Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition (14 page)

“Corrosive type-13 guns. Can reduce a mobile police search-and-destroy robot to scrap. Ten thousand credits.”

Damned dangerous items advertised by barkers with no inclination to adopt a more subtle sales spiel. That was hardly the end of it. Rusty old laser weapons, high pressure “whirlwind” scythes that could slice through steel as well as flesh and bone. Tornado “weather bombs” as big as a man's thumb that sucked up everything within a quarter mile.

If security officials from the outside world could observe what was going on, they'd be lining up shoulder to shoulder and crowding into the tiny shops like dogs after fresh meat.

And not just the established shops. In the shadows, dealers with grim expressions waited for moneyed prospects to walk by. They'd softly sidle up to a client and whisper, “The latest Jekyll and Hyde morphing drugs, bargain-basement prices, ninety-nine percent pure. Take the wimpiest coward who wouldn't hurt a fly, and he'll kill every one out of ten—out of five—people he met without raising an eyebrow. A shot from a magnum rifle wouldn't scratch 'em when they're fully dosed.”

Such activities were little different than dealings in the narcotics trade. And, legally speaking, no different than the business of mercenaries and contract killers that was conducted away from the station, over towards Meiji Avenue in the direction of the former Zenryuji Temple, where an impressive exhibition could be found.

A “murmuring mosquito” could be programmed to steal into the ear of a victim and transmit an autosuggestion loop into the brain on high frequency waves, leading to an apparently impulsive suicide. Depending on how deeply embedded the thought was, murders could be carried out in almost undetectable ways.

Convince a man walking down the sidewalk—for example—that he was on the roof of a tall building. Told to throw himself off, the victim would fall a few feet onto the ground, and yet would die instantly. A subsequent autopsy would reveal the kind of internal damage that only came after falling from a great height.

Other devices and specialized drugs were for sale there, including those that triggered mutations at the cellular level and caused the imbiber to exhibit the characteristics of a tiger or wolf or eagle.

Coat the walls of a room or home with “inorganic appetite accelerator” paint, and the building would literally consume its inhabitants. Stab a victim with a “time delay” knife, and the effects would not manifest themselves until several hours later.

While buyers and sellers conversed conspiratorially together, the loud hustle and bustle on the street went on uninterrupted. A few stalls over, someone shouted, “Thief!” Guns were grabbed, laser light flashed, and a snatch and grab cyborg burst into flames. A hearse showed up a few minutes later, seized the still-smoldering corpse with a remote control arm and hauled it off to a special-purpose crematorium.

The briefly-interrupted flow of human traffic went back to normal as if nothing had happened. Perhaps this one street symbolized the nature of Demon City better than any other.

Sayaka Rama headed down a street like that one, away from the station and towards Meiji Avenue, about the time that Kyoya woke up.

As the demon sprites were not accompanying her, it might seem at first that she had escaped. But no. Her pretty face was as devoid of human emotion as a doll. She walked in a similarly stiff manner. A passerby who glanced down at her feet would surely look twice and run away.

For the slender shadow falling on the ground was not actually connected to her. It was walking along by itself a good foot behind her.

When Sayaka stumbled, so did the shadow. But it quickly found its footing and kept on going. And Sayaka herself straightened in a peculiar manner, as if yanked to her feet by invisible strings, walking along in fits and starts like a toy soldier.

The shadow controlled the body that cast it. “Shadowmancy,” it was called.

“Hold on a second, little lady.”

In another twenty yards, the street intersected with Meiji Avenue. A number of silhouettes stood in her way blocking the path. One of them was considerably more massive than the rest, wearing silvery Space Forces combat fatigues, and filling every spare inch of it. A woman.

Yoshiko Kokonoe, boss of the “Hippopotamus Group,” one the gangs aiming for control of the street markets.

She had a puffy face like a muffin, slathered with rouge—though it looked more like paint splashed across the side of a barn—narrow eyes, a mouth bent into a frown, and a bent disposition to match. Her heft and girth notwithstanding, it was said she preferred a good fight and a side helping of torture over any meal.

