Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Setsura Aki walked casually along the dusky road.

This was the kind of summer evening when a man couldn’t take ten steps before his forehead was damp with sweat. The time of day when housewives rushed about making last-minute purchases for dinner. When kids carrying talismans and water pistols filled with holy water played cops-and-robbers with the more harmless species of gremlin. When hard-working businessmen hurried home, briefcases in hand.

The everyday activities in July here in the “safe area” that brought the streets of Arakimachi to life.

Setsura showed up like a broomstick shoved between the spokes of those smooth routines. What made passersby mopping their foreheads and necks with handkerchiefs stop and gape wasn’t the sight of a long black duster and black high-collar shirt, all completely out of season.

Rather, when it came to upsetting the ordinary routine, even wild and woolly creatures from the no-go areas in the DMZ couldn’t compete with what could be called this man’s heartbreaking beauty.

Usually the unapproachable man-of-mystery, clothed in a vague, indefinable air, would transform into someone friendly and approachable. But that wasn’t the case here.

The cool eyes, the finely chiseled features—that a sculptor would give anything to carve in stone—and that sense of high risk. The combination impressed pedestrians with a sense of danger, while the young women watched him pass by, their cheeks blushing with undisguised desire.

Ryuuki’s qi had put Setsura through the wringer. He felt like he had a ton of lead on his back. The fatigue filled his gut, constricted his veins. After ten yards he was out of breath.

But taking a break was out of the question. This was one time when he couldn’t put off until tomorrow what had to be done right now. If anything, he had to pick up the pace. Based on what he’d understood from Mephisto alone, these were no run-of-the mill villains.

More than anything else, Mephisto had messed it up with Ryuuki and hadn’t come out of it much better than himself. Add the powers of the other three into the mix—

Then there was that little incident at the hospital. The vampire lady came for him and took off without finishing the job. Setsura didn’t understand what had gone down either. But seeing how she’d easily broken through all the security fail-safes in Mephisto Hospital—that the devil himself could not escape from—sent a shiver down his spine.

To make matters worse, Takako had been infected by those poisonous fangs.

He felt like his head was full of steaming muck. The bright face of that college coed was planted there like an orchid in his mind. Even granting that she’d gotten in way over her head of her own accord, she’d tasted Ryuuki’s terrors at his shop and then voluntarily stuck with him all the way to the hospital, where she’d met a much worse fate.

There was no way he could just walk away from her now. It was possible that other victims like Takako were multiplying somewhere in this city at this very moment.

What made vampires so truly terrifying was their ability to reproduce so quickly in such a fashion. Once bitten, the victims became vampires as well, and then turned on their friends and family without mercy.

Demon City Shinjuku was like a cancerous cell in the body of the peaceful world. The bloody flower bloomed in the darkness, and before anybody knew it, was wafting its pollen into the air and gently coaxing open the petals in another garden. There was no way to predict what manner of annihilation awaited them.

Whenever the thought crossed his mind, the roiling impatience made his eyes glow with an ominous light and brought a thin smile to his lips. The labored stride of this young man—who alone understood the true terrors of the situation—concealed the inner strength and resolve necessary to stand against the darkness.

Approaching a row of prefab houses, he stopped in his tracks. In a crook in the road, where the main thoroughfare hung a dogleg to the right, an expected pall of silence suddenly fell.

These prefab houses were vacant. A poisonous miasma hit his nostrils.

The effects of the Devil Quake were not limited to plants and animals, but worked their way into the air and soil. The miasma that had emptied out the residential district in Arakimachi was one such result.

These changes occurred at the molecular level. The earth absorbed the phantom winds and coughed out the gasses in an unending stream. To make matters worse, it didn’t happen until a year after the residences were rebuilt, and seemed to target the people living there.

Miraculously, the gasses contained no components harmful to human life. On the contrary, they proved quite effective at eradicating certain monster species. But the stinging acrid smell couldn’t be filtered or treated or sealed off. In a month, everybody had moved away.

Only one man remained behind. Setsura found such half-crazed bullheadedness amusing. But he hadn’t fully considered the source of such bullheadedness.

A possibly fatal blunder for a Demon City P.I.

The house he was looking for was the same as all the other prefab houses. Except that it had that particular air of being lived in. Setsura still wasn’t aware that about an hour before, an old man with white hair and a white beard appeared in front of that house and slipped like a shadow into the foyer.

Several seconds later the house had swayed and shook and collapsed without a sound. Standing in the midst of the rubble, the old man dropped a small cube at his feet. Smoky liquid streamed out as if from an atomizer and enveloped the entire house and the ground it once stood on.

