Chapter One

Chapter One

The day was hot and humid enough already. When the torrid wind kicked up the fine dust in small whirlwinds, it made a man regret having gotten up that morning.

Theologians and psychics and necromancers had all reached a consensus that the entirety of Shinjuku was wrapped in a demonic miasma, as if trapped beneath a bell jar.

A research team studying supernatural and psychological phenomena made up of scientists from Great Britain, the U.S. and The Netherlands had determined that distortions in this dome of ghostly auras covering Shinjuku arose from irregularities in the line drawn by the fissure at the epicenter of the Devil Quake.

The crown of that dome was measured at exactly 7.94 meters south-south west from the Shinto gate on the grounds of Nukebenten in Yochomachi, at an altitude of 666.66 meters.

The seven-thousand page final report to the mayor of Shinjuku and the prime minister concluded that the dome was composed of parapsychological elements that current scientific methods were at a loss to explain.

In particular frustrating the ability of criminologists and psychologists to analyze and comprehend were the outbreak of heinous crimes in Shinjuku; the violent alterations of personality; the appearance of strange life forms that could not be accounted to the mutations of a few genetic specimens; the observed devolution of human physiology; and many more examples.

They were forced to conclude that unknown factors trapped beneath the dome were inexorably accelerating the violent nature of all organic and inorganic things. It was, the report stated, something other than the simple manifestation of malice that every piece of matter emitted in some form.

According to a “pseudoscience analyzer,” a remarkable recent achievement in the field of parapsychology, these factors derived from still extant supernatural phenomena in the past and were not the product of the natural world or natural processes. Call them malevolent elements, or “these dark materials.”

This darkness existed, the report went on, but could not be properly investigated, spontaneously appearing as it did from outside of the moral realms. At the same time, the selective mental and physical destruction directed at the human world seemed to arise out of an active will.

Who or what was at the root of this will was anybody’s guess.

As if insisting that the supernatural phenomena appearing here and there in the human realm must remain mysteries, and would go unsolved forever. But if by chance that will acted against the human world, no matter how well-intentioned it might be, human beings must annihilate it.

Unfortunately, the report concluded pessimistically, that would probably be impossible. Even now, people were hardly willing to accept that this demonic zone existed, despite Shinjuku’s undeniable existence.

And the fact that it influenced even the laws of science. During the summer, Shinjuku’s average temperature was three degrees Celsius higher than the twenty-two other wards in Tokyo, and two degrees lower in the winter. Yet every year, people froze to death in the middle of the broiling summer and puddles froze over.

Beginning with the Government Freezer, the sunlight streaming down on the city brought about all sorts of strange phenomena. In an extreme case, the profusion of plant life in one neighborhood would completely change from week to week.

As if afraid of the sun, stalks drooped, petals closed. The next day, brown splotches discolored the green stems, the white flowers tinged with red.

Two days later, the listless light filling the magical streets brought forth from the earth flowers with brown stems and crimson petals, scattering their pollen on the wind. One night in Totsuka, over seven hundred people succumbed in ecstasy to the bloodsucking flowers blooming inside them.

That was hardly the end of it. Even stranger were those who didn’t die and lived on, while cultivating the white and purple flowers sprouting from their ears and mouth. The biological designation of these literal “flower children”—flora or fauna—was a matter of vigorous debate.

This was but one of the strange phenomena in this city that made a hot day all the hotter. At high noon, the stirred-up dust dug into the skin like birdshot and left burns behind.

So it might be comforting to know that a fall-down drunk could be lured to sleep by the cool embrace of the earth in the arms of those who cared for him. A place like the grounds of the former Suwa Shrine in Takada no Baba.

The faded red torii gates, almost lost in the dusty clouds of earthen yellow, rose above the ruined steps. Beyond it squatted the skeletal remains of the shrine office.

Setsura Aki brushed away the hot grit stinging his cheeks, not so much sand as small stones.

