Chapter One

Chapter One

It was one of those dreary, two thousand yen a night rooms, in one of those cheap hotels that could be found just about anywhere in Shinjuku. Hardly ten feet by ten feet, equipped with a metal-frame bed, a metal desk and chair—old, used, secondhand and bargain basement.

The ceiling lamps provided sufficient illumination, though the sterile white light did nothing to dampen that bleak sense of a winter landscape.

The reason was obvious. The bare concrete walls had the effect of enervating the human mind as soon as anyone stepped into the room. An organic person would never truly feel at home among the inorganic.

Through a flimsy plywood door in one corner was a toilet and bath. Nothing else. A cold, hard space that suggested nothing of the “life force” engendered by all living things.

But there was something living there, a black silhouette lying on his back on the white mattress. It would be no exaggeration to describe his youthful features as sculpturesque, perhaps chiseled from pale marble by the hands of an accomplished artist.

Light shone off him, a brilliant kind of beauty, brighter than the light itself. But calling it the “light of life” suggested that, contrary to the average man on the street, this young man was a kind of antimatter formed from moonlight. He breathed in air and breathed out moon dust. The touch of his fingers surely left behind traces of frost.

Such was the unapproachable beauty found in too perfect a mien. And in the countenance of Setsura Aki.

A long black slicker covered his lanky frame. He didn’t remove it even in the room. Darker than the artificial night, his pale hands and face emerged from the sleeves and collar.

His raven eyes were open, looking at nothing, taking in the past and the future, sadness or joy, and reflected it all back in a cool light. Perhaps all creatures of Demon City looked at the world with eyes like these.

This was one of Setsura’s many safe houses scattered throughout Shinjuku. He’d instructed his secretary to take a breather outside the ward, shuttered the senbei shop and moved here—before his visit to the Sanbo Group.

Everything he needed was packed into the one suitcase beneath the bed. He hadn’t carried it here. It never left the place.

Something moved in the stagnant air, as if pushing aside the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen. Setsura’s right hand.

A white sheet of paper slipped off the edge of the bed, glided across the floor, and approached a corner of the door.

A brief flash. The thin Japanese paper parted in two. Not torn. The one sheet became two, as if two pages stuck together had been peeled apart. They were about to hit the door and wall when—without the hint of a draft—they changed direction like willful animals and rose vertically up the surface of the walls.

Climbed halfway up when the forefinger on his right hand moved ever so slightly. One sheet of paper became four. And kept on going, reaching the ceiling and sliding along it.

Their movements only became disturbed when reaching the middle of the ceiling. The four sheets and the one trailing behind scattered in all four directions.

Setsura pursed his lips. The puff struck the four sheets. They became eight. And then the same wave of wind hit the newly formed four. As if each puff of air had a mind of its own, losing shape and form, the bits and pieces fluttered down.

Ignoring the snow of paper, the man in black sat up. He went to the door. He didn’t reach for the knob. The key quietly turned in the lock. As if nudged by the breezes he’d aroused, the door swung open of its own accord.

The gloomy hallway revealed no sign of human life, all the doors shut tight, like he was the only occupant in the building.

A dozen minutes later, Setsura was wending his way through the crowds on Yasukuni Avenue. Past the Tokyo Daihanten Restaurant, Hanazono Shrine, and the Pension Fund Association Building and on through Ichigaya, eventually coming to the Outer Moat Road. The streets here showed the full effects of the Devil Quake, the rows of houses still dotted with mountains of rubble.

The buildings here just barely preserved the outlines of their previous selves. Patched up, or simply opened for business the way they were, or taken over by squatters and vagrants.

This sense of indifference after the Devil Quake, the investigating committees had all observed, was a particular characteristic of Shinjuku.

Although established in a social environment devoid of order, ethics and morality, this city had seen the typical human propensities toward discrimination and alienation fade in equal proportion.

After being dispatched to Shinjuku as the British head of the seventh U.N. survey committee, Professor Bernard Sanderink publicly stated the following, making no effort to mask the mixture of wonder and confusion on his face.

