The clouds Setsura had seen at dawn lingered over the city, waiting until noon to fill the air with streaks of silver.
Rain.
A Shinjuku rain.
A Demon City downpour.
Residents and tourists alike immediately sought shelter beneath roofs and eaves. What everybody who lived knew about the rain was clearly spelled out in the tourist guidebooks.
Fifteen years before, the Japan Meteorological Agency hemmed and hawed and finally came up with a term that most accurately described the phenomenon: phantom-infused precipitation.
According to the guidebooks, “When it rains, do not under any circumstances get close to holes, cracks, fissures or exposed raw earth.”
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A drunk climbed a pile of debris in Kabuki-cho. The thick smell of alcohol filled the air around him, with each step the odors overlapping like the layers of a translucent painting, flowing along and twining together again.
His blood alcohol level right then was about a hundred and eight proof. Until a few minutes ago, he’d been imbibing “Shinjuku Spirits” in a bar behind the Koma Theater. That was the beginning of his problems. There was nothing wrong with distilled spirits. They were sold everywhere, though at thirty percent higher prices than outside the ward.
Shinjuku Spirits went for a tenth that. A cup of the stuff could be had for fifty yen. It didn’t taste half bad, either. With a mild taste and texture and a quirky aroma that hit the spot, this refined sake competed with the best.
It delivered a quick buzz—regardless of how much or little was imbibed—in less than two minutes. No matter how much was imbibed, there was never a hangover.
Everybody from carping food critics to the hard-drinking hoi polloi acclaimed it as a drink for the masses. But visit any drinking hole in the city and that label would be found nowhere on the shelves.
The reason for that was simple: if it was, the cops would be busting down doors before the day was done.
The reason for that was simple, too: this ten proof booze, with the pleasantly intoxicating effects of name-brand, had as its principal ingredient rain. The rain that fell on Shinjuku, on Demon City. The rain that was ninety-nine percent phantom-infused precipitation.
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However the barfly was aware of the falling rain, he couldn’t flee the scene.
Five years before, he had undergone strength-enhancing surgery. He was confident he could go toe-to-toe with a brown bear. The rain showered down on him, its unique properties bit by bit soaking his body.
If he’d been a normal man, these concentrations would have little effect on him. But as he was imbibing fifty gallons of the stuff a year, eighty-five percent of it as Shinjuku Spirits, the results could vary a lot from the normal.
He was a looter of sorts, a dumpster diver. He plunged into the depths of these oceans of wreckage and debris—that others could not hope to reach—and retrieved lost items and valuables. For himself.
He had no scruples about robbing these makeshift graves either, especially if the body was that of a rich man. A diamond ring, a cash card, a solid gold necklace—any one of them would keep him happy as a clam for the next six months.
But even he feared the rain.
One more search, he told himself, and he’d hightail it out of there. But he wasn’t going to make it. The mountains of brick and cinderblock around him shook and shimmered. Creatures shaped like dark green rods splashed from beneath the concrete slabs and rose into the air.
A moment later, bumpy nodules covering them opened outwards, forming the wide blades of poisonously green leaves.
The world around him transformed into a verdant field. The luxuriant weeds stood six feet tall, reaching the height of the man. Sensing his body heat, the stalks flexed and bent. The blowholes at the tips spit out fine filaments.
A sweet fragrance filled the air. Green lines wrapped around the man’s neck. These feelers were certainly part and parcel of the vegetation.
Threads that at a glance seemed slender and weak proved as strong as reinforced nylon. This man, who possessed the strength of fifty, could not easily extract himself.
Other plants lassoed his hands and feet. The typical prisoner of these carnivorous plants would slowly starve to death. In time, the body would decay. The feelers would absorb the nutrients needed to sustain them.
In this horrifying case, though, the worst was far sooner to come. The blowholes trembled and spewed a honey-like fluid over the man. Smaller droplets squirmed and fidgeted inside the clear viscous clumps that coated him, as the tiny lumps burrowed into his skin.
The fluid must be a kind of incubating medium. The same way flowers cast pollen to the wind to extend the reach of their life force, these weeds coated the skin of entrapped humans with seeds and fertilizing fluids, which burrowed through the flesh and embedded their buds there.
The fate that awaited the human was to become the pot for the plant. Here and there amidst the rubble, peeking out from the fissures and cracks, were the half-mummified bodies, the desiccated corpses of men and women.
This man, though, was no inattentive pedestrian or naive tourist. The medical augmentations he’d undergone five years before came to the fore. He flexed his muscles with all his might and unleashed all the power in his internal organs.
A muscular energy density of .01 horsepower per gram yielded six hundred horsepower that overwhelmed the combined efforts of the plants. Raising a guttural scream, he tore out the feelers by the roots.
The exhausted, wilting stalks coughed up more of the translucent liquid as the rain streaked down. The rest of the weeds fared no better. They had met their match.
“Fucking freaks,” the man wheezed. Today just wasn’t going to be his day.
Speaking of which, tomorrow was the Night of the Falcon. The man raised his scowling face towards the weeping heavens and climbed down the mountain.
His feet slipped out from under him. He fell on his ass with a heavy plop. Green moss coated the soles of his shoes. The concrete beneath his feet was covered with green. Only where his feet had tread showed the gray skin of the earth.
Fields of green reached as far as the eye could see. Those weeds were everywhere, sprouting up, their shimmering, wavering feelers on the hunt and in search of food.
The man clambered to his feet. In that moment, his number finally came up. The years of imbibing Shinjuku Spirits bore fruit.
A separate sense of will blossomed inside his head. Amidst the shadows and darkness, he felt a keen and unfettered burst of aspiration. He whirled around. Everything in his life up to now had been a waste of his time. There was only one place for him to go, one place that he should be.
Arriving back at the peak of the mountain, the man carefully removed the bricks and shattered cinderblocks, creating a space just big enough for his body to fit.
The mummies on either side stared at him with their hollow eyes and almost seemed to smile. The man smiled back at them, his most genuine expression of emotion in years, and laid his body down between them.
Here was the reason Shinjuku Spirits was banned even in this city. The phantom-infused precipitation implanted a will within that hearkened only to the call of the monsters without.
Rain, rain, go away.
A tide of red flowers unfurled from the cracks in the streets. Rainbow-colored mushrooms sprouted on the sides of buildings. The rain-soaked city blossomed to life in all its luxuriant gory glory.
Come again another day.