Maohden Vol. 2 (16 page)

That demonic spirit still held sway in the open air, for the air sweltered with the same heat and humidity as inside the building. Add to that the smell of sulfur, and the atmosphere became a lung-choking witch’s brew. Even the clouds above seemed to shrink away.

Setsura brushed a strand of hair away from his damp forehead. It was hard to tell the difference between drops of sweat and rain. He pointed his finger at the cedar tree. Thanks to its sturdy roots and trunk, it alone remained standing as it once stood.

The tree was over thirty feet high and would take the embrace of three grown men to span its circumference. The branches stretched wide and reached out, casting faint shadows on the ground.

Holding that pose, Setsura leapt into the branches of the tree. Plunging into the sheltering darkness within the indecipherable yellow and green leaves, the rich foliage wavered for a moment before springing back to its original position.

A few seconds later, several people emerged from the studio doors and from behind the piles of debris. They came in various types and sizes, but all with the same disheveled appearance.

Two rangers in military fatigues. A young man, bare legs poking out from a T-shirt. A young woman in a blouse and skirt. A middle-aged woman with heavy breasts that swayed as she walked.

Five altogether. Their faces and clothing were dirty and stained. The one thing they did have in common was that, one way or another, all of them were armed. The SDF rangers carried Model 89 SIG P220 assault rifles. The young man had a steel pipe in his hands. The young woman wielded a foot-long carving knife.

The assault rifles were set on auto, the men holding them in possession of their senses and their mission. The countenances of the rest were equally suffused with vitality. Theirs were not the vacant eyes betraying psychological compulsion exerted from without. Every step, every movement was sure and swift.

Setsura lay on a branch and didn’t budge.

The motley bunch gazed around the courtyard and exchanged puzzle looks. “Nothing here,” said the young woman, smacking the blade against the palm of her hand. Perhaps she had always been an irritable sort, and now had no reason to hide it. A stream of blood trickled between her fingers and mixed with the rain before staining the ground.

“No, the Master is never wrong,” said one of the rangers, gesturing with the muzzle of the Model 89. “Keep searching.”

“Okey dokey,” said the teenager in the T-shirt.

They fanned out—nobody leading them—apparently of their own volition. No two of them moved in the same direction. This was the ideal military squad on maneuvers. Unlike the man in the PR department, they could communicate.

This must be a special unit.

One of the SDF rangers approached the tree and cast his suspicious gaze up. Then walked on. It took them ten minutes to make a complete circuit of the courtyard. They gathered back where they’d started.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said one of the rangers.

“Looks normal to me,” said the middle-aged woman.

“We’re going to catch hell for this,” the young woman said in a frightened voice.

“There is no returning with our honor besmirched,” said the second ranger, with bitter resolution. “
This
is the only reason our lives are worth living.”

The rest of their rain-washed faces brimmed with equally wrenching distress.

“There’s only one place left,” said the ranger, the same one who’d previously checked the tree.

He took a step away from the group and raised the Model 89 to his shoulder. The muzzle spat orange flame. The 7.62 mm rounds tore white gashes in the thick, leather-like bark and turned the sickly yellow leaves into confetti. The hot spent brass raised puffs of white steam as they fell through the rain to the earth.

The thick limb Setsura was lying on shuddered and shook. Hot lead buzzed by his ears. It was like the rain had turned into a shower of incandescent cinders. But his countenance did not contort in the slightest. Facing a painful death, his features would doubtlessly remain as impassive as ever.

The SDF ranger unleashed fifteen rounds and released the trigger. “All we can do now is deliver an honest report.”

Raw fear and resignation showed on their faces. Without another word, they turned back the way they came. The rain drummed down as they vanished into the mist.

A spider inched down a slender line of silk from the tree limb above and alit on the ground. Though this spider stood erect on two legs and wore a black slicker. The hems of the slicker fluttered and snapped as he cut across the courtyard to the building beyond, raising his left hand above his head.

The handle of the whirling carving knife came to a curious halt in midair. At the same time, from the same direction came a groan—the silhouette of the person who’d thrown it writhed—her hand pressed to her neck.

Setsura slowly turned around. The remaining four came at him through the driving rain. At the fore was the middle-aged woman, a pair of scissors in one hand. Behind her was the teenage boy and the SDF rangers. No matter how well Setsura had hid his presence from them, the Master had still taken notice.

Their faces were suffused with joy. The woman charged at him, the scissors held aloft like a rampaging psycho killer.

Her wide eyes grew wider at the sight of the carving knife protruding from between her heaving breasts. At first, the sight seemed to puzzle her. More than half of the carving knife jutted out her back. Gushing blood, she toppled over.

The teenager—he was maybe nineteen—jumped at him, swinging the pipe at his head too fast to dodge out of the way. It connected with a dull thud.

Though this was not the sound of steel striking a skull. The pipe sunk instead into the shoulder of the now-ashen woman. Setsura had hauled her to her feet before the teenager could react. The teenager slammed against her back. The blade of the carving knife plunged into his heart.

Leaving them skewered together, Setsura leapt backwards. Seeing that he had no cover, the SDF rangers smirked. The two muzzles spat out a fiery hail of bullets at seven hundred rounds a minute.

Flesh flew like popped balloons. The rain ran red—with the blood of the lady and the teenager. The two corpses had absorbed the twin volleys.

Either due to the impact of the bullets, or manipulated by an outside force, they spun around to face the two men.

The ranger on the right gurgled as the carving knife unleashed by the centrifugal force of rotation embedded itself in his neck. Pressing his left hand against the wound, firing the Model 89 with his right, the ranger keeled over.

