Maohden Vol. 1 Page 4

  “He had minions. Have they returned too?”

  “Hyota? He didn’t show his face. But he has means and skills of his own. Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow.”

  “How did they convince you?”

  “Promise me—to send Shiragi and Kurusu on to their just rewards—I couldn’t do it alone, but with you—”

  Mitakara’s head popped off his shoulders like a manhandled old doll coming apart. The blood fountained from his severed neck. The body ballooned to twice its normal size.

  Setsura leapt backwards, to the door, opened it and slammed it shut while still in midair. The door mostly contained the explosion that followed. The four-inch thick oak bowed outwards and split apart under the pressure, the cracked wood stained red.

  He landed in a corner of the hallway. Carried along by the shock wave, the flames and shards of wood rained down on him. If those shards possessed a sentience of their own, they would certainly have expressed their surprise at what their target did next.

  Maintaining a perfect balance, Setsura jumped back again without bending his knees. The walls of the director’s office crumbled like an earthen levy assaulted by a flood, spitting out fire and a blast of superheated air. The flames washed down what was left of the hallway and raced after Setsura.

  He didn’t land but glided three feet above the floor. The black slicker kicked up around his waist streamed out behind him as the jump turned to flight. The eyes watching the fire pursuing him were dark and clear.

  The stairs came up before him. Fire consumed the floor in front of him. A hellish inferno blocked the way back.

  Setsura’s right arm, hanging by his side, jerked up. Rebounding like a spring, he abruptly changed directions toward the line of windows on his right. Bulletproof glass and hardened steel shutters covered the windows.

  His left hand moved within the rushing wind. The black night outside peeked in. Setsura Aki twisted his body and sailed head-first through a gap where the glass and shutters had been. The claw of fire reaching out to him missed by a hair’s breadth, raking only the empty sky.

  Mitakara had literally bet his death to lay the trap, ingesting a radioactive catalyst that turned his body into a furnace. Setsura Aki slipped out of the snare and escaped into the night.

  Who was this Gento Roran who rose to challenge him? Somewhere out in the night, as if answering that question, a dog howled.

  Part Three: Assassin Reincarnation

  Chapter One

  Streets blessed with such a rich variety of pedestrian traffic could be found nowhere else.

  Salarymen wearing three-piece suits and neckties; young men and women in the ever traditional T-shirts and jeans; girls thronging the information booths on the street corners, 3D video cameras hanging around their necks—probably sightseers from outside the ward.

  Men dressed in long reddish-brown robes, razor marks still fresh on their bald heads, evangelists for one of Shinjuku’s hundreds of pagan sects. Maintaining a safe distance behind them, a heavy-set man in his fifties wearing a rumpled suit, not a speck of emotion in his eyes—undoubtedly a hit man hired by a rival sect.

  A discerning eye could read the occupations of the other passersby: a yakuza capo wearing a brightly-colored suit and necktie and sunglasses, his underlings in gaudy aloha shirts; an illegal cyborg, its special alloy head and arms glinting in the sunlight; outlaw espers, hard to tell apart at a glance; the usual underworld muscle.

  In the recessed plaza of a building, a perfumer randomly called out to the tourists, trying to lure them over to his “instant illusion” booth, promising to deliver the real experience of two hours of the hottest sex with an ideal lover in thirty seconds flat.

  The rumors said that since going on sale, the number of dead and disabled customers had already reached double-digits.

  A man wearing a fedora stood on the corner in front of the shuttered Mitsukoshi building. His coat was inappropriate to the season, unusually large and bulky due to the handguns and assault rifles and grenades and incendiaries hanging all over it—the kind of street vendor you could only find in Shinjuku.

  Currently for sale was the latest caseless type 3 mm Colt M77, three fifty-round magazines included, for nine-hundred thousand yen. An old-school Colt Government .45 and a 9 mm Smith & Wesson M 659 went for fifty grand apiece.

