Maohden Vol. 1 (18 page)

“I shall accompany you.”

“That’s okay. Your responsibility is the restoration of my abode.”

Hyota bowed. Gento proceeded through the darkness. All around him flickered dots of red and green light, the eyes of the gremlins and goblins lurking just beyond the curtains of black. They peered suspiciously at the carefree Gento while clearing out of the way, creeping up bit by bit as the darkness closed in behind him.

The ceiling in front of him hung down at a crazy angle. An avalanche of debris spilled down from a giant fissure. In front of it was the wrecked door of what appeared to be an elevator. A gap had opened up between the twisted frame and the wall.

Gento melted into a space that the average person could not hope to fit even twisting and contorting his body. There wasn’t an elevator car in the shaft, only the rectangular abyss. Without a second thought, Gento stepped into what looked like a conduit straight down to hell.

He didn’t fall.

Gento Roran floated there above this pit of Hades. He reached toward the heavens with his right hand and silently glided upwards. High above his head appeared a spot of sunlight. Gento soared like an angel of death abandoning the night in search of the sun.

Ten minutes later, he was mingling among the pedestrian traffic on Hanazono Avenue headed towards the Koshu Highway.

The light unfolding in the dim gloom condensed into a single line. Without a sound, and with a breath of wind, the terrifying skills exhibited therein were known only to the person wielding them.

The results were less than satisfactory. A slight frown creased his lips. A slight shadow crossed his nonchalant face, as if normally disturbed by nothing more severe than a spring breeze.

With a casual swivel of his wrist, the line of light split the darkness and was drawn back to his hand as the black-clad figure reeled back his devil wires.

Setsura Aki sat on the edge of the bed and scowled. The upper half of a human body sat on the table ten feet in front of him, casting off a glossy light. It was a mannequin, in the slender shape of a woman.

Adding to the oddness of the scene was the big bowl sitting beneath the stand supporting her. The faint sunlight reflected off what appeared to be the watery surface of the mannequin. Looking closer, though, the details became clearer.

An oily liquid covered her from the head down to the breasts, dripping down into the bowl like melting snow off a roof.

“As I expected,” Setsura grumbled. “Won’t cut through it. I’ll have to go with a sharper wire, though any finer a gauge and I’ll end up slicing my own hands.” Setsura looked at the mannequin. “I’ll have to change the
way
it cuts.”

He flexed the back of his hand downward and flicked out his index finger. A thin beam of light sprang out. To ordinary eyes, the source of this flash of light would have remained a mystery.

The titanium-steel thread flew through the air and coiled around the right shoulder of the mannequin, stretched across the back to the left armpit, and wrapped three times around the ribcage beneath the breasts.

A terrible fate awaited the mannequin. Except—as Setsura tugged with his right hand, the feedback through the wire did not communicate a momentary tautness, but quickly unwound under the tension.

The oil coating the mannequin defending it against the genie’s wires was the same as that secreted by Hyota’s body. Setsura had it analyzed and synthesized at the Shinjuku Chemical Research and Development Laboratory.

“What the hell is this stuff?” said the head staff researcher, examining the sample Setsura presented to them. “It’s not animal fat. It contains none of the glycerin molecules found in all oils. It’s hardly even a liquid. How in the world did you discover such a substance?”

“I didn’t exactly
discover
it,” Setsura said airily. He couldn’t exactly explain that this was the one substance his devil wires couldn’t sever without getting put under the microscope himself.

Not knowing what it was didn’t stop them from synthesizing it. He borrowed a mannequin from a dress shop whose owner he knew and coated it with the stuff. He’d now spent the last three hours trying to penetrate it with his devil wires.

He was now zero for three thousand tries. He had to admit he was impressed. Hyota must have studied his technique and modified his physiology accordingly. It was time to lay all their cards on the table.

“I guess it was inevitable,” Setsura said, pulling a large suitcase out from under the bed. He placed it on the mattress, released the latch, and took out a small metal box, six inches by four inches by three inches deep.

He replaced the suitcase and sat down in the chair at the table. The box didn’t appear to have a lock. He placed his fingers on the smooth metal surface and with an almost imperceptible motion twisted them clockwise.

The lid slipped slightly to the right revealing a keyhole invisible to the naked eye, into which he inserted a strand of devil wire—though no one could have otherwise detected that that was what he was doing.

Then—he did nothing, nothing to the box or the lid.

The pinky of his right hand transformed into a living thing, into a thing of delicate beauty. The source soon became apparent, from the brilliant swarm oozing out of the narrow opening. Ensnared by the devil wires, the squirming movements were being made by the world’s prettiest bees.

Though each was no more than an eighth of an inch long, Setsura alone knew how deadly they could be.

With lifespans of three hundred years, and stingers that could penetrate alloy steel—made of the same compounds as Setsura’s devil wires—the constantly replenished toxins released could corrode even mechanical devices.

These “guard bees” protected this box that had been passed down through generations of the Aki clan.

With a nod of apology to the captives of his devil wires, Setsura removed the contents of the box: a pair of tweezers so fine the ends appeared to dissolve into the air; a grinding wheel about an inch in diameter attached to a motor the same size; and a magnifying loupe, the most practical-looking item in the bunch.

