Nevertheless, he had just managed to dodge the fearsome Dimensional Blade, causing the giant to miss his target. That smile of satisfaction spoke to his quick footwork.
Due to the giant’s surprise and the severity of the wound, the dark red splotch widened, his face grew ashen. Gento grinned at him like a jovial angel of death.
“Drop your guard for a second and lose your life. But call it a day now and what would we have brought the good doctor all the way here for? Once more into the breach, shall we?”
The meaning of that we soon became apparent. A red cross stained the bandages covering Gento from his belly button to his chest, thickening by the second, already spreading out and seeping down.
The giant hadn’t missed his mark after all.
Gento raised his hands and pressed them against his temples. “The terms here are the same,” he said. “Unless we hasten quickly to a conclusion, we will both go down together.”
“Master—” A voice dull-witted, ominous, and sad all at once.
The top of the giant’s head opened wide. He reached out to the right and left, arms parallel with the floor. Sensing what was coming, Gento sank down lower to the ground.
As the giant turned, a red line welled up around his waist. Gento’s devil wire. But instead of dismembering, it cast off blood like a water sprinkler as he spun like a top.
Devices within the arc of his spinning hands shattered. Flames erupted from the floor. The operating table split in two. Fresh lacerations marred everything the Dimension Blade touched, before cleaving in two.
Mephisto observed the gruesome sight without so much as the flicker of an eyebrow.
Gento danced on the wind, shooting out devil wires. Every last one of them cut apart by the raging Dimensional Blade, humming as the air rushed into the vacuum in its wake.
Gashes opened up on Gento’s forehead and ankle. Blood showered into the air and sprinkled to the ground. But knowing the meaning of his own defeat, a small smile welled up.
The floor beneath his feet ripped apart. Cracks ran up the wall to the ceiling. Weaving among the intervals in the increasingly hectic attacks, Gento sprang up.
Casting out the devil wires from his right hand, he saw the key to victory within his grasp. The rapid rotation sparked strange changes in the giant’s body. With the red at his waist marking the boundaries, his top half faced Gento while his bottom half turned toward the gloom behind him.
He swayed and fell like a tree, splitting in two and shaking the ground upon impact. Sparks showered down.
“Doctor!”
Forgetting to tend to his own deep wounds, Gento cast his eyes at the arc of the giant’s left hand, in the shape of the Dimensional Blade and Mephisto right in front of him.
Mephisto cupped his left hand around his right shoulder. Gento ran up to him, reached out and touched his shoulder. It slid apart.
“Doctor—”
“It seems to have been severed. But no need to worry. Fixing it myself is much simpler than leaving it to others.”
“That is a relief.”
Mephisto returned the arm to its joint. He looked down at the giant with almost tired eyes. “You will live again, but I’ve given you all the power you can handle. No matter how much we have of anything, we’ll always want more.”
“I am still alive. It follows that Setsura would be too.”
Mephisto nodded. “How do you wish to proceed?”
“There is something I would like you to get for me.”
“What is it and where?”
A mechanical scream drowned out Mephisto’s words.
The girl directed her attention to the strange changes taking place in her body. Her white blouse clung to her wet body. Her slender frame carried large breasts and an ample butt. Her nipples showed through the fabric, though she made no effort to hide it, nor was she embarrassed by it.
Moments before, a shock shot through her nerves, like a cold needle stuck into her ass. As if flipping a switch, her entire body lit up from within as if a furnace had fired up in her chest. The symptoms were initially similar to those caused by alcohol or metabolic drinks, but by now far exceeded them.
She was burning up from within. White smoke enveloped her. She hadn’t yet grasped that the sharp rise in body temperature had turned her damp blouse and skirt to steam. There was no way a human being should be able to survive something like that.
The human body could withstand an internal body temperature of a hundred and four degrees. The currents of heat swirling inside her easily exceeded a hundred and forty. And yet she lived.