  The recent bestseller was the Steyr AUG assault rifle, thanks to the Austrian Army converting to Heckler & Koch caseless ammunition and dumping their used inventory on the market.

  Tobacconists selling a compound of drugs illegal outside the ward called “Shinjuku weed”; “instant steroids” guaranteed to have no side-effects, for protection against the violence that could crop up in an instant; S&M parlors that invited passersby to beat on the patrons (anywhere but the head) with a hammer; the usual high street shops.

  It hardly stopped there. Opium smugglers schlepping their wares around in metal lockers; a human reconstruction physician, a doctor’s bag in one hand, hurrying to a house call; diviners of ill fortune who only dealt in bad outcomes; students of the local school of fraud and grifting, all smiles no matter how unfriendly the crowd; the homeless and vagrants, their bodies festering under the effects of unknown narcotics.

  The sightseers aside, people strolled by without the slightest alarm. The uniformed commando police now and then appearing among the crowds showed no inclination to arrest any of them. Their job was to keep Shinjuku’s streets safe for the tourists.

  Every last one of them emanated an evil and foul odor that even in the middle of the day mingled with the rich and bewitching miasmas, filling the streets with an indescribable aura.

  In the midst of all this—any “normal” person suddenly introduced into this environment could expect to get seized by the chills and feel nauseous enough to vomit on the spot—ordinary tourists happily plodded along. The reason must be that they’d been contaminated the minute they stepped foot in Shinjuku’s precincts.

  Chaste and well-bred daughters were known to open their legs to any man at the drop of a hat after spending three days there. Out of every hundred perpetrators of domestic homicide nationwide, at least one had instigated the violence immediately after returning from the city.

  Shinjuku Avenue, with the Isetan and Mitsukoshi department stores hugging the sidewalks on both sides, was the city’s safest boulevard. Fifty thousand people tread its pavement every day, and on average, only one murder was recorded there every three hours.

  People flowed along the roads from there toward Kabuki-cho, Ichigaya, Shinjuku Gardens, roads leading them all down to hell. Of course they did. Because this was Demon City.

  Among those fifty thousand, Banri Sasaki was a man with a mission, if one eccentric even for this population. In order to accomplish it, he had a HD camera and high-gain mike sewn into the collar of his shabby coat and belt buckle.

  Compared to that, the Smith & Wesson .38 Military & Police six-round revolver in the holster on his right hip was nothing more than a sidearm.

  Sasaki was about to cross the street from Mitsubishi Bank headed in the direction of Yotsuya, the Isetan department store on his left, cracks crisscrossing its once-majestic walls.

  Just as the light turned green, he turned around, as if a contrary thought had suddenly occurred to him, and hailed a taxi waiting there at the crosswalk. It was an old-fashioned gasoline vehicle. Gas turbines were all the rage now. Here in Shinjuku, though, old technology still had its uses. To start with, late-model gas turbines were few in number and a prime target for thieves.

  “Where to?” asked the driver.

  He looked less like a cabbie and more like a carjacker, though that was more the product of his environment. The question was relayed via a speaker embedded in the bulletproof glass panel separating the front and back seats.

  “Shinjuku police station.”

  “You a cop?” the cabbie said with a grimace.

  It was a rule of thumb that nobody drove a taxi in Shinjuku that didn’t have somethin
g to hide, and didn’t have a good reason to watch his back. Not only the bulletproof glass, but beneath the rear seats was a tank of gas. Tear gas, usually, but just as easily exchanged for sleeping gas or worse. And yet not one case of murder had ever been recorded. It was against the cabbie code.

  “Something like that.”

  Sasaki leaned back against the seat. Page one of every Shinjuku guide book warned tourists in bold print not to reveal they were from outside the ward. In order to deal with the number and variety of crimes in the city, the police deployed human doubles with implanted memories that veteran criminals had a hard time telling from real residents of Shinjuku.