It was eleven in the morning, the time of day when the hot winds blew the hardest. The time and the place indicated by his foes—but that wasn’t what weighed on his mind. There was no point trying to guess which way a fight would go in this city. A grade school student could come up with ten more alternatives on the spot.

The enemy hadn’t placed any restriction on the kind of heat he could bring to this fight. All they needed was Mina as a bargaining chip.

Setsura stared up at the sky, at the oppressive, lead-colored sea of clouds. He stood there, his back turned to the wind, the hems of his slicker and his long hair fluttering impatiently.

“Yeah, pretty as a picture as always,” came an amiable voice behind him.

Setsura didn’t move. His eyes watched the two figures mounting the steps in front of him. One was a naked woman. Mina. The other was wearing a leather vest and jeans. He was about five-eleven, the same height as Setsura, though as the video made clear, he was a big enough man to fit another Setsura inside him.

Mina had a dog collar wrapped around her neck. The big man behind her was holding the leash. He had nothing in his other hand.

“Don’t go forgetting me behind you,” came the friendly warning.

“I don’t believe we’ve met before, Aki?” The voice this time was laced with menace. “Rumors have reached our ears of your strange talents. The boss warned us to be careful around you. But we can hardly walk away from the golden opportunity to see you in action, now can we?”

“Let go of my secretary,” Setsura said in a tired voice.

Mina bowed her back and bared her throat with a strangled gasp as the man jerked on the leash. “Yeah, to the pretty boys go the spoils, eh? Never fucked a girl as fine as her before. Man, there’s nothing hotter than an amateur sticking her ass out for you like a pro.”

“Forgive my brother’s coarseness,” apologized the man behind him, in a manner that suggested he was totally sincere. “Let her go.”

“If you say so. But wait just a sec.”

The big man grabbed Mina around the waist and pulled her toward him. Lacking any other support, she bent forward. A groan escaped her pale lips. He thrust his hips against her buttocks.

“Rumors are all I’ve heard of the Munakata Brothers as well, but a man who’d use a woman as a shield tells me all I need to know.”

“So you say.” He licked his thick lips. “But I’ll be finished soon enough.”

Of the criminal organizations that had partitioned Shinjuku into thirds, these were the murderous siblings who worked exclusively for Kurusu Real Estate.

Anywhere between a hundred and a thousand professional assassins had set up shop in Shinjuku, their services for sale in the black market Register. The singular exceptions were these two.

In the beginning, all anybody knew was that they were related. Not even their sexes were certain, or their ages or full names. Even after going on retainer and being generally recognized as the best in the business, not even their boss had seen their faces with his own two eyes.

The Register contained a “placeholder” entry. According to it, the year before, the brothers had carried out between twenty-seven and thirty hits, grossing some 350 million yen. At ten million per job, these were extraordinary rates for a pair of freelancers who weren’t actually made men.

“Come to think about it, today is the deadline for updating the Register,” Setsura said, casting a cool look at his accosted secretary. “I wonder who will top the listings, or whether the Munakata Brothers will be listed at all—now that you have met me.”

The big man had started to smile. The smile froze on his face. The young man in front of him had turned into something else.

Ice raced through the veins, nerves conveyed the speed of the darkness, its will ruling over the senses. Hell itself must burnish the face of beauty. Setsura’s countenance had transfigured, like the incarnation of the Hindu devil Rakshasa.

The big man groaned, his fingers clutching at Mina’s ass as he erupted inside her. A moment later, a crimson line ringed his neck, Setsura’s skills being such that not a drop of blood spilled. His body still shuddering in the throes of orgasm, the head slid off his shoulders and thumped to the ground.

Setsura hadn’t moved. Feeling no response from the devil wire flung out behind him could only mean that move had been anticipated.

The curtains of dust wrapped around him. Perhaps that voice had been the work of a ventriloquist. It hadn’t been that of the big man. The resemblances were there, but also the clear differences.

The other brother was hiding somewhere on the grounds of the shrine. He’d hedged his bets and made Setsura show his hand, while Setsura had to guess at his foe’s next move.

