Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  “But—this man is an enemy of my grandfather. He is an enemy of the whole world.”

  “Ryuuki-sama finds such aspects of himself no less abominable. He should stay here. In this city, in this house, if we cannot destroy him, we can at least let him sleep—or live—forever. No matter how accursed and defiled an existence he might have led, here he may pursue life and liberty, if not happiness. Is that not the meaning of Demon City?”

  The doll girl’s clear firm voice did not beg or plead, but only stated. But would it touch the hearts of these men in the grip of their murderous impulses—

  “He loathes himself—I can believe that is true.” Yakou glanced at Ryuuki. “But what do you do when he lusts after blood? When he rises again to his calling as Princess’s servant?”

  “At such a time, Tonbeau-sama and I—no, I alone—”

  She didn’t have to spell it out for him. Yakou looked down at her with sad admiration. “All right, then,” he said. “What about you?”

  “I could not ask for anything more.” Ryuuki placed his hand over the doll girl’s wound and then took it away. “How does that feel?”

  “Much better.”

  “You should take better care of yourself.”

  “Well, come along. What are you two going to do?” asked Tonbeau Nuvenberg, scooping the doll girl up with one hand.

  “I’m returning to the Toyama housing project,” Yakou said with an air of anxiety.

  “We need to talk about that incident. The general will remain here. Sleep well.”

  With Takako in her embrace, and holding the doll girl in one hand, Tonbeau left the room with Yakou behind her. Just before the door closed, through the remaining sliver of light she said, “You really came to the rescue. Much appreciated.”

  The darkness wrapped around Ryuuki, followed by a long stillness. Then a heavy, heartfelt voice said, “I saved another person. Me, of all people.”

  The story Yakou heard from Tonbeau shocked him more than any of his disgraceful memories. Her account of the “Toyama District Nuclear Incident” left him pale at first, gripped by despair and then anger.

  “Who is responsible?”

  “Hard to tell. I heard it from that girl. I don’t know all of the details myself.”

  “What about the survivors?”

  “The official damage and casualty reports haven’t come out yet. No word on who lived and who was vaporized. Nobody is living in the ruins now. A restricted land filled with a blue radioactive glow.”

  Yakou’s shoulders slumped. Tonbeau said curtly, “Save the despondency for later. Whoever tried to kill you all off did it because that woman and her gang showed up. They’re the bad guys here. Job one for you is dealing with them. As for the ones that actually pushed the button—revenge is best served cold.”

  “You’re probably right.” Yakou’s body shook, but he quickly regained control. “But I can’t sit around here twiddling my thumbs. Once we have dealt with them, I will apprehend the criminals and punish them in the most appropriate medieval manner.”

  “Good approach. That would be perfectly fine.”

  “Where is the box?”

  “Over yonder.” She jerked her chin past Takako’s cheek. “Doctor Mephisto’s got it.”

  “Then that is where I shall go.”

  Yakou got to his feet, for the time being thoughts of his colleagues dismissed from his mind.

  Tomoko Kanan had been studying its movements for the better part of an hour. As if brushing aside the thin darkness hanging about her like a veil, the finger stroked the surface of the wooden box.

  That finger filled her whole view—its entrancing gracefulness—every word she could think of related to beauty floated through her mind and evaporated like mist. None of them fit, none were truly appropriate. It had taken her less than an hour to curse her impoverished vocabulary.

  The hand stopped. And time around her started again.

  “Interesting,” said the white silhouette.

  Tomoko could have sworn she heard the gloom around them moan in turn. We too wish to become that silhouette’s shadow. We wish to trace the outlines of that figure.

  “Can you open it?” Tomoko asked.

  And then started a bit herself. This was a question that no one should ask the hospital director. It was like asking him if he could cure a patient.

  Mephisto backed away from the table holding the box without answering and sat down in an armchair.

  The faint creak of the spring brought her back to herself.

  “It is as you say.” Mephisto rested his eyes on Tomoko. That was enough to make this university professor forget about those porcelain hands. “This box is definitely it. However, opening it would take as much time and effort as sealing it did.”

  “Even you—”

  “Our enemy is four thousand years of Chinese history,” Mephisto said, in a manner that on any other day might suggest that even the Demon Physician had a sense of humor. But not today.

  Entranced by the movements of his hands, Tomoko had the sense of a slightly demonic air filling the large room and shivered. To start with, why was the room so dark?

  “In any case, the key shall reveal itself, as the day always follows the night. No, it has already come.”

  Mephisto’s eyes glittered. Tomoko shuddered. The gleam in his eyes had a particular crimson glint. She suddenly remembered why she had entrusted her daughter to this doctor.

  The chiming of the intercom interrupted her thoughts.

  “Mephisto here.”

  “A person has arrived wishing to speak with you. You don’t have any such appointments scheduled.”

  In which case, a meeting should be impossible.

  “Show him in,” said Mephisto, and hung up.

  He got up and circled around the chair Tomoko was sitting in. She felt his hands on her shoulders. She had heard of his particular dislike for the fairer sex. And yet she could not deny the flame of desire welling up in her chest.

