Maohden Vol. 2

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Setsura glanced back over his shoulder. People were entering the arena through doors separate from the main gates. They weren’t spectators, but the organizers, no doubt objecting to him making off with their prize. In the light of the bright spotlights, the caseless submachine guns glimmered in the hands of the security detail.

  “Freeze, buddy.”

  “Or we’ll shoot.”

  They spoke like cops out of an old crime drama. The guns barked fire. The ground around Setsura’s legs kicked up clouds of dust.

  At the same time, a stir shot through the crowd. Clamoring voices and pointing fingers.

  Setsura looked up and said to no one in particular, “Shall I give it a shot?”

  The air whispered. The spectators camped around the spotlights heard a much louder reverberation. The unsteady sway soon prompted cries of alarm. The three spotlights toppled forward, the electrical wires sparking and arcing.

  The Coliseum plunged into darkness, followed by the sounds of steel and glass smashing together and the shouts and cries of the security detail crushed beneath them.

  Several minutes later, when the emergency searchlights came on and guards wearing night vision goggles burst into the arena, the young man wrapped in darkness and the girl had disappeared into thin air.

  Chapter 2

  Beneath the concrete sky, the air was filled with night. The darkness wrapped around the pillars and the mountains of debris propping up the building cast an oppressive, leaden pall across this world.

  Footsteps emerged from one corner of the seemingly infinite black. Heavy footsteps, evidence of substantial weight and volume. Even the concrete floor swayed beneath their tread.

  Two shadows emerged from the gloom, Gento Roran and Siegfried’s enormous frame. But what an awful state the giant was in.

  Down the front of his body, from his throat down to his waist, the flesh was split apart as if he’d been vivisected by a surgeon’s scalpel. Not a single drop of blood oozed from the wounds. He surely must be dead, as his internal organs were missing as well.

  Propelling him forward could only be Gento’s necrodancing techniques. The problem was his head. It wasn’t his. Sitting on his shoulders, eyes staring forward like a dead fish, wasn’t Siegfried’s head, but Yamada’s.

  They stopped in front of the great mound of dirt, that by now reached out farther than the eye could see. A shadow suddenly descended from the ceiling and landed on the ground between the mound and Gento.

  “Hyota.”

  “It is I.”

  “I am tired. I will rest for a while.”

  “You are in need of a cleaning.”

  Gento touched his pale cheek. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t washed myself off since hiding inside this fellow and guiding him hither and yon.”

  His face was stained with Siegfried’s blood and gore. The odor about him was something else as well.

  “I shall prepare your bath.”

  “First, what is the state of my abode?”

  “We have at last grasped its location. We shall produce it in a day or two. But in the process, Gento-sama, I happened upon a most curious prize myself.”

  “Oh? Do you have it here?”

  “Yes,” Hyota said with a bow. His lower half was so short, and his upper half slumped so far forward, that when he bowed his head nearly struck the ground.

  Gento gave the giant behind him a long look. “My necrodancing should keep him together for the next day or two. The rest depends on that doctor.”

  “Then we should soon seek out this doctor?”

  “No, let’s hear about this prize of yours first.”

  Hyota nodded. He turned to the darkness behind him and beckoned with a jerk of his chin.

  A pale figure appeared on unsteady feet. She had short-cut hair and a strong air of physicality about her. A breast spilled from her ruffled blouse. The purple hickeys dotting not only the breast, the nape of her neck, and the bewitching thighs jutting from her hot pants told the story of her forcibly debauched state.

  This was Azusa Sasaki.

  “Oh, another girl.” Gento indicated the giant holding the head. “Store it where it won’t rot. And continue seeing to my abode. I do not doubt that others will come looking for it. There will be no end to those wishing to arouse my ire.”

  “As you wish.”

  “This girl has something to do with Setsura?”

  “Yes. Her name is Sasaki, the younger sister of that reporter. Apparently, Setsura Aki-sama was having her watch this area.”

