Chapter One

Chapter One

“Son of a bitch!” Electric Hands screamed. Spitting fire and black smoke, wrapped in blue light, he pitched over.

Lumpy bounded backwards, cackling with laughter. He didn’t say it as much as his whole body literally shook with mirth. “Good one, buster. Now it’s my turn. But first, I’ll show you something neat.”

General Bey stood like a statue of a war hero in the garden across from the corridor, the pounding rain outlining his body with a fine mist. The second life the Demon Princess had bestowed upon him allowed him to withstand a million-volt charge. But the victory took a terrible toll.

The general’s hair stood on end. His charred skin tore away, exposing the pink flesh and muscle beneath. The gold and silver-embroidered tunic was rent and torn and licked with flames. Wearing it alone would surely have burned any human being to death.

But there he stood, his eyes shining like white-hot coals. He had, as was his gift, delivered to the wielder of electromagnetic power a dose of his own medicine.

“Look at this!”

Lumpy took hold of his shirt and ripped it open. The lights of the building shone from behind him, casting his chest into shadow. But General Bey could see—the swarms of squirming human faces.

They cackled in unison, gnashing their yellow teeth and laughing. His chest and stomach and hands and no doubt his legs—his entire body was covered in fist-sized faces.

Despite himself, even the great General Bey was caught staring for a second. And in that second, blue-black lines leapt out, cutting through the penumbra of light. As the general covered his face, one line bounced off his palm, while the other four or five splashed off his chest and abdomen.

White smoke puffed out. The lines were streams of caustic acid. They ate through clothing and skin, exposing the bones of his hand. But the mouths that spit out this poison chattered in surprise. In a twinkling, the inflamed skin had glistened and healed over with normal scar tissue.

“I didn’t think that would do the job alone, but how about this?”

The streams sprang toward the general’s feet. They were a different color. As the rain beat down, a round puddle formed on the grass about eighteen inches in diameter. The streams mixed together and turned transparent.

Lumpy pursed his lips and spurted out a crimson liquid. As soon as it touched the puddle, a multicolored cloud rose up.

The general grabbed his throat. His mouth opened wide. He gasped for air. The strangled wheezes sounded like a drowning elephant. The kaleidoscopic smoke stole away the oxygen. He fell to his knees and collapsed forward. The rain pattered on his back.

“You’re one nasty motherfucker, but that’s all she wrote. Nicely done, if I do say so myself.”

Lumpy stroked the cackling lumps with his left hand, and reached with his right to pull a dagger out of his belt. He gazed at the keen blade. “I don’t know if this will do the job, so I guess I’ll have to try it and see.”

He positioned himself on the general’s right side and raised the dagger over his head with both hands, aiming for the base of his neck. He started to swing down—and his hands suddenly stopped.

A liquidy, squishy thud, like a stone thrown into a bucket of mud.

He gagged, heaved, screamed. Followed by a chorus of shrieks that were soon erased by the sound of the rain. The last thing Lumpy saw was General Bey’s right arm buried inside his abdomen all the way up to the elbow.

The lumps followed the body in death. The general smashed a couple of them like bubble wrap, and got unsteadily to his feet. He tossed Lumpy aside, and with ragged breaths went over to where Takako was lying in the grass.

“Are you all right?” he asked, though common sense dictated that the question should be directed to him. He’d had steel embedded in his body, high-tension electricity had scorched him down to the marrow, his flesh had been melted, and finally he was asphyxiated—little wonder if he should tread the grass with less than steady steps.

And yet he threw out his chest and drew a thin line across his mouth with his lips, evincing not the slightest sign of weakness. This five-hundred-year-old general could carry himself in no other way.

Still lying down, Takako nodded. As to what she might be thinking, her empty eyes reflected only the dark canopy of the night. She made no effort to move in General Bey’s direction.

“We are almost there, that bastard Setsura’s bedroom.” The general reached down and Takako grasped his hand. “I do not know what is waiting for us ahead. Whether Setsura can be killed. And if he can be, what Princess will do. I do not think she will blithely cast us aside. Our fates are never kind to us. But for now, my dreams have been fulfilled. Do you understand?”

