Losing this battle would mean New Humanity would be forced to completely submit to New World. For the sake of the dead, at least, he couldn’t afford to lose.
He made a tight fist beneath the table.
“Well, should we get started? Where did you—?”
Seizing the first move, he swung his leg and kicked the table upward.
The guests around them nervously shouted. Yuga’s surprised expression was soon masked by the table’s circular shape as it knocked itself over. Standing up, Rentaro planted his left foot on the ground, lowered his hips, and kicked the middle of the table with his right leg. From Yuga’s perspective, not only did the table block his field of vision—the obstacle was advancing upon him. There was no way he could dodge it.
—That conviction was why the sight of Yuga easily leaping high over the table and advancing upon his vision was something Rentaro failed to instantly react to.
Realizing he was about to unleash a flying kick, Rentaro promptly wrapped the tablecloth on the floor around his toes and kicked it up, sending it flying. The white cloth billowed in the air, catching Yuga’s body. The moment he used every bit of his agility to crouch down, Yuga’s kick scraped just past his ear.
Rentaro had only a moment to shake the sweat off before he adjusted his stance toward the cloth-covered, mummylike Yuga.
Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 16—
“How about…this!”
—Inzen Kokutenfu.
The roundhouse kick, delivered with all his might, slapped home against the side of the struggling Yuga’s head. He was sent into the air, crashing into an adjacent table. Plates of dinner meals flipped into the air, and the shrill sound of shattering porcelain rang through the lounge. The guests’ shouts were escalating into a panic.
He felt he had something good going. But, in the next moment, it was Rentaro yelping in surprise.
Yuga wasn’t down. He had carved a pair of large gouges in the carpet as the kick drew him back, but he wasn’t knocked down—he had blocked it. No forward vision at all, and he blocked it. Unless he was tapping directly into Rentaro’s mind, that shouldn’t have been possible.
His adversary finally tore the tablecloth off his body. The moment Rentaro saw his face beneath, his eyes opened wide enough to nearly tear his eyelids off.
A pair of geometric shapes were laid over his irises, both rapidly spinning.
“That…that’s crazy…”
Both his eyes are cybernetic? That’s like saying he’s—
“Oof. Guess you noticed, huh? Didn’t I tell you I was built to surpass you?” Yuga, the very picture of calm composure, pointed a finger at his right eye. “This is the 21-Form Enhanced, an improved version of the 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye. Compared to what you got, all of this model’s specs received major upgrades.”
“The 21-Form Enhanced…?”
Who did that?
The 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye, developed by Sumire, was just one reason why she was hailed as one of the Four Sages. Your typical member of the scientific community, as he understood it, wouldn’t be able to decipher even its basic workings.
As he stood there in a state of near-total desperation, he heard someone say, “Um, excuse me, sir…” from behind Yuga’s back. He was a muscular hotel employee clad in a black suit, clearly a bouncer or something of the sort, and now he was placing a hand on Yuga’s shoulder in a belated attempt to restore order.
“I can’t have you brawling in here, guys; you’re interfering with other—”
With a sharp blam, the man spouted a fountain of blood as he arced through the air, flipped over and unconscious the moment he hit the floor. The backward punch Yuga unleashed without even turning around smashed cleanly against his chin.
“Aaaaaaaaaahhhh!”
There was a series of ear-piercing screams as the hotel guests, their panic unleashed by the sheer bizarreness of the situation, began to swarm toward the revolving door at the hotel’s entrance like an avalanche. Amid the echoing screams and shouts, only Rentaro and Yuga remained quiet, a distance away from each other as opponent sized up opponent.
Yuga reached down to his waist and took something out. It was no coincidence, perhaps, that it was almost exactly where Rentaro liked to keep his gun.
In Yuga’s hand now was a Browning automatic revolver, high-powered. Yuga raised it up, cocked it, and pointed the barrel forward, his squinting eyes focused on his prey. Rentaro could feel the murderous rage already. The shrill drone of the alarm drifted away as his mind immersed itself in the situation. He swallowed hard, his heart beating like a drum.