Though when it came to delivering the coup de grâce, their methods were utterly unimaginative: a knife to the heart or a bullet to the brain, or some variation on those two themes.

The one entirely predictable constant in their modus operandi was that the victim was always hit from behind. Peculiar from the perspective of the criminal element from outside Shinjuku, perhaps, but a Demon City hit man always had a style of his own.

In particular, the freelancers not attached to an organization were a creative bunch, though one critical variable in this equation was that their targets were citizens of Shinjuku as well.

Weapons and defensive methods and materials developed in the outside world inevitably arrived in Shinjuku a month before they reached the markets anywhere else.

Some reports claimed that military procurement officers and weapons manufacturers made sure the shipments got through in order to test equipment in a live-fire environment. A good thirty percent of the approximate 150,000 “incidents of criminal activity” recorded each year could be attributed to street fighting, making it the ideal arena for simulating urban warfare.

The major organized crime associations aside, for small and mid-sized gangs and yakuza outfits, how fast they could acquire these weapons spelled the difference between life and death.

In other words, it was hardly rare for a bunch of street toughs to be armed with RPGs and missile launchers. And all this proceeded hand in hand with defensive measures.

Early bulletproof vests made to stop Magnum and Teflon-coated bullets were replaced by glass and composite carbon fiber ballistic vests, which were in turn supplanted by liquid body armor developed by the U.S. Army. Nowadays, external armor was being enhanced by pain suppressants and drugs that increased muscle strength and density, creating a kind of naturally-secreted protective shield.

A man willing to risk side effects such as a shortened life span, brain damage, and paralysis could escape a car bomb—from inside the car and engulfed in flames—and live to tell the tale.

In Shinjuku, what it took to kill a man required measures commensurate with the environment of Demon City. And so it followed that every professional killer had no choice but to develop his own unique style.

More than weaponry, an eye for an opponent’s weak spot. More than the way he killed, the way he got close. Some studied magic and killed with curses, while others employed remote viewing and hypnotism. Some sported a thousand faces while others could change sexes at will.

Stabbing a man in the back was the easy part. Getting close enough to make it count was another matter entirely.

No hit man with a reputation worth keeping would divulge his tricks of the trade to anybody else, not so much fearing he’d be out of a job as ending up being given a dose of his own medicine.

When it came to following the rules, the Munakata Brothers were old school all the way.

How would they come at him from behind? Setsura stood there silently. His hand hung by his side. Thousands of devil wires spilled from his sleeves. With a keenness of touch on a par with his eyesight, he felt what they found as they crept along the ground.

The wind blew at ten feet a second. There was nothing dangerous in the dust and sand. Nothing lurked behind the torii gates or was hiding in the bushes. Nobody at all was on the grounds, except Mina.

Setsura strolled over to where she was lying face down, gasping for breath. Stepping onto the grounds of the shrine, he sensed no signs of life from the strand of devil wire wrapped around the neck of the big man.

His foe must have fled.

Next to the corpse, Mina looked up at him with a faint smile. “I really did intend to get away, but before I could get to the bridge—”

Setsura undid the buttons of his slicker, but Mina held out her hand. “I’m fine as is,” she said, getting to her feet on her own. The hickeys and teeth marks covering her skin flashed in the dusty sunlight. “The day I need a helping hand is the day I retire.”

Making no attempt to cover up, she started walking. Setsura was halfway between the big man’s body and his secretary. He started after her, leaving the body on the ground behind him, when a gust of wind struck his back.

Setsura turned in a graceful spin. His back was now to Mina.

His secretary’s face transfigured in that second. Her brows hiked up, her eyes grew wide and wild, forming the mien of a demoness. Her arms reached for Setsura’s neck, and then stopped in midair, as if restrained by unseen hands.

Setsura didn’t move. The quiet eyes of the senbei shop owner were drawn to the body on the ground.

The naked woman frozen in the act of leaping at him—the young man dressed in black in this sultry season—the lifeless corpse—all bathed in the milky sunlight and colored by the yellow dust.