The box trembled like a living thing. In a twinkle it grew to the size of the house, reproducing its exterior walls as an exact duplicate, down to the location of the windows and doors and the preexisting damage to the walls.

A short while later, the old man himself appeared at the front door. He smiled a malicious smile. At the end of the walk he turned right and disappeared down the street.

After the front door closed, leaving just a hairline crack behind, a faint, honey-like odor wafted up around the house for several yards in every direction.

Setsura stopped a dozen feet from the house, the brakes applied by a sixth sense that had steered the manhunter clear of many bloody obstacles before. He didn’t understand exactly why, but a fog of danger surrounded the house.

Still, he kept on going. An odor he wasn’t fully conscious of drifted by his nose. His senses would have detected any lethal compounds. It didn’t because the odor itself contained nothing harmful.

Like the pheromones secreted by a bitch in heat, the purpose of the scent was to attract the male, in this case to lure Setsura into the house. And unlike an alley cat, this odor possessed a kind of living beauty.

On the front porch, Setsura briefly glanced around before pressing the intercom button. Nobody answered. A knock had the same result. He put his hand on the doorknob and turned. The cold sensation he received surely came from the metal doorknob. The door easily opened.

“Hello?” Setsura called out, stepping onto the concrete pad of the genkon.

None of the lights were on. Because the man didn’t have a phone, Setsura hadn’t been able to do anything in advance other than confirm the address.

A long moment passed. A human figure emerged out of the darkness and hurried down the hallway. An old man bent over from osteoporosis, walking with clumsy, labored steps.

Something’s wrong here, a warning whispered down in the pit of Setsura’s stomach. This old man—

A face—exactly the same as in the photo Toya had emailed him—glared at him and said in a demanding voice, “What?”

Setsura nodded politely and held out a business card. “Professor Niwa?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to ask you some questions about your field of academic expertise.”

Without a glance at the card, Professor Niwa turned around. He trudged back the way he came, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Just a minute—”

“Follow me,” the old man bluntly instructed him.

Setsura reached behind him and closed the door, and stepped up from the genkon.

The old man passed through the door he’d exited from a minute ago. Setsura trailed behind him. He felt an odd sensation coming up from the floor through the soles of his feet. A close look revealed nothing unusual.

Every inch of the approximately twelve-foot square, Japanese-style room with a tatami mat floor was strewn with clutter. The interior decor consisted of a musty set of living room furniture, an overhead light fixture and dust. The plaster walls were lined with a spider’s web of cracks and actual spider webs.

The only thing that seemed out of place was the sweet smell. Though Setsura had noticed it by now, it was not enough to prompt him to leave.

“Please have a seat.” The old man settled into the sofa and motioned Setsura to a chair.

“Pardon me,” said Setsura, sitting down. His butt sank into the soft cushions.

“What pressing matter did you need to see me about?”

“Among your various fields of expertise, would you happen to know anything about the black art of containing and sealing one world inside another?”

“I believe so,” the professor promptly answered. “However, that is something I do not speak about. And now that you’ve asked, you shan’t be leaving here either.”

“Oh?” Setsura flashed a thin smile.

The old man spoke in a dry, raspy whisper. “A curious Chinese gentlemen dropped by and did some remodeling. I took the opportunity to add some of my own renovations. Like this—”

He poked himself in the left eye with his index finger. The finger sank all the way in. Without so much as a twitch, he pulled it out. The eyeball between his fingers glared at Setsura. At the same time, fluid poured from the eye socket like black crude gushing from an oil well.

The sweetly acidic smell quickly filled the room. Setsura made for the door.

The faint scent of this odor was the same scent that hung around the outside of the house as well. Its composition aside, a sudden slackening in the sensation coming up through his feet brought its purpose to his attention.

It wasn’t so much like concrete turning to quicksand as cold mud warming. In the next moment, Setsura had sunken through the floor up to his waist. A strange noise rang down from the ceiling. The moment he knew that something was amiss, he’d thrown out a strand of devil wire for support, looping it around the light fixture.

It wasn’t the sound of the ceiling boards ripping apart. More like the sound of flesh being torn through from within.

Like a sinking ship, one half of the squirming floor heaved up while the other half plunged down. The floor moved like a storm-tossed ocean. As did the ceiling. The synthetic sheetrock turned black and silver, laced with blue and green, and stirred together like a spreading oil slick.

Setsura didn’t look at either. He’d sensed this room’s true nature the moment he’d detected that “off” sensation on the soles of his feet. Instead he fixed his eyes on Niwa.

