There were no buildings around him. But no native soil would be found anywhere in these city blocks. Only thick layers of asphalt. Now it quaked and rumbled and rose up. Excavated by enormous forces, the black interior peeked out from the fractured surface.
Like a subterranean dragon had arced its back and thrown one of its scales skyward.
The figure leveraged a portion of that power and flew into the air. He harrowed his eyes and concentrated his attention on the deep shaft below him. If his calculations proved true, the layers of earth and asphalt would form an impregnable vault that would ward off any attempts to unearth it for the next fifteen years.
He set back on the ground as the fissures raced toward him. Uncertainty only briefly colored those steady eyes. At the last second, he flew into the air. When he landed, no less nimbly, it was like he’d landed on eggshells.
Landing a second time, neither did the ground reflect the impact of breaking his fall. The hollowed-out earth had been tamed by the enormous power he wielded.
Whatever the results, they were already beyond his control. The only options left to anyone would have to wait fifteen years. And now even he looked tired. As if noticing the damp, clinging fog for the first time, he rubbed the back of his neck.
An angry yelp rang out in the air. A black dog sprang onto the road a dozen feet off to his right, baring its fangs, a good six feet long. He reached his hand into his pocket and drew it out. The legs of the dog spasmed. It fell over dead. Blood gushed from between its spear-like fangs.
This was not a city where a man could ever let down his guard. The shadow sensed a number of malevolent presences within the mist. Slashes of green encircled him. Behind them, more loomed further back in the shadows.
A pack of wild dogs. Efforts to exterminate these man-eating animals had not reached this particular block. Knowing the danger, it made for a perfect place to dump a body.
The black masses closed on him at an incredible velocity. He soared over their heads.
In the midst of this silent attack and counterattack, the pack did not swarm around the canine corpse already on the road. Attacking him surely meant they hadn’t already eaten their fill. But they seemed to possess the intellect, uncrazed by the smell of blood, to fix their attention on the second meal before them.
The shadow landed on a crumbling wall. The concrete cracked beneath his feet. He didn’t lose his balance for an instant. Beyond the wall were the ruins of a factory.
He set off running. Two dogs jumped up at him from below. His right hand flashed. The two dogs died. By the time the bodies crashed to the ground, he had sprinted to another wall a dozen yards off.
A ferocious roar reached his ear. The additional feast of flesh and blood finally overwhelmed the animals’ instincts. Shaking off their pursuit, the shadow disappeared into the mists.
A few minutes later, only bloodstains and shards of bone were left to tell the tale. Watery light slanted across the road. A new day had dawned in the city.
Rising out of the thinning haze, the Keio Plaza Hotel was the first skyscraper to catch the morning sun—in a metropolis where, only a mile or so from the new city center, man-eating animals ran rampant.
Demon City Shinjuku.
Biding its time until that multi-dimensional showdown fifteen years hence, it calmly welcomed yet another one of its same-old accursed days.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, the Lauren Knights hostess club in Kabuki-cho welcomed its most interesting visitor since its opening.
The customer on his way out was demanding a refund. One of the employees, Noriko Toyoshi, was having a few words with him. “What the hell you are bitching about?” she demanded. “The way you were copping feels right and left, we gave a little perv like you a bargain deal.”
The time was 3:52.
Taking her raised voice as a cue, the bartender and bouncer joined the party. By the time they’d wrestled their displeased guest to the ground, thrashed him soundly and tossed him out on his ear, it was a little past 3:56.
He landed with his face on the ground a couple of yards out the back entrance.
“Take a hike, mister!” Noriko hocked a loogie onto his back. “And don’t come back!” An old-fashioned send-off, to be sure.
It was 3:59.
With the man’s finger—torn off at some point during the melee—clenched between her teeth like a cigar, she was heading back inside when she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She glanced over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of
that
face.
It was exactly four o’clock.
The sepia light of early summer stained the falling dusk.
O-magatoki
it was called, the time when ghosts and demons prowled the earth. Probably not a coincidence either.
