“In that case, best you not hang around here. Run for your life. Ko here has a long memory. It would like to sink its fangs into your flesh right now.”
“That is okay with you?”
“Is what okay with me?”
“To so readily dispatch me, and at the hands of a beast no less. Is that okay with you? Don’t you enjoy first making your enemies drink the bitter dregs and wallow in humiliation, and then have them plead for mercy?”
Princess pressed her lips together. Revisiting the past was not her prerogative alone.
“You can’t very well do that with me dead. Do you know where Takako-san is?”
Princess had indeed made her intentions clear that she would torment Takako and so make Setsura suffer, though this was a risky card for him to play.
“Where?” Princess said, narrowing her eyes. She couldn’t have expected Setsura to reply, but it didn’t hurt to ask.
“Good question,” Setsura said.
But there was no denying that he was still without any options. He knew from experience that there was no way to kill the vampire queen with his wires. He’d been wracking his brains during their conversation, trying to formulate his next move, but only ended up spinning his wheels.
The white beast crouched down on its severed forelegs. Princess placed her hand on its neck and pulled it back.
The tiger roared, more a thunderclap.
Without losing his balance, Setsura soared into the air. Dirt and chunks of concrete rained down on the passageway that until now had been hidden behind him. The fire breathed out by the white tiger had weakened the wall, and the shockwave just now blew it apart.
“Huh?”
Setsura leaned toward the right, did a half turn onto his back, and a moment later swung like a pendulum on the path.
More roars and shadows came down at him from the ceiling, the loose ground setting off a chain reaction. The heavens and earth shook like the day of creation.
And then there was light.
The destruction must have reached the surface, for the rays of light unfolded like a white fan, pouring into the tunnel with a mysterious majesty.
Cries—and puffs of white smoke—rose up, the particular sign of a combusting vampire.
Inside the falling shower of dirt and grit, Setsura drew a bead on Princess’s position—the strand he’d cast out when he’d flown into the air. Princess wasn’t moving. She’d found herself a nook to hide in until the destruction passed.
He could cut her in two, but she’d only flow back together again like warm wax without so much as a scar on her fair skin.
Setsura found himself in the same place where the concrete wall had collapsed. A dozen feet around him in all directions, the rubble piled up forming a sturdy fortress.
The tunnel appeared blocked by a great black mass. The vampires lying crushed beneath it would, until it was removed, live out their lives literally within the earth, gasping for breath, tongues licking the air in search of oxygen, unable to move.
Setsura jumped. He wrapped a wire around a sturdy ledge in the ceiling and landed in Princess’s lair. He looked at the ceiling again, and picked out a steel girder jutting out horizontally. He tossed out a demon wire, yanked it down, seized one end, and adding an extra twist with his wrist.
The pale naked body sprang up from the smoke and debris, a good six feet into the air—though shrouded in the dust it was hard to tell—flailing her arms and legs.
“Put me down. If you don’t—” A mist enveloped her. Her limbs were exposed to the sun.
“Sunlight won’t kill you, but it’s got to hurt. You should be cuttable now.”
“You bastard. Put me down!”
Princess grasped the invisible string holding her up. Her five fingers dropped off like pieces of marshmallow.
“So it is effective.”
But then, for a moment, he hesitated, perhaps savoring that moment of victory. A moment of unpardonable neglect for a citizen of Demon City.
From the side came a blast of white-hot heat. The wire he reflexively whipped in response severed the flames in two and slashed at the white tiger bounding over the mound of earth. Setsura’s left sleeve, covering his face, caught fire.
The tiger nimbly ducked the wire and opened its mouth. A second torrent of flame burst out, from a range that must be impossible to avoid.
Setsura suddenly looked up. So did Princess and the tiger.
Something like a curling mist descended. Its skin appeared cool and damp. A mist in a rain. Two dots of light grew closer from deep within the black semicircle. Setsura recalled what Tonbeau had told him—of the two beasts released from the box the mayor had brought her, one was a dragon.
Fire spilled from the tiger’s mouth. Steam billowed up. The rain became a clear drizzle.
As the old saying went: Tiger at the front gate, the wolf at the back door—or in this case, the dragon. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. The cold wind touched the back of his neck. Setsura couldn’t move. The breath of a dragon. The creature breathing it emerged from the tunnel.
It pushed its long snout forward, the long slit of its mouth, from which drooped an almost comical Fu Manchu moustache, though the humor was lost in the fearsome menace of its glittering eyes. Its body was covered with golden scales edged with a green patina.
“You cannot escape, you fool. Choose which one—choose the claws that will tear you apart!” Princess cried out from the air. She was already shrouded in smoke. The sunlight seemed to have robbed her as well of her powers of levitation.
The tiger roared. The dragon opened its mouth. Its teeth appeared quite small in proportion, but the sheer power of its red mouth appeared to outshine even that of its feline companion.
A flood of fire or water would surely gush forth.
Setsura jumped. As he soared vertically upwards, the two magical beasts turned their snouts towards him, but didn’t attack. Princess was directly along their line of fire.
In a not very sporting move, Setsura put an arm around Princess as he climbed higher, using her as a shield. Only those without their lives truly on the line could call it cowardice.
With Princess under his arm, he passed over the heads of the beasts and set down on the stable pile of bricks.
Past the dragon, the hole revealing the sun was surprisingly small, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter on the surface. Considering the amount of light six hundred feet down, dimensional refracting qualities must have arisen in the tunnels, one of the strange blessings of the Devil Quake.
Setsura was about to shoot to the surface when his vision was obscured by an expanding tide of blue. The flood unleashed by the dragon rapidly exceeded what he’d anticipated—as the strand of devil wire slipped out of his hand.