Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition (26 page)

Suiki surely never counted on what was coming next. A crimson current poured from the muzzle of the psychic wave gun and became a raging tide sweeping around the demon's body, according to the perverse laws of that other world burning every last cell to a crisp.

With one final bellow, Suiki disappeared. The shaking of the earth stilled.

Mephisto waved his hand again. The emergency lights in the ceiling came on. Utterly exhausted, Sayaka fell into his arms, the unlikely victor in the struggle to the death.

Mephisto carefully placed his free hand on a nearby piece of equipment. It had returned to its previously solid state. Together with Suiki's death, the demon's magical powers had abated. However, the melted and fused walls and machinery stayed that way, turning the room into a life-sized installation of abstract art.

He sat Sayaka down on a couch whose legs had sunk into the floor. “That was quite a performance,” he said in an unusually gentle voice.

“That earthquake—” said Sayaka, recalling the violent upheavals from before. She was shaking with fear. “It toppled even a demon who didn't conform to the rules of the natural world. That wasn't—perhaps—a second Devil Quake? Those things appearing from the bowels of the earth—”

Mephisto sensed the time from the biological chronograph embedded in his shoulder. “No, it is three minutes to three o'clock.”

The two stared into empty space, as if lost in prayer. The face of the young soldier rose into their thoughts, somewhere in Demon City Shinjuku engaged in an eternal struggle to the death with the sworn enemy of hell, bearing the fate of the world on his shoulders.

That fate would be determined in the next three minutes.

“You cannot begin to imagine how much power I have right now at my fingertips,” said the Sorcerer.

They were standing ten feet apart. His voice came from no vocal organs. The soul spoke through the cyborg's mouth.

“The human spirit has always contained amazing reservoirs of energy. Unfortunately, these biological shells are more a hindrance than a help, capable of expressing a mere one percent of its true potential. The proof is all around us, of souls separating from the body at the moment of death and destroying their enemies, of souls transmigrating to others and reincarnating.”

He wasn't making it up. A team of parapsychology researchers at the University of Virginia had studied thousands of cases of reincarnation in places around the world over the past quarter-century, reporting many incidents of soul transmigration. As the Sorcerer had stated, proof of the inexplicable powers of the soul.

The unflaggingly confident voice continued. “Transforming my
nen
into its spirit essence has bestowed upon me powers that are orders of magnitude greater than when you defeated me before. Furthermore, being housed in this cyborg gives that soul access to all the energy from its fusion generator. That
nen
now fuels this new body. Resign yourself to your inevitable death. Or ally with me.”

“Give me a break, you mutant nut job. You should have died a long time ago.”

Kyoya's cheerful rejoinder was yet lacking in strength, while the Sorcerer's booming voice echoed around the concourse. “Dedicating yourself to the Demon Realm, watching everyone else being consumed with despair and fear and loathing is such a pleasant thrill. Before I left the Himalayas, I asked your father to join me. But he was obsessed with the cosmic mind and such, goals impossible to achieve in a lifetime, and refused point-blank.”

“The obsessed one is you! He abandoned his training after you left in order to defeat you. I'm here to settle the score once and for all.”

“Idiot. Listen, boy. Humans are by nature creatures well-suited for the Demon Realm. Remember what I told you the first time we met. The being making its appearance this night had shown its face in this world once before.”

“Shut the hell up!” Kyoya shouted, leaping forward at the same time, raising Asura high above his head. Pouring all of his psychic energy into it, he brought it down on the Sorcerer's head.

The Sorcerer calmly took the blow with his bare head. The shock radiated through Asura and struck Kyoya's entire body. He flew backwards through the air, barely managed to orient himself and land on his feet.

A burning sensation screamed through his side.

But that wasn't what brought him to his knees. The
nen
concentrated in the blow was absorbed lock, stock and barrel at the point of contact into the Sorcerer's soul. With every attack, he would grow weaker and his opponent would become all the stronger.

“It is too bad. Possession of power and ability exceeding your father's only guarantees that you will die all the faster. Shall I say a prayer for the dead? Perhaps the argument will sound more compelling after you have died.”

The Sorcerer swung his sword, advancing as he delivered the creepy monologue. Shedding his pride and decorum, Kyoya rolled across the floor, scooted out of the way and somersaulted backwards while dodging each swing. His stores of mental and physical energy were drained dry. His movements had lost all of their elegance.

His feet slipped from under him. He fell. The Devil Sword flashed down before his eyes.

“Victory is mine, boy. Become a ghost and watch the world end. Then I shall send you on to the Demon Realm.”

The Sorcerer drew back the sword with all his might. The next moment he would surely thrust it through Kyoya's heart. Death loomed over him. Kyoya bit his lip in helpless frustration.

The ground trembled violently.

A fierce wind roared out of the circle of candles. Both the Sorcerer and Kyoya turned around reflexively. Fissures ran through the concrete. This was the earthquake that had saved Sayaka and Mephisto from Suiki's attack.

“Damn!” cried the Sorcerer. “It has already arrived!”

Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, with a resounding crash thick chunks of concrete erupted into the air and a huge arm jutted out of the ground.

The thing from the depths of the earth?

Watching the sight unfolding before his eyes, Kyoya forgot even to get back on his feet.

The arm raised a fist. And slowly unclenched it. In the massive palm was a rusty iron box.

Kyoya understood at once. The
thing
from beneath the earth wasn't the owner of the arm. It was the contents of the box! And it was his job to prevent whatever was inside from getting out.

