Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Two variables in the local environment of the television studio changed as Setsura made his way further in.

He wiped the sweat off his brow. The humidity was definitely climbing.

Though the heat of early summer often climbed north of ninety degrees, the rain hadn’t stopped falling since morning and the temperature outside was a good ten degrees cooler.

Regardless of how locked and off-limits these back rooms once were, the studio had gotten a direct hit from the Devil Quake. The floors and ceilings were lined with cracks. Not a single pane of glass was left intact.

Add to that the strange smell. One whiff awakened the primordial mind to its nature. Oh, that. Go to the zoo, and this was the odor always wafting up from the pen of one creature in particular. The odor of the “watchman,” as Mephisto had put it only a few minutes before (and several miles away).

Setsura came to a sudden halt in front of the elevators.

There were two doors on his right, both closed. Setsura froze like an ice sculpture. Slowly, inexorably, the aura around him changed—from me to I. From human to genie.

Without sitting down and doing a face-to-face, a close friend couldn’t have detected the transfiguration.

Perhaps the enemy was close. Perhaps an enemy he could perceive. In front of him and to his left were dreary, dusty hallways. Nothing more. But somebody saw something. Someone was watching. Something was watching. From somewhere—

Watching Setsura.

The narrow corridor branched off in a T. A demonic vibe from an unidentifiable corner began to collect around him. Suffused with poisons, the radiating thoughts and evil intents turned the very molecules in the air toxic.

Secret religious sects in the city were known to be capable of the same, but the source of these vapors was not human.

Setsura just stood there.

A normal human being would have gone mad and dropped dead on the spot. The swirl of noxious fumes suddenly wavered. The vibe Setsura was projecting had pushed aside the film of poison or rather, thinned it out. The genie’s qi had denatured and devoured its essence.

In a flash, the air returned to normal.

At the same time, the tension eased out of Setsura’s body. The enemy was no longer there. Those nowhere eyes on the back of his neck vanished into the distance.

Setsura glanced at the elevator doors and uncurled the fingers of his right hand. “No time to use that,” he murmured, lightly shaking his wrist.

There was nothing there, nothing that the eyes could see.

Setsura still didn’t move. As when he became him, not a drop of sweat marred his brow. His eyes half-closed, like a young philosopher ruminating about the mysteries of the universe on a listless rainy afternoon.

His lips moved. “Soundstage 13, is it?” Each word like pearls strung on a string. “There is no telling who made it was it is, but that is the direction of doom, the demon gate. There is where the Master of this place chose.”

He started off at a casual stroll, the silent death struggle unfolding around him vanquished from his mind. The expression on his comely face as unruffled as ever, he strolled into this den of thieves, into the depths of Fuji TV.

The menace to Shinjuku that Fuji TV had become, this citadel of terror—to call it a haunted house sounded rather antiquated, but there in Kawadacho the word fit. Numerous strange phenomena had been observed on the grounds of Fuji TV and in the surrounding areas.

People going missing was an everyday occurrence in this city, but when a family of five vanished, and all of them in a single week, the commando police swung into action. Witnesses reported seeing a family passing through the front gate of the television studio. Five elite members of the mobile police were sent in after them, armed to the teeth.

Nobody ever came back out again.

The disappearances began five years after the Devil Quake, reaching their peak at the seven-year mark, and continuing today. The outbreaks typically came to a head in July or August and then sharply declined, reaching zero between December and February. And then the pattern repeated all over again.

This vanishing phenomenon didn’t only affect the people living there, but even passing taxi drivers. Confirmation came after the first documented disappearance in the 1990s, in what came to be known as the “Absconding Taxi Incident.”

The cabbies had last called into the dispatcher while taking East Gaien Street from Yotsuya to Waseda Tsurumaki. A total of ten taxis were discovered neatly parked in front of the television studio lobby. Further complicating things, all the routes to Fuji TV had been cordoned off by the police. There was no damage to any of the barricades.

The obvious questions were why the taxis had headed to Fuji TV, and how they had gotten past the perimeter fences. And why none of the cabbies were ever seen again. There wasn’t a drop of blood on the abandoned cars or signs of a struggle.

Two weeks later, an investigation team was sent inside. Not local law enforcement, they were relieved to know, but a platoon of SDF rangers.

Only one came out again.

The lone surviving ranger burst into a bakery on the Kawadacho shopping street in a half-crazed state. The SDF was summoned and sent in a rescue team. For the next month, the residents of Kawadacho twice heard screams and gunshots echoing from the Fuji TV studios.

After that, the rumors flew fast and thick—about the SDF stringing high-tension electric fences around the place, about teams armed with flame throwers mounting repeated assaults, and even about plans to hire demolition experts to blow up the building. But whatever they did amounted to nothing. The status quo continued unchanged till now.

