Maohden Vol. 1 Read online

  The structure of his body somehow allowing an exception to the physical laws of inertia, right behind the ball of wind came Hyota, making a sharp left turn without slowing in the slightest and barreling along, his fearful eyes glancing at the wall on his right.

  There was nothing there. But his eyes alone saw something. An empty milk bottle was sitting on the wall. It blew backwards, scattering glittering shards across the surface. Hyota opened his eyes wider. Something else was there.

  An animal sprang into the air, turned to the right and disappeared into a dead end. Ahead was a street leading to Kuyakusho Street. To the right and left were rows of houses and telephone poles.

  Hope welled up on Hyota’s face.

  The top of a telephone pole traced a graceful arc, falling down as pretty as a picture. A foot above the ground, a smooth slit appeared in the concrete pillar. As if calculating Hyota’s forward motion, it intersected his path precisely.

  The shadow of the telephone pole eclipsed Hyota’s head. He planted his hands on the pole and vaulted over it. And a moment later, scrambled beneath another, sweat flying like a wet dog, as the pole split in two beneath his feet.

  The earth shook a second time. And died away. The two telephone poles lay across each other like a pair of logs. The alleyway too fell still.

  Except for Hyota, lying there in a curious posture, in the gap between the two poles. He wasn’t hurt. And yet he wasn’t breathing. His heart didn’t beat. His metabolism had sunk below that which should otherwise support life. Even the circulation of his blood ceased.

  The most sophisticated of the American military’s life detection sensors would report his present condition as quite dead.

  As if aroused by the impact, a great volume and number of strange creatures roiled up from shadowed side streets, from gaps in the rock walls. Octopus arms reached out from the extremities of amoeba-like forms, the ends forming into ruddy pincers, clambering over the poles and dropping to the ground.

  Hyota’s body was wrapped in a grotesque, squirming mass. Tentacles wrapped around his throat, suckers crowded with tiny teeth attached to his back. Viscous, translucent, throbbing lumps covered the half-domes of his pectoral and abdominal muscles. The pale threads of the feelers curled around his groin.

  All the synonyms of “disgusting” could only begin to describe the eerie sense of revulsion the scene aroused.

  Like their brethren in Man-Eater Alley, these voracious creatures had been born in the wreckage of a biotechnology lab in Ichigaya. Normally shunning the wind and sun, they were easily eradicated in the decontamination sweeps. But when they stumbled across an immobilized prey, their rapacious instincts came to the fore.

  Living only to eat and shit and nothing else, their rudimentary sensory organs had registered a positive biological response a dozen seconds earlier. It died away before the heavy reverberations stopped shaking the earth. What brought them there in a rush was the memory of where that response had come from.

  The presence of prey communicated by their avaricious tentacles and tongues was a big lump on the ground. They would crawl into his nose and burrow into his ass. Given the slightest scent of muscle, of moist flesh, and the tiny sharp teeth would chew through the skin, secreting acid that dissolved the fat and tissue and bones, reducing the largest man to compost in less than ten minutes.

  But what these little beasts sensed now was no more organic than sand and stone. Their rudimentary synapses did not suggest that they test and see, for the results could be no different.

  Even after the creatures had departed, Hyota didn’t budge. A window opened above him. A middle-aged woman with a perm peered out, knit her brows, and spit. The saliva sprinkled down on his nose and head.

  The lady closed the window. That a couple of telephone poles fell over and killed somebody was no reason to venture out of doors in this city.

  During the day, when there was hardly a person to be found anywhere, this neighborhood was far more dangerous than at night, when pedestrians thronged the streets. The sightseers kept their distance as well. If any had spotted Hyota, the guidebooks clearly warned tourists to steer clear of trouble, especially trouble involving dead bodies.

  Setsura said, “You met me and then dropped out of sight.”

  He stood there on the strange battlefield like a statue, ears craned to the whistling wind. Only the fingers of his left hand moved, once, with a drawing-in motion.

