Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition (6 page)

A poltergeist at work!

Amidst the ceaseless roar and madly flying objects, Kyoya stood there motionless, eyes half closed. The doll opened its red mouth and laughed a piercing loud laugh.

This was an African voodoo doll. When a witch doctor was asked to cast a spell on a bitter rival, he would secret the doll somewhere in his house. It would draw in the wandering spirits and trigger supernatural events. The poltergeist was one of them. Even after the phenomenon ended, the unleashed miasmas and noxious odors would render the place unlivable.

Actions of the evil spirits could only be countered by being sealed with stronger magic, or by destroying the poltergeist itself. Either way, an arduous task. If a medium were in the room now, it would witness a horde of elated apparitions whirling about.

The doll notched the arrow into the bow string. Kyoya raised Asura over his head. As if by previous arrangement, the mad dancers retreated to the corners of the room. In the middle of the bed covers, a huge mouth opened up and bared its fangs.

The arrow shot across the room, growing in midair to a yard in length, straight at Kyoya's heart. The thing in the bed sprang at him as well.

“
Yaa—!
”

With a shattering cry that could tear the walls in two, Kyoya brought Asura down in a sweeping arc. The air trembled. A flash of silver light shot at the doll's chest.

A moment later he stood alone in the room, as calm and quiet as the autumn night.

Everything was back to normal, the same as before the doll smiled. The only difference was that the doll had toppled over. The arrow protruded from its chest. What was odd about it was a slight twist about halfway down the shaft, as if it had ricocheted off something.

Kyoya wordlessly picked up the doll and put it back in the locker. Just to make sure, he opened the door and peeked into the hallway. There was no sign this late-night racket had disturbed his aunt and uncle. Not a single sound had leaked out of his room.

“Good enough,” he murmured to himself. He propped Asura against the bed and packed his bag.

He'd summoned the poltergeist to test his might, mind and intention, his
nen
. The doll had long been a favorite sparring partner in that regard.

When his and his father's
nen
fused together, frightening results could spring from its misuse. A light jab against a human opponent could crush his skull. A tap with the pinky could shatter the heart. Kyoya had once knocked a truck running a red light into the river with a single swipe of Asura. When it was pulled out of the water, it wasn't damaged. Nothing appeared wrong with it. But it never worked again.

When wielded as a physical manifestation of willpower, without the accompanying purification that
nen
inculcated, his thought could become nothing more than a crude, lethal weapon.

Kyoya wasn't sure he had yet reached that stage. That was why he invited the poltergeists to take him on, testing himself, confronting the threat with a single blow and a minimal projection of
nen
, and then dispersing them without annihilating them.

When he said “Good enough,” he was referring to those possibilities of control.

After a few more minutes, he had everything ready to go. To allow him maximum movement, he put on a pair of stretch jeans and a training jacket. His only luggage was a nylon day pack stuffed with a change of clothes, towel, toothbrush and toiletries. He'd pulled five thousand yen out of the ATM on his way home. He didn't imagine that a credit card would do him much good where he was going.

He wouldn't mind carrying some Shorinji Kenpo hidden weaponry into the battle, such as
shuriken
and
tetsugan
iron pills, but he didn't have any on hand, so that was that.

He left his aunt and uncle a letter stating that he'd be going on a trip for three days. He played hooky all the time to take off to parts unknown, so it wouldn't be anything to worry about. But Kyoya wasn't sure he'd be back in three days.

Not waiting for morning, Kyoya left the slumbering abode. According to the glowing face of his watch it was midnight, the tenth of September. Three days and three hours were left. He could drop by the Information Bureau and have a detailed knowledge of Shinjuku implanted via their auto-suggestion devices, but gave it a pass. He wouldn't be doing himself any favors trying to take shortcuts at this stage in the game.

As he hurried down the midnight streets to the robot bus stop, Kyoya addressed Asura in his left hand.

He was committing himself to this course.
Like you said, of my own free will
. It was a little late to be sorry about being such an unreliable son,
but right now, Dad, I'm going to need all the strength you can give me
.

