Purgatory Strider

by Shiden Kanzaki

  Rentaro checked the time. Midnight. Nobody was there.

  “So this is the sea…”

  Wholly ignoring Rentaro’s concern, Hotaru wandered toward the shoreline, a look of awe on her face.

  “You’ve never seen it before?”

  Hotaru looked up at him and nodded. “Can I go look?”

  “Why do you need my permission?” Rentaro chuckled.

  Under the blessed Monolith magnetic field, she could even go for a swim if she wanted, as long as she didn’t wander too far offshore. However, given the seafaring Gastrea lurking somewhere under the surface in 2031-era Earth, seaside fun in the sun was usually seen as something reserved for the truly eccentric. The fishing industry was basically destroyed, and even missile-bearing ships with Varanium-lined bottoms could never be truly carefree on the high seas. Tokyo Area was now entirely reliant on shoreline spawning farms for their seafood, sending prices through the roof. So it goes, Rentaro supposed.

  Forgetting about Rentaro for the time being, Hotaru ran to the shore. Then she stepped back a bit, surprised at the cold water and positively shocked at the sensation on the tip of her tongue after tasting it.

  “Look, Rentaro! It’s all salty!”

  “Yeah, no shit!”

  Her look of curious astonishment was as pure as it was childlike. It shared something in common with Enju, and it forced Rentaro to recall how at odds he had been with her, too, when they first met.

  “Are you okay, though? The Monolith’s right nearby.”

  Initiator or not, she still had the Gastrea Virus coursing through her veins. Depending on her corrosion rate, that could have assorted effects on her.

  “I’m fine,” she replied. “My rate’s still in the high teens.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s one difference between you and Enju.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” Rentaro said as he glared at the sea, his thoughts turning elsewhere.

  I swear I’ll get you back, Enju.

  Then he turned around, hearing the thump of feet against dirt behind him. A man was there, cool and composed as he walked forward. He was neither very young nor very old; in fact, it was hard to guess his age. He was in a completely white suit, and while his dull, sallow skin suggested he was well on in years, his eyes were quick, young, and penetrating. Rentaro’s civsec instinct told him he was not to be trusted.

  “You the guy Abe told me about?”

  Rentaro kept his response to a silent nod.

  Before they went there, Rentaro and Hotaru had paid a visit to Kofu Finance, the yakuza-linked loansharking outfit located in the Happy Building’s fourth-floor office space. There, they had a little meeting. All of Rentaro’s personal and business contacts were no doubt being marked by the cops at this point, but he doubted even they’d guess he had a yakuza friend or two. As it happened, he was right.

  Shouki Abe, one of the mobsters he was familiar with, usually joked around with him whenever they met. But this time, he had acted oddly nervous. After some chitchat, he had borrowed a lighter, lit a cigarette, and seemed to noticeably calm down. “I was just surprised, Rentaro,” he had admitted. “Your face has changed a lot.”

  It probably had. In order to avoid the facial-recognition cameras, Rentaro no longer let himself be caught in daylight without sunglasses. He had no time to shave, except for the bare minimum. Nor did he have time for a proper meal lately. Maybe it was showing in his hollowed-out cheeks.

  Rentaro, dwelling on this, shook his head. That probably wasn’t what Abe had meant, anyway. This Rentaro—formerly the pursuer, now the pursued, waiting for his chance to turn the tables on his enemy—probably was different. At least, it was to the point that it overwhelmed Abe at first glance, even though he was a man who had no doubt seen a thing or two in his line of work.

  And to think that just a bit ago, I was being hailed as the hero of Tokyo Area.

  It all seemed tremendously ironic. But he had pushed the thought away long enough to ask Abe about the recent market for trifdraphizin. The gangster had sourly explained it all to him. To sum up, the retail price for trifdraphizin was rising because of a lack of supply going around the market. Apparently some mystery group was buying it all up.

