“I do not know,” said the doctor. “But there is nothing more that we can do. To be honest, the president has persevered until today completely thanks to the Master. Compared to his psychic powers, our ESP treatments have only taken the first step. We have left everything up to him. However—”
“However—what?”
“Though my ESP powers are not strong, I have sensed the Master’s nen waning little by little but inexorably—”
His voice trailed off as well. They all stood in front of the monitors, the silence of death etched on their faces. The Master had also grasped the nature of the president’s accelerating decline, but his psychic powers and his ability to check it were reaching their limits. The missile attack of the day before had weakened him as well.
Time is running out, Kyoya. Two and a half hours. The enemy is conducting the summoning ritual even now.
With a heart like still waters, he called out to the youth so many thousands of miles away. The Master felt the world—if not the universe itself—being wrapped in a strange kind of foreboding.
Closing his eyes and concentrating his nen through silent prayer, the Master could sense the boundary between the mortal world and the Demon World. That boundary was steadily retreating toward the mortal world as the territory of blackness on the other side spread.
Deeper within the darkness, from the space into which the coldness and blood and loathing erupted like an icy geyser, myriads of perverse beings cried in ecstatic joy as they slowly invaded this earthly realm, engaging in a battle between good and evil that only the Master and those with similar powers of thought were aware of.
The mortal world was losing.
The first underground level of Shinjuku station. The “My City” mall above was thoroughly wrecked from the first to the eighth floors. Cracks ran across the ceiling in all directions, but this wide space mostly held its original shape and form, along with the rows of neatly arranged turnstiles, the shuttered shops, the empty ticket booths.
This was a terminal for the municipal subway system and the JR, Keio, and Odakyu commuter lines. Shinjuku station had once been visited by several hundred thousand riders a day. Except for government inspectors examining the damage, no one had come here since the Devil Quake. And then even Shinjuku’s residents forgot about it, leaving the once grand building, they imagined, to slumber peacefully in the quiet dark.
The reality was anything but.
In the decades since the Devil Quake, a fierce sense of will had brewed inside the station. In the dead center of the concourse leading from turnstiles at the east entrance to the west exits was an altar constructed of unknown materials. From the black shadow crouched before it came low but powerful incantations.
Wearing a black mantle, the Sorcerer, Rebi Ra.
The strange surgery was done. But then why would his metaphysical soul be wearing a very real cloak? In any case, there he was, and on the floor next to him was the Devil Sword. Shinjuku station was the true lair of the Sorcerer, the headquarters of the war to transform the rest of the world into a Demon Realm.
Behind the altar, in the concourse leading to the west exits, was an array of flickering lights. Thirteen black candles were arranged in a circle nine feet in diameter. The flames fluttered, but not according to any natural breezes flowing through the station.
In the very center of the circle of candles, a wind erupted out of the hard cold floor and raced through the gloom. Every time the flames trembled, the wind threw off another wave of noxious, sulfurous stench.
The mutant forces transforming the mortal world spread forth from the ground in the center of the circle.
“It’s coming,” said the Sorcerer. “Soon. This night for certain.”
Undergirded by an overwhelming power and ecstatic joy, this was nevertheless a somehow human voice. But different from before.
“No one shall interfere. Kaki—prepare to confront any and all enemies.”
A ball of fire rose up behind the Sorcerer and changed into Kaki wearing a monk’s habit.
“Rest assured, any trespassers will be detected at once. I have cast a web of darkness across every entrance and passageway. Continue your prayers without reserve.”
He spoke more respectfully than before—such was the intensity of the magical might and energy that the Sorcerer now contained within him.
“Where is Suiki?”
“He took the girl’s shadow and went to search for her and the boy. Patience is not that demon’s forte. And now that temper is sweetened with revenge. Imagining the retribution when he finds them makes even my fires turn cold. Assuming that they live—”
“You said that they entered the DMZ?”
“Yes. After escaping Shin-Okubo, using shadowmancy they were trailed there. No matter how strong his nen, the odds of him exiting such a danger zone without his protecting sword are thin.”
“That is certainly true. And yet I cannot help wondering why he deliberately went in there—” As if lost in thought, the Sorcerer left off the rest of the question. Not even he had contemplated that the pan-dimensional void might find an outlet there.
“My state of apprehension has not been quelled. Be on your guard. Now go.”
“Yes.”
Kaki turned back into a ball of fire and disappeared.
“Apprehensions, eh? What do I have to be afraid of? Even combining their forces together, that father and son cannot lay a finger on me now.” His confident laughter seemed to increase the force of the wind, and riding on the magical miasmas shot around the station’s interior. “Two more hours. And then it will all be over. This world will become a second Demon Realm.”
The Sorcerer raised his head. What manner of unearthly face was this—inside the hood swirled his soul like a lingering mist and deeper in was the “face”: blue-white electric eyes, bared artificial teeth, an electronic brain encased in a lustrous black skull, like that of a corpse from which the muscles and skin had been scraped away. The face of a cyborg.
It was two twenty-five in the morning when Kyoya reached the underground tunnel. It had once been Shinjuku’s subterranean promenade. Leaving Mephisto’s “hospital” — located in the former but still-standing Shinjuku ward government building—his implanted memories led him to the one remaining undamaged entrance-way on Yasukuni Avenue. Again, his “memories” told him that every other access route had been destroyed during the Devil Quake. At the back of the sub-promenade was a passage to the station.
This subterranean city had once boasted hundreds of shops, equipped with the latest smoke and fire detectors and backup power generators, but it too was helpless before the power of the Devil Quake.
Kyoya gazed around at the tragic reminders of that time. The concrete had torn away from the roof, exposing the steel girders. The floor was cracked and broken. Nor had they been spared the ravages of fire. The shops here and there were charred and blackened inside and out.
There weren’t any lights. Kyoya’s keen night vision guided him through the inky shadows as surely as if it were as bright as day. After a dozen or more twists and turns, his “memories” whispered that this was the place. Turning left and going straight brought him to a flight of stairs and escalator leading to the station.
But as Kyoya sprinted up in a gust of wind, a transparent glass-like wall towered before him, at least ten feet high.
“Hoh. Must be the demonic powers of Suiki at work. The escalator and stairs turned to sheets of water and sucked into the concrete. What a tricky bastard you are.”
The original intent must have been to keep at bay the vagrants and the homeless who made the underground their home. Scale the top and the way to the station should be clear. No one else up till now would have bothered. To begin with, there was nothing left in the station worth the trouble. Anybody else who made it this far would have given up rather than waste the effort.
Kyoya was already feeling the fatigue in his shoulders and the pain in his side. He checked his watch. Two thirty-three. He didn’t have any more time to waste here.
“Well, over the top we go,” he said to himself, and crouched and jumped. He grunted as a hot stab of pain shot through his side. But he maintained his form as he landed on top of the wall.
Corridors far wider than the subterranean passageway reached to his right and left. Right, his “memories” told him.
Kyoya took off running. He knew the wound was bleeding inside. “Son of a bitch! Stop it!”