She was the kind of creature mothers warned their children about when they disobeyed. Certainly no child would venture within screaming distance of her. This woman might well symbolize Demon City's criminal element better than any other.

Sensing that Sayaka was the polar opposite of everything she represented, she went out of her way to pick a fight with her. Sayaka was the personification of the festering itch that every yakuza was born to scratch.

“Well, miss, you're certainly not from around here. What are you doing here? Spying on us? And let me remind you, if I don't get a straight answer, it won't be pretty.”

A frame the size of a small mountain backed up her threats, but Sayaka just stood there with blank eyes. The separation of her body and shadow had left her true self in a trance-like state, making her nothing more than a marionette manipulated by the commands of the shadow itself.

Thinking she was being ignored, Yoshiko filled with a terrifying light. “Hoh. A plain Jane like me isn't worth talking to, eh? God gives a girl a nice-looking face and suddenly she's too good for the rest of us? Maybe I'd like a piece of that face too.”

They whisked Sayaka away to a large room in the ruins. Shipping containers and heaps of cardboard boxes were piled up on the concrete floor. Ten yards further on, water pipes and faucets poked haphazardly out of the floor. It had once been part of a distribution warehouse.

“Bitch!” Yoshiko barked, and went to smack Sayaka across the face. With two hundred pounds of weight behind it, the blow would have sent a normal man flying and broken his jaw to boot.

Sayaka pivoted her lithe body out of the way and the big mass of fat crashed off balance to the ground. The difference in speed and agility between them was like a hippo charging a doe.

“Ow, dammit!” Yoshiko got to her feet, a look of mad fury on her face. It had to hurt doubly bad being shown up by an amateur in front of her lackeys. From the yakuza godfather down to the lowliest street punk, they feared nothing more than ridicule.

She roared, “Teach that girl some manners!”

“No need to say so, Boss!” On her command, the hoodlums rushed her, shouting, “Get the bitch!”

They took two steps and sank down into the ground. With a collective scream and a water-like splash, they were swallowed up by the floor. Except the “water” that struck Yoshiko in the face was the color of concrete.

Mingling with the ear-piercing screams was the sound of tearing flesh and crunching bone. Yoshiko's gaze was drawn toward the faucets. Though no one had turned the spigots, water started pouring out of the pipes, turning from pale pink to blood itself.

“M-monster!” Her thick, alto voice now screeched like tearing metal. With a velocity that belied her mass, she disappeared into the alleys of the market.

Sayaka was left there by herself. “What a bunch of annoying interlopers,” the water faucet gurgled. “But all said, a fine meal. Go with your shadow. Your true enemy awaits.”

Ten minutes later, Sayaka stood beneath a neon sign that read, “Waseda Hotel.”

“Here?” The ground beneath her feet wavered like a low-lying mist. The demon's voice wafted up. “Go in. You remember the plan?”

Led by her shadow, Sayaka entered the hotel—née, the Waseda University Department of Science and Engineering. It was the only wing of the school that remained. The rest had been reduced to towering piles of steel and concrete scattered here and there on the expansive campus.

The first floor was the lobby. Immediately to the left, the owner leaned back in a chair behind the crudely constructed counter, snoring.

The shadow proceeded to the second floor. It stopped in a corner of the hallway, in front of Kyoya's room. The voice again came at her feet. “I'll take this for now. It may come in useful at some point.”

A pale hand reached up from the floor and took hold of the edge of the shadow, in a blink rolling it up like a sheet of paper. And then sucked back into the floor.

Making sure it was gone, Sayaka knocked on the door.

“It's open.”

In reaction to Kyoya's voice, her expression didn't change in the slightest. She pushed open the door.

Kyoya was sitting on the bed, just having put on his shoes. He jumped to his feet, startled by this unexpected visitor.

“You are—definitely Sayaka. What are you doing here? A place like this? And how did you know I was here?”

“I wanted to see you. I thought I could help.” Sayaka's hollow eyes didn't look at Kyoya, but at Asura leaning against the bed. “I am so tired. Could I lie down?”

“Ah—um—sure. Come over here.”