Then he shrugged. No matter what, he still had to wonder how an ordinary high school student ended up going to a place like that—
Demon City
.

The ruins stretched out before him.

Beneath the cold autumn moonlight, the black mountains of bricks and shattered concrete went on and on. Somewhere in the darkness, a wild beast howled. Judging from the lights, people must be living here. Not only that, but as he focused his gaze, hither and yon in the rolling hills of rubble, the outlines of buildings and unit housing came into view.

One structure soared toward the heavens. Another squatted next to the earth, indistinguishable from the surrounding wreckage.

If he concentrated even more, far in the distance he could make out the innumerable lights dotting the periphery, like the guard towers of a penitentiary. The watch towers of a prison—the metaphor was not necessarily inappropriate. The lights came from the windows and neon signs of the surrounding skyscrapers. To the north, the former Omiya and Kawagoe; to the south, Miura Peninsula dividing Tokyo and Yokohama; to the east, Narita; and to the west, Hachioji.

In one corner of the Tokyo megalopolis, these sad and abhorrent remains were exposed for all to see—they called it “Demon City” for short.

As if endeavoring to illustrate the source of that unfortunate name, a sense of dread shrouded the environs. It wasn't only felt in the air, but somehow stained the starlight and moonlight as well. And the cold—not that of a winter's night, but a chill that reached into the heart and soul—the cold of the wayward spirits embracing the visitor with unease and fear.

What was Demon City? It was once Shinjuku.

Back when Tokyo was still the Tokyo of old, the wards of Yodobashi, Yotsuya and Ushigome had been merged into a single city. It covered seven square miles or approximately 4,500 acres. At the turn of the millennium, its population reached 270,000.

Shinjuku station occupied the city center. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex, Kabuki-cho, Hanazono, and the five buildings of the skyscraper district comprised the heart of the new city and its world-renowned shopping and entertainment district. The flow of the young and the adventurous went on all day and all night—until that fall night of September thirteenth.

That day, the entirety of Shinjuku—indeed, only Shinjuku—was leveled by a magnitude 8.5 earthquake directly beneath the city. Even worse, it struck like a surprise attack at three o'clock in the morning.

Since the 1980s, preparing for the next predicted “big one” to strike Tokyo—predicted to occur around the Izu Peninsula—the building codes had been modified to increase the earthquake resistance of the architecture. But the solidly-built reinforced steel and concrete structures and prefabricated residential wooden houses crumbled like papier-mâché in the face of this earthquake.

The pedestrians and homeowners sleeping soundly in their beds, the night-life revelers—all that concrete and steel became an avalanche that swept them away unmercifully and without distinction.

In a “normal” earthquake, the fires sparked in residential housing often posed a bigger threat than the collapsing structures. In this earthquake alone, eighty percent of the dead were killed in the first heave of the earth. There were no aftershocks.

Even the Japan Meteorological Agency abandoned the designation “Great Shinjuku Earthquake” in favor of “Devil Quake,” as the latter perfectly captured its nature and effect, unlike any that had come before.

First of all, the damage did not extend any further than Shinjuku proper.

For example, the Chuo line running from Ichigaya to Iidabashi was bordered on the east by Chiyoda Ward and on the west by Shinjuku Ward. The station employees on duty at Iidabashi could look across the outer moat of the Imperial Palace towards the soaring structures of Ichigaya and watch as they collapsed with a deafening roar, while on their side of the moat not even the air stirred.

They slapped their cheeks, thinking they must be dreaming—that's how they described the experience. As a result, even when the information was relayed to the fire and police departments, they didn't take it seriously at first, delaying the rescue operations. The Devil Quake was clearly limited to Shinjuku. Or rather, it specifically targeted Shinjuku.

Even within Shinjuku, the wreckage was distributed in a random fashion. The Isetan Mitsukoshi, Odakyu and Keio station department stores were leveled, while the Keio Plaza Hotel, the Sumitomo Bank “triangle” building and the rest of the Shinjuku skyscraper district suffered little more than cracks in the walls and broken windows.