Even in the light of a midday sun, the dark castle cast ominous shadows across the ground, standing there as one more symbol of the Demon in Demon City.

Setsura came to the central courtyard. The rain continued to fall, though now more a drizzle. A number of things were moving around inside the ruined remains of the building. The dragging of feet, the drawing of ragged breaths, and all ruled by one overriding will—

That was sending them at Setsura. They came down the hallways, descended the stairs, bearing those vile vibes with them.

He sensed everything through the fingers on his right hand.

Setsura looked around. The rainy haze cloaked the heaps of bricks and debris, but couldn’t mask the stench. Puddles formed here and there, smoldering like sulfurous hot springs, throwing off an acrid miasma.

That demonic spirit still held sway in the open air, for the air sweltered with the same heat and humidity as inside the building. Add to that the smell of sulfur, and the atmosphere became a lung-choking witch’s brew. Even the clouds above seemed to shrink away.

Setsura brushed a strand of hair away from his damp forehead. It was hard to tell the difference between drops of sweat and rain. He pointed his finger at the cedar tree. Thanks to its sturdy roots and trunk, it alone remained standing as it once stood.

The tree was over thirty feet high and would take the embrace of three grown men to span its circumference. The branches stretched wide and reached out, casting faint shadows on the ground.

Holding that pose, Setsura leapt into the branches of the tree. Plunging into the sheltering darkness within the indecipherable yellow and green leaves, the rich foliage wavered for a moment before springing back to its original position.

A few seconds later, several people emerged from the studio doors and from behind the piles of debris. They came in various types and sizes, but all with the same disheveled appearance.

Two rangers in military fatigues. A young man, bare legs poking out from a T-shirt. A young woman in a blouse and skirt. A middle-aged woman with heavy breasts that swayed as she walked.

Five altogether. Their faces and clothing were dirty and stained. The one thing they did have in common was that, one way or another, all of them were armed. The SDF rangers carried Model 89 SIG P220 assault rifles. The young man had a steel pipe in his hands. The young woman wielded a foot-long carving knife.

The assault rifles were set on auto, the men holding them in possession of their senses and their mission. The countenances of the rest were equally suffused with vitality. Theirs were not the vacant eyes betraying psychological compulsion exerted from without. Every step, every movement was sure and swift.

Setsura lay on a branch and didn’t budge.

The motley bunch gazed around the courtyard and exchanged puzzle looks. “Nothing here,” said the young woman, smacking the blade against the palm of her hand. Perhaps she had always been an irritable sort, and now had no reason to hide it. A stream of blood trickled between her fingers and mixed with the rain before staining the ground.

“No, the Master is never wrong,” said one of the rangers, gesturing with the muzzle of the Model 89. “Keep searching.”

“Okey dokey,” said the teenager in the T-shirt.

They fanned out—nobody leading them—apparently of their own volition. No two of them moved in the same direction. This was the ideal military squad on maneuvers. Unlike the man in the PR department, they could communicate.

This must be a special unit.

One of the SDF rangers approached the tree and cast his suspicious gaze up. Then walked on. It took them ten minutes to make a complete circuit of the courtyard. They gathered back where they’d started.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said one of the rangers.

“Looks normal to me,” said the middle-aged woman.

“We’re going to catch hell for this,” the young woman said in a frightened voice.

“There is no returning with our honor besmirched,” said the second ranger, with bitter resolution. “This is the only reason our lives are worth living.”

The rest of their rain-washed faces brimmed with equally wrenching distress.

“There’s only one place left,” said the ranger, the same one who’d previously checked the tree.

He took a step away from the group and raised the Model 89 to his shoulder. The muzzle spat orange flame. The 7.62 mm rounds tore white gashes in the thick, leather-like bark and turned the sickly yellow leaves into confetti. The hot spent brass raised puffs of white steam as they fell through the rain to the earth.

The thick limb Setsura was lying on shuddered and shook. Hot lead buzzed by his ears. It was like the rain had turned into a shower of incandescent cinders. But his countenance did not contort in the slightest. Facing a painful death, his features would doubtlessly remain as impassive as ever.

The SDF ranger unleashed fifteen rounds and released the trigger. “All we can do now is deliver an honest report.”

Raw fear and resignation showed on their faces. Without another word, they turned back the way they came. The rain drummed down as they vanished into the mist.

A spider inched down a slender line of silk from the tree limb above and alit on the ground. Though this spider stood erect on two legs and wore a black slicker. The hems of the slicker fluttered and snapped as he cut across the courtyard to the building beyond, raising his left hand above his head.

The handle of the whirling carving knife came to a curious halt in midair. At the same time, from the same direction came a groan—the silhouette of the person who’d thrown it writhed—her hand pressed to her neck.

