Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  A sudden feeling of apprehension made Princess turn around. “Spirited away from the hot springs, and yet I managed to meet up with her. But where did Setsura Aki sally off to? Did he return to this city? Or to someplace else? That man will harry my thoughts to the very end.”

  Princess set off in pursuit of Takako, dashing down the blood-soaked streets. Ah, the breaking of the day. In one more day—no, Demon City Shinjuku had but twelve more hours—a brief stay of execution during which he must prepare to repel this final assault.

  Chapter Two

  “Doctor.”

  Mephisto turned around at the sound of Yakou’s voice. The white doctor, the dappled sunlight playing across his frame, strolled through the forest behind the Crystal Pavilion. That combination made for a picturesque scene of its own. The surrounding woods were no less extraordinary.

  The roots of the gnarled trees snaked across the ground, growing markedly more slender as they rose higher, creating the image, at a glance, of an upside down vase. The leaves of the trees were closer to black than green in color, lending the white light slanting through the branches a sublime tint.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Doctor.” Yakou alit lightly on the ground in front of him and folded his wings across his back. “There is something I need to tell you.”

  “What is that?”

  “In fact—” Yakou’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I was just discussing things with Kikiou. To cut to the chase, he plans on ending your life by any means necessary.”

  “Is that so?”

  “As you know, I must act in accordance to Princess’s wishes. If Kikiou’s surmise is correct—that the Doctor does not intend to align himself with our objectives—I will have no choice but to participate in your extinction.”

  Needless to say, Mephisto didn’t react in the least. “Is that all you had to say to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Having committed himself to this course of action, no matter what I say, Kikiou will be bound and determined to kill me. The question is what you will do then.”

  “There is something I wish to ask you,” Yakou said in a determined manner.

  “What is that?”

  “Why did you join us, Doctor? To what end?”

  “You use your eyes to see the physical world. But contained therein is also the meaning that refers to the eyes of wisdom.”

  In this doctor’s case, such a meaning was more than plausible. Which was why Kikiou hadn’t doubted Mephisto when he became a vampire with no other inducements.

  “And as for any intentions to destroy this world?”

  “No matter how beneficial the drug, an overdose may prove fatal. That doesn’t make the drug’s inventor a murderer.”

  “What are you saying?” Yakou countered. “That your curiosity has reached a fatal concentration? It is hardly impossible to imagine a supposedly beneficial drug being designed from the start with murder in mind.”

  Mephisto quietly looked back at Yakou. The meaning of “seeing” was at that moment stripped of what common sense might say. The beholder dismissed all such intentions, and entranced by a state of mind permeating body and soul, the beheld lost the ability to process all such thoughts.

  Perhaps this is what it truly meant to see.

  Only a superhuman exercise of will on Yakou’s part allowed him to even blink his eyes and break the spell. Mephisto turned around. “Wait,” said Yakou, blocking the way. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “You would only be as satisfied with my answer as you would be dissatisfied.”

  “Then one more question. Will you and I come to blows in the end?”

  “That all depends on you.”

  “The prospect of us fighting does not disturb you?”

  How many men had asked Mephisto that question before? The light dimmed. A shadow like a bird fell across Mephisto’s face in the shape of a wing. Yakou moved forward. The two silhouettes cast their outlines on the ground. And became one.

  Then more quickly than before, Mephisto pulled back. “I do not think Princess put you up to this. Did Kikiou tell you to?”

  “Forgive me, Doctor,” said Yakou, transfixed by the taste of sweetness on his lips. “Tell me your reason for becoming a creature of the night. Once I have understood that, I will not trouble you again. If the situations call for it, I will kill Kikiou and follow him in short order.”

  “Such laudable aims.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I joined your little band because of Setsura.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you kill me?”

  “I don’t know,” Yakou moaned.

  His allegiances were thrown into discord by the bewildering waves of desire. His loyalty to his sire, Princess, and his feelings toward the doctor in white before him turned his iron will into crumbling adobe.

  “If that is your intention, then I must fight you as best as I can manage.”

  “You needn’t be so humble. If Doctor Mephisto takes up the sword, I can’t imagine him yielding to the likes of me. However, we have Setsura Aki, and I—”

  Yakou stopped. He bit his lower lip and cast his eyes down. Then raised them and looked at Mephisto.

  “I don’t want to fight you.”

  “Would that it were so.”

  “I am not lying. You would kill me whenever. With that same beautiful face, without the flicker of an eyebrow. The only thing that concerns you in this world is Setsura Aki. He is the center of your world, Doctor. You would sacrifice anything to save him. This place and everything in it—including Princess and the rest of us—are no better than dust. What exactly is he to you?”

  “He is Setsura Aki.”

  “And who are you?”

  “People call me Doctor Mephisto.”

  “And what do you call yourself?”

  Mephisto held his fingers up to his lips. Yakou felt something close to vertigo. All fingers were the same. For this doctor, such distinctions did not exist. In a word, these were beautiful fingers.

  “This must have been the elixir on my lips talking. Forget everything said up till now.”

