Maohden Vol. 1 Page 3

  “The Scorpion and the Adder, eh? If something’s afoot, the most likely target would be me.”

  “Nothing’s been confirmed.”

  “Well, if they’re the ones I’m up against, I won’t have to worry about RPGs and lasers and the like. Or the shop getting burned to the ground.”

  “And you shouldn’t have to worry about me either, right?”

  “Sorry, but starting tomorrow would be a good time to take a holiday.”

  “No way. We’re hardly breaking even this month as is.”

  “If you got kidnapped, there’d be no telling when the cavalry would arrive.”

  Mina stared at her orange juice. “I’ll camp out here, then. Permission to break out the heavy artillery?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Setsura sipped at his tea. Here in this peaceful little living room, the talk was all about mobsters and militias. “Anybody else?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but the Shiragi Syndicate and Sanbo Group are mobilizing. The Shiragis seem to be using their own underlings. The Sanbo Group has the word out to the freelancers. That much I have confirmed.”

  “Oh, good grief.”

  He reached into a nearby bowl of Shinagawa maki and popped two or three into his mouth. The movement of his hand was as refined as the senbei.

  The three gangs Mina had mentioned were generally considered the best of the two or three hundred headquartered in Shinjuku, hence his exasperated tone of voice.

  “After this, I’m going to have to start checking to see if the grandma at the newsstand is really her.”

  “Artificial skin really is getting that difficult to tell from the real thing,” Mina coolly and precisely pointed out. “Besides, in this city, just because a person is old doesn’t mean there’s anything normal about them. Watch your step.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Setsura said, staring up at the ceiling.

  Mina glanced toward the genkan. The allure of such a well-proportioned face could not be exaggerated, the kind that made women mull over the possibilities, and any man but a saint seriously consider becoming a switch-hitter.

  “A car?” Setsura asked.

  Mina nodded. Though how she knew that wasn’t immediately obvious. The sound outside was no louder than wind fluttering through the leaves of a tree.

  “Arriving at this time of day, they gotta be chemically enhanced or cyborgs.”

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other, if you’re who they’re after. I don’t see any simple solutions in store.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Setsura drained his teacup and grimaced. Too hot. But that countenance of his didn’t lose any of its cool.

  The four men were on edge. As seasoned pros, they had full confidence in their own abilities, and an inkling of what their foe had to offer as well. Though they hadn’t tangled with him before, they’d all heard the rumors. Even in this city, those rumors stretched credibility. And yet while pouring scorn upon them, these men couldn’t shake that sense of unease, the cold chill that ran down their backs whenever somebody mentioned his name.

  Still, dealing with him should be a piece of cake.

  Their weapons this evening told the tale. They carried recoil-less .44 auto Magnums. They had Uzi submachine guns loaded with 2.5 mm exploding rounds or 12 gauge Winchester auto shotguns slung at the hips of their Arctic combat suits. Two of them had hand grenades and incendiaries pinned to their flak jackets. The weapons were all lubricated with synthetic oil good to minus sixty degrees Celsius.

  More than enough firepower to eliminate most targets. And to literally clean up afterwards, the last man in the detail held a long, thin nozzle. The other end connected to a canister on his waist. The burning mixture of high pressure oxygen and nitromethane gas could shoot out six hundred feet at six thousand degrees, reducing anything in its path to cinders.

  Were-humans using shape-shifting drugs that turned them into bears or tigers couldn’t withstand such a blast.

  The eyes in the middle of their faces, covered by a mask and goggles, didn’t brim with the tenacity of the hunter, nor even that of a killer, but rather with an eerie mechanical vibe.

  But they hadn’t made it a dozen feet from the car when they began having second thoughts. The Arctic combat suits, including a thermal layer that would generate heat from any kind of pressure or movement, were guaranteed to hold up in the shade of the “Government Freezer.” But that didn’t extend to whatever was inside them.