Ignoring for the moment the question of why he even had cybernetic eyes, Rentaro decided to consider his position. His own artificial eye was built for gunners’ work—to help him predict the path of a bullet, from the barrel to the target. But if his foe had the same capability, how effective would that remain? There were fewer than ten meters between them, but to him, it may as well have been a yawning chasm.
Quietly, Rentaro closed his eyes.
Don’t get scared.
Along with his keen, natural eye, his artificial one began its high-speed calculations. He could feel a burning pain behind his eyelid as it began to heat up. As Rentaro’s vision began to go into a bizarre sort of slow motion with the overclocking of his eye, Yuga’s finger tapped against the trigger and slowly began to squeeze. For a single-action weapon, it had a uniquely long and sticky stroke, a trademark of high-powered revolvers. With his focus turned up to maximum, Rentaro could even hear the trigger spring creak as it was being compressed.
Soon, the bar attached to the trigger did its work on the sear, the hammer swinging its way forward, the firing pin inside the breechblock striking the bottom of the cartridge.
Then, with an explosive flash, the bullet spiraled its way out of the barrel with 339 foot-pounds of muzzle energy, plowing its way straight toward him.
Rentaro calculated his escape route and started moving.
The sight of hotel bystanders screaming and crawling out the hotel door in a panic was quickly noticed by Inspector Tadashima, whose crew of officers was secretly staking out the building from the outside.
“Superintendent!”
Hitsuma, accepting the radio call from his director’s van, replied an “All right” and nodded to the man beside him. “Inspector, the commissioner just gave the order to deploy a Special Assault Team.”
“An SAT?! Do we really need to go that far?”
Hitsuma brought in a blue-uniformed special-forces captain. They saluted each other.
“Captain, I need you to bring your guys in. Take the fugitive dead or alive; just get the situation under control ASAP.”
“B-but, Superintendent Hitsuma, Lady Seitenshi said to not hurt the fugitive as much as possible…”
“I think we’ve got some wires crossed, Captain. I want you to shoot the fugitive down. You have my backup on that.”
Just then, a single gunshot rumbled its way across the hotel, as Rentaro Satomi and an unknown teenage boy began to wage battle in the middle of the lounge.
“What in the…?” Tadashima groaned.
The battle proceeded in bizarre fashion. The mystery kid would fire off a succession of shots, and Rentaro would step to the side or back to dodge them all. Not only that, but whenever there was an opening, he’d edge that much closer to his opponent. By the fifth shot, he was at point-blank range, the point where fists would decide the path of the fight.
Rentaro unleashed three punches from his arms. All of them would have ended the match right there, if they landed in the right place. The kid deflected them, retaliating with a high kick of his own. Rentaro bent his chin back to dodge it as he unleashed a horizontal chop designed to smash against his opponent’s throat.
It was a dizzying array of attacks, dodges, and further counters, like an elaborate martial-arts demonstration. The number of strikes offered by each fighter in the space of a single second made any side
observer’s head swim. They appeared to be looking at each other, but in a way, they were both looking somewhere much farther off. When he realized they were simultaneously dodging attacks while piecing together a strategy for their next ten strikes, Tadashima’s entire body shuddered.
This wasn’t the sort of battle any human being could tag into.
What in the hell is going on?
Tadashima slipped a hand inside of his suit and tightened his grip on the revolver in his holster. He was going in after the first SAT assault.
Not that Tadashima could have known, but there was no way a battle whose participants could conduct the entire thought process—observation, comprehension, action—behind each move in a hundredth of a second could ever be stopped by a team of regular people, whose comparatively paltry muscle-reflex time never had a chance of reaching below 0.20 seconds.
The core processors behind each of their cybernetic eyes calculated furiously, straining near their maximum output to find a hole to exploit.
But, gradually, the battle began to demonstrate a certain one-sidedness.
“Gah!”
Taking a kick that made it feel like he was about to be reunited with the contents of his stomach, Rentaro found himself falling over a nearby upturned table. A flurry of glass shards rained upon him.
