Digital Devil Story: Reincarnation of the Goddess (10 page)

"You did good, Kerberos. You can go on back."

Nakajima had no choice but to return the digital beast to his handheld computer.

CHAPTER 4

At about the same time, in the branch office of Fourth Kangyo Bank in Inai, four female employees were in the operations room, entering data in the host computer to write a patch to send the day's transfers to other bank branches. None of the four were looking down at their keyboards; their glances only turned back and forth from their displays to the numbers on the display vouchers they had been working with.

"Why is my terminal always the one to break!?" One of the workers irritatedly got up from her seat.

Her name was Mida Yoshie. She had been working at the bank for two years and was brilliant but somewhat short-tempered, her bob-cut appearance appropriately complimenting her energetic personality. Yoshie looked closely at the other workers' terminals, but it appeared that she was the only one experiencing the problem. Her screen was completely dark, and didn't respond to any keyboard input at all.

"Isn't that what normally happens when you send data to the host computer?" Shimamura Yuko--whose appearance and personality were the polar opposite of Yoshie's--looked over at her while continuing to enter data into her own terminal.

Yuko had been at the company a year longer than Yoshie and thus was slightly higher on the chain of command.

"Is it just mine then? Oh well, I might as well go make some tea." As Yoshie left the room discontentedly, a blue haze started to seep from the display behind her. A pungent musky smell started to waft throughout the room, but engrossed in their work, nobody seemed to notice it. The blue haze started to coagulate and take form behind the chair that Yoshie had previously been sitting in.

As if she was tired from all the data entry, Yuko thrust her arms toward the ceiling and stretched. A strange jelly-like substance grabbed onto her white throat.

"Yoshie, cut it out."

Yawning and turning around, Yuko found herself staring into the bronze face of Loki, his head atop a bizarre pillar of gelatinous flesh. She tried to scream but found that her vocal chords were frozen and she could not make a sound. The demon's tentacle constricted and crushed Yuko's skull with a lound crunch. From the neck up Yuko was nothing more than a grotesque lump of disfigured flesh, yet her hands continued to tap on the keys of the terminal out of sheer inertia. While the other two women sat paralyzed with fear, other tentacles grabbed them and pulled them inside the demon's body.

Behind Loki, there was a sound of porcelain shattering. Yoshie had returned with tea and dropped her tray at the sight of the unbelievable bloodbath she had walked into. Loki's tentacle stretched out to her stomach. Heat shot through her chest along with a sticky sensation, and the next instant, blinding pain shot through her as fresh blood spurted out of her rent skin.

"What's going on!?" Hearing the strange sound within the room, a male employee carrying a load of bills to the safe opened the door. Loki mercilessly threw Yoshie's now-decapitated head at his chest with incredible force.

"Agh!"

Knocked hard against the wall, the man just barely managed to search for the emergency alarm and press it with all his remaining strength before passing out.

The shrill sound of the alarm echoed throughout the building. In the midst of the clamor, Loki calmly completed the transformation into his bronze human form, and turned his pitch-black eyes toward Asuka.

CHAPTER 5

After returning Kerberos to the demon world, Nakajima hoisted Yumiko on his back and arrived at the stone burial chamber of Shirasagi Mound. However, after peering into the small room through the the Kumazasa overgrowth, he could not hold back an expression of disappointment. The burial chamber was dug vertically into the ground and was just waiting for him to come in through an opening about 90 centimeters wide and tall. But the walls of chamber itself were only a few meters long at most. It was just tall enough for Nakajima to stand in if he hunched over. It seemed awfully small for the entryway for such a huge Kofun tomb. Was Izanami really here?

Don't panic, this sort of burial chambers must have some sort of trick or secret passage, or something!
Trying to reassure himself, Nakajima lowered himself into the chamber.

The room was stagnant with cold air, and the basalt walls glistened, damp with humidity. Nakajima gently lowered Yumiko off his back and onto the ground. A frog that had been watching this strange intruder from one of the corners of the chamber croaked and jumped forward in surprise. Sitting down on the stone floor, Nakajima entered a trance and tried to make a connection with Izanami. But he had very little experience doing this sort of thing; maybe it was because of his anxiety, but the picture in his mind's eye was unchanging, and the only thing that happened as he sat on the ground was the passage of time. Nakajima furrowed his brow in frustration.