  While all these measures kept the epidermis warm, the cold seeped into the marrow of their bones. Unluckily for them, none of them had actually experienced this environment before. And the bad luck didn’t end there. A dozen feet in front of the shop, a shadow floated down from the sky like a bird of death and alit on the ground.

  Confronted by both the unexpected appearance and beauty of the target they were after, these seasoned pros momentarily forgot why they were there and failed to pull the trigger.

  Lowering his arms as if to bat down the flare of his slicker, Setsura Aki turned to face the assassins. He said, as if greeting colleagues at a business convention, “You’re from the Shiragi Syndicate, I take it?”

  Their white breath clouded the air. Behind the goggles, their eyes wavered.

  “My secretary filled me in on the details, though it’s not exactly news to me. Tonomura’s got guts, I’ll give him that. I didn’t think he was this reckless, though.”

  Tonomura, the man who’d ordered the hit. His men stood there as if sincerely interested in everything Setsura had to say before opening fire.

  “That’d make you the best of his black ops squad, meaning you take your orders directly from him. So I’ll ask you—did somebody recently pay Tonomura a visit?”

  Setsura turned his eyes to the second man on his left, holding the Winchester shotgun. “How about you?”

  Like he was answering the plea of his prey on the verge of death, the man said in a gravelly voice, “I—don’t know—really—”

  “Next! And you?”

  The man on the far left sported a ghastly white face. “This morning—a guy arrived—the secretary told me—that’s all—I know—”

  Setsura nodded, apparently taking them at their word. “What sort of person was this guy?”

  Like a teacher quizzing his students. Or more like the students quizzing their teachers. And seemingly equally unaware of how the tables had turned, the murderers’ mouths again moved.

  “Twenty or so—pale—thin—a mole next to his mouth—”

  Setsura’s reaction was a flicker in the depths of those endless dark eyes. “Fifteen years,” he murmured. His voice sounded no less far away. “This game of hide and go seek has gone on way too long. There’s hardly enough time to tie up all the loose ends. We’re really going to have to shutter the business for a while.”

  He cast a glance at the men. They stood there like statues. “Disposing of you like this would hardly tax my wiles. I’ll give you a fair shot. I’m going to take the customary ten paces down this street. Ten paces. After that, feel free to fire away. Or not. Whether I turn around. Or not. You’ll be able to move soon enough.”

  With that, he turned his back to them and started walking. At the same time, the binding cords immobilizing them dissolved away. Mutual glances of disbelief gave way to white-hot anger coursing through their limbs to their trigger fingers.

  Setsura hadn’t gone five steps.

  But their fingers didn’t move. That something in the cold had seeped down to the bone and muscle. They’d spent too much time in the shade.

  They all closed their eyes. Not out of fear. They entered a state of autohypnosis, the mind separated from the body. No longer under the conscious control of the shooter, the finger pressed the trigger by sheer force.

  Despite a caliber of 2.5 mm, the high explosive and fuses meant the lead projectiles would penetrate the body before exploding, leaving a hole behind the size of a cat’s paw. The muscles, bones and organs shattered, the body bent ba
ck, a fusillade of buckshot came next.

  The inertia recoil auto shotgun spat out a stream of double-ought buckshot, nine pellets per shell, shredding the flesh like a torn rag. Any vestiges of humanity still left were soon devoured by the six thousand degrees of fire.

  And they all missed.

  The lines of fire split the air, scorched the asphalt, and lit up the empty sky. The target wasn’t even twenty feet away. Looking down at their hands, as if trying to ascertain the cause of the ineffectual assault, the black angel of death in front of them turned around.

  With that same comely countenance. But the face of another.

  “No. I said ten paces. You may execute your own penalties.”

  He raised his right hand. The five fingers spread out. Like a maestro conducting a string ensemble of death, the guns of his assailants again spat fire.

  At each other.

  Torsos cut in two by the exploding rounds, heads blown apart by the shotgun, and turned into flaming scarecrows—these were the assassins. The blood and flesh and smoke and flame danced along the cruel streets while Setsura Aki stared up at the sky, like a fresh-faced college student contemplating the mysteries of the universe.

