Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 2 (2 page)

Takako focused her consciousness on everything she was seeing. There was no way she could deal with this woman by herself. She had to call for help, but had only two options: the call button above the headboard or the micro-cell phone inside the cuff of her sleeve.

The woman was standing right next to the headboard, so that option was out. The cell phone was activated by a switch and then voice controlled. Except she couldn't move her hands or open her mouth.

Takako pushed her consciousness down into her feet, staking everything on her ability to control her
qi
with her mind. A lukewarm sensation rose from beneath her feet, moving at a glacial speed. How long would it take to spread through her entire body?

This woman could kill Setsura a hundred times over in the meantime.

The woman's white hands traveled from his chin up the sides of his face. Takako felt a small start in her chest. The shock of pure surprise. The woman was stroking Setsura's cheeks the way a loving mother would her child.

“How handsome.”

Takako couldn't believe what her eyes and ears were telling her.

“What a lovely man. Enough to excite even me.”

Her voice filled the room like a winter mist. Setsura's cheeks deformed beneath her hands, his nose and mouth shuddered. The vampiress caressed him with an otherworldly passion, as if to inscribe his entire being into the memory of her skin.

Takako was seized by a profound feeling of disgust. She directed her thoughts to the
qi
gathered around her ankles.
Rise
, she commanded. And it rose. To her knees, to her thighs.

“But you must die. If I let you live, you will become our most terrible enemy. If I let you die without tasting death, my heart would never be at peace. I could never tolerate that in myself.”

The woman pulled away. Her mood shifted in a flash. She drew her brows and curled her lips. Her nature had prompted another change, and this was the look of the blood-starved demon. To Takako, it was as if blinds were being drawn across her shining eyes.

Takako's
qi
had reached the small of her back. From there it should suffuse her spine and circulate through her entire body.

She was seized by despair. The woman's form—that Takako could see only from the back—cast off a blindingly demonic vibe as her head swooped down toward Setsura's throat. Fear and despair forced the
qi
through Takako's veins. Her hand reached the device in her sleeve. Her mouth mumbled the words.

The woman straightened. Takako's eyes were drawn to Setsura's throat. There was no trail of blood. The china-like skin remained unmarred by the accursed wounds.

A strange and unforeseen change blossomed within him. Takako's countenance dissolved into a rapturous expression. The woman's also. Setsura's soul had somehow detected the true nature of his enemy and had aroused the only defensive safeguard left to him.

Setsura's face seemed to glow. Create the ultimate ideal of beauty and it would subjugate every heart and soul presented to it. Held up before the eyes of a woman who denied every article of philosophy, religion and ethics, and even she would have no choice but to submit in ecstasy.

Just like the servants who watched over the vampire's casket.

Struggling against the invisible spell of this beauty, the woman raised her right hand up to her face.

“This night—” Her voice shook with sorrow and joy. “This night I have seen the worst of all my days.
But I shall not be defeated by this mere fledgling! Look!
”

She raked her hand across her brows. A mist of blood erupted from her face. In order to release herself from the curse of Setsura's beauty, she had torn out her own eyes.

In that moment, Takako felt the unearthly hold on her falling away. Replaced by the bloody physical grip of the woman's hand seizing her wrist. The ghastly, gruesome face smiled. The blood from her eye sockets poured down the scorched side of her face.

In turn, the unscarred side of her face—now stained red—was all the more entrancing. It left Takako breathless.

“I had no use for you from the start.” The blood dribbled into the corners of her mouth. “But I have underestimated my enemies in this city. Ah, I hear the security guards coming. To the extent that you are related to Setsura, you will prove useful in luring him to hell.”

Like a cold, mechanical arm, her free hand tilted back Takako's chin. She brought her ravaged face against Takako's left carotid artery.

No fear or pain—just a brief sting—and then something thick and warm spread through her veins. A fleeting sense of sorrow grazed her heart. It felt like the time when she was a child and got separated from her parents in the bustling crowds of Asakusa in Tokyo.

