Two o’clock in the afternoon.
Kyoya walked up to Shinjuku’s Koma Theater. Thanks to a strange miracle or the magical whimsies of the Devil Quake, the entire structure was riven with cracks and fissures but stood as it always had, still in possession of its original grandeur.
In an effort to memorialize the scars of the Devil Quake, along with the other standing buildings in the safety zone, the theater was named a historical site and placed under the protection of the Shinjuku Ward government. Two guards were usually posted there.
School wasn’t quite out, but concerned about Sayaka, Kyoya couldn’t stand around doing nothing. He straightaway asked Mephisto for help and lent him the use of his “lost shadow.” He hadn’t heard anything since.
He raced over to Mephisto Hospital, but they couldn’t tell him anything either. His only recourse was to grab Ishmael and get him to cough up the details.
The guards weren’t there.
He had to think they’d met a bad end, else that monster wouldn’t have picked this place to start with. “He’s a dead man,” Kyoya growled to himself. He pushed through the center door and strode into the lobby.
The theater had a capacity of twenty-three hundred. Now it was filled with the stench of decay that no bureaucrat could expunge. Only the smell filled the space. Nobody was there.
“Hey, anybody home?” Kyoya shut the door and called out.
If he was off somewhere else goofing around waiting for school to let out, all the more reason to knock his block off. But then a figure emerged from behind the curtains, erasing that particular concern.
“Thanks for coming,” Ishmael said with an innocent smile.
“What did you do with Sayaka Rama-san?”
“Ah, those two are at my master’s abode.” He raised his head at a point in space.
“You mean she’s with Mephisto?”
“That’s right. The doctor killed my accomplice and took her there.”
“What?” Kyoya exclaimed.
He’d always had his suspicions about the doctor, but visiting the enemy in his lair? He should’ve known better than to trust that pretty boy.
“Do you know who she really is? Yes, the queen. The same who imprisoned me and mine inside that maze. The mask intends to turn her into his perfect queen. In other words, seeing her, the secrets of reincarnation come to light. The doctor appears taken by the possibilities as well. Draw out Semiramis within while leaving the girl unscathed—he would count such a result a success.”
“The bastard.” Kyoya strengthened his grip on Asura. “Resurrecting his old wife? No objections to that, I suppose. But is that all? Why build that freaking big mansion? Why come all the way to Japan and scare the crap out of everybody?”
“It is a mystery to me too. All I want to do is eat you.” Ishmael was already drooling.
“Weirdo. If you turn me into a rock, how are you gonna eat me?”
“Nothing tastier than a rock.”
Kyoya didn’t answer. He walked down the aisle and jumped onto the stage. He raised Asura from the en garde position to the height of Ishmael’s eyes.
“You’re taking this awful easy,” he challenged him. “Just to get this straight. You’re facing me. Look the other way and I’ll wait until you turn back.”
“Understood. No problem.”
Ishmael grinned. He slowly turned his head in the other direction and backed up to Kyoya. He reached up and parted the hair on the back of his head, revealing a set of closed eyes, a nose and a mouth. The kid had another face on the back of his head.
“This is the real one. I’ve already turned around. When I open my eyes, it’s curtains. Or are you faster on the draw? Let’s see.”
He opened his eyes. Wide with surprise. The tip of the sword almost filled his vision, obscuring Kyoya at the other end of it.
“Son of a bitch!” Ishmael cried out.
He jumped backwards as the black comet streaked at his brow, dodging it at the last second. Blood burst from his face, from his broken nose.
“Shit!” Kyoya rejoined. He’d missed the target. There were no second chances in this game.
Ishmael’s eyes flared with rage. Kyoya assumed a martial arts stance, ready to finish the job with his hands. In a flash, he turned to stone.
“You’re not without skill.” Ishmael wiped the blood from his nose and stared back at him. “Besides Semiramis, only the young traveler named Semulia ever drew blood from me. Come to think of it, that swordsmanship does look familiar. Whatever. All the sooner to chow down.”
The kid opened his mouth. His lower jaw dropped, opening his mouth all the way to his ears. Baring his yellow teeth, he started at the top and began chewing through the stone statue of Kyoya.
With an awful crunching that should have never otherwise been associated with “food,” he tore off Kyoya’s head down to its neck. Gnawing away like a rock drill, he suddenly spit out the contents onto the floor. Kyoya’s head had turned to round stones and dust.
“No!” Ishmael screamed, showing his teeth. “No! You don’t taste like this!”
“I don’t suppose I do. And I don’t miss either.”
The voice came from behind Ishmael. The real thing now faced him. But Ishmael saw nothing.
“Bring it on.”
This time, the voice came from above him. He glanced up, but too late. Asura swung down from the ceiling and smashed against the side of his head. Simultaneously a great burst of psychic energy poured down on the monster’s head.
This rare creature sank silently to his knees. Kyoya had been hiding in the chandelier.
“Hey, no hard feelings, eh. Not my true strength. Seems that Doctor Mephisto knows your name. He clued me into your special skills, and lent me a copy for my own use.” He spoke almost in a sad aside. “In any case, I’ve got to get hold of that fickle bastard.”
Kyoya left at once for Azabu and told Chief Yamashina that he needed to get in touch with Mephisto inside the Babylon Palace. The answer Yamashina got back from Babylon Palace was that Mephisto wasn’t there. “But you’re welcome to come see for yourself.”
“Playing dumb, I see. Him and his pissant mask.”
“What do you plan on doing?”
“That’s what I plan on asking him. What the hell kind of game is he up to, waking up here after his two-thousand-year-old dream?”
“That is a question we would like an answer to as well.”
“Where did he build that palace in the first place?”
“That we have figured out. Last night, a gigantic construction facility was discovered in an ancient Babylonian archaeological site. Drawings inscribed there accurately describe the floating city. In other words, it was constructed twenty-five hundred years ago and sealed away in another dimension. They figured out how to warp space too. Obviously the level of prehistoric technology often exceeded ours. The physicists are showing as much interest in those ruins as the archaeologists.”
“Good work.”
“I agree.”
“Has the president been contacted?”
“No, but I’m sure he’s being kept in the loop.”
“You guys are really pulling out all the stops.”
“What are you doing to do?”
“About our guest?”
“We’d dearly like to arrest him, but he’s duly registered as a citizen. We can’t haul him in without a good reason.”
“You’ll have to do what you have to do. Me, I’m on my way to the Himalayas.”
“Where?” exclaimed the chief, his eyes bugging out.
“My powers right now aren’t nearly enough to take out the likes of him. I gotta take it up another notch. And there’s no better place to practice than the holy mountain where, back in the day, my father learned nenpo. A bit Spartan, I know, but I’ll give it a month and see how it goes. Mephisto should be able to keep an eye on Sayaka for that long. Well, see you around.”