Noriko froze in her tracks. A long shadow fell on the earth in front of her.
“Ah, is this where I can find Ryo Terumoto-san?”
The drawling voice burrowed inside Noriko’s head and chased the golden sunset away.
“Who-who are you?” she finally managed to say. The echoes of desire thickly layered her words. She was in the business of arousal but she was the one getting wet.
Whether he knew that or not—the blank tone of his words didn’t change in the slightest—“Where might I find Terumoto-san?”
“You mean, the boss?”
“Yes.”
It was strictly against the rules to give out the name and address of the owner to strangers. But all these taboos had flown out the window as soon as she saw his face. If he asked, she would have stripped naked and gotten herself off in broad daylight.
“The boss—he’s chasing some skirt in the green room on the second floor. What’s this about?”
A ferocious bark of anger made her turn around. “Stupid bitch! You don’t tell shit like that to a perfect—”
The bouncer’s admonition cut off mid-sentence. He’d been lingering at the back entrance. A flush rose to his ashen cheeks. Noriko felt a flash of jealousy. He too was entranced by the man’s spell.
“W-What do you want?” But even this cross-examination was colored by an air of fawning.
“Upstairs, was it? If you would excuse me.”
The silhouette moved. The man was dressed in black. Bathed in the listless sunlight, the turned-up collar of his black slicker suggested being caught in a cutting winter wind. It was the two lowlifes who felt the chill.
A head taller than the five-foot-six bouncer, he disappeared down the hallway. The two stepped aside, as if pushed by an invisible force. The visitor silently climbed the stairs. By the time he got to the steel door identified with a nameplate as the “Ladies Green Room,” a flurry of footsteps sounded out behind him.
“Son of a bitch! You wait right there!”
“Take us for fools, do you? Turn around and face the music, bud!”
The same number of shouts as the pairs of footsteps. A moment later, they fell silent.
The visitor turned around. The next sound was of them all swallowing hard.
Caught in the light streaming in from the end of the hall, the young man’s comely countenance took on an almost ultraviolet glow.
Beneath brows like slender willow leaves, their stupefied faces reflected in his narrow eyes. The chiseled bridge of his nose—white teeth flashing between faintly crimson lips—his entire being wrapped in a savage yet mysterious aura—this was an object of rare beauty, as if sculpted by the gods.
It was almost remarkable that it didn’t strike the grubby eyes of these thugs blind. And yet there somehow arose from his expansive, boundless presence a quite mismatched sense of amiable humanity.
“Listen, you—” But the strangled threats uttered by the head underling carried little force in them.
“I’m here from the Aki Detective Agency,” the young man said. “Two days ago, a girl came here from outside the ward. The word is that she’s making appearances here, apparently against her will. I have a few questions, that’s all.”
“A few questions?” bellowed the stocky enforcer bringing up the rear. “Come here and tell me about it, pretty boy. We’ll sit our two asses down and get to know each other. Or maybe I’ll just set
your
ass down and get to know
it
a whole lot better.”
He licked his lips, expressing less a jest than raw desire. The lewd aroma punctuated the violent atmosphere. The men lurched forward, their eyes hot and vacant.
A hardly human groan spilled from those lips. Only once. The men froze in their tracks, a good ten of them, all reaching for their throats, tearing at the invisible in a strange kind of pantomime.
These frantically struggling ruffians, who otherwise thought no more of another human’s life than they would an insect’s, had been rendered literally blue in the face.
The young man—Aki was his name—smiled languidly back at them. A warm smile, utterly unaffected by the grotesque scene before him.
“I can’t let anyone interfere with my work. Take it easy, okay? A word of warning—put up too much of a struggle and your heads may drop right off. Consider yourselves lucky to have faced off against me, and not
me
.”
With a look like a mischievous child giving the slip to a gang of bullies, he placed his hand on the door knob. The door was locked from the inside. He appeared momentarily perplexed, but tried again—as if he’d been mistaken the first time.
The door opened without a sound.