"I can't feel anything, even though I must be much closer to Izanami than I was before. Izanami, answer me--how can I find you?"

As if in response to his whispered question, the entire burial chamber started shuddering. The stones in the walls started to groan, and a bit of dirt fell from the ceiling. Coughing, Nakajima unconsciously pulled Yumiko's corpse closer to him.

"Izanami, answer me, so I can revive Yumiko!" Like he was chanting a spell, Nakajima murmured the same words over and over.

Soon the earthquake subsided, and as if trying to ask something, the frog's croaking became louder. As Nakajima turned and looked in its direction, his eyes glimmered with excitement at what he saw. The earthquake had created a gap between the stones in the wall, such that crimson paint on their edges became clearly visible. Approaching the divide between the flagstones, Nakajima could feel cold air flowing forth from the reddish crack. Twisting his fingers into the gap, Nakajima dislodged the stones one by one, revealing a crawlspace beyond large enough for a person to enter. The crawlspace sloped slightly downward, proceeding deep into the earth.

The pit was shrouded in darkness, but for Nakajima there was no hesitation. Tearing his shirt and using the strips to tie Yumiko and his handheld computer to his body, Nakajima got down on his stomach and put his feet into the hole. A cold, smooth feeling like marble under his palms gave lie to the fact that the structure was man-made. Hunkered down on all fours so that he would not slip, Nakajima started carefully climbing down the shaft, backwards into the inky blackness below.

CHAPTER 6

Meanwhile, Loki had left the Fourth Kangyo Bank and was standing at the summit of Tonomine, where he could look out over the whole of Asuka. Below him lay the groups of Asuka megaliths. The drizzle falling on his face, Loki opened his mouth. His throat expanded bizarreley and his tongue started vibrating. The extremely high-frequency pitch of his voice was inaudible to human ears, but as if drawn in by the sound, countless black dots the size of rice grains cut through the rain on a beeline toward him. It was a swarm of flies under Loki's command. Brushing his face with their hairy legs, they flew into his ear canals and each whispered something to him.

After hearing all the information he needed, Lokie ordered the flies "OK, Go!" and they returned to their posts. Rubbing the wound on his forehead, Loki stared at Shirasagi Mound.

Nakajima...what do you intend to do, going in there....?

He knew that Nakajima did not escape to Asuka on his own power. Nor was it Yumiko's power that brought them there either. A human woman would never have the power to wound a demon. Most likely a Japanese god or demon had possessed her, and summoned them here to Asuka. And it would be safe to assume that it was quite a powerful one at that.

"I don't care who you are, but I won't let you get away with this. I'll crush you to a pulp!" Loki murmured, charging down the slope toward Shirasagi Mound.

PART 5:

SWORD OF FLAME

CHAPTER 1

The cave sloped down gently, seemingly continuing on forever. Stiffening his limbs, Nakajima slowly held his balance, climbing backwards. As the sounds of his labored breathing echoed off the smooth walls of the shaft, the entrance far above him started to vanish in the distance. The reverberations made it almost sound as if Yumiko, strapped to Nakajima's back, was breathing, and several times Nakajima stopped and strained his ears.

But the shoulders of the corpse were as slumped over as usual, and stopping, Nakajima only detected the stench of death.

His sense of the passage of time was long gone. The tunnel was so long that he almost thought that it continued all the way to the center of the earth. Nakajima's arms and legs felt strained with the effort of supporting the weight of two bodies, and if he let his concentration slip for even a moment he felt that he would lose his grip and slide all the way down. Twisting his body, Nakajima pulled off his shoes and socks and continued downwards in bare feet. This way he could be more sure of his footholds. Had he been here by himself, he might have been able to slide all the way down the shaft. But if Yumiko's body was damaged, all his effort would have been for nothing.

All of a sudden, Nakajima found his feet in thin air.

"Agh!"

