“I don’t believe we’ve met before, Aki?” The voice this time was laced with menace. “Rumors have reached our ears of your strange talents. The boss warned us to be careful around you. But we can hardly walk away from the golden opportunity to see you in action, now can we?”
“Let go of my secretary,” Setsura said in a tired voice.
Mina bowed her back and bared her throat with a strangled gasp as the man jerked on the leash. “Yeah, to the pretty boys go the spoils, eh? Never fucked a girl as fine as her before. Man, there’s nothing hotter than an amateur sticking her ass out for you like a pro.”
“Forgive my brother’s coarseness,” apologized the man behind him, in a manner that suggested he was totally sincere. “Let her go.”
“If you say so. But wait just a sec.”
The big man grabbed Mina around the waist and pulled her toward him. Lacking any other support, she bent forward. A groan escaped her pale lips. He thrust his hips against her buttocks.
“Rumors are all I’ve heard of the Munakata Brothers as well, but a man who’d use a woman as a shield tells me all I need to know.”
“So you say.” He licked his thick lips. “But I’ll be finished soon enough.”
Of the criminal organizations that had partitioned Shinjuku into thirds, these were the murderous siblings who worked exclusively for Kurusu Real Estate.
Anywhere between a hundred and a thousand professional assassins had set up shop in Shinjuku, their services for sale in the black market Register. The singular exceptions were these two.
In the beginning, all anybody knew was that they were related. Not even their sexes were certain, or their ages or full names. Even after going on retainer and being generally recognized as the best in the business, not even their boss had seen their faces with his own two eyes.
The Register contained a “placeholder” entry. According to it, the year before, the brothers had carried out between twenty-seven and thirty hits, grossing some 350 million yen. At ten million per job, these were extraordinary rates for a pair of freelancers who weren’t actually made men.
“Come to think about it, today is the deadline for updating the Register,” Setsura said, casting a cool look at his accosted secretary. “I wonder who will top the listings, or whether the Munakata Brothers will be listed at all—now that you have met me.”
The big man had started to smile. The smile froze on his face. The young man in front of him had turned into something else.
Ice raced through the veins, nerves conveyed the speed of the darkness, its will ruling over the senses. Hell itself must burnish the face of beauty. Setsura’s countenance had transfigured, like the incarnation of the Hindu devil Rakshasa.
The big man groaned, his fingers clutching at Mina’s ass as he erupted inside her. A moment later, a crimson line ringed his neck, Setsura’s skills being such that not a drop of blood spilled. His body still shuddering in the throes of orgasm, the head slid off his shoulders and thumped to the ground.
Setsura hadn’t moved. Feeling no response from the devil wire flung out behind him could only mean that move had been anticipated.
The curtains of dust wrapped around him. Perhaps that voice had been the work of a ventriloquist. It hadn’t been that of the big man. The resemblances were there, but also the clear differences.
The other brother was hiding somewhere on the grounds of the shrine. He’d hedged his bets and made Setsura show his hand, while Setsura had to guess at his foe’s next move.
Though when it came to delivering the coup de grâce, their methods were utterly unimaginative: a knife to the heart or a bullet to the brain, or some variation on those two themes.
The one entirely predictable constant in their modus operandi was that the victim was always hit from behind. Peculiar from the perspective of the criminal element from outside Shinjuku, perhaps, but a Demon City hit man always had a style of his own.
In particular, the freelancers not attached to an organization were a creative bunch, though one critical variable in this equation was that their targets were citizens of Shinjuku as well.
Weapons and defensive methods and materials developed in the outside world inevitably arrived in Shinjuku a month before they reached the markets anywhere else.
Some reports claimed that military procurement officers and weapons manufacturers made sure the shipments got through in order to test equipment in a live-fire environment. A good thirty percent of the approximate 150,000 “incidents of criminal activity” recorded each year could be attributed to street fighting, making it the ideal arena for simulating urban warfare.
The major organized crime associations aside, for small and mid-sized gangs and yakuza outfits, how fast they could acquire these weapons spelled the difference between life and death.
In other words, it was hardly rare for a bunch of street toughs to be armed with RPGs and missile launchers. And all this proceeded hand in hand with defensive measures.
Early bulletproof vests made to stop Magnum and Teflon-coated bullets were replaced by glass and composite carbon fiber ballistic vests, which were in turn supplanted by liquid body armor developed by the U.S. Army. Nowadays, external armor was being enhanced by pain suppressants and drugs that increased muscle strength and density, creating a kind of naturally-secreted protective shield.
A man willing to risk side effects such as a shortened life span, brain damage, and paralysis could escape a car bomb—from inside the car and engulfed in flames—and live to tell the tale.
In Shinjuku, what it took to kill a man required measures commensurate with the environment of Demon City. And so it followed that every professional killer had no choice but to develop his own unique style.
More than weaponry, an eye for an opponent’s weak spot. More than the way he killed, the way he got close. Some studied magic and killed with curses, while others employed remote viewing and hypnotism. Some sported a thousand faces while others could change sexes at will.