Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition Page 9

  “I remember well enough. If I hand it over, you will always come back to me. And we will get to know each other to my heart’s content.”

  “I’ll be taking that other me with me.”

  Princess’s fierce gaze shifted to the Dancing Fiend with the wounded hand. “All right,” she said.

  “You’re not going to get in our way after this?” Setsura insisted.

  “I swear.”

  “And don’t come tagging along. And no tricks, traps or detours.”

  “I understand.” A wry smile contorted the face of the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “Really.”

  “You are an annoying man at times. Do you want me to break my oath?”

  “Got it.” He put his arm around the prime minister’s shoulder and helped him to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  The three made their way to the door. Passing by Princess, Setsura gave her a good hard look, but her alabaster face didn’t react in the slightest.

  Only when the door closed did she turn around. She said, her voice like warm honey, “Struggle all you want. The spell I have cast over you cannot be undone by the world out there. You will return to me, Setsura, before the nuclear fire of that missile devours you, to this world and to my embrace.”

  Chapter Two

  Mayor Kajiwara had sat hunched forward in his leather chair since the night before. Finally he leaned back and said to the man standing next to him, “Hey, what’s the time?”

  Thirty minutes before, Deputy Chief Tanomo had raced over from police headquarters. He and the mayor were the only two men in the room. “It’s just past eleven forty-five.”

  The mayor glanced at his own left wrist. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  Life flooded back into his pale face and eyes. He truly believed that as long as he kept himself in one piece, Shinjuku would never fall apart. But as the last remark clearly demonstrated, the accumulated fatigue of the last several days was slowly eating away at him.

  “Fifteen more minutes. The gates are still locked down?”

  “Yes. Several of our officers were wounded in the latest skirmish.”

  “And none of them?”

  “The SDF has got the armor, that’s for sure. Seems there are monsters infiltrating the ranks. Word is a commander on the other side got an eye and the back of his head chewed off.”

  “How unfortunate,” the mayor said, with a serves-’em-right smile.

  The deputy chief of police couldn’t help but take that as a good omen. They were about to be boiled alive, and the mayor would be meeting it with his fists raised. There wasn’t another ally in this world worth having at the moment.

  But the reality of their situation couldn’t escape him for long. Tanomo said, “Is there anything the citizenry can do right now about the sealed gates?”

  “We’ve made thirty or forty calls this morning alone, lodging protests with every outside agency we can think of. I’ve got people still on it. But I don’t think it’ll do much good at this juncture. This is Demon City. When you think about it, what can be worse than simply living here?”

  “Well—” Not certain of how to answer that, Tanomo’s voice trailed off. Then he said, “Well, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

  Though even he’d admit it sounded pretty dumb when he said it. In less than fifteen minutes, a nuclear blast was going to unleash a tidal wave of energy on their heads. Useless chest-thumping wouldn’t do much good.

  “There are rumors of a nuclear missile strike, probably because of all the clairvoyants in this town. Most people don’t seem inclined to believe it. Or if they do, figure whatever will be will be. Compared to the reality they face every day, it simply isn’t a very realistic threat. I suppose that could be called one of the redeeming graces of this place.”

  “I agree completely.” The mayor stretched. The springs in the seat of the executive chair creaked.

  “And the missile?” Tanomo asked, returning to the more pressing matter at hand.

  “We’ve run the gauntlet with the outside world and have nothing to show for it.”

  “In any case, I suppose not dying in a screaming panic provides some consolation.”

  “Sure.” Kajiwara massaged the knot out of his right shoulder. He got a La Aurora Double Corona out of the cigar case on his desk and bit off the end. With a cool and collected gesture, he lit up his last smoke and puffed away like a smokestack, as the deputy chief of police looked on admiringly.