The woman pulled her head away. The door opened. The security guards rushed in. They aimed the paralyzer guns in their right hands, but hesitated, startled by the terrifying expression on her face and unable to decide whether the blood-smeared woman was the enemy.

That moment passed. Three voices chorused together: “Freeze! Don't resist or we'll shoot!”

“Get out of the way,” came the return command. More of a rebuke.

Struck by her natural elegance, her majesty, and the overwhelming power of her demonic presence, the three men unconsciously retreated several steps.

One managed to come to his senses and pull the trigger. At the same moment a whirling white wind raced among them. The throats of the three erupted in a shower of blood.

Even blinded, the extrasensory abilities of this enchantress were the equal of a normal person's eyes.

From the moment Takako raised the alarm, the scene from the hospital room was being displayed on the security monitors. The surveillance room supervisor watching the monitors goggled. The monitors didn't show the woman standing by Setsura's bed. He'd dispatched a patrol more on the gut feeling that there was something
off
about what he was looking at.

He watched the girl's body stiffen, as if held tightly by some invisible force. He watched the three guards rush in and suddenly come to a halt, their attention focused on somebody—or
something
—other than her. And then a second later, watched as the blood sprayed from their throats.

Security immediately went to DEFCON 1.

Guards encased in mechanized body armor suits raced toward the room, while every critical entranceway and exit on every floor was sealed off with a force field that could repel a battle tank. The nozzles of heavy-grade paralyzer guns and tranquilizer gas jets jutted from the ceilings and walls.

Banned elsewhere, the military weapons in the armory—principally the neural pathway and DNA disruptors—were powered up by compact nuclear batteries.

After this SSDL (“Super-Science Defense Line”), the SPDL (“Super-Psychological Defense Line”) engaged, though only on the upper floors. After that, the SLDZ (“Spiritual Last Defense Zone”)—whose actual functioning only the hospital director truly comprehended—awaited the intruder.

Everything was in perfect working order and ready to go. Except that the worst disaster to befall Mephisto Hospital was not an invading force. It had been born in its very heart.

The military-grade mechanized exoskeletons were equipped with 1,000 horsepower engines powered by a thermo-electric nuclear furnace. The 10mm high-grade silicon composite armor could withstand a direct hit by 120mm smooth bore anti-tank munitions.

Embedded in the armor were tranquilizer guns, multi-beam lasers, and staking missile launchers. Any one of these weapon systems was an equal match for at least three squadrons of the commando units held in such high regard at police headquarters.

It took no longer than a snap of the fingers for ten guardsmen to strap on their mech suits. They rode the emergency elevators from the armory to the floor holding Setsura. And there encountered the beautiful woman coming down the hallway.

They couldn't believe their eyes. A single blast from one of the sonic paralyzers lining the hallway would knock out a whale. The woman must have received a thousand hits already.

With the captain taking the point, the guardsmen spread out in a flying V formation. But the woman didn't stop.

Such a horrible—and beautiful—countenance.

The contradictions bubbling up from their most primal memories threw their minds into confusion. In response, the metabolism monitoring devices strapped to their right arms squirted two-milligram doses of beta blockers into their veins.

“Freeze!” the captain ordered.

She didn't.

“Number two team, engage with paralyzers. If that doesn't work, three and four teams, use lasers.”

The orders flashed through encrypted signals to the rest of the team. The captain aimed and focused the paralyzer on the woman's chest.

The colorless, odorless ultrasonic wave wrapped around her body.

She stretched out her arm. The fear and the drug-induced sense of calm combined to slow the captain's retreat. Her hand struck the breastplate of his mech armor—a quick, willowy movement that seemed to bend the air.

Along with his mech exoskeleton—that weighed a ton—the captain was sent tumbling through the air. The captain's mech struck the one behind him, and the two of them together cartwheeled—as if in slow motion—into the third team.