  “Sasaki?” Gento narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Can’t quite place it, but the name sounds familiar. Fine, let’s have a little chat.”

  “As you wish,” said Hyota, already slipping back into the shadows. Gento alone sensed his presence vanishing from among them.

  “Quick little guy,” Gento said with a small smile. He waved his left hand at the giant behind him. “Be on your way. Hyota has prepared a place for you to stay.”

  He must have already trained his human doll to bow. The giant stiffly leaned his top half forward as if he was carved out of clay, slowly straightened, and left in the same direction where Hyota had disappeared into the gloom. The concrete floor notwithstanding, the giant’s heaving footsteps reverberated like a bass drum and soon faded away.

  Gento cast a cool glance at the woman, her large breasts bared. “This way,” he said, gesturing toward the mountain of dirt.

  He didn’t resort to his devil wires. Azusa was acting of her own accord. But like being reeled along by an invisible line of demonic will, she followed him and climbed the mound.

  “Lie down.”

  Azusa called to mind those strange and overpowering sensations. Made the plaything of that weird “family” beneath the convenience store in East Goken. Penetrated, fellated, bathed in their bodily fluids, her face and breasts stroked and painted like brushes by their cocks.

  She’d burned with humiliation at first, and then abandoned herself to the dogged assaults, Hyota and the father in particular. They went at her long and hard. The middle-aged man had the hands and moves of an accomplished womanizer, making her loins burn.

  “Fuck me already!” she’d demanded of them.

  Hyota made sure she was, as new and satisfying as her first time ever was. Big and hard. His “rod” impressed on her all the more as he raked the inside of her pussy. She seriously thought he was going to wear her out. The unbelievable stimulation wrenched from her bawdy cries.

  Father and son stood by and watched with looks of condescending lust. She didn’t care. Her mind was elsewhere. Pleasure ruled over all. If that man told her to kill Setsura, she could imagine doing so willingly.

  When Hyota was done, the “father” and “son” stood in front of her to be serviced. Azusa took them in her mouth in turns. The kid told her to do him with her breasts. She could do nothing other than comply.

  She lay down and he climbed on top of her. She lifted up her breasts and held his cock between them. “Nympho bitch slut!” the kid practically wailed.

  “That’s me,” Azusa rejoined.

  The kid practically screamed a war cry as he came, gushing between her breasts and spilling across her neck and lips, where she still held his father’s erection in her mouth.

  The kid slathered his cum across her chest and breasts. The spectacle moved the father to groan and shoot his warm, wet wad against the back of her throat.

  After that, Hyota took her down the moonlit road to this underground grotto. She hadn’t walked here. Hyota carried her on his back. She could have pounded on him mercilessly from that position, but the inclination never came upon her.

  His strange skills and the aura about him quenched any thoughts of humiliation and revenge. The fierceness of the assault and the pleasures that followed left her in a state of acquiescence.

  He piggybacked her along at terrific speed. The wind whistled in her ears. The red eyes peering out from the ruins quickly vanished behind them. T
his must have been the same creature that bore the midwife to the estate of Setsura’s father.

  And now she was on a mountain of dirt in a large manmade cave, face to face with the young man who must be running whatever this operation was. Setsura’s enemy. The guy in charge of the men who’d assaulted her.

  Even knowing all that, she couldn’t bring herself to begrudge him. A bizarre state of mind for a tough, no-nonsense broad packing a .44 Magnum.

  Within the curtains of gray gloom surrounding them, the faint light illuminated the dirt mound and the man beside it.

  “Lie down,” he said again.

  He spoke in a rather gentle voice, not irritated or commanding. Azusa looked at him and did as he said.

  The top of the mound was cramped and narrow. Her head and back barely covered the peak. Her legs rested against the downward slope. The pleasant chill of the soft, raw dirt seeped into her exposed shoulder. It must come from deep within the earth.

