Setsura scratched his head. He could have guessed the rest.
Her mouth opened wide to take in his whole width and length, her cheeks drawing in and out in a trance, a sloppy wet slurping sound as he pumped himself into her. Her face was flushed, her body pink with arousal, surrendering all her inhibitions to the onslaught of cruel pleasures.
“Put your teeth into it,” came the scornful voice of the man above her. She complied, baring her pretty white teeth against the tip of his shaft.
The man shoved himself against her. She attacked him with her teeth and slathered him with her tongue, that lovely face waiting to be defiled while she lost herself in the rhapsodic heights of the defilement.
The man picked up the pace and approached the summit. The woman’s voice moaned under the lash of such vulgar torture. She shook her face and shook her ass. Sweat flew.
The man groaned and seized her face and buried himself inside her. Her hips trembled and shuddered. The come filled her mouth. She choked, her throat throbbed, the raw sound of swallowing.
The man pushed her face back, the sucking pop followed by the white thread of come strung between his moist shaft and her lips. Her countenance contorted with pleasure and pain, the foul fluids slathered across her mouth painting a look of extraordinary erotic lewdness.
The hairy hand pulled her closer again. She reached out with her tongue to lick off what remained. Instead he wiped himself off on her cheeks and brows. She rubbed her face against his brush until her skin glistened with sweat and come.
She arched her back and threw back her head, her body shivering with sadomasochistic satisfaction wrenched unwillingly out of her. Setsura didn’t need to see her face. This was the girl who should have left Shinjuku by now, his secretary, Mina Chiaki.
The day was hot and humid enough already. When the torrid wind kicked up the fine dust in small whirlwinds, it made a man regret having gotten up that morning.
Theologians and psychics and necromancers had all reached a consensus that the entirety of Shinjuku was wrapped in a demonic miasma, as if trapped beneath a bell jar.
A research team studying supernatural and psychological phenomena made up of scientists from Great Britain, the U.S. and The Netherlands had determined that distortions in this dome of ghostly auras covering Shinjuku arose from irregularities in the line drawn by the fissure at the epicenter of the Devil Quake.
The crown of that dome was measured at exactly 7.94 meters south-south west from the Shinto gate on the grounds of Nukebenten in Yochomachi, at an altitude of 666.66 meters.
The seven-thousand page final report to the mayor of Shinjuku and the prime minister concluded that the dome was composed of parapsychological elements that current scientific methods were at a loss to explain.
In particular frustrating the ability of criminologists and psychologists to analyze and comprehend were the outbreak of heinous crimes in Shinjuku; the violent alterations of personality; the appearance of strange life forms that could not be accounted to the mutations of a few genetic specimens; the observed devolution of human physiology; and many more examples.
They were forced to conclude that unknown factors trapped beneath the dome were inexorably accelerating the violent nature of all organic and inorganic things. It was, the report stated, something other than the simple manifestation of malice that every piece of matter emitted in some form.
According to a “pseudoscience analyzer,” a remarkable recent achievement in the field of parapsychology, these factors derived from still extant supernatural phenomena in the past and were not the product of the natural world or natural processes. Call them malevolent elements, or “these dark materials.”
This darkness existed, the report went on, but could not be properly investigated, spontaneously appearing as it did from outside of the moral realms. At the same time, the selective mental and physical destruction directed at the human world seemed to arise out of an active will.
Who
or
what
was at the root of this will was anybody’s guess.
As if insisting that the supernatural phenomena appearing here and there in the human realm must remain mysteries, and would go unsolved forever. But if by chance that will acted against the human world, no matter how well-intentioned it might be, human beings must annihilate it.
Unfortunately, the report concluded pessimistically, that would probably be impossible. Even now, people were hardly willing to accept that this demonic zone existed, despite Shinjuku’s undeniable existence.