  “If that is his servant, I can only begin to imagine the master, and the danger that waits in the wings.”

  The wind carried his words away. In the midst of the white light, the beautiful shadow sculpted from frozen darkness strode towards a corner of Hanazono Shrine.

  He’d made himself into a decoy in order to lure out a formless enemy. He’d gotten a tug on the line, but the main target hadn’t showed, and then the one lead that could guide him back to the source slipped through his grasp. As bitter a conclusion to a battle as Setsura had experienced in a good long time.

  He was back to where he’d started.

  Chapter Three

  The hot breath tickling her earlobes alone made her clench between her thighs. That was the last thing that should be happening. She’d heard the rumors, so before coming here, she’d loaded up on libido suppressants.

  And yet lying on the bed and feeling a single breath—or rather, the instant she’d walked into the room and looked into those deep, dark eyes—the drugs might as well have been placebos. She was thereafter reduced to an obedient puppy, eager to fulfill his every wish.

  The tingling desires welling up inside her, like being engulfed by an empty mist, she felt something akin to fear.

  “What a vexing patient.”

  The smell of him filling her nostrils—the entrancing voice humming in her ears—the words changing to hot mud in her brain—resonated like an aural aphrodisiac. The eighteen-year-old forgot herself and moaned.

  “Why did you come here?”

  Tightly shutting her eyes, lashes fluttering, resisting the impulse to blab, she said, “For—for a medical exam.”

  “There is nothing wrong with you. If I had to identify a culprit, it would be these.”

  Cold iron touched her breasts. And what magnificent breasts they were, retaining their natural perkiness even when lying down. The firm combination of muscle and fat and the taut flesh lacked the full luster of a mature woman, but possessed the wild beauty of youth in spades. Breasts that would bring any man to attention above and below.

  Her pride and joy.

  Men lined up to fondle them, suck on them, slather them with their kisses. She would take them in her arms and with a smile slit their throats.

  These breasts were her weapons. And now against her will they trembled merely at the touch of those five fingers.

  “Ahh—” She couldn’t repress the moan that came to her lips. She raised her firm, tight thighs. The flesh glowed, the pale blue blood vessels snaking beneath the translucent skin.

  A bewitching aroma arose from between those thighs. She was completely naked. He hadn’t told her to disrobe. She had done so of her own volition, certain that the allure of her body would captivate him as it had so many others. Her nipples grew erect, her hand slid down her body, perhaps even toward her damp bush.

  “And who are you?” came the quiet question, not issuing from the vocal cords of any normal person. Not so much a pleasant voice, it arose from unfathomable depths, from an intelligent and cultured and refined disposition, containing a cold hint of steel. The listener could not imagine what kind of man this might be in truth.

  Reaching inexorably toward the hot flesh between her legs, her pale hand stopped. Becoming aware of her restrained wrist, she squirmed again. Her voluptuous body undulated, now tinged with chagrin and humiliation.

  “Who are you?” that voice asked again.

  She answered with a gasp. “I am Ginko Asaka. They call me Miss Silver. The capo of Elegance.”

  “A girl gang, eh? You worked
for the Wickerman Group until they fell by the wayside not too long ago. Did you come here to revenge them?”

  “Yeah. The capo you killed was my lover. Ah, shit. Let go of my hand.”

  “I don’t think so,” came the answer, cold as ever. An icy finger brushed her nipple, eliciting from her a pinched cry. “A fool who pretends to be a patient and wastes a doctor’s valuable time I cannot treat so lightly. Shall we first explore those hellish depths of pleasure you so eagerly proffer?”

  Even when he pulled his arctic hands away from her breast and wrist, the girl gangbanger could not move. Far from it, radiating outwards from that hand, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, the sensory currents vanquished from her mind any fate that awaited her hence.

  “In this hospital, the hand is mightier than any surgical sword,” whispered the doctor. Standing next to Ginko, his voice tinged with haunting echoes, “A doctor investigates every connection between every gene and every acupressure point. Your body shall learn the fruits of that research.”

