“Well, what?”
“How many laws are we breaking here?”
“Quite a few.”
“So it appears.”
The professor started toward the equipment. He stopped and said over his shoulder, “By the way, Chief, I’ve been meaning to discuss my salary.”
“You got a raise rather recently.”
“And it’s already been eaten up by my expenses.”
“We’ll have to make sure you’re compensated.”
“Much appreciated.”
“For your research expenses.”
“Stingy bastard.”
He went over to the equipment. Kyoya couldn’t suppress a smile. He was an interesting old buzzard.
The “equipment” consisted of an egg-shaped pod. “This is the pod,” said the professor. Yeah, and? Kyoya thought. As if reading minds already, the old buzzard launched into a lecture.
“It is not, however, an ordinary pod. It is filled with a saline solution. And it is not a creation of this department, but contains a compound I synthesized to backtrack through time. The user is immersed in the pod naked, and in a flash returns to the past. It is not a time machine, to be sure, so it cannot take a person thousands of millennia into the past or forward into the future. Only to a past that person has experienced before. Namely, regress them back to the moment of birth, without any significant side effects.”
“Just a sec,” Kyoya interrupted.
The professor frowned. He leaned closer to Kyoya and said, “What’s the matter? Don’t want to get naked?”
“All the same to me. But what exactly are these insignificant side effects?”
“Nothing made by man is perfect. I’m not a god.”
“Don’t say it like you’re so proud of it. Anyway, she’s the one going in there.”
“Don’t get yourself into such a lather. Fact is, it works just as well with a bathing suit.”
“Quit ducking the question.”
Yamashina stepped in to end the debate. “Time is of the essence. He is the best in his field, which will become apparent soon enough. Forces are conspiring against Sayaka-san even as we speak. Our first priority is discerning their nature. The sooner the better.”
“I agree,” said Sayaka.
Kyoya didn’t voice disapproval and the mad scientist bit his tongue as well.
“Well, then. Gentlemen, let us move to a separate room and leave the young lady to change here.”
They started walking toward the indicated door. Halfway there, Kyoya glanced back over his shoulder. The mad scientist was crouched down in front of the equipment, twiddling with the myriad knobs and switches.
Kyoya grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m checking the equipment.”
“Yeah, right. You’re just randomly pushing buttons. C’mon.”
At the lockers, getting into her bathing suit, Sayaka giggled.
The light of dusk filled the large hall. The world beyond the windows was already dark, filled by twinkling stars and the lights of Demon City.
“Fool.”
Accompanying the quiet curse, a hand reached out from the golden gown and touched a steel epaulet. A dark blue mass silently flew and landed with a thunderous crash on the floor a dozen feet away.
“Idiot.”
The green figure sailed backwards.
“Dunce.”
A red streak flashed through the air.
None of them bounded to his feet. Several hours before, these gladiators had joined the blue knight in a death match with Kyoya Izayoi. None who witnessed it then could have believed their helplessness now, hit so hard they couldn’t get up.
“Why did I invite such useless gutter trash into my abode? All to look into that girl’s heart and finish off the boy. To fail at one was to fail at both, all due to your blunders. And you let him go, on top of that. What did I reincarnate you for? I should want to kill myself.”
“However—” A painful moan came from Vian, the red knight on the floor. “That young man—possesses talents and powers—that exceed even ours. We would have once asked him to join our band. In such a light—by force of numbers—as the three knights of Marduk, we cannot.”
“Quiet!”
The man in the gown—the masked lord—stomped on the floor. The heavy reverberations raced through the ground, throwing the three six feet into the air and pounding them down onto the floor.
“Don’t flatter yourselves! That boy, he is truly a frightening man. I had no desire to let him walk out of here, but could not stop him. Enough. You have your orders. He has returned to Demon City. I will send an assassin appropriate to that place after him.”
“That is—” the red knight groaned.
The other two remained silent.
“Or I will employ them. My queen Semiramis, that merciless woman forbade even those brutal barbarians to enter the human world. I will at last set them free.”
“You cannot.”
“I cannot?” The mask’s eyes glowed with a cruel light—a light from deep within that set the slits afire—and made these fearsome knights tremble. “Having come this far, I am no longer capable of comprehending such words. Demon City Shinjuku—a death suited to such a name will consecrate its power unto myself. This will be my answer until you have mitigated my anger.”
The sleeves of the gown shook. For a moment, nothing happened. And then blackness shrouded the heads of the three knights. Something reached down and grabbed hold of the unmoving men. A hand. Enormous fingers made out of reddish-brown stone grew out of the ceiling and plucked them up like matchsticks.
Several minutes later, the golden mask walked down the hallway through the damp gloom. The corridor was made of stone. The air was not particularly humid. And yet the heavy air had a viscous quality, a rotting odor. It was almost as if had one pressed against the stone wall, it would have given way like a swollen flesh, squeezing out putrid pus.
The result of the overwhelming sense of evil filling the place.
He passed through ten stone doors to reach his destination. The soaring rock walls and ceiling defied the ordinary laws of physics, the length and breadth and angles forming at will, descending staircases turning into ceilings, and from there hallways continuing through the air and plunging underground.
Now the masked lord walked along a vertically soaring floor. Light streaming in horizontally from the ceiling poured down on him from above, as if following the pull of gravity.
Here was a labyrinth to eclipse all others. What made it necessary waited for him at its end.
Long ago on the island of Crete, in the ancient Mediterranean kingdom ruled by King Minos, Queen Pasiphae kept her abominable son, the Minotaur, in the catacombs beneath the palace. She refused to cast him out and secured human sacrifices for its sustenance.
The great architect Daedalus was employed to turn the subterranean fortress into a labyrinth that would secure the Minotaur. But surely Daedalus could not have imagined such a fetid maze as this, from which not even the imprisoned air could escape.
At last, a rusty iron door came into view. It was the size and heft of any door that could accommodate a large person. The man in the mask stopped in front of the door. He was not lost in contemplation. He was hesitating.
The hand holding the black key took several seconds reaching toward the lock.
The key wasn’t necessary. Before his hand touched the handle, the door opened from the inside. The hinges creaked ominously. The interior of the room was pitch dark.
“You. Have. Come?” The muttered words shook the dank air.
“I have come,” the mask answered. “In the name of your Queen, I am releasing you. The purpose for which you were born, make a hell of the earth above.”
Two points of blue-green light glowed like fox-fire within the gloom. These were the undeniably gleeful eyes of a person born in the depths of hell.