Maohden Vol. 1 Page 7

  The FS-9000-G polar combat suit was a ten-year-old design, though one advanced enough to still be employed by the American Air Force and NATO. With a power loading of fifteen hundred watts per pound, one pinky could gouge a hole in a concrete wall, and at full throttle, take down a small building in two minutes. With its large-capacity transformers, an electrical discharge tube turned it into a one-ton murder machine.

  The lucky shopper could find them at the military surplus shops outside Okubo Station, starting at a hundred million yen each.

  Fingers like small warheads with polycarbide joints gripped the trigger of the PP-702 Glisenti assault shotgun he was cradling.

  The other man was wearing a grey-on-white pinstripe suit. But from the green light glowing in his electric eyes, he was a cyborg. And was unarmed. These were the kind of living things that ventured into Man-Eater Alley.

  “You’re late and it’s getting late. Wearing all that bling slow you down?”

  It was clear from the tone of Setsura’s voice that he knew they’d been tailing him, and yet he hadn’t once glanced back over his shoulder.

  “Huh,” the expression on the cyborg’s face said. He was a pro, used to dealing with every kind of unexpected situation.

  “When did you figure it out?” said the man in the combat suit. Speaking via a mike and amplifier, he sounded like a heavy in a radio drama.

  “Since I first picked you out of the crowd.”

  “Ah, so it was your intention all along for us to find you here. The shadow becomes the shadowed. Good show.”

  “Enough of the chit-chat. Seeing as you picked a strange place like this, you must be doing some weird weed. Anyhow, best you just give it up. No way you’re gonna win. You’re gonna end up worm food for these monsters here.”

  The cyborg’s right foot traced an arc in the air. The sound of something soft being crushed beneath his shoe.

  Setsura shrugged. “Trying to scare me to death, Sagara-san?” For the first time, a flicker of surprise showed in the cyborg’s mask-like face. “Hey, it’s no big deal. My secretary has a very capable information broker on speed dial.” Setsura said, as calmly as ever, “In any case, as I’m sure you know, the Sanbo Group is no more. Why waste all the effort trying to kill me? You ought to be the ones forking out the protection money. While you are still talking to me.”

  The cyborg raised his right hand to his mouth and smirked. “You’re a real comedian. I see. Like the boss said, you’ve got a pair of brass ones, I’ll grant you that. But I don’t see the need to hide in the shadows and take shots at you with a laser rifle or RPG from a distance. Hey—”

  He wasn’t calling out to Setsura, but to the man in the combat suit next to him. He yanked back the pump on the gun, producing the distinguishing click of chambering a live round.

  A switch next to the pistol grip of the PP-702 could be toggled between auto and manual fire. But the sound alone of the pump handle being yanked back could be expected to arouse the most fear in a victim.

  Even today, cops in Los Angeles and New York preferred single pump riot shotguns with a manual option. There was nothing to match the effect on the criminal class of that pump handle being drawn back. They knew well enough the suppressing fire of a shotgun, turning a single shot into a blizzard of flying buckshot.

  “What do you say?” the cyborg asked. “Makes a man think twice, eh? This baby holds double-aught. That’s nine pachinko-sized balls inside each shell. Now consider every one of them perforating your body. That’s a lot of red-hot hurt in a small package. All that smoldering lead spinning around in there like a washing machine, it’ll turn your insides to confetti. The last kid who saw what we had to offer clung to my feet begging for mercy. Told ’em to suck it off, and the brat goes at it like a puppy.”

  The twisted grin on his face suddenly vanished. A sense of unease cloaked the cyborg like a cold, wet blanket.

  The man in front of him, about to become another one of his victims, was the same as before. Except that whatever made him him had changed.

  The cyborg experienced what felt like tendrils reaching across the back of his neck. “Boy or a girl?” he heard the young man asking. The same voice from before. Or another voice entirely.

  “Girl,” he answered, though not of his own free will. As if it’d been coaxed out of him.