Concerning our investigation of a ward in Japan’s capital city, we wish to announce our conclusions, fully aware that they contradict those of the six previous official surveys. Namely, that in districts of Shinjuku Ward, known as Demon City, the ideal implementation of human association, sought after but rarely seen since the dawn of civilization, has been achieved.

What has surprised the survey committee in particular are the so-called “upper-class” housing estates in Kabuki-cho, Yotsuya Samoncho, and Shinjuku Nanachome. There we found residents and vagrants, or the unemployed, leading considerate and cooperative lives, coexisting without abuse of their basic civil rights and without recourse to condescension on the one hand, or servility on the other.

It should go without saying that “consideration” and “cooperation” and “charity” are the very foundations of human virtue. It is indeed sad to admit that these traits only persistently exist in certain species of animals.

However, relationships arising out of such elemental factors should not be attributed to the reinforcing mechanisms of the particular environment, or to expressions of pity and mercy. Rather, the people themselves consider it altogether natural that they should be bound together in such a manner, and this, our investigations have revealed, makes the facts of the matter all the more unexpected and impressive.

If nothing else, we wish the following to be taken away from our findings: while Shinjuku reveals to some an evil face as Demon City, at the same time, it shows to others the kind of goodness to which we should all aspire in the course of our daily lives.

Descending Meiji Avenue, Setsura turned onto a wooded alleyway just before Kuyakusho Street. The meandering path of cobblestones known as Four Seasons Lane continued on for a hundred more feet before intersecting with Golden Gai, and then a cross street connecting Kuyakusho Street and Meiji Avenue.

One of those little corners of Shinjuku well known to those tired of the ubiquitous concrete and the constant press of human flesh.

But at this moment, in response to the light tread of Setsura’s feet, the cracks in the cobblestones seemed to widen a bit. Strange shadows—hard to say whether flora or fauna or a combination of both—peeked out, revealing the green dots of their eyes.

Eyes brimming with hunger and loathing. There wasn’t a breeze, but the tree branches on the right and left abruptly swayed. The miasmas they breathed out swirled around Setsura and tightened into a whirlpool.

Black dots covered his face. Without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow, they dropped to his feet. Setsura calmly continued on his way like one of the young people who had once come here seeking a cool stroll in the shade, before the lane had turned into a nest of tiny demons.

Something crunched beneath his feet. A human femur. Looking more closely, skulls and ribs lay scattered around the roots of the trees. They weren’t left over from the Devil Quake. The scraps of tattered clothing were too new. These were the remains of unwary tourists or drunks who’d stumbled into this little corner of hell.

“Four Seasons Lane” had since become known as “Man-Eater Alley.”

Something that wasn’t a snake and wasn’t a tentacle crawled out of a hollow eye socket. An ordinary branch, it appeared at first look. But in fact, a trap to lure in the unsuspecting and set the minds of the unwary at ease. In the shadows cast by the rustling canopy, the undulating legs of a giant spider, a throbbing blob resembling a living liver and entrails, and other creatures crawled down the trunks of the trees and inched toward him.

The dense and sickly fog roiled up around him. Setsura walked right through it. With every step he took, the gremlins sprang up and flew at him. Then twisting their bodies and baring their fangs, they shrieked and screamed and retreated.

Ah, Setsura Aki, that beautiful genie. He stopped in the middle of the path, standing stock still as if finally affected by the poisonous vapors. Other presences shifted behind him, also sporting human forms. Two of them.

Both were a good six feet tall. One had unusually broad shoulders. Standing next to each other, the two of them blocked the narrow lane, their overlapping shadows seeming to weigh down the foliage to their right and left.

The circumstances soon became clear. The faint light falling on the man with the broad shoulders reflected off him with a hard glint. His body was covered with a skin of metal armor.

The protuberances on his shoulders indicated a miniature nuclear generator and power regulator. The electrical nerve fibers encased in reinforced plastic and hardened ceramic sheathing supplied an uninterruptible source of energy to his helmet-shaped head and the forward-jutting eyes.