Not waiting for Kyoya to answer, Sayaka approached the bed and grabbed Asura. Her whole body was pierced as if by a red-hot blade. Then she screamed as the psychic power stored in the sword struck hard at the demon spirit possessing her.

But before collapsing to the floor, Sayaka managed to muster enough strength to hurl Asura toward the nearby window. With the sound of shattering glass, the squirming pan-dimensional lips of the weird creature floating in the air swallowed it up.

“What are you doing?!”

Kyoya ran toward the window and stopped. An eerie aura suffused the room. The enemy was already here.

They'd used Sayaka to steal Asura and then kill Kyoya. This was the Sorcerer's plan. He hadn't planned on Sayaka fainting as well. But Asura getting sucked into another dimension proved an equally happy accident.

Sayaka-san was the trap
. Kyoya suppressed the rising tide of frustration and indignation, and cast his senses around the room.
But what to do now?

He didn't have time to think it through. The miasma filled the room. He raced over to Sayaka and scooped her up in his arms. The jostling soon awakened her. Perhaps because the shock from Asura had released her from the shadowmancy's hypnotic trance, her eyes were clear and lucid.

“Ah, Kyoya-san. W-what am I doing here?”

“I'd like to ask you the same thing, considering that stunt you just pulled.”

Sayaka's face clouded over. Her memories from before the shadowmancy were coming back. “The Sorcerer cast a spell on me. What did I do?”

“Nothing to me personally,” Kyoya said with a smile and a wink. “Don't worry about it.” Taking her to task at this point would do little good.

“What are you doing?” the startled Sayaka asked. He abruptly crouched and drew a circle around them with his forefinger. “What's happening?”

“I don't know. Something crawled under my feet. But no magical powers should be able to cross inside the circle.” Kyoya's eyes shone with a fierce light. “Looks like I was right.”

Sayaka followed Kyoya's gaze and exclaimed in surprise. The bed—the sheets and mattress—turned transparent, like jellyfish. The sheets tossed like the waves of the sea. The frame of the bed bobbed and twisted and started to dissolve.

Not only the bed. The chair lost its form and was sinking into the undulating floor. The window and curtains grew muddy and fused like warm taffy with the concrete wall. The entire room was melting away.

As Sayaka clung to him, Kyoya slipped the watch off her wrist. “The floors and walls are a loss, but what about this?”

He threw the watch upwards. With a plopping sound, it sank into the ceiling. The splash burst “up” toward the floor and “fell back” to the ceiling, the ripples spreading outwards.

“So it's reached the ceiling too. Not just the molecular composition, but gravity. That's one hell of a monster.”

By then, except for the round section they were perched on, the rest of the room had turned into an ocean. The bed was sinking halfway through the floor. Squinting, Sayaka could see slender shadows flitting through the depths of the dark blue floor.

“Those are
fish
,” Sayaka said in a muffled voice.

“Demon City fish. Who knows what's going to show up next.”

As if answering Kyoya, low laughter came from the other side of the room. “Exactly. I thought I'd show off my pets.”

The voice hadn't died away before the surface of the “sea” welled up six feet in front of them. Breaking out of the cresting wave, a giant fish leapt into the air, silvery scales flashing in the light. With one bloodshot eye and spear-like fangs sprouting from its purple triangular mouth, it streaked over their heads like a fifteen-foot torpedo—barely missing as they ducked down—and landed in the “water” of the opposite wall.

A column of water rose “up,” parallel to the floor as the floor beneath their feet rocked like a small boat in a stormy ocean.

“At this rate, I'm going to get seasick before I get eaten,” Kyoya grumbled in an exasperated voice.

As she clung to him, her eyes drawn to the source of the outburst, Sayaka smiled. This girl too had nerves of steel that seemed utterly foreign to her countenance. Kyoya grinned broadly.

“What are you smiling about?” came the demon's voice. “You killed Doki and the Sorcerer—but was that due to your own strength?”

“What? The Sorcerer is dead?” Kyoya forgot about the sea-tossed floor beneath his feet and stood up. “So the president has recovered?”

“Never,” laughed the demon. “You merely
killed
the Sorcerer. You did not
annihilate
him. The curse shall not be undone, not so long as his soul remains intact.”