The stubborn geezer had to be already dead and was up and around only as bait to lure Setsura into the trap. Now the old man reached up to his face and ripped it off. A fissure opened all the way down to his throat. A sweet, honey-like liquid erupted out of the crack.

It lashed the floor and ceiling into a frenzy of desire. Pieces of the floor peeled off in strips and whipped through the air. Blue-green snakes. Beady eyes stared coldly at Setsura. Thread-like tongues flicked from grinning mouths.

Something like a slab of meat fell from the ceiling onto the back of his neck. He reached up and slapped it away. It resembled a cross between a flatfish and a sea slug. Its cool and bluish translucent body was speckled with dark red dots. It was rapidly growing.

From feeding on Setsura’s blood. This was the first giant vampire leech he’d seen, even in Shinjuku. Another one sprang at him. He batted it away.

The wriggling leech was swallowed up by the floor. Though by now the “floor” was anything but. The thousands of intertwined “ropes” wound, unwound and zigzagged back and forth. The “ropes” were snakes.

Setsura looked up at the ceiling. It resembled the surface of a heaving ocean, a sight to freak out any normal person, no matter how evenly disposed. Leeches. Just like the one that had sucked his blood. They were packed so tightly together that they formed a single mass, heaving and rolling in a nausea-inducing motion covering every square inch.

But not every square inch. In China for four thousand years, with all the time in the world on their hands, and this is the best he could come up with? That was the sardonic thought passing through Setsura’s mind.

The snakes wriggled all around him. The giant leeches rained down from the ceiling. Setsura didn’t know it, but these were deadly poisonous zheng-zhe snakes.

They were a little over two feet long—not terribly large, but their bite could fell an ox. The volume of snake venom injected was as bad as the toxicity. There was some hope for the victim as long as the amount was slight, but there was nothing “slight” about the legendary bite of these snakes. It was all or nothing for the prey.

And yet they did not attack.

The leeches on the ceiling were called naruko. They were said to swarm out of the mountain forests from November to early summer of the next year. Their bite was hardly a pinprick. A man with a strong physique could ignore it entirely. But after ten paces or so, the rapid blood loss would keel him over. The Chinese characters for naruko meant “crying child,” because that was the shrill sound its victims made as they lay dying.

Along with the zheng-zhe, they were ready to conduct a thorough war of extermination, just as they had four centuries before. So why did none of them make the first move?

---

Setsura’s right hand moved slightly. His body shot upwards right through the middle of the “floor.” He bounded up a good yard above the clump of snakes. Lurching forward, he quickly found his footing, swaying back and forth in a clumsy manner quite uncharacteristic for him.

Something streaked upwards toward Setsura’s precarious perch. It tore apart lengthwise in midair, exposing its innards as it dropped into the sea of snakes.

“It’s getting dicey in here—” Setsura muttered to himself.

He meant the jumping snakes and whatever had launched itself at him as he balanced on the devil wire strung through the air. This “tightrope” was tied to two telephone poles on either side of Niwa’s house. As for why he’d avoided the house’s frame—

Reaching the dining room, he teetered again. The damage inflicted by Ryuuki’s qi was still with him. He reached out to steady himself and touched what looked like an ordinary blue stucco wall.

His hand sunk through the wall down to his wrist. He had to brace his legs to keep from doing a nosedive. The hole gaped open at the height of Setsura’s chest and caved in, turning into an army of black centipedes rushing up his arm.

Setsura shook his arm. Whipping off the bugs, he contemplated an escape route out of the house. It was clear that the entire structure, from the floorboards to the framing pillars, was made from the corrupted pestilence of the living world.

The liquid erupting from Professor Niwa’s body had stimulated whatever the house was made of and drove it into a mad ferocity. The centipedes Setsura had flung off his arm were snatched out of the air by the snakes, the hundreds of little legs churning helplessly. As one snake tried to gulp down its catch, another lunged at its mouth, while others snapped at its neck and torso. Fangs were bared and the poison flowed without any distinction between friend and foe.

The writhing ropes froze in rigor mortis and were swallowed up by their companions on the floor.

In his present condition, escape looked impossible. In order to evade the attacks by the reptiles and insects, he had to become a dead man. His body temperature fell to room temperature. His pulse was zero. All signs of life ceased. His body cast off no smell and no infrared signature. No different from a stone or an old piece of wood.