The FS-9000-G polar combat suit was a ten-year-old design, though one advanced enough to still be employed by the American Air Force and NATO. With a power loading of fifteen hundred watts per pound, one pinky could gouge a hole in a concrete wall, and at full throttle, take down a small building in two minutes. With its large-capacity transformers, an electrical discharge tube turned it into a one-ton murder machine.

The lucky shopper could find them at the military surplus shops outside Okubo Station, starting at a hundred million yen each.

Fingers like small warheads with polycarbide joints gripped the trigger of the PP-702 Glisenti assault shotgun he was cradling.

The other man was wearing a grey-on-white pinstripe suit. But from the green light glowing in his electric eyes, he was a cyborg. And was unarmed. These were the kind of living things that ventured into Man-Eater Alley.

“You’re late and it’s getting late. Wearing all that bling slow you down?”

It was clear from the tone of Setsura’s voice that he knew they’d been tailing him, and yet he hadn’t once glanced back over his shoulder.

“Huh,” the expression on the cyborg’s face said. He was a pro, used to dealing with every kind of unexpected situation.

“When did you figure it out?” said the man in the combat suit. Speaking via a mike and amplifier, he sounded like a heavy in a radio drama.

“Since I first picked you out of the crowd.”

“Ah, so it was your intention all along for us to find you here. The shadow becomes the shadowed. Good show.”

“Enough of the chit-chat. Seeing as you picked a strange place like this, you must be doing some weird weed. Anyhow, best you just give it up. No way you’re gonna win. You’re gonna end up worm food for these monsters here.”

The cyborg’s right foot traced an arc in the air. The sound of something soft being crushed beneath his shoe.

Setsura shrugged. “Trying to scare me to death, Sagara-san?” For the first time, a flicker of surprise showed in the cyborg’s mask-like face. “Hey, it’s no big deal. My secretary has a very capable information broker on speed dial.” Setsura said, as calmly as ever, “In any case, as I’m sure you know, the Sanbo Group is no more. Why waste all the effort trying to kill me? You ought to be the ones forking out the protection money. While you are still talking to me.”

The cyborg raised his right hand to his mouth and smirked. “You’re a real comedian. I see. Like the boss said, you’ve got a pair of brass ones, I’ll grant you that. But I don’t see the need to hide in the shadows and take shots at you with a laser rifle or RPG from a distance. Hey—”

He wasn’t calling out to Setsura, but to the man in the combat suit next to him. He yanked back the pump on the gun, producing the distinguishing click of chambering a live round.

A switch next to the pistol grip of the PP-702 could be toggled between auto and manual fire. But the sound alone of the pump handle being yanked back could be expected to arouse the most fear in a victim.

Even today, cops in Los Angeles and New York preferred single pump riot shotguns with a manual option. There was nothing to match the effect on the criminal class of that pump handle being drawn back. They knew well enough the suppressing fire of a shotgun, turning a single shot into a blizzard of flying buckshot.

“What do you say?” the cyborg asked. “Makes a man think twice, eh? This baby holds double-aught. That’s nine pachinko-sized balls inside each shell. Now consider every one of them perforating your body. That’s a lot of red-hot hurt in a small package. All that smoldering lead spinning around in there like a washing machine, it’ll turn your insides to confetti. The last kid who saw what we had to offer clung to my feet begging for mercy. Told ’em to suck it off, and the brat goes at it like a puppy.”

The twisted grin on his face suddenly vanished. A sense of unease cloaked the cyborg like a cold, wet blanket.

The man in front of him, about to become another one of his victims, was the same as before. Except that whatever made him him had changed.

The cyborg experienced what felt like tendrils reaching across the back of his neck. “Boy or a girl?” he heard the young man asking. The same voice from before. Or another voice entirely.

“Girl,” he answered, though not of his own free will. As if it’d been coaxed out of him.

“And what happened to her?”

