Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 3 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Meguid descended until he was brushing the treetops. He pulled back the bolt of the ACR, ejecting the bullet, and loaded a tranquilizer round from his belt. It did more than put the subject to sleep. It took over the will, turning the victim into a virtual zombie. Its use was, of course, strictly against the Geneva Conventions.

  He proceeded toward the library. A familiar voice barked orders in his head. He had defied it for but a moment. When Kendall had pressed him, his mind was already no longer his own.

  He tweaked the magnetic field of his levitation belt and silently glided above the branches. The next instruction had him set down on the branch of a nearby tree. He shouldered his rifle and trained the sights down, the rifle and branch forming an inverted cross.

  He’s coming. Shoot on my command. Until then, don’t stir an inch.

  Several seconds later, Setsura Aki appeared on the path running beneath the tree where Meguid was hiding.

  Normally, sensing the presence of the sniper—even a complete stranger—Setsura would have lashed out with his invisible devil wire. But that intuition was, along with his consciousness, in a suspended state.

  The man in black strode into his line of sight and the tranquilizer round went flying—at over 4,400 feet a second. Four times the speed of sound. It grazed the base of Setsura’s neck. He twitched and pitched forward, like a beautiful piece of obsidian art toppling over.

  The anesthetics worked almost instantaneously, and yet had no side effects. Most likely created with someone or something in Demon City in mind. Someone like Setsura Aki. Someone with something other than blood flowing in his veins.

  Perhaps his one literally saving grace was his beauty, after all. The man in black sprawled lifelessly on the ground, his arms and pale fingers outstretched, the profile of his face—it was possible to harbor the delusion that the assassin had stalked him just to get a better view.

  The vision of a sleeping beauty sleepwalking his way through a waking dream had been so weirdly appropriate to the magical forest surrounding him.

  A long moment later, Chan settled soundlessly on the limb next to the unmoving Meguid, who was still aiming the rifle at the fallen target. He was being careful to make sure the tranquilizer was working, and was only beginning to realize he’d already become transfixed by the sight.

  “Good job. The problem now is getting him back.” Chan said in a low voice, “Get up.”

  Setsura didn’t move in the slightest. A natural reaction, what with his consciousness in a null state. Chan turned to Meguid with cold, grim eyes. “Go down and check it out. Be on your guard.”

  The Arab vanished from the tree tops and landed on the ground as softly as a cotton ball. He scanned his surroundings and advanced, his ACR rifle leveled.

  He had taken three steps when his body separated into horizontal slices just above the waist. Blood spouted out as if from a sprinkler head and he continued forward. His Chinese partner watched dispassionately from the tree tops.

  Blood gushed from Meguid’s neck. The right hand fell from the wrist. Then his torso split vertically in half, falling in a pile of butchered meat at Setsura’s feet.

  “Your efforts will not go unnoticed,” Chan said in grateful tones. “I’ll see to it that you receive a posthumous promotion, for guiding me safely to Setsura Aki.”

  Chan soared into the sky and settled back down again just in front of Setsura, like a feather coming to rest. Meguid’s body quivered slightly as his feet tread upon it.

  “I beg your pardon for invading your inner thoughts yet again. I suppose being carried on the back of a stranger would wound such beautiful pride. But I ask you to persevere.”

  Chan leaned over and flung an arm around Setsura’s shoulders. His hand unexpectedly sank into the black fabric without any resistance.

  He jerked his arm back. Something of unknown origins had swallowed it down to the wrist. Like the mouth of a fish. The fangs sprouting from its hinged jaws looked like inverted pyramids. Chan’s hand from the wrist forward had suddenly disappeared. Beyond the head, Setsura’s body and the grass were still clearly visible. Only his hand wasn’t there anymore.

  What the hell—?

  The horrified Chinese soldier jerked uncharacteristically and jumped backwards. Feeling a cold, thin spasm of horror shoot laterally through his neck, he knew this was the precise place where Meguid had lost his head.

