A girl in a sailor suit yanked on his hand. The boy in a high school uniform almost fell off the bar stool. He managed to catch his balance and resolutely shook his head.
“No way. Any place more exciting than this is right out for underage kids. Here is hip enough already.”
“Hip?” the girl pouted. Across the counter, the bartender flashed a wry smile. “Even this guy is some teaching assistant sent over by the Education Association. The beer and whisky is all non-alcoholic. The hostesses are nuns working part time, so no touchy, no feely. Who in the world would bother coming to this place?”
“You got it all wrong, sister,” said the fat lady bartender, polishing a glass and glancing around the place.
The bar’s owner, Junko Toya. She was amazingly fat. She’d started off wanting to be a hostess, but none of the customers would get within an arm’s length of her. So she was stuck there behind the counter, looking rather like a hippo in a mud hole.
“Green Mountain Blues” drifted though the dim, twenty-by-fifty foot interior. The hostesses in their precisely buttoned-up blouses and the uniformed high school students sat there ramrod-straight, discussing an upcoming exam. Seven or eight altogether.
“Plenty of seminary students come here. And just between you and me, one way or another they’re all as horny as alley cats.”
“Let’s go, Izayoi-kun.” The girl again pulled on the boy’s arm.
“Hey, if you want to go, then go. I’m getting to like this place,” he grumbled, a glass of non-alcoholic beer in one hand. For a high school student, he wasn’t overly tall or short, his shoulders not too broad. And yet he was a solidly built and rather handsome young man.
At first glance, he might seem the kind of honors student never found without an English dictionary in one hand, but draw closer and he had about him an approachable, laid-back air.
Told that, just a short time ago, this young man had engaged in a fight to the death in that place, with the fate of mankind in the balance, and managed to eke out a win, the average onlooker would gape at first—then upon further consideration—nod in agreement.
His name was Kyoya Izayoi, a senior at Minakaze High School in Tokyo. “Sorry, but I work as a bouncer here. I can’t be going anywhere for five more minutes.” Then for some reason, he glanced at the clock on the wall. A shadow passed across his face.
“What?” asked Toya.
“Oh, nothing.” Kyoya shook his head. Rubbing the back of his neck with his hand, he added, “This time of the night gives me the creeps. Three in the morning.”
“Huh,” Junko Toya nodded.
Three o’clock in the morning.
The time of night when humans and demons crossed paths. The time when everybody slept, when the human heart was the weakest and most likely to part with that which made it human.
That time would soon be arriving.
“You’re mean,” the girl complained. “You finally said we could go on a date, so I came all the way here. You didn’t say anything about getting together on the job. I thought Izayoi-kun had more class than that. I’m going to—
The rest of the sentence died in her mouth. Her eyes grew wide. She looked at the side of Kyoya’s face.
This time, like a receding tide, all sounds ceased. The music too. The eyes of the hostesses and the guests focused on Kyoya.
The girl watched dumbfounded as he silently slid off the bar stool. Something sprouted from his fists. A pair of disposable chopsticks. Standing in front of the bar, Kyoya slowly rotated his body like a radar dish, scanning the room. And quickly oriented himself in the direction of the door.
His hands rose above his head, the tips of the chopsticks jutting out. There was something in front of him. He had seen something.
It was three o’clock.
“Three seconds,” said the man in the gown. He stood in front of the wall around Chuo Park.
With a mechanical whine, the turret in the bottom of the helicopter rotated to focus the tranquilizer gun on his silhouette.
“Two seconds.”
A black dot welled up on Kyoya’s face. It grew into a line and slid down his cheek.
Blood.
His whole body was soon covered by it.
“One second.”
In a spacious director’s office in a hospital not far away, a man in black raised his head. His was perhaps the most beautiful countenance in the world.
He had just dipped a quill pen into a bottle of ink. The wet tip of the pen evinced the only sign of an abnormality. With his clear, dark eyes, he examined the contents of the glittering container. Once the color of the deep blue sea, it had turned red, the color of blood.
“Construction begins.”
A thunderous roar rolled across Shinjuku.
At a “youth bar” in Mejiro, Kyoya Izayoi slashed with his hands straight down.
The ink bottle erupted with pale flames that singed the director’s hand.
On a small bed, a long-haired girl sat straight up.
A ferocious blow hit the side of the helicopter, spinning it like a top. The altitude controls were rendered useless. The stick went dead. The rotor struck the ground and bent like a pretzel. The craft careened across Twelfth Street, smashed into the Park Hyatt Hotel and burst into flames.
Whatever had destroyed the helicopter roared like an out-of-season cyclone, blowing through every street and nook and cranny of Shinjuku. It shattered windows in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex, scattered buckets sitting on a corner in Kabuki-cho, and tore to pieces an ominous mist that had just sprung up in the Kawadacho neighborhood in Yotsuya.
Here and there on the streets and on the sides of buildings appeared the bloodstains of the homeless and the graveyard shift cops picked up and bodily thrown by the gale. The sudden shock wave touched every part of Shinjuku before disappearing.
The rest of the city facing Shinjuku across the quarter-mile fissure in the earth didn’t feel the whisper of a breeze. What was born in Shinjuku obeyed all of its laws. Even new and unknown forms of destruction.
“Izayoi-kun!”
The girl and all the hostesses ran over to him. Kyoya slumped to the floor on his knees. His face was covered with blood, its skeletal outlines displayed like those of a completely different person.
After the women bore him to the back room and laid him down on a bed, one chopstick was left behind, broken in two. Nobody there was aware that the tip was pointing in the direction Kyoya had been facing in Demon City Shinjuku—Chuo Park.
The next morning, as the first light of dawn cast the cityscape into shadowed relief, the people of Shinjuku saw that the destruction stealing through the streets and alleys the night before had given birth to something completely new—in Shinjuku’s Chuo Park, in the so-called DMZ, in the most dangerous place on earth, home to the mad and the magical.
Floating above it was a structure whose existence could not be believed. It wasn’t exactly floating, but rested on four spindly legs that rose up from the borders of the park, as if intending to straddle its entire hundred and six thousand square yards.
It looked like an upside-down morning glory, with a wide, double-flight of stairs winding lazily up and around the bell of the “flower,” forming a circular ziggurat.
It rose three hundred feet into the air. Holding up the several hundred thousand tons of weight while maintaining a precarious balance must be due to the geometry of the funnel-shaped tower. The flat, terraced area at the bottom would be the living area.
Even the residents of Demon City, accustomed to unexplained phenomena, were amazed at the appearance of this strange giant edifice, that hadn’t existed the day before.
If they knew how it had truly come to be, they would shiver with fear.
The dead helicopter crew knew. This immense building in the air had appeared out of empty space in but a split second.