“Fucked her brains out!” shouted the man in the combat suit, the muzzle of the shotgun shaking violently. “Back and front, both sides at the same time, a big serving of extra-large. Ever done a kid before? Man, they’re so soft inside. Sound just like squealing little puppies too. All the blood just adds to the fun—”

“And now consider that you have met me.”

His low voice seemed to condense into a shaft of ice that pierced the pair of merciless murderers through their chests. The gremlins forming a ring on the ground around him scattered in an instant. They surely felt that something in the air.

The swirling miasma roared, but not at Setsura. The man in the combat suit shouted something, an angry bellow to shake off the entwining spell. The gun spat a tongue of fire into the air.

An arm that could bring down a building raised the shotgun to the vertical, tunneling nine holes through the thick haze. The cyborg knew the arm hadn’t been wrenched up by outside forces. Rather, a stab of pain had assailed the flesh and bone encased inside the supposedly protective armor.

“You should follow the director of the Sanbo Group,” Setsura said.

The pain vanished in that instant. The huge mass of the combat suit charged through the poisonous fog at Setsura. A wave of air beat against his back as his black outlines became a blur. The noxious vapors trailing about him, he leapt into the air.

“You screwed up, kid!”

The voice came from above him. To a man in a combat suit, equipped with inertia controller and recoil-less jumping ability, that vaulting black orchid that was Setsura was heaven-sent folly.

Channeling the momentum of the mad rush in a split-second, the one-ton combat suit climbed ten feet into the air, right above Setsura. The right hand holding the shotgun raised high as if in victory, only moments from turning Setsura’s head into so much cottage cheese.

The cyborg observed from the ground, grinding up a foot-long green caterpillar with his right hand like an overripe banana.

The barrel of the shotgun swung down, grazed Setsura’s head, pointing its black, cyclops eye at the cyborg. But the cyborg only wryly grinned. An expression that immediately vanished in a startled blast of sound. The clump of nine lead shots streaked down at 2,000 feet a second and struck him in the chest.

He reeled backwards as a second and then third volley followed, shredding his suit and sending the pieces of fabric flying. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Sagara?” the cyborg screamed.

The man in the combat suit fell past Setsura and landed on the ground with a crash. “Hey, no way, man!” he frantically explained. “It wasn’t me! My hands did it all by themselves!”

“Naughty hands.” The cool, low voice of that young man interrupted the loud reverberations. “What do you say we tidy things up here?”

The question faded into the falling gloom filling the lane. What appeared at first to be long white radishes rained out of the sky onto the cobblestones. As soon as he realized what it was, the cyborg set off running. He was headed to the entrance to the lane when he divided in two just above his waist.

Blue sparks flew, a blood-like oil spewed. The lower half of his body, trousers and shoes and all, kept on going, galloping onto Yasukuni Avenue and sending pedestrians scattering out of the way before collapsing in the middle of the roadway. This was strange enough even for residents of Demon City that they all gave this most unusual of pedestrians a wide berth.

The tourists and sightseers, on the other hand, growing impatient for something “interesting” to happen, immediately started shooting away with their camcorders.

The man in the combat suit landed on the ground and doubled over. He tried to raise the shotgun but finally realized that his right arm was missing along with the weapon.

The outer shell of duranium steel—that could withstand a direct hit from an anti-tank bazooka—had been lopped off from his shoulder on down. He slumped to his knees. Not so much because of the pain or the loss of blood, but because of those toxic vapors stealing through the severed opening in the armor.

Through the pores of his skin, down to the space between the cells, the miasmas invaded his body like water filtering through a sieve under osmotic pressure, and coursed into his circulation system. The wellspring of his being was torn out at the roots. A feeling of despondency surged through him. This accomplished killer was already well on his way to hell.

The treetops swayed. Sea slug-like creatures slurped their way into the gaping wound. However crazed he might be by the terrible realization of his now inevitable fate, the assassin couldn’t move.

The bloodsucking leeches that had fruitlessly attacked Setsura’s face had found fresh blood and an unresisting victim and swarmed over the wound, slowly devouring the flesh with their little mouths and sharp, tiny fangs.