  Abe had closed by promising to connect him to a courier better versed in the market than he. “Rentaro,” he had said, “let me just tell you one more thing. I know we don’t act like it sometimes, but there’s a code of justice we all live by in here. Me, personally? I’m one hundred percent against the drug trade, period. Most of our people are just messing around with numbers on computers these days—insider trading, that sort of thing—but I think that beats drug dealing any day. That’s the whole reason I’m here—I didn’t wanna deal, so they demoted me to loansharking duty. So I’ll help you, okay? But don’t think that this makes you buddy-buddy with the Kofukai Group or anything. If you start messing around with our sources of income, I think you know how some of us are gonna react to that, you know what I mean?”

  Rentaro ruminated over this previous conversation with Abe as he stared down the courier in front of him. The man, for his part, was focusing on the inky deep-black waters beyond the tetrapods scattered in the wharf, taking an occasional sideways glance in Rentaro’s direction.

  “So, what’s the savior of Tokyo Area want to know?”

  Rentaro ignored the verbal jab, giving the courier a cold gaze. “Who’s going around buying up all the trifdraphizin on the market?”

  “I can’t really go around divulging information about my clients, now can I? Trust means everything in this business.”

  Rentaro was already fed up with this. Even someone like him—who preferred to let his guns do the talking instead of negotiate—could tell: This was Abe’s way of sticking out his palm and asking for it to be greased.

  “All right. Let’s cut the crap. How much do you want?”

  The man let out a raspy, vulgar laugh. “Well, if it’s information you’re looking for, this is about the going rate.”

  He had three fingers lifted up. What a rip-off. You goddamned hyena.

  “I’ll give you twice that. But it’s gotta wait.”

  “You gotta be joking with me.”

  “I don’t have it on me right now. Once I solve this case, I’ll pay you double.”

  “Why do I have to believe an empty promise like that?”

  “Hey, you can’t collect from a dead man, right? So that way, I don’t have to worry about you feeding me a line of BS intel. Besides, apparently I’m famous enough that even you know what I look like, so it’s not like I can run from you for long.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Then only one of us is getting out of here in one piece. And lemme just say, I’m not exactly planning to die in a place like this.”

  The sea breeze beat against Rentaro’s uniform and the courier’s suit.

  “I want triple.”

  Rentaro nodded. They had a deal.

  “Okay. Talk to me.”

  The man removed a pack of cigarettes from his suit pocket and lit one of the sticks. The breeze blew the smoke toward the warehouse building.

  “So actually, I don’t really know much about the client, either. They send a negotiator over to work with me, but I don’t go nosin’ around in his business much. That’s how it works, you know? It pays good enough, too.”

  “Come on,” Rentaro interrupted, the irritation clear in his voice. The man raised a hand to stop him.

  “Hang on. Lemme finish. Every time he makes a deposit, I deliver the trifdraphizin to a set location. It’s kind of a weird one.”

  “A weird location?”

  “Here in the Outer Districts, near one of the Monoliths, there’s a path down under a manhole that looks pretty much like a coal mine. I open the manhole, climb down the ladder, drop off the stuff, and beat it. But I’m guessing that’s their hideout.”

  Rentaro could feel a lightning-flash of inspiration erupt in his mind.


  “Hotaru.”

  The chestnut-haired girl next to him nodded deeply, holding in the excitement just as much as he was.

  “We’re finally on to something. That’s gotta be a Five Wings Syndicate hideout, probably.”

  When Rentaro asked where it was, the man pointed out a spot in the Outer Districts that was almost exactly opposite theirs, the entirety of the city in between. It would take a while to get there. But they were ready.

  Rentaro turned and began to walk off. “Whoa,” a voice said. “What’re you gonna do over there?”

  “I thought you didn’t go nosing around in client business.”

  “Well, judging by how much stuff they’re ordering, the group you’re pursuing probably has a lot of people working for it. I don’t see anything besides handguns on you guys, but you sure you’re ready to take on a group that big with just that?”

  “What’re you trying to tell us?”

  The courier, diverging from his previous macho demeanor, shrugged.