The snakes and leeches detected their prey by smell or heat. When Setsura was a child, his father brought a yoga master from India to teach him. Five years ago, he’d used these techniques against a homicidal monster who read the aura surrounding living things in order to launch its deadly attacks. In another incident, he’d used it in the infirmary of the “death match” coliseum outside Shin-Okubo Station.

It was the same when he was momentarily mired in the floor and the poisonous snakes didn’t think to snap at him. The leech that had sucked his blood had landed on him purely by chance, not because it was reacting to his body temperature and smell. And because he was more or less a “corpse,” even those actions were limited.

Balancing on top of the tightrope, though, was the result of his innate skills. The question was whether he could advance another ten paces along the wire in his current condition.

If he fell to the floor and was bitten by the snakes, a dead man couldn’t die twice. At the same time, whoever had laid this trap must be watching. Setsura had plenty of reason to fear that that person was lying in wait to finish him off. Set the whole house on fire and he’d be pretty much out of options. No matter how “dead” he was now, he’d be even deader then.

Setsura took a strand of the devil wire and inserted it into his neck. He closed his eyes and focused his entire consciousness as the wire embedded itself in his spine.

He did this in order to traverse the tightrope. He commanded the nerves that controlled his muscles. Relying on his fingertips alone, the beautiful manhunter guided the sub-micron devil wire inside his body.

A black rain poured from the ceiling. Aggravated by the squirming leeches, the snakes writhing on the floor uncoiled themselves into the air. Leeches adhered to his head and neck and back while the blue-green snakes slithered over his shoes, inside his slacks and up his legs, inside his shirt.

Inside the squirming mass, Setsura stood with his arms folded across his chest. In order to sense the slightest disturbance along the wire, he purged his thoughts and disciplined his stance, like an ascetic monk remaining aloof from the world and true to the faith while suffering evil’s corrupt enticements and painful lashes.

A snake peeked its head out from the open collar of his shirt and wrapped its tail around his neck. Another opened its mouth and licked his lips with its forked tongue.

If the snake could feel human emotions and could communicate its emotions through its eyes, then the look in the snake’s eyes as it gazed upon Setsura’s countenance would be one of carnal desire. It twisted its body into the shape of a curved sickle and pressed not just its tongue but its grotesque head against Setsura’s lips.

And then, ahh, it was inspired to plunge deeper into Setsura’s mouth—

But the frenzied head withdrew a second later. The leeches convulsed. How would these creatures without emotions or thoughts telegraph the changes they sensed?

Setsura had been standing in a slightly slumped posture. Now he straightened and turned his eyes forward. His whole body was covered with reeking reptiles. With clumsy steps but miraculously maintaining his balance, he set off across the invisible suspension bridge.

The giant leeches crawled on his face—the poisonous snakes writhed around his neck—and yet look again, and they were not slimy disgusting creatures, but had somehow become fashion accessories to the beauty of his presence.

The walking dead man, transformed into the other Setsura, turned the brutal, subhuman creatures that attacked him into glittering ornaments.

From the outside, the Niwa residence still looked perfectly normal. Standing at the front gate thirty feet away, an old man in a long robe and holding a staff stared intently at the house.

In the falling dark, a fierce look further clouded Kikiou’s face. Having once stepped inside, no enemy ever escaped his “Reptile Mansion.” However, the calm and composed figure emerging from the foyer punched a hole through that overweening confidence.

“Unbelievable—” he muttered in the tongue of an ancient land.

Setsura Aki’s unmistakable figure walked through the air. He descended from the “tightrope” that was invisible even to Kikiou’s eyes and uncrossed his arms from his chest. As he did, the remaining vestiges of unnatural clumsiness evaporated from his body.

“Bastard! You broke out of my snare!” Anger and fury further darkened the old schemer’s face. He was about to launch into another death-dealing attack when Setsura looked at him.

A casual glance at best. His eyes quickly focused on a point further in the distance, barely taking note of Kikiou. But the peerless warlock froze in place. The look that pierced him did not belong to the man he knew as “Setsura Aki.”

A sense of dread he’d felt from few people in four thousand years of blood told him that this was no mere enemy. The boundless vibe being cast off by this young man was something he hadn’t ever imagined.

Kikiou watched the departing Setsura. After the figure in the black duster disappeared from his sight, he groaned to himself, “What manner of man is this? I would have thought him easier to handle than that doctor. But tangling with him will require more than a positive mental attitude.”

He spun around and set off quickly in the opposite direction.

After the two demon-haunted men left, all that remained of the Niwa house was the barely-human corpse of an old man and a small cube-shaped object. The illusionary house created by Kikiou’s magic sat in a crumbled, crushed heap, along with the phantom beasts the house had given birth to.