And the fact that it influenced even the laws of science. During the summer, Shinjuku’s average temperature was three degrees Celsius higher than the twenty-two other wards in Tokyo, and two degrees lower in the winter. Yet every year, people froze to death in the middle of the broiling summer and puddles froze over.
Beginning with the Government Freezer, the sunlight streaming down on the city brought about all sorts of strange phenomena. In an extreme case, the profusion of plant life in one neighborhood would completely change from week to week.
As if afraid of the sun, stalks drooped, petals closed. The next day, brown splotches discolored the green stems, the white flowers tinged with red.
Two days later, the listless light filling the magical streets brought forth from the earth flowers with brown stems and crimson petals, scattering their pollen on the wind. One night in Totsuka, over seven hundred people succumbed in ecstasy to the bloodsucking flowers blooming inside them.
That was hardly the end of it. Even stranger were those who didn’t die and lived on, while cultivating the white and purple flowers sprouting from their ears and mouth. The biological designation of these literal “flower children”—flora or fauna—was a matter of vigorous debate.
This was but one of the strange phenomena in this city that made a hot day all the hotter. At high noon, the stirred-up dust dug into the skin like birdshot and left burns behind.
So it might be comforting to know that a fall-down drunk could be lured to sleep by the cool embrace of the earth in the arms of those who cared for him. A place like the grounds of the former Suwa Shrine in Takada no Baba.
The faded red
torii
gates, almost lost in the dusty clouds of earthen yellow, rose above the ruined steps. Beyond it squatted the skeletal remains of the shrine office.
Setsura Aki brushed away the hot grit stinging his cheeks, not so much sand as small stones.
It was eleven in the morning, the time of day when the hot winds blew the hardest. The time and the place indicated by his foes—but that wasn’t what weighed on his mind. There was no point trying to guess which way a fight would go in this city. A grade school student could come up with ten more alternatives on the spot.
The enemy hadn’t placed any restriction on the kind of heat he could bring to this fight. All they needed was Mina as a bargaining chip.
Setsura stared up at the sky, at the oppressive, lead-colored sea of clouds. He stood there, his back turned to the wind, the hems of his slicker and his long hair fluttering impatiently.
“Yeah, pretty as a picture as always,” came an amiable voice behind him.
Setsura didn’t move. His eyes watched the two figures mounting the steps in front of him. One was a naked woman. Mina. The other was wearing a leather vest and jeans. He was about five-eleven, the same height as Setsura, though as the video made clear, he was a big enough man to fit another Setsura inside him.
Mina had a dog collar wrapped around her neck. The big man behind her was holding the leash. He had nothing in his other hand.
“Don’t go forgetting me behind you,” came the friendly warning.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before, Aki?” The voice this time was laced with menace. “Rumors have reached our ears of your strange talents. The boss warned us to be careful around you. But we can hardly walk away from the golden opportunity to see you in action, now can we?”
“Let go of my secretary,” Setsura said in a tired voice.
Mina bowed her back and bared her throat with a strangled gasp as the man jerked on the leash. “Yeah, to the pretty boys go the spoils, eh? Never fucked a girl as fine as her before. Man, there’s nothing hotter than an amateur sticking her ass out for you like a pro.”
“Forgive my brother’s coarseness,” apologized the man behind him, in a manner that suggested he was totally sincere. “Let her go.”
“If you say so. But wait just a sec.”
The big man grabbed Mina around the waist and pulled her toward him. Lacking any other support, she bent forward. A groan escaped her pale lips. He thrust his hips against her buttocks.
“Rumors are all I’ve heard of the Munakata Brothers as well, but a man who’d use a woman as a shield tells me all I need to know.”
“So you say.” He licked his thick lips. “But I’ll be finished soon enough.”
Of the criminal organizations that had partitioned Shinjuku into thirds, these were the murderous siblings who worked exclusively for Kurusu Real Estate.
Anywhere between a hundred and a thousand professional assassins had set up shop in Shinjuku, their services for sale in the black market
Register
. The singular exceptions were these two.
