Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition Page 4

  This was a small Demon Realm within the human world.

  “I know the strengths of your powers,” scolded the Sorcerer. He was seated at the desk, wearing a black hood and mantle. Thirty-seven years before, when he was twenty-five, he had been Master Rai’s pupil. That made him sixty-two. The thin face inside the shroud looked ten years older, except that his eyes possessed a haunting glow, and the aura cast off by his body lent him an oily demeanor.

  He held up his palm for Kaki to see. Gray smoke rose from the scorched flesh, where he’d blocked Kaki’s arm of flame. Otherwise, the fire would have engulfed his body and burned him down to the marrow of his bones. Despite calling them forth as their master, these creatures of the Demon Realm must be treated with all due discretion, though there wasn’t the slightest indication of pain on the sorcerer’s face.

  “But the enemy we face next is far stronger. My prophetic dreams are stained black and blue. Hopefully not with your blood.”

  “And the name of this enemy?” another presence asked.

  “Is that Suiki?”

  “Doki is here also.”

  The voice came from the silver goblet sitting near the sorcerer’s hand, that still held a few drops of wine.

  “Show yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  The upper half of a human body rose out of the goblet. It wore a hood and medieval priestly garb the same color as the sorcerer’s. Its entire body—at least the upper half that appeared out of the goblet—dripped with water. This sprite had water at its command. Shadowed by the hood, its features were impossible to make out, except for the lively red gleam of its eyes. A mist filled the room as the auras of Kaki and Suiki collided.

  “Whoa!”

  Even knowing this was a regular occurrence, Suiki’s unexpected appearance caused the Sorcerer to push back his chair, and then look down at his feet. Something resembling a man’s head and shoulders pushed out of the tiled floor. Resembled because its face lacked eyes or a nose, the fingers seemed to adhere to its hands more out of obligation than biology, and its skin was the reddish-brown color and grain of the soil far below.

  Whether concrete or stone, nothing that touched the ground could hold him back, for this was Doki, the devilish earth sprite.

  The enemies of the earth were gathered here amidst the haze and devilish miasma.

  “And the name?” asked Doki.

  “I do not know the name or the appearance. But I can make an educated guess. After I caught the vision of the Demon Realm and cast aside my sacred training, I heard that the man I had studied with also descended the mountain and perfected a martial art called nenpo. Based on his disposition, I would say that he did so in order to challenge me. He did not pursue me at the time, so I set such concerns aside. His name is Genichiro Izayoi.”

  The murderous discord of the three sprites whirled around the room.

  “So what became of him?”

  “I do not know. Thirty years have passed. He would be an old man by now. Perhaps a son or disciple? Either way, the foe I see in my dreams has frightening skills at his command. Your own powers may not be enough to defeat him.”

  With a dull roar, Kaki’s body expanded to twice its size, an expression of his rage. The heat shook the air in the room. A fierce burst of steam rose from Suiki’s upper half. Doki alone appeared to laugh silently.

  Kaki said, “Leave him to me. I don’t care how strong he thinks he is, if he lives according to the laws of the mortal world, he can die according to them as well. He will not lay a finger on us. Give me a good ten seconds and watch me take him apart piece by piece, molecule by molecule, atom by atom.”

  The Sorcerer gave Kaki’s overweening confidence an equally self-satisfied nod. He had a great amount of trust in the strength of his supernatural bodyguards.

  “I’m counting on you. The day is approaching when you will meet face to face. Reveal your true powers slowly when the time comes. What about tonight’s rite? Is the offering ready? A minimum of two virgins is necessary.”

  “Yes,” said Suiki. “One was located last month and a letter sent. All is going according to plan. The other is being sought out as we speak. She will surely be delivered to the altar of blood at the appointed time.”

  “Then you had better be on your way.”

  Taking that as their cue, the demons disappeared. For a little while longer, the nuclear lamp illuminated the sorcerer’s smiling face in the electric glow. But then that too died away, inviting the return of the surrounding black.

