“Perhaps.”
The two crossed the compound to the gates. The road continued onto Meiji Dori, where they could catch a taxi. The ruins surrounded them. The sun blazed overhead. It was the kind of place where a person without an umbrella wished for rain.
Setsura stopped. From the top of the gentle hill rising to meet Meiji Dori, an old man dressed in white tottered towards them.
The thick wooden staff clutched in his right hand made him look like an old-time warlock. Setsura recognized him. Did the old man know who he was? He was close enough to make out Setsura’s features, but his comical gait didn’t change. The eyes centered in his creased face beneath snowy brows narrowed to slits.
A dozen feet away.
Setsura and Mephisto didn’t move. Not the slightest touch of stress colored the air. The scene resembled two polite young men on a narrow street yielding the right-of-way to a senior citizen.
Six feet away.
Glancing curiously at the desolation around him, the old man passed by without the slightest reaction, his face completely at peace. As he did, the staff and his right hand waved and vanished in a blur. The crack in the wind came only as the staff stopped moving and returned to its original position.
“Youngsters these days are a violent lot,” the old man lamented. “They’d think nothing of cutting a little old man to pieces. The world is surely coming to an end.”
And calmly continued on his way. Setsura softly asked, “You have business more urgent to tend to than me?”
The old man stopped. “I am already late for my next appointment. But I take it you will not let me proceed in peace.”
“As soon as you’ve cut through my threads.”
“Today has just been one thing after the next. I really must put my affairs in order. You, man in white, will you be getting involved as well?”
“If you wish,” Mephisto said with a bow.
“And seeing from whence you came, then you must know who I am?”
Setsura replied, “Yes. Sir Kikiou.”
“Well. You do have the jump on me there. This new city is not so welcoming after all.”
Mephisto smiled. “Do you find that terribly surprising?” His teeth glittered. He was not a man who smiled broadly for no reason at all.
“How much do you know about us?”
“Enough,” said Setsura. “You are a Hsia Dynasty warlock and alchemist. Daji, your mistress, is that woman of such malicious beauty. I am less certain about the other two.”
“I see.”
The old man’s staff kicked out like a rearing stallion. Taking into consideration the amazing speed and heft of the wooden staff, it could have crushed a man’s ribs like matchsticks.
Except that this man was Setsura Aki. Except that his opponent was Kikiou. He dodged right, a racing black shadow. But then came a dull thud as if his chest were the skin of a bass drum. Setsura flew backwards a good five yards and hit the road hard enough to dent the surface.
The paved surface of the road. Like it was wet sand.
Kikiou spun around. He furrowed his brows in a glancing expression of admiration. He could tell from the reverberations in his hands. Plastered against the outlines of the human impression in the road was a long black duster.
A whirlwind swept down the street. Kikiou rode it like a kite, spinning into the air and touching down a dozen feet away on the ruins hugging the right side of the street. He perched on the remnants of a rock wall as delicately as a bird, holding on only with his toes. The wall appeared ready to collapse at any second.
He slowly opened his eyes and focused his blazing gaze on his left shoulder, where a large slash divided the fabric. “You cut me,” the old man said, impressed. “You cut the robes of Kikiou. What manner of man are you? What manner of city is this?”
“This is Shinjuku.” Setsura stood next to the indentation in the pavement. He touched one hand to his chest. “I’m not one for making citizen arrests. Sorry, but I’m going to have to kill you.”
That hand didn’t require more than a hundredth of a second to shoot out the devil wire. But in that hundredth of a second, his finger froze. A qi Setsura had never experienced before erupted from Kikiou’s cuffs and from beneath the hems of his robe.
“Come,” the old man said, beckoning to him with a hand that looked like a piece of weathered wood. “Come into my fold, where my lovely sheep are waiting for you.”
A shadow fell across the sun. The dense, eerie vibe excited even the atoms in the air. Setsura and Mephisto couldn’t easily break through it.
“Oh, you’re not coming? If you do not, I shall take my leave. To a place that you will never find.”
He smiled invitingly, the way a spider smiles at a fly. Setsura stepped forward. He didn’t look at Mephisto. Mephisto wasn’t playing follow the leader. That wasn’t the way the two of them worked.
The psychic field enveloped him. Setsura heard a strange sound. The sound of a heavy revolving thing. A number of them. The sound came from beneath Kikiou’s clothing.
The pile of bricks swayed. Something pushed up at them from below. In the next moment, it reached maximum force and struck in a surging blow.
The bricks went flying. And that something rained down. Each twenty inches long and weighing six or seven pounds. Setsura quickly recognized them. Dozens of pink, naked babies.
“Can you kill them?” Kikiou asked. His unearthly qi smoldered like heat waves. “Kill something with a baby’s face and body? I’m sure you can.”
He pointed at Setsura. The message was clear. Setsura’s devil wire would cut their throats like a hot knife through soft butter. The babies scrambled toward him at an inhuman speed. For some perverse reason, the tottering figures retained all of an infant’s cherubic innocence.
Setsura spun the devil wire as he backed up, ensnaring the soft, pink skin. Given his abilities, that should have been sufficient to check their forward progress. But their hands and necks spouted blood.