  Blood poured from his neck. Not red, but blue as the deep blue sea. At some point, Chan’s body had filled to the brim with water from the depths of the ocean.

  Setsura’s back bulged up like the upwelling surface of a black pool of water and split apart. Some species of shellfish jutted out and buried its crustaceous head into Chan’s torso.

  He cried out from the shock and pain. The sound bubbled from the severed neck in a spout of icy water.

  The creature’s hard scales pushed halfway into Chan’s body and shook his lower half vigorously, tearing him in two. Chan’s upper half changed into an enormous clam shell. His lower half remained human.

  A sudden thought invaded his brain. In a flash he understood—

  This was a dream.

  Long ago his parents had told him a fairy tale about a giant clam that rested at the bottom of the world, living in its dreams. Inside that dream, Chan was turning into a clam himself.

  Chapter Three

  They said that normally the mollusk rested in a deep slumber. But then this one wasn’t that one. The clam asked itself what it was, but it couldn’t answer, except that once it had been a small clam buried deeply beneath Shinjuku. And then the Devil Quake came and it started to dream.

  Now and then, it was aroused from its slumber. Its true self emerged in those moments and it basked in the tranquility of the depths. Perhaps the reason it abided here in Chuo Park, in the middle of Shinjuku’s DMZ, was because of those periods of wakefulness that interrupted its dreams.

  It hadn’t dreamed much that day. That day it was living the ordinary, fearful life of a clam at the bottom of the sea.

  The dreams of two humans interrupted its thoughts. It snared the consciousness of one. Or rather, sucked it in like a breath. More than dreaming a dream, it became that human’s consciousness.

  That human was a void. Emptiness. Drawn into its living dream, it became one with the living fear of all of creation—nothingness.

  The clam screamed. It pleaded and prayed to wake up. And then—

  Chan stood up. The sea water ceased pouring from his neck. The shellfish disappeared. The face tore apart. A starry sky appeared. Though born under the sea and spending its days deep within the earth, the clam now dreamed of the heavens. Hard to believe—but the universe lived inside of every living thing.

  Chan tottered forward. Silently, his legs were cut off at the knees. The countless stars of the Milky Way spouted forth from the severed limbs. Scattering upon the grass, the stars slid off the green blades like rain and splashed onto the ground.

  This was Chan’s dream. The dream had literal legs of its own. Chan transformed from starry sky into a clam. The clam became a human.

  Continuing to pray unanswered prayers, it was gripped by fear. What exactly was this mad dream? What did it accomplish? What did dreams do? Nobody knew. And so there was no way to defend against them.

  The one man who might have known watched as his body turned into the blue ocean, all the while craving the deep, dreamless sleep that narcotics bring.

  About the same time Chan disappeared from the stand of trees, on the opposite side of the grove of trees an odd lump landed on the ground.

  It was a crow, more or less. And for the time being, less. It was missing a wing. From the right, it was perfectly fine. From the left, though, it wasn’t there at all. It was a big crow, but only half of one. The wound didn’t expose tissue, muscle or organs, but the whitish-gray substance of its ectoplasm.

  The bird turned its eye toward the place where Chan had disappeared. “Setsura is finally by his lonesome. I was wondering wh
at would happen when they shot him. That Chinese fellow’s been swallowed up by the mollusk’s dream. I’d better clean up this mess pronto or another bucket’s going to hit the fan. If I can get the dumb bloke to snap out of it. Hey! Wakey, wakey!”

  The bird thumped Setsura on the back with its wing, splashing black water into the air with each stroke.

  “Oh, great,” the raven groaned. “You’re tripping out with the clam too. Shit. Now what?”

  A glint came to its eye. Catching a whiff of danger, it soared into the sky. It was, after all, the familiar of the Czech Republic’s greatest witch.

  A shining mass sprouted from Setsura’s back. The raven cawed. Like a crow. It was too startled for human words.