  It was around eleven when Kyoya got home. His aunt and uncle took seriously the motto early to bed, early to rise and were already asleep. A couple of home delivery food packs were waiting in the kitchen. Not uncommon in this neighborhood. The night life of the young had grown later and later over the years. The PTA blamed, for one, Tokyo’s twenty-four-hour automated bus service.

  A food pack could preserve and keep its contents heated for up to three days. After opening and consuming them, Kyoya went upstairs to his room. From a locker recessed into the wall, he took out a wooden sword in a cloth sheath.

  It was called Asura, after the Hindu archangel, and was the only remaining memento of his father. When he was a boy, his father had placed the sword in his hands—carved from the branch of an evergreen oak on Mount Grdhrakuta—and trained him in the art of nenpo.

  He removed the sheath, stood in the middle of the room, and settled into an en garde position, the blade of the sword centered and the tip rising to the height of an opponent’s eyes. His palms melded to the hilt. A warmth and a power flowed through the connection, the mental energy instilled in Asura by his father, Genichiro. Even to a prodigy like Kyoya, his father’s skills as a fencer were truly awesome.

  In his twilight years, those extraordinary talents seemed to diminish, such that he lost two out of three matches to Kyoya. But Kyoya was not convinced that he had gotten that much better, or his father that much worse. Rather, wielding the sword with all his heart and might had smithed his spirit into the sword. His father’s will as well resided in Asura.

  Not surprising, considering the opponent. However reluctant, this untested son would have to fall back on his father’s strength.

  Kyoya was ready to leave. He couldn’t explain to himself how things had gotten to this point. This had nothing to do with the efforts of Master Rai and Section Chief Yamashina to persuade him. In fact, after Master Rai disappeared, Yamashina and Sayaka left the room without saying another word.

  To start with, he had plans. His path after graduation was already mapped out. He’d applied for and been awarded an athletic scholarship to the Earth Federation base on Phobos. He had a hard time believing a sorcerer’s curses could run after him all the way to Mars.

  Then why?

  Although he’d posed the question to the Master, Kyoya actually did understand where his father was coming from. The purpose of his training was as the Master explained. The reasons he’d kept mum about it were also becoming clear.

  He didn’t want me carrying that burden all through my childhood.

  Suppose that he knew that his son was predestined from the start—Kyoya knew perfectly well that his father wasn’t the type to keep something like that buttoned up because he figured his son would find out about it sooner or later.

  He certainly understood Kyoya’s character—spill the beans just once, and no matter how contrary he might be, in the end he would always return to the scene of the battle. His father couldn’t bear his son living a life so utterly predetermined from the start.

  Then why didn’t he slacken in his training until the day he collapsed? He must have felt the fever coming on as he practiced kenpo in the bitter cold of the mountains. A few hours after Kyoya found him, he died with the single word “Shinjuku” on his lips.

  Because he believed in me. Not because it was something that he was fated to do, but because it was something he would choose of his own free will.

  Though that wasn’t what now propelled h
im on his way. Her face rose up in his thoughts. Her long black hair—that translucent young lady—fighting back the tears. She must be sixteen or so.

  Am I doing it for her?

  He didn’t know the answer. Among all the reasons, it was probably the one closest to the truth. Well, good enough for him. Wracking his brains over it wouldn’t do him any good.

  Every cell of his body was brimming with energy—his and his father’s souls fusing together in Asura, giving birth to psychic energies of unimaginable power. He had unfailingly taken a hundred practice swings morning and night in order to savor that sensation, as if his body was turning into a fusion reactor.

  The question was how well he could control it.

  Kyoya took another object from the back of the locker. A carved wooden doll a foot tall, of an African medicine man with a bow in his hand. The dark paint had worn away in places, exposing the grain beneath. It was clearly an antique, though it didn’t look particularly valuable. A rather odd touch was that the arrow notched in the bow was sticking into the man’s chest.

  Kyoya set the doll in the middle of the floor and removed the arrow. He placed it in the empty hand and quickly backed away and once again assumed an en garde pose.

