The Coliseum Death Matches had reached the climax. After the midget and the old geezer faced off against each other—the former shooting a stream of spit that could melt rock, the latter with hundreds of doppelgangers at his control—the announcer said breathlessly, “Sixteen, Siegfried and Seventeen, Kunishige Yamada!”
Beneath the useless gaze of three thousand unseeing spectators, the giant of a man confronted an ordinary salaryman in a suit.
“Well, shall we get down to business?” Yamada said, adjusting his necktie. “What are you going to do with that stuffed doll? Hardly a vehicle for demonstrating your true talents.”
“Much appreciated,” Siegfried said in Gento’s voice. “This is not a martial art in which I have much confidence.”
“All the more impressive. But what a shame to die in a place like this.”
“I don’t count on it. You have something I want.”
“What would that be?”
“You. More precisely, you from the neck up.”
“You want to stare at my face all day? Or perch it atop Siegfried’s shoulders. To what end?”
“To the end of being reborn to a new life. In order to accomplish my own goals.”
The expression on Yamada’s face shifted. “Before any of that happens, you should look to your own welfare.”
With those words, his right leg swept up and out. The power of the impact sent Siegfried and his five hundred pounds flying into the air. He landed with a heavy thud twenty feet away and tumbled to the ground.
Gento hadn’t expected the surprise attack, or the sheer strength behind it. He stood back up, shaking his head, and struck a fighting pose. But a roundhouse kick came from above and behind to the back of his head, laying him flat again, kissing the earth.
Clambering up in a daze, an elbow dug into the nape of his neck, Siegfried groaned in Gento’s voice.
This ordinary-looking businessman possessed extraordinary karate skills whose destructive powers would require any other martial artist to don a military exoskeleton to match. Yamada’s right foot dug like a spear point into Siegfried’s side, eliciting a tortured moan.
“What’s the matter, boy? Don’t you at least want to grab a breath of fresh air and die on your feet?”
“The feeling’s mutual.”
He staggered to his feet. The next kick came straight at his ruptured flanks. The leg sank into the giant’s body down to his knee.
Such was his subsequent surprise that Yamada momentarily forgot to extract his foot. He leapt backwards. The young man the kick had intended to kill wasn’t there. That foot met empty space and tore through the giant’s back.
Siegfried himself was nothing more than a shell, a marionette dancing at the end of strings pulled elsewhere. With a start of panic, Yamada craned his neck skyward.
“A necrodancer, who makes a dead man walk. Are you Setsura Aki?”
“Sorry, but no.” The dark voice drifted like a black tendril of smoke from the gate out of which Siegfried had emerged. “My name is Gento Roran. And to be honest, until yesterday, I was not capable of such feats either.”
A shadow moved beneath the small light illuminating the gate, the young man who’d entered the locker room earlier. Yamada was about to rush him when he felt a sharp stinging around his neck.
The shrill cry that followed was not one of pain, but Kunishige Yamada’s kiai.
It hardly seemed possible, for the lasso Gento had thrown was the same as Setsura’s titanium devil wires. But Yamada’s hands and feet flashed like steel and severed them like cotton string.
“I take it you haven’t seen my Dimensional Blade?” Yamada declared. He brimmed with confidence as he prowled forward like a cat stalking an unwary mouse.
Parting the air with enough speed to leave a vacuum in its wake created a scythe of wind that could lacerate exposed flesh. Yamada’s hands moved like the cracking of a whip, many times faster than the speed of sound. Faster than the human body should be capable of.
The vacuum in the air spawned a dimensional dislocation that swallowed up anything entering into its space—even devil wires—and rent apart when the void slammed shut.
This was the cutting edge of the Dimensional Blade. Aside from Setsura Aki, the man who wielded it might well be the most fearsome enemy Gento Roran had ever encountered.
“A friendly warning,” Yamada said, fixing Gento in his sights. “Unlike any weapon made of metal, the Dimensional Blade is not confined by length. That hollow shell and the real you, that pretty prize as well—I shall deal justice like Solomon and cleave them all in two.”
Mayumi’s naked body rested unmoving on the platform.
Yamada shifted his stance, severed the charging Siegfried in two, top to bottom, and then similarly bisected Gento behind him. Victory was his—
But it was his own head sailing into the air. Looking down he saw his own blood gouting onto his torso. And the young man—standing next to the second corpse—smiling up at him.
As his consciousness dimmed into oblivion, Yamada realized that the second victim was the Baron.
Gento Roran had made more than one dead man dance, a truly fearsome talent. Sharing the shadows with the Baron’s body, and then convincing Yamada that Gento was behind the charging Siegfried, he’d made the critical substitution at the last second.
With all his senses focused on the battle before him, Yamada hadn’t anticipated a third ambush waiting in the wings. Penetrating the void in the careless moment he believed he’d triumphed, Gento instead dispatched him to the great beyond.
The smell of blood wafting on the breeze, the stands still as a cemetery, this battle belonged more in nightmares.
“I have indeed beheld your Dimensional Blade, but you will be a lot more useful after this.” Gento stretched out his right hand. Yamada’s head fell with a thump onto his palm. “And now, my seal.”
As he strode toward the platform, an equally confident inquiry stopped him in his tracks.
“Perhaps I could trouble you for a rematch, for as long as I am not me?”
Setsura Aki’s words rang out like black pearls, made all the more beautiful by the darkness.