Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The rumbling, exploding sounds came from far away, as the mind-clouded pilots of the hovertanks destroyed themselves over and over again. Wailing sirens mingled with pounding footsteps and motorized carts. The citadel stared into the abyss of its own death throes.

But to one small group of beings, the encircling flames and the unfolding tragedy around them was simply a curious backdrop to a completely different drama.

“As long as she’s in your hands, she cannot be in mine.” There was a power in General Bey’s voice that once shook cities to their foundations. “But now she is in mine and shall never return to yours. We have known each other a long time, Princess. Today is the end of eternity.”

“Hoh. Clever man. A lot of sass from a backwoods aristocrat. You’d be nothing but the dirt beneath my feet had I not taken you aboard my ship. This cesspool of a city will be your gravestone.”

Princess’s eyes blazed with a fire fiercer than the dancing flames. The reverberations rumbled. General Bey closed his eyes. Knowing that her mesmerizing technique had failed, she would find a way to work the failure to her advantage.

In the next moment, her naked body jumped up, soaring with an elegance that would make the most practiced ballerina green with envy. She twisted her body in midair and landed astride General Bey’s broad shoulders before he realized what had happened.

Her willowy hand seized his chin. “Dust you are and to dust shall you return, Kazikli Bey.”

She leaned back. In that instant, the pressure exerted on the general’s neck must have exceeded a thousand tons. The neck bones cracked and separated. Another mouth appeared below his Adam’s apple. Blood showered onto the ground.

General Bey reached up and seized her wrist, even as she pried back with increased force. Blood poured from the mouth and nose of his upturned face.

Thousands of tons of force fell to zero. The general roared in what could be mistaken as his death agonies. But little by little, Princess’s interlaced fingers were slipping apart.

“Bitch!”

The curse seemed to add power to his strength. Princess still held on. How long could the Prince of Darkness live with his head torn off—and Princess doing the tearing?

The pair of shadows bounded backwards. General Bey had done a standing high jump off the floor. With a loud groan, the two crashed into the stairwell wall. The fissures snaked out like a smashed daddy longlegs. Unlikely that any pair of humans, past or present, had ever unleashed so much energy in so tight a space.

General Bey did not let the slight slackness in her grip go to waste. He went to push her aside. She was as steady as a rock. The general got to his feet—it didn’t hurt that Princess weighed practically nothing in comparison—and once again slammed the mass of his body against the wall.

Princess gasped. The general concentrated all of his strength into his arms. The two-headed monster came apart. The general roared and spun around, slamming Princess into the ground. This time, the impact produced a short, ear-piercing scream. And a different comeback.

“Not bad, General,” she gasped, with a small smile.

He wrapped his left hand around her wrist and reached out with his right toward a concrete wall reduced to rubble by one of the hovertank’s laser cannons. A black line stuck out of it. A metal shaft.

He seized the end, twisted and wrenched it free. He smiled with satisfaction. The lasers had sliced the end of the rebar into the shape of a chisel.

“This is the end, Princess.” He raised the instrument of death over his head.

“Give it a try! Let’s see how well the talents of this royal rube work on me.”

“Your history is over!”

A flash of black lightning pierced her sternum just above the white hills of her breasts. Princess’s body trembled. Her clenched teeth—like polished grains of rice—opened and a frothy tide of blood poured out.

Takako and Prime Minister Kongodai stood rooted in place. A kind of electric shock briefly passed across their faces. Kongodai dropped the atomic cannon and sat down heavily on his backside. Takako stood there looking on blankly. Though signs of intelligence were beginning to emerge, her eyes remained misted over by Princess’s spell.

“Hey, miss, are you all right?” Kongodai asked, rubbing his hands together.

The memory of what had happened since becoming Princess’s prisoner was still like a dream, but there was some clarity left. He couldn’t know how far along Takako’s vampiric transformation was. His reflexive, paternal impulse was that this helpless young woman should not be left here to fend for herself.

He took her by the hand and looked around for the way to the lobby. He spotted a shattered exit sign. “This way. Come along.”

He was about to set off, dragging her along if necessary, when a whining turbine sound descended towards them. A large black shadow fell from the fissure in the ceiling, transforming into a hovertank blocking their way.

The pilot was by now quite mad.

The general screwed the iron shaft into Princess deeper and deeper, pinning the woman like a butterfly to a collector’s board. Staring down at her comely features writhing in pain, his own face trembled with the ecstatic joys of a strange sexual perversion.

“It is all over for you, Princess,” he shouted, like a referee declaring the victor of a prize fight.

“No. That is yet to come.”

Startled, he peered down at the woman’s face in her death agonies. And when he understood her meaning, it was too late to pull back. The red glow from Princess’s eyes burned through his pupils.

“The only one on his way to destruction is you, General. Come to me.”

She shook her hand free and grabbed hold of his hair with a claw-like grip. “It took a lot of pain and suffering to get you to look into these eyes. Now I return it with interest.”