He screwed the loupe into his right eye, picked up the tweezers with his right hand, and engaged the tiny switch of the motor with his left pinky.

A faint low hum filled the room. Setsura brought the tips of the tweezers close to the grinding wheel, spinning so fast its contours dissolved into an opaque blur.

Behind the lens of the loupe, his normally lackadaisical black eyes shone with an unexpectedly earnest light. With the tips of the tweezers—practically invisible to the naked eye—he touched the even finer tip of the wire against the wheel, scattering a shower of small sparks into the air.

A burst of warmth in that dimly-lit world, though the coolly utilitarian purpose here was to sharpen the killing edge of these devilish wires and hone the sub-micron strands to a narrower width. All the better to kill with.

Several minutes later, Setsura raised his head. A knock came at the door. This was his safe house. Nobody should know he was here, let alone at home. Unperturbed, he placed the loupe on the table and leaving the sharpening equipment where it was, went to the door.

The knock came again, a signal of some sort. Setsura put his hand on the knob and opened the door. Standing there was a middle-aged woman wearing round, black-rim glasses.

“Excuse me,” she said and pushed back Setsura and strode into the room with an unapologetic, overbearing manner.

She was wearing a bargain-basement white knit polo shirt and a long linen skirt. Her perm was peppered with dandruff. She was holding an equally cheap handbag in her right hand. Her presence in the genie’s dusky hideaway was profoundly surreal.

“Man, it’s hot,” she said, wiping her face with a rumpled handkerchief. She pulled over the chair and sat down. The springs groaned beneath her yard-wide ass. She stood five foot two and had a circumference at her bust and hips to match.

With an ill-tempered glance at Setsura, she said, “What a pain in the neck you are. Yesterday I broke two hundred ten pounds. Damn, I’m fagged.” In the neck of the woods she came from, that meant she was tired. “I gotta pack lunches for my kids. First thing in the morning and all—”

“Morning? What time is it?” Setsura asked, interrupting the chattering hippo next to him.

“Sakes alive! Can’t keep track of the time, neither? It’s ten after five.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, you’re the one asking for favors, remember. You got anything cold to drink around here?”

“Sink’s back there.”

With an exasperated groan, the fat lady reached her fat hand into the handbag and took out a Sony ST2 digital projector. The ST1 model had been released the year before, delivering the same “look and feel” as an IMAX screen to home theater devotees. The ST2 reduced the size to that of a tablet computer.

“This was delivered by bike courier this morning. I already checked it for explosives and the like.” She wiped her forehead. When she sat down, every part of her body from her chin to her belly folded on top of itself like a melting swirl of soft ice cream.

She set the projector on the table. “Shit, I’m outta here. I swear, first time I’ve been in somebody’s place and nobody offered me even a cup of tea.”

She grunted and was about to move her fat ass toward the door when Setsura said, “So what of that job I gave you?”

“Oh, you mean that coffin business?” She turned and stared up at the ceiling. “What with this second reconstruction effort, there’s ground getting dug up all over the place. Intel is sparse. They’re disguising their moves or using third parties. You know, put some salaryman types into a hypnotic state so they think they’re commuting to work when they’re really digging holes in the ground. The Roran clan could pull off something like that before breakfast, no less than you.”

“Yeah, that does figure. Well, keep looking.”

“Don’t need to ask twice,” she said, and left.

More startling than the strange appearance of Yoshiko Toya, the best information broker in Shinjuku, was that she should appear at Setsura’s safe house without fear of being tailed, and blithely go on her way without the slightest concern.

Her ample backside disappeared into the gloomy hallway. He turned his attention to the projector and focused the lens on the corner opposite.

With a faint humming sound, a three-foot square lit up the gray walls. At first the image appeared as a tangle of human shadows. The auto-focus kicked in and it pulled into sharper view, revealing the true vulgarity of the torrid scene of sexual congress—

A shapely woman on her hands and knees, two men going at her from the back and the front, tanned torsos affixed to her mouth and crotch, thrusting back and forth as if to wring all the pleasure out of her.

Perhaps one of the men’s personal fetishes, the woman was wearing nothing but a T-shirt. The T-shirt was rolled up. A man’s hairy arms reached from her waist to grab her breasts, rolling her erect nipples between his thumb and forefinger.

Reflecting the flood of sensations, her hips began to move as well. The camera looked down at her hips from the left. The glistening and translucent layer of flesh covering the taut, throbbing muscles was pockmarked with red hickeys and teeth marks, suggesting he’d gone after her with his mouth before penetrating her.

The man drove into her relentlessly. Her ass took on a life of its own, greedily drawing him in deeper. The sound of ass slapping against thighs, the sound of a damp, engorged rod driving into and out of the sultry bog.

The woman’s muffled voice grew louder. Penetrated in her mouth as well, her labored gasps were reduced to stifled moans, slurping on him like a melting lollipop.

The men’s faces were out of view.

The fiercely turgid state of their flesh and bone wasn’t created by drugs, but according to the rigorous training of their natural endowments. The power wound tightly within was said to equal that of any heavyweight wrestler. Their perspiring pectorals and deltoids, thigh and gluteus maximus muscles were the tools given men to subjugate women.

Whether it was the cameraman or whether it was remote control, the image slowly swiveled and closed in on the woman’s face.