Perhaps in order to put the officer’s mind at ease, Onizuka’s hospital room was filled with a wan, dusky light. This was the room he’d silently occupied for fifteen years. He opened his mouth for the first time.
Sasaki only had one question to ask him: “What did you see?”
He had no way of knowing that in doing so he was taking hold of the end of the strange thread that tied them together, himself, Setsura Aki and that letter he’d sent. He still believed Onizuka was mad. If by chance some spark of sanity had returned, the brain cells holding those memories from a decade and a half ago must have turned to dust in the meantime.
Contrary to expectations, the old cop, all white hair and mottled skin, looked at Sasaki, his eyes coming unmistakably alive. Sasaki had to wonder if he’d been feigning insanity all along.
Onizuka told the story in a voice that sounded like rust falling off an old lock. He’d been transferred to Shinjuku—where the criminal class ran amok—two months after the Devil Quake. Though police headquarters had covered up the true number of cop killings going on, news about Demon City filled the airwaves. An officer who found out he’d been transferred there either resigned on the spot or made out his last will and testament.
As fate would have it, Onizuka was assigned to a police station in Kabuki-cho.
The ragged walls and skeleton of the Koma Theater still remained, while the rest of the buildings and houses had been leveled. Not so different from anywhere else in Shinjuku, except that perhaps because of some lingering karma from its prior existence, the remains of this entertainment district that once fed on human wants and desires became a magnet for all the lower forms of life.
That may have also decided Onizuka’s fate after only two days at his new post.
He set off on a patrol late that night. At one end of “Water Fountain Square” in Kabuki-cho, in the midst of the mountain of bricks and rubble where the Shinjuku Milano and Shinjuku Tokyu Theater once stood, he witnessed a fight.
It was a battle of two against one. The one was a man of medium build. The two consisted of a tall, lanky man and a quite shorter one. The battle resembled a dream beneath the beautiful moonlight, a scene that could surely be found nowhere else.
The Demon City police had been ordered to ignore any gang wars if civilians weren’t caught up in the fray and the combatants outnumbered them by more than three to one.
There were three of them and one of him. And even if the ratio was different, Onizuka would still have stood there rooted to the ground. The contest unfolding before his eyes did not resemble any kind of human combat.
The short man threw a right hook. His opponent ducked behind a slab of concrete. The concrete shattered into a thousand pieces. And didn’t make a sound. As if awed into silence by the scope of this struggle, even shattered concrete dared not break the mood.
The man with the medium build now waved his right hand, as if scattering the moonlight. The short man jumped into the air. A crisscross of slashes tore into the stone wall behind him.
Before the short man touched down, his attacker raced across the ground, like the wind. The silhouette of the lanky man appeared in front of him, sitting cross-legged. The running man’s right hand—that had somehow sliced through stone—flashed again. An invisible surge of energy assaulted the sitting man.
Onizuka could feel it ricocheting off of him.
The short man twisted his body in midair. The man with the medium build reached his left hand behind him. At a distance of ten feet, the invisible power blossomed again.
Windmilling his arms and legs, the fierce surge of energy shot the short man skyward and sent Onizuka crashing into the concrete wall behind him. His skull still ringing, he somehow managed to open his eyes.
The fight was now a duel—at least until the short man came back down to earth.
The sitting man was wearing what looked like a black kimono jacket. Both eyes were closed. The only thing distinct about him were the dark shadows traced by his sunken cheeks. His age was indecipherable.
His adversary was dressed in black as well. Aside from his age, nothing else about him could be discerned. The one thing they did have in common was a demonic aura welling up from their beings, as if about to burst out of their skins.
Despite being bathed in it, Onizuka kept himself conscious.
The hands of the standing man suddenly sprouted dozens of extra appendages. It was an illusion, but that’s what Onizuka saw. He moved his hands up and down at a blazing speed, pausing only a fraction of a second in each stroke.
Whatever he was up to, at some point he tightly closed his eyes. And then opened them wide. At the same time, his infinite number of hands faded into a blur and concentrated into a line extending horizontally from his shoulder.
“Got you, Kongojin Roran!”
Together with the cry, his sweeping left hand grabbed hold of something. The man sitting on the ground convulsed. With a shower of blood, his head dropped to the ground. The fountain of dark blood formed a dome above his head, as if sticking to the air, and then faded away.
The nightmare battle having come to its horrifying conclusion, the stabbing pain washed away by the terror of the moment, Onizuka got to his feet. Now his ears made out a low and bitter sound, a voice crawling across the ground toward him.
A small silhouette stood behind the man with the medium build. Not the short man from before—he’d disappeared into the surrounding darkness—for this was a child.
He was barely three feet tall, ready to enter kindergarten. But the voice—what Onizuka had taken for tears, when he listened more closely—was the sound of an adult.
“I saw you, Renjo Aki, I saw what you did and how. Don’t count on it working a second time. Father, it was worth dying to show me that, wasn’t it?”
That was when Onizuka realized—the child wasn’t weeping. He was laughing. His words were suffused with joy. This young person was literally shaking with delight as he’d watched his father’s head drop from his shoulders.
“Decades hence, we will meet again. And when we do, remember tonight’s encounter, for therein shall be revealed the fate that awaits you or your son.”
The young one’s laughter, sounding at times like it was issuing from an old, rusty pipe, abruptly stopped.
“Gento Roran, I presume. So nice that you could drop by. I do not enjoy killing children, but the enmity between the Roran and Aki clans extends to even the bugs in our beds. That is the fate that awaits you.”
The man called Renjo Aki raised his hands and stopped. He stared at the gaunt, headless man he had so strangely killed. The torso was, from an utterly perverse perspective, doing what it should naturally do. It leaned forward, reached out, and picked up the head.
The man who had killed him stood there like a statue as the bloody corpse clambered to its feet. The air was thick with magical miasmas and the stench of blood.
In the crystal clear moonlight, the bad dream had taken a turn for the worse.
The arms cradling the head raised it up and placed it on the stump of the neck. Out of alignment at first, the head facing to the side. A quick adjustment brought it facing forward.
The head opened its eyes. A grave and gravelly voice said, “I, Gensei Roran, have spoken. When we meet again, the era will no longer be ours. I shall rest for a while. What shall become of this city? Renjo Aki, this is the time for you to start planning as well.”
The words had barely left his mouth when his body crumpled. In a flash, the bloody black smoke spread through the air and shrouded the dark silhouettes of the three other figures.
As Onizuka tried to keep his eyes open, exercising all of his remaining will, he heard what he took to be Renjo Aki’s voice.
“Sorry for wasting your time, Mr. Policeman.”
Then the headless Roran’s response. “He cannot be left to his own devices. It is not good for the hoi polloi to see their overlords fighting among themselves.”
“I—”
Onizuka feared the voice of that child more than all the rest. Renjo came to his rescue. “There is no need to take his life. I shall take his memories instead.”
“Can you, from this man?”
“Only the exchange of your life after this for being alive. Which would you prefer?”
Hardly a simple struggle between life and death, these mortal enemies not only wagered their souls, but freely dealt with the devil on matters that lay far beyond this realm.
On the verge of losing consciousness, Onizuka croaked out the answer and then slumped to the ground.