When the “big one” hit, Chuo Park, a stone's throw away—despite being designated as an evacuation center—saw trees and shrubs yanked out by the roots, the ground tossed like the waves of the sea, as if the gods of the earth had gone mad and bolted for the surface.

Elsewhere, the pleasure quarters of Kabuki-cho and Hanazono presented the cruel irony of flattened wooden residences while the surrounding buildings managed to maintain their outward appearances.

At the same time, the Shinjuku Ward Building, the Koma Theater and the Pension Fund Association Building had their facades stripped away, but remained standing.

It was as if a giant catfish buried deep in the sludge had woken up and haphazardly thrashed about without rhyme or reason.

Had the destruction been confined to such irrationally distributed damage alone, the epithets of “Devil Quake” and “Demon City” should not have stuck. The portents were there all along, but its truly haunted nature didn't become apparent until the reconstruction efforts began.

One day, two weeks later, the disposal of the corpses was almost complete and the removal of the debris was underway. A work site that from all appearances was solid ground suddenly gave way and a dozen remote-operated bulldozers and cranes were swallowed up in the gaping pit.

This was just the beginning. Inexplicable phenomena began popping up in the ruins all over Shinjuku.

Five old-style M1 Abrams tanks on loan from the U.S. Army to the Ministry of Defense in Ichigaya were trapped in a fissure. During the frantic recovery process, one of the guards let loose with a M91 assault rifle. And before he was gunned down, killed twelve of his fellow soldiers. The bullets punctured the reserve fuel tanks of the heavy duty crane, turning the recovery site into an inferno.

The reasons for this shooting incident were unknown.

Twenty patrol officers mustered into duty after the disaster to suppress riots and prevent the looting of precious metals were all found torn to pieces in the police dormitory on the grounds of Hanazono Shrine. Their bodies were drenched with blood and water. Before being chewed to death, several of them had, in fact, drowned.

Corpses went missing, and were later observed walking down Yasukuni Avenue, their insides falling out. Eerie screams were heard coming from the ruins of a certain building. The soldiers from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces sent in to investigate never returned.

The supernatural phenomena never ceased.

Scientists were appointed to investigate the incidents. But once they had ascertained that the “causes” did not conform to any known natural laws, the committee was disbanded without coming to any conclusions. Except that the air bus the scientists were scheduled to leave Shinjuku in was destroyed just before their departure, and those scientists never made it home again.

A high priest was invited to conduct a requiem for the dead. While reciting the sutras, a gust of wind brushed against the side of his face. A second later, his body had dissolved into a muddy puddle of melted flesh, as the white bones continued to chatter the sutras.

The prime minister was in attendance and witnessed the whole thing. Half a year later, he called a halt to the reconstruction efforts in Shinjuku.

And so the name “Demon City” came into being. Ever since then, drawn to the magical miasmas springing to life in Shinjuku, a whole host of new residents came to call Demon City their home.

Outlaws on the lam, from run-of-the-mill swindlers and petty thieves down to the vilest robbers and murderers. Yakuza and street gangs too violent by the standards of street life outside Shinjuku. They soon graduated from the old tools of the trade like knives and chains to large-bore laser weapons in their killing sprees.

They were followed by the kingpins organizing around them factions and cabals, and extending the reach of their power and influence.

As time went on, the residents of Shinjuku grew more and more varied in kind and personality.

During the late twenty-teens, in conjunction with expedited World Federation space exploration efforts, a large number of space cyborgs had been sent from earth throughout the solar system. Many were injured or failed to adapt to the alien environments and returned to earth. But a faltering economy and difficulty finding gainful employment also put them on the road to Shinjuku.

The bewitched atmosphere of Demon City may have proved a comforting fit for their ravaged minds. In that respect, espers as well proved a no less onerous presence.

At the turn of the millennium, ESP research had produced equipment that could detect dormant ability and develop its potential power. A significant number of otherwise normal people with ESP abilities—both dormant and active—emerged. Along with these advances came testing and ranking on a worldwide scale.