Yashakiden: The Demon Princess Volume 4 Omnibus Edition Read online

  “Ah, how sweet. Please, rain down more fire, more death and destruction upon their heads. That’s the only way to make this country into a more agreeable place.”

  A turbine whine resembling the sound of a loud horsefly reached their ears as soldiers in military fatigues closed in on them. The three carried a tactical atomic cannon called the “Juggler.” They took up firing positions, but were held up by the sight of Prime Minister Kongodai.

  In that moment, Princess took off. Leaving her clothing behind. Naked. Her black hair streamed behind her like a comet’s tail. Her breasts swayed. Her thighs throbbed.

  The beauty of this leap was a unique kind of beauty in and of itself, that ruled over death and destruction. The instant her white hand touched the soldier setting up the Juggler, his head and helmet flew away like a helium balloon.

  Before the blood erupted from his now headless torso, she had kicked it away and with her hands and feet plucked the heads off the remaining soldiers and sliced and diced their bodies. There was an aesthetic in this dance of death that entranced them even as they died.

  Princess looked down at the Juggler still clasped in the soldier’s bloody hands and beckoned to Prime Minister Kongodai. The most powerful politician in the country walked over like a man sleepwalking.

  “Hold this,” she said.

  The prime minister cradled the weapon in his arms and staggered. She seized him by the scruff of his neck and drew him to the hillocks of her breasts. Her chest was smeared with blood, the blood that Takako had sucked.

  Their surroundings were on fire and fragrant with the smell of burning flesh. Blood and saliva drew a speckled pattern on her chest. The prime minster’s full lips pressed against her breasts. His tongue lapped at her nipples. His cheeks sucked in and out.

  Then a wet slurp as she pushed his face away. Not bothering to wipe his mouth, muddied with blood and gore, he stared enraptured at the Demon Princess.

  “From the manner in which those soldiers were deployed, this weapon should be loaded. Pull back that bolt.”

  The metal alloy and carbon fiber construction notwithstanding, the fully loaded 150 mm atomic cannon must have weighed a good sixty pounds. But the prime minister operated it with ease.

  “Release the safety. This lever, I suspect. Put it to your shoulder. That’s right. Aim it over there somewhere. Doesn’t matter where.”

  She pointed at the hole in the second floor left by the hovertank. Here was further evidence of her truly terrifying nature. The hole in fact led directly to the ammunition vault in the second sublevel basement.

  The prime minister nodded. The light from the blazing inferno flickered across his entranced face as the cannon round traced a lazy arc through the air. At that moment—

  The astonished Princess whirled around. The expression on her face broadcast the magnitude of the blunder she had made. Takako was where she had left her. Standing next to her was the Herculean outline of a man.

  “General Bey—so you’re still alive.”

  Part Two: Demon City Desolation

  Chapter One

  Toshie Sakamaki sobered up almost as soon as they left the bar. “Damn. What’s with that?” she said in a disgusted voice, patting her cheek.

  “Yeah,” Shigeo Tanaka agreed with a slight lisp. “The fucking alcohol they serve there—you end up just pissing it away.”

  Toshie grimaced. Tanaka gave her a wink, then looked back at the establishment they’d just visited. They couldn’t have taken more than five or six steps, but the neon lights were already a good twenty yards away. They’d probably had enough for the night, after all.

  “Hey, what do you want to do?” said Toshie, clinging to him.

  “Whatever you feel like. It’ll be tomorrow in another ten minutes. We could try a change of scenery. Or go home. I’m good either way.”

  “Doesn’t it feel kinda sad and lonely around here? Isn’t this Okubo Station?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Tanaka glanced nervously around them.

  For the past four or five days, the deserted ruins of the station seemed to stand out more than usual. Today, it was like a sore thumb. Okubo’s famous “drinking stands” were all closed. Only a handful of the more established pubs had their signs lit, even though the night was just getting warmed up.

  Tanaka recalled something the bartender said, and the memory made him shiver. Why remember that here and now?