The Sorcerer whirled around. Kyoya rolled around the tip of the Devil Sword and darted toward the arm. The wrist alone was easily six feet in circumference, the palm as wide as a ten-by-ten foot room.

He struck at the wrist with a shout, but it didn't budge an inch. His
nen
, and his father's
nen
, were both exhausted.

Behind him, the Sorcerer laughed. “Such futility. President Rama will die in exactly thirty seconds. And then, no matter what, the box will open. The only thing you can do is kill me.”

The Devil Sword slashed at his feet. Kyoya jumped onto the palm. It looked like living skin but was hard as steel. What was this earth spirit tasked with guarding the box?

“Twenty-five seconds.”

The Sorcerer sprang into the air, landing between Kyoya and the box, blocking his way. The Devil Sword whirled and hummed. Kyoya countered with Asura and parried with all his might, but was pushed backwards. Light warred with darkness as the blades clashed. The darkness swallowed up the light.

“Five seconds.”

Kyoya swept Asura sideways. The Sorcerer sneered and caught it with his left hand and flung them both away.

There was no denying his overwhelming strength, and Kyoya couldn't spare any more time sparring. He tumbled down to the floor. Steeling his nerves against the pain, he focused his gaze upwards, at the Sorcerer and the box behind him. A black seam appeared beneath the lid of the box. Inside something roiled and writhed.

“Three seconds. You will die along with this world. Two seconds—”

The Sorcerer raised the Devil Sword high above his head and pounced down on him from above.

“One second!”

Kyoya had already resigned himself to a certain death. His ego—his sense of self—was something apart from him now. The Devil Sword would intersect with his skull in another tenth of a second.

The change that occurred next was wrought in hundredths—thousandths—of a second.

Energy suffused his being. His exhausted
nen
, down to every cell in his body, unleashed a thunderous battle cry that announced his resumption of the contest. Kyoya knew the wellspring of his power—the great cosmic truth that from the beginning had warred with the darkness born at the same time. Though wounded and weakened, this was the purified power of goodness, of virtue, that always championed in the end over evil.

For an instant, Asura was enveloped by a white beam of light. In his state of no-mind, it slashed through the Devil Sword in a single one-handed stroke!

The Sorcerer's soul and steel spine was neatly severed in two above the waist. Scattering blinding light, he toppled over, his soul evaporating without a trace.

The crashing sound reverberating around him, Kyoya sprang to his feet and looked at the box. The lid was closing. Just in time.

He didn't know, but at the same moment in a hospital room in New York, attached to the World Federation building, one second before the appointed time, Master Rai unexpectedly died.

The high council members staring at the monitors didn't grasp this at first. Rushing into the room after the deadline passed, they observed the president resting peacefully, the mark of the hand gone from his throat, and shouted with joy. No one looked at the small man sitting there in the lotus position.

Neither had they realized that in the final moment before that fateful deadline, he had channeled the boundless power of the cosmos into the body of a young warrior several thousand miles away. But his knowledge of the results was evident in the small satisfied smile on his worn and haggard face.

The three of them stood on the broad bridge adjacent to Yotsuya station, at the boundary between Demon City and the outside world. The borderline itself was a fissure in the earth over sixty feet wide and a thousand feet deep.

Kyoya had the wound in his side again treated at Mephisto's hospital and then got a ride back in a linear motorcar.

“See you around,” said Kyoya, extending his hand.

Mephisto didn't move. “No need to make affectations you never would have otherwise.”

“Yeah, there is that.” Kyoya grinned and stepped back. “I don't care to see you or this city again either.”

A wry smile creased Mephisto's features. “As long as this city exists, as long as people continue to live here,
that
will surely appear again.”

Kyoya couldn't help starting a bit.
He knew about the thing?

The giant arm had disappeared back into the earth, the lid of the box still sealed, the hand still clenched around it. But Kyoya had grasped something of its true nature—behind the Sorcerer, the repulsive aura wafting from the slightly open gap.
Fear
and
despair
and
malice
and
hate
—every evil emotion hiding in the depths of the human heart.

The Sorcerer had said as much, that human beings had once opened it before—Pandora's Box.

An ancient legend whose origins were lost in the mists of time. The gods, enraged by human pride, created a foolish girl named Pandora, and tricked her into opening a box filled with evil. Ever since that time, human beings have envied and lusted after each other, and taught themselves to curse and to kill.

We have led an accursed existence from long, long ago
, Kyoya thought, gazing at the streets slumbering beneath the morning sun.
Little different than the citizens of Demon City. Or rather, entirely suited to them
.

The other pair of clear eyes looking intently at his shadowed profile belonged to Sayaka. Her shadow—restored upon the Sorcerer's destruction—fell distinctly at her feet.

Kyoya thought of the people of Demon City that he and the girl had chanced upon—the espers who had died defending them; the taxi driver who'd taken them to the DMZ; the ghost rider grateful to be sent to his eternal rest by Sayaka's tears; and Doctor Mephisto — the mystery man healing the helpless and the wounded with his cold smile and ironic attitude and undivided attention.

The power of good that toppled the Sorcerer dwelt inside all of them. Even the worst among them were capable of doing the right thing. As long as one good man remained, the world was worth preserving. The next time somebody arrived on the scene to destroy it, he'd be back.

“Well, we're off. I'm sure you have patients waiting.”

Mephisto turned around.

“Wait.” Kyoya again held out his hand.

For whatever reason, Mephisto shook it firmly and then disappeared into the car without even the flicker of an eyebrow.