Princess drew her right hand down vertically, towards the pole sticking through her chest. The end of the shard buried itself in his wide-open right eye. With a bellow that shook the heavens and the earth, the general tried to pull away, but Princess wouldn’t let him.

“Not yet, Bey. It’s not yet time for us to part.”

She lowered her hand. The shaft dug deeper into his eye socket. A mist of blood erupted from his face. The booming howls echoed against the peals of laughter.

A grotesque scene from one of Dante’s inner rings of hell. A bulge appeared on the back of the general’s head. Then the tip of the steel spar jutted out.

“How’s it feel, General? It’s about time you and your pissant aristocracy and your pissant legend were wiped out. It is my horrors the world should speak freely of instead, not yours.”

There was even a touch of fondness in her voice. The general tried to throw back his head and tear himself free of her grip. But her eyes burned all the brighter, robbing him of the power to resist.

Would she summon forth yet one more reign of destruction?

But painting a new name in red across the pages of history would have to wait. Princess’s expression changed. Lying on her back, her eyes were drawn in the direction of a column of black smoke.

Sensing a slackening in her concentration and strength, the general focused all his power and tore himself free. Righting himself, he yanked the shaft out of his gore-splattered face. Holding a hand over his eye, he jumped back. But not any faster than Princess pushed him away.

Without a backward glance in his direction, her bloody white body plunged into the whirling bands of smoke.

The lines of fire raked the ground on either side of Takako and the prime minister. The 120 mm diameter arrows of fire raised sheets of flame and sent chunks of concrete flying.

“Stop!” Kongodai tried to shout, but the words stuck in his throat. As the onrushing tide of death became inexorable, dumb acceptance was the only human response.

The laser sliced through the floor. Feeling the ground giving way beneath his feet, the prime minister leapt to the right. He intended to take the girl with him, but ran out of time and space.

It seemed that Takako was about to be swallowed up in a rain of falling debris. But then her hair suddenly seemed to stand on end. A white hand reached down and grabbed hold.

Maintaining Takako’s balance at the edge of the precipice was a bloody woman. “You’re not dying yet,” the Demon Princess said in a determined voice. “You are my tool for driving Setsura to despair. No matter what else, I will take you back alive. No matter who else in this world becomes my enemy in the process.”

“Who—who the hell are you?”

Prime Minister Kongodai’s question was lost in another eruption and implosion from below. He had listened to the SDF Chief of Staff’s recordings of General Bey describing the physical and psychological nature of the Demon Princess. But he hadn’t believed what he heard.

The wind rising out of the inferno lifted up her glistening black hair, exposing the scorched side of her face. At this critical moment, Kongodai forgot about everything else and saw only the beauty of her body. The blood covering her face and chest came alive with an obscene elegance, a dash of hot reality interrupting a wet dream.

Her breasts, her hips, those thighs—even with her wounds, the dirt and grime—this physical manifestation of the feminine should be otherwise found only among the divine.

Take this woman to his bed and he would forgo his life and soul. But without a glance at him—a prisoner to his carnal desires—Princess put one arm around Takako and with the other gestured to the hovertank to follow her. She started toward the staircase, then paused and looked back at the prime minister.

Her eyes again glowed with the red light of her irresistible charms. Japan’s chief executive couldn’t close his eyes. “A different cut of cloth from the kings I once made my slaves, but you may prove useful. Until my fires no longer smolder in your heart, you will serve me. Wherever I am, when I beckon, you will come at once. Now go.”

The weight of her words seemed to bow him backwards. In the next moment, he returned to his senses and ran to the front lobby.

“As long as these eyes stand sentry, death will stay its hand. Create an exit so we can leave this stage and be on our way.”

She turned her lovely countenance up at the ceiling. The hovertank shifted its position and pointed upwards. A crimson beam incinerated the ceiling. The walls shattered like a bamboo screen. Fire and concrete showered down, the dull booms drowned out by the shrieking echoes of Princess’s laughter.

Ryuuki watched in casual surprise as the towering building—once called a monument to human folly—toppled over. The one-armed man stood calmly on the overpass that ran past the Park Hyatt Hotel as the flying embers fell around him.

Then he walked on, looking for all the world like a man out for a stroll, as if the flames themselves were determined not to touch him.

“Yet another decline and fall.” The scene of destruction reflected in his eyes, eyes that focused instead on the far away and long ago. “The citadels of the Hun and all their outposts fell in flames too. It is the same everywhere. The world is born to be destroyed.”

His voice was carried away on the wind, a wind born of the building’s downfall. Repeated earth tremors shook the road. Towers of writhing flames rose up like fire-breathing dragons. Light and shadow played across his face.

He raised his hand as if to brush aside the darkness. Twenty yards ahead of him, a trio of shadows faced him on the road.

The large hemispherical object like a turtle’s shell hovered motionless in the air, along with a smaller pod-shaped cylinder. Commanding him to come with all due haste was one of the two willowy silhouettes standing between them.