  “I don’t really get it myself,” the bartender had mused. “But it’s like Okubo is dying. Reminds me of my mom. She was always the heart of the family, always bustling about. But the birds fled the nest one by one, and she needed something else to lean on more and more. And then one day she just laid down and died. Same goes for Okubo. Every day when the dawn comes there are more shut-ins, more stores that never open. These days, the place looks like home to the walking dead. Creeps me out. All those bowed backs and wan faces. They start to come into the bar and stop at the noren curtains. But one day they’ll keep on going. Just my intuition, but that’s the day I close up shop.”

  “Hey, let’s go home.”

  Toshie’s voice brought Tanaka back to the present. “Yeah, let’s. The night shift bus should be arriving soon. Where’s the bus stop?”

  “This way,” said Toshie, sounding a bit fed up with her wishy-washy lover. She pointed into the gloom and started off ahead of him.

  Tanaka masked his fretful thoughts with a self-deprecating grin. Times like this, all he could do was let things sort themselves out.

  Five minutes after they got to the bus stop, the headlights approached.

  “That’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “There’re usually a few more passengers waiting at this time of night.”

  “I suppose. Whatever. The bus is here.”

  The door opened as the hydraulic brakes were applied. The two climbed the steps one after the other. They flashed their passes but the driver was too tired to bother checking.

  Thanks to the dim lighting inside the bus, they hadn’t been able to tell from outside. But at least eighty percent of the seats were filled. They all had their heads bowed. Nobody looked at them. Tanaka felt a seriously bad vibe. And no wonder. This wasn’t the peaceful outside world. This was Demon City, where a single cockroach could eat a human being for dinner and no one would be surprised.

  The bus started moving again as soon as they got on. They found open seats near the back. A sense of calm returned. Thankfully, they would both be getting off at the number five stop, in front of the Okubo Institute for Chemical Research. No need for just one of them to sit at the back of this shitty ride cooling his heels alone.

  Literally. “It’s cold,” Toshie said a minute later.

  Tanaka had thought the same since getting on the bus. The air conditioner was on too hard. He felt goosebumps on his skin. Either the bus driver didn’t care or he ran hot all the time.

  “Just put up with it.”

  “Yeah.”

  However right the customer might be in cases like this, it was their job to “put up with it.” These buses alone improved the safety margin for the second shift and overtime workers by a good eighty percent. They charged extra outside the ward, but were good enough to run the bus on a fixed schedule. Putting up with a few minor inconveniences was worth it.

  A recorded woman’s voice announced the third stop. They’d passed the first two without noticing.

  “Nobody’s getting off,” Toshie observed.

  The passengers sat there, heads bowed, hardly moving at all. Tanaka could hear his heart beating in his ears.

  Two more stops. In any case, they should be able to trust the driver. When Tanaka looked back at Toshie, she was gazing out the window. And seemed to be shaking a bit.

  He tapped her on the shoulder. “The next one after this.”

  “Why aren’t any of them getting off?” she asked, her voice fraught with fear and anxiety.

  “Because it’s not their stop.”

/>   “A lot of people are always getting off. You know that.”

  “Tonight must be special.”

  The woman’s voice announced the fourth stop. Tanaka looked up at the stop button. It wasn’t lit.

  “This is weird.”

  “We get off at the next stop, so don’t worry about it.”

  “Nobody can get off! We’re stuck here forever!”

  She was crying by now. For fuck’s sake! The woman was almost twenty-one and she was carrying on like a little kid.

  “Next stop, Okubo Institute for Chemical Research.”

  As if struck by the voice—Tanaka couldn’t help but imagine the speaker’s haughty face in front of the microphone—he hit the button. The purple light flickered inside the plastic housing. The bus began to slow.

  “We’re getting off,” Tanaka said with a forced sense of calm.

  Toshie nodded. The familiar landmarks approached. The bus stopped. The two came hastily to their feet. And then stopped in their tracks. The aisle was blocked. All of the other passengers stood up too, their heads slumped to their chests like deflated balloons.