Her blouse and skirt dried in a flash. The elevation of the temperature stopped and began to plummet. Though now cooled by equally feverish chills, the girl remained conscious.
“You’re holding up well,” a low voice observed. She turned around.
Standing across the narrow table from her was the man who’d seized her. She knew he was an enemy who must be vanquished, but found herself possessed by his cherubic beauty.
This was Setsura Aki.
They were in what must have been a production planning room, a dreary collection of four narrow tables, a blackboard, and chairs. This was where they’d gone to dry off, the place where the Master’s senses couldn’t reach.
She couldn’t refuse him. His unearthly skills, to start with, had dispatched the rest of her party in a few seconds flat, and add to that the unearthly pain around her neck. But more than anything, his unearthly comeliness drew her along like a dog at the end of a leash.
Despite the demon lurking there beneath the surface, once entranced, man or woman alike, there was no straying from his will.
“Your clothes appear to have dried off. I’ll be going.”
The girl focused her bleary eyes on him. There wasn’t a spot of water on his black-clad person.
“Did you stick that thing up your ass, too?”
“Of course,” Setsura said, nodding his chin at the door. “Stay here until I return. Otherwise that pain in your neck from before will return.”
“You’re just going to leave me here?” she pouted.
“Yes.”
“I know all the shortcuts around here. Aren’t I supposed to be your hostage?”
“You are also a burden.”
“Then why did you spare me?”
“Perhaps you struck his fancy.”
“What does that mean?”
Setsura didn’t answer, but headed for the door.
“Wait,” the girl called out. “There are a lot of my friends still running around out there. You’d be better off taking me with you.”
Setsura stopped. “Would these friends of yours be so forgiving to you?”
The girl fell silent.
“Everybody knows what matters to them most. Go home if you can.”
“No. The Master is here.”
Setsura turned to leave.
“Wait. My name is Kotomi. I don’t remember my last name. What’s yours?”
The door closed without an answer.
Left alone in the stuffy, cramped room, Kotomi stared blankly at the door.
Chapter 3
Studio 13 was located at the back of the building, in the very center of the grounds of Fuji TV.
The further in Setsura proceeded, the hotter and more humid it became. An odd odor permeated the surroundings as the air grew increasingly poisonous.
Setsura slipped past many of his foes on the way to the studio. Like the ones he’d encountered in the courtyard they included men wearing military fatigues, and men and women of all ages patrolling the halls, weapons in hand.
All were those who’d been enthralled. The survivors, at least.
Although their movements were easy to read, for whatever reason Setsura took himself to the midst of their living quarters. Strangely enough, as he drew closer to the studio, the place took on a more orderly appearance.
Serving trays were lined up on the tables in the company cafeteria. In the kitchen, brimm
ing pots and pans simmered over a low heat, fifteen of them. The number of people under the Master’s thrall. The Master must have a vested interest in keeping them alive.
There were beds in the sleeping quarters, and evidence of women’s makeup being used. Even without seeing Kotomi for himself, it was clear they still maintained some sense of themselves as individuals. Far more than that, they were maintaining their sense of mission to protect the Master, and the forthright and exacting mental state the mission required, excluding the unethical and immoral behavior which inevitably resulted.
The influence of the Master invited a kind of emotional corruption that manifested itself in their ragged clothing and unkempt appearance. And yet the women still fussed with their looks, revealing a latitude in their mental processes that persisted beyond this “principal occupation” of theirs.
Two hours after leaving Kotomi, in a corner of the dimly-lit building where time seemed to lose track of itself, Setsura stopped in front of a soaring gray steel door. Stenciled on the door was the number 13.
A sign above the door glowed red. The illuminated white letters flashed, “On Air.” The meaning was clear: the Master was in and the Master was watching.
Setsura shot a strand of devil wire inside. He didn’t detect the Master there either. He’d cast thousands of threads around the building, recording the presence of every living thing, except the Master. There were places apparently where even his devil wires couldn’t steal in.