  Several seconds passed.

  The doll grinned. Simultaneously, the room transformed. Water erupted violently out of the computer display unit, met by a spray of fire from the wall opposite, resulting in an ear-splitting explosion that shook the air. The entire room shuddered. The rollaway desk and the bed danced through the air, along with the digital notepad and electromagnetic pen and trinkets and gifts from his girlfriends.

  A poltergeist at work!

  Amidst the ceaseless roar and madly flying objects, Kyoya stood there motionless, eyes half closed. The doll opened its red mouth and laughed a piercing loud laugh.

  This was an African voodoo doll. When a witch doctor was asked to cast a spell on a bitter rival, he would secret the doll somewhere in his house. It would draw in the wandering spirits and trigger supernatural events. The poltergeist was one of them. Even after the phenomenon ended, the unleashed miasmas and noxious odors would render the place unlivable.

  Actions of the evil spirits could only be countered by being sealed with stronger magic, or by destroying the poltergeist itself. Either way, an arduous task. If a medium were in the room now, it would witness a horde of elated apparitions whirling about.

  The doll notched the arrow into the bow string. Kyoya raised Asura over his head. As if by previous arrangement, the mad dancers retreated to the corners of the room. In the middle of the bed covers, a huge mouth opened up and bared its fangs.

  The arrow shot across the room, growing in midair to a yard in length, straight at Kyoya’s heart. The thing in the bed sprang at him as well.

  “Yaa—!”

  With a shattering cry that could tear the walls in two, Kyoya brought Asura down in a sweeping arc. The air trembled. A flash of silver light shot at the doll’s chest.

  A moment later he stood alone in the room, as calm and quiet as the autumn night.

  Everything was back to normal, the same as before the doll smiled. The only difference was that the doll had toppled over. The arrow protruded from its chest. What was odd about it was a slight twist about halfway down the shaft, as if it had ricocheted off something.

  Kyoya wordlessly picked up the doll and put it back in the locker. Just to make sure, he opened the door and peeked into the hallway. There was no sign this late-night racket had disturbed his aunt and uncle. Not a single sound had leaked out of his room.

  “Good enough,” he murmured to himself. He propped Asura against the bed and packed his bag.

  He’d summoned the poltergeist to test his might, mind and intention, his nen. The doll had long been a favorite sparring partner in that regard.

  When his and his father’s nen fused together, frightening results could spring from its misuse. A light jab against a human opponent could crush his skull. A tap with the pinky could shatter the heart. Kyoya had once knocked a truck running a red light into the river with a single swipe of Asura. When it was pulled out of the water, it wasn’t damaged. Nothing appeared wrong with it. But it never worked again.

  When wielded as a physical manifestation of willpower, without the accompanying purification that nen inculcated, his thought could become nothing more than a crude, lethal weapon.

  Kyoya wasn’t sure he had yet reached that stage. That was why he invited the poltergeists to take him on, testing himself, confronting the threat with a single blow and a minimal projection of nen, and then dispersing them without annihilating them.

  When he said “Good enough,” he was referring to those possibilities of control.

  After a few more minutes, he had everything ready to go. To allow him maximum movement, he put on a pair of stretch jeans and a training jacket. His only luggage was a nylon day pack stuffed with a change of clothes, towel, toothbrush and toiletries. He’d pulled five thousand yen out of the ATM on his way home. He didn’t imagine that a credit card would do him much good where he was going.

  He wouldn’t mind carrying some Shorinji Kenpo hidden weaponry into the battle, such as shuriken and tetsugan iron pills, but he didn’t have any on hand, so that was that.

  He left his aunt and uncle a letter stating that he’d be going on a trip for three days. He played hooky all the time to take off to parts unknown, so it wouldn’t be anything to worry about. But Kyoya wasn’t sure he’d be back in three days.

