Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Though if it was a prison, then the cells must be furnished with torture chambers stocked with the sweetest kind of punishments.

  He abruptly came across a group of men writhing on the ground. They were dressed in civilian clothes, though in a reflection of the pathos of the government man in the gray flannel suit, all were dressed the same. Here were the missing law enforcement personnel.

  Stealing closer through the shadows, Setsura got a better look at their faces. Their bloodshot eyes, devoid of reason and human sentiment, were filled with the least evolved of animal desires, faces etched with carnality and depravity, as if they had been possessed by erotic spirits.

  That woman, he thought.

  The men shifted forward, forming a large ring. The moaning died away. The movement stopped. Sensuous cries again welled up from a point at the top of the ring. Setsura’s eyes were drawn to the source. The body of a woman, skin like cream, could be glimpsed beneath the dark heap of men—her thighs, her arms, her face.

  As if feasting on her discarded body parts, the hands and legs and lips of the men swarmed over her. Hands massaged her breasts, lips sucked at her nipples and dove down between her legs to eat her out.

  Every time a hand moved, another replaced it. Her face was wet with saliva, as if set upon by slathering dogs, their panting lips covering those the color of red coral.

  The voices were all those of the men.

  Not just the man whose waist shuddered between her thighs, but all those lusting after her flesh. Those reduced to simply watching had whipped it out and were engrossed in getting off. Simply watching would make a man come in passing.

  In that moment, urged on by her lascivious nature, or else commanded by the baser instincts to defile her, they spread their seed onto her face and breasts and belly, while she smeared the semen across her body with her porcelain white hands.

  “And in broad daylight,” Setsura said with a wry smile. “Attagirl.”

  Over and over again they would surely have continued this frantic coupling. Having shot their wads, the men stepped back from her, more dead than alive. In their place, more men lined up to unburden themselves on her, the faces etched with exhaustion and fatigue—

  —while the Demon Princess took everything they had to give her without so much as a peep, bathed in the bawdy bodily fluids, her loins glistening, the tentacles of lust erupting all around her like the silk of a black widow spider, consuming the souls of her mates before consuming them.

  At this rate, they would desiccate and turn into mummies and die. And even dead, would continue to sexually service her.

  With more wordless cries and intolerable groans, the men next in line spent themselves.

  Setsura’s thoughts lit up with the spark of a possibility. However immortal a body Princess might possess, perhaps at the center she yet preserved a core of very human attributes. Experiencing the heights of pleasure also implied the ability to feel the depths of pain.

  He flung out his devil wires. They sprang back as if repelled by an unseen force. The men indulging themselves with her had covered her pale body from foot to toe.

  Without a second to spare, Setsura pulled them back and sent them flying behind him. This time came a response like thunder.

  Before the lifeless faces could turn as one, the white beast roared. A white tiger more than ten feet long—there could be no more appropriate stage for the legendary beast to make its appearance.

  “So you finally showed up.” Princess sat up, pushing the enervated men aside. “Seems you have finally found your master. And in pursuit of such wonderful prey. Setsura, does the sight of me start anything burning?”

  She seemed to have been aware of his presence from the start.

  “Hard to say.”

  “Then I will set you on fire myself.” She gestured to him. “Come here.”

  The law enforcement personnel turned their faces to him, faces brimming with dissatisfaction and suspicion, more faces and more faces. Abruptly, several of them twisted and distorted, became black undifferentiated masses, and collapsed in front of their stunned colleagues, spouting blood like fountains of black ink.

  Flinging the torn-off faces at their feet, Princess declared in a high and mighty voice, “No one shall be dissatisfied with me!” As if the petrified shadows indeed satisfied her, she turned her own exquisite face to Setsura. “So, come. Before you turn into that tiger’s next meal.”

  The tiger howled softly.

  “You keep your claws to yourself for now.” Her expression shifted. The tiger’s whimpering didn’t change. “What did you do?”

