The man in the combat suit landed on the ground and doubled over. He tried to raise the shotgun but finally realized that his right arm was missing along with the weapon.
The outer shell of duranium steel—that could withstand a direct hit from an anti-tank bazooka—had been lopped off from his shoulder on down. He slumped to his knees. Not so much because of the pain or the loss of blood, but because of those toxic vapors stealing through the severed opening in the armor.
Through the pores of his skin, down to the space between the cells, the miasmas invaded his body like water filtering through a sieve under osmotic pressure, and coursed into his circulation system. The wellspring of his being was torn out at the roots. A feeling of despondency surged through him. This accomplished killer was already well on his way to hell.
The treetops swayed. Sea slug-like creatures slurped their way into the gaping wound. However crazed he might be by the terrible realization of his now inevitable fate, the assassin couldn’t move.
The bloodsucking leeches that had fruitlessly attacked Setsura’s face had found fresh blood and an unresisting victim and swarmed over the wound, slowly devouring the flesh with their little mouths and sharp, tiny fangs.
Exiting the lane as if nothing was amiss, Setsura came to a halt at a small intersection. The road on his left led to Kuyakusho Street. Behind him waited Man-Eater Alley, mouth open wide.
Setsura turned right and kept on going. Beyond a steel-frame arch, multicolored two-story buildings lined the sidewalks. The compact construction and the signboards hanging from the eaves identified these houses as part of the red light district.
Its
nom de plume
as Demon City notwithstanding, Shinjuku still mostly famously attached its name to the clubs and bars of Golden Gai.
Exercising eminent domain, the land acquisitions accompanying the relocation of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex had left Golden Gai in a precarious state. That it survived and continued to thrive today was a testament to the famous and the nameless who loved the place, and to the shops, and the people who ran them.
But most of all, it was a testament to the perverse blessings of the Devil Quake itself. Holding out longer than anyone expected against the mighty power of the national government, the last group of stubborn owners had exhausted their appeals. Their backs against the wall, they were putting pen to paper to sign over the deeds to the property—right when the earth shook.
The approximately three hundred bars—crowding the quarter-acre plot of land bordered by the five back alleys between Kuyakusho Avenue and Hanazono Shrine—were released from the pressures of the oppressive state and granted a new lease on life.
Its resurrected image was altogether different from the old. A sense of affection unique to this city sprang into existence between the patrons and the owners. The atmosphere on these streets was tinged with a sardonic wit and its own undeniable stench. Here and there between the gaudily accoutered shops remained the skeletons of those establishments that hadn’t come back to life, like missing teeth in a broad smile.
The stories whispered there said that beneath the ruins lingered the unrecovered bodies still dreaming of the morning sun.
Setsura turned one corner after the other, navigating the narrow streets with the gait of one well-accustomed to the place. He stopped in front of a block decorated with garish signs and crowded with shops. It was twenty or thirty more feet to the back alley of Hanazono Shrine. To his left, facing the street, were the ruins of two buildings.
“I bet those two would be pissed off if they knew why all three of you weren’t there to meet me.”
He seemed to be talking to empty air. There was no sight nor sound of anybody around him. Only the noonday sun pushing the shadows deeper beneath the eaves.
“You must be getting tired of playing hide and seek. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Setsura fell silent. A gust of wind came at him from the right. Torn apart, the invisible streams divided high and low, ruffling his hair and coat before fading away.
A human figure suddenly appeared in the center of the rent air, standing there as if he’d condensed out of nothing. Only Setsura would have noticed that he’d jumped down from the roof of the bar behind him.
Not a big man. He was bent over from the waist up, almost parallel to the ground. His unkempt hair was tied behind his head with a strip of black cloth. He had on a black cotton shirt and trousers and a thick waistcoat made from animal skins.
His round face engendered not the slightest vibe of good cheer that might otherwise be expected. Rather, the light in his eyes suggested that the softest touch would split the skin like a knife. He was the predator that crouched in the shadows waiting for his prey to walk by.
This was not so much a man that resembled a beast as a beast taking on the shape of a man, the kind that haunted the moonless nights of bad dreams.