Setsura slowly turned around. The remaining four came at him through the driving rain. At the fore was the middle-aged woman, a pair of scissors in one hand. Behind her was the teenage boy and the SDF rangers. No matter how well Setsura had hid his presence from them, the Master had still taken notice.

Their faces were suffused with joy. The woman charged at him, the scissors held aloft like a rampaging psycho killer.

Her wide eyes grew wider at the sight of the carving knife protruding from between her heaving breasts. At first, the sight seemed to puzzle her. More than half of the carving knife jutted out her back. Gushing blood, she toppled over.

The teenager—he was maybe nineteen—jumped at him, swinging the pipe at his head too fast to dodge out of the way. It connected with a dull thud.

Though this was not the sound of steel striking a skull. The pipe sunk instead into the shoulder of the now-ashen woman. Setsura had hauled her to her feet before the teenager could react. The teenager slammed against her back. The blade of the carving knife plunged into his heart.

Leaving them skewered together, Setsura leapt backwards. Seeing that he had no cover, the SDF rangers smirked. The two muzzles spat out a fiery hail of bullets at seven hundred rounds a minute.

Flesh flew like popped balloons. The rain ran red—with the blood of the lady and the teenager. The two corpses had absorbed the twin volleys.

Either due to the impact of the bullets, or manipulated by an outside force, they spun around to face the two men.

The ranger on the right gurgled as the carving knife unleashed by the centrifugal force of rotation embedded itself in his neck. Pressing his left hand against the wound, firing the Model 89 with his right, the ranger keeled over.

His abrupt demise interrupted his partner’s attack. Setsura swung in an arc to the left, moving so fast through the dark silver torrents pouring down that his figure blurred like a smear of India ink.

The surviving ranger aimed his gun. The muzzle roared—just as his partner popped up in front of him like a dancing marionette. The marionette tried to level his gun and was torn to pieces like a rag doll.

The ranger must have been an expert at close-quarters combat, for as his partner bobbed back up again, instead of making the same mistake twice he beat a fast retreat, ducking behind the cedar tree just as a flash of silver light pierced the trunk.

Barely maintaining a human form, the gunned-down ranger had grabbed the knife out of his throat and hurled it at him. The dead man’s strength so exceeded that of the living that the blade sank halfway through the sturdy wood.

“It’s been a while since I’ve played with knives,” Setsura mused. “I’m a little slow on the draw.”

He waved his right hand, spun on his heels, and set off in the direction where that pained moan had first come from. The report of a gun didn’t echo from the cover of the cedar. The moan came from a gray figure, her hands fastened around her neck, cloaked in the haze of rain.

The girl who’d thrown the knife at him.

Her white blouse clung to her skin, throwing the lines of her pubescent body into strong relief. She was wearing a jeans skirt. Setsura gazed at her young pained face. Her neck and shoulders were grimy, but her face was smooth and comely, the result of some care and grooming.

There had to be a few makeup rooms in a television studio.

“Sorry I took so long with the knife,” Setsura said impassively. He might as well have been a beautiful computerized answering machine. “Those who bare their fangs to me rarely live long, but you have suffered enough. Besides, a guide may well come in handy. Or would the one of you be better off as two?”

Grasping the grave implications of the question, the girl shook her head. Quite unaware, she’d gained the latitude to move her head that much.

Every last trace of the pain that promised to literally split her in two vanished. The girl gazed dumbfounded up at Setsura. More than the fear and loathing, surprise and desire colored her eyes. From the moment she set eyes on him, the pain vanished from around her throat.

He pointed at a spot on the ground a few yards off, though her eyes remained glued to his face. “Stamp your feet there. The cedar tree will feel the reverberations most keenly.”

She finally turned her attention to the place Setsura had indicated and clumsily moved over to it. Staring at the cedar, she softly raised her sandaled right foot and brought it down.

The shape of the tree abruptly shifted. At three feet above the ground the trunk slid apart, the upper part listing to her left. The girl looked on with wide eyes. Something had sliced through the tree.

Stranger still, the canopy of the tree, its branches reaching out, didn’t fall over. The trunk slid sideways at an angle, as if down an icy ramp, and dropped vertically, embedding itself into the wet ground.

A second later, from the other side of the stump a mist of blood filled the air. The girl well knew whose from the torso that tumbled onto the ground.

“Shall we go?” Setsura said, and turned around.

The girl cast her moist eyes after him and hurried to catch up. The two set off together.

“Where is the Master?”

“I don’t know.”

“We first need to dry off. Where would be best?”

“I’ll show you.”

The odd conversation between these two foes faded away and they passed back through the exit doors. Then, only the sound of the rain disturbed the silence of the dead, showing no regard for their souls.