  The frigid finger penetrated the crucible between her legs. The woman arced her back. The translucent fluids welled up and spilled over. Pleasure and pain. There was no telling what would become of the human in the human being when those two things mingled and intersected and shot through the nerves with a hitherto unknown sharpness.

  The pleasure could not mitigate the pain, nor the pain neutralize the pleasure. Both seared her from the inside out, stabbing down to the marrow of her bones.

  Her finger trailed down to that point where they intersected and stroked with a feverish intensity. Her empty eyes filled with the light of madness. She panted, foam and spittle erupting from her mouth. Her pink tongue slid across her lips, brushing it aside. Her hands danced in a masturbatory frenzy.

  “You think maybe that’s enough?”

  The unflappable voice blew like a clean, crisp wind through this obscene tableau. The doctor turned and looked back at the handsome figure standing next to the door.

  Setsura Aki.

  But however handsome he was, this doctor was another species entirely. He would best Setsura in a simple aesthetic competition. Setsura’s countenance had something of the ordinary human about it, while the doctor’s was the very picture of beauty.

  The definitions of a handsome man, a beautiful woman, a sublime painting all differed according to the individual tastes of the observer. The audience applauding the next Miss Universe was unlikely to get similarly worked up about the Maitreya Bodhisattva on display in the Koryu-ji temple in Kyoto.

  Even limiting the enquiries to the face alone could leave the judges worlds apart. This is all “worldly beauty.” By the standards of the human world, there is no “ultimate,” no final word.

  But suppose these imperfect mortal standards were confronted by literally otherworldly beauty, a beauty outside of human experience—here was the physical manifestation of the same, the crystallization of pale perfection standing next to the writhing woman. Having touched her once, the effects did not cease when he removed his hands.

  As further proof he was not of this world, stare at him intently and the vision blurred and the world around him grew misty, lost its shape and contours. The urban legends said that anyone who stared at him for a full minute could look at nothing else. His image was burned into the backs of their retinas. Nobody had stepped forward to say it wasn’t true.

  “Better let her go, Mephisto. She’s going to damage something getting herself off like that.”

  With a white hand Doctor Mephisto swept back the black forelocks falling across his forehead with a captivating smile. His hair spilled down his back like a sheet of black silk. “It is indeed unfortunate to find myself in the presence of your mundane self. When shall we meet that other you?”

  In response to the yet somehow wistful question, that would melt the most beautiful woman in the world, Setsura only shrugged. “I thought you might want to hit a local tea house, but you look busy. I’ll settle for you serving me here.”

  “Gladly.”

  Mephisto’s faint red lips bent into a smile. He reached out to the examination table on his left, where the woman was still in the thrall of self-discovery. No sooner had the elegant fingertips slipped between her legs but the woman’s convulsions ceased.

  As the tension unwound from her body, a somehow bawdy expression of bliss filled her features. Mephisto paid her no mind, waving his hand with the elegance of a symphony conductor.

  Blue light flashed off his index finger. To Setsura’s left at the back of the room, a nurse dressed in whites entered the room pushing a gurney.

  “Give her a six-month memory eradication and discharge her. And don’t admit her again. Oh, and get Aki-san here a coffee.”

  “Your most expensive.”

  “Our most expensive.”

  The outrageous directives notwithstanding, whatever he said was law. The nurse nodded wordlessly. She moved the gurney next to the bed, loaded on the woman, and exited through the same door as silently as she had arrived.

  “Man, when it comes to women you’re one cold bastard,” Setsura said with a wry smile, shaking his head in disbelief. “And yet you surround yourself with legions of nurses. Kind of sets my hair on end at times. What are you thinking?”

  “And if I said I was thinking of you?” He cast Setsura a sidelong glance that would reduce the most beautiful woman in the world to a mere country lass.

  Setsura blanched a bit.

