Manipulating his nenpo, Kyoya passed through the wall of snow he’d raised and sought out his remaining opponent. Studded with his own arrows, Mathias lay there like a rock.
“I’m here,” reverberated a low voice.
Kyoya looked up at the black splotch carved out of the blue sky twenty yards above his head. “You still want to fight? Maybe I should give that horse a little Novocain treatment too.”
“Now the true contest begins,” Valen said. “We three knights of Marduk cannot condone defeat. Nor can we allow any word of our defeat to be whispered abroad. Only to take our secrets to the grave. Except I won’t be dying today. This lance is packed with the same nuclear materials used in the construction of the dams and irrigation canals along the Tigris and Euphrates. In a second, I could reduce a radius of half a mile to ash without a speck of radioactive fallout. So no need to worry about that.”
“Well, that just makes me one happy camper.” Kyoya pointed Asura at the sky. But no matter how much he disciplined his Izayoi nenpo, there were limits to its reach. “Problem is, you got your big brother down here. What about that? Your bomb will take out him too.”
“Fools and losers should shoulder the weight of failure and die happily in recompense.”
“Oh, good grief,” Kyoya exclaimed, more annoyed than panicked.
The guy was going to drop a bomb on his head and there was nothing he could do about it. There was no time to run and no place to hide. He had one ace left up his sleeve. He wasn’t sure it was ready for prime time. But like they said, necessity was the mother of invention. Still—
“Hey, do you think you could give me a sec—?”
In that moment, a white object separated itself from the horse and rider. The long lance. A dozen feet or so above his head, it began to fission. Just as Valen promised, the fireball engulfed the ground for a half-mile around them.
The fireball dissipated. The light faded. The scorched rocks and boulders again came into view. Valen wheeled the horse around and set it down in a corner of the promontory.
He had salvaged the reputation of the three knights of Marduk—that was his only consolation. It was too bad about Mathias, but he would relay to Vian how he had fought. Though Valen had destroyed Semulia, Mathias had done his part too. Sleep well.
Having confirmed that nothing was moving on the blackened slope, he turned around. And froze.
Kyoya and the boy Tarta were standing on a rock less than ten feet away. “You said no radioactivity, right?”
Kyoya grinned, and that told Valen he wasn’t imagining things.
“He was your big brother and all, and you went ahead and did it. That’s the knights of Marduk for you, I guess. No sparing the rod and all.”
Kyoya’s smile vanished as he settled into fighting mode. Valen reached with his left hand for the spear in the saddle. No sooner had he released it from its holder and brought it around to bear than Kyoya was right in his face.
Asura swept down, halting mere fractions of an inch before striking the horse’s neck. In that moment, Valen soared into the air.
While flying upwards, he threw the lance downwards. Kyoya repelled it at the last second, but lost his balance and wavered back and forth on the boulder.
This was the opportunity Valen was waiting for. Switching positions in midair, he drew a short sword from his waist and plunged down on Kyoya.
Shit! was Kyoya’s only thought. He didn’t have time to straighten and meet the attack head on. His next reaction was anything but a thought-through strategy. It was the instinctual response of a tested warrior.
He cast aside all his collected strength and conscious thought and fell to the boulder. A tenth of a second later, the blade at the end of Valen’s lance swept through the air in exactly the place Kyoya’s neck had been.
The shockwave of Kyoya’s shout reached Valen’s ears the same time Asura shot up to connect with his midsection. Valen flew into the air and tumbled into the bottom of a ravine a good distance from the promontory like a human-shaped stone.
“Damn and blast!”
Kyoya sprang to his feet. He hadn’t meant to throw him that far. A purely instinctual muscular response. He ran to the edge of the cliff, but Valen had already disappeared from view.
“So that’s that for those two, and after surviving two thousand years. Idiots.”
He said it sadly, a shadow eclipsing his features. But soon returned to the matter at hand.
“If they’re on that level, then I’ve trained myself to the point where I think I can make an even fight on my hand. But their big brother’s waiting there, and that monster in the mask. Badasses both. Time to take ten and then finish the job.”
A strange atmosphere shrouded Shinjuku. On the surface, it manifested itself in wanton violence and criminality. A martial arts master hopped up on steroids was arrested after attacking total strangers on the street and delivering bone-crushing karate chops to their necks. Street gangs packing laser heat burst into banks and murdered everybody inside.
Giant eagles carried away small children and gathered in the skyscraper district in West Shinjuku. The mayor requested airborne countermeasures from the Ministry of Defense.
Day by day, the collective sense of unease grew stronger—that deeper down, behind it all, lurked an altogether unique, powerful and positively hair-raising phenomenon.
Something was different, something was somehow different. Something humans should not know. Something inherent in Shinjuku itself was welling up and drifting down the streets and thoroughfares, getting under the skin of pedestrians, unsettling their states of mind, causing them to do things they never would have otherwise.
Something that even the most zealous residents of Shinjuku couldn’t be expected to understand. They became no less captives of the weirdness than the regular tourists.
The substance of the abnormalities began to express itself in the most mundane everyday activities.
A bruised and battered man was carted off to the hospital after repeatedly trying to leave the apartment where he’d lived for years—without opening the door.
A woman walking down the stairs from her condo suddenly forgot how to walk down a flight of stairs and squatted there, unmoving, until the EMTs carted her away.
A boy grew so afraid of his own bed that he broke through the ceiling and crammed the fearful thing into the attic and slept soundly on the tatami.
A man who, key in hand, wrenched his finger sticking it into the lock and trying to open the door.
A girl hit by a car when she thought she was walking forward and instead went backwards.