  Yakou thought he might. He felt his lips moving. For reasons he didn’t understand, his own voice followed. “What manner of man are you, Doctor?”

  The doctor in white turned his head in the direction of the manor house. “I shan’t forgive that, Kikiou,” he whispered.

  Kikiou wasn’t there, but Yakou shivered. Something deep in his heart urged him to keep going. Now. The time to expose the truth about this doctor was now, while Kikiou’s drug was still effective.

  “Who are you?”

  “By which you mean me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me?”

  Mephisto’s eyes looked off toward an infinite horizon. Yakou felt as if an infinite amount of time passed. Who was this Demon Physician in the first place? The man every person in Shinjuku sought after, the taboo no one dared touch, was now about to be violated by this magical elixir from four thousand years of Chinese history.

  But is this right? Yakou thought in a sudden flurry of anxiety.

  “I am—” Mephisto said.

  “No!” Yakou cried. “Stop!”

  In that instant, the heavens shook. In that instant, the Demon Princess and Setsura sank down into the depths of the hot springs. But more than the nihilistic terror of being sucked into empty air was the strange sorrow of being separated from the white doctor.

  Right after which, Mayor Kajiwara and his wife were tormented by the mythical beasts.

  “Ye gads! It’s happening again!” Kikiou muttered.

  He was in a room surrounded by mysterious mechanisms and chemical instruments and gadgets. He’d been thrown to the floor.

  “A big one this time. Something must be wrong with the defensive measures. Back when Setsura made the leap, I made some emergency repairs, but apparently they didn’t hold.”

  He’d dredged up the bitter recollection of Princess being severed
in half, Setsura losing consciousness and ending up in the care of a gang of yakuza.

  “So my considerable skills cannot fully compensate for the corrective forces of natural law? It’s about time I double-checked the repairs. Well, then—”

  Two seconds later came the sensation of being drawn through the air. The great warlock sprang to his feet. He grabbed his cane, leaning against the table, and carefully approached the window.

  “What—!”

  Within the “eternal” time he had conjured up here, how many phenomena could have aroused from him such an exclamation of surprise?

  The green faded from the world below. And yet Kikiou quickly noticed that the trees had lost none of their vigor. Right now, the canopy of the forest must be reaching toward another sun, stretching out its branches, spreading out its leaves—in another unseen world.

  What caught Kikiou’s attention in particular were the gnarled brown veins. These foundations of the forest sought after water in the pitch black, crushed rocks, bent and twisted themselves into every accessible nook and cranny. Now they seemed to draw in satisfied breaths beneath the deep blue sky.

  It was as if this strange, sun-drenched world had turned upside down. Soaring up from the ground were the very roots of the trees.

  Chapter Three

  “My, my, my,” Kikiou exclaimed in a hoarse voice, tinged by both curiosity and fatigue. “Trees, shrubs, grasses—billions of them. How to go about replanting every one?”

  The color of the world changed again. The spectrum of the sun hadn’t altered. The sun alone poured down its light with an intensity that made him squint.

  “Oh.” Kikiou’s lips trembled. “Finally, the day has come. The heavens are opening.”

  What was he looking at? The sky, the infinite blue sky—it was being torn asunder. A band slowly traversing the heavens and the earth in unison, of infinite width and length, as if drawn by a giant brush wielded by a great and whimsical god. From it poured forth a languid light tinged an ugly orange.

  “A room,” Kikiou said to himself, though his meaning was not immediately clear.

  At that moment appeared a giant sphere. The vertical edges of the sphere were cut off by the band, placing the sphere beyond it. The sphere glistened, as if submerged in water. Inside it—that could be just as well described as jet black—eerily shimmered another sphere twice as small.

  The only agitation and movement, in fact, came from the fluid that contained it. The small sphere didn’t move at all.

  But the most unsettling thing in view stretched out behind the sphere, garish red threads like radiating electromagnetic waves. Strange and spindly limbs of varying thickness through which, it became clear, flowed a liquid of the same color.

  Now the band of light changed to white. And yet the unsettling orange glow from before continued to spill in and stain the world below.

  For a moment, the big black star glared down at Kikiou and the world. A moment later, a pink cover or membrane or something fell from a great height, extinguishing everything in front of the band of light.

  And then a moment after that, jutting toward him from that base of that membrane, was a line of tall, black, pointed pines. At the same time, the upper part of the band fell, narrowed to a line, and vanished.

  Kikiou’s view was again suffused with blue. As if shrugging off a fleeting dream, the world regained its original color and configuration. He blinked several times and rubbed his eyes. He knew that these strange phenomena he’d just witnessed were closely intertwined.

  “That this world would be touched by the likes of that. White tiger, dragon, what are you slacking off for? This is the one time you should be making your appearance.”

  A strong current buffeted his face, the wind kicked up by the movement of that membrane. The gale roared through the upside-down forest and faded off into the distance.

  “That was one big blink,” he said to himself.

  The old man stuck his right hand out the window. Less than ten seconds later, a soft cooing and the beating of wings came to rest on the tip of his finger.

