared into the gloom.

  With the southern terminus at Shinjuku and the northern end at Takada no Baba, this line was well-known to the old-timers as the JNR Yamate. In better times, it once carried four million commuters during the morning and evening rush hours. The Coliseum sat on the grounds of the former Shin-Okubo Station.

  This area, more than most, had fallen victim to the Devil Quake. Peering into the darkness past the glow of the hastily rebuilt street lights, the remains of the wrecked houses and buildings could still be seen in abundance.

  The flourishing marketplace in the nearby Okubo Station ruins was comparable to the Hanazono Shrine discount bazaar, though even in the full light of day, the aura of destruction hovered over it like a dark cloud. There was said to be no lack of thugs and wise guys among the residents as well.

  Setsura approached the front gate. The shutters were lowered across the broad entranceway. Nobody came out, nobody went in—that was the law of the Death Match.

  On the other side of the louvered steel shutters, three security officers approached Setsura holding Benelli automatic shotguns against their hips. Their eyes glowed blue in the dim light. Artificial eyes. The upper halves of their bodies were cybernetic.

  “What do you want?” said the one in the middle.

  “Police,” Setsura said, speaking as the young owner of a senbei shop.

  “Yeah, right.”

  Fingers tightened on triggers. The muzzles of the guns pointed at Setsura’s chest. The magazine of each weapon contained five ten-gauge shells loaded with number four buckshot. If all three of them let loose, there was no imagining what a rain of 250 pellets in total could do to a human body at point-blank range.

  “No kidding,” Setsura drawled. “And I happen to know something you might find interesting. Turns out we’ve got one of our men in there. Think you could find him for me?”

  “What?” shouted the man on the right, his face red with anger.

  One of the unspoken rules of the Coliseum was no formal involvement by the cops. There were plenty of former officers among the contestants, and a few on active duty as well. But start investigating that and a city-wide war was bound to break out with every gang that made its home here.

  Which was not to say that the police wouldn’t be happy to round up and eradicate all the killers in one fell swoop. They’d been known to send in undercover cops—who were never heard from again.

  Even so, Setsura’s pronouncement was enough to arouse in the organizers all those old fears.

  “Who the hell are you?” The middle man said, “Call it in.”

  The man took a few steps back to an intercom attached to the wall. The speaker buzzed first. He picked up the handset. “What? An intruder?”

  The other two took their eyes off Setsura. “Shit, he wasn’t kidding. You, stay right where you are.”

  The older of the two motioned with his hand. Setsura watched amazed as the steel shutters quietly began to lift up.

  A voice squawked from the intercom. “Two corpsmen just went missing. It’s on us if we don’t get ’em back.”

  “So can I come in?” Setsura asked.

  “Yeah, and hurry it up!”

  He put down the handset, circled around behind Setsura, and jabbed the gun in his back. The muzzle wavered in empty air.

  Setsura should have been there, but at the last second his body seemed to shift of its own accord. The guard stumbled into the space next to him. He glared at Setsura. Perhaps unwilling to b
elieve that this absentminded pretty boy had busted a move like that, he did nothing more.

  “Come on,” he said, jerking the muzzle of the gun.

  “If you don’t mind, there’s something I’d like to ask you,” Setsura said, raising his hands like he was being held up. “You the only ones guarding the front entrance?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I see.” Setsura nodded. He said in a strangely loud voice, “I’m not here. Go on with your business as usual.”

  The intercom buzzed. One of the security guards answered it. The man behind Setsura heard him say, “Everything here is fine. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Hey, hold on a sec—” He started to turn around, but thought better of the inclination and continued toward the stairs, the Benelli pressed against the small of Setsura’s back.

  The two other guards lowered the shutters. They turned their watchful gaze to the world outside the Coliseum, as if nothing had changed before or after Setsura had arrived. Just like he said, any knowledge of Setsura’s existence had been erased from their thoughts.

  On the field of combat, the competition continued without a hitch. But the corridors beneath the stands were seething with an altogether different fervor. Two of the corpsmen responsible for carrying the defeated to the infirmary were nowhere to be found, vanished without a trace.

  When asked, the doctor only scratched his head in bewilderment. Having no cause to doubt his word, they didn’t question him further. Instead, they directed their attention to the supposed intruder responsible and launched a search.

  A patrol in the first basement level observed somebody sauntering down the hallway. They aimed their shotguns and ordered him to halt.

  “Hey, it’s me.” Holding up his hands was the clearly-annoyed guard who’d been escorting Setsura.

  “What are you up to down here?” said the patrol leader, while scanning the guard’s body with his aura detection electronic eye. Disguises using 3D holograms and artificial skin were becoming all the more complex and refined by the day, now impossible to discern with the naked eye.

  However, unnatural electronic and chemical alterations still showed up as disturbances in a person’s natural aura. As of yet, nobody could escape these detection devices.