Setsura put his hand on the door. Some of the Master’s enraptured followers were within. Knowing that, he turned the knob. The door was locked, but there was a keyhole into which he could send his devil wires. His fingers moved with the dexterity of a brain surgeon.
His fingers could sense and command the movements of the threads up to a mile away, or as far into the distance as they could stretch without breaking.
Bathed in special electromagnetic waves and manipulated at the microcellular level, the titanium devil wires transmitted the movements of Setsura’s fingers at nearly the speed of light. It was said that once entwined, as long as the unbroken filaments of the threads continued to unspool, there was no place an enemy could run, no place he could hide, to escape their grasp.
In Shinjuku, when Setsura’s fingers moved, the head of a foe living in a castle in the stratosphere would drop off without a sound.
Right now those wires honed in on the deadbolt inside the lock. Setsura flexed his fingers. Like a tenacious snake with an indomitable will the wires slithered in, tightened around and severed it, as easily as a hot knife through warm butter.
With his back against the wall, Setsura reached out and gave the knob a firm push. The heavy door swung open with no more resistance than a rice paper screen.
Followed by a burst of flame, sticky and oily like napalm. The ball of fire spilled through the door into the hallway, struck the wall opposite, and spread out in both directions. The inferno continued for another three seconds before dying away.
Setsura darted in like a gust of black wind. Two SDF rangers with flame throwers were after him. The last line of defense guarding the Master’s bedroom.
The two incandescent streams focused on a single point, lighting up Setsura’s slicker. The orange lump splashed off the fabric and charred the floor and walls. The smell of jellied gasoline filled the air.
A follow-up attack never came. The tops of their heads split in half. They slumped to the floor.
Setsura’s slicker flapped as he spun around, not an ember sticking to him. Five men stood there cradling Model 89 assault rifles, but doing nothing with them. Because their trigger fingers couldn’t move.
Setsura looked elsewhere. Before the Devil Quake, the immense, twenty-five-thousand square foot studio was home to Asia’s most popular music show. A gaping crack ran down the middle of the floor. On the other side of the crack was a mountain of odds and ends and debris.
The stage lights and battens, television cameras aside, here was the mind of a fanatical collector at work—
Monitors, televisions, sound mixers, refrigerators, audio equipment, cupboards, coffee tables and sofas, automatic weapons, quiz show prizes like motor boats, bikes and computers. Even a taxicab.
Setsura focused his gaze on the midst of all this junk. Sitting at the foot of the mountain was a long, rectangular wooden box. The box was nine feet long, four and a half feet wide, and three feet high. In the center of the intricately carved lid was the golden head of a goat, entwined with a magical mandrake root.
This particular coat of arms was an unmistakable mark of evil. But Setsura wasn’t as interested in the crest as the creepy object enshrined in the very center.
Eye sockets that looked like portals to hell, the pale translucent skin—sublimely beautiful in its own way—that lent it the appearance of wax sculpture. The lips pressed together in a straight line were rotting away, revealing teeth clenched in enmity and hatred.
On the other hand, the sparse mat of greasy hair glowed with an almost living light.
This was the head of an old man. And the person who placed it there fifteen years before was the owner of the head itself. Gento Roran’s father. The wooden box was a casket that the “evil brood” had excavated from its resting place in the Tohan ruins. Inside that casket the devil’s son had grown to adulthood.
“There it is, Gento,” murmured Setsura, what that other genie, Gento Roran, called his “abode.”
Perhaps so as not to obstruct the actions of the enthralled bodyguards, the devilish coat of arms sat there wearing a spooky smile, wrapped in the curtain of dim light descending from the ceiling.
With a derisive glance at the bodyguards, frozen there in place, Setsura sauntered up to the fissure. It was a good fifteen feet across. He raised his right hand. Without so much as a hop, he stepped toward the gap.