  The silver bird deftly folded its metal wings. The joints in its tiny legs bent and flexed as it scurried from the fingers to the wrist, up the arm and came to a halt on his shoulder. Kikiou cocked his head to hear what the whispering clockwork voice said.

  “I see. Mephisto and Yakou too. Princess never left the hot springs. Setsura alone got out. A good thing I wasted no time constructing you. Don’t forget the task ahead of you. Now go.”

  As if following the intent of his waving hand, the steel searching bird glittered beneath the sun and fluttered back into the sky. It soon became a dot in the distance and disappeared from view.

  Having once allowed Setsura to invade their precincts as far as Princess’s mausoleum, and in order to prevent any additional blunders from not detecting his presence, he’d made and released a hundred of these birds into the air.

  Their eyes peered into every nook and corner of the world, relaying everything they found to their closest compatriot and so on until the information reached their creator’s ears.

  Kikiou left the manor house a dozen minutes later. He was wrapped in long gray robes, his favorite staff in hand, but there was no telling what was up when it came to this old man. Only that this was the world he had created.

  After strolling unconcerned through the upside-down forest, the wizardly figure arrived at the Crystal Pavilion where Mephisto was being held.

  The great warlock opened the door. There was nothing about the place to indicate that it had been affected at all by the strange phenomena. Without hesitation, he marched into the room.

  As expected, he found Takako Kanan asleep on an old-style ebony bed. After her doppelganger had arisen in the Demon Pavilion, the little birds had told him that Mephisto had moved her here for further treatment. She lay there in a thin silk gown, appearing to not even breathe.

  “Princess has disappeared. The doctor and Yakou are gone. Before I follow them, something must be done with her.”

  His narrow eyes narrowed even further. A fearsome glow poured from his eyes. An almost blinding qi radiated from his body, as if fringed with white fire. Then it vanished, replaced by a different kind of light—not so much ferocious as confused—something that had welled up in his memories.

  “I have lived for over four thousand years and have encountered such an illness but once.”

  In the year 1704, in a remote village in the Kingdom of Prussia, a fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Ingrid suffered such a split personality. While her body lay upon her bed, her exact double roamed the village, indulging in unspeakable acts of lewd and lascivious behavior. As debauched as the everyday Ingrid was modest and devout, she indulged in every imaginable act of sexual congress with every male from five to ninety-two. However their wives and mothers tried to protect them, she would pass through walls and floors.

  “Just before her spirit returned, her body was burned by the enraged villagers. We shall never know what kind of woman she would have been after waking up. No one can say to this day.”

  Kikiou spoke these words aloud in a curiously cool voice. The dark and murderous rage directed at Takako was muddled by an equally deep and abiding intellectual curiosity.

  He stroked his jowls in an expression of contem-plation. Soon he smiled. “According to the little birds, Setsura still remains here. There is no need to panic. The girl may be useful yet.”

  Setsura sneezed and said with a sniff, “Somebody’s got to be pulling my leg.”

  More than a hour had passed after the Demon Princess had disappeared from the hot springs. He spent that time looking for Takako. He’d left his clothes to dry on a tree limb and sat down on one of the black rocks and sent his devil wires out to do the scouting.

  All he’d gotten back for the effort was this sneeze. Now dressed, his clothes still felt damp. “That woman disappeared from the hot springs. Kanan-san must have gone as well.”

  Setsura shi
vered and stood up. They’d been in the water and were just about to go at it when a powerful vortex sucked Princess right out of that existence. Everything around the hot springs remained unchanged, so it could not be a simple freak of nature. The vortex had been too selective in its target.

  If he was going to have any luck ascertaining Takako’s whereabouts in this world, he’d have to ask Kikiou. That was a pretty outrageous conclusion, but the manor house was where Setsura’s feet were taking him. The sheer outrageousness of a proposition wasn’t the kind of argument likely to sway the thinking of this young man.

  He’d proceeded through the forest for five minutes when something strange came to his attention.

  He was soaking wet.

  He thought at first his clothes were still damp. But that didn’t seem to be the case. Nor had he suddenly walked through a very deep puddle. No, it was as if his body had become water.

  “That’s funny.”

  He touched his cheek. His finger sank through the skin. He lowered his hand. The flesh of his face had lost all color and melted like ice. And when the movement stopped, the torn cheek restored itself in a flash, skin and muscle fusing together.

  “I’ve somehow turned into water,” Setsura muttered. This, at least, surprised him.

  There could only be one cause. That warp in space had rearranged the molecules of the water and his body. Turn into a dream or water, he was a man in a hurry.

  “At this rate, I’ll have to see Kikiou or Mephisto. I’d better get a move on.”

  An invisible thread jumped out from Setsura’s right hand and wrapped around the branch of a tree. The man in black lifted easily into the air. His wires should have also transformed into water. Either way, they continued to work as well as could be expected.

  Five minutes later, Setsura set down on the roof of the Crystal Pavilion.

  First and foremost, he was concerned about Takako’s physical well-being. When Princess and the rest of them had left the Demon Pavilion, the devil wire he’d twined around Takako’s ankle communicated movement toward the Crystal Pavilion.