  “Oh, I’m just saying—if you die, I can’t collect, you know? So I figure I could stand to up the ante a little bit. Follow me.”

  The man ventured into the truck loading dock of the nearby seafood plant, ducked into the management office, and went up into the building.

  Rentaro and Hotaru exchanged glances.

  “What do you think?” Rentaro asked.

  “It’s dicey, but I have to admit: We’re short on resources. Let’s try him.”

  So they followed along, about ten paces behind the courier as he navigated the hallways with a flashlight, not bothering to acknowledge them.

  For an Outer Districts ruin, the processing plant was deteriorating in a remarkably orderly manner. Rentaro had seen dozens of abandoned buildings like this. He could sniff out the difference between a ruin that hadn’t seen human activity in years, and a ruin simply made to look that way. His instincts told him this was the latter kind. Most useful buildings would have been long scavenged by the Outer District’s denizens by then. This wasn’t.

  Going upstairs, the man stopped in front of a door, then held the flashlight with his teeth as he turned a crank. An airtight door for what was probably a freezer room opened up with a clang. The familiar scent of metal and machine oil flew out.

  Taking a look inside made Rentaro sigh. It was, in a word, an arsenal. The walls were lined with countless numbers of handguns, hand grenades, assault rifles, and rocket launchers. They were all brand-new.

  Rentaro shot a dumbfounded look at the courier. He shrugged again.

  “Take whatever you like.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The courier snickered nervously. “Lemme set something straight, though. I don’t care about you. I care about you surviving long enough to pay me. Try not to confuse the two, all right?”

  Rentaro nodded his thanks, then focused back on the arsenal. He brushed his hand against a nearby wooden crate. It felt moist. Using a nearby crowbar on the floor, he pried open the top of the box. There, encased in dried straw packaging and oiled paper, was a large cache of KRISS vector short-barrel machine guns.

  “Ooh, here’s a sniper rifle.”

  He turned around to find Hotaru grasping the large gun, arms trembling.

  “An M24…”

  It was the US Army’s preferred choice of sniper rifle, a customized version of the Remington M700 they purchased in mass quantities. It was equipped with a Leupold 10x fixed-power scope. That made it the so-called A3 model, a heavily reworked version of the original. Must have been sold off by the military. Amazing to see it here of all places, Rentaro thought. But hang on a minute—

  “You’re gonna have to zero that. Otherwise you’re not gonna hit the broad side of a barn.”

  “Oh? You know about these?”

  “Ah,” Rentaro replied, “we had a specialist over at the office. Can you handle that?”

  “I’m still a student,” Hotaru said, “but yeah. I’ll zero this at one hundred meters. You want this?”

  “Nah. I don’t carry anything heavier than a handgun. Otherwise I’ll just be a drag in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “Oh,” Hotaru said, not particularly put off as she crossed her arms. “Well, if we can get some explosives over there, at least, that’ll be perfect.”

  “Explosives?”

  Hotaru stuck her hand into another crate and spread a set of rectangular hunks of clay—plastic explosives—on the floor. There were enough to practically start a war. Certainly more than enough to engage any enemy Rentaro could imagine.

  By the time they were done casing the place, discussing their strategy, making their choices, and stepping outside of the building, the night sky was already starting to lighten. Day was breaking over the placid Pacific. Rentaro took a deep breath, then exhaled.

  The duel was fast approaching.

  3

  “Oh. Swordtail was defeated as well…?”

  “Yes. It was absolutely deplorable.”

  In a break room inside the Central Control Development Organization—the so-called “black building”—Hitsuma looked out the window toward the city, back turned to his conversational partner.

  Yuga Mitsugi, watching his still-turned back, found himself confused. “I thought you’d be angrier than that,” he said.

  “I am,” came the reply. “But before I gnash my teeth about it like a spoiled child, I wanted to think about how we’re going to get Rentaro Satomi’s head.”

  Yuga was impressed, although he decided not to mention this. Hitsuma was not the most satisfying boss he had ever worked with, but even he had matured a bit throughout this ordeal.