An infinite Hades reached down beneath him as Setsura strolled across. With footsteps as firm as if treading on solid earth, the genie arrived at the other side. He walked up to the casket and stopped.
The head had been looking to the right. Now it stared straight ahead with its eyeless eyes. After considering it for a minute, Setsura put his hand on the lid. The electronic lock wasn’t latched.
Whatever the active protective and preservative measures, the wood clearly had not aged in the least. Setsura applied more force. Something flashed across the top of the casket. He jerked back as a red line welled up on the back of his hand.
He looked at the head. Wherever the soul of Byori Roran rested, he surely would have been satisfied to know that he’d drawn blood from Setsura Aki. This was a head driven on by fierce and abiding feelings of hatred.
Setsura slightly shifted his right hand. The devil wire sent forth should have split Byori’s head down the center. But not a scratch showed on its skin.
The deep-rooted sense of conviction to guard this casket shielded Byori’s head from any and all assaults, Gento and Hyota being the only exceptions to that rule. Which must have been why Hyota had to be there when the evil brood brought it out.
“Three hundred sixty degrees of defense, eh?” Setsura observed.
There was no way in. There was no underestimating this opponent, an unrivaled foe. But whatever strategy he might have been formulating, his slightly narrowed eyes opened wider—
Something rose up from the depths of the fissure behind him. Spheres that resembled globes of blue-white fire. Two of them, each a foot in diameter.
Approaching the edge of the fissure, the light from above illuminated a triangular snout. There was no describing it in terms of primary colors. Countless contours ran along the slippery, shining surface, each segment glittering with its own eerie aura.
The glowing globes were eyes. The men on the other side of the fissure quaked in their boots. Bound by Setsura’s devil wires, the slightest movement would have aroused the torments of hell, but such was the fear they must have felt.
Setsura didn’t move. He only looked—at the creature’s s
hadow engulfing him, the casket, and Byori’s head.
It was already a dozen feet over them. The red tongue flicked out like a cracking whip. The tongue was a good six feet long, making the head at least nine. The entirety of its length, still hiding in the fissure, surely reached at least a hundred and twenty feet.
A small snake had escaped from the Ichigaya Genomic Research Center and eventually became this monster, the “Master” of Fuji TV.
Its head hovered there in the air, waiting for Setsura to turn around. Any human who sensed its presence was petrified in place, unable to attack or retreat. And the second they turned around and met its gaze, they lost what was left of their own will.
In exchange for their sanity, the terror was expunged. Some were chosen to be its guardians. No need to mention what became of those who were not, except that this was an eat or be eaten world.
Hence the people of Kawadacho lived in fear. They knew the heavy sound of that great thing softly slithering through the streets at midnight, those twin orbs glowing like a pair of headlights. Not a single other predatory beast remained in Kawadacho, not a two-headed dog or poisonous frog.
The Master waited.
Setsura didn’t move.
Uncertainty welled up inside the Master. This living thing was quite different from what it had dealt with before. The shadow contracted and then surged forward with a roar. No sooner had the rank warm breath struck his neck but Setsura soared into the air.
A sound like a hammer striking steel shook the soles of his feet. The serpent had more than its two pairs of fangs. Its mouth was lined with teeth like a shark, each sharp and hard enough to pierce steel.
Looping a devil wire around one of the lighting rails in the ceiling, Setsura cast out another with his right hand. Humming like a taut piano wire, a red line circumscribed the giant serpent’s head. But it dug only a few inches into the scales before being thrown back.
Similar sounds rang out from separate spots with the same result. The snake’s skin possessed a remarkable elasticity.
Uncoiling with a burst of air, its scales flashing all the colors of the rainbow, the serpent soared upwards. The tongue sprang out at Setsura from its fiery red mouth. Setsura closed his eyes. Fall into the serpent’s spell and it would be game over.
Maohden Vol. 2 Page 13