Maohden Vol. 2 (7 page)

Siegfried himself was nothing more than a shell, a marionette dancing at the end of strings pulled elsewhere. With a start of panic, Yamada craned his neck skyward.

“A necrodancer, who makes a dead man walk. Are you Setsura Aki?”

“Sorry, but no.” The dark voice drifted like a black tendril of smoke from the gate out of which Siegfried had emerged. “My name is Gento Roran. And to be honest, until yesterday, I was not capable of such feats either.”

A shadow moved beneath the small light illuminating the gate, the young man who’d entered the locker room earlier. Yamada was about to rush him when he felt a sharp stinging around his neck.

The shrill cry that followed was not one of pain, but Kunishige Yamada’s
kiai
.

It hardly seemed possible, for the lasso Gento had thrown was the same as Setsura’s titanium devil wires. But Yamada’s hands and feet flashed like steel and severed them like cotton string.

“I take it you haven’t seen my Dimensional Blade?” Yamada declared. He brimmed with confidence as he prowled forward like a cat stalking an unwary mouse.

Parting the air with enough speed to leave a vacuum in its wake created a scythe of wind that could lacerate exposed flesh. Yamada’s hands moved like the cracking of a whip, many times faster than the speed of sound. Faster than the human body should be capable of.

The vacuum in the air spawned a dimensional dislocation that swallowed up anything entering into its space—even devil wires—and rent apart when the void slammed shut.

This was the cutting edge of the Dimensional Blade. Aside from Setsura Aki, the man who wielded it might well be the most fearsome enemy Gento Roran had ever encountered.

“A friendly warning,” Yamada said, fixing Gento in his sights. “Unlike any weapon made of metal, the Dimensional Blade is not confined by length. That hollow shell and the real you, that pretty prize as well—I shall deal justice like Solomon and cleave them all in two.”

Mayumi’s naked body rested unmoving on the platform.

Yamada shifted his stance, severed the charging Siegfried in two, top to bottom, and then similarly bisected Gento behind him. Victory was his—

But it was his own head sailing into the air. Looking down he saw his own blood gouting onto his torso. And the young man—standing next to the second corpse—smiling up at him.

As his consciousness dimmed into oblivion, Yamada realized that the second victim was the Baron.

Gento Roran had made more than one dead man dance, a truly fearsome talent. Sharing the shadows with the Baron’s body, and then convincing Yamada that Gento was behind the charging Siegfried, he’d made the critical substitution at the last second.

With all his senses focused on the battle before him, Yamada hadn’t anticipated a third ambush waiting in the wings. Penetrating the void in the careless moment he believed he’d triumphed, Gento instead dispatched him to the great beyond.

The smell of blood wafting on the breeze, the stands still as a cemetery, this battle belonged more in nightmares.

“I have indeed beheld your Dimensional Blade, but you will be a lot more useful after this.” Gento stretched out his right hand. Yamada’s head fell with a thump onto his palm. “And now, my seal.”

As he strode toward the platform, an equally confident inquiry stopped him in his tracks.

“Perhaps I could trouble you for a rematch, for as long as
I
am not
me
?”

Setsura Aki’s words rang out like black pearls, made all the more beautiful by the darkness.

Gento didn’t turn around. The battle was already on. Setsura could have taken his head had he not given him a fighting chance.

“A chivalrous man,” Gento said, though with neither sarcasm nor surprise. The simple truth. He might have even harbored an honestly grateful thought in that moment.

“You can keep that head you have,” Setsura said softly.

Had they been two men standing around talking in the darkness, such a statement could only be taken at face value. However, the one stood in the gloom outside the ring of light, while the other bore in his right hand a dripping, severed head.

Nobody around them budged. To the spectators and the people running the show, it was as if the stage had suddenly shifted to a separate precinct of Hell.

“Well, that’s a dilemma,” said Gento. “I don’t want to lose either. Another twenty paces and the seal is mine. Waste not, want not.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Setsura said, in what could only be an invitation to the Death Match of the evening.

“What clued you in?” Gento asked. His right hand bobbed up and down, as if judging the weight of the head. Setsura’s poker face told him that he had discerned the identity of the seal, too.

“A certain set of circumstances informed me that the seal was a human being. When its nature began to emerge, abnormalities were sure to manifest themselves in the physical body. The next logical step would be the hospital.”

“Search Shinjuku for a patient showing strange symptoms. You are a man with a gift for finding the unique perspective. Hyota had that right about you.”

“And how is he doing?” Only Gento could have detected the touch of nostalgia in Setsura’s icy voice.

“He still thinks the world of you, as if he would still rather serve you than me. I can’t deny feeling a tad resentful, but I suppose such emotions are inevitable. He always loved you more.”

“Perhaps because you were never lovable.”

“Bingo,” Gento said with a sour smile. Perhaps a hint of sentimentality colored the eyes of this genie, too. “You know me, always the bookworm while you were off playing with Hyota. I let your father know it wasn’t right, you cavorting about with the help.”

“That is water long under the bridge by now,” Setsura said. His words revealed not a hint of emotion, the darkness surrounding him radiated not the slightest sense of bewilderment or alarm. “You want the girl. You don’t want to part with the head. And you’ll still have to go through
me
.”

“So be it,” Gento replied.

He’d fought Setsura once before and lost, and yet answered in equally fearless tones. Both had titanium steel devil wires at their command. But Gento couldn’t see Setsura, and his right hand was already full with the head. He was coming to bat with two strikes against him.

What moves did this genie have left up his sleeve? For he was not the only genie there.

The air hummed.

A fraction of a second earlier, Gento felt a faint surge aimed at his head, the breeze kicked up by the devil wire, the breath of air aroused by the sub-micron thin filament.