  It wasn’t damp or moldy. Though the underground room was dry, this came as a surprise to her. Azusa let out a long, slow sigh.

  “Beginning today, we have let in the light of the moon. Do you understand?”

  The faint light brushing aside the darkness was moonlight then. Peeling her eyes, she had seen nothing on the way here. The illumination in the room flowed in from above. Azusa couldn’t help thinking that it was most befitting the young man as well.

  Gento looked into her eyes and said, “Hyota tells me often, but strange things are happening around and to me.”

  A peaceful face, Azusa thought. Strange things—strange that she could feel so calm around him. He must have her under his spell.

  This was Demon City, after all.

  “What you do after this is no concern of mine. Simply answer my questions. And I would beg a bit of your heart.”

  Azusa blinked. Gento’s request made no sense to her. A bit of her heart?

  “Where is Setsura?”

  The words suffused into her blood like the fragrant pollen from a bouquet.

  “Um, but first,” Azusa said at length, “there’s one thing I need to know.”

  “What is that?” said Gento, not at all taken aback.

  “You and Setsura-san—what are you intending to do with this city? What is this seal thing?”

  “Hoh. You know more than you let on. But I will answer your question. We are, for all intents and purposes, struggling for hegemony of this city. Put in more simple terms, the promise is whoever dies first, the other automatically takes control.”

  “Take control of the city? Then what do you do with it?”

  “I have no idea,” Gento said readily.

  “You have no idea?”

  “I do not. Nor was the end game clear from the start. Since Setsura and I were very young, we heard the tale told over and over. But which one of us would rise to preeminence, and afterwards, what astounding things would then take place, is anybody’s guess. Even now it remains little more than conjecture.”

  “When you were very young,” Azusa echoed blankly. “So you’re telling me this was all set in stone that long ago?”

  One city had no need of two genies. Supposing that Shinjuku itself was being offered up as the instrument by which the one could extinguish the other, some great mystery or miracle must be in the offing. But what did it mean to seize control of Demon City? And what would happen next?

  “And yet despite all that, you two are fighting it out without actually knowing for sure?”

  “That is what soldiers do. We are nothing more than the pawns being played on the chess board. Setsura and I have had this conversation before.”

  “Gento Roran and Setsura Aki—” Azusa muttered in something of a daze.

  When—in what era—were the cruel wheels of fate binding these two young and beautiful genies set in motion? And when would they come to rest—and in what shape and form?

  Like the wan blue light around them, knowing about an unknowable war and its unforgiving conclusion wrapped Azusa more in sadness than in fear. When all was said and done, what then?

  “Stop trying to figure us out or empathize. Simply answer the questions.” Gento’s voice seeped into her heart like the cool dirt. “Feel the ground beneath you. Do not answer me. Answer the earth. It mingled with my abode for fifteen years. Obstructed by the boorish concrete, it touched the earth directly. I will listen to the earth as well, and extract fiction from fact.”

  Azusa thought back to her junior high school days, when one of her teachers taught them about Gaia and the Mother of All Creation. All that she was fused into the chill of the soil, became that something else whispering to her blood.

  Of other memories, other individuals. The darkness covering them within those cramped confines. And inside, the writhing tentacles of the teaching machine.

  Floating white against the curtain of the night, black thread-like lines raked across its face: eyes, a nose and mouth. The face of a man beneath a tousled head of hair—that seemed to disappear into the shroud of darkness. In fact, Azusa soon understood, it had been cleanly severed.

  The head of an old man, as easily sixty as a hundred years old. Gento’s father.

  “The earth is your ally,” said the pale lips, “holding fast to the history and knowledge of the Gento clan down to the last drop. You must wear that knowledge like your own clothing. Fifteen years before, you bid farewell to the sound of the wind and the rain, the warmth of the sun, and grasped hold of victory instead. You are no longer the man you once were, capable of destroying the Aki clan in ways I never could. I know. And so it must be. Because—”

  “Because—”

  By the time Azusa’s interrogative and the old man’s voice overlapped each other, the darkness had suffused the young woman’s body.