Amidst the wreckage, one by one, the desiccated snakes and leeches and centipedes floundered and struggled, grasping vainly for that final hold on life.

Kikiou continued down the street to where it joined up again with the main shopping district.

Rounding the corner of the road came a burly, uniformed man. The tinted goggles on his helmet were flipped back. He had a UHF transceiver around his neck like a choker. The ballistic fabric of his thickly-woven shirt doubled as a heavy-duty flak jacket. He wore an anti-personnel electric nightstick on his hip.

The gold badge on his chest identified him as a police commando, whose fearsome presence in Shinjuku would quiet even a crying child. They usually patrolled in pairs, but in a place like Arakimachi his partner would be hanging back at the patrol car.

These mobile police commandos were said to combine the courage of a tiger and the wariness of a rabbit. They handled themselves with a heroic swagger. This one sported a beard and a splendid moustache. His body imparted the impression of a rolling boulder.

They passed each other without exchanging glances. Five or six steps later, the man said curtly, “Hey.”

Kikiou stopped. “What is it?”

“What are you doing here?” The commando cop smiled. The bluntness was confined to his voice.

“Nothing in particular. Just passing through.” Kikiou turned only his head and smiled genially.

“Tourist?”

“No.”

“In that case, you should steer clear of places like that.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“You got an I.D. on you?”

“Sorry, I’m afraid I left it at home.”

“A friend of mine was attacked the other night by a Chinese fellow using some mighty weird mojo.”

“You don’t say.”

“Well, in this city, there are no shortage of Chinese up to their elbows in weird mojo. There’s one in my lockup at least every night. But you wouldn’t catch them sauntering out of Arakimachi’s no-go area. Anybody other than you and I might let it slide. Sorry, but I’ve got to investigate all suspicious behavior. No need to make a federal case out of it. I’ll escort you back to your house. Once I confirm your bona fides, you’re free to go.”

“In that case, I would not object.” Kikiou’s smile grew broader. “Let us be on our way. Incidentally, that friend of yours, how is he doing?”

“I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been back to the hospital to see him. But knowing him, he’d already be up and about, hard as that may be to believe.”

“Good news in any case.”

“So, where do you live?” said the commando cop, urging him on. “Lead the way.”

“By all means,” said Kikiou, turning around, his back to the commando cop.

The cop scrambled to catch up, closing his right hand around the handle of the electric nightstick hanging from his waist. Outside of Shinjuku, this kind of attitude could cause problems. But otherwise, the police pretty much had a free hand short of outright violence. When it came to a simple I.D. check, a cop could never be too careful.

Still, as he brought the nightstick down against the base of the old man’s neck, he checked his swing a bit. The five-thousand volt charge alone, traveling from head to toe, would lay any normal human being out flat.

Instead, a tremendous force slammed into his solar plexus. The commando cop knew that this was no ordinary old man. He reeled back a good ten feet. Feeling his ribs, three or four of them were broken. Fortunately, his internal organs seemed intact.

“Shit,” the commando cop hissed through clenched teeth. “Never doubt your instincts. That grandpa’s got some crazy-ass moves on him.”

“A public servant striking a citizen from behind—just what I should expect in Demon City. It surely was worth coming all the way here.”

“Son of a bitch!”

“Hope always follows despair. A fine way to dispose of Setsura Aki occurs to me. To that end, your assistance will be necessary.”

“Fuck off,” the commando cop retorted, his right hand blurring through the air faster than any old man could dodge out of the way. The nightstick slammed into the nape of his neck with enough force to drive it into the flesh.

“Wha—?” he gaped. The stinging response ringing through the nightstick was that of a bat striking solid metal.

Kikiou’s staff whirled like a small tornado. Bobbing and weaving, parrying blows to his groin and chin, the commando cop grabbed his elbow with his left hand and raised his numb right arm. The laser gun swiveled with a soft click-click-click, drawing aim on the grandpa’s face.

“Freeze.”

But the staff was again slashing at him. Blue light enveloped his right hand. The commando cop observed with no small satisfaction as the blade of light leapt out and pierced the man’s forehead.

The old man grinned. Jutting his unmarred brows forward as if to afford him a better look, he said, “Any more tricks up your sleeve? Well, then. I’ll make your dreams come true. Come along to our world.”

He jabbed the tip of his staff slightly forward. Nothing else out of the ordinary was seen or heard in the steel-gray dusk. The commando cop’s chin slumped to his chest. Like a poet overcome by melancholy he stood there, unmoving, in the fading twilight.