His abrupt demise interrupted his partner’s attack. Setsura swung in an arc to the left, moving so fast through the dark silver torrents pouring down that his figure blurred like a smear of India ink.

The surviving ranger aimed his gun. The muzzle roared—just as his partner popped up in front of him like a dancing marionette. The marionette tried to level his gun and was torn to pieces like a rag doll.

The ranger must have been an expert at close-quarters combat, for as his partner bobbed back up again, instead of making the same mistake twice he beat a fast retreat, ducking behind the cedar tree just as a flash of silver light pierced the trunk.

Barely maintaining a human form, the gunned-down ranger had grabbed the knife out of his throat and hurled it at him. The dead man’s strength so exceeded that of the living that the blade sank halfway through the sturdy wood.

“It’s been a while since I’ve played with knives,” Setsura mused. “I’m a little slow on the draw.”

He waved his right hand, spun on his heels, and set off in the direction where that pained moan had first come from. The report of a gun didn’t echo from the cover of the cedar. The moan came from a gray figure, her hands fastened around her neck, cloaked in the haze of rain.

The girl who’d thrown the knife at him.

Her white blouse clung to her skin, throwing the lines of her pubescent body into strong relief. She was wearing a jeans skirt. Setsura gazed at her young pained face. Her neck and shoulders were grimy, but her face was smooth and comely, the result of some care and grooming.

There had to be a few makeup rooms in a television studio.

“Sorry
I
took so long with the knife,” Setsura said impassively. He might as well have been a beautiful computerized answering machine. “Those who bare their fangs to
me
rarely live long, but you have suffered enough. Besides, a guide may well come in handy. Or would the one of you be better off as two?”

Grasping the grave implications of the question, the girl shook her head. Quite unaware, she’d gained the latitude to move her head that much.

Every last trace of the pain that promised to literally split her in two vanished. The girl gazed dumbfounded up at Setsura. More than the fear and loathing, surprise and desire colored her eyes. From the moment she set eyes on him, the pain vanished from around her throat.

He pointed at a spot on the ground a few yards off, though her eyes remained glued to his face. “Stamp your feet there. The cedar tree will feel the reverberations most keenly.”

She finally turned her attention to the place Setsura had indicated and clumsily moved over to it. Staring at the cedar, she softly raised her sandaled right foot and brought it down.

The shape of the tree abruptly shifted. At three feet above the ground the trunk slid apart, the upper part listing to her left. The girl looked on with wide eyes. Something had sliced through the tree.

Stranger still, the canopy of the tree, its branches reaching out, didn’t fall over. The trunk slid sideways at an angle, as if down an icy ramp, and dropped vertically, embedding itself into the wet ground.

A second later, from the other side of the stump a mist of blood filled the air. The girl well knew whose from the torso that tumbled onto the ground.

“Shall we go?” Setsura said, and turned around.

The girl cast her moist eyes after him and hurried to catch up. The two set off together.

“Where is the Master?”

“I don’t know.”

“We first need to dry off. Where would be best?”

“I’ll show you.”

The odd conversation between these two foes faded away and they passed back through the exit doors. Then, only the sound of the rain disturbed the silence of the dead, showing no regard for their souls.

The world was wrapped in light and dark. Where they overlapped shades of gray arose. Responding to currents of air that would not disturb a chick’s down, the layers of dark swirled and twined. The light shattered into a kaleidoscope of colors.

Here was an everlasting twilight zone filled with two sounds, the far distant fall of the rain and the closer hum of electricity and electronics.

Behind the silhouette of a man hard at work, another figure approached. Next to him was a large shadow.

“How is it faring?” Gento Roran asked. He was wearing an Inverness topcoat like Hyota’s.

“If perfection is what you are after—” said Mephisto.

“Yes.”

“Well, then. It couldn’t be worse. Shall we take a look?”

“By all means.”

Mephisto took several steps back, and switched on what appeared to be a generator. A grating mechanical sound was followed by the flashing of lights here and there in the dim surroundings. Near and far, far and near, with no sense of depth and distance. Perhaps nothing more than phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps.

Lying on the operating table, the giant rose up. He was human. He was in the shape of a human being. Except his upper half exceeded five feet. There were always conditions attached. Here especially. Demon City Shinjuku in particular. And without question when it came to this synthetic person.

The giant Siegfried bore the head of Yamada, wielder of the Dimensional Blade. The head had died once, and now came back to life on the shoulders of the man already killed once.

Blessed with a splendid physique from the start, the body of the giant boasted a remarkable symmetry. The small head aside, he projected a beauty that almost exceeded the sense of menace.

“And all in an hour. Your skills outdo even the rumors,” Gento remarked, observing that not a scar marred the neck. “Do the dead rejoice or live on in eternal sorrow?”

It wasn’t clear whether he was praising the brief amount of time required to bring this resurrection, or the exquisite nature of the surgical work.

The two turned their attention to the head. Yamada’s slender eyes were shut. “Time to wake up,” Mephisto cooed. “Your master has arrived. You should say hello.”

Yamada’s eyelids fluttered, the brain still arousing itself from its slumber. At last they opened. Siegfried slowly lowered his huge frame from the operating table.

That movement alone kicked up a breeze that stirred Mephisto’s and Gento’s hair. Considering the fighting abilities he’d had to start with, how much more intimidating he must be now.

Even Gento, who boasted being every bit Setsura’s equal, had only recently tossed his hat into the death ring, as was evident from the pale limbs poking out from the topcoat wrapped in white bandages. He’d broken a few ribs during their last face off.