Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Without any evident signs of suspicion, Tonbeau stepped into the darkness. The blue glow stained the world around her. Doctor Mephisto glimmered like a white shark prowling the depths of the sea.

  Next to him sat what appeared to be a brass mechanism of some sort. Pipes jutted out in all directions from a surface covered with rivets, along with levers and knobs. It looked extremely old.

  “What in the world is that?”

  “It is a device that governs the summoning powers you demonstrated.”

  Tonbeau hiked her eyebrows almost to the vertical. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Exactly.” His porcelain smile widened in the azure gloom. “Manipulating the Akashic Records with magic as you have done imposes severe time limits, making necessary the use of a manmade mechanism.”

  “An Akashic Records controller, eh?” Tonbeau muttered, her voice like bubbles dissolving in water. “I’d heard of such things being created, but never thought I’d see one for myself. You truly are a hardcore citizen of Demon City. So is it complete?”

  “Almost.”

  “When do you think it’ll be complete?”

  “There is only one bolt left to tighten.”

  Tonbeau audibly gulped.

  “Time is of the essence. There is another man out there thinking the same thing.”

  “You mean that bearded old man called Kikiou.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any evidence that he’s still here?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  “I believe you. But where is he hiding?”

  “He is a scientist. In a situation like this, he’ll come up with a scientific solution, for which he’ll need the right tools and the right amount of space.”

  “So, I imagine you got informants and the like out there looking for him?”

  “The search is being undertaken by a third party.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll take care of it. I’ll bill the mayor.”

  “Do as you see best.”

  “So when are you fastening the last bolt on that contraption?” Tonbeau asked eagerly. She took an inherent delight in all things strange and out of the ordinary.

  “Tonight at midnight.”

  In Mephisto Hospital, it seemed that time as well influenced the completion of a mechanical device.

  “There’s no way I’m gonna miss that.”

  Tonbeau turned her backside to him, swathed in a long skirt, and chuckled. “Hmm, perhaps another machine will spring to life about the same time. The Akashic Records being fiddled with from two separate locations—that should be interesting. I’m definitely not going to miss it.”

  Mephisto quietly watched as she clomped off like a big Holstein. This time it was weirdness all around, though a particular spark of concern glowed in his eyes.

  Even Doctor Mephisto was anxious about what the future held in store, and Tonbeau had put her finger right on the cause.

  Where was Kikiou? In fact, he had secreted himself in a most unexpected location. An underground room made of stone. It resembled a warehouse. A mountain of wooden boxes and furniture lumped together with glass implements and machine parts of unknown origins or purposes.

  At a glance, they clearly had nothing to do with the everyday life of ordinary folks.

  What was this unordinary warlock doing there? He was building something. The result of which he held in his lips that—boldly, cautiously, delicately—moved and wriggled like no old man’s ever should.

  He had lost both arms in his fight with Mephisto. Using only his mouth, he demonstrated a fineness of control a normal person could never hope to achieve with his fingers.

  The shape of his creation was impossible to discern, a tangled mass of glass and steel tubes, odds and ends joined and connected with needle and thread, like the useless product of a child’s unbridled imagination.

  And yet without hands or fingers, he finished delicately binding two bolts together with colored cords.

  “Hmm,” he said, his eyes burning with evil knowledge. “This leaves just one more to join to the body. The deadline is tonight at midnight. Shall I check on the condition of the other?”

  With these encouraging words, the great scholar and warlock shoved what appeared to be a pile of junk between the boxes with his feet, and then with a nimbleness that belied his years, proceeded to the door a good six feet above him and started up the stairs.

  The door was made of copper. Through the door, a quite narrow hallway appeared. Compared to the vastness of the warehouse, the space was so confined as to make a visitor doubt the architect’s sanity.

  Mumbling imprecations to himself, he made his way down the hallways and after a number of twists and turns, exited in another room. A room like a laboratory.

  Among the antique instruments and generators were arrayed articles well beyond human imagination. The object Kikiou was after sat on a large lab bench. With no concern for his surroundings, he leaned forward and licked a protuberance wrapped with a coil of wire.

  “Energy was injected through the Records. I don’t see a fundamental problem here. As was to be expected.”

  His words evaporated into the air. He whirled around like a leaf struck by a brisk wind and hid behind a distiller.

  The door opened a second later.

  A fat, mountain-sized woman entered the room, followed by a small golden-haired girl. A strange vibe filled the still room as the residents of this house approached the same contraption that Kikiou had been working with.

  The fat one twiddled with the same protuberance. “The one Doctor Mephisto made would appear to employ the same mechanism. My big sister wrecked the converter. There’s no sense trying to make it good as new, but if that alone is attached, it should work well enough.”

  “I believe you are correct,” said the small girl in the satin dress.

  Tonbeau Nuvenberg and the doll girl—they were in the basement of the home of Galeen Nuvenberg in Takada no Baba.

  Hiding behind the steel distiller, Kikiou smothered a smile. Three days before, having been driven out of Mephisto Hospital, he had returned here on foot and snuck into this underground room.