  By you, she meant Setsura.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said with a shrug. “Well, maybe I hobbled it a bit.”

  “You cut that poor Ko’s legs?” Her eyes widened a tad. “Now that it’s wounded, the little pussy won’t listen to what I have to say.” A speck of ghastliness flashed in her troubled eyes. “This should be fun. Setsura, can you slay a giant? Or else—”

  “Share your bed? How do you tell a tiger who won’t obey to keep its distance?”

  “I have my ways. The only other option is to become Ko’s dinner. I want to see that, your handsome face chewed to bits by that monster’s fangs.” Princess licked her lips. She missed a spot of saliva that trickled from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it off with the back of her hand. “That would make for a splendid show. I’m giving you your last chance. Come here.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Idiot!”

  “We’ve rescued Kanan-san and captured her alter-ego. What’s holding either of us back from a good fight?”

  The truth mingled with a lie. Princess paused and considered her next words. “Hoh. I’ll just kill everything and everyone, the tiger included.”

  The tiger probably understood that. It growled and pranced forward. A splendid and elegant sight. Except its forelegs were missing.

  Showering blood in the wind, the tiger pounced on a spot several yards short of where Setsura had been, while Setsura made a much bigger leap backwards.

  A tongue of fire chased after him. That a creature of legend could spit fire was to be expected. This fire, however, blanketed the pile of brick and cinderblock Setsura was hiding behind and melted it away. The temperature must exceed fifty-thousand degrees. The bricks erupted in incandescent flames.

  A plume of white smoke traveled along the wall and suddenly vanished into a gap, the mouth of a drainage pipe.

  If its fire couldn’t follow, what would the tiger do? It moved. Planting its front legs, severed at the knees, it crouched and sprang forward off its hind legs.

  The slimy gore squirmed beneath its feet. Its eyes burned with pain and loathing, but its tenaciousness was implacable. The awkward steps yielded to the glassy smooth movements of a wild beast.

  The pace became a sprint as it closed on the drainage pipe. Those final steps brought it across the deadly tripwires with an ease only two people there could appreciate.

  Peering into the pipe, the tiger shook its head from side to side. The devil wires cut through the air, rebounded, sought its torso.

  The tiger defeated the effort with a quick retreat, opened its mouth and roared. Setsura plastered himself against the ceiling. The shaft of fire shot past only inches away.

  Princess’s laugh mingled with the hot currents. “Ko is a fast learner. Not the kind of predator that’s caught in the same trap twice. These magical beasts always dodge the second strike. Your wires won’t get through. Will you be roasted there? Eaten there? Come to me, or don’t. Let’s see you make another death-defying escape.”

  “Aw, shut up,” Setsura mumbled, scurrying like a spider deeper down the pipe. Any surface, the air itself, was scalding to the touch.

  The tiger tried to climb into the pipe.

  A wild cry came at that moment. The tiger turned and looked back. A stream of blood shot up. And then another. Three, four, five, six. One by one, the Demon Princess twisted off the heads of these law enforcement
personnel. Grabbing some by the hair and ripping them off like the head off a doll, slicing through the necks of others with a slash of her hand, resulting in a splash or spray of blood.

  In the midst of the slaughter, accompanied by the symphony of screams from their death throes echoed the unbridled shouts of Princess’s maniacal laughter.

  Chapter Three

  The gory wind blew down the narrow conduit. The tiger twitched its snout. Though born out of dreams, this creature was formed with a lust for blood.

  Go on! Git! Setsura silently scolded it.

  The white tiger turned around. The humiliation of its defeat at Setsura’s hand was fresh in its mind. The desire for revenge—the thirst for raw flesh—it struggled between its instinctual desires and the desire for revenge and reprisal.