Following after it, the woman broke through the third line of the flying V. The force imparted by that hand alone was difficult to fathom.

Red laser light painted her body from every angle. A single thousand-degree pulse that could vaporize a diamond didn't raise so much as a cigarette burn on the woman's fair skin.

The sound of motors and gears hummed to life, and the last team of mechs rushed her like linebackers, aiming for the shoulders and torso. She hopped backwards and pivoted to the side, dancing like a white butterfly fluttering out of danger, while ripping off the arms of mechs. With the arms still inside them.

The guardsmen were veiled in an unnatural haze. The growl of high-torque electric motors filled the hallway. A whirl of bloody fog. The exoskeleton control systems were out of control. The extreme vibrations were shaking their operators to pieces.

Under normal circumstances, the internal medical monitoring devices initiated treatment and self-repair. The ranges of movement in a limb were restricted according to the damage in the affected area. If there was any possibility—even a one in a thousand chance—of the trouble externalizing and a meltdown occurring, the nuclear power cells would shut down.

The one variable impossible to predict—and thus impossible to program into the operating system firmware—was made real by the woman's slender hands.

“It's out of control!” shouted the guardsman missing an arm.

“We're going to self-destruct!” screamed the one with blood erupting from his shoulders.

The still-standing guardsmen had to act immediately. Three of them circled around the back of the shuddering, shaking exoskeletons and focused their lasers on the central nerve systems of the mechs.

At close range, the direct hits sent electromagnetic pulses coursing through the mech superstructures, splitting the metallic skin like aluminum beer cans. The spinning sound of the motors suddenly diminished and the mechs—their limbs until that moment a blur of vibration—slumped forward and stopped.

“What about the woman?” groaned Uehara, having just shot his own partner to death.

The other guardsmen looked in the direction they'd last seen her. “She kept on going,” said the one plastered against the wall. “She went right over our heads. She fucking
flew
. And the side of her face—
shit
—after seeing that—I'll never sleep again—”

“Tell it to your shrink! You hold the line no matter what! After her! Captain!”

“I can't move,” the captain grumbled. He was flat on his back, wrecked and disabled. The two guardsmen who'd backed him up were in the same condition. “My power cells shut down. This suit won't come off without an auxiliary unit. Uehara, you're in charge. Get going!”

“Yes, sir!”

Four guardsmen took off running, their undamaged mechs barely making a whisper.

Of the original ten, two were dead, three were disabled and immobilized, and the one plastered against the wall turned the laser aperture attached to his right wrist around to focus on his own forehead—almost impatiently, it seemed.

The sun perched high in the sky. Almost as if it never set in this world. Indeed, Doctor Mephisto had observed that the shape and length of the shadows cast on the ground never changed.

The sun, the forests, the lakes and streams were probably all man-made. Though even Mephisto couldn't hazard to guess what manner of advanced technology made it possible.

A little over twenty minutes had passed since he'd dodged the heat ray—what might be called an ancient laser. The cool breeze flitting along the path caressed Mephisto's cheeks. It came from the surrounding woods and contained within it a pleasant dampness as well.

He spotted the dark surface of the water beyond the trees no more than another dozen paces on.

“Water follows upon fire,” Mephisto said to himself. In the same instant he heard the sound of splashing water coming nearer.

Directly ahead of him, a luxuriant purple boat approached the shore. In the center of the boat stood a girl in a purple dress. She was as pretty and vivacious as a freshly-painted picture. A sense of calm filled the forest, quieting any desire to ask where she'd come from.

The hull of the boat scraped against the sand and stopped. The girl called out, “Come. My mistress bade me meet you here. The way by land is hot and long.” She bowed.

She wasn't the seductress called Shuuran. The shape and complexion of her face, its brittle beauty, was closer to that of a doll.

“Will your mistress be waiting where this boat is going?”