Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Setsura stopped before the fissure in Yocho.

It was a little over a dozen feet wide and a yard across at its widest point. Of the hundreds of such chasms and crevasses scattered across Shinjuku, this one was on the small side. Even children knew to avoid them. The stakes and cyclone fences were there to keep the silly sightseers from doing silly things and injuring themselves.

Although they were all generally referred to as “fissures,” they came in a myriad of types and sizes. The one in Ushigome-Yanagi was covered and surrounded by three layers of fifty-thousand-volt electric fencing. On nights when a bright moon rose high, creatures of unknown origins emerged while others recklessly threw themselves in.

The hole in Bentencho was a tad more “real.” Three times a day, at eight o’clock in the morning, noon, and seven in the evening, a single SDF soldier arrived, tossed in a hand grenade, waited for the explosion, and left. As far as anybody knew, nothing had changed about that hole, and the SDF wasn’t testing hand grenade designs.

Whatever was lurking down there demanded caution. The drivers of the vehicles parked around the vacant lot reported that nobody had returned. That they hadn’t hardly surprised him. That responsibility fell on the shoulders of the mayor. However shrewd a man he might be, he couldn’t comprehend Princess’s bottomless powers.

But the real reason Setsura came to a halt was that—something was there. He looked around. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The summer sun poured down, as if trying to reduce everything to a melting pool of white.

The vacant lot was approximately a hundred feet on a side. The buildings that once stood there had been leveled, and now only broken-down ten foot walls on the east and south sides remained.

Setsura’s gaze focused on the top of the south wall. Nothing was there. His devil wires jumped out and scanned the surface of the wall, and detected a warm spot, not the heat of the sun but left by something with a body, that had been there a short time before.

A golden scale about four inches long and two inches wide. The edges of the scale were dark green. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of any creature it might belong to.

He spun around, sensing the raw breath of a wild thing in the vicinity of his waist. Nothing was there.

Gripping the devil wires cast out to the wall, Setsura approached the fissure. Anything after him should still be on his tail. And when it came at him, he’d be better off knowing what he was fighting.

He jumped over the chain-link fence, didn’t land, but fell down into the chasm. His slicker puffed open in the up-rushing wind as he descended like a black dahlia into this literal underworld.

All around him glowed green eyes. His ears rang with the sickening cries and growls. These were the creatures incrusted into the walls of earth on all sides.

Three hundred feet down he reduced the velocity of his descent and dropped silently to solid ground. He’d scanned the ground with a separate devil wire for a safe place to land. The area was lit up by sunlight spilling from the fissure far above and a faint glow from the water conduits.

Bioluminescent bugs flourished in the stone walls and layers of mud. The faint pink light cast Setsura into the silhouette of a man born into a demon world and left with no place else to turn.

But this silhouette had places to go and things to do before calling it a day.

The ground stretching out from the crushed sewers was covered with footprints. The men had shot down the escape tubes currently stacked up on the trucks, which then automatically recoiled when no longer in use—one of the “secret weapons” used by special tactical units.

A strange sound reached Setsura’s ears a short time later—call it the moans and groans of those imprisoned forever in the darkness of this subterranean labyrinth.

Though if it was a prison, then the cells must be furnished with torture chambers stocked with the sweetest kind of punishments.

He abruptly came across a group of men writhing on the ground. They were dressed in civilian clothes, though in a reflection of the pathos of the government man in the gray flannel suit, all were dressed the same. Here were the missing law enforcement personnel.

Stealing closer through the shadows, Setsura got a better look at their faces. Their bloodshot eyes, devoid of reason and human sentiment, were filled with the least evolved of animal desires, faces etched with carnality and depravity, as if they had been possessed by erotic spirits.

That woman, he thought.

The men shifted forward, forming a large ring. The moaning died away. The movement stopped. Sensuous cries again welled up from a point at the top of the ring. Setsura’s eyes were drawn to the source. The body of a woman, skin like cream, could be glimpsed beneath the dark heap of men—her thighs, her arms, her face.

As if feasting on her discarded body parts, the hands and legs and lips of the men swarmed over her. Hands massaged her breasts, lips sucked at her nipples and dove down between her legs to eat her out.

Every time a hand moved, another replaced it. Her face was wet with saliva, as if set upon by slathering dogs, their panting lips covering those the color of red coral.

The voices were all those of the men.

Not just the man whose waist shuddered between her thighs, but all those lusting after her flesh. Those reduced to simply watching had whipped it out and were engrossed in getting off. Simply watching would make a man come in passing.

In that moment, urged on by her lascivious nature, or else commanded by the baser instincts to defile her, they spread their seed onto her face and breasts and belly, while she smeared the semen across her body with her porcelain white hands.

“And in broad daylight,” Setsura said with a wry smile. “Attagirl.”

Over and over again they would surely have continued this frantic coupling. Having shot their wads, the men stepped back from her, more dead than alive. In their place, more men lined up to unburden themselves on her, the faces etched with exhaustion and fatigue—

—while the Demon Princess took everything they had to give her without so much as a peep, bathed in the bawdy bodily fluids, her loins glistening, the tentacles of lust erupting all around her like the silk of a black widow spider, consuming the souls of her mates before consuming them.