  It snarled. A glowing ball of fire grew like a bubble from its mouth. Then in a flash, it spun around and raced back to the scene of the carnage, slashing at the survivors with its mighty fangs. Planting its severed forelegs, it cut the spine of one officer with the claws of its hind legs, stuffed the head into its mouth, and plucked it off the shoulders with a shake of its head.

  The sound of the crunching skull attracted Princess’s enraptured gaze.

  “Well, well. My bad for making you smell blood while in the midst of snuffing out Setsura’s candle. No rush, no rush. After you’ve eaten them, keep room for one more in that stomach of yours.”

  Her shrill laughter reverberated through that dark realm. This woman’s laughter wouldn’t stop as long as others continued to die. In other words, until the ending of the human world.

  The darkness answered back with a differing opinion. Voices welled up around the bloodbath like the lingering resentments of embittered ghosts.

  “No matter your malice, why treat us like this?”

  “We are Princess’s subjects. Not a speck of uncertainty stains our devotion. However immortal our bodies may be, ripping off our heads hurts.”

  Beneath Princess’s feet, around the white tiger, human forms squirmed and writhed and moaned. If not killed in the proper way, a vampire would live forever—with its spine severed, limbs lost, head crushed. A life trapped eternally in that pain was beyond the imagination of mere mortals.

  The headless bodies crawled across the piles of brick and concrete as the limbless agents screamed. And so it would ever be.

  A mad artist who happened to be present would certainly compose a masterpiece that would give no one who saw it another restful night’s sleep thereafter.

  “Forgive us,” said a security officer, torn asunder from the crown of his head to his crotch.

  “Why—why are you doing this to us?” wailed another, frantically stuffing his intestines back into his abdomen.

  “We live for no one else but you.”

  The Demon Princess leaned over and scooped up a handful of the black gore from the lake of blood. She answered with a glance at the man who made that statement, “You live for no one else but me?” She trickled the blood over her white throat and breasts. “Then no matter what fate awaits you, you will voice no complaint to me. That is the calling of a servant. Although I have no use for a person like that.”

  “What are you saying?” someone called from far away. “Then for what purpose were we—”

  “Why ask me? How should I know? Why does dust exist? What is the meaning of garbage?”

  “Are you calling us dust?”

  Princess looked around her, stroking her breasts and her thighs, smearing herself with their blood. The voices came from above the culvert, from above her. But such was Princess’s scorn that she lorded over her servants as if from high above. The emperors of old must have beheld her in no less a fashion.

  “Listen carefully. Your filthy blood cannot begin to quench my thirst. And yet you multiply like rats and rabbits. Think. Over the past four thousand years, in all the time I have been alive, shouldn’t a situation like this have occurred over and over? Those unclean things who sing my praises as my servants covering the earth in swarms. You are hardly the first. Have you heard tell of them ruling the world, let alone shaking its foundations? Hardly. I drink my fill and the world slumbers on. Why do you think that is so?”

  Princess stopped talking. An invisible ardor flowed into the gaps between the sounds of silence. It swelled and reached its breaking point and gushed forth as a single voice.

  “Please save us.”

  Princess answered simply, “Because I put an end to them.”

  It was as if the world had descended into a different kind of darkness. Even the white tiger paused amidst its slaughter.

  “Why would you—”

  “Why would you—”

  “Why—”

  “Why—”

  “Why—”

  “Who could tolerate the sight of a world filled with such vermin? How do you imagine you appear in my eyes? As loving and devoted retainers, our faces nuzzled together as I take you to my bed? No. Ghouls with rancid blood trailing across their black and bloated flesh, corrupt eyes shining with unsated cravings. Ah, the sound of breath whistling across fangs. It stinks. Such filth cannot be allowed to remain in this world.”

  “Weren’t you the one who did this to us?”

  “You have spoken enough. That is enough to wish my soul to hell.”

  “Please extinguish us.”