  The visitor identification device in the foyer, the intruder detection and prevention networks, the lethal, magic-powered weaponry—none of them activated or even clued into his presence—breaking into this house in broad daylight was the kind of trick only a four-thousand-year-old warlock could pull off.

  He must have crossed paths with Tonbeau, who was visiting Mephisto Hospital at the time, leaving the doll girl behind.

  Kikiou’s objective was a return route to that world. For a variety of reasons the usual methods would not work, making that particular device an absolute necessity.

  Even in Demon City Shinjuku, this was the only place that could provide the tools and the raw materials and the workspace to make it.

  Nevertheless, this was a high-risk endeavor of incredible boldness and daring, not to mention waiting for the doll girl to drop her guard so he could filch materials from this laboratory and complete his project in the dimly-lit warehouse. And without any arms to boot.

  Not noticing this oddest of all squatters, Tonbeau easily picked up the device. “Nothing wrong with leaving it here, but it just doesn’t feel right. Let’s stick it in the warehouse. Heave ho.”

  She tossed it to the doll girl, who caught it readily and without a stumble, though it must weigh a good two hundred pounds.

  After the two of them left, Kikiou came out from behind the distiller, a cheerful smile on his face. The owners were carting the crown jewels off to the thief’s own lair. If this wasn’t a stroke of extraordinarily good luck, then nothing was.

  However, after the two proceeded to the staircase to the warehouse and left for the upper floors, he hurried to the hallway, only to stop in stunned silence in front of the wooden door.

  A white cross was affixed to the door. At first glance, it appeared to have been applied with masking tape, but the warlock dis
cerned a design of considerably more enormity hidden inside it.

  “The mark of the Yellow Emperor. There’s no underestimating that Czech witch. She got her paws even on this.” His hoarse voice crawled down the long hallways.

  The Yellow Emperor was currently considered the most ancient of China’s dynastic rulers preceding the Shang Dynasty, hailing from the mythological era of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.

  Five thousand years before the present, the Yellow Emperor give birth to Chinese culture and civilization, invented sailing, the wheel, musical instruments, the ten “stems” and twelve “branches” of the Chinese zodiacal calendar, and discovered a system of medical treatment using the qi pathways, recorded in a book known as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.

  It was said that when he met the strongest of the opposing tribes in battle, led by the legendary “Flame Emperor,” weapons called “pestles” flew through the air and exploded on contact in the enemy camps, killing and wounding scores at once.

  In order to defend against these attacks, the Yellow Emperor had his armies build ramparts miles into the sky. Although they began by simply piling earth and stone atop each other, the Yellow Emperor imbued these earthworks with the rigidity of an iron wall using bands of rough cotton provided by Qibo, the mythological doctor employed by the Yellow Emperor as his minister.

  According to volume thirty-nine of the Canon, these bands were divided into fifty-five varieties, ranging from six inches to hundreds of yards wide. Steeped in a special chemical bath, they imbued the most brittle objects with adamantine strength.

  The high technology, used on one hand to mend broken bones and on the other to construct cities, died with the Yellow Emperor. And yet here it was in the basement of a house in Takada no Baba, binding the feet of the great warlock.

  “That bitch—” He ground his teeth. Not even his qi cannon could break through the impenetrably hard seal of the Yellow Emperor. “I’m powerless by myself. And while I sit here doing nothing, midnight approaches.”

  He brooded darkly on his predicament. His spirits lifted almost immediately. His downcast face smiled broadly. An idea popped into his head, along with the name of the person who could cut through this Gordian Knot.

  “Ryuuki, you are surely around here somewhere.”

  Chapter Two

  Setsura lifted his head. White light suffused the world around him. There was no night here. He had to rely on his internal clock. And that told him it was ten to midnight.

  “The lady is indefatigable. She should be dropping by again anytime now.”

  His voice devoid of vim or vigor, he stared at the calm water and the peaceful sky. He was stretched out on a small boat floating in the lake. The craft was equipped with a bed for two, though Takako wasn’t there. Because the Demon Princess had left with her.

  Though she had promised not to take the last drop of her blood, Setsura was hardly willing to take her at her word. But neither did he have the means of stopping her.

  The light wavered above his head and shattered into a thousand drops that reassembled in human form, as if the brilliant shades and colors were inherent in the light itself.

  “Tonight is the fourth night.”

  The Demon Princess smiled brightly. The long robe wrapped around her like a rainbow was touched by not a single drop of water. She must have flown here through the air. This was perhaps the same brutal smile that had destroyed three dynasties and consigned millions to a dusty death.

  “You’re incorrigible,” Setsura said, scratching around his collar.

  “Call it my trademark. Make thousands cling to a red-hot iron shaft, slice open the bellies of tens of thousands of pregnant women, and I’m still game for more.”

  “I can’t say I’ve heard a stranger boast. I assume Kanan-san is unharmed?”

  “You should care for the condition of your own body more than that girl’s.”

  “Oh, shut up,” he said, waving his hand at her with a dismissive gesture, a hand that looked like a piece of sculpture stolen from Madame Tussauds.