  “And what happened to her?”

  “Fucked her brains out!” shouted the man in the combat suit, the muzzle of the shotgun shaking violently. “Back and front, both sides at the same time, a big serving of extra-large. Ever done a kid before? Man, they’re so soft inside. Sound just like squealing little puppies too. All the blood just adds to the fun—”

  “And now consider that you have met me.”

  His low voice seemed to condense into a shaft of ice that pierced the pair of merciless murderers through their chests. The gremlins forming a ring on the ground around him scattered in an instant. They surely felt that something in the air.

  The swirling miasma roared, but not at Setsura. The man in the combat suit shouted something, an angry bellow to shake off the entwining spell. The gun spat a tongue of fire into the air.

  An arm that could bring down a building raised the shotgun to the vertical, tunneling nine holes through the thick haze. The cyborg knew the arm hadn’t been wrenched up by outside forces. Rather, a stab of pain had assailed the flesh and bone encased inside the supposedly protective armor.

  “You should follow the director of the Sanbo Group,” Setsura said.

  The pain vanished in that instant. The huge mass of the combat suit charged through the poisonous fog at Setsura. A wave of air beat against his back as his black outlines became a blur. The noxious vapors trailing about him, he leapt into the air.

  “You screwed up, kid!”

  The voice came from above him. To a man in a combat suit, equipped with inertia controller and recoil-less jumping ability, that vaulting black orchid that was Setsura was heaven-sent folly.

  Channeling the momentum of the mad rush in a split-second, the one-ton combat suit climbed ten feet into the air, right above Setsura. The right hand holding the shotgun raised high as if in victory, only moments from turning Setsura’s head into so much cottage cheese.

  The cyborg observed from the ground, grinding up a foot-long green caterpillar with his right hand like an overripe banana.

  The barrel of the shotgun swung down, grazed Setsura’s head, pointing its black, cyclops eye at the cyborg. But the cyborg only wryly grinned. An expression that immediately vanished in a startled blast of sound. The clump of nine lead shots streaked down at 2,000 feet a second and struck him in the chest.

  He reeled backwards as a second and then third volley followed, shredding his suit and sending the pieces of fabric flying. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Sagara?” the cyborg screamed.

  The man in the combat suit fell past Setsura and landed on the ground with a crash. “Hey, no way, man!” he frantically explained. “It wasn’t me! My hands did it all by themselves!”

  “Naughty hands.” The cool, low voice of that young man interrupted the loud reverberations. “What do you say we tidy things up here?”

  The question faded into the falling gloom filling the lane. What appeared at first to be long white radishes rained out of the sky onto the cobblestones. As soon as he realized what it was, the cyborg set off running. He was headed to the entrance to the lane when he divided in two just above his waist.

  Blue sparks flew, a blood-like oil spewed. The lower half of his body, trousers and shoes and all, kept on going, galloping onto Yasukuni Avenue and sending pedestrians scattering out of the way before collapsing in the middle of the roadway. This was strange enough even for residents of Demon City that they all gave this most unusual of pedestrians a wide berth.

  The tourists and sightseers, on the other hand, growing impatient for something “interesting” to happen, immediately started shooting away with their camcorders.

  The man in the
combat suit landed on the ground and doubled over. He tried to raise the shotgun but finally realized that his right arm was missing along with the weapon.

  The outer shell of duranium steel—that could withstand a direct hit from an anti-tank bazooka—had been lopped off from his shoulder on down. He slumped to his knees. Not so much because of the pain or the loss of blood, but because of those toxic vapors stealing through the severed opening in the armor.

  Through the pores of his skin, down to the space between the cells, the miasmas invaded his body like water filtering through a sieve under osmotic pressure, and coursed into his circulation system. The wellspring of his being was torn out at the roots. A feeling of despondency surged through him. This accomplished killer was already well on his way to hell.

  The treetops swayed. Sea slug-like creatures slurped their way into the gaping wound. However crazed he might be by the terrible realization of his now inevitable fate, the assassin couldn’t move.