“We’re working with different specs here, okay? Different specs.”
Ahead of him, he could hazily see Yuga, calm and content as he opened his arms to him. Rentaro gritted his teeth as he stood up, readying himself for battle on unsteady legs. Yuga, observing his actions in detail, snorted.
“I know, Satomi. You’ve applied force to your right hamstring, your right femoral bicep muscle, and the ulnar extensor and ulnar flexor muscles on your left wrist. You’re planning to feint with a left and strike me with a mid-level kick, aren’t you? That’s gonna be a poor move, though. Once we exchange blows for the thirty-seventh time, I’m going to smash your skull bone to pieces. Checkmate.”
Startled, Rentaro tossed his accumulated tactical analysis into his mental garbage can and began to conceive a new strategy.
“Oh, are you changing gears now? That’s gonna be even worse. If you lunge at me to try to pin me down, I’ll break your jaw in ten moves or less. Checkmate.”
“No…”
The short circuit taking place in his brain made it impossible for Rentaro to even formulate a plan. He found himself edging back in fear.
Yuga lowered his stance, a self-assured smile on his face. The moment he did, a team of blue-suited assault troops streamed through the entrance and windows behind Yuga, charging for both of them.
The SAT? Why?
This was going too fast. The alarm bell only just started ringing a second ago.
The situation was beyond Rentaro’s comprehension, but he could tell they weren’t exactly here to rescue him. He had to get out of there. Now.
At that moment, a move flashed across his brain like lightning. A move that could completely turn the tables.
So how about this?
Tearing through the skin on his right leg, he revealed his artificial limb, the black chrome shining brilliantly in the light. The striker hit the cartridge hidden inside his leg, the ejector kicking it away.
“Raaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!”
Leaving his body to the power of inertia, Rentaro kicked. His foot was aimed at the floor beneath the carpet. His Super-Varanium toes tore through the fabric, pulverizing both the marble beneath it and the bare concrete beneath that as it blew all the debris forward.
The results were akin to a directional anti-personnel mine, one with a lethal, unavoidable payload of shrapnel.
The rock and marble, now crushed into several hundreds, several thousands of shards, unerringly advanced upon the SAT troops and Yuga. Even one of them striking anyone’s head would cause a sure concussion—and if not, a few dozen of those striking Yuga’s armorless frame could very likely result in multiple bone fractures.
But, amazingly, Yuga covered up his face and plunged right into the storm of shrapnel. An innumerable amount of fragments pounded against his entire body. Blood flew. His clothes were ripped to pieces. But he still made it through the shockwave.
By the time he realized Yuga was at his chest, the heel of his palm right against his breast, it was all too late. The blood drained from Rentaro’s face as he witnessed the twisted look of joy on his opponent’s.
“I admire your performance, Satomi. Good-bye.”
He twisted his palm. A paralyzing pain took Rentaro, as if the torsion was applied directly to his internal organs. Picturing the cold hand of death clasping itself around his heart, he quickly spun his body, kicked at the floor, and flew back, avoiding lethal injury. Something heavy smashed into his back, knocking the air out of his lungs.
The next thing he knew, Rentaro had flown into an elevator car, panting for breath. Yuga was positioned for a follow-up strike. Reflexively, Rentaro jabbed his finger against the DOOR CLOSE button and the one for the top floor. The door closed so slowly, he wanted to scream—and Yuga was advancing on him the whole time.
Just as Rentaro thought his adversary disappeared behind the heavy doors, Yuga let out a shuddering kick to prevent his escape. With the sickening sound of twisting, crushing metal, the door began to dent inward.
The entire elevator car shook, bits of wall tile falling off and plinking against the floor. It took Rentaro some time to realize this disaster was engineered entirely by a single kick.
Still, after a moment or two of thought, the cable hoist installed at the top of the shaft apparently decided to haul the elevator up. The elevator rose with a slow, listless, but nevertheless constant force.