  Mephisto added, as he returned to his desk in the corner of the room, “For one reason or another, this world must have creatures like women in it. Bodies and crazed countenances filled with corrupt flesh and unclean fluids. Why equip them with such grotesquely ample breasts and posteriors? The gods must have been drunk the day they created the female sex. I suppose they had to make do with what they had on hand, with no regard to common decency. A small consolation.”

  Setsura said dryly, “A small consolation as well that the same doctor who wiped out the Freaks with one hand, and with the other would diddle a woman to death, apparently knows what the word decency means. Well, there’s nothing like throwing yourself into your work. Bitching and moaning about this vale of tears will get you nowhere.”

  Mephisto sighed, an altogether human affectation that Setsura knew no one else would ever hear.

  “So, has he come back?” Mephisto unexpectedly asked.

  “Whoa,” said Setsura, patting his heart. “Gave me a start there. How’d you know?”

  “This is Demon City.”

  “And you are the Demon Physician.”

  “As I am now,” he said with a faint smile, turning to face the windows.

  The windows covered the wall opposite. The examination room was flooded with light. It was a room with a view, though the view was not much to look at. The cracks crisscrossing the grounds of the hospital had been sealed with concrete epoxy supplied by Yoneda Industrial. For over a decade now, the piles of rubble covering the adjacent lots had been taken over by a carpet of noxious dark green moss, punctuated by gaudy purple flowers and spotted stalks that peeked out from gaps in the debris.

  The building that Mephisto and Setsura occupied had been spared damage, not because of superior earthquake-resistant construction or sheer luck. But as with the other few structures fortunate enough to have survived, because the Devil Quake “decided” not to.

  At this time of day, the light streaming in from outside seem tinted with a thin film.

  “Looks like rain,” the doctor said in a melancholy voice, though the kind of melancholy that made women—who knew nothing else about him—swoon.

  “The rainy season, huh. I hate this time of year.” The man in the black slicker shrugged.

  “I hardly think so,” said Mephisto. “Rain and gloom and neon go well together in this city.” He glanced back at Setsura. The braid of gold laying against his chest cast off a wavering light. His deep black eyes reflected the image of the young senbei shop owner. “We�
��ve known each other a long time, Aki-kun. So tell me, where did you come from? Where are you headed?”

  “We’ve known each other a year,” Setsura answered in a wary voice. “But maybe a little coffee will loosen my tongue.”

  “Just a second.”

  From the door she’d just exited, the nurse entered carrying a tray bearing steaming mugs. With a glance at Setsura, she said, “Our very best coffee.”

  “Blue Mountain blend?”

  “That is correct.” She turned to Mephisto, “You have some unexpected guests.” She put down the tray and flicked her forefinger across her cheek, a gesture since ancient times used to indicate the presence of yakuza.

  “Oh?”

  Mephisto twisted the ring on his finger. A crisp projection of the hospital waiting room appeared on the wall in the corner of the room. It was clearly a blank wall. But the floor, the pillars holding up the ceiling, the couches and the people sitting on them had depth and dimension and a completely solid feel.

  The high-resolution holographic image revealed the worried expressions on the faces of the patients and the hard, scowling countenances of the muscle-bound enforcers wearing garish aloha shirts and white kung-fu shirts standing guard at the foyer doors.

  Setsura said, “They sure don’t look like patients.” This Setsura was the curious senbei shop owner. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Whatever might be wrong with it only made it that much more interesting.

  “Do they have an appointment?” Mephisto asked.

  The nurse said, “A gang based in Hyaku’nincho, the Killer Light Society. It seems their repeated demands for operating fees and protection money have gone unanswered.”

  “So they made you an offer you couldn’t refuse, eh? Oh, how scary.”

  The same young man who’d just fought off three monsters while barely breaking a sweat—a genie who’d give one of those ancient Greek gods a run for his money—couldn’t resist a touch of portentous melodrama. Or comic relief.

  “You’d better hurry up and put some clothes on that girl and hand her over. As a parting gift, I’ll throw in an Aki Senbei five-thousand yen sampler value pack.”