  “Hoh. So those mortal ambitions are still alive in you. All the better. I’ll drink from you as is. Once you become my servant, all that malice and loathing will persist. You will mourn your outcast state, and that anguish will fill my heart.”

  “You don’t have to be such an ass about it,” Setsura said, lying on his back on the bed.

  The dazzling waves of color swept across him as Princess covered his body with her own. Her pale fingers undid his collar. Directly above his carotid artery on the left side of his neck, the two small red holes opened up.

  Her hot breath and red lips caressed the skin around them. Setsura, the beautiful genie, was being devoured by this creature from hell. Whatever his sacrifice in order to save Takako, that accursed star that Kikiou saw had now fallen to earth.

  Three nights had passed since that first encounter, making this night her fourth feeding. And Setsura had run out of recourses. Takako was being held hostage. When, after the first kiss, he demanded that Takako be set free, Princess told him to stop talking such rubbish.

  “If I returned that girl to you now, you would hunt me for the rest of your life. Another three days must pass until you are my servant completely. A little patience.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Hardly. I have never done it with a man so cool and collected as you. Perhaps that explains this sense of obsession. But don’t worry. I won’t lay a finger on her. When you become my servant, I will send her forth. Although that city now is a much more energetic place than here.”

  The two streams of blood trickling from Setsura’s neck shone in her crimson eyes. Tonight was the last time she would take his blood. From tomorrow evening on, the black and white pair of silhouettes would wander through the beloved darkness.

  And so she did not sate her hunger all at once. She pressed her bountiful breasts against his chest, her thighs snaked around his waist. Her slender finger touched his face. And when he pulled away—

  “Oh? You find that disagreeable? So you should. As long as the girl is within my grasp. No, crossing that third threshold and receiving that third kiss, you will be fated to venture eternally into the night, with me by your side.”

  “Not a chance.”

  An object from the overhanging cliff was drawn silently into Setsura’s hand. A wind-tossed leaf.

  “Little by little, this Potemkin Village is falling apart. Look—”

  He held the leaf up before her eyes. It had already lost its vibrant color and changed into milky-white flake. A waxwork leaf, or rather one carved out of ivory.

  “That, too,” Setsura said with a lazy wave of his hand. A fish leapt from the water, was split lengthwise, and in a flash turned into a weird kind of ivory vivisection, the fine bones of its skeleton like an intricate carving.

  “And this one.”

  This time he flung his devil wires between a distant stand of trees, cutting in half what appeared to be a tapir. The result was the same.

  “How about them?”

  His devil wires slashed through the waves on the lake, casting the triangular whitecaps into the water like chunks of white marble.

  “If you’re in the mood, we can try the sun and the light and the wind. This is the true face of your world. And this is where you will continue to live?”

  “This world will do as well as any other. As long as there is a night, I will continue to live. I could happily spend my lifetime living out of that casket.”

  “I don’t plan on joining you,” Setsura promised. “First of all, how can you spend a lifetime if you don’t plan on dying?”

  “Exactly. And you’ll know the feeling soon.”

  “I hope not.”

  “A little late to start complaining now. You are my servant.”

  “That gets old, you know? Quit crowding me.”

  He shooed her away, but Princess was already on top of him, her ardor inexorably rising up. Anybody chancin
g upon the scene would have taken them for lovers. Except it wasn’t his metaphysical heart at stake, and not even his life, but his very soul.

  With Takako as hostage and Princess on the prowl for blood, there wasn’t much else he could do.

  Fragrant breath tickled his nostrils. Her red lips touched his chin. The sky was as blue as the day of creation. Sunlight and wind filled the seemingly infinite space. The dreadful circumstances aside, this was a backdrop perfectly befitting the countenances of this young man and woman, a love scene to steal the breath away.

  “Now is the time for you to become mine, my beloved man.” Her sultry voice wafted up from his neck.

  In that moment, heaven and hearth shook.

  A single black dot blossomed in the sky and covered the world, as if this world were a stage and the stage lights were suddenly dimmed. Ten-foot waves kicked up. The boat tossed and turned. The waves broke.

  “What’s going on?” Princess gripped the side of the boat, her eyes shining.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Setsura said. He was no longer calm, cool and collected. Due to the bloodletting, his physical strength had reached its limits.

  The small boat bobbed in the rough seas like a leaf in a waterfall as waves the size of small mountains beat against the gunwales. As it danced up and down, Setsura cast off without a second thought.

  Two pale hands latched onto his shoulders. “What a troublesome man you are,” she grumbled as they flew through the gray skies.

  “I don’t recall anybody asking me to save them. Let go.”

  He tried to shrug her off but lacked the strength to make a convincing effort, and could only hang there limply. Princess skimmed across the waves and climbed into the sky. A fierce gust caught them sideways and sent them spiraling down. She corrected her trajectory in time to shoot upwards to a dizzying height.

  “Hoh! Take a look at this, Setsura! The end of this world. The Armageddon promised by the prophets has arrived.”

  “I’m not blind.”

  The hint of pathos in his voice arose from something apart from simple fatigue. When the end of any world arrived, what words could possibly suffice?