Desperately extending his arms foward and clawing at the air, a sense of loss, terror, and despair shot through Nakajima's body. An instant later. Nakajima was painfully slammed against a hard stone surface. He had fallen straight down about two or three meters. Unconsciously moving to protect Yumiko's body, Nakajima's shoulders and back took more of the shock than they should have, and unable to stand, he lost consciousness.

There was a faint light and a calm breeze. The cold caressing his cheek, Nakajima opened his heavy eyelids. A little ways away, Yumiko's body lay next to him silently. He felt light, and it didn't seem like he had any broken bones. In fact, while he hurt, it wasn't enough to worry about. Getting his energy together and standing up, Nakajima took a deep breath. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, his surroundings became clearer.

And what mysterious surroundings they were! Nakajima found himself standing in a plaza carved out in a niche between towering cliffs. The face of the walls around him were deep crimson. About three meters up in one wall was a dark opening; most likely, it was the shaft that Nakajima had just crawled down. Being underground, there should have been a visible ceiling, but looking up, the walls simply climbed up until the red stones were shrouded in the darkness above. At the end of the plaza, a narrow path stretched out into the bottomless darkness. Was this the pathway to Izanami's burial chamber? Unlike the earlier shaft, this appeared to be a natural underground ravine. The phosphorescent light illuminating it, and the entire underground chamber, appeared to be given off from mossy plants growing on the rock face. Nakajima recalled the scene from the visions he had of being chased by the rotting woman.

A viscous drop of water fell onto Nakajima's cheek. Listening closely, he could hear the steady sound of a trickle of water coming from high above. Over the aeons, the lime deposits in this trickle had accumulated here and there along the path, forming giant stalagmites. Nakajima touched the rising cliff face to feel it. The surface of the cold stone was wet with condensation. When he scratched it, the rock crumbled away easily, revealing a new layer of red stone below. When recalling that the ancient red paint used in ancient Japanese tombs was mercuric-sulfide based, Nakajima suddenly remembered Craft's words.

When explorers discovered material that was apparently part of a demon's body in a Mayan temple, it evaporated when coming into contact with their mercuric-sulfide based paint. In other words, this tomb was designed specifically to keep demons out. Getting up his courage with this realization, Nakajima picked up Yumiko's body and walked toward the depths of the red valley. However, Nakajima never had that much in the way of stamina in the first place. In less than ten minutes, his legs were exhausted. He would have liked to have Kerberos' help, but he didn't want to put any more stress on the already terribly-injured demon. Besides, one could hardly say this path would be the most appropriate place for him, with the walls literally painted with demon repellent.

Breathing heavily with exhaustion, Nakajima proceeded along the path to the burial chamber, the stone walls towering up into the air alongside him. The sweat dripping off of his forehead into his eyes blurred his vision, and each step took every ounce of effort he had. Nakajima shook his head back and forth to get rid of the built-up perspiration, and when his vision cleared, he noticed a white silhouette in his peripheral vision.

"Who's there!?"

Looking closer, he could tell that there was more than just one silhouette--in fact there were quite a few of them. But none of them displayed any indication of movement, and simply stood or squatted there. Gingerly approaching one, Nakajima could see that it was a bleached mummy, its head tilted to the side and its black eye sockets staring up into space. Whether it was the power of the mercuric sulfide or the cold of the underground chamber, the corpse had been preserved from natural decay. Its chest area had what looked like a deliberately drilled large hole in it. Looking around, it appeared that the dozen or so mummies here were scattered about without any order to them. Judging by their clothing, they appeared to be the bones of people from many different time periods. One wore primitive robes, another appeared to be wearing the eboshi hat of a Kamakura-era samurai, and yet another looked like an Edo-period peasant. Many of them had signs of their bones being crushed by large jaws or having their throats torn out. Few people would come into a place like this by accident; these were most likely grave robbers here to plunder the Kofun tomb. Who was it that did this to them?

All of a sudden, the sound of a bizarre cry assaulted Nakajima's ears.

"YAAH! GLULULU!"

It sounded like the voice was coming from far away, but the unusual reverberations produced from the walls of the burial pathway made it difficult to judge the distance of sounds. Nakajima cast a sidelong glance at the butchered corpses of the mummies. If the grave guardian that mercilessly slaughtered these would-be grave robbers was still patrolling this path to the burial chamber now...