  The mayor drew a deep drag and exhaled a small cloud of purple smoke that drifted through his office. The cloud floated intact toward Deputy Chief Tanomo. Before he could react, a blue-white flash bolt of lightning struck him on the shoulder. With a stifled cry, he leapt backwards. A pencil laser sprang into his hand from the cuff of his right sleeve.

  Kajiwara held up his hand. “Relax, relax.”

  “What the hell was that?”

  “A practical joke. Thought I’d break the tension, that’s all. A new item in the souvenir shops. It’s called a Thunder Cloud. A pleasant sensation?”

  “More like getting scalded,” said the deputy chief of police, pressing a hand against his smoldering shoulder and doing his best to contain his anger.

  “Hmm. Sorry about that. A stern warning should be delivered that the voltage regulator is out of adjustment. No wait, make that a fine. It’ll help balance the budget. Seems every knickknack shop in Shinjuku has contracted to stock the things.”

  The cigar Kajiwara was holding, and other items of the sort, could just as well be manufactured outside Shinjuku. But when it came to toys on the somewhat dangerous side, “Demon City” had established itself as an important brand name. Shinjuku’s Office of Trademark Licensing received requests not only from within the ward but from around the world.

  The foresight of the first mayor of Demon City, who’d registered the name, was praised to this day.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Mayor,” the deputy chief of police interrupted him, as he applied a handkerchief to the injured place.

  “What?”

  “I may not look it, but I have been going out with the patrol officers twice a week. Not to pat myself on the back, but I’ve walked the beat around the DMZ a good thirty times.”

  “Thirty-four.”

  Kajiwara’s reply caught the veteran police officer momentarily off guard. Tanomo cleared his throat and broke the spell. “Go there ten times and you will lose your fear of death. Instantaneous death by nuclear missile might even be said to be easy by comparison. If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Mayor—”

  “I’d rather not have to think about that place right now,” Kajiwara said, as if chewing on a bitter pill.

  Allow himself to vent his personal feelings in ward council meetings, and since the beginning of his administration he would have been clamoring to pour every exorcist and battalion of shock troops in the world into Chuo Park. Except that, as the chief executive of Shinjuku, he’d signed off on ten times the regular budgetary expenditures in order to preserve this most dangerous place on earth.

  Thanks to its name and existence alone, tours around the high perimeter fence brought in twenty times as much traffic every year as visitors to the Imperial Palace, not to mention the fees collected in the process.

  “What were you saying?”

  “In other words, I guess what I’m asking is, in the face of such premonitions of death, why are all the people so resigned to what is going on? From what I can see, it’s something more than mere bravado or a drug-induced euphoria.”

  “So we’ve played all our trump cards and still lost the pot.” Kajiwara swiveled his chair around to face the window, gazing at the sky or the city. As a spectator, he would first look at the sky.

  “And what about those cards up the sleeve?”

  Kajiwara couldn’t help feeling more than a tad self-satisfied at the echoes of inquisitiveness and relief in the man’s studied tone of voice. A moment later, that sense of satisfaction rapidly faded, an
d the ineffable emptiness pressed against the mayor’s abdomen.

  His gaze shifted to the distant rooftops of the city. Somewhere out there was his beautiful last ace. “There’s one left.” He might as well do the one thing he hadn’t done since the day he’d come to this city. “Namu Hachiman Daibosatsu. Glory to the God of War, incarnation of the Great Buddha. Let the dream of Setsura Aki come true.”

  The intercom buzzed, bringing his prayers to an end. “What?”

  In an atmosphere thick with foreboding, “Setsura Aki would like to see you.”

  Kajiwara’s eyes flew open wide. “Is he alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Kajiwara felt like collapsing on the spot, but somehow kept it together. “Show him in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the time between the intercom cutting off and the door opening, Kajiwara was sure his secretary was playing a bad joke on him. Setsura could not be alone.For the sake of his own good name, he could not have returned alone. And yet he entered the room alone.