  Their voices swirled around her. “Please extinguish you? Do you dare tell me what to do? No, you are hardly the first. You call yourselves my servants and swear allegiance to me alone, but that is not your true selves, not what resides in your heart of hearts. There is only one in this world who truly possesses eternal life. The maggots that writhe in the depths are nothing but annoyances. It appears that this time only, and only in this city has Kikiou pondered different thoughts. I couldn’t care less about that old man’s dreams. And maybe all the better to let them come true.”

  Her voice grew softer. Her blood-soaked visage turned toward the passageway. There stood a man’s silhouette, like a beautiful splotch of ink.

  “You heard me, Setsura?”

  “I did,” he calmly replied. “It’s said that the ultimate state of every despot is a lone figure surrounded by nothing but death. It seems that is indeed true.”

  “Do nothing and that is the fate of this city. Do you think you can stop it?”

  “I don’t know.” Setsura shrugged. It was probably the truth. But he wasn’t the type to throw himself into a fit of desperate improvisation.

  At a loss for words herself, Princess blinked. “Then what will you do?” she asked, ignoring her own non sequitur.

  The white tiger growled beside her. Its brain, intoxicated by the massacre, rekindled its animosity toward Setsura. Setsura shook his head. That was the truth too.

  “In that case, best you not hang around here. Run for your life. Ko here has a long memory. It would like to sink its fangs into your flesh right now.”

  “That is okay with you?”

  “Is what okay with me?”

  “To so readily dispatch me, and at the hands of a beast no less. Is that okay with you? Don’t you enjoy first making your enemies drink the bitter dregs and wallow in humiliation, and then have them plead for mercy?”

  Princess pressed her lips together. Revisiting the past was not her prerogative alone.

  “You can’t very well do that with me dead. Do you know where Takako-san is?”

  Princess had indeed made her intentions clear that she would torment Takako and so make Setsura suffer, though this was a risky card for him to play.

  “Where?” Princess said, narrowing her eyes. She couldn’t have expected Setsura to reply, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

  “Good question,” Setsura said.

  But there was no denying that he was still without any options. He knew from experience that there was no way to kill the vampire queen with his wires. He’d been wracking his brains during their conversation, trying to formulate his next move, but only ended up s
pinning his wheels.

  The white beast crouched down on its severed forelegs. Princess placed her hand on its neck and pulled it back.

  The tiger roared, more a thunderclap.

  Without losing his balance, Setsura soared into the air. Dirt and chunks of concrete rained down on the passageway that until now had been hidden behind him. The fire breathed out by the white tiger had weakened the wall, and the shockwave just now blew it apart.

  “Huh?”

  Setsura leaned toward the right, did a half turn onto his back, and a moment later swung like a pendulum on the path.

  More roars and shadows came down at him from the ceiling, the loose ground setting off a chain reaction. The heavens and earth shook like the day of creation.

  And then there was light.

  The destruction must have reached the surface, for the rays of light unfolded like a white fan, pouring into the tunnel with a mysterious majesty.

  Cries—and puffs of white smoke—rose up, the particular sign of a combusting vampire.

  Inside the falling shower of dirt and grit, Setsura drew a bead on Princess’s position—the strand he’d cast out when he’d flown into the air. Princess wasn’t moving. She’d found herself a nook to hide in until the destruction passed.

  He could cut her in two, but she’d only flow back together again like warm wax without so much as a scar on her fair skin.

  Setsura found himself in the same place where the concrete wall had collapsed. A dozen feet around him in all directions, the rubble piled up forming a sturdy fortress.

  The tunnel appeared blocked by a great black mass. The vampires lying crushed beneath it would, until it was removed, live out their lives literally within the earth, gasping for breath, tongues licking the air in search of oxygen, unable to move.

  Setsura jumped. He wrapped a wire around a sturdy ledge in the ceiling and landed in Princess’s lair. He looked at the ceiling again, and picked out a steel girder jutting out horizontally. He tossed out a demon wire, yanked it down, seized one end, and adding an extra twist with his wrist.