As the door opened, a man’s cajoling voice could be heard, along with a woman’s moans—that might sound like cries of pain at first, but came from an entirely different source.
The young man slipped inside the room.
It was a ten tatami mat room, approximately a dozen feet square. The tiny concrete-lined
genkan
held a girl’s sandals and the owner’s very expensive black patent leather shoes. The shoes were polished to a shine and reflected the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
The thick smell of sweat assailed his nostrils. The walls were lined with utilitarian mirrors and lockers. In the front was a household Shinto shrine. The two other people in the room were right below it.
Between the pair of white thighs waving back and forth through the air, an altogether stranger sight humped in and out of view—the bottom half of a wild animal covered with black, coarse hair. And the gray soles of his feet and the black claws of his toes.
The beast’s lower extremities busily drove her forward and back, pressing the lithesome girl’s body hard against the tatami. Huffing ragged breaths while totally devoted to the task at hand was a bear.
Not a man in a bear outfit. The bloodshot eyes, the gleaming snout, the yellow fangs protruding from the gaping mouth—this was the real thing.
The slender face of the girl beneath him was painted with less a look of fear than a half-crazed expression, staring in a daze at the ceiling. Her breasts and chest were smeared with blood. The red lines crisscrossed her skin. Every time her body shuddered and shook, the bright red blood welled up and the stain spread.
The bear’s claws had left their marks.
Beside them, two outfits had been discarded on the floor—a red dress and a polo shirt and pants and underwear, the latter belonging to the bear.
The girl raised a muffled moan. The bear’s snout covered her mouth, trying to kiss her. A feral maw accosting human lips.
She shut her mouth and turned her face away. The animal pursued her, the pink tongue playing with her lips. The dripping jaws covering her face from chin to nose, she finally opened her mouth.
The tongue dove in, swishing from cheek to cheek, the spit and spittle spilling out of the corners of their mouths.
The girl coughed violently.
“Okay, okay, let’s call it a day,” the young man said, as if bored with the show.
The bear stopped moving, and slowly turned his head and growled, eyes flashing. This was no mere animal. Such a degree of loathing and anger could only be associated with the human species.
With a roar to wake the dead, the creature sprang apart from the woman with a wet
pop
, the sound made by something damp being pulled out of a tight space. The bear’s dark red manhood jutted out, the size of two fists, drenched with her come, not having come himself.
He rose to his feet, five foot eleven or so, the same height as the young man. His width though—the mass of his frame—its hulking presence—was another matter. He must’ve weighed over four hundred pounds. A swipe with a single one of his fingernails could disembowel a horse. A single bite with its row of dagger-like teeth could take a man’s head clean off. Though slow and clumsy standing on two legs, when running on all fours, he could easily reach a speed of twenty-five miles per hour. And climb trees like no other four-footed animal could.
An unarmed man coming face to face with this animal could only hope to stare it down and slowly back away. If it came to a fight, the only way out would be to win its confidence—and then hack out its heart with a hatchet.
But the man at the door didn’t appear to have a gun or a hatchet or a knife. Yet not a flicker of fear rose to his impassive face.
The bear answered with a growl that shook the window panes.
The young man smiled. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said with a slight nod, addressing the bear with the same insouciant attitude. He produced a photograph and compared it to the girl on the floor. “The very woman I’ve been looking for. She’ll be leaving with me. Please don’t interfere. That would only make things more difficult for all of us. I’ll be contacting you tomorrow with an account number to which you will transfer sufficient funds to compensate her for any pain and suffering. Good day.”
The bear had likely never been spoken to so brazenly in its life. It stood there dumbfounded as the young man strode unconcernedly toward him.
“Step aside, Terumoto-san,” he said.
Instead, the bear took a wicked swipe at him, fully intending to ruffle that unruffled face. A black swirl of wind, a death-dealing, knockout punch.
The wind split in two. The former half slid off the vector aimed right at his head and flew at an oblique angle and slammed into the wall with a loud
thud
! The claws of the paw dug into the wood paneling—sans the rest of the arm.