  “I suppose one reason is that we looked down on Hotaru Kouro’s powers. I couldn’t pinpoint what kind of Gastrea factor she had, but the way Swordtail described it, she literally came back from the dead. That, or her ability allows her to fake death, somehow, to throw her enemy off guard.”

  “How do we deal with that?”

  It’s about time you saw things my way, thought Yuga as he removed a rifle round from his pocket and rolled it across the table with a finger. The tip was black, the rest of the body a shiny brass. To Hitsuma, it looked like just another Varanium-tipped bullet. He turned around and scowled.

  “That’s your big strategy? Hummingbird had a Varanium knife; Swordtail had Varanium-tipped ammo. Look what that got them—”

  “Hang on a moment, Mr. Hitsuma,” Yuga said, raising a hand to interrupt. “The tip of this bullet contains enriched Varanium—metal that was melted down and concentrated. Upon impact, the Varanium inside bursts and spreads across the target’s body. It’s enough to kill any Gastrea up to Stage Three, as well as Initiators. It was a pain in the ass procuring these, lemme tell you.”

  “Stage Three?”

  “You’re familiar with that system, right? Targets you can kill with a normal Varanium weapon are classified as Stage One, and that covers most Gastrea and Initiators. If the target doesn’t fall into that field, then we go up to Stage Two and beyond. With Stage Two, the Varanium keeps them from regenerating their bodies. You can still kill them if you decapitate or dismember them, or if you set them on fire. Stage Three, though, those guys can grow back arms and stuff. It’s like being wounded causes their bodies’ cells to call out to one another.”

  “Call out…?” Hitsuma said, eyebrows pressed farther down. Yuga grinned internally. It was exactly the response he’d expected.

  “And Stage Four’s even crazier. It can regenerate itself even if most of its organs are toasted. To kill them, you have to blow them to dust. That’s the only way. That’s the stage Aldebaran was at. Then, with Stage Five, you can put them in deep freeze, in a vacuum, toss ’em into molten lava running at two thousand degrees…but as long as the environment’s right, they’ll regenerate. Like, from the molecular level on up. Right now, in the year 2031, there’s no physical way to kill them.”

  Hitsuma brushed a hand aside, fed up with the subject. “All right, all right,” he said, e
yes swiveled askance at Yuga from his handsome face. “I’m not here to listen to a bunch of gossip. So you’re saying that bullet’s good enough to kill Hotaru Kouro?”

  “It’s already in the bag, sir. At most, Hotaru would be Stage Two. No matter how good she is at regeneration, Stage Three’s got to be the max.”

  “Hmm. Well. I would like to leave them to you…but I think we won’t need those bullets you’ve gathered after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We might find Rentaro Satomi and Hotaru Kouro’s hideout before long. We triangulated their general region based on their escape routes from the expressway shoot-out and the Shiba Heavy Weapons attack. I’m having my people sweep the streets.”

  Oh. Was that all?

  “Even if you find them, sir,” Yuga said as he shrugged and put his hands in the air, “no regular officer’s gonna have a chance against them.”

  “Yes,” Hitsuma agreed. “So I’m sending in civsecs.”

  Yuga found himself unconsciously narrowing his eyes. “…Civsecs?”

  Hitsuma poured a paper cup of coffee from a nearby pot and offered it to Yuga. The assassin waved it away.

  “I thought you weren’t using them?”

  He already had to cover up the total failure of the police to capture Rentaro at the Magata Plaza Hotel, despite the swarms of uniformed personnel on-site. That cover-up should have prevented him from enlisting civsecs or any other public service for this case.

  “We can’t be that picky any longer…in so many words.”

  “Who did you send over?”

  Hitsuma paused to take a dramatic sip of coffee.

  “A group perfect for the job, is who. They’ve already been briefed and are en route to the site. Sadly, you haven’t been activated.”

  Yuga deliberated in silence for a moment. Then he quietly shook his head.

  “I will be on standby for Rentaro Satomi at the time and place we discussed.”