Heartrending wails burst forth. A slight agitation arose in Setsura’s actions. The pink blobs fastened themselves to his shoulders and ankles and sank their teeth into his flesh.
The skull-piercing pain was enough to drive the bravest man momentarily insane. It diminished and then vanished. The ghastly children clutched their hands to their severed faces as they tumbled to the ground. They hadn’t seen the web of steel the senbei shop owner had wound around himself.
The babies stopped springing upon him, and looked up at him. The angelic countenances flickered only momentarily, revealing their true demonic forms. It was a monumental error on their part.
Before they could again put on their childlike masks, their little heads went flying. And what gushed out of their necks was not blood but dark blue fluid.
Setsura retreated. He could already sense Kikiou on the move. He glanced back. The murderous qi exploded around them. Setsura spotted Mephisto’s white-clad form on the road ahead.
The demon children dissolved into blue-black pools. In a few seconds the wind would sweep away the toxic miasma.
“What?” Setsura asked.
Mephisto held up his right hand. The thick shard of a needle jutted out from between his thumb and forefinger. One edge glittered like it had been severed with a knife. Setsura’s eyes brimmed with curiosity, wondering what fighting style it revealed.
“So you’re letting him get away?” he asked, a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
“Whatever cutting I intended to do, I ended up being cut instead. He’s not flesh and blood.” Mephisto looked at the street and then at Setsura’s shoulder. “You don’t want that poison circulating through your veins. We should open it up and burn it out.”
“I’ll take care of that myself, if you don’t mind.”
Setsura coughed. The result of the first blow Kikiou had delivered with his staff.
“That is some qi,” Mephisto diagnosed. “It messed up my aim as well. I haven’t seen skills like that in a long time.”
&n
bsp; “China’s a big place. And we’re talking about them.”
Mephisto nodded. “I sensed a touch of fatigue. He wasn’t at full strength.”
Which meant that this old man at half his powers had escaped death or capture at the hands of Doctor Mephisto and Setsura Aki. The Demon Physician and this demon-haunted senbei shop owner looked back at the place they’d come from. Kikiou was headed in that direction.
Setsura mused, “I wonder if he was going to see the Elder.”
Mephisto didn’t disagree. “I thought they might lay low until they got acclimated to the environment. That doesn’t seem to be the case. They’re quick studies. They must have put their time in exile to good use learning the ways of the modern world.”
“We should make sure the Elder has got the protection he needs. Our strongest ally right now is his gray matter. We wouldn’t want anything funny happening to it.”
“What kind of protection would actually do any good?”
“How about a bunch of four-leaf clovers?”
“Besides that.” A strange light burned in Mephisto’s eyes.
They silently gazed at the corner on Meiji Dori. The Elder had a good deal on his plate. And if they could sniff out the Elder’s home turf in only a few days, they’d have no trouble finding a certain hospital and senbei shop.
As for Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto—who in this city would be willing to sign up to bodyguard them?
Chapter Three
There were three types of souvenirs that tourists visiting Shinjuku never left without:
1. Fashion accessories (made from demon teeth or claws).
2. Amulet and incense sets (for exorcising ghosts).
3. Plasmodial slime monster globes (non-toxic species).
To be sure, these were really the three runners-up. The three souvenirs that people really wanted were illegal in the outside world:
1. Shinjuku spirits (of the highly distilled sort).
2. Divining rods (for casting death spells).
3. Demon extermination kits (including poison).
Nevertheless, Shinjuku’s “exports” caused no end of problems in the outside world.
A subdivision in Negishi was reduced to skeletal remains as Kuronami spiders multiplied in number to ten of thousands in a single night, and swept through the neighborhood.
One morning, a VP in line for the top job at a certain corporation drowned in his car on the way to work. It could only have been the work of a Shinjuku shaman employing a highly-localized hypnotic spell.
Despite the best efforts of the Shinjuku police, perils that could only have arisen in Demon City crossed the borders, leading to all kinds of gruesome “accidents.” It was also a simple fact that there was no shortage of traders and buyers willing to deal in exactly those “products.”
Like Chinese restaurants and convenience stores, “antique” and “souvenir” and “curiosity” shops hung out their shingles everywhere in Shinjuku.
A little past two in the afternoon, Takako Kanan pushed through the bulletproof glass doors of Takada no Baba, one such famous “specialty store.”
“Welcome,” came the owner’s voice from the glass-walled enclosure in the dimly-lit rear of the store. He had a head of hair like an exploding mop. A black patch covered his left eye.
Takako wasn’t at all cowed by his appearance. She nodded and glanced around the store. Though it looked like a cramped, one-story shop from the outside, the inside proved impressively expansive. There was another door to the rear of the glass enclosure, and more rooms deeper in.
U.S. military and Japan Self-Defense Forces bomber jackets and uniforms hung on the walls, along with flak jackets, body armor, and strength extenders. Hand-to-hand combat accessories, old-fashioned bazookas and flame throwers, high-powered lasers and much more were all randomly crammed together.