For a long moment, this surreal scene arrested the flow of time itself.

“What do you say?” Setsura asked the headless man lying on the ground. The look in his eyes and the tone of his voice were such that he could just as well be addressing a friend. “Won’t you come out and play? You’re just going to leave me like this? I don’t much care to leave empty handed myself. That was a good move, making me turn my back to you by getting my own secretary to attack me. But I have eyes everywhere. Well? I can’t imagine it’ll reflect well on your reputation if you don’t at least give it the old college try. To say nothing of your employer.”

The dust swirled around the dead face. When it cleared a second later, it was another creature entirely. The corpse aroused itself with remarkable force and charged at Setsura in a swirl of wind.

Setsura stepped to the side like a matador as the big man stampeded past him. At the same time, his body parted vertically and then horizontally. This time, Setsura paid no attention to the mist of the blood and the scattering body parts. Rather, he focused on the small shadow springing up from inside it.

A human being no bigger than a three or four year old. Drenched by the big man’s bodily fluids, metallic luster glimmered inside the little hand.

Large black wings wrapped around Setsura, the hems and tails of the slicker. Accompanied by the bark of the automatic handgun, the ejected shell casings glittered in the sunlight as the bullets pockmarked the fabric.

Trailing a thin line of blue gun smoke, a dwarf with the face of an adult landed on the ground a dozen feet away.

“But of course. The Munakata Brothers finally reveal themselves.”

The low voice drifted out from the shadow of the slicker. The dwarf’s eyes widened with surprise. There could be nowhere to hide from the impact of the silenced 9 mm armor piercing rounds that could punch through two inches of steel. Even a flesh wound should kill, when the explosive tips would fragment into thousands of shards.

Setsura said, his voice as cool as a winter’s night, “The brothers—a small thing in a big, human-shaped package. I’ll treasure the holes in my coat as souvenirs of our encounter.”

By the time he had folded those black wings around him, the dwarf standing there had been drawn and quartered, the severed body parts strewn across the dusty earth.

“I could undo the spell myself, but Mephisto’s the specialist in that department. I suppose it’s about time I sent you on a paid vacation.”

So spoke the genie in tones any listener would find more than a tad hair-raising as he tossed Mina over his shoulder, the demonic visage still etched on her face by the hypnotic spell.

“Hey, mister, you need a ride?” rang out a woman’s voice.

From beyond the torii gates, at the foot of the stone steps, came the heavy rumble of an engine. A car with tires the size of steel drums bounded up the steps. The windshield wrapped around the driver’s seat and the passenger’s compartment, while the eight cylinder engine was exposed. Pipes coiled like thick snakes down from the manifold and along the frame to the bull horn exhaust stack in the rear, belching clouds of purple smoke.

Excepting the driver’s seat, the chassis itself hung lower than the tops of the tires. This was a “street legal” off-road buggy all the rage these days.

The engine roaring, it came to a stop alongside Setsura. The sheet metal door opened and a pair of shapely tanned thighs swung out, followed by the splendid physique of a young woman with short-cut hair and thin wrap-around sunglasses.

She stood in front of Setsura, blocking the wind. She was wearing blue hot pants. A bikini top the same color tightly contained her ample breasts. The kind of outfit that made a man want to rip it off.

The wardrobe aside, the eyes hidden behind the dark lenses and the way she carried herself said she was something other than a regular member of society.

“Even in Shinjuku, toss a naked girl into a taxi and the next stop will probably be the cops.” She looked up at Setsura, not a little entranced by his visage. “You can count on me, though.”

“What, you just happened to pass by?” Setsura said, showing no interest as he walked away. “You’ve been watching the whole time.”

“You knew? But you never looked my way.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got eyes everywhere,” he said, the temperament of the senbei shop owner returning.

“Hold on,” she said with more urgency. “You’re Setsura Aki, right?”

Setsura stopped and turned around. “How do you know my name?”