  Not waiting for morning, Kyoya left the slumbering abode. According to the glowing face of his watch it was midnight, the tenth of September. Three days and three hours were left. He could drop by the Information Bureau and have a detailed knowledge of Shinjuku implanted via their auto-suggestion devices, but gave it a pass. He wouldn’t be doing himself any favors trying to take shortcuts at this stage in the game.

  As he hurried down the midnight streets to the robot bus stop, Kyoya addressed Asura in his left hand.

  He was committing himself to this course. Like you said, of my own free will. It was a little late to be sorry about being such an unreliable son, but right now, Dad, I’m going to need all the strength you can give me.

  Then he shrugged. No matter what, he still had to wonder how an ordinary high school student ended up going to a place like that—Demon City.

  Part Three

  The ruins stretched out before him.

  Beneath the cold autumn moonlight, the black mountains of bricks and shattered concrete went on and on. Somewhere in the darkness, a wild beast howled. Judging from the lights, people must be living here. Not only that, but as he focused his gaze, hither and yon in the rolling hills of rubble, the outlines of buildings and unit housing came into view.

  One structure soared toward the heavens. Another squatted next to the earth, indistinguishable from the surrounding wreckage.

  If he concentrated even more, far in the distance he could make out the innumerable lights dotting the periphery, like the guard towers of a penitentiary. The watch towers of a prison—the metaphor was not necessarily inappropriate. The lights came from the windows and neon signs of the surrounding skyscrapers. To the north, the former Omiya and Kawagoe; to the south, Miura Peninsula dividing Tokyo and Yokohama; to the east, Narita; and to the west, Hachioji.

  In one corner of the Tokyo megalopolis, these sad and abhorrent remains were exposed for all to see—they called it “Demon City” for short.

  As if endeavoring to illustrate the source of that unfortunate name, a sense of dread shrouded the environs. It wasn’t only felt in the air, but somehow stained the starlight and moonlight as well. And the cold—not that of a winter’s night, but a chill that reached into the heart and soul—the cold of the wayward spirits embracing the visitor with unease and fear.

  What was Demon City? It was once Shinjuku.

  Back when Tokyo was still the Tokyo of old, the wards of Yodobashi, Yotsuya and Ushigome had been merged into a si
ngle city. It covered seven square miles or approximately 4,500 acres. At the turn of the millennium, its population reached 270,000.

  Shinjuku station occupied the city center. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex, Kabuki-cho, Hanazono, and the five buildings of the skyscraper district comprised the heart of the new city and its world-renowned shopping and entertainment district. The flow of the young and the adventurous went on all day and all night—until that fall night of September thirteenth.

  That day, the entirety of Shinjuku—indeed, only Shinjuku—was leveled by a magnitude 8.5 earthquake directly beneath the city. Even worse, it struck like a surprise attack at three o’clock in the morning.

  Since the 1980s, preparing for the next predicted “big one” to strike Tokyo—predicted to occur around the Izu Peninsula—the building codes had been modified to increase the earthquake resistance of the architecture. But the solidly-built reinforced steel and concrete structures and prefabricated residential wooden houses crumbled like papier-mâché in the face of this earthquake.

  The pedestrians and homeowners sleeping soundly in their beds, the night-life revelers—all that concrete and steel became an avalanche that swept them away unmercifully and without distinction.

  In a “normal” earthquake, the fires sparked in residential housing often posed a bigger threat than the collapsing structures. In this earthquake alone, eighty percent of the dead were killed in the first heave of the earth. There were no aftershocks.

  Even the Japan Meteorological Agency abandoned the designation “Great Shinjuku Earthquake” in favor of “Devil Quake,” as the latter perfectly captured its nature and effect, unlike any that had come before.

  First of all, the damage did not extend any further than Shinjuku proper.

  For example, the Chuo line running from Ichigaya to Iidabashi was bordered on the east by Chiyoda Ward and on the west by Shinjuku Ward. The station employees on duty at Iidabashi could look across the outer moat of the Imperial Palace towards the soaring structures of Ichigaya and watch as they collapsed with a deafening roar, while on their side of the moat not even the air stirred.