  Chapter Three

  Upon leaving the village, the three figures came to a halt. Two of them were Setsura and one of them was Prime Minister Kongodai. The man in the black slicker pointed with his right hand, the direction Princess promised would take them out of this world.

  The third figure, also wrapped in black, slowly set off, walking less like he didn’t feel good than as if he’d been severely wounded.

  Watching him disappear down the desolate road, the man in the slicker turned to the naked man next to him, who was presumably Prime Minister Kongodai. With Setsura in the lead, the two of them set off toward a forest on the left.

  In the shade of the overhead branches and leaves, the man in the slicker waved his right hand. Something leapt out from his fist and wound around a branch. The two of them rose magically into the air.

  Flying through the air like a pendulum, he flicked his wrist and waved it again, interrupting their arc, shifting their motion, carrying them deeper and deeper in.

  Many minutes later, at the end of a long arc, he spotted his objective—the manor house standing elegantly near the shores of the lake—and allowed himself a casual smile.

  Princess’s abode.

  The pendulum reached the extent of its arc. He cast out another wire—and suddenly felt no resistance on the wire. Falling from a height of over fifteen feet, they landed softly and silently thanks to him casting out a second safety line. The naked man safely under his arm, he focused his attention on the severed end.

  “But of course you chose my home,” said a voice behind him. He turned around to find Princess hovering ten feet in the air, gazing down at him. “Or rather, Doctor Mephisto’s. As you surmised, he’s the kind of chap who could fashion a new tongue. Or even without a tongue, could make the silent speak. But I won’t allow it.”

  “That’s not what we agreed,” Setsura objected, placing the prime minister behind him. “Who’s the big bag of wind who positively swore not to interfere once we left?”

  “Once you left, indeed. But here you are hurrying to find Mephisto. I can interfere all I want without contradicting myself in the slightest.”

  “You’ve got your directions mixed up.”

  “How’s that?” said Princess incredulously. “Then who was just headed that way? I thought it a simple feint, but supposing you sent your double there doesn’t change anything. Are you Setsura or the Dancing Fiend?”

  “As far as that goes, you’re not following him, are you?” Setsura grinned.

  A small spark of doubt flared in Princess’s breast. Soon after they’d left the warehouse, she exited via a window and followed them. As things stood now, Setsura must have concluded that returning with Kongodai would do no good, and so attending to his health would be the best move. The best man for the job was Mephisto.

  Outside the village, they’d split into two groups. Though the black-clad man must have been the Dancing Fiend, Princess couldn’t see the point of sending the ogre to the outside world. She sensed a diversion, but if he was going one direction alone, it was clear the other two would be going somewhere else.

  However a mystery this nonchalant young man was to her, she didn’t see him stooping to pointless ruses.

  A moment later, two possibilities occurred to her: the man heading to the outside world wasn’t the Dancing Fiend but was Setsura or the prime minister. From her vantage point, if Setsura could don the mask of the Dancing Fiend, then even the frail prime minister could be reborn as that beautiful genie.

  And yet the fact that they were headed towards her manor house told her that the prime minister must be the prime minister. And while the prime minister’s head hung heavy on his chest, mostly hiding his face, this Setsura was, at a glance, clearly Setsura.

  So Princess had followed them.

  Ultimately, she chose the two over the one because of the speed with which they had flown through the forest. Fretting over whether one was the ogre and the other was Setsura would only cost her time.

  But now that she was here, Setsura’s smile and words again raised doubts in her mind.

  “No matter who the other is, he will be of no use in the outside world, as long as you remain here. Give it up, Setsura. The only one welcome in my house is you.”

  “Sorry about this.”

  The air hummed. Red crosses covered Princess’s body from her head to her waist, from her right side to her left, and then disappeared.

  “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times,” Princess jeered. “It has no effect on me.” Her gleeful expression faltered. She tried to raise her arm but her hand didn’t move. “You—”

  “Now you are honestly fit to be tied,” Setsura teased in turn. “I can’t cut you, but I can bind you. I finally figured that much out. There’s still time. Mephisto should be able to fix him in five minutes.”