  The bloodsucking leeches that had fruitlessly attacked Setsura’s face had found fresh blood and an unresisting victim and swarmed over the wound, slowly devouring the flesh with their little mouths and sharp, tiny fangs.

  Chapter Two

  Exiting the lane as if nothing was amiss, Setsura came to a halt at a small intersection. The road on his left led to Kuyakusho Street. Behind him waited Man-Eater Alley, mouth open wide.

  Setsura turned right and kept on going. Beyond a steel-frame arch, multicolored two-story buildings lined the sidewalks. The compact construction and the signboards hanging from the eaves identified these houses as part of the red light district.

  Its nom de plume as Demon City notwithstanding, Shinjuku still mostly famously attached its name to the clubs and bars of Golden Gai.

  Exercising eminent domain, the land acquisitions accompanying the relocation of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex had left Golden Gai in a precarious state. That it survived and continued to thrive today was a testament to the famous and the nameless who loved the place, and to the shops, and the people who ran them.

  But most of all, it was a testament to the perverse blessings of the Devil Quake itself. Holding out longer than anyone expected against the mighty power of the national government, the last group of stubborn owners had exhausted their appeals. Their backs against the wall, they were putting pen to paper to sign over the deeds to the property—right when the earth shook.

  The approximately three hundred bars—crowding the quarter-acre plot of land bordered by the five back alleys between Kuyakusho Avenue and Hanazono Shrine—were released from the pressures of the oppressive state and granted a new lease on life.

  Its resurrected image was altogether different from the old. A sense of affection unique to this city sprang into existence between the patrons and the owners. The atmosphere on these streets was tinged with a sardonic wit and its own undeniable stench. Here and there between the gaudily accoutered shops remained the skeletons of those establishments that hadn’t come back to life, like missing teeth in a broad smile.

  The stories whispered there said that beneath the ruins lingered the unrecovered bodies still dreaming of the morning sun.

  Setsura turned one corner after the other, navigating the narrow streets with the gait of one well-accustomed to the place. He stopped in front of a block decorated with garish signs and crowded with shops. It was twenty or thirty more feet to the back alley of Hanazono Shrine. To his left, facing the street, were the ruins of two buildings.

  “I bet those two would be pissed off if they knew why all three of you weren’t there to meet me.”

  He seemed to be talking to empty air. There was no sight nor sound of anybody around him. Only the noonday sun pushing the shadows deeper beneath the eaves.

  “You must be getting tired of playing hide and seek. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Setsura fell silent. A gust of wind came at him from the right. Torn apart, the invisible streams divided high and low, ruffling his hair and coat before fading away.

  A human figure suddenly appeared in the center of the rent air, standing there as if he’d condensed out of nothing. Only Setsura would have noticed that he’d jumped down from the roof of the bar behind him.

  Not a big man. He was bent over from the waist up, almost parallel to the ground. His unkempt hair was tied behind his head with a strip of black cloth. He had on a black cotton shirt and trousers and a thick waistcoat made from animal skins.

  His round face engendered not the slightest vibe of good cheer that might otherwise be expected. Rather, the light in his eyes suggested that the softest touch would split the skin like a knife. He was the predator that crouched in the shadows waiting for his prey to walk by.

  This was not so much a man that resembled a beast as a beast taking on the shape of a man, the kind that haunted the moonless nights of bad dreams.

  Setsura wasn’t looking at the man’s face. He was examining the man’s back. It rose up like a small mountain. A humpback, a protuberance, lifted up the back of his shirt and waistcoat a good foot.

  “Long time, no see, Hyota.” A small smile rose to Setsura’s lips, hardly befitting such a genie. “It’s been fifteen years. We’ve both aged a bit in the meantime.”

  The man didn’t answer. His forehead shone with a black luster like patent leather. Beads of sweat glistened on the skin. Cold sweat.

  As Setsura had said, he was tired of playing hide and go seek.

