Setsura stopped before the fissure in Yocho.
It was a little over a dozen feet wide and a yard across at its widest point. Of the hundreds of such chasms and crevasses scattered across Shinjuku, this one was on the small side. Even children knew to avoid them. The stakes and cyclone fences were there to keep the silly sightseers from doing silly things and injuring themselves.
Although they were all generally referred to as “fissures,” they came in a myriad of types and sizes. The one in Ushigome-Yanagi was covered and surrounded by three layers of fifty-thousand-volt electric fencing. On nights when a bright moon rose high, creatures of unknown origins emerged while others recklessly threw themselves in.
The hole in Bentencho was a tad more “real.” Three times a day, at eight o’clock in the morning, noon, and seven in the evening, a single SDF soldier arrived, tossed in a hand grenade, waited for the explosion, and left. As far as anybody knew, nothing had changed about that hole, and the SDF wasn’t testing hand grenade designs.
Whatever was lurking down there demanded caution. The drivers of the vehicles parked around the vacant lot reported that nobody had returned. That they hadn’t hardly surprised him. That responsibility fell on the shoulders of the mayor. However shrewd a man he might be, he couldn’t comprehend Princess’s bottomless powers.
But the real reason Setsura came to a halt was that—something was there. He looked around. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The summer sun poured down, as if trying to reduce everything to a melting pool of white.
The vacant lot was approximately a hundred feet on a side. The buildings that once stood there had been leveled, and now only broken-down ten foot walls on the east and south sides remained.
Setsura’s gaze focused on the top of the south wall. Nothing was there. His devil wires jumped out and scanned the surface of the wall, and detected a warm spot, not the heat of the sun but left by something with a body, that had been there a short time before.
A golden scale about four inches long and two inches wide. The edges of the scale were dark green. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of any creature it might belong to.
He spun around, sensing the raw breath of a wild thing in the vicinity of his waist. Nothing was there.
Gripping the devil wires cast out to the wall, Setsura approached the fissure. Anything after him should still be on his tail. And when it came at him, he’d be better off knowing what he was fighting.
He jumped over the chain-link fence, didn’t land, but fell down into the chasm. His slicker puffed open in the up-rushing wind as he descended like a black dahlia into this literal underworld.
All around him glowed green eyes. His ears rang with the sickening cries and growls. These were the creatures incrusted into the walls of earth on all sides.
Three hundred feet down he reduced the velocity of his descent and dropped silently to solid ground. He’d scanned the ground with a separate devil wire for a safe place to land. The area was lit up by sunlight spilling from the fissure far above and a faint glow from the water conduits.
Bioluminescent bugs flourished in the stone walls and layers of mud. The faint pink light cast Setsura into the silhouette of a man born into a demon world and left with no place else to turn.
But this silhouette had places to go and things to do before calling it a day.
The ground stretching out from the crushed sewers was covered with footprints. The men had shot down the escape tubes currently stacked up on the trucks, which then automatically recoiled when no longer in use—one of the “secret weapons” used by special tactical units.
A strange sound reached Setsura’s ears a short time later—call it the moans and groans of those imprisoned forever in the darkness of this subterranean labyrinth.
Though if it was a prison, then the cells must be furnished with torture chambers stocked with the sweetest kind of punishments.
He abruptly came across a group of men writhing on the ground. They were dressed in civilian clothes, though in a reflection of the pathos of the government man in the gray flannel suit, all were dressed the same. Here were the missing law enforcement personnel.
Stealing closer through the shadows, Setsura got a better look at their faces. Their bloodshot eyes, devoid of reason and human sentiment, were filled with the least evolved of animal desires, faces etched with carnality and depravity, as if they had been possessed by erotic spirits.
That woman, he thought.
The men shifted forward, forming a large ring. The moaning died away. The movement stopped. Sensuous cries again welled up from a point at the top of the ring. Setsura’s eyes were drawn to the source. The body of a woman, skin like cream, could be glimpsed beneath the dark heap of men—her thighs, her arms, her face.
As if feasting on her discarded body parts, the hands and legs and lips of the men swarmed over her. Hands massaged her breasts, lips sucked at her nipples and dove down between her legs to eat her out.
Every time a hand moved, another replaced it. Her face was wet with saliva, as if set upon by slathering dogs, their panting lips covering those the color of red coral.
The voices were all those of the men.
Not just the man whose waist shuddered between her thighs, but all those lusting after her flesh. Those reduced to simply watching had whipped it out and were engrossed in getting off. Simply watching would make a man come in passing.
In that moment, urged on by her lascivious nature, or else commanded by the baser instincts to defile her, they spread their seed onto her face and breasts and belly, while she smeared the semen across her body with her porcelain white hands.
“And in broad daylight,” Setsura said with a wry smile. “Attagirl.”
Over and over again they would surely have continued this frantic coupling. Having shot their wads, the men stepped back from her, more dead than alive. In their place, more men lined up to unburden themselves on her, the faces etched with exhaustion and fatigue—