The heavy, dull thud of the impact could only mean that Setsura’s intended target was not on the receiving end of the attack.

Siegfried stood a yard in front of Gento, towering over him like a stone wall. The top half of Siegfried’s torso—right at the height of Gento’s head—slid cleanly off the bottom half.

Even stranger, as the two halves of his body slanted away from each other, Siegfried reached down with his two massive arms and arrested the slippage. It was like he’d divided himself into two distinct living things.

That wasn’t the end of it. With hulking yet surprisingly agile movements, Siegfried leapfrogged out of the arena. Throwing his five hundred pounds through the air, he disappeared into the stands.

To the two left behind, making the dead live was not such an impressive feat. At the moment Siegfried intercepted Setsura’s devil wire attack, Gento bolted toward the platform where Mayumi lay bound.

The strands of devil wire whispering after him, Gento flung out his right hand. Yamada’s head sailed through the air. He did not throw it with enough force, it seemed, to keep it aloft. And yet it flew backwards in a straight line.

Weaving and dodging out of the way of invisible obstacles, the head disappeared into the darkness next to the gate from which Yamada had entered the arena.

“Hoh,” came a low exclamation of admiration.

The darkness swelled and broke apart. His black slicker still dissolved into the blackness behind him, Setsura’s comely countenance glowed vividly in the dark, hovering there like a specter.

Yamada’s head floated in the air on his left. His wide-open mouth, his bared white teeth fastened around Setsura’s right wrist.

Gento reached the platform. He could tell from the cessation of the whispering air behind him that Yamada’s head had hit its target and his teeth had left a painful mark. Its motor functions had long ago ceased, but a strand of devil wire imparted to the skull those same necrodancing skills that made the dead spring back to life.

Skills that had once been the province of Setsura alone.

Gazing down at the naked Mayumi, the owner of that fearsome visage said gently, “We meet at last. Fate has blessed me with my holy seal.”

A spark of volition lit up Mayumi’s vacant eyes, like the glowing wick of a candle about to be blown out. “Who are you?”

“My name is Gento Roran. I am the man you were predestined to meet.”

“What do you intend to do with me?”

“The question I’d intended to ask you. Do you not feel anything of meaning at this moment?”

Mayumi answered him with a puzzled look.

“In any case, let us be on our way. Oh, but before we go, there are a few loose ends that need tying up.”

Gento looked up as Setsura approached. Cloaked in his black slicker, his legs appeared to glide along the ground, Yamada’s head still attached to his wrist. Setsura came to a halt twenty feet away. Even a genie with a blade of limitless length at his disposal must still have a distance he preferred.

“Up until yesterday, I couldn’t have pulled off that necrodancing technique.” Gento spoke calmly, not so much making a threat as an observation. “I believe we are achieving parity on the field of battle. What do you think?”

“You may have a point,” Setsura said.

A puff of black smoke suddenly roiled up from his body. Gento stiffened slightly, preparing to counter with a new angle of attack. A moment later, its true nature became apparent.

Like a shard of the darkness weaving through the night, Setsura’s slicker drifted down with a rustle of wind and covered Mayumi’s body from head to toe, concealing her from so many prying eyes.

“You almost had me there,” Gento grumbled to himself.

He looked anew at his foe. Setsura had made the night his ally. The jet-black, long-sleeved T-shirt cloaked him from the neck down to the wrists. No surprise that the darkness should be so friendly to his equally black magic.

Extending his fingers, Gento swept his right hand sideways, parallel with the ground. Setsura’s arm did the same. They were not mimicking the other’s movements. This was the result of them both choosing the same lethal tactic at the same time.

Gento’s forefinger pointed down.

Setsura heard a soft
ping
. All anybody else saw was the darkness. Twisting and turning and swerving a dozen times, Gento’s devil wire struck at Setsura’s forehead.

Setsura silently shifted to the right.

The devil wire aimed at Setsura’s forehead changed course again and shot at its target. Setsura leapt away. The stinging wire hummed at the soles of his feet, then faded away like a swarm of retreating bees.

The failed strand looped backwards and this time came at his midsection.

Setsura extended his right hand toward the ground and flicked his pinky. The descending thread coiled like a snake across the ground, divided into two in front of the platform and raced at Gento from the left and right.

Gento jumped backwards, small sparks of light around his ankles. In a flash they became a sparkling swarm climbing Gento’s frame, the two strands twining around him in a double helix from his feet to his head. Pretty dewdrops of light sparked as the devil wires crossed.

“Your necrodancing offers you no escape now,” Setsura said softly and without humor.

With the slightest tug of his fingers, the devil wires would dig into Gento’s flesh and bone, slicing him apart like a Cuisinart.

“Goodbye, Gento Roran.”

The pressure Setsura applied to his fingers produced no movement, but only a sharp stab of pain. Yamada’s head smiled at him. Still affixed to Setsura’s arm, the teeth sunk deeper into his tendons.

In that instant, the killing strands that should have settled Gento’s fate instead slipped away. A black mass bolted toward the gates from which he’d come.

Setsura’s right hand moved in a beckoning gesture. Their devil wires clashed halfway between the two men with a shower of blue and white sparks and a sound like crystal glass shattering against tempered steel.

Before either could launch a second volley, Gento disappeared through the steel gates, followed a second later by the hurtling ball of Yamada’s head.

Setsura felt a wet warmth on his arm. Red blood did run through the veins of this young man after all.

With a wave of his left hand, the fetters holding down Mayumi dissolved. Sprinting closer, he caught her—still wrapped in his slicker—with his left arm.

“Can you walk?”

Mayumi didn’t ask him who he was. He probably looked like Gento to her. She shook her head. “They made me drink something—”