  The “Government Freezer” knew as well that this young man was an exception to its rules. He alone couldn’t be frozen.

  Chapter Three

  The middle of the night.

  Not far from the Seibu Shinjuku Nakai Station, in front of the Sanbo Group building, the darkness congealed into the form of a handsome young man.

  Setsura Aki.

  His mist-shrouded countenance shone in the moonlight. Only what was inside was different.

  He’d been told the Sanbo Group had put out a hit on him. It wasn’t clear whether they were ones that wanted him erased, but considering what the Shiragi Syndicate had been up to that evening already, it was a safe bet.

  The building reached into the black like a dark castle. The first four floors of the seven-story building were devoted to a game center, a massage parlor, and other diversions. The fifth floor and up held the offices of the Sanbo Group.

  The building wasn’t just another ferroconcrete structure. It was earthquake reinforced and equipped with blast walls that would withstand a direct hit from the latest handheld “Dart” missiles, the preferred weapon of choice in the terror trade.

  A little over an inch in diameter and ten inches long—the size of an emergency flare—two or three could be hidden in a loose-fitting jacket. Equipped with the frequency agile radar option, they could evade electronic jamming and hit targets two miles away with precision.

  For the old-school yakuza who located their headquarters in well-established buildings and locations, they were a terrific nuisance. As a result, gangs either relocated outside Shinjuku or rotated their operations among several safe houses on a daily basis. Or went totally mobile via high-speed data uplinks.

  In any case, an office nailed down to a single location was definitely not the current fashion. Sanbo Group was one of the few remaining brick-and-mortar outfits.

  Meaning that the outside walls were three layers thick, laminated with armor plating that could repel an attack with a missile or RPG. The radar site on the roof would calculate the coordinates from where the attack originated, and respond with surface-to-air and air-to-ground missiles launched from vertical silos.

  Out of sight of pedestrian traffic, two installations of large-bore, triple-barrel, auto-targeting laser cannons would spit out invisible beams of searing light.

  But what wrapped the building in an ominous air was not its defensive weapons systems, but a demonic aura that arose out of the miasmas lurking between the very molecules in the air. Or it was the miasma itself.

  Which suggested as well that the earth had been cursed from its very creation. At three o’clock in the morning, those miasmas were all the denser and pervasive. This was the time when the human metabolism sank to its lowest ebb, when hopes yielded to despair, love to loathing, joy to sadness.

  The time when Setsura Aki arrived.

  He silently approached the lobby. The crunching from beneath his feet sounded like he was treading on frosty ground. With every step, sparkling stardust fell from the soles of his boots. The ground had turned to glass—the result of being heated to tens of thousands of degrees. Not a gradual process but in a single burst.

  Scars left behind by a burst of laser power. The blast walls showed similar physical changes. Paint covered the damage left behind by older assaults, evidence of an ongoing arms race between offense and defense.

  Paying it no mind, Setsura pushed open the glass doors and stepped into the genkan. The hardened steel shutters hadn’t been lowered.

  If a rival gang caught sight of this situation, the Sanbo Group would have been wiped off the face of the earth in two seconds flat.

  The lobby lights glowed brightly inside the lobby, as if welcoming him. The whole thing was beyond belief. Only two reasons sprang to mind: the guards that night abandoned the building, or they’d given up trying to defend it. Either way, they’d bear the blame the rest of their lives.

  Into the situation, at three o’clock in the morning, stepped Setsura Aki.

  The first floor game center was empty. The garishly-painted American-style pinball machines and video arcade cabinets plastered with posters sat there like haunted tombstones in a grotesque graveyard.

  Setsura crossed the room to the elevators at the back. The power was on. He pushed the up button. The doors opened, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He got on. A few seconds later, he arrived at the seventh floor.

  The hallway was filled with light.