  The thing born out of the deep blue waters welling from Setsura’s back were titanium devil wires. Not what Setsura carried on him, but the dream’s. This was a dream as well, the dream dreamed by the mollusk in the depths of the earth, the reality of its mad nightmares fully expressing itself.

  The threads proliferated and elongated, and crawled along the ground mowing down the underbrush and felling trees like blades of grass under a weed whacker. Twigs and branches swirled into the air and fell back to earth like hail. Even the drifting microbial life was severed in two.

  The wind howled. The forest answered back. The most dangerous place on earth had itself encountered something to be afraid of.

  Behold, the devil wire dream expanding infinitely from the sleeping Setsura’s back. Reaching out in all directions, severing everything it encountered. What could stand against it?

  The twenty foot wall “protecting” Chuo Park? But no wall could hold back a dream.

  And beyond the wall was Demon City Shinjuku.

  “Criminy! What’s gotten into you?” shrieked the raven. “You going to wreck Shinjuku too? Hell, if these threads cross the chasm, Tokyo—Japan—the whole bloody world—is toast. Open your eyes, you dumb bastard!”

  The bird’s brain was seized by a terrifying image—buildings and people covering the ground like so much split kindling. Threads and more threads advancing like the ghastly columns of a mutant army. Snaking into the chasm that separated Shinjuku from the rest of the world. And days later, crawling out the other side. The silver threads stealing through Tokyo. Not even an ocean could stop these dreams.

  For the first time ever, human beings would watch the destruction of their world.

  “Wake up, dammit!” the half-raven screamed again.

  “What a funny crow.” The coarse Japanese came from above its head. “I could make a bundle with you on the talk show circuit. A lot more than capturing that young man.”

  A human descended from the sky until he was in front of the raven, the ACR rifle at his hip. It was Kendall. “What are you up to, Setsura? Never seen half a crow before. Not alive and well, that is. You escape from your cage?”

  The crow cawed.

  Kendall responded with a sardonic smile. “Clever. But I already heard you cussing him out. Though if you really are just a dumb bird, I might as well put you out of your misery. Seeing as you’re not dead already, I don’t imagine a regular round would do any more damage. But I’m loaded with incendiary. Burns at about six thousand degrees. You sure there’ll be anything left but ash?”

  “Nope,” the raven said promptly. Talking like this, its voice was half as loud. “But kill me, and how exactly do you plan on carting Setsura here away?”

  “Say what?” Kendall said fiercely. He then asked inquisitively, “How exactly would you pull that off?”

  “I’ll carry him. Appearances aside, I’m the only one on the planet who can get cut by those devil wires and live to tell the tale. If I take a little care, hug the ground and thread the needle so to speak, I should stay in one piece—well, two pieces—and make this thing work.”

  “You can carry a person with a body like that?”

  “Sure. Watch.”

  The big raven opened its beak wide. Because of the coating of ectoplasm over its cross-section of a torso, Kendall couldn’t see down to its gut. Neither could he comprehend the reason Galeen Nuvenberg had sent the bird to accompany Setsura.

  With a gagging sound, a white rope-like object flew from the bird’s throat and struck Kendall squarely in the face.

  The raven had coughed up a freshly-hewn wooden stake and sent it right through the back of Kendall’s head, killing him on the spot. He stood there, his head flung back. The bird paced in front of him and deliberated.

  “This guy’s the—ocean. I don’t know if this will work, but it shouldn’t kill you. This time. Hey, sorry for having to do this the hard way. Just so’s you know.”

  The raven fastened its beak around the pin of the grenade hanging from Kendall’s chest and pulled it out. The safety lever flipped away. There were four grenades in total. The explosives hissed ominously as the bird removed them one by one and dropped them around Setsura’s neck and shoulders.

  Four splashes and the grenades disappeared. “And now for the pièce de résistance—”

  With its one foot, the bird aimed the ARC downwards and pulled the trigger with its beak. The ripples from the 6,000-degree incendiary rounds were surprisingly small.

  “Well?” it asked, almost as a prayer.