His burned and ravaged face regenerated as he spoke. He gestured at the fallen yakuzas with his left hand. “They have taught me much. I could live in a city filled with them. This city would accept us. Would accept me. And me and you together.”

The pouring rain did not dampen these words of love in the least.

“You kill Setsura. I will assist. Kill him no matter what happens. And you and I will live together in this city. Oh, what am I saying? Am I telling you to live? What a thing to say. Needless to say, we do not live so much as we feign at being alive. And not you alone, but the two of us. No one shall stand in our way. Not Princess, not Kikiou.” He pulled her to her feet. “Once more into the breach. The enemy lies there.”

Baldy cracked open the screen door and poked his head out. “They’re coming.”

“So they’ve already killed five?” came a pensive voice from the center of the twenty-by-twenty foot room. It was covered with tatami mats in the traditional style.

A luxurious futon covered the brand-new tatami mats. One shadow sat by itself at the foot of the futon. Two more were seated next to it at the head. One of the two was Kyuzan Jinbo, the capo of the Mad Men Society. He’d posed the question.

“In that case, there’s no guarantee the five of us in here can defend our guest. Hey, Hamada. Take him and get out of here.”

“That’s crazy!” one of the shadows beside the futon shrilly replied. “I couldn’t live with myself. Send me in first.”

“There’s nobody else I can trust him to.” Kyuzan nodded to the two behind him. “These two chucked any thoughts for their own safety from the start, transfixed by the sight of his face. Who the hell knows what would happen if I left you alone with him? Are you fine with anything kinky happening to our friend here?”

“Then you come too, Boss.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” he thundered. “I got less willpower than the rest of you!”

Not only Hamada, but Baldy and Dead Guy glared hard at him, fuming with murderous intent. At the same time, a deadly—and deadly funny—atmosphere filled the room.

“Get your ass in gear. If you don’t, I will.”

“I get it, I get it. Well, then—”

He leaned over and put his arms around Setsura and hoisted him up. Setsura still had his coat on. Nobody there felt worthy enough to take it off him. Which was leveling no criticism at them.

“I’m so sorry about carrying you on my back. Please persevere.” Hamada was back to talking in a distinctly feminine voice. He picked up the grocery bag next to the futon. He fixed Kyuzan with a look and said, “I’ll contact you later.”

“Sure.”

“Take care.”

With a mixture of camaraderie and jealousy, Hamada bowed low and said, “Forgive me, anniki!” Then the pounding patter of feet as he ran out of the room.

“Well, shall we?” Baldy slapped himself on the head and got to his feet. He held a samurai sword in his left hand.

“Boss, this okay with you? Here?”

“Go ahead. Do it.”

“Done.”

Staring at the ceiling, Baldy rose onto the balls of his feet and jumped off the tatami—not hard, and yet he rose a yard into the air. With a rousing shout, white light gushed from the scabbard in all directions. He landed just as lightly, and with a faint whishing sound sheathed the sword once again in the scabbard.

No one bested Baldy at the iai, the martial art of drawing a sword, cutting down the opponent, and sheathing it afterwards. And this wasn’t a matter of exacting a single death with a single draw. One against five, one against ten, and his scabbard would produce the number of blades needed for the task, dispatching his opponents in the blink of an eye.

Settling to one knee, the white light flashed around him again. He returned the scabbard to his waist and bowed politely. “Sorry for all the commotion.”

At some point, Jinbo had moved in front of the alcove. Needless to say, he’d seen it all before. In the alcove was an odd object for a room like this—a pachinko machine. Not one of the modern, computer-controlled consoles, but an old-school model, where hand-activated levers shot the steel balls through their courses.

In front of it were several green plastic boxes piled high with the shiny, silver balls. This was the way Kyuzan Jinbo, capo of the Mad Men Society and the most feared yakuza in Demon City Shinjuku, liked to entertain himself.

But he wasn’t about to launch into a game here and now. Nor would he be flicking them out like marbles. He did something even stranger. He picked up one of the plastic boxes and opened his mouth wide. The pea-sized ball bearings poured into his big maw, clinking and rattling.

One heaping box held over seven hundred pachinko balls. He swallowed them all without taking a breath. And moved to the next box. His stomach steadily swelled.