One look at the owner’s face said that he’d happily supply the (illegal) ammunition as well. This was a small sampling of the “merchandise” that “souvenir” shops typically handled, not to mention a few other oddities scattered around the shop:
— A fetus with two heads squired in an artificial womb filled with amniotic fluid.
— A figure of a lizard demon sealed inside a building cornerstone dating back to the Showa Era.
— Yellow tentacles oozing out of the mouth of a bottle stoppered with a heavy concrete block.
— The strangely-shaped leaves of a bizarre, cactus-like plant moving in synchronicity with the yellow tentacles.
— A French doll gnashing his jaws, its sharp upper and lower fangs clicking together.
— A shady-looking face continuously emerging from a smoldering haze in the glass of a hand mirror.
— A woman’s arm severed at the shoulder dragging its ball and chain across the floor, searching for what had held it in a stranglehold.
If you really want to know Shinjuku, the word on the street was, you have to come here. Veteran sightseers, underworld types and black marketeers knew that this was the place to get everything they needed.
For that reason alone, the one-eyed proprietor viewed a college student like Takako with undisguised suspicion and annoyance.
“No, you don’t,” Takako scolded, deftly pirouetting out of the way as the arm made a grab for her ankles. She looked here and there, when suddenly her big brown eyes focused on one specific object.
A big black lump sitting next to the dusty showcases.
She hurried over to it, her face bright with curiosity. It was a strange thing indeed. The shape suggested a giant black peapod about six feet long and a yard in diameter in the middle.
The top half was propped up with a bloodstained iron rod, so it must have some weight and heft. A sack of its size could comfortably hold the average human being. That left the question of what it was made from.
There wasn’t any luster to the surface, which didn’t have any bumps or divots. It wasn’t made out of cloth or metal.
Takako picked up a piece of glass from the top of the display case (labeled: “Mitsukoshi Department Store window glass, destroyed in the “Devil Quake”) and tossed it at the black thing.
The “peapod” absorbed the shard without any sign of resistance, without a wrinkle in its skin.
“You owe me for that,” the proprietor said bluntly.
Takako asked, “Where did you find it?”
The proprietor simply folded his arms. Takako took a small purse from the breast pocket of her jacket. “Five thousand yen.”
“Ten,” was his counter offer.
“Seven.”
“It was discovered in the middle of the afternoon at the ruins of the Mt. Tenjin amusement park. A kid threw a rock at it.”
“And it got sucked up?”
“No, the thing tossed it back. I had it hauled back here. That’s the first time I’ve seen it do that.”
Takako leaned over.
“Whoa there!” said the proprietor, but the words had scarcely left his mouth before Takako had thrust her pretty face against the side of the mysterious sack.
She closed her eyes just before impact. The feeling of having penetrated the surface came not from any sense on the skin, but when all the sounds around her grew muffled.
She steeled herself and opened her eyes, but couldn’t see a thing. Only darkness. A cold tendril of fear—the dread of being trapped in here forever—touched the back of her neck. It seemed a much larger space inside than out. There must be all kinds of junk lying around in there.
A small moan of terror escaped her lips. Takako pulled back, to where normal light and sound awaited her.
“How much for this shadow box?”
“Hard to say.” The look of the shrewd bargainer rose to the proprietor’s face. “It’s the most popular item I have in stock right now. Five hundred grand.”
“You expect a college student to afford that?”
“You’re welcome to stop in anytime. There’s plenty of buyers in this city.”
�
�Yeah, I know,” said Takako, raising the stakes as well.
She tore her gaze away, and looked instead at the cases lining the walls. It wasn’t easy to pretend indifference. She wasn’t sure she could pull it off. She couldn’t read his face. She thought of bidding him a good day, while giving herself enough of a look to gauge his expression. But that would mean showing her hand.
Her heart pounded in her chest. She had only one deal of the cards. Carrying herself as nonchalantly as possible, she headed for the exit. She put her hand on the brass handle. Damn, she thought to herself.
Something soft wriggled against her palm. The head of a snake reared up from the handle and flicked its red tongue.
“Hey!” she yelped, jumping back several feet.
Behind her, the conniving voice of the proprietor said, “For a cheeky lass like you—two hundred grand. I can even arrange for installment payments.”
The door handle returned to its inorganic form. Takako took a deep breath and nodded. Her beating heart calmed down. The proprietor looked on with cool eyes as she returned to the display case and got out her checkbook.
“So, how do you plan on moving it?” he asked unhelpfully.
“I’ll call a taxi. Can I borrow your phone?”
“Taking it outside the ward?”
“No.”
“In that case, I’ll deliver it myself. For free.”
“That’s okay,” Takako said.
The smile didn’t disappear from her face. The proprietor impassively reached for the phone behind the counter.
Thirty or so minutes later, the taxi stopped in front of a senbei shop in West Shinjuku. The driver helped get the package out of the back seat. Takako pushed the button for the Aki Detective Agency intercom. The shop girl emerged to say that he was out. He’d been home earlier but had been called away on an emergency.
Takako asked if she could wait, to which the shop girl agreed.
“Sorry to impose, but could you help me haul this thing inside?” She indicated the strange-looking package.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 1 Page 13