  The taxi descended Meiji Avenue and turned left onto Yasukuni Avenue. The look of the city suddenly changed. The blocks leveled during the Devil Quake back in the 1980s had since gone through cycles of rebuilding and setbacks while the real estate brokers played a game of musical chairs. The look of the city here bore no resemblance to what had been there before the tragedy.

  From the intersection with Meiji Avenue to where it collided with the elevated Yamanote line, the street lined with such grand structures as the Isetan Shinjuku Annex, Isetan Hall, Shinjuku Shochiku, and Shinjuku Ad Hoc was jammed with long and narrow three-story buildings, crowded with shops stocked with questionable and hazardous wares. Nothing to match the grandeur of Shinjuku Avenue.

  The high-volume arms dealers were wont to frequent the weekly Hanazono Shrine discount bazaar. The storefronts were packed with the grotesque and magical goods peculiar to Demon City.

  Body snatching parasites with five times the efficacy of potency of human personality modification drugs. Resembling sea cucumbers or jellyfish daubed with nauseating hues, the created personality profiles lodged in their cells got injected into the brains of the hosts, turning a demure young lady into a professional sneak thief, or a scrawny teenager into a hardened street tough that’d put a mobster to shame.

  They also sold souvenirs more to the liking of the sightseers. But most of those were available at the customs stations adjacent to the three gates that connected Shinjuku and the outside world. Items successfully smuggled through raised such hell that the authorities exercised all due precautions.

  The unfortunate effects of Demon City weren’t limited to its citizens alone.

  Take the pottery piled on tables in one of the shop fronts.

  A crudely-shaped small black saucer, looking like it’d been fired by a rank amateur, went for a hundred thousand yen. A bit much, it might seem. But then, from that night hence, the purchaser would dream bad dreams, and forget all about them the next morning. By and by, they would sap his physical and mental strength, within a fortnight rendering him little more than a vegetable.

  At that point, whoever discovered the saucer would find it stained blood red. Some unknown necromancer had literally baked the curse into the glaze of this “nightmare saucer.” Needless to say, those harboring criminal intent would find reasons to give someone this gift.

  Take the dazzling array of flowers.

  A rare species that certainly did not exist in the outside world. Its uses were as varied as its strange effects. Set out on the roof on a night when a brisk wind blew, the flowers’ petals unfurled in the glittering moonlight, scattering its scent on the wind. Then wait. Like moths drawn to the flame, men and women would clamber up to the room, hoping to seize a bouquet of those flowers swaying so gently in the breeze.

  Hardly a concern, at least until they pitched from the building and toppled to the ground in perfect bliss. Heaven forefend that a ne’re-do-well might plant them in some less godforsaken place.

  Perfectly legitimate items were sold as well.

  Leveled in the Devil Quake, the mayor had turned Kikuicho into farmland yielding produce rich in minerals and proteins. Exports brought two billion yen a year into the ward, though what sold at ten thousand yen a pound yielded barely one percent of that inside Shinjuku itself.

  Recent publications filled the stacks in secondhand bookshops, more often than not in the form of crudely-bound machine-made copies. Information didn’t care what medium it was printed on as long as it was there to be read.

  Scholars with a keen knowledge of the handwriting of the great thinkers and scientists of the past would not believe their eyes, for there they would find preserved the soul and intellect of those great minds lost to history. These were the very writings those great men had once consigned to oblivion, and had gone to their graves assured that such accursed thoughts would never be read by future generations.

  Books about sorcery and witchcraft; books about the modus operandi and true deeds of the criminal class; books spelling out their scorn and contempt for human intelligence and the future of the human species; books expressing skepticism about the fundamental basis of their own thoughts and philosophies.

  Nobody ever knew from whence they sprang forth or into whose hands they fell, only that those who defined the world as it was presently known possessed minds given over to darkness.

  But the sightseers who came to this city weren’t known for their interest in research monographs and prophetic scribblings. A handbook revealing the true face of the world was available in three volumes, fifty yen each. They sat there gathering dust on a grimy store shelf in Shinjuku.

  The taxi passed beneath an elevated train track and onto Oume Road and stopped.