Setsura wasn’t looking at the man’s face. He was examining the man’s back. It rose up like a small mountain. A humpback, a protuberance, lifted up the back of his shirt and waistcoat a good foot.
“Long time, no see, Hyota.” A small smile rose to Setsura’s lips, hardly befitting such a genie. “It’s been fifteen years. We’ve both aged a bit in the meantime.”
The man didn’t answer. His forehead shone with a black luster like patent leather. Beads of sweat glistened on the skin. Cold sweat.
As Setsura had said, he was tired of playing hide and go seek.
The sweat shimmered, gathered into a drop and coursed down his cheek. The lips moved. “You’re one scary bastard. The prey becomes the predator in the snap of a finger. Those two never saw it coming. Considering the heat they were packing, hard to believe they’d ever lose.”
“I can’t be so sure when it comes to your abilities,” Setsura softly answered. “Fifteen years ago we weren’t given the opportunity to test ourselves. But now? How about it?”
“Well,” said Hyota, cocking his head to the side. The beads of sweat seemed to silently suck back into the pores. “Fifteen years ago I was honing my skills as well. Shall we have at it for a round or two?”
“First, where’s
he
been all this time?”
Hyota did not smile at the odd question. “We’re all laying our cards on the table together. After all, this contest has gone on for fifteen years already.”
“Where has he
been
? Or where
is
he now?”
Hyota raised his right hand. Setsura stepped forward. Hyota backed away. He didn’t lower his right hand, retreating as if overwhelmed by some sort of primordial imbalance between them, until he’d run into the door of the bar behind him.
A thin line ran diagonally across the rectangular storefront. The entire top of the building started to slide down that line.
Whatever severed the ghostly wind must have sliced through the facade of this building at the same time. With a heavy rumbling sound, the tumbling structure shook the ground. By then Hyota had already jumped into the air.
Setsura’s right hand moved. The air hummed. Hyota twisted his body. Glittering lines danced around him. Inside the layers of the narrow rings, Hyota spun like a top.
The rings tightened and contracted. Managing to slip through the mesh like a fish escaping through the holes in a net, Hyota sprang to a nearby roof and stood there like a stump.
“That’s the game,” he said, as if throwing in the towel, though there was no telling what this “defeat” was or how he had been defeated. The thin, glittering rings that threatened to enclose him had already vanished. Nothing connected them now but the thin air.
All the more improbably, he hadn’t made a single offensive move in return.
“I haven’t spent the last fifteen years twiddling my thumbs. And neither have you, I see.”
“Where is he?” Setsura asked again. “Having shown you
me
, the least he could do is return the favor.”
“You’re not going to ask where the seal is?” Hyota said. “Gento-sama has already taken possession of it. You’re late to the party, Aki-sama.”
“I see,” Setsura said, though his lips didn’t actually move. Not a muscle in his body so much as twitched.
Hyota was the one who writhed. The sweat again coursed from his brow, streaking down his face with every tremble of his body, forming a damp spot beneath his feet. His face twisted with pain, so much so an objective observer might fear it would stick that way, like the pain was assailing him down to the marrow of his bones.
The faraway smell of alcohol wafted into the air, perhaps from a bottle of liquor severed along with the building.
“That being the case, you had no reason to show up. I don’t imagine you wanted to drop by and say hello. Payback’s a bitch, but there’s no knocking on heaven’s door until you do.”
“I don’t imagine—Aki-sama—that you are the sort of man to let that slide—”
His reply could almost be taken for praise, though Hyota probably didn’t see the slight smile that creased Setsura’s lips.
A moment later the smile vanished. Hyota snaked out of his shackles like a contortionist defeating an invisible wire cage. He soared through the air, hugging the rooftops, with the speed and agility of a four-legged beast.
Scrambling toward the alleyway, his body once again stiffened. Hyota shook off the new constraints with his strange undulations. However disordered his appearance, he landed without a sound. His feet barely touched the ground before again propelling him forward at a sprint.