In the beginning, all anybody knew was that they were related. Not even their sexes were certain, or their ages or full names. Even after going on retainer and being generally recognized as the best in the business, not even their boss had seen their faces with his own two eyes.
The
Register
contained a “placeholder” entry. According to it, the year before, the brothers had carried out between twenty-seven and thirty hits, grossing some 350 million yen. At ten million per job, these were extraordinary rates for a pair of freelancers who weren’t actually made men.
“Come to think about it, today is the deadline for updating the
Register
,” Setsura said, casting a cool look at his accosted secretary. “I wonder who will top the listings, or whether the Munakata Brothers will be listed at all—now that you have met
me
.”
The big man had started to smile. The smile froze on his face. The young man in front of him had turned into something
else
.
Ice raced through the veins, nerves conveyed the speed of the darkness, its will ruling over the senses. Hell itself must burnish the face of beauty. Setsura’s countenance had transfigured, like the incarnation of the Hindu devil Rakshasa.
The big man groaned, his fingers clutching at Mina’s ass as he erupted inside her. A moment later, a crimson line ringed his neck, Setsura’s skills being such that not a drop of blood spilled. His body still shuddering in the throes of orgasm, the head slid off his shoulders and thumped to the ground.
Setsura hadn’t moved. Feeling no response from the devil wire flung out behind him could only mean that move had been anticipated.
The curtains of dust wrapped around him. Perhaps that voice had been the work of a ventriloquist. It hadn’t been that of the big man. The resemblances were there, but also the clear differences.
The other brother was hiding somewhere on the grounds of the shrine. He’d hedged his bets and made Setsura show his hand, while Setsura had to guess at his foe’s next move.
Though when it came to delivering the
coup de grâce
, their methods were utterly unimaginative: a knife to the heart or a bullet to the brain, or some variation on those two themes.
The one entirely predictable constant in their
modus operandi
was that the victim was always hit from behind. Peculiar from the perspective of the criminal element from outside Shinjuku, perhaps, but a Demon City hit man always had a style of his own.
In particular, the freelancers not attached to an organization were a creative bunch, though one critical variable in this equation was that their targets were citizens of Shinjuku as well.
Weapons and defensive methods and materials developed in the outside world inevitably arrived in Shinjuku a month before they reached the markets anywhere else.
Some reports claimed that military procurement officers and weapons manufacturers made sure the shipments got through in order to test equipment in a live-fire environment. A good thirty percent of the approximate 150,000 “incidents of criminal activity” recorded each year could be attributed to street fighting, making it the ideal arena for simulating urban warfare.
The major organized crime associations aside, for small and mid-sized gangs and yakuza outfits, how fast they could acquire these weapons spelled the difference between life and death.
In other words, it was hardly rare for a bunch of street toughs to be armed with RPGs and missile launchers. And all this proceeded hand in hand with defensive measures.
Early bulletproof vests made to stop Magnum and Teflon-coated bullets were replaced by glass and composite carbon fiber ballistic vests, which were in turn supplanted by liquid body armor developed by the U.S. Army. Nowadays, external armor was being enhanced by pain suppressants and drugs that increased muscle strength and density, creating a kind of naturally-secreted protective shield.
A man willing to risk side effects such as a shortened life span, brain damage, and paralysis could escape a car bomb—from inside the car and engulfed in flames—and live to tell the tale.
In Shinjuku, what it took to kill a man required measures commensurate with the environment of Demon City. And so it followed that every professional killer had no choice but to develop his own unique style.
More than weaponry, an eye for an opponent’s weak spot. More than the way he killed, the way he got close. Some studied magic and killed with curses, while others employed remote viewing and hypnotism. Some sported a thousand faces while others could change sexes at will.
Stabbing a man in the back was the easy part. Getting close enough to make it count was another matter entirely.
No hit man with a reputation worth keeping would divulge his tricks of the trade to anybody else, not so much fearing he’d be out of a job as ending up being given a dose of his own medicine.