  Setsura walked with muffled footsteps. Quieter than any rubber soles. Silence uninterrupted by even a breath or a heartbeat. It was like a brilliant watchmaker had poured moonlight into the veins of a doll, wound the spring of a heart made from glass and paper, and this young man had stepped forth.

  Turning the corners without hesitation, Setsura came to an ornate, ebony door. Though he’d only been there once before in his life, his memory proved precise. He grasped the brass doorknob.

  He wasn’t greeted by an electric pulse strong enough to fell an elephant, or a spurt of mustard gas. The door silently opened to the left and right, revealing the large director’s office.

  The lavish furnishings, the leather sofa and marble table, didn’t seem at all fitting to a yakuza’s headquarters.

  Next to the window on the left was a large oak desk. Behind the desk was his host. The face beneath the shock of well-groomed blond hair sported an unusually hearty complexion. The build of his body suggested a sixtyish corporate president who was into sports and kendo.

  However, his countenance and the vigor suffusing it—as if all the fat in his body had been boiled down and his face extruded from the lye—was hardly that of a company man.

  Kanji Mitakara. The director of the Sanbo Group, that ruled over the northwest quadrant of Shinjuku. Their territory comprised the once quiet suburban neighborhoods and school zones from the Seibu Shinjuku line to Mejiro Boulevard, followed the cross streets to New Mejiro Boulevard, and traveled the length of Yamate Street, running through Kamiochiai, Nakaochiai and Shimo’ochiai.

  This old man—it was said he could freeze a tiger in its tracks with a single look—stood at the head of an organization of five hundred “associates,” dealing in narcotics, prostitution and illegal weapons, and taking in seven billion yen a year.

  He’d earned his livelihood in the black market for almost half a century without suffering so much as a scratch, his good luck and wariness making him a legend in Shinjuku. And now he threw the doors wide open and cast all precautions aside to greet this young man—just who was this Setsura Aki?

  Setsura closed the door behind him and gave the old man a long look. “You look pretty drugged up to me.”

  Kanji Mitakara nodded. His face was flushed, his intoxicated eyes moist. His pale lips moved, like a pair of willow leafs. “Yeah, I’m scar
ed. Were you any other man in my line of business, hell, you could chew me up and spit me out and I’d die with a smile on my face.”

  Fear and fierceness filled his voice, and it wasn’t just the drugs. Setsura answered quietly, “And knowing that, you threw the first punch.”

  The voice emerged from the shadows drifting there in the darkness, devoid of human emotion, as if those crystal clear eyes existed only to take in all the melodrama of life and communicate only the cold hard facts to the cerebral cortex.

  “What about Shiragi and Kurusu?” Mitakara asked.

  “Skedaddled. But I know where.”

  A faint smile finally graced Mitakara’s mouth. “Skedaddled, eh? Since the day I met you, I haven’t thought about anything else. But them, they’re still young, they’ve still attachments to this world. I have to hope you’ll see them off one of these days.”

  “One of these days.”

  Mitakara flashed a broad, relieved smile. “Good to know. I’d really hate to take the trip by myself and leave them behind, no matter how much I may deserve it.”

  “So has Gento Roran returned?”

  “That he has. Where has he been these fifteen years? No matter who you ask, nobody knows. But one thing’s for certain—he wants your head on a platter. I told him the odds were against us pulling it off. He was going to have to settle things with you himself. And we wouldn’t meet again.”

  Mitakara suddenly stopped speaking. His eyes brimmed. His lips trembled. He seemed caught up in a rapturous state.

  “It is terrifying,” he said, the words leaking from the corners of his mouth all the weaker and euphoric. “Anybody who sees you fight regrets it, and now resents those who sleep soundly at night having not seen what they’ve seen. I at last wish to see for myself. What will become of this city?”

  Setsura stood there in front of the door. He didn’t answer. Or perhaps it was the darkness itself that held its tongue.

  “This city has belonged to the likes of you all along. Fifteen years and we’ve only just remembered. He’s a tough nut, tougher than his father, tougher than yours. Are you tougher than your father?”