A mound of black debris filled the narrow lane. The debris was Hyota’s clothing. The noonday sun glistened off his body, the tempered and striated muscles of his naked limbs exposed to the white light. Glowing beads formed a trail behind him, the sweat flung off his skin.
He ran as if being pursued by something close behind. His sweating face was etched with terror. A three-foot-high cinderblock wall rose up in front of him. The alley forked left and right. Hyota didn’t slacken his speed. The ball of wind rammed into the prefab wall.
The structure of his body somehow allowing an exception to the physical laws of inertia, right behind the ball of wind came Hyota, making a sharp left turn without slowing in the slightest and barreling along, his fearful eyes glancing at the wall on his right.
There was nothing there. But his eyes alone saw something. An empty milk bottle was sitting on the wall. It blew backwards, scattering glittering shards across the surface. Hyota opened his eyes wider. Something else was there.
An animal sprang into the air, turned to the right and disappeared into a dead end. Ahead was a street leading to Kuyakusho Street. To the right and left were rows of houses and telephone poles.
Hope welled up on Hyota’s face.
The top of a telephone pole traced a graceful arc, falling down as pretty as a picture. A foot above the ground, a smooth slit appeared in the concrete pillar. As if calculating Hyota’s forward motion, it intersected his path precisely.
The shadow of the telephone pole eclipsed Hyota’s head. He planted his hands on the pole and vaulted over it. And a moment later, scrambled beneath another, sweat flying like a wet dog, as the pole split in two beneath his feet.
The earth shook a second time. And died away. The two telephone poles lay across each other like a pair of logs. The alleyway too fell still.
Except for Hyota, lying there in a curious posture, in the gap between the two poles. He wasn’t hurt. And yet he wasn’t breathing. His heart didn’t beat. His metabolism had sunk below that which should otherwise support life. Even the circulation of his blood ceased.
The most sophisticated of the American military’s life detection sensors would report his present condition as quite dead.
As if aroused by the impact, a great volume and number of strange creatures roiled up from shadowed side streets, from gaps in the rock walls. Octopus arms reached out from the extremities of amoeba-like forms, the ends forming into ruddy pincers, clambering over the poles and dropping to the ground.
Hyota’s body was wrapped in a grotesque, squirming mass. Tentacles wrapped around his throat, suckers crowded with tiny teeth attached to his back. Viscous, translucent, throbbing lumps covered the half-domes of his pectoral and abdominal muscles. The pale threads of the feelers curled around his groin.
All the synonyms of “disgusting” could only begin to describe the eerie sense of revulsion the scene aroused.
Like their brethren in Man-Eater Alley, these voracious creatures had been born in the wreckage of a biotechnology lab in Ichigaya. Normally shunning the wind and sun, they were easily eradicated in the decontamination sweeps. But when they stumbled across an immobilized prey, their rapacious instincts came to the fore.
Living only to eat and shit and nothing else, their rudimentary sensory organs had registered a positive biological response a dozen seconds earlier. It died away before the heavy reverberations stopped shaking the earth. What brought them there in a rush was the memory of where that response had come from.
The presence of prey communicated by their avaricious tentacles and tongues was a big lump on the ground. They would crawl into his nose and burrow into his ass. Given the slightest scent of muscle, of moist flesh, and the tiny sharp teeth would chew through the skin, secreting acid that dissolved the fat and tissue and bones, reducing the largest man to compost in less than ten minutes.
But what these little beasts sensed now was no more organic than sand and stone. Their rudimentary synapses did not suggest that they test and see, for the results could be no different.
Even after the creatures had departed, Hyota didn’t budge. A window opened above him. A middle-aged woman with a perm peered out, knit her brows, and spit. The saliva sprinkled down on his nose and head.
The lady closed the window. That a couple of telephone poles fell over and killed somebody was no reason to venture out of doors in this city.
During the day, when there was hardly a person to be found anywhere, this neighborhood was far more dangerous than at night, when pedestrians thronged the streets. The sightseers kept their distance as well. If any had spotted Hyota, the guidebooks clearly warned tourists to steer clear of trouble, especially trouble involving dead bodies.