  “This is as far as I go,” the cabbie said. “I’ll round it down to the nearest ten-yen.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Sasaki grumbled. “It’s another quarter mile to the police station. I’ll round it up to the nearest hundred, so keep going.”

  “Hey, don’t give me no lip about it. You don’t get out now, I’ll round it up to whatever you’ve got on you. Capisce?” The cabbie reached for the control panel on the seat console.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Sasaki said, thumping his hands on his knees.

  The air was hotter and more humid than downtown. The sultry air felt as if individual molecules of water were clinging to the skin and getting absorbed directly into the body. And in perverse exchange, the demonic miasmas welling up all around seemed to rob the soul of all ambition. Walking a dozen paces was enough to bring a strong man to his knees.

  Sasaki raised his left hand to his eyes. The winding chain-link fence was over ten feet tall. Now and then blue-white sparks showered down. The five-hundred thousand volts of high-tension current had snatched a harmless gremlin out of the sky.

  If a commando police patrol car hadn’t passed by, Sasaki might have collapsed after another twenty yards or so.

  “What the hell you doing something like that for?” one of the cops sighed. “We’ve warned people so many damned times about walking here from the station, you’d think they’d get the message. But there’s still a couple every year.”

  His partner added, “The miasma from the park blows through here the strongest. Don’t you listen to the news?”

  Sasaki shook his head. The news updates at six in the morning, noon, six at night, and midnight broadcast DMZ miasma density eco-zone warnings to the general public on the public television screens. Though lately they had become more part of a general safety policy directed at tourists and visitors. The previous February, the “Third Mopping-Up Operation” had yielded great results.

  Sasaki was treated in the infirmary of the Shinjuku police station. After some bed rest, he started feeling mostly normal again. The diagnostic machine next to his bed analyzed the symptoms when he was brought in and dispensed the proper amount of medicine. Sasaki mulled over the three white pills and pocketed them.

  There wasn’t a doctor. He must be helping out at the affiliated hospital. Suspects were constantly being hauled down to the station. If they hadn’t already gotten roughed up pretty severely for “resisting,” interrogation was bound to leave many of the rest of them half dead.

  Sasaki discharged himself from the infirmary, found an elevator, and pushed the button for the third underground level. The
cops had confirmed his ID in the patrol car. After explaining what he was doing in Shinjuku, he was given an all-access badge.

  The third underground level was lined with steel doors. Interrogation rooms. All of the doors were bent and dented, the marks left by criminals freaking out inside. In this city, there was no underestimating the kind of damage a roid rage could inflict on two-inch hardened steel.

  Sasaki knocked on the door marked with the number seven. The fingerprint lock clicked and the eight-inch steel door silently slid open. The windowless, steel-lined, battle-hardened ten foot square room was designed to contain the worst effects of a suicide bomber.

  The wall on the right held an intercom and switch panel. Facing the entrance was a wooden table and two chairs. The lights recessed into the ceiling filled the dreary space with cool light. The fair features of the young man standing behind the table cast off a cold fire all their own.

  Chapter Two

  “Are—are you Setsura Aki?”

  Sasaki’s voice rose half an octave. His blood pressure followed suit. Keep your head in the game, he remonstrated with himself.

  This was probably the same young man who, on the corner in front of Mitsubishi Bank, had whispered in his ear that he could come to this room in the Shinjuku police station.

  “I’m Sasaki, from Historical World. I apologize for taking you away from your regular business.”

  He held out a business card. The young man took it, and motioned him to the remaining chair.

  Sasaki had the uncomfortable sense of being under a microscope. Glancing at the young man’s face, he simply couldn’t get riled up about it. He knew he was staring at the smiling countenance beneath the wave of black hair, but had a hard time averting his eyes.

  “I heard you ran into a bit of trouble getting here,” Setsura Aki said, the pleasant expression not fading from his face. “Get into the wrong taxi and you can end up in a world of hurt. In this city, you take your life in your hands just visiting the police station.”