  “No—no—no—” Toshie grabbed his arm, her hands like pincers.

  Tanaka didn’t feel the pain. “They’re all getting off,” he said.

  With the sound of compressed air venting, the door opened and one by one the passengers descended the stairs.

  “Hey, let’s stay on.” Toshie shook his arm. “Let’s stay on.”

  “But—” Tanaka said reluctantly. He felt the pressure on his back, the passengers walking forward. “Okay. We’ll stay here.”

  Somebody grabbed his left arm. Tightly. He felt the cold chill through his clothing. “What the hell—?” was all that came out of his mouth before he was dragged down the aisle. “What’s going on? Who the fuck are you guys?”

  He twisted his body, only to have his right hand pinned as well by the guy in the seat in front. And hard enough to make him completely lose his voice. With Toshie struggling and complaining behind him, he was dragged as far as the door.

  The driver sat there on his black vinyl seat, staring blankly ahead. “Help—” Tanaka tried to say, but his tongue wouldn’t move. The two of them descended the stairs to the ground. The bus took off. The passengers didn’t stand there. They silently trudged along the road.

  Ordinary residences surrounded the Institute grounds, but no group of commuters or day laborers had ever trooped home so weirdly as this. There were no cars or other pedestrians on the street.

  The sense of impending threat faded behind him. Toshie had apparently given into the inevitable as well. Tanaka felt himself being drawn toward a certain fate. The white wall of the Institute came up on his right as they proceeded south. The wall transitioned to a chain-link fence.

  This was the off-grid generator facility for the Institute, rows of transformers and power converters beneath the low-hanging loops of high tension lines. They stopped behind the building housing the generators. One of them grabbed the chain-link fence and shook it. A six-foot section came loose. This must be the place they were aiming for.

  They all trooped in. The fence was put back in place. Tanaka and Toshie continued around the building with the others.

  Lights were on in the building. Somebody must be in there. Somebody not like the weirdoes on the bus. Somebody with red blood flowing through his veins, a cup of hot coffee in his hands, chatting about the weather and talking about the good old times.

  Behind the building was a thirty-foot circular divot in the ground roughly in the shape of a grinding stone.

  It probably hadn’t been attended to since the Devil Quake. On one side, the weeds had grown into a wild and unkempt mass. There might be more medicinal species of weeds growing there too. But it was the kind of place that the more lethal insects and monsters liked to inhabit.

  The building’s foundation rose a good ten feet above ground level. A fifteen-foot-long fissure snaked out from where it touched the rim of the “grinding stone.” The rooms underground would have caved in, now useless as research facilities. At some point, the monsters had likely made their nests there.

  Several people plunged into the crevice ahead of them. Then the two were forced inside also. A six-foot slope of earth and concrete slanted down to the floor, preventing a vertical drop. Tanaka was a little surprised they’d even bothered with such amenities.

  Standing in the basement, at first the pitch black was completely opaque. The man next to him didn’t let go, but stood there rooted to the spot with the rest of them.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, Tanaka perceived that they were in a fairly large room. A laboratory or a parking garage. There weren’t any cars. Or tables or chairs. There was something else—here and there flickered small lights like candles. Tanaka strained his eyes to make out what they were.

  Steel lockers lying here and there in the wide open space. Bumps in the floor due to piles of dirt and sand. Beside the lockers, he could make out chests of drawers, private Buddhist altars, all lying on their sides.

  Tanaka grasped the true nature of the room’s inhabitants. Fleeing sunlight, sleeping inside boxes under the earth. No, not boxes—caskets.

  “You—all of you—on the bus—”

  “Hunting,” one of them said, not one of the passengers.

  Holes in the walls led to adjoining rooms and hallways. The silhouettes of others came through them. Men, women, old and young and children. Salarymen and office ladies. A cook still wearing his apron. A barber in a white smock and with scissors in his hand. A musician with a guitar strapped to his back. A cop.