  “All humans have throats, but yours is exceptional.”

  It took several seconds for the meaning to crystallize in her mind. Tomoko couldn’t move—mesmerized by Mephisto’s touch, and because of a different sensation.

  Fear. Who was this person?

  The hands let go of her. But for some reason she couldn’t turn around. A different presence entered the room. The magical miasma it emitted kept Tomoko rooted to the chair. Considering the distance to the director’s office, the brief amount of time taken getting from the receptionist’s desk to this room convinced her that this new guest was in no way Mephisto’s inferior.

  Then where did he stand?

  The presence came closer and stopped right behind her. And where was Mephisto? For the first time, she sensed him nowhere.

  “So it was here,” an old man said in a hoarse voice. “No matter where it goes, the connecting links will always join up. Finding the end point is only a matter of time and simple effort.”

  She strained her ears, but couldn’t make out Mephisto’s replies, only the enlivened responses of the old man in the course of what appeared to be a conversation.

  “I am very sorry, but this box is our lifeline. I ask you to return it as speedily as possible.”

  She could not hear what was said in turn.

  “And why is that?” Now there was a harder edge to the old man’s question. The next words came quickly. “Yes, joining our little band is altogether too great a risk for you. Do you want to know why? Even should the Demon Physician lose but one drop of blood, whoever drinks it would rule over him.”

  Tomoko’s whole body went rigid. Fear poured forth from the very pores of her skin.

  The air hummed around her. The hoarse voice cried out. At the same time, the room was flooded with light.

  “How do you find the illumination, Doctor?” he asked, the question rising in timbre from the dredges of pain to a shout of triumph.

  This was sunlight, Tomoko’s uncomprehending mind somehow gras
ped the simple fact. Not artificial sunlight. The sun that graced the sky of every season, that woke the living from their slumber and played across the farmers in their fields. That gleaming force of nature.

  Tomoko couldn’t begin to comprehend how he had gathered it, stored it, brought it with him, and now unleashed it. But she had the feeling that none of that was beyond the grasp of the man behind her.

  “Hoh! You cannot move, can you? Understandable in this sunlight. Become one of us and you will behold a world no mortal can see. But the toll on your freedom is high. I knew I could at least count on you, Doctor Mephisto, to maintain a grip on your wits while in the light. Well, then. I shall take the box and take my leave.”

  His voice approached the desk. A moment later, the sound of smug assurance turned into an exclamation of surprise.

  Unable to bear the mystery a minute longer, Tomoko sprang to her feet and whirled around. Before her eyes was an old man with a white beard. He was holding the box and writhing. The way his spine arched backwards, the box itself had sent a shock of pain through his arms to his body.

  Mephisto must have devised something since bringing the box here. He had only touched it. That those beautiful hands, that mystical loving touch, contained such awesome power was hard to believe.

  A small sun radiated forth from the old man’s chest. This glowing globe, this jewel pouring forth its vivid light, tumbled onto the floor. A golden arrow of fire shot down from the ceiling and straight though it. The jewel itself showed no changes at all.

  “Damn you—Mephisto—to do such a thing—in such a way—”

  Tomoko had never heard spoken such deeply held resentment in all her life. And never would again.

  The old man’s arms rose up, as if to smash the box against the floor.

  “Stop!” Tomoko cried out.

  “I won’t hand it over, Mephisto!”

  His hands waved back and forth. A cracking sound came from around his shoulders. Still holding the box, he jumped toward a corner of the room, where a bookcase was filled with volumes of unknown origins. All the more surprising was the elliptical opening that rippled across the surface. The box and the old man’s arms were sucked into it.

  One even stranger scene after the other. When Tomoko finally looked back at the old man, off in the distance came the sound of a door closing with a heavy thump.

  “Kanan-san,” Mephisto called out behind her.

  However overjoyed she was that he was back to “normal,” Tomoko felt a chill down her spine.

  “That ball of light, could you wrap it up with something? It is a bit too bright for me to handle right now.”

  There were a mountain of things she wished to ask him, but she put them all out of her mind. No matter what questions she asked and answers she got, this was all beyond her powers of comprehension.

  She couldn’t find anything useful in the immediate vicinity, so Tomoko took off her jacket and covered the little sun. She was afraid it might burst into flames. Nothing happened. This was light without heat.

  Mephisto approached through the shadowed darkness, not Tomoko, but the oval tear in the bookcase.

  “So this is the connecting link?” mused Mephisto, gazing down at the space, wavering like a patch of rough sea. “And what happens when the box connected to it is cast down it?”

  The intercom chimed. “Yakou-sama is here to see you.”

  Chapter Three

  When Setsura regained consciousness, the first thing he saw was the black rocky ceiling. He tried to sit up but couldn’t move a muscle.

  The reason why quickly became apparent. His body was covered with devil wires, strapping him to the earth like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians.

  “That little bitch. She’s the death of any party.”