The man was clearly mad. Except that the yakuza capo and his crew performed these actions like holy men conducting solemn rituals.

Jinbo digested the contents of ten boxes in total. With a burp, he set down the last one and turned to face the door.

Two silhouettes were standing there. “Where is Setsura?” the big one asked. A chunk of sword stuck out of his neck.

“Sorry, there’s nobody home. The only thing you’ll find here is your grave.”

Baldy glided forward, leaving his left foot planted behind him. His right hand released from his left, a colorless, odorless bloodlust radiating not just from the grip but from his whole body. The killing stance of the iai—and only an idiot would sally forth to fight after seeing it.

The big shadow in the doorway moved forward.

“Yaaah—!” With a glass-shattering martial scream, the spirit and power bundled in the white light struck at the foreign soldier’s brow, sweeping at him so fast that to the human eye he might as well be standing still.

But neither the severer nor the severed were ordinary humans.

The sword split General Bey’s cranium and bisected his spine down to his hipbone and exited at his groin.

Something surely no human could withstand.

A red line ran vertically down the center of his body and burst forth in a fountain. The big man fell over. The tatami shook from the impact.

The other three men watched the intruder’s frame split like a stick of kindling. Even with his regenerative powers, how could he recover from such a wound? There was no way.

The gore sprayed across sliding doors and screens and stained the sweat on Baldy’s forehead as he extracted the blade.

“Good job,” Jinbo beamed. He was by now twice his normal size.

A white ghost approached the corpse, like a beautiful sculpture out of a wax museum. She put her hands on the severed torso and pressed the two halves together. The red dividing line shimmered, grew transparent like gelatin, and disappeared.

Baldy would have no mercy on her either. He aimed at Takako’s head, drawing and attacking simultaneously, with a terrifying speed that yielded nothing to General Bey’s.

Blood burst from her white neck. Baldy bore down with all his weight. He should have instantly decapitated her. What fell instead was the sword from his hands.

Baldy looked down and saw a hand in his side. The left hand of the man he’d sliced in two. The hand tore through the front of him. The thick dagger of the hand transformed into the tip of a sword that could puncture steel and ripped through his stomach.

General Bey stood up. Baldy fell down. The sword grip thumped onto the tatami.

The world twisted and warped around them. Black fissures ran to all four corners of the ceiling. The whole structure fell down on the heads of the general and Takako. Baldy’s sword had sliced through to the beams holding up the roof.

The cloud of debris swallowed up the two, along with Baldy. The building was a one-story house. The rain beat down the rising cloud, reducing it to a mountain of shattered pillars, lumber and plaster.

A figure slowly approached the wreckage—a pale, skeletal frame—the man resurrected from the incinerator of a crematorium. He wasn’t carrying any weapons.

“I’m not dead yet!” he called out to the rubble. “Come on down!”

A chunk of plaster rolled up to his feet. Dead Guy smiled. The rubble stirred. Plywood and beams flew up, scattering the settling dust and stucco. The rain pelted the looming white shadow. In a flash, General Bey resumed his normal shape and form. He reached down to Takako lying in front of him.

Just as the roof caved in, he’d thrown Takako to the floor and rolled on top of her, shielding her against the collapsing building.

“C’mon. That’s it. Let’s not dawdle.” The living Dead Guy clapped his hands. “One way or another, somebody’s finally going to die tonight. It’s been a long time coming, living while dead. Five years.”

What he did next was no less incomprehensible. He ran up to the general and bit down on his neck.

The general’s mouth popped open in surprise. Dead Guy had fangs like a wild animal. No sooner had he sunk them halfway into the general’s neck than Dead Guy’s body burst into flames.

On this wet, warm summer evening, the waves of heat raced through the remains of the room and beat against their faces. Inside a fire that scalded his flesh and melted his bones, General Bey breathed in the nostalgic scent. The smell of the grave. The fire of the crematorium.

Rain poured down on the burning bodies, sending columns of steam skyward. The incandescent flare gradually faded. After the white smoke wafted away, the charred remains of the two decorated the scorched tatami.

Jinbo Kyuzan watched the last of his underlings literally go up in smoke. He glanced from the general to where Takako Kanan was lying. “Some fireworks, eh sister?” he said softly.