  Several seconds later, explosions reverberated from somewhere within Setsura’s body like dull, distant echoes. Two, three and four. But the beautiful mannequin-like figure didn’t move.

  “No good, huh,” the raven said in a disappointed voice.

  In that instant, Setsura’s body sprang up like a coiled spring. The devil wires streamed outwards, merging into a single, fat, flowing rope.

  “It’s alive! It’s alive! The drugs didn’t reach him at the bottom of the sea? Or dissolved in the water?”

  The delighted voice of the raven suddenly ceased. The face of the standing Setsura as was blank as ever. And then, as if from the depths of his soul, a human countenance bubbled to the surface.

  The raven called out, “Hey, hey! Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you,” said Setsura in a fatigued voice—or rather, a voice still shaking off a dreamlike stupor. “I hear everything. Time and space present no obstacles to dreams.”

  “You still dreaming?”

  “So it appears.”

  “Then what’s with the devil wires coming out of your back?”

  “The way I am right now, there’s not much I can do about it. My consciousness will be gone again any moment now. Alternately coming and going.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The mollusk is quite mad.”

  You don’t say, the raven didn’t say. Setsura had turned into a dream, sending out bundles of his devil wire, and was standing there chatting like it was no big deal.

  “Despite attuning its conscious state to the nothingness of my unconscious, it still couldn’t bear it. Although the shock of this tough love treatment of yours woke me up for the time being, but I’m barely standing here on my own. I am still little more than the mollusk’s dream.”

  “Then what’s our next move?”

  “We’ve got to wake it up.”

  “And how do you propose waking up a clam?” the raven fretted.

  “I don’t—” Know, Setsura was about to say, when he choked and coughed. His lips parted. A bright object appeared. The raven felt its radiant, dazzling presence. A form that blithely ignored all the physical laws of the universe.

  Up was down. Left was right. The acute was the obtuse. Straight lines bent and yet remained straight. Lines disappeared into infinitely close vanishing points. The only things that existed were the points they occupied at that moment.

  The thing spilling from Setsura’s mouth touched the devil wires and severed into pieces, which were then caught up by the wind and buried themselves into the ground, into the trunks of the trees. The trees transformed, as did the earth, each taking on strange shapes and forms, unfurling the dreamworld before their eyes.

  “Oh, great!” the r
aven shouted. “As if those wires of yours weren’t enough! Now there’s another thing to deal with. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  The raven turned to Setsura and glared at him. The beautiful young man turned on his heel and walked off into the underbrush on his far right.

  The raven flapped its wing and yelled in a despairing voice, “Is there anybody here with the slightest idea about how to clean up this crap?”

  Part Six: The Untouchable Casket

  Chapter One

  The Clairvoyant saw the whole thing in minute detail.

  When Chan was cut to pieces by the devil wire, the telepath’s spell broke. But the grotesque scene that followed kept him rooted him to the spot. The raven watched. Setsura was a witness. Chan’s final destination was no mystery to him.

  After that, the outrageous future that awaited them became clear as day. The necessity of contacting his colleagues about the strange scene unfolding before him temporarily slipped his mind.

  When he finally came back to his senses and rushed to his car in order to get the word out, a hoarse voice called out to him.

  “You look like you’ve seen quite the ghost. I wouldn’t mind a look myself.”

  The Clairvoyant whirled around. Seeing the strange trio next to the tall wall, he narrowed his eyes. An old woman in a wheelchair. Next to her, a golden-haired girl. Above their heads, a black bird flapped its—wing. The bird was missing its left-hand side.

  But more than the weird bird, the haunting vibe he felt in his bones looking at this small, inconsequential grandma made his blood freeze in his veins. The Clairvoyant swallowed hard.

  “I don’t know what sort of clairvoyant you are, but seeing into Chuo Park is quite the feat. What organization do you belong to and what are its objectives? And where is Setsura Aki?”

  The Clairvoyant ran through a quick list of strategies for dealing with the three, and discarded them. He didn’t respond and put his hand on the door handle.