  He quit struggling and gazed into space. Though he couldn’t move his hands or legs, strangely, he didn’t feel any pain.

  His eyelids dropped and he focused all his faculties on the invisible colors and the silent sounds around him. The sensations from his back and the scene before him said that he was still underground, in the culverts extending out from the underground water treatment facility.

  This was a natural cavern not constructed by human hands, or a hole dug long ago and abandoned.

  A small noise reached his eardrums, the sound of running water, an underground river or water still coursing through the ruins of the culverts and sewers. That life should go on in a place like this was hardly surprising in Demon City. It was always better not to jump to conclusions too quickly.

  Without any presentiment, a pale face gazed down on him from above. “Can you move?” the Demon Princess cheerfully asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, at least you didn’t drown.”

  “That was the dragon’s flood?”

  “Yes. Had I not intervened, you would have ended up another Dozaemon. Though that might have proved no less interesting an outcome.”

  “Never a dull day for this busybody of a princess.”

  Dozaemon was a famous sumo wrester who had drowned. The name had once been synonymous with all those who met their end in a similar fashion. Setsura couldn’t help being a little impressed that anybody in this day and age would use the metaphor.

  “I really could have drowned to death like that?” He smiled like a flower. “If that’s what you want, then let’s do it and get it over with already. Why come to the rescue?”

  “Because such a demise would hardly begin to assuage my feelings. You are the only man who ever severed me end to end.”

  “What’s with this personal grudge business?” Setsura said with an air of disdain. “Man, I don’t get women. Always obsessed with the details, never seeing the big picture.”

  “Why do you keep getting in Kikiou’s way? Is that your way of saving this city?”

  “Speaking of which—” Setsura paused and thought for a moment. “That doctor—the one who went all in with General Ryuuki—made it my job. And then he went and got mixed up in all this mess and became one of you.”

  “According to Kikiou, he did it all in a quest for knowledge. What do you think?”

  “Doctors and long-lived women remain a mystery to me.”

  Princess laughed. “You will continue to pursue me on account of a man like that?”

  “You are not a friend of me and mine.”

  “Hmph. You mean that witch?”

  Princess frowned, the kind of frown that would make a masochist come. “Pursuing me to revenge such an insignificant speck of a life sounds an awful lot like a personal grudge to me.”

  “I suppose so,” Setsura confessed.

  “At any rate, you are a strange one. Such a pretty face on a head filled with such puzzles. It’s like you spend every day staring at the sky watching the clouds go by.”

  “I could almost agree with you. But every new day is another day going to the mattresses with the uruchimai.”

  Princess knit her brows. “What’s that?”

  “Ah, your education is lacking. The non-glutinous rice used to make senbei.”

  “Senbei?”

  Princess looked all the more confused, as if she was playing hooky the day the subject was covered in school.

  “A confection, a kind of rice cake seasoned with soy sauce and baked.”

  “Sounds like something girls would play house with.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What a way to earn your daily bread. You truly lead a pitiful life.”

  “Give me a fucking break,” Setsura shot back. He had no use for pity from the person he was trying to kill, though he wasn’t all that put out. Princess really did seem to be sympathizing.

  “Why not give that miserable life of yours a fucking break and come to my world? You could watch the clouds go by for ten thousand years. Bow down to me and ask nicely and I will make such wishes come true, just like that.” With a snap of her fingers.

  “That’s one thing I would rather you not do.
To tip one’s head to this personification of perverse pride is the last thing on earth anyone should do. Besides, I like making senbei. It’s fun. You should give it a try.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “So, now what? Boil me or bake me, whatever you want to do is up to you.”

  Were he some over-the-hill made man, the line would be pitch perfect. But coming in the languid words of a half-asleep youngster, the effect was altogether odd.

  “Fine. I’ll kill you then. But first, do you remember what I told you?”

  “When, and about what?”

  “About tormenting Takako and my promise that you would bend your knee to me.”

  “Oh yeah, that.”

  She might as well be talking to a brick wall, and it was getting her dander up. She drew herself to her full height. “Enough! If that’s how it’s going to be, then before getting down to business with you, I’ll bring Takako here. You will watch me drink her blood with your own two eyes. Then we’ll see what that smart mouth of yours has to say.”

  “Do you know where Takako-san is? She’s got a literally split personality right now, remember?”

  “I don’t know where she is here. I haven’t tasted her blood. But I do know where she is there. In my kingdom. What do you say? I’ll go fetch her right away.”

  “And I’ll take the opportunity to escape while you do,” Setsura said in a threatening manner.

  With a dismissive glance, Princess put her fingers to her mouth and whistled. In front and behind him, out of his line of sight, a pair of growls rose up from two creatures.

  “We have our watchers. Especially the one whose legs you cut off. I’m sure it didn’t take it kindly and isn’t about to forget. Besides, can you move? The devil wires binding you are your own.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “Then you’d better think of it before I get back.”

  The Demon Princess strolled away.

  “Hey!” Setsura called after her. “You know, it’s still light outside!”

  “Do you think me as vulnerable as my wretched servants?”