At this rate, they would desiccate and turn into mummies and die. And even dead, would continue to sexually service her.

With more wordless cries and intolerable groans, the men next in line spent themselves.

Setsura’s thoughts lit up with the spark of a possibility. However immortal a body Princess might possess, perhaps at the center she yet preserved a core of very human attributes. Experiencing the heights of pleasure also implied the ability to feel the depths of pain.

He flung out his devil wires. They sprang back as if repelled by an unseen force. The men indulging themselves with her had covered her pale body from foot to toe.

Without a second to spare, Setsura pulled them back and sent them flying behind him. This time came a response like thunder.

Before the lifeless faces could turn as one, the white beast roared. A white tiger more than ten feet long—there could be no more appropriate stage for the legendary beast to make its appearance.

“So you finally showed up.” Princess sat up, pushing the enervated men aside. “Seems you have finally found your master. And in pursuit of such wonderful prey. Setsura, does the sight of me start anything burning?”

She seemed to have been aware of his presence from the start.

“Hard to say.”

“Then I will set you on fire myself.” She gestured to him. “Come here.”

The law enforcement personnel turned their faces to him, faces brimming with dissatisfaction and suspicion, more faces and more faces. Abruptly, several of them twisted and distorted, became black undifferentiated masses, and collapsed in front of their stunned colleagues, spouting blood like fountains of black ink.

Flinging the torn-off faces at their feet, Princess declared in a high and mighty voice, “No one shall be dissatisfied with me!” As if the petrified shadows indeed satisfied her, she turned her own exquisite face to Setsura. “So, come. Before you turn into that tiger’s next meal.”

The tiger howled softly.

“You keep your claws to yourself for now.” Her expression shifted. The tiger’s whimpering didn’t change. “What did you do?”

By you, she meant Setsura.

“Oh, nothing,” he said with a shrug. “Well, maybe I hobbled it a bit.”

“You cut that poor Ko’s legs?” Her eyes widened a tad. “Now that it’s wounded, the little pussy won’t listen to what I have to say.” A speck of ghastliness flashed in her troubled eyes. “This should be fun. Setsura, can you slay a giant? Or else—”

“Share your bed? How do you tell a tiger who won’t obey to keep its distance?”

“I have my ways. The only other option is to become Ko’s dinner. I want to see that, your handsome face chewed to bits by that monster’s fangs.” Princess licked her lips. She missed a spot of saliva that trickled from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it off with the back of her hand. “That would make for a splendid show. I’m giving you your last chance. Come here.”

“Maybe not.”

“Idiot!”

“We’ve rescued Kanan-san and captured her alter-ego. What’s holding either of us back from a good fight?”

The truth mingled with a lie. Princess paused and considered her next words. “Hoh. I’ll just kill everything and everyone, the tiger included.”

The tiger probably understood that. It growled and pranced forward. A splendid and elegant sight. Except its forelegs were missing.

Showering blood in the wind, the tiger pounced on a spot several yards short of where Setsura had been, while Setsura made a much bigger leap backwards.

A tongue of fire chased after him. That a creature of legend could spit fire was to be expected. This fire, however, blanketed the pile of brick and cinderblock Setsura was hiding behind and melted it away. The temperature must exceed fifty-thousand degrees. The bricks erupted in incandescent flames.

A plume of white smoke traveled along the wall and suddenly vanished into a gap, the mouth of a drainage pipe.

If its fire couldn’t follow, what would the tiger do? It moved. Planting its front legs, severed at the knees, it crouched and sprang forward off its hind legs.

The slimy gore squirmed beneath its feet. Its eyes burned with pain and loathing, but its tenaciousness was implacable. The awkward steps yielded to the glassy smooth movements of a wild beast.

The pace became a sprint as it closed on the drainage pipe. Those final steps brought it across the deadly tripwires with an ease only two people there could appreciate.

Peering into the pipe, the tiger shook its head from side to side. The devil wires cut through the air, rebounded, sought its torso.

The tiger defeated the effort with a quick retreat, opened its mouth and roared. Setsura plastered himself against the ceiling. The shaft of fire shot past only inches away.

Princess’s laugh mingled with the hot currents. “Ko is a fast learner. Not the kind of predator that’s caught in the same trap twice. These magical beasts always dodge the second strike. Your wires won’t get through. Will you be roasted there? Eaten there? Come to me, or don’t. Let’s see you make another death-defying escape.”

“Aw, shut up,” Setsura mumbled, scurrying like a spider deeper down the pipe. Any surface, the air itself, was scalding to the touch.

The tiger tried to climb into the pipe.

A wild cry came at that moment. The tiger turned and looked back. A stream of blood shot up. And then another. Three, four, five, six. One by one, the Demon Princess twisted off the heads of these law enforcement personnel. Grabbing some by the hair and ripping them off like the head off a doll, slicing through the necks of others with a slash of her hand, resulting in a splash or spray of blood.

In the midst of the slaughter, accompanied by the symphony of screams from their death throes echoed the unbridled shouts of Princess’s maniacal laughter.