Rentaro gritted his teeth at the grinding pain as he rolled up the long-sleeve shirt he was wearing. The mark Yuga’s palm had left on his chest was a sickeningly deep shade of blue. What kind of strike could damage the human body so profoundly? All he knew was that Yuga meant that last move to be his finisher. If it had hit him full bore, he’d be dead right now.
That was the New World Creation Project.
“Damn it…!” He sighed deeply as he stared at the ceiling, languid.
Despite losing his prey, Yuga—eyes staring at the elevator’s floor indicator to see where Rentaro would escape—felt perfectly refreshed in his heart. The edges of his lips curled upward.
“The game begins, Satomi. Just try to escape this hotel alive.”
“Halt!”
Suddenly, a rather impolite voice flew at him from behind.
“Put the gun down and put your hands on your head!”
He narrowed his eyes, annoyed at the interlopers ruining the mood. As he expected, a large force had their eyes and guns pointed at him.
They were clad in blue, which nicely framed their black bulletproof vests and the visored helmets on their heads. The front line wielded handguns and riot shields, the troops behind them armed with submachine guns. It was the SAT.
Yuga very reluctantly put his left hand above his head, the right one pointing at a pocket in his light jacket. Receiving a nod of permission, he slowly, deliberately took out a card holder and threw it on the ground.
An SAT team member gingerly picked it up, fixing his gaze upon it. It contained a civil security license.
Yuga was not a Promoter, nor did he have an Initiator partner. It was a fake, given by his “employer” to make it easier for him to walk around armed in public, but the special-forces team would never have a chance to confirm that.
“Oh, what, you’re a civsec? What’re you doing here?”
“I heard about him escaping on the news. I spotted him on the street, and as a fellow civsec, I felt it was my duty to do something about this. Guess he got away, though.”
The SAT member tossed the case back at Yuga and waved him away. “All right, you can go. We’ll take over the scene.”
Yuga shrugged and walked toward the entrance. Just as he did, two detectives came through the revolving door. One was
clearly Hitsuma—tall and handsome, even from afar—but who was that worn-out old guy next to him?
Hitsuma clapped his hands to get the SAT troops’ attention. “All right, hurry up and cut off the elevator’s main and backup power. Once we trap Rentaro Satomi in there, you guys take the stairs up. I have another team coming down from the roof; we’ll close in on him from both sides. Do not let the fugitive get away.”
With a single order, the hall filled with noise as the SAT crew divided into two groups, one running for the emergency stairwell. As he passed by Hitsuma, Yuga took advantage of the loud footsteps to whisper into his ear.
“I’m ambushing Satomi from another point.”
“Don’t make this harder for me, Dark Stalker. Not even I can cover for you forever.”
“I know, Mr. Hitsuma.”
The whole interaction took place without so much as their eyes meeting. Once Yuga emerged out the revolving door, he found a small herd of police cars, their lights bouncing off every surface in the area around the hotel. A hot, sticky wind blew against his face, but it still felt weirdly refreshing to him as he looked up at the Magata Plaza Hotel, looming large in the night sky.
They had already allowed him to escape once. If Rentaro made it out of the hotel, the police’s reputation would be at stake. There was no doubt they’d pull out every stop to hunt him down.
From this point forward, Yuga’s adversary would be the SAT.
Rentaro slapped his cheeks to mentally refresh himself. He couldn’t sit in this car forever.
Before long, the elevators would shut off. They’d operate a circuit breaker or two, he figured, to make sure only his elevator would stop in place. This meant the car would turn into a giant metal tomb. He’d just have to sit there and wait for his arrest.
But how am I gonna get out of this hotel…?
Looking at the floor indicator, he found the hotel spanned a total of thirty-two floors. He pushed the 20 button, nearest to where he was now, and in a few moments, the door opened with a chipper beep.
Then the light in the elevator shut off, darkening his vision. Just as the door was about to close, it stopped cold for good. Rentaro had no time to be startled—he knew immediately what had happened. A bead of cold sweat ran down his back.
Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive Page 12