“I’m looking for my brother. Hey, perfect timing, us crossing paths like this. He came here to get an interview with you. You’ve met him, right?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Sasaki. Freelances for Historical World. I’m his little sister. Name’s Azusa.”

“Sasaki-san,” Setsura repeated to himself. “I met him in Shinjuku Gardens the other night. We talked for half an hour or so. That’s all.”

The senbei shop owner wasn’t eager to be the bearer of bad news. The girl was too young to learn about death the hard way.

But she didn’t think so. “You mean, he’s dead?”

“Well—”

“Fine,” Azusa said. He couldn’t tell from her expression if she was sad or relieved. “My brother had no business getting involved in whatever business you’re in. And certainly not in this city. He did have a lead or two. You interested?”

“Maybe later,” Setsura said coolly, and started walking again.

He’d descended from the grounds of the shrine when the rumble of the engine pulled up next to him again.

“Hey, want a ride?”

“I don’t have the fare,” he said, not turning around. The occasional passerby apparently saw nothing unusual about a man walking with a naked woman flung across his shoulder.

“I’m not a cabbie. Just wanted to find out about my brother and sell a little intel.”

Her voice trailed a step behind Setsura, awfully chipper for having just learned of her brother’s death. A strange girl.

Setsura raised his left hand. A taxi approached the curb. The engine of the street buggy snarled, jabbing its nose menacingly at the taxi. Behind the windshield, the cabbie snarled back and yanked hard on the steering wheel.

The brakes squealed and the cab stopped by the sidewalk ahead of them. The door swung violently open and the barrel-chested cabbie leaned out and bared his yellow teeth. “You crazy, lady? Quit poaching my turf!”

As if waiting for this moment, the buggy’s door swung up and down. “Put a sock in it, fatso!” she shot back. “You blind or something? Get yourself a pair of glasses! No easy mark for you here. What, you looking for a little corrective surgery or something?”

She growled out that last challenge with an unnerving calmness that only pissed off the cabbie all the more.

“I’m gonna wring that bitch’s neck.” His sleeve rolled up, showing his bulging bicep, he cracked his knuckles as he strode towards her.

“Bring it on, bub.”

It was hard to tell whether the cabbie stopped before her voice reached him or the report from the gun did. The heavy crack of the large-caliber revolver was followed by flying chunks of asphalt.

The cabbie yelped, and amidst the spouting flame and booming echoes did a crazy little dance there on the spot.

The noise suddenly ceased. The smoking muzzle of the gun drew a bead on the center of the sweating man’s ugly face. The gun was a .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 29. Weighing almost three pounds, the average man would need both hands to hold it level. Azusa was using one hand and it wasn’t trembling in the slightest.

The first assumption was that she was on some sort of roids. In any case, a girl who’d pull a .44 Magnum to ward off a bit of harmless road rage had a personality profile way out of the norm.

“One shot left.” Azusa licked her lips and flashed a bright smile. “Wring away. If you feel lucky. I’m a lousy shot, you know. My, my, my, I was aiming at your heart the whole time. Who knows where the next one will land?”

From the rock-hard steadiness of her arm, probably right between the eyes.

The cabbie backed away slowly, holding up one hand as a sign of surrender. He tried to return her look with an equal one of nonchalance, but still looked scared shitless. The sweat turned his shirt into a sheet of sticky cellophane covering his chubby chest and paunchy belly.

He backed into the door of his cab, and then with a speed that belied his flabby frame, ducked into the car and started the engine before the door had closed behind him.

Two engines kicked into gear. The taxi had turned into the center of the street when the buggy rear-ended it. Setsura watched with blank surprise as the taxi slid sideways onto the sidewalk and into a telephone pole.

If a car could saunter along with a self-satisfied grin, that’s what the buggy was doing as it pulled up next to Setsura. “Well, it looks like the taxi can’t make it. How about a ride?”

Taking in both the girl’s pretty face, unmarred by even a speck of guilt or evil, and the cabbie crawling out of the wrecked car, Setsura Aki shrugged and nodded.