  “You son of a bitch. Let me go.”

  Princess writhed with all of her strength. But the tree the wires were wrapped around bent no further than her arms could stretch. No matter her supernatural strength, she couldn’t free herself. Knowing what happened during the fight at Mephisto Hospital, this was a trick only Setsura could pull off.

  “I really do wonder what would happen if I plunged a branch through your heart. But lucky for you,” he said, as if she really should be grateful, “I haven’t got the time right now to conduct any experiments!”

  Setsura threw an arm around the naked man—his head still hanging down—and jumped into the air.

  “Wait, dammit!”

  Princess’s cry quickly faded into the distance. The manor house was located at the edge of the forest.

  “I still gotta wonder if this is gonna work,” Setsura said to himself. He sensed something above him and looked up.

  “Yo,” Yakou said, thirty feet in the air.

  Black light burst from his right hand. With a snap of the little finger on his right hand Setsura released the wire, and the two of them sprang vertically upwards. The black shuriken buried itself in the ground, just as half of Yakou’s right wing sheared away, the work of the second wire cast off by his pinky.

  Yakou tumbled off balance. Setsura called out, “Into the woods! Princess needs you!” He fell back into the canopy of the forest, shifting out of the way before colliding with the branches.

  Glancing up at the sky, he set off at a run. Yakou was still after him. Seemed he could do well enough with clipped wings. Princess must have communicated through her telepathy the absolute urgency of stopping Setsura first.

  “He should be arriving soon enough,” Setsura reminded himself. All he had to do now was run out the clock.

  He dodged left. Yakou was hot on his heels. No matter where Setsura went, he would be waiting, his eyes burning with a monstrous blood lust. Yakou reached into the right pocket of his jacket and released a black round tube from his hand.

  As Setsura flew through the air, the seals broke apart and the tube became a swarm of black balls.
<
br />   “Shit!”

  Setsura’s slicker fluttered like feathers. Missing by a literal hair’s breadth, the balls struck the ground below. Flames billowed upwards, and not all at once.

  Striking the ground at an angle, the explosions spread out like a crashing freight train. In an instant the fire spread out, enveloping the trees and bushes. Every living thing seemed to erupt with incandescent light. The sounds and shapes of monsters and gremlins writhed and disappeared.

  Setsura spun his slicker as the wall of fire crested over him. He hoisted Prime Minister Kongodai onto his back. This was the only protection he had on hand. It repelled the flames. But some stuck.

  “Ouch! Dammit!”

  Running entirely on instinct, he twirled the slicker again and landed on the limb in front of him. Then looked back. “Good grief,” he said without even thinking.

  The pursuing inferno was no longer in pursuit. Ten feet behind him, a tree burned furiously. The hot wind struck Setsura in the face. “You okay back there?” he asked.

  His face still cast down, Kongodai didn’t answer. Confirming that he wasn’t burned anywhere, Setsura peered up at the sky. He couldn’t see Yakou. It wasn’t likely that Yakou had lost them in the flames. He was likely lying in wait with his next bag of tricks.

  “Where did you scamper off to, One Winged Yakou?” said Setsura, succumbing to a rare bit of name-calling.

  He cast out a wire behind him and got an improbable response. The wire had severed. Not only that, faster than he could renew the attack, some kind of fabric wrapped around Setsura and Kongodai and bound them to the branch.

  “So something still comes from the pricking of my thumbs.” Princess appeared from behind the tree in front of him and stopped in midair. “You are bound by a strip of my own clothing. The more you struggle the tighter it gets. And if you attempt to free yourself—”

  The report of a gun erupted from the base of the tree. A bullet grazed the branch over Setsura’s head.

  “You look familiar,” Setsura said to the man in the suit holding the firearm, Kongodai’s bodyguard, Sejika.