Somebody asked, “Can she be destroyed?”
The rest turned censorious eyes on him and he faltered a bit. That particular question was taboo. And yet—
“Who knows?” someone else said. Nobody reacted this time, because it was the truth.
“All we can do is try and see,” came a third opinion.
They all agreed. Their bodies still trailed plumes of smoke. The greenhouse wasn’t entirely dark. Their outlines wavered as if underwater, while pulling into sharper focus.
The song of morning was to the Toyama residents a funeral dirge, announcing the arrival of pain and suffering. Their skin singed and crumbled like a match held to paper, their nerves and organs deteriorating as they stood there.
Even as they withstood this suffering, they raised their stakes over the chest of the Demon Princess.
“I’ll go first. The rest of you follow in turn.”
These directions and the actions that followed commenced in an orderly fashion. The meaning of “in turn” wouldn’t have been apparent at first to the uninitiated. The men lined up—not in a straight line—but in a circle around her.
And no ordinary circle at that. One end of the circle expanded out, the other end forming a ring inside it. Looking down from above, they had formed a human helix.
Anyone who knew something about the occult, and about the nature of the woman sleeping surrounded by flowers at the center, would have applauded the effort—this perfect execution of an execution.
The spiral helix was the structure most accommodating to the growth of human life. Life that formed in a logarithmic spiral grew in equal proportions outside and in. The extinct ammonites and the extant nautiloids of the mollusk phylum both traced beautiful spiral shapes.
The difference between the former—that disappeared with the dinosaurs—and the latter—unchanged for millions of years—was that between a tight helix and the more relaxed logarithmic spiral. The difference between finding a balance in life and the ultimate lack of it.
Following these patterns of ideal growth ensured that the energy born in the center would reach its maximum strength.
Wafting with white smoke, the men positioned themselves to maximize the extermination of the Demon Princess.
“Let’s do it.”
The head man bent over Princess’s right side, a hammer in his right hand, a foot-long wooden stake in his left. He placed the sharpened stake next to her pale, round breast, just above her heart. The hammer raised, the hand didn’t move.
In that moment, a force erupted from the center of the helix, tying every one of the men together, and streaming into the hammer.
The head of steel swung down. The stake sank into her body. Her eyes shot open, her lips frothed with blood—though which came first was impossible to say.
A gasping gurgle rose from her throat. It was as if the night itself rushed out of her mouth, painting the faces of her killers with a spray of blood. One turned away from the writhing body. Another shut his eyes. They were not without compassion.
But far more compelling emotions rose to their faces and stiffened their resolve. Invisible energy surged down the helix. The hammer again hummed through the air. The Demon Princess unleashed a scream.
These were her unmistakable death agonies. All the more surprising was the arousing nature of her movements.
Their eyes were drawn inexorably to the root of her flailing thighs. The sight of her heaving chest scorched their retinas. Her bloody hands painted streaks of blood across stomach, thighs, sides.
Her own body became the canvas, like a tortured and tormented artist throwing herself at her obscene masterpiece in a mad frenzy.
Wordless moans issued from their mouths. Their groins grew hot and hard. One bolted towards Princess. The man next to him grabbed his arm. He shook it loose. Too late to stop him, he flung himself onto her naked body.
Somebody screamed. From the gap where the man had been standing, the sacred power dispersed into the air.
The spiral helix shattered.
With a shout, the man with the hammer raised up the mallet of wood and steel. A piercing clear gaze shot into his own eyes. He reared back as the head of the hammer sank into his own skull.
The men stumbled backwards. Before them, the gore-smeared body rose to her feet.
Here was the Demon Princess. The wooden stake pierced her left breast. The bloody tip jutted out her back. Her chest and flanks were painted bright red and dotted with white and yellow petals, the roses tossed and flung as she danced and writhed, attaching themselves to her with her own blood.
There could be a no more grotesque sight. And a no more beautiful woman.
The Toyama men who had pounded the stake through her gazed in stupefaction. Princess smiled. These were not the first men to behold that smile.
So had Emperor Jie. And Emperor Zhou. And Emperor You. What came before would surely come again, and now those winds of destruction were blowing through Demon City Shinjuku.
The men silently charged forward, suffused with fighting spirits that defied their inevitable fates. Princess made no effort to evade them or their slashing stakes. Then came the sound of tearing flesh. The spikes sank into her back.
The men retreated again.
She was stabbed and skewered. Through her chest, her stomach, her thighs, a single stake through her throat and out the back of her skull.
“Perhaps if you made another one of your clever curlicues?” Princess said in a hoarse voice. “Oh, not enough time? Well, then I should return these stakes to their proper owners.”
She yanked the stake out of her throat and tossed it away as if discarding a toothpick. She barely seemed in a hurry, and yet the man moved as if entranced, and the stake caught him full in the chest.
The man who had stabbed her with it in the first place.
Princess’s right hand flicked seven more times the same way. Seven stakes pierced the hearts of the seven remaining men. They toppled to the ground.
The smoke wafting up from their bodies increased in magnitude. Yet the triumphant Demon Princess was spouting that murderous smoke as well. Light poured in through the door.
“The only other person who exposed my body to the light of day was Ji Chang of King Zhou’s Privy Council. You managed the same on this unhallowed ground. Well done.”
Paying no attention to the bits and pieces of her skin flaking and falling off, Princess walked over to the men already half-engulfed in flames and stepped on the chest of one. The sternum caved in like embers in a fire, consuming the rest of the body in pitiless flames.
After treading on all eight, Princess narrowed her eyes and turned to the doorway. The sheets of blood had charred and turned black, the wounds clotted and sealed.
“Remain here, and their allies will inevitably arrive as well. What a nuisance. I need to find some temporary shelter until nightfall. Good thing I implanted that map Kikiou made in my head. In a few more hours, Takako and I will wreak carnage on this city.”
Several minutes later, not even bothering to shield the sun from her face with her hand, the Demon Princess grandly set off beneath the bright sunlight. Clothed in a robe of rose petals, her nude body charred, smoked and smoldered.
Early in the morning, a few minutes before five o’clock. Neon lights lit up the fading night like those bioluminescencing fishes from the bottom of the sea. The street life was drained of its verve, but schools of fish still swarmed to the feeding grounds.
In Kabuki-cho, on a block in the center of Demon City, the grimy unkempt heartbeat of life went on.