  Chapter 3

  It was three o’clock in the morning when the doctor got back to the examination room.

  This was the time of day when the night made its futile last stand against the impending dawn. A time of day beyond the command of ordinary mortals. The ravenous, twin-headed dogs vanished from the streets, as did the patrol cars of the commando police.

  Only once, five minutes before, near the precincts of Hanazono Shrine, had the doctor raised his head toward the sky. “This night is not the night of the falcon.”

  The beauty of his face as he muttered those words was fairer than that of any fairy princess, who would think herself more akin to the frog in its pond by comparison.

  His gaze soon returned to the road ahead, his cape fluttering out behind him.

  The room was dark. Entering any of the other exam rooms, a sensor would switch on the lights automatically. But here the doctor’s own will ruled over all. In any case, he was a man more suited to the dark than the light.

  He sat in a hard chair in front of the desk. A low voice welled up behind him. “I still don’t know where you live. You are a man with strange tastes.”

  The doctor didn’t turn around. “Home is where the heart is, isn’t that what people say? More importantly, you seem to have run off with the grand prize.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  With a flick of his right index finger, light sent the dark fleeing. The doctor turned around. He had two patients. A girl wrapped in an ink-black slicker lying on the examination table, and the young man in black sitting in the chair next to her. A face that suffered nothing in comparison to the doctor’s own visage.

  Setsura Aki.

  “You caused quite a commotion,” Doctor Mephisto scolded his night visitor. “The spectators rioted. The remaining security guards fanned the flames. Four died. The sponsors will offer up someone’s head on a platter to atone for the fiasco. Literally.”

  “I figured if you were there, all would be well,” Setsura said indifferently. Perhaps because he was still him, his whole being seemed sheathed in icy steel. “You bring the dead back to life, even when they don’t want to. That’s why you are the Demon Physician. It’d be no di
fferent if he showed up at your door.”

  “I suppose so.” A faraway look came to Mephisto’s eyes.

  “He fled with the giant’s corpse and the head of the kenpo master. Add yourself to the mix and what follows isn’t that hard to imagine. The question is how you will proceed?”

  The question being whether he would take Gento up on his proposal.

  “I am the Demon Physician,” Mephisto answered clearly and plainly. With that, any further discussion on the matter was dispensed with.

  “The girl’s name is Mayumi.” Setsura shifted his gaze to the girl lying on the table, drawing slow and even breaths.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I called your office, asked if you were seeing any patients presenting with particularly peculiar symptoms.”

  “And you got a ready answer?”

  Setsura nodded. “They are a well-disciplined bunch.”

  “They need to be more disciplined about divulging the contents of a patient’s records. Ah, well. Their standing orders are to go to any lengths to meet your needs. So when will you act similarly out of consideration for my needs?”

  His eyes sparkled with a devilish, even lascivious light.

  Setsura said with a wry smile, “Have you learned anything more about this girl’s condition? Seems she sends every man she sleeps with straight to Heaven. And not in a good way.”

  Mephisto shook his head. Not a speck of that lascivious light was left in those black pupils. “I’ve made use of every resource I have at my disposal and have still come up empty. Nothing unusual shows up in her DNA.”

  “Anything in her family tree?”

  “I haven’t discovered any abnormalities going back two generations. No more data is available from before then.”

  “If the Demon Physician can’t figure it out, I’ll have to settle for a Voodoo Doctor. Any thoughts about what is going to happen to her next?”

  Mephisto shook his head. That alone was enough to dash his hopes. “Is she the seal?” Mephisto asked, turning his attention to the examination table.

  “Ignorance is bliss in my case,” Setsura said bluntly.

  “I guess I’ll have to ask Gento.”