  The sweat shimmered, gathered into a drop and coursed down his cheek. The lips moved. “You’re one scary bastard. The prey becomes the predator in the snap of a finger. Those two never saw it coming. Considering the heat they were packing, hard to believe they’d ever lose.”

  “I can’t be so sure when it comes to your abilities,” Setsura softly answered. “Fifteen years ago we weren’t given the opportunity to test ourselves. But now? How about it?”

  “Well,” said Hyota, cocking his head to the side. The beads of sweat seemed to silently suck back into the pores. “Fifteen years ago I was honing my skills as well. Shall we have at it for a round or two?”

  “First, where’s he been all this time?”

  Hyota did not smile at the odd question. “We’re all laying our cards on the table together. After all, this contest has gone on for fifteen years already.”

  “Where has he been? Or where is he now?”

  Hyota raised his right hand. Setsura stepped forward. Hyota backed away. He didn’t lower his right hand, retreating as if overwhelmed by some sort of primordial imbalance between them, until he’d run into the door of the bar behind him.

  A thin line ran diagonally across the rectangular storefront. The entire top of the building started to slide down that line.

  Whatever severed the ghostly wind must have sliced through the facade of this building at the same time. With a heavy rumbling sound, the tumbling structure shook the ground. By then Hyota had already jumped into the air.

  Setsura’s right hand moved. The air hummed. Hyota twisted his body. Glittering lines danced around him. Inside the layers of the narrow rings, Hyota spun like a top.

  The rings tightened and contracted. Managing to slip through the mesh like a fish escaping through the holes in a net, Hyota sprang to a nearby roof and stood there like a stump.

  “That’s the game,” he said, as if throwing in the towel, though there was no telling what this “defeat” was or how he had been defeated. The thin, glittering rings that threatened to enclose him had already vanished. Nothing connected them now but the thin air.

  All the more improbably, he hadn’t made a single offensive move in return.

  “I haven’t spent the last fifteen years twiddling my thumbs. And neither have you, I see.”

  “Where is he?” Setsura asked again. “Having shown you me, the least he could do is return the favor.”

  “You’re not going to ask where the seal is?” Hyota said. “Gento-sama has already taken possession of it. You’re lat
e to the party, Aki-sama.”

  “I see,” Setsura said, though his lips didn’t actually move. Not a muscle in his body so much as twitched.

  Hyota was the one who writhed. The sweat again coursed from his brow, streaking down his face with every tremble of his body, forming a damp spot beneath his feet. His face twisted with pain, so much so an objective observer might fear it would stick that way, like the pain was assailing him down to the marrow of his bones.

  The faraway smell of alcohol wafted into the air, perhaps from a bottle of liquor severed along with the building.

  “That being the case, you had no reason to show up. I don’t imagine you wanted to drop by and say hello. Payback’s a bitch, but there’s no knocking on heaven’s door until you do.”

  “I don’t imagine—Aki-sama—that you are the sort of man to let that slide—”

  His reply could almost be taken for praise, though Hyota probably didn’t see the slight smile that creased Setsura’s lips.

  A moment later the smile vanished. Hyota snaked out of his shackles like a contortionist defeating an invisible wire cage. He soared through the air, hugging the rooftops, with the speed and agility of a four-legged beast.

  Scrambling toward the alleyway, his body once again stiffened. Hyota shook off the new constraints with his strange undulations. However disordered his appearance, he landed without a sound. His feet barely touched the ground before again propelling him forward at a sprint.

  A mound of black debris filled the narrow lane. The debris was Hyota’s clothing. The noonday sun glistened off his body, the tempered and striated muscles of his naked limbs exposed to the white light. Glowing beads formed a trail behind him, the sweat flung off his skin.

  He ran as if being pursued by something close behind. His sweating face was etched with terror. A three-foot-high cinderblock wall rose up in front of him. The alley forked left and right. Hyota didn’t slacken his speed. The ball of wind rammed into the prefab wall.