  Pale as ghosts, fangs gleaming in the corners of their mouths.

  “I’m sorry for this,” said an old man in a yukata. “But we simply must invite you to join our little club. It does get cramped in here, you know? But we do need to eat.”

  A shove from behind. Toshie screamed. The blood-red points of light advanced on them from all directions. As the strong fingers dug into their throats, Tanaka knew it was the glow of hunger radiating from their eyes.

  Chapter Two

  “Well, this is a bit of a pickle,” Setsura said, stroking his jaw. “If ordinary weapons won’t work, we’re pretty much screwed. Unless we can use them against each other like before.”

  That would be well-nigh impossible in this case.

  The bull stamped on the ground and charged Setsura. Just as Setsura realized the soldier had vanished from his line of sight. The bull’s body suddenly crouched down on its forelegs. From its hindquarters came the glimmer of armor and the light reflecting off it, soaring past its head.

  Timing his run with the bull’s sudden stop and attacking from above as his opponent fanned at empty air. Going high and going low simultaneously, leaving him at a loss as to how to respond, splitting his head down to his waist.

  Except that, beneath the sweep of the sword—powerful enough to cleave a large boulder in two—Setsura was also gone.

  He’d leapt ten feet back. The collar of his slicker, though, showed a fresh scar. More than a split-second decision, he had readied himself to retreat from the charging bull from the very start. Even so, he’d made it only by the skin of his teeth. These were formidable opponents.

  The joints of the armor sang out as the soldier stepped forward with his left foot, the sword raised high over his right shoulder. His entire frame was wrapped in glittering strands of light as thousands of the thread-like wires cocooned him.

  The swordsman stirred.

  “This gonna work?” Setsura muttered to himself.

  The stirring turned to a tremor. The swordsman stretched out his arms. The shimmering twine shattered into grains of silver and scattered in all directions.

  Setsura sighed. “Would you look at that.” He hadn’t harbored high hopes for the strategy. This business of appearing to take things less seriously than they deserved was an affectation more associated with young irresponsible scions of large fortunes.

  Witho
ut a sign of being stalled in the least, the swordsman marched forward. The steps were a bit clunky, but he had the control of a maestro down to the tips of his fingers. This was a fearsome martial talent on display.

  The bull sidled up to him, a mass of killer instinct.

  “Hey,” Setsura called over his shoulder to Pretend Takako. “That was sure a troublesome bit of graffiti.”

  “Yes, it was,” Pretend Takako answered in a frightened voice.

  Setsura could only count his blessings that they had what little room they had to maneuver in. Pretend Takako added urgently, “Setsura-san, the hallway is coming to an end!”

  “Eh?” Setsura glanced around. Another ten feet behind Pretend Takako was a soaring wall. “So the infinite just became the finite. How stingy.”

  Pretend Takako didn’t answer this time. The situation was too pressing.

  “Get on my back.”

  “What?”

  “Hurry.”

  Pretend Takako climbed onto his back. He turned to face his attackers. The swordsman stopped a dozen feet from them.

  As comical as it might appear, this was no laughing matter. These beings—born out of mere scribbles—existed only to kill anyone who visited this hallway.

  “You scared?” Setsura asked.

  “Um—no.”

  “Well, I’m ready to piss my pants. This chap is quite the handful.”

  “It’ll be okay,” said Pretend Takako, her voice constricted to almost a squeak.

  “You sure?”

  “As long as I’m with you, I won’t be afraid.”

  “I appreciate it,” said Setsura, and charged.

  His chances weren’t good by himself, to say nothing of having another along for the ride. The long sword whistled through the air, as if to separate the one from the other. But then the soldier’s onrushing target suddenly disappeared from before his eyes.

  They had soared upwards before the information could travel from his eyes to his brain.

  Setsura looped the devil wire around a beam in the ceiling. The big bull was the one who caught on first and reacted to the Tarzan and Jane act. With a watery snort, it whirled around and stomped against the floor, intending to run them through as soon as they landed.