Two variables in the local environment of the television studio changed as Setsura made his way further in.
He wiped the sweat off his brow. The humidity was definitely climbing.
Though the heat of early summer often climbed north of ninety degrees, the rain hadn’t stopped falling since morning and the temperature outside was a good ten degrees cooler.
Regardless of how locked and off-limits these back rooms once were, the studio had gotten a direct hit from the Devil Quake. The floors and ceilings were lined with cracks. Not a single pane of glass was left intact.
Add to that the strange smell. One whiff awakened the primordial mind to its nature. Oh, that. Go to the zoo, and this was the odor always wafting up from the pen of one creature in particular. The odor of the “watchman,” as Mephisto had put it only a few minutes before (and several miles away).
Setsura came to a sudden halt in front of the elevators.
There were two doors on his right, both closed. Setsura froze like an ice sculpture. Slowly, inexorably, the aura around him changed—from me to I. From human to genie.
Without sitting down and doing a face-to-face, a close friend couldn’t have detected the transfiguration.
Perhaps the enemy was close. Perhaps an enemy he could perceive. In front of him and to his left were dreary, dusty hallways. Nothing more. But somebody saw something. Someone was watching. Something was watching. From somewhere—
Watching Setsura.
The narrow corridor branched off in a T. A demonic vibe from an unidentifiable corner began to collect around him. Suffused with poisons, the radiating thoughts and evil intents turned the very molecules in the air toxic.
Secret religious sects in the city were known to be capable of the same, but the source of these vapors was not human.
Setsura just stood there.
A normal human being would have gone mad and dropped dead on the spot. The swirl of noxious fumes suddenly wavered. The vibe Setsura was projecting had pushed aside the film of poison or rather, thinned it out. The genie’s qi had denatured and devoured its essence.
In a flash, the air returned to normal.
At the same time, the tension eased out of Setsura’s body. The enemy was no longer there. Those nowhere eyes on the back of his neck vanished into the distance.
Setsura glanced at the elevator doors and uncurled the fingers of his right hand. “No time to use that,” he murmured, lightly shaking his wrist.
There was nothing there, nothing that the eyes could see.
Setsura still didn’t move. As when he became him, not a drop of sweat marred his brow. His eyes half-closed, like a young philosopher ruminating about the mysteries of the universe on a listless rainy afternoon.
His lips moved. “Soundstage 13, is it?” Each word like pearls strung on a string. “There is no telling who made it was it is, but that is the direction of doom, the demon gate. There is where the Master of this place chose.”
He started off at a casual stroll, the silent death struggle unfolding around him vanquished from his mind. The expression on his comely face as unruffled as ever, he strolled into this den of thieves, into the depths of Fuji TV.
✦ ✦ ✦
The menace to Shinjuku that Fuji TV had become, this citadel of terror—to call it a haunted house sounded rather antiquated, but there in Kawadacho the word fit. Numerous strange phenomena had been observed on the grounds of Fuji TV and in the surrounding areas.
People going missing was an everyday occurrence in this city, but when a family of five vanished, and all of them in a single week, the commando police swung into action. Witnesses reported seeing a family passing through the front gate of the television studio. Five elite members of the mobile police were sent in after them, armed to the teeth.
Nobody ever came back out again.
The disappearances began five years after the Devil Quake, reaching their peak at the seven-year mark, and continuing today. The outbreaks typically came to a head in July or August and then sharply declined, reaching zero between December and February. And then the pattern repeated all over again.
This vanishing phenomenon didn’t only affect the people living there, but even passing taxi drivers. Confirmation came after the first documented disappearance in the 1990s, in what came to be known as the “Absconding Taxi Incident.”
The cabbies had last called into the dispatcher while taking East Gaien Street from Yotsuya to Waseda Tsurumaki. A total of ten taxis were discovered neatly parked in front of the television studio lobby. Further complicating things, all the routes to Fuji TV had been cordoned off by the police. There was no damage to any of the barricades.
The obvious questions were why the taxis had headed to Fuji TV, and how they had gotten past the perimeter fences. And why none of the cabbies were ever seen again. There wasn’t a drop of blood on the abandoned cars or signs of a struggle.
Two weeks later, an investigation team was sent inside. Not local law enforcement, they were relieved to know, but a platoon of SDF rangers.
Only one came out again.
The lone surviving ranger burst into a bakery on the Kawadacho shopping street in a half-crazed state. The SDF was summoned and sent in a rescue team. For the next month, the residents of Kawadacho twice heard screams and gunshots echoing from the Fuji TV studios.
After that, the rumors flew fast and thick—about the SDF stringing high-tension electric fences around the place, about teams armed with flame throwers mounting repeated assaults, and even about plans to hire demolition experts to blow up the building. But whatever they did amounted to nothing. The status quo continued unchanged till now.
Even in the light of a midday sun, the dark castle cast ominous shadows across the ground, standing there as one more symbol of the Demon in Demon City.